By Jael Montellano
Somehow, though the details are noise in my head, I tripped into lunch with Bonnie Jo Campbell at the Hilton in 2012. We sat facing East Balbo on a frozen March day and ordered shareable plates, and to my delight, Bonnie wrapped up the leftover bread to take home to her chickens in napkins perfectly embossed with the letter ‘H.’ I should be clear, it wasn’t just us—there was another student and the writers Nami Mun and Patricia Ann McNair—before readers here think I absconded with Bonnie. Bonnie, Nami, and Patti contributed to a panel on female characters in contemporary fiction and I took notes on their wise words, wrote down things in my journal like, “I love John Steinbeck, but he can’t write a female character for the life of him,” “I’m a really good rewriter,” and “When a draft is done, I think, Now, now I can get started.”
All three of those quotes come from Bonnie, a sign that I recognized her as some kind of sage. But it would take a decade of living and growing and writing for any of Bonnie’s lessons to take—I am not so good I could spin gold overnight.
The Rumpelstiltskin reference is pertinent to the subject matter at hand. Bonnie’s latest and very-anticipated novel, The Waters (W.W. Norton), has just been released, a tale about the Great Massassauga Swamp, the women who live on it, and the Michigan town that lingers in its orbit, and we caught up to converse about writing fairy tales, creating characters that are embodiments of their landscape, myth, collective dreaming, and more.
You mentioned in your Substack The Waters is a fairy tale. Did you set out with the idea to write a fairy tale or did the characters fog into the swampland first, and later the fairy tale form became the conduit? Why was the fairy tale the form of choice for the magic of the Zook women versus your traditional realism?
The fairy tale elements of my stories always arise way down the road of writing—they arise out of many revisions. It’s funny that the fairy tale structure appears simple, but it really isn’t. Fairy tales aren’t the simple sketches they appear to be. They are more like grooves worn into limestone after a long time of a river or stream flowing across a surface. Or maybe I should say a fairy tale is a river valley carved deep into a landscape without the aid of heavy earth-moving equipment. A fairy tale that has lasted thousands of years is an entirely natural (but hard-wrought) phenomenon. My initial conception for this book had no fairy tale elements, but they rose naturally out of my paying close attention to the characters’ ways of living and their fears and needs.
I don’t start with any form at all. This novel was begun because of my interest in a young woman who loved mathematics. Then I stepped back in time six years and made her a more vulnerable girl and gave her the family she needed to become who she would be. And then I fashioned the difficult situation that would best make her who she was. And then all the rest.
This fairy-tale-ization process happened many moons ago with my short story “The Trespasser.” I wrote what I thought was a gritty realistic take on a meth-addled young woman breaking into and entering a family’s weekend cottage. And when I was done, I shared it with a writer friend, Alicia Conroy, and she said, “Look, you just rewrote ‘Goldilocks’.” Since then, I have tried to be more aware of when this happens. Also, in the last decade, I’ve become an aficionado of Carl Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, a Jungian who focused on the meanings of fairy tales. So whenever I can find one of these fairy-tale patterns arising naturally out of my work, I know I’m in luck.
Lucky in the sense that my story is now in conversation with another older story. And I can study the older stories for their wisdom and their archetypes and tropes and play with those. So in The Waters, I have an old witch in a cottage on an island and she has three daughters, the youngest of which is the most foolish and beautiful, and therefore she must save them all. In Once Upon a River there are fairy tale tropes as well—even the title is one—but they are subtler. That story is in conversation with Huck Finn and the Odyssey, not exactly fairy tales but something like them.
I can’t imagine writing a story where I intentionally lay down a fairy tale form and follow it—that wouldn’t feel honest. But I do think that the gritty realism and fairy tale elements are perfectly married in writing. Literature is not fairy tales—they aren’t three dimensional or diverse or especially insightful on contemporary issues, and that is what we want in books and movies, something that resonates with our lives today. But at their essence, they honor basic human archetypes and truths, and if what you are doing with your realism also matches up to what a fairy tale can do, then that is time to ring the bells!
The women of the island also do read fairy tales, and they are especially a favorite of Hermine. Andrew Lang’s The Blue Book of Fairy Tales plays a role in The Waters, in particular the story “The Bronze Ring,” in which an old sultan is ill and the only way to cure him is to cut him up into pieces and boil his bones along with the ashes of three dogs of different colors. I sort of think that’s what I do when I write; that is exactly what I do to the most important characters in my story. I tear them apart and heat treat them, stew them in their own mortality and then resurrect them.
I love that people say The Waters is filled with magic, because (if that’s true) then it’s a magic that rises out of character and landscape. My kind of magic might be more like the placebo effect, a kind of “cure” that I happen to believe in, a soul cure. In fact, I believe the placebo effect is probably stronger than the strongest medicine or close to it, so I’m happy to expand that beyond medicine. And if it seems magical that people must endure trials to become who they are, if it is magical that people can communicate with animals, then bring on the magic.
