This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Robert P. Baird, whose debut novel, The Nimbus, is out today from Henry Holt. On a normal day on a university campus in Chicago, the toddler son of an ambitious divinity school professor named Adrian Bennett mysteriously starts to glow. The nimbus, as the light comes to be known, offers no clues to its origin and frustrates every attempt at rational explanation. Though the nimbus appears only intermittently, and not to everyone, the otherworldly glow quickly upends the lives of all those who encounter it, including Paul Harkin, Adrian’s broke graduate student, who likes being a graduate student a bit too much; Renata Bennett, Adrian’s omnicompetent wife, who can’t see her son glowing even as the nimbus turns her life upside down; and Warren Kayita, a librarian on the run from a violent criminal. An intellectual satire, searing family portrait, and thrilling metaphysical page-turner, The Nimbus offers a humorous and deep exploration of the persistence of spiritual belief in a secular age and humanity’s enduring search for meaning. Elliot Ackerman calls The Nimbus a “big-hearted novel about the biggest questions—marriage, religion, parenthood, meaning,” adding, “The Nimbus is comic and profound, a novel that practically glows. Robert P. Baird is a huge talent.” Robert P. Baird is a writer and editor who has worked at the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, the Chicago Review, and Esquire. He grew up in Chico, California, studied mechanical engineering and human biology at Stanford, and completed a master’s degree and a PhD at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, children, and dog.
Robert P. Baird, author of The Nimbus. (Credit: Betsy Baird)
1. How long did it take you to write The Nimbus?
I had the idea for the novel, and decided to write it, in 2018. I completed a draft that was ready for submission in the spring of last year. So: six years start to finish. But the writing was not continuous for that entire interval. For one thing, I was doing a fair amount of journalism and freelance editing while I was working on the novel. And then, of course, there was COVID. My wife is an infectious-disease doctor at a safety-net hospital in Brooklyn, so when schools closed in March 2020 I became the primary caregiver for our two children. Plus I was doing a bunch of reporting on the pandemic that left me no time for fiction. Looking back, The Nimbus feels to me more like a three- or four-year project, but it’s hard to say for sure.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I wish I could say it was something high-minded like trying to find a prose style adequate to the age, or orienting myself existentially so that I could hear the deepest rhythms of the universe. The truth, though, is that by far the biggest challenge was pushing through my doubts about whether I could write the book I wanted to write and manage to get it published. When I was in my twenties I would have scoffed at worrying so much about whether I could sell the manuscript. How crass! How commercial! That was before I had the experience of writing a novel that didn’t get published. It was also before I had to weigh not just weeks but months and years of working on a book that might not ever amount to anything against journalism that came with a more or less guaranteed paycheck. And, of course, that was before I became a parent, which for all its wonderful aspects also meant the evaporation of the marginal early-morning and weekend time that I used to steal for fiction. While writing The Nimbus I was keenly aware—probably too keenly aware—that this might be my last serious shot at writing a novel, and for a long time it felt like it just wasn’t good enough to justify all the time and expense it was demanding from me and my family. That thought weighed pretty heavy in my mind.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write at home. I wrote much of The Nimbus at a desk in my bedroom, but I now have a small office with a desk and reading chair. When I’m in the middle of a project, I try to write at least six days a week. I wake up early whether I want to or not, so I usually go for a morning run and try to get to my desk by eight or nine. I’ll push till two or three in the afternoon, when the sentence-generating precincts of my brain tend to go on strike. That’s when I switch to reading, or editing, or household errands. Eight hundred words a day is my usual goal. Five hundred is an acceptable minimum. If I top a thousand, I break out the joss sticks and confetti.
