Episode Transcript
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Welcome to Right on Radio. I'm Eric and on tonight's program, Josh talks with Newell Searle about his novel An Adverse Possession. When Robert Hartwell returns to his Minnesota hometown to open a meditation center at a mineral spring, he finds a locked gate barring his way. Rancher Justin Taylor insists the spring belongs to him. Acquired through a legal loophole after purchasing the land from a farmer who squatted on Hartwell's property. Determined to expose the truth, Hartwell's lawyer enlists investigative journalist Boston Mead to track down the elusive farmer. Need uncovers a deception far more perilous than a simple land dispute. All of this and more. So stay tuned to Write on Radio.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Right on Radio. I have in studio, Newell Searle is with us. Newell, if you are ready, you can do your first reading.
[00:01:31] Speaker C: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
This introduces one of the main characters of this story, and it's. Robert Hartwell is a retired cardiologist who came from Minnesota but lived in San Francisco and returns to take over the mineral spring property that's been in his family forever. Or so he thinks.
And so he discovers that the road to the mineral spring property is blocked and he can't understand why.
And so he. Okay.
Horatio, I am here.
He told you. Told me to come.
How to explain the frightening dream where he met a long dead ancestor. It defied all reason and science. It had to be a what? His great grandfather knew him as if he had been by his side all his life. He talked to me when I needed someone told me to sell the practice. Come here. Now here I am, shut out of my property.
In family lore, Horatio Hartwell was a Waterford pioneer and a homeopathic doctor who bought the spring and opened a health resort in the 1880s.
After his death in 1913, the family leased the resort to the state as a tuberculosis sanatorium until penicillin became an effective treatment. After that, his father leased the property to a neighbor for hay and pasture. The vacant sanatorium was already derelict when Hartwell inherited the property. It had to be more dilapidated. Now, he thought decay, like any disease, had a way of accelerating. It didn't matter. This was to be his future.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: Very good. That was Newell Cyril reading from his novel. In adverse possession, two men possessed divide their by their visions square off like charolais bulls over who owns a Minnesota mineral spring. Dr. Robert Hartwell returns home from San Francisco to open a meditation center while Justin Taylor claims the spring as part of his ranch when he bought it from a farmer who used Hartwell's land and got titled by adverse Possession. In the details of everyday farming, journalist sleuth Boston Me discovers that adverse possession hides something more dangerous than running bulls. Newell Searle is an award winning Minnesota writer, historian and advocate who grew up on a farm and draws inspiration from the people and landscapes that formed him.
Newell, welcome to write on radio.
[00:04:26] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: In an Adverse Possession, the catalyst for the entire plot is the contested ownership of the mineral spring property. Could you talk about how you first conceived this central conflict, particularly the idea of adverse possession laws and what steps you took to shape it into the novel's driving force?
[00:04:45] Speaker C: Well, it began with a different novel idea that didn't work and that was taking property to build a public road. So I was studying township road laws and I won't go into that, but it's, it's important but complex and there is a current suit going on in central Minnesota over a blocked township road.
And so I started to think about the blocked road and then I thought, all right, if I do a story about it, it's got to have something at the end of the road that's worth fighting for.
And not far from where I grew up, there's a mineral spring, it's in Ovatana and there's another one in near Northfield and they had tuberculosis sanatoriums on them. So I started thinking about that and I thought, all right, how about a TB sanatorium that is now derelict but it belongs to this family and the guy wants to open a wellness center. So that was the kind of the germ of it. Meanwhile, the other side of it. Justin Taylor is a Texas cattleman, or was actually made his money in Texas oil, but he came from a ranch, made his money in Texas oil and has always wanted to raise cattle by rotational grazing, which is an ecological process.
And grass fed beef is more healthy than lot fed beef. And so that's the other, that's the other possession is wanting to build this ranch with this ideal E process.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: The novel References the 1980s farm crisis and that involved significant farm debts and droughts and land and commodity price fluctuations, tight money policies from the Federal Reserve, et cetera. How much this backdrop drew upon real cases you were familiar with or had personally observed?
[00:06:46] Speaker C: Well, I grew up on a farm.
I was working for Cargill at the time the farm crisis hit.
