“Once upon a time, M’sauga Island was the place where desperate mothers abandoned baby girls and where young women went seeking to prevent babies altogether. But in living memory, Rose Cottage on the island was the home of the herbalist Hermine “Herself” Zook, who raised her three daughters there…” And so, begins the Prologue of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s astonishing, enchanting new novel, The Waters. The opening suggests an almost mythic reading experience, and so it is, an island of women and girls, lush and verdant with the herbs that “Herself” compounds for healing tonics, and various “female problems,” and rattlesnakes, lots of rattlesnakes. On this island, Dorothy (Donkey) Zook is born to Hermine’s youngest daughter, Rose Thorn, described as “beautiful and lazy.” Donkey is a budding mathematical genius, a child in love with animals and nature, longing for Titus, Rose Thorn’s love interest, to be her dad, and secretly learning the science of mixing and compounding herbs that can help make (or unmake) a baby, and for Titus’s “thin blood” ailment, when she’s not running wild and free on the island.
Bonnie Jo Campbell is known as the premier writer of rural noir: “With a ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world” (New York Times Book Review). In The Waters, Campbell celebrates the great and wild beauty of the natural world, while telling a story almost fabled in tone, delving into both the science of herbalism and the heralding of feminine power versus the sometimes-darker nature of masculinity.
A National Book Award Finalist for her brilliant story collection, American Salvage, Bonnie Jo Campbell has in this novel created a world so extraordinary, mythic, and wise, and with such heart, I found myself gasping, crying, even occasionally laughing, while meticulously high-lighting my copy of the novel for posterity, so I could return to it and live again on M’sauga Island. I’ve known Bonnie since 2010 when we met teaching at a low-res MFA Program on the West Coast. It was both an honor and a lot of fun getting to chat with her about her new novel over a long weekend.
Hermine “Herself” Zook, mistress of an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp, is a healer and a fixer of “female problems,” and she is teaching her granddaughter her craft. One of Hermine’s daughters is a nurse, another has an uncanny ability to soothe people. The Zook women are healers, but the men of the surrounding town seem dangerous with their ever-ready guns, noise, and threat of personal violence. Can you talk a little about this aspect of the male-female dynamic in The Waters?
Well, not all the men are violent, but indeed trouble is brewing! And a certain kind of male-female dynamic is something I’m working through in this story. You no doubt noticed I’m employing the fairy tale trick of making everything more extreme, so that the men are expressing aspects of their masculinity to a profound degree, and the women are eccentrically feminine. I’m writing the characters this way to explore how these extremes act on one another.
In real life, persons of all genders can be healers. As a fiction writer, I’m out of my league trying to explain it logically, but the notion of this family of female healers arose mysteriously as I wrote this story. I’m describing a kind of healing that a person can provide as a byproduct of being exactly who she is. Hermine heals by knowing everything about her swampy place in the world, while Molly heals by being practical and scientific. The third daughter Primrose saves lives, too, in her own prickly way.
We are living in strange times, where the masculine element (in all of us, maybe) has become powerfully dominant; meanwhile, the wholesome, fulsome femininity seems to be on the run or under siege. And then I’m going way out on a limb by using the male-female dynamic to stand in for the larger social divide between the political right and left. For example, I’m exploring land use practices and possibilities for the preservation of natural spaces, and in my over-simplified rendering, the women of the island are the preservers of those spaces while the men from the surrounding town—the farmers and shop workers—mostly want to encroach upon and domesticate the wild places. So, naturally, conflict arises!
When speaking about Massasauga Island, Rose Thorn says, “Girls do what they want here. They don’t like to be bossed around.” All the other women echo this sentiment at some point or other. It makes me wonder if you consider this a feminist novel.
Well, hell yes. It had better be. I say this as a woman of a certain age, and I’m never sure if my kind of feminism works anymore. My mother’s feminism was the Peggy Lee version of feminism, she would bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and impress men with all she could do.
