Born and raised in Michigan, Isaac Hamlet graduated from the University of Iowa majoring in English and minoring in Latin and journalism. In June 2022, he published his first book, “Light Keeper Chronicle: The Unspoken Prophecy,” and on Oct. 29, 2024, he published his second book, “The Wilderlands.” He has contributed to Little Village Magazine and was an arts and entertainment reporter for the Des Moines Register. From 2013 to 2017, Hamlet worked for The Daily Iowan.
The Daily Iowan: What was your biggest inspiration for “The Wilderlands”?
Hamlet: Probably the biggest one was the Latin class that I took in my senior year of high school. We had to read the Aeneid, which [was] a famously unfinished text from Virgil. I had to translate it line by line over a year. I latched on to the idea of language, which you can sort of see in my book. It’s all in English, but it is implied that there are a few different languages spoken, and I played with that. “Something Wicked This Way Comes” by Ray Bradbury was a big anchor point for me where I was like, “Oh, this is how I get this to work on the page linguistically.”
What has your experience as a self-published author been like?
That’s a big question because it’s ongoing, especially this month. This past week, I was listening to the audiobook recording of this, which was the first time I’ve had that done. [For The Wilderlands], I was like, “I know this is a solid text, and I know that I feel good about this.” I’d rather put it out there myself than try to go through all [the work] of convincing people about it and then getting rejected.
What character do you resonate with the most?
It has been different characters in different parts of my life. I came up with the first chapter of the book around the time I was wrapping up high school. I wrote the first version of the first chapter and thought, “Ah, that didn’t quite hit with me,” so I didn’t have a strong connection to anyone at that point. When I was writing the first full draft in 2018, I resonated with Knalc, who was the character you’re introduced to at the start of the story who is a person in The Wilderlands. Whether or not it was true, there was an isolation that [he was] experiencing that I resonated with at the time.
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Why did you choose the pseudonym “R.E. Bellesmith?”
I decided to write under a pseudonym because at the time I was rebranding “Lightkeeper’s Chronicle,” I was working at The Des Moines Register as an arts and entertainment reporter. A lot of my friends have been like, “[Isaac Hamlet] is the perfect writer’s name, you don’t need to change it.” While I was inclined to agree, I had a backlog of nonfiction writing under that name. Just to be a little bit cleaner and distinguish myself more, I [wanted to] use a pseudonym. I liked the mystical idea of it, that you could create a name that evokes a certain feeling or sense of the genre you’re writing. R.E. Bellesmith felt sort of fantasy-adjacent. I ended up pulling my sister’s name, Rachel, and my brother’s name, Eli. My mom’s maiden name is Belle, and my father was born with the last name Smith. I think I had an uncle who spotted the pseudonym and said, “I see what you did.”