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National Book Award finalist Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters, highlights the world of the Zooks—four generations of women led by matriarch and herbalist Hermine—as they claim their place in the male-dominated world of rural Whiteheart, Michigan. From their cabin on an island in the swamp, also called The Waters, Hermine “Herself,” with the help of eleven-year-old Dorothy “Donkey,” tend to the land, ward away venomous Massasauga rattlesnakes, and collect roots, herbs, snakeskins, and their own blood to create home remedies. At once reverent and judgemental of Hermine, the god-fearing people of Whiteheart, for generations, have turned to her remedies for help with everything from fevers and aches to missed periods.
This tenuous relationship is worn thinner with the return of Rose Thorn, Dorothy’s mother and the idol of so many of Whiteheart’s armed and drunk men. Caught in the middle of isolated Hermine, lazy Rose Thorn, and the men encroaching on their island, is Donkey, coming of age. When Hermine is rendered incapable of making new medicines, Donkey must choose which traditions she wants—and needs—to continue.
The Waters has already received much acclaim, including a recent selection by Oprah as one of her “Most Anticipated Books of 2024,” In celebration, Campbell and I discussed women, men, community, and the forces that impact them below.
RS Deeren
In many ways, this book reads like a classic “great American novel,” with its larger-than-life characters, its traditional values-driven community vs. the black sheep character dynamics, and the generations-worth of history, expectations, and trauma influencing the lives of the characters. There is even a group of men at the beginning, introducing readers to the lore of Whiteheart and the Waters, which reads much like a classic Greek chorus. Can you share a little bit of what you were reading at various points of writing this book? Similarly, what books or authors do you believe The Waters is in conversation with?
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Thank you for taking the time to interview me, RS, and thank you for this question. There are wonderful moments in drafting a book when I realize that my book is indeed in conversation with another. This happened several times with The Waters. Most importantly, perhaps, is Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café, which is about a surprising kind of love coming to a small town, bringing joy and vibrancy with it. In The Ballad, it is the love of Miss Amelia, the old bootlegger and medicine woman for the dwarf, called Cousin Lymon, that gets the ball rolling. With the return of Marvin, Miss Amelia’s ex-con ex-husband, the love becomes a love triangle, a very potent literary tool. In The Waters, it’s a bit more complicated, with two (or more) love triangles, but the main one involves an eleven-year-old math prodigy, her wild mother, and a farmer down the road. There’s a place in the book into which I dropped a few paragraphs from The Ballad and then wrote them away, if that makes sense, a section about how people in a small town can begin to value themselves when community thrives. Another inspiration was Sula by Toni Morrison, which focuses on three generations of women, who are at turns ferocious and vulnerable; Morrison does this in 192 pages—amazing. Another book I kept turning to was The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson, a book of the modest adventures of an artist grandmother and her precocious six-year-old daughter Sophia spending the summer on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland. In The Waters, my character Rose Thorn owes something to Marianne Robinson’s Sylvie in Housekeeping—she’s that kind of mother. And the book owes a debt to True Grit. And because I have a character of the age to read children’s books, I found myself revisiting those stories, too, seeing something new in them, and they became important, including the Oz books, which are Rose’s favorite.
As for what I was reading when I wrote this book, the book took something like ten years to write so I read a world of things. I was particularly influenced by Michiganer Diane Seuss’s poetry. As far as the pathos of women in the wilderness, I read all the Little House on the Prairie books and loved The Marsh King’s Daughter, by Karen Dionne, about a girl who grew up isolated in northern Michigan.
RS Deeren
I drew a connection between math and the values of women and men in Whiteheart. Throughout the novel, Donkey finds herself stuck between the men and women in her life and trying to balance the values that each have. Unfairly, a mathematical and logical brain tend to be considered “masculine” traits, and Donkey’s favorite response to Herself’s idiosyncrasies is “be logical, ma’am.” When she’s most confused, Donkey leans heavily on math, particularly the guidance she finds in her favorite book, The Garden of Logic by A. Schweiss, who she wrongfully assumes is a man. You are a trained mathematician; can you speak to the role math and logic play in this book?
