Behind the pages of Rachael Moorthy’s debut novel River Meets the Sea
Rachael Moorthy, photo by Ohla Ruccya (@ruccya on Instagram).
When Rachael Moorthy, alumnus of the Bachelor of Fine Arts program, neared the end of her creative writing journey at the University of Victoria, she drafted the first chapters of what would become her debut novel, River Meets the Sea. Today, as she works toward the completion of her master’s degree at the University of Basel, she celebrates the long-awaited publication of her book.
I met Moorthy at seventeen when she was teaching at my high school. Now, four years later, I had the pleasure of speaking with her about River Meets the Sea, the ever-changing publishing industry, her myriad of artistic influences, and her exciting plans for her future as an emerging novelist.
On her inspiration for River Meets the Sea
“I, up until that point, had exclusively written from the perspective of a mixed female protagonist because it’s an underrepresented demographic. It’s my own demographic. I was really interested in writing female perspectives that didn’t revolve around romantic love and that didn’t fall into specific tropes, focusing, especially on female friendships. But for whatever reason, when it came to a larger-form thing … that was always there — this idea of these two characters, who, I guess I should add: are inspired largely by my father and my grandfather.”
“The way the world interacts with you depends heavily on how you’re racially coded. So, whether you have a strong connection to your identity or not, that does also have lots of other socio-cultural influences. But on a daily basis, in a more immediate sense, the way that the world interacts with you materialistically — the way that you look and have people make assumptions about your so-called ‘race’ is really impactful.”
“I knew that that was going to be my first book. And initially, it was going to be a creative nonfiction-style book … That’s how I started writing this book, was just through interviewing my grandfather. And I started right at the beginning; the first thing that he wanted to tell me about, and that was the river and going down to the river when he was still a foster kid.”
On logophilia
“I noticed so many things about myself through editing, like what words I really love, what ones I avoid. That’s interesting to learn.”
“I feel like I use ‘gold’ a lot, ‘golden’ light, ‘waterfalls of light.’ And then through that, I became really enchanted with the word ‘aurelian’.”
“I have such a logophilic relationship with words, where it’s not just about the meaning of the word — it’s also the sound, the musicality of it. So for example, ‘glittering’. There’s so many other words that I could use, like shimmering or scintillating, [but] something about glittering makes my brain light up.”
On her research for River Meets the Sea
“Oh, it was so fun. I loved it. At first, I was scared. But then once I really dove into it, it was just so much fun.”
“It was a mixed approach. A lot of it would come from interviews initially. And then I would further flesh things out through research, because, I mean, human memory is flawed and my grandfather was getting older, so things can kind of get blurred.”
“I was really, really fascinated with the history of Hogan’s Alley. It wasn’t called Hogan’s Alley at the time. I just knew from the spaces that my grandfather was talking about and the things that he loved — specifically he was really into jive music and dancing — that was around. But he wouldn’t know to call it Hogan’s Alley. That space [was] more diverse than the history that was presented to me in a classroom context, when I was going to school at least. So, then I started researching Hogan’s Alley.”
“I found a lot of primary sources. So, newspaper articles, … diving into the archives, and finding out dates when, like, Dizzy Gelespie was playing in Vancouver … I loved reimagining that space.”
“Sometimes it would be like little mini documentaries on YouTube, or I listened to a lot of music from the time. My thesis is actually on music as historical archives. You can get a lot from listening to music from a time, from a specific location.”
On the publishing industry
“There’s a lot of systemic stuff involved. And that’s why the work that Chelene [Knight] is doing with the BIPOC mentorship program is so important. She’s the only Black female literary agent that I could find — which shouldn’t be the case — in all of Canada.”
“There’s a lot of people of colour who are writers and who want to be working in those industries, but it’s such a white-dominated space. It’s such a male-dominated space … We have a much more diverse readership in the actual world than is reflected in the publishing houses, which isn’t good. They have a false idea of what will sell because they’ve never sold certain things. They don’t know how those things will sell.”
On what’s next
“I immediately started writing my second book, and I am so excited about it … In a lot of ways it’ll be easier for me to write because it’s told from perspectives closer to my demographic, probably like millennial, Gen Z. And I am just really in a Greek mythology phase.”
“I like the messiness and the flaws in non-monotheistic religions, of the deities. I just find that cool, to look at divinity as something that is moody and flawed and capable of growth.”
“I’m really, really into Persephone and the philosophical or allegorical lens you could look at her narrative through … I think what I like about it is the cyclical nature of her knowing she’s going to have to go back to the underworld for a certain period of time … I think it’s more of an integrated allegory for trauma, and so I really want to weave that specifically in there.”
“I spent a lot of time with [River Meets the Sea] on masculinity, which was something that I needed to spend time with because I had a really bruised relationship with masculinity. And so it was almost like an internal restorative justice process for myself, for my heart. I came out the end with a very bell hooksian lens. But now I get to go back to what is closer to me, and that is femininity, as an entity … Part of what I am delighted by with femininity is the way that it has been historically defined as something that’s more fluid and ever-evolving.”
“It’s going to be fun. I’m really excited about it.”
This interview was edited for brevity.
