Kim asked Carol Goodman:

I'm a big fan of your early "academic" & folklore work and noticed the heavy use of water imagery in many of your titles (Seduction of Water, Lake of Dead Languages, Drowning Tree, Arcadia Falls, and now River Road). Is there a story behind those choices? Is there a larger theme to these novels that their watery titles suggest?

Carol Goodman Ah, yes my water imagery! I think it started almost by accident when I decided to set Lake of Dead Languages on a lake (it had just been DEAD LANGUAGES up until then). As I wrote that book I found I could say a lot about my narrator Jane's emotionally shut-down state by using images of the lake freezing. I had so much fun that when I went onto my second book (originally titled HOTEL EQUINOX not SEDUCTION OF WATER) I found that using the Selkie imagery was another way of exploring a character's emotional state. I've always loved water--the ocean, lakes, rivers, rain--so I suppose it just comes naturally to use it in my writing. I hadn't made a conscious effort to return to it in RIVER ROAD but since moving to the Hudson Valley I've been entranced by a road of the same name that seems to move through the country like a mirror image of the river itself. So ... I'd say that the water imagery is a way of expressing the narrator's emotional state and how we see our own lives mirrored in the world around us. Thank you for asking.

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