An Interview with Jennifer Givhan on Salt Bones

Cover of Jennifer Givhan’s upcoming novel, Salt Bones

Mary McMyne: Thank you so much for agreeing to talk with us about this book, Jennifer. I’m such a fan of your work—both
your poetry and your fiction. Your last novel, River Woman, River Demon, was one of my favorite novels of the last few years.

This book, like that one, is a mystery infused with magical realism and family drama. It’s the story of a woman who lives at the edge of the dying Salton Sea, who is haunted by a horse-headed woman from local legend, but it’s also a retelling of the Persephone and Demeter myth. Those three elements make for an eerie combination. Could you talk first about the Salton Sea for our readers who may not know its history and why you feel so passionate about telling this story?

Jenn Givhan: In the 90s, I grew up near the Salton Sea, an ancient saline basin that has filled and emptied over millennia in the Southern California desert. In the early 1900s, it was unintentionally recreated after two floods and a broken dam channeled irrigation water from the Colorado River. But when I was a kid, 90 years after its re-creation, I often heard stories about how toxic it was—how it killed fish and stank for weeks from algal blooms.

After I left for college, got married and had kids, I returned to my hometown to visit my best friend, who told me that the Salton Sea was drying up and releasing toxic chemicals like arsenic, residue from decades of pesticide runoff, which had sunk into the lakebed, aerosolized, and wafted into the lungs of everyone still breathing throughout the community. The whole Valley would become a ghost town if nothing was done.

I started researching and over the next decade, I became increasingly concerned about the fate of the place that raised me, which had been featured in shows like Abandoned America, though the mostly Mexican community was still thriving, even as the farm-owning elite brought in billions in agricultural revenue each year, all while the so-called accidental lake poisoned the air. I knew I had to tell this story, although lawmakers had actually been recorded as justifying their apathy with remarks like, “No one lives there anyway.” I also knew that my soapbox was slippery, but that people tend to love murder mysteries. So I wrapped my heart in one.

MM: What inspired you to write that story as a retelling of the Persephone and Demeter myth?

Jennifer Givhan, author of Salt Bones

JG: As a Mexicali Chicana, I’ve always felt a deep, ancestral connection to the land—one passed down through the stories my mother told me about the desert and the Salton Sea. These weren’t Greek myths, but they held the same sacred weight: stories rooted in place, survival, and the fierce protectiveness of women over the earth.

When I became a mother myself, I saw that protectiveness evolve in my daughter—except she’s sharper, more outspoken, ecologically savvy in a way that reminds me of Greta Thunberg. Watching her, I felt a kind of hope: that the younger generations will lead us out of the damage caused by the “we” of capitalist Western expansion—the systems that separated people from land and prioritized profit over sustainability. But Indigenous women and our lineages have always known how to care for the earth. We’ve been protectors long before it was political. By returning to our stories, our culture, and by listening to our relatives—our elders, our ancestors—we can remember how to protect what’s left and reimagine what’s possible. The Persephone and Demeter myth felt like the perfect frame for this—a mother and daughter, separated by a dying world, finding a way to resist, return, and restore.

MM: Is the horse-headed woman an actual local legend from the area? Is she related to the shape-shifting spirit in Central American and Mexican folklore? How did you decide to bring her into the story?

JG: The horse-headed woman in my story is inspired by La Siguanaba, a shape-shifting figure from Central American folklore, but she’s also an amalgamation of the many legends that echo across Mexico and the borderlands where I grew up. My work often draws from these magical realist landscapes—places where nightmares, memory, and myth all overlap. I’m especially interested in how cultural stories evolve and migrate, how they get retold and reshaped to reflect new dangers, new hauntings, new hopes. The Salton Sea, as it dried and the fish began to die en masse, became covered in bones—millions of them—what locals call “hash.” They look disturbingly like human teeth. I remember visiting, walking along the shore, hearing that awful crunch under my boots. I’d wear a mask because the air was toxic. And in those moments, the image of a skulled, faceless, horse-headed woman began to haunt me.

At the same time, my daughter—who, as I’ve shared, is a powerful force of ecological awareness in my life—was riding horses a lot. She had a fall that shook both of us, and those fears, that vulnerability, merged with the myths I carried. This story, like many of mine, emerges from the spaces where my internal landscape meets my cultural memory and lived experience. It’s a mother-daughter story, yes, but it’s also a story born of the land itself—the poisoned air, the dry bones, the stories our people have told to survive danger, and the ones we must keep telling to reimagine our future.

MM: How long have you been working on this novel? Was your process for writing this book different from your process for writing your first three? When did you start it? What made you decide to finish it?

JG: As I mentioned above, the kernel for this story came to me almost ten years ago, when my best friend told me what was happening at the Salton Sea. I pulled out a story I’d tucked away in a drawer—about siblings living beside a toxic lake—and began revising. Over the years, it went through several transformations, including an early version set mostly in the 1970s. But the story didn’t fully take shape until I grounded it in the present day, while keeping its roots deep in the history of El Valle and the Salton Sea, and in the lives of the Veracruz family.

Writing this novel felt like rolling the masa of all three of my previous novels together—it carries the eco-justice of my first, the layered family drama and mystery of the second, and the magical realism laced with thriller elements from the third. It was my most arduous task… until I started the next manuscript—ha! Honestly, every book feels like the one that challenges me most. But I keep going because these are the stories of my family, my people, the land that raised me and now raises my children. I’m utterly haunted until the work is finished—or until it finishes with me.

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Thank you so much, again, for taking the time to discuss this important book with us, Jennifer. Salt Bones releases July 22 from Mulholland/Little Brown, and signed copies are available for preorder from independent Albequerque bookstore Books on the Bosque.

Jennifer Givhan is an award-winning Mexican American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert. To learn more about her upcoming fourth novel, Salt Bones, read an excerpt in issue 3, no. 2 of The Headlight Review.