By Anita Gill
I came across this quote by writer Sarah Dessen: “Family isn’t something that’s supposed to be static, or set. People marry in, divorce out. They’re born, they die. It’s always evolving, turning into something else.”
Jaimee Wriston’s latest novel, How Not to Drown, focuses on exactly this—a family that’s anything but static. Set in Massachusetts, the story centers around straight-talking Amelia who fondly remembers her glory days as a model. Now in her twilight years and mourning the tragic murder of her son, her teenage granddaughter appears at her doorstep. Written in chapters based on several main characters, this novel unfolds the workings of a family, stretching back and forth in time.
Jaimee Wriston serves as a professor of English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University in New York. Her previous books, published under the name Jaimee Wriston Colbert, are Wild Things, Shark Girls, Dream Lives of Butterflies, Climbing the God Tree, and Vanishing Acts.
Wriston corresponded with me to discuss her latest novel.
You created characters from different generations and each voice is unique. First, there’s the grandparent Amelia, then there’s her adult son Daniel, and finally, Heaven, who is on the cusp of her teenage years. It’s quite a remarkable feat. Did you find this challenging to manage, and did you implement any strategies to get the voices right?
I’ve always been interested in generations of families, what changes in each with the times, what remains the same. I’m fascinated with family dynamics–how the oldest generations, bearing their wealth of experience (which can also mean they’re set in their ways), relates to the youngest who are making the rules as they go.
I had a lot of fun with Amelia and Heaven, for instance, as Amelia does not immediately embrace Heaven at all–she’s definitely not the cookie-making Grandma–and yet she feels obligated to impose her will on Heaven, who of course immediately rejects that. Fireworks! I hear the voices of my characters in my head, and with three generations I can see and hear them at a dinner table, let’s say, arguing from their own orientations. Thus Heaven “needs” a smartphone; Daniel just wants to be left alone to ogle the diner waitress next door, and Amelia, naturally, is certain she knows what’s best for them all.
I think once you know your characters, know what they want, what they yearn for, you hear their voices in your head. I believe it was Robert Olen Butler who said, “fiction is the art of yearning.”
The ancestor Maggie MacQueen speaks to us from 1851, her journey beginning in Scotland and then progressing into her travels across the Atlantic. With such a change in place and time, it is obvious that you had to give a great deal of attention to shaping her voice on the page. What was the experience like trying to hone her narration?
My first attempt was downright comical. I had gone to the Isle of Skye and the outer Hebrides to do research for the book, where I was able to hear both Gaelic being spoken, and people speaking with a Scottish brogue. There was no chance I could have Maggie speak Gaelic, which would’ve been accurate for the time period, although I did include a smattering of words here and there to render some authenticity. But in my first draft, I had her speak with a Scottish accent, feeling fairly certain I could make that believable. Not happening, my agent said when I showed her my draft. So, I read a few historical novels that took place in Great Britain during the 1800’s and in doing so, I began to hear a voice for Maggie that felt natural. Then I included just a few Scottish words and idioms for her to use here and there, such as aye, and wee lassie, enough to hopefully give the reader a sense of both place and time period. Eventually, I grew into Maggie’s voice and it started to drive her character for me.
Recently through my publisher, I was contacted by the production company doing the audiobook for How Not to Drown. They had sent a spreadsheet with the Gaelic words I used, hoping I could supply the pronunciation guide for them. Ha, not a chance I’m afraid. Gaelic sounds downright poetic, but completely incomprehensible if you don’t know the language. I was honored they wanted to get them right though, so I researched a Gaelic-to-English online dictionary that had an interactive pronunciation guide and my publisher sent them the link.
Part of what makes this novel so strong is the care and attention to research. I am curious about whether you had initiated research before embarking on writing this novel or if you were researching while writing.
I generally do both, but the lion’s share of on-site research is always done before I begin the writing. This was particularly true for this novel, as I really didn’t know much about the Isle of Skye; when I began thinking about the story I had only recently found out the details of our family connection to it. All I knew was that my great-grandmother had been Scottish. One day chatting with my dad he casually mentioned her family had been from the Isle of Skye, and that the landlords had seized their home (and many others all over the Highlands) forcing them to emigrate to Prince Edward Island.
Originally I thought I’d do a nonfiction book telling my great-grandmother’s story. She was one of seven children growing up on a farm in PEI, and there weren’t enough resources to keep all of them fed. So she and her sister traveled to San Francisco, became nurses, and, as I mentioned in the novel, she became William Randall Hearst’s private nurse on a voyage to Honolulu. I was afraid I couldn’t do her justice in a nonfiction book.
Once I began thinking of Maggie in the novel, she became her own character and it was necessary to visit the Isle of Skye, the home she loved and was forced to leave at just fifteen years old. Besides getting a feel for the beauty of the land and its people, I needed to visit some of the sites of The Clearances, as described in the novel. That was such a sad and moving experience for me and helped me to feel more deeply this loss, not just the house but the land itself that is one’s home. The following year I went to Prince Edward Island, researched my ancestors there, and discovered an old wooden fishing pier still standing that my great-great grandfather built. Besides the powerful family connections, walking on those red-sand beaches, visiting the oldest lighthouse still standing where their vessel bearing them to the “new world” landed (I referenced this in the novel), once again helped grow that deeper connection to the story so important in a novel, to give it that feeling of authenticity. With the contemporary story set in the south shore of Massachusetts and on the coast of Maine, I’ve lived in both places and know them pretty well. However, I did go to Scituate before writing the novel to make sure I’d get all the historical storms and shipwrecks correct. That took a lot of source research as well.
