From Whence it Comes - IWSG May 2023

Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of  Alex Cavanaugh.  To find other contributors, click here. Thank you to this month’s co-hosts: Joylene Nowell Butler, Ronel Janse van Vuuren, Meka James, Diane Burton, Victoria Marie Lees, and M Louise Barbour.

This month's optional question: When you are working on a story, what inspires you?

The former owners of our home used to dump trash on the property. When we cleaned up the yard, my husband discovered a couple of antique glass bottles, pre-twist top. I cleaned them out, put them on my windowsill and used them as a bud vases. One day when trying to jog my creative juices, I wrote a scene I posted in Middle Passages about a woman with three similar bottles. Then came the questions. Who was the woman? What was the significance of the bottles? The story changed radically, but that scene triggered my first attempt at a novel.

Anything can inspire. Back in the late 1800’s in my hometown, an eccentric man built a kind of amusement park on his 800-acre estate. His “folly” featured a hotel, a “pirate’s grotto,” a bear pit, a crystal palace, a monkey house, and a camera obscura. There was a water tower with a mammoth statue of Poseidon. He dammed up a stream and made his own lake. The property featured mechanical jokes as well as progressive ideas. At one exhibit guests were invited to drink “Laughing Water” and after they did, the floor would tilt to make them feel drunk. He maintained a fastidious “piggery” with the innovative thought that taking care of the animals used for food would make for healthier eating.

Years later, the property was sold, parceled off and developed. Growing up, kids I knew who lived in the area talked about fishing in the lake and playing in the woods around the ruins of the old grotto, but I never experienced any of it. From my side of town, unless you lived in or visited one of those houses, the land and pond were physically inaccessible. But they weren’t inaccessible to my imagination. I used a fictionalized version of the ruins of that old estate in one of my books. 

More inspiration? A family at our church arranged for a memorial service honoring the passengers of an Irish immigrant ship who perished in wreck off the coast of our town in 1849. Once the service became an annual event, I did some research. Newspaper articles written about the tragedy listed ninety-nine official passengers on the ship manifest (the maximum allowed) but according to witnesses, as many as twenty off-the-record and nameless passengers traveled also. Twelve passengers survived the wreck. Forty-four people are buried in an unmarked grave in our Central Cemetery. (A marker was raised in their memory later.) Other victims were buried up and down the coast. I was haunted by the idea of the unregistered victims whose names were never reported. Would their families have ever known what happened to them? I wove the angst of unknowing into an unreliable character, threw in a missing child with correlations related to 150+ year old Irish shipwreck and it all came together in one of my novels.

Inspiration comes from anything. Trash, history, church, or simply walking down the street. All it takes is imagination.

What inspires your best writing?

The Unexpected - IWSG August 2019

It's IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh, our brilliant ninja leader. The awesome co-hosts for August are Renee Scattergood, Sadira Stone, Jacqui Murray, Tamara Narayan, and LG Keltner. To find a list of other contributors and to link to their posts, click here. 

August's question: Has your writing ever taken you by surprise. For example, a positive and belated response to a submission you'd forgotten about or an ending you never saw coming? 

Other than a very high-level idea of where things will end, when I start a project I’m usually not sure of the details until they spew out of my fingertips. Surprises occur all the time. That said, I suppose the biggest one was getting twenty-thousand words into a tale and realizing the story I thought I was writing wasn’t the story at all. Cue the sound of brakes screeching.

Truth be told, there are things in life that rather haunt me--pieces of local history, intriguing places I’m compelled to visit again and again. One such place is a memorial in our town cemetery placed in memory of the Brig St. John, an Irish immigrant ship out of Galway. In the summer of 1849, it headed to Boston filled with folks escaping the potato famine, or The Great Hunger (or the Great Famine) as it is called in Ireland. After an uneventful six-week trip, they arrived off the coast of Cape Cod where they anchored and celebrated the end of their journey. The next morning, on what should have been the last day of the voyage, they set sail again and ran into a storm. With about 13 nautical miles left to their destination, the ship was dragged by the wind and smashed against Grampus Ledge off the South Shore of Massachusetts, a set of rocks my husband and I sail by regularly. Of the ninety-nine people estimated to be on the ship, twelve made it to shore alive. Forty-five bodies were buried in a mass grave in our town cemetery. It is assumed the remaining victims were consigned to the sea. The monument I visit was erected many years after the fact as a marker for the forty-five lost souls who washed up on our shores.

