Aker’s ideas about art are precisely what I tried to convey through Lark and these very ideals are represented by his most noted piece, The Dead Pearl Diver” that is housed in the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine.
Aker’s Dead Pearl Diver is a statue of a young man reclined across an embankment at the bottom of the sea. A finely sculpted fish net drapes across his lower torso and in the unseen negative space around the youthful figure is the “water” into which you the viewer momentarily are allowed to enter. The statue is rendered so lifelike that while standing there next to the young man, one might imagine that he is still breathing. But then you realize he is dead and then the paradox hits you. Of course he’s dead. He has drowned in that element and yet it is this very realization, which gives life to the marble.
I believe that everything I feel when I look at The Dead Pearl Diver is exactly Aker’s intended effect. The sorrow for a fallen young man who sought nothing more than to retrieve a beautiful pearl from the ocean floor is a common reaction to the piece, but a transcending message lingers with the viewer. The artist’s conveyance of this expression can only be achieved through the art, but if words came close to doing so then consider this excerpt from Aker’s article published in the January 1860 issue of The Atlantic Monthly: “the foremost purpose of an artist should be to claim and take possession of the self.” He later says that “genius (artist) is exquisitely fastidious, and the man whom it possess must live its life, or no life.” I somehow see this in the Dead Pearl Diver and imagine that the statue is actually the Akers himself, who indeed died as a young man.
Lark’s modern day experience of discovering herself in art springs directly from having lost her father in a drowning accident. Her grief for having lost her earthly father and her obsession with “The Dead Pearl Diver” hearken the greater, human struggle to determine spirituality. The title Swimming with Wings is a play on this idea as if to say that we are truly spirits mired in the waters of humanity. Just as this struggle is literally displayed through the religious polarity between Lark and her love, Peter Roma, the Jennison mansion literally hides the truth about their father’s death, and in so doing it symbolizes the greater mysteries in life. Likewise “The Dead Pearl Diver” takes both a literal and an underlying role in the story. When one looks deeply, though it is mentioned in but a few passages, the statue, it resonates with these same themes and thereby plays a role as predominantly as any one of the living characters.
In order to reveal that piece of the crime, Matt must travel back
over his years in the Caribbean; he must recount how he met a Dominican woman whom he fell in love with, before he can come to terms with his brother Hale, the family god. This element of my novel emerges out of my own extended family. I had a cousin who was a blue angel pilot and his plane crashed. He was a family god: handsome, dashing, funny, reckless. He was intended to live forever but he died young and that one death broke my uncle's family apart. The grief that won't quit is also at the center of my story.
Every Boat Turns South is very much a coming-home tale, a sailing
adventure, a father-son drama, a crime story as well as a story of one man's guilt and redemption. Many of the elements of the story emerge from my experiences delivering boats in the Bahamas and Caribbean. The waypoints of the boat delivery in the novel from West Palm Beach to St. Thomas in the B.V.I. are ones I'm very familiar with. I include a much abbreviated chart at the front of the book to show the reader the actual route of Stardust, Matt Younger's delivery boat.
Because Every Boat Turns South is part family drama and part
Caribbean noir it has struck a chord with men and women readers who find parts of their own family saga played out on the high seas and islands far away.
In the last 35 years, J.P. White has published essays, articles, fiction,
reviews, interviews and poetry in over a hundred publications including The Nation, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, and Poetry (Chicago). He is a graduate of New College in Sarasota, Florida, Colorado State University and Vermont
College in Fine Arts. He is the author of five books of poems and a novel, Every Boat Turns South. www.jpwhite.net
Read the Review for Every Boat Turns South HERE
At a recent book presentation, someone asked me what training I had. It gave me pause. How did I learn to write?
As a withdrawn and unhappy child, reading was my escape. I read everything I could get my hands on (yes, even the proverbial cereal box). While I fell in love with writing (what a wonder; a world I could control) in the fourth grade, I had no writing instruction through high school. I can only have learned how to write by reading, and practice. Because I did write. I wrote terrible poetry and sappy love stories for my sisters and myself. I took on projects in school that required writing. I earned recognition in a Scholastics Magazine writing competition. I forged ahead as if I knew what I was doing.
