Writer’s Block: Ben Zalkind

All Lit Up: Tell us about your new book Honeydew. What can readers expect?

Ben Zalkind: My debut novel, Honeydew, is a madcap dystopian satire that follows a group of feckless rebels whose act of petty sabotage puts them in the crosshairs of a megacorporation and its celebrity CEO, Moses Honeydew.

Honeydew has something for everyone: A billionaire tech bro who plans to pilot a submersible drill to Earth’s mantle, a criminal kingpin who bankrolls an anarchist collective, a Swiss family doctor moonlighting as a spook, and even a direct action splinter cell composed entirely of elderly activists. One of my blurbers, the novelist Ryan Chapman, described it as “a Monkey Wrench Gang for the frenzied, techno-dystopian now.”

ALU: If you had to describe your writing style in just a few words, what would they be?

BZ: Sneaky, wide-eyed, slightly surreal satire filtered through indignation and bewilderment.

ALU: If you could collaborate with any author, living or dead, who would it be and why?

BZ: More and more, it’s Terry Pratchett, the beloved author of the Discworld series. I came to his satirical, nominally fantasy novels a few years ago, and they’re ingenious, hilarious, and ultimately astute works of literature and social commentary. I admire the crispness of his prose and the tidiness of his plotting. He also has a way of delivering his humane, often subversive, reflections without resorting to ham-fisted parody.

Before his passing, Sir Terry also participated in a number of successful collaborations. Most famously, his Good Omens, written with the now-disgraced Neil Gaiman, is an excellent novel. As a writer, I suspect I would benefit from his restraint and inventiveness, and it would be a privilege of the highest order to get a glimpse into the mind of a genius. 

ALU: How has your perspective on writing changed over time?

BZ: In the late aughts, when I was a creative writing graduate student at the University of Chicago, I had the outrageously good fortune to join a group of students and faculty for a dinner with the award-winning novelist and short story writer, George Saunders. He shared a story about his own writing journey, which began with a desire to emulate Hemingway and, in his recounting, stymied him in ways he could only understand later. The Saunders we know and love was a work in progress, and his inimitable mélange of satire, absurdism, and the surreal was something he had to permit. It was his wife who picked up one of the short stories he had written for fun and assured him, “Hey, this is good. Why don’t you write this type of thing?”

I’ve been on a similar journey, I think, an evolution through prose styles and genre frames. Honeydew’s tone and flow are probably most natural for me, and it marks the first time I allowed my cracked sense of humour to flow without a filter. Like Saunders, I think I’ve also become somewhat less mimetic over the years, and I’ve started to root around in my own interior as often as the literary world without. This hasn’t tempered my experimentation. In fact, I’d say it’s turbocharged it.

ALU: What inspired the idea for Honeydew? 

BZ: Honeydew was a sort of locus for my (many) preoccupations: tech fascism, surveillance, the importance of humour that punches up, and why, to paraphrase the great cultural critic, Thomas Frank, Johnny still can’t dissent. The spark for the story itself was an edifying Evan Calder Williams essay in The New Inquiry some years back that outlines the history of sabotage and highlights the early-20th-Century Industrial Workers of the World organizer and early feminist radical badass, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Flynn coined the term “the fine thread of deviation” to distinguish capitalist trickery (e.g., planned obsolescence) and worker sabotage. The former is “good for business” and the latter is a crime. This led to an encounter with the recently declassified OSS (now CIA) Simple Sabotage Field Manual and the journalist Brian Merchant’s fantastic Blood in the Machine, which sets the story straight about the unfairly maligned Luddites, who were among the earliest resisters of automation. The narrative that emerged from this lava pit of research was a wacky farce, equal parts A Confederacy of Dunces and The Monkey Wrench Gang, that channels my disgruntlement and anxious bewilderment through the clarifying prism of humour.

ALU: How do you approach developing your characters or world-building?

BZ: Honeydew takes place in the fictional city of Bonneville, which is the setting for all of my novels. For some of my well-travelled readers, this name will be familiar. It’s a winking reference to Utah, where I’m originally from, and the city itself is a mishmash of Salt Lake City, my hometown, and Vancouver, my favourite Canadian city. Like me, it is equal parts Canadian and American, and it exists in the liminal space between a real-ish world and a universe of my invention. This is not so much a political or polemical decision as an aesthetic one. The laws of physics endure, but the realm of possibility is a lot more capacious in 2020s Bonneville, which has been both artistically liberating and risky. The line separating surreal and silly is thin. But I’ve chosen to be a gut player, to quote George W. Bush, and bound my literary world by feel. This decision gives me tremendous freedom, but it also comes with great responsibility (I couldn’t resist). I try to be mindful of believability, consistency, and fidelity within my stories. I keep good notes on various locales, events, and bits of Bonneville history. At some point, I’ll have to make a map, but so far, my memory and notes have served me well. In future projects, as I expand beyond the confines of Bonneville, I will likely have to make some tough choices about that fuzzy line separating the imaginary and the real.

Ben Zalkind lives and works in Calgary, Canada. His debut novel, Honeydew, was released by Radiant Press in October 2025. A Salt Lake City native and naturalized Western Canadian, Ben is happiest outdoors, where he can cycle, drink coffee, and adventure with his wife and fellow traveller.