The author talks about the serious themes woven throughout her latest novel.
A publishing professional for 18 years, Erin Bartels is the award-winning author of We Hope for Better Things (2020 Michigan Notable Book, 2020 WFWA Star Award-winner, 2019 Christy Award finalist) and The Words between Us (2020 Christy Award finalist, 2015 WFWA Rising Star Award finalist). Her short story, “This Elegant Ruin,” was a finalist in the Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest in 2014, and her poetry has been published by The Lyric.
Her new novel is All That We Carried (Revell):
Ten years ago, sisters Olivia and Melanie Greene were on a hiking trip when their parents were in a fatal car accident. They haven’t seen each other since the funeral. Olivia coped with the loss by plunging herself into law school, work, and a materialist view of the world. Melanie dropped out of college and developed an online life coaching business around her DIY spirituality.
Now, at Melanie’s insistence (and against Olivia’s better judgment), they are embarking on a hike in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In this remote wilderness they’ll face their deepest fears, question their most dearly held beliefs, and begin to see that perhaps the best way to move forward is the one way they had never considered.
In this interview, Erin explains why she used her fiction to touch on serious themes, what draws her to hiking, and how her characters each deal with grief.
Tell us a little about your novel All That We Carried.
Ten years ago, sisters Carrie and Melanie Greene were on a hiking trip when their parents were in a fatal car accident. They haven’t seen each other since.
Olivia coped with the loss by plunging herself into law school, work, and a materialistic view of the world—what you see is what you get, and that’s all you get. Melanie dropped out of college and developed an online life-coaching business around her cafeteria-style spirituality—a little of this, a little of that, whatever makes you happy.
Now, at Melanie’s insistence (and against Olivia’s better judgement), they are embarking on a hike in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In this remote wilderness they’ll face their deepest fears, question their most dearly held beliefs, and begin to see that perhaps the best way to move forward is the one way they had never considered.
You have based three of your novels in Michigan. Why this location?
Despite all being set in Michigan, my novels are set in very different places. An urban center and a rural farmhouse, a small town with an active boating and shipping life, the middle of an old-growth forest.
Michigan is a deceptively large state with incredibly varied landscapes (and lakescapes). It is second only to California in the diversity of its agriculture. It is chock-full of fascinating history—Native American tribes, French fur trading, copper mining, lumberjacks, the auto industry, Motown—and Michiganders have a deep love of the great outdoors in every season.
There’s just so much story potential here! I do have plans for some novels outside of Michigan, but as one does as when one travels, I’ll always come home again.
What inspired this story?
I’ve wanted to write a hiking story for a few years, simply because I love hiking Michigan’s trails and I have a lot of experience upon which to draw. And I’ve wanted to write a book featuring sisters who found it difficult to get along, as my sister and I did for so long.
Those two storylines naturally go together in my mind because the longer two people are with each other without distraction or way of escape, the more they can get on each other’s nerves, and therefore the more conflict and interest the story will have. Place them on a real-world trail and you impose a particular structure and a particular timeline, and you add physical challenges to the emotional and spiritual ones the characters must deal with. It condenses the action.
After writing books with tons of characters and dual and triple timelines covering decades or even centuries, I wanted to write a story that had few characters and took place over the space of just one week. It was a fun challenge.
In addition to the theme of sisterhood, you also touch on the heavier topics of grief and faith. Can you explain how these three themes weave together?
In my family of origin, we tend to keep our griefs to ourselves. There’s a lot of English and German DNA in the bloodline, so we’re experts at repressing, putting on a brave face, and getting on with what needs to be done. It doesn’t mean you don’t feel grief deeply. It just means you do your crying alone.
That’s also how many people approach faith. It’s private. It’s personal. It’s no one else’s business.
That kind of individualistic approach to faith, which is so common in the West, leads to many people believing a hodgepodge of spiritual things filled with internal contradictions and questions without sure answers. That kind of faith offers no assurance because we’ve cobbled it together on our own, instead of entering into a community of faith that stretches back to ancient times and can help us test whether what we believe has any truth to it or power in it.
When we grieve, we shouldn’t go it alone. When it comes to our beliefs about God, death, and eternity, again, we shouldn’t go it alone. And when it comes to life, these two sisters will discover not only that they shouldn’t go it alone but that they don’t actually want to.
What draws you to hiking?
Like many people, I find quiet time in the natural world restorative to the soul. I’ve spent many, many hours walking by myself at nature centers and along trails and lakeshores, and many more hiking Michigan’s backcountry with my sister.
