An Interview with A Possibility of Whales Author Karen Rivers About Unexpected Encounters

First, can I just say how stunning the cover to A Possibility of Whales is?

Thank you!  The cover artist is Julie McLaughlin. She also illustrated my novels The Girl in the Well is Me and Love, Ish.  All her work is so gorgeous and so inspiring.  I feel lucky to have been teamed up with her on these books!

I was so drawn to your character Natalia “Nat” Rose Baleine Gallagher, and I wish there were more books with such strong young female protagonists. Can you tell someone who hasn’t read the book yet a bit more about her?

I was a single mom for 10 years so I love to spread the word about novels that show how a single parent and child navigate the world together. This passage in the beginning of A Possibility of Whales really struck me: “Nat did not know her mother. She had never met her, except for the few fleeting moments after she was born. You can come out of someone’s body, she thought, and not have that count as meeting them.”… Can you say more about why you were pulled into this solo-father-raising-a-daughter theme?

I’m a single mum, too (cheers!). My son is about to turn thirteen, and my daughter is ten. One of the obstacles we’ve been working around lately is how tricky it is to be the sole confidante of an opposite-gender kid during this somewhat awkward time, when bodies are doing what bodies do. I can explain, but I can’t relate, which is of course what Nat’s Dad is up against, too.

We single parents can love our kids to bits, but it can be very hard to be absolutely everything that they need/want us to be at every stage along the way. Xan and I parent in a similar way, I think, defaulting to humor when things get awkward or difficult.

You’ve said that you first started to write this novel a tribute to Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. What do you love about that novel? (It’s one of my favorites, too!)

I often say that puberty is a lot like childbirth: You can learn about what’s happening and why, but you can’t possibly know how you’re going to feel about it until it’s actively happening to you. What Are you There God did was to give us a version of, “and this is what it’s like.”

It was so humanizing and real, especially in an era that was given to diagrams and technical explanations. Margaret was relatable, she had a lot of other things going on apart from puberty and her lack of development, but she was also obsessed with it, which I think resonates with a lot of kids around that time.

I remember it kind of being background noise to everything. Oh, here is a trip to Hawaii, a great book, a new friend, but also, when will I get my period? When I read it, way back in 1982, when I was 12, I felt seen. To me, that is the great accomplishment of Judy Blume: she really makes kids feel understood.

Let’s talk about Nat’s best friend, Harry, a transgender classmate who’s embracing his identity in spite of his narrow-minded father’s rejection. What inspired you to write about Harry?

I wanted to include Harry in this story because of kids who I know, kids in my own kids’ lives, who are on their own specific journeys, some similar to Harry’s and some different, but all are about navigating a reality where they don’t easily fit into other peoples’ expectations of them. I don’t want to accidentally out anyone, but I will say that the full-on way these kids embrace who they are was what inspired me to create Harry and to give him a voice in this story, even though it is Nat’s story at the end of the day.

Tell us more about your love for whales. Before you became a writer, you wanted to be a vet, yes?

Funny! Yes, when I was a kid, around Nat’s age, I think that’s what I would say when someone asked what I wanted to be. I remember having a book called something like A Very Young Veterinarian and it seemed like everything I wanted to be. I love animals, but as it turns out, I’m allergic to a lot of them, so that ruled that out. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and am fortunate enough to have spent most of my summers growing up on one of the Gulf Islands, where we would see both the local pods of orcas, and humpbacks and other orcas on migratory routes.

There never stopped being a magic in seeing them, in that moment when you spot the fins rising out of the Salish Sea, when someone would yell, “WHALES!” and we’d all run to the shore as though we’d never seen them before and may never see them again. I still do this—run towards the sea—and I still feel like I’m holding my breath when they pass, I still feel like they are a harbinger of beauty and magic.

What is up next for you? Are there more books coming that we can look forward to? (We hope!)

Yes! This fall (2018), I have You Are The Everything, a YA novel about survival, love, loss, and wanting something (or, in this case, someone) so much that it has the power to rewrite your fate.

In 2019, I’ll have (if all goes well with this revision!) Naked Mole Rat Saves the World, a middle-grade novel that once again delves into the tricky time of being 12—the changes that are both expected and entirely surprising—and what happens when you are unexpectedly called upon to be a hero when you feel anything except equipped for the job.

A Possibility of Whales is on B&N bookshelves now.