Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Ocean in My Ears
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://meaganmacvie.com/
CITY:
STATE: WA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
https://hotpinkunderwear.com/; married with one daughter
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in AK.
EDUCATION:University of Idaho, B.A.; Pacific Lutheran University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Government communications director and college composition instructor.
AWARDS:Best Teen Historical Fiction, 2017, for The Ocean in My Ears.
WRITINGS
Contributor of fiction to periodicals, including Narrative, Barrelhouse, and Fugue, and the anthology, Timberland Writes Together.
SIDELIGHTS
Meagan Macvie is a young adult fiction writer whose debut novel, The Ocean in My Ears, received the Best Teen Historical Fiction award in 2017. Born and raised in Alaska, Macvie studied poetry and literature at the University of Idaho, earned an M.F.A. in fiction at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop, and worked many years as a government communications director and college composition instructor. Based in her hometown of Soldotna, Alaska, in the 1990s, her novel is a loosely based memoir.
The book follows seventeen-year-old Meri Miller who can’t wait to finish her senior year of high school and move away to college in a big, exciting city like New York or Los Angeles. Yet instead of worrying about SAT tests and the prom, she needs to grow up fast as her grandmother dies, her brother becomes injured, she has her first sexual encounter, her religious parents disapprove, and her friends begin to leave her. Although the dialogue can sound overly melodramatic, like a true teenager, “Macvie movingly explores the ever-shifting highs and lows of adolescence,” according to a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. Working through Meri’s feelings and those of the people around her, the book addresses purpose and the ability to control your own future.
“The 1990s setting is marked by tsunami-height hair, acid-wash denim, and multiple trips to see Pretty Woman. An unforgettable journey to adulthood,” according to a Kirkus Reviews Online writer. Macvie shared her reason for setting the book in the 1990s with Tom Cantwell online at NW Book Lovers: “I wish I had a deep and meaningful reason for setting the story in 1990. It just seemed fun. The music, the clothes, the politics…even the candy. I lived through those years, so I had a fair amount of knowledge about the time.” As for the story being autobiographical, Macvie discussed in a blog at 49 Writers: “I did mine bits of my own experiences and use details from my life to build scenes and create a sense of realness. That’s what writers do. We make fake people and almost-real places, and we use whatever magic tricks we can to render a near-authentic experience.”
Diane Colson commented in Booklist that some of Meri’s mundane diary entries interrupt the engaging narrative. Nevertheless, the unconventional Alaska location and setting in the recent past “will give contemporary readers a glimpse into a time when their parents were teens,” noted Colson. In School Library Journal, Elizabeth Nicolai called the book “A strong debut novel featuring memorable, relatable characters making adult decisions at the edge of high school.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 1, 2017, Diane Colson, review of The Ocean in My Ears, p. 66.
Publishers Weekly, October 2, 2017, review of The Ocean in My Ears, p. 141.
School Library Journal, November 2017, Elizabeth Nicolai, review of The Ocean in My Ears, p. 90.
ONLINE
49 Writers, http://49writers.org/ (December 5, 2017), Meagan Macvie, “The Fabricated Truth.”
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (September 18, 2017), review of The Ocean in My Ears.
Meagan Macvie Website, http://meaganmacvie.com (April 1, 2018), author profile.
NW Book Lovers, https://nwbooklovers.org/ (November 7, 2017), Tom Cantwell, “Straight Outta Soldotna: Debut Novelist Meagan Macvie.”
Guest Blogger Meagan Macvie | The Fabricated Truth
49 WritersDecember 5, 201749 Writers, Guest Blogger1 Comment
PHOTO BY CLARK FAIR
I was a teen in 1990s Soldotna, Alaska—the setting for my debut novel—so people often ask me if The Ocean in My Ears is a thinly disguised memoir. The short answer is no.
Sure, I was probably every bit as frustrating, angsty, and confused as Meri, my teen protagonist. She attends a high school that I worked hard to make seem real, writes poetry and journal entries that I painstakingly crafted to feel like this teen girl’s private thoughts, and she loves other fictional people with as much passion as I could conjure onto the page. However, Meri exists only there, on the page, moving from scene to scene in a world I made up.
So yeah. The Ocean in My Ears is fiction.
But the content is not exactly untrue. For starters, I wrote with a devotion to facts. I took great pains, for example, to align the whole book to the actual 1990-91 calendar (holidays, weekends, etc.) and coordinate the characters’ timelines accordingly. Pro tip: notecards helped me synchronize Meri’s life events with the school calendar and actual historic events.
I had rules, you see, the kind to which anyone writing historical fiction must adhere. In the beginning, I didn’t think of myself as writing “historical fiction,” and, honestly, when I first read the Kirkus Reviews categorization, I’ll admit to being slightly offended. Or maybe it was more a sheepish vexation the way a… ahem… mature person buying liquor feels when not asked for ID.
