Photo: Drew Faraday, author of Pearl Fields and Core Haven, bringing turbulence and triumph to life through gripping storytelling.
Quiet Hope In The Face Of Adversity
Author Drew Faraday discusses their gripping Oregon Meltdown novels Pearl Fields and Core Haven, sharing insights on survival, resilience, storytelling, and the intricate weaving of hope into dystopian worlds.
Drew Faraday is a literary voice unlike any other, weaving vivid narratives that both chill and uplift, placing the resilience of the human spirit at the heart of their work. With the enthralling Pearl Fields and the Oregon Meltdown debuting in 2022 and its standalone companion novel, Core Haven, gracing the shelves in 2025, Faraday has firmly established themselves as a masterful storyteller. Set against the backdrop of the tumultuous Oregon Meltdown, these novels are not merely dystopian; they are intricate portraits of survival, grit, and quiet hope in the face of calamity.
Through these two companion works, Faraday crafts a world that brims with intensity, authenticity, and profound human connection. In Pearl Fields, readers are introduced to the indomitable spirit of a river merchant whose wit and integrity make her a captivating heroine, while Core Haven chronicles Nate’s perilous fifty-mile trek amidst devastating chaos, unfolding his journey with raw, immersive detail. Both novels overlap in narrative yet stand proudly on their own, offering distinct voices and perspectives that illuminate Faraday’s exceptional talent for building layered, emotionally resonant worlds.
In this interview, Faraday speaks with us about the inspirations behind their Oregon Meltdown saga, the careful craftsmanship of these two strikingly different novels, and the delicate balance of realism and hope in dystopian fiction. We gain insight into the personal moments, experiences, and memories that have shaped their work and discover how resilience and kindness endure even in the face of fictional disasters. For lovers of speculative fiction, complex characters, and vivid sensory storytelling, Drew Faraday’s world is one you won’t soon forget.
Drew Faraday writes with remarkable authenticity, crafting unforgettable characters and vivid worlds that illuminate resilience and human connection.
What first sparked the idea of an Oregon Meltdown, and how did that seed grow into two companion novels?
The original idea came from a series of “What if…?” questions I posed in a journal entry while backpacking in the Cascades:
- What if a region of the Pacific Northwest bore the brunt of a severe weather event followed by a mysterious health crisis?
- What if both a bomb cyclone and a nonlethal virus that permanently disfigured its victims came and went in a specific area of the Oregon Coast Range?
- How would those dual crises impact the local infrastructure and the rule of law?
After I developed the story of one family’s ordeal taking place near the end of the Oregon Meltdown, I mothballed the first draft with the intention of returning to it in short order.
However, the river merchant’s voice from that novel clamored for attention, so I fleshed out her backstory until a standalone companion novel emerged. Following the publication of Pearl Fields and the Oregon Meltdown in 2022, I reinvigorated my original novel by serializing it for Kindle Vella. But in October 2024, Amazon announced that platform’s imminent demise. So I recombined the episodes and published the standalone companion novel Core Haven on the Kindle Store at the end of July 2025.
In Core Haven, Nate’s fifty-mile trek is almost a character in itself; what practical research did you do to make every blister and shortcut feel authentic?
For the most part, I relied on my own backpacking experiences including sleeping in trees, duct taping the torn sole of a trail runner, floating downriver on a log, and being humbled by the kindness of strangers.
I also took pictures and wrote descriptions of each physical site mentioned in Core Haven, including the Siuslaw Wilderness, the Alsea River, and Astoria.
“Hope and kindness always seemed to find each other during disasters.” – Drew Faraday
Pearl Fields is such a vividly drawn outlier—were there real-life river traders or wartime smugglers you borrowed from when shaping her moral compass?
The truth of the matter is that instead of researching traders and smugglers, I added to my “What if…?” decision tree by asking, “What if my mother had been in a similar situation?”
