Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore

In this episode Brett sits down with Charlotte McConaghy to discuss her new book, 'Wild Dark Shore'. They talk about the island that inspired the fictional one from the novel, the way she visualizes her characters, the far reaching effects of climate change, and what it all affects beyond us. 

Charlotte's website:

https://www.charlottemcconaghy.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macquarie_Island

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Transcript

Brett Benner: 0:00

Hello everybody, it's Brett Benner, and welcome to another episode of. Behind the stack. I can't even believe we're already into March, but we are and March and April, for those of you readers out there it's just insane. It's insane how many books are being published in the next two months. I feel like we have effectively a year's worth of books coming out in the next two months, and it's crazy, crazy, crazy. I wanted to highlight a couple of them before we get into, today's conversation. Coming out today, March 4th is Chloe Dalton's Raising Hare which is a nonfiction book, which I read and it's just fantastic. Chloe Dalton, who is a British writer and political advisor, she, during the covid lockdown, was staying in a family home in the English countryside, and she rescued a newborn hare and. Against all good advice begins to raise this hare and how it changes her life and going through the process and following this hare through its life. It's really beautiful. It's such a, tender and just a lovely, lovely, lovely book. So I would highly recommend that. Also, I know a lot of people are looking forward to Dream Count, By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie which is her follow up. Book to Americanah. and it's been, actually been, it's been years since we've seen another book from her. It's basically about four women navigating life during the pandemic. so that is out today as well. I. And then the one other book that I wanted to talk about was called Woodworking by Emily St. James, which is about a trans woman who is a teacher who discovers a kind of unlikely ally in another trans individual who happens to be one of her students. I'm reading it now. It's really good. It's incredibly engaging. It's really funny. So I would check that as well. And of course all of these will be on my bookshop.org page, so please check that out. Now a little bit about today's author. I am so thrilled to be sitting down with Charlotte McConaghy, who has written her latest book, Wild Dark Shore, which is also out today. A little bit about Charlotte. She is the author of The New York Times Bestseller Once There Were Wolves, which was the winner of the indie book Award for fiction in 2022, and it's currently being developed for television. Also, the International Bestseller Migrations, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the year and the amazon.com best fiction book of the year for 2020, which has been translated into more than 20 languages and is being adapted for film. She has both a graduate degree in screenwriting and a master's degree in Screen Arts, and she lives in Sydney with her partner and two children. So I hope you enjoy this episode of Behind the Stack. I can't even tell you how happy I am to have Charlotte McConaughey here, here today. First of all, I read this book early enough that I feel like I went crazy and I was like, I have to have you on. I had to talk to you about this. and then for other reasons that I'll explain as we get into the book, but, your new book, wild, dark Shore. It is so fantastic. It's just absolutely beautiful. It's heartbreaking and breathtaking. So congratulations. It's really, really, really wonderful.

Charlotte McConaghy: 3:40

Thank you so much. It's so nice to be here to chat with you today.

Brett Benner: 3:43

So I, I'd love to ask you, first of all, do you have, and I'm, I'm sure you're starting to gear up for this. Do do you have an elevator pitch for the book?

Charlotte McConaghy: 3:50

I'll try. I'll, I'll, let's give it a go. Um. So the book is about Dominic Salt and his three children, who are the caretakers of a very small remote island out, down near Antarctica. They're alone on this island because it's become very dangerous, and uninhabitable due to rising sea levels. so they're sort of packing up to leave, until a one night. During a terrible storm, a woman washes ashore and she's a very mysterious figure. She, they don't know why she's there or how she got there. her name's Rowan. She also starts to realize that the salts are keeping secrets from her. So it's a bit of, a bit of a, uh, I'd say a gothic romantic mystery. It explores, I think, um, the interconnectedness of all living things, but also looks at, how far we are sort of willing to go for the people we love.

Brett Benner: 4:42

Is it too punny to ask you? Uh, what was the seed of the story for you?

