Transcription of Jon Keller for the show Making a Living on Maine Waters #198
Lisa: I’m sure I’ve said more than once that one of my favorite things to do is get into a good book and especially to get into a good book of fiction. Today we have with us the writer of this wonderful book of fiction, “Of Sea and Cloud.” This is John Keller. John Keller actually is an interesting individual you’ll learn more about. His latest book “Of Sea and Cloud” was inspired by years of experience working in the secluded lobstering culture of rural Maine.
Keller now lives year round on a sail boat off the coast of Maine but he typically returns to the Montana back country to guide each fall. Between the mountains and the sea he’s made a lifestyle out of working and writing about traditional labors and the disappearing cultures that surround those labors. Thanks so much for taking time to come in off your sail boat.
John: Thank you.
Lisa: Now you live in Addison?
John: Yes, not full time now. Right now I’m in Portland, South Portland actually on my boat.
Lisa: Okay, so wherever the boat takes you, you are?
John: Yeah, I spent the winter in Portland, at DiMillo’s marina and then moved to South Portland this summer during the spring. I’m here for a little while.
Lisa: So you’re here for a little while. Why Portland?
John: I wanted to be around more people for a little while. I’ve been living down east for eight years and just decided it was time to be around people on activity and bars and restaurants, so Portland seemed like a good place to try.
Lisa: You have an interesting background in that you’ve not only worked within the lobstering community, work as a guide, you also have a master’s in fine arts and creative writing. You’ve written books and articles. How do you combine those aspects of your life?
John: It’s pretty difficult at times and easy at times. At best it’s a good balance. I spend a lot of time in my head as it is, so working outside like working on a lobster boat or digging clams or even guiding is a good way for me to get out of my head and to experience the world in more physical sense instead of sitting by myself by the desk writing, or reading, or thinking about stories. It’s really almost a meditative thing for me to work outside. Clam digging especially is that way because you’re alone and it’s quiet and really beautiful. I get a lot of peace of mind from it. Also a lot of energy I think from the people I meet doing that and that where’s all of my stories come from.
Lisa: As I was reading your book you have an interesting way of writing dialogue. Actually as I was reading and I could almost hear, and I’m assuming this is what you’re going for because you’re trying to write to what you know. I could almost hear the guys that I know are doing lobstering off the dock where I live in Yarmouth. I mean really there’s a very specific way, there’s a very specific way that people speak, there’s a very specific usage of words.
John: Oh yeah, for sure.
Lisa: Did you spend a lot of time listening to the way people were talking in order to get to that place?
John: Yeah. It’s funny actually somebody did a reading at Longfellows the other night and somebody asked that question as well. Really working on the lobster boat I was a sterman, so I was just spending all my time stuffing dead fish into bags, bating big bags that would go into the trap. We didn’t have a radio for music or anything on the boat and so the captain played the … Or just had the radio on, the two-way radio, the lobstermen all talking. That would be on all day every day and just all the fishermen just going back and forth about whatever it is, whatever is going on with lobstering or if it’s about food. They talked about food or just gossiping and stuff.
When I first started I couldn’t even understand what they were saying. So the guy I worked for he’d have to translate it literally because of their accents. But it wasn’t just their accents. It was their speech patterns and the way the words would actually be ordered. It was like the syntax was different than anything I’d ever experienced before.
It took me a long time to really start processing and be able to … Even after years of working there I still had trouble sometimes understanding what some of them said. So just spending so many long hours on the boat with that being the only thing going to my ears is these guys talking just for 12 hours every day, is just these guys talking over the radio. I’d go home and write down a lot of lines. I took a lot of notes. Most of the notes I took were lines, just quotes from these guys that I could remember. I’d have notebooks of this stuff.
Slowly that just got into my head I think. That’s what I really wanted to come out in the book, was this pattern of speech, not just the lingo but the syntax if that makes sense.
Lisa: It does make sense. It’s interesting because you also have written, “After each day aboard the boat he took copious notes on the people and dialect that amazed him. These notes eventually evolved into a novel but he was hesitant about writing that novel because he felt that to write about a world so new to him would be a form of trespass. To Keller fiction writers have a serious responsibility, especially when writing about something that others view as sacred, and on the coast of Maine lobster fishing is sacred.” I’m assuming actually somebody wrote this about you and talking to you.
John: Yeah that’s taken from several interviews I’ve done in the past.
