The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory
Hosted by writer and ranter Mookie Spitz, the SFFF is where science fiction & fantasy creators, fans, and technologists transform imagination into reality. Each episode explores how writers, filmmakers, and world-builders bring their universes to life, with personal stories about turning wild ideas into finished projects that connect, inspire, and thrill. From indie authors to visionary engineers, Mookie uncovers the creative engines powering the future of sci-fi & fantasy storytelling!
The Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory
Dennison Smith's The Westward Hours: Nightmare of a Sacrificial America
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Dennison Smith joins Mookie in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory to talk about The Westward Hours, a genre-blending literary dystopia landing in the US and Canada on September 8th. The premise starts from something genuinely real: in the 1970s, corporations quietly floated the idea in Congress of declaring the strip-mined Four Corners region a formal "sacrifice area," officially exempt from cleanup or accountability. It never made it to a vote. In Dennison's near-future America, that idea won by default: everything west of a single line in Kansas becomes exactly that, a sacrifice area, plundered for resources once corporate power fills the vacuum left by a government that climate catastrophe finally broke.
Dennison and Mookie dig into what makes dystopian fiction actually work, tracing a line from Orwell's 1984 through Brave New World to the genre's current moment, where writers increasingly find themselves less warning about a possible future and more describing one already arriving. Dennison's own approach sets her apart from the genre's usual playbook. She's a committed "pantser," writing from character and sentence rather than outline, and describes how a minor supporting character seized control of an earlier novel entirely, and how two of Westward Hours' most magnetic, morally ambiguous characters emerged the same uninvited way. The novel took her a full decade to write, and she's candid about how history itself caught up with her mid-draft, what felt speculative when she started reads uncomfortably close to current events now.
The conversation goes somewhere unexpected too: two and a half years Dennison spent living in the New Mexico desert after finishing the manuscript, learning to weave with a Navajo community, and how Native American conceptions of time, where the past isn't fixed but recurring, directly shaped both the novel's title and its structure. They range across Nabokov, Pynchon, and Norman Lear's famous miscalculation with Archie Bunker, land on a shared, sharp point about how modern media distorts our sense of scale and catastrophe, and, by accident, discover they grew up as neighbors in Chicago's suburbs decades ago.
The Guest
Dennison Smith is author of The Westward Hours and two previous novels, The Eye of the Day and Scavenger, as well as a collection of poetry, Fermata. She holds both an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from University of East Anglia in the UK. She was founder and creative director of The Baldwin Gallery and Curatorial Team (London, England), curating dialogue between arts, cultures and nature and specializing in representing contemporary fine art by indigenous North American artists, whose lands stand at the front-line of Climate Change. She is also an interdisciplinary theatre artist and fiber artist. American and Canadian, faced with the recent sea change in US politics, she now makes her home in Alentejo, Portugal.
More from Dennison Smith: https://www.dennisonsmith.com
Get The Westward Hours: https://www.amazon.com/Westward-Hours-Dennison-Smith/dp/1739521167
Hello and welcome to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory. I'm your host, Okie Spitz. And I'm excited to have in the factory with us today Dennison Smith. He is the author of The Westward Hours, an intriguing dystopian style novel of what could be. So I'm excited to talk to you about what should not be. So your novel does not come to fruition, at least, not literally. Welcome to the factory. Thank you for joining us.
SPEAKER_01Hi Mookie.
SPEAKER_00So tell us a little bit about the westward hours. Why is it westward? Why is it ours? I have my own opinion, but we want to hear it from the author and not from Mookie. It's westward, the clock is ticking. Tell us a little bit about the story.
SPEAKER_01Well, it plays with the genre of the Western, even though it's a work of literary fiction. So in that, in that playfulness with genre, um, and the both the genre of West the Western as well as sci-fi, then you've got Westward Home. You've got, you know, Westward is such an iconic uh word. And in this reality, in the Westward hours, uh, the uh the new civil war in the United States uh is about the decimation um and plundering of the West. Everything west of minus 101, which is basically Ulysses, Kansas. Um that the West is declared a sacrificial area. And that's an idea that I actually took from uh a real occurrence in the 1970s when government uh when corporations were not yet uh all powerful as they are in the world of the Western hours, um, but that there was uh strip mining in the Four Corners region that was so destructive that corporations tried to float it through uh Congress that the Four Corners region should be declared a sacrificial area, which would mean that you would not have to be responsible for cleanup, you wouldn't have to be responsible for uh human destruction. Um, and of course, it never even made it to the floor. Uh but in a world where corporations are all powerful because climate change has brought in incredible devastation, and in that uh insecurity, it appears that corporations are managing to offer some kind of stability. Uh at that point, the West becomes sacrificial, it's there only for its resources.
SPEAKER_00So by West By West, you mean Western United States and not the West in terms of Western Hemisphere or First World, right?
SPEAKER_01Yes, exactly. The Western Western United States. Uh, what's happened to the rest of the world is only gestured towards. We know that the what it in the Westward Hours that the rest of the world uh is also in uh catastrophe, but we don't learn too much about what's happening out there. Though we might in the I actually devised the Westward Hours as potentially a trilogy, so uh it its scope may well expand in the next book.
SPEAKER_00And this one came out in May of this year, is that right? So we'll put a link in the description below for folks to pick up your book available on Amazon, right?
SPEAKER_01So we can yeah, so it came out in May in Europe and the UK, and then it's coming out in Canada and the United States in September, September 8th, I think.
SPEAKER_00Oh, so this is like a launch party. Oh, okay. All right. Sounds sounds good. It's a good compliment to my last guest, Matt Witten. He's been a TV writer for years. He wrote for Law and Order and Jag and Homicide, a bunch of shows. He's also a novelist, he's written crime fiction, and his first speculative science fiction novel has a very similar backdrop to yours, which is uh the corporations have taken over the responsibilities of the government. So everything is privatized, the police, education, and then he takes it to its its logical and inevitable implication. But it's very different in tone from yours because it's a crime thriller, and yours is more of an expansive, dystopian style narrative. Can you tell us a little bit about your unique style and your approach to what ostensibly is is this trope of science fiction, which is end of the world, uh corporations take over, but I got a different flavor from reading parts of your book. You got a different thing. Can you tell us a little bit about the denison style?