Charlotte McConaghy: 4:48

Not at all. It's excellent. Um, so it sort of started in, I would say there were two seeds. Mm-hmm. Um, the first, the very first seed was, so this is a little, nugget of story that finds its way into the, into the book. The youngest son Ollie tells the stories of seeds and one of them is the story of the Wallay pine, which is an Australian, tree that is extremely old. It's ancient. They, we call it the dinosaur trees. And for millions of years we thought it was extinct. And then randomly, during the nineties, a someone just stumbled across this secret, grove of them in a forest. And it was really kind of extraordinary because. It was like they had come back to life straight out of the dinosaur period. And, it's been kept secret where they are. You can't go and look at them. They've, they've been, sort of withheld from the public to keep them safe. And then recently during the horrific wildfires that we had here. The fires were approaching these, you know, incredibly precious, rare trees. And it was all over the news at the time. these kind of amazing, emergency fire, fighters, came down from helicopters like they were winched down into the forest and had to set up this kind of protective perimeter to save these trees from the fires. This whole story was just kind of extraordinary to me, the idea of how far we will go and what are the things that we are willing to save. And so I sort of had this idea of, um, I wanted to use that somehow and I started to think about, plants biodiversity. And then I read the story of, the global seed vault in Falbo. Mm-hmm. Uh, which is set up, as a world's kind of, the world's backup for all the, the, humanities food sources. All the seeds are up there in case we ever need them after some terrible emergency. but, and, and this, this vault is meant to survive, you know? Hundreds of years into the future to protect us. But the one thing that they hadn't kind of prepared for was melting permafrost. And the, the whole tunnel to this vault started flooding. And so that just kind of gave me this whole idea. I really wanted to write about a seed vault that was flooding. and I ended up deciding not to, to set the book on spell Bard, because there was no way I would ever be able to get there. It was right when co in the middle of Covid or this idea was happening. Um, so I needed to figure out where I could put it. And then I discovered this, well, I had known about Macquarie Island for a while, but I, I looked into it and it was just kind of perfect. All of a sudden, there's this incredible island down, halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica, and it's an extraordinary place. And so I decided to base my island on Macquarie. I fictionalized it because I needed to put the seed vault there. And yeah, it kind of just went from there.

Brett Benner: 7:50

And, and didn't you, um, in terms of research, didn't you go for a while with your family to Macquarie Island?

Charlotte McConaghy: 7:55

can you talk

Brett Benner: 7:56

a little bit about that and also if, if you can explain for our listeners and viewers. I did a deep dive on it when I was researching this and also just when I finished the book, but if you could just talk about that and the diversity of kind of the mammals of the birds on the island, that would be awesome.

Charlotte McConaghy: 8:10

Yeah, sure. So, yes. So my partner and I, well, I realized I was writing this book and it was just, I was struggling because I really needed to, to see it. I needed to experience this island. And so we looked, I looked into it and it was, there was one boat that was headed there. Um, at the end of the year it was, you get one opportunity to go. And so even though we had a 1-year-old at the time, I knew this would be our, my only chance to go before the book was due. So we just decided to go for it. I contacted the, um, the boat and asked them if it was. Within the realm of possibility to take a baby on what could be potentially a very perilous journey. And they said they'd never done it before, but if I was willing to do it, then they were willing to do it. Wow. And so it was, it was genuinely terrifying. I, I wandered many times if I was, you know, making a terrible mistake in taking him down there because it's, you know, it's very remote and there's no. Get home. You can't just leave the boat. Um, if things go awry, if it was truly terrible, we could potentially get a helicopter down there to evacuate us out. But you know. That's a big deal anyway. It's not like

Brett Benner: 9:32

an Uber.

Charlotte McConaghy: 9:33

No, absolutely not. Um, luckily everything went wonderfully. There was no, there was no dramas. It was amazing weather. We had an incredible time. Macquarie is. Truly like nowhere else on this planet, I, I will never see anything like it again. You step off onto black sand and there are elephant seals. Next to your feet. There's penguins that waddle up to say hello. There's, there was a giant, petrell that kind of like flew down over our heads and then landed in the ocean right next to us. There's albatross flying around. It's, it's just an incredible place. It's full of, just really kind of untouched wildlife. But the thing about, Macquarie is that in fact, it almost was completely destroyed by, the oil trade back in the 18 hundreds. So it has a really kind of, very sad, grim history, of oil exploitation. And they nearly wiped out the whole seal population, most of the penguins. And so you can actually sort of feel that when you, when you go onto the island, it's, it's. Incredibly beautiful, but it also has this feeling of being very haunted. and that's something that I would not have known had I not gone there and taken the effort to go there. And so that kind of really ended up, inspiring the feel of the novel.

