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Dawn Clifton Tripp Massachusetts Book Award Series |
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A Conversation with Dawn Clifton Tripp, author of
THE SEASON OF OPEN WATER
1) What sparked the idea for The Season of Open Water?
In my first novel Moon Tide, I had a character who was a rum-runner. Through his story, I briefly explored how the bootleg trade impacted the lives of the inhabitants of Westport. As I was doing that research, I came across a short passage in a book called The Black Ships which referenced a young woman, unnamed, who rode shot-gun with the rummies. I immediately knew I wanted to build a novel about that girl.
2) What prompted you to narrate the novel with alternating perspectives?
Shifting point of view is a voice that works well for me. It gives me a certain freedom, and I find that I can write a more fully developed story, characters of more depth and dimension, when I allow myself to crawl into the head and thoughts of each. I can create more powerful tensions when I can pit the desires and fears, the secrets, ambitions and stakes, of one character against those of another.
3) How did you create your characters? How is each one unique to the story?
Bridge is a character I have always wanted to write--a willful young woman, boyish, independent--a thief no less--"able to divide her body from her heart, to let her thoughts drain and pool and splash, never getting too settled on any one person or thing."
In the course of the Season of Open Water, Bridge begins to awaken, not only to her own desires, but to a more complete understanding of the elements of her world. Her love for Henry, as beautiful and vulnerable as it is, is merely a shadow of the more essential, vital need she feels to move beyond the bounds of what she has always known.
Although Bridge is the central character of The Season of Open Water, her grandfather, Noel, is the seeing eye of the novel. His character is based on my own grandfather. The bond between Bridge and Noel is based on that relationship, as well as on my relationship with my son, who was a year old when I was writing the book.
Toughened by his experiences as a whaleman in the Arctic, by "years of living heaped on his shoulders," Noel has a level-minded understanding of human passions and greed, a clear view of the town and its dynamics, the lures and dangers of the rum-running trade. He also "knows that his own life is a long-coiled line inside him, and he knows it is unwinding." Noel's fierce love for Bridge, his hopes to build a better future for her, his awareness of the mistakes he has made in his past which have shaped his fate, lend a deeper, at times even sorrowful, resonance to the story.
With Luce, I wanted to portray a young man, a local, whose ambition and hunger for risk draws him over his head into the dark underworld of the rum-running trade. At the opening of the novel, there is an almost incestuous closeness between Luce and Bridge. As Bridge begins to move into her own life, the threads that bind them begin to fray. Luce has a gift for water. He knows the river the way Noel once knew the sea. But Luce has a streak in him - reckless, even cruel - which by the novel's end will threaten to destroy those very things he once most loved.
Sometimes, when I am writing, I will cut into a current, and that current will sweep over me - intellect is gone - words, emotions, images all flow and come together on the page, and I will emerge from that state and discover that I have written myself into a world, a psyche, I could not have otherwise imagined. This happened to me, over and again, as I was writing the character of Cora. Cora is Noel's daughter, Luce and Bridge's mother. She is odd, by turns absent and mystical. Shattered by the loss of her oldest daughter who drowned when she fell through an eel hole axed in the ice, Cora, at first glance, appears to be the passive member of the family. However, she is the unspoken center, the hole in the wheel the rest of them revolve around. It is Cora who sees the other side of Luce, the broken side, the tender side. And it is Cora who first witnesses the sparks between her daughter, Bridge, and the young doctor who lives in 'the big house down the beach,' Henry Vonniker.
I first began to sketch out the character of Henry after a conversation I had with my husband when we debated the difference between destiny and dumb luck. Henry believes in destiny. He believes that a man's fate is stitched into his everyday.
Henry is markedly different from the other four main characters. He is not a local. He is a summer person, from a wealthy family, and although he now lives in the town year around, he will always be that step removed.
More importantly, whereas the lives and intuitions of the other are directly in tune with the workings of the natural world, Henry's life has been primarily shaped by intellectual thought, and he has been emotionally leveled by his experiences in World War I.