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm principally a literary novelist, so in it, so in a way, in that which ultimately means that that the process of writing is driven by the sentence. Uh, it's driven it, and I have a background as a poet, right? So it's uh there's a kind of exploratory following the sentence as I start to find the story. So, in terms of my own process, that's very different from uh most genre writers. Um, that uh I'm not uh I don't work from creating an outline and then filling it in. Um I work from a character-driven place, as you know, I discover, you know, who is who is Dorothy, who is who are Tom and Tam, these the psychopathic uh characters who really emerge in the the center of the sacrifice wars. Um I think when I was writing it, it was much more speculative fiction, maybe even science fiction, than it is now. It took me 10 years to write the Westward Hours. Um, and during that time, uh, history changed. During that time, climate change uh went from being a um obviously discussed but fairly quietly discussed problem uh to being you know central to our news feed today. Um and also during that time the American government and the polarization of the United States started to erupt. Um so when I was writing it, it seemed like a much greater stretch to peak than it does now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Matt Witten felt the same way too when he he started 51%, his novel. 51% is that you you owe more and more of your net worth to the corporations until it flips into a majority stake, and then you're essentially a slave to the syndicate. That's his theme. But uh, when he started, he thought, yeah, this is 30, 40 years out, and took him about a year to finish the book. And then during the course of the year, just given our political cultural climate, he's like, ah, this will this will probably happen a lot sooner than that. So, you know, that sentiment is shared, I think, by a lot of people where we're seeing this acceleration toward what ostensibly would be considered authoritarianism on the ones, one side, that uh jeopardizing democracy, including maybe even our election integrity, depending on which side of the aisle you sit, right? It's the same kind of story, and the plutocratic oligarchy now of the techie bros as well, who are just taking taking increasing control through data, through information, and now, of course, through AI. So uh this is top of mind for everybody, which is really the loss of control and the impotence of the government to really ostensibly help the people they're purported to represent.
SPEAKER_01Right, right. There's another element of the Westward Hours, which is not just the what are called the Gulf Corps, which is the uh the corporate oligarchy, but uh there's also the Christian Brigade Association, and there's a sort of unholy alliance um between very extreme um fundamentalism um and corporate values. That's uh that's that's the that's a good element, right?
SPEAKER_00The Margaret Atwood kind of handmaid's tale, you know, nightmare juxtaposed juxtaposed with corporate power. So that that that that's uh that's a nice nightmare to explore from a writing point of view. There I I have a bunch of guests on, and a big topic is whether you're a pantser or a plotter. Have you heard that before?
SPEAKER_01No, what's a pantser? I mean, I know what a plotter is.
SPEAKER_00A pantser is you're writing literally from the seat of your pants. So you are a pantser, sounds like through and through a pantzer, a pantzer. So this I feel this way right now, right here, and I am writing, and the story is evolving out from under me, literally, as I pants my way through a narrative. In contrast to the plotter, uh, my archetype of the plotter is James Elroy. He is the author of LA Confidential, American Tabloid. I think the guy is incredible, and he literally spends probably 80-90% of his time writing, outlining the story. So he needs every detail worked out before he actually creates the scenes. He's the archetypal plotter. And uh sounds like you're on the other, you're on the other side.
SPEAKER_01My feeling is if I know where I'm going, if I know what's going to happen on a journey, why would I take the journey? Uh, so I can't make the decisions about where I'm going to go if I'm uh I would lose the motivation to actually go there. So in a way too, I feel like the writing process is for me, it's like trying to translate a dream. Um and it takes a lot of time to listen into that dream and to keep getting more and more clarity in that dream. And something that I've told uh writing students in the past is that it's like you're standing in a great dark cathedral, and one light after another slowly comes up. So suddenly you see that fresco, and then you see that corner. And you know, then maybe maybe you see the the altar. Um but gradually, gradually, gradually more lights come on. And I think that there's a point in the writing process when you're actually able to hold the whole novel, and that is the that's the breakthrough point. But for me, that takes years to get to. I always think it's going to be much faster than it is, and I'm always wrong.
SPEAKER_00Um writers, writers tend to. Uh, I think I'm somewhere in between. I write also, and I do speculative fiction as well, and I have a general idea in my bald head as to the overall story, and I know the major milestones in the arc of the story, and then I'll throw the characters into the cauldron of this mix. Each character is delineated, we know what they want and what they're trying to get to, they're in opposition to each other, and then I pants away, I let them start uh to interact, and it's it's like uh one of those um you know Chinese doll boxes, like a fractal. So on a macro level, all the monasteries are there, but then scene by scene, there's this balance between uh you know pantsing and plotting, which is a comfort zone for me. Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01The plotting is comfort. Yeah. I'll put up I'll put up scaffolding in a way. Um, but uh, but often it is it's provisional, it'll come back down again. Um, it might not be scaffolding that I'll ultimately use in the end. But I also think that there's there's an element of time in writing that is uh uh that is terribly important. That's you you have to catch up with your own work in a way. Uh there were things that I couldn't have written Tom and Tam the way that I did until I'd lived through some rather devastating things. And that made me understand the characters that I was actually trying to create. Um so there are things that you don't know that you don't know. Um and uh and I think if you're lucky in that process, you suddenly uh get to know them. Um yeah, and so Tom and Tam were that for me. So they are they're the they're the the mythic center and the most ambiguous center of the novel. Uh they are really uh pivoting on this question of uh of what's good, what's evil, even when you're on, you might be firmly on their side, but they are horrendous characters. Um so that was something that I I knew what I wanted to explore inside of the Western Hours. I knew what I wanted to explore thematically, and I knew a sense of uh color and a deep sense of place. Uh, but in terms of plot, that's uh that works its way out as I start to find out who these characters are. And I come from the theater originally, so I still feel I still think um in a very character-based way. And I need to know who they are.
SPEAKER_00That's the way to go. Um, as a creator, I just feel the greatest satisfaction when my characters wrestle the book away from me. That they about there's they're starting to call the shots, and occasionally they'll selfishly grab elements of the story that might not be might not be appropriate, but then it's my job to to wrestle it back, and that dynamic tension between what they want and what I think is necessary is very, very healthy for a good dramatic tension.