ME: Really? But I was in high school only… nevermind.
But I digress. We were discussing truth.
Yes, I did mine bits of my own experiences and use details from my life to build scenes and create a sense of realness. That’s what writers do. We make fake people and almost-real places, and we use whatever magic tricks we can to render a near-authentic experience. (I’m giving a class on my magic tricks, if you’re interested.)
True-to-life landscape descriptions are also kind of a big deal to me, and I generally kept places in the novel and other setting details accurate, though not if accuracy messed with or impeded the story. Like in real life, there were two Dairy Queens—one in Kenai and one ten miles away in Soldotna—which was unnecessarily complicated, so I fudged them into one. I sort of reinvented the high school, in part because the real Soldotna High School split into two different schools my senior year then later merged back into one.
Still, I worried over each decision to veer from precision (though admittedly, I took great pleasure in making up an alternate high school universe). I know how people who live in a place-used-in-fiction can be. Even in a novel, readers can get hung up on writing that “doesn’t get it right.”
Thus, I aspired both for a sense of truth and a uniquely imagined world inside the book. An elaborate fabrication that feels genuine, which made for a tough balancing act.
At the beginning, when I was writing small vignettes, I stuck closer to my own experiences. I mined both my past and my present for starting points. But slowly, the characters transformed into wholly their own people and drove the narrative. As an arc began to take shape, the story developed internal inertia. I gave my imagination full license to change earlier scenes and create new, entirely fictional material.
Any bits close to the truth of my own life that managed to hang in through revisions now serve as tiny touchstones, reminders that I did, in fact, author this story. For the most part, Meri’s experiences aren’t true to my own life. Not in a play-by-play way. But there is a kind of deep truth there. I definitely wasn’t Meri, but she is, in many ways, a girl I wish I would have been. She evolves over the course of the novel into a more reflective and introspective person, and she has an agency I never had. She confronts wrongs the way I should have, but didn’t.
Real-life teens often don’t understand their situations and experiences until much later—maybe not until full adulthood. But fiction isn’t real life. It operates differently. Fiction asks us to consider possibility. What if a teen did have a broader and deeper sense of her circumstances? What if this girl was stronger? How would a more empowered girl confront the things I couldn’t?
As a mother of a daughter, I’m still answering those questions in life. But in fiction, I was able to explore countless possible questions and answers. In The Ocean in My Ears, I could simultaneously consider what is, what was, and what could be.
Though set in the “historical past” of 1990, the issues tackled in the novel are relevant today. Meri confronts the same challenges many small town kids face, and while my own lived experiences are relics of the past, this novel’s mixture of fact and fiction is an elaborate fabrication for present-day readers.
Meagan Macvie was born and raised in Soldotna, Alaska. Her debut novel, The Ocean in My Ears, is set in her hometown. The novel was published in 2017 by Portland State University’s Ooligan Press and was a finalist for the 2016 Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Contest. In their starred review, Kirkus calls The Ocean in My Ears an “unforgettable journey to adulthood.” Meagan is a former government communications director and college composition instructor who now writes full-time and teaches writing workshops through her local schools and libraries. She earned her MFA in fiction from Pacific Lutheran University and a BA in English Literature from the University of Idaho. Her work has appeared in Narrative, Barrelhouse, and Fugue, as well as the regional library anthology, Timberland Writes Together. In 2017, her short story, “Dinosaur Guys,” was awarded second place in the Willamette Writers Kay Snow Writing Contest. Meagan now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and daughter, as well as a dog, two goats, and seven chickens. Find her online at meaganmacvie.com and on Twitter and Instagram as @meaganmacvie.
Don’t miss her upcoming Southcentral Alaska tour appearances and register for her two-hour writing class in Anchorage on Saturday Dec. 16, 2017.
An Intimate Evening with Meagan Macvie
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November 3, 2017 by OoliganPress 0 Comments
We took a second to catch up with author Meagan Macvie before the launch of The Ocean in My Ears (November 7), asking some questions about books, goats, and life growing up in Alaska.
First, I’ve got to get the most burning question out of the way: what can you tell me about your goats?
I have two Dwarf Nigerian goats—a girl named Beth and her stinky brother Lucky. I take them out almost every day for walks in the field behind my house. They munch blackberry bushes and fiddle ferns while I think about the world. My goat-inspired ponderings often end up in my writing.
Meagan and her goats. “I look crazy in this photo, but it’s also kind of hilarious.”
Besides totally owning #goatstagram, got any weird hobbies?
