by Elaine Ford
Jim’s still hanging on in the nursing home, a little weaker each day. Gradually he seems to be withdrawing to the private place where people go before they die. Yes, she did remember to take the jigsaw piece from the car’s dashboard back to the day room. Turned out it wasn’t part of the rose trellis, but the feathers of some yellow bird—oriole?—in the upper right-hand corner of the puzzle.
Unaccountably, as the year winds down, Meg finds her spirits lifting. Maybe her disease isn’t a fatal one, after all. Yesterday Mike telephoned from Katmandu to say he’ll definitely be home by Christmas. She’s looking forward to it.
Afterword
Elaine Ford, Writer: A Brief Biography
By Arthur Boatin
Elaine Ford’s first three novels, written while she lived in Massachusetts, take place in cities. Cheek-by-jowl triple-decker houses, small rooms, noisy streets, parks with more pavement than plant growth—these are the books’ backdrops. Book reviewers noted a cracks-in-the-sidewalk realism and the author’s empathy for the residents of ethnic enclaves. What accounts, then, for Elaine’s adoption of Maine, especially rural Maine, as the locale for her next novels and for the stories in This Time Might Be Different?
Elaine moved to Maine—to puckerbrush Maine, six hours’ drive north of Boston—in 1985. An unapologetic realist writer for whom community and physical landscape have always been important, she naturally used the new surroundings in her work. Her success in depicting this different place and milieu in fiction can be measured in reviewers’ reactions. Monkey Bay, a 1989 novel set Downeast, demonstrates “a wonderful ear and eye, capturing the vernacular of the state’s working class and the rhythms of life so close to the sea,” as Howard Frank Mosher wrote in The New York Times Book Review, and, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, “is accurate about a thousand details of life on the northern coast of New England.”
Thus Elaine was able to make the jump from urban novelist to rural novelist. Or are urban and rural secondary distinctions in discussing her characters and their often difficult lives? Perhaps for the writer there was no jump, and more ties together her city dwellers and country folk than separates them.
Elaine Palmer Ford was born in White Plains, New York, and grew up in Cresskill, in Bergen County, New Jersey. Her father, John H. Ford, worked as loan officer of a Manhattan savings bank. John was, according to his nephew Richard I. Ford, a frustrated engineer whose inventor father declined to send his sons to college, believing they should make their own way in the world. Her mother, the former Ruth Palmer, was a homemaker active in education causes. John and Ruth met during the 1930s at a socialist convention, Elaine told a Maine interviewer in 1990, but the family in which she was the eldest of three children was “middle middle class.”
Elaine excelled as a student at Tenafly High School, where she served as co-editor of the literary magazine. In her senior year a poem of hers won Seventeen’s annual competition for high school writers and appeared in that magazine.
Admitted to Radcliffe College, Elaine majored in English, aiming to become a writer. A creative writing course with the avant-garde novelist John Hawkes, she wrote on her website, “taught me the values of significant detail and economy of language.” However, she told the 1990 interviewer, “my style [of writing] has always been the same. . . . I’m interested in doing the same things and have more or less the same way of telling the story as I did [in high school].”
In 1958, during her junior year, Elaine dropped out of college to marry a Harvard undergraduate, Gerald Bunker. That marriage would last eighteen years and produce five children, before ending in 1976. “In the ’60s, Radcliffe women were supposed to marry Harvard men, produce superior children, and fit into the mold,” Elaine told The Boston Globe in 1980. “It was the prevailing spirit of the time.”
Gerald’s academic pursuits and changes of career led to frequent moves. At various times the family lived in New Haven, Cambridge, Demarest (New Jersey), Annapolis, and McLean (Virginia), as well as Kyoto, Japan, and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Elaine became expert in packing and unpacking. In 1959, when their first child, Mark, was an infant, the couple “embarked on what turned out to be a yearlong and in some ways foolhardy adventure,” she wrote on her website, “traveling through Western Europe, living in Greece for a few months, then on to Egypt, India, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe in a Volkswagen camping bus.”