Brett Benner: 10:59

Wow. Where did you guys stay? Like where did they house you when you went?

Charlotte McConaghy: 11:05

So you can't stay on the island, you have to stay on the boat and you just do. Oh, wow. Yeah. You, because it's not, it's completely uninhabited except for one, there's a science base. Um, and so there's only about 20 people on the base, I believe, at a time. Um, and they were completely closed to us because of Covid. They couldn't have any outside. People coming to, to sort of see them, they had to protect their, their little tiny population. So we were just there. and you can only kind of go for a few days. Like they don't allow sort of long, long visits. And you've gotta be really careful about, you can't take anything onto the island. You've gotta scrub your boots before and after, so you're not bringing on any kind of, contaminants to the environment. Wow. Yeah.

Brett Benner: 11:48

And so, okay, so then you had your place, you had your idea, and then how did you build the idea for, uh, well for starters, this family, what was your impetus with them? I mean, let's like, talk about them really quick. You know, we talked about Dominic and the, he, his, he's widowed. Yes. Um, which we know at the start. And he has three children Orly who you've spoken about already is the youngest who's very bookish and, um, kind of obsessed with seeds and the trees and the whole wildlife. And then there's Fen, who's the middle child, 17, and she's. At least the start of this. Really The only girl on the island. Yep. And then there's raf, is that how we pronounce his name?

Charlotte McConaghy: 12:31

Yeah, RAF the

Brett Benner: 12:32

oldest. Yeah. And so I wondered two things, like how did you start to construct this family? And I also wondered, in regards to these three kids. Was there something specific that you wanted these three kids to be representative of in your writing or a greater role? I mean, Orly clearly has a very distinct role in the book, but I wasn't sure about the other two.

Charlotte McConaghy: 12:56

Yeah, that's an interesting question. Um, yeah, so, so Raf I think is, look, the, I think the idea about this family is that they were. There are family who are kind of deeply wounded by the loss of their mother. They all carry that loss in different ways. They're, you know, they have different kind of levels of trauma around it. But they are all certainly kind of clinging to this memory of her. Dominic is, I mean, he, he literally sees her ghost. He's haunted by. Because of the, the way in which she died. He has a lot of unresolved trauma around that. Um. Raf I think really holds on his mother as well. He's got a lot of rage, that he doesn't really know how to manage. He just punches a punching bag'cause it's what his dad's told him to do. He hasn't been taught how to kind of express his emotions or his feelings. He's got other losses too, that have, that are more recent on the, on the island and. I really, I really loved for him that he is naturally very gifted with music, so he loves, to play the violin and specifically loves trying to make whale song out of the violin. So that's kind of a really creative outlet for him. He goes out looking for whales and to try and record the whale song. And then, yeah, as you said, there's Fen who's also struggling with being, a young woman who's trying to become herself on this very isolated island with no, nobody, her own age. She actually now lives with the seals. She's left the lighthouse that her family stay in, and she goes, and she, she spends a lot of time down on the beach with the seals. She kind of loves being in the water, and I think that's also a bit of a response to. Particular traumas and wounds that she's carrying, um, fears in terms of what they represent. I don't know. I, I wanted them to be a family that think deep down beneath all the kind of struggles that they have, they needed to be deeply loving and bonded with each other. I, I, I really wanted them to be. A family who just kind of adore each other, um mm-hmm. And, and, and needed to kind of grapple with their differences beyond that as a starting place. But, you know, really struggling with being, not being able to communicate and not knowing how to kind of manage their various. Traumas and wounds, um, with a, with a father who doesn't know how to talk about anything. Um, so Rowan's really a catalyst for them. I like to map them all out, you know, I, I have pictures of them and I try to think about, um, how they kind of fit into a, a bigger picture and how they kind of will work together and what they'll bring to the story and what dynamic they might bring.

Brett Benner: 15:49

And when you said pictures, do you have visualizations of each of them and what you think they would look like?

