KMWR: Can you tell us what it was like writing the first draft of “Seventies Cold”?

ZD: First of all, I just want to say thanks to Feign for doing such a great job with this story. For believing in it in the first place; for the rad design treatment; and for the excellent Instagram reels and other promotion. The short story as an artform clearly needs a boost, American writing needs a boost, and it's invigorating to see an outfit with swagger and style, a clear effort to cultivate an aesthetic reaction. That's often missing in literary culture. So thank you.

"Seventies Cold" was inspired by the podcast Mother Country Radicals, one of those sensational, immersive narrative podcasts with a distinct sonic palette and narrative brand, archival audio and atmosphere, that they just don't make very often. Like, there was a brief golden age of that style, before podcasts defaulted to talk shows. (The podcast series I work on, Death in the West, aspires to that energy.) Mother Country Radicals is a family story about Weatherman, the clandestine revolutionary organization that began in the late 1960s in opposition to the Vietnam War and American racism. Weatherman, eventually known as the Weather Underground, was at the heart of very complex events across the 1970s—bombings, a prison break, bank robberies, all kinds of craziness. Some people ended up living underground for years. A lot went to prison. A few of them died. It's an epic and wild story, worthy of Russian novel treatment.

So I got into this podcast. It planted specific seeds in my mind—ideas for individual scenes that began to coalesce into plot points. And it pointed to characters and, really, a whole atmosphere of underground life and struggle that I wanted to evoke. 

The first draft evolved out of those scenes and my efforts to understand the time and place, and imagine people who could live in that space.

The first draft played very loosely with chronology. The scenes were out of order. I did that for a reason: I wanted to create a sense that my main character was so adrift in her own identity that she didn't know who or even when she was.

But I showed it to my brother, Chad Dundas, who is a much more experienced fiction writer than I am. He's published two brilliant novels—like, he's the real deal. And his feedback was, yo, this is confusing. On reflection, I do think fractured chronologies are hard to make work. And so the most important difference between the published story and the first draft is that the story that Feign published is mostly in straight chronological order.

KMWR: The many details of the early 1970s peppered through this piece (the outfits, the dialects and slang, the appliances) makes me have to inquire how you went about researching for this piece. Was there a reason for picking this time period? Did you have a certain familiarity or interest in it before sitting down to write?

ZD: I just turned 50. I was born in 1975. This story takes place in January, 1973, exactly two years before I was born. I am fascinated by this time period, definitely, and I think it's because I grew up around all kinds of artifacts and clues and traces of this era, but obviously didn't live through it. If you weren't around in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it's hard to understand the huge, dreadful, looming presence of Vietnam over those years. Through my most formative years, there were three central driving forces in American life: the Cold War (we thought we could die at any moment), Vietnam (we'd lost a war, but the protest and music culture of the time remained completely central), and the Middle East (we were hated and endangered). And so even in 1982 or 1983, stuff that happened in the early '70s remained very front and center. And in terms of pop culture, the big music and sports moments of the '70s were very present all through the '80s. It wasn't until the Cold War suddenly ended, 1989-91, that we collectively decided to put the '70s to bed.

I also think that time period is interestingly amorphous. In 1973, you're no longer in "The Sixties." But the core culture of "The Seventies" hasn't happened yet. You don't have disco or punk, Star Wars or Fleetwood Mac. Watergate hasn't happened yet. Nixon was just re-elected by an absolute landslide—he's a political colossus. No one knows who Jimmy Carter is at this point. The war is dragging on and some of the anti-war energy has curdled into this desire for violent revolution. It's this sort of awkward, in-between time.

I wouldn't say I did in-depth research for this story, exactly, but I did try to make some things feel right. For the language, I tried to vibe with the cadences of the archival audio I heard in that podcast, and some of the written material I found related to Weatherman. There was a verbal style that was very much of the time. It sounds slightly stilted to our ears now, mannered. But also kind of cool and forthright.

Thanks to the internet, it's easy to find a model of space heater or table-top radio that could have been in a fleabag apartment in 1973. If I needed a specific "prop" for my characters—a TV, a car—I'd think about the kinds of things people might own in 1973 if they had basically no money. It would be stuff that came out several years before. And I'd just look that up on the Google machine. It's easy to find Sears fashion ads from fall 1972 and see the jackets and slacks marketed to lower-middle-class people. There's a lot of grist for the imagination.

KMWR: I’m curious to learn more about your attention to crime fiction and to learn more about what it was like writing your book, The Great Detective. Would you consider yourself a writer of noir?

