Tara Karr Roberts in Conversation with Kailee Haong Ellis
Tara Karr Roberts is a freelance writer, science writer, and newspaper columnist. She is a lifelong Idahoan who grew up along the Pend Oreille River and now lives in Moscow, Idaho, with her family. Wild and Distant Seas, published in January 2024, is her first novel. Roberts spoke with Moss contributing editor Kailee Haong Ellis by video call.
I want to start with your opening, and this book’s connection to Moby-Dick. I haven’t read Moby-Dick. To be honest, I don’t know if I want to, now that I’ve read Wild and Distant Seas. I want your stories of these women to be my Moby-Dick. To me, this novel feels like a tale of yearning and loving and finding oneself, in the company of other women. What was it like for you, taking a classically adventurous, completely male-driven novel, and turning it into a story rife with girlhood, sisterhood, motherhood, womanhood?
That gap in Moby-Dick is what drew me to this story. I managed to avoid reading it until I was in my mid 30s, when I was finishing my master’s degree. It was the first book I had to read for the last class I took. I was drawn to this character of the innkeeper because she’s the only woman who has any significant speaking part in the whole novel, and she’s this slapstick, silly, ridiculous character. As soon as I encountered her, I started thinking, “What’s missing here?” I love considering other perspectives or experiences, and I started playing with the idea of rethinking Ishmael, who presents himself in Moby-Dick as an adventurous, introspective man of the world. But what if he’s totally misunderstanding everything that’s happening in the innkeeper’s life, and there’s more going on than we’re ever seeing in Melville’s pages?
At first, I approached it as a short story, strictly paralleling the chapters of Moby-Dick where the innkeeper—who’s just called Mrs. Hosea Hussey in Moby-Dick, but who I named Evangeline—appears. But when it became a novel, the first thing I did was decide to break away from Moby-Dick and follow generations of Evangeline’s family, focusing on the relationships among women. When I started writing, my sons were in kindergarten and third grade, so I was drowning in motherhood a little bit. My parents had recently moved to town, so I was spending more time with my mom than I had since I was a little kid. My grandmothers also live in the area, so I grew up knowing them well and still see them often. And I deeply treasure my friendships with other women. So I wanted to dive into telling women’s stories out of a space that, exactly like you said, was so dominated by men. Sometimes people talk about Moby-Dick as a microcosm of the world, but it’s a world with almost no women. That is not my world, and it’s not the world.
When we were chatting earlier, we talked a little bit about historical fiction and how it’s maybe a genre that neither of us enjoy that much. Tell me a little bit about your dive into historical fiction. What brought you here?
What I’ve been telling everybody is that if I took a time machine back to the day before I started writing this novel, and said, “Oh, hey, past Tara, you’re gonna write your novel, the thing you’ve been wanting to do your whole life, and it’s going to be historical fiction. It’s going to be four first-person narrators, and it’s going to be connected to Moby-Dick,” I just would have died laughing. I avoided writing historical fiction for a long time. When I was in my 20s, I went to a workshop about historical fiction at a conference and walked out totally overwhelmed. But when I started writing the story that became Wild and Distant Seas, I realized that I actually love this. My background is in journalism and science writing, and I’m a curious person; I like to know everything about everything. Historical fiction scratched all those itches. Most of what I had written previously was magical realism or sci-fi, which is more of what I read for fun. I realized too, that historical fiction is just as much about world-building as sci-fi or fantasy or magical realism. And then, of course, to be true to myself, I brought magical realism to Wild and Distant Seas, too.
Do you have plans to stay in the world of historical fiction?
I don’t think I will ever identify myself strongly with a single genre. I admire writers like Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who very boldly says, “I do not just write one thing,” and I hope to be the kind of writer who can do that. What I am working on now does have historical elements, but in a totally different time and space.