Then I repeated that same question for each of my grandmothers, aunts, and great-aunts. Those amazing women were consummate survivors, not of a dystopian world, of course, but of their own stressful situations working and raising children during troubled times.
Although I’m sure none of them would have resorted to gunrunning, I know they would have found their own ways to persevere without selling themselves out. After all, they kept their integrity and grit intact as they coped with living in a society where misogyny, mistreatment, and poverty helped forge their resilience and indefatigable sense of humor.
The two books overlap in time yet differ sharply in tone; how hard was it to keep continuity of events while letting each story breathe on its own?
Maintaining continuity was certainly a challenge, in part because of the gap between the start of each project—Core Haven in 2005 and Pearl Fields in 2018.
However, it was a foregone conclusion that Pearl’s story would be told in her distinctive voice since her testimony and tenacity in the face of incredible hardship formed the centerpiece of that novel.
In the case of Nate’s story, I stayed with the initial third person restrictive point of view with a focus on action in the moment. I was pleasantly surprised by how much clearer the narration was after serializing Core Haven into forty-three episodes, then recombining it into one novel with five parts.
Goodreads reviewers often praise the “quiet hope” in your dystopia; how do you balance bleak realism with glimmers of light without softening the stakes?
I suspect that sense of hope may be the result of my experience growing up in the shadow of financial stressors and serious health issues with loved ones. In the face of adversity, my family openly acknowledged the elephant in the room but refused to let those difficulties define them. I followed suit by not giving up on my innate sense of joy, my quirky sense of humor, or my desire to live in the moment as much as possible.
In addition, I found myself remembering random acts of kindness I either received or gifted, from simple gestures to joining forces with strangers during tornados, snowstorms, ice storms, floods, a hurricane, and a freight train wreck. Hope and kindness always seemed to find each other during those disasters, so it was only natural for me to give that human tendency its due during a fictional calamity like the Oregon Meltdown.
You published Pearl Fields in 2022 and Core Haven in 2025; did reader feedback between launches nudge anything in the second book, or was the arc already fixed?
Honestly, the arc was already fixed due to the impact that Pearl, a.k.a. Sunny, had on Core Haven. As I mentioned earlier, her pivotal role in Nate’s story prompted a standalone novel as an homage to the strong-willed, loving, hopeful, hilarious women I was blessed to grow up around.
Music, scent, and texture feel hyper-real in your prose—what sensory trick do you rely on most when the words refuse to come?
Whenever I’m in my writing zone, I’m blissfully unaware of anything other than one aspect or another of storytelling as if I were sitting around the archetypal crowded prehistoric campfire.
After a satisfactory first draft emerges, I devote myself to the rewriting phase and add as much texture as possible without impeding the movement of the story. I repeatedly read my work aloud to add sensory touches and hone the dialogue until I finally say the coveted phrase, “That’s a wrap.”
For authors stitching together companion novels in uncertain times, what single piece of counsel would you give about planning, marketing, or simply staying sane between releases?
Answering this question would normally be a stretch for me since I rarely give advice about anything, particularly writing, even during my regular interactions on various social media platforms and in my weekly posts on my website. However, in this case, I’m willing to step outside my comfort zone.
The only counsel I’d offer about stitching together companion novels is simple—have a damn good time whenever possible.
I certainly did, especially when it came to dovetailing places and events in both novels since character arcs, plot progressions, and physical details naturally aligned, even down to the phase of the moon and the river level.
The option to make choices like that might be my favorite part of being an independent author. With no one pressuring me…ahem…that is, advising me otherwise, I was free to reread Pearl Fields and find details about her description of the entire Oregon Meltdown that I then folded back into Core Haven, and vice versa.
Maybe that’s one way of helping myself stay sane during these “uncertain times,” as the question mentions. Another, of course, is to embrace the discovery phase of my current writing project as a way of embarking on a welcome detour around the dystopian landscape of the Oregon Meltdown.
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