Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Tobias Carroll writes about Ex-Members from Astrophil Press.

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An Ex-Members Alphabet Book

E is for Eventide

I started a zine in the summer of 1996; it was called Eventide, because I thought that sounded appropriately melancholy. When it began, it was largely focused on music; I was inspired pretty heavily by the zines Rumpshaker, Trustkill, and Anti-Matter. I should stress that at the beginning, I had little sense of what I was doing; I used Microsoft Word for the layout, created page number graphics manually for some reason that’s lost to time, and never quite figured out the right way to make photos look good when the issues were printed.

Still, it was an education. And there’s a direct line from the zine writing I did over 20 years ago to the fiction I’m writing now. That’s true both from an aesthetic standpoint and from a logistical one; there are friends I’ve made from doing the zine who played a key part in both creative writing generally and this novel specifically. (Astrophil’s duncan b. barlow was one of the first people I interviewed for it, for instance.)

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X is for Parkway eXits

My hometown is located about an hour south of New York. I grew up five minutes from Exit 109 on the Garden State Parkway. There’s a weird combination of density and isolation that, I think, comes from living in New Jersey — or at least it can. (Tom Perotta’s The Wishbones does a particularly good job of tapping into this particular sensation; so does the show Mr. Robot.) And while I knew I didn’t want to set Ex-Members in Monmouth County, or a fictionalized version thereof, I did know starting out that I wanted to deal with that paradox of suburban Jersey: you’re close to major cities, but it’s also very easy to get stuck in a very locked-down routine.

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M is for Maps (of the hand-drawn variety)

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At this point, I’ve been using Field Notes for most of my projects. Lots and lots of Field Notes. (I think there are seven different ones for my current work in progress.) One of the ones for Ex-Members — which was, I think, just going by Untitled New Dutchess Project at that point — has a bunch of maps where I tried to give a sense of where the town was relative to the Delaware River and where certain places in the town were in relation to one another. It’s not the greatest work of cartography, but it was a helpful reference point throughout the process.

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E is for Endeavor

My three favorite punk records from my home state? Endeavor’s Constructive Semantics, Dahlia Seed’s Survived By, Lifetime’s Jersey’s Best Dancers.

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M is for (John) McPhee

I was in Portland, Oregon at some point in the late 2000s or early 2010s when I picked up a copy of John McPhee’s The Pine Barrens on a whim. It was my first time reading McPhee, who’s since become one of my favorite writers — but it was also a more fascinating detour into my home state’s history than I’d anticipated. McPhee was researching his book about the titular region of New Jersey at a time when it seemed likely that a planned airport and city would radically change it. That stuck with me; I ended up spending some time in the archives of the New Jersey Pinelands Commission a few years ago, which houses a substantial number of planning documents. I don’t remember the exact moment when I decided to allude to some of that history in Ex-Members, but it seemed like a good fit.

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B is for (Gavin) Bryars

At some point in my alt-rock-fueled youth, I picked up a copy of the 1993 recording of Gavin Bryars’s composition Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, likely due to the presence of Tom Waits on this recording. It was, in retrospect, my introduction to minimalist composition — several years before my friend Daphne took me to Tower Records and instructed me to buy a copy of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.

The Bryars composition is based around a selection of found audio — a recording of an apparently unhoused man singing a section of a hymn. Bryars then incorporated this into a larger musical work; the version I had also incorporated Tom Waits’s distinctive vocals. This was my introduction to what my Jason described many years ago as “Alex Ross-core” — and it seemed fitting to have one of Dean’s fictional compositions be based around a similar interplay of live music and found audio.

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E is for (Route) Eighteen

I spent a lot of time in my late teens and early twenties driving between my hometown and New Brunswick, New Jersey. If you’re going between the two, you’re going to take Route 18 unless traffic is an absolute nightmare, and at the time I was making those drives there wasn’t an easy way to find out that traffic would be an issue.

So, call it driving as research. There’s a short story that’s in my collection Transitory called “Party Able Model” that’s directly inspired by those drives. This was a more general sensation — of driving alone at night, sad music on, feeling like the most melancholy person on the planet. (Or at least in New Jersey.)

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R is for Rivers

One of the reasons I created New Dutchess as a fictional town in northwestern New Jersey is because the sound of the band The Alphanumeric Murders wouldn’t necessarily have worked anywhere else. I wanted to create a fictional band that could fit on the roster of (say) Gern Blandsten Records, but also be comfortable in the hardcore scene. And situating the town not far from the Delaware River gave me a recurring mental image there as well. I’ve spent more time in the last few years in various towns on the river in question, Lambertville in particular, and that also ended up working its way into the novel.

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S is for Sunset/Sunrise

As in, the album by the band The Dutchess and the Duke. One of the reasons New Dutchess is named what it’s named is because of a weird editorial argument I got into in the late 2000s over “Dutchess” versus “Duchess.” I’m entirely fine with using either; growing up, I can remember family members referencing Dutchess County, New York, which in turn made the band’s name seem entirely familiar to me. The editor I was chatting with felt that the version of the word sans the “t” was preferable. And I decided that I’d make the setting of the next thing I wrote in a town called “New Dutchess,” because I liked the sound of it. I rationalized it with the idea that the founders of New Dutchess had, at some point, left Dutchess County to do their own thing. This is, at least, my headcanon for it. Though if I’m the author, does that just make it “canon”?

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