Moon Tide (38 page)

Finally, I would like to thank my son, Jack Clifton Tripp, for reminding me over and over again that life comes first, and my husband, Steven Tripp, who has read every draft, every phrase, and endured every temperamental mood, who forgives me and loves me and takes me for walks and tells me stories and sweeps up the day-to-day details of our life so I can write.

Throughout this book, I have used italics to heighten a moment, to indicate a different breed of thought, a shadow voice. In several cases, I have used italics to reference lines taken from other works, as indicated below:

Dawn Clifton Tripp

A READER’S GUIDE

Q: Where or how did you find inspiration for
Moon Tide
, and how did you move from that kernel of an idea to a fully developed story? What sparked the idea for this particular novel?

Dawn Clifton Tripp:
Moon Tide
is a novel that grew in me over time. In many ways, it grew out of my passion for the landscape of the town where I live. Apart from that, there was no single kernel or event that triggered the book. Eve had been with me for a while—the image of a child painting with food on the walls of her room because she could not express her vision or her grief in any other way. Jake came to me one day several years ago, while I was watching a man crawl around on the roof of the restaurant next door, painting the awning. I had my first image of Jake then, a young boy eeling on the river. That same summer, my grandmother was ill. I read to her, and I remember watching her face, deeply lined, her eyes half closed, half listening to me, half drifting off through old places. That night, I wrote the scene of Eve and Elizabeth in the library. I knew that I wanted to write a story of love and class, a story of memory and desire, and when I began to read about the Great Hurricane of 1938 that leveled this town,
leveled creatures, buildings, landscape indiscriminately, I knew that I wanted to write toward that event. I built the story from there.

Q: What about New England’s environment do you find so compelling?

DCT:
There are two particular aspects of New England that influenced
Moon Tide
. First, I am in love with the landscape here—its rugged beauty. I love the climate, the tides, the change of seasons, the sky, the light. I love the harshness of the winters and the storms that alter the shape of the marsh, the river channel and the dunes. I love how weather in New England can be fierce one day, calm the next; it can be gentle and brutal, magnificent, breathtaking, serene. I live on a barrier beach, and I love the toughness of the plants and creatures that survive here. I love the solitude.

The second aspect involves class tensions, which seem to run deeper in New England than in other parts of the country. I see class as an extremely powerful undercurrent of our individual and common mind, in part because it is an element we have ostensibly outgrown. Class is a force, particularly in small towns, that can be damaging and intensely pervasive. When I speak of class tensions, I include both the subtle and the overt; tensions between blue-collar workers and the people who hire them; the assumptions that each make about the other. In a coastal community, tensions between the locals and summer residents often run along class lines. In many respects class is like weather—implicit in every relationship, in every exchange.

Q: How do you shape your characters?

DCT:
Elizabeth is a character I have always wanted to write. An older woman who looks back on her life with longing and regret,
who sees, quite clearly, that she did not make the choices that she needed to make. There was a window she missed. On some level, she did not live her life as fully as she might have.

This is my greatest fear. It has been for as long as I can remember. That I would get to Elizabeth’s age, that I would reach the end of my life with so much left undone. And so I began to write this woman. At a certain point, however, I realized that she was arriving at understandings that were beyond me. They were not understandings I had created for her. They were understandings she was leading me to.

Maggie is similar. She was the most difficult character for me to write, because she is so far beyond me. Fathoms beyond me. The depth of her experience and her knowing.

Jake was inspired by my husband (that same man I saw painting the awning of the restaurant next door). Not so much with regard to the details of his life. But his essence; his core. In the course of the novel, Jake is the one character who is deep and steady and clear. In a sense, he is the wisest—he lives in his body, he lives in the world, rather than in his head. He stays true to what he wants. And in the end, it comes to him.

Q: You use nature, particularly the Great Hurricane of 1938, as a driving force in both the action and the emotional undercurrents of the novel. What drew you to this idea and how did you go about executing it?

DCT:
To me, the natural world is intensely alive. Always. I see this in the tides, in the ocean, in the wind. I see it in how the dunes migrate. I have a sort of rough faith that the natural world functions according to a logic and a will that we cannot, because of our humanness, completely understand. We try to predict its behavior, pin it down with calculations and science. But in the end, it is wild, and like things that are wild, it eludes us.

