Thanks For the Memories...I Think
Still one of my favorite photos taken on Monhegan Island more than twenty years ago.
John Clark pondering aplenty these days. Let’s begin with characters. I’ve lived in Maine most of my life and trust me, it’s chock full of characters, especially in small towns. Those of us who have been around for a while find it a challenge to suppress a guffaw when PFA’s (people from away) wax poetic about having visited Maine, usually by telling us ‘I got all the way up to Old Orchard Beach on my trip’.
Bubby, if that’s as far as you got, you never really left Massachusetts. Opinions vary, but most people agree there are two Maines, but where the dividing line runs changes from person to person and election. I grew up in Union 17 miles inland from Rockland and Camden on a chicken farm overlooking Sennebec Lake. I earned money for things like gas and school clothes by taking care of those chickens and later by raking blueberries and working in the factory that processed them.
I graduated third in a class of thirty-eight, the biggest ever in town. Two years later, the high school closed and kids were bussed to Medomak Valley High School which served five towns. That changed the character of teen social life considerably.
Want to talk culture shock? I went from that tiny school where my concept of a minority group was Nancy Simmons, the only catholic attending school, to Arizona State University which had an enrollment of 29,000 at the time. Add in every race, ethnic, and religious group, extreme dry heat and unlimited access to drugs and you can understand how and why my perception of life changed markedly.
One of Maine's famous 'Praying Anteaters'.
Since my draft number was 29 and we were in the middle of the Vietnam War, which I actively opposed, I had to return to Maine to deal with my draft board. When they accepted my claim of being a conscientious objector, I was ordered to spend two years working at the larger of two state psychiatric facilities. That was a few years before the push to actively treat patients and return them to the community took place. During the twenty-seven years I worked there, I met and made friends with a lot of people who had a mental illness. Some of my best characters are composites mined from that time.
Add in my active alcoholism, family friction, busted relationships, and eventually getting married to a nurse with a psychiatric background, plus finally getting sober just before our first daughter was born, and you see where some of my perspective on life and situations worth using in stories come from.
Like people and places, beach stones lend themselves to creativity.
I didn’t set out to become a writer or a librarian, but ended up as both. My mother, A. Carman Clark was one of my major influences. She started writing in the late 1950s, researching bread recipes and the history of rhubarb in America. Mom began writing a weekly newspaper column From The Orange Mailbox and also put together the garden page for the Camden Herald. When she was encouraged to put her best columns in a book, she did so and it had the same title as her column. It won two national awards. She then pulled out a manuscript she’d abandoned twenty years before and published her first mystery The Maine Mulch Murder at age 63.
My sister, Kate Flora, is the most prolific writer in the family, having published some twenty-five books. She has two series, one featuring Thea Kozak, a private school consultant who can’t avoid murders, the other a police procedural set in Portland, featuring detective Joe Burgess. She’s also written several true crime books and co-authored a biography of Maine game warden Roger Guay.
Even Mother Nature knows about tangled webs.
With a mother and sibling as writers, you can imagine how interesting family gatherings could become. Mom is no longer with us, but when she was, I’d go to the farm to hunt or cut wood and we’d talk writing. Mom was also a recovering alcoholic, so we talked a lot of program as well, not to mention her being a true character magnet. I met some incredible people through her, including a couple in AA who built their house from materials scavenged from the transfer station in their town.
Add in the unique small town experiences of serving as chair of the planning board, participating in town meetings, and enjoying grange suppers, coupled with carefully honed listening skills, and you might see the tip of my character and situation reservoir.
Here are a couple snippets heard in the past. My late neighbor Edna talking about an unethical businessman in town: “When he dies, they’ll have to screw him into the ground, he’s so crooked.” Then my friend Jack, qualifying at an AA meeting years ago: “When I was a kid, I liked being alone. It was the only time I understood all the rules.” He gave me permission to use that in a story which I sold to one of the New England Crime anthologies published by Level Best Books.
Give yourself a moment or two and reflect upon some of the places and people in your past. Would they make interesting characters in a forthcoming story?
!! Those Vietnam-era experiences have got to be a YA.
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