After publishing eight books in her native Australia, Charlotte McConaghy makes her U.S. debut with the deeply affecting story of Franny Stone, a young woman always on the run, with no real sense of home. Migrations is set in an imminent future in which nearly all of Earth’s animals are extinct. As Franny joins a fishing vessel to follow the last migration of Arctic terns, we begin to learn more about the loss and pain that have brought Franny to this place in her life.

A wrenching adventure tale, Migrations reveals the brokenness at the heart of a so-called “wild” woman. We reached out to McConaghy to discuss her novel and how to find hope amid humanity’s destructive impact on the earth.

Tell us a bit about the research for Migrations. Did learning more about climate change and the environment make you feel better or worse about this issue?
My research had to be quite wide and varied, as I chose a subject matter that of course I knew next to nothing about, just to make it really hard for myself! But it was a great experience learning about things like migratory birds and fishing vessels and far distant lands. My research into climate change, however, wasn’t as enjoyable. It definitely made me feel worse. Although of course I knew things were bad, I’d had no idea of the severity or speed of the decline in animal numbers. In the last 50 years alone we humans have caused the deaths of over 60% of all wild animals on earth. That was a staggering number for me to learn, and it became a huge component of the novel. I knew I needed to set Migrations in this very near future, to show how close it is and how inevitable if we don’t do something to stop it.

Which of the settings in Migrations do you most connect with?
I have a personal connection to the south coast of New South Wales, which is where the protagonist, Franny, spends her adolescence. My dad has a farm there, and I’ve spent a lot of time on that beautiful stretch of coast, so I connect with it, certainly. But I’ve also visited Ireland a few times, which is where she lives as an adult, and I really love the country, so rich in moody weather and landscapes, in music and poetry and art. And while I haven’t been to Greenland or Antarctica, I did a trip to Iceland, which was where I first heard the sound of great cracking, thunderous icebergs and fell in love with wild, icy lands.

“We can be nurturing and tender to our planet and the creatures we share this earth with. There is joy in that.”

What do you love about Franny Stone, and what do you wish for her? What do you most connect with her about?
Franny is so dear to my heart. It sounds a bit crazy to say, but after spending so much time with her and connecting so deeply, I really do love her like a best friend or a family member. I want all the best things for her, despite having put her through a huge amount of torment! I’m very sorry about that, Franny. I think I connect most with her love of nature, her passion for the people she loves, her desire for connection and wilderness, her need to be apart from society. She’s far braver than I will ever be. She’s earthy and grounded and has zero ambition. But there are also parts of her that I’m very glad I’m not: She’s a tortured soul whose wandering feet and restlessness, while deeply instinctive, lead her away from her husband and cause her no end to pain. She’s wilder than most of us and very creaturely, which means she feels the loss of the natural world keenly.

Of all the creatures for Franny to follow, why Arctic terns?
I fell in love with the terns when I learned they have the longest migration of any animal in the world. They fly from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again in a year, and so in the span of their lifetimes that means they’ll fly the equivalent distance of to the moon and back three times. That blew me away and struck me as incredibly courageous, particularly given the journey is becoming more and more perilous for them by the year, what with human impact making the world a harsher environment for them. So they became a kind of metaphor for courage in my mind, a metaphor for the courage that Franny needed on such a journey and in facing the extinction crisis.

Some of my favorite parts in Migrations were with the crew of the Saghani. What inspired this crew? Do you have experience forming the types of particular bonds as a group of people like this, in which they’re all each other has when they’re away at sea?
As much as I would love to be at sea, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen because I get quite seasick! So no, I don’t know what it’s like to be confined with a group of people for months at a time, but I do have a close-knit group of friends who are like family to me, and I think we all know a little of what it feels like to bond with people you might not have expected to. I wanted all the crewmembers to be interesting and distinct in their own rights, and I wanted to love them, so I tried to have fun with their stories, always aware that these people would need to be interesting and loving enough to bring Franny back to life. They’re the people who provide her with the family she’s never had and remind her of the joy of being alive, even after immense loss.

The structure of the book allows the facts of Franny’s life to unfold slowly, so that her trauma and pain—and revelations about where it came from—ultimately become the beating heart of this book. Why did you choose this structure?
I get bored easily when writing, so the thought of writing a single POV in a linear structure didn’t engage or challenge me enough. It felt natural to be telling Franny’s present-day story alongside the past moments of her life that have impacted her. This way, readers get to experience those moments intimately with Franny. You get to feel them in a way you don’t if you learn about backstory through dialogue. Franny’s whole life became the basis for this book, in a way. It felt important that we get to know all the facets of her, all the phases and relationships that have shaped her. I also find it a really great way of creating tension and high stakes in a story. You can seed in information slowly and use reveals to create catharsis. And you can highlight the transformation of a character by showing who they are now versus who they used to be, and create a mystery around what changed her.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Give a warm welcome to these eight new novelists.

