Poets & Writers – July-August 2019

near the ocean or in the forest. Alaska

truly comes alive in these pages, but

so too do the quieter, more intimate

spaces within the Alaskan landscape.

I’m thinking particularly of the family’s

house, which feels like a character in

itself. The father used to tell the fam-

ily “that other houses would be built

around” their house, but this never

comes to pass, and this absence of

neighbors only stands to further our

sense of the family’s isolation—“in a

country where we had no ancestors,

in a state only twenty-some years old”

and in a house inhabited only by ghosts

and one another. Why was the house

important to you?

The image of this house on the edge of

a spruce forest lodged itself in my mind

very early on. We think of the walls

of a house as defining our domestic

space, but in the novel these boundar-

ies start to soften, for inside the house

it’s as wild as outside. And nature

constantly infiltrates the house: rain,

JULY AUGUST 2019 42

graduate of the M FA program at Syra-

cuse University, Miciah now teaches

at Vermont College of Fine Arts and

lives in Montpelier. When I read an

advance copy of her first book, Good-

night Stranger, I was mesmerized by ev-

erything I recognized: It is steeped in

the textures and images of our home-

town. Beyond that it is a captivating,

character-driven thriller with dazzling

sentences. I couldn’t wait to talk to her

about it.

One of the distinct pleasures of this

novel—and there are so many—is your

handling of the setting. Place functions

as character in Goodnight Stranger, and

the book is rife with evocative descrip-

tions that seem to externalize so much

of the story’s meaning, its symbols, and

the characters’ interior states. It was

also impossible not to see the similari-

ties to the place you and I both grew up

in. Can you talk a little about the impor-

tance of place in the book and how you

developed it?

The book is set on a fictional island

off Cape Cod, and the Cape of course

is where we both grew up. I love its

color palette, its textures, the sounds

it makes, the way it smells. I haven’t

lived there for a long time, but I still

visit often. I some-

t i mes ex per ience

this sense of long-

ing for the Cape,

even when I’m

there. It almost

feels like unre-

quited love, or

maybe more like

old love, love from

the past, half-

forgotten love. I

think you explore

this feeling a little gault: daryl burtnett; febos: katrina del mar

M

iciah Gault and I grew up in

the same town on Cape Cod.

We swam at the same secret

beaches, rode the same ferry

through the fog to Martha’s Vineyard,

saw movies at the same local theater.

Our mothers were pals, and Miciah was

one of the first writers whose sentences

I admired. We are both writers who

heard our calling early and were lucky

enough to have families and a commu-

nity who supported our obsessions. A

forest animals, mushrooms. Added to

the mix is a haunting, both in the house

and in the woods—the kind of haunt-

ing we create by projecting our human

needs and desires onto our inhuman

surroundings.

The process of maintaining a house,

of keeping the elements outside, is

FIRST FICTION 2019

Melissa

Febos

author of two

books, most

recently

Abandon Me,

published by

Bloomsbury

in 2017.

INTRODUCED BY

Miciah

Bay Gault whose

debut novel, Goodnight Stranger,

will be published by Park Row

Books in July.

Agent: Jenni Ferrari-Adler

Editor: Laura Brown

Publicist: Laura Gianino

“The image of this house on the edge of a spruce forest

lodged itself in my mind very early on. We think of the

walls of a house as defining our domestic space, but in

the novel these boundaries start to soften, for inside the

house it’s as wild as outside.”