Lost in flight

When we ask Travis Nichols how his debut novel ended up on the Twin Cities’ small but venerable Coffee House Press, he says, “Well, that’s one of the weird things about the book.” And it turns out to be pretty weird.

Nichols wrote his debut novel, Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder (Coffee House, $14.95), first as a nonfiction account of his travels with his grandfather, a pilot in World War II who was shot down by the Nazis, when the two revisited the European sites his grandfather had bombed. But dismayed at the limitations of nonfiction, Nichols switched to a third-person voice and found himself even further from success.

Then he got the idea to write it as an epistolary novel, and he started penning it, figuring he’d staple it as a chapbook and give it as a Christmas gift to his girlfriend, who had traveled with the two to Europe.

“It didn’t occur to me that that’s not really the best gift,” says Nichols, 31. “It’s more of an obligation. She had to read it.”

Luckily she did and suggested that others might like it. Another friend read it and suggested Nichols submit it to Coffee House. After a few more bumps in the road (The Coffee House editor had unknowingly lost the last 40 pages of the book, a mistake that was clarified when the two ran into each other at a party in New York), Yonder became a book that other people can give as a Christmas gift.

“I was luckily stupid about it all,” says Nichols, an editor for the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. “If it hadn’t worked out with them, I probably would have just put it in a drawer. I’m from the world of poetry, where you don’t equate the time you put into writing with any sort of payoff.”

The novel is told through the letters of a twentysomething to a Polish woman named Luddie, a woman his grandfather (whom he calls The Bombadier) fell in love with during the war. The narrator and his girlfriend fly from New England to Chicago to meet the Bombadier, and then depart to Frankfurt to dig through the Bombadier’s memories.

“It’s always a conversation and argument about what is remembered and what history is,” says Nichols. “This is an argument that is still happening right now: What will the legacy of the people who were [in WWII] firsthand be for us? We’re trying to figure out how we’re going to carry those memories forward, and I think it’s essential to who we’re going to be and who we are.”

But far from a fog-lensed Greatest Generation tale, Yonder relies on the unreliable narrator’s obsessive quest to fit the stories of his family together, even as he has difficulty telling a single story straight. He tells Luddie of a time he dropped acid and came in contact with the ghost of himself from another time through touching a doorknob, and he wants to be like said doorknob for his grandfather. The letters are frenetic and earnest, as the narrator circles in on his family’s story.

“In a lot of books, individual stories are shown to be broader stories of history,” he says. “What I wanted to do was show how the big stories of history are actually all of these small stories.”

And though Nichols has, in a sense, written his grandfather’s story into a novel, it still feels like a private story to him. What was once a trip with his family, and then a gift to his girlfriend, now sits on the bookstore’s shelf.

“A couple of people have come up to me and quoted something from the book, and I’ll think, How do you know that?” he laughs. “It takes awhile. I’ll think it’s an inside joke, but then I’ll remember I put it in a book.”

Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder is out now.

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