Rachel Cochran

Rachel Cochran, author of The Gulf

[0:00] Welcome back to the reading and writing podcast. I'm joined on the podcast today by Rachel Cochran, author of the debut novel, The Gulf.
Author Alana Massad wrote about the novel, exquisite and gripping, The Gulf is a page turner to be savored.
Cochran is a master of both prose and plot.
Rachel, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me.
Absolutely. if someone hasn't yet heard about your debut novel, The Gulf, how would you describe the novel?

[0:35] Oh, of course. The Gulf is a queer literary thriller set in the 1970s on the Gulf Coast of Texas. It's set in the town of Parson, which has been hit by a major hurricane, and there's a question of whether the town is going to survive. Is there enough there worth saving and rebuilding, or is it better to leave and start fresh someplace else?
So this question in the book is brought to life by Lou, who's the protagonist.
She's a woman who's lived in Parson since she was abandoned there by her mother when she was a very young girl. She feels strangely drawn and connected to Parson, and she's resentful of those who are ready to give it up as a lost cause after the storm. She's also torn up by recent questions she has about the recent violent death of her friend, Miss Kate, who had been a kind of mother figure for her throughout her childhood. In most recent years, Kate had bought up Parson House, which is this crumbling old mansion that had once long ago been the home of the town's founders. So Lou never knew why Miss Kate bought the house or how she afforded it, not even when Miss Kate hired Lou on to help with some of the work rebuilding the house back to its former glory.

[1:43] So all Lou knows is that the police want to insist that Miss Kate's sudden death was an accident, But to Lou, it's really obvious that there's something else going on, especially when Joanna, Miss Kate's estranged daughter and Lou's first love, shows up looking to make a profit off of selling the mansion. Lou, who's held this obsessive grudge against Joanna for years, starts to dig around, asking questions that stir up all this old dirt, reaching all the way back to Lou and Joanna's childhood in the 1950s and what was really going on back then in Parson, in Joanna and Miss Kate's household and in Lou's own life that she might have missed or not understood the first time she encountered them.

Inspiration and Writing Process for The Gulf

[2:23] That's great and do you remember the original idea or impetus that led you to riding the Gulf?

[2:30] Yes, I do. I so I grew up on the Gulf Coast of Texas as a child. Back then I didn't think it was what either boring or interesting. It was just sort of how things were. But when I moved away from that region and especially in graduate school when I started writing nonfiction in my workshops about my childhood there, people's reactions told me that there was something special and interesting about this place. They were fascinated by the details that I sort of really casually included because they were just part of my life. So the more I thought about it from this space of removed, the more I realized, actually, this would make a really great setting for a crime novel. I don't know how flattering that is, but it was almost a joke at first.
But even so, the backburner of my mind slowly started to what if my way into what felt like a pretty good mystery plot set in this weird region where I'd grown up, which I knew so well.
And then in this context, this was not my main project at all, it was just something that I was kicking around when I had free time. Suddenly, the pandemic came and I had been that semester.

[3:36] Teaching a course in the literature of mystery and the Gothic. So these two different but very related and overlapping literary traditions. I've been having these regular conversations with wonderful, bright, amazing students.
This was really my dream course.
Um, and then suddenly all those conversations stopped dead and I was alone, mostly alone in my home, feeding myself obsessively on a steady diet of Tana French, Daphne du Maurier, uh, reading and teaching meanwhile books like Toni Morrison's Beloved and Kazue Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills, which is a favorite of mine. All of these super eerie books that deal with trauma and place and that added this gothic element to all of their mysterious plot threads. So I didn't really have anything to do but write and the gulf is what came out of that. Once I got onto it and found the right voice, it really fell together pretty quickly, six or seven weeks for that first draft and obviously a lot of revising and polishing with new readers' perspectives after that.
But that was kind of the germ and the evolution of the project.

[4:42] That's great. Well, you described it earlier as a queer literary thriller. Is that a description that you came up with?
It is. I have an interesting relationship to genre because I kind of love all things about all genres and I read really voraciously. So when I work with genre tags or labels, I'm doing my best not to confine the book because the gulf and nearly all projects I work with are engaging in sort of multiple genre modes, which I know is not always something the publishing world loves, genre I really respect because I know it's kind of about helping the right audience find the right book. So I want to concede to that point. And what I love so much about thrillers is that.

