Interview with women’s fiction author Heather G. Marshall

Novelist Heather G. Marshall is chatting with me about her new women’s literary fiction, When the Ocean Flies.

During her virtual book tour, Heather will be giving away a $20 Amazon or Barnes and Noble (winner’s choice) gift card to a lucky randomly drawn winner. To be entered for a chance to win, use the form below. To increase your chances of winning, feel free to visit her other tour stops and enter there, too!

Bio:
Heather G. Marshall is an adoptee, author, speaker, teacher, coach, and traveler. Her short fiction has been published in a variety of journals, including Black Middens: New Writing Scotland, and Quarried, an anthology of the best of three decades of Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel. Her first novel, The Thorn Tree, released in 2014 (MP Publishing). Her TED talk, “Letting Go of Expectations,” centers around her adoption and reunion. Originally from Scotland, Heather is currently based in Massachusetts.

Welcome, Heather. What inspired you to write this book?
I’m an adoptee. I found my biological parents when I was in my 30s. The reunion process brought up lots of questions for me—who am I and what even makes me who I am? How true is the narrative that we believe about ourselves—the one we are given by the people we grow up amid, by time and place? Can we change it? Insert a plot twist?

I read a lot about the adoption experience from the adoptee perspective, and I knew I wanted to write about it, too, but that I wanted something larger (and more compelling) than my own life. I wanted to write fiction, not memoir.

I wanted to explore who we are as individuals and women, what causes us to alter ourselves for the promise of acceptance and belonging, how we can connect even over huge gaps in time and geographical distance, and how we might heal and live full and satisfying lives.

Excerpt from When the Ocean Flies:
I’m including the opening of the book:

The beginning of her story is buried. Pieces of it dot the landscape, like a body severed and scattered: one shard in the basement of the House of Records in Edinburgh, another beneath the tidewaters that swayed her mother to and fro, and the last on the island where it all began, held only by her grandmother, whom she has never met. Decades have passed, now, and these pieces have fossilized, years of detritus accumulated over them. Still they are there. Buried, silent, waiting until something in her bones, in her soft marrow, calls her home.

Excerpt from
When the Ocean Flies
Heather G. Marshall
This material may be protected by copyright.

What exciting project are you working on next?
I’m working on a few projects—some creative nonfiction and essays surrounding the themes being an adoptee, choosing a soul-satisfying life, late-life coming-of-age; I’m also working on a new novel that includes one of the characters from When the Ocean Flies. She’s not at a nice person in the book, but it turns out she has had her own challenges and has a few secrets that have contributed to who she becomes and how she behaves in the novel.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I wrote all my life and got my undergraduate degree in English and Journalism but still didn’t consider myself a ‘real’ writer. It wasn’t until I started my MFA in Creative Writing that I saw myself as a writer and fully committed to it.

Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I like health insurance and other perks of having a ‘day job’, so I have one of those, but it has a flexible schedule that allows me to as much as I want. After years of being a teacher and a single parent, the open space of being single (and no longer teaching) and with adult children means I don’t have to wedge writing in between everything else. For years, I got up at 4 or 4:30 every morning and wrote until I had to get my children up for school and head out to work. Now, my schedule allows me to sleep until I wake up naturally and have time to write before I do anything else. It is delightful!

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I love research and I often go down rabbit holes, looking for something to connect to what I’m writing. Usually, it doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m writing, on the surface. I just feel the connection on a gut level and roll with it. For instance, in one of my stories, an elderly woman has escaped her house for a last long hike, and I wanted some sort of nature connection other than just what she was seeing as she walks. I ended up with sheep—she feels this deep connection with them that reveals things about who she is and where she is in her life. 

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a large-animal vet. I loved the idea of living in the countryside and working with farm animals. I still love the idea of living in the countryside and all kinds of animals. Not so much the vet part.

Links:
Website | Instagram | Substack | Bookshop | Amazon

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