BEHIND THE SCENES

TELL ME ONE THING

AMANDA AND HER COUSIN AMY

Mary Ellen Mark, 1990, Valdese, North Carolina

I first met this photograph in graduate school at Wayne State University in Detroit where I was studying contemporary art. The image haunted me. There was something vaguely reminiscent about it. I recognized that look on Amanda's face.

I would think about the photograph from time to time for the next 15 years. And then one day my husband and I were on a road trip through rural Pennsylvania and listening to NPR. The photographer, Mary Ellen Mark, had recently passed away and NPR did a segment on the photograph. They had found Amanda, then in her late 30s, and asked her why she allowed herself to be photographed. She said she thought someone would see the photos and come help her. That was obviously not the case.

After the segment ended, we stopped for gas in a tiny town in the middle of Pennsylvania. My story started to take shape, and the town became the fictional Riverdale in TELL ME ONE THING.

RECREATING THE PAST

1980 was a pivotal year for me personally. My parents divorced and for years afterwards my single mother struggled to support herself and my older sister and me. For us, the early 80s were a time of crisis. And this crisis was reflected across the country. I knew I that was the era I wanted for my novel.

I moved from Michigan to New York City in 2005, and having studied art history, I also knew this was where I wanted Quinn to live. To recreate the 1980s, I read books, I wandered alleyways where clubs and artist studios used to be, I talked to artists who were young and actively exhibiting then, and I scoured archives. For Lulu, I was able to draw upon my personal experiences growing up in very close proximity to a disenfranchised rural Michigan, which is quite similar to that of Pennsylvania.

I've been asked what I hope readers will take away from the book and it's this: I hope we can start to find ways back to each other, to realize that we're not so different from one another, and to come together to finally create the change we all deeply deserve.

DAYTIME MOON

A TEN-YEAR-LONG OBSESSION

I can't remember now how I first got introduced to the Salton Sea, but my guess is that it was a 2008 No Reservations episode where Anthony Bourdain visited and ate at the Ski Inn in Bombay Beach.

There was something about the area that absolutely intrigued me. It needled at my mind over the course of writing four other books. Somewhere, deep down, I knew I had a story in me that was set at the Salton Sea. Over the years, I played with several characters, wrote and re-wrote various openings (which is generally my first step into writing something new), and consumed every bit of media I could find about the Salton Sea.

The story finally started to take shape in 2018 as things began to click into place around a novel I wanted to write about my own personal feeling of solastalgia, which is the feeling of homesickness even while still at home. This climate change term recognizes a social condition that many of us feel in response to the unwanted transformation of our natural environment.

I have always been concerned about climate change. At age 17, I wrote my dad a lengthly letter expressing my concern about Bill Clinton's horrific environmental stances.

Writing DAYTIME MOON gave me an arena for expressing my feelings and the ways that ecological loss was weighing on me. The Salton Sea is an accidental place, created by run-off from the Colorado River which flooded the desert basin. Initially, the area became a popular tourist site, but soon after, agricultural run-off and rising salinity in the water killed the fish, who killed the birds. Their crushed white bones are the makings of the shoreline.

Partway into working on the novel, I happened to mention to a close friend what I was writing and she was shocked since she had just recently been to the Salton Sea, visiting artist friends who had moved out there temporarily to create art installations and a Bombay Beach Biennial. Given the area's remoteness and the lack of attention, this felt like an extraordinary coincidence. I desperately wanted to visit too.

The Salton Sea is an hours drive east into the low desert from Palms Springs. I was finally able to make a trip out there in January 2021. It was thrilling to see that my research had served me well, and while there were a few revisions necessary to my draft (for instance, the road around the Salton Sea is hilly in places from the deep crevices created by agricultural run-off which posed a potential issue for a motorcycle scene), I had mostly very well represented the area.

DAYTIME MOON will be published in May 2026 by Unnamed Press. On the surface, the book is about a young woman, Isa Calder, who is summoned by her brother to return from New York City to Salton City, a sparsely populated town on the west side of the Salton Sea, when the man who raised them becomes terminally ill.

Once home, Isa must heal the wounds of her past, confront the reasons she ran away in the first place, and put the pieces of her family together. The novel is a metaphor for the larger repair needed for our home (this earth) and how we feel this urgency uniquely in ourselves.

As we’re bearing witness to ecological collapse, I find myself looking for opportunities to use literature as a medium for translating and personalizing our ecological dissociation and to create relatable scenarios that offer options for healing and repair.

After several years of unsuccessful interventions, the Salton Sea is being left to slowly shrink away. In time, it will fully disappear, leaving toxic swirls of remembrance in its place. It’s a fitting set for bearing witness to our ecological distress.