“I really wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know what that meant,” says Terry Gamble. “It’s hard to be a mommy and be Charles Bukowski.”

Certainly sleep deprivation qualifies as an altered state of consciousness, and whether helped or hindered by it, Gamble found that she did have the talent and determination to write. Her first novel, “The Water Dancers,” was published this month by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Gamble—who lives in San Francisco with her husband and their two children—says that after the arrival of her first child, “I gave myself permission to shift my attention from earning a living. I decided to take a year off and do what I really wanted to do in a soulful way.”

She briefly considered taking an improv class. Luckily, she joined the writing group of Anne Lamott (author of “Operating Instructions,” among other books) instead. More...

An interview with Terry Gamble about her book, The Water Dancers, May 2003

QUESTION: Your revealing and heartfelt narrative captures the secret struggles, failures and strength of the members of the March family, helping us to understand why they live and interact the way they do. How much did you draw on your own family history in imagining the Marches? Was there a scene in the book that was difficult for you to write?

TERY GAMBLE: I drew on a “way of life” more than my actual family, although any family—especially a large, extended one—provides wonderful archetypes. My own family is quite warm, gregarious, resilient and egalitarian, but I was no stranger to the Lydia March’s almost Victorian views of virtue and values. In Harbor Point, which serves as the model for Beck’s Point, there was always an undercurrent of noblesse oblige as well as the kind of entitlement that comes with multi-generational wealth and comfort. Anything to do with the Marches came easily in the writing because it was so familiar. Rachel’s life on Horseshoe Lake and with the two farmwomen was more challenging as I had to cull these characters more from my imagination and observation than from first hand experience.

Q: Much of Woody’s emotional and physical pain stems from his injuries in World War II and the loss of his brother in battle. What compelled you to choose this war as a springboard for the story as opposed to any other in American history? What is unique about this time, in terms of American culture and society?

TG: In his wonderful little history of Harbor Point, John Creecy quotes one long time denizen who recalls the tableau of the ladies’ lunch as it manifested between the turn of the century and the 1960’s: There was always a parade; you could hear the clicking of French heels down the sidewalk at about a quarter after twelve as the women headed for their luncheon party. Today, life is so informal. [Those lovely ladies] were beautifully turned out, in their immaculate white gloves and their perky little hats. This went on for a good period of time. It took at least twenty years for the system to break down, when the war came along.

The war. Basing his observation upon his own experience in France and Germany during World War II, my father used to remark that war was the great leveler. More than I, he had spent a cloistered youth in the sanctuary of Harbor Point, upholding the traditions, bearing both the burden and the privilege of wealth. But within a year of graduating from Princeton, he—like the men of a previous generation—was fighting a war that would rattle his perspective to its core. For the first time in his life, he was an equal among men, bound in a struggle that rendered starkly trivial the previously all-encompassing sail boat races and tennis matches of his childhood. He returned home to a country in which “the system” was breaking down.

Fast-forward twenty years. Vietnam. Civil rights. The pill. If World War II had been the great leveler for my father’s generation, my generation was rapidly reassessing its social and political orthodoxies on every level. American class attitudes—so entrenched since the nineteenth century—seemed glaringly irrelevant, even in the context (or perhaps especially in the context) of a place as determinedly immutable as Harbor Point and its equivalents elsewhere.

Q: The physical beauty and powerful spirit of Lake Michigan figure prominently throughout The Water Dancers. What is your own experience with this setting? How has it been an important influence on your own life?

TG: Because my family has gathered for the summer in Michigan since the late 1800’s, I feel steeped in a culture that is both alluringly nostalgic and refined, as well as alarmingly anachronistic and privileged. The summers of my childhood were halcyon and endless, as indelible as the aurora borealis. That they were also spent in the peculiar and rarified isolation of a Victorian colony frozen in time (to this day on Harbor Point, no cars are allowed from July to September, and carriages are still drawn by horses) was lost on me for many years. By the time I became aware of the subtle and not-so-subtle class differences between employer and servant, summer family and townspeople, townspeople and indigenous people, the sixties and seventies had rocked our notions of social structure. Like Edith Wharton, with her ambivalently fond yet unsentimental view of Old New York, I am haunted by Northern Michigan. If only in mind and on paper, I inevitably go back.

