Vancouver author Scott Alexander Howard puts a inventive twist on time travel in his novel The Other Valley

Scott Alexander Howard drew on his own personal experiences with loss when writing The Other Valley, his debut novel. Instead of time travel as a sci-fi phenomenon, it is simply a geographical landscape that allows his characters to govern and use time to ease their grief.

The Other Valley follows the story of Odile Ozanne, who lives in a town with a magical valley. To the east, the town exists twenty years forward in time. To the west, it’s twenty years behind. Odile seeks to join the Conseil, who decides which of the town’s residents may cross the border into the valley to see departed loved ones. When she recognizes two mourners by accident, Odile realizes they have travelled from the future to see someone Odile knows in her present — setting off a chain of events that change the course of several lives. 

Howard holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. He currently lives in Vancouver. The Other Valley is his first novel.

Howard spoke to The Next Chapter‘s Ali Hassan about the inspiration for The Other Valley, from grief and travel to childhood and language. 

So the world of this story is unique: the same valley, but 20 years ahead in the east, 20 years behind in the west, and both heavily guarded. What inspired you to create this reality?

The idea of rendering time travel as just as simple as geographical travel is the original conceit of the book. What if there was no time machine? What if there was no wormhole or portal or anything like that? What if it was as simple as walking to the past or future? 

That image, I’m not really sure where it came from, but I know when it came. I was living in Toronto and a friend of mine was about to pass away. She was in hospice, and this was about ten years ago. I had this idea long before I did anything with it.

And so we were in that awful period of just waiting. And the idea of getting to visit her again was floated. But then it turned out that things were moving too quickly and most of her friends didn’t get to see her again after she went into hospice. It was during those days when I suddenly had this image come to me of just the same town, across the landscape, repeating over and over and over again.

What if it was as simple as walking to the past or future?– Scott Alexander Howard on his novel The Other Valley

I think the personal context of where that idea came from sort of explains why I always knew that the primary use of time travel in this world was going to be for grieving or for mourning, as opposed to any kind of more action-oriented tropes. 

I always thought it was going to be about emotions and I think that’s probably due to where I was at when that idea came.

So in The Other Valley, we meet Odile, the protagonist. She’s at a crucial moment in her life. She’s 16. She’s about to choose her career path. She’s an awkward and shy teen and like teenagers do at that time of life, she falls in with a new group of friends. Why did you choose that time of life for your heroine?

There was a period right around the time that I was Odile’s age when I was around 16, I had a friend group coalesce, and it coalesced quite quickly. We knew there was an expiration date on it because one key member was about to move back to Europe at the end of the month. 

So we had this one May when we were all 16, and that impending ending kind of made the whole thing much more precious and sort of painfully romantic. We knew we had this very little time as a group. And so it’s very poignant. And I just like that setting. I liked the idea of setting a story in that same atmosphere of highly concentrated teenage emotion. 

I liked the idea of setting a story in that same atmosphere of highly concentrated teenage emotion. ​​​​​​– Scott Alexander Howard on his novel The Other Valley

There’s times in our lives that seem kind of pre-compressed in terms of their events and their emotions, to almost be like the structure and meaningfulness of fiction already. So I liked exploring that. 

Your academic research focused on memory and emotion, and those are themes that are central to the novel. Did your understanding of those two concepts change or evolve as you wrote this story?

I don’t think that they changed while I was writing this story, I think that they just deepened. I was thinking about grief a lot while I was writing this. I was thinking about the kinds of advice that we get when we’re grieving. One thing you’ll encounter when you’re in the throes of grief, oftentimes you’ll be told, “Don’t make big decisions.” 

You’re tempted to suddenly upend your life. You’re tempted to maybe move away from the town you’re living in, or end a relationship or leave a career. And then people come back to you and say, “Well, no, that you’re in the middle of a storm right now. You should wait. You’re not thinking straight.”

I am a little bit skeptical of that cautionary advice. I found that when I lost some friends in my early 30s, it jolted me out of a certain amount of inertia.– Scott Alexander Howard on grief and loss

And everybody’s different, so I’m not going to make any prescriptive claims about that. But I am a little bit skeptical of that cautionary advice. I found that when I lost some friends in my early 30s, it jolted me out of a certain amount of inertia. I was in academia and I was just plodding along because I’d already sunk so much time into it. So I thought, “Well, I better just keep going,” even though I wasn’t really happy. And I knew in my heart that I wasn’t happy.

When I was writing the book, I put some of that into Odile’s experience. I let her upend her life when she’s in the throes of grief, which for her is maybe a mistake. For me, I don’t think it was. But I was exploring the contours of that decision in the book. 

Reading about the world of The Other Valley, I was reminded of the Okanagan region in B.C. You have a little sprinkling of Italian and Spanish, but I connected with all the French, from Odile’s name to the Conseil to her friends and family. Why did you decide on that mix of names and identifiers?

Well, first of all, you nailed it with the Okanagan. I’m from the southern interior and there’s a few whimsical reasons why the French first started to sort of pop up in the drafts. And then there’s sort of the more functional reasons why it stuck around. 

When you’re just starting to write something, you kind of throw things in and see if they stick. And so there were a couple of reasons for that. One, as part of my day job, I was editing a book about the cartography of Paris and there were a lot of French place names.

I got Edme’s name from that book, for example. I was reading some novels by Patrick Modiano at the time, too. So there’s a lot of French names floating around in my brain. Two, they felt appropriate because the southern Okanagan is a weird landscape in Canada, like barren mountains above a lush ecosystem going on. I thought these names fit this landscape too. 

It suited the world building I was doing in the book, because I didn’t want to go so far as to have sci-fi fantasy names that are based on fictional languages. I wanted the world to feel a little bit more familiar than that.

But I also didn’t want to just have characters named Scott, for example. I wanted to hover between the familiar and the unfamiliar. And so for most of the readers of this book, Anglo readers anyway, I felt like the foreign language, the foreign names, suited that, that they achieved that same familiar, unfamiliar balance.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.