What the Waves Know (27 page)
Read What the Waves Know Online
Authors: Tamara Valentine
For the first time in my life, I was standing on the edge of a cliff, standing on the edge of my life, completely unafraid of the fall. The stone disappeared with a soft
plop
into the water, sending up little frothy fingers to catch it, splashing a dozen creamy pearls skipping into the air, and I imagined Yemaya's hand reaching up to snatch it before diving into the depths of the sea and washing all the hurt clean, restoring it into a tiny pearl of luck in that way mothers do.
There are no adequate words to express thanks for those who helped encourage, shape, and refine this work. My deepest gratitude goes out to my family for their consistent support, love, and patience as I drifted in and out of long periods of writing and revising that stole me away from kicking soccer balls and play dates. I'd like to thank my children, Alexandra, Dante, and Kian, who inspire me every second of every day and remind me that a lifetime is that block of hours built for catching dreams by the tail and bringing them home to live. My undying gratitude goes out to my amazing husband, Jorge, who is the embodiment of patience, love, and persistence and has spent many days running interference to carve out space for me to work. Stories always crackle to life long before they take proper shape, and I want to thank my parents, Ron and Heather, for giving me the opportunity and courage to tell my own and for surrounding me with magic and stories
my entire life. Finally, thanks to my closest confidant and partner in crime through the years, my sister, Laurie Van Hout whose sense of adventure and zest always result in mischief, memories, and material.
I have been blessed and humbled to have worked with a team of brilliance throughout this process, without whom this work would have disappeared into a dusty cabinet. Immeasurable thanks to my amazing agent, Jill Marsal, who has believed in my writing for nearly a decade and, as fate would have it, reentered my world years later to take charge of it with enormous tenacity and intelligence. Behind every strong book is the sharp savvy skill of an awesome editor with the inspiring ability to step inside the brain of an author and clearly see her vision. My endless appreciation goes out to the wonderful Chelsey Emmelhainz for her faith and steely determination to fully actualize the vision of this work and Karen Richardson for her razor sharp focus and attention to detail. I also want to thank Kristine Serio for her sharp eye and early enthusiasm for this story.
While there is neither enough space nor ink to list everyone in my life who has inspired, supported, or otherwise influenced my work, I am both thankful and privileged to be surrounded by amazing friends and storytellers from whom I learn something new every day.
TAMARA VALENTINE
obtained an MA with distinction from Middlebury College's esteemed Bread Loaf School of English in 2000 and has spent the past fourteen years as a professor in the English Department at Johnson & Wales University. Presently, she lives in Kingston, Rhode Island, with her husband and three children.
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  1.  Â
What the Waves Know
is told from the first-person point of view of Izabella, who hasn't spoken in eight years. The concept of stories and secrets rests at the heart of this piece. How does Izabella become the keeper of both through her silence?
  2.   How does the title
What the Waves Know
represent these elements of the work?
  3.   In what ways do religion and mythology make sense of the world for Izabella? What myths, specifically, does she embrace? Are there similarities between them even though they are drawn from different cultures?
  4.   Do you think it is true that Izabella cannot speak initially, or is she choosing her own silence?
  5.   Izabella not only accompanies her father on his adventures, she follows him into the stories that slowly take over reality for him. Is there a point when she makes a conscious decision to stop? If so, when?
  6.   The characters all represent different interpretations of what defines mental illness, as well as dramatically different responses to trauma and loss. How do they each reframe their lives in the face of devastation? How does each hold on to the past and let go of it?
  7.   The title plays not only on the theme of mental illness, but a person's culpability, or lack of it, in the face of mental illness. In what passages do we see this?
  8.   Throughout the story, Izabella both wants to hear the Nikommo and is afraid of them. Why? How do they speak to the issues with her father? Why might it be important that they are tied to her father's heredity? Is this potentially defining to Izabella?
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9.   Izabella is afraid that she is insane. Why? What does this reveal about her actual breadth of understanding about what happened with her father?
10.   One of the elements of the story is that the past and present continuously weave and bob around one another. Why has the author created a storyline in which you are constantly being pulled from one point in time to another?
11.   Not only is the reader being torn between the past and present, she is also being thrust in and out of stories and mythologies. Why? Is there a clear truth behind the fiction?
12.   While in many ways Zorrie's character is struggling to get Izabella to fall into societal norms, Remy's character is intent on ignoring societal rules and norms. How are the two characters different? What role does Remy play in healing both Izabella and Zorrie?
13.   Why does Remy become so entwined in Zorrie and Izabella's life? How do the different members of the O'Malley family respond to Zorrie and Izabella returning to Tillings Island? How do the vastly different reactions represent the human experience of loss and grief?
14.   Both of Izabella's parents impart aspects of their philosophies about life to her, and both visions of the world become equally important in her recovery. What does each parent give Izabella and how does it become integral to her survival?
15.   Competing images of light and darkness are used symbolically throughout the story. What do they represent in the struggle for Izabella to reclaim and make sense of what has happened? One of the issues central to her struggle is weighing what is real against what is fiction, from religion to perception. How does she resolve this?
