In 1958, in a small town in upstate New York, the Buell family is falling apart. The sudden death of David, the only son, forever changes the bonds that connect them to one another and to the world. As her mother sinks into depression, eleven-year-old Dorrie Buell, full of an unusual mix of grit and delicacy, sets out on her own. Armed with the imagined identity of a cowboy drifter, Dorrie finds kinship and refuge in the hilltop farm of the eccentric Tappen family. Yet the deep currents of Dorrie's life keep pulling her back toward her mother, toward the past that binds them, toward common ground.

Luminous, alive with the secret knowledge of childhood, In Dark Water is a stunning novel of one family's trial and redemption.

"A triumph of the spirit . . . A novel of uncommon grace and soaring beauty. In Dark Water explores a family's deepest grief and a young girl's amazing journey toward understanding, reconciliation, and redemption."
--CONNIE MAY FOWLER
Author of Before Women Had Wings

"PROFOUNDLY MOVING, THIS BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN NOVEL REFLECTS THE OFTEN CONFLICTED BUT UNIQUELY SPECIAL CONNECTION BETWEEN MOTHER AND DAUGHTER."
--Booklist (starred and boxed review)

"Resonant . . . Blakeslee is adept at revealing a child's logic behind actions and statements that seem illogical to adults, and in Dorrie she has created a believable character whose resourcefulness keeps pace with her increasing isolation."
--The New York Times Book Review

QUESTION: How did the idea for this novel begin?

MermerBlakeslee: One day while I was working in the garden, a new voice came to me--immediate, urgent, delicate. I recognized it right away--it was Eudora, a forty-year-old character in my first novel, now visiting me as a small girl, a ten-year-old. I ran in and started writing. But even though Dorrie's voice was extremely compelling and it obviously had a story it was trying to squeeze out, it was also elusive. Dorrie was hiding, very wary, as if she didn't trust me yet. When I tried to face her voice directly and capture it, it would sneak away.

I had a few "facts" that I knew from my first novel, Same Blood--that Dorrie had had trouble with her mother and that she had run away to Beulah's. But I didn't know why. What would have driven such a young babe out of her house? I kept writing "backwards," trying to uncover the layers underneath their mutual pain. With each layer, I got closer to being inside Dorrie's body. Then the image came of Dorrie squeezing her dead brother's toe. That was it, the catalyst. Dorrie's fist. Dorrie's delicate but forceful soul forming itself around her brother's death. Once I knew about David, Florence started to make sense and came into focus. Then I could begin to write "forwards," still into the dark toward what I did not know, but the story could now unfold.

Q: The story takes place between the years 1958 and 1959. Why did you choose this time period?

MB: The time period was purely logistical--one of the givens because Dorrie (Doro) was forty in 1988 in Same Blood. But I felt close to that time anyway. And for months, my family had to listen to a lot of radio tapes from the late fifties. All those jingles! And such melodrama in the music--Harvey and The Moonglows, The Platters. It was great to watch anybody who had been a teenager back then listening to those songs--they'd invariably start crooning away.

Q: Throughout the novel, Eudora is intrigued by animals and seeks solace in and identification with them. In what ways do you believe that a child's intuition is similar to that of an animal's? How do you think these instincts change as we become adults?

MB: Let me tell you a story. I knew pretty early on that Dorrie loved snakes. (That's funny, my husband said, when you talk about her voice, it's just like a snake in the grass--here, gone, just a flash.) Still, I was sort of waiting for a snake to come into the book. One day one did, ring-necked with a bright yellow collar. After writing, I walked out the back door and there on the mat in front of me was a baby snake, the smallest thing! And it had a bright yellow collar. It was dead but perfectly intact. I had never actually seen one until then, and there it was. What an offering!

But back to your question. I think part of the reason Dorrie fascinated me was that her vision is very "primitive," instinctual, and therefore close to the animal soul. The world shines for her. It is animated, not inert or lifeless. And it is not separated from her interior life. This way of perceiving would be hard to find in an adult in our predominantly monotheistic, middle-class, white culture with its concept of what is "normal." (Cultures that are closer to the land, to animals, to poverty, or marginalized cultures that have managed to keep their traditions, rituals, and even foods intact, seem to be more in tune with this instinctual way of perceiving.) The predominant culture is part of Dorrie's problem. She blossoms at the Tappens', where her soul is given latitude. But when she is in an environment that has deadened and rationalized the world, she withdraws into herself. In a sense, both Florence and Dorrie suffer from an allergic reaction to our culture, which has little place for grief or the darker shadings of life. Grief gets in the way of its obsessive productivity. In that way Florence and Dorrie, both fully engaged with their troubled, tenacious souls, are very connected.

Q: Despite the misplaced rage in Eudora and Florence's relationship, they seem to be equals at some level--soul mates even. As a parent, what are your feelings about their relationship?

