A Compelling Conversation with Isaac Constantine

Photo Miriam Berkley

Isaac Constantine is a writer, political activist, editor, and mental health advocate. He holds a bachelor's from Williams College and an MFA from Columbia University. His debut novel Jeremiah's Ghost: An Apocalyptic Fantasy brings forth the relationship of father and son with dramatic flair set in an apocalyptic backdrop. I was very fortunate to ask Isaac questions about his writing process, his debut novel, and his activism through the years.

UZOMAH: What is the best advice anyone has given you in becoming a writer?

ISAAC: Be a ruthless critic of your own work. Ben Marcus said that in my workshop at Columbia. Read your manuscript, he said, like you’re reading a book you’ve picked up in a bookstore to decide whether or not to buy it. Ask yourself if you’d keep reading and answer as honestly as you can.

U: Many writers find another author, book, or passage that marks the point or moment when they know they were meant to be a writer. What was it for you?

I: I can’t pinpoint any specific writer or work that led to a moment of self-discovery when I knew I wanted to write. Like many writers I wrote bad poetry as a teenager, and it was sometime around the age of 18 when the work I was attempting revealed itself as a calling. I was filled with angst and desperate to find my place in the world and poetry seemed like the appropriate medium to transmute all the anger, sadness, and confusion I felt. I hadn’t read very much poetry at that age but poems appealed to me in their brevity. A poem seemed more manageable to me, an aspiring writer with little to no experience, than a novel or a play. It wasn’t until the second semester of my Freshman year, when I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, that I knew I wanted to write novels. It was unlike any piece of writing I’d ever encountered. Marquez was like a sorcerer to me. I’d never conceived of the possibility of creating something so beautiful, evocative, and poignant with words alone. I wanted to write books like that, to conjure worlds that readers could live in for weeks and never want to leave. I slowed down at the end of that book because I didn’t want it to end.

U: Do you give yourself timelines to complete a project?

I: Not really. No strict deadlines at least. I probably should. If I did I’d have published more by now, but I’m usually very prolific, which may compensate for my lack of structure, if that’s the word. It isn’t a lack of discipline certainly. In the coming years, I hope to publish a few unfinished projects I’ve been working on for a while. 

U: Tell us about Jeremiah’s Ghost: an Apocalyptic Fantasy. Where did you come up with the idea for the book?

I: Jeremiah’s Ghost is an autobiographical novel about my herculean efforts to destroy myself as a younger man and the terror of losing my mind. I don’t think I realized when I wrote it to what extent it dramatized my struggle with mental illness. It was written years before I was ever hospitalized or diagnosed with any psychiatric disorder, so it isn’t always about mental illness explicitly, but the theme is clearly embedded in the text. The protagonist, plagued by negative thoughts, suspects something is wrong with him, and tries to understand what it is, but the cause of his suffering eludes and mystifies him. 

It’s also a coming-of-age story about a boy and his relationship to a sometimes loving but often abusive father. My personal experience compelled me to write it but it isn’t entirely factual. I write about things that happened to me as a young child like I could remember every detail of the experience when clearly I could not. Some of what I wrote is re-imagined and some of it is imagined completely. It’s fiction after all.  

U: How did you set out to address humanity with a theme such as apocalyptic fantasy? Will the reader be able to use your text to answer those questions, or simply ask more?

I: The “Apocalyptic Fantasy” is something of a misnomer if you take it at face value, and more than one person has complained about buying or reading the book expecting a literal fantasy novel about the end of the world, but the fantasy is in the protagonist’s mind.  An entire chapter describes Jeremiah’s drug-induced vision of the Armageddon, and he often imagines that something catastrophic will happen to him and the world he inhabits. It could be trauma from his abusive upbringing, a feature of his hyperactive imagination, or both. But the novel is neither science fiction nor fantasy as one bookseller at least has labeled it confusingly. The title may be too clever for its own good.  

U: Do you have any tips for new writers about what to do when they have finished a manuscript and are looking for a publisher?

