“Why can no one in this family ever just say what’s on their mind?” asks Joseph Kurkjian, twin brother, son, cousin, and nephew in the new book, Waterline. Though his question may be an overstatement, it illustrates the tension in which his family finds itself.

Waterline is the debut novel of Aram Mrjoian, a University of Michigan lecturer and managing editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review. He will be in conversation with Julie Buntin at Literati Bookstore on Tuesday, June 3, at 6:30 pm.

The book's chapters cycle through the point of view of each member in the Kurkjian family as they cope with their cousin, daughter, and niece Mari’s fatal decision to swim far out into Lake Michigan and not come back. The rotating focus on each character’s perspective provides unique angles on how they respond to what has happened with Mari, as well as what is going on in their own lives.

Part of their stories is the anguish from historical injustices as Gregor, the Kurkjians’ great-grandfather, and Mara, their great-grandmother, resisted and survived the Armenian Genocide. This history troubles their descendants who now live on Grosse Ile. Karo, who is Mari’s father and Gregor’s grandson, talks to Joseph, his nephew, about the past as he sips brandy:

“Just don’t let it tell you who to be,” Karo warned. He drank from his mug and puckered his lips as he lowered it again. “That was a mistake of my generation. It’s okay to learn from the past, to believe it is important to remember the past, to never forget the past, to let the past help you interpret the present, et cetera, without it solely defining you. There are many ways to fight.”

Even though the past preoccupies the family, the dramas of the present take place and demand attention, too.

As the family endures the pain of the past, the loss of Mari, and new challenges, they start to realize, in their own ways, that avoidance does not resolve their issues. Hannah, Mari’s aunt, considers their lives and her marriage to Edgar, Karo’s brother. She understands, “There was no returning to the beginning. There was only beginning again.”

Mrjoian and I had an interview about his life in Ann Arbor, the setting of his novel in Michigan, the theme of water in the book, characters in Waterline, and what he is writing next.

Q: What does your work as managing editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review involve?
A: Having been the managing editor at a couple different literary journals over the years, I’d say the role generally involves maintaining a publication’s production schedule and routine administration. At MQR, I do a little bit of everything, but it’s not necessarily what people expect of an editorial position. Some days I’m applying for grants and nominating MQR’s work for awards, other days I’m coordinating with copyeditors and our typesetter, making sure contributors get paid on time—I’m almost always responding to a big pile of email inquiries and shipping out print copies. I also assist and work with everyone across the journal’s masthead, so it’s a lot of spreadsheets, contracts, and agendas, but it’s extremely rewarding, especially when boxes of a new issue arrive in our office.

Q: How did you decide to set your new novel, Waterline, primarily on Grosse Ile and around the Midwest?
A: I grew up in Ann Arbor. When I was little, we visited my grandparents on Grosse Ile nearly every weekend—or that’s the way I remember it as a kid. Michigan is a very important place to me and has been integral to my literary upbringing, so I knew from the beginning I wanted to set the novel here. A lot of my stories and essays are also set in Michigan. I imagine the state will be one I return to for most of my writing in the future.

Q: Water surrounds Michigan and flows as a theme throughout this book. The book’s description depicts Mari’s last swim in Lake Michigan. Her father Karo grapples with how, “She hadn’t only marred Lake Michigan, but every waterfront, each stretch of beach and glistening water. For the rest of his life, every time he stood on the shore and tried to guess how far out the line was where the water met the sky, he would think about her swimming toward it.” Tell us about the role of water in this novel, not only with Mari but for any or all of the characters.
A: I think water in this novel has a lot of different roles. Water functions as a symbol of grief and despair, of environmental degradation and biblical flood, but also as a symbol of hope and survival. Water also holds a more literal role since Grosse Ile is an island within reasonable driving distance of all the Great Lakes. For Mari, water is a childhood source of comfort that ultimately becomes a means of ending her life, thus creating conflicted emotions about water for her surviving family. One of the reasons for the title, Waterline, is because that word represents a kind of barrier that one can be above or below, each of those possibilities having very different connotations of the dark abyss or fresh air and safety.

