Literary Flaneurs: Andrew Ervin

A guest series curated by Jeffrey Condran. Project intro here.

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Soles-on-the-Ground Time

by Andrew Ervin

For years I was obsessed with a place I’ve never been to. Over a decade ago, on our honeymoon, my wife and I took a long walk along the coast of Islay in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. The rain is what I remember the most—there was no fighting it, no staying dry. Through the mist we could make out the next island over, the all but inaccessible Jura, which was where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. The fact that he had to get so far from the seats of political power to write about Big Brother remains a source of fascination to me. We were unable to get a ferry across in the limited time we had so we continued our walk along the embankment. I can still smell the peat smoke and see those hills—the so-called Paps of Jura—across the sound.

The not-quite-getting-there sensation of being so close to Jura gnawed at me for years afterward. I began to imagine what life was like there. I would catch myself inventing the people—or cartoonish versions of them, at least—and the houses and the glens I never saw. Those thoughts eventually congealed into a novel, Burning Down George Orwell’s House, which will be published next year. The book begins right there, on that embankment at the ferry port. Like Orwell, my protagonist escaped the bustling city—Chicago, in this case—and got off the grid. Or attempted to.

My original idea was to contrast these two worlds, the wired and the pastoral, but the more time I spent walking around Chicago—miles and miles, through neighborhoods whose names I’ve forgotten—the more apparent it became that just as there are now technological intrusions in even the most remote forests there are also moments of real transcendence possible in even the most crowded cities. The Inner Hebrides and Chicago aren’t as different as I would’ve imagined, or at least not in the ways I would’ve imagined.

When I started running a few years ago, the best advice I received had nothing to do with pains that billowed like heat lightening through my shins or even the obvious benefits of decent footwear. The days you don’t run, I was told, are as important as the days you do. The idea that down time is ultimately beneficial sounds so obvious now, but it was a radical concept for me—and it’s one I’ve adopted for my writing.

I’ve never been a write-everyday kind of writer. In fact, I can go days or sometimes weeks between setting down a word. That time rejuvenates my work, I’m sure, in large part because I spend so much of it walking. My current go-to place is the Wissahickon Valley Park, a hilly and edenic part the massive Fairmount Park system. I’ve found long trails where there’s no sound of city life whatsoever, other than the occasional airplane. Most of what I write begins there, in my head, long before I commit anything to paper. For several weeks now, I’ve been outlining a novel that will be set here in Philadelphia, possibly from 1600 to the present or into the future, and it’s during my long walks in this forest that these characters introduce themselves just as the fictional people of Jura once did.

For me, it takes the soles-on-the-ground time spent walking someplace to see it for what it is and not what I imagine it to be. That said, one of fiction’s greatest joys is allowing us to walk in places we would otherwise only see in the distance, through the fog and rain.

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Andrew Ervin is the author of a collection of novellas, Extraordinary Renditions. His debut novel Burning Down George Orwell’s House is forthcoming from Soho Press and in French translation from Gallimard.