First-time novelist Stephanie Powell Watts prefers to write outside her home in a place where there’s some noise—somewhere like a grocery store or a coffee shop.

A grocery store?! Watts laughs. “I don’t like to be isolated,” she says during a call to her home near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Watts has been teaching creative writing and African-American literature at Lehigh University since 2004. She and her husband, the poet Bob Watts, are the creative writing department at Lehigh, she notes. They have a 7-year-old son. Watts adds that she wrote most of her wonderful novel, No One Is ­Coming to Save Us, in the coffee house on campus.

“I had four younger brothers in my house,” she says, explaining her need for noise. “There was always noise and there were always people running in and out, so you had to carve out your own space. And we had a very small house. Maybe I’m referring back to that. I really, really like a sense of connection.”

Watts grew up in Lenoir, North Carolina, a small town “right at the base of the Smoky and Brushy mountains,” where as a child 30 years ago, there was a vibrant furniture-making industry. The town has now fallen on hard times. “It’s empty parking lots. People have nothing to do. It’s a beautiful area, but the town used to be bustling and kind of grimy. Now there’s no bustle.”

Watts draws brilliantly on her personal experiences of those changes to create her fictional town of Pinewood. The place has an exhausted, ghostly feel that underlies the nostalgia, tumult and strife in the lives of her characters, who are mostly African Americans.

Watts drew similarly on her experiences in this part of North Carolina in creating her highly regarded short story collection, We Are Taking Only What We Need. The book earned Watts a Whiting Award, which comes with a $50,000 prize, and individual stories in the collection won additional awards. That’s one reason her first novel has deservedly earned a lot of early attention.

Another is that one of the surprising influences on the novel is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

“Once I realized that this was a story about displacement and identity, particularly racial identity,” Watts says, “I started to wonder how I could embody that. And I began thinking how Gatsby appears to be about one thing, but is really about many other things. That had generative force for me.”

But influence did not lead to imitation. In Watt’s telling, Jay (JJ) Ferguson, who left Pinewood as a very, very poor man, returns after 17 years as a rich man and begins building a house on a hill overlooking the town, where in the past only wealthy white people could live. Like Jay Gatsby, his intention is to woo and win a married woman he has long been in love with. The object of JJ’s obsession is Ava Bailey.

And here the shape, texture and even the diction of the two novels diverge widely. “When I read Gatsby and thought about [the women characters] Daisy and Myrtle, I thought, oh my gosh, they should have some say here. We never see them as anything other than materialistic and flighty people. Their stories seemed potentially fascinating.”

The emotional heart of Watts’ novel actually lies in the vexed relationships between Ava and her mother, Sylvia, and between each of these women and their detached and wandering husbands. Sylvia is so saddened by the absence of her son that she begins a phone relationship with a desperate young man in the county jail who randomly called her. She also feels free to intrude upon her daughter’s life while maintaining a complicated distance from her husband. Ava, nearing 40, is a manager at the local bank and wants fiercely to have a baby. Her husband, Henry, a casualty of the collapse of the furniture manufacturing business, seems aimless.

“One of the things I wanted to write about was difficult mothers and daughters. But I wanted to write about loving difficult mothers and daughters,” Watts says of Sylvia and Ava. The men, she admits, “are not on their best behavior. These men have access to a kind of power, and it’s sexual power, and they take it. But I hope they are rounded enough and that I’ve shown their lives in other lights.”

One way Watts leads the reader to feel empathy toward her characters, even though we may not always like them, is through an inspired shifting and intermingling of points of view. Another is the humor in the book, both in her own narration and in the exchanges among her characters. “Humor is absolutely necessary to keep going,” she says. “So many of the people in my family and my community were wonderful storytellers. They would tell stories about just awful things that happened to them. But their humor made what happened into their own kind of triumph.”

The novel, Watts says, “absolutely has the particularity of African-American experience. But I feel strongly that this kind of experience is not so different from other people’s experiences. This is about a particular time and place, but I think there are so many other resonances here to other kinds of experiences. And that to me is the beauty of reading. As a reader, you know the gut of it and say, ‘I get this,’ and I’ve felt like that, too.”

