Rebecca Morean AZIMUTHS: A trailer park on the edge of the Mojave Desert...

HALLIE EPRON: I met Rebecca Morean when I taught at Antioch Midwest's wonderful summer workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and I knew I'd met a kindred spirit. Turns out her first novel was a mystery that St. Martin's published back in '94. She's warm, talented, and I immediately forgave her for being a literary writer.

Her new novel AZIMUTHS, is just out, and I love the pitch:  

Raceway Trailer Park, “On the edge of the Mojave Desert, five women...”

It's perfect, because it made me want to hear more.

REBECCA MOREAN: The novel takes place out in the desert but is filled with water imagery. Raceway trailer park is a  strip of three lines of trailers with a fossilized whale underneath them and an oval supercollider beneath both. I needed a place where all three “levels” could co-exist.

Plus, I grew up in the Southern Californian desert. The cover is a photo of Vasquez Rocks, a place used in many films and TV shows for Westerns or Sci Fi stories.  I grew up within hiking range of Vasquez. In fact, the small cave in the photo is where I’d crawl up and sit and read.

I liked growing up in the desert and some of the people you meet there are right out of central casting, real characters. I wanted to bring the setting in as a character as well.

As AZIMUTHS is written almost like an allegory, the water imagery in contrast to the desert was fun to play around with.

HALLIE: And the five women? What is it about this setting that mirrors the characters/or does it limit and challenge them?

REBECCA: All of them are stuck, paralyzed really. They can’t leave Raceway, and they are afraid.

Hattie is afraid of who she is, and suffers from the loss of her mother. Melody is terrifiedof dying, Lani of real intimacy, Kinni of surviving. Oxena is afraid she does not love her husband any more. The land shapes all the characters and pushes them to move forward.

Even the men in the novel are stuck: Henry, Hattie’s father, is slowly dying of the weight of history and Barday Tullis thinks it is still the Civil War.

HALLIE: AZIMUTHS is such an intriguing title. I had to look it up, and I’m still not sure I know what it means. What is the meaning it has for you and this book?

REBECCA: It was not the original title. For years the title was “True Horizons,” but my publisher felt this sounded like a romance (which is interesting because I just had a romance published this past fall and am thrilled with the reviews, so why is that bad thing?) and the novel would be hard to market in the already difficult literary market.

An “Azimuth” is the arc stretching forward (usually North) to the horizon line from a fixed object. It is a navigational and surveying term. As all the characters are on their own trajectory, the title worked. It came to me from a close friend who loved the book.

HALLIE: The cover has this fantastic photograph of rock surging from ground and pointing skyward. There’s got to be a story behind it?

REBECCA: Vasquez is really a magical place. Tiburcio Vasquez was a kind of Mexican Robin Hood who robbed banks and burned land records (thereby destroying proof of the white settlers’ land claims) for twenty years or so beginning in 1854.  There are so many small caves there that rumor has it there are still hidden bags of gold.

So when you are twelve and you’ve got a sturdy canteen on your shoulder and a dog at your side, what choice to have really if you live a mile away? You have to go.

The California Condor which in on the cover is also a character in the book and the stretch of rock in the foreground are remains of a fossilized whale, Basilosaurus.

From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilosaurus

HALLIE: You wrote a mystery novel (In the Dead of Winter). Is there a mystery in Azimuths, too?

REBECCA: Yes. There are mysteries everywhere, but I don’t want to give even the questions away. Any good story regardless of genre should answer those basic questions of who, what, when, where, why and how and then re-address them later from a slightly different perspective.  The reader learns alongside the characters and it is that dynamic, that relationship between writer and reader, that is so fascinating to cultivate. Even my funny romance, We’ve Got This, is fueled by a huge mystery.

HALLIE: You’re also a short story writer. Do you find the long or short form more challenging?

REBECCA: For me, the novel is harder simply because of the length and breadth of the project.

In a short story there are distinct elements of story, character, setting, and theme which shape the plot and as a short story writer you have to really focus on the specific task in front of you. Absolutely every word counts, like poetry, and that part can be very challenging, but still, you are telling one basic story with some embellishments to the major theme.

With a novel there are so many technical layers, many subplots, many themes, so many threads which must work together and then be resolved at the end, it can seem overwhelming as you approach the home stretch. Just the length of time a novel takes to write is more challenging.

With a short story, there is often one point I am trying to move forward in the reader’s mind and from that comes some additional thematic components and a deepening of that story. In a novel, this process of discovery, of continuing to grow the subplots and themes can seem endless.

Finally, in a short story, the writing itself feels more laser-like to me. I may not know what I am doing at the beginning, but by the end of the piece, I’ve got it and then I go back in for the rewrite. My understanding of what the work is about comes quickly. In a novel, it can be months after I finish the first draft before I really know what the book is about--and then the rewrite process starts!

HALLIE: So Reds, when you were growing up did you have a special place like Vasquez Rocks to hide away?

An aside: Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park is in a town called Agua Dulce - so appropriate for Rebecca's water theme.

Rebecca Morean is a novelist, short story writer, essayist and screenwriter. Her work has appeared in Salon, Sundial Press, The Tishman Review, The Lost Coast Review, Piker Press, Ploughshares, Kalliope, Bella and more, and her novels are with St. Martin's Press, Avignon Press, Escape Publishing (AU), Roundfire Books (UK), and Breese Books (UK). Also...



Writer and mom. Dog walker and goat milker. 
Warrior against the ravages of ignorance (and time).
Addicted to popcorn and seacoasts. Loves Rocks.