Katherine Towler

Interviews/Articles

Listen to Katherine Towler's reading at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City on July 27, 2005. She reads from Evening Ferry and answers questions from the audience. Broadcast live on Iowa Public Radio.
http://wsui.uiowa.edu/prairie_lights.htm

The Island Itself
an interview with novelist Katherine Towler
by Felicia C. Sullivan
Fall 2002 edition of RainTaxi

A dazzling debut, Snow Island (Macadam/Cage, $25) follows the dual stories of Alice Daggett and George Tibbits in a small isolated island populated by quahoggers and eccentrics during the Second World War. Towler weaves the two plot lines intricately, at the same time subtly relaying the nuances of the island's inhabitants through gossip and tales.

Sixteen-year old Alice Daggett, haunted by the tragic death of her father six years prior and the overbearing presence of her mother Evelyn, never quite fits into the strict societal rules of the small gossiping town. Her awkwardness as she becomes aware of her own sexuality-her fear of not understanding her role as a woman and her fear of her inability to fulfill it-is beautifully told. Snow Island also unravels the unique story of George Tibbits, a recluse in his forties...

Read the complete interview at Rain Taxi online.

Katherine Towler on Snow Island and How to Ignore the Rejections
By Denise Hart
Poets & Writers online magazine
March 22, 2002

Katherine Towler spent eight years writing her first novel Snow Island, published in February by MacAdam/Cage, an independent press in San Francisco. The novel tells the story of 16-year-old Alice Daggett and a reclusive World War I veteran, George Tibbits, who live on a New England island during the first years of World War II.

Snow Island was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Authors selection for Winter 2002. In January the novel was chosen for the Borders Books Original Voices program and was a Booksense 76 pick. The paperback edition of Snow Island will be published in February 2003 by Plume Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA).

Towler works as a freelance writer in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where she and her husband live in a brown-shingled Cape-style house tucked away on a tidal inlet. Poets & Writers Magazine asked Towler how she conceived the characters in Snow Island.

Katherine Towler: The book was inspired by the time I spent living on Prudence Island in Narragansett Bay. The real island is...

Read the complete interview at Poets & Writers online.

A Book's Quiet Landscape Comforts
by Donald M. Murray, Globe Correspondent

Twenty-five years ago, after our middle daughter, Lee, died and we were left trying to find a hidden trail through the rest of our lives, we decided to go camping.

It was our first and last family camping trip, but we knew we had to get close to earth, weather, and one another.

We had to wander a gentle geography where her mother, her two sisters, and her father could be alone together as we rebuilt our suddenly shrunken family.

With little discussion we chose Canada's Prince Edward Island, where we had never been. It was the right choice, a place where rolling farmlands led to the sea. There were no dramatic vistas - we had enough of drama - but narrow roads that led us between kind fields, beaches where we could find solitude, a subtle variety of geography that brought us a necessary measure of peace.

Recently I felt the need for a quiet retreat for far less dramatic reasons but with a similar urgency. I felt that Minnie Mae and I had crossed an invisible border from the medical landscape of the young where crisis was a surprise and a cure expected. Of course we knew only too well that did not always happen, but it was the expected.

At 82 and 78 we found ourselves in a new territory where most of our illnesses were chronic, continuing, one blending into the next - and instead of cures we were more likely to attempt a holding action, seeking a delay against the inevitable.

I needed a quiet landscape and I found it - no surprise to this lifetime reader - in a book: Snow Island by Katherine Towler.

She does not tell us about the people who live on Snow Island off the New England coast from 1941 to 1943; she allows us to live among them. Slowly their landscape comes clear, as do the individual characters, especially Alice Daggett, who passes from one of those strong, responsible teenagers we have all known to the strong, responsible woman on whom we so often depend.

The remoteness of the island allows the world of 1941, 1942, and 1943 to gradually intrude. As one who was about the same age as Alice in those years, I was struck but the accuracy of details and more surprisingly, the accuracy of attitude of those who lived through the change of their world.

Living within the boundaries of Snow Island, I slowly confronted the human drama of responsibility and irresponsibility, love won and love lost, innocence and wisdom. Towler's characters are as complex and contradictory as those with whom we live our lives.

Recently I have been reading novels that roar through life at a dramatic pace that is unreal but - I admit - exciting. These books allow us to escape the ordinary.

Towler, a master of pacing, accomplishes the higher art of bringing us to see the drama in the commonplace, the demands of the ordinary, the conflicts and decisions made by people living the lives we discover in our families, our neighbors, ourselves.

As one who is restarting a novel, I was instructed by Towler - and amused again that, when I read those who write better than I ever will, I am not silenced but inspired.

I urge you to take up residence on Snow Island, where the author will never get between you and the characters but reveal a quiet, heroic world, and give the comfort we need when we see ordinary people survive the challenges of the human condition.

This article ran on page E8 of The Boston Globe on October 15, 2002.