David Chase began his writing career as a columnist for the Brattleboro Reformer in the 1980s, and he self-published his columns as a book, A Peasant of West Brattleboro, in 1987.
Now, 25 years later, Chase, a native of Brattleboro who now lives in Keene, N.H. with his wife, Susan Lane Shaw, has published Grants Ferry, a novel about Kenneth Forbes, a man who returns to his hometown 30 years after he ran away. Forbes must deal with the vindictive will of his deceased aunt Fanny.
“Add the people Kenneth left behind when he ran away, the steady decay of the town itself, and what Kenneth views as provincial simplicity of the generation now in charge, and Kenneth finds himself soundly ensnared in Fanny's trap,” the book's jacket copy reads. “But Grants Ferry survives. Its history is long and peppered with local characters, often a touch eccentric, who create a pleasant mix of humor, cruelty, tenderness, and violence.”
The title of the book derives from the history of Vermont's origins as the New Hampshire Grants, and it references an early ferry crossing between the two states.
“I did a lot of research around the New Hampshire Grants, and how it came about, through conflict between New York and New Hampshire,” Chase says.
When the colonies were established, England “gave New York Colony the west side of the Connecticut river as a colony. New Hampshire Colony had no western boundary, so Benning Wentworth [the colonial governor of New Hampshire] thought it was all his and he could go as far as he wanted. It all fit to create Grants Ferry.”
But, he says, much of the research that informs the setting of the book is “stuff that never shows up” in the actual story.
When asked about the origin of the book itself, Chase says “The story I wrote isn't the one I thought of.”
“I started out with a broad idea about changes in a town, and a list of characters,” he says. “Most of it fell aside. It's part of my process.”
Better with deadlines
In 1989, the author won a one-month residency to the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, N.Y.
“I had been writing my newspaper column for four years, and I was used to writing four pages at once. I spent that month teaching myself to write long, stretching it out to a thousand words. I wrote something about 22 pages long, and I thought that was quite a deal.”
That writing, he says, turned out to be a piece of what became Grants Ferry.
The story stuck with him even 10 years later while he was living in California, where he moved in 1999.
“I kept talking about [writing the book] and my wife was asking 'When are you going to write it?' We were doing something in San Francisco, and I was telling a woman about it, and she thought it was a riot and said 'You're going to have to promise me you'll write this.'”
So Chase started writing.
“I found a couple of writers' groups up above SF, and one was just a free-write group and the other was a memoir group, working on novels,” he says.
“So the fact that somebody expected something every week [helped], because I do much better with deadlines even though I hate them,” Chase recalls.
Having an audience for the work also helped.
“I would do something because they wanted to know 'What happens next?' And I didn't write it in sequence, so it came and went. [I liked] getting a reaction from people, having them get caught up in the characters, when they 'get it.'”
Chase, also a playwright, penned a three-act play, As Fair As You Were, in 1998, which was performed in 2009 by the Vermont Theatre Company.
As for future projects, Chase has another novel in the beginning stages. “I've changed it several times. I still write in blocks like a [newspaper] column, and sections vary in length.”
Grants Ferry is available for Kindle download on Amazon.com.