Ken Scholes is the author of five novels and over fifty short stories published internationally in eight languages. His series, The Psalms of Isaak, is published by Tor Books, and his short fiction has been collected in three volumes published by Fairwood Press. Fairwood is also publishing Better Dreams, Fallen Seeds and Other Handfuls of Hope, another collection of Ken’s short stories, in summer 2025. Ken is a winner of, among others, the Writers of the Future Award, France’s Prix Imaginales, and the Endeavour Awards. Ken’s a public advocate for people living with C-PTSD and speaks openly about his experiences with it and growing up with ongoing trauma as a survivor of domestic violence and sexual abuse. Ken is also a performing musician, presenter and occasional consultant/coach.
Daniel A. Rabuzzi: Your epic The Psalms of Isaak “starts with a king finding a metal man weeping in an impact crater and goes from there …,” to quote you. That startling image gripped me, as it clearly did many other readers, and made me hunger to know more. Talk to us about the source of the image, how you knew it was the right place to begin your story, and how you grew it into five novels (and counting).
Ken Scholes: The Psalms of Isaak started as a short story. I had been getting a little experimental after a story called “The Santaman Cycle” and I had been toying with the line “Rudolfo rode to Glimmerglam in the Age of Laughing Madness.” Around the same time, a magazine called Lenox Avenue was calling for stories featuring mechanical oddities. It sparked what I thought was an interesting line about Rudolfo’s Gypsy Scouts finding a metal man weeping in an impact crater in the ruins of Windwir. With my short stories, I tend to know just how they need to start and finish. I wrote “Of Metal Men and Scarlet Thread and Dancing with the Sunrise” in a few sittings and then it went on to become my second pro-level sale after Writers of the Future. Alas, the market it was meant for closed for submissions before I had the story ready but Realms of Fantasy grabbed it up.
Early in my career, when I knew a story was coming out at some point, I’d start a Google search to see if anyone was noticing. In this instance, I was super early and I knew it wasn’t slated to release for a few months. But I did the search anyway and I got a hit on the title of my story. The artist Realms of Fantasy hired to illustrate my story had posted the image and had given it the same title as my story. And when I saw Allen Douglas’ image of Isaak weeping in the crater, I had a profound moment of epiphany. I understood two things clearly – that there was a very distinct 9/11 influence in my story that Allen brought out beautifully and powerfully, and that Isaak had a much bigger story for me to capture. I saw four distinct moments in Isaak’s life—viewed through his relationship to Rudolfo—and I started the second short story in the sequence. When the second story (“Of Missing Kings and Backward Dreams and the Honoring of Lies”) was rejected by Realms of Fantasy, I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Jay Lake and Realms editor Shawna McCarthy both wanted to see me use those two stories to create a novel and on 9/11/2006, Jay and my wife at the time threw down that life-changing dare. I’d sold probably a dozen short stories at this point, most at the small press level, but I’d also just won Writers of the Future and was getting traction in my writing career. It was time to write a novel and Jay had just placed his first series with Tor Books. He promised to take me under his wing at the upcoming Austin World Fantasy Convention at the end of October and introduce me to every agent and editor he’d met while marketing his book. But … and this was a big important but … he wasn’t going to do this for me unless I had a finished first draft. I felt daunted at the idea of writing a novel in six months, so seven weeks didn’t feel very possible. But when my wife offered to handle my end of the housework for those weeks, I took the plunge despite how terrifying it all felt. So from a string of words to what seemed to be a good place to start to a big, story-unfolding epiphany from the original artwork and a rejected second short story, I committed to the novel (knowing it was at least three novels potentially) and I won that dare. By the time I’d started Canticle (months before Tor’s offer came), I knew it would be five books come hell or high water. The only bit I severely underestimated was just how long it would take to get them all written.
DAR: The Psalms of Isaak adroitly addresses questions of faith, free will, and religion, without either dismissal or uncritical embrace. In so doing, your work acknowledges spiritual belief, morality, and eschatology, elements I think are central to much (most?) speculative fiction. As David Lodge says: “Popular science fiction … is a curious mixture of invented gadgetry and archetypal narrative motifs very obviously derived from folk tale, fairy tale, and Scripture, recycling the myths of Creation, Fall, Flood and a Divine Saviour, for a secular but still superstitious age” (The Art of Fiction, Viking Penguin, 1993). What do you think: are we trying to rewrite the Bible?
