Have you ever asked yourself, "Now
where did that thought come from?" Creative ideas are the
result of a collision among two or more previously unrelated
experiences, events or ideas. With fiction, I think many
ingredients get thrown into the mixing bowl, some of which lurk
secretly in the deepest recesses of the author's mind, and it is often
difficult to trace the origin and evolution of a story.
Not
so with Sea Room. A theme that has always intrigued me—how some people
take action, even in the face of overwhelming events, while others
remain passive victims—forms a basis of this book. And with
that as a grounding, I can trace almost precisely the many thoughts
and impressions which contributed to Sea Room's story line.
Thirty
years ago I wrote a short story involving a grandfather, a grandson
and a boat. However, I then became consumed by the corporate
world and nothing ever came of it. Not a sentence of that story
appears in Sea Room. Nevertheless the germ of the idea—grandfather,
grandson, boat—simmered in my brain and every so often I said,
"You know, you ought to do something with that story."
Also other stories began floating around in my mind. So,
eventually I walked away form a lucrative career as a management
consultant, made the difficult adjustment to a much simpler life, and,
quite simply, wrote,
Then
one day, while in the Berkshires, I visited the Norman Rockwell museum
where I saw a painting called Outward Bound. You may have
seen it—an old man and a
young boy stand gazing out at a sailing ship. The old man is
bent at his waist. The boy has a wistful posture. Seagulls
spiral overhead. The day is sunny but not for long; ominous
clouds are massing.
The
night before seeing that painting I was reading Stephen Ambrose's book
about the D-Day landings. So as I stood gazing at the painting I
wondered what if, out beyond the horizon in the picture, troops were
landing on Omaha Beach. Questions naturally followed: who was
the old man? The boy? Was someone they knew—the son of one; the
father of the other—landing on the beach? And with that simple
convergence of ideas, the characters of Pip, Jordi and Gil were born
and a story started to take shape.
This
stirred my interest in what we've come to call the "Greatest
Generation." So I listened to music from WWII (music often
inspires me) and the temper of the book began to emerge. For
example, the character of Lydie, the young wife bravely enduring the
painful absence of her husband, came almost fully rounded from Jo
Stafford's song "I'll Be Seeing You". The song "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?" remarkably delivered up
a sketch of the character Nana, the feisty and deeply religious mother
who declares war on her son's enemy through Victory Gardens and scrap
drives and who intercedes with God to spare the life of her only
remaining child.
I
immersed myself in books about the period. I read stories.
I talked with my French-Canadian relatives. I listened intently
to my mother-in-law who met her future husband on D-Day in a hospital
in England where they worked, waiting for casualties from the
beaches. My wife and I toured the coast of Maine looking for a
setting and fell in love with the Blue Hill peninsula. We spent
a great deal of time doing local research. I read all the essays
of E.B. White who lived there. I even took a course in
half-model carving and studied wooden boat building.
So
I stirred all these ingredients—my love of
take-charge people, my long-ago short story, the Rockwell painting,
the Ambrose book, WWII music, family stories, the coast of Maine, boat
building—into the pot of my writer's imagination and out came Sea Room.
—Norman G. Gautreau
From
the Spring 2002 Macadam/Cage Publishing Catalogue
for the Author's Upcoming Appearances