Lions, Tigers, and Bogs, oh my!

In Kay Chronister's new psychological suspense novel, be careful where you step ...

Happy Friday, readers! As we are counting down the days until election night, I recommended six politically adjacent books for you to dive into this weekend. Please go out and vote! Your voice matters. Kay Chronister joins me this week to discuss some safe topics- peat, bogs, and physical environments in novels.

Books on Tap:

On this week’s episode of The Book Maven Podcast, I am joined by the wonderful Kay Chronister. We talk about bogs and how environments influence a novel, Gothic vs. horror elements, and physically experiencing a setting as part of the writing process. Kay’s novel, The Bog Wife, was published earlier this month by Counterpoint LLC.

#FridayReads

This week our Friday Readers are glowing about Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo, The Long Call by Ann Cleeves, Morning Glory on the Vine: Early Songs and Drawings by Joni Mitchell, and American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures, edited by America Ferrera.

Canon or Can It

Animal Farm by George Orwell is debated on this week’s Canon or Can It. Does this novel about animals rebelling against their human masters in an attempt to improve their lives deserve its place in the literary canon? Or should it be canned forever?

Six Recs: Political Issues

This week, my Six Recs are: Outlawed by Anna North, Gun Love by Jennifer Clement, Into the Beautiful North by Luis Urrea, Harrow by Joy Williams, American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson, and The Power by Naomi Alderman.

We now have a Bookshop.org page up and running HERE for you readers to be able to support these authors and purchase all of the book titles we have mentioned in the podcast.

All titles mentioned:

The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister, Dearest by Jacquie Walters, Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo, The Long Call by Ann Cleeves, Morning Glory on the Vine: Early Songs and Drawings by Joni Mitchell, American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures by America Ferrera, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Outlawed by Anna North, Gun Love by Jennifer Clement, Into the Beautiful North by Luis Urrea, Harrow by Joy Williams, American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson,  and The Power by Naomi Alderman.

Find me on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads. 

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.

Episode Transcript:

BP: Hello, readers!  Welcome to my new show, The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This is a podcast where we'll dive into the hottest book world trends, address some of the great or not so great classics, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode.

But first, I had the opportunity to chat with Kay Chronister, whose new novel The Bog Wife follows an isolated family who worship the bog that surrounds them. We talk about everything from bogs and peat to Gothic vs. horror. Join us in conversation as we talk about physically experiencing bogs as part of the process of Kay’s writing her novel.

BP: So, Kay Chronister, The Bog Wife, takes place in a cranberry bog, which I find fascinating because I've spent a lot of time on Cape Cod and, I, you know, know a lot about those bogs. I’ve visited them, each in their fruits, if you will. But it's, this is a cranberry bog that is not in Massachusetts. It's in West Virginia. So the Hadsley family, and I also don't want to spoil things too much, is so personally, intimately, and geographically connected to this bog. So, you mentioned, you know, boreal bogs. Let's start there, because I find boreal places fascinating. Just like taiga or taiga, however you say that. So what is it about the boreal bog? I can't say that too many times fast. That, it, you know, attracted you. When did you first look into that as a sort of micro climate place? 

KC: I started with the idea that I wanted to write about some kind of wetland. And I started with the more Southern Appalachian wetlands, kind of fens or swamps. But then I got really, really interested in bog bodies and in the particular dynamics of peat bogs. And as I learned a little more about wetlands, cause I really knew nothing about wetland ecology before I started writing this book. I kind of figured out where geographically those happen and what kind of climate you need, that they're more of a cold weather environment. And so, really, I was after the peat moss and the qualities peat moss has and what it does and the kind of ecosystem it produces. And so it ended up being a little more of like a chilly woodsy environment rather than a, you know, humid, swampy environment. And I think it would feel a little different, like, atmosphere wise if I had gone that way, but I was really just following the peat. 