16.   Izabella says she first came to know what it meant to be God standing in the waters of Potter's Creek. What do you think she means by this and how does it become a critical framework for the story?
17.   Although the impetus of the story revolves around Ansel Haywood's disappearance, the author has included repeating images and references to the Divine Feminine in Yemaya, the moon, the Virgin Mary, and Venus. Why does this become inherently important to the story?
18.   In ancient times, the moon was the sign of the “Triple Goddess,” representing maiden, mother, and crone. How is this interpretation realized in the text?
19.   The salmon in Potter's Creek becomes an important symbol for Izabella's story. How does it foreshadow what is to come in the story?
20.   In many ways, each of the characters has a separate understanding and interpretation of the past. How does this speak to the idea of stories defining our realities?
21.   Does Izabella become the healed or the healer in the story?
22.   Why might the author have chosen a stone to represent the process of carrying secrets? How does this come to represent both the interconnectivity and independence of our own existence and reality?
W
ITHOUT A DOUBT
the most common question I am asked when I write anything is, “What is the story about?” It seems like a simple question, but it is not. How do you compress a group of complex characters and situations down to a four- or five-sentence answer?
What the Waves Know
is a story about voice, and silence. Memory, and the lack of it. Destruction, and creation. Mistakes, and redemption. It is all of those things, but the soul of the story is about stories themselves, those that are real and the ones we tell ourselvesâboth individually and collectively.
We are storytellers, all of us, and that fact begs the question of whose story gets to dominate the narrative. The stories we pass forward and the ones we turn away from rest at the heart of every conflict, from families to entire societiesâthey also rest at the center of every resolution. We live by them and die for them. They cause pain and they heal. So, to me, it is no small wonder that a storyteller walking around with the truth in her pocket may be frightened by her own voice, by the transformative power of her tale. I believe Iz is correct: we are all just the caboodle of stories we leave behind. They shape us, and those around us, with enduring persistence.
I grew up deep in the northern woods of upstate New York, the daughter of a mother devoted to helping children find their own voices and a father who is a lot like Ansel Haywood. He did not wrestle with mental illness, but he saw magic in every corner of the world, despite the fact that he was a criminal defense attorney who spent his days surrounded by the utter destruction of the human spirit. It is a fact that I continue to live in awe of and strive toward. When I was a child, my father would stumble into our bedroom and wake my sister and me in the middle of the night to go on snipe hunts. The snipe, if you were not fortunate enough to be raised among them, is a real bird with a fictional narrative. The legend dictates that the snipe comes out by the light of a full
moon. To catch a snipe, you must trek into the woods armed with your pillowcase and a shaker of salt. The process goes something like this: you sneak up behind the fat little bird, shake salt on its wings, and toss the pillowcase over it.
Voilà !
As an adult, I moved to rural Rhode Island and somehow the topic of snipes arose with our neighbor. “So,” I asked her, “snipes are indigenous here? Have you ever gone snipe hunting?” At which point, she tipped her head at me curiously and fell to the ground laughing. When she had worn herself out, she gazed up at me and said, “You do know that isn't real, don't you?”
No
, I thought, poking my father's number into the phone while wondering what other fictions about the world I was wandering through life with.
That is the power of stories. We all struggle to tell our own, and writers spend a great deal of time agonizing over getting it just right in neurotic fits of wording, organization, elimination, and posturing, but there is also a great deal of surrendering to the story in ways that I imagine are a hair's width from true mental illness. During a graduate seminar, I once had a classmate ask how I developed diametrically different voices in a work. “I hear them in my mind,” I told him with complete honesty, and other heads around the table nodded earnestly in agreement.
As an adult, I have watched several people I love wrestle with the voices in their headsâvoices bigger and stronger than their own. It is often painful for everyone living through the experience. But as is so often the case, there is also an inherent beauty in that destructionâthe yin and yang, the counterbalance. The wind is meant for flying into, the moon is meant for dancing with. In a world filled with stark realities, there is true exquisiteness in seeing things in a different way. We may not always believe in magic and mysticism, but we all have moments when we yearn to believe. I am a writer, and a dreamer, and a perpetual seeker of magic, so I am always mesmerized by moments when the story wrestles reality to the ground. But not all stories get told.
When I first completed my undergraduate degree I worked with young adults diagnosed with autism, a condition that inherently silences the people struggling with it in a multitude of ways. There were several young people whose diagnosis was questionable, and one who was a victim of trauma and had stopped speaking directly following the event. That was years ago, and I still wonder. We can be scared silent by the world. It has happened to all of us, and certainly we all have heard our own voice say things we ache to recall and erase. Words are powerful things that breathe their own life once they are born into the universe, so I can imagine a situation where a person decides to lay down that authority.
Several years ago, when I decided to try to tell this story, I had someone say, “So, you want to write a story from the first-person point of view of a character who cannot speak. Good luck with that.” While there is truth in that challenge, I cannot imagine a situation where a character would have more to say. We should all spend the time we are given finding our voice and teaching it to sing, because in the end those stories are our legacy and lesson to the world.