Fortunately, my first two years of college, at Northwestern Michigan Community College, I had an inspired and inspiring writing instructor. Al Shumsky probably never knew how much his comments on my weekly writing assignments meant to a person starved for validation and honest, knowledgeable criticism. On one paper, he wrote that I had the potential to be a really good writer if I persevered. That one comment was probably the most important factor in my eventual success.
Because the eight years that I taught school, I had no energy left for writing and almost gave up. My next job, however, was editorial assistant on a magazine, where I honed my writing skills. A move ended that job and I took five years to try and make some money writing. I found an excellent writer’s critique group to keep me on track, but it didn’t happen, and I had to go back to work. Still, it was practice, practice, practice, with a completed novel (even though unpublishable) at the end of it.
That was pretty much the extent of my training except for reading all I could find about successful writing, reading the type of novels I wanted to write, attending writing conferences when I could, and more practice, practice, practice, until I could retire early and zero in on writing something I could believe other people would enjoy reading.
For a kid who grew up in a house full of books and music, I must admit I was a reluctant reader. I loved stories, but preferred them to be read to me. My mother must still remember word-for-word many stories she read to me dozens of times. My father often made up stories to tell me. When I was six, (first grade) I learned to read for myself. My older brother was a quick study and learned to read when he was four. But I was somewhat hyperactive, and preferred playing outdoors to reading. Stories that were short and highly illustrated were okay, chapter books were punishment pretty much right through grammar school. One of the books I remember best was THE BOXCAR CHILDREN, read to the class by our fourth grade teacher. I loved that book, even though I didn’t read it for myself.
My mother had an uphill battle on her hands. It was part of the job description of being a kid in our family to go to the library every 2 weeks, and get 2 books to read. I mostly wimped out and got short illustrated books from Doctor Seuss and the like. Most of the books I got from the library ended up on top of a bureau or under the bed until they were overdue. Unread. I did start to enjoy the Danny Dunn series in fifth or sixth grade, and got my imagination so fired up that I would go off and write my own Danny Dunn stories. Filling 3 pages in those days took about as much of me as filling 300 now. My parents were highly amused that I would write so vigorously and read so . . . not.
On Saturdays we would go to the Charlestown Boys Club, where my father had a part-time job. Weekdays he taught English at a junior high school, nights he was a bartender, and Saturdays he worked the “games room” at the boys club, where a hundred boys played pool, checkers, chess, watched “Fury” and “Casper the Friendly Ghost” on TV, and had fistfights. The games room could also be set up as an auditorium, and each Saturday afternoon the room would be darkened for a movie. We got into the movie free if we helped set up the folding chairs. Upstairs was the Boys Club Library, where “Miss D” presided at her old oak desk. “Miss D” was actually Mrs. DeSimone, who cleverly got us to read by starting a reading club. If you read five books, you would get a prize. After reading each book, you had to go to her desk, where she would go through the book with you and ask a few questions, and then she would record it on your record. I don’t remember how many books I read there, nor do I remember the prizes, but I clearly remember “Miss D.”
The big change came in eighth grade. One evening my parents discovered that “To Kill a Mockingbird” was on TV, and I watched it with them. When my father told me that there was also a book, and he could get it for me at his school, I jumped at the chance. I devoured the book and decided that reading was an open door to an incredible world that I wanted to be a part of, and it’s been that way since.
In a few days WELCOME TO HARMONY will hit the stores and I don’t know when I’ve been so excited about a book coming out. This will be my 29th book. When I started writing I had two little kids and my hope was to make enough money to send them to college. Now all these books later, they are both out of college and I’m still writing.
A writer writes a story, climbs into a world and lives there for months. Then, the writer has to send the story off and let go of the characters for a while. With this book it wasn’t easy.