4. What are you reading right now?
I like to keep several reading lanes running at once. For a new project I’m working on, I’m reading a bit of Boccaccio’s Decameron each day. In anticipation of my book tour (The Nimbus has a lot to do with religion), I’ve been looking back through Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007) and David Bentley Hart’s brilliant and cranky That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (Yale University Press, 2019). When I’m done with those I’m hoping to crack into two books by friends: Megan Greenwell’s Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream (Dey Street Books, 2025), which publishes the same day as The Nimbus, and Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America (Random House, 2025), Sam Tanenhaus’s new biography of William F. Buckley. As far as fiction goes, I just finished Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (Knopf, 1992), which somehow I’d never read before, and am getting underway on Aaron John Curtis’s Old School Indian (Hillman Grad, 2025). And while I’m reading less poetry than I’d prefer right now, I recently finished Forrest Gander’s terrific Mojave Ghost (New Directions, 2024) and have been working my way through a new edition of Ronald Johnson’s Ark, published by the wonderful Flood Editions in Chicago.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Given the state of reading in America, any author who’s worth reading once is almost by definition not getting the recognition they deserve. Edward P. Jones, Lauren Groff, Paul Beatty, Patricia Lockwood, and the late Hilary Mantel are no one’s idea of obscure, but they are all still, to my mind, underappreciated. I’ll also say, though, that even within the attentional confines of book culture as it exists now, I miss the days of the thriving midlist. As thrilling as it is to watch books like All Fours (Riverhead Books, 2024) by Miranda July, Martyr! (Knopf, 2024) by Kaveh Akbar, and James (Doubleday, 2024) by Percival Everett become genuine cultural sensations—all of them deservedly so!—I wish we had better means to help readers find their way to brilliant oddities like Dayswork (Norton, 2023) by Jennifer Habel and Chris Bachelder, and You Dreamed of Empires (Riverhead Books, 2024) written by Álvaro Enrigue, and translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Time, always time. I understand completely why so many people are so desperate for AI: Writing and reading both take inordinate amounts of time, and they both often feel wildly inefficient. But I’m absolutely convinced that you can’t cheat either endeavor, just like you can’t cheat the time it takes to be a good parent or romantic partner. And—especially if you’re a parent and a partner while also being a writer—it never feels like there are enough hours in the day, weeks in the year, or years in the life to get it all done.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
My agent, Amelia Atlas, and editor, Tim Duggan, have both given me plenty of terrific wisdom, but one piece of advice I keep returning to lately came from a friend, Elliot Ackerman. He warned me that it’s tremendously easy to get distracted by all the stuff that isn’t happening to and for your book instead of paying attention to the good things that are. The winner-take-all logic that dominates publishing (as it dominates every other part of American life) makes it way too easy to slip into a scarcity mindset. Precisely because I’m not immune to that temptation, I have to remind myself constantly that that mindset is a terrible way to think about art. Yes, I want my book to find its way into the hands of readers who will enjoy it—as many as possible, obviously—but I also know that good books are good for the world. The more of them that get celebrated, the better it is for everyone.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Nimbus, what would you say?
If I knew it was all going to work out—the book would find a shape I was happy with, and that someone would want to publish it—I’d tell myself precisely that.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of The Nimbus?
The Nimbus is set in and around a divinity school in Chicago, and I spent nearly a decade in and around a divinity school in Chicago. Though the novel is not autobiographical in any direct way—it concerns a mysteriously glowing toddler—I obviously drew on that experience to create my fictional world. I also spent nearly a decade working in and around magazines, as a writer, editor, fact-checker, and copy editor. I think my prose benefitted a lot from the discipline of word-count constraints, and that time in longform journalism also taught me to think on a very granular level about how a given piece of writing is engaging or taxing a reader’s attention.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
“Always serve the reader.” Annie Dillard told me this twenty-odd years ago, when I was working as a secretary for her and her husband, the late Robert D. Richardson, Jr. What she meant is that you should write, or at the very least revise, with a reader always in mind. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be weird or peculiar or even off-putting. It does mean that you need to know what risks you’re running and how much of it your reader can take. It also doesn’t mean that you should try to write for everyone—“Please the reader you want” was another of her dicta—but unless you’re a genius channeling spirits from the Great Unknown then you have to remember that you’re not writing into a void. As writers, we’re all in the position of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: We’re stopping strangers on a way to a wedding, when the feast is set and they can hear the merry din. We owe it to them not to abuse their time.