It’s a time when I can ignore the problems and busyness of regular life, I can revel in God’s good creation, and I can remember that the world doesn’t center on me or my schedule. It centers on God and His purposes.
Remembering my rather inconsequential place in the world is good for someone whose besetting sin is pride.
Tell us about your protagonists, sisters Olivia and Melanie.
Over the years, they grew apart, each coping with the loss in her own way. Older sister Olivia plunged herself into law school, work, and an atomistic view of the world—what you see is what you get, and that’s all you get. Younger sister Melanie dropped out of college and developed an online life-coaching business around her cafeteria-style spirituality—a little of this, a little of that, whatever makes you happy.
In every way possible, these two sisters are polar opposites, except for one thing: they are both missing the same thing.
Both sisters in your novel deal with grief in their own way. Can you please touch on how these sisters tackle their grief and how they come to terms with it?
It’s really hard to lose someone we love. It’s much harder when we don’t have firm beliefs about what happens after death. I think more and more people don’t have any solid beliefs about the afterlife—whether there is one and what happens there.
Even [some] Christians have wacky, unbiblical ideas of what happens after we die. I have been to many a funeral where I’ve come away with the feeling that even the minister wasn’t sure what to say. So it’s just a string of platitudes with no logical basis for believing any of it is true.
That’s the world these sisters are living in—one where they don’t have a firm footing in what they believe, so they decide what they believe about death and the nature of existence according to what makes them feel able to move on.
One believes in a little of everything, hoping that because of that she will eventually see her parents again when she dies. The other believes that this life is all there is and her parents’ disembodied souls are not living on in some other dimension or place. And neither one is at peace because neither one is truly sure about any of it.
Did you find one of the sisters harder to write about than the other?
No, because I identify with both of them, despite how different they are. In one way, they’re representative of the head and the heart—reason and intuition. And they are fairly accurate pictures of the two sides of my own personality.
I am, on the one hand, a driven, practical, achievement-oriented, and skeptical person, just like Olivia. But I am also a dawdler, an observer, a stop-the-car-in-the-middle-of-traffic-to-save-a-turtle kind of person like Melanie.
I probably would have made a good lawyer, like Olivia. But, like Melanie, I feel a close kinship with the natural world, and I want to get along with everybody. And in writing out the spiritual and philosophical arguments the sisters have with each other and with a stranger they meet along the way, I’m simply working out lines of reasoning and arguments I’ve had in my own mind over the past 30-some years—things I want to believe, things I have trouble believing, things I wish were true, and things I wish weren’t true.
What would you like readers to take away after having read All That We Carried?
Beyond the outer story of these sisters finding common ground and forgiveness, All That We Carried is really about the inner journey each of us takes as we come to terms with what we believe—about God, about what happens after we die, about how we view everything in the world—and most of all why we believe it. I hope readers will be open to honestly examining these things in their own minds and with each other as they discuss the book.
We spend so much time, effort, and money to distract ourselves from boredom. The prospect of even 30 seconds of unoccupied time has us reaching for our phones to quickly check social media.
But filling up every waking moment of our days with distractions keeps us from ever following our thoughts somewhere new and interesting or considering the deeper questions of life, death, and eternity. I hope that readers come away from this book with a desire to get outside, get quiet, and explore the trails of their own thoughts for a while. To not ignore their own questions and doubts about the nature of existence and the nature of God, and instead to humbly work through them, seeking answers that satisfy both the head and the heart.
Above all, I hope that readers see the value of extending grace and forgiveness to those who have wronged them.
Visit Erin Bartels’ author page:
https://www.familyfiction.com/authors/erin-bartels
All That We Carried
Erin Bartels
Revell
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Ten years ago, sisters Olivia and Melanie Greene were on a backcountry hiking trip when their parents were in a fatal car accident. Over the years, they grew apart, each coping with the loss in her own way.
Olivia plunged herself into law school, work, and a materialist view of the world—what you see is what you get, and that’s all you get.
Melanie dropped out of college and developed an online life-coaching business around her cafeteria-style spirituality—a little of this, a little of that, whatever makes you happy.
Now, at Melanie’s insistence (and against Olivia’s better judgment), they are embarking on a hike in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In this remote wilderness they’ll face their deepest fears, question their most dearly held beliefs, and begin to see that perhaps the best way to move forward is the one way they had never considered.
Michigan Notable Book Award winner Erin Bartels draws from personal experience hiking backcountry trails with her sister to bring you a story about the complexities of grief, faith, and sisterhood.