And then after Cargill I went to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. So I got to work on the backside of that farm crisis. So it was very, very close to me seeing, meeting people who were in great Difficulty. And so that it was a time of stress, it was a time of change. The number of farmers was diminishing rapidly out of bankruptcy. One in three was close to bankruptcy.
So this is a kind of a nice little cauldron, if you will, to write about rural issues and rural people.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Looking at the finished prose, there's a careful detail when describing farmland, weather and old legal documents. How did you refine the balance between scene setting and pacing? Were there sections you expand or cut significantly in revision stages?
[00:07:50] Speaker C: You know, that's. It's hard to answer that question because it's a very intuitive process with me, and it just has to feel right. I tend to write in short paragraphs. In a short paragraph, you have a paragraph and it has to tell you something.
And so that's one way that you keep things in balance, is the size of the paragraph that you. That you write. The other is the length of the sentence.
Unlike Mexican novelists, I have paragraph breaks and short sentences.
[00:08:25] Speaker B: The plot includes sleuthing elements alongside legal strategies, revisiting property records, filing claims. Did you always intend this blend of mystery and legal drama, or did one element grow larger as you kept writing?
[00:08:40] Speaker C: Well, they grew at the same time. They grew together.
And. And so you write about. If I write about the legal documents, it starts begging questions about, all right, well, what. How much of this is going to go into figuring out what the crime is? How much do I need? How much does a reader need?
So I have to weigh. How much information do I have to give the reader to understand what I'm talking about? And how much do I. I can skip it over, I can get rid of it.
And then how much does the character need to know?
And how do I lay it out?
Is laying it out in order to create tension or uncertainty so that it keeps the reader going.
[00:09:35] Speaker B: Boston Mead is a character that hovers between journalist, detective and friend, bridging the legal drama and the community voices. What techniques did you use to make his investigative role believable while also fleshing out his personal journey?
[00:09:51] Speaker C: Well, I've been with Boston for two other novels. So his. He's a. Well, he's a well known character to me. I don't have to. I know intuitively what he's going to do.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: There's an intuitive intimacy you have with his character.
[00:10:06] Speaker C: Yes, yes. So with Boston, he's a friend of the lawyer that Hartwell hires, and the lawyer, Maury Isaacs, asked for a favor. Check out somebody, the farmer who disappeared.
Locate him so we can resolve this issue. Boston thinks It'll take only a day or two. It takes all summer.
And once he gets into it, as his wife Ginger points out, once you get into these things, you don't let go.
And so he says, yeah, it's a self inflicted wound.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: As an author, I would be concerned that readers would be lost in the minutiae of legal details that could potentially overwhelm the readers. Did you have a particular strategy such as integrating them into conversations, to keep the pace brisk?
[00:11:06] Speaker C: Yeah, conversations, short scenes where summarize what. What one of the characters is doing and there is what is the result of that activity in it. And so some of that information comes out in that way, some of it comes out in conversation.
It's a combination, but it's again, it's an intuitive process, at least for me, in which I just go with gut feel. Is this too much information?
Am I showing or am I telling?
[00:11:39] Speaker B: Right.
[00:11:40] Speaker C: And if there's, I can usually know that, oh, I'm telling here. So, okay, cut it out or change it so that it's showing.
[00:11:51] Speaker B: We see multiple viewpoints from different characters. We see Hartwell, Justin Taylor, Boston, Mead, each with his own motivations and arcs. How did you manage these parallel storylines during the manuscript stage? So they ultimately converged around the spring.
[00:12:10] Speaker C: I don't know if they did manage them.
It's a process of.
Each character has its own driving force and they work again. They work, they interact among the characters and an author inhabits the characters and the author's intimate with the characters and the author.
This author lets the characters tell me what their reaction is because these characters have their limits, they have their quirks.
And so their personalities, even though they're fictional, tell me a lot about how they are going to think or act in. In relation to another person.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: I remember, I think I told you this before in our previous conversation on Right on Radio Neul, that I. Your writing has a rural imagery to it that I really appreciate you. And were you aiming for an almost cinematic feel to capture the Minnesota farmland's unique beauty and harshness while writing?
[00:13:20] Speaker C: Well, not consciously. I'm a visual. I'm visual. So when I'm telling the story, I'm actually visualizing the story. I'm visualizing the place.
