TNT Book Club to read Vanessa Veselka’s ‘The Great Offshore Grounds’ for October
The TNT Book Club has selected “The Great Offshore Grounds” for its October book of the month.
If you would like to join the discussion, email chase.hutchinson@thenewstribune.com for more information or join our Facebook group.
The story follows half sisters Cheyenne and Livy, who have not seen each other in years. They have found themselves back together in Seattle, which is where the novel begins.
They soon set off on a cross-country trip to claim their inheritance and look into a family secret based on information, a single name, they receive from their father.
You can listen to a preview of the novel.
On Nov. 6, the club will discuss the book and be joined by the author Vanessa Veselka for a question-and-answer session.
Veselka’s bio on her website says she “has been at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a musician, a union organizer, and a student of paleontology.”
Her previous novel “Zazen” won the 2012 PEN/Bingham Prize for fiction.
Veselka’s newest novel was recently put on the long list for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. She discussed the selection and her work in a phone interview with The News Tribune.
This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and might contain details surrounding the plot of “The Great Offshore Grounds.”
Q: How does it feel to have been long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award?
A: It is a remarkable feeling that was totally unexpected and a true pleasure. It took me a couple of days to really get it, you know. My agent called me at like, 7 a.m., and she was crying. Because I think this novel was such a long, arduous, at many times hopeless, trajectory and really, really was difficult. Not just to write but to publish. It was a really unexpected and beautiful thing. This has not been an easy year for humans. I think I didn’t realize until then that it had been so long since I’d heard good news. I was kind of not taking it in. I felt a little numb.
Q: After reading some of your past writings, especially about your personal experience of being on the road, I wanted to ask where do you think this novel fits in that long trajectory of your career?
A: My first novel, it didn’t have any road trips in it. And I actually never expected that I would write about road trips. It emerged from a piece I did in GQ about trying to figure out if somebody was a serial killer. I was very mixed about whether to do that piece. I had to be talked into it quite hard. In doing that, that raised other questions. And then I wrote a piece called “Green Screen,” which Salon then picked up and retitled. I was a little bit surprised when I started doing a road trip in this novel, but these were poor characters, and they needed to get from one place to another. It was an area I was comfortable writing in.
Q: These characters start out in Seattle. What is your connection to the area?
A: I lived in Seattle for 12 and a half years. That was a very familiar place to me, though I live in Portland now. There is a scene at the Gas Works Park and that was one of my favorite places. A lot of my initial inspiration for the novel was thinking about those kinds of structures, those kinds of different time periods, and what’s left behind. Industrial structures appear in different places in the book, whether it’s oil rigs or whaling stations or it’s smelters or iron works. There’s a sense that the whole American project has been moving towards a locust leaving shells behind.