Even more compelling than the milieu of Harbor Point, however, is the wider history, culture, and geology of the region with its Pleistocene fossils, its deciduous and evergreen forests, its glaciated topography that drew indigenous tribes, first as hunters and gatherers and, later, as farmers. And as befell most indigenous people, they were eventually exploited, uprooted, converted, and otherwise preempted by those who came later: the French, the English, the Polish, the Germans, the Dutch and, especially, the priests. Pristine beaches, previously skirted by canoes, became the domain of loggers and fur trappers. After the wealthy Victorian summer people arrived by the mid-nineteenth century, the beaches gradually became privatized and out of bounds to the original inhabitants of the region.

Q: The Water Dancers examines the complicated role class has played in American society through the lens of Woody and Rachel’s affair and its effect on their communities. How has the importance of class allegiance changed since the mid-twentieth century and how has it stayed the same? How would a love affair between Woody and Rachel fare in 2003?

TG: One could say that the quintessential spirit of The American Dream is one that subverts the notion of class. Compared to the castes of India and the Far East, or the entrenched aristocracy and social hierarchies of Europe, this is certainly true. But even in America, class differences insinuated their way early on into the fabric of society. With the exclusion of the Native Americans, status accrued primarily to those “who were here first” and those “who had the most wealth.” Often, though not always, these claims were mutually inclusive. In the case of the latter not being predicated on the former, conflict usually occurred; hence, the favorite theme of social upheaval explored by writers such as Dickens, James, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, and Updike.

In America, the successful industrialist of the mid-1880’s became the turn-of-the-century gentry. People whose fortunes were founded on such prosaic enterprises as chewing gum and wheelbarrows could lay claim to social position in ways unheard of in Europe or China where merchants were considered lower class. Along with this claim came a fierce sense of entitlement and providence that resisted subsequent claims by so-called upstarts and interlopers until some catalyst, such as the political upheaval of war, not unlike the geological upheaval of an ice age, changed the landscape. World War II uprooted young Americans—mostly men—from the lethargy of the Great Depression and sent them to fight side by side in what was considered a virtuous war, bringing them home in a wave of prosperity not seen since the 1920’s. America had a new sense of itself, and in the wake of this reassessment, subtle fissures were cracking the established culture of American life. Were it not for his war experience, a character such as Woody March may never have questioned the inevitability of the life to which he was born. Had he not been wounded and traumatized, his eyes may not have been opened to the possibility of someone like Rachel Winnapee.

As much psychological as it is physical, Woody’s wounded-ness hampers his ability to “fit in” with the culture of Beck’s Point and meet his parents’ expectations. Furthermore, given the prevailing attitude of preservation and entitlement, his disenchantment with the “status quo” would be construed as a form of disability. Rachel, therefore, serves both figuratively and literally as a healing agent—a metaphor for the painful and important changes that followed in the sixties and the seventies when the most social upheaval occurred, and when the lines of social distinction, once rigid and aggressively drawn in the sand, became blurred.

It would be disingenuous to claim that an affair between two people of such different back rounds and means would not have its challenges today, but the seeds sown during the years following the 1930’s and into the present have made possible opportunities that would have seemed farfetched to the privileged classes of nineteenth century America.

Q: Woody’s bride-to-be, Elizabeth, is an intriguing figure. We are tempted to write her off as a spoiled brat who has never known struggle, but in truth, she becomes a sympathetic character trapped in an almost pre-destined life of society obligations. Why was it important to you and to the story to render Elizabeth in this way?

TG: Like Lydia March, and to some extent like Rachel, Elizabeth is a character who suffers from her own resistance to change and her lack of adaptability. In an earlier draft of The Water Dancers, Rachel has a prescient moment before meeting Woody March when she thinks of Elizabeth in the following terms: “The gold of his medals would gild her wrists, bind her ankles.” In this metaphor, Woody’s manhood, as represented by his medals, is reduced to jewelry to glorify but ultimately manacle his wife in her prescribed role. Although Rachel goes on to think of Miss Elizabeth as someone who “has everything,” in reality, Elizabeth’s destiny is as narrow as her own. Elizabeth’s fate—in fact, her only hope—is to marry “well,” a prescribed course of action not unlike that of a nineteenth century woman of her class.