SPEAKER_01It's really interesting. The last novel uh before the Westward Hours, um The Eye of the Day, when I was writing The Eye of the Day, um I wrote this bit character. He was just to be basically a walk-on. Um, he was the handyman for the family that that uh were the center of this novel. And once I wrote him, he stood up and he took over the entire novel. That that he basically it felt like he demanded that this novel was about him, and so that's what the Eye of the Day became.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, my anti-protagonist did something similar, and I kind of let him have it. So I would write and rewrite my little three-line lyrical paragraphs that the whole book is written in to make him look worse and worse and worse. So I exaggerated his negative qualities, and in ways he was uh unflattering reflection of myself. So it was deeply satisfying as a personal and creative catharsis for me to get it all out there, and that made the writing process and frankly the output very, very satisfying in that way that it was emotionally fulfilling to me. And hopefully that energy and enthusiasm translates to the reader. So I'm with you being character-focused, being more pantsy than plotty. Right. The other quote, the other question, though, is when is it appropriate or inappropriate from a storytelling point of view, strictly from the effectiveness of a narrative, for our ideology and belief system and even politics to get into the narrative? So you clearly have a point of view. We began the conversation saying that we're in arduous times, and you clearly had what would be conceived of as a point of view, maybe even an agenda of what you wanted to communicate in terms of warning people about tendencies that you see increasingly prevalent now, politically, culturally, etc. So, how do you find a balance and what do you think is the is the right mix for doing that?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think the right mix is always your very cliched but important uh statement, which is uh show, don't tell, right? Um, that uh as long as you're showing, then I think that agenda uh worldview is something that you you never get away from. That uh you've got a you know, you've got a worldview. If you're you know writing a rom-com, there's a worldview. Um you might not notice that there's a worldview, but there is one, right? Um, so when I started writing the Westward Hours, it was 2012, and uh and I did think in terms of trying to write a warning. Um but uh by the time that I finished the Westward Hours, it was far too late to warn anybody. And uh that uh you know we're we're deeply in the throes of it, certainly in terms of the the uh certainly in terms of climate change. I mean what we just saw happen over in Nepal. Um that uh you know we're we're starting to see um some devastating effects, um, and the kind of effects that show up in the Western Hours. Um so I don't think it reads as a warning, and I think that that's something I had to kind of let go as I was in the process of writing it. Um but uh that trying to grapple with with the dangers of autocracy, um, that uh uh that's very much a part of the Westward Hours. But the but the Westwood Hours is not didactic. Um that it's constantly um um asking this question about where where are the Linux and who's good, who's bad here. I think the thing that that uh Dorothy, who's really your heroine in the story, the thing that that she has to come to and own is that all of this belongs to her. There's no scapegoating. Um, and that is a worldview, of course, to say that that um there's uh of course there are there are people to fight against in the Western Hours, but Dorothy only truly becomes a hero in the sense that her that Tom and Tam are not uh true heroes, they're mythic creatures. Um she becomes a hero uh really in that that final litany, um, which was kind of my answer to uh Walt Whitman's um Song of the of Myself, um which is when she owns all of it, that she's all of it, from the uh from the victim to the hero to the psychopath, she's all of it. And now what's you gonna do with that? Um so yeah.
SPEAKER_00How did it feel to you getting it getting it out? Did did you feel a sense of catharsis and resolution? You mentioned that it could be the first book in a trilogy, and then no spoil, no spoilers necessary, but uh where where did you land after working on this thing for a decade? Did you reach any conclusions, any resolutions, any feeling that you were better for it? A cleansing, or did you feel dirtier for bringing all of this stuff up in such a visceral way?
SPEAKER_01I definitely didn't feel dirtier. Um, but I can't say I felt cleansed either. Um that uh the Westbrook hours went through a very strange sort of birth. That uh I more or less finished it three years ago. I would go back, and there were things that would need to be changed, and there were things that I could not have gotten right three years ago that I could get right more recently. Um but um basically I finished it and then I just put it in a drawer more, you know, kind of. Metaphorically, because of course it's in my laptop. Um but uh it sat for a while as I spent two and a half years walking in the New Mexican desert. Um and um in and I went went into a kind of quietude for a while that I didn't want anything to do with with words for some time. And I just wove. Uh I actually learned to weave with the Navajo, and the Navajo or Navajo conceptions of time particularly are really significant in the in the novel you asked about white hours that uh that is something to do with it. Um but uh I went back to weaving after 30 years and just wove and lay down lines with color and texture and uh and without words and without thought and without character. Um so that's how the Western Hours landed for me. And then um and then Mitchell wrote over an extraordinary book. Um he uh he was deeply uh he was the commissioning editor uh with Periscope when they picked up the British copy of the Eye of the Day. And he reached out to me. He had read earlier drafts and reached out and said, Is it still available? And it just seemed to be the right time to bring it into the world.
SPEAKER_00Great. So you got someone interested in the publishing world. That that that's uh that's a leap for a lot of independent writers, especially. I've got many viewers and listeners who are up and coming speculative fiction writers. Some people are trying to make it and break it into the world of speculative fiction, and it's tough because there's a tsunami of content, AI is generating mountains of slop, and uh there's an unprecedented amount of content that's being hurled out there, some of questionable quality, and not all of it human-written. So it's a turbulent time right now in publishing. Also, getting it out there is one thing, but then getting it read is another.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, getting it and getting it reviewed is another. That's kind of one of the hurdles and holy grails right now. Um but uh I'm about to head over to the United States for a New Mexico launch. Um, so that's nice, and to be back in in that community because it was very much born out of a sense of place. And even though it's more set in California, it's it's sort of the spiritual heart of the novel is the Four Corners region. So New Mexico is significant.
SPEAKER_00That's really the best way. It's it's looking people in the eye and setting up a little booth or a table, and it's actually talking to readers and potential readers, and basically barking your book old school is tried and true, going all the way back to traditional publishing and especially nowadays. So cutting through the digital clutter is one thing, but if you attend uh a Comic-Con or a science fiction conference, or to your point, actually go into a community, into a bookstore, into a meeting, into a club, and they can actually meet you. It sounds very small in scope and grassroots, but that's really how to lay the roots, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I think also, you know, the well, the tradition of the book launch is really old, right? That that uh it's always been that you know you you launch a book into the world with a party. Um and so that's gonna happen in person. Um, and uh there's a lot of people have come to that party in New Mexico, so that's great. Um, so those books will it'll get well sold there. Um and uh we just had a launch in London, and then there'll be a launch here in Portugal as well.
