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"The Gulf" Live Q&A
🕑 Added 2023-11-12 13:00:02 +0000 UTCHi folks,
I did an online panel with a few other authors this past week. We got our questions in advance, so, as the over-preparer I am, I wrote out my answers. If it's of interest to you, you can check them out below!
All the best,
Adam
The Gulf is a YA road trip novel about a group of friends heading to a commune. Tell us about some of the things the characters hope to gain from this adventure.
Each of the characters desires something specific from their journey but, generally, they each want to find a unique “third option” forward. This option isn't something that has been presented to them in their high school or university tours but it's something they desire. In the end, they each have their own version of what they expect to find at commune.
For Oli, who see’s the world with a wide and empathetic view, she cannot reconcile all the societal contradictions she observes on a daily basis; she’s overwhelmed and the commune symbolises something that can put her worldview into order - she just want things to make sense! Contrastingly, for her best friend Milo who sees the world through his camera, it’s much more personal; he just wants a safe space to be himself.
Oli is at the point where she is graduating and having to make life decisions. Tell us about some of the events and pressures that have led Oli to a bit of an existential crisis.
Being expected to know or even choose “what you want to do with your life” is a tremendous amount of pressure! What an absurdly huge question! What do you do if you don’t have a “passion”? Should we be surprised if they find that question so existentially intimidating that they would rather skip class and smoke weed? It’s the first time you’re really asked to take the reins and plot out your life. But also, to plot out your own life within the borders of a system that already exists independently of you.
If you’re someone like Oli, who generally cares a lot about the world but has no quantifiable “skill” or “passion” to exploit, I think it’s even more pressure. Oli see’s the world with a wide-view and her response to both the pressure of choosing, but also the wider, post 9/11 world she’s grown up within is to want to opt out. Not opt out out of laziness but because she doesn’t want to take part in an unfair world. For Oli, these existential frustrations are more intangible - if she were to try and put it into words it would come out trite or only half true. It’s something she feels intuitively through absorbing her mothers financial stresses, watching the news, feeling the inequities on every street corner in a rich city like Vancouver, and generally just being alive in the world as a biracial women.
She is in crisis because she can feel that this is the first time she is expected to “buy in” to how the world is and she sees that, if she were to jump in, leaving it again would perhaps be impossible.
