The Blurry Realm

It’s official. I’ve become a writer who, in the process of writing and researching, has blurred the line between fact and fiction.

We’ve come back to Rockport, MA where my novel is set. Since our last visit, I’ve completed two drafts and I’m now fully in the revision process which also means I’m headlong into research which, of course, warrants a visit to the place of inspiration.

And, of course, the moment we turned from the main road, 128 North, onto Route 127 that leads into Rockport, I was pitched into the Blurry Realm. Then, when we walked into the Inn where I’ve set my novel, the innkeepers, Tobey and John Shepherd, held out their arms to me and said, “Welcome Home!” My husband, too, was visibly pleased that we’ve come back. It was a moment incomparable to others I’ve experienced with each return trip to this house and this village, for with each visit here I’ve felt myself enter a kind of dizzy space wherein the characters I’ve created and the days through which they move in this house and this town have taken on very real lives and merged with my present day reality. This re-entry feels very different. For one thing, I’ve toted the hefty draft of my novel, dog-eared in places that need further research, and for another, I’ve finished graduate school, resolved to complete the book’s revisions this summer and send it to agents. It has a beginning, middle, and an end and needs work, absolutely, but it’s a book and it lives and breathes with characters I’ve created out of this house in a time I’ve never lived, in a language that feels frighteningly easy for me to use, with feelings very near the surface.

So, today, sitting in the parlor, a place I use often in my story, I’m writing this piece to honor the pleasing space of that Blurry Realm where my mind resides, to welcome the confusion, and turn my thoughts toward the tasks I’ve set for myself for these two days in Rockport. We’ll begin with a drive around the area that I’ve looked at many times but not truly mapped in my head, for writing came before this kind of refinement of detail. Then I’ll spend a couple of hours – for the second time in as many years – at the Sandy Bay Historical Society’s library, just poking around in Rockport’s granite and fishing industry archives, studying journals kept by erstwhile citizens of the village, people who lived in the mid-19th century. I don’t know if the curator I met back in 2006 is still living, one Cynthia Peckham who was descended from so many who settled Sandy Bay (1690-1840) which then became Rockport. I’ve been getting messages from Gwen Stephenson this past week, a most helpful curator herself, which made me wonder about Mrs. Peckham. I also don’t know if the prolific town historian, Eleanor Parsons, is still living. She would be in her mid-90’s and I met her two years earlier as well, sat in her living room and talked about Hannah Jumper who lives and breathes in my novel, too. Mrs. Parsons, possessed, ironically, of the same surname as my protagonist, was a generous help. I must find out if she’s still living even if I don’t meet with her this visit, or ever again. The three books I purchased from her have been an enormous help.

There’s more on my docket, such as a visit to Dogtown Common, a pass by some granite quarries, a cruise around Manchester-by-the-Sea to get a lay of that land because (rather than Newburyport) it’s the place where my heroine was born and where her parents still reside. I want to sit in the Sawyer Free Library, where my novel’s hero, Theodore Abel, was born out of the archives of the pages of a fisheries chronicle and find out what exactly was going on in Rockport in 1855-56, who was the President, and sundry details in the days lived 150 years ago.

I did get caught up in the research two years ago, last time I was here, and promptly suspended that process, knowing that with only half a novel written at the time, all the riveting details I was finding were going to paralyze me. So, I left it and told myself and my husband that research would be the reward of completion, that this visit would be the cap on getting the book written, however much drivel it contained.

And now, here I am, home again, in this parlor, with the entranceway just outside it and the dining room on the opposite side of the front hallway, the sitting/sun room and porch adjacent to it, the kitchen and pantry off the dining room. The cupola, which I visited just last night when we arrived as evening came on, was so familiar to me. When I climbed its narrow staircase from the third floor and from those ogling windows high above so many of the other rooftops in Rockport, I felt the grey sky pressing lightly down on the village, caught the gulls lofting on the breeze, saw that the telescope pointed toward Mill Pond Meadow, a place that figures prominently in my book, and saw the line of the ocean, that Marianne Parsons looks to so often for a sighting of her husband, just to my left. It is a place I know as well in my head as I do in its reality.

Or do I have that backwards?