BP: One of the things that fascinated me about The Bog Wife is the way we're talking about the climate and about the bog and all of this. It's so claustrophobic. It's so interdependent. And so you know, like I said, claustrophobic and tangled and all of the things we think about when we think about something that can't be taken apart without ruining something. So what I'm thinking about here is something I heard yesterday. I was interviewing a new horror writer named Jacquie Walters about her book, Dearest at Politics and Prose. And Jackie was talking, or responding to a question about ‘why write a novel?’ because she does a lot of script writing. And she said, you can create a feeling of claustrophobia so well in a novel because you are so close to the characters. It's not just about, she said, here you are thinking, you know, for example, the weird house and being John Malkovich. Sure, that's claustrophobic, but, in order to produce our, you know, fight, flight, or freeze responses, prose is so much better at that. And I found that, so it's, the family is claustrophobic, the bog is claustrophobic, the house, the relationships. So, talk to me a little bit about how the bog and the idea of the bog and you talked about why you said it where you did and all that sort of thing. How that helped you, I don't know, do you consider this a horror novel or do you consider it something else? 

KC: I love that question because I thought so much about claustrophobia and the bog environment when I started to write this book. Initially, I felt like bogs aren't very claustrophobic at all, and I wanted that, I wanted my setting to be, because as you said, like, the family dynamics are all about claustrophobia, about interconnection to perhaps a dysfunctional degree, and about this kind of feeling that you can't get away. And a setting like a forest is great and easy to make claustrophobic because it's very closed. You can't see well, you don't have a great sense of, like, how much space you have. But a bog is very open. And when I visited bogs in person, I was struck by that, by how unforbidding it felt, by how kind of, I don't know, just, not anxiety provoking it is to walk around a bog. 

BP: Oh, But you got there. You got there. 

KC: But I got there. And in order to get there, I really had to get much deeper into the ecology than I expected, where it couldn't just be ‘this is how it looks on the surface’ because I think there is something very claustrophobic about the bog ecosystem. If you go under the surface, you know, you're thick in the peat and everything is very, very interdependent where if you took out one species, the whole thing would crumble. And so there are these features to bogs that I think bring out that sense of claustrophobia. The more you know about them, probably the more claustrophobic they feel because you realize, oh, that looks like an open field, but if I walk across it, I'm going to fall in to my waist. 

BP: Did you go in? Did you go in?

KC: I did not. 

BP: Oh, interesting! 

KC: You are not allowed to go into the bogs that I have visited. They're protected with boardwalks and park rangers. And they did show us, on one tour I went on, they stuck a long stick down into the peat and showed us how deep it went. But, no. No putting your own feet in.

BP: Well, on the other hand, that gives you, as a novelist, incredible license to imagine what's down there. 

KC: Absolutely. 

BP: Was there something in The Bog Wife that you created out of whole cloth that happens? Not necessarily, I mean, I know there are some things that happen that are you know, super, supra natural, but, just in terms of bog ecology and biology. Did you say, oh, I'm going to put, I don't know, a layer of fine gravel in the, you know, something like that. 

KC: I'm thinking about that. I didn't like kind of, it kind of worked out to a hue pretty close to reality, at least in terms of the ecology. But I know I added a kind of mummified prehistoric little corpse that they find, which I think is not very probable. And I'm trying to think if there's anything else that I really stretched. There may not be. 

BP: No, I just thought that was really interesting. And you know, the fact that you can't, you know, go into them, which makes perfect sense. It makes sense to protect them, especially because we don't have a lot of boreal areas, you know, that are protected environments. Or we don't have enough, I should say. And so did you spend some time, is it something where, for example, I know you said you went on some tours. Could you rent an Airbnb that looked out over a bog? How did you sort take it all in. 

KC: Yeah. So I didn't get to look out over the bog, but I did go on a weekend trip to Cranberry Glades in West Virginia with a couple of friends. We got a cabin. We, and we spent about two days. You can go through the bog on a boardwalk, so you can see everything, even though you can't walk on it. We also just spent time in kind of the surrounding area, sniffing moss and looking at owl pellets and getting rained on and kind of just having those sensory experiences. And it did really end up informing the book and how it felt to be there. And just sort of atmosphere. It was really, really useful to actually have physically visited. 

BP: So I did ask you and I know you mentioned that it was interesting to you. I said, you know, is this a horror novel? 

