Seamus Sullivan on Daedalus Is Dead and Writing Through Upheaval
Seamus Sullivan reflects on writing Daedalus Is Dead
Seamus Sullivan’s debut novel Daedalus Is Dead was born out of parenthood, protest, and myth. Written in the quiet hours between caring for his young children, the book reimagines one of Greek mythology’s most enduring figures while reckoning with a world in upheaval. Here, Sullivan reflects on how the story came together and what it means to create, persist, and tell myths anew in uncertain times.
Guest post written by Seamus Sullivan, author of Daedalus Is Dead.
There’s never a great time to live through a global pandemic, plus a fascist crackdown on protestors, plus a fucking insurrection. But if you must live through all of those things you might as well do it with a baby. The thing about a baby is, you have to pick him up every morning and take care of him, even if you would prefer to spend your day screaming and crying and pounding your fists on the floor. He’s there in his crib making noises and holding his arms up and so you will find yourself picking him up and carrying him out and putting one foot in front of the other. He’ll look at things, and occasionally point at things, and you’ll do your best to explain them.
After about a year of this you may decide to get back to writing regularly again. You’ll start with Greek mythology because it depicts a society and a cosmos that has little to no relationship with fairness or justice, and most of the mythology is at least honest and up-front about that. You’ll write about one of your favorite mythological characters, Daedalus, because like you he’s creative and a dad and has no physical courage and doesn’t go outside much. You’ll start writing in January, around the time you help your son strap on his Velcro sneakers and go for wobbly practice walks in the park around the corner. Writing is always hard work but to your relief several pretty good first draft scenes will seem to spring out of you fully-formed. Thanks to months of processing your reality aloud with your moon-cheeked baby strapped to your chest, you’ll find yourself slipping into second-person narration almost without thinking about it.
You’ll start getting up at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning to write for an hour or two before the baby stands up in his crib and yells for you. During his first year your in-laws, who were stuck in lockdown with you for months, helped take care of the baby, and without them you wouldn’t have gotten even a modest amount of writing done. You and your wife alternated days off from work to be with the baby. Your place of employment is headquartered in Europe and has paternity leave and you were able to parcel that out for a big chunk of the spring. By the time your Daedalus story becomes book-sized, your in-laws will be gone and your paternity leave will be used up, and you will owe every written word to your wife and your nanny and the slack they create for you. You and your wife will put on masks and go outside and meet your parents and sister in the park and let them hold your son, which they didn’t get to do for most of that first year.
About a year after you begin, you’ll have a book and you’ll query it to agents, and after nearly a year of querying and the birth of your second baby, you’ll get a call while you’re out with your eldest son, who has been sent home from school with pinkeye. You’ll listen to the voicemail on the way to the pharmacy for antibiotics – it will be an agent, saying she liked your book and wants to talk more. You may share the good news with your son, who is just happy to be out of school and watching snow fall.
Another year will pass while your agent helps you sell the book and your eldest becomes eligible for pre-K. He’ll take the bus to and from school, and during the sometimes-frantic walks to and from the school bus he will ask for stories, and since he’s into monsters you’ll give him highlights from The Odyssey, Scylla and Charybdis and the Cyclops and the Sirens. You’ll show him paintings of a raving Odysseus tied to the mast while his crew putter away around him, ears stuffed with beeswax.
About two years will pass between selling the book and publication day. Your eldest, largely thanks to the hardest-working pre-K teachers you ever hope to meet, will learn to read and write and draw. You’ll receive galleys of your book, and you’ll show him and do your best to summarize what the book is about. He’ll listen soberly as you describe the death of Icarus, and then he’ll respond that he wants to write his own version. He’ll draw it as a comic on a large sketchpad, using magic markers. His Icarus has talons and a beak to go with his wings, a design that owes something to the creature power suits from Wild Kratts. In his version, Icarus lives. Daedalus builds an airship, and the two of them fly into the heavens to repair a fractured sun. Your son will explain a lot of this for your benefit.
There’s never a great time to be living through scaled-up ICE raids, plus national guard deployments, plus the theft of unprecedented amounts of government funding, plus the illegal abduction and detention of Gaza activists. But if you must live through all of those things you might as well do it with your sons, plus your wife, plus your families and friends, plus the writers you don’t know and the writers you do, all of whom helped you get through yesterday and will help you get through tomorrow. Your kids will be watching. Your eldest will be big enough to talk to about protests and boycotts and strikes. You’ll have to pick yourself up every morning and find ways you can help too. They’ll need to see that there are ways to help. You can do it. One foot in front of the other.
