Norman G. Gautreau
Thoughts on Island
of First Light
After
a career as a management consultant and public speaking
coach, Norman Gautreau left the business world to
pursue his writing career.
His first
novel Sea Room, was published in 2002 and won the 2003 Massachusetts
Book Award for Fiction. It was also chosen as the 2004 All Wakefield Reads
selection. His
second novel, Island of First Light,
was published in 2004.
Mr. Gautreau
writes fulltime, with his wife as a loving but tough editor. They live in
Wakefield, Massachusetts.
Set
on two fictional islands in Downeast Maine, Island of First Light
is a novel about the continuous struggle to rise above troubles, even
horrors, surrounding us and the long road through guilt and shame back to
joy and peace.
My intention was to view this drama of the human spirit through the prisms
of four very different personalities. Thus I ended up with several
interweaving stories centered around these four major characters: a woman
disoriented by a disintegrating marriage and propelled by a profound sense
of terror; a retired fisherman who remains deeply troubled by personal
loss and by things he witnessed during World War II; a Passamaquoddy
Indian woman who suffers in an abusive relationship and turns to her
Native American heritage for solace; and the fourth character, presented
through a journal he kept, a Jesuit priest who came to the aid of the
Acadians (my ancestors) when they were expelled from their homes in Nova
Scotia. The journal also reveals secrets that condemn the ancestors of the
contemporary residents of the island.
What
I wanted to do with all the relationships in the intertwined stories is
speak to the ways modern society has forced us to redefine the notion of
family from the traditional one, centered around the nuclear family, to a
broader notion of a community, made necessary in the face of overwhelming
events. In short, I wanted to explore how peaple reach out to others when
confronted with the hard truths of life.
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