Robin Oliveira: Author Interview

A WILD AND HEAVENLY PLACE

NYT Best Seller Robin Oliveira’s latest book, A Wild and Heavenly Place, launched this month on the 13th, perfect timing for a cozy winter novel. A Wild And Heavenly Place is the historic and romantic tale of Samuel Fiddes, a destitute young man in Glasgow, Scotland in the late 19th century. After losing his parents to plague, he is in charge of his little sister, working hard at below-poverty wages to keep a roof over their heads and food in their bellies. One day, he serendipitously meets Hailey, a young woman from a wealthy family, who suddenly and unexpectedly lose all of their wealth and relocate to Seattle, Washington to build a new life. After falling in love, Samuel risks everything to find her across the globe in this burgeoning, new city.

A fellow Vermont College of Fine Arts alum, Robin Oliveira is the author of 3 novels. She holds a BA in Russian and studied at the Pushkin Language Institute in Moscow. She is a former registered nurse, specializing in critical care, and lives near Seattle.

I invited Robin to participate in an interview with me, which we conducted over email just as her book launched. What follows is our discussion.

Rachael W: I was markedly impressed by your relationship with Samuel as author and character. It almost seems, as the reader, who knows little about you personally, that the character, Samuel, is a part of you. You wrote and developed the other characters perfectly, but there was just something about Samuel that was different, more personal. How do you get to know your characters so well that you write about them so convincingly? Alternatively, what obstacles can get in the way of knowing a character and what they will do, the choices they’ll make? Has Samuel appeared in your other books, maybe in a different form or with a different name?

Robin O: I’d written from the male point of view before, however Samuel Fiddes IS close to my heart. I imbued him with the characteristics of all the good men I’ve admired in my life, young and old, who have been friends to me. Samuel is loyal, kind, whip smart, generous, full of integrity, and willing to do anything to ensure the safety and well-being of those he loves. In many ways he exaggerates those traits, as an ideal, though he does stumble as he tries to rebuild his life after a significant loss. One of the manifestations of his integrity is that Samuel makes community through his goodness, which is very important to me, personally, and very important in A WILD AND HEAVENLY PLACE.

The level of research necessary to be as detailed as I am in my novels gives me breathing room to spend time with the characters. I think a writer should aways be willing to be surprised, to ask why a character is doing something, what they want, how might they get what they want. I play with them by putting them in challenging situations to see how they will react, go down different avenues with them, make mistakes with them as I try to discover who they are. My most apt tool is one that the author Douglas Glover once posed to me when I struck an impasse with a character. I’ll pass it along here. When you are at an impasse with a character, ask yourself, What does their soul want? This simple but vital question gets at the heart of the emotional arc of any character. I ask this multiple times of each of the characters as I write the novel, which keeps the narrative thread intact.

Samuel Fiddes is unique among my characters. I had never met him until A WILD AND HEAVENLY PLACE.

RW: I loved the short interludes between each part, providing third party context for the times and the history. Did you write those, or were the ones from the Glasgow Herald or the Daily Intelligencer real excerpts that you were able to dig up? If you wrote them, how did you research current events in those times and places and match the language? If you found them, how easy was it to get these old newspaper articles?

RO: The epigraphs at the beginning of each of the five acts/parts of the novel are taken directly from newspapers and books of the era. It was very easy to find them. American Memory at the Library of Congress has many digitized newspapers from the last 150-200 years, with an excellent search function that allows you to focus on either dates or events. Newspapers can lead you to other resources. For instance, the epigraph from a travel guide I found because The Glasgow Herald reviewed the book, which I was then able to find in Gutenberg or Google Books. In the first draft I turned into my editor, I had epigraphs for each chapter, but she cut them in favor of including them only at the beginning of each section. I would have preferred to keep them all, but we writers only have control over so much.

RW: Tell me about your research process. In the acknowledgements, you mention a few people who helped in your journey. But I want to know what questions you started with, what you intended to find out or answer, what deviations you might’ve taken, and anything else you can share about the researching process. 

RO: I can best summarize my research process by saying that I do not outline, nor do I know when I begin writing what I might need to know to bring a story to life. I often know very little about my subject matter, so I don’t know what questions I am going to have, or the answers I will need. I do not have a period of research and then a period of writing. I wouldn’t know what the story needs. Research is ongoing. When I run into a roadblock—for instance, needing to know about coal mining in the Pacific Northwest—I stop writing and dive in, consulting every available resource, both primary and secondary. I have utilized nonfiction books, JSTOR articles, historical maps, newspapers, diaries, court transcripts, railroad and ship timetables, old city directories, advertisements, photographs, contemporary travel guides. In addition, I speak to experts in their fields, both over the phone and in person. I have flown to France to study the artifacts of Edgar Degas’s studios in the basement of the Musée d’Orsay, walked Civil War battlefields, traipsed over mountains looking for 19^th century mining artifacts, etc. What is fundamental to my process is that I will do whatever is necessary to understand the subject and the place that I am writing about. Research gives me story, and story gives me research. The two are symbiotic.