[5:32] There is intentionality with pace and with suspense and with plotting. And there is sort of this handshake agreement with the reader that everything is going somewhere and it's all pulling towards this sort of vanishing point or catharsis or tension release implosion at the end of the book. But then literary and queer sort of, both work to extend, I mean, some people would even call them maybe oppositional to, I just saw a hot take on Twitter the other day that, you know, arguing that the literary thriller didn't exist. I didn't, I don't agree with that, obviously, but I was compelled by the value system implicit in that thought. But for me, literary means that the characters and their world and their idiosyncrasies and their roundness is really taken incredibly seriously, and it's kind of where the plot comes from. And then queer sort of means that it's not interested.

[6:33] In acknowledging boundaries as boundaries. It sort of subverts and works around boundaries.
And then of course there is the plot element that these characters, so many of them are queer, in their sexualities, in their gender identities, in a moment and in a place where they didn't have a language for that. And they didn't really necessarily understand that there was a larger community for that as well.
That's great. Well, what was your writing journey that led you to writing and getting your first short stories and now your debut novel published?

[7:07] It's not a special or secret journey at all. I just sort of was in workshops in undergraduate and, um, really enjoyed them, had some instructors I really connected with, turned out a couple of stories that, you know, an instructor mentioned, oh, you might want to send this out, and that sounded like such a mysterious thing, like, what does that mean? So far, I had just been writing for myself, for my friends, but then, you know, I started reading literary journals, mostly undergraduate literary journals at that point, and, you know, being inspired by what I was seeing, the kind of cool innovations I was seeing from writers my age at that time. But then also, you know, there's that sort of sense of, oh, I could do this, right? There's nothing happening here that's so genius that it's removed and distant and that I'm not invited. The kinds of questions I was asking in my fiction, the kinds of things I was doing with my craft, it all felt very in conversation with these things. So I would actually start seeing potential connections. Oh, they're publishing stories kind of like that one that I wrote in this teacher's class last semester. So maybe now that I've revised based on his feedback and my class's feedback, maybe I could send this piece there. They've got this really welcoming submissions call. And then I just sort of aged up in my reading, along with my own sort of writerly development and my master's program. I had the great opportunity to learn from from my instructors, but particularly from my peers.

[8:36] Many of whom were in the PhD programs.

[8:38] Where they were reading, where they were sending work. And I really admired the writing they were bringing into workshop. I learned a lot about craft from it. And I kind of followed their, footsteps of publication. I sent work to the same kinds of journals where they were sending work.
And then the novel question is a totally different process and a totally different idea.

[9:02] As you well know, that involves getting an agent, which is this completely different milieu that you have to study and learn about and really respect and really think hard about, before you enter into it. So once I had a really finished, really polished book project on my hands and I felt really passionate about it and I could see the same kinds of connections as I used to see between my short stories and their publication world, I could see those between the novel I had just written and all of these novels within and around these genres that I was reading at the time and teaching in my classes. Once that synapse between what I'd produced and what I was reading felt very, very close, I studied and looked into agents who represented this kind of stuff. I read their projects. I took it as seriously as I ever took any of my graduate work in college. And I.

[9:55] Learned the form of a query letter and the rest is not history really, but that was important step one, then step two, and three, and four, and five, maybe.
Well, you talked earlier about this initial draft of the gulf that you wrote during the pandemic. What was your writing process during that?
When you were thinking about the novel and you said you kind of landed on The Voice, did you do a lot of pre-planning or outlining or did you just kind of dive into the narrative?
How did that work for you?
This is a really great question. I certainly love to know where I'm going, and I think it has something to do with my respect for and enthusiasm for thrillers and mysteries.

The importance of knowledge vs non-knowledge in writing

[10:42] The mystery is all about that tension of knowledge and non-knowledge, right?
Between the writer who knows the answers to the questions that are posed in the beginning of the novel, the questions that start up this engine that drives the entire impetus of the novel's plot.
But the characters by definition kind of can't and don't know that.
And they see little sort of like glimmers. So that's difficult to achieve.
And I know some people actually just pants it and write into the dark and figure it out as they go along.
But I'm much more puppet mastery about it. And I really like to know all of the answers, to have everything kind of carefully plotted out where and how certain reveals are gonna happen.
And in fact, just before I wrote The Gulf, I did a little ghostwriting stint.
I was about to graduate with my PhD and I didn't know how or whether I would be able to get a teaching job after that in the pandemic when everything was so up in the air.
So I took on a little ghostwriting gig and I'm not allowed to, I've signed an NDA, so I'm not allowed to give too many specifics.
But one thing that we ended up doing was we wrote a lot of mystery books, like cozy mystery books together. And I sort of took almost like an X-ray skeleton of like.

