Writer in Residence - Marina Endicott

I’ve come to believe that the image is the original source—the most primary of sources. It seems to me that we move, in writing and maybe in other arts, from the image to the word—and that the senses are inextricably linked or tangled with both image and word. The portal from writer to reader seems to be that link of sense and image, conveyed (as well as possible, of course) in words.

My childhood piano teacher, Miss Kay Ladd, was brought up on a clipper ship, from 1901-1918 or thereabouts—her accounts varied with her mood. Here she is with her mother on the deck of the Belmont, her father’s ship. 

Writing fiction always means writing from memory: from emotional and sensory data, and from experience and intellectual understanding, recalled and arranged into an invented reality. So the first necessary task in historical fiction is fabricating memory to write from: immersing ourselves in period, from the smallest physical details of life to the largest philosophical concerns. 

Without lived memory of the distant past, we require evidence. Written evidence in the form of diaries, letters, laundry lists, wills; visual evidence in photographs and paintings, house-plans, ship’s manifests; detritus left on the shelves, the attics, the walls of old houses. 

I use physical objects too: this was Miss Ladd's stove onboard the Belmont, but (very conveniently) my paren'ts have an identical one. The glaze on the medallions and the women's patient faces are familiar to my childhood fingertips, ghost digits that still remember the heavy movement of that iron fender. Physical objects anchor images for us, propel them.

In some sense Miss Ladd’s story belongs to me, by virtue of remembering her, her house and her artifacts so well; by my having spent every Tuesday evening for seven years in her darkened drawing room, staring at the convolute whorls of the narwhal’s tusk that hung over the piano, while Miss Ladd drifted off into a story that I helped her to string out as long as possible, so as to avoid going on to Barcarolle, which I had not practiced at all.

When I travelled to Yarmouth to work in the archives of the County Historical Museum, which now houses Miss Ladd’s papers and belongings, it was peculiar and evocative—haunting, almost—to see her external self displayed. To refresh my memories of her, and create new imagined memory.

In an interview with Herb Wylie, the novelist Michael Crummey said that visiting a man whose mother had known a historical character in his book River Thieves (about the last of the Beothuk in Newfound­land) was “…a very freaky moment, to be sitting with him and to have the sense of touching his hand, and he is touching his mother’s hand, and his mother is touching John Peyton Jr.” 

I can still feel Miss Ladd’s bent, arthriticky fingers pushing my hand into the proper position on the keyboard; I have the sense of her mother’s hand cupped over her fingers, teaching her to play.