As the writer, I had great compassion for Elizabeth March who seems so determined to pursue her goal of marrying this man who, given all the evidence, does not love her. In her refusal to accept the changes in him, she represents the entrenched and limited view of her social set, as summed up by her insistence that Venus “has to be a star. I’ve already wished.”

Q: In addition to the difficulties of class, race and culture further separate Woody and Rachel’s lives. What did you discover in your research on the Native cultures that are such an important part of the history of Northern Michigan? Is Rachel’s character based on someone you knew in your childhood summers at the lake?

TG: Native American culture—Odawa and Ojibwa in particular—permeates the landscape and history of Northern Michigan. Many of the names in the region, although often given a French twist, originated with native nomenclature interpreted by a bureaucrat named Henry Schoolcraft. So, too, the myths and legends of these tribes leave their legacy on the land. No self-respecting summer cottage would be without an example of quillwork or a birch-bark wastebasket. No child attending summer camp in Michigan would be unaware of the stories of Tecumseh and Pontiac, Hiawatha, or the story of the Sleeping Bears. And yet the Native Americans of the region whose pedigree far precedes that of their European counterparts were relieved of their land and disenfranchised as early as 1800.

Thus the re-acquirement of land has become of paramount importance to Michigan tribal people. As contracts are negotiated for fishing rights and casinos, resources are set aside to procure the land that once belonged to their ancestors. Harbor Point (or Beck’s Point) was itself a subject of dispute at one point when the local Odawa tribe maintained it was unfairly purchased from them by Father Weikamp of the Franciscan brotherhood. As usual, the Native Americans lost. Throughout the century and a half that followed, the socio-economic plight of the Indians worsened. For many, the best hope was to affiliate with or send their children to the Catholic schools. Many of these children, upon becoming teenagers, took jobs as domestics with the summer families. It would not have been unusual to have a girl like Rachel (who is totally fictional) working for the Marches. What would be unusual is the friendship of Rachel and Woody that transcends their cultural differences. Indeed, many of these old summer families would have felt more affinity for their African American help than for the Native American whose presence was more exotic and, as a result, more problematic. Segregation persisted to some degree until the 1970’s. If the black domestics took their night off on Thursday, and the white domestics on Wednesday, which night would be appropriate for the indigenous help? It was a dilemma.

It is a dilemma that doesn’t pass unnoticed by Rachel and Woody who are playful enough with each other to joke about their different worlds. Woody, for instance, mocks St. Louis society by insisting the powwow would be the social event of the season. Rachel counters by pointing out how he would stick out in his blazer and tie at one of her tribal events. Their lightheartedness, however, fails to bridge the gap. It takes another generation before any possibility of a true and equal relationship can be considered, and even at that, it is only a nascent friendship between Ben and Rory that suggests a turn.

Q: How is the eating of earth and stone licking symbolically important to the story? How does it connect the Native characters to the earth in a way that eludes the white characters?

TG: I have always been fascinated with the geology of Northern Michigan that, eons ago, was a shallow, salty sea, followed by glaciers that came and went, leaving their talus behind. The story is in the rocks. The Water Dancers both begins and ends with images of ingested rock or soil. It seemed a lovely, if somewhat odd, image for literally consuming the land while figuratively being fed by it. While I was aware of the condition of pica, or the ingestion of non-nutritive substances such as clay or bleach, it took a little research to discover the subcategories of geophagy and, even more obscurely, lithophagy—the eating of soil and the eating of rocks, respectively. Both have associations with malnutrition as well as ritualistic links. Connoting communion as well as hunger, I endowed Rachel and Ben with the behavior because it so profoundly expresses their visceral relationship with the land.

Q: Lydia March is, surprisingly, a Catholic in a family of old-money Protestants. How does Lydia’s faith separate her from the rest of the family? How does this “outsider” status color her views of Rachel and the other servants? What did you imagine about her background that didn’t make it into the book?

