(Ig publishing, 2018)

INTERVIEW BY JO VARNISH

—

Jo Varnish: Your new novel, Unfurled, has just been released. Briefly, what is the book about?

Michelle Bailat-Jones: It’s a book about a family from Seattle with a secret in their past. In terms of the plot, it’s the story of a young woman named Ella who discovers that the story she’s believed about her life for twenty years wasn’t the right story at all. And maybe she won’t be allowed to know the whole story, or the true story, if such a thing actually exists. It’s about Ella losing her father, the man who raised her on his own, a man she fiercely loved and admired, and about having to go looking for her mother, the woman who abandoned her. It’s also a story about the Pacific Northwest, and the ocean, and fathers and daughters and absent mothers, and imagination and delusion.

JV: Tell us about the themes that Unfurled explores.

MBJ: The theme of Unfurled is how childhood trauma manifests in one’s adult life, as well as the stories we tell ourselves about our own history and the sense-making work we engage in to function despite that trauma. It is also a mother-daughter book in many ways, despite the apparent focus on father-daughter. And finally, anger is a very big theme in the novel.

JV: What was your inspiration for the book?

MBJ: I wrote a short story almost twenty years ago about a young woman who loses her father and uncovers a secret while going through his papers. It was set in a gritty, working class neighborhood of the Pacific Northwest, and although that character was much much younger than the Ella of Unfurled, it was the seed of the novel. And then some years ago, I read an article about the ferry system in Seattle, in particular the ferry pilots, and I became interested in that world. At the same time, my fiction is often interested in issues of absence and presence – physical but also metaphorical – and especially how grieving is negotiated within different personalities and family structures. The book grew and morphed over many many years into what it is today, but it grew out of those questions.

JV: You wrote Unfurled over an extended period of time. What kept drawing you back to the project? What research was necessary to make the book ‘real’?

MBJ: Unfurled is a novel that has taken me almost eighteen years to complete. So in that sense it is difficult to write about how I wrote the book; it would make more sense to talk about how I re-wrote it. Throughout all of these revisions and transformations—all of my attempts to tell the story that was ultimately asking to be told—I changed the lens a lot, sometimes focusing more on John, Ella’s father, or more on Maggie, Ella’s mother. I wrote an entire draft in Maggie’s POV, I wrote several in Ella’s POV but from different points of entry into her story.

Probably the most interesting research I was able to do for the novel involved looking at nautical charts of the Puget Sound. I could literally spend hours going over these charts, learning the names of the passages between the islands and the coves and points that dot the coastlines. These are unusual maps that you need nautical background to understand, so they were very exotic to me, and I found them quite beautiful.

I also took a lot of interest in social services, trying to understand how an individual could vanish for many years at a time. I learned that it is shockingly easy in America for a person to disappear – and this both saddened and intrigued me, and I wanted to explore that idea on the people left behind, what would that lack of control feel like? How does a person negotiate that kind of intangible loss?

JV: How does the setting of the Pacific Northwest influence Unfurled’s characters and the action?

MBJ: I am a very big fan of fiction that uses setting as an integral part of the characters. I dislike the idea of setting as a character on its own, it’s not that, but just that setting is big, setting has an emotional pull on my characters. This is probably just my own personal feelings on landscape, and most likely comes out of growing up in the Pacific Northwest, with all its looming beauty. But also, the idea that John, the stalwart ferry boat captain, was the kind of person who managed to create a “safe passage” for Maggie or for Ella, through the difficult waters of their lives was key to me, and I tried to mirror this in his work as a ferry pilot and the way the landscape has worked its way deeply into Ella’s sense of self. The ferries in the Pacific Northwest are big hulking workhorses, and I like how they navigate the deeps of the Pacific Ocean.

JV: Unfurled is told from the perspective of a single character, Ella, but who tries to grant herself imaginative access to a story that she could not have really known—of her parent’s relationship. What is the effect of this access and how is it meant to inform the reader’s understanding of the story?

MBJ: It makes sense to me that children might create a narrative of their parents’ lives and that at some poit that narrative proves to be false. So when John’s death involves learning that her own memories were false ones, I wanted to show how she went about confronting and investigating those memories. What did she believe to be true about her parent’s relationship and how did it influence her own development into an adult? What did it feel like to have to go back over those memories and try to find a line of reality or something really concrete to hold onto? I also think she deserved the chance to re-imagine those memories at some point, something she finally does toward the end of the book.

JV: The book is clearly influenced by nautical imagery and scene-settings. Does that reflect a personal interest of yours?

MBJ: I’m so lucky in that I grew up spending my summers camping in Oregon and Washington, and learning to fish in rivers and lakes with my own family. I love fishing, I always have. Nature is really important to me, and I think this is really clear in all of my fiction. It was a delight to focus on this in Unfurled. But I have never fished in the ocean – and I always wanted to. As a child in Seattle, we had friends who were into boats and took my family out onto the ocean, even once on a three-week trip up into the Gulf of Alaska, and I loved this so much but my first-hand knowledge is quite limited. The language of sailing is magical, and the science of navigation has always interested me. I really enjoyed researching this aspect of the novel.

