Shelby Van Pelt to visit Seattle to promote ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’

Anthropomorphizing an octopus for her bestselling book made Shelby Van Pelt more mindful of the perspectives that animals in captivity might have on their situation.

Van Pelt debuted with “Remarkably Bright Creatures” in 2022, and her octopus narrator, Marcellus, gained wild popularity. The novel, set in a fictional Puget Sound small town, explores the life of aquarium cleaner Tova Sullivan as she develops an unlikely — and life-changing — connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

“One of the very last things Marcellus says in the book is that humans can occasionally be remarkably bright creatures,” Van Pelt said in an interview. “But occasionally, not always. It’s not a book about how great humans are. But we can occasionally be a bright spot, in spite of all of the less-than-savory things that we put out into the world.”

When the book first came out on the heels of the pandemic, there was no book tour, and Van Pelt is excited about meeting readers at the tour events lined up for this year.

“I’ve gotten to know my characters more since the book came out, and some of that is just from talking about them so much,” Van Pelt said. “I do a lot of book clubs and community reads events, basically just groups of people coming together and really wanting to talk about how they relate to these characters and where they came from.”

The Seattle Times spoke to Van Pelt about the tour, why she set the story in the Pacific Northwest, the importance of wildlife protection and how real-life relationships inspired the intergenerational connections in her novel. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As someone born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, what are some of the things that inspired you to re-create that specific, distinct atmosphere in the book? 

The Pacific Northwest will truly always be home to me. … The trees are bigger, they’re denser, they’re evergreen. It’s like having a blanket or a sheath or something around you when you’re there, because the foliage is so dense — the moss, the ferns, the dampness. I have always had this itch: I really want to make people understand what this place is like, because I love it so much. It is my home. It is so different from so many other places, and it is so unique and special. So I just took that personal challenge. 

On a very practical level, it was important to me that Marcellus be very close to his home. I loved the idea of having him in captivity on the other side of the wall from where he should have been — in the wild. So in that sense, the story really couldn’t work anywhere else, other than the Northwest coast of the U.S.

One of the book’s strengths is how it handles grief. What helped you tap into those emotional threads?

Grief is just something that everyone experiences. It’s impossible to get through life without experiencing it. And a lot of times, we think of grief as, “This is what happens when someone dies.” But sometimes we don’t talk about the other kinds of grief that come out of maybe a lost opportunity, or just the smaller things. It is such a universal emotion when we think of it in that broader definition. … The circumstances of Tova’s life are obviously fiction, and I have not had those specific circumstances in my life. But I feel, in writing the book, I tried to become much more attuned to processing my own grief about other things.

Another just amazing thing that I’ve seen is that it’s really hard to talk about grief, and sometimes using a book as sort of a catalyst to do that, I’ve seen it be really helpful for people. So that just makes me really glad, if [the book] helped even one person.

Did any of your real-life experiences and relationships shape the powerful connections and intergenerational dynamics in the book?

The character of Tova, I took a lot from my grandmother when I was creating her. I grew up in Tacoma, Wash., on the east side of Tacoma, in a house next door to my grandparents. There were actually a couple of houses that had been in my family for many, many years. Generations. I actually grew up in the house that my great-grandfather built, and then my grandma, when she grew up, bought the lot next door with her husband, and he built a house there. So we had these two little houses on the east side of Tacoma that were our little homestead. I was really close with her. And I was an only child, so I spent a lot of time with her. It was natural for me to want to explore like that.

The giant Pacific octopus in the book was rescued after a life-threatening injury. What do you think about the role of aquariums in conservation?

It’s not a book that is like pro-aquarium or anti-aquarium. What I had hoped was that people would just feel some tension in reading the book that you can love your local aquarium. It can be your favorite place to take your kids, and you can really support the work that they do, because a lot of it’s really good work, and also feel some way about the ethics of keeping animals in captivity, particularly really intelligent animals.

You have this wide spectrum of situations when you say an animal is in captivity. There’s the very good and there’s the very bad, and everything else probably is somewhere in between. So, in some ways, the book is kind of like a love letter to this childhood aquarium that I loved so much in Point Defiance in Tacoma. But in other ways, it is meant to make people think a little bit more about the ethics and the costs of keeping animals in captivity.