TG: In an earlier draft, Lydia March was a Protestant who had converted to Catholicism out of her own spiritual hunger, beginning with the summer of her European “tour” when she became fascinated with “the peeling flesh of frescoed hands.” As the book evolved, it seemed more appropriate to have her be Catholic all along—a fact that would have been highly charged in the early part of the century when she married her husband, a Protestant. In their own way, Charles and Lydia’s religious differences would have echoed the controversy of Woody and Rachel’s class and racial disparity, the implication being that Lydia has had to come to terms with her own marginalized status. Perhaps in an attempt to compensate for being an “outsider”, she fiercely emulates and guards the social prerogatives of Beck’s Point, going so far as to dismiss later newcomers (“I never know who anyone is anymore”).

Lydia has chosen to become assimilated into her husband’s world—but not completely. Like Rachel who returns, almost reluctantly, to her birthplace and traditions, Lydia, too, has held onto and incorporated her Catholic beliefs into the starchy Protestant culture of her husband. She says her rosary, sleeps under a crucifix, supports the church and entertains the priest, hires Catholic girls, and, on her deathbed, takes the ultimate communion by asking for absolution and ingesting the ashy remains of her son.

Q: Though Mr. March’s influence on his son and the family as a whole is present throughout the book, we never get to know him very well. Lydia is the matriarch, making the major decisions that keep the family and the house together. What does this say about the nominal roles of women as opposed to the roles they actually play in the story and in this period in general?

TG: In the first chapter, a passage reads: “It was a house of women. Since the beginning of the war, women had prepared the food, cleaned the floors, kept the books, given the orders, folded the sheets, scraped the dough off butcher’s block.” This alludes to the incredibly binding role women had and have—not only in the family, but in the social and domestic fabric of life, in enterprise and continuity. While the men are off at war, characters such as Lydia, Rachel, Minnie, Ada, and Bliss are keeping the home-front functioning. They are powerful and essential forces in their husband and son’s lives. Nevertheless, they are constricted by their biology and by tradition. As Rachel reflects: “Men went to war. Women had babies.”

Women seem to be the dominant forces in both Woody and Ben’s lives. At the same time, there is a clear yearning for a bond with a father—Woody for the elusive and remote father who taught him, in Spartan fashion, how to sail, Ben for the man who took him on his lap and did likewise, but who ultimately failed to father. It is the character of Honda Jack, tattooed, coarse, and of questionable virtue, who ultimately expresses the presence and benign influence of the father.

Q: What writers have had an important influence on your work? What’s next for you?

TG: As a student, I’ve had the good fortune to work with Lynn Freed, along with Anne Lamott, Donna Levin, Adair Lara, Francine Prose, and Christopher Tilghman. Authors whose work has influenced me are too numerous to list, but among them are Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Michael Ondaatje, Tobias Wolff, Edna O’Brien, Alice Munro, and Louise Erdrich are gods and goddesses of language.

Currently, I’m in the middle of my second novel, and though I hope to eventually stray further geographically, it is once again set in Northern Michigan. This piece, however, is set in contemporary times and borrows more from personal experience.

An interview with Terry Gamble about her book, The Water Dancers, May 2003

QUESTION: How did you develop the idea for The Water Dancers?

TERRY GAMBLE: The idea for The Water Dancers resulted more from woolgathering than from being struck by a clear vision of character and story. In fact, I initially wrote an entire draft using characters to whom Rachel was tangential. The one thing I was clear about was the sense of “place.” I wanted to tell some story about this beautiful Northern Michigan area that has these many layers of inhabitants who relate to it in entirely different ways. One line describing boats being led across a green Autumn lake remains from my very first efforts, dating back ten years. A year or so later, I wrote a scene about an Odawa Indian standing in the urine-warm water of a boggy, inland lake.

Other things struck me—the stories about the war, for instance. Every Fourth of July in Harbor Springs (Moss Village) there is the classic parade of war veterans typical of small towns all across the U.S. Watching them—these guys from two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam, one gets the sense of our shared story, regardless of our ancestry, regardless of what brought us to the region. I began to ask the question, What if…? What if one of the sons from the wealthy resort families came back, wounded and disenchanted? What if his disenchantment compromised his ability to uphold tradition? What if this shift laid the groundwork for the changes that were to come later, particularly in the sixties and seventies, when tradition and status quo would become reexamined on every level?

