Take a trip to Vanessa Hua’s "Coyoteland"

What does it actually take to belong? And who gets to decide? How do you know you’ve made it? And how does the place you reside affect it?

Those are just a few of the themes being explored in Vanessa Hua’s new novel “Coyoteland.” Set in a fictionalized suburb in the East Berkeley hills, the novel explores class and race through multiple perspectives against the backdrop of California’s expanding wildfire season. 

The best-selling author behind “A River of Stars,” which made NPR’s best books of 2018 list, returns to the region Friday, May 22 for CapLit Sacramento, where an excerpt from “Coyoteland” will be performed on stage.

She spoke with CapRadio’s Laura Fitzgerald on a recent episode of Insight.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired you to write “Coyoteland”?

Well, in the early months of lockdown, I was out for a walk in the morning and I heard what sounded like the clatter of high heels and I turned and I couldn't believe my eyes. There was a coyote running at me full tilt chased by two deer. The sound of the hooves  was creating that clatter and they ran right past me and jumped into the brush. And it seemed like another sign of a world that felt topsy-turvy.

I mean, that was the year of the racial reckoning about police brutality. That was the year that the sky turned orange. And so the novel, you know, it got me thinking about this hinge point, right? The novel opens in the summer of 2021. We move past that early part of the pandemic, but the question remained, are we going to go back to the way we were before or forge something better or is a pendulum going to swing back even worse than before? And I feel like those sorts of moments are really rich for a novelist to explore.

The book is based in a community near Berkeley, Calif. I've lived in Berkeley. It's quite a unique place. What's the significance of basing the story there? What about that community helps convey the themes that you wanted to explore in the story? 

First off, is this urban wildlife interface. I mean, coyotes are in cities and in the countryside and the suburbs. But in the borderlands, the places where there is encroachment, there's the potential for conflict, whether that's between animals or between people, right? 

Also, this is a community that prides itself on its progressive ideals, but those ideals are harder to uphold when it comes to your house and to the education of your children. For families, those are the two biggest senses. Going back to that idea, how do we live with each other? How do we be good neighbors to each other? Particularly, when there are these flash points of, are you going to hold true to your ideals or are you going to revert back to every person out for themselves?

Your novel features multiple points of view, including the point of view of an actual coyote. Why did you choose to structure the novel this way?

This was a new challenge for me, often terrifying, because I wondered if I could pull it off. But I felt it was necessary to truly tell the story of a community. There's also an omniscient voice that will also step in at times too. I don't want to say pass judgment, but there are often things that a character can't know about themselves and I really enjoyed being able to approach this story of this time in this community through those points of view.

What kind of research did you have to do to write a convincing coyote? 

Coyotes have such a rich symbolic importance. They have been in folklore for thousands of years, and yet we hear them, you know, as our neighbors howling outside the window.

I can recommend an excellent book called “Coyote America” by Dan Flores where he really highlights that long history, their migration, their start in the plains and now they're in every state except for Hawaii and I have no doubt someday there will be a coyote stowaway on a plane to the islands.

So like that sort of research, studying them myself when I've seen them in the neighborhood and also reading the news, like many of us were captivated by the coyote that swam to Alcatraz, or even talking to friends. Everyone has a coyote story, don’t they?

You also write very convincingly from the perspective of multiple teenagers, competing with each other to get into their top schools after high school. This seems like a pretty common theme for kids. What experience did you use to convey those themes?

Well, I graduated from high school, let's say a while back, and you know, it's been interesting to observe. My kids are still freshmen, but I definitely know kids who are in the junior and senior grind and all the worry and money spent and concern. I think in some ways, compared to when I was applying to school, it's more difficult in that kids are applying to more colleges than before or there's also the aspect of social media. I'm Gen X, so if we messed up, it wasn't recorded anywhere but in our memory and in our legends. And now, I think teenagers these days have to think about their presence online and I mean that's another theme of the novel: surveillance, whether it's through you know apps or or through self-surveillance on social media.

What do you hope people take away from the novel as they read it? What does it have to say about the nature of territory, predator and prey?

I think we have not fully reckoned with the events of 2020, 2021. There's consequences still unfolding six years later. On one hand, I hope the book serves as a page turner and that people are compelled to find out what happens. But I also hope that it can open up conversations about that time. And as you mentioned in the intro, how can we live in community? How can we be good neighbors across race, across class?