KS: This is a great question. I don’t think we’re trying to rewrite the Bible necessarily but I do think we’re still growing in our understanding of how life and humans really work, which is often what sacred writing seeks to uncover. And I think humans put their truth into their art all the way back to the caves they once drew in. As I’ve grown and stretched as a human, leaving my fundamentalism behind, I’ve come to see that the arts are a type of sacred expression and reflection and that expression and reflection are at the heart of religion. It doesn’t make the religion factually true, or the gods actually exist, but it does mean there’s psychological truth buried by humans in all of these things we make whether it’s a song, a poem, a painting, a prophecy or a psalm … or a series of novels. And the need to express these reflections is baked into us as critters. So in a sense, we’re crafting our own sacred expressions, drafting our own versions of the Bible that draws us into life, and leaving them for others to see and respond to. In the Psalms of Isaak, I’ve created a world largely fashioned with an eye to scripture, with odd capitalizations and references to mythological beings as if they were real in some “other world’s biblical epic.” The Moon Wizard in my series, for example, and his fall. But for anyone who reads deep enough into the books, by the time you reach the fourth novel you’ll have a much better sense of what’s really going on. And by the final volume’s ending, readers should have a really good sense of what’s been happening. And I do finally, slowly answer the question that was so prevalent when the first three volumes came out: Is it science fiction or fantasy? There really was always an answer I was pointing to there. And we know by the finish line that everything that seemed superstitious or supernatural ultimately was grounded in reality. [Arthur C.] Clarke’s law about the technology of advanced civilizations appearing to be magic was one of the early “guiding lines” for me in this unfolding saga.
DAR: The post-apocalyptic setting of your novels may well recall the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Book of Revelation. Reviewers have likened The Psalms of Isaak to Walter M. Miller Jr. ‘s A Canticle for Leibowitz; I am also reminded of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Do such comparisons resonate for you, and why or why not?
KS: I’ve fed myself a solid diet of post-apocalyptia probably back to Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold and Zelazny’s Damnation Alley along with the Bible stories I was raised on. I think the flood myth was the most prevalent in my earliest childhood but not long after, I started hearing tales of the Great Tribulation and the Rapture (note the capitalizations) from the Bible as various preachers in various denominations unpacked their End Times belief systems upon me and my little sister in all of the churches we visited as children. I’ve read some of the titles you reference and I can see why it might draw comparisons, but post-apocalyptia isn’t really the genre the Psalms of Isaak lives within in my mind. I think the technothriller and Otherworldly Biblical Epic genres fit it better but I also think a lot of my writing hasn’t easily settled into a genre. I think if folks can let themselves just experience the unfolding saga without needing to label it, they may be surprised at the elements of genre they experience—mystery, romance, military, epic fantasy, fairy tale—but it’s all wrapped up with a “soft” science fiction bow. It’s the future of the last pocket of humanities playing out the finale of a millions-of-years spread across the galaxy from the humble beginnings of Firsthome.
DAR: You’ve said that you “fell in love with Story at a young age, through TV at first, then later through movies, books, comics and games.” This reminds me of Michael Chabon’s discussion of how he became a writer in his Maps and Legends, and likewise Jonathan Lethem in The Ecstasy of Influence. Tell us more about which movies, and so on, influenced you, in which directions with what balance of force, and how.
KS: My earliest memories are television shows that captured my imagination when I was probably between the ages of three and eight years old initially. Batman, Speed Racer, Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, Land of the Lost, Star Trek. The first movies I remember really gosh-wowing me were The Planet of the Apes, The Time Machine, Logan’s Run and then of course, Star Wars showed up when I was almost ten. My first chapter books showed up in a big way in second grade. I started with Lester Del Rey and Fred Williamson but quickly expanded to include, well, just about everything I could find. I’d plowed through enough Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators along with the juvenile SFs I could find and then of course Susan Cooper and J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, not those other books of his) and somewhere in the midst of it all, Ray Bradbury. Recently, Sarah Chorn wrote in the introduction of my fourth collection, that my humanity is my greatest strength and I see that as Bradbury’s ultimate influence over me. His fiction showed me a side to us and to life that registered and resonated in a deeper way. His nostalgia and longing, the quiet passion for October, the stories—and truths—that flowed from him following his humanity. I’d read a bit of his work, and then reading his essay “How to Keep and Feed a Muse” convinced me I needed to be a writer.
