We had the great pleasure of sitting down with Amy Brill, whose articles, essays, and short stories have appeared in The Washington Post, Salon, Guernica, One Story, and Real Simple, among others, and whose work as a producer (for PBS and MTV) earned her a George Foster Peabody Award. Amy has also been the recipient of a Pushcart nomination and fellowships in fiction by the Edward Albee Foundation, Jentel, the Millay Colony, Fundación Valparaíso, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, as well as the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA. But this particular interviewer first encountered her when she received a copy of Amy’s extraordinary novel The Movement of Stars from her neighbor last Christmas. (Thank you, Bruce!)
Your debut novel, The Movement of Stars, has been a big hit, garnering praise from Oprah, Vanity Fair, People magazine, and so many more. Before writing it, you were a producer working for PBS and MTV. What made you decide to make the transition?
I’ve always been a fiction writer—it was my major in college. I started the book when I was 25, and by the time it was published I was nearly 40. So I was actually working on it all along, during the time I was a producer and writer for documentary programming.
The protagonist in The Movement of Stars, astronomer Hannah Price, is based on real-life astronomer Maria Mitchell. Besides some “textbook” basics, there doesn’t seem to be a lot written about Mitchell. Did you dig deep to discover so much more, or did you create Hannah Price on the bones of what little exists about Mitchell?
I dug all the way! I visited the Mitchell archives at the Maria Mitchell Association on Nantucket several times. On one of those trips, I asked the curator why there wasn’t anything written by Mitchell herself in her younger years, and she said, “Oh, Maria Mitchell burned all her own diaries and letters during the great fire of 1846, because papers were being blown around by the wind, all over the streets…” For a novelist, this was a gold strike. Great fire! Burned her own papers! It led to both a great scene in the novel and also a central question (for me): what would make a young woman burn all her own papers? What was she trying to hide? And of course, I read the biographies, and her collected writing, which helped me get a sense of her as a person and ultimately inspired my fictional character.
Your story begins in 1845 and involves a whaling community in Nantucket. In the course of telling it, you provide some wonderful information about telescopes and also chronometers and how they can be used to measure time by the positions of stars and determine longitude. Do you have a background in sailing? In astronomy? (If not, how did you come by this passion for instruments to measure time and space?)
I have zero background in any of those things, and, truth be told, have zero passion for the instruments. I had to channel my character’s passion! I was intrigued by the idea of a teenaged girl who spent all her nights staring up at the dark sky, hoping to find something she was incredibly unlikely to find. It was her psyche that intrigued me. The instruments were, frankly, a major challenge. I don’t think I would ever take on that level of historical science again. It was my first novel—I’m smarter now.
Hannah’s activities throughout the story are constrained by her father, by the dictates of the mid-19th century version of the Quaker religion (of which she is a member), and by the fact that she is a woman. Was it difficult to imagine how these constraints impacted her regarding not only big things but also on a day-to-day basis?
It wasn’t that much of a stretch, to be honest. Women are still constrained in so many ways by domestic demands. Even in homes where mothers have full-time jobs and are earning as much if not more than a male partner, it’s the women who take on the vast majority of the home-keeping, the child-rearing, all of what is known as the “mental load” of keeping track of what a household needs. America seems to be trailing a lot of the world when it comes to affordable, high-quality childcare—not to mention electing women to leadership positions (edited to add: hooray for Kamala Harris!).
So we know that Hannah is part fiction and part historical. What about the other characters in the book, particularly her twin brother and her father?
All the characters in the book are products of my imagination, with a few real people thrown in, like the Bonds, who did indeed run the Harvard Observatory and were family friends of the Mitchells. I tried to make all the characters and their occupations credible for the time and place, but none of the relationships in the book were drawn from real-life except as noted in the afterword.
Isaac Martin is a wonderful character, a whaler from the Azores. Given the fact that Isaac is black in the year 1845 and that Hannah, who is white, belongs to religious and social communities that cheer on equal rights from a distance but reject them in their hearts, it might easily have felt like a stretch to believe Isaac and Hannah could have a relationship. But in your hands, it feels perfectly credible. How did you decide on Isaac?
Isaac’s character was born the moment I asked myself why a youngish woman would feel compelled to burn all her own journal entries while her whole town was on fire. I saw him so clearly—this eloquent, ambitious man from another island on the other side of the ocean. He is my favorite character in the book. I’ll never write a sequel to this book, but one day I will write the story of Isaac rowing away from his island in the dead of night to join a whaling ship to escape conscription by the Portuguese army.
To write this kind of historical literary novel, wherein you really bring a time and place—as well as a person—to full life, you must have had to “be with” your research (astronomy, whaling, Nantucket history, Quaker society, etc.) for a very long time. Can you talk about the creative experience of immersing yourself in this way, as opposed to the experience of writing something “smaller”?
I was “with” my research for far too long! I think especially as a debut novelist, I felt compelled to get everything right, to the point where I obsessed over small details that ultimately weren’t that important. It would have been better to skip over a lot of that research and just write the story I had in my heart. But I felt like I didn’t know how to write a novel, so I focused on the things I could control. Eventually, I had to put aside the facts and imagine the journey of my character. I’m not sorry I gave myself what amounts to a Ph.D. in maritime New England women’s lives… but I wouldn’t do it again!
What are you working on now?
I’m revising my next novel, which concerns a young Jewish refugee who falls in love with a Cuban-American bandleader in Havana. It spans the years between World War II and the Cuban Revolution. Hopefully, I’ll be done soon!
How can Occhi readers keep up with your projects?
I love connecting with readers! They can find me on Instagram @amybrillbk; on Twitter @amy_brill; and on Facebook @AmyBrillAuthor. I’m terrible at updating my writing work on my website, but I try! And I receive all the messages submitted via the contact form at amybrill.com, so feel free to visit.
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