Getting Lost Where You Live
Noticing the World Around Us: A Conversation with Novelist Denise S. Robbins
I love meeting authors and learning how they do what they do. So when I had a chance to talk with novelist Denise S. Robbins, I was eager to do so. Robbins is a Pushcart-nominated writer and a regular here on Substack, where she began her newsletter Noticements in late 2020.
Her debut novel, The Unmapping, released in 2025. The premise: New York City’s buildings silently switch locations overnight—and then it happens again the next night, and the next, and the next. How do people manage amid the chaos?
Robbins is hard at work on a new novel now. Along with her long-form writing, she’s written for Barcelona Review, Chicago Review of Books, Gulf Coast Journal, and other outlets, including The Creative Independent (where Robbins recently interviewed me).
In this exchange, we cover the challenge of noticing where you live, the case for letting art manipulate you, and why a novelist needs a body.
In your novel The Unmapping New York buildings silently switch places overnight. You go to bed with one version of the city and find it’s totally rearranged itself by morning. Where did that premise come from?
I was living in DC at the time and would go on the same hourlong walk home every day after work if weather allowed. One day, halfway through my walk, I realized I had no memory of the past thirty minutes. If everything had changed during that time, would I even realize?
We take so much of our surroundings for granted, without really looking. Even now, I’ve lived in my house for more than two years and I can’t tell you what the houses across the street look like unless I get up and go to the window. When you treat a place as brand-new, you pay attention to every detail. But eventually you start to take things for granted. So I wanted to write a story about getting lost where you live.
How did you sustain it?
Equal parts logic and fantasy. I asked myself dozens of logistical questions: What would happen to the electricity system, the sewage pipes? What about trees? What about basements? How do zoning codes come into play? Sometimes I created answers based on the story’s needs, other times the story morphed around it, still other times I let those questions lie (like with zoning codes, for example—perhaps some lawyers can argue about that later).
Then this one vivid idea became a receptacle for a ton of other ideas. It started with one character, Esme, looking for her lost fiancé. It became so much more. Suddenly there were all these bigger questions about chaos in the world and how we deal with that, both societally and individually.
While writing this, I was thinking a lot about climate change (which I work on for my day job), but Covid happened while I was drafting, and that informed the writing too. At the end of the day, though, the characters themselves mattered more than the set pieces, and their arcs drove the story.
You’ve said you take George Saunders’s advice and try following the energy in a piece of writing. When you’ve got a strong top-down idea and then all the bottom-up feedback as the story develops, how do you balance the two? What’s the interplay between those two in practice?
I do like to have a strong vision of the story before I write it, and I love to outline, but I’m always completely open to changes as I go. Sometimes the writing will veer away from the outline and I’ll readjust accordingly. Sometimes when I find myself avoiding a key scene, it’s just because I’m not ready to write it yet; I need to do more reading or research first. A lot of change and discovery happens in the first and second drafts.
By the third draft, I have a stronger idea of the overarching story and I sometimes need to tell the sentence-level writing to stay in line. Without that discipline, I can find myself writing three pages about rabid foxes giving birth that are completely irrelevant to the overarching story. (This is a true anecdote.)
You’re currently at work on a new novel. Can you describe your process? Does it differ from how you wrote The Unmapping?
My new novel is based on a short story I wrote many years ago, inspired by a Russian father-son duo aiming to rewild Siberia with Ice Age-era mammals. I later rewrote it into a novella as part of a novella collection, but it didn’t go anywhere because no one wants to publish a novella collection (unless you’re already mind-bogglingly famous, like Stephen King or Gabriel García Márquez).
My agent encouraged me to turn one of the novellas into a novel, an idea I pushed back on at first because I adore the novella form, but when I reread my tundra story, I fell back in love with it and thought there were enough burgeoning ideas in it that I could really expand it out.
This is probably the slowest I’ve written a novel because a ton of research is going into it on ecology, linguistics, evolution, and so on. But otherwise, the process is pretty similar. I have my outline, I actually have two complete versions of the story, and now I’m rediscovering how the story will actually shape out in this new form.
Intellectual curiosity seems to undergird your work. You read history, philosophy, physics, and you have a background in ecology and statistics. How does all of that end up in your fiction?
