The Brooklyn Rail

As a writer of creative nonfiction, Matthew Gavin Frank is the tour guide to end all tour guides, leading his readers through the weird and wonderful realms of what humans consume and what consumes them. From 2010’s Barolo to 2012’s Pot Farm, from 2014’s Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer to 2015’s The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America’s Food, and from 2021’s Flight of the Diamond Smugglers: A Tale of Pigeons, Obsession, and Greed Along Coastal South Africa to this year’s Submersed: Wonder, Obsession, and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines, Frank is as obsessive in his accumulation of history and contemporary detail as any of the obsessive characters and pastimes he covers. Frank’s eye for strange and scintillating subcultures makes for a reading experience that pulls his audience into worlds they might never have considered existed, let alone considered that they might—through Frank’s own avidity—become fascinated by. In Submersed, he plumbs the depths of the hearts and minds of the (mostly) men who are so drawn to the sea, that they seek to explore the oceans in the most direct and unregulated manners. We talked about nonfiction writing ethics, how to craft a great transition, and the Danish concept of grensoverschrijdende, and made some inevitable ocean puns along the way.

Kathleen Rooney (Rail): Why write about something you’re afraid of, such as, for instance, the ocean?

Matthew Gavin Frank: I’m interested in learning about the fabric of a phobia—of giving the object of intense feelings (like fear) a good, solid micro-examination, so that, maybe, I can break it down and isolate its components. I think many of us are also fixated on the things that make us afraid—however inadvertently. I’ve had recurring drowning nightmares since I was a kid, and have long wanted to get to the bottom (pun very much intended) of their stubborn persistence. In examining the deep sea, and various manifestations of the human compulsion to explore it across history and culture, I was hoping to uncover some kind of answer—however illusory or elusive—as to why I am the way I am. One way to scratch at this, and grapple toward some semblance of an answer, is to hold my own anxieties about the ocean up against other—perhaps opposing—engagements of it. Speaking of research, and creative process and “progress,” Michel de Montaigne said, “It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.” Leslie Jamison believes that research can sensitize us to points of connection. In writing about something I’m afraid of (and also obsessed with), I hoped to elicit some beguiling interaction between personal narrative/interest/obsession/fear and the attendant, contextualizing, “sensitizing,” research. I wondered: how can brain-rubbing like this—examining myriad facts and stories of deep-sea exploration—help me uncover fresh meaning and resonance in the stuff that makes me afraid?

Rail: This is your sixth nonfiction book, and you also have three poetry collections. How do you decide what genre is the best container for a given subject?

Frank: These days, prose—long-form nonfiction—seems to be my default container. I’m an innate maximalist (especially during the early drafting process), and this big, diffuse canvas feels like a natural and fun—and scary!—space in which to play and try things out and throw everything at the wall to see what sticks and what falls off. My last poetry collection came out back in 2013, so it’s been a while since I’ve worked within that container. I’m still writing poems here and there, but, as far as burrowing into a poetry collection, I confess that I find it a little daunting, since it’s been so long. Which probably means that I should engage that container again. I remember—this is back in, like, 2003 or so—when I first tried writing long-form prose, I saw a disconnect between the impulses I engaged when writing poems (which, to be reductive, pertained to trying to find connections between seemingly dissimilar things, via juxtaposition, imagery, etc.). With practice, I became comfortable engaging this impulse in prose. It’s a wonderful thing: as writers, we have the power to manipulate connections between just about anything, no matter how seemingly dissimilar—via research, contemplation, the PI-style discovery of that perfect “bridge” ingredient. When it works, it feels like a magic trick—a way to conjure surprising, often bewildering meaning in intense formative experience, or personal obsession.  

Rail: To be clear: I really enjoyed your book. But my advice to my fellow readers might be to just start with chapter one, because the prologue is apologetic to the point of being almost off-putting. There’s so much hand-wringing over writing about the murder of Kim Wall, but also so much justification for doing so, that I was afraid I was in for something dour, self-flagellating, and even preachy. Luckily, on page 10, the tone shifts and you dive in. But I was baffled by your assertion on page 5 that any engagement with true crime is “ethically unsound.” You don’t, as you mention on that same page, engage in any kind of “sensational” depictions. So I’m perplexed at the assumption that writing about violence or murder—which are, sadly, very much in the sphere of human experience—is somehow wrong. Can you talk about why you felt the need to start that way?