The novel is told omnisciently, but a large portion of the narrative follows eleven-year-old Dorothy, Rose Thorn’s daughter, Hermine’s granddaughter, better known as Donkey after the jenny’s milk that saves her life. Donkey is tall, loves mathematics, is a little bit rebellious, is empathetic to animals, including the famed m’sauga rattlesnake…pardon, I seem to be describing you. How much of Donkey is young eleven-year-old Bonnie? What parts of yourself did you seek to revisit in the course of writing this novel?
I wish I were Donkey, as sure of myself and what I want as Donkey is in the book. As a kid, I was kind of a blob, absorbing and watching, changing according to who I was with in order to be loved and accepted. As a kid I learned to shapeshift to fit into any situation, which is a great skill for getting along, but not one for figuring out who I was. (Who I was inherently seemed pretty unimportant when my attention was focused on getting along.) I am Donkey because I am all of my characters, but as a child, I did not aspire to mathematics or logic; my curiosity was more about why and how people did what they did. I liked making Donkey tall because tall girls get into trouble—they seem older than they are—and I thought that was good for her to have that challenge, and it also adds another masculine element to her character.
I took up mathematics fairly late in my life, after graduating college. I was like Donkey, though, in that I was searching for meaning in concrete, countable, measurable aspects of things. I studied philosophy in college, thinking I might want to be a lawyer, but then never followed up with that. I have long been seeking some kind of order, and mathematics promises order in a way few disciplines do. So Donkey is more part of my adult self.
I’m also the slutty drunk character who isn’t certain she wants to be a mother (though I have been happily monogamous for 38 years). I’m also a wise and angry old woman—I always have been—though people around me probably don’t see me that way. In my personal life it has always seemed wise to keep my wisdom to myself, unless somebody asks for my advice. Having a critical mother has kept me humble, and being wise actually feels dangerous, and I probably could not have pulled off the omniscient narration if my mother was still alive to take me to task.
In her essay “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale,” the scholar Kate Bernheimer writes about four formal components of fairy tales, one of which is flatness, something that in the hallowed halls of MFA classrooms across the nation is blasphemy to do. Bernheimer refers to a kind of silhouette in which characters “are not given many emotions–perhaps one.” While the naturalist Hermine Zook isn’t entirely flat, she does represent a fairy tale character type, and we do largely see Hermine, known as Herself, in only one predominant emotional state throughout the novel: fury. She banishes her husband from her presence, she refers to the town of Whiteheart as Nowhere, she prevents and teaches Donkey to prevent the men of Whiteheart from setting foot on M’sauga Island. But flatness, Bernheimer brilliantly posits, “allows depth of response in the reader.” What ‘depth of response’ do you think Bernheimer suggests here and how does it apply to Hermine Zook?
This is the dance, isn’t it, of writing fiction like this: how to balance the flatness of fairy tales (in which we get strong impressions) against the full-blown characterization demanded in contemporary fiction (where we get subtlety). I hope I have presented Hermine as both in turns. You are allowed to see her both ways, as an inherently furious character whose essence is anger, or as somebody whose life has dealt with circumstances to which she has reacted. To the town she is a Baba Yaga character, fierce, dangerous, powerful, and eternal, and indeed her anger is something that all the characters around her must navigate.
The people from Whiteheart don’t even want to see anything else in her—they don’t want to see her as a mere mortal. And through feeling and knowing their response, the reader can have that as part of the package. The townspeople don’t want to see that she was abandoned at birth, is a wife who feels like a fool for having been cuckolded by her husband in a terrible way; they don’t want to see that Hermine is so in love with her granddaughter that she is almost crippled by that love.
The town’s focus is often on the fact that she has provided abortifacients, but those close to her (and the reader) know she loves babies so much that it almost overwhelms her—every day of her life, when she searches for a foundling, longs for a new baby to hold close and raise. The flatness is achieved by accentuating both her power and her lack of verbal communication (and her nickname), and this is how we get present archetypal characters: witches, heroes, innocent maidens, etc. However, we can also see Hermine’s anger as part of the package of her whole complicated self.
M’sauga Island is a kind of eternal garden paradise and Herself its godlike overlord. Donkey and her mother see it as such at first, and then as Donkey has more exposure to the outside world, she changes and asks why they can’t have more clean, modern, unbroken things. Paradise is lost. How is Donkey different after her encounter with the rattlesnake?
