Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview Nancy McCabe, whose novel Vaulting Through Time has its debut on July 25.
Vaulting through Time isn’t your first novel, but it’s your first YA novel. Tell us what impelled you to write a YA book with science fiction elements.
I’ve always loved time travel—I even teach a class called Time Travel Fiction. And I’ve also always loved YA fiction. Years ago when I was spending most of my weekends watching my daughter’s gymnastics meets, I entertained myself by imagining the way I could combine all of those elements: YA fiction, time travel, gymnastics. It started as a game but I became so intrigued by the idea that I just kept working on it.
You have written extensively about Chinese adoption, including your experience of adopting your daughter. How did you weave together fact and fiction in Vaulting through Time?
My protagonist, Elizabeth, is not a Chinese adoptee. If she were a hundred percent Chinese, she would not have believed for so many years that she was biologically related to her tall blond mother. But it felt wrong to make her completely white, either, since she is based on my daughter. So I gave her a portion of Chinese ethnicity. Her adoption story is quite different from my daughter’s, but in writing this book I drew on the extensive research I’d done for my nonfiction books, particularly related to birth parents and to the psychology of adoptees. Historically, adoption has been mostly represented through the eyes of adoptive parents. I felt it was important to shed more light on the experience of the others in the adoption triad through the two birth mothers and the two adoptees in my novel, all of whom were based on my research and interviews.
The protagonist of Vaulting through Time, Elizabeth, is a teenage gymnast struggling with many things - her identity, her changing body and more. What propels her on her quest?
Everything is changing in Elizabeth’s world—her relationships with her mom and her best friend, her once-passionate love for gymnastics—and of course, she’s also experiencing hormonal and physical changes as she matures. My daughter and I both went through radical shifts in adolescence where what once defined us was gone and we had to redefine ourselves. And from years of teaching young writers I’ve seen that that’s pretty typical. Elizabeth’s quest is ultimately to understand her past and figure out who she is going forward.
Elizabeth’s former best friend, Zach, helps Elizabeth to use a time machine - a magical watch. What can you tell us about the watch - and Zach?
The watch is a prototypical time machine that uses GPS technology to locate traversable wormholes. As children, Elizabeth and Zach find it in an abandoned house, but don’t realize what it is until much later. They figure out that it’s programmed for the night of Elizabeth’s birth as well as several other dates in her family’s history and in gymnastics history. In the course of the story, she has to figure out the significance of all of those dates.
With the aid of the watch, Elizabeth finds herself travelling to different places and eras. Who does she encounter on her journey and where does she go?
Elizabeth discovers a mysterious child in the 1970s who is somehow connected to her, then, because of a watch malfunction, finds herself in the 1980s where she meets an elite gymnast preparing for Olympic Trials. Later she gets to know a strange woman in the 1920s. While she’s in the process of figuring out how she’s connected to all of these characters, one of the time machine prototypes identical to Elizabeth’s gets into the hands of a stranger. Elizabeth tries to track her down and stop her by cycling through the watch’s settings, which take her to great moments in gymnastics history. Eventually she ends up at the 1988 Olympic Trials, where to accomplish her mission she has to try to compete though she’s completely out of her element.
At the heart of the story is Elizabeth’s relationship with her mother. How does the theme emerge?
Elizabeth and her mother have always been close, so it’s a shock to Elizabeth to discover that her mother has never told her the full truth about her origins. Elizabeth’s quest helps her to understand why her mother has withheld information and leads her to understand and appreciate her mother better in general.
Elizabeth and her world are endangered when someone steals a time-machine that is the mirror image of hers. What does she do?
Elizabeth isn’t sure whether a woman she knows only as Mrs. Grundy is just taking a joy ride of sorts through time or whether she has a nefarious motive. But it may not matter, since she also discovers that people can mean well but still create devastation, and she has to stop Mrs. Grundy from purposely or inadvertently erasing Elizabeth’s existence.
You have published many works of non-fiction, though they are not conventional, linear narratives. What links your fiction and your non-fiction writing?
I started out as a fiction writer, but took a long detour into writing creative nonfiction, which was very much informed by my knowledge of storytelling techniques—characterization, scenes, narrative structure. My most recent memoir, Can This Marriage Be Saved? actually started as a novel but then evolved into a series of pieces in experimental forms that I could never have pulled off without my fiction background. For me, the biggest difference between creative nonfiction and fiction is that in creative nonfiction, I have to stick to the truth of what happened whereas in fiction I get to make things up. And I definitely went all out making things up in this novel even though many elements are based on real life.
In your bio you call yourself a ‘former longtime gymnastics mom’ - how did you set about describing the experiences of a young gymnast and the physical struggles?
My daughter competed as a YMCA gymnast for eight or so years, so I was a firsthand witness to the experiences and struggles of young gymnasts. During meets, I often sat by girls from my daughter’s team who were competing in other sessions and asked them questions about skills, scoring, and their own experience. And I also did a lot of research while writing this book, particularly reading gymnastics memoirs.
Talk to us about your non-fiction writing and what it means to you.
I turn to nonfiction when I need to directly process real experience—experience that was already dramatic on its own so I don’t really have to make anything up to tell a compelling story. Taking those questions and exploring them through art can be very healing.
What are the different challenges of writing fiction (especially sci-fi) and non-fiction?
For me fiction is often a different approach to the same subjects, issues, and material, a different way of digging into the truth. I often write about similar themes—identity, family, how the past affects us—in both genres. The difference is, in fiction I have the freedom to make up characters and details that will serve the story. I think fiction is also a good medium for focusing on relationships through creating characters rather than risking exposing or hurting people in our lives. I love how speculative elements push that invention one step further.
Do you think women writers approach these issues differently, given the present cultural context?
Historically women have contended with misrepresentation by male writers and also tended to write more about the domestic sphere, which was considered less significant than the public one. Nowadays we’re generally more conscious of issues of representation and authenticity, and we embrace home and family as legitimate subjects in fiction written by all genders. I do think women writers have a lot to say from their lived experience about reproductive rights and issues of oppression. And my own experience of sometimes feeling misrepresented as a woman hopefully makes me more sensitive to the way I write about ethnicities and situations outside my own experience, and helps me understand the importance of trying to get it right while also acknowledging my own limitations.
Have you got more fiction books awaiting publication?
My middle grade novel Fires Burning Underground, a coming-of-age story with a hint of the supernatural, will be released in 2025 by Fitzroy/Regal House. My short adult novel The Pamela Papers, an academic satire, will be out early next year from Outpost 19.
What will you write next?
I have a lot of projects in various stages. I’ve made notes toward a sequel to Vaulting through Time and written half of a draft of an adult novel about an ex-Amish dancer. I’m working on more creative nonfiction, in particular a project about my 120-year-old house and the stories I’ve uncovered about people who have lived here. And I have a nonfiction project related to adoption and trauma for which I’ve done a lot of research.
Thanks so much for these great questions!
Amazon
About Nancy McCabe:
An adoptive parent and former longtime gymnastics mom, Nancy McCabe is the author of six books for adults and has published articles in Newsweek, Salon, Writer’s Digest, The Brevity Blog, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among many others. She’s a Pushcart winner and her work has been recognized nine times on Best American Notable Lists. She directs the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford and teaches in the graduate program at the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University.
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