Frank: I don’t assume that writing about violence and murder is wrong, but, in my very particular experience of engaging with this very particular story, it did often feel, well, unsound—destabilizing, off-balance. Through the years-long process of writing the book, I often asked myself: how is another engagement of Wall’s murder—however de-sensationalized and different from that which has been previously written about it—going to land with Wall’s parents, who are still alive; or Wall’s brother, or former partner? These concerns haunted me, even as I embedded the story within a larger engagement of our evolving obsession with the deep sea over time, and with the niche sub-culture of DIY submersible enthusiasts. I remember something that the essayist Elena Passarello once asked, and I’m paraphrasing: To what degree is it the writer’s duty to represent, in part, the essayistic mind-at-work right there on the page—however flawed or contradictory, or even hypocritical? I confess: I was wringing my hands a lot. So I considered the role of apology—in this case, authorial apology—in the act of writing about a murder. Even in laboring to avoid sensational depictions, these lines from Eula Biss’s essay, “All Apologies,” occurred to me: “Some of us learn as children that it is often better to apologize for something we did not do than to try to maintain our innocence. And some of us do not learn this until we are adults.” My wrestling with this stuff felt off-putting to me too, actually, but I decided—after many conversations with my editor—to see what may happen if I wrestled with that stuff, as if in real-time, on the page.

But I will admit this: I didn’t feel the need to start this way initially. The draft of the book that I submitted to my editor began with chapter one—the meandering through Refshaleøen, Copenhagen. There was no prologue, and there was no epilogue either. (In that draft, the book ended with the chapter on my visit to Herstedvester Prison). The prologue was written afterward. It was the last bit written. And what is now the epilogue—the second part of my dive on Karl Stanley’s submersible—was then, in that earlier draft, incorporated into the body of the book. During the editorial process, I decided to end the book with a greater sense of wonder and beauty, so I moved the submersible dive to an epilogue. In that way too, the epilogue was able to harken back to and extend the dream that was introduced in what is now the prologue.

Rail: Also, on page 6, you talk about how hard it is to know what Wall’s murderer, Peter Madsen, was thinking or feeling, which seems kind of obvious to a savvy reader of creative nonfiction. Then you describe yourself as “grappling toward that unknowable center” and call that “an admittedly dubious act.” I understand, of course, that ethics are important overall and especially in nonfiction. Yet isn’t the effort to explore unknowable mysteries a crucial part of being a writer and a person?

Frank: Oh, yes. I totally agree. I feel like I’m pathologically curious—probably annoyingly so. Yeah: burrowing into these mysteries is a byproduct of just being alive. And it’s often beautiful—this act of burrowing, but I wonder also what else it is, or can be. In certain cases, can it be beautiful, unavoidable, and also dubious? At what point does curiosity and the exploratory spirit dovetail with dubiousness? Exploring mystery is crucial, yes, but sometimes I admit—retroactively, post-exploration—that I have doubts about the efficacy of my exploratory methods. Exploring the mysterious fabric of the exploration act itself often feels crucial to me too. Does that sound annoying? I don’t know, maybe.

This section of the prologue is, I think, less concerned with the fact that there is mystery or an unknowable center, and more with how, in telling this very particular story, I went about reckoning with that unknowable center on the page—engaging the craft choices I made; the scraps of fact that I chose to surround the unknowable center with; and what sort of intricate research agenda I chased, and how I interacted with that research in order to permit myself to speculate on the stuff lurking in that unknowable center. Of course, I allow that authorial speculation and filtration is a natural byproduct of writing creative nonfiction. Hell, that kind of filtration is what I often turn to nonfiction for, as a reader. But in conversations with my editor, concerns arose as to how to signal to a reader as to where and when—and especially how—I’m speculating in the book, and what sorts of research responsibilities I undertook in order to get away with that. Here’s where I’m speculating, and here’s how I did it. My editor and I were concerned that—without a brief acknowledgement of craft in the prologue—some readers may have pause when getting to a section where I’m engaging what Peter Madsen is thinking. We didn’t want such sections to break the spell or the trajectory of the book if a reader felt compelled to ask, “Wait, how does the author know this? Is this speculation? Is this fact? Where is this coming from?” By engaging this in the prologue, we felt that a reader could more smoothly navigate those sections in the main text without the spell being broken.

