“Go on, everybody here’s kin to everybody. We look out for each other”: Place, home, and family in BettyJoyce Nash’s “Everybody here is Kin” https://ift.tt/xtR59L1
BettyJoyce Nash and I met at Wildacres, a writing retreat in North Carolina. We share similar lifestyles and writing interests. I attended her book launch in Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, where the landscape resembles the setting of her debut novel, Everybody Here is Kin.
In the novel, thirteen-year-old Lucille is marooned on Boneyard Island, Georgia, when her mother, Naomi, goes AWOL with an old flame. She leaves Lucille with her father’s ashes, two half-siblings, and Will, an Iraq War veteran and misanthropic but diligent manager of the island’s only motel. Naomi’s sudden departure compromises a promised snorkeling trip to the Florida Reef “before ocean heat wipes out coral” and Lucille’s illusions about her mother’s stability. Everybody Here is Kin explores the lives of this sinking family, the island community, and the fear of exposing old and new wounds. In the end, a super-storm forces them not only to trust but also to depend on strangers.
Nash’s essays, articles, and stories have aired on WVTF, an NPR affiliate, and appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, North Dakota Quarterly, Reckon Review, Across the Margin, and elsewhere. She co-edited Lock & Load: ArmedFiction, a collection of literary short stories that probe Americans’ complicated relationship to firearms (University of New Mexico Press, 2017). Her fiction has been recognized with fellowships from MacDowell, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, and the Weymouth Center. She earned an MSJ with distinction from Northwestern’s Medill Journalism School; her MFA is from Queens University of Charlotte. She’s taught writing at the University of Richmond and the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail. She currently teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville.
We connected by email and phone for the interview.
The titleEverybodyHere is Kin appears throughout the novel. Can you talk about this theme and what you were trying to say?
Frustrated by rejections, I changed the title on a whim. I used the new title with Shakespeare’s quote in mind: “One Touch of Nature Makes the Whole World Kin.” The bard freely lifted words and phrases, so I figured he wouldn’t mind my borrowing this. As a child, I heard similar sentiments visiting my dad’s tiny hometown in Georgia. In Everybody Here is Kin, the island’s store clerk offers to watch the kids so Lucille can take a run. “Go on, everybody here’s kin to everybody. We look out for each other.” Will also remarks that everybody on the island is somebody’s second or third cousin. The characters liked the title, so I let them run with it.
Lucille, the teenage main character, grapples with the idea of “home.” What were you exploring here?
Who doesn’t question the who, what, when, why, and where of home? Is “home” the human family we’re born into? A physical structure or a specific geography? A job? Writing is my home. It’s a state of mind, even a climate, circumstance, or perhaps one particular moment in the space and time of our lives.
The inimitable Pat Conroy opens his lush South Carolina low-country novel, The Prince of Tides, with this riveting phrase: “My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.” Home is our wound and also our salvation.
Lucille visits Will’s fire-damaged homeplace and likens his home to “. . . habitat: the place where a person or thing is usually found…” She goes on to say, “This seemed truer of Will than anyone I’d met…He’d never leave this marsh place. It belonged to him and he belonged to the marsh.” Lucille craves such ties to people and places she’s lived and loved; we all do.
Bret Anthony Johnston eloquently describes home in Kin’s cover blurb, “…the places we keep running from and toward.”
You alternate points of view between the two main characters, Lucille in the first person and Will in the third. Can you say more about this?
I wrote drafts in first, third, and omniscient. This deepened my connection with the characters, enabling me to “see” them in specific scenes, with dialogue and action. Writers can’t know what a character will do or can do until they throw them into a tight spot under stress.
When I wrote from Will’s perspective, I felt too distant from Lucille. When I wrote from Lucille’s perspective, Will got short shrift. Writing from two different points of view made sense, but I used first—the closest possible perspective—for Lucille, and third—close third, but more distant—for Will. I also wrote an entire draft from multiple perspectives, including Jack and Mayzie, Lucille’s half-sibs, and Queen, the village elder. This confused even me, the author.
Looking back, I think Queen could possibly have narrated the novel. Perhaps I’ll consider a “wise-ancient” with an omniscient voice for my next full-length novel.
How did the characters emerge? Which ones gave you the most grief?
