Love Island Redux

The first time I tried to write about that small island off the coast of Maine was during junior high chemistry class.

Was that the first August I didn’t return to the island with my family? 

The story was about the smallest thing in the world: a girl and boy in love. 

The daughter of the hermit from the small island across the harbor falls for a boy from a prominent family on the mainland who has run away to the island to live unencumbered. If the story had any conflict at all it was the girl’s fear of how the boy might grow bored with the fantasy of living on an island.

Sometime in the spring of that Chemistry class, the teacher reached his wits end. I wish I could remember what the chemistry teacher said to the class. For seven straight months I never picked my head up from that notebook. He didn’t say my name. But everybody in class knew he was talking about me when he leveled the comment. Even unremembered, something in that comment has followed me for decades as I criss-crossed the country filling notebooks with invented longing.

The next bit I wrote about that island was published in a college literary magazine titled The Idiom.

The story was called The Corroding Ship at Lobster Cove. The titular ship was a metaphor for fleeting summer love. The setting: A party on Lobster Cove at the end of the summer season for the kids who came to the island to work various jobs. The plot: The last conversation between a boy who was going back to the mainland and a girl who lives on the island discussing how their love will never work out.

Around the same time the story was published, Andre Dubus III was offering a writing workshop out of his house in Newbury, Massachusetts. He hadn’t written a best seller yet. We spoke on the phone twice. I was too broke for his workshop. He sympathized while also needing the money to finish the book that Oprah would eventually choose for her book club and ultimately transform his life.

One night while smoking on the roof of the admin building my roommate said he was sure Andre Dubus III would have dug that island story which he knew was coming out in the college literary magazine soon.

That first restless year after college I discovered Chris Offutt’s Kentucky Straight in a Louisville bookstore. Those stories rewired my brain. After reading it I knew I needed to write a series of linked stories about an island in Maine. The kind of interconnected stories where one character brushes past another character in a store and in the next story the character who runs the store is at the funeral for a character from a third story. 

Stories that have been sitting in a box in the attic for decades now.

Not until my forties did I write about the island again. Avoiding work at the office, I found myself writing a letter from a girl to a boy. A reply. A confession. How she could never love a boy from an island. Each sentence darker and darker, unravelling her family’s fall from grace.

Here I am again, at fifty, still writing about that island. Still writing about love. Still haunted by that curse leveled on me by my Chemistry teacher.