If I diverge from history, which is rare, I note it in my author’s note. Sometimes the needs of story and novel structure demand a deviation to make the novel sing. I remind myself that I am not writing history. I use history to bring the past to life. In A WILD AND HEAVELY PLACE, I moved an explosion in a coal mine to a different time period because it was necessary to echo an earlier event in the novel. In WINTER SISTERS, I moved the date of a catastrophic storm. The goal is an excellent novel, a vibrant invocation of the past, a story that haunts the reader after they have finished the book. Sometimes divergence is necessary.

RW: Did you know much about ship building before writing this book, or was that also part of your research? What made you decide that Samuel was a ship builder as opposed to any other possible trades he could’ve done at that time?

RO: I knew about shipbuilding because during the pandemic my husband and I were working with a shipbuilder to build our first boat. Some of the conversations that Samuel has about the craft are lifted directly from conversations with our shipbuilder. One of the goals of research for any novel is to find connections that strengthen the story. For this novel, in traveling to Scotland, I learned that the best ships in the world were built on the River Clyde, the river that flows through Glasgow. “Clyde Built” was the shorthand for excellence in late 19^th and 20^th century shipbuilding. When I learned that in 1879 Seattle there were three major shipyards in a town of only 3,000 people, Voila! Connection! So, Samuel got his profession.

RW: On page 106, you write, “Aside from Bonnie Atherton, the six hundred citizens of Newcastle were not welcoming.” I think that any community the MacIntyre family moved to would’ve had a a faction of gossipers that are unfriendly. But for those of us familiar with the Seattle Freeze, the stereotype that Seattleites are cold and unfriendly, it’s unsurprising that Hailey’s only friend is from California. Based on your research about Seattle’s history, how do you explain the Seattle Freeze? Do you think it’s true or an unfair generalization? 

RO: Ha! My personal experience living in the Pacific Northwest is that the Seattle Freeze is part myth and part function of the hibernation that occurs every Fall, Winter, and Spring due to the heavy rain, darkness, and gray skies. The effort of entertaining or socializing can be too much when there is too little light in the day. Summertime brings about the best in us, with its long days and big skies. Remember, in the novel, Seattle was made up of immigrants. The town was young, and Newcastle even younger. Neither could have formed a cohesive behavior or identity yet. I put it down to the weather. And in the MacIntyres’ case, a function of class. They arrived with the trappings of wealth to a primitive coal town recently cut out of the wilderness. The gap in social standing was significant, prompting division.

RW: On page 247, you write, “After an oppressive November and December filled with incessant rain, the whole town was astonished when six feet of snow fell over a period of one week in mid-January. The Indians had no collective memory of such an event ever occurring.” I laughed out loud because when I lived in Seattle in the winter of 2019, we had a major blizzard and everyone said the same thing: “This doesn’t happen here.”  I thought to myself, they’ve been saying that for over 130 years! Is snow something that really does happen more frequently than anyone wants to admit or is this a funny coincidence?

RO: Snow really doesn’t happen here that often. And six feet of it? Unheard of. Except for once. The storm in the novel was historic, a rare meteorological hiccup that did indeed bury Seattle and cause roofs to cave in.

RW: In Part 4, you write a lot about race relations in Seattle in the late 19th century. It varies from other parts of the country in that it is less confrontational, particularly from the south, but that racism is still alive and well. There is a lot of anti-Asian sentiment in Seattle in the 1880’s. When we fast forward to today, Seattle is known for being a super progressive, liberal city. When I lived there, I recall many neighbors with anti-racist signage in front of their houses, but I couldn’t help notice the irony that there isn’t much diversity there. Where I lived in Ballard had once been a white-only neighborhood during redlining. How do you think Seattle has changed or stayed the same culturally when it comes to racism? 

RO: I can’t speak for all of Seattle, obviously, but I will say that racism has reared its ugly head in many ways in Seattle’s history. The Chinese were abruptly expelled from Seattle in a riot in 1886 over (doesn’t this sound present-day?) fears they would take white people’s jobs. Never mind that the Chinese had almost single handedly built a great deal of Seattle’s early infrastructure and without their labor, Seattle would have been handicapped in its early ambitions. Whites then wrote a law to keep the indigenous Indians from their ancestral hunting, farming, and camping grounds within the ever-expanding city limits, forcing them to beach their canoes on an island of ballast in the harbor and visit the city only during the day. In 1879, there were by census only eight African Americans in the city, but you can bet there was a newspaper editorial printed about how if more came to the city they would get the same ugly treatment meted out to the Chinese. Interestingly, Henry Yesler, a city founder and major rascal, employed many native Americans and sold land to African Americans when no one else would. And James Colman, another mover and shaker, had an excellent relationship with Chin Gee Hee, who provided Chinese labor to much of the city. And now?  According to Data USA, In 2021, there were 3.84 times more White (Non-Hispanic) residents (451k people) in Seattle, WA than any other race or ethnicity.

