Immersed

N&S: You interviewed many real-life mermaids and mermen for this book. Did your approach to these interviews change throughout the writing, as your understanding of the community developed?

Megan Dunn: I was very addicted to interviewing those mermaids. For a while I was thinking, do I interview 80 mermaids and call it Around the World in 80 Mermaids? The vast majority of interviews happened in 2017 and 2018, most of them on Skype or Facetime. I would have my stock questions: How much does beauty matter to being a mermaid? Where’s the best place you’ve swum? But I was always interested in the cutaways, like the mermaid who owned 2 parrots, and looking for the little shiny bits that you can’t make up. 

One mermaid worked in a tank in New York in a bar called the Coral Room. She worked with lots of other fish, including Sugar, an emperor snapper that used to attack her because it was territorial. And Al, the Aquarist, said “You get that fish, Julie, you shake his tail. You show him who’s boss.” All of that stuff’s like catnip for me. I was just crazy for it. 

Then the mermaids started telling me their history, and that’s how I found out about figures like Annette Kellerman,  the Australian champion swimmer, who became a vaudeville star, then the first silent screen actress to perform in a mermaid tail.

I love the way different people relate to the Mermaid as a figure. Daryl Hannah’s my big touchstone, from seeing Splash and later being told in an art school critique after I made a video artwork using footage from Splash, “It can be about the mermaid but it has to be about the important historical, cultural aspects of the mermaid. It can’t be about a blonde, beautiful young woman as a mermaid.” 

Splash also happens to be a comedy, and the status of comedy, as necessary as it is, is never top-notch. Not many booker prizes go to a comic novel!