Although “engaged in the business of baby-making,” Elaine completed her bachelor’s degree, graduating from Harvard in 1964, cum laude.
A turning point for Elaine as a writer came in 1972, when her mother was diagnosed with leukemia. Ruth Ford died in her early sixties. “I had to come to terms with the fact that we’re all mortal,” Elaine wrote of this development. “If I was going to be a writer I’d better get cracking, children or no.” Her family was then living in a working-class, largely Irish-American area of North Cambridge, and the surroundings became the setting of her first novel, The Playhouse.
Much of the information about the book’s characters was collected firsthand. Elaine took a job advertised in a local newspaper as a door-to-door interviewer for a community schools program, and was able to observe the lives behind the doors of North Cambridge. “I didn’t get any characters out of [the interviews],” she told The Boston Globe in 1980, “but I did get a feeling for their lives.” Many of her interview subjects expect and demand little from life, because “they . . . don’t have the money to change their lives in any significant way.” The Playhouse “is about people making the best lives they can out of what little they’ve got.”
Snatching two hours a day for writing while her youngest child napped, Elaine completed a draft of the novel. But no sooner had she got down to writing seriously than Gerald, who already held a PhD in history, determined to become a physician. At the time, American medical schools did not welcome students over thirty, so he enrolled at a British university, in a six-year program. “So off we went again in 1973,” Elaine later wrote, “this time to Northern Ireland. Deprived of geographical context for my infant novel, I found that my writing was stymied. It was at the height of the Troubles. Bombs were going off all over Belfast, rain fell constantly, and my marriage began to disintegrate.”
Husband and wife separated in 1976 and divorced after Elaine’s return to the United States. There she reconnected with, and subsequently married, the writer of this essay, an old friend. Elaine and I moved to the Boston area, where we would reside nine years, first in Dorchester, while Elaine attended library school, then in Somerville, where she got a job as a reference librarian.
During the 1970s, The Playhouse had been represented by a literary agent, but following multiple rejections, Elaine put away the manuscript and gave no thought to writing a second novel. With her permission, I prepared excerpts from the novel and sent them unsolicited to untried publishers. For some time these submissions were rejected, until one day a young McGraw-Hill editor asked to read the complete manuscript. He liked what he saw and made an offer to publish. The Playhouse came out in September 1980 to favorable reviews, and already Elaine was at work on her next book.
Somerville provided the budding novelist rich material for fiction. Her second novel, Missed Connections (Random House), is set in the precise area of East Somerville where the Boatins lived from 1979, and draws on local history, including the construction of neighborhood-disrupting Interstate 93 during the 1950s. The protagonist of her third novel, Ivory Bright (Viking Penguin), operates a chaotic toy store in Somerville’s Union Square, which at the time had yet to experience gentrification.
When Elaine decided, in 1983, to stop working as a librarian and devote herself to fiction writing, we looked to Northern New England as a less crowded, unspoiled, affordable place to live. In January 1985 we became owners of a log home on a tidal bay in Milbridge, Washington County, Maine. Unlike in Somerville, looking out our windows on the Rays Point peninsula
we saw trees and water and wildlife but no other house.
Beautiful or not, Milbridge was a poorly informed choice. Washington County, we would learn, is sparsely populated with inexpensive real estate because its soil is poor, its job opportunities limited, and its cultural amenities few. Even Mainers consider the region remote.
The move was poorly timed, as well. After settling in Milbridge, Elaine was hired to teach creative writing and literature at the University of Maine. For this opening the English Department wanted above all a publishing fiction writer, a stroke of luck for Elaine, whose highest degree was a master’s in library science. But Orono lies too far from Milbridge for a daily commute, and Elaine wound up renting an apartment in Bangor and spending half the teaching week there during her nineteen years at the university. Had she known of the UM job sooner, we would have moved from Somerville to Orono or Bangor.