Q: Are any of the book’s characters based on people you know or from your family’s past?

TG: The characters are amalgams and types—although I can certainly think of Lydia Marches I have known, as well as Serena Boyd, or even Elizabeth. Although my immediate family never had domestic help like Ella Mae or Mandy, my aunts did, and these women were the heart and soul of the house. They were always baking and laughing and scolding, and now their photographs hang in these houses. What was less clear to us as children was that they had left their own families to be with ours, and that once in Harbor Springs, they had a secret and rather elaborate social life of their own.

My parents did hire a local girl one summer—a Caucasian girl who was a fire and brimstone Baptist, and she told me my family was going to hell because they drank cocktails.

Q: What inspired its location/setting?

TG: The peninsula of Beck’s Point and the town of Moss Village are unabashedly based upon a summer colony called Harbor Point in Harbor Springs. My family has spent summers there since the late nineteenth-century. Originally a spit of land used by the Indians for hunting, it was sold off to the Catholic priests, who then sold it to loggers and fur trappers, who then sold it to some Victorian developers who wanted a modest camp, who then sold it to other Victorians with a grander vision. Harbor Point has a colorful history, and commands great loyalty from its denizens, especially those who have been there for generations. Even as early as 1900, some of the owners were expressing dismay about the newer, wealthier people changing the tone of “The Point.” The conversation hasn’t changed much since. There’s this incredible resistance to change.

The same holds true for the surrounding areas. Northern Michigan is a region of striking beaches and shoreline, endless pasture and orchard, seemingly infinite forest. That, too, is changing. The beaches are no longer pristine. Development is rampant. Farmland is giving way to subdivisions and golf courses. Land, once the domain of the Native Americans, is now private property.

Q: When did you first want to write this book? When did you first want to be a writer?

TG: I have written and made up stories since I was eight or nine. Alas, only an early copy of my fourth grade effort—a picaresque epic of Bertha the Beetle—survives. I was an English and Art History major in college, rendering me virtually unemployable, though I wrote all the time—stories and poetry, most of it bad. Having failed to secure a Hopwood Award at the University of Michigan, I realized writing was keeping me from my true calling as a waitress. For the next decade, I meandered through various vocations—visual design, in particular—until I had my first child. After that, I felt compelled to start writing again. Stories, mostly. About seven years ago, I began to undertake a novel. The first draft was called The Moccasin Dream, most of which ended up merely as fodder or under-painting for The Water Dancers.

Q: Are the class struggles and tensions you write about still in existence on Lake Michigan? Are these a smaller version of struggles that go on today in our society?

TG: Since I am neither a historian, nor a sociologist, I can’t authoritatively comment on this topic except to express my opinion, which is that class is a very fungible concept in American society. Although “rich people” are still spoken of as a separate, discreet group, the reality is that anyone potentially can become a rich person, just as any rich person potentially can become impoverished. Along with financial status, perception of class involves education and access, but the extent to which class has been associated with race and religion has diminished markedly since the middle of the twentieth century. Still, the human impulse to “classify” oneself seems pronounced, as if by aligning with some group financially, racially, politically, and so forth, one guarantees some sort of buffer from the dynamic forces of change.

Insofar as this still expresses itself in areas like the resorts of Northern Michigan, there continues to be the phenomenon of the very affluent and those who serve them. However, as new money, new people, new ideas flood in, the rigidly held prerogative of a prior generation gives way to a new and, undoubtedly, equally ephemeral order.

Q: Why set the story after WWII? It almost seems like the March family belongs in a Fitzgerald novel of the 1920s.

TG: As stated in the previous answer, a lot of social change occurred in the United States after WWII. Of course, the same could be said about the period after the Civil War and, to some degree, WWI. However, the period of time with which I am most familiar spans the decades from the forties, as recounted by my parents’ generation, though the sixties and seventies, as experienced by my contemporaries. That the March family would fit into the period of F. Scott Fitzgerald is entirely conceivable, for it is a family that defines itself by the position of privilege it has enjoyed since the Civil War when it made its fortune. Furthermore, a place like Beck’s Point prides itself on its imperviousness to change, so whatever traditions and customs were apparent in the 1920’s would probably be upheld in the 1940’s and, to some degree, the 1950’s. It was in the 1960’s that custom among some of the more established families began to unravel, and formality broke down. Using our family as an example, nowadays we are lucky to get our children to wear shoes to the table, whereas my parents’ generation came to dinner dressed in eveningwear.