Hm. Weird hobbies. I like taking pictures of fungi. Like a lot. I go on walks in the woods and see all these crazy ‘shrooms. Wild mushrooms are strange and mysterious to me. There are so many different kinds and colors, and they’re very photogenic.
The Ocean in My Ears opens with an epigraph from Margaret Atwood’s “Circe/Mud Poems.” Without spoilers, why is this epigraph so important for this book? Why should we read Atwood with relevance today—and, if we’ve never read her before, what should we start with?
There are many ways into Atwood because she’s wildly interesting. She’s a big thinker and prolific writer who’s written in all genres. As a young person, I started with her poetry for so many reasons. I was a teen girl becoming uncomfortable with the roles being foisted upon me as an almost-woman, and Atwood’s Circe/Mud Poems explored these cultural expectations in ways that sharpened my own thinking. I badly needed an ally at that time in my life, and there weren’t many to be found in Soldotna, Alaska. As a feminist thinker, Atwood’s work is as relevant today as it ever was. I also loved The Edible Woman and, of course, The Handmaid’s Tale.
What were some of your favorite fictional heroines growing up? How about more recent ones?
I was pretty geeked out on sci-fi and fantasy in my younger days. Wonder Woman, the Bionic Woman, and Morgaine from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon come to mind. I wanted to be beautiful and strong, clever and mysterious. Even then, I wanted to fight evil in the world, especially evil that was confusing. Not the obvious “bad guys” in Disney films, but the slick conspirators who pretended to be good. The early Christian patriarchs threatening the matriarchal Celtic culture. The doddering old man who puts his hand up your shirt when no one’s looking. That last one may be a real-life experience, but my battle felt no different, the odds no less impossible, than those facing my fictional heroines. I still admire strong women who face impossible odds. Although I did love the new Wonder Woman movie, now my heroines tend to be real women fighting for justice in today’s world. Beautiful, strong, clever, and mysterious women like former First Lady Michelle Obama, writer Roxane Gay, and US Senator Patty Murray.
What was the book scene like in small town Alaska in the 90s?
I went to a Christian school through seventh grade. There was no library in my school. We read from the Bible, Christian textbooks, and ancient Encyclopedia Britannicas. My mom also had a mail order subscription for kids books. Disney, Dr. Seuss, and Little Golden books would arrive in our mailbox once a month. I don’t remember an actual bookstore in town, but at the drugstore I bought Nancy Drew hardbacks as a kid and later mostly popular sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks. My mom had stacks of romance novels that I would sneak and read in the bathroom. That pretty much sums up my young reading life. I did attend a public high school, where I read novels that focused on social, political, and cultural critique—1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Looking Backward, The Jungle. There was no shortage of fear-based thinking in my life at the time. I also had to read some Shakespeare, Of Mice and Men, and bits of Greek mythology in school, but I didn’t encounter a ton of literary fiction until college. As an English major, I was expected to read everything from John Milton to Toni Morrison. That was a steep learning curve for me—I had to quickly step up my library, reading, and critical thinking skills.
If you were to be tattooed with one literary quote, which one would you choose? And what font?
Oh, that’s a good one. Maybe just “without guilt” from the Atwood epigraph in the book, because guilt has sucked so much of my energy—wasted energy—over the years and kept me from doing things I wanted or needed to do. It’s made me hate myself. Guilt is an empty glass.
In terms of font, I have very particular font tastes. I like a traditional serif font with round “i” dots and round periods. Garamond is a traditional font I like, but this Alice Google font is pretty lovely.
The Ocean in My Ears is heavily rooted in nostalgia for the 90s. Did you listen to anything in particular to get you into that mindset while writing? What 90s band would you recommend for teens today?
I listened to a lot of Journey while I was writing Joaquin and Meri scenes. Though I wouldn’t call Journey a 90s band, I listened to them a lot back then, and their songs—especially their ballads—were popular at dances. The Brett character was clearly informed by Def Leppard. Depending on my mood while writing Meri, I’d maybe pull up some old Madonna or British bands I used to love, like Pet Shop Boys or Tears for Fears or OMD.
(Listen to Meagan’s The Ocean in My Ears–inspired playlists to really get in the mood.)
What’s one interesting thing about growing up in Alaska that readers won’t find in The Ocean in My Ears?
Once in real life I fed carrots to a moose from my back door. That is not in the book.
Kirkus Reviews categorized The Ocean in My Ears as historical fiction. How does that make you feel?
Old, of course.
Rapid Fire
What was your very first job?
Babysitting. I hated it.
Go-to order at Dairy Queen?
Chocolate Dilly Bar.
Last book you read & loved?
Thi Bui’s graphic memoir The Best We Could Do.
Three things you can’t live without?
Hummus and salami on a pita (I count that as one thing), my green puffy coat, and my phone that is also a computer and a gps and a thermometer and camera and a data base and a recorder and a million other gadgets in one.