Charlotte McConaghy: 15:53

Yeah. I like to choose faces, actors that I think might be, um, might kind of have the essence. It's, it's when I can kind of imagine them with bodies as people. Yes. Sometimes it brings little, little textural details that you wouldn't otherwise be able to come up with. A

Brett Benner: 16:12

hundred percent.

Charlotte McConaghy: 16:13

Yeah. I

Brett Benner: 16:14

think it's interesting too, as a reader sometimes, because you read these characters and you have ideas of these characters. Sometimes I'll read and it's so descriptive, and this was one of these circumstances, I can't always get the face necessarily. Isn't that interesting? I never seen, but I could get. Yeah. But I get the rest of it. I get the body, I get the way it moves. I hear that voice and I have to tell you that I, um, I happen to listen to this as well. And first of all, I. It's an incredibly d well done book on tape. Have you heard it at all?

Charlotte McConaghy: 16:49

Um, I've heard little bits of it. I haven't sat and listened to the whole thing'cause I feel too embarrassed.

Brett Benner: 16:56

Really?

Charlotte McConaghy: 16:57

Not by them. They're amazing. Yes. Amazing. But by my, my own writing, I, there's something about it that I. Find a little bit freaky.

Brett Benner: 17:06

That's interesting. So beyond, are you someone that, you know, you'll do your rewrites, you get your edits, you go through the process, but once it's done, it's done and you're like, put it away.

Charlotte McConaghy: 17:14

Yeah. I mean, I'll ha I'll, I'll, I'm sure I'll be reading out, you know, bits of this many times to come. Um, but yeah, it will probably be a little while before I'll be able to pick it up and just start reading because I live in terror that I've like left in something bad or like badly written or I'll see a mistake or

Brett Benner: 17:35

Well, Anne Patchett talks about that when she had, you know, she just put out this annotated version of, bel Canto and a lot of it is her going through and saying like, this was horrible. Like, why did I write that? Oh God, I

Charlotte McConaghy: 17:47

love that.

Brett Benner: 17:48

So I don't think you're alone, but it's also like you hear a lot of actors will, will not watch the performance once it's finished. You know, they're in it, but they'll ne like, I think it would be. Personally excruciating to sit through a premiere of a movie or something. I agree with all those people. And sharing it, especially when you've been so vulnerable and it's much Yeah. Like writing you, you are sharing something and it's a very vulnerable thing you've done and suddenly it's like, oh, okay. Yeah.

Charlotte McConaghy: 18:13

Yeah. Whereas if you, if you give it enough time, like I can kind of look back at migrations now and read it and. Not that I've sat down and read the whole thing, but I can kind of, I pick up, you know, pages of it and, and, and it's separate enough from me now that it doesn't even feel like me on the page. It's kind of an interesting experience.

Brett Benner: 18:32

You get away from it enough.

Charlotte McConaghy: 18:33

Yeah.

Brett Benner: 18:34

It, it'll be interesting, I think for you one day if your son chooses to read. Your stuff and, and, and his impression. But to tell you anyway, the, the audio book is, is wonderful and all of the readers actors are fantastic. And there's a man named Cooper Mortlock who in particular, who reads Dominic and it's so evocative and he does, it's really great. So anyway, it's really wonderful. So let's talk a little bit about Rowan because first of all, I loved all these characters, but I found her so, so interesting and she, to me so much is the heart of this book. Um, and like you've talked about earlier, in terms of being a catalyst, and I think she's a catalyst for all of them. Yeah. In terms of what she opens up in each of them. So can you talk to about her a little bit?

