With Christina McLaurine
Photo credit: Benjamin Gardere
The Island of Forgetting spans over many decades. When it comes to character development, did this broad time period make it harder or easier to move your characters through events and show the impact and change that time had upon them? Is there a time or place in the book that you wished you had expanded upon?
I always knew I wanted the book to span several decades because I wanted to show the way the decisions made during each character’s youth rippled outwards, affecting the subsequent generation. In many ways, though the characters are related to each other, they are strangers, each never fully revealing themselves to the others. In a sense the reader actually knows these characters better than they know each other, and themselves. This was intentional on my part, because I was interested in exploring time, memory and secrets and how they impact a family dynamic. But it was hard to leave each character behind at the end of their sections. I could probably write a novel for each one and still have more to say.
Mental health and various forms of mental unwellness are present in The Island of Forgetting. What inspired you to include them in this novel and how did it shape the way you chose to tell this story?
Mental health is something that isn’t frequently discussed in Bajan families. Within my own family, there is alcoholism, depression, anxiety, but we tend to speak of these things euphemistically, which is common for the culture. My grandmother had a brother who used to “wander”, much the same way that Iapetus does in the novel, but he was always referred to as “the mad one”, his mental illness dismissed or made light of. Only in adulthood, through conversations with my parents, have I learned of violence they experienced in childhood that impacted their own parenting, and by extension my life. I became fascinated by the idea that so much of my life, the things I understood about myself, were shaped by events that happened before I was born. These unspoken intergenerational traumas, many of which are tied to untreated mental illness and addiction, inspired the novel.
The characters within The Island of Forgetting feature many different struggles/challenges and you’ve fed them so seamlessly into one another, in a way layering them? This must have been very challenging. How did you keep yourself organized?
I wrote the novel in two major stages. The first draft I wrote chronologically, beginning with Atlas and ending with Nautilus. Once I had those sections more or less drafted I began the work of weaving them together, building connections and creating that layering. It was a long and tedious process involving a lot of rewriting. I probably have a whole second novel in deleted scenes!
Your story re-envisions aspects of Greek mythology. Was there a story or aspect of Greek Mythology that drew you to want to write The Island of Forgetting for a modern day audience?
I stumbled across Calypso’s story while diving down a late-night, insomnia-fuelled Wikipedia rabbit hole. I was actually checking to see if there was an etymological connection between “calypso”—as in the Caribbean folkloric music—and the Greek myth (there isn’t). But once I started reading The Odyssey I was struck by this image of Calypso as a Caribbean woman, falling hard for this foreign man who was just passing through. The depiction of Calypso, as this wanton woman, a seductress, mirrors the way Caribbean women are fetishized and sexualized in the media. Funnily enough, in the 1997 TV adaptation of The Odyssey, all of the characters are white, except for Calypso who is played by a black woman. I wanted to turn this cliché on its head. To dig into this idea of “the temptress” and tell it from Calypso’s point of view.
Did you know where you wanted the narrative to go and how you wanted it to end when you first began writing or did it reveal itself to you as you wrote?
A bit of both. I actually changed the ending of the novel very late in the editing process. I knew how I wanted the reader to feel at the end of the novel, I had an idea of the message I was trying to get across, but it took me a few tries to figure out the “how” of it. But I didn’t do much planning or plotting ahead of time. It was a trial and error process (hence all of those deleted scenes!)
Can you describe your writing process? Do you outline each chapter? Are you a 5 am writer? Do you have any writing habits?
My writing process is incredibly chaotic. I do not outline but if I have a sense of what needs to happen next in a given scene I will write a few bullet point notes for myself at the top of the page so that I can keep track. I write mostly in bed, propped up on too many pillows and wreaking havoc on my spinal health. I do like to write in the mornings, but I require a good chunk of procrastination time before I can actually get into a flow. I work in bursts, sometimes churning out thousands of words day after day and then going several days where I write nothing at all and lie around feeling sorry for myself. When I look back on it I’m surprised that I somehow managed to finish this novel at all, the entire time I was always on the verge of quitting, convinced it would never be done. I wish I had a better system! But I think I’m doomed to always be a “muddle through” kind of writer.
What is your “must-read” book recommendation and what book has had the most impact and influence on your writing?
I don’t have a “must-read” recommendation, but I would encourage readers to explore other works by Caribbean writers. It is such a diverse and endlessly fascinating region and there are phenomenal contemporary works being released all of the time. I recommend How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones and What Storm What Thunder by Myriam Chancy.
As for books that have influenced me, there are several but the one that comes to mind first is Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. I love stories where the mad woman in the attic is allowed to come downstairs and bare her soul.
What advice would you give to aspiring authors who are trying to navigate the publishing world?
Learn how to sell your own writing. Learn the skill of a good pitch. Knowing how to summarize your own work and make it sound compelling is something they ought to teach in MFAs, its importance cannot be overstated.
Do you have another novel in the works? When can readers expect to get their hands on it?
I do! I’m working on another novel set in Barbados, a work of historical fiction that takes place in the late 1960s during the independence era, when Barbados broke away from British colonial rule. It includes murdered prime ministers and mysterious starlets and lots of women behaving badly.