Brooke Shaffner‘s book, Country of Under, was the winner of the winner of the 1729 Book Prize at Mason Jar Press and was recently republished by Split/Lip Press. The All-Night Sun author Diane Zinna praised the novel by saying it had “big heart” and was a wonder.”
It follows Pilar, who was raised by her undocumented father, and Carlos/Carla/Río, who is gender-fluid and was raised by their grandmother as they return to the Rio Grande Valley after tragedy strikes years after their friendship began.
We asked the author to answer our recurring “A Life of Books” questionnaire so readers can get to know her better.
Is there a book or series that, when you think back, helped define your childhood?
As an adolescent, I read all of the Anne of Green Gables books, drawn by Anne’s misfit, irrepressible spirit, then every book written by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I would disappear for days with these stories of smart, imaginative girls growing up in Prince Edward Island, Canada in the late 1800s.
My father, an adventurous pilot, became a quadriplegic in an accident when I was ten, a year after my parents divorced. When I was 14 and my sister was eight, he told us that he wanted to take a family trip, our first since his accident, and asked where we wanted to go. Books being my primary form of travel, I suggested Prince Edward Island. So Dad drove us up the east coast in his wheelchair-accessible van, from his home in Fort Lauderdale to PEI. A support team of flight attendant and pilot friends and various hired nurses joined us at various points along the way to make the trip possible.
It was a long, arduous trip, for my father most of all, and I grew homesick for the familiar order of life with my mother and stepfather. When we finally reached Prince Edward Island, it was tiny and highly commodified—the house that Green Gables was based on, Anne’s lake of shining waters and silvery white birches, all staked and labeled like a Candyland board.
Sarah Polley starred in the TV series based on Montgomery’s The Story Girl and describes Montgomery’s books in her powerful essay collection, Run Towards the Danger, as “nostalgia for a time that never existed… a fictional, glorified, all-white past”. Polley writes that Montgomery married a mentally ill, abusive minister, suffered from severe depression, and eventually took her life. I went on to read that Montgomery and her husband were addicted to opioids prescribed for depression, that she needed a “hypodermic” to write—an image I can’t dissociate from her books.
At 14, I felt only that whatever we’d driven so far for was not in our destination. But I must have had some sense of how meaningful the trip was for my father. In a photograph, I smile and grip his curled hand with intensity.
Four years after becoming a quadriplegic, my father drove us 2,000 miles on a great American (and Canadian) road trip. Remembering the trip recently, he said it showed him that adventures with us were still possible. It’s my father’s irrepressible spirit that interests me now.
Would you want any children in your life (yours or relatives’) to read those too? Or, what’s your philosophy on what children read?
A Jamaican American middle school student whom I tutored at the Brooklyn Public Library a few years back arrived with a copy of Anne of Green Gables and told me that she was loving it. I think what’s important is that kids have access and exposure to a wide variety of books in which they see themselves and their lives reflected, and adults with whom they can talk openly about difficult subject matter. I know that there are wonderful middle grade books with diverse characters that cultivate confidence, kindness, and a love of nature and help kids to navigate our present world.
I discovered some of my favorite writers in high school. What writers did you discover then? Either ones that were assigned for class or ones you found on your own.
I chose Faulkner’s Light in August for an independent reading assignment my sophomore year of high school and loved it without fully understanding it. I read it again in my MFA program and unconsciously imitated Faulkner’s use of lyricism and experimentation to render characters’ internal landscapes. In high school English classes, I also remember Crime and Punishment being a page-turner and liking The Metamorphosis, Catcher in the Rye, and The Scarlet Letter. But I found my favorite writers, the ones I’ve returned to over the years, in college—Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and Jeanette Winterson.
Are there any books that you read while writing your debut that helped shape the direction you took your own book?
Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids was a touchstone for Country of Under, and her music figures largely in the novel. At my book launch, drag artists performed to “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo” and “Because the Night”. Like Just Kids, Country of Under is a dual Künstlerroman in which Pilar and Río’s becoming is intertwined. Their stories are entangled, and in many ways, they—as in my epigraph—believe each other into being. I think of Patti Smith not only as the Godmother of Punk, but as the perfect Godmother for Río and Pilar with her wise, defiant straight talk and loyalty to a larger vision. Gloria Anzaldúa was from my hometown of Edinburg, Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, where the beginning of Country of Under is set, and Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza was a big influence. The themes and styles of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and Amanda Coplin’s The Orchardist, heavily researched socially conscious novels that don’t sacrifice lyricism, imagination, or characterization, also shaped Country of Under. And Lily King’s Writers & Lovers helped me to render Pilar and Río’s emotions in all of their youthful fullness, while layering in the equanimity of an older perspective.
What is a book you’ve read that you thought, Damn, I wish that was mine?
I’m just grateful that the books I love most, return to and re-read, exist and that I get to be in communion with them. Good books are so particular to the minds that create them. Country of Under is so intertwined with my own obsessions and the life journey that I was on over the ten years that I worked on it. I intensely love Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, which is dazzling in its expansive vision, emotional complexity, poetic beauty, and stylistic innovation. I wonder what a contemporary adaptation of The Waves, with the seven characters existing now, would be like.
What have you been reading lately that you can recommend to Debutiful readers?
I’ve been reading more memoirs because I’m working on a memoir. Two have been guides, one new and the other a re-read from 2012: Carvell Wallace’s gorgeous, searing, searching Another Word for Love and Jeanette Winterson’s fiery, luminous, and often humorous Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? A friend recommended Carter Sickels’ novel The Prettiest Star as an alternative to a certain book on Appalachia, and it was really moving. I’m doing two book events with SG Huerta, so recently read and was deeply moved by their collections of poetry. I’m currently reading and finding Enter Ghost by British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad very powerful. And for comic relief, I’m getting a kick out of Maria Bamford’s Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult.
And, finally, I have to ask… I’m sorry. What’s next? But wait! Only use three words.
Embracing radical uncertainty.