Yet this leap of faith, naïve and clumsy though it was, did work out. Elaine found a job that she enjoyed, that utilized her skills and supported the family. As for Milbridge, if life there had disagreed with us, we would not have remained sixteen years.
Elaine joined the town’s Congregational church, a denomination familiar from her youth. She sang in the church choir, helped prepare fundraising soup lunches, participated in craft fairs and rummage sales and Christmas pageants, and served two yearlong stints as church moderator. She gardened, as she had not been able to do in Somerville. She served on a committee that helped create a public library in Milbridge. She attended town meetings. She made friends in the community. She observed.
In Orono, Elaine soon found her way in the classroom. That she gave honest criticism leavened with practical advice became a byword among writing students. “She was relentless in her pursuit of the right expression,” Marc Grigorov, a former master’s candidate in English, has written, “often picking out a single word and reading it out loud like sounding a bell for cracks. . . . She wanted me to write about ‘interesting and important things,’ as she put it. In order to have something of value to say about my life, I would have to believe, as she did, that my life, as well as all others, contained importance, some piece of a universal reality.”
“[Among writing teachers] only Elaine taught me . . . how to live as a writer,” Kurtis Scaletta, another former student, said. “She told me it was okay to have written a terrible novel just to have the practice. She prepared me for the reality that publishing a first novel didn’t mean the rest of your writing life was a cakewalk. She encouraged me to submit stories and get rejected, because developing a thick skin was part of the process.”
In the English Department, Elaine’s became a respected deliberative voice, according to a colleague, Harvey Kail, particularly in shaping the creative writing curriculum. Off-campus, by 1990 Elaine had founded a fiction-writers’ workshop that met at her Bangor apartment to critique one another’s work-in-progress. Elaine submitted her own new work for the group’s review, expecting frank criticism.
At home and in Bangor, Elaine wrote. In addition to Monkey Bay, published in 1989 and set in a town much like Milbridge, while living in Washington County she wrote at least twenty works of short fiction. Those stories with non-Maine settings appear in The American Wife, her story collection published by University of Michigan Press in 2007. Pieces that take place in Maine are included here in This Time Might Be Different (Islandport Press). During the 1990s Elaine completed two as-yet unpublished novels set in Maine: Rampion and Through the Fire. In 1997 her novel Life Designs was published by Zoland Books. Its final and longest chapter takes place in Maine.
The one and a half decades in Milbridge were productive for the writer Elaine Ford and for the person Elaine Boatin. Nonetheless, contemplating her coming retirement from teaching, Elaine and I decided to look around. In December 2001 we moved to Harpswell, a town adjacent to Brunswick but more countrified. This location represented compromises: not in town, as Elaine on some level preferred, but only ten minutes’ drive from a rich urban center; a beautiful house in a beautiful setting, although without water view; spaces for gardens.
Early in 2005 Elaine became a full professor emerita, free of the commute to Orono, able to write all day, if she chose. At her retirement party, when asked about her plans, she surprised people by answering, “My days of writing fiction are done. The characters don’t come to me the way they used to.”
What Elaine chose to do instead was genealogical research. A beloved uncle, Dick Ford, had been the family historian. As a high-school girl she accompanied him on a trip to New England to meet cousins on her father’s mother’s side. Now, using Uncle Dick’s notes and hypotheses, Elaine began her own research. But rather than focusing on the well-documented Sayleses of New England, she wanted to learn more about the nineteenth-century Ford family in the antebellum South.
In her pursuit she benefited from the internet and its tools, including Ancestry.com and easy access to National Archives. Through the internet, Elaine wrote on her website, she also “met distant cousins who shared invaluable information and a few precious photographs.” Her training and experience as a reference librarian helped. She enjoyed doing research and she relished a challenge, none greater than ferreting out the birthplace and lineage of her great-great-grandfather, Thomas Lawson Ford, who, before moving to Kosciusko, Mississippi, in the 1840s, had been a small cotton planter in Madison County, Alabama, but who had come there from elsewhere.
