Port Meadow Frost

“What do you miss the most about home?” asked an American friend visiting Oxford. It was a rainy December day.

“Snow!” My children replied before I could answer.

Brunswick, Maine on New Year’s Day 2008 (by Stephanie Foster)

I had been missing snow until a deep frost settled over Port Meadow. My dog and I set off for our morning walk in mist so thick that it was hard to find the horizon. Bike ruts in the frozen grass looked like ski trails in snow. The meadow is a flood bank for the River Thames (called the Isis only in Oxford) and communal grazing grounds.

At this time of year, the cattle are gone and only a couple dozen horses are left to forage. Their warm breath melted the frost into green grass as the sun was struggling to burn through the clouds. Could this be England? I felt inside the pages of an Annie Proulx story, home on the western range. Or maybe a late Rothko painting?

A Shetland pony, not much bigger than my dog, watched us with curiosity. She looked warm in her shaggy coat, even dripping frost. My dog wanted to play, but the pony lost interest once she realized that Stella’s tennis ball was not a green apple. Seeing us every day, the herd barely twitch an ear at my bouncing golden retriever.

Despite the chill, Stella was eager to get to the river. She swims in the ocean year round back in Maine. Seagulls, geese and swans eyed my swimming retriever nervously, but Stella kept her eye on the ball. The Greylag Geese were once domesticated but now have gone wild, interbreeding with Canada geese. The Queen owns the swans. No one can explain what seagulls are doing here this far inland.

As we headed down the river past the lock, the water became a mirror. Another walker and his dogs were dots along the bank. Despite the beauty of dawn, we were otherwise alone. Even the wind had slept in.

The only sound was the honking gaggle of geese. The meadow teams with myriads of migrating water fowl and attending bird watchers during the fall. My son and I once surprised some black and white birds that took off with a startled “Eeek!”

Port Meadow is dog heaven for a retriever. Every writer should have a dog. I do some of my best thinking for my novels on our walks. I’m sure Port Meadow will feature in NOT CRICKET. Not so sure about the wet dog . . . .

Happy New Year! We spent ours in Cambridge.

Did other bloggers have trouble up-loading images or publishing? I fear everyone made a blog-more-often New Year's resolution.

An English Christmas

A swan feather frost covered Port Meadow last Thursday, but it melted into mist long before Christmas. I remember one magical year in Britain when we awoke to a sparkling frost, but mostly a white Christmas in England means dense fog. Back home in Brunswick, Maine, they’ve had 28 inches of snow just in December. Our buddy, Pete Coviello was out ice fishing.

When it comes to Christmas spirit, the Brits snow anyone over. Our corner shop, the Post Box in Wolvercote, has covered every surface in tinsel with Christmas crackers (more on that later) hanging from the ceiling. Carl, another Brit married to an American, decks his shop out “for the children.” He sells what I would call miniature X-mas trees along with his usual supply of free range eggs, organic juices, fresh veg, milk and canned goods. It’s also our post office but only open a couple of odd hours on assorted days. There is something very small town American about a post office/convenience store. It brings a community together.

Oxford at Christmas

All of Britain basically shuts down over Christmas, a national holiday. Even the trains don’t run for two days. Holiday cards are clipped to red ribbons and hung from the moldings. Most have nativity scenes or pastoral scenes in snow instead of the ubiquitous family photos and Santas you see in the US. Christmas feels far less commercial in the UK although many Brits go into debt paying for it. Decorations will stay up until twelfth night. People say "Happy Christmas" instead of "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays;" there is but one holiday for most of England.

We spent the long weekend with Henry’s family in Goring-on-Thames. It was a tight squeeze: 11 people and 2 dogs. The children helped their grandparents harvest mistletoe from the old crab apple tree. It spreads like ivy, clumping into balls – the male is yellowish and the female has the distinct white berries. They save a sprig for their house and barter the rest for a Christmas tree. Bits of holly are collected from the countryside to place over portraits of ancestors (that’s my husband’s great grandfather, Steven Cattley.)



Saturday was a “champagne” and canapés luncheon we all helped prepare for village friends. The English sparkling wine was surprisingly good. Camel Valley is in Cornwall. I met an old friend of Henry’s, the photographer Charlie Glover. His wife, Miranda Glover, writes women’s fiction just like me. We had fun talking shop and planned to get together soon. Like my character from NOT CRICKET, Miranda was at Oxford in the 1980's and recently moved back to the area. I’d love to meet her writer friends as I miss my support community in Brunswick. Writing is a lonely profession.

On Christmas Eve we had Christmas cake for tea. It’s a dense fruitcake with a two-layer frosting: marzipan then white sugar.

After tea we crossed the River Thames to Streatley to attend the children’s service at St. Mary’s. My son was christened in this 13th century church in a Georgian gown, a family heirloom. Note the small cars.

The service told the story of Jesus’s birth and invited the children to bring up the animals and figures to fill in the manger. Candles dripped as we sang carols. The children placed presents by the tree for underprivileged children.

On the walk back home, we stopped at the old Goring Mill. The woman who lives there creates a life size paper mache manger in her living room. The children count the little creatures (this year baby owls) and write the number down for a raffle. She also collects donations for her Swan Lifeline, aiding injured swans. My question is: why doesn’t the wealthy Queen look after her ailing swans?

At 6pm a torchlight procession gathers in Goring and in Streatley, convening in the fields for carol singing around a huge bonfire. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of participants. The flaring torches seemed to float above the river as they crossed the bridge.

To warm up, Henry and I slipped into our favorite Goring pub, the Catherine Wheel, for Hobgoblin bitter by the roaring fire. The pub was decked out for the holidays and full of families.

For Christmas Eve dinner we had lamb tagine followed by 3 puddings (English for dessert). The adults had mince pie, which is a miniature pie of dried fruit and minced meat or a substitute, which is topped with brandy butter and then drowned in double cream. For the children, my mother-in-law had crafted a Chocolate Log, which is basically a Maine whoopie pie: chocolate cake and whipped cream with a sprig of holly. Since I’m lactose intolerant (a sad fate in Britain,) Nicola had made a caramelized orange pudding for me. We never made it to the stilton and port.

After pudding, it was time for Christmas crackers. Two people pull (or you circle round the table) and crack! Inside is a paper crown and dinky prize for the winner like nail clippers. Also a dumb joke eg: what do you call a person who's afraid of Santa? Claustrophobic! Dear Elizabeth, an elderly cousin, buys enormous quantities of crackers so that no one is a loser. "There can never be too many crackers on Christmas,” says she.

On Christmas morning the children woke before sunrise for their stockings. We had a candlelit breakfast of croissants since the sun doesn’t rise until after eight. It sets before 4pm. We are even farther north than Maine. My father-in-law gets little sleep at Christmas since he was out past midnight ringing church bells at both Goring and Streatley. Before having children, we used to attend the 11pm carol service. Never one to complain about duty, Capt. Tony Laurence rang in Christmas morning as well.

Most of the grown ups headed to church and to champagne at a neighbors’ while Henry and I took the 4 children and 2 dogs for a walk along the Thames tow path. My nine-year-old nephew slid in over his wellies, and before we knew it, the 3 younger children were sliding down the muddy banks and jumping in the river with the dogs! It was raining so I hadn’t brought my camera. I was cold just watching them, but they have English blood.

It was a good distraction, as the children were going crazy waiting to open presents. This could not commence until after the Queen’s speech although my son suggested just watching it later on You Tube (half a million did!) At 3pm we gathered round “the telly” to hear the longest reigning British monarch address her nation. Then it was time for more tea and gifts. I got 2 umbrellas! That scared the rain away, and we were treated to a rare sunset. Note the balls of mistletoe in the tree.

Christmas dinner in England is always turkey, roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts. My husband and his sister Charlotte prepared the feast while the rest of us played charades. Nicola already made a traditional chestnut and sausage stuffing. There was also bread sauce made by simmering a clove-studded onion in milk (or, yet again, cream) and then dissolving breadcrumbs into it with seasonings.

The climax of the evening is the flaming Christmas pudding. Brandy is ignited that spreads to the sprig of holly. The pudding itself is alcohol infused fruitcake with hidden sixpences. The lucky make a wish on the old currency; the unlucky break a tooth!


Christmas was not over the next morning. On Boxing Day we journeyed out on the ancient ridgeway for a long walk. We passed through the site of the old Roman temple (below). The undulating greens were from a pastoral painting. An English Christmas is like stepping back in time.


Today it was 64F/18C! My son and I walked along the canal into Oxford. Last week's frost seems so long ago. Have a Happy New Year! It's been a fun first year of blogging for me, and I've enjoyed your comments. Thank you!

Unusual Holiday Lights

The Christmas lights around Oxford seem quite understated after the USA. Back home in Brunswick, Maine people go wild. I’ve seen a dry-docked boat towing a skiing snowman and Santa with all the reindeers on the roof. First prize for original Christmas lights in Maine this year goes to Melissa Walters and Bob Black. Check out their house lights above. That’s the date when the next American president will be sworn into office.

Given that there is no separation between church and state in England, I was not expecting much for Hanukkah. The stores were filled with only Christmas decorations and busy shoppers. Trees were adorned with lights and tasteful white stars hung above the high streets.

Sunday night we had just come from a lovely candle-lit carol service at Magdalen College Chapel when my daughter cried out, “Look a giant outdoor menorah!”

“Where?”

“Right there next to the Christmas Tree.”

At first I thought it had to be Advent candles, but sure enough it was a menorah on Broad Street. The biggest one I’ve ever seen. Add the gothic architecture and it was surreal. My daughter came back the next night to see how it was lit. At 5:00 pm a cherry picker truck hoisted up a rabbi to light the gas lamps. Brilliant!

Hanukkah is usually an understated affair, celebrated in the home by lighting candles for eight nights. Yesterday was the last night. It’s not the most important Jewish holiday but has risen in importance to balance the commercial appeal of Christmas for children.

Growing up in NYC with a Jewish father and an Episcopalian mother, my family celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah as well as Easter, Passover, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I thought I was pretty lucky and have done the same for my family. Only my children, unlike me, went to Hebrew School for several years. It’s a relief when Hanukkah and Christmas don’t overlap. It makes the balancing act a little easier.

