Author Season Butler - Cygnet

**Nicole Barbosa** (0:29)
Hey y'all, welcome to Shelf Life, a podcast where I, Nicole Barbosa, chat with some of the coolest people in publishing about the wonderful world of books. In each episode, my guest and I will chat all about their book, real or imaginary, and then place it on a shelf alongside other authors and books that inspire them. Great literature frozen in time. It's definitely one for all the bibliophiles. In today's episode, I chat with a brilliant author, Season Butler, whose debut novel, Cygnet, was published by Dialogue Books in April. Cygnet is a beautiful coming of age story that everyone needs to read. It's set on Swan Island, a very unique place to live, particularly for the kid, a 17-year-old who is stranded with the island's community of old age separists. With no guarantee of when she'll see her parents again, the kid experiences ups and downs of being unwanted by the elderly residents, and much to her disappointment, her family. I absolutely loved this book, and my chat with Season. We talked about Cygnet, the important themes woven throughout the story, such as climate change and ageism, and why it's absolutely vital that younger and older generations band together to take on the challenges of the world today. I really hope you enjoy our episode. So it is a beautiful day outside, and I am here with the extremely talented Season Butler in Waterstones Hitchin. How are you?

**Season Butler** (1:44)
I'm really good, thanks.

**Nicole Barbosa** (1:45)
Thank you so much for being here. I can't wait to talk to you about your amazing book.

**Season Butler** (1:50)
Thank you for having me. This is exciting.

**Nicole Barbosa** (1:51)
I want to delve straight in because I have a lot of questions. And I want to make sure that we get to them all. So for people who are unaware, although I don't think that there are very many of them now, you have written a gorgeous debut called Cygnet. And it's definitely, I can say without a doubt, one of my favorites of 2019 And I would love for you to just go into what the book is about.

**Season Butler** (2:15)
The set up before the novel opens, we've got a community of older people who have decided that they want to completely reject mainstream society. And so they are a kind of group of old age separatists who've moved out to Swan Island, a small island in the Atlantic. And so in their separatist society, they only allow people who are over 65 to live with them. One of this group has a granddaughter who's been taken into care by social services because the parents are struggling with drug addiction and other kinds of instability. So her granddaughter comes to live with her, but in the meantime, the grandmother dies and the granddaughter, who's the protagonist of the novel, can't get in touch with her parents. So she's there on this island, kind of stuck between a separatist society who doesn't want her there or the possibility of going back to the mainland but risking never seeing her parents again. On top of that, her house is situated on a cliff on the coast of the island, and the cliff is slowly eroding away. So she's in a kind of doubly unsafe situation. And over the course of the three days of the novel, she's got to decide what to do.

**Nicole Barbosa** (3:38)
Oh my gosh. That is quite a story. I love it. I think that, you know, you've just touched on a few of the themes in the book and there's some beautiful irony. The cliff, you know, kind of eroding away, I think is really great. As I was reading this book, the whole time I was thinking to myself, okay, so we have this character and she's been kind of placed here involuntarily, but also at the same time throughout the book, we do see her start to blend in. We do see her kind of settle in and feel a bit more comfortable. There's obviously challenges and ups and downs that come with it, but the kid, she is rather wise for being only 17 years old, isn't she? She does have to grow up quite quickly in that environment, doesn't she?

**Season Butler** (4:19)
There's a combination of growing up, the kinds of dysfunction, but also the other sort of sideways opportunities come from being raised by people who are in addiction and being raised kind of below the poverty line, without secure housing. I think one of those things will make you grow up quite quickly. Then there's also the question of culture and how we end up assimilating with the culture and her immediate culture is a geriatric culture, one that really celebrates aging.