Little Atoms 584 - Season Butler's Cygnet

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**Season Butler** (0:41)
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**Season Butler** (0:57)
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**Neil Denny** (1:21)
This is Little Atoms, a radio show about ideas and culture with me, Neil Denny. This week, I'm talking to Season Butler about her debut novel, Cygnet.
Season Butler is a writer, artist and dramaturg born in Washington, DC. Through her work, she explores her interest in identity and otherness, the opportunities and trap of hindsight and hope, and what it means to look forward to an increasingly wily future. An early draft of her debut novel, Cygnet, which we're gonna be talking about today, was shortlisted for the SI Leeds Prize for Unpublished Fiction by Black and Asian Women. She lives and works between London and Berlin, and today she's in London. Season, welcome to Little Atoms.

**Season Butler** (2:16)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Neil Denny** (2:18)
So how would you describe Cygnet?

**Season Butler** (2:22)
Well, Cygnet is a coming of age novel that's very much set within the anxieties and also some of the optimisms of our contemporary moment. So the plot centers on an island that's an old age separatist community. This group of people who are over 65 have decided to completely turn their backs on the youth obsessed, old age marginalizing mainstream world. And they've kind of created this space just for themselves.
One of their number has a granddaughter who found herself in a spot of trouble taken in by social services. And so she allowed the granddaughter to come and stay for what was supposed to be just a couple of weeks, but then the grandmother dies and the protagonist of Cygnet is this granddaughter who's found herself stranded in an old age separatist community on an island in the Atlantic.

**Neil Denny** (3:22)
And so known as the kid, she's the narrator of the story. It's the first person narration. She's 17, turns 18 during the course of the book. Tell us more about her, where she came from.

**Season Butler** (3:34)
So the narrator has kind of come from all over. She doesn't really have a home and that's one of the defining features of her kind of existence in this fictional world.
Anywhere she's been for a short space of time, if that's been Colorado or LA or Boston or New York, there's always been some reason why she's had to move on. And that's also the case out here on Swan Island.

**Neil Denny** (4:01)
And you said she's been in care for a period of time and her parents are, as the book begins, drug addicts. But there's scenes of a past where they've had better times, a scene set in California where a mother's a singer. Tell us something about that.

**Season Butler** (4:18)
I think I'm really interested in marginalized identities and their actual lives. I think both old people, drug addicts, young black girls, are often heavily stereotyped when there's no one single way to be a junkie. And if we were to generalize, I'd say a lot of people who live in addiction are interesting, artistic, sensitive, poetic, intelligent people.
And so, yeah, life is rarely as homogeneous as stereotyping might make it seem.

**Neil Denny** (4:56)
There's a point in the book where you talk about people that are perhaps wealthy, casual users of drugs, look upon drug addicted people as if they're also just having a great time at the weekend, like life's one long party.