Valerie Nieman’s latest novel, In the Lonely Backwater (Regal House 2022) is as much a mystery novel as it is the story of its too-grown-up and often inscrutable teenage narrator’s fascination with and devotion to the natural world around her. When teenager Maggie Warshauer’s cousin Charisse goes missing near the marina where she and her father live, Maggie and her small group of loner friends, the last to see Charisse alive, become people of interest in the case. At times, it’s hard to say what’s propelling you through In the Lonely Backwater more: the desire, familiar to all crime novels, to finally uncover the truth, or Maggie Warshauer’s wry intelligence and keen observational skills as she catalogs the natural—and the human—worlds around her.
Nieman is the author of several books, including the supernatural mystery To the Bones (West Virginia University Press 2019), the poetry collections Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse (Press 53 2018) and Hotel Worthy (Press 53 2015), and the science fiction dystopia novel Neena Gathering (Pageant Books 1988). Her story “Colonials” was published by storySouth in 2012. You can read it here. I caught up with Nieman over email ahead of In the Lonely Backwater’s May 10 release.
EVAN FACKLER: In an interview with The Rumpus a few years ago, you described the narrator of your last poetry collection, Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse, as coming to you through a process of invasion. So, Maggie Warshauer, the teenage narrator of In the Lonely Backwater: where’d you find her? Or should I ask, From whence did she invade?
VALERIE NIEMAN: Maggie didn’t have to invade—she was already close to my heart. I was just such a teenager, introspective, living in the woods, living in my head, creating stories for which I had no outlet. I was an only child until the age of seven, and by then was pretty fully formed as a loner and tomboy.
I was lucky to have a home bookshelf with classics and books that had been popular a generation before. Gene Stratton-Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost, with its tale of a girl intrepidly collecting moths in the swamp, made a deep impression. I also read Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders, and a lot of Twain and Emerson, Shakespeare and Poe. No YA literature, unless you retroactively designate Huck Finn.
Two different streams, make that three, came together for this book. The first was in the form of notes for a “botanizer novel” that I’d been kicking around, with a young woman wandering in the woods. The second came from my time sailing at Lake Kerr and initiation into marina life. The third arrived when I was moving (yet again) with a chance discovery of an inscription in my senior yearbook. “I hope all our misunderstandings are cleared up. Always remember our great class and me! Love _____” I do not remember the disagreement, but these words summoned all sorts of emotional resonances with teenage conflicts. Everything came together—and as always, the work in progress drew in material from elsewhere in my life.
FACKLER: You describe Maggie as a loner, but she also has deep sympathetic ties to her marina community and its collection of loners and weirdos. Similarly, the Leopard Lady finds common community among outcast circus performers. Have you always been drawn to write about these kinds of communities?
NIEMAN: Yes, I think you’re right. My books tend to feature people who are not in the mainstream, or who find themselves pushed to the margins because they are different or new or sometimes just cussedly difficult.
When we talk about the natural world, “edge effects” locales such as sea marshes or the boundary between field and forest are often the most interesting and productive. I think it’s the same with human ecology. Those who are comfortably ensconced in the center of their culture, familiar and at ease, are not as dynamic and compelling as those who haunt the fringes, able to negotiate two different habitats but holding the center of neither.
People on the edges also may have a better view, more insight, into the workings of larger and more cohesive communities. They have perspective, if you will. They’re tricksters, able to satisfy the expectations of one side or the other while always remaining on that borderline. Generalists rather than specialists. When Maggie describes herself, it is exactly that way, and she invokes two such creatures: “Me, I’m a creature like a bear or raccoon, I can live lots of ways. Daughter of Andrew, cleaner of boats, sailor of Bellatrix that I built from a derelict, roamer of woods, scientist, stalker of plants and animals, teller of tales.”
It’s interesting that my writing life has also occupied just such an “edge.” I’ve been simultaneously a newspaper reporter, poet, science fiction writer, and literary writer. Later, I added being a professor and writer of horror, mystery, and historical fantasy. I enjoy keeping all those balls in the air, but realize that those who inhabit one group or another often look askance at my juggling.
