‘Dream State’ author talks teaching at Hopkins, writing with humor and his next book

“Dream State” will mess with your perception of time and challenge the way you think about life amid climate change.

The book by Eric Puchner is also a dreamlike exploration of marriage, male friendship, guilt and so much else about what it means to be human.

The story follows the lives of three friends after a wedding in summer 2004. Cece arrives a month early to her fiancé Charlie’s family home in Montana to finish planning and arranging the ceremony, when Charlie asks his friend Garrett — who is set to officiate the wedding — to check in on Cece and make sure she’s doing OK alone.

The story zips through time and follows the consequences of that event (and a warming world) through the lives of Garrett, Cece, Charlie and their children.

Puchner‘s prose is at times laugh-out-loud funny and other times feels like a gut punch — which is probably part of the reason the novel was picked for Oprah’s Book Club when it published in February 2025.

It’s also part of The Banner Book Club. Puchner, who lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor in the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, will be stopping by The Banner on Wednesday at 6 p.m. to discuss his fourth book.

Ahead of his visit, he spoke with us about the importance of setting, how working at Hopkins affects his writing and what’s next.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Do you think that where you spend your time affects the way you write?

Absolutely. Setting has always been huge for me in terms of inspiring me what to write, and Montana is a setting that means a lot to me. The landscape itself just speaks to me in a way that no other landscape does.

Montana spoke to me in that literary way and it’s partly because I wanted to write about climate change, but I wanted that to be in the background, not overwhelming the story and hitting the reader over the head. And there’s just something about spending time in Montana, having been there every summer for the past 25 years and watching the way that climate change has affected people’s lives.

Could you have told Cece, Garrett and Charlie’s story in, say, Ohio or Maryland? Or did it have to be Montana?

It had to be Montana. The trajectory of the book is going from Eden to Hell.

It’s very purposefully set at this lake house. It’s not an accident that there is an apple orchard in the backyard. That landscape is so important, and also the house itself is so important. It’s a house that I know extremely well. The one purely autobiographical element in the book is the lake house.

How does living in Baltimore, and teaching at Johns Hopkins, affect the way you write?

Hopkins has been incredibly supportive of what they call my research, which is my fiction writing. I have nothing to complain about.

And I’ve come to really adore Baltimore. We lived in the Bay Area, and we didn’t know any of our neighbors. Now we live on a block in a Baltimore neighborhood, we know all of our neighbors, and we have lots of friends in walking distance.

I found several parts of the book to be laugh-out-loud funny. I write every day, and I know it’s not easy to write funny all the time without falling into cliché or being totally ham-fisted. How do you do it?

The tone has to be 100% perfect, and it’s really hard to do on the first draft. It’s one of my favorite things to do, is to try to be funny when I’m writing. And it’s partly because I like to write about heavy stuff. It’s a way of diffusing the melodrama.

What’s funny about life and what’s horrible and dreadful about life is pretty much the same thing — just the absurdity of existence.

Often the funniest type of humor is the type of humor in which the characters don’t know that they’re being funny. They’re being accidentally funny.

I don’t want to spoil the book so I won’t be specific, but there are a couple of story developments where you handle these gigantic life events in quick, almost incidental phrases or sentences. Can you talk about that writing decision?

That is definitely something I was going for. I mean, that’s the way life works, isn’t it? You learn about horrific events in ways that are completely incidental. I wanted to write a book in which the real antagonist is time.

I wanted to surprise the reader, not just with the events themselves but with the sense of, “Oh my God, it’s been 20 years.”

Can you talk about what you’re working on now or what’s coming next?

I just sent 60 pages to my agent with great trepidation, because it’s very different than anything I’ve written before. It is a historical novel set in the West. I’ll say that much.