DAR: Your characters grow and change, they surprise us (do they surprise you?); they are, in Forster’s famous words, “round.” In the cavalcade of their flaws, failures, and self-deceptions, which you present with sympathy and humor, I see echoes of The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, and the novels of Sinclair Lewis. What models do you use for character evolution and self-awareness?
KS: That’s the goal—that my characters grow and change as they face the problems I set in their path. Sometimes, they double down and pay the price for not growing and changing. And yes, sometimes they surprise me but not very often. Usually they act just as I suspected they would. It’s weirdly tied to “how much I’m listening to them,” which is an interesting activity with made-up people. I think at the heart, my characters feel pretty real because I treat them pretty real. And at the end of the day, they’re all variations of the one character I know most about—me. We writers can use all the world of humanity to influence, inspire and inform but at the end of the day, my own experience of life is the richest mine I can pull from. Including my flaws, failures, self-deceptions, plans, schemes, hopes, dreams. I use life as my model, I guess, and my own experience—which has varied widely. And initially, my writing was an exploration of my psyche with every story being a different aspect of my inner life as I explored shifts in my beliefs and all of the feelings that came with it.
I think maybe the secret (and this includes my relationship with my C-PTSD) is that in fiction and the characters I stand up within my fiction, I go wide and deep with my view and try to capture life as it is mixed in with humanity’s deep inner child’s cry for a magical solution that will sweep us all off our metaphysical feet. I try (just as I do in life) to integrate all of the authentic, true bits. And the storytelling flows out from there. People we can care about facing a problem we can identify with in a place that feels real and believable to us in such a way that we can suspend our disbelief and vicariously experience Story. Because at the end of the day, I’m just a kind of story, telling a kind of story, to a bunch of folks who are … kind of stories themselves but maybe don’t realize it.
DAR: The five novels comprising The Psalms of Isaak total nearly 2,200 pages, and were published over an eight-year span. You are working now on a new series in the world of Isaak. I would have asked the same question of Trollope about his Palliser novels or Galsworthy about the Forsyte Chronicles: how do you shape and target such a long narrative with so many characters, how do you keep the flow from eddying into lullwaters, how do you sustain pace, tone, and suspense?
KS: Yes, it was somewhere around three quarters of a million words all told. I never imagined tackling a story that big. And I worked on it for just under a decade with the first book started in September 2006 and the fifth book finished in spring 2016. For the first five books, it was a lot of discovering as I wrote. But I uncovered an entire world and a vast history of humanity buried in my body of work. You can find bits of the backstory for the series in stories like “The First Gift Given” written before I started the series and “A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon” written as I was drafting the series. As I wrote the series, characters would show up like Vlad Li Tam or Winters and I’d decide to give them their own POV if they whispered loud enough. Now I’m underway with a new series, The Pilgrims of the Dream, following a cast of characters as they experience the Final Dream (deep in the fourth volume,Requiem) and follow it to the moon. But for this venture, I have a five book series to draw from. Originally, I thought I’d be writing novellas with two POV characters and maybe 20k per story but as I started researching, it expanded within a few months into a new series of novels. I started out studying the Empire of Y’Zir and the moon thinking my novella would be set only in those two places. The best way to do that was to start by listening to the audio of Requiem and Hymn where my readers first experience those settings. And then of course, as I listened, I met familiar (but sometimes forgotten) characters who insisted they also wanted to go to the moon. So I ultimately rolled back to Lamentation and listened to all five books. I created lists and copied and pasted big batches of detail about characters and setting and bits of plot. I started a spreadsheet with “taped markers” where each of my POV characters were during key events in the series and let it all simmer in my slow-cooker brain. Ultimately, I know going in that the first novel of the new series, To Sail The Blue-Green Moon, starts just before the Final Dream and goes through the end of Hymn so the events all have to line up. But for the second volume (I think By the Dim Light of Lasthome) I’ll have a blank bit of canvas and less need to line things up.
Now how it all keeps flowing, pacing, moving? I’m not quite sure. It’s probably tied to the musical side of me in some way. I feel very much like I write by ear—it just sounds and feels right—and I stay with it. I learned over the long haul of the series that even the days where the words feel wrong, blocked, slowed, they are nearly always just fine. I just need to show up. And the quality check comes later after the quantity of words—knowing all of that is ahead at some level helps me stay in the current lane I need to swim.
DAR: Do you have a specific audience in mind as you write? What reactions do you seek from your readers? What reactions surprise you?