Pick a gif to describe your feelings about the upcoming publication of The Ocean in My Ears.
Like that one gif of Sam and Dean where Dean’s all “I’m totally fine” and then makes a whacked out face and the caption reads INTERNALLY SCREAMING.
Meagan’s The Ocean in My Ears is about Meri Miller, a girl growing up and facing challenges of leaving her small-town life in rural Alaska for college in the 1990s. Read it November 7, 2017.
Meagan Macvie grew up in Alaska writing poems about injustice and hot boys. Her debut novel, The Ocean in My Ears (Ooligan Press, 2017), is set in her hometown. In their starred review, Kirkus Reviews calls the novel an “unforgettable journey to adulthood” and named it a 2017 Best Teen Historical Fiction. Meagan is a former government communications director and college composition instructor who now writes full-time and teaches writing workshops. She earned her MFA in fiction from Pacific Lutheran University and BA in English Literature from the University of Idaho. Her work has appeared in Narrative, Barrelhouse, and Fugue. Meagan now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and daughter, as well as a dog, two goats, and chickens. Find her online at meaganmacvie.com and on Twitter and Instagram as @meaganmacvie.
Meagan grew up in Alaska writing poems about injustice and hot boys. She left Alaska to study poetry and literature at the University of Idaho, then spent fifteen years in government communications before breaking up with her career to pursue creative writing.
She earned her MFA in fiction at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop. That was a very, very good time. The Ocean in My Ears (2017, Ooligan Press) is her first novel. Her short work has appeared in Narrative, Barrelhouse, and Fugue, as well as the regional anthology, Timberland Writes Together. She lives and plays in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, daughter, dog, two stinky goats, and many chickens.
Meagan Macvie was born and raised in Alaska. Her debut, The Ocean in My Ears, is set in her hometown and was published in November 2017 by Portland State University’s Ooligan Press. In their starred review, Kirkus Reviews calls the novel an “unforgettable journey to adulthood” and named it a 2017 Best Teen Historical Fiction. Meagan is a former government communications director and college composition instructor who now writes full-time and teaches writing workshops. She earned her MFA in fiction from Pacific Lutheran University and a BA in English Literature from the University of Idaho. Her work has appeared in Narrative, Barrelhouse, and Fugue, as well as the regional anthology, Timberland Writes Together. Meagan lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and daughter, as well as a dog, two goats, and chickens. Find her online at meaganmacvie.com and on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as @meaganmacvie.
Seattle Author Meagan Macvie: Exploring the Opportunities That Fiction Provides
My apologies for months and months without any new features! It's been a crazy year, but I'm excited to get back in the saddle, especially by featuring a brand new Seattle area novelist, Meagan Macvie. Her debut novel comes out November 7th, but we took some time to talk about her book and her writing journey ahead of the launch.
Author Meagan Macvie
Since she was young, Meagan has written in various forms as a method of understanding herself and the world better. "I’m really gregarious… Having a quiet space to interrogate myself and my feelings was really important - especially when I was young. Writing helps me better understand the world and people and myself," she said.
Poetry and other writing was a part of her life growing up (she studied poetry and literature at the University of Idaho), and eventually formed a key part of her early career in government communications. After 15 years, a series of changes led her to quit her day job to focus on creative writing and her family.
"Change is usually a convergence of many things, and that’s how it was for me. I’d been writing every day as part of my job, but that was for someone else. Quitting my job gave me a chance to find out, 'what do I have to say'? I had a chance to get to know the poet I used to be, and find that person again," Meagan says.
She took a writing class, and one of the prompts was to write about her first memory. Meagan asserts that memory is far from a strong suit, so, "When I wrote the memory, I filled in a bunch of details that weren’t actually in the memory because I couldn’t remember all of the details," she said. "I remember emotional resonance, but not details. That's a great starting point for fiction."
Meagan had the opportunity to read the piece at a salon at Hedgebrook, a wonderful haven for women writers, where it received a great reaction from the audience. This gave her the encouragement she needed to develop the character she had created in a series of vignettes. In the meantime, she was working her way through an MFA in fiction, and blogging on the side.
The vignettes about Meri - as the character came to be called - centered around her teen years. Meagan chose to place the stories between the summer before Meri's senior year in high school to the summer after. "There's so much profound change that happens in that time!" Meagan says. "I felt that was a time that was just rich." As she began to see a plot, the vignettes became the workings of her debut novel.
By watching her own daughter (who is now 15), interviewing young people, and working with groups of high school girls, Meagan was able to get some interesting and helpful perspectives to work into Meri's story. "I gave myself permission to make Meri smarter and braver than I was at the time... I wanted to imagine ways Meri could face things that my teen self couldn’t or wouldn’t," she said.
