Amber Dermont — A Rare Book

Don’t miss the info at the end of this post to enter to win a copy of Amber Dermont’s The Starboard Sea. I’ve read it folks, and you will be amazed. It is a rare book, as she is.

I believe in the importance of acknowledging our mentors, our teachers and those people who appear in our lives at the right time with the right words and encouragement to propel us further toward our dreams. Regular readers here know I often express my thanks to Judy Redbird Bridges and Kim Suhr for helping me become part of an amazing community of writers in Milwaukee. (There are many other writers and coaches I owe thanks to, Robert Vaughan, Tony Press, Carol Wobig, but the list would get too long!)  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Amber Dermont, the instructor in the first short story workshop I ever took in 2009 at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. She taught me about compression, about managing point of view, about reigning in my tendency to over-describe. She taught me to admire a form – the short story – that I had avoided, favoring instead a strong, strong lean toward novels. She made me believe that I too, could actually one day write publishable stories. And, thanks to her, I have.

 So, when the publishing world began to buzz with news of Amber’s forthcoming debut novel, The Starboard Sea (out on Feb. 29th), I was thrilled for her. But, I was also a little nervous for Amber. Her web presence was minimal. Being a recovered introvert, I decided to address this with her, with some gentle prodding. Some licorice whipping, as she has called it. Get on Facebook. (She has.) Get on Twitter.(She is.)  Get a website. (She’s working on it.) And though she may rightfully belong in the 19th century, she’s dipping into the internet waters and joining us for an interview.

P: In a wonderful interview with Ali Fisher, you spoke of growing up in a library with parents who were rare book dealers. Has anyone ever called you a rare book? If not, consider yourself so named and respond to the tag. (Note: See other great reviews at Broken Penguin and q & a’s with Julianna Baggott.)

You know how to flatter a girl. I’ve been called a lot of things—someone once compared me to the Goldberg Variations and someone else once told me I reminded him of Don Rickles—but the beauty of being known as a rare book, now there’s something worth aspiring to! My favorite possession is a gorgeous red leather and gold embossed copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, signed by Alice herself. My mother gifted the book to me when I sold my novel, The Starboard Sea and my collection of short stories, Damage Control. This Alice comes in a special slipcase and mom made me promise that I would take good care of her. My Alice is rare in many ways. She’s delicate so I’m only allowed to take her out of her special case once a year. I make a serious ceremony out of that occasion—a high tea. If the Cheshire Cat would allow, I would crawl inside Wonderland and never leave.

P: When we last spoke, you said how much literature has meant to your life and how you want to “return the favor” by adding books to the shelves. Is there a teacher, a librarian, a professor, a sailing coach, someone in your past who was the right person at the right time for you as a writer? Have you thanked him or her already?

There are way too many people to thank. I could go all the way back to the fifth grade and Mr. Cody’s Language Arts course. I wrote my first short story for him—a classic holiday tale about an orphan girl, who gets hit by a train, falls off a trestle and into a coma thereby enabling her small New England village to learn the true meaning of Christmas. The story must have been ridiculous but at the end of the year, I was the only student in Mr. Cody’s class who received an A. This A got me thinking. At nine years old, I announced that I wanted to go to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Mr. Cody was the first person that told me I could tell a story, which is different from telling someone they can write. I thanked him for the A and he told me I didn’t owe him any thanks. “You did the work,” he said. I’d like to reaffirm my thanks for the official record.

P: You grew up on Cape Cod. I think I was conceived there, so maybe we’re soul sisters? Just kidding – but your love of water and sailing is evident in The Starboard Sea. Are there other ways that a New England upbringing may have influenced your novel?

One of the great things about growing up in Massachusetts is that you have the opportunity to enjoy an immediate and profound relationship with literary history. My grandmother lived down the street from Brook Farm, the utopian agricultural collective/literary society founded by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I remember going there and visiting Hawthorne’s ancestral home in Salem, the literal house of the seven gables. To me, Hawthorne wasn’t just some strange wild-haired dude; he was a vibrant, complex man with noble aspirations and minimal farming skills. I remember skinny-dipping at Walden Pond knowing that Thoreau had done the same and knowing that he wasn’t as secluded as he pretended to be—his mother brought him dinner most nights. Louisa May Alcott was real to me as were Frederick Douglass, who lived by the water in New Bedford, and Herman Melville who left on his whaling voyage from that very same harbor.  I knew that Joshua Slocum had worked on his sloop, The Spray, in Fairhaven then sailed out of Boston to become the first person to circumnavigate the globe alone. Slocum’s memoir, Sailing Alone Around the World informed my own novel in many ways.