I have a place, a piece of landscape I've seen. I have it in mind.
And so I describe that place.
So, sure, I probably like. I. I may augment the features a little. I may airbrush out other things I don't like, but these are places that I have seen.
And so, okay, I need. I need. I need the Runyon Valley.
And what does that look like? And so there's a place, southeast Minnesota, that I think, okay, it's. That will do. And it's grassy and it's kind of southeast of Northfield. And so I use that.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: There's early glimpses of tension, like the lock gate or the mention that no man owned a farm, the farm owned him. Portend troubles ahead in the novel. Can you describe how you sprinkled these hints to maintain suspense around the fate of the spring and the missing farmer?
[00:14:40] Speaker C: Well, I.
If you growing up around farmers, you. You quickly learn that if you work a piece of ground long enough, you become attached to it. And if you have children who work the piece of ground after you and they become attached to it, this third generation farms, fourth generation farms, when those farms went into foreclosure, you also saw a high rate of alcoholism and suicide.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: I wanted to ask you. So I wasn't going to bring this up, but. So when I was in college, one of the last courses I took was food politics. And There was a PBS documentary about the farm crisis in the 80s. And to this day, I'll never forget there's imagery. They talked about a farmer who killed himself and they talked to the wife and the only thing he wrote before he killed himself was the farm did.
[00:15:29] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:15:29] Speaker B: And it's. That is stuck with me. And I will never forget that.
[00:15:32] Speaker C: Yeah. No, you, you.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: It's a horrible moment. I'm tearing up thinking about it now. It was awful to see that.
[00:15:37] Speaker C: Yes. Well, it's in. I mean, one of them does kill himself.
[00:15:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:42] Speaker C: Or they, you know, it's. It's a grief that doesn't go away.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: The novel repeatedly asks who truly owns land and by extension, who truly belongs. Could you reflect on how you wanted readers to consider the notion that land can up owning the people who farm it rather than the other way around?
[00:16:03] Speaker C: Well, it. Please answer that question again.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:16:10] Speaker C: The last part of it.
[00:16:11] Speaker B: Could you reflect on how you wanted readers to consider the notion that land can end up owning the people who farm it rather than the other way around?
[00:16:20] Speaker C: Well, I think it's true not only of land, but there are other careers and professions that tend to own the person practicing. The person who practices it, if they're really dedicated to owns them.
That's who they are. That's their identity. I know weavers in Oaxaca, Mexico, they can't make any money weaving. But we are weavers and we weave and we do other things to make money.
It's Just, it's identity, and there's an interplay and an intimacy between people and land that I won't say goes into the mystical, but it's certainly very profound.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: I think we'll take this moment, Neul, if you want to do another reading.
[00:17:11] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: Land first. Possession. I would love that.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: Oops.
[00:17:33] Speaker C: Okay, this. This is a scene where the rancher named Justin Taylor standing in his office on the edge of the escarpment overlooking the valley.
Justin Taylor stood at the office window with his phone to his ear. Say your name again. Uh huh. And you say you own the mineral spring, that right? He listened, surprised at the call. No, I'm sorry, he said. That ain't possible. While he listened to the caller, he gazed at the cattle in the valley below him. His 1800 acres were the kind of range he had dreamed of since adolescence. In it, he saw everything his father's Texas ranch had lacked. Minnesota's soil and climate produced more than enough forage to fatten 300 head of Charolais cattle.
Well, come on out if you want, he conceited, but I'm telling you, it won't change a thing.
The office window offered long views of the upper Runyon Valley, most of it his property. His yard was at the bight of an escarpment that curved in two directions and defined the upper valley. The northern rim ran easterly and the other curved away to the southeast. He picked up naval binoculars and focused on a herd of 50 head grazing in a paddock below him. Nothing on God's green earth outshines cattle grazing. Good grass.
Damned soothing to hear them chewing their cuds. It's all I ever wanted in life.
[00:19:13] Speaker B: Very good. If you're just tuning in, that was Newell Searle reading from his novel in Adverse Possession. The novel encompasses serious conflicts, property rights, potential fraud, personal grief, but also comedic or warm interactions. How did you calibrate tone changes without losing dramatic momentum?
[00:19:30] Speaker C: Oh, those happened without conscious eff. I don't know.
I don't know.
