What would Ned Do?

Whenever I start a new project, I’ve got in the habit of choosing an image, which is somehow emblematic of the underlying spirit of the novel. It’s both a fun and a commemorative exercise, which began accidentally but is now a habit. It also makes me feel as if I am doing something besides sitting and staring as my life circles the drain.

These totems give me a feeling for the story I want to tell. They help me establish the underlying mood and they buddy up with me as I write, often mysteriously deepening and enriching my experience of the characters and the language. While these signifiers don’t always make logical connections to the novel, they conduct a kind of whisper campaign that influences my understand of the story and how I tell it.

Sometimes the associations are obvious, as in the case of The Miracle on Monhegan Island, which was narrated by not just any dog, but my real-life dog, Ned, who is one of the great loves of my life and whose depiction in the novel, is exactly as I have found him to be in life. Ned wields a powerful influence in my life and it is not unusual for me to ask myself on a regular basis: What would Ned do?

The original title of the manuscript was The Purveyor of Wonderment, which is what the character of Hugh Monahan called his painting of Ned as written about in the novel. It is a painting I own that hangs over the fireplace mantle.

I had long been interested in writing about the phenomena of Marian apparitions, which featured prominently in Monhegan, mostly because I have always wanted to experience one firsthand—Fatima compelling my imagination in early childhood—as long as I didn’t have to become a nun as a result or lead a life of quiet piety and in prayerful disregard of self. I have had to settle for this representative statue instead, which is probably in everyone’s best interest, including the Mother of God.

Interestingly, as I wrote I also provided a daily soundtrack, singing Bring Flowers of the Rarest on an endless soul-destroying loop. These are the sacrifices novelists must sometimes make.

While working on Apologize, Apologize!, I relied on an old photo of the poet Rupert Brooke for inspiration. He is one of my earliest crushes, along with Mickey Rooney, circa Andy Hardy, and Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities. (Hey, hey, they were my Monkees.)

Brooke was also an obsessive interest of Anais Flanagan’s, one of the novel’s key characters.

Before writing The Last Summer of the Camperdowns, I spent time looking at a black-and-white image of a young girl in a hammock, origin unknown, which represented the first flickering of the character who would become Riddle Camperdown.

I am currently finishing up two novels, one set in Nova Scotia, for which The Recently Deflowered Girl by Edward Gorey holds some inexplicable significance and another set in multiple locations in Canada, the U.S. and South America. I have invited my late Great-Aunt Madge along for the ride, an eccentric presence in life and in art.

The dreamy print depicting life at Scaroon Manor on Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks is evocative of another time and another place that somehow found its way to me and has informed aspects of my writing in another novel, which is set mostly in Upper State New York.

I rarely know much about a story before I write it, relying on tiny pinholes of discovery, faint glimmerings of what lies ahead. Only through the act of writing do I discover the story. When I felt those first intimations about Camperdowns, I found myself repeatedly visualizing a keyhole in a fence. I could look through it and see the vague shape of a young girl. I could hear the distant murmur of her voice.

The keyhole through which I saw Riddle, would eventually become the keyhole through which she saw the terrible event on which the novel pivots.