You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

My name is Michael Silverblatt.

My guest today is Steve Erickson.

He's the author most recently of American Nomad, which is a analysis of the most recent election campaign,

presidential election campaign.

But the book takes part in a series or arc of books that began with days between stations, Rubicon Beach, Tours of the Black Clock, Leap Year, Arctex, Amnesioscope.

Now it's the nonfiction American Nomad as being steps in an American apocalypse, more

or less. At any rate, the impulse to talk about America, as he does an American nomad,

is present in all of the books. This is the second nonfiction or impressionistic report.

The first was leap year.

And I wondered, would you want to make the kinds of distinction of fiction and nonfiction

for these books that are conventionally made?

I guess I don't care, Michael. I find in a lot of bookstores leapier filed with my fiction,

which seems completely valid to me. And as you know, the nonfiction books have

novelistic qualities and are kind of shaped in a novelistic fashion.

And at this point, as you alluded to,

I sort of see it all as one ongoing book, which sometimes ventures into the terrain of the imagination

and sometimes more into the terrain of reality.

Now, I started in making notes in a margin to write the word visionary poet and then visionary politician and then visionary preacher.

...