You know, I can't even think of a comedic moment. Although they're there, but they're.
Again, as I said before, it's the interaction of the.
Of the people and the situation that they're in. And occasionally they lend themselves to. Okay, a little irony here, maybe a little quip or a little something like that, but it's not planned. It's just as I'm writing it, I see it there, it's there, and all I have to do is give it a little tweak and it's there.
[00:20:14] Speaker B: Yeah, the character Dr. Hartwell, he arrives from California still mourning his wife, looking to start anew. How'd you go about showing his gradual shift from a disoriented outsider to a determined local advocate?
[00:20:28] Speaker C: Well, I thought I was writing about an over privileged rich doctor who has an urban person's impatience and expectations that when you say stat, things move.
And you have Taylor, who's more of a good old boy. Things move when he wants them to move, not because somebody is, you know, snapping their finger. So I had, I started with that. He drives a silver Mercedes and he has a nice tan, so I started with that.
And then gradually he regains his Minnesota identity through one small. I mean, there's subtle episodes after another. There's no great epiphany. It's just small things that happen that begin to calm his ego and make him a little more humble.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: Yeah. So conversely, though, I kind of like, though is that there's contradictions with both these men. Oh yeah, because Justin Taylor, I mean, sure, he's a good old boy, but he's also not against the idea of innovative practices, I think like he rotational farming, for example, you mentioned before. So he's not against progressiveness, so to.
[00:21:50] Speaker C: Speak, but he's always. It's the ranch he always wanted.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:53] Speaker C: And I want to comment on the title, an adverse possession because it's a double play. Adverse possession is squatters rights. You take somebody's property by using it without permission.
But an adverse possession in this case are two men possessed by a vision.
And that's the, that's.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:22:19] Speaker C: So it's an adverse possession.
And so they each have a vision. It's in conflict.
And just as you can't roller skate in a buffalo herd, you can't have a meditation center in the middle of a ranch.
So who owns the mineral spring? And so that's a whole question that plays out.
And yes, there's some discussion of legal state law, but not too much.
You won't get through law school on it. And it also township road law, which is very arcane.
But if you happen to live in the countryside, it's very important.
For example, you cannot landlock a property owner, meaning you can't deny a property owner access by a public road to his property. And that was part of the fight here because Taylor said, well, I own everything behind. I own everything on either side of this road. It's my road now, I can block it.
Well, you had to go. He had to go to court to fight that. So I'm really raising two Issues with important to rural people. One, who owns the land and by what means. And secondly, is it a public road or not?
[00:23:48] Speaker B: The mineral spring introduced is introduced as a sacred, almost magical place dating back to Dr. Howell's great grandfather. Did you intentionally give it mythic undertones to contrast with the more cut and dry legal drama?
[00:24:03] Speaker C: Well, I didn't think of it in terms of contrasting the legal drama, but there had to be something. I had to give readers something to care about. I had to give Hartwell something to care about. And so this spring, he first saw it when he was 12 years old. Magical place to him, with little creatures and ferns and flowers and the water gushing out of the cavern and the escarpment.
And it gets embedded in his kind of. In his psyche when he's a medic in Korea and under. Under artillery fire. He thought of the spring, he thought of wanting to go back. And that's what's he said. It's what has saved his sanity.
[00:24:56] Speaker B: And my last question for you. The novel ends with many issues, with many issues resolved. Yet the farmland and Wellness center have futures that might face fresh challenges. Have you considered a sequel to delve deeper into Waterford's transformation?
[00:25:11] Speaker C: No, I haven't. This is a trilogy. And so the three books, Copy Desk Murders, Life's Legacy, and Adverse Possession, close off a story arc for the principals, Boston Mead, Ginger Meadows and so forth. So a trilogy is just a nice package and then you can be done with that. Then you can start another trilogy. But I'm not doing a series and I'm not doing sequels.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: That's disappointing.
[00:25:42] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: This has been my time talking Newell Searle about his novel, An Adverse Possession, available now on Amazon and wherever books are sold. Newell, thank you. Thank you for your time with us.
[00:25:52] Speaker C: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: And now this.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: You'Ve been listening to right on radio. I'm Eric Zimmerman and we would like to thank Noel Searle and all of our listeners. Without your support, KFAI would not be possible.
