How a Little-known Historical Event Inspired a Decade-long Writing Project: A Conversation with Joan Schweighardt
Thank you, Joan, for allowing me to interview you about this incredible and compelling trilogy. What gave you the idea to write about rubber tapping in the Amazon?
A freelance job that came my way required me to read a brief annotated diary by a man who worked tapping rubber trees in the middle of the South American rainforest during the rubber boom in the early 1900s. His story was riveting, as was the dramatic and dangerous setting in which he found himself. Since I knew nothing about the rubber boom, I began to read other books on the subject. Around this same time, an opportunity arose for me to travel to South America with a group of sustainability advocates. We spent part of our time visiting an indigenous tribe that had been uncontacted as little as twenty years before and was seeking help to keep oil drillers from destroying their lands. The experience, which included a cultural exchange, was lifechanging. Since I could not—and didn’t want to—shake it off, I decided to write a novel that would take place, at least in part, in the deep rainforest, during the rubber boom.
When did you know this would become The Rivers Trilogy? Did you write the first book, Before We Died, knowing that there would be two more books?
As I got to the end of the first book, which tells the story of two brothers traveling to South America in 1908, I knew there would have to be a second book because the impact of what happened in the jungle had to be felt by people awaiting my characters’ return back home, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Same thing with the second book; it begged for a follow up. As I was finishing the third book, I wanted to write a fourth, because I wanted to continue on with the same characters I’d been with for so long. But there wasn’t a need, really. What needed to be resolved had been.
Tell me about your research for these books. Each volume seems to have required much research. You seem so well informed on so many topics. Did you travel for some of your research? Please talk about how you managed all of this and how long it took you to do it.
When I first began, I needed to research the short history (1879 to 1913) of the rubber boom in South America, and of course the flora and fauna of the rainforest, etc. But my characters had to be from somewhere. I choose Hoboken, NJ, because it has shipping docks from which they could sail to South America, and because I’m from that part of the world. I began to research the history of Hoboken in the early 20th century and learned that it had had a diverse immigrant community, mostly German, Irish and Italian. The second book in the trilogy takes place in part during WWI, which very much impacted Hoboken. In fact, all the German ships in the shipyard there were taken over by the American army when the U.S. joined in the war. The doughboys left from and returned to Hoboken. Of course this bit of history got woven into my novel. For the third book, River Aria, I had to learn everything I could about Manaus, Brazil, which was the headquarters of the rubber boom, and especially about the city’s opera house, which plays a major role in the story. I made a second trip to South America at that time, to visit Manaus and to explore the rivers surrounding it with a private guide and see, among other things, rubber trees. Then I had to research the old Metropolitan Opera House in New York, because one of my characters, a student of opera, travels from Manaus to New York to work in the Met Opera House, albeit in the sewing room. I also had to research speakeasies and rumrunning.
All this research was a thrill for me. It was like exploring a cave that you expect to be straightforward and then finding all sorts of sub-chambers and sub-sub-chambers leading to new and wondrous discoveries along the way. The writing of the three books took ten years, because I was working as a freelancer, writing for private and corporate clients at the same time. Sometimes I could only steal one day in an entire week to work on my own projects. But I never really minded, because it stretched out the period of time I stayed immersed in the project.
Many authors stick to writing their own gender, but you seem to be equally equipped to write men and women. Do you find it more difficult to write men than women? The men in these novels seem so true to character.
I don’t think men and women are all that different in these times, in the way we think, at least. I have written several men over the years, many in first person. But writing Jack and Baxter Hopper—two Irish American brothers, both dockworkers from a rough immigrant neighborhood in 1908—was difficult. The challenges they had to face were particular to the setting and the times. Unlike most “good” men today, Jack and Bax are as ready to throw a punch when they feel themselves the victims of an injustice as they are to spend the last penny in their pockets sitting in on a poker game. I’m not saying they were unknowable, but they were harder to know than the women in the three books. It took several drafts, and a lot of consultations with my husband and sons and male writer friends, to feel I’d come close to portraying them authentically.
In all three of the novels, Jack Hopper continues to appear, sometimes the story is told by him, but not always. Other characters take precedence at times, telling the story through their eyes as Jack Hopper takes a back seat. In some novels I’ve read, this throws me off balance, but in these novels, I never had that feeling. Your structure is flawless. How did you decide who to make the narrator and when?
Because Jack, the narrator of Book One, suffers through a long convalescence when he returns from the rainforest, he was never really a candidate to narrate Book Two, Gifts for the Dead. Nora, who was both Jack and Baxter’s love interest in the first book, seemed to be the best character to take the baton. Before We Died is necessarily full of adventure. Thanks to Nora, the second book is able to continue the saga while focusing on adventures of a more domestic nature. The first book reveals a lot about the men in the Irish American character contingent. The second book shines a light on the women, on Nora herself, but also Maggie, Jack and Baxter’s loving mother, and even on Maggie’s fortuneteller, Clementine.
