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The Utterly Unacceptable Atrocity of Isabelle Marsden follows a former event planner who retreats to Kansas and discovers, through art and friendship, that healing may require becoming gloriously unacceptable. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
NSP: Everywhere I’ve lived, I’ve found–and eventually been absorbed into–a community of colorful, creative folks who have encouraged me to explore and develop sides of myself I didn’t even know I had. Their encouragement has been instrumental in helping me heal from grief and physical setbacks. I wanted to see how my protagonist, Belle, would react if placed in a similar community.
How did you approach creating characters like Reba, Mae, Ezra, and Wallace so they felt emotionally essential to Belle’s journey?
NSP: I’m glad you thought so. I had to think about how to answer this question because I didn’t do anything intentionally with that aim in mind. I just thought Belle connected with those three characters, and they connected with her, in very sincere ways that conveyed care and support.
Lawrence, Kansas feels both grounded and faintly enchanted in the story. What drew you to this setting, and how did it shape the novel’s atmosphere?
NSP: I lived in Lawrence for six years while attending graduate school. I found a rich and diverse community both inside and outside the university, including a few people on whom I based some of the book’s characters. It was also there that I learned about Lucas, grassroots art, and the people who create it. And yes, Lawrence did feel both grounded and faintly enchanted in my experience there.
Humor plays a big role in a story that also deals with trauma, humiliation, and grief. How did you balance the novel’s off-kilter comedy with its more serious emotional undercurrent?
NSP: I grew up in a family that used humor to cope with stressful situations–not in a way that discounted the seriousness, but in off-kilter ways that gave us a break and a chance to smile and laugh together. That impulse still comes naturally to me.
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All Isabelle Marsden wants when she moves from Chicago to Kansas is a place to retreat, reassess, and regain control of her life after an ugly #MeToo experience. But after a chance encounter with a free-spirited artist who carries a wallaby in a baby sling and makes assemblages from roadkill, she’s drawn into a community of eccentrics who soon have her lobbying to rescue their Summer Solstice parade, conducting surveillance at a roadside zoo, and visiting an outsider artist’s strange, yet intriguing, sculpture garden.
Inspired by that wild creation, Belle starts her own peculiar assemblage, convinced it’s the key to repairing her fractured life. As she uncovers her hidden creativity—and madness—her project lands her in trouble with her landlady, the city zoning department, and even the police. Ultimately, her only way through is to rely on help from her found family of oddball characters—and on her newly redefined self.
The Utterly Unacceptable Atrocity of Isabelle Marsden
The Utterly Unacceptable Atrocity of Isabelle Marsden follows Belle Marsden, a tightly wound former Chicago event planner who lands in Lawrence, Kansas, after a traumatic rupture in her old life. What begins as a six-month experiment in retreat becomes something stranger and more necessary when Belle is pulled into the orbit of Reba, Wallace the wallaby, a ragtag Soulstice crew, a roadside zoo, and the world of outsider art. As Belle builds her own unruly yard installation, “Belle Jardin,” she begins turning pain, fear, and buried anger into concrete, glass, color, and nerve.
I loved the way the novel treats eccentricity not as decoration, but as a form of survival. The book is full of oddballs, yes, but they are not merely quirky furniture arranged around Belle’s crisis. Reba’s birdlike speech, Mae’s crossword mind, Ezra’s careful awkwardness, and Wallace’s improbable presence all push Belle toward a looser, more honest self. The humor is bright and sometimes delightfully off-kilter, but beneath it runs a serious current: the question of what a person does with humiliation, violation, and grief when ordinary language has failed her.
What stayed with me most was the book’s affection for “unacceptable” art. Belle’s creation is messy, excessive, and not easily approved by zoning departments or polite taste, which is exactly why it matters. Author Nan Sanders Pokerwinski writes about outsider art with a contagious tenderness, making Kansas feel both flatly real and faintly enchanted. At times the novel’s abundance of characters and subplots threatens to sprawl, but that sprawl also suits the book’s spirit. This is a story about refusing the tidy container.
The ideal audience is readers who enjoy contemporary literary fiction, women’s fiction, humorous fiction, and Kansas-set fiction. Readers who liked the emotional oddity of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine or the antic social weather of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette will find a similar pleasure here, though Pokerwinski’s novel has its own mosaic-bright, grassroots soul. The Utterly Unacceptable Atrocity of Isabelle Marsden is a generous, cockeyed hymn to the art we make when being merely acceptable is no longer enough.
Pages: 280 | ASIN: B0FD41879N
The Emotional Truth
Nan Sanders Pokerwinski Author Interview
Mango Rash is a memoir of your time in American Samoa as a teen in the mid-sixties. What was the inspiration that made you want to write this memoir?
I started writing bits and pieces of my Samoa story when I joined a writers’ group in 2004. That was almost forty years after my time in Samoa, and for all those years I’d struggled to convey what it was like living on a tropical island as a teenager in the 1960s. All I could come up with was, “It was beautiful . . . It was a blast . . . “ and other generic responses that didn’t begin to capture the essence of the experience. So I started writing about that year as a way to not only fill in the details, but also tease out why living in Samoa made such an impression on me—something I’m not sure I completely understood until I finished writing the memoir.
