Joan Schweighardt is the author of the RIVERS trilogy: Before We Died, Gifts for the Dead, and River Aria, as well as other fiction and nonfiction titles. She’s taken time out from contributing to Occhi editorials to work on several projects, including a new novel. We caught up to find out more about her book titled “Under The Blue Moon’.
Joan, you’ve taken out from writing for Occhi to focus on other projects. You’ve just completed a new novel, titled ‘Under The Blue Moon’. Please tell us more about the book, its primary characters, and what readers can expect.
Ben, one of the two main characters in Under the Blue Moon, is homeless. He lives on a ledge under a highway overpass with his 18-year-old cat and two other men who, like him, have lost their way. Lola, the other main character, has a home, but she has lost the people she always believed would live in it with her.
The chapters in Under the Blue Moon alternate between Ben’s story of how he became homeless and his struggles since, and Lola’s story of her ongoing battle with grief. Ben and Lola are on very different paths, hoping to achieve their individual goals. But there are places where their paths intersect and they get some insight into what the other is going through.
This is the second novel you’ve written about homelessness, and also the second that takes place in Albuquerque. What’s the correlation or is it just coincidental?
Much of the fiction I write is historical, so the history I’ve settled on dictates the location. I recently completed a trilogy that takes place during the early 20th-century rubber boom in Brazil. Before that, I wrote a novel about Attila the Hun and the tribes he interacted with during his reign, so that took place throughout Europe in 450-ish. Under the Blue Moon could take place in virtually any city in the U.S. I chose Albuquerque, New Mexico because I live here. I grew up on the east coast, just a few miles away from Manhattan; Albuquerque is my adopted home and it’s a treat to get to write about it.
As for homelessness, my sister, who died in 2017, found herself on the verge of homelessness a few times in her too-short life. She had friends who were homeless. After our parents died and before I was able to help her to find an apartment, she invited homeless friends to live with her in what had been the family house. I spent a lot of time worrying about her over the years, and all that worry got fictionalized and wound up first in a novel I wrote in 2015, called The Accidental Art Thief, and now again in the new novel, Under the Blue Moon.
These are very different books. In the first one, Art Thief, I only touched the surface of homelessness. My protagonist, a middle-aged woman called Zinc, spends 25 years working as a caretaker for an old man and living in a casita on his ranch. When he dies, his daughter, who is also his sole heir, kicks Zinc out of the casita and she has no choice but to beg her brother, who also lives in town, to let her and her two big dogs stay with him until she can find a new job and a place to live. She is not wanted at his house at all; he makes that very clear. But she is not exactly homeless either—though the possibility looms. In Blue Moon, Ben is not so lucky. After he is made to leave his home, where he lived with his wife and daughter until he suffered the consequences of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he stays in a friend’s shed for a while, but his friend eventually kicks him out too and he finds himself on the street.
You were on the board of directors for a local homeless shelter for a while, and a fundraiser for the shelter’s gala annual fundraising event. Can you tell us more about the project, its current fundraising activities, and how our readers can support it?
The shelter I was associated with is called Barrett Foundation. We have other shelters in town, and they all operate a little differently. The (somewhat fictional) one that Ben frequents in Under the Blue Moon provides meals and some services to men and women on a first-come-first-serve basis. Barrett Foundation works only with women, and their children if they have any. Barrett provides them with the basics, food, and shelter, and then some: They help them with daycare if they have kids, and they support them in their efforts to find a job. It’s big, what happens there. A good percentage of their residents find work and eventually get into an apartment. Ongoing donations help to make this happen.
The story in ‘Under the Blue Moon’ unfolds in a post-pandemic world. Is this timeline important?
Yes. Ben’s problems are exacerbated by the pandemic. When he first leaves his family home and settles into his friend’s shed, he is certain that he will get back on his feet in no time. He was, after all, an architect. But during the heart of the pandemic, construction came to a standstill. No one needed an architect, especially one who had inadvertently ruined his reputation. The pandemic is fizzling out by the time Ben leaves the shed and begins life on the street. But then he is immediately accosted by more urgent problems: Where will he get his next meal? Where can he charge his phone so he can at least begin to look for work? What happens when the nights get too cold for his very old cat? Lola has a roof over her head and she knows where her next meal is coming from, so she can push some of her personal issues aside for periods of time and concentrate on the problems we all face. Climate crisis is a big concern for her, and the flora and fauna that are rapidly becoming extinct as a result. And she worries a lot about the growing number of people who seem not to love the planet—or each other, for that matter—as much as she thinks we all should. Her challenge is to come to terms with the difficulties that are built into these post-pandemic times, and find some degree of happiness in life in spite of them.
What other projects are in the pipeline?
I’ve spent a lot of time collaborating with other writers in recent times, and I’m really loving it. For one, my fellow author and colleague of many years Faye Rapoport DesPres and I put together an anthology on the subject of touch. We reached out to 38 poets, essayists, massage therapists, scientists, healers… all sorts of people who had something to say about touch, or lack thereof, especially during COVID, and produced a book called The Art of Touch: A Collection of Prose and Poetry from the Pandemic and Beyond, which will be published by the University of Georgia Press in October (and is available for pre-order now). We’re still working on final edits and last-minute tweaks for that. Also, I’ve been working with another friend (he doesn’t want his name or our book project title mentioned until we get closer to publication; he’s afraid I’ll jinx us) to complete a more commercial, fun-filled novel than either of us would have written on our own. And I’ve also started a solo project, another historical novel, this one about a woman who lived a few hundred years ago (I can’t divulge her name; like my writing partner, I’m afraid of jinxing myself), which I’m very excited about.
For further information on Joan, visit her links:
- https://www.joanschweighardt.com
- https://twitter.com/joanschwei
- https://www.facebook.com/joanschweighardtwriter
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