Donkey changes (as kids do) with her every exposure to the wider outside world. Herself would have liked to keep Donkey’s sites on nothing beyond the island, but by her aunts’ influence, she is exposed to science and math, which is both an accompaniment to her granny’s work and a profound departure. She considers herself a “mathematical” healer at one point, using logical principles of healing, which is slightly different from her Aunt Molly’s way of healing, which is scientific (i.e., mathematicians work from first principles, while the scientific method involves lots of testing and trial and error). Donkey is further changed by spending time at the hospital, running around with boys, and by her desire to know boys and men, who are all the more intriguing because of being forbidden. Hermine has withdrawn from the island after her experiences with the devils of Nowhere, but Donkey must have her own experiences and make her own choices. And even on the island, Donkey chooses to engage with the forbidden thing. Of course. Bluebeard forbids only one thing of his new wife—do not open that door—and so she must open the door. Eve must eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Without that, we wouldn’t be humans, without that we would have no story. So of course, Donkey must take a special interest in the rattlesnake.
In your novel, you attribute the men of Whiteheart’s displacement and mis-attunement to the industrial changes that take place within the region which move them from agricultural farming to the polluting paper mill. They cease to be connected to the land and therefore they cease to be connected to each other. They are mystified as to where the Zook women’s power comes from and mistrust them, violating them in numerous ways because they are not compliant like their own mothers or sisters or wives. Rose Thorn says of M’sauga Island, here women do what they want. Why do the men of Whiteheart fear the Zook women so much? (I realize I’m no longer exclusively talking about the men of Whiteheart here, haha.) How are the Zook women’s bodies, and by extension their groundedness to place (Hermine’s daughters are named after flowers as though they too come from the wild earth), the source of their power?
You are answering all these questions as well as I can just by asking them! These issues are worthy of lots of exploration in The Waters and the real world. I don’t know how it works that I create characters that are human embodiments of the landscape, but that is what I often end up doing. Margo, in Once Upon a River, is the human embodiment of a Michigan River—show her trouble and she’ll flow around it and wear it away. In my novel Q Road, my character Rachel feels so connected to the land of her ancestors that she marries the man who owns the biggest piece of it and finds a way to love him. The swamp is in the blood and bones of these characters, and if they’re forced to leave it, they’ll die, at least in a metaphorical sense.
I’ve been reading Sharon Blackie, a British mythologist, and she feels that we are intimately connected to the landscapes of our ancestors as well, so the more generations a family spends in a place, the more connected they are. She claims “All myth is local,” and furthermore, myth rises out of a landscape. She also feels it is dangerous to try to universalize any myth, but of course that is what writers are trying to do. We are trying to create new myths and universalize them! Good luck, I say to all of us writers! Good luck with that!
The women’s groundedness is a profound part of the story. They know where they feel at home and (to some extent) belong. They go barefoot on the island so they are literally grounded, and they know the land and the water as they know the breaths they take and are often on the verge of falling to their knees in reverence; this is as opposed to the men who see the swamp as a hunting and fishing ground. The women have their hands in the dirt and on the animals, and they eat the things that grow locally. In every way imaginable, they are of the place they are from.
With a few exceptions, the men in The Waters do not have this profound connection to their own land and lives. They feel displaced and confused and often they take psychological refuge in the only things they know for sure: their masculinity, their ability and determination to work hard, their church, and their ownership of things (and people, sort of). They are angry with the women for reasons they don’t understand, partly because they are confused and jealous—they know they need something the women have. They also are insulted that the women seem to be fine without them. There is plenty of hope for these men, who are good guys and want to do well and good for their families and communities. I love the men in this story.
There is a strong religious anti-abortion/pro-life contingent in the townspeople of Whiteheart that colors the spectrum through which the Zook women are seen. The emasculated men of Whiteheart project their personal grievances onto Herself and her abortifacients and nurse their particular hate in ways that spiral. In fairy tales, often characters who violate the rules of society do so out of a form of survival. What are the women of Whiteheart surviving? The Zook women?
The people of Whiteheart are heavily influenced by a kind of fundamentalist church. I suggest that generations past attended a Pentecostal-type church, so that the people have a bit of history with an ecstatic religious experience, though the church has changed to be more of a rule-establishing church that tells people how to behave, how to vote, how to judge others. And we readers know that’s where the trouble lies! If you find yourself a self-righteous religious man, you just have to wait a while if you want to see him topple himself. It’s part of the package. This truth should keep us all humble!
The people of Whiteheart don’t feel good inside, and they are searching for an enemy in the outside world to explain why; we readers of fiction know better, we know that the solution (if there is one) and understanding of most of our problems lies within the person, not without. Unfortunately, many millions of human beings have paid the price for righteous men’s need to project evil onto an external source, and the women of M’sauga Island are paying the price in the book.
