We chat with author Page Getz about A Town With Half The Lights On, which is a quirky and refreshing epistolary novel about a family of culture-shocked Brooklynites transplanted to Goodnight, Kansas and their fight for their unexpected lifeline: the legendary May Day Diner.
Hi, Page! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I’ve lived the life you’d expect from someone born half-cloud, half-human. I grew up as a neurodivergent oddball in Kansas. I was sure I was on the wrong planet. I used to pray for the aliens to come back and get me. I didn’t find the mothership, I found drugs. I’ve been clean and sober now 24 years, but my life has never fit into act breaks, from surviving crystal meth addiction to reporting for the Los Angeles Times, to being a social justice activist and being tossed around the mental health machine for years, to raising kids and rescuing dogs. I’ve worked as a palm reader, produced radio, sold fire works, worked in libraries and strip clubs, opened a free food pantry during pandemic and moved to Canada, but through all of it I was always writing novels, screenplays, poetry and stories.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I don’t remember ever making the decision to be a writer. As a child I wrote terrible poetry culminating in a collection that read like Dr. Seuss’s 88-page suicide note. I wrote a short novel when I was 10. I intended for it to be a short story about an alligator named Dexter, but it ended up being a novella about the existential loneliness of the alligator’s sister and it only ended because I ran out of paper. At 13, I wrote a novella about a ballerina who timetravelled to save the Titanic, which was an obsession for so many years I was called Titanic Girl in school. I remember writing late into the night while everyone was sleeping and feeling sort of high on it. The magic, for me, is writing myself into a sort of trance-like spell and then being surprised by what lands on the paper.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: Anne of Green Gables is the first substantial book I picked up and it’s still a favorite. Technically, my first book was The Dr. Seuss Sleep Book. It’sfunny,I have multiple forms of synesthesia, including that I taste colors and shapes and to this day, every time I pick up that book, it tastes the same! It’s an intense sensory wave of familiar shapes and I’m always so surprised that every picture tastes exactly as it did in my earliest memories.
- The one that made you want to become an author: I read Carrie Fisher’s Postcards From the Edge and Surrender the Pink back to back as a teenager when I was struggling with addiction and undiagnosed neurodivergence. There was something about her unapologetically neurotic self-deprecation, that felt like the voice in my head and I found myself putting her books down to write. I was a latch-key alcoholic by 14 and I was struggling to reconcile my rigid idealism with my self-destructive tendencies, so YA of that era did not speak to me, but her writing did. Woody Allen would have a similar impact on me. They shifted my perspective to see my neurosis as a literary filter, transforming my meshuggaas into material to write from, rather than trauma that was in my way.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: Haven Kimmel’s memoir A Girl Named Zippy is one of my all-time favorites. I use her work teaching writing as a brilliant example of how to use voice as a filter for juxtaposition, how it can subvert the expectation of the reader to reframe, in this case, trauma, in a tone that takes a familiar story somewhere it’s never been. It also radiates intelligent kindness, which is something I long for as a reader and as a human.
Your debut novel, A Town with Half the Lights On, is out April 22nd! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Schitt’s Creek meets Erin Brockovich-ish
My characters would answer: Howta save a ghost town
What can readers expect?
This novel follows the intersecting lives of a quirky small town on the verge of being a ghost town, as the Solvang family arrives from New York. Chef Sid Solvang has lost everything when his wife, Scarlet, inherits her estranged father’s estate in Goodnight, Kansas. The family rescues the fledgling May Day Diner and becomes entrenched in town histrionics from the eccentricities of locals to class antagonism playing out in the pages of the Goodnight Star. Told in a non-traditional format, from diary confessions and email gossip to notes passed during algebra and letters to the Goodnight Star, it’s a modern-day epistolary with themes of community, redemption and the power of the press. It’s also, very much, about being different.
Where did the inspiration for A Town with Half the Lights On come from?
The world of Goodnight began as comical stories I wrote as medicine for homesickness when
I was living in Hollywood. I created a sort of virtual Kansas where I could leave out the
Westboro Baptists and redesign a town around my idealism. I was profoundly inspired by the 2003 UFCW grocery workers’ strike in Los Angeles. As an activist, I was involved in strike support and that was the first food drive I organized. It was life-changing to witness the solidarity of the labor movement in contrast to my experiences as a worker trying to survive on minimum wage and the hopelessness of managing food insecurity alone. I was so inspired by that strike, from then on, as a reporter I threw myself into covering labor struggles from sweatshops to bellhops.
Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful life, was a reverberating influence and there are a number of nods and homages to Bedford Falls throughout the book. An ambient inspiration was Chef Anthony Bourdain and my addiction to Top Chef marathons. As this iteration evolved it absorbed my childhood as the daughter of a newspaper columnist and Disco’s arc drew from my mental health struggles as a teenager. The story was softened by motherhood and as a reaction to the proliferation of dystopian literature amid political acrimony that has deepened my belief that literature can (and should) dream us out of where we are.`
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Disco Kennedy is a joyful spin on my childhood sense of alienation, my inability to censor myself and my love of glitter! I was such a black sheep, but it’s possible nobody would’ve noticed if I could’ve stopped talking for five seconds. Like Disco, I could never shut up.
It’s also been healing to find a literary use for moments of struggle in my life when I felt so invisible, from exploitation by unconscionable landlords to being dehumanized as a worker. We live in an impossible class system that can be so degrading and fraught with inequity, it was joyful to imagine what a way out could look like.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
This story is a prequel to a novel I wrote about Disco, as a rather cartoonishly dysfunctional young adult. I meant to write a chapter on her backstory, but it sprawled into 150 pages on the history of the whole town. After two years of rewrites, it wasn’t working. My former agent sent me packing and I slid into a deep depression, which became Sid’s depression. I’d been living in the world of Goodnight for 11 years by then and I didn’t want to leave. I took a break and when I returned with fresh eyes, I decided to experiment with incorporating this troublesome backstory into an entirely different novel.
Since I knew where the characters would start in the next book, it was fun to ask how they got there. I found myself drawn to the moment that seemed to define Goodnight and Disco’s place in it, which was the day the Solvangs arrived. Sid began as a peripheral character, but it was so cathartic to channel my artistic angst through him that it began to reshape the book.
I have to approach writing as a playful act of experimentation in order to keep that channel flowing. Sometimes I forget that, the inspiration stalls and then I feel like I’m dying!
This is your debut novel! What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?
This is the third novel I’ve written, but it’s the first to be published. I only sent it to a handful of agents because I moved to Canada to start graduate school not long after I finished it. It was originally called, Never Stop if You See a Girl with an Accordion by the Side of the Road and when it was rejected, I crawled into the MFA feeling defeated. Halfway through the program, I got an email from what would become my new agent, Jenissa Graham, at BookEnds, who said she read the novel as an intern almost two years prior and was still thinking about it. She was the first champion of the book and having her kind support made a world of difference. In order to keep my writing pure, I want to know as little as possible about the business end, so I’m grateful to have an agent I trust.
What’s next for you?
One of my obsessions is genealogy, so I’m working on a new novel inspired by a true century-old family mystery that’s been unfolding as a result of a DNA test.
Since my debut found a publisher while I was in graduate school, I have a pile of projects from MFA workshops I’ve been meaning to get back to. Meanwhile, my ADHD is off the charts these days and I inadvertently wrote an entire book of poetry in processing my political disillusionment. I’m also looking forward to eventually returning to Disco’s book, so maybe there is a sequel on the horizon.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
I’m excited to read Once Upon an Effing Time by Buffy Cram and Kirsten Miller’s Lula Dean’s Library of Banned Books.