KC: Yeah, thank you for returning to that question. I realized I didn't answer it and I really wanted to. To me, this novel is first and foremost a family drama, but I think it's a Gothic family drama. I think for me, it's first and foremost, I think, a Gothic novel, and whether it's horror or not is sort of less primary of a question to me, I guess. But I always struggle a little with the boundaries of horror because I think I'm far more interested in being unsettling or upsetting than scary, and I think that's probably apparent in my work. I don't think I'm necessarily very scary. And for me, this novel is about the dynamics of the people and this land that they live on and own and how they interact and the supernatural elements are part of what the drama is about, but it's sort of not first and foremost about the supernatural. I was most interested in the people and their personalities. And so that's where it lands for me. 

BP: The thing I want to end on is you said you're working on a degree in mental health counseling right now, which is, you know, that's really important work these days. And you were talking about the history of the development of the Gothic novel, as well as the history of the Hadsley's in your novel in ways that do center mental health and mental health concerns. So if you would, talk to me for a minute or two about why it's so important right now to be paying attention to mental health and mental wellness. 

KC: We've had a fair number of major historical disruptions of our own in the last decade or so. I mean, they're a little unceasing, but I think they've been especially acute in the last five, ten years. And I think there's a lot more acknowledgement now than ever before that you should care about mental health and that a wide range of people will experience mental health problems at different times and for different reasons. But I think there's still a lot of work to be done in terms of access and in terms of like education of the general public, like not just individuals going into therapy, but you know, how did your family system affect you? How might you still be processing things from earlier in your life? What are you kind of not examining about the way you function day to day? And so I think, yeah, it's a huge, hugely important time to be thinking about mental health. And I think in a weird, twisted way, Gothic novels are really great at helping us think about some of those things. 

BP: This is just fantastic. I'm really, really delighted to talk to you. Glad we could make it work.

Thank you again, Kay. You can get a copy of The Bog Wife wherever books are sold. Now, let’s move on to Friday Reads, where we’ll see what you’ve been reading this week. 

It's time for another Friday Reads collection of posts. So Jordan, help me out here. Who are we highlighting this week? 

JA: All right well, first we're going to start off with the BookCougars podcast @BookCougars on X. They shared an episode of Friday Reads, August 9th, 2024. Their #Friday Reads.

BP: Excellent. Love the book cougars. Love their podcast. I've appeared on it. I hope I'll get to go back someday because they are two of the most delightful readers and book lovers. And I don't even know everything about their careers. I hope to learn more, but this little YouTube video that they've got up is also hashtagged #whatareyou #currentlyreading? And so it looks like they've got some good kids books recommendations on here. Highly recommend you listen to the BookCougers podcast and also take a look at whatever the recommendations are. So next up. 

JA: Next up we've got from @websitemanagement on X today is national book lovers day, I'm reading a delightful rom com and this weird speculative book about Richard Nixon #Fridayreads.

Okay, first of all this caught my eye because I saw weird speculative book about Richard Nixon. And I thought my brain is exploding! What is going on? But then I looked at it and read it again. I am a big proponent of commas all the time. I love the Oxford comma, but I also love this. And I thought, I am reading a delightful rom com and a weird speculative book about Richard Nixon. I thought, is it the same book? Is there a delightful rom com that is also a weird speculative book? No. Okay. I'm sure they’re two different books, but Kay, thanks for sharing Friday Reads. Love it. 

JA: All right. Yeah, that one is, uh, definitely a paradoxical one to think about. Up next, we've got from Miriam Halberstam. She's reading the book Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo.

BP: I have to say, Miriam shows up in Friday Reads often. Thank you for being a Friday Reads person, Miriam. And I love that she has a photograph of this novel, Same As It Ever Was, by Claire Lombardo on a very pretty, you know, sort of pillowcase or sheet background that echoes the blues and greens and all the different colors in the book jacket. But I also wanted to point out that Lombardo's novel is really good. It is one of the ones I devoured this summer. It just has such a feeling of authenticity about, you know, people who are Gen Xers and what they're dealing with in midlife. So, highly recommend. Onward. 

JA: Finally, we've got from @GirlSwagger101. My Friday Reads are The Long Call by Ann Cleeves, Morning Glory on the Vine: Early Songs and Drawings by Joni Mitchell, and American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures, edited by America Ferrera. 

