Stonecoast alumna and former Stonecoast Review Editor-in-Chief Shannon Bowring is the author of The Road to Dalton and the newly released Where the Forest Meets the River. She sat down recent­ly with Stonecoast faculty member Aaron Ham­burg­er, her first mentor in the program, to reflect on her rapid lit­er­ary tra­jec­to­ry and the high points of their time togeth­er as mentor and mentee.

It’s been a busy few years since we were working togeth­er at Stonecoast, hasn’t it?

I know, right? I came into Stonecoast with the inten­tion of getting the first book pub­lished and becom­ing the writer I’ve always wanted to be. But actu­al­ly seeing it come to fruition has been a bit jarring at times. That it just hap­pened so quickly.

I get that. Could you talk a little bit about what it’s like to go from being a student in an MFA program to becom­ing a pub­lished author?

It’s been surreal. I grad­u­at­ed January 2022. The first book, The Road to Dalton, came out a year later. Amazing. And then the second book, Where the Forest Meets the River, just came out in Sep­tem­ber of this year, and I’ve written and sold the third book in the series, as well. So it feels like I’ve been at warp speed since I met you in 2020.

Amazing! How are you so prolific?

I’m obses­sive com­pul­sive. And I don’t go out and inter­act with people very much.

That can work well! It’s been great revis­it­ing those char­ac­ters I met in your Stonecoast writing and in your first book, The Road to Dalton. I want to start out by asking you, how do you develop your char­ac­ters? And I should say, full dis­clo­sure: I want to learn from you!

I don’t create them so much as they exist in my mind—I just have to wait and see what they’re willing to show me. Sure, I decided that Greg is an Aquar­ius, this is his middle name, and so on. But when I’m writing in scene, I’m lis­ten­ing to what he’s telling me, even if it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly what I thought it would be at the begin­ning. These char­ac­ters are like family. The more time you spend with them, the more you get to know them—for better or worse.

I remem­ber saying once at a writers’ event, “Let the char­ac­ters talk to you.” And the response was, what’s all this woo-woo, magical char­ac­ters talking to you? Char­ac­ters can’t talk. They’re just inven­tions in your mind. But as those char­ac­ters inter­act on the page, there’s an inter­nal logic that devel­ops. You might want a char­ac­ter to go a certain way, but it would defy that logic.

Def­i­nite­ly. A really good example of that is in the first book, The Road to Dalton. I thought Bev and Trudy, who are a lesbian couple, were only friends at first. But then they loudly insist­ed to me that they were much more. Now I can’t imagine them being any­thing other than roman­ti­cal­ly involved.

The neigh­bors are like, Oh, yeah, Bev and Trudy, we all know about them, but we [the people in Dalton] don’t say it openly. They’re such a great couple. I love that unspo­ken acknowl­edg­ment and acceptance.

I love writing about them. Their spark is all in their dia­logue, and how they just spend time togeth­er. My mother thanks me for not writing any­thing sala­cious in the books. But I don’t need to. You can see the inti­ma­cy between these char­ac­ters in their natural inter­ac­tions without my going behind closed doors.

Could you talk a little bit about that choice to be discreet?

Sure. Part of it is I’m writing to that culture in Aroos­t­ook County, which is very dis­creet. When I was writing The Road to Dalton at Stonecoast, we talked about por­tray­ing Tommy as abusive without showing phys­i­cal vio­lence. The same applies to romance and sex. When I try to write those scenes, they’re really awkward. I feel like a voyeur, as if I’m intrud­ing on their privacy. It feels a little cheap in a way. The town of Dalton calls for some dis­tance and dis­cre­tion. And it’s more effec­tive for the reader to imagine what’s hap­pen­ing off the page.

In these books you’ve intro­duced us to a small, close-knit com­mu­ni­ty of people who take pride in helping one another out. The town is also a char­ac­ter, isn’t it?

You and I explored “place” a lot when I was your mentee. I can’t write a good story unless I com­plete­ly under­stand the setting where it’s taking place. For me, it’s a small town in North­ern Maine, where I grew up and where part of me will always live—mentally, at least, as I now live in the mid-coast area of the state. I keep saying that I escaped Ashland but will never leave Dalton. Even though it’s been almost 20 years since I’ve lived in my home­town, I’ll be there forever anyway. It’s in my DNA.

