Jessica Bryant Klagmann is the author of the new novel North of the Sunlit River. She also has written the novel This Impossible Brightness. She lives in New Mexico.
Q: What inspired you to write North of the Sunlit River, and how did you create your cast of characters?
A: This book was inspired, really, by a desire to write about living in Fairbanks, Alaska. There were a couple of reasons. The weather, the environment, the distance from the rest of the country… it was all so extreme that it felt magical.
On top of that, while I lived there, I rented a dry cabin, which meant it didn’t have running water. There was an outhouse in the backyard, and I carried 5-gallon jugs of water in for dishes. It felt unique, but for people who live there, especially my fellow MFA students, it actually wasn’t all that unusual.
I wanted to bring this place to life on the page, but beyond that, I just started writing, seeing where it would take me.
Stefan was initially based on a landlord I had, who built a bunch of these cabins. He added some interesting flairs, like a full tree trunk split to create a staircase.
Eventually, Stefan’s character started to take on qualities of my father, like his love for working with his hands and his appreciation for the environment. My father had died 10 years before I started writing this book, and though he’d always wanted to go to Alaska, he never got the chance, so I realized this could be my way of getting him there.
The more I researched Alaska’s plants and animals, the more I became fascinated with the ideas of migration and adaptability. This led me to Eila, who is studying the caribou migration patterns, and I built her character around her research and the experience I’d had losing my father.
Vern came from the adaptability piece. His character creates tension by pushing back against the idea of accepting nature’s cycles, as to him, the very meaning of adaptability is that anything we don’t like we should be able to change. He has good intentions, but continues to cause pain for those around him despite this.
Jackson is a character I always wanted to write—inspired by a story I read about a man who ran a marathon every day from one side of the country to the other. Similar to Vern, he’s a character who exists in opposition to the others—he can’t stop moving, while Eila prefers stillness.
The more I pulled at the threads of each character, the more I revealed the ways they were tied to one another. It was really a process of unraveling and then stitching back together.
Q: In our previous Q&A, you said of this novel, “It’s about resilience and adaptation and finding a sense of lightness in the way we live every day.” Can you say more about that?
A: Vern’s and Sadie’s discovery is a way to change the rules of nature. While this might be tempting, it isn’t necessarily the right thing to do. The book is about balance, about having to take the grief in life along with the joy. It’s also about learning to adapt, though not exactly in the way Vern would prefer.
For many of us, it may seem impossible that we could survive something as tragic as losing a loved one, but then it happens—we’re all faced with some kind of struggle or heartache in our lives—and somehow, we find we’re still standing.
Humans are so much more resilient than we think we are, and my personal philosophy is that when we’re going through darkness, the only way to approach it is with lightness.
The artist Rose B. Simpson, who lives here in New Mexico, spoke in a lecture about the aesthetics in the way we live our lives, the way we move through the world. That always stuck with me. I thought that my father lived with a special kind of aesthetic, and so I infused Stefan’s character with the same qualities of joy, lightness, and acceptance.
Q: As you mentioned, the novel is set in Alaska--how important is setting to you in your writing?
A: I couldn’t possibly begin writing a novel without knowing exactly where it’s taking place. Once that’s decided, the setting is developed alongside the characters and the plot.
In fact, a lot of the character and plot development arise from the setting because the natural world plays such a big role in the story’s direction. The arctic plants and the idea of migration are inextricable from this book.
Alaska is such a big place—to me, like the kind of place you can pour yourself into. It can also be a hard place to live sometimes. My time there challenged me, tested me, and left such an impression on the person I am now. I found a lot of resilience in myself there, and that became the theme of this book.
This story couldn’t happen anywhere else, and I think that’s the way it should be. At least that’s how it is in the books I love most.
Q: How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: Early on, because I wanted to make sure I got things right, I reached out to a Ph.D. candidate at Northern Arizona University, Katie Orndahl. She was doing research into the vegetation in the Arctic and the effects of climate change. She gave me some great initial resources.
Once the book was picked up by Lake Union, I contacted her again, and she was able to send photos and spreadsheets from her field work, which were super helpful. She also provided resources for more caribou-specific research that her colleagues were doing.
Even on a basic level, she gave me some really important insight into the life of a field researcher in the Arctic, like trip packing lists and daily schedules.
One thing that surprised me, and that I found so fascinating, is how much scientists can learn about the warming of the Arctic from space. One of Katie’s colleagues gave a talk at the University of Alaska Southeast about this, and it was amazing to find that they can tell how long trees have been growing in certain places from satellite images taken in winter just by measuring their shadows in these photographs.
It’s more complicated than that, but the video can be found on YouTube by searching for Watching a Warming Arctic from Space with Logan Berner, PhD.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m actually taking a short break from writing to devote more time to the other half of my professional life. My husband and I started an indie board game company, Only Then Studios, for which I illustrate and assist in game development.
Right now, we’re working on our third game, so there’s a lot to think about and many bad drawings to get through before I find my way to artwork that I’m happy with.
Of course, I’m always thinking of stories, and if I’m being honest, there are a few that I’m itching to turn into a third novel. I’ll just have to wait until I have a little more time!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Although I spent time living in Alaska, all references in this book to Alaska Native culture comes mainly from secondhand interviews and research.
I’m in awe of what I’ve learned of the Indigenous peoples of Alaska—their culture, their traditional stories, and their spiritual connection to the land and animals that is integral to their daily lives. It’s a way of life that feels, in this present moment, like one we could all use to learn something from.
In order to gain some perspective on this, and on climate change in the Arctic, I read, watched, and listened to as much as I could.
One highlight, which I’d recommend, is the podcast For the Wild, specifically the episode featuring the educator and activist Subhankar Banerjee, as well as the one with Faith Gemmill and Princess Lucaj of Alaska.
Books that helped me along included Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, Karsten Heuer’s Being Caribou, Bernd Heinrich’s The Homing Instinct, Velma Wallis’s Two Old Women, and Seth Kantner’s A Thousand Trails Home.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Jessica Bryant Klagmann.
No comments:
Post a Comment