I: I’m probably the wrong author to ask for publishing advice. Maybe not. In either case if I had to do it over I’d go about publishing my debut novel very differently. My best advice for a new writer with a finished manuscript would be to find an agent. It’s no easy task but there are ways to go about finding one. Occasionally an agent will approach a writer at a reading or, if you’re working on a collection, after reading a story you’ve published in a journal or a magazine. Most people send their manuscripts to agents, and it’s pretty easy in the information age to find a list of literary agents, and to determine which of them represent authors who write books that you believe are similar to your manuscript. If you write literary fiction, certain agents handle literary authors exclusively or primarily. The same goes for science fiction, non-fiction, and other genres. Some agents represent a range of authors but they tend to specialize like authors do.

I had an agent for my manuscript initially. She was very established and successful and she liked my work but didn’t specialize in literary fiction, and couldn’t seem to find the right publisher for my novel. There was some interest at Simon Spotlight, the young-adult imprint at Simon & Schuster, but they wanted me to revise the manuscript radically to adapt it for a younger audience. I wasn’t interested, and eventually, my agent and I parted ways. A couple years later, without representation, I sold my novel to an independent publisher based in the U.K., on the Isle of Man, with an office in San Francisco that handled their American authors. Months after I signed my deal my editor in San Francisco was fired, unsurprisingly to me, for gross negligence, and my publisher shuttered the entire San Francisco office. It’s hard to sell a book to an American audience with no one in the States to help publicize it and get it reviewed. A woman in the U.K. did what she could for me, which was very little as it turned out, and Jeremiah’s Ghost never really found its audience. I hope to find a better home for it someday.

U: How has your writing expanded your thought process in other areas of life?

I: When I was in India studying abroad for the Spring semester of my junior year in college I kept a journal of my experiences and wrote poems and stories set in the places I visited. One of my guides and instructors was a writer, too, and she said to me at the time that I had a unique perspective because I was writing about my experiences. My peers were experiencing everything that happened once, she said, but I got to experience it all again in writing. She wasn’t exactly right since others kept some form of journal too probably, and if not they still remembered their experiences, and re-experienced them in memories, but writing about your memories forces you to interrogate and flesh out all that your mind can recall. So maybe writing makes me more attentive to my experience than others. I might notice more than most people, or maybe writing only encourages me to live in the past and self-fixate. Maybe both are true.     

U: How do you develop characters in your stories? Can you explain your writing process?

I: When I’m writing non-fiction or autobiographical fiction I describe characters who exist in real life. Right now I’m working on a collection of stories that aren’t autobiographical, and two of the stories I’ve written, or begun to write so far have female protagonists. The first is based on a woman I met once on a date, but given how little I knew about her I had to invent thoughts, emotions, a story and backstory for her character that included details from her childhood, which I knew almost nothing about.

The second female protagonist is a character I imagined entirely. She reminds me in certain ways of people I know, who I must have had in mind as I envisioned and wrote about her, but she’s definitely my character. I set out to write one I could fall in love with and succeeded I think, but I don’t love how her story ends. I hope to return to it soon. I invented other characters in the same story. I needed a foil and a love interest for my female protagonist, so I wrote a male character I thought would attract and conflict with her. My characters usually bear some resemblance at least to people I’ve met in real life and found compelling in some way, and that’s probably true of virtually every author in every genre. 

U: If you weren’t writing, what would you be doing?

I: I haven’t found a way yet to earn a complete living writing books alone so over the years I’ve worked other jobs in several fields. I worked in publishing, as a communications director for a not-for-profit, a free-lance writer, and briefly a writing teacher. I’m not working a full-time paying job right now but I plan to look for work again in the coming months.

If you’re asking what I’d like to be if I weren’t a writer at all, I’d love to be a frontman for a rock band, or a professional MMA fighter maybe. I train in Thai kickboxing and often wonder what I might have accomplished if I’d started training in my twenties. My voice is nothing too special, sadly. I can do a mean karaoke.  

