The real life inspiration behind Shelby Van Pelt’s ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures,’ coming to Netflix and Northwest Passages in same week

When author Shelby Van Pelt was a child, her parents would send her to summer camps at Point Defiance Park in Tacoma.

“We would go down to the beach and slide down these cliffsides through the mud down to some beach that’s only open at low tide and muck around in the tide pools and then scramble back up this hill,” Van Pelt said via phone from her home in the Chicago suburbs.

The old Point Defiance aquarium building, with a cement dome she describes as a “mini Kingdome,” and the surrounding old-growth forest inspired the scenes of her 2022 debut novel, “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” which she is bringing to a sold-out Northwest Passages crowd on May 12, just days after its film adaptation featuring Sally Field is released on Netflix.

But it’s human and animal behavior that is truly at the crux of her New York Times bestseller, featuring a captive and complex octopus named Marcellus and a widow named Tova who cleans the fictional Sowell Bay Aquarium at night.

“When you go to an aquarium, sometimes you just watch the fish or the turtle or the shark … or octopus circle their tank,” Van Pelt said. “And I think that human beings do a lot of circling the tank.”

Van Pelt’s Grandma Anna is the inspiration behind the isolated, Swedish Tova, who is, in fact, circling the tank.

“She lived in Tacoma in the same two houses, basically, her entire life,” Van Pelt said about her grandmother. “And I lived next door. We were next door neighbors growing up, so I was very close to her.”

While Van Pelt says Tova is a fictional character whose story is made up, a lot of things about her are identical to Grandma Anna.

“Just sort of her stubbornness, her kind of stoic shell that she wears around herself, a reluctance to let people help her, to allow herself to be sort of emotionally vulnerable, this sort of almost compulsion to stay busy, to always be in motion,” Van Pelt said.

At 70 years old, Tova is struggling to enter a new phase of life.

“She still is in great, great shape and great health, but she’s starting to see like, ‘Gosh, I may not be able to maintain this just utter absolute independence for the rest of my life. I’m going to have to accept help and support at some point.’ And that’s very hard for her to do. … And I feel like I see so much of my grandma in her as she aged and dealt with some of those same issues.”

When Van Pelt met Sally Field on set, she saw much of her grandma in Field, too.

“The crazy thing is that she actually looks a little bit like my grandma,” Van Pelt said. “They just have a similar stature and a similar face shape.”

Van Pelt had sent the hair, makeup and wardrobe departments some photos of her grandmother, so they could find inspiration in dressing the actor who has played roles in films such as “Smokey and the Bandit,” “Steel Magnolias” and “Mrs. Doubtfire.”

“It was almost like seeing ghosts when I stepped on set, because she looked so much like the grandma that I remembered from a couple decades back,” Van Pelt said.

Beyond Field being “so nice and so funny” while Van Pelt was on set for a week in Vancouver, British Columbia, Van Pelt said she has a new respect for Field’s difficult job with “very long days and sometimes very uncomfortable conditions.”

“She must have been exhausted,” while it was raining nonstop, Van Pelt said. “There were a lot of outdoor scenes. So a lot of just being in 50 degrees and drizzling. And it’s hard work making a movie.”

While it’s not Point Defiance, Van Pelt said B.C. was the perfect setting for the book: “completely matched to the landscape and the mood.”

“Of course, it was just misty and rainy the entire time we were there. I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s perfect,’ ” Van Pelt said. “I feel like (the Netflix production team was) very collaborative in involving me and making sure that I felt good about everything that was going on.”

When Van Pelt pointed out a small discrepancy in the film’s version of the script, the film’s co-writer and director Olivia Newman was all ears.

“They had Tova waking up to a thunderstorm, and I was like, thunderstorms?” Van Pelt said. “Not that they don’t happen in the Pacific Northwest and Western Washington, but they’re kind of unusual. It’s not like being in the Midwest or on the East Coast where this is almost a daily occurrence in the summer … So I said, if you’re gonna write this in, I think people need to be kind of like, ‘Ooh, it’s a thunderstorm. This is not an everyday occurrence.’ ”

Newman told Van Pelt she was right, and changed the scene to Tova instead waking up to, not surprisingly, rain.

Van Pelt was flexible, too. There are some new scenes in the movie that were not in the book.

“A few of them, I was like, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ Because this is really good,” Van Pelt said.

Being her debut novel – Van Pelt wrote the Marcellus scenes on a whim during a continuing education class she took while feeling burned out from her job as a financial consultant – she was not prepared for the kind of reception the McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns First Novel prized book has received, including being a Top 5 read at Spokane County libraries in 2025 and being invited to a Northwest Passages event almost four years after the book’s release.

“This is one of the unexpected joys of this gig of being an author is being able to get out into communities and meet readers and hear people’s stories and just connect with people,” Van Pelt said. “I don’t think that I expected that to be so joyful and meaningful, but it truly is my favorite part of my job.”

Plus, Van Pelt said, it will be fun to follow on the heels of author and friend Eileen Garvin, whose book “Crow Talk” she “blurbed” – or promoted. Garvin joined Northwest Passages at the Bing Theater on April 29.

“She’s just such a wonderful voice in this space of nature writing, animal writing, stories about how our relationship with nature sort of guides our human humanness, I guess, for lack of a better word,” Van Pelt said of Garvin, who most recently released “Bumblebee Season.”

By the time Van Pelt comes to the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center – where her family and father, who relocated from Tacoma to Spokane, plan to attend – she will have just wrapped up a “grueling” week of publicity for Netflix.

“It is going to be a wild time,” Van Pelt said. “I’m kind of thinking of this as my victory lap. I’m going to come to Spokane and do a victory lap.”