All fiction is a metaphor, but there needs to be something on the other side. My favorite novels span history, philosophy, physics, ecology, and so on. I want to write a great novel. Therefore, I must read about history, philosophy, physics, ecology, and so on. Great novels aren’t just about characters completing tasks, they reach for something greater, something universal about the world.
But also, I find it really fun to read about these things. Channeling them into my fiction just gives me an excuse to read about topics I already find interesting.
What books made you want to be a writer—not the ones you admire most now, but the ones that triggered something in you when you first read them?
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. Tenth of December by George Saunders. Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link. It’s interesting that they’re all short-story collections, given that now I prefer reading and writing novels. But these books in particular inspired me when I was in the in-between state of wanting to be a “real” fiction writer but not sure if I was ready to commit yet. At that time, only short stories felt accessible and manageable to me.
Has MFA culture blunted what novelists can do in their work?
I wouldn’t know since I haven’t been! I think the biggest risk of MFAs is probably ending up with a cohort that doesn’t match your wavelength. You’re stuck with them for two or three years and they define the MFA experience with the feedback they provide on your work. This can be a little dangerous. The writing starts to be geared towards what the group would like, not necessarily aligned with excellence.
This danger exists in any literary scene, however, like in edgy Brooklyn readings where the hot thing is to write poems about having sex with your dad (this is another true anecdote). The difference is that it’s harder to extricate yourself from your MFA cohort once you’re in. But if you’re getting paid to read and write and talk about writing for two to three years, there’s obviously freedom there, too. Everyone I know who attended an MFA loved their experience. (Or at least claimed they did.)
Socrates complained that books say what they say and nothing more, but you’ve argued that books need the equivalent of DVD extras: director’s commentaries, annotated chapters, behind-the-scenes materials. Are we bringing back appendices? What’s the argument for “more book beyond the book”?
I don’t watch too many movies these days, but I have fond memories of finishing a film, then turning straight to the bonus features so I could live in that world a little longer. When I finish a book I love, I feel the same way: I’m not quite ready to let go. I want to understand it more, to unlock its secrets. So I often look for reviews and author interviews and read whatever I can find. But it’s not the same when you’re reading something meant as promotional material versus commentary provided to someone who’s already finished the book. (Of course, the famous books that have been anointed as classics have dozens and dozens of commentaries, so much that it gets overwhelming, but I’m talking about the average contemporary novel.)
It’s a bit of a selfish desire and a way to push back against my own tendency to read quickly and want to move on to the next book right away. But I also do believe that if books in general had more “fun stuff” attached to them, we’d see more people get excited about reading.
(Some people already do this! Vanya Bagaev has been posting chapter-by-chapter annotations to his new book Tulubaikaporia. I hope to see more of it.)
Your Substack essays often take a distinctive shape. You start with something concrete, and the essay spirals outward into larger questions about meaning, logic, what’s real. Is that how your mind naturally works, or is it something you’ve learned to do on the page?
If there has been any consistency to my Substack over the years, it is this shape. It comes from the intention behind the newsletter, why it’s called “noticements,” or moments worth noticing. I started it in the height of Covid as a way to remind myself that life stuck at home could still be interesting, that every small thing could lead you somewhere else. It’s kind of trite: everything is connected! But it’s true and has guided my writing and sparked ideas and helped me find meaning in the everyday.
I could write impersonal essays about literature and music and science, and I have for other publications. If something goes on my own Substack, though, it has to be more personal and connected to something happening in my life. That’s really all that distinguishes it from anything else. It has me in it. I don’t think my life is particularly special, but I think it’s interesting, because every life is interesting.
So I’m bringing together all of my interests into the narrative of living because all of my interests do impact my way of living. People often make this argument about books and art: they can and should change you. It’s one thing to say this, another to show it. It’s why many people read fiction over nonfiction: they are learning about the world through the lens of one particular life. One life is so much bigger than itself.
My most-read post so far takes on this shape. It starts with the mole in my belly button and expands to grief, Russian literature, and some wild ideas about time. It’s hard to categorize and would be impossible to publish anywhere else.
