Ling Ma on Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban

Ling Ma joins Windham-Campbell Prizes director Michael Kelleher to talk about tuning into the same frequency as Rachel Ingalls, crying on airplanes, and what it means to write about human-cryptid romance.

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From the episode:

Michael Kelleher: I was really amazed at like how much sympathy I felt for both of them. I think Ingalls is really good at drawing these like really rich characters, and doing so by like constructing an environment that, you know is familiar and recognizable and yet, not as you would want it to be, right? It’s very particular in drawing upon Dorothy’s grief and on Larry’s suffering in a way that, that doesn’t allow your sense of the place or your familiarity with the place to make you feel comfortable as a reader.

Ling Ma: You get the sense of maybe estrangement that Dorothy has, but also the sense that she has to—feels that she has to pass as whatever societal role she’s been assigned. And I guess they’re similar in that way, her and Larry, and maybe that’s forms, you know, the basis of their connection is that they’re both, well, she has to pass and I guess he can’t even be seen.

I think for Dorothy, she knows, she always knows there’s a distinction between herself and like the fact that she has to pass is always very clear to her and it’s very cumbersome. And I think living each day feeling as if you have to pass for something else is very tiring. And and I think that sense of exhaustion is especially prevalent maybe in the earlier part of the novel.

MK: Hmm. What do you think she’s passing?

LM: Well, she’s passing… as what she is, which a woman. I guess not quite a mother, but yeah. She’s passing as the things that she is.

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Reading list: 

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls • Times Like These by Rachel Ingalls • The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum • The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) • Grumpy Old Men (1993)