When a Character Shows up in the Flesh
By Cheryl Grey Bostrom author of What the River Keeps
—
I arrived home to a friend rising from a chair in my home office. She laid an early reader’s copy of my newest novel What the River Keeps on my desk and squared her heavy frame to mine. “I have a bone to pick with you, author lady.”
“Tessie! What on earth? How did you . . .? Why are you here, in my study? And in the flesh no less!”
Tess huffed. “Maybe because I was born here? Because you wrote me to be real?” Her work boots thunked the small room’s hardwood as she paced. “The second you sent our story off in that email I knew there’d be trouble. I knew it.”
I frowned, gestured for her to sit again, and lowered myself to a nearby stool. “What sort of trouble?”
She shot me a bewildered look. “Did you not consider how publishing this book would affect us?”
“Us?”
“Well, only me, which is odd. My man Bingo tells me the story all worked out, and the other characters think I’m nuts. But I haven’t had a decent sleep since this reached early readers.” She slapped the book, waggled a thick finger. “Day, night. Doesn’t matter. They interrupt me during working hours. Keep waking me up until two or three in the morning. How’m I s’posed to cook for Bingo’s clients on no sleep? He’s got fishing groups booked all summer, and you know how they eat after a day on the strait.”
My turn for bewilderment. “Who wakes you?”
She fanned the novel’s pages. “Everybody with a nose in this thing. People read at all hours, you know, and if someone’s reading about Bingo or Hildy or me, I feel it, know it—and I’m on, living the story all over again. Kinda like that Groundhog Day movie, only without the re-dos. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you had it out for me.”
My lungs tightened. “Oh, Tessie. I’m sorry. Truly sorry. I had no idea such a thing could happen.”
She slumped in the chair. “If I’d been able to move on when you finished writing us, it wouldn’t be so bad. But to re-live those scenes every single time someone’s reading the book? I know there’s good and funny stuff in those pages, but that wakes me up, too. Weirdest is the feeling I get when somebody somewhere is reading about us.”
I looked at my hands, then back at her. “What kind of feeling?”
“An urgency. Like there’s something I don’t understand, but need to. You know I’m not one to beg, Cheryl, but please, please make it stop. Can’t you write something to make the book leave me alone? So far, the story’s only been with advance reviewers. What will happen to me when it releases in August? All those readers?”
I stared at the floor for a long minute. Through her role as a secondary character, Tess had supported the narrative, furthering plot and themes without complaint. But she’d had little to do with the final chapters, and had not been privy to wrap-up details or other characters’ thoughts. Real as she was, now the story was haunting her, unresolved in her mind—as it was naturally doing to readers still in the midst of its pages. The daytime disruptions? The night awakenings? People find their people, after all. And if you’re a book character? No limits on where.
“What if I could help you understand how those scenes fit together, Tess? May I give you the big picture? If we lay them to rest, maybe you won’t relive the story every time someone reads it.”
Tess sighed. “I know what happens in the book, Cheryl.”
I patted her knee. “But do you know why?
She hesitated. “Guess I never thought about it. We worked stuff through. I got my sister back. The end.”
“That’s it?”
“I’m a practical woman. You know that. I get my work done. Take care of my family. I don’t have time to go deep.”
“If you want to sleep, Tessie, that’s exactly where we need to go. Wait here. I’ll get tea.”
***
I began writing What the River Keeps with only a few navigational markers. First, I knew I’d send a reclusive fisheries biologist named Hildy back to her childhood home on the Pacific Northwest’s Elwha River, where she’d help re-wild the habitat as two ill-conceived dams were demolished.
Second, I knew Hildy’s unexpected task—to decipher a past riddled with lies. That past, as well as her present and future, would parallel the river’s actual history.
Third, I knew that both Hildy and the river would be freed of all that held them captive, and that as she escaped the deception, Hildy would fall in love.
While this tale is in no way a memoir, I also knew I would be mining my own story to tell Hildy’s. I grew up a few miles from the Elwha River, steeped in the region’s magnificence and overshadowed by unseen, confusing strongholds I couldn’t describe. Through Hildy’s story I wanted to address the physical, emotional, and spiritual impact of such beauty and brokenness—along with the capability of ecosystems and people to heal.
But how I would show all that was up for grabs. One by one, I asked the characters. Like Hildy’s sister Tess, they told me point-blank what they were thinking—and what they’d do next.
Sometimes I felt like I simply brought these people to life, delivered my concepts to them, then stood by as a consultant while they wrote the book. Come to think of it, apart from Hildy, I didn’t even conceive the characters. Hildy introduced me to them, complete to their bones. I did little more than nourish them.
Apparently, I also counsel my characters, and I’m glad to report that since we talked, Tess is sleeping better. What the River Keeps still awakens me from time-to-time, though.
Fortunately, with joy.
—
A keen student of the natural world and the workings of the human heart, Pacific Northwest author Cheryl Grey Bostrom captures the mystery and wonder of both in her lyrical, surprising fiction.
Her novels Sugar Birds (Christy finalist, Amazon bestseller, and Book of the Year) and Leaning on Air have won more than two dozen industry honors, among which are CT’s Fiction Award of Merit and American Fiction, Reader’s Favorite, ACFW Carol, Nautilus, Best Book, Foreword Indies, and International Book Awards. Cheryl’s newest work of contemporary women’s fiction, What the River Keeps, releases August 12.
An avid birder and nature photographer, Cheryl lives in rural Washington State with her husband and a pack of half-trained Gordon setters.
Find out more about Cheryl on her website! https://cherylbostrom.com/
WHAT THE RIVER KEEPS
In the beautiful Pacific Northwest, a young woman’s discovery of her hidden past illuminates her present in this new novel from the award-winning author of Sugar Birds, “an engrossing tale” (Kirkus Reviews), and Leaning on Air, “an exquisitely nuanced love story” (BookTrib).
Hildy Nybo is a successful biologist, her study of the Pacific Northwest’s wild fish both a passion and a career. But behind her professional brilliance, Hildy’s reclusive private life reflects a childhood fraught with uncertainty. Despite her father’s love and her mother’s sympathy, she grew up constantly losing even her most cherished belongings, unable to recall where she misplaced them. Haunted by the confusion of those early years, she now records her life in detailed diaries and clings tightly to memory-prompting keepsakes.
Then her mother’s health fails, and Hildy accepts a job near her childhood home, joining a team of scientists who will help restore her beloved Elwha River after the demolition of two century-old dams. There Hildy settles into one of the cabins on her family’s rustic resort―a place she both loves and dreads, for reasons she can’t fully explain.
When local artist Miranda Rimmer rents an adjacent cabin for her pottery studio, Hildy shrinks from such a close neighbor. But then Miranda’s carpenter brother, Luke, shows up to help with construction and captures Hildy’s attention. Now a few years beyond a tragedy that brought him to his knees, Luke recognizes a kindred soul in Hildy, and they build a relationship that dismantles the walls Hildy’s built to keep people out. As troubling pieces of the past surface, Hildy dares to wonder if she can banish the shadows that have burdened her and follow her river’s course to freedom.
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Category: Interviews, On Writing
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