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Well, the math was in the book from the beginning; a girl who loved math was my starting point, and everything else formed around that. Math is Donkey’s superpower, and it is essential to the story in the most profound way, but I’m not sure I can logically trace what it means. If there’s a symbol for the book, it’s the ouroboros, the snake eating its tail—a symbol of renewal and also infinity, the latter being something Donkey fears—but that symbol appears only as a hint in Chapter Seven. I think it’s fair to say mathematics is a masculine study, in that it is analytical, it is about discernment, and right and wrong; mathematics aspires to the spiritual, as opposed to being earthy or soulful. Of course, women can be as masculine as men sometimes, and I think what I’m seeing in Donkey is that she has grown up surrounded by women in an intensely feminine environment of fertility and healing, and so she naturally craves the masculinity of men’s bodies and mathematics to balance that.
Masculinity is very much an issue in the book, and I suspect folks would tire quickly of any explicit explanation, but it’s easy to see that each of the women is working her masculine aspect: Hermine is as authoritative as any man in her way and always carries her stick. Rose Thorn projects her masculinity onto Titus, the man she loves. There are plenty of elements that got worked out of the book during a long period of writing (e.g., I had various burials and more animals in earlier versions), but the math stayed and felt meaningful, and I hope it feels organically connected to other elements, such as the snake that appears in the story.
RS Deeren
Women take on so many roles and are given so many titles throughout this novel: healer, mother, grandmother, aunt, sister, slut, savior, daughter, demon. Donkey witnesses so many of the women in her life take on numerous roles throughout. Part of this novel follows her coming of age and, even at only eleven, she’s forced to see what womanhood might hold for her. Maybe an unfair question: to the people of Whiteheart, what is a woman and what is her role? How do the Zooks meet and shirk these expectations?
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Women, glorious, women, in all their variety and iterations! If Blake is right that the whole world can be seen in a grain of sand, then a diverse family of women can certainly contain the world. The book calls out for women to do what they want, and I should add that they should be what they want, as well. It’s hard enough to figure all that out (what they/ we want) apart from societal expectations, but maybe my characters have a little more leeway than women ordinarily do, a little more likelihood of becoming who they are. Within the family, the women put demands on one another: to be a proper mother, to honor the family’s healing project, to be educated in the right way, to be normal, to eat a healthy diet. The expectations from the outside are more problematic because the people of the town demand contradictory things from the women, and maybe that’s true of society’s treatment of women in general. They want the women to heal them, and that healing requires that the women stay true to themselves; but they want the women to appear more like the men, or at least more like the mainstream women, to behave according to society’s rules, to not say surprising things. Maybe this is happening in relationships all the time: one partner says to the other: I love you and need you just the way you are, and simultaneously, Stop being weird and be more like me (and don’t disagree with me.)
RS Deeren
On the other side of the coin, the men of Whiteheart are rarely, if ever, seen without a gun. The men are also framed by who their fathers and grandfathers were, or what they have done for Whiteheart. Their presence is looming and lurking. Toxic masculinity is like a generational illness in this novel but, in many ways, these men are victims of the illness they inherited. Do the men of Whiteheart have a shot at redemption?
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Men, glorious men, let them have more iterations than they do! I might say that the whole book is about the redemption of men. Even as it is about the durability and necessity of women. Men and women, these extreme expressions of the masculine and feminine, are probably here to stay, despite all our bending and melding of genders. You forgot to mention that the men of The Waters work very hard—that is a big part of the masculine identity in this town. As the story opens, the men are confused and seem to be behaving in ways that might be dangerous, and when I began to write, I wanted the women to win the contest I thought I was setting up between men and women, but my writer self is a better soul than my planning self, and that wasn’t what I wrote. The final book is a coming together of men and women, it is even a path through the wilderness of gender, opening up into a better and larger place—not a perfect place, but a place where all genders can be living a story about the community that they can believe in.
And while I am not God, and Titus Clay is not Job, I am putting Titus through hell for a good reason. He will be a better man after he is tested and forged in the fire.