Q: The family history of the characters goes back to the Armenian Genocide, during which the kids’ great-grandfather fought on Musa Dagh, and now family members lug around The Forty Days of Musa Dagh to read. How did you approach weaving history into a work of fiction?
A: For me, weaving in history was one of the most complicated parts of the project. From the beginning, I restricted myself in terms of structure and subject matter, making a rule that no more than 10 percent of the total word count could take place in the era of the Armenian Genocide. I wanted readers to experience the fragmentation of a family trying to trace more than a century of their lineage without filling in all the gaps. You mentioned family members lugging around The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which is heavily researched historical fiction, so I think part of it is this tension to understand the past in both recorded history and popular culture. I didn’t want to spell everything out for the reader.

Q: You mentioned how a portion of the novel takes place in the era of the Armenian Genocide. The novel starts by going back in time to when great-grandfather Gregor is alive in 1994. Parts one and two take place in 2018, and an interlude in between them meditates on a mountain and a flood and looks back again to Gregor and also his wife, Mara. When did you know it was time to end Part One, have an interlude, and go on to Part Two? How do you distinguish the parts?
A: As nebulous as this sounds, and even though it took me several drafts to land on this structure, part of it was instinctual. When I was doing my coursework for my PhD, I took a novel-writing workshop, and one of our assignments was to select and read 10 novels and kind of reverse-engineer how they were put together. Breaking the book down into smaller parts made it much easier for me to visualize and navigate. I had to think about Part One as its own thing before I could determine when and how to end it, but that changed once Part Two was written, because then the two became interdependent. The interlude was very much inspired by Tommy Orange’s first novel, There There, and I always imagined it as a kind of central anchor.

Q: As each chapter follows an individual character in third person, the story unfolds by narrating the different perspectives in turn. The family members live in two houses next door to each other, and they make appearances in each other’s sections. In Talin’s chapter, the narrator says about Talin and her twin brother, Joseph, “They were only a door apart from one another, but it might as well have been a voyage spanning the Atlantic, a distant and torturous expanse. They were miles and miles away.” What did you consider as you switched from character to character while writing about this close-knit family?
A: That’s a great question. I’d say my major consideration was how little we can truly know about one another, even the family and friends to whom we’re super close. We spend so much time in our heads moving through emotional and intellectual fluctuations that can’t be easily communicated. Staying in third person, flipping perspectives with each new chapter, allowed me to try and capture this profound sense of distance and some of the loneliness it causes. The novel’s primary storyline only covers a couple months of summer, and all the characters are in quite near proximity to one another, yet there are all these thoughts and feelings they’re unable to convey or are withholding from one another. The narrative moves forward in time, but the understanding of events and reactions shifts when the perspective changes.

Q: Do you think the characters work through their traumas? Why or why not?
A: It’s hard for me to say. As I mentioned, I don’t necessarily aim to answer everything in my fiction, so there is some intentional ambiguity, but I do think this novel is more hopeful than it looks on its face. The trauma plot has been popular for some time now, and commercially, there is a tendency toward clear resolution. That might not be as much the case here. The characters are beginning to work through something, but it’s hard to know what their futures hold.   

Q: Would you like to share what you are reading now?
A: I’m always reading from literary magazines that land in MQR’s mailbox and want to make a brief pitch for supporting and subscribing to university publications, which offer such a brilliant array of literature across genres. In poetry, I recently read Leigh Sugar’s debut collection, FREELAND, and loved it. For fiction, I’ve been a fan of Kristen Arnett since her debut short story collection came out with an indie press and just flew through her latest, and incredibly funny, novel, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One. I’m about to jump into Big Chief by John Hickey next.

Q: What are you writing next?
A: I’m pretty set on writing about Michigan—the novel I just started working on is loosely focused on the Gelman plume. I’ve also been revising a few speculative short stories focused on climate crisis and environmental collapse across the state, as well as tinkering with ideas for one or two nonfiction projects.

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.  

Aram Mrjoian will be in conversation with Julie Buntin at Literati Bookstore, 124 East Washington Street, Ann Arbor, on Tuesday, June 3, at 6:30 pm.