Interviewing Lorraine Wilson

Hello!

I recently viewed the fascinating Mother Sea by Lorraine Wilson — Mother Sea by Lorraine Wilson The Shelves a tale of a community rocked by climate change, big business, science and the desire to have the life you want. Delivered with Wilson’s now trademark delicious writing this was a great book that leaves a mark on the reader. It was great to have the chance to welcome Lorraine back to the blog to discuss the book and a few other things!

Hi Womble! Thank you so much for having me back on your blog - I feel very lucky!

How do you like to booktempt Mother Sea?

It’s a hard one to booktempt, but I guess my pitch line is that it’s a story about a pregnant scientist fighting to save her island home and her child, and explores how we are shaped by the fear of exile. Although I think just telling people it’s set on a remote tropical island is more likely to make them want to read it because who doesn’t love that!?

This feels a story of choices – none easy. Was that something you wished to explore?

Yes, absolutely and I love that you picked that out as a theme. I think a lot of the times we struggle with making change it’s either because it feel overwhelming, or we are being forced to make imperfect choices. Whether that’s how we approach parenthood right up to how we tackle climate change. The impossible choice is a story telling device that’s as old as stories, of course, but that’s because they’re so compelling, right? Because we all know what it’s like to have to choose between your own hurts and someone else’s, with neither of those choices feeling ‘right’. But I think in a lot of fiction, the impossible choice is a huge, stark moral dilemma like save your own child or a hundred strangers, save yourself or the world etc. Which is exciting, but I personally am more drawn to the quieter dilemmas – the ones that may not matter to the wider world but still feel like they’re tearing us apart – and in Mother Sea I kind of liberally scattered these choices throughout the story. From the decisions that the community needs to make as a whole, to the things both my main characters do that exile them from their loved ones.

I think being paralysed by an imperfect choice is about powerlessness. We wish for more agency so that we can make a better choice, so we stall and don’t do anything. We desperately want to see action on climate change, but our own choices feel pointless so we don’t make them, and we don’t make them, and the world continues to burn. I think this story, to a degree, is about me exploring this dilemma of an imperfect choice, and how even when there are no ‘right’ answers, there are still paths forward that hold greater hope.

What led you to this particular setting?

Unusually for me, the setting was a deliberate choice long after I stumbled on the themes of the story (they normally materialise together). The idea for this story grew out of the history of the abandonment of St. Kilda in the Outer Hebrides and the current climate crisis threatening so many nations with the same forced loss of homeland. I knew I wanted to write a pregnant woman’s story of the divide between science and faith that St. Kilda so sadly experienced, but it was only as she took shape in my mind that I realised the story had to be set somewhere currently confronting climate change. Most of the Global North is living in functional denial about the threats we’re facing, so to explore the present-day climate-driven threat of exile, I realised Mother Sea needed to take place in an area where people aren’t buffered from the worst of climate collapse by socioeconomic privilege.

By this point it was obvious I needed an entirely fictitious setting because this story is about connecting shared experiences, not telling any one people’s story. And when I started to imagine a setting, it was firmly in the Indian Ocean, because that’s the oceanic island zone I have spent the most time in and I could build in my mind a sense of how it would look and smell and sound.

In one of those fabulous books about remote and forgotten places, I’d read a strange, awful history of a fleetingly inhabited island called Tromelin (go check it out), and that too contributed to setting the roots of this story in the Indian Ocean as it gave me the seed of my community’s birth. So from there it was really just a case of going through old photos from the region, playing fast and loose with geography, and striving to create a place and a people that felt entirely real.

How did you approach the faith element of Mother Sea and Brother Island?

Good question! A lot of research into the faiths and folklores of societies from islands and coastal regions around the world, to be honest. I did a lot of reading, and started to pull together patterns that are common across societies shaped by the sea. Then I used those patterns to devise my own faith system that felt embedded in the island and the community’s history. It was important to me to write this faith not as a sort of romanticised folksy set of superstitions, but as something that was rooted and alive in the way that any extant faith is - both archaic and modern at the same time. So all of the rules and practices that I mention have a reason for being there, they all say something about the dangers the nascent community had to learn to navigate, or the morals they wanted to live by, or the faiths that they brought with them to Brother Island.

In terms of the role faith plays in the story, it was incredibly important to me that this didn’t become a question of western science versus traditional practices, because that’s a complicated and nuanced issue that doesn’t fall within the scope of the book. The choice in Mother Sea isn’t as straightforward as ‘either this religion is right, or science is right’, it’s about finding a way draw on the strengths of both without losing your identity in the process. Or perhaps of both belonging and retaining your own agency. Like I said, there are no ‘perfect’ answers to that because it’s such a complicated balancing act of power and the (communal) self.

Rather than draw lines between science and faith, I wanted to explore the tension between what community asks of us versus what we need of ourselves, but because of the powerful presence of faith in my island community, a lot of their framing of these moral issues is through the lens of religion. For Sisi and Nuru, community was asking for a version of faith that was difficult to reconcile. For Kit, his family was asking him to deny his own self entirely. It was fun and fascinating to develop a whole faith system for this story though, and I was delighted to give some of my fav creatures important roles to play!

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and where can we find more?

Oh, lots! Next February I am joining the ranks of the wonderful Luna Novella series from Luna Press, with a story about Icelandic ghosts, PTSD and family secrets. And there are two more books on the horizon which I will be able to talk more about very soon. Keep your eyes peeled, I am so excited about 2024!

What great books have you read recently?

I finally got around to reading Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go In The Dark recently and loved it. So clever and tangled and strangely warm. I’ve also loved Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Ten Percent Thief for it’s scintillating and enthralling world; and for a complete change of pace, adored returning to Philippa Gregory’s deeply atmospheric Tidelands series with Dark Tides.