BP: I love this. GirlSwagger101 has Swaggerific up as their moniker. And these three books are just all so different and all so interesting and good. Ann Cleeves is a British mystery writer. Usually, I don't know if The Long Call is one of her Vera mysteries or one of her Jimmy Perez Shetland mysteries, because she has the two, but always, always great mysteries to read. I'd call them cozy, but the landscape is a little brutal, so not quite. They're cozy with an edge. Morning Glory on the Vine by Joni Mitchell. Come on, talk about another, we were talking earlier today about Toni Morrison and I want to say Joni Mitchell is a GOAT when it comes to folk music. So this might be a really great thing to take a look at if you are a big Mitchell stan like I am. And finally, America Ferrera's American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures. I have loved America Ferrera since the very earliest days of Ugly Betty. And I also loved her star turn. I think it was a star turn even though she had a supporting role in the Barbie movie last summer. So, fantastic collection there. And that brings us to the close of a Friday Reads. I hope you come back to hear more of them. Not you, Jordan. You have to. 

JA: I'll be here anytime, anyplace. Friday Reads.

BP: Next week is election week, and so we wanted to look at one of the literary canon’s most popular books about politics and power, Animal Farm. Will George Orwell’s classic live on in the canon, or will we simply have to can it forever?

Every Monday we begin again. We pull on our business casual, or our non-slip shoes, or our button up and sweat pant combo, and clock in to another week of work. In this country of go getters, labor is king. When's the last time you met someone and didn't follow up with, so what do you do? Whether we like it or not, our work defines us.

But isn't it better to dream of a world where it doesn't? Even if you haven't read Animal Farm by George Orwell, you've thought about a three day work week. You've always thought about what your work is worth, what your boss' work is worth, and how come the farther up you climb that corporate ladder, the less work you do and the more you get paid.

And what would you be like as a boss? Would you, too, forget about all the little people? For this segment of Canon or Can It, I'll cut to the chase. There is no chance I'm canning George Orwell's famous allegory.

In this beast fable for the ages, farm animals successfully rebel against their human masters, only to end up where they started, but this time with the pigs in charge.

Animal Farm is based on the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Orwell's story begins with a boar named Old Major, the porcine version of Vladimir Lenin. Old Major exhorts his animal comrades to tell them of a dream, one of equal rights and fair labor practices. How is it that man is the only creature that consumes without producing?

This galvanizes the farm population against human master Mr. Jones. Three nights pass and Old Major dies in his sleep. In his honor, two other pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, lead the revolution, but with two different ideologies. History buffs know where I'm going with this. Snowball, the Trotsky of the trio, is ousted.

And Napoleon, a stand in for Joseph Stalin, leads the farm to a worse fate than where they began. Napoleon and the high ranking pig class end the story on two feet, selling their exploitative labor practices to the human farmers they once despised. 

This story tracks the progression of an impassioned public fighting for a just cause to be eventually manipulated by a power hungry leader. Napoleon makes empty promises. Each move he makes is to further his own agenda. Can you think of another charismatic leader who built a phony platform on the working class?

I'm Donald Trump and I approve this message. 

Animal Farm is just as relevant today as it was in the 40s. Most Americans read Animal Farm in middle school. Yes, I think this book should be in the canon, but no, I don't think middle school is the right place for it. The lessons of this book of revolution, of power, of greed, would hold more weight for an older audience, an audience who has, say, actually held a job.

An audience who has voted in an election just to be disappointed by the outcome. When I read this in middle school, I couldn't connect a farm of toiling animals to an American working class. I mean, once my English teacher told me to, I suppose I made the connection, but I never understood it. It's easy to read Animal Farm and point to what is wrong with our world.

I mean, this book famously has a bleak ending. But it's one of the few books of required reading that addresses revolution, propaganda, and activism. This book should come with everyone's first work permit, or their first license, or be handed out at every polling place. Animal Farm is one of those rare works that has the power to shift a mindset, to open eyes, and to make real change.

Animal Farm shows us that even barnyard beasts struggle with power, which complicates politics. 

On today’s Six Recs, we look at some books that touch on today’s most relevant issues, regardless of who wins this election.