MOOSE CROSSING is about a mixed religion family that moves from NYC to Maine after 9/11. There’s even a scene with a moose menorah. First novels are often very personal. Common advice is to write about what you know. The characters and the plot are fictional, but I do like to draw from experience for setting and subject. S.A.D. also looks at multiple religions. Neither book is particularly religious, but belief and identity are important themes.

Right now I’m busy turning around S.A.D. for my next reader, Kim Slote, who will be reading over her holiday vacation. That’s a good friend! Kim does advocacy for Planned Parenthood in Florida as well as selling natural cosmetics. She’s a mother of two children and coincidentally from a mixed religion family too. I like to test my work on typical readers as well as get feedback from those in my profession.

As I work on plot, I highlight each plot string in a different color. That shows me how the sub plots are proportioned throughout the narrative and in relation to one another. Unweaving the plot helps me address specific criticisms and focus on inconsistencies, redundancies and verbosity. Each plot string needs to be able to stand alone and to weave seamlessly into the whole. It’s rewarding when it all comes together in the end. Still plenty of work to do!

I'm dreaming of a green Christmas....

Philip Pullman on Writing Myth & Religion

I thought it was a joke: Philip Pullman, young adult author and outspoken critic of organized religion, in a public discussion with, get this, the vicar in a church. So it’s okay to be organized in a church so long as the topic is writing.

I grabbed my teenaged son, who loved His Dark Materials trilogy even more then Harry Potter, and joined throngs of Oxford students at The University Church of St. Mary the Virgin on October 22nd. What a dramatic setting: stained glass, vaulted ceilings and gargoyles dating back to the 13th century. I half expected to find a daemon lurking in the pews. The fantasy series was set in his hometown of Oxford in this universe and in others.

Philip Pullman fitted the collegiate venue. He looked and sounded more like a tenured college professor than a bestselling author and iconoclast. He was warm and friendly with his host, Canon Brian Mountford.

Pullman referred to himself as a “Church of England Atheist.” He praised the Bible for its beautiful prose and noted religion’s value in building community. Pullman’s quarrel is not so much with religion but that “the church abandoned people in my position.” He cited religious wars, persecution and intolerance.

The Church of England was an important part of his personal history. He seemed to regard it more like an eccentric relative than the enemy. When Pullman was only seven, his father died. His grandfather, an ordained minister, partially raised him. Pullman praised his beloved grandfather for being a gifted storyteller. Later Pullman claimed that parents could do better by telling moral stories as opposed to religious ones.

In a Hollywood minute, the conversation jumped from religion to the upcoming film version of His Dark Materials. When Mountfield asked if the adaptation was true to the book, Pullman replied that the film is but one in a long series of different ways of telling the same story. Since writing the novels, there have been abridged audio books, a radio dramatization and 2 stage plays. Each has a different emphasis that reflects the genre.

His Dark Materials film will have special effects not possible on the page. It won’t be the same because the book takes eleven hours to read out loud, compared to a two-hour film. Pullman also wrote some special scenes just for the movie.

What impressed me most was Pullman’s eloquence and lack of conceit. He seemed to see the writer as a tool in the process: “stories only come into being when you read them; you can’t tell the meaning.”

Pullman has no problem with readers having different interpretations or leaving questions unanswered. When writing, the author is a tyrant and the process is despotic. Once the book becomes published, it becomes a democracy of the readers. “Reading is engaged in silence and secrecy, and there is nothing I can do about it.”

Writing is still hard work. The Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in the USA) took Pullman seven years to write. It still isn’t faultless. “If you want to write a perfect piece of literature, write a haiku or a sonnet but don’t bother writing a novel.”

Nonetheless, Pullman appreciates the craftsmanship of forming sentences and the discipline of using words precisely. He frequently consults the dictionary and loathes clichés. His focus is as much on enjoying the medium of language as on telling the story. With experience writing gets both harder and easier. “It is easier because there are more ways to say the same thing, but it is harder to choose.”

What sets Pullman apart from most contemporary writers of children’s fiction are his literary references. His work draws heavily from the Judeo-Christian tradition and from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. His books resonate with the notion of fall and redemption. There is also a fair bit of science, including string theory, in creating his parallel universes and “dust.”

His Dark Materials leave readers of any age with questions. The biggest one is “what is dust?”

Pullman explained, “It is the visual analogue of all things known, all thoughts. What I call dust is what makes us what we are.” He avoided using the term soul but instead referred to the human “sense of consciousness.” The purpose of dust was “to develop a myth as a place to stand like in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

I’m wondering how much of this will be clear to my ten-year-old daughter, who just started reading the series. To her, it is all about the daemons, those lovable animalistic beings that are the other half of humans. My daughter would calls them cute, little shape changers, but Pullman said they are the “aspect of oneself.”

Pullman claims that his best idea was having the daemons constantly changing form until their humans hit puberty. At heart, it is a young adult book dealing with this magical transformation from child to adult.

Biggest laughs came when Pullman answered the question of what would be his daemon. “My daemon would be a scruffy bird that steals from his neighbors.” He elaborated on how his imaginative fiction is rooted in research.

There is no doubt in my mind that his best character is the drunken, armored polar bear. Pullman created this creature and the dueling scene after reading an 1812 essay about fencing with a bear. His magic brings it to life.

The view from St. Mary's tower of Oxford

On the way out, we dropped a couple pounds in the church collection box. St. Mary’s also raises funds from visitors to the tower and by running a café called Vaults and Garden. The food is fresh and wholesome. Still, it’s hard to imagine any of this happening in an American church. That’s the fun of living abroad.

A blog is the ultimate democracy of the readers. What’s your take on Philip Pullman’s mythology?

Lord & Lady Krebs at Jesus College

The best fun of writing is playing location scout. It gets me out of my office and takes me to settings I could not have imagined. Last week I visited Jesus College. Our guide was the Principal himself, Lord Krebs.


Oxford colleges remind me of gemstones. On the outside most look the same in weathered sandstone, but inside are glittering jewels, each one unique and full of history. Many are closed to the public. These ancient rocks are hard to crack.

The Oxford Newcomer’s Club is designed for the other halves. Our husbands/wives/partners are working or studying at the University. The club takes pleasure in arranging special insider tours only for us. The organizers are mostly academic spouses themselves and can relate to our displacement and isolation.

The inner courtyards are quiet and laid with perfect grass, but don’t step on it! It feels like a castle or a monastery. That makes sense since many Oxford colleges were started as religious instituitions. Jesus College was founded by royal charter in 1571, making it one of the middle-aged colleges. The earliest ones date from the thirteenth century.


Each college is like an archeological dig with visible layers of history. Behind me in the first quad photo you can see the original sandstone of the dining hall, pitted with time. To my right is the oldest part of the college, but the third floor and those battlements were later additions. To my left is the principal’s residence.

Queen Elizabeth I founded Jesus College for the purpose of converting the Welsh to Protestantism by training clergymen for the recently established Anglican Church. The queen herself came from a Welsh family, the Tudors. The benefactor, Hugh Price, endowed it with the income from his Welsh estates. It was his idea to start the college. His income was not sufficient, but later graduates have contributed generously to make Jesus one of the wealthier colleges. Traditionally the students were predominantly Welsh, although reform has made the student body more diverse. It is still called the Welsh college.

Lady Krebs is Welsh, but her husband is not. They are both biologists. She used to teach at a girls’ technical college, and he has been a professor of ecology. He is now devoted to running Jesus College. His father, the former Lord Krebs, was also an Oxford college principal. Despite their lofty titles, I found the Krebs to be very warm and engaging. They were more Katharine and John than his lady and lordship.

Upon hearing that I was American, John smiled and told me the story of his summer in the States. He had taken a research job at Woods Hole on Cape Cod. At lunchtimes he snuck off to sail. Later he drove with his friends cross-country in a red Mustang.

We laughed over the words that mean one thing in English and another in American. A torch is a flashlight, and a rubber is not something you pull over your shoes to keep them dry. The amusing misunderstandings between the two cultures, despite a common language, will be a theme in my third novel. John and Katharine suggested some reading material for my research. They are eager to read NOT CRICKET one day.


Seeing inside the college was an inspiration. The double courtyard windows flooded the dining hall in sunlight. On the walls hung austere portraits of the founders and famous graduates such as Lawrence of Arabia, Harold Wilson and John Nash.


We also visited the old bursary where special guests go for dessert, port and even snuff under the eyes of Queen Elizabeth. There were many portraits of their royal founder in the college. King Charles I’s gold watch resides inside a glass display case. The silver postdates the republic years. During the Civil War, all the colleges had to donate their silver to flatten into coins to pay the soldiers. It amazes me that the Brits went back to a monarchy, but perhaps this is easier to understand if all the nobility were as charming and gracious as the Krebs.

Our college tour ended at the principal’s residence. Katharine served us coffee and cakes, and then John showed us around upstairs. I don’t think I have ever been inside a lovelier dwelling although it was very formal. Delft tiles lined the fireplaces. The large window overlooking the quad and private gardens made the space light and airy, especially on this rare sunny day.



On the walls hung portraits of former principals and impressionist paintings borrowed from the Ashmolean Museum. The oddest portrait was of a vegetable seller with a monkey on her shoulder. The monkey was a trick to lure customers into buying more produce. It was very unusual to have an oil painting of a commoner during the Renaissance.

After coffee, I wandered around Oxford soaking up the setting and taking photos of the turning leaves and golden buildings. Despite being November, it was so warm I had lunch outside. My mind raced with ideas for NOT CRICKET. Should I use a real college or make one up? Lovers kissing became characters, and I walked their paths with a light step. On days like this I feel I have the best job in the world.


On the weekend my husband and I saw Elizabeth: the Golden Age. The cinematography was stunning and the acting was almost good enough to make you ignore the weak script. “There is a wind coming which will sweep away your pride,” says the Spanish Ambassador. Honestly! Forget the Virgin Queen, she was the Cliché Queen. The King of Spain and his mini-me daughter were Monty Pythonesque. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition or the Addams Family. Still, the talented Cate Blanchett was worth seeing. Even if this sequel was disappointing after the perfection of the first, Elizabeth I was a fascinating character. How amazing to leave the theater and pass the college she had founded.

Shaping a Novel (S.A.D.)

It helps to have two book projects going on simultaneously especially while living abroad. I researched NOT CRICKET while I waited for S.A.D. to come back from my second reader. It was a long wait. There have been a series of wildcat postal strikes in Britain, the worst in 20 years. It made me sad.