ZD: I've been obsessed with detective stories since I was a little kid, growing up in Montana. And yes, a decade ago, I published a nonfiction book called The Great Detective, a pop-cultural history of Sherlock Holmes. (It's available at bargain prices online these days.) Working on that book, I learned a lot about the history of that genre. In the context of crime fiction, the Sherlock Holmes stories are like a bridge from a primordial era—Edgar Allan Poe, basically—right up to the advent of what you'd call "hardboiled" or "noir." (Arthur Conan Doyle was writing those stories and novels from the 1880s all the way into the 1920s.) And I am a huge, unabashed lover of Raymond Chandler. I have a more complicated relationship with Dashiell Hammett, but I would say that my "Roman Empire" is the fact that Hammett set Red Harvest, arguably the historically definitive "hardboiled" novel, in Montana. I love Ross MacDonald; I spent a ton of time in my late teens and early 20s with Jim Thompson and David Goodis—there was a time in my life when I'd would basically only read Black Lizard paperbacks.

But I'm not so much determined to write "noir" or crime fiction specifically as I am interested in writing short stories about secret life, about various substrata of underground America. 

KMWR: Katie is sharp and observant, and I love how attuned she is to the music that surrounds her in this piece; it’s almost a comfort amongst the fear of Katie’s group being found out. Why was it important for music to play a large part in a story about so many other, seemingly bigger things?

ZD: I haven't written a lot of short stories, but I've been trying to make music as central to them as I can. Music is a huge inspiration to me. When I was younger, I was involved in the punk-rock scene, such as it was in Missoula, Montana, and I still play in a band and try to get out to shows. To me, songs are the galvanizing force of American culture—it's all I can do not to name every story I start after a song title. So, hey, if I'm going to write a story set in the early '70s, I'm going to try to geek out on the music of that broad time period. 

And then, Katie—it's so interesting, how characters change as you're working with them, as they reveal themselves in your imagination as you go along with the draft. With Katie, I started with some basic biographical DNA that I cribbed from real-life women who were involved with Weatherman. There are some extraordinary stories, really strange actually. Idealistic young women who were involved with conventional liberal/left politics and activism in the mid-1960s who, come 1970, had changed their names and gone underground. Reinvented themselves as desperados. It happened very quickly. I was thinking about women like Diana Oughton, who graduated from Bryn Mawr in the early '60s and was an American Friends Service Committee volunteer in Guatemala—a do-gooder,  basically, in the best sense of the term—but who got killed in 1970 when a bunch of Weathermen accidentally blew themselves up in New York. What was up with that? How does someone go from being a hopeful young liberal to a clandestine would-be revolutionary?

But as I was writing Katie, frankly a lot of that faded into the background. She turned out to be a total music nerd who's deeply into bands and songs—like a real super-fan—the kind of person who immediately zeroes in on whatever's on the radio. She has opinions about the Stones, and about Stevie Wonder. She's got Big Brother and the Holding Company songs running through her head. If she walks into an old-man bar and Sinatra's on, she knows what album. 

Beyond that, she's a highly competent journalist, with a sort of managing-editor skillset, which puts her in the driver's seat of the propaganda project she and her comrades are working on. (The magazine that Katie and friends are working on in the story is loosely based on the real-life book Prairie Fire, which came out of the Weatherman milieu a bit later in the '70s.) And she's got this boyfriend Eric, whom she's somewhat in love with and definitely attracted to, but he's problematic. And she's on the edge of a drinking problem and very much trying to keep that in check. 

So music ended up being part of the collage that made up Katie in my mind.

KMWR: What have you been reading recently that you’ve loved, and is there anything you’ve read recently you wanted to throw across the room?

ZD: I tend to read a bunch of different books simultaneously and somewhat slowly. In the short-story vein, latest greatest hits include Kevin Barry's That Old Country Music, Catherine Lacey's Certain American States, Jamel Brinkley's Witness and Mariana Enriquez's Things We Lost in the Fire. 

Of those, Barry is a killer. I love his writing so much. He can build a story that has just enough plot to carry you along without getting overwhelmed with details, which I think is a problem for me as a writer. Enriquez is wild—totally singular, and her modern-horror-movie version of Buenos Aires is compelling, an atmosphere you sink into. I recommend all of the above, though, for different reasons.

KMWR: Are you working on anything new?

ZD: It's been a bit of a struggle! I have a fairly demanding day job as an editor at Wildsam, a travel and culture publisher with a magazine and book series, both of which cross my desk. I've got a family and a bunch of other pursuits, including the band I mentioned earlier. So writing momentum can come and go, despite my best efforts to be disciplined and systematic. I recently realized I had about four early-stage drafts going simultaneously—and I didn't like any of them. I put them all in a Drive folder and said sayonara for now. I committed to one story that I think tracks more closely with themes and tones I care about. I'm about a third of a way into the draft!

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Zach Dundas is a writer and editor born in Montana, based in Portland. He serves as editorial director for the travel and culture publisher Wildsam and co-producer for the award-winning podcast Death in the West. Back in the day, his book The Great Detective explored the cultural legacy of Sherlock Holmes and Victorian crime fiction. Right about now, he plays bass guitar in the band the Wrong Hands and his writing can be found at zachdundas.substack.com.

Read “Seventies Cold” here.