That opportunity with fiction is very important to Meagan. "I was able to do things in the fictional world that I couldn’t have done if I tried to make this particular story nonfiction."
As she neared completion of her MFA, with the novel as her thesis, Meagan attended a one-day workshop with Ooligan Press (on the recommendation of a fellow Y/A author friend). She had queried a few agents - enough to know that her first pages weren't really working - so Meagan wrote a brand new Chapter One to pitch at the workshop.
It went extremely well.
Within three months, Ooligan Press had agreed to publish her novel (April 21st, 2016). The crazy process of actually publishing a book commenced next, but Meagan fell in love with her Ooligan team. "They are all so young and smart - smarter than they realize! I got about seven pages of feedback, and I started crying because I loved what they had to say. It got me energized and excited about the book again, which really helped me dig back in," she said.
The Ocean in My Ears will be released on November 7th and is the story of a young girl growing up in rural Alaska.
"There’s a bunch of wonderful things about being from a small town, and some not-so-wonderful. I think reading a book like this may help people who don’t understand these things get them a little better. I don't think I was very successful at dealing with certain things in high school, and I'm a little ashamed of that," Meagan said. "You can only give a teen so much agency, but as a writer, I asked myself, what could a young girl do different or better without it being ridiculous?"
This process has been challenging, exciting and transformative for Meagan, and she's definitely hooked on the craft. "I think writing is an amazing way to communicate with other people. There’s an artfulness, a craft. My craft has improved dramatically through this process," she says.
To aspiring authors, Meagan would say to never give up. "Keep investigating, keep interrogating. You write something and it may have kernels of beauty and greatness there, but it’s likely going to take longer than you think… So you stick with it for the long haul. Be patient with the process," she said. "Remember, sometimes it takes YOU awhile to be in the place to write the story. It’s never NOT worth that. Be willing to change in ways you never imagined changing it. Stories almost by design require that of you if you’re going to do this thing."
Several book events are planned around The Ocean in My Ears' launch date of November 7th. Check out the events page on Meagan's website for details!
Posted 12th September 2017 by Norelle Done
Straight Outta Soldotna: Debut Novelist Meagan Macvie
AN INTERVIEW BY TOM CANTWELL
November 7, 2017
When I met Meagan Macvie, during the first minutes of our three-year MFA program, she was buried in a book, occasionally peeking up through her glasses to observe us all getting to know each other. An introverted bookworm, I thought, and I was right about the bookworm part. Just check out her answer below when I asked her for the titles of two influential books. But by the end of the evening, as we all continued getting to know each other over pizza and drinks, and more drinks, Meagan was perhaps the loudest and bawdiest among us.
There is a lot of Meagan in Meri Miller, the protagonist of Macvie’s debut YA novel, The Ocean in My Ears, which is set in Macvie’s hometown of Soldotna, Alaska, or as Meri thinks of it, Slowdotna. Both Meri and Macvie are readers, introspective and brimming with big thoughts, but there is also a fire in them, smoldering and flaring as the fuel around them varies. Like Meagan that first day we met, Meri keenly observes her world – suffocating, small-town Alaska and the broader promise of “Outside” – providing insight and humor along the way. It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to be along for the ride with Meri and Meagan through our time together at the Rainier Writing Workshop and beyond. This summer we raised a virtual toast and exchanged e-mails to celebrate the release of The Ocean in My Ears, an outstanding book that promises to be the first of many. –Tom Cantwell
TC: Having read an earlier draft of your book, I’d like to start at the beginning, literally. Your early draft began at the 7-Eleven and the night at the carnival. Why did you choose to instead open the story at church, with the sermon from Pastor Dan?
MM: A great question only a person familiar with the early manuscript could ask. The short answer: the former beginning wasn’t the right place to start Meri’s story. My first inkling that something wasn’t working was when I queried using the old first pages and received lukewarm responses. One agent felt the characters of best friends Meri and Charlie in that early carnival scene didn’t hit the right note. (Her exact words: “close but no cigar.”)
So I stopped querying and set about figuring out how to fix the problem. I re-read favorite novel first pages, analyzing how they worked, and decided a good first chapter made clear promises to the reader on which the rest of the novel delivered. The old opening passage didn’t show Meri’s true character or even really what the story was about. There’s an artifice in the later carnival scene (the former opening) that only works if the reader first understands the nature of Meri and Charlie’s friendship and knows the real Meri—the vulnerable and conflicted Meri. I wanted my first chapter to show what’s at stake for Meri and to draw readers into her inner landscape—all her turmoil and yearning, humor and indignation. All her stifled desires and confusion. The way she argues with the adult advice constantly being hurled at her.