U: Are there times when you are unable to write?

I: There are, and they can be agonizing. In the winter of 2016-17 I had a psychotic break and ended up spending most of 2017 living voluntarily as a patient in psychiatric institutions. After I left the second, an “open therapeutic community and psychiatric hospital” in the Berkshires of Western Mass where I stayed for 6 months, I remained severely depressed for another year at least. During that two-year span, I couldn’t write at all. Usually, I begin to compose sentences in my head before I sit to write them down, and have at least a rough sense of where I’m headed, but in those days my mind was completely blank. My affect was totally flat. No thoughts or feelings arose in me and I struggled with the simple task of writing a text or an email. 2 or 3 short declarative sentences were all I could seem to manage. I had as much trouble speaking. I’d begin and forget the point I was trying to make or the question I was answering before I could complete my thought. Whereas I could once converse with ease and eloquence suddenly I could barely hold my end of a conversation. My cousin, a sculptor, encouraged me often to write anyway, to force myself to get something, anything down each and every day rather than wait for inspiration, but it was more than a lack of inspiration that kept me from writing. My mind, it seemed, had stopped functioning properly. Maybe she was right. Maybe I should have forced myself to write if that was even possible. It’s not like I never tried. If I could do it over I might have sat down at the end of every day and simply tried to remember and write down every boring detail of it. That might have freed me up a bit. 

In any event, I was more or less completely blocked for two years, and pretty convinced I would never write again. When my faculties returned to me it was gradual at first, and it took many more months to really hit my stride again. That was far and away the longest I’ve ever gone without writing. Occasionally weeks will pass when I seem to lose interest or focus. That can happen after long stretches of intense productivity. Writing is psychologically and emotionally taxing and not always rewarding. Burnout is real, and sometimes I at least need a break.

U: How has writing helped you with your mental health issues?

I: I can’t say with certainty that it has. Writing gives my life a purpose, and I tend to be happier, more confident, and possessed of a sense of well-being when I’m writing a lot and pleased, initially at least, with the result, but that can be illusory. I might be producing wonderful work while paranoid thoughts and other delusions infiltrate my mind. Writing can be a useful tool in recovery but is insufficient as a treatment, I’d say, for issues relating to mental health. When I’m healthy, and able to write clearly about my experience, I do gain plenty of insight into my condition, and that helps me explain it others. Harmful stigmas attached to the mentally ill too often prevail in our culture, and I intend to use whatever platform my writing gives me to diffuse the fear, suspicion, and hostility directed at people who are already at war with themselves, and need and deserve your compassion and support.   

U: Could you see yourself using writing as a means to help children with their issues with mental health?

I: There’s a program in Massachusetts that provides tutors to assist children forced to miss school due to complications arising from mental illness. I’ve been meaning to reach out to them to see if a similar program runs closer to home, maybe another organization they’ve partnered with. Given my empathy for and ability to relate to these children, and considering my background, education, and professional skills, I think I’d be a good fit for that sort of work and think I’d get a lot out of it, too.

U: What journeys have you taken that have led to better understandings about yourself or certain situations where you saw something you couldn’t write about only bear witness to the experience?

I: learned a lot about myself while I was living in mental hospitals, not least that I hated living in institutions, though others had me convinced it was the best thing for me then. I couldn’t write about the experience since I couldn’t write anything at all but I am now.

Very recently I received some sad news about people who are close to me, news that affects me, which they’ve asked me to keep to myself for now, and I’ve agreed. That doesn’t mean I can’t write about it, just that I can’t share what I’ve written, but since I’m always writing with an audience in mind it can be hard to focus on something you know may never be read. I’m sure it will make it into my writing eventually. If you’re a writer, and something is important to you, and you think about it a lot, sooner or later you’ll probably write about it.  

 U: Would you rather read the book, or go on the journey?

 I: I’d rather go on the journey than write the book.

How do you want your writing to be remembered?