FACKLER: You mentioned that one of the seeds for In the Lonely Backwater were notes you had been making for a “botanizer novel.” Maggie is forever taxonomizing the world around her—the plants and animals as well as the people she meets. She has this deep fascination with the naturalist and scientist Carl Linnaeus, who she hilariously refers to as simply “Carl.” Yet, the novel seems to suggest that maybe as a result of all this categorizing Maggie must herself remain, paradoxically, apart from that which she seeks to intimately know. Is this the taxonomist’s curse? Will Maggie ever find a place where she can belong the way a regular critter belongs?
NIEMAN: I love the idea of a taxonomist’s curse!
This is a different form of observer’s dilemma from the ones we think of in physics and psychology. You must have such close focus to properly document the world, yet there’s a great danger that when you get really, really close to something, you lose perspective. Also that by focusing on the task of noting things down, you lose the experience, the moment.
Maggie ponders this problem more than once. “Everything was categorized by wing venation and number of abdominal segments. This is how Carl started, by enumerating the fin rays on fish and the spots on the wings of gnats that pestered him.” And later, “I had learned from Linnaeus to look closely at the world—to count the veins on the wings of tiny flies that torment you. But it’s another thing to look closely into people’s minds, or into your own mind.”
I trained as a journalist—another profession that demands consistent close observation—and as part of that took classes in news photography. Depth of field was one of the major lessons, how you set a narrow aperture to have deep depth of field, with more of the scene in focus, while the opposite will allow more of the background to blur while a very small area is sharp. I loved that class, hauling my Canon AE-1 around town and developing film in hot darkrooms during the summer. But getting back to the point—you have to make a choice. What do you see? What do you therefore show in the photo? Do you privilege the landscape, or the insect on a leaf?
I may approach this subject with additional intensity because of my “other life” as a poet. The compression demanded by the form, the need for precision of thought and image, are akin to a field biologist’s. Wallace Stevens said that “accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.” And Mary Oliver famously wrote instructions for life in one of her poems: “Pay attention./Be astonished./Tell about it.”
I think this is a writer’s curse as well as a taxonomist’s. We must both get close and keep some distance, be able to assess and judge even as we evoke emotion. We are observers, of ourselves as well as others. That little imp perched behind the eyes or on the shoulder is taking notes, always.
FACKLER: How important is it to you that you can draw on this level of ecological familiarity for the places you write about?
NIEMAN: I’ve always loved the kind of immersive literary worlds that I first encountered in science fiction and fantasy, whether the planet Winter in The Left Hand of Darkness, or the Forest of Fangorn in Tolkien, or the deserts of Arrakis (so lovingly depicted in the new “Dune” film), or Bradbury’s lush evocations of future American suburbia and a Mars that never was. I hungered for the reality of the unreal, wanted to know what the air smelled like, what plants grew in the crevices of the rock, what people drank with their evening meal and how they paid for it.
My “places” have mostly been in or near Appalachia. I grew up on the Allegheny Plateau of western New York, then went to college and worked as a journalist and farmer in the northern coalfields region of West Virginia. Some years back, I moved to North Carolina, just over the county line from the zone demarcated as Appalachia, in an area of farms and rolling hills. It feels not much different from my earlier homes in terms of the landforms, but I’ve treasured each place for the particularity of its plants, birds, and insect life.
All this time, I was walking, or wandering—didn’t really call it “hiking.” I love to be out in the woods, but usually not with a group because I want to stop and look at things along the way. I’m more interested in the journey than the destination.
My fiction and poetry are mostly set in West Virginia and rural North Carolina. How important is a sense of the natural world and human ecology of a place? For me it’s essential. I find myself disengaging quickly from fiction or poetry that is generic, the setting some kind of average. Doesn’t matter if it’s urban or rural or wild, I want to feel that place with all my senses, as much as I want the characters to be developed fully and deeply. Lately, I’ve been trying to plant native species around my new home, some small effort to help preserve a fragment of the world.
