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Artists & Climate Change Interview
Andy Davis from Eco-Fiction recently interviewed Cai Emmons author of Weather Woman. Davis asks Emmons about her inspirations and knowledge needed to write about the character in the story. Davis also asks about Emmons' writing process; you can read about that and the rest of the interview here. Eco-Fiction Interview
ForeWord Interview with Cai Emmons and Tammy Lynne Stoner
Five Questions with Cai Emmons Interview
Autorentext
Cai Emmons is the author of the novels His Mother's Son and The Stylist and, most recently, Weather Woman. A graduate of Yale University, with MFAs from New York University and the University of Oregon, Cai is formerly a playwright and screenwriter. Her short work has appeared in such publications as TriQuarterly, Narrative, and Arts and Culture, among others. She teaches in the University of Oregon's Creative Writing Program.
Klappentext
Weather Woman, a realistic novel with a touch of fantasy, is the story of a meteorologist who discovers she has the power to change the weather.
Leseprobe
At Odiorne Point State Park the sight of the ocean is immediately tranquilizing. She loves the sand, the cool trembling water, the ranting gulls, the waves’ susurrus. The ocean holds onto an untouchable wildness that the rest of the world is losing. Today, a Wednesday, the park is deserted, no doubt because of the overcast sky. No families, no hand-in-hand lovers, no tourists with maps and binoculars. She sees only a single runner, a woman, adhering to her fitness routine, face set in an expression of grim stoicism. Bronwyn always finds this a sad sight; she hates the thought of anything in her own life becoming so doggedly, cheerlessly habitual, and yet there is something in the woman’s face she understands, and she worries her own face might sometimes look as cheerless.
She puts on the running shoes she always leaves in the trunk and chooses a path that leads over a lawn, then slopes gently down through tall beach grass to the shore. It’s a shaggy, scraggy beach, one for walking and skipping stones, its sand coarse and multi-colored as wild rice, and strewn with pebbles and fist-sized rocks and driftwood and whorls of dry black seaweed. Unraked, unmanicured, it doesn’t have the fine-grained white sand that appeals to sun-bathers and swimmers. Bronwyn likes it for that. She appreciates an unpretentious beach, a beach that still belongs more to the earth than to humans.
Whenever she comes here she thinks of childhood trips to the Jersey shore, to those wide flat beaches where swimmers and sunbathers flocked during heat waves—Long Beach Township, or Surf City, or Seaside Park, sometimes further north to Manasquan or Belmar. Maggie always had strict rules. No running, no rolling in the sand, no throwing rocks or shells, no swimming until she said it was time. But mainly Bronwyn was to always stay in Maggie’s sightlines. Dreadful things are done to girls who are found alone, Maggie would say, though when Bronwyn would push to know what exactly was done to those girls, Maggie would never say. Girls just never have an easy time of it; men call the shots in this world, you might as well know that from the get-go.
Here the shoreline curves in a gentle crescent. The tide is out and timid waves nibble the sand. At the far end of the beach a woman tosses a stick for her dog. Bronwyn loves dogs, has been teased for the way she brings her face right down to a dog’s to exchange sloppy kisses.
Usually she walks quickly, savoring the elasticity and power of her legs, but today her dress is restrictive, and the sky’s strange antics grip her attention, keeping her in place. The clouds are cleaving in a solid impenetrable line, as they have been for several days, barring the brief movement she witnessed at the Blue Skiff. In all her years of weather watching she has never seen such prolonged and defiant stillness. It reminds her a little of how her mother’s face used to look just before an outburst, battened down, so uncannily motionless it almost seemed dead, or as if she was compressing all her energy to bring additional force to her imminent explosion. There’s that feeling now, of limitless energy hovering behind the gray-brown wash of clouds. The sun is clearly there, but inaccessible, a curtained wizard waiting, unwilling to reveal his next move.
Surely things are moving in other places—natural forces are never static—so why not here on this stretch of New Hampshire coastline? It’s almost like being at the eye of a glacially moving storm. A catalyst is necessary, a slight change of temperature, or air pressure, or wind speed. A sword of righteous anger.
She draws a line with her gaze up from her shoes across the rough rock and sand and desiccated seaweed. It travels over the black water to the murky horizon where sea and sky are scarcely differentiated. In the path of her gaze the molecules are stuck in their dance like human veins occluded by plaque. She locks her eyes on a distant point where the clouds look most menacing. Her vision takes in a wide swath of sky. Eyes like telescopes, she zeroes in on the distant droplets. She sees molecules: hydrogen, oxygen. She hears the rise and fall of her own breathing, nothing more. Then a pulsing hum. Her body expands in steely concentration until it domes the beach, the ocean. An inferno, hot as the sun, explodes in her gut, spreads to her chest. She doesn’t move, at once sunk in her body and soaring out of it. She presides here for a while, swirling in moisture and light, in a trance but more sentient than ever before.
A spear of sunlight tears the sky vertically, lightning-like, dividing it in half. She pants, grabs another breath, deeper, and holds it for a long time, releases it slowly, to a sound like a pigeon’s coo. Before her, the sky is ripped and frayed by the light streak, the cloud masses on either side parting and drifting in different directions as she’s never seen clouds do; the light in the middle spills out, viral, blooming, a gold limned with silver. It’s like the light after drenching rain storms, prismatic, promising rainbows, light so sudden and welcome it appears more dimensional and colorful than other light.
The dog surprises her, bounding up to her legs, barking enthusiastically, demanding attention. Bronwyn pants, turns, begins to hear the world again. The light has blinded her, leaving dark floaters drifting across her vision like a flotilla of tiny boats. The day has become a circus, loud and confusing. She crouches to greet the dog. “Hey there, buddy.” She looks around to find the dog’s owner, but there isn’t a soul in sight, and the dog takes off back down the beach.
The sky looks dappled now, like the forest floor on an exceptionally sunny day. Not quite as disturbingly dramatic as it was a minute ago, though still impressive. She thinks of Reed, wonders if he is seeing this. To whom could she describe this piercing beauty? Suddenly she panics. She’s due at work in ten minutes and at best it’s a forty-five-minute drive. She hikes her dress to her thighs, sprints toward the car, trips on some of the loose rocks,…