(gentle upbeat music) - Welcome to "Maine Public Book Club."

I'm Bill Nemitz, and today we are talking to Woodworth about "Little Great Island: A Novel," and it sure is.

(both chuckling) Welcome, Kate .

- Thank you.

It's wonderful to be here.

- I had a ton of fun reading this book, I have to tell you.

Anybody who spent time on the Maine coast, or particularly on an island in Maine, tapped right into that special way of life here.

But before we get into the story, I wanna talk a little bit about you because I did read a a bit about you here and there, and I think the most astounding fact that I came across was that you wrote your first novel when you were 12 years old.

- Yes.

- Can you tell us about that?

Is it in print?

- (chuckling) Well, it depends on how you define print.

There are a couple of copies.

Happily, my teacher at that time, which is some 60 years ago, has a copy, and I have a copy as well.

We had... We, being my elementary school class, Dedham Country Day School in Dedham, Massachusetts, had a teacher who had come to the school after graduating from Harvard and riding his motorbike across country.

He came back to the East coast and realized he needed a job.

So he called up a friend of his, who was a teacher at DCD and got a job teaching the boys sports.

Did not pay the bills.

So he said, "What else can I teach?"

And they said, "Well, composition."

So this was a man who did not know how to teach elementary school students who came and taught us beginning in fifth grade.

And he really taught us how to write.

He taught us all of the mechanics of writing.

He had us writing a lot.

He read out loud to us, which I think is critical for writers.

And over the course of the year, he built us up to where he asked that we write a novel, which probably by today's standards is a novella at best.

But I was thrilled.

- But by fifth grade standards, it's "War and Peace," I assume.

- Exactly, yes.

It did take the better part of a year.

- Sure, yeah.

What was the name of it?

I'm curious.

- It's called "The Prince," and it's about a cougar.

I was obsessed with cougars at the time.

- How about that?

Well, let's cut to the present here, and this really just multi-layered book.

There are things I wanna talk about the island first, but before we do, maybe as we start the story, Mari is coming back to the island on the ferry and leaving something obviously dark and nefarious in her past, which we later learned is a cult, an agricultural religion-based cult.

I, like many other people probably, was really fascinated by this because in my own family, we had an experience with a family member who lived very much the same trajectory, you know, went there, kind of disappeared.

And then lo and behold, one day, "I'm back," and had this kind of epiphany that this was all not what it was supposed to be.

I was curious, as I read it, because you captured so much of that person's story that I thought, "How do you research cults?"

How do you find out about them because they're so impenetrable?

- I mean, it's interesting.

One of the things I really... I struggled with Mari's character because I needed her to be really likable to readers and really sympathetic to readers.

So Mari is somebody who's really interested in sustainable agriculture.

She really wants to do that with her life.

And she gets the opportunity to go to graduate school and recognizes that she's ready to actually get out there and have her hands in the dirt.

So she comes across this thing called a farming ministry.

Well, Mari, like me, was not raised in a particularly religious environment, so she just kind of bypassed that whole idea, the ministry part of it.

And the fact that people are praying, that's up to them, they get to do that.

I share that as a corollary there, that I lived in Utah for almost 30 years, and we are not Mormon.

I raised my kids to understand that you respect other people's religion, but you don't need to participate.

So that was really playing into it.

And then over the course of Mari's time there, the way somebody has expressed it to me, it's like putting the frog in the water and turning the heat up.

And I think that's really what happened with Mari.

The heat kept turning up until finally she got burned.

- She hopped out of the pot.

- Yeah.

She had to hop out of the pot.

- Yeah, yeah, well, and just in the nick of time, it would seem too.

- Yes.

- Yeah.

And now on the other side of the coin here, we have the island, which is Little Great Island.

I spent a lot of time scouring my geographic knowledge of Maine, trying to figure out which island it is.

I think it was finally in the acknowledgements when there was some reference to several people on North Haven.

I said, "Ah, that was one of my finalists."

- Yes.. - And I got the impression that it was basically North Haven without Vinalhaven right next to it.

- Yes, yes.

- You know, because North- - Sorry, Vinalhaven.

(both laughing) - North Haven is in itself, a very little microcosm.

- Yes.

- And it seemed to fit all those things to the point where you have many characters, and I want to get into this a little later in this book.

And, you know, there were a lot of disparate threads all moving very much in the same direction.

But you're keeping track of lots of stories within the story.

And then every once in a while, a chapter backs out and it's the island talking.

Tell us how that became part of the formula for the book.

- The first chapter of the book, which is in that omniscient island point of view, was actually the first part of this book that I wrote.

