conversation with the author

Conversation with the Author

How did you come to set the book in the Aleutians?

I lived on Unalaska briefly in my early 20s, actually I think I got there just before my 21st birthday. I was taking time off from college and bumming around with a cute fisherman. Something about the place was so different than anywhere I’d live previously, or since. (And I’ve lived in Anchorage, Juneau, Los Angeles, Laytonville, C.A., Missouri, New York, and Montana.) At the time, I don’t remember thinking, “Wow this is an extraordinary place.” But over the years, the feel and look of it never left me.

In the book, the Aleutians have a magical quality and I guess that’s because of the way that place stayed with me, giving me a comparison for the rest of my life. I wrote an article recently about the closing of the Elbow Room, which happened in April 2005. While writing that piece and interviewing folks for it, I realized that part of the reason Unalaska was memorable was because, at least when I was there, it was perhaps the last vestige of the American frontier. There was a wild west feeling of possibility and danger and freedom that went beyond the stark natural beauty and captured a raw kind of human beauty. So it was both an awe I felt at those pinnacle mountains in green and gray rising from the Bering Sea, as well as a feeling that because this place had not yet been civilized, it still held hope and danger and second chances.

The themes of motherhood reappear several times in the book. How has being a mother influenced your work?

I actually began this book because I became a mother. I’d been doing magazine freelancing and work-for-hire kids nonfiction books. When my son was born, all of a sudden it was tough to work on deadline, and travel, and schedule interviews. My son would wake up screaming right in the middle of a hard-to-get phone interview, or, even worse, an editor would call as I drifted off for a rarified nap.

So I started on this story about Brandy that had been brewing, mostly in my mind and one opening paragraph on my computer that I’d been rewriting for years.

At the same time I was researching the Aleutians and the Aleuts, I was learning to be a mother. I was learning about this overpowering protective instinct that had suddenly taken over my body. I was surprised by the ferocity of mother love, the vicious potential I felt it awaken in me. I mean I would take a hatchet to anyone who threatened my son. I would pull his vitals out. I would turn the world upside down and beat it like a rug to keep my son safe. These feelings were unexpected and all encompassing.

For example, we had a kid trying to make meth in the house next to us, although at the time I thought he was just selling pot. Some drug dealer in a fancy red sports car kept parking in front of his house and setting his car alarm. Of course, it kept going off right during my son’s (and my) nap. The second or third time, I stomped out to the front yard, and screamed at the driver. Something like, “I have a sleeping baby and a forty-four and I know how to use it and I will pump that f--- car full of holes if it ever makes a peep again.” I’m sure my son was crying by that time and that my breasts had started to leak. So the drug dealer was probably just as frightened by the spreading dark blobs on my shirt as by my gun threats. But he never set the alarm again.

Now that’s just a small-town instance of vicious motherhood, but if you extrapolate that to real danger on a real edge, that ferocity contains so much character, desperation, potential.

So the unexpected strength of these feelings colored how I wrote the stories of the generations of Aleut women. What stronger justification exists to break taboos, to kill, to murder, than a mother whose children are threatened? And then the same feeling leaked into Brandy because she needed to care about something enough to kill or die for it.

First novels are often somewhat autobiographical. How much of Brandy is you?

I hate that question and people keep asking it. I guess because it assumes that our experiences are limited to what we’ve done. Have you ever confused the experiences of a character in a book or movie with your own? At times, I swear I’ve lived in Australia and skydived and had an abortion. I’ve even caught myself telling someone I did something and realized, no, I didn’t, but I feel like I have because I was with a character who did. Everything I’ve done, and seen, and read about, and wondered about, and imagined are, in ways, things I’ve done. I scavenge experiences and thoughts wherever I come across them. And then I think of them as mine.

That said, a lot of the book is auto-experiential, which is a term my husband came up when I was ranting about another “autobiographical” question. I lived in the Aleutians; I cocktail waitressed; I commercial fished in the Bering Sea, and hung out in dive bars. I’ve noted latrinealia, ridden a motorcycle, been to a Mary Kay party or two. I’ve tried an illegal drug or two; I’ve been too drunk, slipped into caves, eaten decayed seal flipper and a lot of other weird stuff. I’ve seen women stuck in party-girl mode into their 30s, 40s, 50s and wondered about the how’s and why’s. I’ve stood in the wind over an ocean and felt something soft and possible opening in front of me. And I’ve listened to my friends’ experiences and thoughts and they’ve become part of my own.

I think this is a large part of why we read, to broaden our experiences. And to a large extent, that’s part of why I write, to hone and bring all the scavenged experiences into focus and see what they mean to me.

What research went into writing this book?

I love research so I did a lot. And working on a book with a dominate non-fiction component was so nice. If I didn’t feel creative or blessed with the muse one morning, I could use my writing time to research. I read every book on Aleutian history and archeology I could get. I interviewed archeologists, social workers, anthropologists. I went back to Unalaska and revisited the settings of the book, toured an archeology site.

Some of the funnest research was interviewing a few of my friends to get a better handle on Brandy and her past. I had an idyllic childhood and didn’t understand Brandy’s past and how it had messed up her present with as much depth as I needed to. Fortunately a couple of my friends had good messed up parents and I interviewed them repeatedly (usually over drinks to loosen them up) until I could feel their experiences so I could write about them not just with detailed accuracy but with emotional accuracy.

Another fun research was exploring the ideas of the book. When I wanted to explore ideas about the effects of conquest, I read thinkers who had subversive ideas about the nature of conquest. When I wanted Brandy to embrace blame for an attempted rape, I found thinkers who were going against the grain and looking at victim culpability. When I started including Roman history, I read the classics on the rise and fall of Rome. Then there was graffiti, mummies, blondness. All that was wonderful research to delve into.