In the end, these characters achieve a kind of peace with one another, a place where Watts says, “I could see them having a future, a difficult one, but a future.”

She adds, “There are mercies that we get all the time, if we can see them as that. That doesn’t necessarily mean change and it doesn’t necessarily mean forgiveness. But we can decide that this [harm done to us] is not going to destroy me or lead me to destroy you. I think my characters are on that road.”

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Doug Benedict.

Thirty-year-old Eleanor isn’t concerned with anything outside of her weekly ritual. But sometimes “fine” isn’t good enough, and when a love interest and unexpected friendships cross her path, Eleanor slowly ventures into social interactions and takes tentative steps toward confronting the great pain in her past. Her description of learning to dance the “YMCA” is worth the price of admission alone.

Brimming with heartbreak and humor, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine was shortlisted for the U.K.’s Lucy Cavendish Prize in 2014 and was a hot title at the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair. Rights were sold in 26 countries, and soon after its U.S. publication in May, Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, announced plans to bring it to the big screen.

We asked Honeyman, who lives in Glasgow, Scotland, some questions about her standout debut.

Did you have any idea that the world would receive Eleanor Oliphant with such open arms?
Definitely not! As a debut writer, I was managing my expectations for the book very rigorously throughout the process of completing and submitting the manuscript. I still can’t quite believe what’s happened with it—I’m pinching myself!

What reactions to Eleanor have surprised you the most?
I’m delighted by how incredibly generous readers have been. When we first meet Eleanor, she’s not, on the surface, a particularly likable character; people have talked about feeling protective toward her, which has been wonderful to hear.

In Eleanor, you have created a wholly original heroine: She is a social outsider, but she’s doing her best to avoid self-pity. She is—she must be—fine. Where did this determined voice come from?
I wanted to show that Eleanor is a survivor, that she’s damaged but not broken by what has happened to her. I also thought it was important, if the character was going to work, that Eleanor never displays or experiences self-pity, however distressing her circumstances. I wanted to leave space in the narrative for the reader to draw their own conclusions about her life and her experiences and how she’s responded to them, and hopefully, to empathize with Eleanor as a result.

At one point, Eleanor says, “Loneliness is the new cancer.” In the way people used to fear saying the word “cancer,” loneliness is often considered embarrassing, even shameful. Why did you decide to write about it?
The idea for the book was initially sparked by an article I read about loneliness. It included an interview with a young woman who lived alone in a big city, had an apartment and a job, but who said that unless she made a special effort, she would often leave work on a Friday night and not talk to anyone again until Monday morning. That really struck me, because when loneliness is discussed in the media, it’s usually in the context of older people. When I thought more about it, I realized that there were plenty of potential routes to a young person finding themselves in those circumstances, through no fault of their own, and how hard it can be, at any age, to forge meaningful connections. From this, the story and the character of Eleanor slowly began to emerge.

“People have talked about feeling protective toward [Eleanor], which has been wonderful to hear.”

Eleanor is aware that love could change her, to help her “rise from the ashes and be reborn.” She sets her sights on local musician Johnnie Lomond, and through the internet and social media, she’s able to believe that love with him is possible. What are your feelings about the false intimacy that can be formed through social media?
Eleanor’s passion for Johnnie is a crush— I tried to show, in her responses to him, that it’s a very juvenile passion. Although she’s 30 years old, emotionally she seems much younger because of what’s happened to her. I’m not sure about social media more generally, but in the book, it was a very useful way of allowing the reader to see aspects of Johnnie which Eleanor, in the throes of her crush, is oblivious to.

I would be terrified and delighted to hear Eleanor’s initial impression of me. She’s so eloquent and specific with her harsh judgment. How would Eleanor describe your book?
That’s a tricky one! Although Eleanor’s directness causes her some problems socially, the first-person narrative allows readers to know that there’s no deliberate intention on her part to offend. It certainly makes life a bit awkward for her sometimes, though!

Some of my favorite moments of the book are when Eleanor ventures into areas of physical self-improvement, as her descriptions of getting a bikini wax or a manicure had me laughing aloud in public. What was the most fun to write?
I don’t have a favorite scene but did make myself laugh when I was writing the ones you’ve mentioned, so it’s very reassuring to hear that they made you laugh, too—thank you!

