Lost Scullion follows a resourceful Irish boy separated from his mother who navigates poverty, religious hatred, political corruption, and nativist violence in antebellum Boston. Why did you want to explore nineteenth-century institutions through the experiences of a child?

Writing Lost Scullion was exhausting. I wanted to give the reader a break from the emotional battering this novel inflicts on anyone who’s obstinate after injury, and cracks its spine again. That being said, it was a taxing effort to sustain the pace, rhyme and play of Michael’s buoyant adventures. With no poetry chops worth a broken chord, fallen into my minstrelsy deficient, punk rock writing bin, every finespun sentence exacted hours of incessant revisions whilst I gathered the phonetic, fun antics of like sounding sequiturs in this kid’s syllabized romp of domino plaints. Attempting to mimic Edgar Allan Poe’s genius of sorting his words according to their ring as much as any given meaning, Lost Scullion’s unique verbal sonancy is occasioned by a wish to emulate macabre’s seminal auteur with matching, tale to head yoked consonants and accordances of vowels in a rhythmic cadence intended to enkindle any dickens story reader’s pulse. Describing the day-to-day affairs of an unfamiliar era to an audience visiting out of time through the eyes of a ten year old boy, provided ample tools with which to sketch his youthful virtue whilst it gradually gets tainted by the world of adults around him.

Each chapter adopts not only a character’s perspective but elements of that person’s vocabulary, prejudices, rhythms, and worldview. What led you to this unusual narrative approach?

Painting a given chapter’s scene in conformance with its central character’s fears and biases, yields ample descriptive instruments with which to expound on that individual’s evolving persona in their quotidian drama’s every imbibed relation whereby each affront, gloat or curse they feel is expressed through the narration’s singly focused lens. As Lost Scullion is set in Boston’s epochal cauldron of clamant abolitionism when nativist conflicts kindled in the fire reddened embers of America’s ructious slavery issue leading up to the Civil War, a given character’s ‘information barrier’ helps sketch the limits of their awareness whilst exposing what inner motivations most drive them.

The novel repeatedly shows institutions treating poverty as evidence of defective character. How historically widespread was that attitude?

Before the Industrial Revolution had spurred the Second Great Awakening’s antebellum social reforms, the importance of kindred blood relations made the public execution of corporal punishment a chastisement that branded the convicted offender’s entire clan. When the iron seared stigmata of past evil done threatened a family’s business, the resultant kin shunning meant loss of employment without lodging.

While both a captured felon’s indentured naval service in the merchant marines and an outlaw’s expulsion to the budding empire’s blooming penal colony served crown, realm and state, there was little need for a government dole to help deter crime since public executions browbeat the teeming, polis unwashed with behavior training pageants that rid them of their worst.

Because the early 19th century saw water wheel machinery so decisively out strip artisanal crafts in market scale and price, the overnight collapse of cottage trades broke the age’s customary familial roost when a mass, bucolic migration of impoverished, rustic commoners flocked to cities for work in manufacturing centers. What trace of people’s former lives were not fragmented by the abrupt loss of hereditary self employment, suffered from the absence of morale aligned loved ones when, flown to earn wages, lost, ken off from kin, they renested in factory owned coops.

As a consequence to the dissolution of kin tethers and their moral leashing the resultant severing of traditional family ties made existing methods of criminal punishment less effective and long term incarceration rose in its place. Whereas the excessive cost of feeding and housing convicts induced governments to aid those whose beggared misery nudged them into crime, shaming indigence lightens the tax of curbing degenerate behavior. Just as the state’s alms pittance remits the expense of building prisons, the recourse of chastening able bodied, welfare recipients into toil has always eased their sovereign’s purse.

When merchants sought to keep the urban blight of poverty and mental illness from decreasing their profit values, industry leaders summoned the gift of personal charity from a religious conscience and, ushering in an altruistic Christian revival throughout America, demanding humanitarian care for the needy, these civic patrons established public institutions that cleansed the city of filthy, real estate depreciating debtors.

Mrs Emmerson’s claim that ‘Solomon’s wisdom is the child of Abraham’s wealth’ comes from a practical decoding of the bible which expands on the gathering of scholars about the kings of Israel. As ancient Macedonia’s Philip the II spent his mined, gold opulence to retain the great peripatetic, Aristotle, himself, to instruct his son Alexander for war, China’s venerated Romance of the Three Kingdoms exalts Liu Pei’s attendance to the mystic Chuge Liang, though he were scolded by sworn brothers not to.

Thus whilst records show genocidal fortunes jostling to host celebrated wise men, scripture oft asserts that riches stem from godly favor.

If an ‘all knowing’ deity blesses the accumulation of wealth, the Judeo-Christian curse on poverty was never implied, it was Holy Writ’s faith held doctrine all along. So, aside from Thoreau, Jesus and Buddha there are few exceptions where an adult’s able bodied beggary is admired before that same destitution is equated with contemplative virtue.

Beneath the history, politics, religion, and linguistic experimentation, what do you hope readers ultimately understand about Michael O’Reilly and the people struggling to survive around him?

Story books are flawed.

As ‘people struggling to survive’, the world we perceive is imprinted by those most pressed upon us. Being products of our environment, we are tricked as infants into hereditary beliefs that indoctrine kids into conflict over war perpetuating fables, before we ever stumble onto the scientific method as students of higher education. And this, even as the planet burns.

When Babry holds a white cloth to light and thanks Aine in her illumination spell, her faith is redeemed by the laws of matter. Clam dregs may not tell us when it’s going to rain but peer reviewed efforts winnow out baseless notions that are harmful to us all.

When discovery of the typhoid bacterium resolved ‘germ theory’s’ decades long struggle with miasma it brought on massive infrastructural changes that so improved city life, formerly disease crowded, urban ‘death traps’ were remade into healthy abodes for droves more people, on our road to Eden.

Story books are flawed but the laws of matter are constant and unwavering.

While the injustices of religious violence, erupt from the simmering feuds of ancient myth, the eternal constancy of the universe is sovereign over all and without favor. If we cease teaching youth to detest others along incessant tribal grudges future generations won’t learn to perpetually reap conflict, sowing their inherited seeds of war. Otherwise, unless we come together in a cooperative, global action, the image is grim. We can see our own climate demise looming ahead, yet persist in fighting over ghosts and the spirits of tradition while the planet burns.

This is paradise, ‘St Peter went ahead and let everybody in,’ as Michael says.

We’re here, let’s stop fighting over flawed, millennia old story books and make the best of it.

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