SPEAKER_00Um and of course you are international. Z Z Z Top was nationwide, and and Dennison Smith is international.
SPEAKER_01There's also you know, there's also the beauty of reading your work. I think that uh people like to hear the work in your own voice. Um, and and that sells books too.
SPEAKER_00Well, that brings up the audiobook. Are you planning on an audiobook? Are you gonna read it? Are you gonna have a reading it?
SPEAKER_01Um there's a uh really excellent um American uh actress BBC Award winner who's uh reading the audiobook. Um, and that should come out in about two months, I think.
SPEAKER_00All right, that's exciting too. Um just when you look at overall sales, audiobooks are getting a bigger and bigger chunk of the of the pie. And in some genres, it's actually overtaking Kindle, ebooks and paperback, and of course, hard copy. So people are shifting into audiobooks into an audio format. People are multitasking their driving to work, they're cooking their dinner, they're listening to books, to the point where they don't even say I listened to the book, they say I read the book. You can talk to someone and they said, I read five books last week. And I go, You did? How'd you have time? Oh, I read them in the car, and I read them, I read them while I was cleaning my apartment, and what they're doing is listening, and it's become synonymous to the point of being interchangeable, to the point of dominating as a modality, I think. People are are listening, the podcast streaming era, right?
SPEAKER_01People have always loved a good story, and you know that that sort of sitting around the campfire, uh listening to a story. I think that that the audiobook is doing that for people in many ways. And it's also about people in a very busy world to multitask. That's uh time that felt like it was wasted sitting in the car computing is suddenly rich with books.
SPEAKER_00Yes, it's a it's a worthwhile use of time. I I do it all the time. I I don't so much listen to books as the news and pundits and articles, and I chit-chat with Claudia, my bot. So uh so I'm I'm auditory too, and I'm engaging uh with sound, right? You know, rather than vision. I I think it's cool. I think it's a neat evolution. As an author, though, it presents new opportunities and ways new challenges. And you bring up a great point that the origin of storytelling was telling stories around the fire, the Odyssey, the Iliad, these were all memorized. They weren't they weren't even read, they were just recited by memory. And a lot of the metering and the naming was done so that people could more readily memorize thousands of words of an intricate, complicated, detailed story all passed by word of mouth from generation to generation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. So I think that the the book is transitioning back into the oral in many ways. And I actually think that's really exciting. And I I you asked about you know how did it feel, how does it land being done? I I think that one of the very exciting things is you know, it's wonderful to see a book hold up, particularly it's hard back and it'll come out in a year in uh paperback. But uh even more exciting in some ways for me was just listening to the demo tape of the reader for the audiobook. Um to to hear your book lifted off of the page in somebody's voice other than your own, uh, and somebody doing it justice was just really strange and exciting, and it made it it made it almost more real to me than holding the book in my hand.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's weird, it's weird. It's uh kind of surreal. An added element again is the AI, which which is divisive in so many ways. I I signed into 11 labs and I made a clone of my own voice. So now you could text anything and it's Mookie talking. And I'm playing around with um an interactive audiobook idea, too. So playing with the technology. So instead of acquiescing to the bots stealing our jobs and writing our books for us, let's collaborate a little bit and see if something interesting could come out of that. But to your point, it's always a little bit bizarre as a writer, as an artist, to have other people, let alone a machine, interpret the feelings and ideas that were in your head when you were pantsing your way through your story. Because the lived experience is so different, right? When you're sitting and writing, you're by yourself, your thoughts, your emotions. It's an arduous process. By any stretch, it's difficult, it's challenging, it's hard work. And then you throw it out into the world, and then it goes into other minds and other hearts, and then you have to kind of let your baby loose. And people interpret it all sorts of ways, and it can get kind of weird.
SPEAKER_01This is where I think also time is one of the most important uh ingredients that's overlooked in the writing process. It's that you've got to have enough time to get enough distance. That uh there's always this problem for any author that it's very difficult to see what you've actually written and to be able to imagine what the reader is receiving because there's so much uh previous knowledge inside of you as the author. So there's always that difference between what's on the page and and uh what you're carrying with you as the author. So I think it's only time that uh that allows that. And one goes through all sorts of uh exercises to try to disconnect, to try to uh other your own work so that you can actually hear it and see it. You know, and one of those ways is to read it, um, read it, record it, listen it to it, you know, uh back again, and try to make it not yours. But if enough time goes by, it starts to not be yours, and then you can see it with uh a greater and greater clarity. And I think that's when one really becomes a good editor of their own work.