That said, I believe I am not the best person to address current racism in Seattle. Better to ask someone whose life has been unjustly disrupted economically and socially by their ethnicity or color of their skin. I wanted to include the subject of racism in the novel because it was complicated issue for the town then, part and parcel of its being. I like to hold a mirror to the past so that we can view our present with some degree of perspective.

RW: I want to switch gears and talk about your experience at VCFA. When did you graduate and what were you working on when you were a student? How do you think attending VCFA helped your writing career? Are there things you wish you had learned in school that you didn’t find out until later about writing, publishing, publicity, etc?

RO: I graduated from VCFA in 2006. I worked on short stories and the beginning of what would become my first novel, MY NAME IS MARY SUTTER. I came to study at VCFA because I had taken writing courses at a community college and extension courses at the University of Washington, and still did not know what I needed to know. I had gotten an agent for a novel I had written, but it was rejected by several publishing houses. At that point, I decided that someone might know what it was that I didn’t yet know, so I went searching for an MFA program. I liked the pedagogical model of VCFA, applied, and was accepted. I learned everything I needed to know about writing at VCFA, without question. That said, a writer is always learning. Perhaps it’s best to say that VCFA taught me how to approach writing, how to think about it, how to find what I need to know so that when I left the program, I was equipped to go it alone. As far as publishing and agency, I had already learned that portion of the business by attending Writer’s Conferences that focused on the subject. It’s easy to learn that. Writing is harder. And as far as publicity? See below.

RW: Talk to me about your author platform. You are active on Instagram and Facebook. Do you find that you need to rely on an author platform in order to sell books? Is it a part of the job that comes naturally to you or do you find it a necessary evil?

RO: I am not fond of social media, and blowing my own horn is tough for me.  That said, I am active on the two platforms you mentioned. Regarding relying on those to sell books, I maintain that it’s hard to know what moves the needle on sales these days. Obviously, visibility is key in myriad ways. I’d like to believe that word of mouth alone works, but I’m fairly certain that’s no longer the case. I dabble in social media, really. I do what I can within my own values in order to maintain my sanity. That said, the publishing house has done extensive social media outreach, including bookstagrammers, which has helped with visibility. The mantra seems to be to do what is necessary to get the novel to those readers who will love it. As my publisher emphasizes, the landscape has changed, and the more adaptable you can be to social media, the better, within the bounds of your own willingness to engage.

RW: For readers who are unaware, you were inspired by an old stone house on San Juan Island. Can you tell me what about that house called to you? Why did you feel compelled to create this story to understand it?

RO: The ruins of an old stone house on San Juan Island intrigued me from the moment I first saw them. They are unlike any other architecture on the islands. The care it took to build that house remains evident in the ruins, which appealed to me because the house seemed to carry a story. Someone built the house with love. I knew I would put them in a novel one day.

Coastline from Orcas Island today, near where the novel is set. Photo: Kaela Farrington

RW: I always want to know a writer’s process. The research notwithstanding, it does seem that you prepared for this book and did a lot of planning. You were inspired by the stone house. How long did you percolate on this story before committing to writing a novel? How did the characters and their story come to you? Do you outline? How do you revise? Do you write and revise each chapter at a time or do you wait until the manuscript is completed before you go back through?

RO: The percolation time I can never really estimate because in this instance, I first came upon those ruins about a decade ago. Nor can I say the point at which I begin a novel, because the imagination process is ongoing. I will say that when I begin thinking about a story, I wonder whether it matters. Is it worthy of telling? What is at emotional stake for these characters who are beginning to occupy my mind? (Characters are mysterious. They appear.) Will readers care? (I never know the answer to that question, but I’ve decided that if a story is interesting to me, it might be interesting to others.) Then I begin to put words to paper. A scene here, a fragment there. Things build. I hit a roadblock in my knowledge base and stop writing to research. I discover something I had no idea existed, which gives me an idea (research gives me story) and then I imagine more, write more. Writing a novel is a process of combining the demands of novel structure with individual character desires and molding the story into a coherent, living thing which seems real, but isn’t. On many levels, my process is intuitive. Essentially, I feel my way, keeping in mind the demands of form.

The nuts and bolts are that I write about six hours a day, sometimes more. I revise as I write, or not. I follow the narrative thread, explore other aspects of the story. Working at the sentence level is important. I have never once written a draft from beginning to end in a linear way. My process is not methodical. It is a dance.

RW: What do you hope readers walk away with after reading A Wild And Heavenly Place?

RO: I have no control over what readers walk away with. Art, literature, becomes a reader’s once they have taken in the story. I do my part by working as hard as I can, imbuing every sentence with meaning and beauty, employing the best diction for the moment and character, interrogating and perfecting every aspect of story, enlivening the characters, vitalizing the setting, and hopefully, through all of that work, elevating the theme. It is out of my hands once it is in the readers’ hands. At some point, the author has to let go.  

---

---

Buy a copy of A Wild and Heavenly Place by Robin Oliveira