If it’s remembered at all I’ll be pleased. I try to be savagely honest in my writing and I hope that readers will remember it for that.

U: What are you currently working on?

I: I’ve mentioned the memoir I’m writing, and the story collection, and that’s pretty much all that I’m working on now. The memoir is political, as I’ve mentioned, but it’s also personal and transformational. After my divorce in 2008, I left New York and moved to San Francisco, where I lived for almost a full decade. I left searching for something I couldn’t quite articulate or grasp, some alternative to the culture I grew up in and which had begun to constrain me, or so it felt, and I got radicalized somewhere along the way. That’s where Occupy comes in, but the book is also about my relationships, adventures, personal tragedies, and so forth. I write about my divorce and the loneliness I felt when I first moved to the Bay Area, where I knew almost no one. In the years I lived there I joined a psychedelic men’s group, attended a school for clairvoyant meditation and “energy healing,” went to Burning Man, took a massage workshop at Esalen, did a work trade at a nude hot spring, stay as a guest at a polyamorous artists colony in Slab City, an off-the-grid squatter community near the Salton Sea, in the desert wasteland by the Mexico border, and I write about it all. The work will cover my psychotic break, my hospitalization, and slow, painful recovery. It’s a lot to contain within in a single work and I’m writing, and plan to publish it in three volumes. Do I tie it all together somehow? Certain themes that recur will give the narrative structure, I hope. I hope the writing is enthralling enough, at least, to keep my readers on the hook.  

I’ve put the story collection aside for the time being but plan to return to it soon. I started it a few years ago and abandoned it during my mental health crisis. When after two full years I was finally able to write again I returned to the memoir but never to the stories. It started as a collection of tales all set in California, but now that I’ve moved back east to Brooklyn I’m rethinking that whole conceit. Now I think the rest of the stories may be set in other places. The world looks very different today than it did when I began the collection, and the themes I set out to explore in 2016 may no longer feel as urgent to me. The stories I’ve already written were set a few years ago while the ones I have yet to write could be set in 2020, or in the post-Trump, post-Covid age, in which case the juxtaposition, or progression, could be interesting. I hope to have it finished a year from now.  The memoir will take longer than that to finish because I’m envisioning an end to it that’s probably still a couple years off—an adventure I haven’t had yet but am planning in the coming years. It requires lots of preparation, and I’ve prepared for a long time already. A few years after I moved to SF I began training in Muay Thai and I’d like to fight in Thailand. I’m not there yet. I spar but I’ve never competed. I hope to have my first amateur fight in the states sometime next year. In the meantime, I’m training to prepare and writing about my training. I may decide to complete and publish the first and second books while I’m waiting to finish the third. I have a lot on my plate so I guess we’ll see what I finish first.        

U: You also have a background in activism that extends to Occupy Wall Street. How does your writing reflect your views and/or ideas about society and life? How do you use fiction to address these issues?

I: I was a writer before I became an activist, and there was a time when I was naive enough to believe that high art transcended worldly political affairs, and I considered political art to be inferior. Real art was about love, death, the flight of the human spirit, or soul, or whatever, and had no political agenda. Garcia Marquez, one of my favorite authors even then, was a deeply political writer. One Hundred Years of Solitude was a deeply political work but I knew so little about the world that I didn’t quite realize it at the age when I read it. The politics weren’t what I responded to then, and were I to re-read it today it wouldn’t be for that aspect alone but I’d be much more aware of the history of Latin America and the politics underlying GGM’s vision. By the time I began in grad school to write my novel I’d become far more politically engaged. Jeremiah’s Ghost is overtly political at times, but I wouldn’t call it political fiction.

The memoir I’m writing now is very political. It isn’t just about politics but my activism is prominently featured, and in writing it I hope to illustrate a clear vision for a kinder, more humane and equitable society. My participation in the Occupy Wall Street movement was a catalyst for the work and I’ll dedicate several chapters to it. It’s set from the late 2000s to the present day and covers a lot of political ground.

To find out more about Issac’s debut novel please go here.