In this novel, you elevate myth to have as much weight as the actual events. We have the reality that consists of Gavin’s murder, his daughter, Heaven, moving in with Amelia (“Grandmelia”) and Daniel, who never leaves his room. But then we have this rich story of ancestry and tales of selkies, fairies, and magic. What revelations unfolded for you when weaving these two elements together?
That the boundaries between worlds–real and magical–are thinner than I imagined! I’ve always been drawn toward using elements of magical realism in my novels. With Vanishing Acts, Jody Johnstone surfs a giant wave, using a physics formula he invents, to become invisible. In Shark Girls, the narrator’s bratty little sister Willa survives a shark bite that amputates her leg and is rumored to have become a mythical healer, and at the end, a mermaid. 
I read so many Celtic tales for How Not to Drown, that I found my writing about them and the realist story started to merge. For Daniel, agoraphobic and alone in his room, in his head the two worlds have completely merged. He believes he was rescued from drowning by a selkie and tries to get Heaven to believe this as well, in part to help her survive the bullying she’s getting at school. Meanwhile, Heaven is indeed singing “drowning songs” from her uncle’s tales about selkies and sirens, and what she does as a result of her bullying is straight from the stories he’s told her. I had a lot of fun with Maggie, her own “rescue” in the shipwreck, and the magic that happens as a result.
I thought it would be fun and challenging to see if I could indeed weave these worlds together–the contemporary story that involves drugs, crimes, a woman’s fears of aging and her granddaughter’s challenges to survive her grief and eighth grade, with the fluid boundaries of eternal time as Maggie’s story from the 1850s merges into the 21st-century MacQueen family.
There’s an ongoing theme in the novel pertaining to drowning. Every character but Leo has some experience with being close to drowning. But there is this other, quieter tone in this novel about climate change and how most of the coastline will be underwater.
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. I would feel remiss if I didn’t write about it. My last three books, including this one, name it, refer to it, and the worlds of their stories are affected by it. The town that I placed the How Not to Drown MacQueen family in, Seahaven, is a fictional “satellite town” of Scituate, MA.
I lived in Scituate for eight years in the 1980s. When I return these days to visit friends, the beautiful beaches I used to walk on are rapidly disappearing. The increasing severity of storms due to climate change is not only wiping out the coastline there but regularly flood neighborhoods and has destroyed a number of houses. I modeled the nor’easter that becomes a hurricane in How Not to Drown, the flooding that happens in Seahaven and Scituate, on what these storms have done in the recent past.
I was absolutely paralleling human drowning in How Not to Drown, with the drowning of the coasts from sea-level rise. I’m glad you picked up on that! Sadly, we know all of this will keep getting worse if our country along with other nations doesn’t act immediately.
Many people are comparing the character of Amelia to Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. How do you feel about this comparison?
I love it! I’m a huge Elizabeth Strout fan and I’m quite fond of Olive Kitteridge as a character. The more older women characters that are created to be real people, in all their complexity and faults, instead of stereotypical “grandmas” inhabiting the backgrounds of stories, the better. Let’s hear it for smart, cranky older women characters who forge their own destinies!
I had a lot of fun with Amelia, who refuses to be “invisible,” a product of ageism in our society that is still, unfortunately, an issue. She is tough, opinionated, and at seventy she’s also beautiful. She’s uncomfortable in her sudden grandmother role but determined to make the best of it, while desperately grieving her son, Heaven’s dad. It was sort of heartbreaking for me to create the scene where she’s trying to teach an uninterested Heaven how to apply makeup. Amelia’s a former celebrity model, and that’s the world she knows. Of course, she believes she’s offering useful advice to her granddaughter, who is also grieving and has her own problems being bullied at school. What Heaven wants is that smartphone, so she can see what’s being posted about her on Snapchat, not the right shade of blush.
Are there any novels you are currently reading or forthcoming that you recommend?
I’m reading The Hole, by Hiroko Oyamada, a delightful novella about a Japanese housewife in Japan, that employs magical realism in places and becomes quite surreal. It makes an interesting statement about the limitations of women’s traditional roles. Also The Water Museum, a story collection by Luis Alberto Urrea, who is a master storyteller. His stories, their voice, and heart and sense of place, are terrific. And Another Brooklyn, by Jacqueline Woodson. It was a National Book Award Finalist, a beautifully written, poetic meditation on loss and grief as it follows four African-American girls growing up in Brooklyn in the seventies. I’m teaching all of these books in my grad workshop this semester, so I’m reading two of them for the second time and one for the third. I only assign books I think are absolutely worth multiple reads!
Jaimee Wriston Colbert is the author of seven books of fiction. Her new novel, How Not to Drown (Jaimee Wriston), is forthcoming in May 2021. Her books won the 2018 International Book Award, CNY 2017 Fiction Award, Willa Cather Fiction Prize, Zephyr Prize, IPPY Gold Medal, Ian MacMillan Fiction Award and more. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals, including New Letters, Prairie Schooner, and The Gettysburg Review. Originally from Hawaii, she lives in upstate New York, where she is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY, Binghamton University.
Anita Gill is a writer, editor, and recent Fulbright fellow in Spain. Her essays, memoir, and satire have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Prairie Schooner, The Offing, The Baltimore Sun, and elsewhere. Her writing has been listed as Notable in Best American Essays and has won The Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. She holds an MA in Literature from American University and an MFA in Writing from Pacific University. Follow her on Twitter @anitamgill.