Q: Did you have to do any research to bring the Marches and their surroundings to life?

TG: Much of the joy in writing this book came from the conversations I had with old family housekeepers and townspeople who shared with me memories of working on Harbor Point, the prototype for Beck’s Point, as far back as the 1930’s and 40’s. One woman, now eighty, recounted how, as a girl working with her laundress mother, she took real pride in ironing the damask linens in the old houses. Another told me about what they cooked (tongue and tripe) and how the houses were opened and closed at the beginning and end of each summer season. She also reminded me that the domestic staff was expected to walk on the roads as opposed to the sidewalks.

I owe my father a tremendous debt for recalling how it was in his childhood and during the war, as well as passing on stories told to him by the previous generation. John Creecy’s short history of Harbor Point was invaluable. And Patsy Ketterer, who is mentioned in the book’s dedication, and her mother, Blanche Wager, who was born in 1900 and who moved to Harbor Springs (Moss Village) as the wife of the butcher, have and had a contagious passion and knowledge about the region.

Understanding and appreciating the history of the Odawa was more challenging. There are some wonderful treatises on the area and its history, particularly Andrew Blackbird’s history of the Ottawa (sic) and John C. Wright’s history of the tribe and the region. Conversations with Richard Keller who is a master quillworker, and with Winnay and Bev Wemegwase about the Little Traverse Band of Odawa, brought much of the tradition and experience of the native culture to light.

Q: What is the main thing you would like the reader to take away from The Water Dancers?

TG: Mostly, that they love it passionately and tell all their friends to buy the book, thus replenishing the dwindling fortunes of the Gamble family.

That aside—and more seriously—my hope is that The Water Dancers conveys this author’s love and respect for this region, its people and its history, and that the reader is moved by this depiction of the yearning to hang onto something, while needing to break free of it.

Q: Who was your favorite character to write and why? What about your least favorite or most difficult?

TG: I loved writing Lydia March. In an earlier draft, I wrote sections from her point of view. When I later made an editorial decision to limit the points of view to Rachel, Woody and Ben, I had to let Lydia’s go. By then, I knew her history, and why it is so important to for her to have everything work out in the way she thinks best. And I love her for changing at the end and admitting that she was wrong. I love her for hanging onto that ridiculously incongruous crucifix.

Woody, too, was a pleasure to write, with all his delicious angst and ambivalence, his heroic inadequacy. I love that he questions, I love that he is troubled and lost. Moreover, I feel a tremendous compassion for his predicament of being unable to return to the seductive complacency of pre-war attitudes in a post-war culture.

Rachel was the toughest. I could see her more than I could feel her. It was a challenge to create her as a full-fledged character as opposed to a symbol. But by the end, I was in love with her, too.

Q: What is the significance of the title?

TG: I chose The Water Dancers because it is evocative as well as thematic. Water permeates the story. There is an omnipresent sense of lake. The notion of dancing plays on the fact that Woody’s mother gauges his rehabilitation by whether or not he will be “up and dancing by August.” So, too, does Rachel expect Ben to demonstrate his connection with the Horseshoe Band by participating in dancing rituals. While I know of no “water dance” in native culture, it has the same simple syntax as Fancy Dancers or Grass Dancers.

Then there is the swimming aspect. Rachel is a swimmer. In what is truly a healing moment, she takes Woody swimming, in a sense baptizing him. Afterwards, they consummate their relationship by the lake. At one point, Rachel imagines of Woody that “he cannot walk, but he can walk on water.” Ultimately, Woody succumbs while swimming.

Sailing, too, evokes a certain sure-footedness upon the water. Boats seem to dance on water, and the book is full of images of canoes dancing up the shore, fleets of boats racing and, of course, The Blue Heron. While Woody, in a sense, stumbles in the water, his son, Ben, adroitly pulls off a simple, but heroic, act.