Ann Cummins Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Ann Cummins discusses her first novel, Yellowcake, a multi-generational and multicultural story set in a former uranium milling community.

Why is your novel titled Yellowcake?

My novel is set in the uranium-rich lands of the American Southwest, the Four Corners area, including the San Juan Mountains of Colorado and the Navajo Indian reservation in northern New Mexico and Arizona. My subject is the lives of Navajos and Anglos for whom the mining and milling of uranium was a way of life from the fifties through the early seventies. Yellowcake, a controversial energy source used to power both nuclear bombs and power plants, comes from processed uranium ore. I titled my novel Yellowcake in part because the making of yellowcake was such an important element of my characters' lives, but also because it's a long-lived energy source emitting radiation for years after the ore is mined. My novel is set in 1991, twenty years after the closing of many uranium mines and mills on the Colorado Plateau, but my characters continue to feel the industry's effects in many ways — physically, emotionally, and spiritually. History and the present converge in the characters. Yellowcake, or rather the "half-life" of the processed ore, represents the echoes and consequences of historical events and how they play out in the present.


So is it ...