Eleanor has a spectacular vocabulary and perfect grammar. Has your own speech improved after spending so much time in Eleanor’s head?
Sadly not, I suspect! I wanted to make Eleanor’s voice a distinctive component of her character, and a big part of that was her unusual and mannered way of articulating her thoughts, both internally and in conversation. In some respects, her speech mannerisms result from her loneliness and lack of social interaction, and unfortunately, they also sometimes serve to reinforce this. As a writer, trying to capture that particular voice was both a challenge and enormous fun.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.

Author photo credit Philippa Gedge Photography UK.

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The television in the bar is showing 24-hour footage of the wreckage of Hurricane Irene. Vale, a young, strong-willed woman from Vermont, nervously watches as she bartends. Then she gets a call. Her mother, Bonnie, is missing, and nobody has seen her since the storm blew through New England. Although Vale moved far from her bleak hometown to escape her drug-addicted mother, she must now return to Heart Spring Mountain.

As she searches for Bonnie, Vale finds clues that astonish her. Through photos, police records, cellphone footage and the folklore of her family, Vale learns she is inescapably tied to the land and people of Heart Spring Mountain. She discovers the importance of that place and sees her origin in a new light.

Robin MacArthur’s debut novel, Heart Spring Mountain, exhibits the power of place and how land can hold people together. It shows how the earth we live on is tied to our being. Answering questions about the Vermont setting, her characters and the act of writing, MacArthur imparts wisdom about landscape, our attempts to redefine our pasts and more.

What inspired this work?
I’m not sure where novels come from—a dream space we’re only half conscious of, a compost pile of everything we’ve ever felt and seen and known. The first scraps (characters) arose out of my subconscious and lingered for long enough (10 years) that I knew they were worthy of my time. The more concrete shapes and themes of the novel—Tropical Storm Irene, climate change, opioid addiction—reflect my most pressing fears for my children, my community, the world.

In 2011, Tropical Storm Irene devastated my community in southern Vermont, and I realized for the first time that the effects of climate change would not only be wild and unpredictable, but everywhere. There would be no escaping its tragedies. The opioid epidemic has deeply altered my hometown. And so the question for me, and for this novel, became: How do we help one another through hard times? How can the past both answer for our brokenness and teach us how to heal?

Both of your published works, the story collection Half Wild and Heart Spring Mountain, have such a strong sense of place set in Vermont. What do you hope to capture about Vermont with your work, and in what ways do your stories go beyond your setting?
I love the Eudora Welty quote, “One place understood helps us understand all places better.” My work is set in southern Vermont because that’s the place I know and have access to. My great-grandparents moved here in the 1930s, and each generation of my family has lived here since. That’s taught me about this place, but more importantly, about places in general—how there are both vertical and horizontal understandings of place. I try to access the vertical layers of place in my work; to show how places evolve over time, and how the markings of time and history—racial, economic, agricultural—are etched into our everyday lives, whether we recognize those layers or not. So yes, my work is set in Vermont, but I don’t consider them stories “about” Vermont. I consider them stories about how humans both shape and are shaped by the landscapes they inhabit. About how we can be transformed by our relationships to place—their histories, their natural landscapes, the creatures we share them with, the stories embedded within.

How has your own relationship with farming in Vermont informed your writing?
My grandparents lived in the farmhouse up the hill from where I live now; they had a huge vegetable garden and cut all their own firewood (20 cords a winter). In 1968, my parents dropped out of college and built a cabin on a nearby hillside and have lived on that piece of land since, dedicating their lives to sugar making and vegetable farming. I grew up in an off-grid house with an outhouse, cows, chickens, a wood stove, a monstrous vegetable garden. I knew exactly where my water came from, where the electricity that powered our flickering lights came from (a couple of solar panels), where the heat came from, where my food came from (and where it retired). Living that way gives you a sense of interconnection with the natural world and resources that I don’t think you could ever learn from a book.