Naomi was not a view character but perhaps should have been. I may have sold her short. She has the biggest burden—a widow who believes, despite her addiction to prescription drugs and the male gaze, that she copes just fine when, in fact, she is broken, maybe beyond repair. Women with children must always keep going—working and worrying. By the end, we’re not sure who she is. I regret that I didn’t excavate her character more completely. Perhaps even I, her creator, feared what I might find. Yikes. Until I answered this question, I didn’t know I thought that. Proves we don’t know what’s there until we start writing.
Naomi, Lucille’s mother, is the widow of a veteran, a marine who suffered a traumatic brain injury in the Iraq War. In the novel, the family visits the island beach where Lucille was conceived to scatter his ashes. Naomi is a character traumatized by grief. She is a functional addict, not a great mother, and afraid of intimacy, even with the father of the two younger children, Jack and Mayzie. This kind of military family trauma is rarely depicted in fiction or in public discourse, particularly in mothers. Why did you create this character?
Wars can traumatize entire families. Mothers, wives, and children suffer. After a silent women’s retreat outside Washington, D.C., I met attendees married to veterans. They spoke of the fear, isolation, and terror haunting their husbands, haunting them.
I came of age during the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, a boyfriend of mine became psychotic after going AWOL and running from the FBI during Vietnam. He killed someone while suffering a psychotic episode and spent his life incarcerated in a mental institution. This rare but unforgettable case influenced my writing of these characters. Veterans can’t be stereotyped, but some fall into alcohol and drugs, trying to dull the ongoing trauma of war. I am also the daughter, granddaughter, and niece of veterans from World Wars I and II, men who rarely discussed their war experiences.
The protagonist, Lucille, is a precocious fourteen-year-old morbidly obsessed with climate change. Can you talk about climate change as a theme?
The book deals with humans’ relationship with the earth. Lucille champions the cause with fervor, partly to compensate for the out-of-control elements in her own life. Lucille would deny being “morbidly” obsessed; she would accuse adults of being “morbidly” complacent, just as young people blame older adults for failing to make hard choices to protect the earth. Climate change as a theme suits the perilous barrier island setting and Lucille’s character arc, which is also precarious. The title characterizes not only the tight-knit nature of the island community but also human relationships with all species. These connections are concrete and urgent.
The descriptions of place were particularly evocative, filled with rich sensory detail. Can you tell me about your experience with the setting of Boneyard Beach?
The barrier island ecological profile fascinates me—wide, sandy beaches fortified by shifting and disappearing sand dunes. Behind the island, twisting tidal creeks and marshes are flanked by maritime forests. I love mud squishing between my toes, warm water, slanting sunlight gilding the marsh grasses and skin.
In my twenties, I lived on a barrier island in South Carolina. My family also occasionally rented rambling cottages on Pawley’s Island back when sand dunes there were humongous. We’d spend the days wading in the marsh, dangling chicken neck hooks fastened to twine, luring crabs from their hideouts. We never ate them. They somehow always escaped the bucket and scuttled away.
How did you write this novel? Over what span of time? How many drafts? Did you work solo or with a writing group?
My scenes and my characters were always auditioning as I tried to bring them into focus. My biggest challenge was fear. First drafts, especially, scare me. When a scene makes me cringe, I ask myself why I’m afraid of the territory. Once I think it through, I proceed. So, I guess, fear is my friend.
I wrote the first thin draft at MacDowell, a writer’s residency, in 2013. I was ashamed of the puny page count, half-baked characters, and poorly constructed plot. The bright spot that still excites me is the setting. I like activating the landscape, imagining myself slathered with marsh muck or body surfing in the ocean.
When ennui sets in, I write from the outside in and/or the inside out. For example, I dwell in the senses — twisting trees, the paralyzing sensation of cold or heat-choked lungs, or breathlessness. When I was blocked, I read about sea turtles, Native American shell rings, or attended a lecture on global warming. I studied authors whose scene-writing and character-building skills continue to floor me. I still practice writing scenes with two or three characters, mood changes, dialogue, and action.
My women’s writing group meets five times a year. I shared some early chapters there, but mostly, I depend on meetups, workshops, and classes with writers of any genre. This keeps me going.
I can only say how much I’ve learned about writing by reading your novel and orchestrating this interview. Like Lucille’s story, writing is a journey through the network of our interests, fears, sensitivities, and cultural lenses. We weave words into a unique and particular tapestry. Yet, the themes are universal. We writers and readers are all human. We are not separate from nature or each other. We are truly all kin. Thanks so much for this time together, BettyJoyce, and for sharing the page.
FICTION Everybody Here is Kin
By BettyJoyce Nash
Madville Publishing
Published September 19, 2023
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