SPEAKER_00I think that's exactly right. The only way to really gain objectivity is with time, and then changing it up a little bit. I'm tweeting my novel backwards on X. So when you go to the profile of the character's name, Johnny Fizzuli, the book is unfolding, so you could read it linearly, but I'm tweeting it from the back to the front, so that could happen. I'm working my way through the book from the back, and that's weird. So every day I I I put out 10 tweets from my book going backwards, and that way I see it again in this odd way, and uh, and then I I did my own practice audiobook. I posted section by section through half the book, too. I created images, and I even had the bots write essays about my book in different styles, in the style of Atlantic magazine, in the style of the New York Times book review, review my book. And that was kind of fun too. So, you know, you could get people to review, you could get the bots to take a look, you could play with your own text, you could deconstruct it and reconstruct it. And and essentially it's what you were saying that that you need to shake and bake your own content to get new perspectives to really appreciate what went into it and what didn't go into it, because we have a model of what we think a great book could and should be, which is not shared rote for rote, one for one by anyone else on the planet. We have our own unique view of what a book could or should be. Yes, that's that's pretty fun.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and then you know, then then your readers come along and they uh they expand your book, right? They uh they bring that book into all of their own references um and into the into their world so deeply that it's it's another book, and that book just keeps sort of growing and morphing and changing with everybody that reads it. You know, and hopefully there's enough that's uh stable and solid there that it's not an entirely different book. But uh, but that's it's always interesting and exciting to hear back from people what they heard and who they identified with uh inside of a novel and um where it took them and and how it resonated, or how it terrified, or how it gave hope, or whether they missed the hope. I mean, this is a this is a very important part of writing a dystopian novel, is that uh you can't orphan everybody at the end. Uh there's and it took a long time, a lot of writing and rewriting and rewriting to take the hope that I knew was there and uh gradually give it to the to the prose, um, that for it to actually land inside the book itself, um, that and for it to be more visible uh and more uh for it to carry the reader through to the end, through through a very, very difficult and painful landscape. Um and for them not to be saying, oh, there's a happy ending at the end, it's not a happy ending book, but it's not a tragedy either. It's a book of of the book sort of opens at the end to possibility to to a different story in a way. The there's a there's a line in the Westward Hours that gets repeated several times, which is we have been singing the wrong song uh for thousands of years. We need to sing a new song. Um and and and there, going right back to the oral again, right? That uh I and and to those those times that I lived with an Amaho as I was learning to weave and how important song was. Song is as basically sort of creating the world uh in all of the ceremonies that I attended. Um that that I think the idea that there's a new song at the very end, you don't know what it is, you haven't heard it yet, but you know it's there, and that's the hope that sort of drives you through the novel.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's part of the catharsis that that I was poking you for, and that you're reiterating now, which is uh it's releasing the energy, but it's also gathering it up to, in a sense, fight back, right? We're not helpless, we're not hopeless. There's hopefulness, and it's based on intentionality and action. So the world is crumbling around you, there are all these seemingly infinite forces closing in. That doesn't mean you need to crawl fetal position into a corner, but there's things you could do about it, both for yourself personally and maybe even collectively for everybody else. So that's it.
SPEAKER_01Well, I can I can give you the last line of the novel without you know being a spoiler, that uh it's just from here we walk. So it's sort of the opposite the opposite of ending up in the fetal position in the corner. It's from here we walk. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Not not quite a sprint yet, but it's only the first book of perhaps many, right? So there you go. That's uh that's a very fitting ending. Ulysses ends Joyce's Magnum opus with yes. Yeah, yes. Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_01I actually performed Molly Bloom years ago. I performed that that final uh that final monologue, yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Good old Bloom gets some at the end.
SPEAKER_01Although from Molly's perspective, you know. Yeah, right. It leaves Bloom alone and it's curious.
SPEAKER_00Right, right, right, right, right. Well, well, speaking of making an impact on other people, what kind of writers, what kind of books made an impact on you? So the dystopian format is is is a trope. It's common, um, it's adopted in many, many forms. Everything from Orwell's 1984, he created his own language. That's a great example of world building right there, too. Amazing extending the uh Soviet style uh totalitarian nightmare into its own extreme. And then you've got other ones like Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle, which was adapted for I think it was the Netflix show, right? And uh that that you have the country split in half, with Japan taking the West and Germany taking the east. And then you've got uh what would be considered almost silly science fiction, like Rollerball, which is actually a pretty good movie uh with James Kahn back in the day. The corporations have taken over. There's the sport that's used to basically remind everyone of the hopelessness of individuality, and there the United States is divided into energy, food, war. They're no more states, they're just these regions of corporate control. So who or what influenced you, do you think, in your dystopian world?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think of myself first just as a writer, not as a dystopian writer, because the eye of the day is set between 1938 and 1945. So then people tried to call me historical writer. Um, so it just happens that it's about tomorrow that the Western Hours takes place between tomorrow and 100 years from tomorrow. But um 1984 certainly had a massive impact on me as a as a young reader, right? Um, and I think that it continued to linger that my father was a historian, so um the historical importance of 1984, and I remember as we hit 1984 too, then you know everybody was sort of looking to see, you know, how close are we to this. But it was so much a response to the possibility of uh of what could happen as fascism was rising. And I have a, I'm not sure what the date is, I think it's like a I think it's 1942, something like that, an OED from my dad. So the Oxford English Dictionary, the whole you know, tome of it, the takes up at your living room sort of thing. The word fascism is not in that dictionary, which I thought was absolutely fascinating. That uh you've got you've got World War II raging, right? But so maybe it was 30, maybe it's a 38, 39.
SPEAKER_00Um uh I should look at it comes from Il Dusse, right? From uh Italy, right? From Mussolini invented the term or used it, the fascisti. And doesn't it in Italian mean like a group, like a the fascisti? Oh does it? I think so.
SPEAKER_01I didn't know that. That's really interesting. But it was so interesting to see how language was was kind of stumbling behind experience, that that people were experiencing the outcome of fascism before they were using the word in English. Um and yeah, and I think that so 1984 certainly helped to shape some of my worldview, as did Brave New World, uh, you know, two sort of great classics. And and I think that there's been a lot of comparison that we seem to be on track with both of those. That the 1984 and and Brave New World were sort of posited as either-or scenarios, but they're becoming more both and scenarios.
SPEAKER_00That's Brave New World is a little bit like the end of Wally, the Pixar movie, like we're uh we're it we're we're drugged into oblivion, right? So control is the control is exerted in what would be construed as a luxurious kind of way to incapacitate everyone, as opposed to uh the oppressive regime of Orwell's horrible, horrible world. But control is control, power is power. You don't need to just cite fascism as its own starting point. Um, this goes back to humanity itself. We're social Darwinian creatures where we have limited resources, uh, we we evolved in a competitive environment, and uh and we've acquired habits. Which are likely instinctive, and we need to get over ourselves in order to survive. But most of our history occurred pre-technological, right? And we were in bands of maybe 50, 60, maximum 80 human beings running around out there with no technology and uh and competing with each other. And we even had like ideas like genetic drift that we can only intermingle so much because if we become genetically homogeneous, then a single virus or contagion will make the species extinct. So we need to stay separate, not only because of limited resources, but from an immunological point of view, right? And then we find people who look a little different from us kind of hot. We want to intermingle, but maybe xenophobia might even be programmed into us to keep us in separate bands for all these reasons. So the instincts that served us well as Homo sapiens for tens, hundreds of thousands of years are now all obsolete with the advent of technology and civilization. World War I introduced the machine gun, and then and then millions died. And now we've got data and technology and surveillance and control and AI.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we've never dealt with this level of amplification in a way. It's like everything is amplified amplified. And uh and more and more so, and also those questions of as we're starting into a very new world where we can't tell the difference between reality and simulation anymore. That that's what we're really right on the horizon of uh true misunderstanding of around what's real, what's simulated. And these are things that I think that's we don't have any biological DNA history of and memory of how to deal with.