So, I got curious and read Roxane Gay’s bullet-point article in Dissent Magazine about what makes a feminist novel. Most importantly, she says, “A feminist novel, then, is one that not only deals explicitly with the stories and thereby the lives of women; it is also a novel that illuminates some aspect of the female condition and/or offers some kind of imperative for change and/or makes a bold or unapologetic political statement in the best interests of women.”
Once again, as a creator of fictional characters and scenes, I’m over my head espousing theory, but I hope the novel illustrates in fairy-tale clarity the vulnerability of women in a hyper-masculine society, and I concretize the dangers. I don’t want to provide any spoilers here, but The Waters does suggest a way through the morass, one that does not condemn masculinity but holds men to account for how they use it.
There is a distinct lack of cultural diversity in the fictional community in this book, which might seem a little non-feminist, but that is rather the point and the very problem with the community. The novel should serve as a descriptive study of such a community at a particular time in history. What I’ve written should serve, in part, as a critique of that society from within.
I’m curious about how you arrived at the choice of total omniscience for the narration, a narrator who’s able to jump into every character’s mindset, including some minor, supporting characters. This gives readers a chance to be in the consciousness of the men of Whiteheart, so they are allowed to be fully fleshed and complex rather than mere foils of the Zook women.
It’s thrilling to write in the omniscient point of view, God’s point of view, but it can feel heavy handed and is rarely called for nowadays—though it worked well for Dickens! If it’s working here, it’s because this is a story of a community and a story of human nature more than the story of any individual personality. My early drafts of this book were attempts at using both first person and third person. I love the forward-driving first-person narration of True Grit, for example, and I tried that, but I found myself wanting to veer off the path of any given sensibility and explore every nook and cranny of desire and fear in the community. Also, I wanted to point at some remarkable behavior and say, “Look, this is how it really is in the world!” I’m not a confident person, but when we serve our stories, we can create something larger than ourselves.
The Waters is in large part about the resilience of nature, a celebration of the rural world with its lush vegetation, trees, and animal life. But also, there are plenty of references to pollution and climate change—the land has its weaknesses and limits. Can you talk about the importance of the natural world to the novel?
In each of my novels, the natural world more-or-less gives rise to the story. In Q Road, a young woman’s desire to own the rich river-valley land of her ancestors drives every action, including her marriage. In Once Upon a River, Margo becomes the human embodiment of the river as she travels along it. In The Waters the lush and fertile swamp nourishes the women of the novel—you might say the swamp even mothers them, providing them with much of what they need.
Initially, I didn’t envision the story taking place in the swamp. Rather, I had three female characters (a precocious child, a nontraditional mother who drank and smoked and disappeared, and a wise but embittered grandmother) in a rural space, and only as I wrote their personalities, desires, and interactions, did it become clear that the soupy, foggy swamp was their rightful home. So, even as I say the landscape gives rise to the characters and plot, the characters and plot similarly gave rise to the landscape.
And because the landscape is ever-present for everyone in the story, it works as a touchstone for every character. Nobody is indifferent to the natural areas and its creatures, and most people in the community are intimately familiar with the swamp in some way or other. Some want to develop the land, while others want to protect it. By knowing what they think about the wildlands around them, we know these characters better.
We find out partway through The Waters that someone has an ailment that cannot be cured by Hermine’s medicines; people in general and one person in particular in this story must decide whether to turn to modern medicine or take their chances with the island’s ways. Your novel embraces natural healing but admits its limitations. Can you talk about this more?
Well, nobody in their right mind (with the possible, exception of Hermine Zook) would eschew modern medicine altogether. Gangrene, broken arms, cancers, and snake bites do call out for the miracles of allopathy. However, so much of what ails all of us is mysterious, and we spend a lot of time and money on tests and therapies trying to track down causes and diagnoses, which may in the end not help us much. I read a great book that made the case that all diseases—starting with the common cold—are made up of biological elements, psychological elements, and sociological elements, and that has stuck with me (though the name of the book and the author has not).