Rail: The book is crammed in the best way with information and fun facts, like that Wall’s home village, Trelleborg, has a statue of a nude woman who is a likeness of Uma Thurman’s grandmother “erected in 1930 to commemorate the ‘embrace’ of the land and the sea.” How did you decide what material of this sort to include and what to cut?

Frank: [Laughs] It was so difficult. I fell in love with all of my research. Cuts—and there were many—hurt. There are so many amazing facts and stories pertaining to submersible history and the deep sea that I felt overwhelmed by them initially. As I wrote my way into the book, early drafts were really just this mosaic of vignettes—facts and stories that I kept rearranging on the page to see how each would resonate with and comment on the others. I was looking for echoes—ways in which a subsequent fact could extend or revise the story or themes lurking in a previously-rendered fact. When I landed on the story of the murder, and incorporated it as a through-line in the book, I was better able to see which facts helped to shape and extend nuances of that story, and what became the book’s more focused inquiries (and therefore needed to remain), and which—however cool—became extraneous. I wrote the book over five years, and about fourteen drafts, and with each draft—however painful it felt—more of these cool facts that didn’t help lend fresh resonance to the book’s primary inquiries fell away.

Rail: When we first meet him, Peter Madsen seems like a classic “mad scientist.” How is he (and isn’t he) representative of a typical DIY submersible obsessive?

Frank: In interviews that Madsen gave prior to the murder, he sounds unnervingly Musk-ian (as did Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO responsible for the Titan implosion tragedy), oozing hubris in that “regulation is anathema to innovation” sort of way. Many DIY sub enthusiasts seem to exhibit this—fusing a sometimes-charming “mad scientist” vibe with a libertarian “Don’t Tread on Me” ethic. But there are many DIY sub obsessives who also seem to be benign and lovely eccentrics who urgently want to chase wonder, and behold extraordinary things. Like any community, they’re not monolithic, of course. When news of the murder broke, many in the community voiced their horror at Madsen’s actions, while simultaneously lamenting the destruction of his submarine, UC3 Nautilus—the engineering of which was greatly admired by his peers.

Rail: You write:

Aristotle was able to see his obsessions from a scholarly remove, and to recognize that his drive to spend so much time at depth may have begotten a sort of madness (“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness,” he snarkily wrote.) Of course, Aristotle would have been aware of the treatise on “madness” written by Hippocrates, titled On the Sacred Disease, in which the ancient Greek physician described insanity as a “wet disease … ascribed to a wet condition of the brain involving excess movement.”

Why do you think that madness and science often go together?

Frank: In Aristotle’s case, maybe it had something to do with the level of obsession required to use oneself—one’s mind, body, or both—as a test subject in order to appraise a theory. (My mind’s now going to the movie, The Fly.) Aristotle was the first to write about the diving bell in the fourth-century BC, and it’s believed that he used this proto-submersible off the coast of Asia Minor to observe and chronicle sea creatures. It’s likely that this early version of a submersible didn’t adequately protect Aristotle from the pressure-born side-effects of diving—decompression illness, narcosis, carbon dioxide toxicity, oxygen toxicity, all of which affect our bodies and our minds, and can cause us to behave as if we are having a psychoneurotic reaction. And if these kinds of experiments also beget isolation (as they did in Aristotle’s case), maybe the slate for a version of madness may be primed? I don’t know. The “mad scientist” is, of course, more of a narrative trope than a truism—like the absent-minded professor or the tortured artist. It seems that madness these days lurks more in the corporate and political realms than the laboratory—a bunch of high-functioning psychopaths occupying positions of power.

Rail: You interview a personal submersible enthusiast named Hank Pronk in Fairmont, BC and mention, “I have traveled all this way to speak to him.” How many places did you travel and were there any places you wanted to go but couldn’t?