I liked your mention too about your interest in magical realism and bringing that into your world here. That’s something that I really love, too. When I started to encounter those bits in your novel, I was so excited. Could you say a bit more about your process of incorporating magical realism here? Especially in thinking about these sorts of supernatural powers that the women in the novel possess. Each “power” felt exactly right for what each character needed in their lives at the time—how did you land on what to give each of them?
Oh, thank you. From the moment I started writing this, it had a little bit of magic in it. One of the things I’ve learned growing up as a writer over the last 20 years or so is that I’ve got to be a little weird. That’s what I love to read, and it’s what I love to write. Some of my favorite parts of Moby-Dick, especially in those scenes I was paralleling, are a little mystical and a little strange. The character Elijah, who appears also in my novel, wanders around these chapters yelling prophecies, and I loved him. So it felt natural that my story had some magic, too.
As far as the powers I gave my characters, so many of the questions of Wild and Distant Seas are about women’s inherent power and all the things that constrain it. I see their powers as being inherited and mutated, changing from mother to daughter, though the characters don’t use scientific language to explain that. But they do notice—I have a moment where one of the characters looks at her mother and reflects on the ways that they look the same, but different. It was also important to me to connect how my characters experience their powers with how, or whether, they understand them as part of their own body. It became an interesting way to explore the way that not just external forces, but internal forces shape the way that we understand ourselves in the world.
It’s easy for magic to kind of toe into the gimmicky but it didn’t feel like that at all here. It was very cool.
I really appreciate that.
We follow each of these characters on a journey across continents and seas—no small feat in the 19th century. How did you decide which countries would become home (or maybe just a stop along the way to home) for these women?
So obviously I started with Nantucket was because of Moby-Dick, which felt completely outrageous to me because I am from North Idaho. When I found out that Herman Melville didn’t go to Nantucket until after he had written Moby-Dick, I used that as my permission slip to keep going. I had been to Boston, so I felt a bit more comfortable when I moved the story inland with my second narrator, Rachel. I have a wonderful friend from high school who lived in Salem for years and is a historian and a librarian, so she gave me suggestions for background reading. When I decided this was a global book, I thought, “Okay, Moby-Dick was a global book, I’m going to write a global book.” But it was intimidating because I have not traveled widely, as much as I would have loved to. When I started writing this novel, I’d actually never been out of the United States, except to the part of Canada directly over North Idaho. (That has changed, I’m happy to say!)
My third narrator, Mara, spends her childhood in Brazil, which was not exactly an arbitrary pick, but kind of a quirky one. One of the chapters in Moby-Dick that people tend to love to hate, or just straight up hate, is where Ishmael pulls us completely out of the story of the Pequod to tell a story about another ship that he once told to his buddy Don Pedro in Lima, Peru. My character is searching for Ishmael, and she learns that he’s been in Peru—so the question was how she would get there. I looked at some old shipping maps, and pretty much thought, “Okay, well, this part of Brazil [Rio Grande do Norte] sticks out towards that route. So let’s end up there after a shipwreck.” Before I started writing each section of my novel, I did some background research to help me feel out the possibilities of the time and place. I had been toying with the idea of Mara ending up at a convent, because I felt like I needed to keep my story within a fairly tight boundary if I was going to write about this place and time and culture that was so distant from me. I also was interested in writing an extremely contained community of women, to explore what their relationships would be like. I found a book about women and the Catholic Church in that era of Brazil, and I learned about the recolhimento system, which took on all sorts of different flavors, but generally involved being a place where women or girls who had nowhere else to go could go. It had many dark sides, of course, but I wanted to construct one that was not a perfect thing by any means, but was a place where these otherwise lost or abandoned women and girls could create a family. Learning about Brazil in general was fascinating, too. I got super lucky that there is a history professor at the University of Idaho, Dale Graden, who is an expert in 1880s Brazil. He happily let me ask him really random questions, and he shared some wonderful details and ideas that helped give some depth to that section.
