- Can you describe Maine, for those unfamiliar with its landscape?
- Is A Piece of the World a “New England” novel? How much of your depiction of Christina Olson takes into account her deep New England roots?
- In the prologue to A Piece of the World, you write: ‘… the skeleton of a house can carry in its bones the marrow of all that came before.’ Christina’s house, particularly through the eyes of Andrew, seems to ooze with the bygone events of past generations – was this sense of a building being occupied by the past based on a real place that you’ve been?
- The majority of historical fiction revolves around monarchs, cultural beacons or warmongers – people at the centre of world-impacting events. Christina Olson lived a ‘quiet, ordinary life’. How did you extract enough drama and complexity from her life in order to build a book around the character?
- How is Christina’s story linked to the Salem Witch Trials?
- How are Orphan Train and A Piece of the World similar? How are they different?
- Other than the central character in your first novel, Sweet Water, who is a sculptor, you haven’t written about the act of artistic creation – or about being an artist’s muse. Was this difficult to do in A Piece of the World? Were you able to tap into anything from your own experience?
- Christina Olson lived twenty more years after Wyeth completed the painting Christina’s World. Why did you choose to end the novel where you did?
- Can you describe Maine, for those unfamiliar with its landscape?
- Is A Piece of the World a “New England” novel? How much of your depiction of Christina Olson takes into account her deep New England roots?
- In the prologue to A Piece of the World, you write: ‘… the skeleton of a house can carry in its bones the marrow of all that came before.’ Christina’s house, particularly through the eyes of Andrew, seems to ooze with the bygone events of past generations – was this sense of a building being occupied by the past based on a real place that you’ve been?
- The majority of historical fiction revolves around monarchs, cultural beacons or warmongers – people at the centre of world-impacting events. Christina Olson lived a ‘quiet, ordinary life’. How did you extract enough drama and complexity from her life in order to build a book around the character?
- How is Christina’s story linked to the Salem Witch Trials?
- How are Orphan Train and A Piece of the World similar? How are they different?
- Other than the central character in your first novel, Sweet Water, who is a sculptor, you haven’t written about the act of artistic creation – or about being an artist’s muse. Was this difficult to do in A Piece of the World? Were you able to tap into anything from your own experience?
- Christina Olson lived twenty more years after Wyeth completed the painting Christina’s World. Why did you choose to end the novel where you did?
Maine is breathtakingly beautiful, with a long jagged coastline, deep green fir trees, and many lakes and mountains. The southern and coastal regions are fairly affluent; inland, and in the north, many live in poverty. Maine’s state slogan is “Vacationland” – much of the economy thrives on tourism. But like many places that attract outsiders, there’s a natural tension between native Mainers and the “from-aways.” I consider myself both an insider and an outsider: I grew up in a working-class town in Maine, but I moved away and now own a house on the coast.
While I was writing this novel, I thought of it as not only a New England story but a specifically American one, with its depiction of ruggedly independent people forging a path out of the wilderness and claiming a piece of the world for themselves. Christina Olson’s story is linked (IRL, as the kids say) to the Salem Witch Trials, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and many Maine sea captains. But having traveled recently to remote islands like Iceland and Tasmania, and having read accounts of people’s lives in those places, I now view this novel much more broadly as a story about the human impulse to persevere, to put down stakes, and to carve a life out of the flintiest of circumstances.
I’ve lived in some very old houses. When I was born, my parents lived in a 13th-century stone house called Apple Trees in a small village in England, Swaffham Bulbeck. Eventually we moved to Tennessee, into an abandoned brick house in Tennessee, “The Wayside,” that we were told came with a resident ghost, Rufus. I’ve always been fascinated with how houses contain layers of stories. The epigraph of my first novel is from Aeschylus: “The house itself, could it take voice, might speak aloud and plain.”
Thomas Hardy famously said, “The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.” I wrote A Piece of the World in the first-person, from Christina’s perspective, because I knew that to pull off this quiet story I would need to get deep inside the head of that girl in the grass. I wanted to reveal her complexity and contradictions; she is ornery and stubborn but also deeply passionate and soulful. Most of the drama in the book is internal. It was an incredibly difficult challenge.
The real-life Christina was descended from the chief magistrate of the Salem Witch Trials; her ancestors, trying to escape the taint of association, fled Salem for the coast of Maine in the middle of winter. Christina’s grandmother kept the door between the kitchen and shed open for the witches to come and go. And Christina herself was rumoured, among some of the townspeople, to be a witch herself. (Wyeth variously described her “a witch” and “the queen of Maine.”) I think she enjoyed, and flirted with, the association.
Orphan Train and A Piece of the World are both, in part, about women living hardscrabble lives in rural American in the first half of the 20th century, and both illuminate little-known aspects of American history. But the similarities end there. It’s been said that there are two kinds of stories: “a person goes on a journey” and “a stranger comes to town.” ORPHAN TRAIN is about a person on a journey. In A PIECE OF THE WORLD, Christina muses that she lives on a remote point on the coast of Maine, the kind of place where “a stranger at the door may hold a key to the rest of your life.” Writing about a character who takes action and one who is acted upon are two very different undertakings.
One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that you’re constantly dredging up some arcane knowledge or long-forgotten experience, rediscovering old passions and interests. In my teens I fancied myself an artist; I hung out with the eccentric art teacher at my high school, painted still lifes and portraits and landscapes in watercolor and acrylics, took private lessons, won some blue ribbons for my earnest renderings. My lack of talent did little to dampen my enthusiasm. In college I thought I’d continue, but, like Salieri, I quickly realized that while I had the ability to appreciate art, I wasn’t actually very good. Instead of painting, I studied art history. As I wrote A Piece of the World I drew on my love of painting and my understanding of 20th-century American art to create Wyeth’s character.
From the beginning of the writing process I knew that I wanted to start and end the novel with the moment Christina sees the painting for the first time. My task, as I wrote, was to funnel the story toward that moment, to make it as resonant and revealing about her relationship with Wyeth as I could. The ending is a breakthrough: the painting is Wyeth’s gift to Christina, proof that he has come to understand her in a way that no one else ever will. The real Christina lived for another 20 years, but her life became harder and more desolate; her disease was degenerative, and she was quite isolated (even as she became famous from the portrait). While the ending of the novel may not be conventionally “happy,” I wanted the reader to turn the final page with a sense of clarity and a newfound appreciation for both artist and subject.