I don’t live that way now—I’m a terrible gardener and love my flush toilet—but that sense of reverence for resources and for the natural world has never left me. My parents, through their way of living, taught me that humans are part and parcel of the natural world, co-habitors, with an immense responsibility to keep the woods and fields and streams around us healthy and vibrant (for our own health and survival as well as for the ecosystem at large). Without expressing it as such, my parents are pragmatic transcendentalists, deeply humble, servants to their community and their landscape—and though I’ve rejected many parts of my upbringing (indoor toilet! lazy mornings!), I deeply admire their reverence for the earth.

Really it comes down to perspective—seeing the individual human story as a small story within a much larger story—that of seasons and generations, of the earth’s wildness and the earth’s ability to feed our bodies if we tend it with care. My mother loves the coyotes that stalk the creek between our houses as much as she loves anything or anyone. I weave that worldview into every one of my books—a shifting from the human at center stage to the human at side stage, and that viewpoint without a doubt comes from the way I was raised.

“Vale unravels family secrets and cultural secrets, and in doing so uncovers a blueprint for her future. She uncovers brokenness, yes, but within those shards are strands of hope, too. Blueprints for love. Resiliency. Connection.”

Vale is such a strong-willed and independent character. How do you think she changes over the course of the novel?
It was a challenge for me working with character evolution over the long arc of a novel. In short stories, characters can change relatively quickly—or you focus a story on that moment when they do change. With Vale, I needed to evolve her at the tempo of the book, which meant she and I both had to move slowly.

I see her as fierce and resilient at the beginning of the book, but also afraid to let people in. Afraid of intimacy. She’s running from her past (with good reason) and trying to find family / connection / belonging in a city 1,500 miles away from home. But she also doesn’t know who she is, because she’s running. She does find an adopted family of sorts in New Orleans, whom she might return to, but she can’t discover who she is until she returns home and faces her demons. And she does. She returns home to look for her mother, Bonnie, for whom life has not been easy; she’s long been addicted to opioids, has recently found Jesus. During the course of the book, Vale unravels family secrets and cultural secrets, and in doing so uncovers a blueprint for her future. She uncovers brokenness, yes, but within those shards are strands of hope, too. Blueprints for love. Resiliency. Connection. A narrative of hope, strung amid the broken rafters. And so she slowly opens herself. To vulnerability. To the humans nearby. And begins to ask questions she hasn’t asked before about life purpose, and what hers might be.

With Heart Spring Mountain, you’re considering questions of our past: what we can escape or redefine (about ourselves and our own families) and what we can’t. Why?
Yes, this is one of the big questions of the book, and something that’s personal for me. Unlike most college graduates, I chose to return home to build a house and raise a family on the land where I grew up and where my dad grew up. I wanted to be immersed in a landscape I knew well, and I wanted to be near its ghosts. Like Faulkner, the ghosts of a place are ever-present for me, in ways that both haunt me and define who I am. Faulkner’s famous quote, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past,” echoes my worldview. We live in culture obsessed with rebirth and freedom and things that are new, but until we acknowledge the past, both our historical violences (racism, slavery, the genocide of Native peoples) and own personal histories and lineage (embedded in our cells), we can’t begin to heal. And so while I don’t believe that everyone has to, or should, return home to find themselves, I do believe that the only way forward, as a nation or personally, is by acknowledging the grievances and resiliency embedded in our pasts. Both history’s wounds and history’s beauty.

And that’s where the hope of this book lies—that when we do uncover the past, we might be surprised by what hope lies there as well. All sorts of new and beautiful things have the potential to unfold. That, in my mind, is true freedom. Not running, but digging in and letting the ghosts escape. Defining yourself via the past, not in spite of it. At the book’s conclusion, Vale has found a connection—to her family, to the landscape, to the past—that will root her no matter where she lands.

With Vale coming from New Orleans to witness the wreckage of Tropical Storm Irene, it seems that our land faces similar questions of repeating the past, and bearing the wounds of the past’s damage. Is this something you wanted to explore with your novel?
Yes. There’s a quote from Evan Pritchard’s book No Word for Time that I use in the book: “To do damage to the earth does spiritual damage as well.” In some ways that quote captures what I believe to be the heart of this story—the ways in which we, as a culture, have severed our connections to the earth, to community, to indigenous traditions, to family, to the past, to spiritual traditions, and in doing so, have become, like Bonnie and like Vale, irreparably or reparably lost.