My fourth and final narrator, Annie, winds up in Idaho. I was willing to take a risk and write a global book, but it wouldn’t feel true to me if I didn’t bring the story back to Idaho. In early drafts, I set it in rural North Idaho, near where I grew up and where my family has lived for generations. But as I revised, my timeline shifted to the turn of the twentieth century, and it made more sense to set it in Moscow. I’ve lived here for 20 years, and it’s a place that means a lot to me. It was fun to learn about Moscow in that era, and even more fun to bring characters here who were thoroughly not from here and were seeing it in a wildly different way than I ever have.
As Annie puts it, Moscow “was not some lucky spot plucked from a thousand choices. It was not some pleasant surprise she hadn’t meant to look for. It was her only choice.” I’d love to hear more about your choice to bring readers into this little corner of the inland northwest after a whirlwind of global travel. To you, what does it mean to invite a reader here, to your home?
Oh, that’s such an interesting way to ask that question. I love it. I’ve lived in Idaho my whole life. Idaho is my home and part of my identity, and my book wouldn’t feel like it came from me if Idaho wasn’t part of it. I was born in Moscow when my parents were students at the university, then moved up to Laclede, where my mother’s family is from. It’s tiny, only about 300 people. It’s a bar, a mill, a store, a church, that’s it. Until I was an older teenager, I didn’t appreciate that I was from a place that most people had never thought about. That being from Idaho, period, was strange. When I would start explaining where in Idaho I was from, it was like I was from the moon. When I went to college—and I went to University of Idaho—even people from Idaho had no idea where I was from.
I will admit I laughed when I read Otávia’s final line at the end of this chapter: “Oh, Mare. Where have you brought us?”
Moscow felt like a big city to me when I was eighteen, which is just a wild idea. My husband is from a farm outside Blanchard, Idaho, and felt the same way. But everyone else would say, “What are you talking about? Moscow is tiny!” There are a lot of exceptional and unexpected and strange and frustrating things about being from a rural community, and I embraced that idea when Annie comes to Moscow. Her mother is basically tricked into coming to Idaho, and I enjoyed writing about their absolute shock when they realize they’re in the actual middle of nowhere. (I like to joke that North Idaho is the “upper left-hand corner of nowhere.”) I have always taken for granted this place that I know in detail, but it’s all new for these characters. And it became interesting to make Moscow the first place that they ever really do feel at home. Mara and Otávia, the woman Annie calls her aunt, have been running away for most of their adult lives. They’ve been living this dream life, hopscotching around Europe, but never allowing themselves to attach to anything but each other. And they finally are able to attach to a place here. What makes Moscow my home is the people here. I wanted that kind of community to be something that appeared in this book because it has been so important to my life
Because this is such an awesome female-led story, I kind of hate to bring men back into it, but I’m going to. Of all the men in the novel, how did you decide upon allowing Nathaniel (Mr. Sweet) some space to develop here? We get to see a lot of his gentleness and commitment to his family that we don’t get to see in the other male characters in the book who either meet their ends, or make the choice to abstain from their families. Was it always him?
To some extent, Nat was a necessity, since my narrator in that section was going to a newspaper and a newspaper at the time would definitely have been run by a man. I wanted the editor to be an unconventional guy who already had one woman as an assistant, in part because I wanted it to be this unusual space where Rachel could actually enter. As Nat came together, I realized I wanted to build a very lovable, if flawed, character who could be central to the story. I puzzled him together with traits from many men I know, but my grandfathers were a particular influence, especially when Nat appears again in the novel as an older man. Both of my grandfathers died in 2019, while I was writing Wild and Distant Seas. I spent a lot of time with both of them when I was a kid, so they really shaped me as a person. Nat isn’t much like either of them directly, but there are pieces of them in him. So much of it was trying to create a man who, because of the lessons he learned from the mistakes he made with his wife and daughter, wants to give his granddaughter space to be everything that she can be. My grandpas were very different people from each other, but in those last days that I spent with them, I was reminded how they both just fully thought that I could do anything. And that is a spectacular way to feel. That’s a gift they gave me for my whole childhood and my whole adulthood. I wanted to write a character who could do that for his granddaughter.