Lisa: Tell me about that. I think that that is something that many people worry about when they’re writing, is accurately representing an individual or group of people or culture.
John: Yeah, when I moved to Maine I didn’t … I moved here to work on a boat. I was done with school and universities and so forth and just wanted a bite from it. I always wanted to work on a boat so I moved here to do that. I didn’t have any intentions writing about it, but yeah, I just finished my MFA and my mind just works in stories. I’d write down these lines just because they’re great, not because that I was planning to use them.
It took me quite a while. I’d worked on a boat for a couple of years before I actually started writing. I wrote just the first chapter of the book which is now actually the second chapter of the book. Then I stopped because I didn’t feel comfortable writing about it because I was so new there. All these fishermen down east, they’re eighth, ninth, tenth generation fishermen and I’d been there for two years and I just didn’t feel like I was … It just didn’t feel right. I was still kind of tourist in that world.
But after more time went by I just slowly realized that none of these fishermen are writing books about this stuff because they’re fishermen. That’s what they do, they’re full time, they’re lobstermen and I was a writer. There weren’t probably many writers, if any that I … in the way that had spent that much time working on a boat and spending winters working in the lobster pound and digging clams and stuff.
I talked with the lobstermen that I worked for. I remember one day he said, “You’re not a lobsterman. You’re a writer so write.” That winter I just sat down and took that chapter and just went with it and I wrote the whole book in like five weeks or six weeks that winter, just all, just kind of spilled out. Then I spent the next like five years editing it. Yeah, I still, even so I still do feel a touch of that’s not where I’m from. But I kind of mediated that by making the main characters first generation fishermen instead of ninth or tenth generation. I hope it works. I wanted a book that any lobsterman could read and say that this is true to the place and to the industry. Every lobsterman I know that has read it has thought so.
Lisa: Give us a little background about the book itself, about the story, describe it for the people who are listening.
John: Early on the first chapter there is murder that takes place and the rest of the book is kind of the follow out after that murder. The larger context is that it’s this very isolated fishing village way down east that is being confronted with these huge global forces, economic forces, as well as cultural and social. The price of lobsters has really crashed and there is a fisheries guy from Boston who has a market in Japan. He’s looking to move into the harbor, this one small harbor and raise the prices of lobster and create a market there.
So between the murder and the price of lobsters dropping and then this new guy moving into town it becomes this whirlwind of social and economic upheaval in this really small, small village I guess you’d call it, this one harbor. The wharf, the local wharf which is the community center in that area is changing hands and the lobster pound that these guys run is changing hands. So it’s just a lot of change at one time. The bigger context like I said being the global forces that these people aren’t really even aware of, and that’s really affecting them.
I simply put like the price of lobsters goes up in Japan and it affects a guy on the coast of Maine who isn’t even aware that his lobsters are being sold in Japan. It’s just kind of these strange, strange forces I’d say.
Lisa: There’s also a bit of a macabre element to this as to where the body goes.
John: Yeah.
Lisa: I don’t want to ruin anything for people who are going to want to read this. Here’s a spoiler alert for you but why did you decide to go in that direction?
John: Well a lot of that’s because I wasn’t sure what I was doing when I was writing the book. I wrote the book really fast and I wasn’t very good at thinking through plotlines. My writing is, it just comes as it comes. I can’t make notes ahead of time. If I sit down and think about okay this is where I want the book to go tomorrow then it’s not going to work, it’s not going to go that direction. It’s unfolding each day as I wrote. What I ended up with was this plot, this huge book with a lot of pretty central characters. I mean there’s not really one main character. From there I had to carve out a plot.
Through all these revisions the body ended up in different places and it wasn’t found and then it was found and I moved it around quite a lot. Then I just arrived at how it is now with a lot of … I don’t know if it’s mystery or not, but a lot of uncertainty. I wanted that. I mean the whole book has got a lot of uncertainty in it.
Lisa: Yeah. It feels like there is that uncertainty even at the end. Even at the end there was a murder but it doesn’t feel like things ever completely get resolved with all of this.