MB: I'm glad you said that. Florence definitely wasn't a great mother. A parent is supposed to take care of her children, feed and clothe them, give them a home, and she was unable, after David died, to do that. But she was something else to Dorrie, and finally, she was needed. They both shared an invisible realm. They both felt David descend. No one else could reach into Dorrie's soul like that. So despite the biology, Beulah was Dorrie's mother, and Florence was, as you say, a soul mate. And in the end, Dorrie says goodbye to Florence physically and returns to a life with the Tappens. But after having been initiated, in a sense, by grief, Dorrie carries her mother within her as a permanent internal figure.

And that gets to one more thing. I feel Dorrie's traumatic year is about initiation, not victimhood, and certainly not about abuse or living in a dysfunctional family. It is about a girl who follows each gesture of her soul no matter how low it takes her, as it forms around grief and around the inviolable elements of life: death, love, the loss of innocence. Often, if we are not "normal," we think we need to be cured, fixed. But families are never normal, never rational. They are, thankfully, incurable. The dark streaks that run through every family are often what the soul feeds on. They are what makes us who we are. They bring us nearer to the center of life, where the strong, deep currents run.

Q: You've been praised by critics for creating such a believable and sincere voice for Eudora. Why do you think you were so successful in narrating via an eleven-year-old girl?

MB: Just patience. It took me a while to sink into her voice. I literally felt I had to descend into her little body. And then I could feel it viscerally. Sometimes my stomach would knot up. When I wrote from her point of view, the world would come in very close and large, and I could never see far into the distance. When Dorrie speaks, she is grappling, trying to survive. Her voice carries with it an urgent necessity. I didn't want any adult retrospect to break the spell of being inside her. But, on the other hand, I did want the reader to see beyond Dorrie, to guess at a larger truth than Dorrie's telling without losing the empathy and identification with her. That was a challenge, especially in the chapter "Procedure," where Dorrie is largely unaware of sexuality.

Q: Eudora experiences her feelings through her body in a very visceral manner. Do you think that this physical manifestation of emotion is common to children as they deal with grief that is beyond their understanding?

MB: I think children haven't learned yet to separate their bodies and their souls like adults do. They squirm, wriggle, wag their whole bodies. All emotions, not just grief, can elude our intellectual "understanding," but they can never elude our bodies. Our bodies know much more than we give them credit for. As adults, we often wait until our bodies are screaming at us in pain to pay attention to them--except in rare moments, like in sex or in a risk sport. Then, for a moment, body and soul can merge.

Q: We witness the sudden, uncontrollable spread of Eudora's "bad" smile throughout the novel. The smile seems almost personified--as if it takes on a life of its own. Can you elaborate on this?

MB: That's true. And our souls, too, have a life of their own. We don't own them. Beulah sees that same smile and calls it a grin, "Just breakin' across her face." She loves it. And Dorrie only feels the bad smile come back when she starts to lie or when she thinks of her mother. I didn't plan that, but in hindsight I see that the soul's expression can get so twisted when it is not given any welcoming place.

Q: What was the inspiration behind Dorrie's imagined identity as the cowboy Shane?

MB: I don't know. I just saw her walk through Beulah's door like that. Then later, I remembered seeing Shane on TV when I was sick. (We never got to watch TV except when we were sick.) I remembered those boots walking down that dusty road.

Q: How long and in what ways do you live with your characters before they make it to the page?

MB: Once I hear them, either on the page or in the shower, they move in. My whole family and all my friends have to live with them. I once called up my friend to complain, "That Dorrie is gonna get kicked out of school if she doesn't start behaving. Now what am I gonna do with that girl?" Occasionally, I had to ask my son and his friend to do something Dorrie would do, smash a cup, burn some hair. I made him squirm and wriggle on the floor. I knew exactly what I would feed her every night.

When I was young, maybe ten, I cut a picture out of a magazine of a feisty-looking little girl, barefoot on the dirt in the middle of some chickens, a wild thing. As a kid, I kept the photograph in my journal. For the past fifteen, twenty years, I have had her by my desk. Her face is turned toward the camera like she just got caught.

And Beulah? She teaches me--about raising a child, about handling a horse, about growing plants--to be who they are. She looks at their peculiar convolutions as signs, as messages from their souls, not as problems to cure. I often think to myself, "Now, what would Beulah do?"

Popsy, my grandfather, was the only character taken straight from real life. Born in 1880, he was a potato farmer who could not read or write. I haven't met anyone even remotely like him in our modern world. He lived with us, crippled, mostly incontinent, barely able to see out of his one eye. (Every day before school, it was my job to empty his chamber pot.) We were alone in the house when my parents went on their long vacations. I got him his food, and he told me his stories. His presence made my family life very different from my friends'. I was so excited when he came into the book. He was all there, still wild, saying and doing things that surprised me.

Q: Making Beulah a central narrator added a unique dimension to the story. Why do you think she is such an effective storyteller?

