We recently spoke with debut author Darren Cools about his new book, Light in the Canyon.
This is your debut novel. What was the journey like that brought you to this moment?
When I was nine years old my family watched the film Iron Will. I don’t remember a single thing about it, but for some reason it inspired my young self to write a short story—my first. Those hand-scrawled words are still around somewhere, but rather than go back and reread it only to chuckle at what that earnest kid thought was the coolest thing ever, I’ll simply appreciate the moment as the first time I knew I wanted to be a writer. A few years later I imagined myself being known around the small town I lived near as “that author who wrote [whatever it was I was going to write].” A ridiculous memory, but one that might eventually become real after all.
Life has a way of derailing us with many detours and distractions, some terribly important, some considerably less so. I wrote often but not effectively all through my twenties. Around 2015 I was flipping through an old notebook and found an entry from when I was fifteen years old. It describes a dream I had just awoken from, in which I opened my teenage eyes to discover I’d become a girl overnight. In this dream I was distraught, exhilarated, and utterly preoccupied with a sense of dread about what might happen when I encountered parents, siblings, friends. My thirty-something year old self, reading this with fresh eyes, knew right away there was something intriguing here, something I wanted to ponder and maybe write about.
In 2016 I completed a century ride. 100 miles in one day on a bike. I didn’t bring headphones. While riding around Puget Sound alone on a bicycle from Seattle to Bremerton, I crafted the rough plot of what eventually became Light in the Canyon. It took me another five years and a move across the country to actually sit down and write the book—as I said, life can be very distracting—but once I got started, I couldn’t stop. I’ve rewritten and revised the book dozens of times. I now have short stories, picture books, and two additional novels at various stages of completion as well. My nine-year-old self is glad I’m finally listening.
There are a lot of ‘Easter eggs’ in your book. What’s the purpose behind them?
I’m a nerd. It’s so satisfying to encounter something obscure and feel that surge of, “Hey, I recognize this!” My childhood was perhaps a bit unusual in that a lot of what I experienced was from previous eras. Books, movies, music, basically all of it. Even our home and the cars we drove were old (and cool, I still maintain). I remember wishing at thirteen that it was still the 1960s, because that’s when everything I loved happened. Things change. I grew up. I’m not thirteen anymore. But I hope the odd tidbits, both old and new, spark that recognition for a few readers, anyway. For the shrewd, a few of the references are pretty relevant to the plot. Can you guess which?
Gender plays a big role in this book. Considering today’s fraught social and political landscape on the subject, what prompted you to tackle this topic?
The topic of gender is just really interesting to me. A neighbor kid asked once when I was, like, nine or so, if I was a girl. It seemed a perfectly natural question. (I’m also pretty sure I was wearing pink shorts at the time.) I had that dream when I was fifteen and I’ve sometimes wondered what it would actually be like to experience life as NOT a boy. Girls are amazing. I also love to get covered in grease while working on classic cars and tend to mansplain (just a little) about the best way to build a campfire. Boys are awesome too. I’ve always found the strict division of gender roles, interests, and expression a bit mystifying. Aren’t we all human, first, after all? Simply living in generous community together as people on this wildly wonderful planet with all our various interests, hopes, desires, and inclinations is, to me, the basis of our interconnectedness. Not so much how we’re “allowed” to behave or what we’re supposed to do and not do based on some notion of what’s correct for “our kind.” I’m oversimplifying. But maybe you see what I’m getting at. I admit I was a little worried at first about how people might receive my book, but the idea was too fascinating to push aside and my early readers have all loved it.
What role does landscape and place play in your writing?
I was pretty lonely as a child. We lived far from town, surrounded by endless rolling wheat fields and tangled pockets of forest. The roads were mostly dirt. Certain trees, abandoned houses, and all sorts of interesting empty places became nearly as important to me as living, breathing friends. Some approximation of all that had to make it into my story. Places have meaning.
Each major location in the book is real, mostly centered around Portland, Oregon. Howell Island (not its real name); Halley, Gill, and Raina’s neighborhood; the tall bridge with the park underneath; the library; the highway Ash and Roberto traverse up the Columbia River Gorge; the Meadow, which is a slightly altered version of my grandparents’ farm in a deep box canyon in rural Eastern Washington State.
Is this book autobiographical?
No. I wove in many small fragments from my own life and the lives of friends and acquaintances that are real, or inspired by something real, but it’s entirely a work of fiction, assembled from my imagination and supported by ideas and reimagined possibilities from lived experience. For instance, I encountered a blue-haired man at night by the side of the road once, my own car cooling after overheating…but the details are all different. In my early twenties I was on a bus in Peru that broke down in the desert, and the young woman driver really did fix it. Some people close to me resembling Rachel and O.P. really did die, and I might have blushed over kind, pretty, Japanese flight attendants when I was too young to even know why I was flustered—but again, nothing is as I wrote it. It’s just a story.
Who is this book for? What kind of audience(s) will enjoy this book?
It may sound odd, but I initially wrote this book for me. My young life felt strange to me even as I lived it—being homeschooled was pretty unusual in the nineties, as was living far from town or mostly reading books from long before Iwas born. I wrote the book my thirteen-year-old self would’ve hid in the bottom of a backpack to pull out much later in private with a flashlight under a blanket. I think I would’ve treasured this book—Jamie’s shocking switch, the cozy science fiction (I was obsessed with space as a kid), the notes of spookiness, and most of all, the beautiful, tragic sacrifice Halley is willing to make at the end. I might identify with Jamie more, but Halley is my hero.
Now that I’ve written it, I realize it’s not for me at all. I hope there are others out there who might find something of the same excitement in this story as I would’ve when it felt critical to my life. This book was written for little me, but it’s for all the people, of any age, who feel they’re on the outside or have been forgotten, people who don’t quite fit in, and those who wonder about things like what happens when science and magic get all mixed up. It’s for all who delight in the unusual and the unexpected.