Eighty to one hundred years ago, the workings of a life were
more directly in tune with the workings of the natural world. Back then, Westport was primarily a fishing and farming community. People worked the river and the land. For many, that was their subsistence. It was how they made do. Their lives were determined by the change of season, by changes in the weather and the tides, by when the corn was planted and when the peas came up, by how the wind blew on any given day and how the fish ran. It was not an easier life, by any terms. There was a hardship to it that we cannot begin to comprehend, but at the same time, there was a texture, a connection to the natural world, that we simply do not have anymore.

One of the reasons Maggie is such an important figure for me is because in many ways she is the closest to the storm. She takes a similar path. She comes from a tropical place. She blows into town, and there is the sense, by the end of the novel, that for as long as she stays, she is just passing through. She is not from Westport. She is not rooted there, and yet she is closer to the workings of the natural world than the others are. I think she understands that earth is earth, no matter where you are from, no matter where you go.

Q: Could you discuss some of the other themes of the novel—such as memory, longing, redemption. Were you conscious of these themes as you were writing, or did they develop organically from the story, the characters, and the setting?

DCT:
Longing was the theme I was conscious of as I was writing
Moon Tide
. I wanted to explore the different shapes desire can take. For me, the spine of the novel was Jake’s longing for Eve—a longing so simple and singular and deep, it becomes almost magnetic. At the opposite extreme, Wes’s desire for Maggie is possessive and consuming. It swerves and grows twisted, awry. It triggers small cruelties and then a staggering act of violence.

Longing for place is everywhere through the book—and memory, it seems to me, is the vehicle for that. Maggie’s memory of the Central American world she came from—her past that she culls through until it is worn and she can leave it behind. Eve’s mother’s odd death is linked with her desire to return to the Western Australian bush where she was raised. For me, the most poignant longing of the novel is Elizabeth’s. Her longing for Ireland. Her longing for God. Her longing for old moments in her life where she might have made a different choice. As I was writing Elizabeth, I often thought of the phrase “the sin of the unlived life.” But what I sense Elizabeth discovers by the end of the book is that all of the deepest emotions that longing inspires—regret, fear, shame, passion, sadness, grief, and sometimes joy—to feel all of that at once is an act of aliveness. We don’t necessarily arrive at the object or place that we are reaching for. What matters is that we reach. We are meant to feel. Not necessarily to act on what we feel. Or to act in any way to control or injure another being. But to feel what we feel. To own it, claim it. Desire can cripple or destroy us, as it does Wes. But for Elizabeth, her desire is her salvation. She lets herself go, and it is that letting go, into her longing, into her life, that sets her free.

Q: Writers are often told to “write what they know,” but in historical fiction, like
Moon Tide
, an author must strike a balance between personal experience and historical research to make a book both credible and compelling. What research went into
Moon Tide
, and what process did you go through to reconcile historical fact with literary fiction?

DCT:
The adage of “write what you know” has never exactly worked for me, unless you are willing to bend the definition of knowing. Sometimes I feel I know my characters better than I know the people in my life. I know their secrets, their fears, their hungers. I know the smells, sounds, sights of their world.

In my experience, it is less important to write what you know than to write what you are compelled by. To write what you are desperate to write. And at the same time, to write into places that make you uncomfortable, places that make you afraid, to write into the underside of things; to explore, in some instances, worlds that are alien, different, strange, often to discover what you don’t know. To embark on a novel, I have to be intensely passionate about the characters and the world that I am writing into, because a novel can take years, day in and day out, years.

When I decided to set
Moon Tide
in the first part of the 1900s, I began to read everything I could find about the history of Westport. I scavenged local bookstores, libraries, collections at the Westport Historical Society. I talked to old-timers who remembered the storm, and I read and read and read. But I read less for historical fact and more to get a feel for the traditions, the landscape, the rhythms of day-to-day life as it was lived back then. Facts can create a spine for a work, but I believe that at a certain point, you need to abandon facts and let a story breathe.

Q: Eve, Maggie, and Elizabeth are women of different ages and class, yet their relationship to one another transcends these differences. The men in the book—Charles, Jake, Wes, Ben, and Patrick—whether they are rich or poor, young or old, are in conflict either with themselves or with one another. What are you saying about the relationship women have with one another versus the way men interact?

DCT:
I have the belief, and perhaps it is only my perception, that men tend to be more isolated by class differences, more pinned to their given roles. At the same time, men can interact with one another more freely through conflict. That doesn’t necessarily mean men cannot transcend differences of class or age, etc. It just means that conflict, or violence, is an elemental, and often acceptable,
language that men may resort to, or employ, among themselves.