That’s really sweet. I feel like I now have to ask the flip side of that question, then: are there women in your life that have influenced the women characters in your novel as well?
Yes, many wonderful women! The structure of Wild and Distant Seas is generational for a reason. I’m from a North Idaho family where we have kids young, and then we live a long time. My great-grandmother lived until I was 15, and my great-great grandmother lived until I was 11. I used to go over after school and play cards with them and hang out in their apartments and hear their stories. I was also close as a kid with both of my grandmothers and several aunts and great aunts, and I’ve gotten to know whole new dimensions of them now. And of course there’s my mom, who I am so grateful to get to see all the time and really get to be friends with as an adult, and to watch her be a grandmother to my kids. They’re all, in some way, hovering over this story.
The fact that we’re a family full of people who like to tell stories is influential, too. I love the way that stories change over time, which can be a beautiful or terrible thing. You might find out that something you thought was true was not, in fact, true, or that something you thought went this way actually went that way. But I’m fascinated with that. I’ve gotten to see that embodied in the way that my family has collected and told and retold stories over time, and sometimes revised or obscured them—it’s always interesting to compare notes with my cousins. A central idea in the novel is how important it is to tell stories, and the consequences of failing to tell stories, and how both of those choices can shape a family and shape a person.
I want to talk a little bit about Mara (one of my favorite characters and sections of the novel). As a queer reader and writer, I can’t help but bring my own lens into any piece of media that I consume, so I have to ask about Mara and Otávia. Of course, these two are raised like sisters (and they bicker and fight as such), but I couldn’t help but also feel a sort of queerness there, in their moments of tenderness and in their act of practically raising a child together. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I really loved watching them grow up together and watching their relationship develop.
I definitely intended that to be a queer relationship between the two of them. As I was first writing Mara and Otávia’s childhood scenes, their relationship seemed like it transcended friendship, and I followed that instinct. I worked within the bounds of how I thought the characters would talk about it, because Mara is a first-person narrator and I had to consider how she might have presented it in her time and place (as well as her particular personality, which isn’t always forthcoming). But yes, when readers have asked, that’s one of the few things that I say pretty definitively. That is a relationship, unquestionably, to me. Some of my early readers were queer women who shared their insights about that part of the novel, which helped me know that I had built that relationship well, which was really meaningful to me. Also, including queer characters fit into my interest in writing many different relationships between women. In historical fiction I think we have some responsibility to bring in what existed but was not spoken of. It happened in the story very organically, but I wanted it to be there, once I realized it was there.
It’s always so exciting and a breath of fresh air to see some representation somewhere you weren’t anticipating it. I feel like it was done in such a subtle way. But the people who are going to pick up on it are going to pick up on it. I think that was really cool. And I’m excited to hear your definitive “yes.”
Thank you. It was also important to me to give their relationship time to grow and deepen over the course of their lives, and that we see them as teeny little girls and as teenagers, but also as women. Their relationship isn’t just a moment, it’s their whole lives.
I want to bring us back right back to the beginning, in Nantucket with our dear friend Evangeline. By now she’s weathered and weary but rife with stories to tell (not knowing the stories her lineage was also creating during that time). At what point did you realize we were going to end with Evangeline, or rather, return to her? Whose story is this, anyway?
I love stories that fold back on themselves. I wanted Evangeline to come back and comment on everything that has happened from the last time readers saw her, but also to show the ways that she has revisited her own life and reconsidered her own choices. For me, Moby-Dick is a story about men who kill and die because they’re chasing the wrong damn thing. And my characters—because of the world they’re brought up in, the struggles they have internally, the struggles they have with others—also keep chasing the wrong damn thing, and that shapes their lives and, for some, their deaths. Sometimes the right thing is right in front of them, and sometimes they don’t even know that it’s out there. Coming back to Evangeline gave me the chance to explore how complicated that idea of “the right thing” is and how difficult it can be to contend with the choices you’ve made, but also how important it is to keep trying.