John: Yeah, no, it’s not a firm resolution. That’s one thing some readers have commented on, is that the end is definitely vague. I think the whole book is vague in a way. Again, for me that was how I saw life down east in a way, is like this … One of my friends down there who’s lived there forever, after she read the book she made the comment that the book was like living there and that if you talking to some people like say you walk up on a conversation you don’t know what people are talking about unless you know ahead of time what they’re talking about, because everything references something else and it’s just such an old place that it’s really hard to understand what’s going on in a way. I don’t know if that makes sense but it’s …
The book to me is that way in that you really have to pay attention. Most of what’s happening is under the surface and everything has got a meaning that’s under there. The reader has to really pay attention in order to pick those meanings up. I think that was, for me that was what echoed my experience there. Also I think the voice, the voice in the book it’s hard to step out of that voice in order to explain what’s going on. I tried to several times to step back and try to explain because I knew there’s a lot of diction in the book and a lot of things that happened just about commercial fishing and about boats and the ocean that people aren’t going to know. But in order to explain those things you’re going to have to break from the voice of the book, and I just wasn’t willing to do and so people have to tolerate the ambiguity I think.
Lisa: Is there a part that you like that you’d like to read to us?
John: I like actually the first couple of pages probably. I think the first few pages are the only time in the whole book where we see a lobsterman just going, just doing his own thing without any of this upheaval going on around him yet.
Ebb tide and fog and three slashes with wooden oars. No land left only the fog and the oars like bones creaked in their locks. A single gull rode the skiff’s bow. The tidewater drained fast and the lobster fisherman named Nicolas Graves leaned his shoulder and spun his skiff and rowed stern-first together with the tide and he and the gull both squinted into the fog.
He told himself that his boat was moored here and somewhere. He told himself that after a lifetime on the Atlantic he could not be lost in this one small cove. He shipped the oars and ducked his head. He lit a cigarette. Water dripped from the oar blades. His sweatshirt hood was beaded with moisture and his hands were cold and raw. Fog like frost spread atop his gray beard and condensed on his glasses and trickled from the lenses to the coin-size patches of skin above his beard. From behind him the gull watched and Nicolas turned to the bird and released a lungful of smoke and said, “You tell me.”
He smoked and allowed the ebb tide to draw him toward the mouth of the cove and when he was finished smoking he dropped the butt into the water. The gull circled and landed. Nicolas took a plastic bag of crackers from his sweatshirt pocket and removed one. He turned fully around on the bench seat to face the gull and held out the cracker in his cracked palm. The gull batted its wings and craned its neck and hopped on one foot. “Come on,” Nicolas said. “You like them quite well.”
The bird flapped its wings in place and jumped into the air and hovered overtop Nicolas for a split second. It landed again on the bow. Nicolas rested his knuckles on the wooden gunwale. He wiggled his fingers. The gulled stepped hesitantly from the bow to the gunwale as if understanding this beckoning and it walked the rail and in a quick lunge it took the cracker and returned to the bow. Nicolas smiled to himself and turned in his seat and took up the oars. The gull disappeared into the fog then reappeared like apparition that hovered six feet above the surface of the sea. A few more slashes with the oars and he saw that the gull was perched on the bow of his moored boat. Then the entire hull shape of the boat emerged like the body of a centaur beneath a gull head.
Lisa: There is something that is very I don’t know like the calmness of the sea I guess while you’re reading this. Just a sense that there’s action but it’s the kind of action that happens, and I can just imagine exactly what you’re describing. There’s just a little bit going on but that you can sense the fog, you can sense the quietness of it, you can sense the conversation that the guys are having with the seagull. There’s a lot that goes on in lobstering and in fishing. There’s a lot of quiet moments that happen.
John: Yeah, yeah, definitely. It’s a lot of … especially in the down east stretch of the coast, yeah, there’s a lot of fog. Just it’s all there is, it’s fog and water and rocks. I think the voice of the book is really what I wanted to give that feel. The book is really written in a different voice than anything I’ve ever written before. Hopefully it echoes that, the place.
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Lisa: Now that you are living in the Portland area you’re still living in your sail boat?
John: Yep.
Lisa: What type of voice are you? What’s coming through to you at this point? What types of dialogues and conversations and …
John: I’m not sure yet. I’m at somewhat of stance. I’ve been working on essays, mostly essays about down east area still, so about digging clams and working on the mussel jargon and lobster boat and stuff. I’m still working with that same stuff. I’ll go back there at some point. I’m just only here for a while and enjoying myself and trying to be social after … Writing is a lonely thing, and when you live in a lonely place it’s, they compound each other, so I just wanted to come up and get a breath of air I guess.
Lisa: You live by yourself on the sailboat?
John: Yep.
Lisa: Tell me what’s that like?
