 "Photo: Courtesy Photo")
"Memories are suspect, naturally. They put roads in the wrong places, rearrange furniture, distort proportions of trees and rooms, put houses where they do not exist. Yet they feel as real as one's own hand. Sometimes they are shockingly right. The bridge arches as it does in the mind's eye. The remembered voice is the real voice"-excerpt from Charlotte Bacon's "There Is Room for You."
In her latest novel, "There Is Room for You," UNH assistant professor Charlotte Bacon explores the relationship people have with geography. One character, Rose, is raised in India and leaves it; her daughter, Anna, lives in America but leaves to visit India in the hopes of understanding her mother better.
But the novel isn't focused on the land specifically. Instead, Bacon says, the land is where the story unfolds.
"India is just where the novel is set," Bacon said in a recent interview. "The way these two women know and don't know each other... it's as hard to know someone you're close to as a country [that's] not your own."
Bacon richly explores how memory can play an integral part in a person's reaction to who they are and where they come from. Rose was a British girl growing up in an India that had poverty beyond her front doorsteps. In America she lives in New Hampshire and writes a column on gardening. Bacon interweaves the narrative of Rose and Anna in the first person, something that is difficult to achieve when writing two very different characters; but it works because of the differences. Bacon said that she used a crisper, more succinct voice for Rose since she was ultimately a journalist, and a poetic, richer language for Anna since Anna is a poet.
"With first person you have to justify why you're using all this language," Bacon said. She describes herself as a third person writer because she can have the most access to compelling descriptions. Her previous novel, "Lost Geography," was not written in first person like this novel. Originally, she attempted to write "There is Room for You" in the third person, and she played around with it, going through around eight revisions before she settled on the final draft of the novel.
"Much of what I had in one draft didn't survive," Bacon said. She was inspired to write her novel partly from work she did in college when she found journals written by British women who had lived in India during the 1780s to 1840s.
"They were fascinating," Bacon said. She talked about how journals cannot reveal the full truth of what is real in someone's life. This is why she played with two voices competing with each other in order to explore connections between two characters.
Bacon is interested in how people interact with the space they are put in, and it is a common theme in her writing. She likes to explore "when geography rubs up against peoples emotional states." The next novel she is working on is set in Wyoming, and she is hoping it will be published in the next couple of years. The publishing industry is strongly into getting a new book out of a writer every two to three years, Bacon said, in order to maintain a steady readership.
"I definitely feel like I have a sense of pressure about getting the next thing done," she said.
Bacon did not always know that she wanted to be a writer, but she was an avid reader and loved languages when she was younger. Some of the first authors to capture her heart were Virginia Woolf, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and E.M. Forster. Now, she strongly admires Alice Munro and Michael Ondaatje to name a few.
Now, some weeks she reads 300 to 500 pages of student writing on top of being a mother, and she sits on three committees at UNH. This past year she has worked with Alex Parsons to bring a number of writers to campus as part of the English department Writer's Series. Bacon is also on the executive committee of the College of Liberal Arts, and she is on a committee that is helping to plan and start a MFA program for writing at UNH. With her hectic schedule, it is hard to find the personal time for introspection that is required of a writer, but she still does it.
"Work is not life," Bacon said. "There is a life that comes first. I try real hard to be a dedicated teacher and writer and mother."
Charlotte Bacon will be giving a reading of her work in Hamilton Smith 127 Thursday, April 29, at 5 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.
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