Climate change and opioid addiction are both symptoms of the same illness: capitalism and disconnection. Just as Vale has to unearth her family story in order to begin to find herself, there are secrets written in the landscape that will continue to haunt the landscape until those secrets are revealed. In the case of this book, Vale learns about the Eugenics Survey of Vermont, a survey of the 1920s and ’30s whose intent and result was to institutionalize, terrorize and force into hiding Vermont’s marginalized people. Many native people in Vermont were institutionalized, sterilized and forced to either hide or flee. This is not ancient history—it’s a fresh and violent wound that has been successfully covered up, and has yet to be properly acknowledged or addressed. How can we heal, as a culture, until we acknowledge our trespasses? How can we have a sustainable relationship with the earth if we have evicted and silenced our indigenous cultures?

Capitalism is very good at distracting us. It has bred a world of disconnection—to the past, to community, to family, to reverence for the natural world. And the repercussions are vast: war, climate change, opioid addiction, inequality—you name it. Healing—personal via changing neural pathways, or cultural via reparations—can only begin once we acknowledge what’s been done. And then we need to come together, as the characters in this book do, in the most old fashioned and essential of ways. With fire. And music. And soup and bread and wine, to keep one another company. We need to learn from the vanquished past ways of survival, ways of reverence. Life is long and can be so lonely. We are in a dark spell and the years ahead may be dark as well—authentic companionship is key, and where hope lies.

What was the most difficult part of writing your debut novel? What was the easiest?
This novel had been brewing in my mind (and on scraps of paper) for a good 10 years, so I knew, for years, what the general shape would be. I knew the characters. I knew that Vale would return home. I knew I wanted it to have a buoyancy of perspective—hop from one point of view to the next quickly, skip back and forth in time—to reflect the ways in which the past and the present, and each of us, are inextricably interwoven and interconnected. So the overall shaping of the novel was surprisingly easy. (I think because it happened in an unpressured dream space over such a long period of time.) The writing itself was also fun—scenes, characters, voice—those are my bread and butter. The challenge was creating a narrative arc for the novel as a whole, and for each point of view (there are seven). I needed to make sure each character thread had urgency and momentum, but was moving at the same pace as the novel. And then I had to find a way to weave them all together in ways that felt organic. I spent many hours mapping scenes, and wasted many more moving scenes around trying to find their perfect home. Thank goodness for my brilliant editor, who let me know, gracefully, when to take my hands off the pages and call it done.

You are a musician as well as a writer. Do these two arts inform each other?
Yes, my husband and I have a band, Red Heart the Ticker. We’ve recorded four albums and toured and all that jazz. We’ve stopped recording and performing music (for now), but I like to think of my writing as an extension of that singing. My grandmother was a folk-song collector and singer; I grew up listening to her and others sing in her farmhouse up the hill. There’s a part of me that considers the writing of books a continuation of her singing—keeping company through the darkness, offering a gift to bring peace or laughter or yearning or mere companionship to another. Like I said above—life is long and these times are dark. Art is the light in the dark. Both blueprint and company. On a more practical note, I think I might rock back and forth a bit when I’m writing; the rhythm on the page, like the rhythm of the song, is for me essential.

What are you working on next?
Oh, I don’t know! I have three or four files on my computer that are each growing slowly and fermenting, and at some point I’m hoping one of them will jump off the page and scream, “Me! I’m next!” I don’t think we can choose these things. Writing a book is a long love affair. One has to feel authentically called to the page. So we shall see what happens.

During one of several research forays for his brilliant first novel depicting contemporary experiences of urban Native Americans, Tommy Orange discovered Gertrude Stein’s famously misunderstood quote about Oakland, California: “There is no there there.”

Why was that important?

“She was talking about how the place where she had grown up—Oakland—had changed so much that it was no longer recognizable,” says Orange during a call to his home in Angels Camp, California, not far from Yosemite Valley. Orange, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, was born and raised in Oakland. “I didn’t immediately know this was going to be the title. But there was so much resonance for Native people—what this country is now compared to what it was for our ancestors. The parallels just jumped out at me.”