RS Deeren
A woman’s right to her own body is the core of this novel. Herself has gained notoriety for her ability to “help” women, even for those who would publicly decry this help. Rose Thorn has wavering ideas on this. Donkey, too. Did the repeal of Roe v. Wade influence this aspect of the novel?
Bonnie Jo Campbell
The repeal of Roe v. Wade has been a horror show for many of us, but the novel was pretty much in the can by the time that actually happened. It’s safe to say, though, that its imminent repeal was in the air, and my cousin Mimi Lipson, a writer, calls this book “The Great Abortion Novel,” and the issue was on my mind in every scene in the book, though it is not overtly expressed. I don’t take on the issue in the narration as a polemic, but the characters are all grappling with their feelings about it.
Speaking outside of the novel, the whole real-life scenario is a bit much. Neither liberals nor conservatives much like abortion, but plenty of folks in both groups have them performed, probably in equal numbers—they’re just arguing about what punishment should be doled out to those unfortunate women who need them and those who help meet the need. But people are so caught up that there’s no talking it through, and demanding people be rational doesn’t help. Looking back in history we can see times when people were so entirely caught up in a cultural complex as they are now—think Hitler’s Germany—and we have reason to worry, also reason to keep trying to find ways through the morass. Fiction seems to be the best place to do this, and many have done a great job of it (Joyce Carol Oates, John Irving, and Jennifer Haigh, to name a few). In The Waters I’ve tried to work earnestly through ways in which both sides of the political divide can come together.
RS Deeren
For all the charged poles in this novel, between men and women, men and men, women and women, there is a core of community. Everyone needs someone at some time in Whiteheart: Titus Jr. needs Rose Thorn; Donkey needs Herself and vice versa; even the religious women who denounce Herself as a witch need her cures when they “get in trouble.” What is the role of community in Whiteheart?
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Community is determined by place and landscape—we are all in something together in all our variety, not by kinship or by like-mindedness, and so it isn’t surprising that most communities contain expressions of all the larger troubles of the nation. Community is a puzzle, and all the pieces—all the people—have to be included to make it whole, whether we like it or not. Even the people we lock away are a part, even people who have died are a part—those people live in the memories of those who remain. American traditions of individualism, self-reliance, and distrust of government, make it so community is a little harder to achieve here, even in a homogeneous place like Whiteheart.
RS Deeren
The Waters and the island are home to generations of Zook women: Herself and Donkey, and for a time, Primrose, Molly, and Rose Thorn. It makes up much of their identity, even if they try to define themselves away from the place. Off the island, the people of Whiteheart want to push Herself off her island. How do the places and people of The Waters maintain their identities in a world that is changing and slowly creeping in on them?
Bonnie Jo Campbell
One of the conceits of my fiction—I do what I want, as a writer!—is that people often are the landscape, or the physical embodiment of it. In my novel Once Upon a River, a girl behaves like and identifies with a Michigan river; in Q Road, a young woman feels so connected to the land of her ancestors that she marries a farmer in order to legally own his piece of it. The Waters is a story of women who are the swamp, through and through, with all the stink and lushness and fertility and uncertainty—the very ground is unstable and might swallow up a hapless wanderer. And because the women are the swamp, if they are forced to leave their place, they will not be who they are, and that is a kind of death, for sure. Maybe development and displacement are inevitable, but I hope not in their lifetime!
RS Deeren
You’ve said before that you’re starting to recognize a distinct “rural Michigan” voice in fiction. Care to elaborate on that? What does The Waters add to this voice?
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Heck, somebody else is going to have to answer that question. When I said before that I could recognize a distinct Michigan voice, it was because I saw it in your fiction, RS. I guess, I know it when I see it. If I can hope for anything, it’s that I’ve mythologized my rural Michigan people and created a memorable story that rises out of that landscape, and then I hope that the story is universal. Sharon Blackie, a British mythologist and psychologist claims that “All Myth is Local,” and maybe that is the very thing that makes it universal.
FICTION
The Waters
By Bonnie Jo Campbell
W. W. Norton & Company
Published January 9, 2023
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