What Formed Your Imagination?

Secret rooms and the ocean are two of my things

My mom grew up in Rhode Island.

We went there to visit my grandparents multiple times a year, and when that side of the family went on vacation together, it was always to waterside (usually seaside—except for the cool A-frame on a pond) places, like Popham, Maine, or Mystic, Connecticut. Then from the time I turned 16 until I graduated from college, I spent my summers working at an 8-week day camp at the church my grandfather had planted in the 50’s. There were always field trips with the kids to the beach.

After the Oasis retreat (Pilgrimage in-person) in September, one of the retreatants stayed a couple of extra days in the area, and then on Monday I brought her to the airport in Providence. Afterwards, because Mondays are my day off, I drove to my mom’s hometown even though I have no family there anymore, to sit by the water.

There’s a long park near where my grandparents used to live. It starts out feeling like one type of park (two small fields divided by a narrow road), and then transitions to another kind of park (kind of woodsy, and some baseball diamonds), and then, after crossing a bike path and a road, ends up (among scrubby pine trees, picnic tables, and those old 1940’s stone grill things) by a boat launch and a marina. If you start at the front of the park and travel toward the marina, it kind of feels like you’re transitioning into rooms behind rooms that aren’t exactly secret, but you might not have expected them to be there. Both sets of grandparents’ houses had rooms like that. I think I have a “secret room” secret room in my imagination. I’ve spent my life looking for secret passages, rooms, and compartments and trying to incorporate them into places I’ve lived.

I started at the front of the park and traveled to the back, and parked at the marina end. Then I walked around a little bit, and after that I sat down on some boulders by the boat launch. I stared through the water at some very tiny fish, observed a pile of overturned kayaks and rowboats, listened to the seagulls and the slapping of boat riggings against masts, felt the sun through the stripey clouds on my face. An egret startled me, flapping very close to my head and landing in the sawgrass a few paces from my boulder. We stared at each other for a while.

The salt air seeped into my soul and I marveled. Because here’s the funny thing: I don’t sail. I don’t fish. My swimming level is “able to not drown”—but I’m not even sure how long that would be true, given extreme circumstances. And yet I realized that day, as I sat by the water among the birds and the boats, that regardless of how non-seafaring I am, this type of setting has formed me, as much as the secrets of houses. It is essential, and it seeps into my writing.

The day I sat by the water in the park, my Follower Kickstarter had just launched, and, because Simon Peter—one of the “main characters” of this nonfiction book—was a fisherman, I had been populating all my posts with images of fish. Images of fish I had created. (Oh, and the one God and God’s weather patterns had created in the clouds that one day—also by the seaside—on Cape Cod earlier in September.) Like I said, I don’t fish, and I am sure there’s not a whole lot that a inlet in Rhode Island and the Sea of Galilee have in common, besides that they’re both wet, but there was sea and water imagery that I had been making for the last year without even thinking about it. And then, while I was sitting there staring at boats, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Now I’m working on a novel. It’s a time travel novel, and it’s an idea I’ve had since middle school (actually an idea that came to me at my Rhode Island grandparents’ house). The bulk of it takes place at the Rhode Island seashore. The secret compartments in that story are, I think, going to be more time- than space-based. But we’ll see. I really should be working on a book about glory, which a publisher is interested in taking a look at, but for some reason right now, my imagination is drawn again to the sea.

We’re each formed by lots of different things, and I don’t think I often reflect on the non-human, non-social influences on my view of the world. But after that day at the water, I’ve been more curious to notice what other imagery may have formed my imagination. And I’m curious about what kinds of places and imagery have formed yours.

Let me know in the comments. Together we might craft a universe.