Was everything you wrote from memory, or did you have to do research like dig through old photographs and letters?
Some events and conversations were so deeply etched in memory I could write them off the top of my head. Others surfaced as I looked through old photographs, played music from the time, and read letters and diary entries. One very good friend from high school days had saved all the letters I wrote her from Samoa, and those filled in so many details, including entire, verbatim conversations and descriptions of people and places. As I was revising the manuscript, a cousin unearthed letters my parents had written to her parents from Samoa. Those letters corroborated my accounts and provided even more details.
I appreciated the candid nature of your book. What were some goals you set for yourself as a writer for this book?
Interesting question! I think my main goal was to dig beneath the day-by-day recounting of events, extract the most pivotal events, and ferret out my reactions to those events, both at the time and forty to fifty years later, as I was writing about them. And then to keep making sure I was telling the truth, not only the factual truth, but also the emotional truth.
This is a lovely coming of age story that superbly captures a whirlwind of emotions. What do you hope readers take away from your story?
Thank you! I hope readers take away several messages from my story.
First, that even though our individual life stories may be very different, we all experience similar emotions at key points in our lives—adolescence, for one, but also other points along the way.
Second, that change is inevitable—nothing is permanent—but it’s good to consider which changes are beneficial and growth-promoting and which ones are destructive. Neither resisting change nor forging ahead just for the sake of change is the best path.
Finally, I think the most important message is that we all can learn so much from cultures other than our own if we open ourselves up to what they have to offer. Given all the mistrust and misunderstanding among different groups of people these days, this message can’t be stressed too often.
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![Mango Rash: Coming of Age in the Land of Frangipani and Fanta by [Pokerwinski, Nan Sanders]](https://i0.wp.com/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51N0e--iGKL.jpg?w=604&ssl=1)
Moving to a South Pacific island from small town Oklahoma, sixteen year old Nancy Sanders trades cruising Main Street in search of tater tots for strolling sandy shores with islanders who feast on sea worms and summon sharks with song.
With a dash of teenage sass, MANGO RASH chronicles Nancy’s search for adventure—and identity—in two alien realms: the tricky terrain of adolescence and the remote U.S. territory of American Samoa. Against a backdrop of lava-rimmed beaches, frangipani-laced air, and sensual music, Nancy immerses herself in 1960s island culture with a colorful cast of Samoan and American expat kids.
But life is not one big beach party, Nancy soon finds, when she clashes with her parents over forbidden boys and discovers double standards in the expat community. Samoa, too, is experiencing growing pains as ancient customs collide with 20th-century ways. In the midst of all this, a hurricane shatters the peaceful paradise, delivering lessons in attachment and loss, strength and survival.
Like Nancy, readers of this unforgettable memoir will fall in love with Samoa’s biscuit-tin drum serenades, its mountains like mounds of cut velvet cushions, and its open-hearted people, who face adversity with grace. And just as Nancy does when her own health crisis thrusts her into a very different kind of unfamiliar territory, readers will draw strength from fa’a Samoa: the Samoan Way.
In language as lush as the island landscape, MANGO RASH enchants, entertains, and, ultimately, inspires with its message about embracing and learning from other cultures.
Mango Rash: Coming of Age in the Land of Frangipani and Fanta
Every person in their youth has dreamt of escaping to some exotic locale for fun, freedom, and newness. Someplace on the globe that is ‘other’; a place that can physically represent the internal battle of reaching adulthood and really understanding how things change and how one wants to find their own and new identity.
For the author, Nan Sanders Pokerwinski, the dream of a far off world full of new possibilities was a lush and beautiful reality. Mango Rash is a memoir of her brief time in America Samoa as a teen back in the mid-sixties. But it is so much more than that! Nan’s recall of her life-transforming time is a lush, layered, inviting and provocative tale that is so delightful to read!
Mango Rash peppers in historical references and factual instances in a perfect way that makes Nan’s story more intriguing and doesn’t date the story. In fact, the writer’s coming of age story is so timeless in the way that any teen can relate too in any age or any setting.
America Samoa provides such a picturesque and breathtaking backdrop to the timelessness of Mango Rash. Nan’s voice is so strong and effective and pens such a likable and marvelous story with a place that everyone will want to visit and a group of people that everyone will want to meet.
Nan’s ups and downs on the island mirror her ups and downs in life and her voyage to figure out where her home really is. The all too brief interactions with her parents and the very quick observations she makes about the world around her were such wise touches!
Mango Rash has an ending I did not see coming, but probably should have. Despite the memoirs’ sudden end and out of nowhere change, the author makes the conclusion stick with flair and whimsy.
Pokerwinski has a huge talent for drawing the reader in with such ease and flair; like listening to a story being told by your best friend! Everything about Mango Rash is delightful and wondrously fun!
Take the time to enjoy this book and you will find yourself reflecting on the people and places that helped shape you and still hold a part of your heart today; as well as identifying closely with the characters. For sure, you will dream of American Samoa and will be hoping that Nan has more stories to tell.
Pages: 300 | ASIN: B07WNXS6LV
