Daytime Moon: Living with Death
An Interview with Kerri Schlottman, installment #1
warning: this contains spoilers!
A three-part conversation about Daytime Moon between author Kerri Schlottman and Pool Party managing editor, Ryan-Ashley Anderson.
[ Installment 1/3 ]
Lithium buried beneath the Salton Sea, the tragedy of hostile architecture, and the connections between colonialism and ecological collapse. The search for identity, fractured family systems, and the role spiritual and symbolic practices play in healing ourselves, our connection to each other, and our connection to the planet.
These are just a few of the interrelated topics that came up during my chat with Kerri Schlottman about her new novel, Daytime Moon, released this week by Unnamed Press.
While a casual read may leave one with a sense of the book as a story about chosen family, the special bond between sisters, and the tension that shows up in relationships between people with very different values from one another, close inspection produces a more layered experience. Mica comes to mind: when cohering, all the thin, delicate layers press into each other to produce what appears to be a solid yet slightly translucent flake of quartz. But it’s not one singular thing. It’s whole is made up of countless layers of tissue-thin slices of material that looks more like the vulnerable material of a dragon fly’s wing than the solid mass of a rock. Each layer maps onto the next—murky, opalescent.
While reading Daytime Moon, I found myself taking two steps forward then three steps back, each new discovery a portal into understanding the deeper meaning of something or someone that had come before. Often, it felt like I was reading backwards, but not because it was dense or disorganized, but because it was all just so rich.
Consequently, the conversation was bottomless, which is to say, long—10k+ words long. So we decided to organize it into sections and publish in installments. In this, installment #1, ecology and feminism features strongly, and we spend time talking about both the devastating ecological impacts of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism, and the psycho-social impacts of living daily on a dying planet.
Read installment #1 of our conversation below, and then, if you’re interested in digging deeper into eco-criticism, ecofeminism, and environmentalism, check out the companion recommendations we have curated at BookShop.org
Ryan-Ashley Anderson / Given that water plays such a large role in Daytime Moon, the Salton Sea being its own character really—I wondered if the choice to make your Hudson a Marine scientist had something to do with creating an affective connection between him his daughter, Isa, and her mother, Janelle.
Kerri Schlottman / The practical reason is that I needed him to have an interest in bodies of water and a reason for him to be at the Salton Sea where he met Janelle. It made sense that, as a marine scientist, he would be there studying the ecology of the lake. I also liked the tenderness of his care for the small things: he’s studying the smallest pieces of the environment that are falling apart.
His role as a scientist also created a kind of bridge for this idea about water and watery bodies. In the viewpoint of this book the bodies of water are very female-centered and this makes him a bit of an interloper.
In some ways, his character represents beginnings. He wants to know what happened here, what’s causing this ecological collapse. He’s trying to identify the parts we need to worry about because of what else they can lead to.
It’s the oceans where we are seeing this most, the cumulative effects of countless small environmental violences, and I wanted him to have that experience with bodies of water, with origin points, with repair.
R.A. / What is your relationship with the Salton Sea like now?
K.S. / The Salton Sea is so fascinating. I first heard about it through an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No reservations. It was a long time ago, a really long time ago, and maybe I had heard or read about the Salton Sea somewhere already. But when he went there I became particularly attuned to it, attracted to the bizarre history of these unnatural natural places.
I had a weird relationship with the Salton Sea for a long time because I had only researched it and I hadn’t been there. The first time I went, it was exactly like what I had envisioned. There’s just nothing like it. I spent time there talking to locals, really touring the area and getting to know it. I told a cousin who was out at Joshua Tree that he should go, and he did. He’s enamored with it now.
If you experience it, it stays with you and I can see why people stay, even as there’s so much toxicity.
But it’s not an easy place to be. It’s in the middle of the desert and it’s a really challenging climate. And so many people get sick just from being around it, but there’s something about it that lures people there anyway. There were people camping with RVs right next to the toxic water when I went.
It’s a destination. It’s also dying. For many years, scientists tried to intervene. More recently they determined there’s lithium beneath the lake. Now, companies have clearance to extract the lithium.
People are calling it the white gold rush.
The problem is, as they mine, the toxicity will increase. There’s a big question mark about what’s going to happen to the people that are living nearby but also in places further out, like Palm Springs, where the wind can blow that toxic dust even further.