MB: Ah, she's got the gift of gab, doesn't she? Beulah speaks in the dialect of the rural Catskills--its rhythm, its weight, its swing, its inevitable dive at the end of the sentence back to the land it came from. It's a language that's got body, enough substance to hold a lot of metaphor without being flowery. I said before that Dorrie speaks out of an urgency, a need to survive. Beulah, on the other hand, is able to be generous. She tells a story to you, for you, the reader. She says, "Come on in. Sit down. Let me tell you how it really happened." I grew up with this in the people here. They wrap a story around the ear of their audience. When Dorrie lands at Beulah's door, I wanted the reader to land there, too. Beulah not only takes care of Dorrie, but she also takes care of the reader, too. She lets you in on things. So you can relax for a while.

Q: The story is told through many different voices, creating a full and layered story. Which voice came most naturally to you, and which presented the greatest challenge? Why?

MB: Well, I've told you about Dorrie's elusive, secretive nature. I guess Beulah was the easiest; she loves to talk. I wrote only poetry till I was twenty-five, which was always from my point of view. When I shattered into many voices, Beulah's was the first to emerge. And I feel so honored that she did.

Florence was a difficult character to get inside of. She wasn't hard to see from the outside. But her internal voice was tough--I really had to let go, because she is so wildly unpredictable. It was like being on a roller coaster. At first, she would just rant and rave and rage in my head. It took a while to get into her body and feel her hand creep across the sheets and reach for the bedside table. And I have to be inside a character's body before the voice becomes clear. Them I am firmly grounded in their place. I can see what they see. Florence lives with so much pain, and to feel that was not easy.

But Michael was the toughest character to discover. I don't think characters get developed as much as discovered.

Q: I was going to ask you about Michael. How do you personally feel about Michael's decisions regarding Eudora? Do you think he did the best he could given the circumstances?

MB: Yes, he did the best he could. I loved what Sandra Scofield said about the book--that there is a great deal of pain but no villains. And she used the phrase "the unceasing devotion of the father." Michael, like many fathers in his time, did what he was supposed to do. He worked very hard outside the home. But to the family, he was almost invisible. And Michael was holding so much together on the outside, there was no time or place for letting any of his internal turmoil out. Florence left no room for that. Not till the end. And he had no cultural support for him to be anything else than who he was, somewhat opaque and impermeable. At least in this book, because it wasn't his story and he was seen mainly through Dorrie's eyes. She loved him, but she couldn't really know him, and she longed for him even in his presence. In a sense, Michael is a hero, albeit a weak, very ordinary one.

Q: The Tappens' great capacity to love another's child as much as their own is a major part of the novel. In your own life, have you experienced or witnessed this extended notion of family, or does this relationship represent an ideal?

MB: From the time I was twelve to about sixteen, I lived on a horse farm in the summer with a family I felt part of. Like many teenagers do, I found there my surrogate mom, and then there was her mom, who everyone called Grandma. She was Italian and fed us all. The farm was a lot like the Roman notion of "familias" that James Hillman talks about in his "Myths of the Family" lectures. The origin of that word was not based on the idea of kinship but on the house itself, the place itself and all belonging to it, the animals, the furniture, the servants. It was not a nuclear family but rather a "psycho-economic organism based on service and participation."

As a single mother for five years, I watched not only my mom and dad but also my closest friends "take on" the effort of raising my child. One of my son's baby-sitters had taken in, for indefinite lengths of time, more than twenty children whose parents were somehow unavailable. Yes, I think the notion of an extended family is still alive. And I think also that biology is overrated.

Q: Much of the novel's imagery is rooted in nature and landscape. Since you live in the Catskill Mountains, how much of this connection to the earth comes from your own experience?

MB: All of it. I am married to these mountains and to the place where I live now, an old defunct farm. After college, I tried to live somewhere else, but I felt called back here. It was not a matter of liking the Catskills; it was not a choice. They are my kin. I could not leave them. They speak to what is mute inside me, what is underneath all words.

In many English classes, "setting" is talked about as if it is superfluous to a story, a mere backdrop, or else a device to be manipulated for some emotion. But for me, place is primary, a touchstone of sorts. Place governs the tempo and voice of my characters. From within my characters, I can feel where they live. I purposely don't use a lot of long descriptions as if looking on from the outside. I want the characters to speak from within that place, the details to leak out almost casually, like you would speak about your own home.

Q: What was the greatest challenge in writing this novel?

MB: I threw out about one thousand pages. What was the hardest was the break in momentum that comes from my dual life. Over six months of the year, I travel as a member of the National Demonstration Team for the Professional Ski Instructors of America, skiing, lecturing, and training teachers. When I come home from all that, I have to land, literally. It takes a while digging in the dirt, planting, struggling with big rocks, being with my horses on a very basic, wordless level, being with my family, getting quiet again, filling up with questions and letting the answers go. It is never a painless landing. I actually feel a movement of my awareness --from my head down into my belly, my wordless self. Then I can start thinking of writing. I'm empty enough to allow the characters to come in and move about freely.

Q: What are some of your favorite novels?

MB: Toni Morrison's Beloved; Russell Banks's Continental Drift; William Kennedy's Ironweed; Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine; Gabriel García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude; Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.

 

 

Courtesy of Random House, Inc.