Charlotte McConaghy: 19:23

Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what I wanted her to be. I, I sort of had this feeling like there would, there's no point to the story if she doesn't come and change all of their lives in some way, in, in a meaningful way. Rowan is. She's a very, I would say she's a very, practical, capable, handy person. She's a builder by trade. and in some ways I really liked kind of inverting the, I guess, stereotypical, gender roles of Dominic and role, and I kind of swapped them a little bit in, in, in some elements. She's lived through a lot, I guess, in her life, and she has some kind of old wounds that she's trying to recover from, and I think they inform how she sort of, um, relates to the world. Now. She's been through, and this is, I don't think this is really a spoiler. She's, she's recently lost her house, to a fire. This is a house that she spent her whole life building herself with her own hands. And so it's a, it's a profound loss to her. Um, and she's, it's sort of left her feeling very jaded and pessimistic about the world and, and what's to come. And she's given up hoping for anything about anything. She's very protective of herself in terms of her relationships. She decided a long time ago that she wouldn't, um, have children because. She doesn't wanna live in a world where she may not be able to keep them safe. And I think that's a really heartbreaking decision that a lot of people are thinking about these days in terms of our climate crisis and whether or not we do bring children into it. So I, I sort of wanted her to be, a voice for that concern. While also taking her through a journey of, I guess discovering that at the end of the world, love should grow instead of shrink. And that, that kind of love can be worth the risk.

Brett Benner: 21:20

Do you find yourself, uh, let me rephrase it and say this, I imagined that much of her mindset in certain ways is Charlotte's mindset in certain ways in regards to climate. Is that true?

Charlotte McConaghy: 21:36

Yeah, I think she's probably the side of me that's most pessimistic. Um, I move between the two versions of myself. I move between feeling very depressed about the whole thing and like it is just all going downhill and then I kind of swing back to, no, you know, we need to have. Purpose around this and we can't give up yet. And, you know, feeling like our responsibility to the planet is, that we need to live as well as we can with, as, as, as positive an impact as we can. So thinking about how, what that means for our life choices, definitely I think about those things for sure. I, I do have children though, I, I, that, that one for me is, was not. Not negotiable. I've always known yeah, to have children. But I, it concerns me the, all these things that Rowan thinks about. You know, I, I, I think about those things too. I think about what, what children mean to the planet and what, what dangers the planet will, you know, inflict on my kids and how I'm gonna kind of prepare them for that and what I need to teach them about. Loss and impermanence and how, how do we talk to these kids about this?

Brett Benner: 22:46

Yeah. And, and we're experiencing so much of this in this accelerating real time.

Charlotte McConaghy: 22:53

Yeah.

Brett Benner: 22:53

you know, I, I was reading this while the fires in Los Angeles happened. I was driving from LA with my daughter. We were going to the desert to get out of Los Angeles.

23:08

Mm-hmm.

Brett Benner: 23:09

Um, and it wasn't that our home in particular was in direct line with where the fires were headed, but however it was so smoky and the kind of everything that was happening, and you've been through that. And so I did wanna read this. One really quick passage because it's talking about what you've already brought up with, Rowan losing her home. But it, so, uh, affected me because you captured something. So, beautifully. That I think is hard to really, convey to people the magnitude of it. But, she says here, I cry for the forest, for the trees and the shrubs, and for all who lived within it. So many species, so many creatures. I'd come down here to look for each day and delight in the glimpses I caught. I cry for my life here in this little patch of paradise for the safety I felt for the woman I was while living here. I fed the mag pies each evening in the spot. I waited for the passage of mother Wombat and her baby amling. Slowly by. Her burrow was here somewhere. I stopped crying and stand look unsure why I would do this to myself, and he remains. I made fine, will only make it worse. But I lift the sheet of tin and rested against the burned husk of a tree. I can see the opening of the burrow and the earth. I get down on my knees, then onto my stomach, pressing my whole body flat into the. It just that image and that whole scene reminded me so much of watching these people showing back up to their, what was left of their homes and their neighborhoods. And you know, I had a very dear friend who texted me that second morning and said, you know. We lost everything. Mm-hmm. This was the house that I raised our children in. This was the home. This was where our school was, that we walked our children to school every day, and the park that they played in every afternoon and. She finished it with we'll move on and, and it's also a testament in this book. It does too, because I think it all speaks to perseverance in the face of this incredible adversity that we're all entering into now.

Charlotte McConaghy: 25:21

Yeah, that's right. Oh, it's so heartbreaking, isn't it? But it is. It's about, yeah, we just kind of have to keep going. We've, there's no, there's no other choice. Now it's, everything will start to get harder and yeah, we're gonna have to teach our kids how to keep going.

Brett Benner: 25:36

Yeah. And I do have the one thing, I do have faith despite what's happening in the US right now, which is so unreal. But you know, if we've learned anything, progress does move forward. And I just hope that too many things don't continue to spiral out of control. Because before we can get, some sort of righting of the ship and ahead of it because too many of us now know what's happening and see it. And see it firsthand.