John: Here it’s really it’s a great way for me to live in a city because I can come into town and do the city thing and see people, but I can also walk down the dock and step onto my boat and be on the water and look out the window at the harbor and it’s quiet and it’s beautiful. I really need that. It’s a good way for me to step out of everything. I have a woodstove on my boat so I can sit by the fire and be on the water. It’s something I need I think and I enjoy. That’s where I do all my writing, I write on the boat and it mediates the urban lifestyle for me.
Lisa: How does this contrast with the time that you spend in Montana?
John: Well what I’ve been doing for the past few years is I go back in the fall so clamming season has ended for me, I’ve stopped clamming in September and I’ve gone back to Montana and guided [inaudible 00:51:55] in September, October. It’s worked out well seasonally because the clam, firstly clams goes down in September and the big summer push is over. It’s nice to finish that season up and then get on an airplane and go to Montana and go up in the mountains and see a lot of my old friends.
I’ve lived out there for 12 years so all of my friends are still there. It’s a nice, nice way to just get out of Maine and get up in the mountains, because like I said earlier I never leave the coast when I’m in Maine. I stay south route one. So yeah, my mountains and land based activities usually center round Montana.
Actually until this year Montana has also been like my big social time. I go back and spend a week or two in Missoula, and coming from down east to Missoula that was like going to a big city. I could see all my friends and go out and be social for a couple of weeks. Then go back to down east and haul up at the end of this peninsula where I lived in this little cabin. But now I don’t need that one. Probably the only guy that ever goes to Montana for the urban life but it’s a good mix.
Lisa: How did you decide that you wanted to be a writer? What was your background? Where are you from?
John: I grew up in New Hampshire and it’s just, I don’t know, I decided, I think if I could decide on something else. My sister is a writer as well. Her name is Abby Maxwell, and two of us talk a lot about that that if either of us felt like we had a choice we would do something else, like looking at people with real jobs and nine to five job and it just seems so nice.
I love the freedom of my lifestyle but it’s a constant struggle and writing it’s not an easy thing to do. I meet a lot of people that want to be writers. My attitude is if you can do something else do it, but it’s never really been a choice for me. It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. Every time I have a job I save up enough money until I can take time off and write. It’s just how my brain works and what makes me feel good at the end of the day. So yeah, it’s not really a choice for me.
Lisa: How has it been to do things like reading at Longfellow Books or this interview here or some of the stuff that’s around the business of actually selling your book?
John: I’m not very good at it. I’m really more used to the readings and stuff but the first few it’s really hard to come out from being just alone at a desk for so many hours and alone in a lot of ways where I was living. I’ll do what I can do but, yeah, that’s …
Lisa: You’re hoping it’ll sell itself I think is what you’re saying.
John: Yeah, oh yeah, it’s just I’m not a self-promoter at all. It’s just …
Lisa: Well somehow you got Anthony Doerr to write a little a quote on the front of your book. He says, “It’s a gorgeously written exploration of faith and loyalty, love and dishonesty. I will never forget these characters, these waters, the harrowing dramas that unfolded upon and beneath them.” It’s pretty great. He’s a National Book Award finalist and I read his book also, “All the Light We Cannot See” so somehow you got somebody to believe in this.
John: When I went to Boise State he was a teacher of Boise State of mine. He and I, he did an independent study with me when I actually wrote the first novel I ever wrote. He went through my first novel with me and we just maintained correspondence ever since. Yeah, so when the book came out he read it and really liked so that was really great.
Lisa: How can people find out about “Of Sea and Cloud” and the other works that you’ve done John?
John: I have a website, it’s jonkellerauthor.com. Tyrus Books has a website as well. The book is on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and hopefully at local bookstores as well.
Lisa: Well I’m very appreciative of the time that you took to listen to the people around you, to capture them, put them on the pages of this book. I wish you all the best as you continue to do your writing, as you write. You’re correct, it’s not an easy task, but that seems like it’s something that brings you great joy.
John: Yeah, oh yes. It’s what I’m doing.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with John Keller who is the author of “Of Sea and Cloud” and people who are interested I think that this is most likely available in local bookstores including Longfellow Books.
John: Yep, they have it.
Lisa: Well thank you John, thanks for coming in.
John: Yeah, thank you.
Lisa: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 198, Making a Living on Maine Waters. Our guests have included Abigail Carroll and John Keller. For more information on our guests, and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa, and see my running, travel, food and wellness photos as Bountiful One on Instagram.
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