You wrote an essay connecting Impressionism to AI, arguing that what makes human art matter isn’t the product but the relationship between creator and audience. But in your “Slow News Day” essay, you wrote that we may not be constructing reality so much as being constructed by it—by algorithms, by feedback loops. If that’s true for readers, does the relationship you’re describing still exist? Can it?
Art can be manipulative, but I don’t think that’s always a bad thing. The artist puts themselves and their perspective into a piece of work in hopes that whoever engages with it will have an experience that changes them. The consumer (although I hate that word) gets to choose what to consume (blech) and how to respond. They can be intentional in doing so. They can ask themselves, before they read or watch something: “I’m going to be manipulated by this. Do I want that?”
I have a Reddit account and tried to create an intentional homepage, with subreddits exclusively about sourdough, cello, gardening, and Karl Ove Knausgaard. And yet because it is Reddit, popular posts from other subreddits make their way onto my home page, so I click on one conspiracy theory about Taylor and Travis, and suddenly that’s my whole feed. Lesson learned: Reddit is not the best place to edify oneself.
I still believe we’re constantly being constructed by our surroundings, but we have some say in what those surroundings are. It can be really hard to tell the difference. It’s like in David Foster Wallace’s classic “This Is Water” speech. It’s hard to see what really surrounds you. Sometimes it requires breaking your own patterns and stepping out of your comfort zone.
Hobbies. You’ve got several: you play cello, you run daily, you garden—wrangling rabbits, studying soil science, and all the rest. Do these practices feed your writing? How?
Just like my thoughts on science and history, it’s all connected and everything is a metaphor for something else. There’s music to writing fiction, a story in the music, an art to gardening, a fruitfulness and growth to making art. (And sometimes weeds you need to cut, nutrients and water, and so on.) These hobbies also make me feel like I’m building something tangible in my day-to-day life: with cello, I can see myself slowly improve; with gardening, I’m creating a miniature ecosystem.
But these hobbies in particular also require me to step away from the computer and clear my head and remember I have a body, am a body, and my body interacts with the real world, not just brains in a vat. I love having a body.
You’ve interviewed several authors—Abraham Verghese, John Pistelli, Caoilinn Hughes, and many others. You even recently interviewed me! Has interviewing people about their work affected how you think about yours?
I’m sure it all affects me in some way, but the main reason I interview authors is because it’s so much fun. It’s like I’m putting together my own “DVD extras,” asking questions that weren’t necessarily answered in the book. Often a book will connect to something else I’m thinking through, like, recently, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on how language shapes one’s perception of reality, so I’ll ask about that.
Sometimes authors will basically ignore the question and say what they want to say about their book, and that’s fine too. (When I’m on the other side of the equation in live conversations, I often do the opposite, sometimes to my own detriment, focusing too intensely on the specific question and forgetting what I wanted to actually say.)
Either way, I’m happy to help authors I like by bringing more attention to their work. And the act of interviewing is its own fun art form. I usually put together way too many questions, then ignore almost all of them, instead following the conversation where it goes and asking what comes to mind based on the answers I receive.
Is there a question you’ve asked someone else that you wish someone would ask you?
I often ask people about their moms, but nobody asks me back. So my mom is doing great, thank you. She likes to learn new musical instruments. I’m guessing the tuba is next.
Final question. You can invite any three authors—living or dead—for a long meal. Neither time nor language is an obstacle. Who do you invite, and how does the conversation go?
Homer, Shakespeare, and Bud Smith.
With Homer and Shakespeare, I would solve two great centuries-old questions right away! Who are they really? What is their true identity? And are they one person or many? (If they are many, it still counts, right?)
Once that matter was solved, I would ask them about their mothers. Then I would probably get overwhelmed, but that’s okay, because Bud Smith would be there for backup. He’s hilarious and quick and equally interested in the classics. He’s an incredible writer, but also likes a good beer and a laugh, so would be able to keep up the conversation whenever I get shy. Dinner parties should be fun. I want to show them a nice time.
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I put a hold on The Unmapping and am first on the list so I will let you know. Interesting concept. I also read Woman in White. I think I am not really into long books that just give too much information. It just went on too long and to be honest I was not enamored of any of the characters. Guess it just wasn’t my cup of tea. I am also reading your book currently as well. Will let you know.
such an insightful post!