The title of my second novel, S.A.D., stands for both School Administrative District and Seasonal Affective Disorder. I have always loved puns. The story came to me when I was caught up in a political campaign for building a new school in Brunswick, Maine. Why not plunder my hard-won knowledge of small town politics for fiction?

There is so much beyond a political activist’s influence in the real world, what a relief to be in control of a novel. Although sometimes I don’t feel like I’m really in control. I create the characters, put them in a setting and watch to see what happens. It’s more like directing than playing God.

An appropriate analogy since S.A.D. puts evangelicals on a school board who want to add Intelligent Design to the science curriculum. A lobsterman and a liberal professor fight back, and my protagonist is caught in the middle of the drama. The superintendent pays the deadly cost.

Like any production, there is a large cast of characters working behind the scenes. Education lawyer George Isaacson corrected my interpretation of the law and found my scenario scarily plausible. I also spoke to teachers, administrators and a former superintendent. A couple of professors, a priest, a fire chief, a lobsterman, a pilot, a detective , and a marine patrolman helped with other plot points. The evangelical ministers didn’t return my calls so I just went to services. Plenty of book/internet research too.

After my husband, the first reader for S.A.D. was Kathy Thorson. Like my protagonist, Kathy is new to the school board and has red hair. The similarities stop there as I created Haley Swan before Kathy even thought of running. Sorry to ruin the fun, but my characters are all fictional. Most of the work is imagination. My novels may be based on research but are spiced up with plenty of romance and drama.

My second reader was author Charlotte Agell (check out her new website.) She encouraged me to enliven the narrative by playing out some of the drama in the classroom and through my teen characters. That has been fun! It broadens the appeal to a Jodi Picoult family drama audience. Charlotte, Kathy and George all live on my street back home. How’s that for a small town?

My third reader will be Abigail Holland in NYC, a former Harper’s editor now home with her kids. She was also the first reader of MOOSE CROSSING and encouraged me to publish it. After she comments, I’ll figure out if S.A.D. is ready to go to my last reader for a proof read.

Then S.A.D. will go to my agent, Jean Naggar, in NYC for her feedback. Other agents at her medium-size firm might advise. Any major changes would be tested on yet another reader. Once the manuscript is ready, my agent draws up a list of editors who have shown interest (think of a dance card at a ball.) An agent works on commission after the sale of the book to a publisher. Readers just get a line on the acknowledgement page and my eternal gratitude. I also read for other writer/readers.

At the publishing houses a manuscript may get several reads with marketing and publicity involved. A committee makes the decision to publish, and more work gets rejected than accepted. An accepted manuscript will be worked on by editors, copy editors, type setters, book jacket designers, marketers and publicists. Even after the editorial revisions are complete, it will be another nine months or so until you see it at the bookstore.

My agent’s assistant, Marika Josephson, made an insightful comment:

I always thought the Bible was so fascinating because so many hands went into the production of it. And you could see it all in each line if your ears were tuned to it. I never realized that a book you pick up off the shelves even these days is exactly the same. The whole entire package has been touched and sculpted by dozens and dozens of hands. I certainly can't look at books the same way again after having worked in publishing!



P.S. I received a comment from Rachel, who just moved to Maine. Talk about characters coming to life – that is the protagonist from MOOSE CROSSING. Welcome to Maine, Rachel!

Horses in the Mist

In the mornings, the mist is often thick over Port Meadow. The herds of horses and cattle come into soft focus as I walk the dog. The sun is low on the horizon, making the most ordinary objects glow. Only in Oxford can swans flying over a river be called ordinary.

The misty landscape is a reflection of my mind as I try to find NOT CRICKET. First there are the characters, shifting in and out of focus and teasing me at the periphery of my vision. Sometimes I think I see them clearly, but other times they fade away.

In my latest version of S.A.D., I decided my protagonist needed a personality makeover and changed her name from Agnes Wolfe to Haley Swan. Time in England is affecting even my American book although Swan is a Maine name. I try to be true to my settings.

The plot is pure fiction. It keeps changing like a folktale passed down through generations. The essential message stays the same, but the story shifts in details and in structure almost organically.

The plot is key to commercial fiction as it drives the narrative. It’s tricky to create a story that keeps the reader turning pages but also resonates on a deeper level. I like to keep the narrative open for as long as possible so as to explore the many paths. A story that doesn’t surprise me won’t surprise you.

As important as thinking is reading. Some books I read for research and others for writing inspiration. I have just finished a most lovely novel, Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, translated from the Norwegian by Ann Borne. It is not long, and the prose is simple, but it says so much with so little. It breaths between the words.

A coming-of-age story, Out Stealing Horses explores the relationship between a fourteen-year-old son and his enigmatic father. The beautiful, raw setting roots the characters and frames the narrative. It is a small community in the northeastern woods of Norway. The narrator is an older man, looking back on a disturbing and formative summer shortly after WWII. When I finished, it was like saying goodbye to a close friend. I miss his voice.

Another story that relies heavily on setting is Ann Patchett’s new release, Run. It takes place close to home in Boston and Cambridge where I attended university. Patchett is one of my favorite authors, and her last novel, Bel Canto, was too good to match. In her latest novel she looks closely at a family and the effects of race and class. Her characters are so real you feel you know them. Run was helpful for me to read because it is set in winter like my first two novels.


Popham Beach, Maine in December

So many authors set their Maine stories in the summer, possibly because they only vacation there. For year-round residents, Maine is defined by its long winter and unpredictable storms. It is what makes living up north unique and special. Don’t get me wrong, nothing beats a Maine summer, but you feel like you’ve earned it after surviving the winter and appreciate it the more.

As it rains and the leaves turn brown instead of flaming red and gold, Maine feels far away. Still, I have to admit that I may be quite happy to see daffodils in February for a change. When I leave Oxford, I will dream about horses in the mist.

Quince Tree

The owl and the pussycat “dined on mince and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon.” It was my favorite nursery rhyme. Before discovering a quince tree in our backyard, I couldn’t picture the fruit any more than I could define runcible. It turns out Edward Lear made up the word “runcible,” but the fruit defies imagination it is so weird.

My English mother-in-law described the quince as a cross between an apple and a pear. It certainly looks like a fuzzy pear, but it tastes like unsweetened cranberries or rhubarb. But don’t the Brit’s love rhubarb too? Mind you, add enough sugar and cream, and you can eat anything, even quince.

Henry assayed a quince stuffing in roast chicken, hence the unsweetened cranberries simile, and had more success making quince jelly. He then used a spot of quince jelly to prepare a savory gravy for quails. Now that was tasty, only my daughter found the tiny birds too life-like to eat. Qunice, she proclaimed, is either bitter or sour. My dog likes rolling in them. I’m trying to train Stella to collect the fallen fruit before the wasps find them.


My daughter’s watercolor of the quince tree and laundry.

A search on wikipedia showed that the Portuguese word for quince is marmelo and that the word marmalade originally meant quince jam. Apparently quinces need a more southern climate than England to ripen.

My claim is there is only one season in England: wet and 40 to upper 60’s. It doesn’t rain all day, but it sprinkles like a greenhouse mister. If it does get cold enough for snow, the whole country grinds to a halt. The sun shines in the 80’s, and it’s a heat wave /drought. Having lived about two years in England over the past couple of decades, I have never seen before the three pleasantly warm and sunny weeks we have just enjoyed. Needless to say, as soon as I blogged about that last week, it started raining.

After Monday morning’s monsoon, we bought a dryer. It was more green to have a clothesline, as in the moldy green color of our underwear. My son had to wear dirty sports kit to cross-country practice. Even on a dry day, our clothes were taking two days to stiffen into cardboard. “I hate crusty socks,” my daughter sighed. Hard water doesn’t help.

One trick to doing laundry in England is the airing cupboard. These are wooden slats built above the water heater to dry line-damp clothing. Unfortunately our house has the nation’s smallest airing cupboard. My dog keeps wagging over our supplemental drying rack and picking socks like berries.

On the weekend we went on a blackberry-picking hike. Three and a half pounds later we are now planning on a quince and blackberry crumble. The berries at least are unbelievably sweet, unlike their American counterparts.

We passed sheep and cows, then circled back along the Thames.

Stella appreciated the dog doors at the fences.

We also drove twenty minutes to Woodstock to visit Blenheim Palace where Winston Churchill was born. Churchill gave up his noble title so that he could become prime minister. During World War II, Hitler did not bomb Blenheim because he planned to rule his empire from that seat.


The palace facade was very grand, but the small rooms inside were dark and dreary despite all the gold leaf. The library was a treat with big windows and more leather bound volumes than I’ve ever seen in one place. The vast estate covers 2,700 acres, and the Capability Brown gardens were pleasant. We only got sprinkled on once.


After Maine, I find it a bit freaky how the countryside is completely cultivated. There are no wild woods only hedgerows. On the plus side, there is little suburban sprawl and farming is doing well. I especially appreciate the rights of way allowing the public to traverse private estates and farms. Dogs are welcome almost everywhere, even on the bus and in pubs. They are tolerated more than children.

A typical mistake Americans make is assuming that England will be similar due to the common language. Culturally there is a sizable gap that is a reflection of the landscape. English society is well cultivated and seeped in tradition and culture, but it lacks the wild exuberance of the USA. I don’t think one is necessarily better than the other, but it’s quite different. Leaving one’s home is the best way to get perspective and appreciate what you have and acknowledge what you are missing.

I never feel more American than when I’m living abroad, but until I open my mouth, no one knows. People are always asking me for directions, no matter where I am. I think that’s the New Yorker in me: always walking someplace briskly and acting like I know where I’m going.

I find my way as I go along. The trick is being observant and exploring detours. It’s quite like writing a novel. The journey is all part of the adventure.

Uprooting to England

I type to the whine of chainsaws. Most of our hundred year old white pines, towering high above our home, have died of a mysterious infection. Feeling the thud of falling trees brings home my own uprooting. Or is it transplanting?

We are moving to England for the year. My husband, Henry, is taking a research sabbatical at Oxford University, his alma mater. Our children will be attending English schools, and we’re even taking the dog along. Henry and the kids have dual citizenship, but my visa states that I’m a “settlement wife!” I do feel like a pioneer venturing into a new life.