Frank: I spent a lot of time in Copenhagen—where Kim Wall lived, and where the murder took place—and other sites in Denmark. I conducted further research—whether observational or archival—in Norway and Sweden. I interviewed folks in the DIY submersible community in British Columbia (as you mentioned), Alaska, the Canary Islands, mainland Spain, California, Michigan, Rhode Island. Where else? I can’t remember! I interviewed the submersible builder Shanee Stopnitzky, who was scouting out locations off the coasts of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia, where she was planning on building an underwater house. Since she was a kid, she had this dream of moving underwater and living there long-term, and now she’s busy trying to make it real. I desperately wanted to accompany her and her team (of donors and engineers) out on at least one of these location-scouting expeditions, but couldn’t finagle it.

Rail: You get insistent in your questioning of Pronk, prompting him to say, in your recounting, “‘I think I will pass. I am quite private and your questions scream drama.’ His body looks huge and immovable. He makes of himself a wall, a hull, a sphere protecting the privacy of its occupant.” I like that you included this moment of what could be called failure. What do you gain by leaving this in when you could easily have left it out?

Frank: These kinds of failures to get some desired bit of information out of an interview subject can be revealing. In this case, it revealed something about Pronk—his caginess, his wariness of talking about his enthusiasms with an outsider like me; and it also revealed something about my persona I guess, in that I was desperate to get to some kind of vulnerable “bottom” of Pronk’s enthusiasms. He was a great foil. I tend to wear my excitability on my sleeve, and he kept his under tight wraps. Even if it was a failed interview in that sense, the moment represented the distrust of outsiders that tends to permeate the community. Also: Pronk was too interesting and too accomplished to leave out of the book, even if he didn’t answer my juicier, more melodramatic questions. I mean, with no formal engineering training, he fashioned the Elementary 3000—then the world’s deepest diving homemade submersible—in his garage, and he was planning on using it to search for this legendary golden boulder that some believe is hidden at the bottom of a remote lake in British Columbia, missing since the 1890s.

Rail: I was struck by how Kim Wall seemed driven by the same sort of journalistic curiosity that you are as a nonfiction writer. You write of her quest to write about Madsen, “Kim put the story on the back burner, but continued to pitch her idea to magazines and newspapers, hoping to profile the neighborhood eccentrics and write on the ‘space race’ between Madsen and the Suborbitals.” Have you ever come near to death on any of your projects?

Frank: I don’t think so. For the book, I did dive to a depth of two thousand feet in an unclassed, uninsured submersible off the coast of Honduras with Karl Stanley, the captain who built the sub in a defunct airport hangar in rural Oklahoma. That’s likely the most death-defying bit of research I’ve conducted, but I don’t think I really came near to death, because, thankfully, nothing went wrong down there. Just before the dive, Stanley did tell me that he had eschewed communication systems for his sub, believing that if something went wrong at the depths to which we were to dive, no one would be able to find and get to us, let alone save us. At the whimsy of the ocean, he said, the best-case scenario if something went wrong, would be for the sub to quickly tumble to its crush point and implode. I took a few deep breaths to try to calm myself down, and lowered myself into the sub. I’m not naturally intrepid. I’m a pretty anxious cauldron of phobias. But I’m easily obsessed, and if I’m in the middle of writing a book, I find that I can put my head down, and more easily tuck those phobias into the confines of the project, which momentarily dampens them.

Rail: You weave a lot of history into your coverage of the contemporary submersible scene, like on page 88, when you tell the reader about the Dutch engraver and glassworker turned engineer Cornelius Drebbel. How do you choose when to toggle?

Frank: I’m always interested in couching a contemporary scene and first-hand observation or interview within a larger, related historical context, in essence to see how we got here. Which historical manifestations of human obsessions, experiments, and innovations shaped and lent shine to the current obsessions and eccentricities of the contemporary DIY submersible community? Jockeying between the present-day scene-at-hand and the tidal influences of history on that present scene can help flush out the implications behind the current community’s choices, desires, practices, credos. Ideally, in these instances, the engagements of the historical figure or moment should enliven the contemporary scene, teach me (and, in turn, a reader) new things about its meanings and parameters, and lend it fresh and surprising metaphorical import. Likewise, so juxtaposed like this, the contemporary scene should enliven the “meaning”—the benefits and consequences—of the historical moment as well.