In 2006 Elaine traveled to Kosciusko, where she consulted courthouse records and met distant kin named Boyd. There she learned of the diary of Judge Jason Niles, which provides a picture of daily life in mid-nineteenth-century Kosciusko and on occasion mentions her great-greats by name. In 2007 she wrote a 15,500-word summary of her findings that was published online in November that year.
What happened next is described by Elaine as follows: Doing this family-history research “I’d collected such an array of good stories that my fiction-writing impulse re-emerged. I felt driven to write a novel about these people.” In fact her decision to undertake what would become God’s Red Clay was arrived at circuitously.
Friends of Elaine, hearing about her Southern ancestors as they emerged in her research, suggested she use what she’d learned as a basis for fiction. Why not make her great-great-grandparents, Tom and Anner Malone Ford, the protagonists of a novel? “Think of all I’d have to learn about the nineteenth century!” she’d reply. “And put myself in the mind of a slaveholder?”
Meanwhile, having written up the Fords, Elaine turned her new facility in tracing family history to other ancestors, specifically, my mother’s parents, Sol and Fanny Mendelson, 1890s emigrants from the former Russian Empire to Scotland and then, in 1906, to America.
What allowed Elaine finally to overcome her reservations and make fiction out of genealogical research? A chance prompt to the Bangor writers’ group was the catalyst. Members were invited to write a story about a character who clings fiercely to something of dubious value. Elaine came up with a tale involving my grandparents when they lived in Rhode Island in 1910. In the story “Providence” the wife clings to her marriage, imperfect as it is, because she cannot imagine herself and her seven children without a husband’s provision, however meager.
Elaine now felt as though a door had opened. She began to conceive other biographically based plots about the Mendelsons, their siblings, and their children, taking place in three countries over two generations. But soon another thought registered: if, using period research, she could write about oppressed peoples in Czarist Russia and immigrant Jews crammed into tenements in turn-of-the-century Glasgow and New York, then wasn’t she also capable of imagining nineteenth-century Fords, farmers of cotton in Alabama and, later, proprietors of a hotel and a grocery store in Mississippi? In 2011 she shelved my forebears in favor of the Fords and the Malones and all the information about them and their times already accumulated.
A third cousin with an
interest in genealogy, Steven Ford Scott, accompanied Elaine on two study trips to Kosciusko that followed her decision to fictionalize her ancestors. According to him, she first planned a short story about Thomas Lawson Ford, which, as she wrote and researched, expanded to a novella, then to several stories in a chain, and finally to a multigenerational novel, God’s Red Clay. Of his fellow unearther of family history, Steve wrote: “Elaine’s research was extensive and copiously documented. . . . [But] her special gift . . . was the fiction-writer’s imagination . . . her insight into character, relationships, and the unique dynamics of family that don’t always conform to expectation. She had an innate ability to spot clues and follow them. . . . She used others to help gather information, but seemed able to see things there that no one else had ever spotted. The product was a singular insight into people, time, and place [that] coalesced in God’s Red Clay.”
Once that 165,000-word novel was written, Elaine returned to the subject of my relatives in early twentieth-century Europe and America. By 2015 she had completed eleven stories about them, a book’s length, spanning the years 1882 to 1933. She titled the collection Bread and Freedom: Stories of an Immigrant Family’s Journey.
This long-postponed dive into biographically based historical fiction was not the only new undertaking of Elaine’s seventies. For Maine Playwrights Festival, an annual competition, Elaine adapted an already-published short story of hers, “Original Brasses, Fine Patina,” which, conveniently, takes place in a single scene in a single room, a gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. MPF named Elaine’s piece a runner-up and gave it a staged reading in Portland in March 2016. The same play received a full production by Gallery Players of Brooklyn, New York, in June 2016.
At her new home in Topsham, Elaine spent the winter of 2016-17 adapting other existing stories into one-act plays. A Maine-set dark comedy called “Elwood’s Last Job” received a full production in the 2017 Maine Playwrights Festival. At her death she left six completed one-act plays, four of them yet to be produced.