In England I will be researching my third novel, NOT CRICKET. My first two novels were set in my home state of Maine. NOT CRICKET's Evelyn Levesque is a Maine native on a junior year at Oxford University. She returns 20 years later to track down her first love who disappeared mysteriously.

Like my central character, I spent my junior year at an English University. I had a rather dramatic trip overseas. My flight to London was cancelled when the plane exploded on its way to NYC over Lockerbie. Henry was beside himself until he learned that I was not on that doomed flight.

The next day I flew to London undeterred, assuming security would be top notch. My hometown of NYC changed so much after 9/11, but the shadow of terrorism has hung over England for decades. You learn to live with it.

My last long stint of living in England was in 2004. Henry ran the Colby-Bowdoin-Bates study abroad program in London for six months. Our children attended an English school like Hogwarts. My son won enough house points to attend a cricket match at Lord’s. We had many good adventures which I relayed to friends and family via bi-weekly e-mails. This time it will be easier with a blog.

England already feels like a second home. Raising a mixed nationality family, it helps to spend time in both countries. We are lucky that academia and writing provide the flexibility to do this.

I’ve always planned to write a novel about the Anglo-American experience. Despite a common language, there are cultural barriers leading to amusing misunderstandings. I consider myself bilingual after 17 years married to a Brit. Do I have stories to tell!

It may take a couple of weeks for me to get back on line, but I will keep this blog running weekly about our adventures abroad. We plan to travel to France, Italy, Kenya and other countries. It won’t be just vacation. I will be alternating research on NOT CRICKET with revisions on S.A.D.

First I need to finish packing and preparing the house for our lodgers (already thinking in English vernacular!) Next Wednesday we will be flying across the Atlantic and won’t return home until July 2008. After friends and family, the hardest thing to leave behind is my personal library, but I hear there are a lot of books in Oxford!

And now to answer the desert island question:

Books for the plane:
Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights
(it takes place in Oxford if in a different dimension)
Kirin Desai’s Inheritance of Loss
(well recommended literary fiction)

Books I shipped:

For Writing:
Strunk and White – the classic writer’s manual
The Brief English Handbook- another for checking grammar
Points of View – a collection of different narrative points of view
A new journal

For S.A.D:
Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener for my Bartleby character– I still have my copy from high school
Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes since S.A.D. is also set in public high school
Four nonfiction research books

For NOT CRICKET:
Valerie Martin’s The Unfinished Novel – brilliant short stories about artists and writers
Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants-excellent example of first person present and past tense interwoven narratives, a form I’m considering
Ian McEwan’s Atonement – as an alternative form, a book in chronological parts, also very English

Books I will buy in England:
A dictionary, a thesaurus and a baby name book
Does Cricket for Dummies exist?

Wolfe's Neck Park

The first time I visited Wolfe’s Neck Park in Freeport, I had my newborn daughter strapped to my chest. My three-year-old son fished for periwinkles in the tidal pools with his new friend, Baxter. His mother, Sarah Worthing, was a fitness coordinator for L.L. Bean with a teacher’s knowledge of coastal habitats. I had arrived in Maine.

When my daughter started pre-school, I returned to Wolfe’s Neck to paint. I had been an oil-painter, but watercolors were easier to take on location and less toxic around my children. It took some experimenting and a summer course at M.E.C.A., but soon I learned to appreciate the way watercolor flows like the sea.

Soon after I resumed my art, I started writing my first novel, Moose Crossing. I was looking for work I could do from home while living in a remote location, and the two occupations complemented one another. There are only a few good months this far north for painting en plein air. Also a novel takes so much time to complete, but a watercolor is a day’s work. Selling my paintings was a fast reward.


About the time I was planning to approach galleries with my portfolio, a well-established literary agent, Jean Naggar, signed me on as an author. I realized it was hard enough to find the time for one career, let alone two, while raising children. I chose to focus on my writing.



I have a backlog of paintings to photograph, catalog and sell. Two have found a new home in California this spring. As an anniversary gift, the couple bought a view of Googin’s Island in Wolfe’s Neck Park and another of Reid State Park in nearby Georgetown.


On Sunday my family went back to Wolfe’s Neck. It was only fitting since I had named S.A.D.’s protagonist Agnes Wolfe. After an intense ten days straight of revising S.A.D., draft two was done! I worked faster because I had extra time.


Both kids had gone to Maine Audubon’s fabulous Hog Island Camp. It felt odd to be home and childless for the first time in thirteen years exactly. My son had his birthday at camp, and I’m still trying to get my head around the idea of him being a teenager. My youngest is now ten. When did that happen?


My husband and I didn’t work the whole time. We snuck off to the beach on a 90-degree afternoon. We went out to dinner together and with friends on short notice. Two Bowdoin couples, who don’t have children, came to dinner and stayed up late drinking Pimm’s cocktails. No kids to wake up with our conversation and laughter. Life felt like it had back when Henry and I were in grad. school. Sort of like taking off ski boots at the end of a day on the slopes.

Still, I’m eager to hit the trails again with the kids. With S.A.D. out with my next two readers and experts fact-checking sections, I’ll enjoy the excuse to go to the beach and slow down a bit. I have to admit I’m already thinking about my third novel, but that’s a story that can wait a couple more weeks.

Test Flight

Coming back home to Maine, I was in for a shock. My fluffy golden retriever . . .

. . .had become a Labrador retriever.

Or perhaps a naked mole rat? Poor Stella had been dying in the summer heat so a buzz cut was in order. She spent the first couple days chewing her tail, but now she is much perkier on her walks. Her feathers will grow back by autumn.

A mother’s solo vacation is more like racking up a debt. My husband coped well during my 5-day absence but didn’t get any work done. With a home office, I’ve learned to work with interruption if not gracefully. My children had so much to tell me they had to talk simultaneously. The laundry, camp forms, home repairs and bills had stacked up.

The piles only grew as my first priority was finishing manuscript revisions for my first reader. Henry is taking S.A.D. to England where he’s visiting family. Call it a test flight for an airplane book. With both of my books I gave my first chapter to my husband to read, and then I shut the door to my office. He waited patiently for years the first time and for months the second time for me to finish.

Henry must have read Moose Crossing six times. My first draft of that novel was a ridiculous 660 pages – more than twice what it is now! I’ve learned. The first draft of S.A.D. is 260 pages with room to expand. True love is the patience to proof carefully and offer constructive criticism.

Henry welcomes the fictional characters and their problems into our home but also entices me back to the real world. My son pointed out some people live in the past, others for the future, but I live too much in my imaginary world.

Stephen King (another Maine author!) wrote an excellent book On Writing in which he describes his creative process as writing for the ideal reader. For him that is his wife. His writing style, like mine, is to lock himself in his office, not sharing half completed work.

There is no one right way to write. The trick is finding the method that works best for you. I need privacy and big chunks of time; others need more feedback and write better in short bursts. All writers need readers because it’s hard to see the fault lines in one’s own work.

Although I write women’s fiction, my ideal reader is my husband. He’s a demanding critic, my most avid supporter and has a great sense of humor. He’s also an excellent writer himself. My comments on his political writing tend towards critique of theory. Academia is geared towards a narrow audience but good writing is all about communicating and entertaining.

Entertaining was the theme of last weekend. My youngest child just turned ten and invited SEVEN girls to what could only be called a wake-over. One parent described the next day as giving your child a hangover as a party favor. Not from alcohol but from sleep deprivation after watching Pirates of the Caribbean and giggling all night long.

P.S. Does anyone know who took the naked mole rat photo? If so leave a comment so I can credit the photographer.

Big Chill No Body

Cathy, Jen, Me, Kim, Deb, Amy, Abigail (L to R) at the RopeWalk

“It sounds like it was The Big Chill minus the dead body,” my husband said. I invited my six school friends to Nantucket to celebrate our 40th birthdays. Deb was my first play date when we were toddlers. We met Cathy and Jen in a Central Park playground, and our parents became friends too. Amy, Abigail, and Kim joined us at the Dalton School. One other school friend, Anna, couldn’t come as she lives in Italy.


Abigail summed it up, “What a fabulous weekend! More important than the beautiful surroundings and weather--though of course they helped--the company was just perfect. I find it so amazing that we never run out of things to talk about, and so comforting to know that we all have been there for one another over so many years, with the various ups and downs that we've all had. It makes me wish there was more time to just pick up the phone and chat with more frequency--and I really intend to do that more--but I guess it also says something that we can easily pick up wherever we left off, no matter how much time has passed.”


On Saturday we went on a twelve-mile bike ride and still managed to chat through most of it. Nantucket is small, flat and ringed with bike paths along the moors. The beach plums were in bloom as were the wildflowers. We stopped to watch enormous snapping turtles, a family of swans and a pair of egrets on our way to Madaket beach.

For lunch it was over-stuffed sandwiches on fresh baked bread at Something Natural that has been there decades before the health food craze even started. I always order avocado, cheddar and chutney on pumpernickel with Matt Fee iced herbal tea and carrot cake. We ate picnic style in the bucolic garden.


The sunset over the harbor was, as Deb likes to say, “spectacular.” Someone noticed that we all have our favorite words. Mine is “literary.” A lot of conversations revolved around books. Deb and Abigail worked in publishing before having kids, and we all bonded in high school over our love of books.

I remember taking turns reading aloud passages from romance novels between giggles. We learned all sorts of good SAT words like diaphanous and talked about writing our own Harlequin romance. I wonder now if that is where my idea to write commercial women’s fiction germinated.

Now Abigail, with her background in editing romance novels, and Cathy, with her good proofing eyes, are helpful readers. Deb promises a great book party in NYC when my debut novel is published one day. My novels are not romance genre, but there is still romance, which back in high school was a big topic of discussion.

We weren’t just bookworms. In high school we spent many a Saturday night dancing at clubs like Studio 54. Promoters passed out free passes in front of our school. Some nights we’d go to the theater, concerts, bars, movies or restaurants, when we weren’t babysitting.

Other times we’d just meet up at an apartment to watch a movie or General Hospital over tubs of Haagan Dazs ice cream, warm David’s Cookies and TAB. There can’t be a more fun and independent place to be a teenager than NYC. It’s safer too since no one drives.


