Thank you Ben Wakeman, Sharon Hom, @MaureenBridget, Ariees Roman, Vincent Maeder, and many others for tuning into my live interview with Nina Schuyler! Her book is available for preorder at her website or from the publisher or your local indy bookstore.
Why give the river a voice
Nina Schuyler traces the book back to law school, where her favorite class was water law. “Northern California moves a big chunk of the water to Southern California,” she said. “Really, Los Angeles wouldn’t exist without Northern California water.” Following that thread led her to legal personhood: in 2008 Ecuador granted personhood not just to rivers but to all of nature, and in 2017 New Zealand became the first country to name a river a legal person, with rights and the ability to sue. That discovery that a river could be property one day and a rights-bearing entity the next became the seed of the novel.
A theory of personhood
Nina’s aim was to write about climate change without falling into despair. “I have not seen a climate literature book that’s — here, a river’s going to court to try to live,” she said. She wanted magical realism, playfulness, even humor, genre choices that are largely missing from climate fiction. Philosophically, she leaned on Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s essay “The Extended Mind,” using it to argue against a Cartesian, bound self: “You are not confined to your skull and skin... being in the world and your relationship to the natural world is defining the self.” In the novel, the river doesn’t fully understand personhood either. It’s “trying to wear this cloak and figure it out,” a legal fiction it has to inhabit just to survive.
Fluid movement
I counted a dozen or more nonhuman characters, each distinct, and asked how she kept track of them, whether it was mapped out or more of a fluid process. Nina said the first draft was, by her own account, “a big mess.” She began narrowly with the river, then the judge, then the judge’s wife, but then pushed further. “Why am I staying confined to this little story? There’s all these other stories going on.”
She also consciously avoided the hero’s-journey structure, “the dominant model in Western literature,” with a single protagonist conquering and saving everyone. That shape felt wrong for a climate story. Later revisions were more deliberate: “I wanted to make it feel like water.” She noted that humans are “highly watery” and let that physical fact shape the book’s structure.
The perspective shifts never feel arbitrary. Consciousness passes from one character to another through a gesture, a conversation, an emotion like love, or a sound like the river’s song. Nina explained that the handoffs were intentional: one character passes near another, and at that “little juncture,” the narrative shifts into the new person’s point of view. “There was this kind of, like you said, passing the baton,” she said. The beautiful thing is that this technique goes beyond plot mechanics to embody, structurally, the entangled theory of personhood the story argues for. She invoked Robert Creeley’s idea that form is content: the passing itself is the interconnection the novel is trying to show, whether between two humans or between a human and an “other.”
We can all be Hazel
I asked about one of the novel’s sharpest human character, a 75-year-old named Hazel. Nina said, “I think every female after the age of 50, and hopefully earlie, becomes a Hazel.” Hazel has slipped out of what she called “the envelope of the good girl,” the one trained to avoid conflict at any cost, “including the cost of the self.” On the stand, Hazel gets the courtroom’s full attention and finally says what she’s been holding back about the treatment of animals, children, and nature, how objectification of one bleeds into objectification of all three. Hazel testifies, among other wonders, that mice can sing — inaudibly to us, but recorded by scientists — and uses it to indict how casually humans have killed what they assumed had no inner life.
When the judge asks Hazel, “Where are you going with this?” She answers, “Wherever I feel I need to go.”
Her testimony had me cheering, Go, Hazel!
The imaginative leap
Asked whether it’s presumptuous to write from the point of view of a river, a mouse, a mountain, Nina pushed back: “I view it as an obligation. . . That is the role of empathy: to take the imagination and make the imaginative leap. What does the river need? What does it want? How can it thrive?” She sees fiction as the one place built for exactly that kind of trespass: “In fiction, there are no walls and no barriers... if you shut that down and say, oh no, I can’t write from that point of view, then the imagination is censored.” Refusing the leap, she argued, is its own kind of objectification — the very thing the book is trying to undo.
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