And it came from a point where I really wanted to just be on the island in my imagination, just for various sort of emotional reasons.

And of course, that's what writers do.

We create worlds that we can go into and then we invite our readers into them.

So really on that first one, it was just trying to capture the sensory experience of being on this island, which played a very important role in my young adulthood as it had for my father many years before he first took us there.

- [Bill] Was this North Haven?

- Yeah.

And as I really had to confront what the structure of this book was and what exactly I was trying to communicate, I realized, and again, we probably talk about this later, but I needed all of those perspectives.

And I needed this overarching omniscient point of view of the island, both to tie all of those voices together, but also because fundamentally this is a book about climate change.

I needed to ensure that the Earth and all of those other living creatures were incorporated into the story as well.

- Yeah.

Because I had the sense on the island chapters of kind of looking down.

And as we all know, if you fly someplace, for example, you can be down on the ground, caught up in the minutiae of everyday life, and then you get up to 10, 20,000 feet and it's all one.

And over time, it never changes, even though it's changing.

- Yep.

- And I think islands in particular seem to capture that sense of timelessness, if you know what I mean, you know.

- There's a timelessness, absolutely.

I mean, I think one of the things that people who go to North Haven always appreciate is that sense of stepping back in time.

But there's another chapter, it was actually one of the last pieces that I wrote of the book, "Shelter History," where I realized that I didn't want this to be just a book about what's happening right now or what people's concerns were about the future.

Because when you look at the fact that all of the rocks, and the water, and the fish and the birds are all part of this story, history has to be a part of it.

And I'm talking, you know, ancient history going all the way back.

- Yeah.

Thanks to OceanView at Falmouth, Islandport Press, and Coffee By Design for their generous support of the club.

Without organizations like these, shows like this would not be possible.

Let's talk about the characters.

I think there are 11, - [] Yes.

- 11, you know- - [] Humans.

- Humans and people whose stories are being told.

There are other people on the periphery, but they are the cast, if you will.

And they all have amazing stories to tell.

And the way they intertwine, like Lydia and Tom for example, you'd never... Who would've thought, you know?

How... And you introduce each chapter by basically telling us who the focal point of this chapter is going to be.

Yet everyone else comes waltzing in and out as necessary.

How did you keep track of those stories?

Did you worry, "Oh, did I leave any loose ends?"

You know, how did you maintain order as you came up with this story?

- This book took me 10 years to write.

- [Bill] Oh, my.

- So I think that's a big piece.

And I have likened it to playing 3D chess in the dark, and I don't play chess.

(Bill laughs) So it was tremendously complex just at that sort of higher level of organization.

When I first started writing the book, I was not intending to write a novel.

I just, as I said, wanted to be on this island.

And some of that involved honing in on different people and following their stories.

So when I finally realized I was indeed writing a novel, I had this sprawling mess, and I had to figure out how do I hone this?

And I realized that in order to tell the story in a way that readers could follow, I had to have two primary points of view.

So that was Harry and Mari.

And then I went through and I thought, "What is the purpose of each of these other characters?"

And then of course, I had to figure out their arc.

Then I started to get to what I refer to as the jewelers craft, where, how do I keep these stories going?

All of these characters need their own arc.

They all have to come together in the end.

And then I have to make this work for the reader.

So as you pointed out at the beginning of each chapter, I have to work in those tags.

So it does say, you're in Reggie's point of view, or you're in Sam's point of view.

- Have a road sign.

- Yes, there's a road sign, but I'm not one of those people who reads road signs.

(Bill laughs) So I had to make sure that within those first two sentences of that chapter that I oriented people as to who was speaking, where they were and how much time had passed since the last chapter.

- Yeah, yeah.

So you don't leave something alone for too long.

- [] Yeah.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And in order to do that, I really had... Probably my most important tool was a large piece of foam core with three arcs on it.

One was Harry, one was Mari, and one was essentially everyone else.

And then each chapter had a little post-it note that went into the right place.

And I had the page numbers for that so that I could figure out at the end, that everybody had approximately an equal number of pages.

- Okay, so you didn't get caught up at the expense of the other, in other words.

- [] Yeah.

- Let's talk about those two main characters, because we meet them, they don't know it, but they're both on the same boat coming over.

And, you know, I'll start with Mari because at many points during the story, it seems like everyone on the island is furious with Mari.

Yet at the same time, she's almost like someone who just can't get out of her own way.

Yet, despite all that, her motives are always honorable.

And I found myself kind of going back and forth thinking, well, like with Frank, the keeper of all business on the island, and said, "Well, I could see how that would've ticked him off, you know?"

So I can understand their ill... Not ill feelings, but their anger toward her.