SPEAKER_02It's like we're entering into the world.
SPEAKER_00That's a great point. In ways, technology has given us running water and hygiene and has improved our longevity and our overall state of being, but it's also introduced new challenges that our ancestors couldn't even imagine.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00And we're not we're not designed ostensibly for it. The good news is that the human mind and and heart are plastic in the sense of being flexible. Yes, we can adapt, we can learn. That's why we've dominated the planet. It's not the rigidity of instinct, which all animals exhibit, right? But the flu fluidity of cognition and intelligence. So hopefully we can be smart enough to save our own asses.
SPEAKER_01Yes, let's hope so. And uh, you know, in the Westward hours, the the aesthetic of the R USA, the reunited uh USA, uh is all retro. It's all about going back, uh at least uh aesthetically, to uh a world that felt concrete, a world where people felt like they knew where they were. So inside of these domed cities, uh people, of course, they're they're living um on a level of high technology, but they're interfacing with it in a way that feels deeply comfortable and reassuring because they've gone back to the 20th century.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that's that's a repeating motif in science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, which is uh one or two steps forward and then several steps back as well, because we want security, we want comfort, not only in our imaginations, but in our everyday lives. And that trope, if you will, of of being atavistic and retro is its own aesthetic. You see it everywhere. There's a resurgence now in the mixed genre of of sci-fi westerns, right? You know, and and you brought that up. I've had several guests, like Rick Cutler, who uh wrote a book, Kurt Ostergaard, a man with a gun.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yes, I saw that on your website.
SPEAKER_00On the cover, he's got a gun slinging cowboy and his old western town, and he's riding a horse, but his gun is like a laser blaster, and in the background you see spaceships hovering. So it's uh it's an odd juxtaposition of forward and backward, and it's a retro style motif which which you've which you've laddered up on as well, which is uh you know, the dome cities of high technology, mass surveillance, and control, coupled with the more intimate reality of just living with your fellow human, right?
SPEAKER_01Right. Well, yeah, and then there's you know, life back at the ranch, um, life back in the sacrifice area, uh, where um technology is not 20th century, it's 19th century. It's it's how do you just survive out here? And you survive with with old basic prepper skills, basically.
SPEAKER_00Um it's the Bernie Sanders nightmare of income inequality stretched to its logical conclusion, right? The haves and the have-nothings.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, of course, we have this situation where we are deeply technologically dependent, and more and more so, that uh even as we become more articulate, uh, each of us in terms of technology, all that has to happen is that the grid goes down, all that has to happen is that the the plug gets pulled. Um, so that's really what you experience in the Westward hours out in the sacrifice area. Um, and you've got sort of you've got these different worlds. You've got the world in the further future where the novel opens and where it appears at first that you're just dealing with a domestic drama at the end of a marriage. But in fact, it's a lot more than that. Um, and then you go back in time to the moment before uh a series of simultaneous weather events changes everything.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the climate change angle is is strong too. And headline news these days, you brought up the Nepal flood, which is literally a glacier, just uh imploding. And then we've got El Nino, which is ready to hit with a ferocity that we've likely not seen in this generation or maybe any before that. And we've been duking it out. Are we really responsible for climate change? If so, to what extent?
SPEAKER_01You know, when the novel opens, the the world is already deeply destabilized, and you and you get glimpses of what's going on over in Scotland with this inordinate amount of rain, and you've got the vacuumers that are just pulling the water uh off of the highways and over the fences where you've got all of this immigration, you've got people walking the fences. But you still have simultaneously a certain normality. Uh, you've got Connie McAllister going for spring vacation to her grandparents' house, uh, where all of the cousins uh congregate every year and they all come by themselves and to their grandparents, and the grandparents are throwback ranchers. So the grandparents are already living a sort of 19th-century life. So you've got all of this layering of time, and some of that is born for me out of this conception of time that I was introduced to on the Navajo reservations. And in the Navajo language, even though you can talk about yesterday, you there's no concrete past tense. Um, there's a way of implying the past, but there isn't a concrete past tense like like we have. Um but there is a repetitive tense, which uh meaning that if it happened, it happens again. Um, and that there's a and the repetitive tense that's used in ritual that where where there's mythic time, time is always going on. And I've tried to take that and uh apply it to the structure of the Westward Hours, but also I thought was thinking in terms of how wars don't end, they simply morph, that we have these pauses between wars, but one war is actually constantly giving birth to the next war. So there's a sense that all of it is endlessly ongoing. So you the novel opens with ostensibly the sacrifice wars are over. Uh, but what becomes very clear is that the sacrifice wars are never over.
SPEAKER_00Eternal recurrence. I like especially this idea that despite all that, people just go on with their lives. And we were just we were just talking about media saturation, digital encroaching on our lives from a surveillance and even entertainment point of view. And we're so overwhelmed now by so much information that what used to be constituted as this enormous news event that would be all consuming is now just a byline, is now just a tweet. And there's so much that we're bombarded by that, you know, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, and 20% of the world's oil, natural gas, and helium and fertilizers choked, but whatever, what's for lunch? Yeah, and uh, you know, the huge flood in Nepal and El Nino is ready to hit like never before. Well, you know, maybe I should go out and buy a new shirt. So we're we're we're just buffeted by so much ostensibly cataclysmic information that we're like, oh, whatever.
SPEAKER_01And there's a level in which we don't really have any option. We still go on being humans, we still, you know, we go still go on wanting things, we still go on falling in love, we still go on having arguments. All these things are uh the constant of our lives, even as the house is falling down. So so we're going to be kind of bipolar, I think, on this.
