Nancy Schoellkopf is the author of the new novel Catherine Over Water. Her other books include Yellow-Billed Magpie. Also an educator, she is based in Sacramento.
Q: What inspired you to write Catherine Over Water?
A: Catherine Over Water is the story of a woman named Catherine who feels trapped in a kind of limbo ever since the disappearance of her daughter Sierra. She’s afraid to grieve because she thinks that would mean giving up. She wants to be strong but she comes across as angry and intolerant.
Then she meets a chatty young crow she dubs Veronica.
This story was inspired by two ideas that became linked in my mind.
The first came from my work as a special education teacher with children who have severe disabilities. I was reading a book about sensory integration disorders, which may affect anyone, but most often affects people who are on the autism spectrum.
One of these issues is called face blindness, an inability to recognize even familiar people. I realized that happens to me sometimes, that I myself apparently have a mild case of face blindness.
Around the same time, I heard a podcast about a group of ornithologists who captured and banded several crows on their university campus. Soon these hapless scientists were being attacked by crows—and not just the birds they’d banded.
It appeared the crows not only remembered which humans had captured them, but they spread the word. The scientists felt compelled to don masks! Then they changed the focus of their study to facial recognition itself. It soon became obvious that crows excel in this area.
I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to have a seeing-eye crow as a support animal? A crow who might perch on my shoulder and whisper the names of people I didn’t recognize? Of course, such a crow would have to be able to speak, so I knew my story would enter into the realm of magical realism.
But a woman with a support crow is a situation, not a story. I wondered for a long time what the two of them would do together. Finally the idea of a lost child came to me, and I started writing.
Q: Can you say more about how you created your characters Catherine, Veronica, and Mari, and why you chose a crow as one of your protagonists?
A: Among writers there’s a question I learned not too long ago: are you a plotter or a pantser? In other words, do you meticulously create your characters and plan out your plot before you begin writing OR do you write by the seat of your pants? Me—I’m more or less a pantser—I start with a vague idea and a prompt or two, and then I start to scribble.
I wouldn’t say that I “create” characters, not really. I invite them into my story when I need someone to talk to my protagonist. I write and write, and if I’m patient, my characters will tell me about themselves.
I knew my protagonist had a missing daughter, and I knew she had face blindness, but I didn’t know who she would be. I knew my other main character would be a crow, but I didn’t realize at first that she was going to be so young, so naïve, and yet also so very wise. This all evolved as I followed the two of them around.
Mari was the big surprise. I wrote her initially as a way to bring Veronica into Catherine’s sphere in a dramatic way. I thought she might fade away into the streets of midtown, but Veronica loved her and wanted her two human friends to come together. Soon Mari seemed to be driving the plot, and Catherine and I allowed this.
I love allowing stories to evolve naturally. I see it as an outgrowth of writing as a spiritual practice. I feel a lot of joy that my intuitive process and my magical content are becoming aligned in this way.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: In my fictional crow community, the story is told that birds have a near-mystical relationship with air streams. No one may see the air, and yet it holds birds aloft; it allows them to fly.
As Veronica’s mother explains to Catherine, when a crow is flying over water, when she may no longer see the land she left, and the land where she is heading is not yet in sight, it may be a very scary time. But it is also a precious time, because this is when a bird will learn to trust in “The Stream” more than ever before.
Since the disappearance of her daughter Sierra, Catherine feels she’s been stuck in an unbearable state of limbo. Veronica and her mother help Catherine reframe her experience as a liminal time, when she learns to trust herself, and allows herself to be guided.
Q: The author June Gilliam called the novel “a down-to earth fable for our time.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love this description because I could see that my dear friend June had discerned the mythic themes that evolved as I was writing.
I didn’t set out to write a story about climate change or the plight of unhoused people. I began telling a very personal story of one woman who had lost her daughter. But as Catherine led me on this journey, she met other women who had concerns for their own daughters.
This led me to a larger issue of the loss of nurturing feminine energy. It’s always been women who have sought to create flourishing homes for their families and communities, not simply nice houses, but healthy environments to raise children, places with clean air, water, and food.
To lose the feminine perspective is to lose our joy—just as Demeter’s creative energy is diminished when Hades takes Persephone underground.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m focusing on flash fiction right now—along with a lot of promotional material for Catherine Over Water.
But I’m also in an exploratory phase, playing with the idea of a brewing rebellion in a dystopian society. Unbeknownst to the larger culture is that the rebellion is being led by a group of shape shifters, working in concert with creatures from the natural world.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I am very grateful to Brooke Warner of She Writes Press, and to project manager Addison Gallegos; as well as the team at Book Sparks: Crystal Patriarche, Rylee Warner, Leilani Fitzpatrick, and Maggie Ruf.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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