Nina Schuyler, the award-winning climate fiction author, grew up surrounded by bodies of water in Washington State. She spent most of her summers as a girl in or on Gravelly Lake, which was carved out by a glacier, so it was very deep and very blue, she explains. The lake is surrounded by Douglas fir and hidden homes. She sailed, swam and snorkeled in that water, which she says was like a second home. On a paddle boat, she’d head out to a buoy, tie it up, and read for hours in the middle of the lake.

Her family also spent a lot of time at Puget Sound. She and her sisters wandered the shore, playing house with the small crabs and building rock homes for them. They would find oysters and bring them to their dad, who’d open them with a knife, squeeze lemon juice on them and they’d eat them. They had a rowboat named Rosie, and would head out and look for sharks.

At the Deschutes River in Oregon, the sisters would ride their bikes alongside the river and have a picnic along its shores. Their dad taught them how to fly fish on that river.

These experiences gave her a bone-deep understanding of the natural world that shines through in her new novel, Open the Floodgates , a book that opens with a major character, the River, arriving at a small-town courthouse for a trial to determine its rights going forward.

Jane Ciabattari: In our last conversation about In This Ravishing World , which won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections, the Prism Prize for Climate Literature and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, you told me you were working on “something experimental-ish involving nature….I’m in that stage of letting it unfold, trying not to judge it or rein it in. I’m back to that refrain: go ahead, what am I waiting for? Let it rip.” How did that approach work for you?

Nina Schuyler: It meant that in early drafts, with the story breathing down my neck and the River waiting to come to life, I paid attention to rhythm and sound and movement and the way the text felt rather than to rules. Rules that would have suffocated the story and steered me far from what I wanted to write, which was to have the text feel like a current on the page, swishing here and there. Instead of steadiness, with one or two points of view, I wanted an oceanic point of view, with the view sometimes very close and sometimes panoramic. It allowed me to move from character to character, even in the middle of a scene. It was thrilling and scary because I didn’t know if it would work. If I’d listened to a lot of the rules stuffed in my brain, I wouldn’t have done any of it. But this let-it-rip approach (coupled with: what do you have to lose?) said Yes, go ahead. Do it!”

JC: How would you trace the evolution of Open the Floodgates ?

NS: During law school, my favorite class was water law. My professor was a passionate man about water. Over the years, I’ve followed the legal trend of granting personhood to natural entities: rivers, mountains, forests, sea turtles, valleys. Not only is it fascinating legally, moving what is usually considered property into the category of person, but also at the language level, conflating the word “river” with “person”; what an unexpected jolt, kicking my brain into high gear with a bunch of “what ifs.” Once that happened, I began reading everything about the Rights of Nature movement and the granting of personhood to natural entities.