Q&A with Ellen Meeropol

  

Photo by Jill Meyers

 

 

Ellen Meeropol is the author of the new novel Sometimes an Island. Her other books include Kinship of Clover. She lives in Western Massachusetts. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Sometimes an Island?

 

A: There were two major inspirations: my ongoing fascination with a small island in Penobscot Bay and my loyalty to characters from my past novels and stories.

 

The island, Vinalhaven, is one of Maine’s Fox Islands and was the place where I started writing fiction 25 years ago. I’ve transformed the real place into the Three Sister’s Island of my imagination, but much of the geography and history is based on fact.

 

Writing fiction, for me, is a simmering stew of memory, research, and imagination. I love the island so much that I’ve imagined a history there for my ancestors who fled their shtetls in the Pale of Settlement (the areas in Russia where Jews were allowed to live) and this place, this combination of reality and fiction, is the setting for parts of many of my novels and stories.

 

My other major inspiration is the characters who’ve accompanied me on this 25-year journey of writing fiction. They are part of my family. I think of this book as a literary family reunion, gathering characters from my previous five novels and couple of dozen short stories.

 

It brings them together in the near future, to continue many of the themes of their fictional lives as their world, and ours, becomes increasingly turbulent and unjust. 

 

Q: The book’s subtitle calls it a “mosaic novel.” How would you describe that, and what was your writing process like?

 

A: I didn’t plan to write another book. After my last novel was published in 2022, I decided to focus on short stories, which can be published in literary magazines. I turn 80 the month after this book is published and am not interested in a book tour. So, I gathered never-completed drafts and wrote new ones, aiming to publish short stories.

 

I soon noticed that many of the stories shared three settings: an immigrant neighborhood on the island in Penobscot Bay, an off-the-grid, activist, cooperative community in western Massachusetts, and a homestead in rural central Maine, where some of the characters gathered to escape climate change and other threats. Three intentional communities.

 

The stories shared themes as well: political activism, multi-generational conflict, the challenge of passing one’s beliefs to younger generations, and migrants fleeing various kinds of danger in pursuit of safety.

 

It became clear that the stories wanted to play together and the characters kept jumping from story to story, insisting on a through narrative. Okay, I agreed, it can be a novel-in-stories.

 

When my publisher suggested the term mosaic novel, I had to look it up. Turns out mosaic novel is a more elegant name for a novel-in-stories, and is a perfect description for Sometimes an Island.

 

Q: Why did you choose to focus on climate issues in the book?

 

A: Along with nuclear war, I believe that the climate crisis is the major threat to human life today and is profoundly connected with issues of injustice around the world.

 

Writing fiction about climate change is as challenging as it is imperative. One must balance the science with the storytelling and balance despair with hope. Writing this novel gave me an opportunity to dramatize those challenges, and to continue the stories of the characters in my 2017 climate fiction novel, Kinship of Clover.

 

I believe that writing is activism and writing about the threats we face as a planet is one way we can reach out and perhaps inspire readers to take action to reverse or mitigate the impending harm.

 

Q: The writer Randy Susan Meyers said of the book, “Sometimes an Island celebrates the fierce, fragile resilience of the human spirit when everything familiar threatens to wash away.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I love Meyers’ description. Above all, this is a novel about people (okay, characters, but they’re people to me) who face the challenges we may all face very soon.

 

What if many aspects of “civilization” on which we rely for our daily life were to disappear: No internet. No electricity. No email or texting or postal delivery. No grocery stores. How would we live?

 

That’s the situation in which my beloved characters come to find themselves. Many of these characters are old women, with decades of lived experience and problem-solving skills. Can they survive? How do they organize their lives?

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I rarely start a big project in the months just before and after a book is published, so I’m working on some flash pieces, some poems, and bunch of essays growing from the issues brought up by this book.

 

For example, I’ve become very interested in how the structure of novels might change in periods of intense political turmoil. Is it a coincidence that mosaic and constellation novels such as A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu have become popular?

 

Or, is it like Paul Klee wrote in 1915, during the first World War, that the “more horrifying the world is, the more art becomes abstract” and fiction about our turbulent world invites nontraditional and non-linear novel structure. Stay tuned!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: On the balancing seesaws between science and storytelling, between despair and hope, I have tried, in this book, to lean more heavily on storytelling and hope.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Ellen Meeropol.