Rail: You discuss the hubris of various military submariners, including Commander Scott Waddle and Admiral Hyman Rickover, and the loss of life this hubris has cost. Do you think submersibles attract a higher number of reckless and arrogant men than other fields, and if so, why?

Frank: Proportionally so, for such a niche community, yeah, probably. The drive to immerse oneself for great periods of time in a subsea capsule depends, I think, on a degree of recklessness. The submarine is a place to be a human, away from the rhythms and ornaments and structures and rules of the surface world. The underwater world is a place where we shouldn’t be, a place our bodies weren’t made for. In naval culture—of which Waddle and Rickover were a part—there are these intricate, disturbing hazing traditions and initiation rituals involving some very strange role-play that would horrify many outsiders. I won’t get into the gross details here for the sake of space, but I write about some of these in the book. The crews assigned to submarines are rumored to have some of the more intense, extreme, and most abusive manifestations of these traditions, perhaps aggravated by the fact that they are also more intensely cloistered—not only out to sea, but also submersed within it.

So, yeah, this kind of recklessness and hubris can certainly manifest in ugly ways, as it did with the likes of Waddle, for instance, and Stockton Rush. Rush dubbed his own seemingly addictive attraction to the sea, “the deep disease,” and he was hellbent on infecting others, and getting richer in the process. He wasn’t content with being a mere passenger, and he was even dissatisfied with being any old ordinary captain. He wanted to be the biggest captain. The best captain. He once said, “I wanted to be Captain Kirk on the Enterprise I wanted to explore.” It’s not hard to impose a Freudian analytical framework over and onto the sub, and those who are drawn to it. Many, Peter Madsen included, have seen the sub as a safe haven from surface mores and government strictures. The sub, for these men, is a place of ultimate control, where they can exact a brief lordship over their own womb-like world—a womb created by them, for them, and that gives back by incubating only them. In there, they don’t have to share their resources. In there, what they say and do goes.

That said, this kind of recklessness can, in other cases, also be beautiful. Shanee Stopnitzky, who I’ve mentioned, has such a magnetic sense of curiosity and wonder, and this kind of wonder, and the recklessness often required to chase it, has led to some pretty amazing discoveries and innovations.

Rail: Your transitions are key to the tempo of the book. On page 121, you tell the amazing and infuriating story of the black engineer Raye Montague, then on page 126, you tell us about your visit to the icky submersible enthusiast Albrecht Jotten. Can you say a bit about both of them, and also how you decide when to juxtapose people and incidents in this manner?

Frank: Montague, in 1971, after years of combatting racism and sexism, became the first person to fully design a naval ship on a computer. Until then, she was employed by the Navy as a typist, and was actually forbidden from touching the office computer. One day, as fate would have it, all of the male engineers called in sick. To stay on schedule, Montague was finally allowed access to the computer, and, proving her genius, she designed a ship on that computer in eighteen hours and fifty-six minutes, a task that typically took her male colleagues up to two years to complete on paper. She single-handedly transformed the design procedure for naval ships and submarines. She became the first female programs manager of ships in the history of the Navy. She ran a staff of 250 people. Her design methods are still being used today.

Albrecht Jotten, conversely, is a less inspiring figure. Icky is the right word. I visited him in his one-room, off-the-grid cabin in the middle of the woods outside Homer, Alaska. Albrecht was this narcissistic outsider artist who built what he called “strange and wonderful” machines in the woods. These included a giant green fiberglass spire that was like twenty stories high—as tall as the tallest Sitka spruce trees—and fixed with a rickety spiral staircase and a series of platforms, so he could hang out with the eagles where they nested. I confess that I went to the top of it with him after midnight, and we drank too much tequila from the bottle up there, which was not smart. He also built a submersible in the woods, which he painted with tie-dye whorls, and homages to Vincent van Gogh. He showed me the inside of the sub, closed the hatch. And there, so trapped, he decided to confess his admiration for Hitler.

