Gabriel Bump’s utopian vision within his sophomore novel, The New Naturals, was much-appreciated by UMass Living Writers classes, and I had the pleasure of sitting in on their Q&A session with Bump himself before he was the featured guest at the final installation of this year’s Visiting Writers Series hosted by the UMass MFA for Poets and Writers. Gabriel Bump graduated from UMass’s own MFA Program and now teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bump’s The New Naturals is an exploration of an underground utopian society and the people who become involved.
Arriving at Old Chapel for the Q&A with students, Bump, super friendly, walks in and waves hello to everyone. The first story he tells us is about how the previous night within hours of arriving in the area, he was held up in the street by two large, gorgeous white horses, which was, according to him, just about the most Western Massachusetts thing to happen.
The crowd laughed, and the moderator jumped right into asking Bump about the area surrounding Amherst, what being back here made him think about, and why of course he set his most recent novel, The New Naturals, mainly in Western Massachusetts. Aside from it being a familiar area to Bump, he said, “I wanted Western Mass. to be the focus because I wanted to make the characters happy here when I wasn’t.” After going through a bit of a tough time while living in the area following graduation, he really just wanted to utilize the emotionality of that familiar setting and give the characters who begin the novel very sad the happiness that he eventually found, despite it not being found in Massachusetts.
This opened up a conversation about the presence of mental health issues within Bump’s novel and more specifically his decision to not “name” or “diagnose” any of the troubles that the characters’ deal with. He refers to one of the book’s protagonists simply as a “sad sack dude.” He talked about the urge that we often have to diagnose and name things, how there are emotions that the characters deal with throughout the book but that he wanted to “focus more on the emotion and less on the name of it” which is why he made the decision to not put a label on these feelings.
At one point during the event, Bump opened up about the trauma that he experienced of his wife’s late-term miscarriage and how this child loss changed the way that he viewed his writing and his characters retrospectively. He described how this event made him feel like he would do anything for his wife’s happiness, and how his own character’s decisions felt more realistic to him as a result, as he was able to further understand that kind of intense dedication to a person as a result of shared trauma.
One student asked Bump about how The New Naturals became a “braided novel,” which was a new term to me. A braided novel refers to a story with multiple intertwined points of view. Bump chose this style for his novel because after an initial draft that contained only three points of view, he really wanted to expand on the characters, so he added an additional three. At many points throughout the event, Bump referred to his novel as being at its core about the relationships between these characters. As an enjoyer of character-driven novels myself, I can always appreciate when a writer devotes that extra attention to these relationships, really examining how they function together and as individuals.
Bump explains how he went into the first draft of this book expecting two characters in particular to have tragic endings to their story, maybe even for one to die, but instead he decided to make them happy even though they end up on a different path they intended. A large part of his novel seems to be about the differences between success and failure, what makes something a failure, and if something can be considered a success even if it is not what one was intending to do. He says of his writing process that he “was writing towards failure” because of how he had often felt like a failure throughout his life. He talked a lot about the idea of coincidences versus fate and the role that fate or divine intervention might play in the outcomes of certain situations, whether that be a success or a failure of some kind.
It became quickly evident that Bump’s text stimulated a lot of intense debates within the Living Writers classes as the moderator seemed to bring up again and again how the class was split on one issue or another. One topic that was debated throughout the Q&A was about the idea of the utopian New Naturals in general, whether we would join it, and how we felt about the idea of a “faceless benefactor” providing the funds for such a utopia to exist. The class seemed split on almost every issue, there being two sides to every moral and ethical quandary, but one idea that was generally agreed upon was that almost none of those in the crowd would join the New Naturals, Bump himself included. Bump laughed, “I like watching TV!”
The concept of The New Naturals and its underground utopian society was discussed further upon Bump receiving a question from a student regarding the particular decision for the society to be underground. Bump talked about this decision and how the inspiration for the underground utopia came largely from research he had done on runaway slave communities in 18th and 19th century Brazil. He talked about mini empires that were hidden among the Amazon Rainforest due to the lack of mapping of the forest at that time. For a community now to be truly hidden, it would have to be fully underground.
Ending the Q&A, the moderator asked Bump about one way that he wants to see the world change for the better. His thoughtful answer was that he wants to see the way people are educated change. We tend to think that the world can only change in the largest ways, in the types of ways that are conquered in fiction like The New Naturals, but Bump says about education: “We don’t need to go underground to change that.”
At the start of the night’s reading, Bump says of his book, The New Naturals, that he sees it as being about “sad people trying to get happy.” He dives into his reading of the first section of his choosing, in which he introduces us to one of the main characters, Bounce, and then Bounce’s later companion, Sojourner. He describes them as “sad people who need each other.” From these two descriptions, Bump’s book is clearly about those of us who are realistically sad about the state of the world and our own individual places in it.
Bump reads a couple of wonderful sections of his work, getting us attached to these characters after only a few pages, making everyone want to know more. After he finished reading, he invited questions from the audience. He answered a variety of questions from the audience, ranging from personal experiences to the writing process to the specificities of his novel, including characters’ names. One question in particular that was intriguing was the discussion of place and setting, the importance of location to Bump himself and how that impacts his writing.
Because Bump had written his first book while in Western Massachusetts about where he grew up in Chicago and then wrote The New Naturals about Western Massachusetts while living in Buffalo, an audience member asked if his next book would take place in, or be about, Buffalo, to which Bump laughed, before simply replying, “yes…”
As we close out the 2023 Visiting Writers Series, it feels important to mention the event’s impact. We bring artists to the UMass campus to celebrate and inspire creativity. The Living Writers course gives undergraduate students the opportunity to meet and interact with writers who were once in their position as students. By combining the work of these undergrads with the events of the MFA program, UMass attempts to bridge the gap between these two on-campus literary communities.
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