Charlotte McConaghy: 26:05

Yeah. And the danger with exactly, with going too far down the wrong path is that it becomes too emotionally difficult for us to figure out how to steer back the other way. And more and more of us will start to give up.

Brett Benner: 26:19

That's a hundred percent. With all of your books, there is a very big kind of, ecological connection or very much a connection with animals and there many times what's happening to them as a result of us.

Charlotte McConaghy: 26:37

Yeah.

Brett Benner: 26:38

That's something that's obviously very important to you.

Charlotte McConaghy: 26:40

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I just, I don't know, I just feel incredibly sad when I think about the impact we're having on the other creatures on this planet. and I think a lot of the, rhetoric around climate change and, and. Sort of slowing it down tends to be about how we are gonna save ourselves.

26:59

Mm-hmm.

Charlotte McConaghy: 27:00

And I just, I don't know. I suppose with my books, I, I like to try and decenter people a little bit and, and try to, really look at what, what impact this is having on wildlife. And, you know, plant life is big in Wild Duck shore as well. Just for their own sakes, rather than, you know, only a big idea about this book is what would we try and save if we had the chance? Would it only be things that could feed us and that would benefit us, or would we try to prioritize things that exist for their own sake? I don't know what the answer would be. I know there's a lot of people out there fighting for biodiversity because, you know, everything is incredibly interconnected. So it all does matter, but just purely for its own sake. I, I, I like to think that we would make a choice to save, you know, what we don't need.

Brett Benner: 27:54

going back to the three kids in this book I was talking to with someone and I said, they're remarkably well adjusted for everything that they're facing and the incredible amounts of grief and the incredible isolation and the incredible sense of loneliness. But they really do. Like I I, I really got through it and I was like. I'm shocked that one of them is not a serial killer after all this.

Charlotte McConaghy: 28:14

Are they kind of miraculous in that way, aren't they?

Brett Benner: 28:17

Well, they are, but I also think it's like what you're talking about. It's really a testament to the family and to each other. Um, even, even separate from Dominic, they're finding a way to survive. And that gave me hope too, because I thought, here's a very good example of. You know, pushed to extreme circumstances, they really are coming together.

Charlotte McConaghy: 28:41

Yeah. That's the thing. And I think also there's something about having to nurture somebody who's more vulnerable than you. So for them, well, for, for Raf and fan and Dom, it's, it's having to raise this little boy. They bring him with them when he's one. So they've got a baby on this island that they have to look after and they have to band together to do it. And I, I think there is something to be said for looking after something other than yourself, asking you to step up and just be okay within yourself for that little boy, you know, for four children. And that's what you have to do as parents. You've gotta be okay for your, for your kids.

Brett Benner: 29:24

coming back to. Climate change. Do you feel at all optimistic, I mean, even writing these stories, do you feel optimistic and you, you have children over your own in terms of reconciling for this future?

Charlotte McConaghy: 29:34

Um, yeah, I do. I have to work hard at feeling optimistic. And I don't know if it's. About that anymore? For me, I think it's more about just getting on with it. Yeah. Regardless of how I feel, we have to still be purposeful, you know, about what we're doing and we have to still make an effort. I think that's the main thing. And so hope helps with that because it can give us energy, it gives us enough energy to kind of be. Galvanized for the fight, but, I'd be lying if I said I felt it all the time. I, I do, I swing between, you know, emotions a lot. but I will keep, trying and I'll keep doing the best that I can. Um, because it's not just about us, it's about all the generations to come and it's about all our wild creatures and places That's right. That we haven't yet lost. We kind of don't have the luxury of giving up, of just, you know, losing hope. I don't, I don't think we've got that luxury.

Brett Benner: 30:31

Yeah, I, I completely agree with you. Well, Charlotte, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. This was just terrific. as I said before, I think the book is just fantastic. Wild, dark Shore. Get it, buy Independent if you can. It's truly a terrific book. So congratulations. And of course this will also be up on my bookshop.org page, along with Charlotte's other books, so you can check them all out there. but thanks again for joining me.