PORTLAND, Maine — Emily Zack’s first published novel, which hits bookstores next month, includes an expletive we can’t print here in its first, six-word sentence.
Then it gets a little crazy.
Zack, who goes by the pen name MZ, fills the next 250-or-so pages of “The Moorings of Mackerel Sky” with outrageous, yet still recognizable, Maine characters, settings, libations and situations. The slim novel is so packed with single moms, closeted gay kids, coffee brandy and sewing circles, that when the mermaids emerge, they ring as true as the lobster boats and Oxycontin.
The patchwork-stitched story is set in the fictitious coastal Maine town of Mackerel Sky. The hamlet was founded when a sea captain fell in love with a local mermaid and set up a lean-to on a bluff overlooking the water while keeping watch for her. His simple hut eventually grew into a house, a settlement and, finally, a town.
Fast forward 200 years, and the main tale concerns three interwoven stories.
First, there’s a boy named Leo. Drunk one night on coffee brandy, he wrecks an old woman’s car. Instead of sending him to juvie, she decides to make him fix the damage. Then she mentors him.
Second, there’s Derek. He’s a closeted 16-year-old, the star pitcher on his high school baseball team, from the only Black family in town. Derek, who’s falling in love with another boy at school, feels like he can’t come out to his taciturn, lobsterman father.
Then there are the mermaids.
It’s complicated, but the third story involves missing babies, involuntary commitment to a medical facility and humanlike sea creatures who may, or may not, be as friendly as you’d want them to be.
Though MZ is a lifelong Portlander, she’s no stranger to Down East life, with deep family roots in Jonesport, her mom’s hometown. She spent many childhood summers there, running wild and messing about on her grandfather’s lobster boat.
Though she has always been a writer, MZ is better known in Portland as a co-founder of the wildly successful Vivid Motion dance company, which first came to prominence more than a decade ago with its risque and long-running “Nutcracker Burlesque” holiday show. MZ was also a fixture at King Middle School, where she taught French for 20 years.
We sat down and spoke with MZ about her new novel one morning this week after she dropped her two kids, ages 3 and 17, off at their respective schools for the day.
BDN: Wow. This is quite a tale. I’ll probably be exhausted just typing up a synopsis.
MZ: It’s really just a tribute to anyone who’s had a Maine childhood, especially one where you grew up in the wild. It’s for anyone who seeks magic around every corner or is still looking for the door to Narnia.
BDN: But it’s not just whimsey.
MZ: Right. It’s also for all the badass dudes who came out of the closet in high school. I was inspired by a friend of mine who did that. His football captain would stand in the doorway of the showers, so that people wouldn’t come in and beat him up. I wanted to tell a story that honored the bravery it takes to be who you are. I also wanted to tell a story that paid homage to my mother and my aunts and my Down East family.
BDN: You hit the realism pretty hard, with people living gritty, hardscrabble lives amid empty liquor bottles — but there’s also a lot of poetry sandwiched between the prose, kind of like [J.R.R.] Tolkien.
MZ: Yes. I’m so happy you brought up Tolkien.
MZ: then rolled up her sleeve, revealing a tattoo of Smaug, the dragon from “The Hobbit,” done in Tolkien’s own drawing style.]
BDN: Mackerel Sky is the name of your fictional town. Why?
MZ: A mackerel sky has clouds that sort of look like fish scales. It’s that idea of the sky reflecting the ocean, the idea of a lobstering town on land which is also very much tied to the ocean. Then extending that just a little bit more, into the fantastical, creating mermaids and land characters, very grounded in Earth. I really just enjoyed that play.
BDN: The book comes out nationally on Feb. 27, but you’re doing a special local launch before that?
MZ: Yes. I’m doing a book launch in the form of a dance show on Feb. 6 at Hill Arts in Portland. It will involve a lot of people from Vivid Motion.
BDN: Tell me more about that.
MZ: I gave galley copies of the book to my choreographers and said, ‘I want you to go and read this and come back to me and tell me what strikes you.’ I really, really enjoy the idea of artists collectively communicating — letting them shine in their own way. When everyone can do what they really want to do — when they’re passionate about it — I get the best art out of them. And so they all came back with a bunch of different pieces. One of my choreographers was really struck by a pirate bird in the story, so she decided to do some choreography with feathered fan veils.
BDN: Are you already working on another novel?
MZ: Yes. It’s about a downtown building which has a tattoo shop called Skull Bone, which is next door to a burlesque house — and there’s a body of a drag queen interred in the bricks between them.
BDN: I can’t wait to write the synopsis for that one.
MZ: I really want to pull the curtain back on the world of burlesque because it tends to be very much misunderstood. It’s also very much a love story to my hometown of Portland and the misfit communities that find homes here.
“Moorings of Mackerel Sky” is available for pre-order from Disney-Hyperion Books. Tickets for the local dance and book launch are on sale now.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
