Summit High grad Forbes pens thriller ‘Pluto Cove’

Published 2:20 pm Wednesday, June 30, 2021

You don’t have to be a parent to figure that raising two young children doesn’t leave one with much free time. But if you’re in doubt, ask recently minted author Arran Forbes. The 2005 salutatorian graduate of Summit High School, 33, can attest to how busy she is as the working mother of two girls Carra, age 2 and Ailsa, 6. Somehow, though, she pulled off the writing of a suspenseful new novel, “Pluto Cove,” set in Alaska, where she lives in Anchorage and works as a NICU nurse.

Growing up, she spent time in Alaska and Bend. Her interest in writing took root at Summit.

“It was actually the teachers at Summit that actually got me into writing, and finding my passion and my voice there,” Forbes said. “But I always had an understanding that I probably couldn’t make a living doing it, especially at fiction.” Instead of writing, she opted for a career in nursing.

After earning her undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College, she lived in South Africa, where she did tuberculosis research for Dartmouth, and later Slovenia, where she taught English. 

The latter gig she called “one of the goofiest, most rewarding jobs. I was teaching refugees from the former Balkan states … just these zany, wild little children. We really did very little English. We just played games and did a lot of sign language, and I took them on field trips up into the Alps.”

Perhaps it was good training for her future writing endeavors with her own young children. Forbes moved back to Alaska in 2011. Though she opted not to pursue writing professionally, she’d always written recreationally. But she never envisioned writing a novel now — perhaps when she was old and sitting on a porch, but not now.

Instead, she began working on what became “Pluto Cove” after second daughter Carra was born.

“She was born on Winter Solstice, which up here is very dark, to say the least,” Forbes said, laughing. “I was awake pretty much all night with this new baby, and I really started to lose sense of time and place in that sort of new motherhood, 20 hours of darkness environment.”

It was in that “bizarre, alien” headspace that she began to conceive of a story of a family that, amid catastrophic drought, seeks refuge in the Alaskan wilderness.

“This story started to form, and it occurred to me I needed to start writing it down. If I was going to make any peace with this story, I needed to get it out of my head,” Forbes said.

She wrote while breastfeeding, while pumping and while Carra slept on her chest.

“It was really my path out of postpartum,” she said.

Even as the days lengthened and Carra began to grow, “I just kept writing. The story just kept coming,” Forbes said. “It really felt out of my hands at that point. It was just this other world that I needed to communicate. … It was almost parasitic. It was, like, inhabiting me, and it was my job to get it out.”

“Pluto Cove” tells the story of Enna Martinez and her family, who as political and environmental turmoil ravages much of the planet, seek refuge in a cabin Alaskan wilderness called Pluto Cove, where Enna’s sister goes missing.

“Just as they’re learning to survive the wilderness, they learn that they also have to survive their neighbors,” Forbes said.

While there was rewriting and editing to do, “there was also definitely a very cogent and compelling story that had unfolded from this time with my newborn in the pit of Alaska darkness.”

Other readers concur. One verified-purchase review at Amazon.com, where the book is available on Kindle and as a paperback, wrote, “Although Pluto Cove is a work of fiction set in the wilderness of Alaska, I often found myself comparing themes in this book with global current events including racial issues, political turmoil and climate change.”

Though the book’s themes, its food scarcity and lack of irrigation water lead some people to view “Pluto Cove” as dystopian or post-apocalyptic, Forbes herself sees it differently.

“I see it as being far more practical than that,” she said. Events unfold due to drought, “and drought is something that we experience fairly routinely … and so it doesn’t feel that out of the ordinary of what we see in our world now, but that said, it does take it to a more extreme level.”

Forbes believes the current state of the world — and the birth of her second daughter — had a hand in her needing to tell the story of “Pluto Cove.”

“We have our feet to the fire right now. There’s a mounting sense of pressure over resources and the climate,” she said. “Especially for me, I wrote this as a new mom, and I have this new little human in my arms. And wondering about her world is a big part of where this came from.”

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected. An earlier version gave an incorrect school for her nursing studies. She attended the University of Alaska. The Bulletin regrets the error.