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Tara Karr Roberts is a freelance writer, newspaper columnist, and journalism and English instructor at the University of Idaho. She is a lifelong Idahoan who grew up along the Pend Oreille River and now lives in Moscow, Idaho, with her family.
Tara Karr Roberts's website
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Q: What inspired you to write Wild and Distant Seas, and what do you see as the relationship between it and Moby-Dick?
I didn't read Moby-Dick until I was in my 30s, finishing a grad program very slowly. It was the first book I had to read for the last class I took, and I had honestly been avoiding it until then.
I was surprised by how strange and funny it was, but I was drawn immediately to the character of Mrs. Hosea Hussey — a Nantucket innkeeper who is the only woman with any significant speaking part in the entire novel.
My book started as a short story, my final project for the class, that paralleled a few chapters of Moby-Dick, starting with the idea that Ishmael was wildly misunderstanding Mrs. Hussey's situation and she needed to tell her own story.
I was particularly interested in exploring ideas that are largely absent in Moby- Dick because of the absence of women, like the joys and horrors of parenting and the limits that society puts on women (and, in turn, women are taught to put on themselves).
When the short story became a novel-in-progress, I knew I wanted to move away from the source material and make it a narrative of its own.
I think Moby-Dick echoes throughout Wild and Distant Seas: All of my ...
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