Welcome to BookView Interview, a conversation series where BookView talks to authors.
Recently, we talked to Curtis Palmer about his writing and recently released debut novel, Domesteaders: Cloud 8.5, a dense, unruly tale that follows one man’s long, looping attempt to make meaning out of personal and historical wreckage (read the review here).
Before Curtis Palmer received his degrees: a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Art, Industrial Design, he was a student of R. Buckminster Fuller. He trained as a computer-aided draughtsman and subsequently became a CPU whisperer. With perseverance and pluck he’s now a guitarist too. Since 2005 he has exhibited and published with the Bridges Organization’s MathArt Conferences, Generative Art Conferences, and Joint Mathematics Meetings. Exhibitions have included prints, sculptures and animations that emerged from the wedding of platonic ideals and computer approximations. In 1994 he couldn’t imagine that his thesis topic, “Omniopticon, Design Alternatives for a Spherical Projection System”, would become a multibillion dollar billboard in Las Vegas. He lives in Edmonton, Alberta, with his wife and son.
YouTube Channel: Omniopticon
What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?
It was the summer of love ’67, Edmonton Coronation Field. Edmonton’s Love In. An activist had acquired a ring of listeners. Un-amplified he held the attention of a crowd I estimate at 120. Me crosslegged on the ground a few metres away from the speaker. He spoke about racism in Canadian prisons. How First Nation’s peoples and Metis were disproportionately affected by corporal punishment. Then my mother appeared and dragged me from the circle of enchantment by my ear. Oh, the earony!
What was the best money you ever spent as a writer?
I have spent $15k to publish my first novel, probably my last. $2500 on a 3 week retreat whence the framework was set. Thanks Powell River. Thence $9K spent with a team of editors who served to drill into me the mantra, “Respect your Reader!” Thanks Friesen. $3K for copies hard and soft. Downpayment on the opportunity for community engagement.
Are you a feeler or a thinker?
If you ask Suzanne Langer, there’s little difference. Reasoning is behaviour in pursuit of the feeling of certainty. I am certain of it.
What inspired the premise of your book?
The story goes like this. Near the end of covid lockdown, I opened a box of papers to discover past research on airships. 130 pages including correspondence with industry, government and most importantly,
“Son. Son. Come quick. Look at this. I found my dirigible file. I forgot I wrote Bucky about this.”
My son replied,
“Every son should have a father with a dirigible file.”
So I wrote a novel to close the dirigible file.
How do you come up with names for your characters?
I share with a character in my novel, the disconnect to family history. Boon or bane? Then along comes a distant cousin who writes a 400 year family history and voilà almost everybody in the bible is a member of the family. Character names were easy after that.
What makes this book important right now?
People need to be sensitized to the emergent reality that the future is ours to design. We don’t need mind control, just environmental controls.
Design or design not. If design not, suffer the fates.
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BookView Review 
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