SPEAKER_00And that's what makes for good storytelling. Uh I've had many conversations with many writers and artists about world building versus plot versus character. And if you slice and dice it and deconstruct it that way, it could be a very circular conversation because they're all intertwined if the if the story is good and they all serve their own purpose, and the sum is greater than its parts. It's a holistic enterprise that is a literature, at least in principle, and at least as we'd like it to be. And we we work hard to make it organic and natural. And if you just concentrate on these huge cataclysmic events, it's it's a Wikipedia article on the possible future of humanity. And if you dwell exclusively just on the relationship, then it's like a rom com. Or or just you know, a Tolstoy-like drama. So when you juxtapose these elements and you do it well, then it's a real joy to engage with and behold. And I think that's the ticket: finding a balance between genres and approaches, between characters and plot, between plot and the world you created. And if they all work seamlessly together, it's all toward one end, which is bringing your vision to life as a writer and exploding in the reader's mind and heart with all the feelings that you want to share.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. And it makes it as as close to life as you can get, I think that like I know that that with Westwood Always, it was a it was a constant challenge and uh and goal to move back and forth between uh the intimacy of the domestic uh and the kitchen sink stuff, right? And um and these grand epic sweeps uh of uh paralyzing violence. Um that we actually do live in both of those worlds. Um, you know, and some of us more than others, you know, some of us are very lucky to get to stay inside the domestic world a lot, uh, right? And that that that those sweeps of violence are still on the outside of our of our houses. But um but you know, then you're in Nepal last week, and the world changes in a second, right? You're going about your daily life, and in a moment, you're in an entirely different world.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and what gets to me is it's the freakonomics point of view. I don't know if you're familiar with uh the Dubner podcast series. It's early in the in the evolution of podcasts, and and him and his writing partner at the time had this point of view that we we focus on the wrong things as human beings, just from a data and analytics point of view. And the reason I bring that perspective up is we're talking about Nepal right now, and the death count is about 950, I just heard it'll probably go into several thousands, billions of damages, whole towns swept away, catastrophic, no question about it. But during the course of every day on planet Earth, murders, rapes, there are something like two dozen active war zones right now. What's going on in Sudan as we speak? Uh, and then the list goes on and on. So, from a headline point of view, from a news marketing freakonomics point of view, our view of the world, even when we want to be humanistic and egalitarian and helpful, is so distorted by the tropes of storytelling. The news is marketed to us as what would be considered most interesting.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. This mountain of information is sliced and diced and spoon-fed to us in ways where we have no idea what's going on. What's really going on out there, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, what's really going on out there? Well, and you know, and then that gives rise to endless conspiracy theories, right? That uh and I think that a lot of the conspiracy theories get born out of people's sense of powerlessness and precariousness. That I that suddenly you want to be the one who knows, and you want to be the one who's in control because you know. Um, you know, this was something I I saw in the Navajo reservation a lot in the in the 80s was um, so I was I was hitchhiking around the country and I was taken in uh by an old woman to teach me to weave in in exchange for taking care of her sheep. And I saw so much um so many accusations of witchcraft. Now you were you're dealing with it with a a world inside of the United States where at that point there was there was no running water, uh, there was no electricity, um, you know, we were uh living on USDA surplus and um and using the outhouse. But it was possible to uh to accuse somebody down the way who had more sheep than you of witchcraft, I think because you couldn't actually address in any way the actual forces that were impacting your life, right? Those forces were too big and too far away. Um and so so then you know you find your scapegoat. And I think that that's part of one of the things that's going on with conspiracy theories at the moment, is uh is trying to find a story that makes you feel powerful in the face of powerlessness.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I had another guest, Matthew Nelson, and he had just gotten his doctorate in the writing of Thomas Pynchon.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I love Pynchon.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and uh the essence of his ove is this paranoid state of being overwhelmed by information, not knowing really what's going on, and then wondering who does and what we should do about it. And uh and and all this feeds into the speculative fiction drama too, which is the engine of creativity for the genre itself, which is the counterfactual conditional. What if, what if corporations took over America? What if America got fragmented? What if all of our worst authoritarian and plutocratic tendencies came together? What if the evangelical dream of a Christian, white, heterosexual, male America melds with this authoritarian plutocracy? What if? What if boom, boom, boom? And and you're revving it up, but that's good stuff because that's really our job as writers to take things to their logical and hopefully not inevitable conclusion, and then putting real people in that cauldron of what ifs and letting it play out.
SPEAKER_01Well, you know, you you probably know a lot more than I do about what the impact of 1984 was that when that was written. I mean, that was a big warning, what if, right? Um, and it'd be interesting to know what kind of uh impact that had on then what happened, right? It I mean, it was so widely read. It was, you know, it's kind of a a a Western touchstone in literature um of that of what was possible if we went towards full authoritarianism. And it'd be interesting to know how much that influenced people's uh thinking and direction. Uh sometimes one gets pleased as a writer of uh if you let yourself think these things, somehow you're creating them, you're putting them into the world. That this is, you know, this is like the the the secret stuff, right? That that uh the these um you get these accusations that if you allow yourself to think about it, you've actually created it. Um but if you don't allow yourself to think about it, if you don't actually say what if, and then play out the scenario and simultaneously look for those places where where there is empowerment uh inside of that story, where there are uh touchstones of love and hope. Um, if you don't do that, then the story unfolds in in front of you and everybody's just blindsided.
SPEAKER_00Well, Norman Lear, the TV producer, was a liberal Democrat, and he created the character of Archie Bunker as a satirical, a satirical counterpoint. Uh but then he admitted that to a large extent it backfired. I remember growing up in the Chicago suburbs back in the 70s.
SPEAKER_01Where did wait, which suburbs? I grew up in Wilmet.
SPEAKER_00Oh, we were neighbors. I was Skoky, Skokie Evanston.
SPEAKER_01On the verge of Evanston. Both my parents were at Northwestern.
SPEAKER_00That's what and so wow, that's interesting. Which high school did you go to?
SPEAKER_01New True East.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I went to Niles North.
SPEAKER_01Oh, wow. We played you.
SPEAKER_00We were rivals. I was on the swim team. I think we we competed against you. Oh, that's interesting. Small world. So hello, hello, Chicagoan, fellow Chicagoan. So anyway, I saw bumper stickers that said, and they meant it, Archie Bunker for President.
