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We are delighted that Evanthia Bromiley made time to chat with us about her debut novel Crown, available June 17. Learn more about the author’s inspiration for the novel and the way that setting plays an important role in telling this story.
Ingram Library Services: Can you give us the elevator pitch for Crown?
Evanthia Bromiley: Jude Woods is on the brink of eviction. Pregnant and almost to term, jobless, and mother to Evan and Virginia, she has three days to box up her family’s life and find a safe place to live.
ILS: This is your debut novel, but you have a background in short fiction and creative nonfiction. What brought you to this story?
EB: Crown began for me with an image. I saw this little girl on the edge of a grassfire. I saw the things of the field fleeing, and ash on her face. I wrote to find out who she was and what she was running from. Jude and the park rose up around her and grew into something intimate yet multi-faceted that showed the lives around me in the Southwest … there is something incredibly complex about being a child in a world over which one has no control, but has these vast, imaginary kingdoms in which to reside. There is this immense ceiling that the world places on an American child, and there is her slamming against it. As I wrote, the language started to tell me things about will. About motherhood—it’s an animal thing, really. Motherhood. Childhood, too. Things of the body. I think that initial image helped me to find the style of the book and the terroir of the language. It took me a long time to get the structure, because I felt real pressure to get the energy and the sound of the prose right.
ILS: What were some of your inspirations?
EB: Ah! I love this question. The land and the people around me. It’s a harsh and beautiful place, the Southwest, and there are very deep divisions in what people have and don’t have, yet we do make it work.
I also love poetry, and I was reading a lot of sonnets at the time I structured the novel. I wanted to make the book a kind of offering to the unborn child, and much in the same way a volta operates in a sonnet, I wanted the energy between point of view characters to create torque, tension, and surprise, and for that space to bind the narrative together as a whole more complex than the parts.
ILS: Crown sets a specific, haunting atmosphere in the blue-collar Southwest. How did you bring this story to life, and what were the challenges in rendering this environment?
EB: I live in a little town called Hermosa, Colorado. In the four corners, the land is wildly different from one mile to the next. You can leave the rich, riparian land next to the Animas River and drive a few hours and be in the Painted Desert. If you go north, you can be in an avalanche field in the San Juans. That kind of diversity does something to people, I think. The people here understand the land, they work it, and they adapt to it, its dangers and temperamental beauty and harshness. For the most part, people here take care of each other. Land like this does something to the imagination. One of the challenges I faced while writing the novel was that I wanted to capture the land and people on the page, but I didn’t want to name places directly. I wanted it to be like any small town in the American Southwest, where all kinds of people live together and do the best they can. I also didn’t believe the names mattered to the kids, who have moved so much that space takes on a more immediate and intimate feeling.
Also, I’ve moved a lot. I’ve moved seven times in this small corner of Southwest Colorado alone, so I’m familiar with the feeling of leaving things behind, and the questions leaving raises—what do you keep? What’s worth holding onto?
ILS: What do you hope readers take away from this story?
EB: There’s a Eudora Welty quote I love, from The Wide Net: “The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.” I hope readers can feel the joy in the prose. I think it belongs there and it’s truthful. I’ve had the privilege of working with children for a long time, and their resilience and capacity to transcend unbelievable hardships with imagination and joy have been a gift to me.
ILS: What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
EB: I’m re-reading The Lover, by Marguerite Duras. I just love her—the prose is brave and unapologetic, and the structure of that book is so female. Some scenes just rip you apart. Deborah Levy says “Duras wants to nail a catastrophe to the page,” and I think that is the very best way to say what I see happening there.
ILS: What’s next?
EB: I’m working on my next novel, which is a story of complicated female friendship, and a search for a missing street artist, Leda. While she searches, my narrator must excavate a girlhood friendship that shaped both women—a friendship empowering and subversive, jealous and reverent, steadfast and treacherous—and the childhood event that led to Leda’s disappearance.
ILS: Can you share a favorite memory of the library?
EB: The public library saved me once as a girl and again in high school. I grew up on an island that was seven miles long and three miles wide, with some pretty brutal northern weather. I think if I had been a different kind of kid, I might have been lonely, but I was introverted, a daydreamer; I was fine with the solitude. My dad would drive me to the Burlington library, and we would leave with the maximum number of books, which I think was twenty-five at the time. I remember armfuls of books filling my arms and pinned down by my chin.
High school wasn’t particularly pleasant for me; I was terribly uncomfortable in my own skin at that age, and I wasn’t very interested in my classes. Our librarian, Miss Duteau, was very kind to me. She understood right away that I liked to hide in the library, and that I was ravenous for books. That gave me something to do in high school. I just read under my desk. I missed most of algebra, but I think I spent a lot of very productive hours that way.
