Rachel Heng is the author of the novels The Great Reclamation (forthcoming from Riverhead Books in 2022) and Suicide Club (Henry Holt, 2018), which has been translated into ten languages worldwide and won the Gladstone Library Writer in Residence Award 2020. Rachel’s short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Best Small Fictions, Best New Singaporean Short Stories, and elsewhere. An excerpt from her story “Coffins Patch” can be found here. It appears in the Jan/Feb 2021 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Coffins Patch”?
I’ve always wanted to write a story about work, specifically, what it is to be female and to be deeply passionate about one’s work. And though I never wanted to be a marine biologist, I did use to scuba dive! The weightlessness, the clumsy equipment, the heartbreaking experience of visiting bleached or dying reefs—all of it is very dear to me.
Can you share a little bit about the science writing aspect of this story? How did you first encounter the story of this coral, or is it one you imagined? How did you approach the research?
I happened upon this article about scientists fighting a deadly coral disease outbreaks around the world. I’m constantly fascinated by the jobs people do, and the pictures of marine biologists carving trenches into diseased corals to save healthy tissue (and the description of their techniques as being ‘borrowed from firefighters’!) struck me as incredibly moving. Coffins Patch is a real place, the actual last remaining high density area of endangered pillar coral in Florida. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection has an active Coral Reef Conservation Program, so I spent lots of time going through their research papers and studies, learning about the extent of the problem, the various solutions and experiments underway. I looked up photos and videos of marine biologists working on coral reef conservation. Also, I’ve only been to Florida once, very briefly, so for that, Google Maps was very helpful. And I took the advice a professor once gave me about setting stories in unfamiliar places, which was to spend time going through the local Craigslist.
For writers who are interested in setting a scene under water, do you have any advice to share?
Physicality is always important to me in fiction, so perhaps, try to spend some time underwater if you can! Just in a pool or even in a bathtub, to get a sense of the way limbs and hair feel, the way light looks underwater, what it’s like to breathe or not breathe.
Ei Mun has such a nuanced experience with the news of her pregnancy, and the experience of it, even though it is cut short. I’m moved, too, by her incredible connection to her work. Are there other writers who you think have covered either or both of these subjects unusually well?
On the experience of pregnancy, some fiction and nonfiction I find powerful are Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool, Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, and Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica Of A Figment Of My Imagination. On the nature and intricacies of work, I am always inspired by Studs Terkel’s magnificent oral history Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of A Lion is also stunning in its evocation of engineers, bridge-builders, and tannery workers.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I am currently working on the edits of my second novel, The Great Reclamation, which is scheduled to be published in 2022. It’s a coming-of-age story about a boy who grows up amidst the social, political and environmental upheaval of mid-twentieth century Singapore, and who ultimately has to grapple with the implications of a large land reclamation project that will threaten the village that is his home.