I didn’t want there to be a definitive, “We’re all done. Here’s the ending ending,” but I wanted it to come full circle. I knew that the book wouldn’t be shaped right if it didn’t end up with her.
Great. I love that. I also really like the closure of kind of bringing it all together. I don’t think I was anticipating it either.
I love hearing that, because of course in my head all the time I knew we were going there. Whenever I find out that I successfully surprised a reader, I am delighted, because I was never surprised.
Two general questions to close us out here. Writing is a big process. I loved in your acknowledgments your nod to your pet, Maggie. Who or what kept you company on your course to finish this novel?
So yes, Maggie is my dog. She is an extremely clingy little dog, and we got her a few months before I started writing this book, so she literally did sleep on my feet through all of it. There is a little dog that’s in part four of Wild and Distant Seas, and she was a very late addition to the book because I realized I’d written a book without a dog, and I couldn’t let myself do that.
My husband is not a writer, not an artist—he’s an IT guy—but he is the best possible partner and supporter for my art. He’s always tried to find ways to make space for me to write. And my kids, like I said, were in kindergarten and third grade when I started writing the book, and they are in sixth and ninth grade now. So they grew up with the book. They learned very early that “when Mom is writing, we don’t bother her,” and they still know that. It’s really fun now, because they both love to write—my older son especially—and I’ve gotten this wild, unexpected joy of getting to talk about writing with my own children while my book is coming out. They came to my book launch, and my older son has read it. The little guy, I’m giving him a few more years. He only reads books about dragons right now.
Their presence was essential to making the book what it is, and the support from my extended family and my friends really was, too. I am spoiled rotten to just be surrounded by people who think it’s cool that I do what I do and make it possible for me to do it. And I’m very grateful to live in a community where I’ve gotten to know so many incredible women from all sorts of backgrounds and different generations. In my acknowledgements I mention my book club, which is women from my church—and you cannot ask for a better squad of cheerleaders than a bunch of retired Lutheran women. They’re amazing.
You know, writing is often lonely, and it’s very easy to fall into the rabbit hole of, “I have no business doing this. I’m literally making it up.” I’ll have the horrible imposter syndrome that I think every writer does. And so having people in my life who are constantly willing to say, “No, you actually do deserve to do this, and you can in fact do this, so go sit down and write”—it changes everything.
Did you find yourself reading or listening to anything that set the mood or inspired you in any way?
I try to read widely, and I also tend to read kind of impulsively, where I read whatever I feel like reading at the moment. I read a lot of the sci-fi and fantasy authors that I deeply love while I was writing my book, even though I was working in my historical fiction world. Writers like NK Jemisin and Naomi Novik and Katherine Arden and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who I mentioned earlier, were meaningful to me, just in seeing how they construct their absolutely irresistible worlds. I did go to some of those godparents of magical realism, too: I read 100 Years of Solitude and The House of the Spirits. A more contemporary writer who uses the mystical and magical and weird and terrifying really well is Kelly Link, and her story “The Faery Handbag” definitely influenced my book. One of the authors I looked to for an example of writing about parents and children is Lauren Groff. Her short story “The Midnight Zone” is my all-time favorite story about motherhood, and I love her work in general. Her novel Matrix is just a beautiful shining example of an incredibly powerful writer who can write about any topic, which is what I aspire to.
Earlier on you kind of hinted there might be something in the works. Are there any upcoming projects we can look forward to?
I hope so! I’m always writing something, but at different paces. I am working on another novel that much more deeply involves North Idaho in all of its glory and terror. It is also a little weird. The way I’ve been explaining it is that it doesn’t necessarily involve aliens, but it involves people who very earnestly believe in aliens. The inspiration came from a prank that my cousins and my aunt played on me and my brother when we were kids, when they convinced us they were from another planet. I’ve always wanted to do something with that, and it’s gone off in its own wild direction, but I hope that it gets to see the light of day.
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