If you had to follow any type of animal in order to reveal some truth about yourself, what would you choose?
Oh wow, that’s an incredibly difficult question! I guess it would be birds of some kind. I really love the greyling geese that travel from Iceland to the U.K. and back. My current obsession is wolves, as they’re the topic of my next book. Their mysteries seem infinite, so I’d love to spend time watching them. And I love whales. Their migrations through vast oceans are extraordinary.

"It’s very hard to be optimistic in the face of what’s going on in the world, but this is a story of a woman who has lost all hope and yet is able to reclaim it."

How do you find hope in a story about humanity’s destructive impact?
You have to look closely at the acts of kindness and generosity that people display every day. Yes, our impact as a whole is destructive, but what I wanted Franny to understand in the book is that our impacts, individually, can be positive. We can be nurturing and tender to our planet and the creatures we share the Earth with. There is joy in that. And once we start to feel powerful in those abilities, I think we’ll start shifting things. It’s very hard to be optimistic in the face of what’s going on in the world, but this is a story of a woman who has lost all hope and yet is able to reclaim it. She’s able to see the beauty that still remains, and she’s brave enough to take up the fight for it. I hope that’s what people take from this book, that there is still time, and we must have hope.

What are your writing rituals?
I’m more of an afternoon/evening/night writer. So my mornings are usually spent on finding ways to feel inspired—reading, watching, walking, listening—until it gets to the time of day when I start to feel creative, and then I sit down to work. It doesn’t always happen, and I don’t force it too much because that can really throw you off, but for me it’s all about mood. You do whatever you have to, to get into the right mood. To tap into that deeper well of emotion and thought. And that might be listening to particular music or reading a poem I love.

How did the writing of Migrations change you?
It has been an incredible journey for me, from the start of this book to now. It’s taken over my life in a big way. Writing it has made me more thoughtful, more aware of my actions and choices and the impact I have on the planet. And it’s made me more confident in my ability to dig deeper, to go places within myself I didn’t think I could go or didn’t even know existed. It challenged me to be a better writer, to demand more of myself. It taught me to be braver. To cherish every part of the natural world. To try not to take for granted the people in my life and what a gift they are. Life really is a joy, and we are so lucky to be here.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Migrations.

Author photo © Emma Daniels.

Life has become a lot more complicated since Bryan Washington started writing his debut novel, Memorial. The United States is contending with a global pandemic, civil unrest, climate change and a contentious political atmosphere—but not everything is terrible. This past winter, former President Barack Obama included Lot, Washington’s 2019 collection of short stories, on his year-end reading list—a bump that placed Memorial high on many lists of the most anticipated books of 2020. Lot also recently won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, an annual prize given to a fiction writer who is 35 or younger.

“For the most part, things are going good in the immediate vicinity,” Washington says during a Zoom call to his home in Houston, Texas. But especially regarding Memorial, things seem to be going great. The book has received praise from authors like Jia Tolentino and Ocean Vuong, who called Memorial “a new vision for the twenty-first century novel” that “made [him] happy.” It’s apparent that Washington has struck a chord within the literary community, but Washington especially leans in to the latter part of Vuong’s praise. “As weighty as that particular diagnosis is, the fact that it made him happy means so much, if not more, to me, because it is a tricky novel tonally,” he says. “I was trying to hit a mark that was not quite straight down the middle.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Memorial.

Memorial focuses primarily on the intricate relationship between Black day care worker Benson and his boyfriend, Japanese American chef Mike, two young men in love who are being torn apart by the separate forces of their lives. On the same day that Mike’s Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives to stay with him and Benson in their home in the Third Ward, a historically Black neighborhood in Houston, Mike announces that he’s leaving. He’s going to Osaka, Japan, to visit his sick father—“Just for a few weeks, he says. Or maybe a couple of months”—leaving Benson and Mitsuko behind. The two reluctant roommates form a bond, sharing delicious meals in their one-bedroom apartment, while Mike journeys to the other side of the globe. Emotionally and physically, the young lovers are drifting apart, a process that readers experience in intimate first-person narration that alternates between the two men.

Memorial makes the reader feel a lot of feelings and ask a lot of questions, not just about the book’s narrative but also about the state of love and relationships today. Washington grappled with many of these questions while writing the book, but there’s one question he says he wrestled with the most: Will they or won’t they stay together? This quintessential back-and-forth between Benson and Mike is what drives Memorial. “I always had that question in the back of my head,” he says, “knowing that I would have to answer it, even if I didn’t know what the answer would look like from the outset.”

