Giving Voice

A few years ago, I was surfing the Internet and happened upon a hundred-year-old newspaper article about an accident involving a passenger steamship travelling from Providence to New York City. On a frigid February night, a three-masted schooner, loaded with coal, rammed the steamer and practically cut her in half. Conditions were horrendous: the temperature hovered near zero, winds gusted up to 60 miles an hour, white-capped waves grew into 20-foot high mountains of seawater, and the crippled steamship sank beneath them in less than 15 minutes. Of the approximately 150 people aboard, only 17 survived the accident.After reading the article several times, I wanted to know more.I especially wanted to know about the people aboard the ship that night. So, I went back to the Internet and visited several libraries and historical societies. Even though the accident occurred more than a century earlier, I was able to unearth facts about dozens of the steamship’s passengers. I used this information to write a non-fiction article about the disaster for a local magazine.Then the questions began.One of the passengers was a 17-year-old boy struggling to support his family as a professional magician. He had just finished doing a magic show in the steamer’s dining saloon when the collision occurred. If he could talk to us today, what would he say?And what about the 18-year-old girl who’d recently immigrated from Russia. Newspapers at the time reported that a steamship officer pushed her away from a lifeboat. Did that really happen? She was on her way to New York City to care for her sister’s seriously ill baby. Did the baby survive?The young captain of the steamship was in the first lifeboat to leave the sinking vessel, rather than going down with the ship. How would he justify his actions to us? He had a wife and two young children with another one on the way. Did that influence his behavior that night?And then there was the wealthy mother who was taking her teenage daughter away from a money-grubbing husband to start her life over again in Europe. If the mother could re-live that night, would she make different choices?All of these thoughts and questions whirled around and around in my head for months, until I just couldn’t stand it anymore. So, I wrote a historical novel about the disaster from the points of view of the magician, the dressmaker, the captain, and the mother. When I finished, I realized my book had given a voice to those real-life people.

... one or more audience member comes up to me and tells me his or her story, too, almost as if the presentation of the characters’ voices facilitates the unleashing of their own.

Two of them died that long-ago night, and even the survivors have died since, but by writing about them, I’ve allowed them the opportunity to tell us their stories: their experience aboard the steamship, their hopes for their lives, their feelings about others, anything they wanted to say but never had the chance. Or perhaps they had said it before but it was lost in the passage of time. Now, in the novel, their voices are preserved.In the year since my book was first published, I’ve given dozens of presentations about it throughout New England, with some fascinating results. After nearly every book talk, one or more audience member comes up to me and tells me his or her story, too, almost as if the presentation of the characters’ voices facilitates the unleashing of their own.About two months ago, I gave a talk at a library in eastern Rhode Island. Just before I began, an elderly man shuffled into the room and took a seat. He looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him. For that presentation, I spoke about the four narrators of my book and why I had selected each of them. I ended with a brief reading in each character’s voice. Afterward, like usual, several people came up to the podium to tell me their stories: a man who’d scuba-dived down to the wreck of the steamship and a woman who’d been working on a historical novel of her own for over 30 years.When they left and the room was nearly empty, the elderly man approached me. He quietly introduced himself as the nephew of the steamship captain and told me in all the years he knew his uncle, the captain had never spoken about the accident. Never. As he left, the elderly man thanked me for letting his uncle finally tell his side of the story.When I first started writing seriously, I thought I was doing so to tell others my stories. But after I wrote this novel, I realized that wasn’t true. Instead, I write to allow my characters to tell their stories, which, in turn, encourages the readers to tell theirs. And perhaps one of the readers’ stories will become the basis of a future novel, in a never-ending cycle of narrative generosity.