Quick Take
After a decade of research and writing, Santa Cruz author Victoria Tatum is preparing for the release of her second novel, “More Than Any River,” which transforms California’s water wars into a human story rooted in the Central Valley. The novel focuses on the struggle among farmers, laborers and big business trying to install Delta tunnels and pushing the ecosystem to the brink. Some publishers doubted Tatum’s vision of the land as a main character. But she persevered. As long as California keeps gambling with water, the struggle, she believes, remains unfinished.
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It took me 10 years to research and write my novel “More Than Any River,” which She Writes Press will release in March.
It is my second novel, and I am proud of the time it took to wrangle a complex subject that held my attention for a decade. Now, to see it published marks a personal milestone, one any writer understands.
The novel offers up a classic California conflict – the fight for water. It pits farmers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta against agribusiness owners fighting over the massive water tunnels the state wants to build beneath thousands of acres of prime farmland.
My story focuses on characters. There’s Nate, a young state Fish and Game biologist who is passionate about the Delta and gets caught between his ideals and Fish and Game’s true agenda. John Kimura is a third-generation Delta farmer, who, along with his employees Manuel, Lupe, and Marie, is committed to organic family farming. He allies himself with Buzz Eberstark, a rice grower in the Sacramento Valley, and other Delta farmers in the fight against the tunnels.
Buzz’s nemesis, Lawrence Scheffield, grows 118,000 acres of cotton and almonds in the hydrologically closed basin to the south, and partners with Tulare cotton baron Patrick Smith to control most of the water flowing through the state.
Bringing these characters to life meant falling in love with each of them – including my antagonists, who are based on agribusinessmen whose ties to the Central Valley run as deep as the wells they dig for both water and oil. And the valley itself is the most important character of all. It’s what captured my heart and led me to want to write this story.
When I tried to sell the book, some publishers hesitated at the concept of land as character, but I didn’t give up. I am grateful to the team of women at She Writes Press who embraced my vision. And – although it took me a decade to write – the situation in the Central Valley hasn’t changed since I began my work. The state still wants to build a tunnel, and we are still tussling over water.
That is because in the West, water can be an illusion: Some years we’re inundated with snow and rain, but more often we’re left parched. And in California, the biggest battle for water occurs in the Great Central Valley, where south-of-Delta agribusiness controls every stream feeding into the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers.
The Sacramento Delta first captured my heart in high school, when each year in May my best friend sailed with her family on their 28-foot sloop north from San Francisco, into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and up the San Joaquin to a little slough where they docked on an island for the summer. I was invited to spend weekends with them, sleeping under the stars on the deck of the boat and cooking outdoors over coals in the communal kitchen. We would jump into the water for relief from the summer heat.
Decades later, I found out the poor quality of the Delta water made it no longer safe for swimming. I wanted to know what had happened to the water and who was responsible.
I read San Francisco Chronicle articles about the tunnels and I found my answer. When droughts occur and farmers and agriculture overdraw fresh water, salt water from San Francisco Bay, along with pollutants, fill the void.
As I wrote my book, I learned much more than I could include in my story. One of the stories that captured my attention was the Round Valley Indian Tribes’ fight to save their homes from the Eel River. I became engulfed, dreamt of water, and got swept away. I wrote long historical accounts of California’s water infrastructure, which my agent Liz slogged through and, spot on, told me to take out.
My husband, Blue, who devours plot-driven novels, read an early version and told me I needed to emphasize the rivalry of the warring water factions. In my rewrite, I drew out the conflict without sacrificing the complexity, and while it hurt to do so, I cut out much about the Eel River story.
The result was a better novel.
I wrote my novel out of concern. With so much of the wild disappearing or being destroyed every day, I am drawn to the land whenever I sit down to write. And living on the California coast and enjoying year-round produce at farmers markets gives me an appreciation of the laborers who work the land. These laborers became protagonists in my novel.
We all need to understand what it takes to get our produce to the stalls, and what it will take for the bounty we enjoy to continue. “More Than Any River” provided an opportunity to expose those truths.
Victoria Tatum received her master’s degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University and her master’s in education at UC Santa Cruz. Her first novel, “The Virgin’s Children,” was released by a Canadian publisher, formerly known as Rain Publishing, in 2006. She and her husband have two adult children and live in Santa Cruz.