Eleanor Morse uses the shock of United States immigration policy to jumpstart her fifth novel, “This Foreign Land.” When Vincent Ottley hears a 2018 radio broadcast describing children being separated from their parents at the border, he turns to his sister Bryn and asks, “What are we? Savages?” Though he lives outside of Augusta, he secretly heads south on foot, wanting to help. Bryn is left to care for Vincent’s beloved donkeys, her class of fragile third grade students and her own faltering self. Meanwhile, Dolores, a young Ecuadorian widow, and her daughter are also walking to the border, fleeing from danger. The characters’ literal and metaphorical journeys make for a beautifully wise, quirky and moving book.
Morse spoke with the Press Herald about what inspired her characters, the purpose of imagination and activating compassion in others.
Let’s start with Vincent. He’s a deeply compassionate, luminously perceptive character who has bouts of psychosis when under profound stress. He sees things ‘askew and true,’ as you write of a different character. How did you come up with him and his backstory?
My father had a brother, Uncle Dwight, who had schizophrenia. I got to know him fairly well. I think Vincent partly grew from Uncle Dwight. But I was very comfortable inside Vincent’s head, and I loved writing scenes with him. I slipped into his brain, and I liked being there. Toward the end of his life, I became Uncle Dwight’s guardian, though he didn’t want me to be. He said I wasn’t beautiful enough. He wanted Rita Hayworth.
Vincent’s journey involves many curious stops. I was particularly struck by the woman in a tarpaper shack who puts Vincent up for the night and how he offers to bury her husband’s ashes.
Vincent is a character who has a holy fool aspect to him. He activates compassion in people that he meets, partly because of his oddity and the things that he says. But that scene is one of my favorite scenes in the book, too. I had an image in my head of an old piano that had music in it still, but nobody had played it in years and years. In a sense, that’s who the woman was. She had music in her and she hadn’t really spoken much in years. There was something about Vincent that activated her sense of humanity. I loved what happened between them. It wasn’t something that I planned out. It was something that I just followed the thread of, which often happens in the way that I write.
In Vincent’s absence, Bryn becomes close with an arborist named Ollie. What made you want to develop that plot line?
Oddly enough, sometimes it’s easier for me to develop a male character than a female character. With a female character, I feel the closeness of gender. But Ollie is a very different woman than I am. I don’t climb trees for a living. But I love that she did. I knew her name right away, Ollie Dobson. I always thought of her as having those two names attached to her, and I could see her up in the treetops where she was really risking her life every day.
Speaking of difference, did you have any concerns about writing Dolores, who is a different ethnicity than yourself?
I grappled with it and finally came to think, “Well, what do we have an imagination for? What do we have compassion in our hearts for if not to try to understand human beings who grow up differently than ourselves?”
What kind of research did you do for this novel?
I did a lot of different kinds of research about donkeys for one thing. What they eat, how to trim their hooves, that kind of thing. I did research about lightning strikes, about schizophrenia. Even though I knew something about schizophrenia from my own family, I learned quite a bit more about it.
I went to the southern border because I needed to know more than I knew. I met people while I was in Texas who had come through the Darién Gap, which is the most dangerous migration route in the world. There was a mother I remember who had three children with her — older children — and they had lost everything except the clothes on their backs. I learned so much from everybody that I spoke with. I feel if I hadn’t gone to Texas and crossed the border and spoken to people who were kind enough to speak to me, that I would not have had the right to tell any part of Dolores’s story.
Given the subject, how did you keep your book from becoming a polemic?
Moral outrage, when it’s on the page, gets tiresome very quickly. I didn’t want to write that kind of book any more than I would want to read it. But it felt like the utmost cruelty to use parents and their children politically. I couldn’t think of anything more cruel. I didn’t anticipate what we would be facing now. I knew that I had to take it on in some way. Vincent kind of saved me because he felt grief in his heart, but it didn’t come out as outrage. It came out with his odd connections with people. He set out because his heart told him to. And that’s kind of how I set out: because my heart told me to.
Debra Spark is the Zacamy Professor of English at Colby College. Her most recent novel is “Discipline.”