Julia Glass

Julia Glass's books of fiction include the best-selling Three Junes, winner of the National Book Award, and I See You Everywhere, winner of the Binghamton University John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Other published works include the Kindle Single Chairs in the Rafters and essays in several anthologies. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Glass is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College. She lives with her family in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

Glass's new novel is Vigil Harbor.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Vigil Harbor was titled, until the 11th hour, In a Time of Tempests. I loved that title the way one loves a garish dress that you secretly suspect makes you look more clownish than elegant. I wanted the reader to picture storms, hurricanes, typhoons--high drama! (And if there were an intimation of themes Shakespearean, so much the better.) In the near-future era of this novel, the volume's been turned up on many existential threats, but none more prominently than climate change (though I would not call this novel cli-fi).

Ultimately, however, that title was a diva. At heart, this is a story about a place, the forces that its history and topography have exerted on nearly five centuries of inhabitants. I thought of David Ebershoff's Pasadena, Richard Russo's Empire Falls (such a great pun); Sebald's Austerlitz, Eliot's Middlemarch. All good company. (My fictional town Vigil Harbor actually harks back to a previous novel of mine, The Widower's Tale.)

Last week I got a wonderful note from a close writer friend, praising the title: "What a terrific name for where we are this day, this year, now! I think all the time about how to characterize the sense of parlousness and the need not to give up hope, both more intensely felt than ever before in our lives. Vigil Harbor covers the ground in two words." Never mind that I had to look up the word parlous (which does not, it turns out, mean "talkative"). Miraculously, what he describes is the very ethos of the book as I've intended it!

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Beginnings simply arrive, like a dear friend pulling up to the house in a convertible and saying, "Hey, climb in. Champagne's chilled and the day is ours." A new beginning will feel, for a while, perfect, even brilliant. Endings, on the other hand, are valiantly fought for, like the summit of a mountain after a long hike. (I sometimes think I suffer the climb just to earn the view.) Yet once I reach the end of a book--which takes months, if not years, since I revise as I go along, rather than writing a series of drafts--I'm often happily surprised. Rarely does it change much, if at all. Over the course of writing a novel, it's that seductive beginning that I'll fuss with and change, discard, replace, re-voice, dozens of times. So the entire enterprise is a big game of bait-and-switch. Yet I fall for it every time.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

All the characters I end up caring for the most (and often my feelings about them change radically along the way) emerge from some cranny of my own psyche--generally reflecting qualities and habits of which I'm not terribly proud. Yet I won't realize it (and this is a blessing) until I'm well along in crafting a story. My tendency toward caution, my curmudgeonly resistance to innovative changes, my hoarding of grudges: these are just some of the worst sides of my personality that have distinguished characters with whom, to my shock, readers fall in love. A number of major characters in my novels would seem to embody cautionary tales written by and for their author!

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Above all, the ambition I once had to succeed as a visual artist, which lasted into my early thirties, definitely shaped the way I write. I am extremely visual and love nothing more than to put my reader in a very particular place, be it a house, a landscape ... or a town like Vigil Harbor. I am a writer who looks as passionately as I feel. The places I've lived and loved also cast a large shadow, especially New York City and New England.

I would also have to say that becoming a mother and raising children, something I've done on a later timeline than most women, changed forever the way I see and write about my characters, all of whom I can't help seeing as the children of their parents. I think hard about every character's family tree and gene pool. And so, quite often, do they.

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The Page 69 Test: Vigil Harbor.

--Marshal Zeringue