Set in Oakland, There There follows the intersecting lives of 12 contemporary Native Americans as they prepare for the Big Oakland Powwow. Some, like young Orvil Red Feather, want to connect with Native traditions. He discovers Indian dance regalia hidden away in the closet of his aunt, Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, a mail carrier who as a child was part of the Native occupation of Alcatraz Island, but who now “wants nothing to do with anything Indian.” Orvil has taught himself to dance by watching videos on YouTube.

Octavio Gomez, an alienated young Native American, sees the powwow as an opportunity to rob businesses to pay off drug debts. He is close with his uncle Sixto, who at one point tells him, “We got bad blood in us. . . . Some of these wounds get passed down.”

And then there is Dene Oxendene, the character who is perhaps closest in experience to Orange himself. A graffiti artist of mixed heritage, Dene tremulously applies for—and receives—a grant to collect the oral histories of Oakland’s Native people. “I actually got a cultural arts grant from the city of Oakland to do a storytelling project that never existed but for the fictional version in this novel,” Orange admits, laughing.

Orange, who is now 36 and a recent graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts’ MFA program, did not grow up reading fiction or wanting to be a writer. He played indoor roller hockey until the sport died out, and he has a degree in sound engineering. “There weren’t many job prospects,” he says. “People with stars in their eyes who wanted to end up in big studios had to be willing to fetch coffee and clean toilets, so we were told.”

So Orange got a job at a used bookstore. “At the time, I was reading to find meaning,” he says. “I was raised religiously, Christian evangelical. My dad was into the Native American Church, which is the peyote church. Both of my parents were intensely into God. But none of that was for me. I was reading to figure out what it all did mean to me. I found fiction first through Borges and Kafka. I was actually eating a doughnut on a break, reading A Confederacy of Dunces, when I realized what a novel could do. In that singular moment, I became obsessed. Once I knew what a novel could do, I wanted to do it.”

Orange first imagined There There around the time he and his wife, a psychotherapist whom he met when they were both working at Oakland’s Native American Health Center, conceived their now-7-year-old son.

“I was driving down to LA with my wife, and it just popped into my head all at once,” Orange says. “I knew I wanted to write a polyphonic novel and have all the characters converge at a shooting at an Oakland powwow. Growing up in Oakland, [I saw] that there were no Native-people-living-in-the-city-type novels. They were all reservation-based. That made me feel isolated. If I was reading about Native experience, it had nothing to do with my experience. So my idea was to have a mix of the contemporary with the traditional, an urban feel, with echoes of violence and the continuation of violence in Native communities.”

“I wanted to find a way to portray the way Natives experience history.”

One of the animating questions for all the novel’s characters is what being Native American means today. Orvil, for example, alienated from his heritage, anxiously Googles, “What does it mean to be a real Indian?”

“For a long time,” Orange says, “a real Indian meant someone who does not exist anymore. We’re going through a period right now as a people, wondering—because there are 575 recognized tribes, each with its own language and way of thinking—are we doing harm against Indian identity by talking about us as one people? But at the same time, we’re probably more alike than we are different.”

Which is why the idea of powwows is so symbolic for Orange. He didn’t grow up going to powwows. But later in life, he was on the Oakland powwow committee. “The reason it works so well for Native people living in the city is that it is intertribal. All these tribes come together to do one thing together. It’s a marketplace, but it’s also where we see each other as Native people. It’s an intensely visible, communal space, with people coming together, dancing and singing the old ways.”

Orange says it was very important for There There, a novel with many characters and voices, to be a readable book. “It’s an elusive thing,” he says. “Native people, I think, have a skeptical view of history, the way it’s taught and the way it’s understood by the average American. There’s a certain burden to inform correctly. I wanted to find a way to portray the way Natives experience history. And I wanted to find a way to do it in a compelling and, again, readable way.”

In There There, Orange has succeeded in doing just that. It’s a compelling read, a stunning tour de force and a display of Orange’s impressive virtuosity.

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Elena Seibert.