FACKLER: I’d never considered Tolkien or Herbert or Le Guin as “nature” writers, but you’re right! Among sf and f writers and readers there’s a high premium placed on “world building,” on evoking and naming an immersive setting. “World building” is so much grander-sounding than “setting,” isn’t it? What advice do you give to your students at North Carolina A & T to help them avoid evoking “some kind of average” in their writing?
NIEMAN: Well, I’m now retired from the university, but I can say that I taught a course in world-building on two or three occasions before I tossed my worn-out whiteboard marker.
The biggest problem was getting students to see, really see. To understand that trees are species and individuals, not just green blobs. In both poetry and fiction, I would ask students to go outside for a class period and do a “scavenger hunt” for certain categories of sensory images, dialog, etc. Among these items was a tree, one that they could identify as to species, and speak to its form, location, impact on the landscape, etc. Many, many students could not identify common species such as oaks and maples. What ever happened to collecting fall leaves and building an identification notebook? I can still smell the tangy blend of decay and mold and hot wax as I ironed the leaves between sheets of wax paper.
So, specificity. Not simply that “a tree” grows there, but what kind, so that we have a sense of its height and girth and life story in the landscape. Not just “a dog” but a pit bull or a Pekingese.
All that’s on the way to fostering a concept of ecology, the idea that you have a world that works together in a cohesive, coherent way. A story set in the past will require research into clothing, transportation, laws, historical events, cultural mores. A story set off-world in the future will necessitate much consideration of physical issues such as gravity, orbital motion, suns/moons, climate before you can even begin to think about the natural world and the cultures that are grounded there.
FACKLER: In In the Lonely Backwater, Maggie uses fiction in order to survive, but also, I think it’s suggested, to potentially delude herself. As you mentioned, you were trained as a journalist. In what ways does the fictionalizing imagination remain important in this era of fake news and alternative facts? What are its dangers?
NIEMAN: Journalistic writing sets up boundaries, or at least used to. Leave the speculation and opinion to the editorial pages — I can almost hear Professor Atkins and Dr. Ours at West Virginia University hammering home those concepts.
We’ve always had two streams of thought, have we not? The scientific, measurement-based one, and another that emerges from myth and poetry. They are as necessary to each other as the two snakes twining on the caduceus—that symbol of (among other things) eloquence, alchemy, and wisdom.
Einstein famously used thought experiments to test out scientific theories. The metaphorical realm helps illuminate issues. The danger, of course, arises when you cannot separate fact from fiction, no longer know where one ends and the other begins.
FACKLER: Does Maggie always have a clear handle on this, do you think?
NIEMAN: As with all my characters, I don’t know who they are at the start, but have to find out through their words and deeds. Maggie’s opening thought, “This is how I remembered it,” takes on various shadings and nuance as the story develops. And then by the end we come to see this in quite a different light.
I thought Maggie was pretty much in control at the start, but I came to understand that she pushed that boundary pretty hard.
FACKLER: Maggie’s voice is at the center of the novel, but she is also surrounded by a host of other interesting characters. Her father, for one. But also Drexel Vann, the detective assigned to Charisse’s murder case. Can you tell us about the provenances of any of these other characters?
NIEMAN: Drexel Vann is one of those characters who might have been a walk-on, but as soon as Maggie saw him, and categorized him, he became the major secondary character. Her understanding of him shifts several times during the story, from early underestimation to later wariness and finally respect. They are in some ways mirrors of each other, in their attention to detail and tendency to hold information close to the vest. He is based on detectives I worked with during my many years as a police reporter, one in particular.
Maggie’s father, Drew, is part of the Appalachian diaspora, leaving West Virginia in hopes of a better life only to see all he’d achieved, marriage and family and career, left shattered around him. He’s unable to cope and sinks into alcohol. Maggie’s love, her valiant efforts to help him and to keep the marina going, conflict with her well-justified anger at the situation. Like just about everybody, I’ve seen addiction at close hand, and experienced its effects on individuals and families.
Of the other characters, I’ll say that the science teacher Mr. Palko is an homage to all my science teachers and particularly one who taught chemistry and physics and believed in the intellectual capabilities of country girls.
FACKLER: Can we talk briefly about genre? On your website, you describe In the Lonely Backwater as a “YA/crossover mystery.” What makes a book YA? Was that genre designation something you thought about while you were writing or was it appended later?