KS: I think it varies from project to project but as my career has grown, my sense of there being such a thing as A Ken Scholes fan has also emerged. It kind of had to with all of the positive attention my work received. For instance, for this new series, I’m thinking about all of the Psalms of Isaak fans that might get enthused about a follow-on story with found families finding home. For my self help book, the audience I think about are the 150 or so Mill Valley High School students who spent 90 minutes with me (in three blocks of 50 kids each) discussing my life and work and brainstorming a story together. It was the first time I’d ever been asked (several times) if I’d consider writing a memoir and the Experiencing Life book points back to that time as what I’d want to put in a memoir for young people to read. I don’t know that I especially seek a reaction but I hope that my words will evoke thoughts and feelings of resonance, connection and vicarious story as they pull readers through my wacky imagination. I think the surprising reactions have been the ones at the far edges—the overwhelming enthusiasm on one hand and the varieties of negative expressions on the other. For instance, the tiny bits of hate mail or the unhappy colleagues choosing to trash the book rather than blurb it when they received their copies. Oh and the gentleman who saw my photo, was convinced my weight would kill me before I finished his books, and offered to personally develop my diet and fitness practices so I would not die on him like Robert Jordan did. But there were much fewer negatives and the overall positive reaction has been helpful to me embracing my skills and doing my work.
DAR: Let’s talk more about how your being a musician may influence your writing, and vice versa. Haruki Murakami goes so far as to say “you can’t write well if you don’t have an ear for music … listening to music improves your style” (Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa, Knopf 2016, trans. Jay Rubin). How does that sound to you?
KS: I think in my case it absolutely has been a big influence. Both being a musician and being a lover of music. My first stories were banged out on a manual typewriter while my six Simon and Garfunkel records played through side A and then side B and to this day, if I’m stuck or easing back to work after time away, S&G is my go-to comfort music. As I was saying earlier, I write by ear much the same way I perform music or speak. The words have a right feeling to them (but as I said, even the wrong feeling words end up still being the right words.) When I play a show, I don’t use a playlist and when I write, I don’t really use an outline. I just flow along with what makes sense next. But along with the music, I would add what Bradbury added to my life “read poetry … read poetry every day.” Lyrics can be fine poems set to music and by combining the music with the words, there’s a rhythm and cadence and beat. I think a diligent fan could find a LOT of Paul Simon references buried in my work. For instance, The Ship That Sailed the Moon (from “Rufello and the First Czarist Lunar Expedition”) came from his line “we come on a ship they called the Mayflower, we come on a ship that sailed the moon, we come in the Age’s most uncertain hours and sing an American Tune.” The book Canticle took its title from their version of “Scarborough Fair” and the lines “war bellows blazing in scarlet battalions” inspired the Crimson Empress in the Empire of Y’Zir.
DAR: You have returned to writing after almost seven years on hiatus. With your mind refreshed and full of new perspectives, what strikes you about the state of literature and publishing today? What trends most excite you? Which might alarm or depress you?
KS: Part of the fuel for my hiatus was to strip away what wasn’t necessary or adding to my life and to invest more into the areas that hadn’t received much attention in the twenty years (1997 to 2016) that I’d been pushing that writing rock like a solid part time job. And I was absolutely finding my mind refreshed and full of new perspectives but one of the biggest was: I no longer really care about the state of literature or publishing today, am not alarmed or depressed or elated or encouraged. I cared far more about how to pay forward all I’d learned along the way so humans could suffer a little less and have a better experience of life. Certainly writing was one area that could happen in and I kept the door open for anyone who wanted a Ken Scholes story but I felt I’d given that twenty years of time and there were other bits of me that deserved a bit of time to catch up. I had a life-changing epiphany shortly after finishing the series while I was navigating my divorce and trying to decide what to do next. I’d never seen myself as a full time writer but the Psalms of Isaak and a small inheritance gave me a chance to try it out. Then my five-year plan to get my writing revenue up to livable became a four-year plan to get divorced and start a new life in a different town co-parenting my twin girls. Initially, I cast about for something that could keep me self-employed but after my epiphany and some time for the dust to settle, I saw quite clearly what I needed to do. I went back to my government job in public procurement, started “adding on” wings to my house of creativity. I invested money into equipment to perform and record my music. I started a deep dive of research into philosophy, neurology, and the science of consciousness. I set up a consultancy that would let me use my skills as a facilitator, nonprofit executive, and creative coach in a more focused way. I started the self-help book and spin-off of presentations, classes, the consulting/life framework that lived within it all – this model I call Integrated Authenticity.
