IN THE HEART OF THE CANYON

Author interview

What inspired this novel?

I got maytagged! Which is to say, I fell overboard in a big rapid. It was during my first trip down the Colorado, back in 2002. I hadn’t even wanted to go on the trip in the first place, because I have a habit of sinking boats, not to mention the fact that I get very cranky when the temperature rises above 80.

But off we went, and within a few days I was hooked on the Canyon and the river. By the end of the first week I was thinking about running away and becoming a river guide.

And then on Day 9, we hit Deubendorff Rapid at the wrong angle. I was in the back of the paddle boat, digging hard, and then suddenly this giant rooster tail of a wave loomed up, and Ed the paddle guide was shouting “Left turn! LEFT TURN, PADDLERS, LEFT TURN!” in his gravelly captain’s voice, and the boat reared straight up toward the sun and I went back overboard.

Ed grabbed my ankle, and for the briefest of moments he held on. Then – no doubt realizing that my being tethered upside down wasn’t the safest way to swim a rapid -- he let go. Down I went, into this vast universe of cold gray bubbles, getting tumbled and spun around, coming up for air, getting yanked back down and finally – just when I thought I was going to fill my lungs with the coldest river water in the world – the river spat me up into the sunlight; with my lifejacket keeping me above water, I floated, feet first, down toward the boat, which was waiting for me at the bottom of the rapid.

Lord. I should have been scared to death but I wasn’t – in fact I was as exhilarated as I’d ever been in my life. I started writing as soon as I was on land – writing and chattering, recounting the swim for anyone who would listen. That night I read a long breathless poem to the group (a poem I won’t print here, because it’s really, really terrible and goofy).

And all during the ride back to Boulder, Colorado, I kept writing – in my mind, on paper. I was working on The Abortionist’s Daughter at the time, and tried to make one of my characters a river guide. Let’s just say that it didn’t work out, and my husband finally said forget it, just write a whole book about a river trip.

All from a 45 second swim.

How did you research the novel?

After that first trip, I read every book I could find on whitewater rafting and the Colorado River. I subscribed to Boatman’s Quarterly Review, http://www.gcrg.org/bqr.html. I took kayak lessons (never did master that Eskimo roll, sadly) and studied hydraulics and learned about currents, and then I’d go stand on the footbridge that spans Boulder Creek and pretend the creek was a hundred times bigger than it was, and imagined my route down through its mighty rapids.

But most importantly, I pestered the guides, and made it no secret with Arizona Raft Adventures, that I would like to go down the river again, as an assistant – a swamper, in river parlance. And finally, in 2005, the call came through in early September. Five days later I was on a plane to Flagstaff, and for the next 14 days I schlepped bags and cooked on an open stove and set up and dismantled the groover; I learned a teensy bit about rowing, and continued to indulge my fantasy about becoming a river guide.

The guides themselves were so incredibly patient with me. Bill Mobley, Jan Sullivan, Jerry Cox, Jon Harned, and Jessica Cortright – they welcomed my questions and if anything encouraged me not to work quite so hard (I have this New Englandy thing of needing to make myself useful all the time). They let me row some of the more benevolent rapids, and patiently rescued the boat when I got stuck in an eddy at the bottom.

A few of the guides knew I was working on a novel (and they weren’t particularly impressed; book contracts don’t really matter, down on the river), but I didn’t broadcast this fact to the other passengers. Eventually it slipped out, though. One passenger’s reaction: “Oh shit!” And so to all the people on that river trip, I will reiterate the standard disclaimer that all characters in my novel are fictional, and any resemblances to any of them are entirely coincidental.

I haven’t made it to guide school yet. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened had I known what a magical place the river was, back in my twenties. I was all hung up on getting a career going as an attorney, and I’m not saying I regret it, but there are times in your life where you can really push yourself physically, and my twenties would have been a good time to join the river community.

The story is told from 6 different points of view. Why so many?

First of all, there’s a huge difference between the way the guides perceive things, and the way passengers do. Amongst the passengers themselves, you’ve got every type of personality under the sun, and they all have a different agenda, as well as vastly different takes on each other. These are close quarters, and you’re stuck with each other for those 14 days.

So X thinks Y’s a know-it-all, and Y wishes Z would stop hogging all the avocado at lunch – you get the picture. I wanted to give readers a variety of different impressions, and this was the only way.

Besides, I love writing from different points of view. Of all my novels, only Crazy As Chocolate is written in the first person, and the first person only. My favorite book as an English major was The Sound and The Fury. Another novel that influenced me – especially for this kind of a journey book – was Ship of Fools. All those characters, all those different agendas – the story is almost written for you, as long as you keep your ears open.

What was the hardest part of writing this novel?

The first draft I handed in was 800 pages long. That’s WAY too long, at least for the kind of novel I was trying to write. The problem was that I thought anyone reading the book would naturally want to know every single detail of how things work on a river trip – and so to that end, I included all the menus, the guides’ methods for packing their boats, and a few too many descriptions of the toilet system.

So I was faced with cutting it basically by half. My husband was teaching for a semester at Cardozo Law School in New York City, so I joined him, and holed myself up in our tiny dark apartment and began ruthlessly cutting. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I used a lot of post-its.