Crones and Queens: Inspiration for When the Ocean Flies

Crones and Queens: Inspiration for When the Ocean Flies

I’ve written in other places about the ways in which finding my biological parents inspired and influenced the writing of When the Ocean Flies. I’m an adoptee from what’s known as the Baby Scoop Era—post World War II to the early 1970s—during which time millions of women in the US, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia relinquished their newborn babies to be adopted, many under coercion or duress. Being in reunion with my biological parents, learning about them, their stories, their backgrounds, called into question everything I believed about myself. It brought up big questions: Who am I and what even makes me who I am? Do I have any real choice or am I just a pile of genetic code? How true is the narrative that we believe about ourselves—the one we are given by the people we grow up amid, by place and time? Can we change it? Insert our own plot twist?

I knew I wanted to write about all of this—identity, belonging, the experience of being separated from our biological roots and the landscape of our ancestors, the impact of trauma on identity. 

I read everything I could about adoption and its impact. What I discovered was at once shocking and resonant: that adoptees are four times more likely to die by suicide and have higher rates of addiction than the general population, that being removed from your mother causes trauma and that adoption alone does not heal that wound. 

I could have written a memoir, but I wanted something larger (and more compelling) than my own life.

I also wanted to explore and incorporate another thread that was inspired by a discovery I made early in my reunion with my biological mother: that my grandmother had come to see me in hospital just after I was born, and that she wanted to take me home. This little nugget inspired me to examine inter-generational grief and the role of relinquishment and adoption in that. 

As I researched these ideas and began writing When the Ocean Flies, in addition to the ideas of intergenerational grief and ancestry, the incredible—and often untold—stories and the strength women have demonstrated through the ages kept asking to be let in. That led me to explore women’s history, particularly in Scotland, to go digging for things that we might not learn in standard history books. I went back and back through time, finding fascinating tales of women warriors and queens, of women who endured false accusations and awful punishments and who survived against all odds. As I was exploring and writing, I had no idea how I could possibly incorporate these women into the story. I just knew they had to be there.

I have a deep respect for the strength and wisdom of older women, for crones, if you will. I grew up with a strong grandmother and great aunts. These were women who had given birth in the middle of war, who had supported their families when fathers or brothers died too soon, who retained a sense of dignity, of connection, of love. They were wise. Yet, as much as they’d done, they had been forced to corral themselves in order to survive in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

I could feel them with me as I wrote and researched this thread, and, as a result, it seemed right that these stories would become the epistolary thread that runs through the book: letters from a grandmother, Eilidh, to the granddaughter she hopes will find her way home. In them, Eilidh begins by passing on ancient lore that has come down through the ages, handed down through the generations in the form of storytelling from grandmother to mother to daughter since life began on her little Scottish island. 

The research was fascinating and writing the letters was an absolute delight, and, I think, an element that enriches the novel, that offers hope, and that pulls the book together. It turned out to be a key element in facilitating what I set out to do: to offer an exploration and understanding of who we are as individuals and as women, of what causes us to alter our selves for the promise of acceptance and belonging, of how we can connect even over huge gaps in time and geographical distance, and of how we might heal and learn to live full and satisfying lives. I also hope I’ve written a damn fine story, one you’ll return to and share. I do so want all these women—the characters and the ancestors—to be about in the world. 

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Heather G. Marshall is adoptee, author, mother, speaker, teacher, coach, and traveler. Her short fiction has been published in a variety of journals, including Black Middens: New Writing Scotland, and Quarried, an anthology of the best of three decades of Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel. Her first novel, The Thorn Tree, released in 2014 (MP Publishing). Her TED talk, “Letting Go of Expectations,” centers around her adoption and reunion. Originally from Scotland, Heather is currently based in Massachusetts. You can find out more about her at heathergmarshall.com.

WHEN THE OCEAN FLIES

“This book brought me to tears and a greater understanding of my own possibilities.” Terresa Cooper Haskew, author of Winston’s Book of Souls

An email from a stranger tells Alison Earley that her natural father, whom she has known for only six years, has died suddenly. What begins as a short trip back to Scotland for a funeral soon becomes a journey that puts adoption, sexuality, and identity on a collision course as Alison finds herself caught between the life and family she has so carefully constructed on one continent and the family from which she was taken on another.

Shunned by her father’s family, reunited with her natural mother, and reconnected with a long-lost love, Alison finds herself trying to shepherd her youngest child towards college while questioning everything she thought she knew about herself.

When her natural mother uncovers a series of letters written to Alison from the grandmother she never knew, resurrecting the stories of generations of women-stories long buried by patriarchal rule-Alison realizes that she must find the courage to face and reveal the secrets of her own past. At what cost, though? And who and what will be left in the aftermath?

When the Ocean Flies explores the pain of separation and abuse, and the power of love to heal even over huge gaps in time and geographical distance.

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Category: On Writing