So back to my stalled novel. When I stomped on the brakes, it was because I pictured the memorial to these victims. The tragedy has always stuck hard in my heart, all those desperate folks making it so close to a new life, but then, simply not. Suddenly, it became imperative to include some of this history in my book. I started all over and the next thing I knew, a mystical apparition of a boy from a fictional representation of that ship began appearing and disappearing from my main character's apple tree. I began to research the ship and all sorts of Irish folktales and traditions, many of which made their way into my book. I had no sense I’d write something with supernatural elements, seeped in Celtic lore, but it was almost as if the mysterious boy directed me. In the end, at a high level, the theme of the story is still the same. So is the main character. But every subsequent detail comes from my moment of clarity, when I realized I had to honor The Brig St. John and when the spirit of a young boy, the catalyst for all the subsequent action in the book decided he was going to drive my tale. 

How has your writing surprised you?

A Matter of Degree

When our most recent Nor’easter, “Athena” arrived last week (Who knew “winter” storms get labeled now, too?), I choked when I heard her name.  Athena, the Greek Goddess of Wisdom and “Just” Wars, pounded our coast eight days after Sandy. For a while Wednesday and Thursday, I wondered what wisdom irate Mother Nature sought to impart as she launched her second offensive in less than two weeks. Patience, perhaps? Maybe fortitude?  Or perhaps, it was something else. 

 

We get these Nor’easters, and we get through them, but during Athena, following so closely on the heels of Sandy’s devastation, something occurred that brought to mind how fate factors into our lives.

   

The coast south of Boston is littered with sharp rocks.  The area’s past is colored with tragic shipwrecks—including a horrible story of Irish of immigrants who died within sight of our unforgiving shores.  Only a fool pilots the waters anywhere near us without up-to-date navigational charts.  Once, my husband watched a man throttle his powerboat outside a marked channel at the mouth of our harbor.  Before he could finish saying, “That guy is nuts” that “guy” hit ledge and began to sink. 

Keeping that in mind, tell me how this happens? With the wind blasting and massive swells pounding on shore and off shore ledges this week, an empty fishing boat from Gloucester, a city north of Boston, (13.5 nautical miles away, or about 60 miles by car— an interminable time through traffic should you choose to drive), pulls its mooring and travels across Massachusetts Bay to the South Shore.  It makes it from one coast to another, without capsizing and without hitting rock.  It rides Athena’s mountainous waves and washes up, relatively unscathed in front of a house, which happens to sit on the brink of one of the few small stretches of ledge-free coast in our town. 

I’m sure the owner of that boat is cursing the mooring that didn’t hold, but I hope, also, he is counting his blessings.  I think of folks in New York and New Jersey, who’ve lost everything—scrabbling for scraps of their lives—chasing family photos as they blow across debris littered lots.  Then I imagine that fishing boat, twirling and spinning across miles of dangerous water, missing the Grampus Ledges, the Black Rocks, Minot’s Ledge, Harding Ledge, Thieves Ledge, and so many other obstacles, to land, battered but whole, on the other side of Massachusetts Bay. 

I caught a photo of the boat during the height of the storm.  The next day, the sky was scrubbed clean and blue.  I stepped out with the camera, chasing a picture of the still ferocious sea crashing over our lighthouse, and as I made my way down the coast, I passed the stranded boat again.  Seeing it there, safe and whole, I understood Athena's lesson. 

There’s a mighty fine line between awesome and awful.