Diane Wald is the author of the new novella The Bayrose Files. Her other books include the poetry collection The Warhol Pillows. She lives near Boston.
Q: What inspired you to write The Bayrose Files, and how did you create your character Violet Maris?
A: The first line of the book, “My name is Violet Maris and I’ve done a terrible thing,” just popped into my head while I was sitting on my porch on a beautiful summer day during the pandemic. Honestly, that sort of thing has never happened to me before!
I don’t know where it came from, except maybe it was a subconscious answer to the fact that I’d been thinking in those days that I really needed a project very soon to distract me from what was going on in the world.
I was intrigued by the idea of “a terrible thing,” but it took me a while to figure out what that was, and who Violet Maris might be. “Maris” in Latin means “of the sea,” and that made me think about Provincetown, one of my favorite places, which further led me to think about my experiences when I lived there many years ago.
I was in my 20s when I was accepted for a two-year poetry fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 1973. So I thought about what terrible thing Violet might have done at an artists’ colony and presto!– my terrible thing appeared.
After that it was easy to flesh out the story with characters who might easily been inhabitants of Violet’s world. I didn’t use “composite” characters from my past, however—these were newly minted models who would help me work out the story.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Violet and her friend Spence?
A: Over their many years of knowing each other, first as student and professor, then as working colleagues, their relationship progressed to a deep friendship.
Violet is thrilled with this friendship and values it highly; Spence, I think, is grateful for her wise understanding and her unspoken respect for his privacy. There’s a big age difference, a gender difference, and a sexual orientation difference, but it all works for them.
When he is dying, Spence finally expresses how he feels about Violet, and his death upends her world so much that she shocks herself by confessing her deception to her paramour. Oddly, even though the original idea for Violet’s escapade was Spencer’s, neither one of them really thought it through enough to avoid disaster.
Q: The novel is set in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the 1980s--how important is setting to you in your writing?
A: Provincetown as a setting allowed me to explore a wide array of lifestyles, ages, careers, art forms, and beliefs in order to enhance my book’s themes of personal ethics, creativity, love, and friendship. I often think of the setting as a character in my book.
As described above, I was very familiar with the area, so I was able to employ the unique aura of the place as well as the physical details to enhance the story. I lived in Provincetown in the ‘70s, but I set this story in the 1980s, which allowed me to combine Spencer’s diagnosis with the general attitude toward AIDS in those days.
Q: The writer Miriam Gershow said of the book, “What starts as a simple story of deception unspools into a tale of grief, love, and complicated regret.” What do you think of that description?
A: I think it’s perfect! Violet sets out naively to pull off a journalistic caper, but learns that every action provokes a reaction: the people she already knows and the people she meets in Provincetown propel her into a series of behaviors and emotions that she struggles to handle.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Short stories, flash fiction, more poetry. I got the short story bug last year and I’m having a lot of fun with it. I’m putting together a “selected/collected” volume of poems. I’m also thinking about a story based on my experiences in the New York City area as a very young writer.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m a lifelong, zealous animal lover. I worked as an in-house writer for an animal welfare organization for 18 years before retiring and adored the fact that I could walk downstairs from my office and visit animals in the veterinary hospital and shelter.
There are animals in every one of my books and many of my shorter works—the cat Dusty Springfield, for example, in The Bayrose Files.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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