[12:08] Many many many different cozy mysteries that I was reading and that we were putting together and I figured out their structural beats and it's Really interesting because there's very little cozy about the Gulf, but just being able to see, Like where are the the joints, you know, where do things sort of move and pivot?

[12:28] Because you know a good thriller is kind of all about like the buildup of tension and then the redirection as a new twist or a new major question comes swooping in. So I had all these almost like formulae for a very, very formulaic genre. And that weirdly empowered me to plan what turned into a much like weirder, more amorphous novel.
I know you can't reveal much because you said there's an NDA, but were those books published?
Mm-hmm. Okay, great. Good. what writing advice would you offer for those who are working on their own stories or novels?

The importance of reading and learning from all books as a writer

[13:08] I don't have anything new to say, but I really want to underscore all of the voices that have told writers who are really working on their craft, you have to read and you have to love reading. And I think the one thing I will add to this is, you know, some wisdom that I see around the internet, and I respect it, I think it's interesting, are these voices that say, life's too short, if you're not enjoying a book, put it down. I think that that's really well and good for people who read for fun, but for writers, you read to learn. So you learn as much, if not much more, from the books that don't speak directly to your soul, as from the books that, you know, deeply inspire you with their art or their craft or what have you. So I've, you know, I put down books sometimes if I find there's something sort of like propelling me away from them, but I've actually had really wonderful experiences just learning a lot and thinking a lot and sitting a lot with the answer to the question, what don't I like about this book?
What isn't working for me in this book? And that gives me so much insight and so many tools that that I can add to the way that I approach my own work.

[14:29] I tend to like everything I read just because I like reading and that gives me a really strong sense of appreciation for when I love something, I'm almost like struck dumb by it.

[14:42] I almost can't answer the question, what do I love about it because the answer is so everything.
Whereas when I'm simply stimulated by or interested by a book I can have smarter sort of craft takeaways from that process.
Well, have you started working on a new novel yet? I have, yes.

Rachel Cochran's new novel and recent favorite reads

[15:02] I'm working on a sort of Sarah Waters-y, Victorian, campus gothic.
It's set in a finishing school in the late 19th century, and it sort of asks the question, what if the cult of domesticity were literally a cult?
A step for wives for the 19th century. Absolutely, yes. I read the Stepford Wives for this.
I've been reading every campus novel I can get my hands on. So that's been a very, very fun process.
That sounds fun.
Well, what novels have you read recently that you enjoyed?
Oh, sure. Well, along the lines of those campus novels, let's see, some that I've really loved are, gosh, a recent one, Disorientation by Elaine Shih-Shu.
I adored that. It's a weird satire, but it also has essentially just a thriller element to it.

[15:59] Other recent ones are True Biz by Sarah Novich, also a campus story.
And We Ride Upon Sticks by Kwan Berry, also a campus story. Those are really, really like compelling, interesting, unique in their own ways, books, very funny at times.
I loved Rebecca McKay's latest, I have some questions for you.
But outside of campus novels, some of my recent favorites include, Gosh, I just finished reading Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, which I adored.
And then recent thrillers, like More Than You'll Ever Know by Katie Gutierrez.
And then actually a book that just came out this week, The Good Ones by Polly Stewart is just a really great rural thriller crime story with excellent character work and it's got queer elements in there too.
So just a really beautiful read.
That's wonderful. Well, where can people find you online And if they want to learn more about you and your writing and your debut novel, the gulf.
Yes, absolutely. Um, well you can find me at my website, which is rachelcochran.net. So my name.net.
And then I'm also, um, on Twitter, not very active though. I'm a very passionate retweeter, um, at underscore Rachel Cochran.

[17:13] That's wonderful. Well, again, we've been speaking to Rachel Cochran, author of the debut novel, the gulf.
The novel is available now, so go buy a copy.
And Rachel, thanks for doing this interview.
Thank you so much, Jeff. I appreciate it. Absolutely.