What was the most difficult scene for you to write in each of these books? As a writer, I find there is always a place where I struggle to get the blood on the page and as a result, much rewriting takes place. Can you speak to this?
In Book One, Before We Died, Jack and Baxter are captured by an indigenous tribe living not too far from their camp. They are already in a bad place at that point, and their abduction could have dire consequences. But they have something the tribal chief wants, and thus they are treated well. The capture chapter was challenging for me. Most of the tribal people I read about in my research were both extremely spiritual and entirely capable of violence when they thought the situation called for it. I wanted to get that balance right. I didn’t want to idolize them.
In Book Two, Gifts for the Dead, Jack, the wild, somewhat moody, adventurer from Book One, must begin to change as a result of both the things that happened to him in the jungle and the fact that he is aging, moving from his late teens into adulthood. I worked hard to make sure his transition didn’t feel too jarring.
I wrote Book Three, River Aria, in a few drafts and thought I was done. Then I sent it to two wonderful writers who regularly critique my work—and both of them shot it down. It just wasn’t happening. It lacked the je ne sais quoi of the first two books. It was flat. I wanted to fix it but I really didn’t know how. For maybe four months I didn’t work on it at all. And then one night, when my husband and I were sitting in a concert hall, waiting for the performance to begin, it hit me. I saw clearly what was missing and I knew what I had to do to repair it. But I didn’t have a paper and pen, and I wouldn’t have been so rude as to take out my phone and start typing notes. So I kept repeating the gist of my literary epiphany to myself over and over throughout the night, and as soon as we got home, I ran for my notepad. I basically had to rewrite several sections of the book.
There is always a bit of the author in most of our characters. Which character would you say is most like you and why? What traits does the character possess that you also possess?
When I was a younger writer, I forced my traits on almost all my characters without even realizing it. But over the years I made a concerted effort to keep myself out of my writing—unless of course I was writing nonfiction. I think I was finally able to do this because my freelance background includes ghostwriting books for clients. Obviously you can’t insert your own traits into a book you’re being paid to write on behalf of someone else. I’d like to say I’m assertive, like Nora, or exuberant, like Estela, but if I’m like anyone in the trilogy, I’m probably most like Maggie, the mom, cherishing her domestic life above all else and fretting when it feels threatened.
I am so impressed with your attention to detail. You are quite an observer of people and places. Can you say a little bit about this quality?
Thanks. Being shy as a kid—and really into adulthood—made me a people watcher. Unfortunately, I’m not as good at picking up on the details of places as I would like to be. Thank goodness for the Internet, where refreshing my memory is always only a click away.
Tell me something about your writing process. Do you write as you go, or do you plot everything out beforehand?
I do a little of each to get through the first draft. Thereafter each draft becomes an act of accretion.
Please say something about how you came up with the title The Rivers Trilogy and the titles for each of your books.
There are two main locations that run through all three books: Hoboken, NJ and Manhattan, NY on the Hudson River, and Manaus, which is on the Rio Negro, and the rubber camp locations on the Rio Negro’s tributaries. None of the plotlines would work without a river running in the background.
As for the titles of the individual book titles, Before We Died is a phrase that comes to Jack at some point in the book, when he feels he and his brother are as good as dead. Gifts for the Dead has a funny story. I couldn’t think what to call the darn thing, and then I remembered that years ago, when I was too young and immature to be writing a novel, I wrote one, about a confused older woman who believes herself to be Aphrodite, and I called it Gifts for the Dead. Since that manuscript never went anywhere (except into a box beneath my bed), I borrowed the title for Book Two of the trilogy, and it turned out to be a good fit. River Aria is basically the story of a river brat from an impoverished community who is offered a twist of fate opportunity to study opera with a master, so that title was a no-brainer—though I did later learn there is a European cruise ship by the same name.
The Rivers Trilogy is so cinematic. Can you envision it becoming a series of films or an adapted series for television?
Thank you again, and to that point, I have written a story bible to spell out just how such a TV series might unfold. The problem of course is getting someone in the film world to read it.
Share a few of your favorite authors and what genres you like to read.
I love fiction, especially literary fiction and literary historical fiction. I just read Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell. And my favorite novel last year was Circe, by Madeline Miller. The Dogs of Babel is another favorite, as it most anything by Emma Donahue, T.C. Boyle, Dave Eggers. . . There are a lot of writers whose books I will pre-order as soon as I hear about them.
Do you have another project in mind and if so, can you tell me something about it?
I have been working on a non-fiction about my sister, who died three years ago. I came into possession of a stack of poems she wrote during a particularly difficult period in her life. Because I was essentially her caretaker (her health was compromised in a variety of ways), I never got to be her friend. Reading her poems after she died revealed her to me in a different light. The manuscript consists of chapters describing how I saw her journey through her too-short life, separated by her poems, which tell a different story.