But at the same time, I kept thinking, she didn't mean for that, for them to feel that way.

So what does that say about the community, that you have somebody with lofty goals, very idealistic, yet coming from a place of trauma, parachutes back onto the island?

And within months or weeks, everybody on the island is furious at her for different reasons.

What does that tell you about the community?

That they don't like being intruded upon?

- I really was playing a lot with the idea of homeostasis.

And you have, I think in a lot of communities, just as you do in your own body, there's a homeostasis, and something comes along and pokes that.

And to just mix my metaphors, you now have that mobile that's been put into action.

What is it that brings that back into a new balance that incorporates this amount of change?

And so really, what throws the island off is both Mari's return and Harry's arrival back on the island.

And the dynamics between the two really is what causes a lot of the issue.

And then also, it is where the resolution comes from.

So I think I was really poking more at not like, is this community responding in a bad way or good way?

'Cause I really, really tried very hard throughout the book not to have those kinds of sort of dichotomous moral judgments.

- Judgment, yeah.

- But just to make sure everybody was coming from a place that was going to be understandable to readers.

The same is true of the whole community.

They have their reasons for responding to Mari as a person and to what Mari is trying to do.

Some people feel very threatened by her.

Some people have a history with her that shows up again in the present.

Some people think she should just be someone other than who she is.

And that sounds like life.

- Have a favorite quote from this book?

Wanna know if anyone else is thinking as much about a plot twist as you are?

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Now back to the book.

You mentioned Harry, and of course he's the other, as you said, two.

If are main characters, it's those two.

And it struck me how long it took for them to fall in love.

And from the first kind of chance encounter, I think it was the day after they arrived or very close, where she's out walking and they have that kind of tentative chat as they're walking down the road together.

And at that point, I started thinking, "Hmm, you know, something's going... This is way too distant to stay this way."

But yet it took a long time.

And I found myself wondering whether they're both... I knew that they're both recovering from some kind of personal loss.

Harry, of course, his late wife, Ellie.

And in Mari's case, this life she thought she had that blew up in her face and that she was basically fleeing from now.

And I was wondering if that shared sadness that they both felt was ultimately what kept them from getting together, or was it a catalyst for bringing them together?

- Or was it both?

- Or was it both?

- I've already admitted I'm not a big dichotomous-thinking person.

- [Bill] Yeah, sure.

So I think it really was both.

And as you were saying that, I realized it might have been a reflection of the fact that the author had difficulty coming to the realization that there had to be a romance between those two.

I specifically gave them a lot of differences, including, there's this fairly big age difference between the two of them, because I didn't want there to be... I didn't wanna write a love story.

- Yeah, right.

- Other than the love story for our planet and for this island.

So it took me a while, but I think also what I really began to realize with the two of them is their ability to heal each other.

And both of them are, as you say, they're quite in pain.

They've been both deeply, deeply wounded.

And that felt very real to me too.

Both of them have been wounded in ways that do not automatically trigger people around them to come be supportive.

Obviously for Harry, he's lost his wife, but it's been two years.

And so there's that sense of, you know, "Well, why haven't you moved on yet?"

So they had that in common as well.

- Yeah.

We also have this gulf, if you will, between the island people, the year-round island people, and the summer people, which is true in any... Well, in many, I should say, communities, particularly along the Maine coast.

But it seems to be more pronounced on an island because you can't get away from each other.

Talk to us about that inherent chasm between the summer people and the year-round people, yet at the same time, the codependence- - Yes.

- That they have on each other.

- And I actually see it as a very symbiotic relationship.

And there is... I did not wanna tell that story of the summer people versus the year-round people.

It's been done.

And again, it's that dichotomous thinking, And I wanted it to be more complex than that.

And so as you look at the different individuals from each of those two different sides, they don't all... They're not all lining up on what should or should not be done.

Some people are in favor of the changes that Harry is suggesting or has gotten himself into.

And some people are in favor of what Mari's doing.

And I really wanted to include that as well.

I think, because for me, there's always a repercussion of how I see things playing out with climate change.

That that's where the difference comes between the affluent and the less affluent.

Because one of the things about climate change is your money's not actually gonna save you.

It may help you for a little bit longer, but in the end, it's not gonna save you.

And we need to address this situation as a community.

- Yeah.

- And so that's what I was really looking at with all of the individuals and with those two different factions, if you will.

- You may have money to build a new dock, but 10 years from now, you're gonna have to build a new dock.

- [] Yes.

- That kind of thing.

- Or a bunker, or whatever you think it is.

- Let's talk about that because there is a strong current, no pun intended- - [] So to speak.

