Author Interview with Megan Dunn

1. What does a day in the life of Megan Dunn look like?

It looks like that scene in Charli xcx’s 360 music video, when Chloë Sevigny gets out of the black sports car, smoking a ciggy, wearing bare legs and a short black leather jacket. Actually, my life is now more Drat, than Brat. Alas!

My days are pedestrian. It’s like an umbilical cord connects to my computer, scrolling, thinking, falling down google worm holes. I work as a curator at the moment, and I have a 9-year-old daughter. I walk her to school, go to work, pick her up, always walking—I don’t drive— and thinking, thinking, procrastinating, storing things up inside until — BAM! I swing the door of the black sports car open and am striding down the road next to Charli xcx, throwing my fag—I don’t even smoke!—wantonly into the gutter.

1. How do you set yourself up for a day of writing?

In desperation. I often put a timer on and trick myself into outrunning my common sense. I like to write totally spontaneously—spontaneity is a big part of my appeal in person and on the page—and then I myopically bonsai every line, talking it out loud to myself to see what sounds wrong. Words and sentences are like footsteps, and you can catch them out of place. Pace.

1. Tell us what The Mermaid Chronicles is about?

This book is about my red-hot intellectual pursuit of professional mermaids and what it means that all over the world right now people can buy and access their own mermaid tails and try to make an honest living out of it. Imagine being asked at a party, what do you do for work? And replying, “I’m a mermaid.” Well, that’s what I thought it was about when I started. What I later realized, was that the book was actually about my unexpected transformation into a mother at the age of forty, and how this altered my relationship with myself, the world and my own mother. What started as a selfish journey into my own childhood dream—of being just like the actress Daryl Hannah in the 1984 blockbuster Splash—became a mythic quest into finding my maternal and artistic voice. It is a journey inside the wreck of my own broken dreams, but also one of re-enchantment, as I do hear the mermaids singing.

I hope for the right reader, they will get an enquiry into the enduring myth of the mermaid that is surprising, because mermaids are half women, and this book is half me.

1. You ask a mermaid what she thinks the fascination with them is, and she replies “mermaids are naturally beautiful, and beauty fascinates people”. Where does your fascination with them come from? Why are you so fascinated?

To be bald my fascination with mermaids also started with stereotypical beauty. I first saw Daryl Hannah perform as Madison, a beautiful Botticelli-esque long-haired, long-limbed mermaid at the Odeon cinema. I totally believed in her performance, and adored the notion that she could transform into this mythical creature in the bathtub. Something about the mythical in the mundane, deeply appeals to me. Decades later, I could see mermaids online dressed in bright orange Splash tribute tails and I felt like I had witnessed something important—a 21st century example of how we are trying to live our dreams.

I realized that the classic mermaid narrative had changed—it now says new about our relationship with the environment, and I am going to find out what. I didn’t realise at that point, my story would become so personal, or that I would come to view the beauty of mermaids in a much more metaphoric and metaphysical way.

1. There’s an authentic account of your relationship with your mum and your relationship to your daughter Fearne intertwined in your pursuit of mermaids. What do you think mothers, daughters and mermaids have in common?

Well on the surface - nothing! That’s why at first, I felt so pleased with myself, wandering around with my daughter in her buggy saying I was writing a book about mermaids that was not for children. But actually, most mermaid performers entertain children, so in this way, motherhood and being a mermaid are very similar. Both are heavily gendered, feminized, trivialized and stereotyped.

1. What was the most memorable encounter you had with a mermaid on your travels?

I loved going to The Wreck Bar in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and peering into the porthole windows set into the hotel bar. That bar was decked out like a sunken ship, but the windows faced into the pool. That’s where MeduSirena, a glamourous showgirl entertainer ran her own aquatic underwater burlesque show. I had some high falutin’ idea in my mind that going to this bar, would finally bring me into a deeper understanding of Adrienne Rich’s feminist poem, Diving into the Wreck. It’s a wonderful poem. My experience in Fort Lauderdale, was lonely but also profound. I loved MeduSirena, and felt I was touching the bottom of something. Or as Adrienne Rich says in stanza seven: “The thing I came for, the wreck, and not the story of the wreck, the thing itself and not the myth…”

All the encounters in the book touched me, and moved me forward in some way, from Copenhagen to Sydney. But I was stunned, when at the very end of my journey, I finally got to interview Daryl Hannah about her experiences of being a mermaid, and being underwater, and she even made me—completely spontaneously—a beautiful little ceramic mermaid tail. I keep it on my writing desk.

1. You say that upon stroking a mermaid’s tale it was “weighty, but up close it was quite rudimentary - the interior looked bare…Why do we love this horrible story?” Did the experience of getting so familiar with something so mythical ruin the magic of mermaids for you?

No! It only increased my wonder and admiration for these often-female performers and their bravery and imagination. In the middle of your life, bogged down with work and responsibility, it is really easy to stop meeting new people, and having playful experiences. My mermaid odyssey brought me into the realm of academics, medievalists, freedivers, fire breathers, underwater photographers and models, entrepre-mermaids, and a few good mermen. I met a delightful dude who retired early and was now an underwater photographer who specialized in mermaid photography and workshops but told me he made all his money from photographing frozen ice-cream cakes!

1. In your pursuit of mermaids, what surprised you the most about yourself and mermaids?

How far we will all travel in pursuit of our dreams, how much we need to make meaning from the experiences of our lives, and how so many of us try and long to contribute positively to the world, no matter what. Also, how much we long to be seen—a mermaid must be sighted to exist.

1. You say in the book, “I will never become a professional mermaid”. Why?

Once you have met the professionals like Hannah Mermaid, MeduSirena and Mermaid Linden, the stakes are high. I am happy to chronicle the ‘real’ mermaids instead.

1. What’s next in the world of art and writing for Megan Dunn?

I’m currently writing about money! One for the books surely. I am also interested in writing an artist’s biography. And I continue to enjoy writing about toys, and the nebulous overlapping places where childhood and adulthood meet.