Reading at City Lights Bookstore

I was lucky and honored to do a reading and book signing for Seven Tears in the Sea at City Lights Bookstore and Cafe in Sylva, NC on August 5th, 2023. In case you missed it, here is what I said.

I’m so glad to be here, and so happy that all of YOU are here, I don’t know how to tell you. To say that being here—with my very own book and my very own reading at the bookstore I grew up in—has been a life-long goal of mine would be a slight exaggeration, but only because my mom didn’t became the owner of City Lights and start hosting author readings until I was in 4th or 5th grade. So I didn’t really think of it before then.

And I’m so grateful to Chris for giving me this opportunity, since it’s been his bookstore for quite a few years now, and, you know, he’s not even my mother.

And I’m so grateful to all of YOU for being here—some of you came quite a long way—it really means the world to me that you would show up and celebrate this thing with me that I’ve been trying for so many years to make happen. Because, you know, if a book falls in the Amazon and no one is there to witness, it definitely does not make a sound. Let alone a splash.

I spent way too much time trying to decide what I should say to you now that I have you here at my mercy. There seemed like so many possibilities! Then the Sylva Herald interviewed me and the first thing Ruby asked me was, “What is your book about?” And I panicked. I hate this question. I’m pretty sure I gave the wrong answer.

You know, I spent a dozen years writing and rewriting this book and trying to get it published, and that involved sending literally hundreds of query letters to agents and editors, all of which ostensibly described what the book is about. You’d think I’d be good at it by now. But all those summaries were geared toward convincing someone that my book was something they could sell. This is a romance, here’s why. This is a fantasy novel, here’s why. I tried some other ones. Young Adult, New Adult, Women’s Fiction, Literary Erotica… Well, it’s none of those things. I think it’s safe to say, at this point, that this book has no genre. And the question, “What is your book about?” has become a little traumatic for me.

Then I realized, “Oh! I can tell them what the book is actually about! How amazing would that be? And I get more than three sentences to do it in!"

WHEN I only have three sentences, I tell people the book is about selkies, and they nod politely, and I ask if they know what a selkie is, and they say no, and then I tell them that selkies are creatures out of Celtic mythology, and they are seals that can shed their skins to become human. And that’s three sentences.

Well. Let me expand. In the classic selkie story, the seals come up from the sea and shed their skins to dance naked on the beach in the moonlight. (This makes sense, because seals don’t have legs, and they really can’t dance on the beach unless they take their sealskins off.) And an insomniac fisherman sees the naked selkie and is “overcome by her beauty” and steals her skin so she can’t go back to the sea. Instead, she is forced to follow him home and bear his children and keep his house. It is said that selkies make very fine wives. I mean, they’re sad. They spend a lot of time leaning on their brooms staring longingly out to sea. But I guess the fishermen don’t care about that as long as they stay home and take care of the house and kids, and their other wifely duties, which they do, because they can’t leave. In the end, one of the children says, “Mama, what is that weird fur coat Papa keeps in the attic?” And then the selkie puts on her pelt and swims away, leaving her children behind forever.

It’s a really tragic story. And my story isn’t a tragedy in the end, by the way. But I started thinking about all those half-selkie kids left behind on Scottish shores, and wondering about those recessive genes, and what happens when the kids grow up and marry other half-selkie kids and have children. Are their kids half seal? And how problematic would that be, to have this strong, instinctive need to put on a sealskin and take off to sea, but to also be raised human with all these social expectations and responsibilities that don’t leave any room for being a seal, and also to be raised by parents who have no idea that you’re half seal, and can’t help you with that?

Now, most of us are not secretly half seal. But I believe all of us are subject to cultural expectations and societal norms that are at odds with our essential natures, and which we are given so little room to question that we mostly don’t even realize how cruel and disrespectful these social and cultural expectations can be to the instinctive, creaturely parts of us. And selkies gave me a way to write about that.

None of my selkies start the story as wives, but they are all trying to be the modern equivalent of a “very fine wife,” by being good and dutiful in their roles. And they all get hijacked from their duties by their selkie natures, which overwhelm them at a certain point and make it impossible for them to do the dutiful human thing. The way this happens is that selkies are subject to certain overwhelming desires. The first desire is to put on their sealskins and swim away. And the second desire is to mate with another selkie. It’s an evolutionary adaptation, because selkies are pretty rare, and if they don’t mate with other selkies at pretty much every opportunity, they won’t survive as a species.

So there’s a certain amount of hot sex in this book, which is polarizing. Some people, like me, really like that in a story, and other people find it uncomfortable and in poor taste. But the reason I was really committed to all the sex in this book—

Well, actually, there are two reasons. The first is that literary writers like to talk about how it’s impossible to write well about sex—there are New York Times articles written on this subject—and for me that’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Oh really? Do you triple dog dare me? I had to give it a shot. And since there’s no Nobel or Pulitzer or Academy Award for Best-Written Sex Scene, I figure I get to declare my own victory and move on.

The other reason, the literary reason, for the sex is that, even for those of us who are not selkies, I believe that the compass needle that leads us to knowledge of our essential natures, our true selves, our reason for being here in this life, is our desire. It’s our passion, our longing, our curiosity, our pleasure, our—love. Sexual desire is only one aspect of that, of course, but it’s an easy one to see. Like a selkie without a pelt, we’ve all been conditioned in various ways not to listen to or follow those desiring parts of ourselves, but to be good. Be a modern-day “fine wife.” Get up too early, go spend all day in the company of people you wouldn’t choose if you had a choice, show aptitude and commitment to things you don’t care about or enjoy, do your homework, do your chores, earn your paycheck, support your family, don’t talk about sex…

The selkies in my book are lucky, in a way, that their passionate instincts are so overwhelming, because in the end, this is what shows them the way—out to the wild sea, and home again to their true loves.

The rest of us fully human creatures have more of a choice. Do we do as we’ve been taught—ignore our desire and behave ourselves, and live sad, longing lives, leaning on our brooms and staring out to sea? Or do we allow our desire to be the compass needle leading the way to whatever it is that we came into this life to do?