- Throughout the story about the looming threat that anyone along the Maine coast knows well is real.

And going back to the island as a character, the threat that the island is under here.

And you did that very subtly.

I mean, it wasn't like... I didn't come away thinking this was a climate change book, yet there was a very strong theme throughout the story about the threats that the island faces.

At what point, what prompted you to... Aside from how it figures into island life these days, what prompted you to make that such a powerful theme?

- It kind of goes back to the genesis of this whole journey of writing this book, that over here, I was really concerned about climate change.

And one of my concerns was nobody is doing anything.

You know, again, this was at this point, like 12 years ago.

So we were all... We had our cloth shopping bags, we were trying to remember not to use the single-use plastic bottles.

But it wasn't... I was probably more hysterical than most of the people in my world.

And over here, I was trying not to write a novel.

I was just writing these fun stories and really allowing myself to play on this island in my imagination.

And then one day I thought, "Wow, I actually can't wander around talking about how nobody is doing anything about climate change if I'm not doing anything enough."

So I started really looking at that and looking at things like becoming an activist, trying to be a donor, and things that just really did not fit for me.

And then I had the, "Oh, duh, I'm a novelist."

So I started looking around at other climate fiction.

I had not actually heard that phrase when I started doing this.

And it seemed to me that most of it was post-apocalyptic, it was science fiction, it was dystopian.

- [Bill] "And look what you've done," kind of thing.

- Yep.

- [Bill] Yeah.

- And, you know, these are the handful of people that have survived.

And now here's how we're going to try and move forward.

That's not the kind of story I write.

And the other thing I noticed, those books had been around for a while and it wasn't moving the needle.

It was not making a difference.

So I thought, "Well, why?"

And one of the things I thought of was because it allows people to think that climate change isn't actually happening right now.

So that's when I realized I need to set this right now.

And I wanted to set it not in some far-off country, which is probably not far-off to the people who live there, but I wanted it to be a place that was familiar.

And I thought, "Well, I have all this material I've written about Maine, and even people who've never been to Maine have a picture in their head, that whole kind of the iconic Maine.

It fit.

So that all really came together at that point.

- You talk about, again, with Tom, the butterfly effect, which I thought was great in terms of particularly when in the context of his diplomatic career.

But that really plays into what you're talking about here, you writing a novel.

Was that you spreading your butterfly wings- - Yes, absolutely.

- And trying to have an impact.

Because it seems that it did catch on.

And I'll jump ahead a little bit to the ending of the story, because I'm thinking, "This can't end with the executive retreat."

I mean, I'm gonna walk around for three days in a funk if that project happens.

And then near the end, I think it was Harry and Mari come up with the new and improved plan that involves farming the land and all that.

And it just plays out to the point where I guess the only people who aren't happy are the Duncan guy, the developer.

- Yep.

(laughs) - But did you... How did you decide early on, "I want this book to end on an optimistic note," to have the quintessential happy ending, as opposed to something more apocalyptic?

- I absolutely believed I had to end the book on a note of hope, because as part of writing this book, I did a lot of research on cults, on lobster, on all things lobster boat.

I talked to a lot of people.

I don't actually know a lot about sustainable agriculture, and I know even less about farming on an island in Maine.

Luckily, I know people who do farm on islands in Maine, lot of research, and what kind of development might you put on this island?

And then I did a lot of research on why have people not responded more to not only climate fiction and all climate writing, even the nonfiction, but to the news.

And I thought, this is a... It's an existential threat that we're facing here.

And that's really hard to wrap your head around.

I did not want to be that person standing on my soapbox and shaking my finger because that's not fiction and it's no fun.

I also didn't want to leave people with that sense that everything is inedible.

That thought process connected to my paying career, which was as a medical writer working primarily in cancer centers.

And one of the things that people who have been diagnosed with cancer and their families need is hope.

And I thought, "Okay, I want hope.

How do I leave this on a note of hope?"

And that's where I really started to look at the butterfly effect for the reader.

- Yeah, well, it ends on a hope... I found myself uplifted by the ending and I- - Good.

- And I hope they're all doing well right now (laughs) with their new organization and their new identity as an island.

I wish we could keep talking for two more hours.

- [] Me too.

- This has been so much... I mean, I would love the... I'd love to hear your take on some of the characters, but unfortunately we've run out of time.

I want to thank you for this and I wanna thank you for the book because it really, as somebody who's been in Maine for close to half a century, it made me feel a lot better about what could happen as opposed to what some people say will inevitably happen.

- I'm very glad to hear that.

Thank you.

- [Bill] And thanks for joining us.

- Thank you.

(gentle upbeat music)