This week's Six Recs focuses on books about the matters at hand during this election week, no matter what happens. So, as usual, my producer Jordan is going to be timing me to make sure I give you six book recommendations in three minutes or less. Jordan, are you ready? 

JA: We're ready to go. 

BP: And what happens, remind everyone, if I go over time?

JA: Well, uh, the stakes of this might be lower than those of the election, but, a large bookcase will fall over, and books will scatter everywhere if we don't get it in under three minutes. 

BP: Oh, no. And then I have to reorganize them. I'm not gonna do it by color. I just can't. I can't take that. But in any case, let me get started. Is the clock ticking? 

JA: It's going. 

BP: All right. The first one is about reproductive rights, which is a very hot issue, and I'm recommending a dystopian novel called Outlawed by Anna North. It's set in a near future United States where abortion has been outlawed. Juniper has discovered she's pregnant. She was unfortunately sexually assaulted, and she has to navigate underground abortions, the illegal world that has sprung up. And she discovers she'd much rather head west and live with a group of women who have decided to eschew society completely. It's about oppression, resistance, and the lengths people will go to to protect their freedoms. 

Gun control is another very important topic in our society. And Gun Love by Jennifer Clement is a novel that actually stands up for gun control, even as it describes someone who has fallen in love, in a way, with guns and firearms. It's set in Florida, and Pearl is a young woman who gets obsessed with guns, and as she gets increasingly involved in that culture she grapples with the moral and ethical implications of the violence that results. It is a real examination of the gun lobby, the second amendment and the consequences of gun related tragedies that we're seeing you know, on the weekly, let's put it that way.

Next immigration. I am recommending Into the Beautiful North by Luis Urrea, who is a friend of this podcast. It's a satirical novel exploring this complex issue by following Nayeli, a young woman from Mexico, who sets out to go to the United States to find her father. And then recruit seven men to return to her hometown. You've got to read it to get the plot. But along the way, she encounters many challenges and obstacles, including border crossings, cultural differences, and all kinds of discrimination. It's a humorous, poignant perspective on immigrant struggles. And I think it is a great book about enduring hope and about the dreamers. So check it out. 

Next, the environment. We're all concerned with what is happening around the world and in our country. Joy Williams wrote Harrow, a dystopian novel, again, that explores environmental destruction. There's a young woman named A, who lives in a post apocalyptic world, sort of somewhere in the, you know, the Great Lakes states and the area has been ravaged by pollution and climate change. She's struggling to survive and also grappling with what humanity has done to the earth. It's very stark. It's very challenging. It's also incredibly readable. And it highlights our need to urgently protect our planet.

Foreign policy always at the forefront of national elections, I recommend Lauren Wilkinson's American Spy. This is historical fiction at a very high level and it explores American foreign policy during the 1980’s. So you got a CIA agent named Eleanor Cookie Washington, and she’s Black. She infiltrates a radical group in Harlem and she is working as a spy, but she’s grappling with her own identity- her double consciousness as a Black American. What it means to be a CIA agent and the era’s racial tensions. It’s a critical examination of American foreign policy, particularly in Latin America, and how it can be exploited for political gain. 

Finally, a book about the police state that I think is really, really amazing is Naomi Alderman's The Power. Another dystopian novel I know, thank me later. It explores a world where women suddenly gain the ability to generate electricity, and this shifts global dynamics completely because women are starting to rise to power. They're starting to get authority. What does this mean when men are relegated to subordinate roles? What does it mean when gender equality and power and abuse are all involved? It doesn't explicitly focus on a police state, but it does talk about forms of social control and surveillance. And that highlights the potential for any group to become oppressive with unchecked power.

So, those are my Six Recs. Jordan, how did I do? 

JA: Well, unfortunately, I think we’re going to have to hear that big bookshelf fall once again as we’re at about 4 minutes and 57 seconds. 

BP: Okay, okay. Um, boom, crash. 

Thank you all for listening… and please make a plan to go vote. There is so much at stake in this election and everybody should make their voices heard on November 5th. 

The Book Maven: A Literary Revue, is produced and hosted by me, Bethanne Patrick. It's also produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.