The new first scene in church accomplishes these things much better. It sets the novel’s tone and showcases Meri’s personality. The sanctuary (even in its ironic name) serves as a kind of metaphor, reflecting her larger sense of feeling trapped. But the microcosm of the stuffy church sanctuary is also a perfect setting for an intimate and funny scene. Out the window is a vibrant world she can’t even see from her pew. Meri’s dreaming about a boy while the pastor’s warning her about (maybe even inspiring her to have) these lascivious teen thoughts. Her parents and brother, though so close in physical proximity, have very little awareness of Meri’s inner landscape. The reader, however, has deep intimacy. The reader feels with her. The new opening better establishes the critical relationship between reader and narrator, communicates what’s at stake for this girl, and invites the reader along on Meri’s journey.
TC: Something else I think is new for me with this published version are the diary/journal entries. It’s interesting, because you have a 1st person narrative, spliced with these 1st person entries. What were you going for there?
MM: One of the things about writing a first-person present-tense story is that your main character is operating in the moment so has limited space to reflect. I wanted to build in pauses and spaces for the reader (and Meri) to take breaths, consider, and contemplate. The initial idea was to create a private place where Meri, the blooming writer, could work her stuff out on the page while also allowing the reader deeper access to her character.
I did have journal entries in the early manuscript, but they were neither consistent nor effective. As I worked through revision, I edited, deleted, and added entries. Written in past tense, the entries reveal thoughts Meri’s been mulling over, provide an outlet for her grief and angst and emerging inner poet, and expose brief flashes from her everyday life.
Each tiny entry was, for me, like adding layers of color onto the canvas of her character. I found as I worked through the novel that the entries could also function as connective tissue without slowing down the narrative. For example, a short journal entry in which Meri wrestles through a fight with Charlie or her feelings about Joaquin was often a more effective and expeditious way of moving the story forward than adding a full-blown scene.
TC: Let’s talk about your decision to set the story in 1990, which I love, right there on the cusp of two decades loaded with pop culture treasure. I’m wondering why else you chose that time, besides it also being central to your own experience.
MM: I wish I had a deep and meaningful reason for setting the story in 1990. It just seemed fun. The music, the clothes, the politics…even the candy. I lived through those years, so I had a fair amount of knowledge about the time. Unfortunately, the things that loomed largest in my memories were the teenage minutiae like lines from popular movies, my best friend’s dress size, and what cars people drove. Actual important details—what time of year salmon spawn, when and how the U.S. became involved in the Gulf War, and what happened when Mt. Redoubt erupted—were fuzzy. I loved going back as a researching adult and essentially learning about my own history.
TC: One thing I really liked about the book is the motif of anticipation. Meri talks about loving the early part of the weekend evening, the moment right before pulling up the fishing net, the first snow “fresh with possibility and waiting to be made into anything.” I’m wondering how conscious you were of that in creating Meri’s character, and while we’re at it, how much of that is you?
MM: I’m fascinated by the idea of temporal experience, and that element of the book is one hundred percent authentic to me. That you can be completely ignorant about, say, the feeling of a roller coaster and literally five minutes later be filled with the knowledge of having just ridden a roller coaster—it probably sounds stupid, but I want to sit and examine those before and after moments. I want to know what else changes in a person—what other perceptions and conceptions about the world, for example, are altered by even seemingly small first experiences. How does a first act or encounter imprint on a person, modify the way that person thinks, or even unconsciously revise who the person is or will become?
The book began as a series of connected vignettes, each titled “First [Fill in the blank].” In the final novel, the word “first” survived editing in four chapter titles, including the last. While writing the book, I definitely considered how first times impacted me and my life. However, Meri’s not me. Her friends and family only live in the fictional Soldotna. Though many scenes and characters initially grew from a seed of my own lived experience, Meri’s world became a realm all its own, more exciting than mine by miles.
TC: What single book had the biggest influence on you as a writer, and what’s the best book you’ve read this year?
BelovedMM: One book? There’s no singular book. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman as well as her Selected Poems 1965-1975, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories, Sharon Old’s Satan Says, Marie Howe’s What the Living Do—these amazing women writers (plus so many more!) all were formative voices in my development as a writer.
Books that heavily influenced me while writing and editing The Ocean in My Ears include Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Erica Lorraine Scheidt’s Uses for Boys, Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Keshni Kashyup’s Tina’s Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, Sonja Livingston’s Ghostbread, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, David Levithan’s Every Day and more than I can list here. I learn something from almost every book I read, but for this project, I focused on first-person narratives, including memoir and nonfiction, though mostly young adult fiction and coming-of-age stories.