Organizationally, I wanted Montague’s story to appear before Jotten’s, because I hoped that she would haunt the Jotten chapter, making Jotten seem as icky and as frivolous as he was without overt authorial commentary. If we glimpse Jotten through the lens of Montague and her brilliance, he seems that much more frivolous. The juxtaposition did some of the work of characterization. I uncovered so many fascinating stories and people in my research that braiding them into the book was reminiscent of making a mixtape (yes, I realize I am dating myself), seeing how each story or character resonated with those who appeared in the book before and after. We think about a GWAR tune differently if it’s preceded by Mozart, and we retroactively reconsider Mozart once the first few GWAR notes play. The submersible community is full of sometimes-wonderful, sometimes-terrible oddballs. An animating question throughout the writing of the book was: In certain cases, does wonder—if sufficiently chased—bump up against tragedy, or atrocity; and if so, at what point? In microcosm, I guess, the juxtaposed stories of Montague and Jotten chime with this question.

Rail: I appreciated the way that you wrote about Stopnitzky and her submersible the Fangtooth, especially how she’s determined to show that submersibles are not just for war and science, but also for wonder and awe. Yet I still find experimental-class subs terrifying. Do you think they need to be better regulated, and, if so, how?

Frank: Stopnitzky is one of my favorite people. “I think curiosity makes everything better,” she often said. But I also find experimental class subs terrifying! I understand the attraction to these endeavors, but, in the wake of yet another submarine disaster like the one that occurred this past March off Egypt’s Red Sea coast, I’ve again been wondering about the malign side-effects of this extreme wonder and exploration, and the sagacity of packaging it for and peddling it to curious tourists. Many enthusiasts tout the safety of their hobby, their backup plans and their fail-safes, and—should they monetize their subs for the tourist trade—prominently display their licenses and certifications. But—as yet another submarine disaster makes headlines—after all of the safety tests and regulations, and all of the historical studies, if the ocean decides to hiccup in a fresh way, and disaster ensues, everything once again has to be called into question. Hands are wrung, and protocols revised. I don’t feel qualified to come up with an adequate set of regulations. I’m not sure that any set, no matter how strict, would make me feel comfortable boarding an experimental-class sub again.

Rail: You write about the Danish concept of grensoverschrijdende:

The inappropriate or perverse transgression of boundaries, which can be applied to Madsen’s own desperate need to shun gravity—to rise and to sink, to be rocket and sub, bird and fish, inventor and murderer. To be, via his constructions and adventures, a storyteller who needed to free himself from the confines of those very stories he perpetuated.

When does a pursuit that starts as eccentric or adventurous cross over into this perverse territory and what’s to be done about it?

Frank: When one’s enthusiasms implicate the body of another, and then use or dehumanize that body in service of maintaining or extending those enthusiasms or agenda, that’s when the pursuit becomes perverse, I think. It’s what happened with Madsen; it’s what happened with the Titan disaster. One can argue that it’s what happens when megalomaniacal politicians treat a populace as cogs, or guinea pigs. The Danes were compelled to come up with the term to describe an existing phenomenon—something that is, however unfortunately, part of the human condition; that’s perhaps been with us from the start. I’m not sure what we can do about it except learn to recognize it, have a perspective on it, speak out against it; tell these stories. And if we recognize it in ourselves, we can try to be better.

Rail: On page 229, you finally make a dive in a homemade amateur submersible yourself off the coast of Roatán, Honduras. How did you choose that as your site, and why did you trust captain Karl Stanley—“intriguing but also menacing—Big Bird on MDMA”—as the guy to take you on this trip?

Frank: I found Karl through Shanee Stopnitzky. She told me that if I was to experience a dive on a personal submersible, it should be Karl’s. Karl is based in Roatán, in part, because there, he doesn’t need to have his sub officially classed or certified or insured (all of which is expensive); in part because off Roatán, there’s such deep water so close to shore, and it’s part of the Mesoamerican Reef, where so many beautiful and beguiling sea creatures live. Trust may be too strong a word, but I chose Karl on Stopnitzky’s recommendation, the fact that he’s done more dives on an amateur submersible than just about anyone, and his reputation as a wonderful weirdo. Stopnitzky told me that his house was made of a dead coral reef, and so I also really wanted to see that. It was amazing. The entire ocean-facing facade of it had all these crooked pillars. It looked like some condemned castle of bone.

