by Elaine Ford
Industriousness; openness to new forms (historical fiction, plays, light verse for children, newspaper op-eds); willingness to adapt (turning stories into plays, fictionalizing family history, using fact for a story’s skeleton when pure invention flags); inextinguishable curiosity. And a sharp eye for telling detail. All these characterize Elaine Ford as a writer. Most are also her personal characteristics.
Looking at her body of work, published and unpublished, a shift in setting from one novel or story to another seems less important than how richly each setting is evoked—rural or urban, domestic or foreign, present day or centuries past. “As the novel progresses,” a reviewer wrote in The Washington Post about Monkey Bay, “the characters become more and more identified with the harsh, craggy landscape in which they live.” Similar things might be said of the protagonists of Missed Connections and Ivory Bright, although their Somerville landscape is hardly craggy. The point is that in all these books, place is important—is used.
More significant are the continuities in Elaine’s fiction, whatever the setting. She is a writer with a worldview. “What happens to you largely comes out of who you are,” she told an interviewer the year after Monkey Bay was published, “and who you are is constrained by the circumstances in which you find yourself.” This statement applies to the protagonists in that novel; to those in the Somerville books; to Kori in the story “The Depth of Winter”; to both Lynette Bragg and John Scarano in “Suicide”; and to great-great-grandfather Thomas Lawson Ford, the hard-luck Alabama cotton planter.
“I have always been drawn to write about characters who are marginalized by class, ethnicity, physical appearance, or geographical location,” Elaine wrote on her website, “and about those afflicted by bad luck or devotion to causes doomed to failure.”
A reader of Ivory Bright once wrote to complain that at the book’s conclusion it was “too easy” for the writer “to allow Ivory to accept her [unsatisfactory] life with resignation.” Elaine replied in a brief essay titled “Not All Endings Are Happy,” published in The Eloquent Edge: 15 Maine Women Writers in 1989. “Everybody, including me, yearns for happy endings. The trouble is, life doesn’t work that way. People are still sorting out their mistakes and misalliances the day they drop. Most of us do not have the luxury of starting over. . . . It would be lovely if happy endings could be clapped onto lives and novels could honestly reflect that. But it seems to me that the day-to-day living with one’s choices is the very essence of life. And for me the whole point of writing is to tell it like it is, not like I wish it were. As long as I’m doing that, I’ll have to continue to let my characters struggle on, and on, and finally make the best peace they can.”
In February 2017 Elaine was fully functioning, distressed by the election of President Donald Trump but fulfilled and happy in her personal life. She looked forward to a May canal-barge trip in France and to two summer writing projects. She was healthy, so she thought. But the next month suddenly brought her severe neurological symptoms and the diagnosis of an incurable brain tumor. She underwent surgery in April and prescribed radiation in May and June, but these failed to prolong her life or maintain its quality. At the end of June, Elaine chose to abandon treatment and entered a hospice program in her home. She died August 27, 2017.
Sources
Estill, Katie. “Lives of Choice and Chance.” The Washington Post, July 25, 1989.
Ford, Elaine. “Not All Endings Are Happy.” The Eloquent Edge: 15 Maine Women Writers, edited by Kathleen Lignell and Margery Wilson. Bar Harbor, Maine: Acadia Publishing, 1989.
Ford, Elaine. “The Lopsided Tree.” Family Chronicle, November 2014.
Landry, Peter. “Ebb and Flow of Time and Fortune among a Coastal Clan.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 6, 1989.
Machin, Linda. “A Different Story on Cambridge.” The Boston Globe, November 13, 1980.
Mosher, Howard Frank. “Far from Kennebunkport.” The New York Times Book Review, August 6, 1989.
Private correspondence with Richard I. Ford, Marc Grigorov, Harvey Kail, Kurtis Scaletta, Steven Ford Scott.
Walker, David. “Out of Order: the Lives of People Who Hang Out in Laundromats.” Preview!, Ellsworth, Maine, August 24, 1990.
www.elainefordauthor.com/about
An expanded version of this essay appears at
www.elainefordauthor.com.
AcknowleDgments
Some of the stories in This Time Might Be Different have been previously published, in different form:
“The Depth of Winter.” Passages North. Winter/Spring 2004.
“Suicide.” North American Review. May–August 2001.
“In the Marrow.” Night Train. Spring 2004.
“Bent Reeds.” The Quotable Moose: A Contemporary Maine Reader. Hanover, New Hampshire, 1994.
“Elwood’s Last Job.” Nebraska Review. Summer 2003. Reprinted in Contemporary Maine Fiction. Camden, Maine: Down East Books, 2005.
“Button, Needle, Thread.” Colorado Review. Spring 2001.
“Fire Escape.” Phantasmagoria. Winter 2002.
“Dragon Palaces.” Talking River Review. Winter 2000.
“Why Men Love to Cut Things Down.” Chariton Review. Fall 2013.
“Junk.” The Eloquent Edge: 15 Maine Women Writers. Bar Harbor, Maine: Acadia Publishing, 1989.
“Millennium Bug.” The Flexible Persona. Fall 2016.
“Original Brasses, Fine Patina.” The Marriage Bed. Wordrunner eChapbooks. November 2015. http://echapbook.com/fiction/ford
“The Rock As Big As the Queen Mary.” Colorado Review. Fall 1997.