I open with Reagan, a runaway, being dropped off after dark on the Main Street of Harmony, Texas. Before the night is over, she’s stepped into a world she’s never known. A world where she can belong.
As I wrote it seemed like my characters came to me one at a time, sat down, and began to tell me their story. As the book moves through the weeks, you’ll meet a funeral director who cares about everyone he meets, a volunteer fire chief who loves what he does, a sheriff who fights every day to live up to her family, and a child who sees people for who they really are.
This story will touch your heart and make you laugh. By the time you finish, you’ll feel like Harmony is a real place.
Three love stories wind their way through the book. One is a story of first love between two teenagers. Another is a love story between two strong willed adults who have loved each other since childhood but are torn apart because of an accident. The third love story is between a middle aged kind man who had never found anyone he can talk too. He develops a relationship with a woman on line that he met one icy night when they were both forced of the road due to weather. Both are professionals dedicated to their work and not the kind of people used to sharing feelings.
I hope to keep you up late because you have to learn what happens to the folks in Harmony. So, come along with me for a visit.
Much love to you all,
Jodi Thomas
Enter our Giveaway for Welcome To Harmony HERE
I was quite unprepared for love when first it came to me. I was fifteen and attending a new boarding school in Western Massachusetts, renowned as much for its high academic standards as it was for its bucolic location nestled in a horseshoe of the Berkshire Mountains. It was my first day there and after meeting my roommate, stowing my gear and making my bunk, I decided to take a walk around the campus. The grounds were alive with students. You could tell the new ones. Like me, they strolled around in a semi-catatonic daze, trying to get their bearings.
It was later in the afternoon when I saw Claudia for the first time. I literally stopped in my tracks, watching her stride up the walkway toward the main building, where the new students were to meet for a brief orientation. The spun gold of her light blonde hair caught the rays of the September sun as it swayed across her shoulder blades, and the air grew thick around me, my breath catching in my throat. Her Caribbean-blue eyes shown with an inner light, set into a face while not supermodel beautiful, nonetheless struck me with its knowing innocence. Her body, however, was far from innocent, shaped in curvaceous ways no fifteen-year-old body should have been. I was captivated. And I had no idea what in hell to do.
You see, I'd always been very shy, and while I'd had crushes on girls before, none of them hit me with the primal force of nature that was Claudia. The emotions rushing through me every time I caught sight of her were so intense—so powerful—my heart raced and my tongue seized in my mouth, rendering me mute. Eventually, I worked up the courage to speak to her and we became friends, but I wanted so much more and lacked the courage to say or do anything about it. I watched, in agony, as she took up with another boy, their attraction to each other a palpable thing.
When she broke up with him a month or two later, I was hopeful again, but those fleeting aspirations were dashed, when one of the "big men on campus" swept her off her feet. He broke her heart shortly thereafter and I tried to be of solace to her, to be the friend she needed, in the hopes she would at last see the love brimming in my heart. I ached to declare myself, but feared ridicule, or worse, the dreaded "we're just friends" speech. Alas, she found romance with yet another boy and after a few dark nights of the soul I finally realized she and I would never have that kind of relationship.
I only spent a year at the school, as my family moved from Connecticut to Florida that spring, where I attended a private day school. The truth was I could never go back to that school nestled in the mountains, could never walk those ivied halls again without being reminded of her. I still think of Claudia every now and then and wonder how her life's turned out. I hope she's happier now than she was then.
If you're out there, Claudia, now you know the truth....
Bill Walker is a graphic designer specializing in book and dust jacket design, and has worked on projects by Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Dean Koontz, and Stephen King. Between his design work and his writing, he spends his spare time reading voraciously and playing very loud guitar, much to the chagrin of his lovely wife and two sons. Bill makes his home in Los Angeles and can be reached through his web site: http://www.billwalkerdesigns.com/
You'll read my review of his new book "A note from an Old Acquaintance" Wednesday! ~Mandie
