I was thirty-seven, living in Nova Scotia when I got the idea for this first novel. I had heard about a terrible accident at sea. A father was out on his Cape Island boat with his five-year-old son, who was killed when a rough sea knocked him into the engine box. The father, drunk, had left the cover off the engine box. The accident possessed me — the terror of parental negligence, how a reckless father could let something like that happen to his young son. A father drunk, like my own father during my childhood.
This is how a fiction writer can work — taking a real-life event and using it as a trigger to conjure up scenes and questions taken from one’s own personal experience. Certainly, the father evoked my heartbreaking familiarity as the daughter of an alcoholic. Now alcoholism is recognized as a disease that needs to be treated, but that knowledge didn’t exist when I was a child.
To write Shoal Water, I had to imagine everything I could about the characters who were tangential to the accident. The mother, the father, and the people who lived in the same Nova Scotia community. I created these characters based on what I learned from living in an inshore fishing community and working at the local library for nine years, where I met and worked with many local Nova Scotians. My characters are a collage of these people.
I began my first drafts in the voice of the Nova Scotians. I attracted the interest of a New York agent, but she kept asking the question — “Who is telling the story?” It took me a long time to see that the story was really drawn from myself and my ex-husband — two Americans disillusioned by the Vietnam War, who moved to a family home in the remote fishing village in search of a simpler life.
Then the story began to unravel and open trap doors when I found my true point of view. The Americans settled into the barren, Atlantic community, started a bookstore, and began to raise a family. Over time, they discovered that the problems of their own past were mirrored in the unrest of the locals who were grappling with change as modern technology threatened their traditional fishing livelihood.
The fiction came alive in their shared sense of place, when the American characters became inextricably linked with the fate of the Nova Scotians, and a love triangle, a tragic accident, and addiction capsized their future.
The process of making these characters three-dimensional was long and arduous. “Shoal water” became my metaphor for imagining the story and not giving up on it. Meanwhile, I was raising my two daughters and worked full-time at Seattle Arts & Lectures launching the Writers in the Schools program.
At some point, after many rejections from publishing houses, I put the drafts of Shoal Water away in my desk. For the next ten years, I kept writing short stories in my spare time.
When I left my job, I continued working on these short stories, but the more I wrote, the more Shoal Water beckoned me. I missed my characters. I wanted to know what happened to them. Haunted by them, I realized their love story was also my love story with the book. So, I pulled my drafts back out of the drawer and felt like I was coming home. Both my point of view and the characters had changed during my absence. I thought I knew how the story would end. But as I wrote through the story again, my main characters kept surprising me, so much so that the ending turned out completely differently from what I had imagined.
Shoal water… the shallows, where the sea floor comes up just beneath the surface of the sea, a treacherous place to be. Not in deep water, and not on land, it is a place in between, full of unexpected hazards, of submerged sandbars, diffracted waves, and countercurrents.
Yet shoal water is also where the richest fishing grounds lie.
At 74, I won the 2020 Landmark Prize for Fiction sponsored by Homebound Publications. At 75, I am at last holding Shoal Water in my hands.
Write on, my writer friends, write on!