For one area to kind of hold all that weight is fascinating and, as a person who’s for my whole life been concerned about the environment and studying different areas of ecological collapse, it was like: everything is here.
Every conversation you could have is right here. It felt like very much the right place to set the book.
R.A. / The Salton Sea is really looming throughout. It seems to breathe, like a character. Tarot is treated similarly. I think it makes sense as we’re talking about indigeneity—the destruction of indigenous lands and cultural practices—to think about the ways that being identified as ‘other’ produces a sort of illegibility that makes, in this book, a character like Isa somewhat invisible. She is able to sort of float in and out of worlds undetected and her connection to tarot seems to be a part of that. It was particularly striking that while Isa is using this discipline to help other people find answers and create some sort of financial stability for herself, she is simultaneously really trying to answer for her own identity, to understand her own history. I wonder if you can speak to that and, in particular, the way that tarot made possible Isa’s friendship with Lizzy, a friendship that is so fundamental to the movement of the book.
K.S. / Yeah, I don’t know that I was so intentional about this. Sometimes it’s easier to look at your book after it’s finished and be like, oh, this is why I did it.
My process is very intuitive: I don’t plan it out, I kind of just let it come. Tarot felt like the right thing for Isa but also, tarot plays a role in my life too. I am a little bit obsessed with it.
Having gone through trauma myself, I think that anybody who’s been through something really traumatic feels the need to find ways to control their situation. Hypervigilance isn’t that different from predicting the future. It’s such a strong part of dealing with trauma. In many ways, tarot has functioned that way for Isa. She’s externalizing in a way that makes it hard for her to ask herself the difficult questions, so she pulls cards instead to try to understand what’s happening and what she should be doing.
And when you follow Isa through the book, you notice that tarot plays a much stronger role in the beginning than the end. I think this is an important kind of change. She’s finding her own healing and not necessarily feeling the need to rely on something external for answers.
R.A. / To me it seemed like by connecting with her history, Isa became intuitively connected to the future. Something slipped into place. This connected, for me as a reader, the gesturing toward an indigenous history and the erasure of colonialism, how it controls by erasing: erasing people, language, traditions, beliefs, family connections, and so much more. I felt Isa’s noncommittal nature early on directly related to her sense that something was missing, something that was found as she uncovered more information about her mother.
K.S. / That’s exactly right. You know, she doesn’t know much about herself. Her mother died in childbirth and the man who raised her—Dane, Janelle’s best friend—was in so much pain and grief of his own loss that he didn’t really share much with Isa and Cole. There are so many things about her mom’s life that Isa doesn’t know and so she’s on a quest to figure out who she was.
The people she meets begin to help put that together for her.
R.A. / I’m curious about your research approach, especially when writing about sensitive topics. Do you feel any trepidation around writing outside of your experience? As a white person whose research often involves cultural analyses of colonialism, the impacts of racism, economic disparity, etc., I imagine you took some steps to ensure you were really adequately researched and could write this book.
K.S. / The thing about identity in this book is that it’s really not set and that’s purposeful. Also, I’m not a writer that believes that you can’t write about other cultures, but I think this sensitivity has been really legit in the U.S. because many people write insensitively about race and gender
The thing with Isa is, we don’t even know exactly what her background is. The point is that she’s connected to a way bigger story than herself. And I think that that’s the important thing about identity—I don’t think identity is actually about the individual themselves, but about their connection to a longer history. I think that once you zoom out in that kind of way and you look at it more broadly, then it changes our orientation.
Isa and Marnie are both really stuck. Marnie is caught in the crosshairs of all personal trauma and grief and unfortunate circumstances, and she’s stuck in white patriarchal patterns. Her grandfather, who was white, had tried to hush her and her mother’s story, whatever that story was. She doesn’t even have the full story herself and she doesn’t understand her own connection to various traditions. Isa doesn’t interrogate it because there’s no way for her to know either.
That throughline was important because I wanted to be able to enter into a conversation about where these first moments of harm happen, and the genesis of so many of these harms, in this book, are caused by colonialism.
Relatedly, this book really doubles down on feminism.