“Within the various traumas that people experience, you still have the things that make you laugh and the things you enjoy eating and your crushes and your first loves.”

But Memorial is bigger than any one question, and Washington’s motivations for writing the book show deep respect for his myriad communities and found families. When he began drafting, Washington realized his book would “not have a lot of thematic or plot [comparisons] in contemporary American literature.” Rather than being disheartened by this absence, however, he embraced it. “The fact that it’s a departure is what encouraged it,” he says.

One major departure from other queer fiction is the way Memorial handles trauma within the story. “There’s a way that narratives in contemporary American literature—if they do feature queer characters, and especially queer characters of marginalized communities—are trauma-based,” Washington says, “and it was very important for me not to center trauma in the midst of the novel. . . . Within the various traumas that people experience, you still have the things that make you laugh and the things you enjoy eating and your crushes and your first loves and the acceleration of relationships and the deterioration of relationships. I wanted to find a way to center community without solely underlining the traumas in the story.”

Decades of literary discussions and debates preceded Washington’s creation of a book like Memorial, and he’s aware of the special place it holds in the chronology of queer literature. From Langston Hughes to James Baldwin, all the way to contemporary writers like poet Danez Smith, the conversation around how queer characters and communities are depicted in American literature has been going on for a long time, and Memorial continues that lineage. “A lot of other people had to have written the books that they wrote in order for the possibility of a novel like Memorial to even get to the precipice of publication,” Washington says. “It feels nice to be able to contribute another facet, I hope, to the conversation.”

Washington’s unique place in literature isn’t something he’s overly concerned about, though. It was only after writing Memorial that he could look back and ask himself which writers he had been in conversation with. During the writing process, he just wanted to make the best book he could.

In fact, when I ask him what books inspired him, he can’t think of any. All that come to mind are films. He mentions the 2019 dramedy The Farewell, starring Akwafina, as a standout inspiration, particularly for its relationship with the audience. “We get the events and we get the things that happen,” Washington says, “but we aren’t told how to feel about it.” Films like Edward Yang’s Yi Yi and Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood helped him to be less proscriptive in his writing, and to strike a balance between showing and not showing.

Another goal of the novel was to foster communication with readers, making them think critically and deeply about modern love and relationships. Washington describes this as an especially difficult part of the writing process, as he tried “to find a way to direct every conversation and every gesture . . . toward not answering [the reader’s] questions. I don’t think I’m really interested in answering questions so much as lengthening the conversation, so that the reader can take what they have and do what they want with it.”

I pitch him a metaphor, about how experiencing art is like hearing a gavel strike, a moment to decide whether or not to pass judgment. “I’m certainly interested in holding the gavel, but I don’t need to be the person who actually makes contact with it,” Washington says. “I’d prefer if that’s the reader. The final judgment can be what they want. Then the narrative relationship becomes symbiotic, and it’s not just me saying this is what happened.”

“I feel like narratives that really stick with me are those that allow space for the readers.”

This consideration of the individual reading experience isn’t new in the world of literature, but it transforms Washington’s intimate novel into an opportunity for reflection, for the reader to glimpse into their own mind, rather than some kind of indoctrination by the author. However, this style of storytelling stands out as unique in the information age. When so much mass media is trying to tell us what to think and do and buy, it’s refreshing to be encouraged to think for ourselves.

Books like Memorial, which require emotional investment and internal inquiry by the reader, hold a lot of power, and Washington wields it with grace. It’s not that he doesn’t have the answers to the questions he raises in this book; it’s that he’s more interested in all of us searching for them together. “There is a difference between a narrative that simply refuses to illuminate what it’s going after, and a narrative that comes to a logical conclusion that is still open to the world of the reader by way of their personal experiences and that allows them to fall into that world,” he says.

Empathy is the goal here. All these open-ended questions encourage readers to understand the characters’ motivations and their own reactions to those characters. “By the end of the drafting process,” Washington says, “I felt as though I understood where [the characters] were coming from, but I didn’t need to like them. . . . If I knew where they were coming from, I had a better understanding of why they did the things they did.”

To Washington, shifting interpretative authority to the reader is a vital element of literature. “You really don’t need to answer every question for a reader or for someone in the audience. As long as you are extremely calculated in how you are giving information and details on the page, everyone will end up in the general pocket,” he says. “I feel like narratives that really stick with me are those that allow space for the readers.”

Author photo by Dailey Hubbard