The topic of normalizing the feminization of men is dear to me; it is my opinion the feminine will always be seen as other until cisgender heteronormative men recognize and uplift the feminine within themselves. Your novel presents a rural locality that can stand in for other rural localities that sees only binaries of gender and perpetrate judgment because of their narrowness of vision. Hermine banishes her husband Wild Will and curses him to live as a woman, and you write that he becomes a better man through “becoming a woman,” which I should note here is not a gender change, but a kind of softening into vulnerability. Additionally, six men of Whiteheart are redeemed through a communal act for Rose Thorn that also requires them to be vulnerable. How are the Whiteheart men made better through femininity?
Thank you for that phrasing, “normalizing the feminization of men.” That’s what Carl Jung was up to, when he was at his best—he didn’t quite make it there, but he was on the road. Indeed, men need to “uplift the feminine in themselves,” but a good start at that is to appreciate it wholeheartedly in others around them. (The Jungians say that the projection of positive qualities onto others can be a great first step to recognizing them in ourselves.) But I think we all know so many men who hate the women in themselves and so must make those real-life women suffer. I would make the case that this uplifting of the feminine often does happen naturally to men as they grow older, but I sure wish it could happen earlier before so much damage is wrought.
The men of Whiteheart want to help the women of the island—they are desperate to help. They want to feel useful. And many of them also do want to seek help, and seeking help from women is also a way of acknowledging the value of these women.
You mention Hermine’s curses, of which there were two. Of course I was playing around with the story of Tiresias. Two of the curses put on Tiresias were to go blind (by Athena, after he saw her naked) and to become a woman (by Hera after he bothered some snakes mating). Again, I love playing with the old stories!
I had the chance in the past year to listen to the great fabulists Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, and Carmen Maria Machado speak about fairy tales and the climate crisis, and I can’t help but think how The Waters clicks like the perfect jigsaw piece into that conversation as though we’re all part of the collective dreaming Herself and Donkey experience, except we’re instead really wide awake and paying attention. I’d like to ask you to meditate on one of the points raised to the panel about unhappy endings. In The Waters, Donkey’s disappointment mirrors Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Sea Maid’s disappointment. What lessons can we learn from Donkey about sacrifice to move us forward? What is the alternative offer of The Waters’ fairy tale ending?
Part of the collective dream! That’s beautiful. My favorite comment about The Waters so far is Diane Seuss saying it is “… the dream we’d have if we could sleep.” I like your idea that a lot of us are dreaming a bigger, more inclusive dream that can save the world, a dream that when dreamed by enough of us might save the world.
Yeah, the non-Disney ending of The Little Mermaid is a handful. I am in the camp of feeling the Christian salvation element seems superfluous. Ariel dissolving into the ocean and becoming sea foam seems just right to me. When a person or a character has an impossible choice to make, all she can do is hope for a third choice to arise or a new symbol that can make a new kind of sense of the choices. The Jungians call this the “transcendent function,” and that happens in the book.
I don’t think of my ending as either happy or unhappy—it’s the necessary ending that grounds the story solidly in the (gritty) real world. I had some crazy idea when I was first writing that the women would “win” over the men. I wanted the women to keep the men off the island, thinking that women deserved to have some place to themselves that could not be invaded. Now I think that is naïve; after all, men and women are together in this project of life.
What lessons can we learn from Donkey: Well, I guess, Donkey follows her bliss to some degree, as kids should do, but she also has some hard lessons that she has to learn. For example, you have the family you have—you can wish for the father you want, but you get what you get. If you think you want a man to solve your problems, you had better get in touch with the man in yourself in the meantime. Also, sometimes kids have to take on the weight of the world—I think we all know kids for whom that is true, and it is certainly true in young-adult literature. Donkey does have a realization that she might be the one with the clearest vision in the whole family, which makes her the only one who can keep the family together.
It is also true that Rose Thorn saves the community just by being a touchstone for the other characters and loving them exactly as they are. She’s friendly and naturally social, though socializing wears her out. Molly saves lives every day. Maybe Titus is going to save the world, too, just by being honest with himself and not giving up on or denying his love for Rose Thorn. They all taught me a lot, these characters.
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the novels Once Upon a River, a National Bestseller which was adapted into a full-length feature film released to international claim in 2020, and Q Road. Her critically-acclaimed short fiction collections include American Salvage, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Women and Other Animals, which won the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction; and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. She was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow whose other honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Eudora Welty Prize, and the Mark Twain Award. She lives outside Kalamazoo with her husband and two donkeys. http://www.bonniejocampbell.net
Jael Montellano (she/they) is a Mexican-born writer, poet, and editor. Her work exploring otherness features in ANMLY Lit, Tint Journal, Beyond Queer Words, Fauxmoir, The Selkie, the Columbia Journal, and more. She practices a variety of visual arts and is currently learning Mandarin. Find her at jaelmontellano.com, at X @gathcreator, and at BlueSky @gathcreator.