NIEMAN: These designations are all about marketing and shelf space, much the same as Coke and Pepsi jockeying for product placement at your local supermarket. My first novel, Neena Gathering, was published as a straight science fiction novel a long, long time ago. Although the character is in her teens, the book was never positioned as one for “young readers.” It certainly would be today.
When I began writing In the Lonely Backwater, I was not thinking of it as anything but a story. Certainly not about writing it to fit a category such as mystery or literary or YA, though it’s all three. I let the voice lead, and the voice is that of a teenage girl, so it’s understandable that the publisher chose that direction for marketing, but I was writing for a general audience from the get-go. We’ve all been 16, 17, and that emotional landscape remains with us lifelong. I think that’s why “YA lit” attracts so many adult readers. Emotions are raw, then, and the world as yet unexplored, a place of mystery and exaltation, wonder and terror.
FACKLER: But there’s a lot of cultural cache wrapped up in genre designations as well. There’s probably an academic specialty’s worth of literature out there just by sf writers writing about genre. Samuel R. Delany, tired of the constant battle for legitimacy he and others faced as sf writers among the literati, at one point even tried to get the term “mundane fiction” to stick to everything that wasn’t science fiction or fantasy. Lately, it seems like whether I’m going to find the Octavia Butler in the science fiction or general fiction section of a bookstore is being decided by some kind of chaos algorithm. And that’s sort of the contentious point about these designations: they often determine where in a store (or, more and more, in an algorithm) a book will encounter a potential reader. Does that YA designation make you uneasy at all?
NIEMAN: All in all, I would have preferred that it simply be considered a novel. I hope I’m not stepping out of bounds, but Fred Chappell wrote me after reading In the Lonely Backwater and said it was “one of the strongest contemporary novels” he had ever read.
I’m not averse to being labeled a genre writer, but as a writer who works in literary, mainstream, science fiction, horror, mystery, YA, and historical fantasy—and combinations of the above—I have definitely seen that labels matter. They can define your audience in a way that makes the work more noticeable, but also can limit your audience, in ways that I believe are not healthy for the writing or reading community.
Stephen King got in trouble at one point for a tweet in which he wrote (responding to his son’s tweet) “It’s true. Horror is usually considered a ghetto genre.” I believe he meant no disparagement of people nor of the form he perfected, but was calling attention to how horror is walled-off from “literature” in the way that the original ghettos were separated from the rest of a town or city.
I’ll invoke Sturgeon’s Law, or Revelation, which appeared in various forms in his presentations and written work. He summed it up as follows:
It is in this vein that I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of S.F. is crud.
The Revelation:
Ninety percent of everything is crud.
Corollary 1:
The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.
Corollary 2:
The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field.[1]
So, yes, I might have preferred that In the Lonely Backwater was not tagged with YA or mystery or Southern because I wouldn’t want people to turn away from the book simply because of the designation—knowing that such “metadata” is nonetheless essential for readers to find the books they want to read in an incredibly crowded media landscape. It is indeed a two-edged sword.
[1] Sturgeon, Theodore (1958). “Books: On Hand”. Venture Science Fiction. Vol. 2, no. 2. p. 66. Cited from Wikipedia.
VALERIE NIEMAN’s latest, In the Lonely Backwater, a YA/crossover mystery novel in the Southern gothic tradition, is being published by Regal House/Fitzroy Books. To the Bones, her genre-bending folk horror/thriller about coal country, was published by West Virginia University Press and was a finalist for the 2020 Manly Wade Wellman Award, joining Blood Clay (Eric Hoffer Award) and two other novels. She has also published a short fiction collection and three poetry collections, most recently, Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse from Press 53, which was runner-up for the Brockman-Campbell Prize. She has published widely in journals and anthologies, and has held state and NEA creative writing fellowships. A native of western New York, Nieman holds degrees from WVU and Queens University of Charlotte, and was a reporter and farmer in West Virginia before moving to North Carolina, where she worked as an editor and as a creative writing professor at NC A&T State University. Her activities include hiking, fly-fishing, and gardening.