Rail: As you’ve mentioned, on June 18, 2023, Stockton Rush and his Titan submersible set out to explore the wreckage of the Titanic, and for days people speculated what had happened before we learned that the craft had imploded, killing all five people aboard. How long had you been working on this book at that point, and what was your immediate reaction, and what do you think now?

Frank: I began working on the book in 2019, so I had been immersed in this world for some time when the implosion happened. It was crazy. I wrote this article for Harper’s about my dive with Karl (which took place in February 2023), and it was published on the day that Titan went missing. Even before the implosion was confirmed, many amateur submersible builders were pessimistic. My immediate reaction was to consult with them, and they assured me that there was no hope of rescue. Moreover, they told me that all the experts at the Coast Guard and elsewhere knew that there was no hope of rescue. Still, the news cycle stretched the story out. And the ways in which the story was reported ingeniously exploited our collective anxiety by stitching it, almost cinematically, to a time-clock—a suspense-inducing breathable-air countdown clock. Remember that? Those little clocks at the bottom of the TV screen when they were telling the story? We all became so keenly aware of the passage of time, and the hours ticking away, in our own lives too. It’s downright stress-inducing—72 hours left, 48 hours left, 24 hours left, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…. In this, even if implicitly, we were also made keenly aware of how much closer we all are to our deaths. We were implicated.

I began fixating on my dive with Karl four months prior and became haunted by the experience—a haunting made more acute, bewildering, and, frankly, nauseating, after the disappearance and subsequent implosion of Titan. I felt as if maybe I shouldn’t be here. There was some knee-jerk crying, and feelings of a complicated, mournful, elegiac kind of gratitude. My mom kept calling me, making me promise over and over that I would never set foot on an amateur submersible again. I promised.

Now, in the aftermath, I find that even my ruminations and desire to contextualize the incident have taken on a stubborn redundancy. I’ve probably watched too many Bond movies and can’t help but think of the dark side of chasing this exploratory impulse, especially if the vision belongs to an ultra-wealthy, Stockton Rush-type. Still, I don’t regret having dove with Karl—thankfully surviving—in that home-built submersible. What I saw down there was indeed wondrous, but also in a torturous kind of way. I think about it every day, and so, from time to time, I get lost, foggy—as if still down there with the bioluminescence.

Rail: What have you read lately that you’ve adored and want to recommend?

Frank: I loved Bailey Gaylin Moore’s recent essay collection, Thank You for Staying with Me, and Sayaka Murata’s latest novel, Vanishing World. Right now, I’m reading A. Kendra Greene’s new essay collection, No Less Strange or Wonderful, which is brilliant and delightful.

Rail: What’s your next obsession, and what might you write a book about as a result?

Frank: In the first and second centuries, Plutarch wrote on what are known as “the Fortunate Isles,” a magical archipelago that straddles the realms of the mythological and the actual. In Plutarch’s time, the isles were believed to be real—a timeless, winterless, perpetually harmonious and balmy paradise where the gods of Greek mythology lived and vacationed (among us humans) when earthbound. Plutarch based his writings and his pinpointing of these isles on actual reports related by ancient mariners who claimed to have found gods there. Today, scholars and cartographers have tried to pinpoint the Fortunate Isles with varying hypotheses—perhaps they are the Azores or the Canary Islands, Cape Verde or the Lesser Antilles, Madeira or the Aeolian Islands of Sicily. Increasingly fixated on the idea of these isles, I want to attempt to crack the code of Plutarch’s essays, hoping to home in on the isles’ locale, travel there, and uncover not only some secret for living a life “without toil or trouble,” (to quote Plutarch) but also evidence of the gods’ existence—a quest in order to, in essence, fact-check Plutarch. I want to travel to these places in search of proof that—in these frightening times—remnants of a holiness still exists on earth, and that its populace is still capable of loving, and sustaining itself.