What was the genesis of the book idea?

There were really two starts to this book. The first was a general question that sprung from my wayward years. I was hanging in dive bars around less than savory characters, and I’d see women doing what I was doing who were much older. I was in my 20s, when such behavior is more accepted as a sowing-wild-oats kind of thing. But there were women much older doing the same thing. I always wondered why? Why was this never going to be a lifestyle thing for me? I never needed to escape it because I was playing, dabbling. I wondered what the difference between them and me was. And I wondered what it would take to shove such a woman out of that life. So that’s how I came up with the character of Brandy, who is that woman. And I knew I wanted her in Unalaska, just because it’s got the best dive bar and it’s so on the edge of everything.

But I had no idea for a story, an actual plot. Then my friend, Dana, mis-described or I mis-heard, the description of a book. She described it as about a group of old women in a quilting circle who had been judiciously killing “bad” men in their community for decades. So I read the book because, well, that’s a great idea. But it turned out the quilting biddies had only killed one man and it was in the heat of the moment, not a premeditated, assassin’s club kind of thing. I was disappointed and then I was elated because I suddenly had a plot. And as I read about Aleut history, the plot just fit better and better. And suddenly I knew how to burden my cocktail waitress with freedom. I knew what it would take to set her free and what it would cost.

How did being born and raised in Alaska influence you as a writer?

Well, I wasn’t born in Alaska. I was born near Berkley, California. My parents were somewhat hippy Jesus freak type Christians, who, like half the Alaskan population, moved up in the 70s with the oil rush. I was three. All I remember of the trip up was peeing out the door of the old black Cadillac we drove up in.

It surprises me when people think of Alaska as exotic somehow because for me it was just the norm. Growing up in NYC or L.A. or something seems exotic. I’ve lived in the Lower Forty-eight for many years now, and I finally have some perspective on my Alaska upbringing. Alaska is different. Not just the cold and dark; you can get cold and dark in many places. It’s the people. What kind of people do you think seek out Alaska? What kind of people stay? The average Alaskan is just not that average.

I find it difficult to separate how much I’ve been influenced by my Alaskan upbringing as compared to my Dyson upbringing. My family culture was, is, so dominate for me that I don’t know how to separate it from the Alaska stuff. And maybe it doesn’t matter. The fact is my parents, whether by instinct or by conscious decision, made the move to Alaska because it fit them. Dyson-Alaskan culture means having ugly dogs who don’t obey too quickly. It means knowing Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” by heart as a five year old. It means you can wrap chains around your tires in a short skirt in the dark in five minutes flat. It means you lost your ice scraper and don’t even think that the tape case isn’t sufficient, and besides you can see just fine through that four-inch square in the windshield. It’s not like you need peripheral vision; nobody’s out walking. It means you go for the highest powered deet mosquitoe spray you can get and couldn’t give a rats about what it may do to you in the long run because the short run is a bloody mess.

As a writer, I’m not so sure. I’m reading a book by a very Alaskan author right now, “Ordinary Wolves.” Seth Kantner is an Alaskan’s Alaska writer, growing up with igloos and dog sleds. He is interested in what Alaska means and what the Outside means by comparison. This isn’t a big part of my thoughts or writings. I would say I’m more inclined to take Alaska for granted, classic second-generation immigrant, I suppose.

You’ve said elsewhere that one of the book’s central themes is spiritual in some ways and you’ve patterned a scene after the biblical account of The Fall. Can you explain the spiritual aspects of this very back-alley toned book?

I would not call the themes in the book spiritual. I would call them theological. By that I mean the themes are not so much concerned with god in general terms or our place and purpose with him/her/it, but with the thorns in Judeo-Christian theology, with my prickly religion.

So I’m writing this story that requires a good bit of f-words and a zillion synonyms for cocaine. Then, about half way through, it dawned on me that underneath all the raw stuff, my writing was returning to an old and angst-ridden issue I’ve had with Christian explanations for the Problem of Pain, as C.S. Lewis called it. I’ve never been comfortable with the justification of all the pain and suffering in the world by the human capacity for free will. That God would curse us with knowledge and make us culpable for his mistake of planting the Tree right where we could see it.

So I tackled that with Brandy and with the Aleut women. Brandy is living in a pre-Fall kind of state. She has never recognized her capacity for free will; she’s Eve, wandering around picking at juicy fruit without shame. The Aleut women, before they break taboos and kill, are living an Eden kind of existence. They both have to make a decision to enter into knowledge and into exercising their wills. I wanted to see what they would think about it, see if they would blame God, and by extension, see if I could figure out what I thought about it and where I would place the blame. The answer? I don’t know. I argue with myself, and any other willing party, about this all the time. If any Christian book clubs want to tackle my book, I’ll just say, don’t expect Brandy to see a blinding light on the road to anywhere; she doesn’t talk in those terms. I leave my characters acting within this thoroughly gray area, I guess, because that’s where I’m at and that’s what fascinates me, the uncertainty.

At times the whole thing has made me angry at God and full of intellectual angst. But this angst, I think, is an inherently Christian, or at least deistic, angst. If you don’t believe in a God who is involved and good-hearted, you don’t have compatibility issues with a world in which children are mutilated and people die at the blade of a machete (just watched Hotel Rwanda). If you are simply spiritual without a hard and fast theology, you don’t get to wrestle with all the uncomfortable, gray stuff. You’re out of the game.

I’m realizing even more as I work on the second book, which is also wrapped up with these issues, how much the Problem of Pain nags at me. In my better moments, I see that embracing a religion that isn’t easy, that demands a continual grappling with cognitive dissonance, is at least more interesting than something so vague you can’t argue with it. But maybe I just like to have something to get all worked up about.