As much as I appreciate having grown up in New England, I’d like to think that wherever I was raised, I would have familiarized myself with the writers who lived in that area. My parents currently reside in Pennsylvania, very close to where Zane Grey wrote Riders of the Purple Sage. In high school, one of my teachers asserted that the best American writers were all from the South. I took this news pretty hard—as a Northerner I was already out of contention. Maybe I’ve spent the last decade of my life carpet bagging in the South just to fit in with a tradition. One of the perks of living in Georgia is that I am within striking distance of Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia. The first time I went there, my friend Jonathan Blum and I drove around for hours in search of her farm. When we finally sought directions from the locals, we were stunned to learn that all we had to do was take a left at the Wal-Mart. I think Flannery would have appreciated the demonic humor behind her ancestral home sharing a roadway with a big box behemoth. I actually grabbed a handful of rocks and pinecones from her property just to have some small totem of her life. I’m super close to buying myself a pet peacock in her honor. If you haven’t read Brad Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Connor give yourself a gift.

This is all to say that wherever you live, pay attention and allow yourself to be influenced by the history, culture, landscape and literary tradition of the region.

P: As I’ve worked on my novel, I’ve occasionally been surprised when an unexpected character appears. Did any character in particular bubble up and surprise you in the evolution of The Starboard Sea? If yes and you could thank that character, what would you be grateful to them for?

Howard Cakebread VI or “Cakes” as I call him wandered into a late draft of the novel and thankfully didn’t wander out. He appears in a brief section when Jason Prosper and his Bellingham friends go to the Head of the Charles Regatta, the international rowing competition that takes place every October in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cakes is the perfect example of a privileged kid who’s primarily selfish and inconsiderate but who’s also nursing a great deal of pain. Cakes is the default host of a series of Head of the Charles parties. One of the crazy things that would often happen in prep school is that on the weekends people would gather together from different schools and everyone would wind up at these crazy hotel parties or these epic shindigs at colossal estates. You’d find yourself in someone’s eighteenth century mansion and realize that you didn’t know whose house it was and you didn’t understand just how exactly you’d arrived there. I was on the periphery of much of this action but when I was present I may have been the only one paying close attention. Nearly everyone else was bored the way Cakes is bored by his Harvard Square manor house, his Newbury Street Brownstone, his Walden Pond estate. Cakes matters to me as a character because at his core he is lonely and heartbroken. He knows that his twin sister will die soon and that he will be alone in the world in an untenable way. Nearly all of the characters in, The Starboard Sea are over-privileged but the one thing their privilege can’t mask is their loneliness. Cakes helped me learn how to empathize with my characters and protect them from themselves. I wanted always to give each character—even the most seemingly unredeemable ones—a moment of grace.

   Amber Dermont is the author of the novel, The Starboard Sea, and the short story collection, Damage Control, forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Dermont received her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Her work has recently appeared in American Short Fiction, Crazyhorse, TriQuarterly, Zoetrope: All-Story and in the anthologies, Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Worst Years of Your Life and Home of the Brave: Stories in Uniform. She teaches Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia.

Many, many thanks to Amber!! To be eligible to win a signed copy of The Starboard Sea, please do any one or more of the following (and yes, the more you do, the more chances you get to win):

1. Leave a comment here.   2. Like Amber’s author page on Facebook.  3. Follow her on twitter. Let’s use the honor system – if you do all three, let me know in your comment. Two of the three, same deal. Or, just comment. (You’ll get an additional entry for each one you do.) And, if you happen to help with spreading the word on Facebook or twitter, let me know that too. Extra points for shares. Winner will be announced on March 7th. Spread the word… this is a great opportunity to win a truly rare book. It is stunning! Once you read it, you will not soon forget Jason Prosper and the world Amber created for him to navigate.