Katherine Towler - Author Interview: Setting

Pick one of your favourites among the settings from your published fiction stories or a setting which is an interesting example from your published fiction. What makes this setting one of your favourites or an interesting example from your fiction?

I have written a trilogy of novels set on a fictional New England island. The setting came first, before characters or plot, in my thinking about these connected books. I was fascinated by life in a small, contained community and what happens to the people who reside in such places. There is plenty of romance about islands. They are places of escape, away from the mainstream. People fantasize about leaving everything behind and going to an island where life will be simpler, and they can live in harmony with nature. In many ways, this fantasy is true, but islands are also places of confinement. When you cannot leave, unless the ferry comes or you have your own boat, your understanding of life’s possibilities becomes constrained. Locate an island far enough offshore, with a small population, and you have a petri dish for looking at human experience and character. It was this that attracted me to writing about an island and making the setting the centerpiece of the trilogy.

What is a setting from a published fiction story by another author you would compare this setting to and why are they similar?

The Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod comes to mind, though I hesitate to compare myself to him in any way. His collection of short stories, ISLAND, and his novel, NO GREAT MISCHIEF, are set on Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. He evokes that landscape and the Scottish immigrants who have carved out tough lives there in beautiful prose. Other writers whose use of setting inspired me are Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Thomas Hardy (to name a few).

How would you describe the way you introduced this setting to readers of your story?

I introduced the setting in the first volume of the trilogy, SNOW ISLAND, through the characters and their daily lives. The book begins with the arrival of an enigmatic character, George Tibbits, who returns to the island for his annual visit each spring. The first chapters detail his trip to the island, and then from the point of view of another character who works at the island’s store, his arrival on the ferry. Through the different viewpoints, I attempt to bring the island to life and place the reader in a world where the arrival and departure of the ferry is the main event of the day.

How would you describe the integration of characters and setting in this story?

A number of readers have said that the island is really the main character of my books. Though I didn’t quite think of it this way as I was writing, I have been pleased that readers see the setting as so essential to the story. My aim in writing is to evoke both setting and character in ways that make them vividly real for the reader. Though there is plot in my novels, character and setting drive plot, rather than the other way around. A major focus as I wrote the trilogy was the relationship between character and setting. Alice Daggett, one of the main characters in SNOW ISLAND, is a teenager who has lived her entire life on the island. I was curious about how knowing only island life shaped Alice. Though she has led a sheltered life and is unsophisticated (in the eyes of the mainland world), she is independent and resourceful. As I took the book through repeated drafts, Alice became a character who was both vulnerable and strong, and in many ways wise beyond her years. The island made her someone with values a bit different from those who live in cities.

The three volumes of my trilogy span the years from 1941 to 1991. Each volume covers a period of a couple of years, with 30 years in between each book. The novels have different main characters, though many of the characters appear in all three. In the third volume, ISLAND LIGHT, Alice is a grandmother in her early sixties. I tell the story, in the course of the three books, of Alice’s life from adolescence to approaching old age, although not in a direct narrative. The reader pieces together the arc of her life from one volume to the next.

How would you describe the interaction of story and setting in this story?

Because my characters live in a contained community, the setting defines the story. Everything that happens occurs on the island. They can’t leave, and neither could I as I was writing the books. This posed particular challenges. I didn’t want the story to become too static, but at the same time I was determined to be true to the nature of island life. The setting forced me to look closely at small moments in the lives of my characters because on the island there weren’t a lot of big moments. Yet within those small moments, I found a large canvas for the interior lives of my characters, and their experiences of love, loss, and betrayal. I like to tell stories that focus closely on characters’ emotional experience and interior lives, so the island setting was a natural fit with my interests and inclinations as a writer, even as it was also a challenge.

Each volume of my trilogy is set with war as the backdrop. The first volume takes place during World War II, the second during the Vietnam War, and the third at the start of the first Gulf War. The wars provided another setting, in a sense, though there are no scenes on actual battlefields. I wanted to tell the stories of the men and women who left the island to serve in these wars – what happened to them and what happened to those who stayed behind. My island setting became a microcosm for registering the impact of war on the country as a whole.

How much research did you do for the setting of this story, and what did that involve?

I lived on a small island in Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, in the United States, for a short time in the late 1980s. I didn’t go to the island with the intention of writing about it, but I was so entranced with the island and the people I met there that I went on to do so. I visited the island several times over the next few years. The “real” island has a year-round population of 125 and is accessible only by ferry. Much of the atmosphere and landscape of my books comes from the real place and my observations of it. I also did a fair amount of reading about island life, especially in the 1940s, and research on the fisherman who work in Narragansett Bay (along with lots of other research about the different wars, popular music, events in the news, and on and on).

To what extent would you describe the setting of this story typical or atypical of the settings in your fiction stories?

I am very interested in place and the role it plays in people’s lives. Setting is always significant in anything I am writing. The novels in the trilogy are my only published books to date, but I am currently working on a non-fiction book set in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and a collection of short stories. I love the ocean and seaside towns, which tend to turn up in my stories. I grew up in New York City and have set some of my stories there, but New England, where I have lived most of my adult life, is the place I feel most at home and for which I have a real passion, so many of my stories are set in New England.

How do you usually decide on or develop a setting for your fiction stories?

As I think I have already demonstrated, setting, character, and story are intertwined in my work. The setting is not usually a conscious choice, but results from the intersection of all three elements. I tend to write about places I know well.

To what extent do the settings of novels you read have an impact on why you read them, and why?

I choose some books to read because of the setting. Anything about islands, for instance! But I read widely and enjoy reading books that take me to places I have not been.

Author website: www.katherinetowler.com