You don’t really need a car in Nantucket either. Town has cute boutiques, but sadly the five-and-ten I used to frequent as a kid is now yet another T-shirt shop. On the way to the lighthouse (feeling like Virginia Woolf) we ran into John Kerry, who has a summerhouse nearby. He returned my smile and wave. It was bittersweet thinking he could have been our president instead of out walking alone.


We walked into town for dinner at Oran Mor. It feels as intimate as eating in someone’s colonial home but with gourmet food. Deb’s husband surprised us by calling the restaurant to foot the bill as a birthday present for his wife who turned 40 in Nantucket. Under his instruction, we ordered champagne and the finest wines. He was off fishing with his brother that weekend since their kids were at camp. The other husbands were at home tending kids and dogs.



Heading home to my husband, kids and dog, I took a one-night detour to see my college roommate. We met at the Harvard Book Store and laughed over how their table of summer reading included one of our favorite novels, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, which would be quite a weight in the beach bag. It’s not just that it is a serious literary novel about India; it is also over 1,400 pages. Another summer read suggestion was a biography of Einstein. Only in Harvard Square!

My college roommate and her husband are heading off to teach for two years at a school in Columbia. They’ve rented out their house in suburban Lexington and are packing up their three kids aged three to thirteen. Mike has been a principal at a bilingual school in East Cambridge, and Debbie has worked in teaching and writer tutoring.

Debbie was also another reader for my first novel, Moose Crossing. We spent a good part of our sushi dinner at Shilla brainstorming over the plot of my third novel. I’m going to miss not having her around to bounce ideas, but what an adventure to move your family to South America!

I took the Downeaster train, my favorite way to travel from Boston to Maine. It’s a pleasant ride through New England towns, farms and marshes, bypassing the summer traffic. Onboard I proofed S.A.D., having finished the first draft of my second novel before my vacation.

Working for myself, I find it helps to set personal deadlines. It takes a disciplined mindset and self-motivation to work at home. After all that social time, I’m ready to revert to my introverted habits, my batteries recharged. This is good since a bigger part of writing a novel is rewriting it. It’s a long process of revision, fact checking, additional research and restructuring after feedback from readers. It’s exciting to be almost at the point where I can share my work. A book is only a book with readers.

Reading on Nantucket

Best to arrive by sea to Nantucket. Two hours of rocking on gentle waves lulls away tension. My children giggle teary-eyed at the ferry’s bow, their shirts ballooning. Cape Cod becomes a smeared line on the horizon before sinking. Sailboats blow by like feathers on the wind. Slowly, an island rises in the fog.

Rounding the tiny lighthouse at Brant Point, we enter an expansive harbor of sailing yachts. From this viewpoint not much has changed in decades. Squinting into the mist, it could still be a wealthy whaling town with its cobblestones, gas lamps and venerable architecture.


For over three decades my family has been coming to Nantucket. The grey-weathered shingles climbing with roses were a welcome contrast to hot concrete. The island is wrapped in an endless beach with the Gulf Stream warming the water. At night elegant restaurants take advantage of local farms and day boat fish.


Mostly I come to Nantucket to read. There are two independent bookstores and a good library in town. Nantucket Bookworks has a large selection of modern classics while Mitchell’s Book Corner stocks more current women authors. By odd coincidence the three books I read were gender benders: two men writing about women and one woman writing about men.


Haruki Murakami’s just released After Dark is a departure from his recent novels. The main characters are female: one sister with insomnia and another trapped in sleep. It reads more like a stretched short story or a dream unfolding over one night. It lacked the well-structured plot of his other novels, but it was just as surreal and evocative of alienation in modern Tokyo. He is one of my favorite authors with his original voice and flawless prose.

Ian McEwan’s Atonement left me stunned. It brought to mind Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh and Leon Uris, but it stands independently as a modern classic. It’s an intensely human book with characters that are deeply flawed but sympathetic and real. McEwan writes so well about women and family. Set during World War II amidst class conflict, it’s a depressing story but told with such eloquence as to be uplifting. It’s a good vacation book because once you start, it’s impossible to put down.

Annie Proulx’s Close Range includes the story that became the movie Brokeback Mountain. That sad tale was one of the more upbeat stories in this beautiful collection. In this book it is a woman writing in a male voice. The writing is as raw and stunning as the western landscape. I find her work an inspiration, although bleaker than I would dare to venture. Proulx allows the landscape to become a character in the narrative; more than a setting, it sets the tone.

Writing is quite like painting. First mix the characters and then block out the plot before finding the light, the shadows and the details. The trick is holding onto the negative space – you feel that with Proulx. Her art is as much about what she doesn’t say as what she does. There is no better teacher than a well-written book.

Happy July 4th!

Lobster Tales

Mackerel Cove, Bailey Island

I went out with the Marine Patrol to research lobster crime for my second novel. The coast guard rescues people at sea, but enforcing state fishing laws and safety regulations falls under the jurisdiction of the Maine Marine Patrol. These waterfront policemen become part of the community they serve. It’s all about knowing the people and working with them to maintain a sustainable fishery and deter crime.

Allen’s Lobster Pier at Lookout Point

Lobster thieving is common, especially with prices reaching record highs. In January it peaked at $11.00 per pound off the boat. It’s a valuable commodity floating in holding crates, often unlocked, below the docks. The live lobsters are not tagged so they are hard to trace. After a string of recent robberies, most of the wharves now have surveillance cameras. In search of easy money to buy drugs, some crafty criminals cut power lines or don scuba gear.

Marine Patrol Officer Robby Beal at Interstate Lobster Pier

With M.P.O. Robby Beal as my guide, I set out to inspect the lobster wharves. Robby grew up lobstering since age seven with his Dad off Mt. Desert Island. He went to Syracuse University in New York, but the sea called him back to Maine. In yet another small town moment, I discovered that his sister-in-law was my daughter’s teacher.



Robby picked me up in Brunswick and drove south through Harpswell down a narrow neck of land. After days of rain, the sky was washed clean to bleached blue with sixty-degree weather and a gentle breeze. It was fresh as linens on a line. What a day to drive along the coast, stopping at hidden coves riddled with small islands.

Most of the wharves were quiet since it’s early in lobster season that in this region kicks in mid June and lasts through Christmas. Some set traps year round but have to buy an expensive offshore fishing permit. The annual lobster migration follows the warm water from the shallow, tidal coves out to the open seabed. At this time of year, most of the catch is shedders. To grow, lobster shed their hard shell. The soft shell lobsters are easier to eat and sweeter but not worth as much since there is less meat per pound. The old timers know to wait.

Redder shedders hauled up by the Whistlin’ Dixie

Bobby Bidder has been lobstering for over forty years. He makes and maintains his wooden traps. His wife, Marolyn, was painting the rusty parts of their metal traps. Bobby’s family has been fishing in this area since 1650.

Merolyn Bibber

The Bibbers still live in an old house overlooking the docks. High property values and soaring taxes have forced the younger lobstermen to commute from inland. The old fishing shacks are torn down and replaced by luxurious summer homes. That’s the worst lobster crime in my book.

Bobby Bibber

The story of Bobby’s childhood was worthy of Dickens. His father had a drinking problem and let his injured wife die of neglect. Bobby and his brother became wards of the state and set to work on a farm. When Bobby was 13 and his brother 14, they heard from the minister that their two sisters were living with their father.

The boys stole the farm pick up truck and went in search of their lost family. When his brother ran a stop sign, the police gave chase. Scared, the boy sped off at 80 mph. He didn’t stop until he lost control and crashed into a tree. The brothers blacked out but, even without seatbelts, survived the impact; the truck did not. It took two wreckers to unwrap it from the tree.

Bobby and his brother fled the crash site and hid in the hills for a week, living off berries. They then headed off to Portland on foot hoping to find work. When the disheveled pair made it to the biggest city in Maine, they were arrested for bank robbery. They were innocent of that crime but not for the stolen truck, driven too far from the farm by a minor. Instead of finding their family, they were sent back to the farm with a criminal record.

After enlisting in the marines, Bobby returned to his old home in Harpswell to fish for lobster. He practiced shooting at eight-penny nails hammered into a tree. He has a .357 pistol and a rifle. That tree is going nowhere.

Bobby’s sharp shooting came in use on the night he awoke to the sound of lobster thieves. He called the state trooper and loaded his pistol with two bullets. He fired a warning shot into the ground, but the thieves jumped into their truck.

I can’t share the rest of the story because a fictionalized version will be in S.A.D. It was a good day of lobstering: I hauled in a salty tale.

Plot Detective

For the second time in the past year I was in the police interrogation room. It’s in the windowless basement over-illuminated by flickering fluorescents. It amused the detective to be on the receiving end of the interrogation. The crimes never happened; they exist only in my mind and on the written page.

Like a character from one of my novels, Detective Mark Waltz of the Brunswick Police Department is not what you would expect. At Bowdoin College, Mark caught the law bug in Dick Morgan’s class on criminal justice. The summer after his junior year, Mark trained to become a foot patrolman at in his New Hampshire hometown.

Mark graduated from Bowdoin with the aim of joining the FBI, but first he would need three years work experience or a law school degree. Mark chose law school. Upon his graduation, the FBI had a hiring freeze.

To pay off his student loans, Mark joined a law practice in Brunswick. After four years, the police chief enticed Mark to join the Brunswick police force as a detective. The pay and benefits were not that different, and Mark missed police work.

Mark described his career change as “having a midlife crisis at age thirty.” He loves being a small town cop and still practices law (but not criminal law) on the side part time. He enjoys the personal connections on his beat and living in a good community to raise a family.

For Moose Crossing I set up an appointment last fall with Mark to discuss a missing child. I had a working mom dilemma. My nine-year-old daughter was home from school due to a teacher’s workshop, but the subject matter of my research made for the worst “take your daughter to work day.” I most certainly couldn’t leave her at home alone so I dropped her off with my husband to sit through student office hours. She learned about Japanese politics while I learned about the most heinous crimes.

I was relieved to hear that in my town, children have gone missing but never kidnapped. Mark talked me through the procedure of a missing person search. An expert can help me find the many branches from every plot twist.

For S.A.D., my second novel, I called once again. “Mark, I need your help. I found a dead body on page one, and I’m not sure what to do with it.”

Mark walked me through the crime scene and all the possible permutations. I don’t think I’ll use the autopsy detail about re-stuffing the organs into a plastic bag like turkey giblets and then sewing up the body for the funeral. Too much gory detail for women’s fiction!