R.A. / Laura represents a sort of internalized misogyny for me in the book. She’s standing close to power while keeping women at arm’s length. In many ways, she rejects femininity, or maybe womanhood would be more accurate, but this rejection often makes women suffer more. Unlike Laura, Isa, Lizzy, and especially Amber, serve as a really important foil to Laura. I love Amber. She is like this secret feminist. She’s powerful and kind and uplifts other women in really understated ways. The only woman who exhibits that misogyny-coded energy is Laura. I think Amber’s character does a great job of showing one way feminism can look. Like, it’s not a hashtag, it’s not #GirlBossing, not #FutureIsFemale, in my opinion.
K.S. / Yes, and it relates to one of the stories I learned that, in part, inspired the book. It’s a story Lizzy tells at the beginning of Daytime Moon about a female teacher, Hannah Upp, who went missing and days later was found floating in the Hudson River near Staten Island after going into a dissociative fugue state and just walking into the water near Chelsea Piers. She was sunburned and dehydrated but otherwise okay. That’s a real story. It fascinated me so much because, in that dissociative state, Hannah was drawn into the water. And it had happened to her before and happened again after that instance. It’s fascinating to me that when her brain turned off, she experienced this sort of biological call to the water.
So, that’s kind of where all the water elements came into the book. There’s also this hydrofeminism theory I’ve been exploring which looks at gender and queerness specifically from a woman’s perspective and talks about the function of water in our bodies as creators and ecosystems onto our own along with our connections to rivers and tributaries.
R.A. / Thinking about ecofeminism, I’m thinking about how bodies of water don’t impose themselves on the earth. They materialize because of other things that are happening in concert, small events that cohere to facilitate the production of, for example, river beds. It starts as a trickle which carves out a little slice which pebbles slip into and everything works together to help facilitate the transmission of water. And yeah, collaboration feels like a very feminist characteristic.
K.S. / Yes, I love that.
R.A. / In the book you write about the toxicity of the Salton Sea and you also mentioned the lithium mining that will soon be taking place there, specifically how mining will negatively impact surrounding communities. I’m curious about what led you to interrogate this. You’re obviously someone who is interested in the environment and the weight of our human impact on it, but, what about ecological collapse in particular.
K.S. / Well I was a kid of the 80s, and, from as young as I can remember, everybody was talking about the problem with the ozone layer. It was a really big deal.
R.A. / I remember that. Specifically feeling like I couldn’t use hairspray anymore.
K.S. / Yes! I remember very acutely realizing that our everyday actions directly impact the environment. And I swear it was like from that minute on, I was concerned about the environment. But even before then, when I was a little kid, I was just weird. I would walk around our yard pretending to give tours of the last tree on earth, pretending that this one tree was the last one ever.
The environment was always on my mind. My grandma was also a grade school science teacher, and she was really interested in the environment. She loved bird watching, collected rocks and insects, and she did all kinds of other cool stuff. I’m sure part of my concern about the environment was because of her; she helped raise me a lot.
When Bill Clinton was in office, I remember writing my dad a letter about how upset I was that he capitulated to the anti-environmentalists. I was really upset about it. So, this has been a lifelong preoccupation, for better or worse. I also just feel like, I don’t know if you’re like this, but I’m a very somatic person. I feel everything physically in my body.
As things get worse and worse with the climate, I’m feeling it. Physically in weird, upsetting ways, and it’s really troubling. There are all these small things. Like in our neighborhood, there are a lot of new high rises, and, this happened maybe six months ago, when I went out for a run one day, I found this little bird, like a little sparrow, that had hit one of the big buildings. This happens all the time and this one was still alive, but it was definitely broken. So I picked it up and carried it to the veterinarian in the neighborhood, and the whole time, the bird was holding onto my finger with its little feet.
It was the sweetest thing, but it was so injured, and it was so scared. I was cradling it at the vet and, of course, they couldn’t do anything besides euthanize it. I am telling you, I still hold that loss. Like, I feel physically horrified inside my body when I think about it. These problems exist on a spectrum: from massive environmental devastation to the everyday problems like high rises getting built without using bird-protective glass.
R.A. / And they are so fucking empty. So many of these buildings aren’t nearly at capacity, yet we have people living on the streets. These buildings damage ecologies without offering any real social benefit.
K.S. / Everything draws back to capitalism, to accumulation, to hoarding.
Stay tuned for future installments. Daytime Moon can be found all the places you buy books. Grab a copy or two today: there is something for everybody.