Maybe a lot of what natural healing accomplishes is a version of the placebo effect, which is probably the strongest effect we have in medicine. Maybe that’s true of regular medicine, too! An important element of Hermine’s healing has something to do with just getting oddball natural ingredients and their micronutrients into people’s bodies. Around the world, much healing is done through home remedies and herbal cures, by taking the waters, and by all sorts of shamanic healing. Maybe literature heals, too. And when something heals folks who are in pain, I won’t sneeze at it.
And please tell us more about the snakes in your novel! The island itself bears the name of the swamp rattlesnake species that lurk here. Of course, in Genesis, the story of Eve and the snake comes to mind, too. Please talk about the symbol or perhaps the role of the snake!
Snakes are long! And they can be anything in fiction. They can represent evil, earthiness, and healing; they stand in for the feminine and by their phallic shape for the masculine. Also, snakes are living, breathing, wiggling creatures that share the earth with us, and know the earth better than we do. I don’t write snakes (or anything) to work as a symbol. But since our minds go to work on things, we’re going to pay special attention to an animal that presses our buttons.
The Massasauga rattlesnake is an endangered species, but that doesn’t stop people in the story from wanting to kill it for a variety of reasons, and I wanted to explore that. It is a feared, reviled, and respected creature. How people feel about the Massasauga rattlesnake tells us a lot about them. You could say that everybody has a relationship with the Massasauga. For example, even as Donkey is getting all intellectual and lofty (spiritual even) about her mathematics, her curiosity about the snake brings her back down to earth. She wants to talk to it, to touch it, know it, and this earthy desire balances her character.
As well as Donkey’s math books, there are many literary works mentioned in this novel, many references to the Wizard of Oz, for starters. Donkey reads The Blue Fairy Book and Pippi Longstocking among others. In this very non-literary environment on the island, where some of the characters are functionally illiterate, why are you calling attention to so many books? And how did you use other books in writing the novel?
There’s a stage in writing a novel where I become aware of the other books that my book is in conversation with. For example, Once Upon a River was in constant communication with Huckleberry Finn and The Odyssey. While writing The Waters, I indulged in a handful of books, including The Ballad of the Sad Café (by Carson McCullers, about how love can bring a dismal town to life), Sula (by Toni Morrison, about three generations in a matriarchy), The Summer Book (by Tove Jansson, about a girl spending a summer on an island with her dying grandmother), Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson), and True Grit (by Charles Portis). For anybody who wants to look for them, there are odes to all these books written into The Waters.
Finally, you’ve mentioned Sharon Blackie’s notion of the “post-heroic novel” as possibly describing the movement of your novel. In The Art of Enchantment, Blackie says that “post-heroic stories are the stories which offer us a more enriching set of values to live by.” As opposed perhaps to the “hero’s journey, where the hero goes on a journey, learns a lesson, wins a victory and with that knowledge then returns home transformed.” Is The Waters a post-heroic novel?
This novel plagued me in many ways, as did my real life, during the writing of it. I had breast cancer, a sick mother, and then a mother dying of breast cancer. We’ve all had years of Covid, conspiracy theories, and the threat of fascism, and this all got me in the place I write from. But I kept trying to write a straightforward novel, and so I kept feeling like a failure.
Repeatedly I threw up my hands over a draft of the book. Repeatedly I went back to the drawing board, read basic books about how to write, outlined, drew pictures, tore apart my plot, and tried to shape it into three acts (Bless you, curse you, Ben Percy!) No matter how I tried, the story kept spiraling, revisiting its trodden path, and finding something new there. (As I’m writing this, Joyce Carol Oates’s novella Black Water comes to mind as another touchstone). In other words, I tried to write a sensible book and I ended up with a soul’s book—if that doesn’t sound too corny. I wrote this story despite my practical, mathematical self.
Recently I’ve been reading the mythologist Sharon Blackie and thinking maybe my book is not an aberration, a book that has more to do with community and the human condition than with anybody’s heroic journey. If the hero’s journey is about conquering the dragon, The Waters is about experiencing and knowing the dragon, accepting the dragon into the community, all the while being wary of the very real danger a fire-breathing dragon, or an angry man with a gun, might pose.