SPEAKER_02Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_00But I'm just reiterating your point, which is Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, as a lesson. He Orwell himself, if you're familiar with his biography, I'm I'm sure you are, was a socialist. And he flipped when he realized that Stalinism was the horror that it was, and that burgeoned 1984, the disillusioned socialists realizing that it had authoritarianism at its at its core, and then extrapolating the consequences of that kind of state.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00And your point is well, you know, if you're an authoritarian, you're like, hmm, that's a good idea. And maybe maybe that maybe that's the case, but I think as writers we should just write. And Orwell did not only, you know, our politics and our culture a great service, but he gave he he gave us great literature. Uh 1984 is a a hell of a novel.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it is.
SPEAKER_00And it fits squarely in this speculative dystopian camp.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And it's a master class in world building, in character development, and in literally creating a new language, Newspeak.
SPEAKER_01Oh, absolutely. And constantly still referenced because in a way, we uh I think the world just keeps adding to that language, right? It's it's sort of the extra textual, but but it's the but it's still Orwell's language, right?
SPEAKER_00You know, I'm TikTok supermaxing, you know, even some of the nomenclature used by gen alphas right now on TikTok is variations of that new speak, which is the silly polysyllabic, hyperbolic nonsense words that are all grouped together, right? Double double plus good, double plus good, super maxing. I am uh I'm video maxing on TikTok right now. So it's it's fascinating. And and the other extreme though is Nabokov.
SPEAKER_02Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_00Uh he was actually Pynchon's English teacher.
SPEAKER_02Oh, really? I didn't know that.
SPEAKER_00Apparently, Nabokov's wife used uh was used to grade papers, and she remembers Thomas Pynchon as having very neat handwriting. That was her only comment. Anyways, uh interviewer asked Nabokov how he felt about being this famous author. Like he he he had done it. He was also an entomologist, so he collected butterflies too and studied them. So he was in two departments at uh Cornell. He was in the science department with his butterflies and he taught literature. So he's a quirky kind of guy that way. And they asked him, How does it feel to be a great writer and being so influential? And his answer was, eh, what I no one gives a shit, was his it wasn't he didn't say no one gives a shit, but that was essentially his response. That I'm just a writer who the fuck reads, you know. There's a handful of people interested. They read Lolita, they hear about the controversy. No one really reads, let alone are our books influential of the broader culture. We're niche, we're quirky artists, leave me alone. That was Nabokov's uh so I don't know. I mean, what what does or doesn't influence the masses? It's really hard to say. Did Mein Kampf have an impact? Probably. Did Das Capital have an impact? Probably. These aren't works of fiction necessarily. So did Wizard of Oz have an impact? I think it did, you know.
SPEAKER_01Did you catch the Wizard of Oz uh references throughout the Westward Hours? There's a yeah, that's cool.
SPEAKER_00Well, well, well, Dor Dorothy is your as your yeah. In in in my speculative fiction novel, the the bad guy is Alice, and she literally her avatar appears in a as a seven-year-old girl in a Victorian dress, you know, and you know, you have you have Dorothy and I have Alice. Yeah, yeah. And that that's a book that I think had impact, Alice in Wonderland, speaking of iconic.
SPEAKER_01You know, when I was studying theater at Northwestern, uh, I had Lolita because Lolita was uh the we would start out our uh exercises for your voice with reciting Lolita. So, you know, we would say Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my soul, my sin, my Lolita. Um so Lolita was like ground into me, but as as sounds, right? Not as not as literature, but as sounds. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00That was a great part of Nabokov's style, which was it was very phonetic. And English was, I think, his second or third language. And he had great sensitivity to writing. He was a stranger in a strange land writing English, and uh, and that enunciation, you could tell he was he was whispering the words as he wrote them, and it lulled off the tongue. And and most of his writing is like that, you know, invitation to a beheading.
SPEAKER_01Well, which brings us right back to the oral, right? Which we were talking about a half an hour ago, right? That that that that possibility of returning to to the the impetus of sound because you couldn't talk about do you start from characters, do you start from place, do you start from plot, but you could also start from sound, right? Uh that I was teaching um I was teaching Shakespeare to actors, and uh one of the things I started doing was actually having them just speak the vowels, because the way that Shakespeare was using vowels in in monologues so carried the emotional resonance uh of where he was trying to bring the monologue, that if they just moved from vowel to vowel to vowel and didn't get caught up in meaning, suddenly their whole their bodies and their and their emotional systems were responding to the text in a way that the text was alienating because of its because it's Shakespearean England, right? Because it's it's remote and complex. Uh yeah.
SPEAKER_00Feel the iambic pentameter and let it become the rhythm of your own heartbeat and life. Light seeking light, the light of light beguile.
SPEAKER_01Exactly.
SPEAKER_00That that is like, whoa, there's a lot going on in that one line, yeah, but you could feel it, and it's got uh impact physically, it's a physical expression. And uh writers out there read your own shit back to yourself, you know, and do that to do that. I do that all the time, and I think it's it's eminently worthwhile. I do a lot of solo podcasts too, where I just rant. I have a separate podcast show called Bald and Bloviating, and I I usurp that show to just you know bark out my points of view. So for half hour, hour, I'll just let the hot mic go. And I think that that's that's a great opportunity. I don't even care if anyone's listening on the other end. I just think it you gotta talk, you gotta let it out, you gotta announce it.
SPEAKER_01Like I said, you know, I spent a couple of years in uh basically just walking the New Mexican desert, and it didn't mean I was quiet. I did a lot of talking to myself.
SPEAKER_00That's the place for it, right? Yeah, well, I want to be respectful of your time. I'd love to bring you back and we can talk more about your poetry. I have another show in addition to uh bald and bloviating and the science fiction podcast we're on now, which is Inc. vs Algorithm. Talk to poets, talk to writers, and we talk about the writing process, especially in this age of AI. So it'd be fun for you to come back.
SPEAKER_01I'd love to. That would be great. Let's do it.
SPEAKER_00So, ladies and gentlemen, and everyone in between, thank you for listening and watching the science fiction and fantasy factory. Dennison Smith. It's coming out in September. Is that right? We're almost September. This is being August 31st, 2026. You're coming out imminently. Pick it up. There'll be a link below. The Westward Hour.
SPEAKER_01Hours, hours, many hours.
SPEAKER_00I was getting Churchillion about your title. The Westward Hours, folks. Thank you so much, Dennison. We appreciate it. Like, comment, share. We'd love to hear from you and more to come on the pod.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
