Article contributed by Tessa Qi
Accompany Kindred Greyreach, as she takes on a wild journey and sets sail across The Forever Sea discovering hidden secrets and mysteries, engaging in dangerous adventures and finding new love along the way. Joshua Johnson brings to life a new environmental epic fantasy series featuring ships sailing above prairie grasses, cities dependent on water to survive and battles against monsters of the deep!
I had the pleasure of asking Joshua some questions about his new book The Forever Sea, his inspiration behind the story, book recommendations, and more!
Hi Joshua! Tell us a little about yourself!
Hello! Thanks so much for inviting me to talk about The Forever Sea! I live in the Prairie Pothole region of the United States and teach in the English program at a small liberal arts university. Right now, since we’re in a pandemic, I spend my days playing with my daughter, teaching online, hanging out with my partner, and writing and reading when I can!
Can you describe your book in just one sentence?
The Forever Sea is an eco-fantasy about a woman who sails on a grass sea and will sacrifice everything to know what mysteries wait below the waves.
What was your inspiration for this novel?
I was inspired by the tallgrass prairie that used to exist in huge swaths on the land where I now live. It’s mostly gone now, of course—replaced by monoculture farm fields—but there are small remnants that remain here and there. The prairie is such a striking thing, and I find myself constantly amazed by it.
I was also really inspired by astronauts! I know that seems a little strange, but I’ve always found it interesting and wild and inspirational that people would choose to take on so much risk to go up into space. Of course, there are plenty of technological benefits to doing that sort of thing, but I think there also must be a simple desire to experience the unknown, and I love that. It’s a desire that doesn’t feet neatly into a capitalistic box where everything you want must pay material dividends. Instead, it’s a desire to see for the sake of seeing, and that’s really present in my novel.
Your book is described as an ‘environmental epic fantasy series’. When did you first discover that you wanted to write something like this?
I’ve been an environmentalist for a long time, and I love the idea of people who aren’t scientists or researchers finding ways to contribute to environmental causes. I’m a teacher, and many of the classes I teach have an environmental angle to them, and this was always going to be the case for my fiction. I’d written novels before, but this was the first that I cared enough to revise and improve, and I think a lot of that had to do with the environmental messages that I care so much about being central to the book.
How did you come up with the idea with a sea of grass and ships sailing across it? It did give me some Treasure Island feels when I first read it.
Oh yes! Lots of sailing/boat-y/sea books were in my head while coming up with this novel. In terms of the Forever Sea itself, I was out for a walk one windy, blustery day and was passing by a small field that someone had let grow unchecked, and it had been taken over by grass. Not the bluestem or switchgrass that once covered this land, but grass all the same, thrashing around in the wind. I watched it for awhile, and it looked SO MUCH like a sea—I could trace currents running along it and waves cresting and breaking. And once I saw it as a sea, it was a short leap to imagine boats on it, and then to imagine who might sail those boats, and what kind of lives they might lead…
Was there a scene or a character in the novel that you found challenging to write?
Kindred was hardest for me to write, which is a problem since she’s the main character! She can be quite passive and navel-gaze-y (like me in lots of ways), and so I often felt like she was at odds with the pacing of the plot, which I wanted to be snappy when possible. The challenge for me was not to change Kindred so she fit the story but to think more about how I might give her interior scenes the same kind of attention and energy that I was giving to the action scenes. I don’t know that I always succeeded in that, but it’s what I was aiming for!
What did you enjoy most when you were writing this book?
This is going to sound like the most boring thing ever, but I really, really loved writing the quiet scenes where Kindred is just looking out over the sea and marvelling at it. I know it won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I love those pockets of peace in between the action of stories, and it made me so happy to pivot those scenes around the prairie!
What kind of research did you do for this novel?
I’m lucky to have a colleague at the university who studies the prairie, and I talked with her a lot to get an understanding of how this kind of ecosystem could speculatively work. I also read several books on the prairie and wrote with a copy of Wildflowers of the Tallgrass Prairie at hand.
Before writing, I’d never been on a sailboat, so a few friends took me and my partner on their sailboat one weekend. I get terrible motion sickness, so I don’t think a sea life is for me, but I learned a ton while I was out there. I also spent a lovely and long afternoon at the Vancouver Maritime Museum, which was great fun until my partner and I discovered that our daughter had lost her favourite toy somewhere in the museum. It took us awhile to find it, but we were ultimately successful, and the day was saved.
With so many mysteries unsolved, what can we expect in the next book?
The sequel will answer many mysteries, but I think you can expect at least a few to remain. It features a new POV character, a language war, visitors from the other side of the Forever Sea, and so much more! I’m so excited for this second book, and I hope readers will join me on the next leg of this journey.
What is your current read at the moment and what is a book that you would recommend everyone to read?
I’m currently listening to the audiobook of The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal and reading The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers and Fermat’s Enigma by Simon Singh. I highly recommend them all!
A book I recommend often is Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay. It’s a slim little book of poetry, but, like me and you, it contains multitudes.
Lastly, what’s next for you?
I still need to revise the sequel to The Forever Sea, but I’ve started working on a new project. It features a math-based magic system, some weird death rituals, and small-town spookiness.