I’m not writing a murder mystery; still, a novel about educational politics and religious fundamentalism could benefit from some drama. I now know what to do with my dead body, assuming this plot line remains in S.A.D.. Anything can happen in between the first and final drafts. Like a detective, it’s my job to uncover the story.


Popham Beach: a setting for SAD

Smart Plot Growth

I just had the best day. Early Tuesday morning I swam laps, as I do 2-3 times a week to counter all those hours sitting at the computer, and walked slowly home enjoying the sun. I opened all the windows to the wonderful warm air and produced a NEW chapter after a long, painful week of controlling plot sprawl.

Rambling prose is quite a common problem in a first draft. Many writers can only discover their characters through writing. I need to hear them talk, meet their families and see the world through their eyes before I can decide what is worth sharing. A classic piece of advice I’d heard from a writer-friend: you needed to write that, but I didn’t need to read it.

Before my children came home, I interviewed a school board member/former superintendent for research on S.A.D., my second novel. I like to let my imagination run wild and then take a reality check, adjusting details for verisimilitude. Often I ask my experts to spot-check the section later for mistakes and jargon. It’s odd being active in real educational politics while writing an imaginary version – almost like living out a dream.

I could have gone back to proofing, but it was low 70’s with a cooling sea breeze and everything had started blooming all at once. I took the dog for a walk on the way to get my daughter from girl scouts and lingered in the playground. The girls were playing an inventive mix of baseball, badminton and freeze tag. Even close to 5pm the sun was high above the tall pines. In Maine the flip side of short, dark winters are blissfully long spring/summer days.

On the deck I broke out my library book, Lionel Shriver’s The Post Birthday World. It is written in back to back chapters contrasting what would have happened had the protagonist kissed another man on his birthday or stayed faithful to her life partner. It sounds gimmicky, but it’s very well done. There are amusing twists: when she’s unfaithful, her partner dotes on her, but he almost ignores her when she’s dependable. Her flirtation sparks her creativity, but her work suffers when she leaves her supportive partner. It’s the book that answers what if… in two versions, and it does so artfully.

To top the perfect day, Henry and I decided to try Sweet Leaves Teahouse with the kids for dinner. All three dinner options were delicious (pork roast, gnocchi and scallops) and it was open mike night. I started laughing so hard I thought I’d fall off my chair to Henry’s horror because he thought the singer was trying to be serious.

Afterwards I had to get the name of the woman who sang about menopause, rhyming “my breasts are sagging” with “my energy is flagging,” and “aging” with “hormones raging.” The singer recognized me from my blog and said I was friends with her sister the writer Charlotte Agell. What a small town moment and what a pleasure to meet the talented Anna Agell.

Last night I slept well which doesn’t always happen. Often during creative bursts I wake in the night and scribble plot lines and dialogue on file cards I keep in the bathroom. I can’t help it – the characters wake me with their chatter. Other times I have worried about getting published, but as a writer I keep on writing. I do it because I can’t stop and because every day I look forward to working. It’s a passion as much as an obsession.

Some people ask how I manage to concentrate while working at home or how I find self-discipline without deadlines. I must have attention excessive disorder. I love what I do, even when it is painful, mostly it is pure joy.

Building Character

For the kids' spring break the options were:

A. The tree house in our backyard

B. Central Park in NYC (after a record 7 1/2 inches of rain)

Every April the kids and I head south to NYC, trading muddy fields and snow banks for daffodils and blooming magnolias. My mother, the artist Cynthia Lamport, has a long list of museums for the kids to visit.

Grey Landscape by Cynthia Lamport, oil, 1999

We all loved the experimental design exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt. There were robots, computer simulation games, modern furniture, fashion, light shows, interactive house designing and Chip Kidd’s futuristic book jackets. The Design Triennial is really a children’s museum for preteens through adults with an eye to the future. By contrast, the museum itself is an ornate gem of pre-war architecture with elaborate carved moldings.

The Cooper-Hewitt Museum on 5th Ave.

My parents took the children on an historical tour at the Tenement Museum on the lower Eastside while I worked. We have an ancestor, who in the turn of the last century was living in similar accommodation, crammed 6-12 people to an apartment of 325 square feet. This was both living and working space for the tailors. My great grandfather went on to become a union official in the garment industry.

While the kids were visiting the Museum of Natural History, I met my brother for lunch downtown with his colleague. They are architects at a large, prominent firm. Lunch wasn’t just for fun. The protagonist of my third book hails from a small town in northern Maine and works as an architect in NYC.

My brother’s colleague talked about the experience of being a woman directing a male construction crew. There are a few female electricians, but it’s a testosterone-infused jobsite. At the beginning a woman architect has to fight hard to win respect. Some of the men will say things like, “I bet you thought it would be all picking paint chips.”

After proving herself, a female architect often makes a better manager due to excellent interpersonal and organizational skills. She can earn love as well as respect and encourage people to work as a team.

Although most architecture schools have a 50/50 female to male ratio, most large firms are 40/60 at the junior level, and this ratio drops as you rise through the hierarchy. At this firm there are only two women out of nine full partners: one woman who never married nor had kids and a single mother who adopted.

My brother manages to raise a family with the understanding support of his wife, who is home with the kids in the suburbs. They met when he was working for an architecture firm in Japan. Male architects have an advantage since their spouses are often more willing to take on the responsibilities of being the primary caretaker for their children.

Parenting is difficult because architects work long hours and need to prove themselves in their early 30’s. The pay is low, comparable to academia but with very limited vacation time. There are all-night charettes to make deadlines. The hours only increase with promotion. Worst of all, an architect has little control of her time.

My brother’s colleague, an avid reader of fiction, would love to join a book group but could never commit to a weeknight regularly. Work comes home thanks to Blackberries, known as “crackberries” since architects check them like addicts.

My brother, like his colleague, is compulsive about his work. The profession seems to attract a creative but intensely focused personality. You have to care about the details. I sat with my brother through a two-hour meeting in which all they discussed was millwork as in window trim, door openings and cubbies. All drafting is now done on computers, but they're still called blueprints.

My brother decided he wanted to be an architect at age five. Most architects come to the profession at a young age like a calling. Watching my brother make his dream a reality has given me a feel for the character of architects and an understanding for the profession. His colleague agreed to be my bridge to the female experience.

It may sound confusing that I’m researching my third novel while I’m still writing my second novel. It’s no more difficult than reading two books at the same time and means that I never have wasted time if my manuscript is out being read.

I like to spend time getting to know my characters and structuring the plot before I start writing. It’s never set in stone but gives me a sound foundation upon which to build.

Children's Author Cynthia Lord

“It must be something in the water,” Cynthia Lord surmised. Cindy’s first children’s book, Rules, just won a Newbery Honor Medal and the Schneider Family Book Award. We both live on the same street as Charlotte Agell who has published eleven children’s books. I guess I should drink more water.

Rules is fiction, but it rings true. Twelve-year-old Catherine tries to teach her autistic younger brother the rules of life. David has to be told that it’s okay to take his shirt off to swim but not his pants. Catherine creates the words to communicate with her paraplegic friend, Jason, and struggles to get her busy parents to listen to her needs too. The characters have challenges that restrict their lives but don’t define them. They find happiness on their own terms without a miracle cure.

When I read Rules aloud to my children, it made us laugh and almost cry. It was quite an accomplishment to create a book that would appeal to both a nine-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old boy, not to mention their mother. The book was flawlessly well written.

“Most books about autism are so sad,” Cindy said, “but a family has to learn how to laugh or they’re not going to make it.”

CYNTHIA LORD INTERVIEW:

Is there a true story behind your story?

When my son was first diagnosed with autism, I spent forty hours a week on Behavior Modification Treatment because Maine didn’t offer it. The state flew up experts from New York and paid for the student helpers I trained. It was worth it to see my son recover the words he had lost at eighteen months.

Now my fourteen-year-old son attends the junior high for special classes like cooking and art. It’s too noisy there for him to concentrate in such a big school, so he does his schoolwork at home. His seventeen-year-old sister attends the high school.

How did you find the time to write Rules when your son was only five?

I realized I would have to make time for writing or not want it anymore. I set my alarm for 4am and wrote every morning until my family got up at 7am. In four months I finished the first draft and then spent a year revising it with help from readers.

Was the road to publication as short?

The first two publishers rejected Rules but sent the manuscript back with helpful comments. I rewrote it and sent out a query letter and two sample chapters to four more publishers. One rejected it with a form letter, but the other three asked for the complete manuscript.

I loved the Scholastic Book Club as a child, so I granted Scholastic an exclusive read. Then September 11th happened, and everything ground to a halt. After eight months, I finally got a call from the editor saying they would be running some numbers and planned to acquire it. I realized that I needed an agent to negotiate the contract, so I called Tracey Adams in New York. We had met at a conference.

So why did the book not come out until 2006 – almost five years later?

As a first time author, I was put on the slow track. The manuscript went from one over-committed editor to a second one. There were revisions to add more drama. Even when the manuscript was ready, I was bumped off the list by established authors. New authors were the first to be cut when the list had to shrink for financial problems.

How did you deal with the long wait?

It was demoralizing, but I kept writing. Scholastic bought my picture book; it’s waiting for illustration. My second middle reader (grades 4-8) was pending senior editorial approval when Rules won the Newbury Honor Medal. Scholastic immediately made an offer on that book and another one I have yet to write.

What is the next book about?

Halfway Between Hope and Hurricane takes place on an island off the coast of Maine with a protagonist whose mother teaches at the school. I drew from both my own experience as a teacher on Chebeague Island and an historical incident on another island. In the 1960’s Frenchboro Island tried to head off closure of their school by bringing in foster children from the mainland. For me the ethical question is the most important part. Do the means justify the end?

You won’t have to wait too long to find out. Halfway Between Hope and Hurricane is projected for a fall 2008 release. Since the Newbury Honor, Rules has spent 10 weeks on the NYT bestseller list and is in its fourth run. Cynthia Lord is on the fast track!

A Closet Lobsterman

Forget about mud season. We had the biggest snowstorm of the year last week after three days of flurries. A foot of snow buried the mud, snapped branches as loud as gunshots and stole our power.

My daughter sighed, “It’s just like Narnia: always winter and never Christmas.”

