Why did you entitle your novel Night Navigation?
The actual title, Night Navigation, was inspired by waking up to find several bats flying around in the dark above my bed. This led to my discovery that there were hundreds of bats living in the space above my ceiling. Further investigation revealed that this was a maternal colony and that the bats in my room were adolescents who’d mistakenly entered through the small opening around my overhead light rather than exiting out the hole in the vent-screen like their mothers. Each evening I watched bats flutter over my house. It came to me that their flight through the dark was a good metaphor for my novel.
Did you draw on your own experiences in the writing of this novel?
Though Night Navigation is a work of fiction, with its characters and much of its development based on research and invention, the core of the story springs from real events in my own family’s life: suicide, and all of this complicated by the co-occurrence of mental illness and substance abuse. Like Del Merrick, the mother in Night Navigation, I have received many calls in the night, driven many miles on snowy roads to support meetings: Al-Anon, where I’ve been encouraged to “let go” and to National Alliance on Mental Illness groups, where I’ve been advised to “hang on.”
Perhaps all unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways, but in any home where one person usurps or is given more than a fair share of the oxygen, the others must find ways to go on breathing: denial, secrets, control, use, anger… As a writer, no question my anxiety, my concern for my children, my sometimes longing to escape and leave no forwarding address, were the initial energy that caused me to try to make this world on the page, but right from the beginning, the story came to me as a novel: a fugue in two alternating voices—that of a 37 year old man and his mother. By working in the third person, by imagining the interior of this man, I was able to enter places, to walk around in rooms where I could never have gone as myself.
What led you to become a writer after years of being a teacher?
I came to writing by chance in my late 40’s. The New York State English Bureau began to press all teachers to actively write with their students: how could you teach something that you didn’t do yourself? I remember writing my first short story as part of an assignment I’d given one of my senior classes. After a weekend of struggling to put into fictional scenes the experience of seeing a boy have an epileptic seizure on the playground when I was a sixth grader, I said to my class, “Wow, writing a story is hard isn’t it?”
I was further encouraged by having a poet conduct a workshop in my class for a few days that same year. He insisted I write along with the group. I wrote a love poem about my fear of walking along the rocks, the sheer drop to the sea, at Montauk Point. The poet wrote, “You make it new!” across the top of my paper. That was my beginning.
But surely the most important factor in my becoming a writer was the gift of time I was given when both my children went away from home for the first time. I believe that blank time and liking to be alone may be the main ingredients for pursuing any art. When I was a child, at some point, I always left the neighborhood play to go off to my room to be by myself. I had one particular game I liked. I drew the interior of a house. I added broken windows and sagging furniture. Next I drew the people, their hair uncombed, their clothes torn. A scrawny cat and a bony dog. Then I pretended some good fortune had come to this poor family. I turned the paper over and traced the outlines from the other side, only this time I made the roof beam straight. I put ruffled curtains on the windows and logs burning in the fireplace. I repaired the popping springs. The mother’s apron became clean, the daughter’s hair curly. I played this game many afternoons sitting on my bed in the attic. For me writing fiction is very much like that childhood experience. In my writing I am both the one making the house and the characters being transformed.
Being able to spend time alone, to mull, to enter the fictional world, is especially helpful in writing a novel. It’s a long trip and if the bus is a local, stopping twenty times a day, one loses the blurry belief that there’s a final destination.
Are there any other factors in your life that have influenced your writing?
I was born in 1939 in Charleston, West Virginia. Though I didn’t discover writing until much later in my life, I was a lover of books. A long-term thumb-sucker who could be happy for hours off in stories. My favorites were usually English orphans or a girl in the limber lost, characters wronged by people I loathed. Though finally I overcame my attraction to Rhett Butler, I’m still leaning into some of the after-shocks.
I grew up under the care of a strong mother, also a lover of books, a person who always encouraged me. The kind of woman who was able to run the night infirmary on the 17th floor in one of Pratt’s dormitories after undergoing some failed knee surgery, dressed in a bright caftan which covered a body cast that ran from below her breast down her left leg to her toes. A woman who when I became pregnant encouraged me not to drop out of graduate school with the advice that I might have to work one day. A one day that began almost immediately and lasted for twenty-seven years of teaching high school English, a job I graduated from in 1995 which left me more time to sit down to put words on the page.