JV: At the center of Unfurled is a mother with a mental illness.  What drew you to exploring the effects of her illness on her daughter and husband?

MBJ: I have always been interested in how people make sense of their histories, their childhoods. All families, at least to me, are based on variations and versions of stories that are told by different family members. The truth is always situated somewhere near those stories, but no one story can contain the actual truth – if that even exists. In a family touched by mental illness, and one like Maggie’s which involves fantastic and even delusional storytelling, truth becomes even slipperier and I wanted to explore that. But not just from Maggie’s perspective, also from Ella’s and John’s.

JV: There are secrets at the heart of Unfurled.  Tell us about the function of secrets in the novel, as well as in family life.

MBJ: I think it’s very natural for parents to keep certain secrets from their children. It’s a necessary part of parenting, for safety reasons, for privacy reasons, but when it becomes extreme, as in the novel with John keeping Maggie’s “story” from Ella, it creates a real disconnect. I like to think that this disconnect existed even while John was still alive. This is something that Ella must recognize at some point, that she has internalized this way of behaving between two people who love each other, and this definitely informs her relationship with Neil. I also think that secrets are often based around shame and the image we want others to have of us, so that was interesting to look at in terms of both John and Ella, and where their traumas are located and why they hold them so close to their hearts.

JV: Ella is a veterinarian; does her scientific background affect her processing of emotional issues?

MBJ: This is something that, I think, came out of how Ella’s character evolved and her resistance to self-analysis. She pretends to be able to look at herself directly, analytically, but she is much more comfortable hiding within the terminology of the one thing in her life she feels competent at: doctoring animals.

JV: Michelle, you co-founded L’Atelier Writers, a retreat for writers held in France each summer that is entering its fifth year, you teach fiction writing and you work as a literary translator.  How do these branches of your writing life inform your writing as an author?

MBJ: Literary translation is very much like writing, only I don’t have make the story up. In that sense it is actually quite relaxing, even if translation questions can be complicated and make me work hard. I consider it practice for writing as well as an art form on its own, and I cannot imagine being a writer only. L’ATELIER has become a cherished writing community and I’m so grateful to be involved and be able to support a diverse group of writers each year. We have a lot of fun on our annual retreat, but we are also very serious and I’m always impressed with the work that comes from our group. In terms of informing my writing, all these various activities are a way of energizing me with different ideas and connections with people. Book and writing discussions are vital, I feel, and keep me on my toes.

JV: You have lived in Switzerland for 14 years. How has your writing been influenced by living in Europe?

MBJ: I worry about this actually. I have been greatly influenced, I’m sure, by living outside of the place where I am published. I read a lot of French and Swiss literature, and it is often very different from American or English literature and I cannot help but internalize those narrative structures and find them very familiar, when an American reader might find them disconcerting. The lines are blurry for me. I hope this is a strength, but I also hope I will always read broadly enough to see what I’m doing. I consider Unfurled to be a very American book, but then Fog Island Mountains was hardly American at all. I like the flexibility in that, and I hope I will always be able to do that.

JV: Finally, what are you working on now?

MBJ: I’m finishing the draft of a novel – and for the first time I’m working in two landscapes: Switzerland and the US. The novel is set in Eastern Oregon and in Switzerland, and I’m maybe a bit superstitious about revealing the plot while I’m still finishing it, so I won’t say too much that’s concrete. Probably because I always do so much re-writing before a novel is actually done. I’m hoping this novel won’t take me eighteen years to finish – although I’m getting close to four or five at this point. But the book deals with radiation physics and ambition, from a woman’s perspective, and it looks at some of the changes in the world, in particular at our current feeling of compromised safety, and how terrorism has become a commonplace concern for people in the west, in a way it wasn’t before, or in a way that we were able to ignore it because it was only happening elsewhere. It’s been a challenging and interesting project, and I’m hoping to finish it up before the end of the year.

—

Michelle Bailat-Jones is a writer and translator. Her début novel, Fog Island Mountains (Tantor 2014), won the inaugural Christopher Doheny Award from The Center for Fiction and Audible. Her second novel, Unfurled, was just published by Ig Publishing in Oct 2018. Her fiction, poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in various journals, including: The Kenyon Review, the Rumpus, Public Pool, the View from Here, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Quarterly Conversation, PANK, Spolia Mag, Two Serious Ladies, Cerise Press and the Atticus Review. Her translation credits include two novels by celebrated Swiss modernist, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz: Beauty on Earth (Skomlin, 2013) and What if the Sun…? (Skomlin, 2016). Michelle was born in Japan, grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and now lives in Switzerland.

Having moved from her native England aged 24, Jo Varnish now lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.  Her work has most recently appeared in, or is forthcoming in, The Bangalore Review and Necessary Fiction. Currently she is studying for her MFA and working on her novel.