DrylandSo far this year Sara Jaffe’s novel Dryland (2015) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists are probably among my favorite reads. I just read Samantha Hunt’s brilliant short story “A Love Story” in The New Yorker (also included in her 2017 collection The Dark Dark) and am still reeling. Currently, I’m reading two books from 2017—Roxanne Gay’s story collection Difficult Women and fellow Ooligan author Brian K. Friesen’s debut novel At the Waterline—and am loving them both!
TC: What’s been the coolest part of publishing your first book, and what’s next for you?
MM: Working with the editorial team was definitely my favorite part. Having smart, invested readers provide insightful feedback that I could use to improve the manuscript—I seriously almost cry when I think of what a gift the developmental edit process was to me. I learned a ton and am endlessly grateful to Ooligan and my book team!
The future is…I don’t know. Scary? I’ve been surprised by how onerous book publicity responsibilities have felt, but I’m trying to carve out time to write. I’m working on a short story collection. I also have a middle grade novel drafted and another young adult novel started, but all writers know that the work is in the revisions and the getting-to-done, so I guess what’s next for me is the same thing as what’s next for all of us. A long, arduous slog punctuated by fleeting moments of joy.
Meagan Macvie was born and raised in Alaska. She received her MFA in fiction from Pacific Lutheran University. Her work has appeared in Narrative, Fugue, and Barrelhouse, as well as the short story anthology, Timberland Writes Together. Meagan lives with her husband and daughter in Washington State. For more on Meagan, visit her website.
Tom Cantwell earned his MFA, along with Meagan, at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. The nine short stories in his creative thesis, Earth Names, have been published in literary journals such as New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, and Weber–The Contemporary West. Tom lives with his wife and two children in Eugene, Oregon, where he as at work on a novel.
Meagan grew up in Alaska writing poems about injustice and hot boys. After studying poetry and literature at the University of Idaho, she spent fifteen years in government communications before breaking up with her career to pursue creative writing.
In 2014, she earned her MFA in fiction at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop. That was a very very good time.
Her work has appeared in Narrative, Barrelhouse, and Fugue, as well as the regional anthology, Timberland Writes Together.
Meagan’s first novel, The Ocean in My Ears (formerly Conspiring to Be Meri), will be out in 2017 from Portland State University’s Ooligan Press.
Contact Meagan at hotpinkunderwear at gmail dot com
The Ocean in My Ears
Diane Colson
Booklist. 114.5 (Nov. 1, 2017): p66.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Ocean in My Ears.
By Meagan Macvie.
Nov. 2017.300p. Ooligan, paper, $16 (9781932010947); e-book, $5.99 (9781932010954). Gr. 9-12.
Small-town teens will recognize the hallmarks of Meri's life: church on Sundays, lunches at Dairy Queen, and an extremely limited pool of potential dates. But life in small-town Alaska in 1990 has a distinctive flair, with dipnetting, snowmachines, and gruelingly dark Decembers. As Meri begins her senior year, she's mostly thinking about a boy named Joaquin and college in Idaho with her best friend, Charlie. Over the course of that year, however, Meri gets entwined in a convenient relationship with an insensitive jerk and watches as Charlie drifts away from their shared college dream. Meri's first-person account is strikingly original, with frank discussion of sexual experiences, religious posturing, and stilted family dynamics. Occasionally, this engaging narrative is interrupted by fairly mundane entries from Meri's diary, which seem to merely speed up the passage of time. While the unique setting and time period will give contemporary readers a glimpse into a time when their parents were teens, Meri's struggles are nevertheless universal. Fans of Miranda Kenneally or Jennifer Echols should like this debut novel. --Diane Colson
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Colson, Diane. "The Ocean in My Ears." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2017, p. 66. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515383105/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e759eaaf. Accessed 16 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A515383105
The Ocean in My Ears
Publishers Weekly. 264.40 (Oct. 2, 2017): p141+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Ocean in My Ears
Meagan Macvie. Ooligan, $16 (300p)
ISBN 978-1-932010-94-7
Set in the early 1990s, Macvie's debut novel follows 17-year-old Meri Miller during her last year of high school in (very) small-town Soldotna, Alaska, yet the year turns out to be anything but uneventful. As she seeks a way to leave Alaska for college, she navigates her first sexual encounter, the loss of her grandmother, a friend who drifts away, and the stifling rules of her religious parents. The novel is interspersed with pages from Meri's diary, as well as letters she exchanges with friends and family, demonstrating Meri's careful work coward becoming a writer. The writing is raw and occasionally verges on melodramatic in its true-to-life capturing of an adolescent voice, as when Meri's will clashes with her mother's ("I want to tell Joquin the truth about dating Brett and what happened, but I don't want to wreck what I have now with him"). As Meri learns to trust her gut instincts in a variety of situations, Macvie movingly explores the ever-shifting highs and lows of adolescence. Ages 14-up. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Ocean in My Ears." Publishers Weekly, 2 Oct. 2017, p. 141+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509728517/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=067c74ba. Accessed 16 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509728517
MACVIE, Meagan. The Ocean in My Ears
Elizabeth Nicolai
School Library Journal. 63.11 (Nov. 2017): p90.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
MACVIE, Meagan. The Ocean in My Ears. 300p. Ooligan. Nov. 2017. pap. $16. ISBN 9781932010947.