My focus became wandering the Pacific Northwest with my guitar playing music, talking about writing and sometimes giving readings wrapped in songs, finding people and organizations that needed a leg up in small towns like the one that made me, telling my story about how I went out from those spaces with one set of beliefs and found better ones. So that’s what I’m up to in my spare time. And even coming back to writing this new series, I find myself still pretty divorced from the industry. I read very little fiction these days and prefer short stories when I do, despite reading thousands of novels in my day. I know little to nothing about the market and state of publishing. And really don’t feel a strong need to know. What I know is: I have a book to write and once I have a draft of it, I have a publisher who gets first crack at it based on my contract for the Psalms of Isaak. Certainly, I hope Tor will love it and put the next series into the world but I have no assurances and really don’t need any. My job is to write the next book and send it over. And to avoid big multi-book contracts if I can. It feels much nice doing that from the standpoint of believing my body of work is Kenough. Heh.
All of the newest reading and writers have been nonfiction and I think out of it, my new favorite book (besides the Tao te Ching) is probably Awareness by Anthony DeMello. I also became far more of an Audible than paper reader.
AI is interesting stuff. It’s inevitable that we would reach this point. And the human ego just loves the romanticism of the writer’s life. Everyone has a novel in them. Writing is so easy, I’ll just let YOU write my idea and split the money. Oh my. So when the taboo on self publishing lifted and some folks saw success in the indy publishing world, there was a massive amount of suddenly available, not-quite-ready-for-prime-time books (along with the good ones) as EVERYONE decided how easy it all was to Be a Published Author. Classes sprung up to help folks achieve their writerly dreams. Books on how to win at it burst forth. New marching orders issued by the Writing Cult’s Leaders. Now, not long later, we have AI showing up and I’m unsurprised to see that folks would go there to write their books because they don’t know how to do it otherwise and yet they still think it’s a good idea. Having an AI ghostwriter isn’t the same as writing your own book and learning painfully as you do the work. Not that AI won’t have some kind of place at the table. I’m certain it will. But I don’t feel super at all about the entire Psalms of Isaak being cribbed for their AI training. No one asked, no one paid, and that’s not how it works. I suspect we’ll settle into something and I suspect artisans will still make art, assisted by AI or not, and that there will be camps and flame wars and all the things human critters do as they face change with fear and the secondary emotions that rise off of that fear.
My job is to just do my job—put my stories and songs into the world and love my neighbor into a more hopeful, empowered life full of real choices and not dominated by fear or self inflicted suffering. And raise my children under those values. Everything else beyond those things is extraneous.
DAR: Let’s close by returning to the main themes of your novels. I see your work as what Stephanie Burt calls “wisdom literature” (Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems, Basic Book 2019), i.e., building on deep traditions to update profound truths in the face of new challenges, offering hope without promising simple solutions. I also see your writing as an emancipatory project, presenting Kantian “dare to know” possibilities together with a rousing defense of human diversity along the lines of Le Guin or Delany. Your thoughts?
KS: Well first off, I’m very flattered and grateful that you see my work in this way. When I go back over my body of work, especially the Psalms of Isaak, I see where I’ve been pointed since leaving the ministry and entering into therapy. I see my beliefs changing and my values emerging and as I’ve said earlier, all of us humans hide our truth in our art. As I’ve discovered what’s true about me, I’ve avoided tossing the bits I don’t like and have instead seen what happens when you mix the good, the bad, the ugly about yourself into stories and songs and sling them out into the world. Those bits of Integrated Authenticity go forth and carry within them epiphanies, revelations, awakenings and realizations of all we are, all we’ve been, and all we can be.
One of my work friends recently labeled me a philosopher (with a philosophy of his own) and it set me back on my heels a bit like when my friend Jay (Lake) called me a compassionate humanist. But ultimately, I have been and am a lover and seeker of wisdom and my writing has always been a shovel excavating my own soul from the muck and mire of my origin story. And I think all of our truth, our wisdom, can show up powerfully in all of our art from cave drawings to novels to statues and poems and songs.
DAR: Thank you Ken, both for your ongoing body of creative work, and for offering your insights and observations in this interview.
Daniel A. Rabuzzi is an author and a visual artist. He has been published in, among others, Crab Creek Review, Harvard Review, New Letters, Hopscotch Translation, Ancillary Review of Books, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 