Blog by Stella Aisenshtat
Reading Salt Bones was unlike any book I’ve ever read. Jennifer Givhan’s motherwriting, as she so aptly described, breathes life to the pages and transports her readers to El Valle - “both the hellscape and the place of restoration, rescue, and rebirth” at the heart of her motherhood poetics.
Inspired by the myth of Demeter and her lost daughter, Persephone, Jennifer “needed to delve deep into the underworld and boiling sopa pot of [her] mother’s stories, [her] communities histories, [her] own daughterhood, and [her] lived experience as a mother. That descent became part of the work, and [she] found a certain line of poetry kept returning to [her] on this journey,” so it became the preface of Salt Bones:
“The only legend I have ever loved is / the story of a daughter lost in hell. / And found and rescued there.”
-Eavan Boland, Pomegranate.
Talking to her about her writing process and the themes she explores in the book was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up – little did I know that her responses to my questions would be just as poetic as Salt Bones itself.
Let’s go back to the beginning: What first sparked the idea for Salt Bones?
“I grew up along a toxic river that flowed into a salty sea where we’d watch the pelicans diving for fish,” Jennifer begins, recounting her own childhood as the building blocks and inspiration behind Salt Bones. “But my mama warned us never to eat the fish because they were poison. Years later, at a carne asada with my comadre, she told me the sea was drying up, releasing toxic chemicals like arsenic and DDT from decades of pesticide-laden crop dusting over nearby fields. As the sea shrank and exposed the playa, poison dust was blowing into everyone’s lungs. We’ll all have to leave, she said. If nothing was done, the whole Valle would become a ghost town.”
“At the same time that I was pulling a story draft from the compost heap about siblings growing up on a toxic lake called 'Salt Bones,’ I’d gone to pick up my daughter from school—but when the bell rang to release the kids, she hadn’t come outside. I panicked. Unbeknownst to me, her teacher had kept her class late, but I was ready to set the whole world on fire to find her. And so, the current iteration of Salt Bones was born—an ecological swansong for disappearing girls on a vanishing sea, all wrapped in a murder mystery like a burrito!”
The author’s journey isn’t linear, and Salt Bones is a testament to the transformative magic of writing. Even though Jennifer plotted, planned and outlined, she could not escape the “many twists and revelations that occur spontaneously while drafting and revising.”
She explained how Salt Bones began as a short story, only to morph into a historical novel set in the 1970s, until finally it transformed “into the contemporary ecological and socio-political outcry it is now for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls told through the voices of Mal and her two daughters. This story is also all [of her] poems, braided together through genre and mythmaking, entangling the characters and the land.”
Themes of cultural identity and Indigeneity
When reading Jennifer’s work, it is almost impossible to miss how her Indigenous and Mexican-American roots shape her writing, beautifully interplaying with the novel’s environmental themes, and the haunting presence of the Salton Sea.
“My Ancestors had moved with the water before there were borders,” she explains. “I felt a tremendous responsibility to speak up for the land and its relationship with the community, not just for what it could provide as the agricultural industry extracts every ounce it can, but what the land needs in return.” She never meant to write a polemic, only wishing to “trace the vast eco-socio-political threads that bind us to the land and to embody those connections through the story of one family, whom [she] lent the spirit of [her] own, with many of [her] mother’s stories bleeding into the narrative.”
Salt Bones examines not just literal but emotional erosion - grief, trauma, memory. The geographical landscape mirrors the inner turmoil and transformation of the main character, Malamar.
“Mal embodies my entire motherhood poetics,” explained Jennifer, “which sees the mother as capable of delving into the underbelly to heal her own trauma as a girl in order to heal and protect her daughters. The hellscape I drew from, my own childhood nearby the Salton Sea, along with its current state of wreckage, mirrors the mental health battles I fought throughout mothering my children, which I realized at some point paralleled my own mothers, and hers, and hers… and so on.”
The haunting of the Salton Sea that permeates every page of Salt Bones “was very much [her] own from girlhood, always drawn to the water that [her] mama warned [her] was poison.” El Valle and the land itself are characters from the book in their own right. “The landscape doesn’t just reflect Mal’s emotional world; it shapes and haunts it, ultimately offering the possibility of healing.”
Sustainable creation in the social media era
Sustainability for Jennifer goes beyond environmental balance, it is also a “spiritual and cultural alignment. When we reconnect to our souls, our families, our land—when we give as much as we take.” Sustainable creation means prioritizing family, togetherness, and making space for “rest, fallowness, silence, [and] shadow.”
“We don’t always need to be doing and striving, working and burning out. Sometimes the most radical act is simply to be. We need time to dream. To heal. To imagine new possibilities for how to move forward when it’s time.”
Jennifer credits the magical realism that she carefully and beautifully wove through each page of Salt Bones with “finding joy and sustaining ourselves and our world.” She describes it as more than a genre or a literary device - it is everything.
“There are places in our hearts, our imaginations, our selves, our bodies, our homes, our sacred altars and hilltops and in the water, none of [the darkness] can reach.”
“That’s both magical and real. “
So, when you pick up a copy of Salt Bones, and you turn to the final page, remember that: “We are not alone, dear ones. Badasses. Warriors. Mamas and aunties and grandmothers and comadres and healers and storytellers and dreamers and believers and scientists and teachers and historians and beloveds. We walk through the hellscape together, carrying each other—
Carrying each other back home.”
Get your copy today Amazon.com: Salt Bones: A Novel: 9780316581523: Givhan, Jennifer: Books