Henry's passion for Bridge becomes the single impulse in him that is not intellectual, that cannot be subdued or contained or described in rational terms.
4) Is there a connection between the change of seasons and the transient population of Westport, Massachusetts with the major themes of the novel?
Tensions between locals and summer people are tensions which tend to run along class lines. They are powerful, at times vicious, undercurrents in a small town such as Westport. They can shape not only the consciousness and fate of individuals, and the relationships between those individuals, but the face of an entire town. They are tensions which existed in the twenties, and they are tensions which continue to exist today.
When the summer months come, on the one hand, it is a time of intense beauty, opening, and growth. Vegetables are ripening, flowers are blooming, fish are running. But locals often feel a tremendous shift, not altogether pleasant, in the tone and texture of their day-to-day world when the sudden influx of summer people arrives.
I wanted to explore these seasonal changes and the tensions they create in the context of a love story which is essentially a story of love and class. When Bridge and Henry start to fall for each other, they are smudging the line between their separate worlds. Bridge sees this line clearly. Henry, because he comes from a place of privilege, is more blind to it. As a result, the tight weave of Bridge's world begins to unravel first. Henry's does as well, but only later and in a slightly different way.
5) The vivid details you give of Luce's rum-running excursions - processes involved, smuggling routes, common obstacles encountered - paint a vivid backdrop of 1920's prohibition in New England. How did you do the research for The Season of Open Water?
This novel was a thrill to research, in part because there are so few books that have been written about the rum-running era. As a result, I had to speak with old-timers, locals, who remembered that era and could recall specific incidents which took place in Westport. There were a few I spoke with whose families were directly involved in the trade. Several in particular were incredibly generous with their time and stories. One man estimated that roughly half the town was in some way involved.
For some young men, it was the lure of the adventure that drew them into rum-running. Others saw the government's 'noble experiment,' as a ridiculous exercise of power, and balked at the regulation. For most, however, the rum trade was simply a way to make a good dollar when working the river and the land was not enough. The fisherman had an obvious advantage because they knew the river and the outlying waters. Some farmers would rent the rummies use of their barns to load and unload, to transfer cases of liquor from the small boats to the trucks which would move it overland. The hijacking that Luce gets involved with - one gang picking off another's load - is an aspect of the bootleg trade that only began to take hold in the late twenties when the syndicates were controlling the larger markets and the trade turned more cutthroat.
6) What is the significance of the book's title, The Season of Open Water?
The season of open water literally refers to a brief period of time during the arctic summer, when the snow melts and the leads in the ice open. It is a time of extended daylight, warmth, intense life. Birds arrive in the arctic to mate and birth their young. The tundra blooms. Whales and other fish migrate north through the open channels. In the whaling era of the late 1800's, when Noel shipped on the Sarah Mar, the season of open water was the time when ships could venture higher up into the arctic to hunt whales.
Throughout the novel, Noel is haunted by his memory of that time. He sees clearly that beauty and violence are not separate, life and death cannot be unfolded from one another. It was the very opening of the water, the softening of the leads in the ice, which enabled the capture and slaughter of walrus and whales. For Noel, "the crime of it was not the act itself - whatever kind of carnage that might have been. No, the crime of it was that they had taken them in that fertile season, the season of open water, in the midst of all that life."
As Bridge starts to open to her relationship with Henry, even she and Noel begin to drift apart. They are still close, but she keeps her secrets. She is moving into her own life, and he can feel it. At one point, in the summer of 1929, while they are working together in the boat shop, he looks at her for a long moment, and she realizes that he is telling her, without telling her in words, that "this will be the season of her life that she looks back on - years from now - this will be the summer that she meets when she walks through the door at the end of her mind - this will be the time in her life - brief, endless, full of youth and love and hope and joy - that every future happiness will be weighed against."
And it is not a warning - what he tells her - but what any grandfather would tell a granddaughter he loves. Still, for the reader, and perhaps for Noel as well, there is an inescapable sense of foreboding, a knowing that the season will change.
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