My son added, “Well, we didn’t have a white Christmas, but maybe we’ll have a white Easter. Guess we won’t be looking for eggs outside this year.”

The kids were at least happy for a snow day. Needless to say, they were up at 5am. We snarled at them to be quiet and went back to sleep, hiding from the cold house under the covers. When I came down, I was overjoyed to find that the kids had shoveled out the walkways.

We’re usually plowed out before dawn but still plenty to shovel. Five years ago Carl said that he was too old to get out of his truck for the remainders. Every fall I call to check back in with him.

Carl replies, “Oh yeah. I’ll be plowin’ for as long as the good Lord be willin.’”

Many locals enjoy the extra income of a snowstorm’s bounty. We don’t usually get this much snow in April, but anything can happen in mud season. There’s an expression in Maine that if you don’t like the weather, just wait a minute.

Flowers and green leaves don’t even make an appearance until May. It’s a good thing I’m traveling south to NYC next week –I can catch a spot of daffodils. There's still snow on the ground here with another snow storm due tomorrow.

Spring is the off-season for lobster fishing except for those who are willing to pay for an offshore fishing permit. In March the lobsters migrate to the open ocean and don’t come back until June. Many lobstermen work a second job during that time or build and repair their traps.

Dave Merryman with a v-notched female lobster

I met a lobsterman in my closet. Dave Merryman was subcontracting to my builder Mark Wild. It was a big walk in closet, but Dave looked cramped and resigned to shelving a New York shoe collection. Even discussing the most intimate details, he was always a gentleman.

When I created the character of Jake Marlin, the lobsterman in my second novel S.A.D., I called on Dave. I had read The Secret Life of Lobsters, so I was well prepared in my wellies, waterproofs and life jacket.

Lobster fishing is wet. There’s the ocean spray and several inches of fishy wash on the deck flowing out the open stern. It’s no mean trick balancing on the swells, but luckily we had a calm day in September. Doped up on anti-nausea drugs, I nibbled through a box of saltines as I inhaled the diesel fumes.

I’m no stranger to doing research on a boat, having spent a summer studying dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico. I soon rediscovered my sea legs. Snapping photos of lobstering is easier than catching a dorsal fin in the instant it breaks clear. You don’t get to name the lobsters, as I did the dolphins, but at least you can eat the catch.

I asked Dave what was the strangest thing he ever hauled up in a lobster trap. “Other than a dead body?” he asked with a knowing smile.

“Sorry, I’ve changed course. It’s commercial women’s fiction. I don’t think I can use severed limbs, although I’m still going with the marauding lobster gangs.”

Aside from the dead body, it’s a true story. Dave’s father runs a cooperative on Pott’s Point to sell their catch. One year some guys were stealing lobsters from the holding crates that float below the docks. Dave and his family set out a video camera and caught them at night.

Lobstermen have a code of honor. If you break the rules, someone will cut your lines, and you’ll lose your traps. A lobstermen, however, won’t hesitate to aid another in need – we stopped to help another fishermen detangle his lines.


Lobstering is one of the few sustainable fisheries due to decades of self-regulation. The state has only more recently gotten involved and not always with the most desirable results.


Baby lobster (not a keeper)

I watched Dave throw back more than half his catch, measuring each and every lobster with lightening speed. The little ones, big ones and breeding females are tossed back; the rest are “keepers.” If a lobsterman catches an egg-laying female, he cuts a v-notch in her tail fin so that she’ll be protected even without her spawn.

Female lobster with eggs

It’s hard work hauling up the 40-pound brick weighted traps, and it’s dangerous. It would be easy to step into a loop of rope and be pulled down to the seabed. Dave keeps a sharp knife close to hand at all times. I nervously kept an eye on the open stern.


Dave keeps track of his trap location by GPS and a chart plotter. It’s a jealously guarded art as to where to set the traps and quite a privilege to be allowed on board to watch. Dave says he trusts me. What a gift.


I came back dockside full of humble respect and joy. I had found the romantic interest for my divorced naval wife in S.A.D. My fictional lobsterman had come to life in the salt spray. He’s not Dave in character, but he’ll have his knowledge and love of the sea.

Mixed Religions & Mud Season

On Monday night I found myself walking home in an April snowstorm. Around my neck was a Star of David and in my raincoat pocket was that Easter egg. It was the first night of Passover. Torn between two religions and trapped in mud season, it can be hard to find my balance.

Barb Swisher throws an Ukranian Easter Egg party every year. You melt wax over a candle and dribble patterns on an egg; then drop the egg in dye. Whatever was waxed stays white. More wax and dye dunks, and colors emerge like dawn. It takes a steady hand, tricky given the free-flowing wine and amusing conversation. In a room full of women my waxy squiggles became sperm. I blame all the estrogen.


Barb is a special ed. teacher and a ski instructor. Her husband is a commercial pilot who knew enough to retire early to bed. Their house reminded me of Cambridge, Massachusetts with its wood stained moldings and doors, bay window, eclectic furniture and a jungle of houseplants. Barb (standing on the right in profile) has a close circle of friends who met through their little kids, who are now soon to be heading off to college.


Maria Padian (second from the left) and Charlotte Agell (left of Barb) both write young adult fiction. Maria’s debut book is coming out next March; it sold in only a month. She writes that well. Charlotte is waiting to hear back from her editor about her twelfth book, and I’m as eager since I was a reader.

Both Maria and Charlotte have read for me too – it helps to have the support. As Charlotte said, “having a manuscript out there is like standing naked, waiting for someone to throw you clothes.” Charlotte illustrates her books, and her egg was as funky, bright and original as her writing.

I had arrived late to the egg party after taking my kids to a Seder at Bowdoin. My nine-year-old daughter sighed with relief when they made only the college freshman rise to recite the four questions of Passover, normally asked by the youngest child. It begins with: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The answer tells of how Moses led the Jews out of enslavement in Egypt into the desert onto Israel. A Seder is designed for children so that the lessons of the past will never be forgotten.


I like to tell my children that the Last Supper was a Passover Seder and that the Jews and the Christians worship the same God. We celebrate a sampling of the holidays: Passover, Easter, Christmas, Hanukkah, Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. My children attended Hebrew School for several years. At Christmas we go to see their friends perform the First Parish Church's pageant. For Easter Sunday we’re getting together with two Catholic families on Westport Island.

In England we return to Henry’s village church on the Thames. Our son was christened in a Georgian gown passed down through my husband’s Anglican family. My son’s Great Grandfather Eric lived just long enough for the christening. There were tears of happiness in his eyes as he gave his great grandson a silver mug that had been his.

Religion for me is more about tradition and family heritage than it is about belief. My father is Jewish and my mother is Episcopalian. Her mother was a Christian Scientist and her father a Congregationalist.

Raised among so many religions, it seemed only natural for me to take on religious diversity as a theme in my second novel. In S.A.D. (School Administration District) a Maine school board wrestles over adding Creationism/Intelligent Design to the science curriculum. Tangled relationships, gossip and quirky personalities interplay in small town politics. It's a dark comedy featuring a love story between a divorced naval wife and a lobsterman.

For research on S.A.D., I went to church. There are a large number of Catholics in Maine from the early French colonists and the Irish farmers who immigrated during the potato famine. In Brunswick there are two Catholic communities historically divided by the railroad tracks. On the downtown side are the French Catholics at St. John’s.

I attended the Irish Catholic church and was surprised by how casual it was. The choir leader is usually shoeless, and few people dress up. Afterward people hang out for doughnuts and coffee – there were many familiar faces. At this popular church there are three masses on Sunday and one on Saturday evening and on weekday mornings.

I was surprised to find that The Seventh-day Adventist Church was not that different. There were hymns and Bible stories with an uplifting sermon. The pastor was a well-spoken woman, and the pews were full of young families and the elderly. The evangelicals weren’t dancing in the aisle, although there was more talk of salvation and seeing the light.

Researching my novels has been a broadening experience for me. Like the weather, Maine is never what you’d expect.

Horses on Popham Beach last Saturday.

Dog Blog

Henry with Stella 2004

“The dog ate my driver’s license,” I said at Motor Vehicles. I had to show her the half chewed card before she believed me. Then I had to wait for her to stop laughing.

We shouldn’t have gotten Stella in the first place. My husband, Henry, was having heart problems, but the children had already picked a puppy on Cape Cod. I called the breeder to explain. Before I could say anything, she told me we could have our first choice. My daughter hadn’t gotten over losing our first dog the year before, and my son wanted to know if his father would die too.

I agreed to drive into Boston to pick up the puppy, even though Henry was in no shape to travel. My friend Elizabeth drove down with me instead. She was one of the few people who didn’t think I was making a huge mistake, and she was right. We needed that crazy puppy for comic relief.

It wasn’t always funny. Stella ate herself sick on mushrooms and tried to commit suicide by chewing through a safety bottle of Advil. She left tooth marks on my father’s slipper when my parents came up so I could be with Henry in the hospital. My friend Mark Wild and his family offered to look after Stella on those days.

Other friends brought meals or took the kids overnight. When an ambulance arrived at our door, my retired neighbor crossed the street to watch the kids. Al didn’t even call first. Henry was turning blue, but I didn’t panic. I knew the paramedic; he was my friend’s brother, Peter Wild. A small town is special.

On and off through his recovery, I was still working, and Henry needed to rest in a quiet house. One weekend I loaded up the kids and the puppy to drive to Georgetown Island for a painting sale. During the week Stella yipped in her crate when I tried to write. She made me get out and walk in the sunlight and the kids giggle with delight.

My work and that needy puppy kept me sane as the months dragged into two years. I also learned from the experience to include comedy even when writing tragedy. Shakespeare figured that out before me.

For a year now Henry has been healthy. He’s finally on just the right medication with a pacemaker, and the puppy had grown into a somewhat more obedient dog. Still, today Stella brought me a chewed pencil in two parts as if she wanted to help me write. She’s good company even with the trouble.

MA2 Shaun Hogan with MWD Paco, bomb dog 2006

Researching Moose Crossing, I met the world’s most obedient dog. I imagined a scene with a police dog tracking a missing child through the woods, but was my vision accurate? In a classic small town moment, I discovered that my daughter’s soccer coach, Shaun Hogan, commanded the bomb dogs at Brunswick Naval Air Station. He’d trained his partner dog, Paco, to track humans as well and offered to stage a re-enactment from my book at the base. Paco was one of the dogs that sniffed out the 9/11 site before the presidential visit last fall.