The Irish writer Claire Keegan has said that no good book can lack a sense of place. Place tells you what a char­ac­ter dreams of and what they don’t dare to dream of. Do you agree?

She says it way better than I could!

You share this rev­er­ence for a sense of place with another Stonecoast­er and Maine writer, Morgan Talty. Didn’t you two recent­ly speak togeth­er at an event?

Yes, we did a joint event at Book­Space in Bangor for Morgan’s first novel, Fire Exit, and my second book, Where the Forest Meets the River. Both our work centers around com­mu­ni­ties in Maine that don’t get written about very often. He’s writing about the state’s Indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties; I’m writing about far north, rural Maine. And I can’t speak for Morgan, but I think he under­stands what I mean when I talk about feeling a certain sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty in rep­re­sent­ing a place so intrin­sic and impor­tant to me.

I know you set out to struc­ture each of these books dif­fer­ent­ly. The first one began as a linked story col­lec­tion. But I’m sure with the second one, you were think­ing, I know what I’m doing. I’m making it into a novel. How did that go?

With The Road to Dalton, I wrote each piece indi­vid­u­al­ly. And though the book takes place chrono­log­i­cal­ly over the course of one year, I wrote each segment out of sequence. I wanted to make sure the reader could pop in at any time and still feel like they were getting the whole story.

But with Where the Forest Meets the River, I wrote it in chrono­log­i­cal order as the story unfold­ed over the course of one summer. I liked writing in a linear fashion for this second novel.

In cre­ative writing circles and work­shops, people tend to talk a lot about char­ac­ter and plot, and yet setting in time is so crucial to sto­ry­telling. Have you found that to be true?

As someone who’s so char­ac­ter driven, I strug­gle with plot. That was one of the harder things about this second book. There is a little bit of an arc, but it’s still very much everybody’s indi­vid­ual stories min­gling together—which, to me, mirrors what life is like. Life doesn’t have a linear plot line, so I don’t know why fiction needs to have one.

Speak­ing of time and place in a small town, what else did you take away from the Stonecoast experience?

I’m def­i­nite­ly a better writer than I was when I went in. I became the writer I wanted to be. I learned from you and others in the program that it was okay to focus on char­ac­ter-driven stories. And it was okay to be obsessed with this tiny little town where nothing really happens, yet somehow every­thing happens.

I can see the dif­fer­ences in your writing. When I found out we were going to be chat­ting, I went back on my hard drive because I save every­thing. I wanted to find the first letter that I wrote to you, as your first mentor, and what I said.

Wow! And?

The writing was already very clear, accom­plished, and doing a lot on the page. I sug­gest­ed that you should work toward devel­op­ing more texture and sense of place. And here we are. There’s been some beau­ti­ful devel­op­ment in your work.

Thank you. And don’t forget the famous boiled dinner story.

Yes! I hadn’t heard of it, since it’s a very Maine kind of thing. To me it was kind of exotic. And you really leaned into that by real­iz­ing that Dalton was a unique place with customs, like boiled dinners, that can’t be taken for granted and must be explained.

Let me put on my mar­ket­ing pants and say that if people want to know more about what we’re talking about here, they should go read The Road to Dalton.

What advice do you have for people who want to be you?

Don’t be me. Be your­self. Your own kind of writer.

Fair! But how can they land where you have?

You have to work your ass off and keep at it. I’ve spent count­less hours research­ing where and how and when to submit my work. I started sending short stories to lit­er­ary mag­a­zines when I was 19 or 20. I didn’t get any­thing accept­ed until I was 25. I keep spread­sheets of all my sub­mis­sions, which show me that I’ve had over 700 rejec­tions for essays and short stories. So be pre­pared to get reject­ed a lot.

Failing is really, really impor­tant. You can’t cleave to every single word you write or think “Oh, my gosh, if I get one rejec­tion, it’s the end of the world.” And it hurts every time, doesn’t it?

It does, but you just learn to say, okay, maybe the next one. Maybe the next one.

Well, this has been fan­tas­tic. Any­thing else that you want to add?

I’m so grate­ful you were my first mentor. You gave me faith that this little story about a small town can be some­thing. Thank you for that.

That means a lot to me, espe­cial­ly coming from someone as tal­ent­ed and as vision­ary as you are. It’s a joy and a priv­i­lege to see you succeed.

Thanks again. You’re a great teacher—and a great person.