Gr 9 Up--Like many teen girls, Meri spends her senior year worrying about college admissions, hoping to get away from her small Alaskan town, and falling in love and lust with boys. However, there ends up being a lot more than partying and studying going on as she faces teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol use, accidents, and even death. This book movingly presents a pivotal year in a teenager's life. The characters are well varied and manage to avoid being either cliches or morality lessons, instead resembling teenagers facing tough choices. Most remarkable in this debut novel is the setting, Soldotna, Alaska in 1990, which is perfectly portrayed. It is gritty and hopeless in the way of many small towns without a lot of jobs or chances, and filled with uniquely Alaskan elements like fishing and small airplanes. At times, the plot's many threads become overwhelming. While the book might be set 30 years ago, teens today will still relate to first love, first sexual experiences, wanting to escape, and watching your friends make different choices. VERDICT A strong debut novel featuring memorable, relatable characters making adult decisions at the edge of high school in a fantastically drawn Alaskan setting.--Elizabeth Nicolai, Anchorage Public Library, AK
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Nicolai, Elizabeth. "MACVIE, Meagan. The Ocean in My Ears." School Library Journal, Nov. 2017, p. 90. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A513759674/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=89d80cc0. Accessed 16 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A513759674
THE OCEAN IN MY EARS
by Meagan Macvie
Age Range: 15 & up
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KIRKUS REVIEW
Merideth “Meri” Miller’s future is a black hole, but the summer before senior year stretches before her, and her life is changing faster than she can keep up.
Meri’s white best friend, Charlie, spends all of her time with her new boyfriend; her grandmother is dying; her brother is in a serious accident; and she struggles with decisions: where to go to college and when to have sex for the first time. Her two-faced boyfriend, older white guy Brett, is all hands and runs hot and cold, but she ignores the red flags; at least he’s interested in her. The boy she wishes she were with, her longtime crush, the elusive Joaquin, who is Mexican, seems mildly interested, although he doesn’t act on his feelings. Meri is complex: her desire to leave her small hometown of Soldotna, Alaska, after graduation battles the 17-year-old white girl’s fear of leaving for the unknown. She questions everything and asks all the right questions; themes of life and death, ecstasy and grief, and loss and gain permeate the story. Her story eventually subverts the familiar heteronormative plotline, in which the girl gives up everything for the boy and allows herself to be defined by his feelings for her. Her candid first-person narrative is punctuated by journal entries, notes exchanged with her best friend, and letters between Meri and her grandmother. The 1990s setting is marked by tsunami-height hair, acid-wash denim, and multiple trips to see Pretty Woman.
An unforgettable journey to adulthood. (Historical fiction. 15-adult)
Pub Date: Nov. 7th, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-932010-94-7
Page count: 300pp
Publisher: Ooligan Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18th, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1st, 2017
The Ocean in My Ears by Meagan Macvie
by Barbara Cothern on February 2, 2018
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Seventeen-year-old Meri Miller is way past ready to leave her tiny town of Soldotna, Alaska. She’s not sure what she wants to do but she knows she wants to do it elsewhere. All Meri wants to do is spend her senior year applying to colleges, hanging out with her best friend Taylor, and planning her future. Life, however, has different plans. Soon Meri is dealing with multiple family crises and has her own personal conflict between two boys – one who her family approves of and one who makes her heart sing. Meri must figure out what she wants and find the courage to stand up for herself if she ever wants to leave Soldotna.
Publisher: Ooligan Press
Formats: Paperback, eBook, Kindle
Purchase: Powell’s | Amazon
The Ocean in My Ears is a lovely, funny, and heart-wrenching coming-of-age novel by author Meagan Macvie. Meri is relatable in a lot of ways: overly sheltered from her parents, struggling to break free and be her own person, but not being entirely sure who she is or what she really wants. Her choices and decisions throughout the whole book echo as real and genuine, particularly her struggle between what she thinks she should want and what she actually does want from her life. The book is told from Meri’s point of view and her narration is at times agonizing, anxiety-provoking, and downright hilarious. The other characters in the novel are equally well written and complex. No one is there to fill space. Overall, The Ocean in My Ears is a wonderful novel that will resonate both with adults and teens. It’s a must read for fans of YA fiction.