Running behind Shaun as Paco tracked the scent, my fiction came to life. The passage is only a couple of pages, but it is true. Shaun, a former elementary school teacher, even checked the language for me. I spoke to a judge, police detectives, computer scientists, cyber-crime experts, missing children organizations, historians and a state wildlife ecologist about moose. It’s fiction, but I still like to get it right.

Sloppy facts and grammatical mistakes irritate me. That doesn’t mean rules can’t be broken. Natural dialogue is not always grammatically correct, and there is always room for poetic license. The trick is to create an imaginary world that sounds both plausible and appealing. The research is fun and takes me out of my office into the real world. Writers need more than dogs for company.

Literary Heroes

On Valentine’s Day it’s snowing and nine degrees. The kids are home from school with up to eight inches expected. They're outside, installing a second ice window in their fort. My husband is coming home rather than meeting me for a romantic lunch in town. Still, fresh snow is good, like a blank sheet of paper waiting for new words.

My favorite non-fiction author,Tracy Kidder, had “a problem of goodness” when writing Mountains Beyond Moutains. It is a chronicle of Dr. Paul Farmer's global quest to cure the poor of illness. Kidder explained to a packed auditorium at Bowdoin College last Friday that it is the reporter’s duty to dig up the dirty secrets. And yet Kidder couldn’t find a chink in Farmer’s armor. A friend had told me that Farmer is called “the saint” by his coworkers. He seemed too good to be real. “Honesty is necessary but not sufficient to make what you believe to be true to be true to readers.”

In order to make the book believable, Kidder inserted himself as a character in his book for the first time. He became the everyman foil to the selfless, brilliant Farmer and takes the reader along for a ride through a world of darkness, following the light of hope. We travel with Kidder and Farmer to poverty stricken Haiti, Russia and Peru and see first hand what a difference a small group of people can make in setting up clinics to cure the poor of TB and other illnesses. Partners in Health succeeded where governments had failed.

Kidder’s other literary problem was that he might alienate his reader. “Good provokes and makes us think about things we are not comfortable about.” Such as the fact that our American “life of privilege is built at least in part by misery elsewhere.” Employing the first person narrative, Kidder candidly shows how he, like you the reader, is less than perfect and even selfish. Even so we can still so do our bit to narrow the gap between rich and poor to a more “dignified poverty.” It’s a message of hope instead of despair.

At the end of the moving presentation, a preppy Bowdoin student turned to her friend and said, “Now, I want to be a doctor!”



I joined a long line of students and professors at the signing. Bowdoin senior Selina Asante was raised by grandparents in Ghana before moving to New Jersey. Like Farmer, she chose to study anthropology and science at college. After graduation, she will return to Ghana to volunteer with Unite for Sight. She found Kidder’s words inspiring as I did hers. Kidder was thrilled to hear about Selina’s plans from me. He said that his own daughter was in medical school but modestly took no credit for it.

Kidder, so well spoken and charmingly funny on stage, seemed almost shy when talking one-on-one unscripted. I was surprised that the author, who won a Pulitzer for his engaging book on emerging computer technology, had never read a blog, but he asked for my website address with the curiosity of a journalist. What I love the most about Kidder’s writing is how he sucks you completely into the world of computers, house builders, school children or health aid workers. His characters are believable and his true books read like novels, which was why I had wrongly assumed he was a computer nerd.

Then again Kidder also wrote Hometown about small town life in Western Mass. and his first question to me was, “You live here?” This from a man who had just visited Farmer’s plumbing free shack in Haiti! Maine in winter must appear equally remote and not the first place where you’d expect to find a blogging novelist in a black turtleneck and boot cut jeans. I love that when talented writers, like Kidder, come to Maine, I actually get the opportunity to meet them.

I met one of my favorite fiction authors, Haruki Murakami, in my mudroom. My husband was taking him out to dinner with other Japan scholars at Bowdoin. I had just that day finished writing the first draft of Moose Crossing. Odder than the talking cat in Kafka on the Shore was the reclusive author’s appearance in my home on that auspicious night.

Murakami was soft-spoken and surprisingly down to earth given the surreal, disturbing tone of his original work. With almost child-like delight, he spoke about discovering some rare jazz records at Vinyl Haven in town and found Maine charming. Murakami shared my joy in finishing a manuscript and wished me the best of luck in getting published. It must have been good karma because that draft of Moose Crossing led me to my agent, Jean Naggar.

There are many fine writers who reside in Maine. My favorite elementary school author is my daughter. She wrote a scary story, The Nevergreen Forest, featuring a white-faced witch with a “voice like fingernails screeching against the chalk-board.” Even adult writers can learn a lesson from her book. Remember to employ all the senses, not just sight, when writing descriptive prose, and draw from your own experiences even when writing fantasy.

When she grows up, my daughter wants to be a writer or a photographer (she took the photo of me on skis in the second blog 1/24/07.) With help from friends, she is starting back up the school newspaper. Always drawing, writing or reading, my daughter won’t leave the house without a notebook. She’s been very curious and excited about my book. I read only the first chapter of Moose Crossing to my children (with a few sentences removed.) They laughed and loved it. It’s fun to be a literary hero, if only in my nine-year-old daughter’s eyes!

Haruki Murakami photo by Marion Ettlinger.

Good Beginnings

I met my last reader, Mary Sreden, for lunch at Renaissance Bistro in Brunswick. Across from the old mill on the Androscoggin River, the tiny restaurant is a crimson gem of local art and ingredients. I have to admit I enjoyed the atmosphere more than the food, but that was only because the mint dressing was too oily on my duck salad. My starter, an apple-pear-squash soup, was very good. It was cozy and warm, which was a relief since the morning’s minus five was still below plus five at noon. The bright sun helped, but the stiff breeze did not.

Mary is a nurse who grew up in the Midwest and attended state university. Last June she left her four children with her husband and joined a male crew to deliver a sailboat across the Atlantic. She was the cook and nurse but had no previous sailing experience aside from day tripping. The seas were rough, and she came home bruised yet loved it. I figured she could tackle the novel experience of reading critically, especially since she’s a voracious consumer of women’s fiction. I had noted and admired her ability to speak her mind but with tact and sensitivity.

If you don’t count my family and my literary agency, I’ve had six readers. These women have read drafts of Moose Crossing and offered invaluable commentary. Half of my readers were writer/editor friends, but the others were typical readers of my genre, commercial women’s fiction. Half were local and the others “from away,” as we say in Maine.

When I asked Mary to read, I had just added a prologue and cut over 30 slow pages from my opening. The problem was I had the 101 other versions in my head. I needed fresh eyes to find the flaws and the vestigial traces of old plot.

Mary found an irritating dialogue and one embarrassingly corny line, but she enjoyed the rest. She mentioned several scenes that were either funny or emotionally resonant. The characters felt real to her. Most reassuringly, she was totally hooked on the new prologue and eager to read beyond the opening chapters.

I often find what a reader doesn’t say is as important as what she does say. If she doesn’t mention a scene, perhaps it is too slow and could be cut. The trick is to preserve what is working and prune out the rest, no matter how hard you worked on it. This is no more crucial than in the opening chapters of a novel.

I love the first title in the Lemony Snicket series: The Bad Beginning. Openings are so challenging partly because you write them before you truly know where you’re going. You need to grab the reader’s attention in those first few pages or you’re lost.

Just remember your last trip to a bookstore. How far did you read? I spent a morning at Bookland reading first pages before I tackled my new beginning. Search inside Jodi Picoult’s novels for the catchy first sentence.

Even with a punchy prologue, the job isn’t over. You must move the narrative along while introducing characters and setting while weaving in back story. Good writing takes not only talent, it takes the ability to absorb criticism and use it constructively.

First Blog: From Maine to New York

How hard can it be to get from Maine to New York? Friday night (1/5/07) I was editing my first novel, Moose Crossing, while waiting in the Portland airport for hours. They announce that Kennedy is closing due to weather delays. I rebook myself on a flight the next morning and call my husband, Henry. He says he’ll drive in to get me and leaves our twelve -year-old son babysitting his sleeping younger sister.

I get a call on my cell from Henry, “I’m okay, but the car is totaled.” A sudden rainstorm had made the car hydroplane off the highway into a ditch. Some college students, one a former boy scout, stopped to help. By two in the morning we are all back home in Brunswick, minus one Subaru. Henry doesn’t even have a scratch.

At the NYC Party: Petria, Me, Cathy, Jen, Llisa, Amy and Deb

On three hours of sleep, I still enjoy my friend’s party in New York Saturday night (1/6/07). She is the first of my Dalton School friends to turn forty and does it with style. There must have been thirty people there, and I talk to maybe twenty. Petria May, in peacock blue Pucci, quit law to open a vintage clothing store in the Berkshires. Llisa Demetrios, a sculptor from California wine country, bemoans the rising cost of bronze since 9/11. A New York investment banker reads only electronic books. He’s reading War and Peace on his Blackberry one sentence at a time. I promise a book group that I’ll visit when (and if) my novel gets published.

As I leave, my hostess asks if I met their friend the editor who just got promoted at a good publishing house.

What editor? Oh, well.


On Monday (1/8/07) it's raining sideways. I borrow a raincoat and umbrella from my mother and head out in a short skirt and high-heeled flower power boots to meet Jean Naggar, my agent, for a 12:30 lunch at A La Turka on East 74th. Only a few blocks from arriving on time, a man in a wheelchair asks, “Miss, can you help me?” He’d scattered about 20 quarters all over the sidewalk. What would the ethicist say? I bend down to help him, and my hair blows wildly in the wind. I’m wet and running late. I arrive at an empty restaurant and go downstairs to fix myself up. My hand comes away from the banister brown with varnish, but it scrubs off. It’s now 12:45 so I call my agent’s assistant only to learn that the time was meant to be 1:00. By then I’ve had time to look back over my manuscript.

Jean is always a delight and her enthusiasm infectious. She brought along her daughter Jennifer Weltz, who handles their foreign and film rights, because she thinks we have a lot in common. We do. Their advice is helpful and well worth the trip. I come home re-energized to tackle the final revisions. There is more rewriting than writing to creating a novel.

Visit my website: www.sarahlaurence.com