In the absence of a lightning bolt of inspiration, Dean Whitlock let the premise of Finn’s Clock dawn on him the way the first rays of September sun peek through the cold fog on Boston Harbor in the opening scene of his novel for young adults.
“I didn’t have characters when I started writing,” the author and writing coach recalled at his house outside Thetford Center on a recent frigid afternoon. “I didn’t have the plot.”
Whitlock did have a place and a time: the Boston waterfront before the Civil War, near the end of the golden age of sail and at the genesis of shipping by steam power. A lifelong devotee of boats and the lore behind them, he’d been reading about the invention of ship chronometers and about early American trade with China.
“I picked the year at random,” Whitlock said. “I happened to have a penny from 1853.”
He also knew that he wanted to weave in a dash of magical realism and then, after further reading, the struggles of recent Irish immigrants to gain a foothold on this side of the Atlantic, in the face of fierce anti-Catholic, anti-foreigner sentiment.
The adventures of Finn O’Neill, the 14-year-old son of an Ireland-born boatman, eventually emerged. Whitlock handed the first draft to his son, Ross, then in his early 20s.
“He was always my first reader,” said Whitlock, whose young adult books also include his Sky Carver trilogy. “That’s how his point of view got in. He read each chapter as I finished it and gave me feedback. He liked (Finn’s Clock), but he gave me good, solid suggestions for ways to improve it.”
After sharpening some of the action sequences and running the second draft past his wife Sally Duston, and sharing subsequent drafts with friends, Whitlock published Finn’s Clock as an e-book, which sold tepidly.
“Very few of the people I know, and Ross was among them, are interested in reading e-books, some not at all,” Whitlock said. “Since my best market is my group of friends and acquaintances, it became obvious that I needed to respond to their wants.”
So Whitlock commissioned a private printing in paperback, which came out last fall.
Ross, who’d been the story’s first reader, never saw the finished book — he took his own life in October 2016.
In a Facebook post shortly after Ross’ death, Whitlock said that his son, then living in Colorado, had been taking an antibiotic whose side effects induce suicidal tendencies in some patients.
Whitlock credits the friends that he and Duston have made since moving to Thetford from Boston in 1973 with helping them absorb the blow.
“We were lucky,” Whitlock said. “Right from the start, we found people very welcoming. … There are some drawbacks to living here, but on a scale of global suckiness, we’re really low. That really came home to us when this happened.”
The support network included friends from the Parish Players theater company, from Ross’ schools, and from Duston’s service with the Thetford Historical Society and Whitlock’s on the Planning Board. Whitlock needed every helping hand while playing one of the lead roles in the Players’ staging of the two-person thriller Sleuth at the Eclipse Grange on Thetford Hill, in the days immediately following Ross’ death.
“It was a welcome, welcome distraction,” Whitlock said. “All of them greeted me with arms open wide when I came back.”
Whitlock and Duston impressed, but didn’t surprise, their circle of friends with their strength over the ensuing months.
“I have no idea how they pulled through this past year,” longtime fellow Parish Players stalwart Neal Meglathery said this week. “A lot of us were there with hugs and occasionally meals. They weren’t shy about asking for help, and a few of us kept our antennae up for when they needed to talk.”
The network had some practice, having helped the family through Whitlock’s bout with leukemia in the 1980s.
“He’s been flexible over the years — reinventing himself, adapting to whatever is going on in his life,” John Griesemer, a Lyme resident with long ties to the Parish Players, said this week. “He was dealing with cancer at a time when not many people got through it. He was sort of a trailblazer: ‘This is how you deal with this stuff.’ He kept going, and adapted, and prevailed.”
This adaptation is a work in progress.
“The shock of (Ross’) death led us into finding ways to be happy in life, despite all,” Whitlock said. “You don’t move on from losing someone too soon, but you reach a point where you carry them forward with you.”
The latest vehicle for carrying Ross’ memory forward is Final Confrontation #43, the younger Whitlock’s script satirizing superhero fiction. During its festival of 10-minute plays next month, the Parish Players will stage the comedy, with Whitlock playing a sewer rat named Lorry and Meglathery portraying Korrrl, retired super-villain hiding in human form.
“He had written the role of Lorry for himself,” Whitlock said. “He would easily have surpassed me. His imagination at that age far outstripped me at the same age.”
His parents stoked that imagination early and often.
“We read with Ross from the time he could sit up in our laps,” Whitlock said. “We started reading together and then as Ross got older, we’d take turns. I would do the dishes while Sally read to him, and then she would be doing some chores while I read. It was such a wonderful thing.”
Ross carried those early lessons in imagination into the private Open Fields School in Thetford, where he wrote skits for various events during his elementary-grade years, and then into Thetford Academy. He continued to write short stories and plays while majoring in anthropology at the University of Vermont, and after relocating to Colorado, where he met his life partner, Chris Pratt.
“When he was younger, he got into books like R.L. Stine’s horror stories,” Whitlock recalled. “He was really good with scripts and dialogue for plays and videos, which helped inform my writing. I think he was 11 when he came up to me with a finished script and said, ‘Would you look it over for me?’ The only things I changed were some of the punctuation.”
Ross returned the favor with advice of his own over the ensuing years, including encouraging his father to stick with the plan to write Finn’s Clock in the first person, for the first time in his career.
“I think it’s helped to make the book more accessible to adults,” Whitlock said. “There’s nothing more gratifying than learning that a grown adult has stayed up all night to finish a book that’s ostensibly for young teens.”
Ross’ love of reading and writing continues to inform Whitlock’s work as a writing coach.
“I always feel very lucky when we can work out bringing Dean into my creative writing class,” Thetford Academy English teacher Emily Silver said this week. “It really lends credibility to the advice the students are getting. He’s a published author, and continuing to work to get his stories published. He’s good at asking students about the progress of their own stories, and he really takes everybody’s ideas very seriously. A kid will express an idea, and in a really genuine way, Dean starts firing off questions: ‘What do you think happens next?’ He can make a verbal observation on the spot that follows the storyline. It’s really fun to watch. He just comes up with this prose.”
In addition to leading workshops and giving private lessons, Whitlock in recent months has been visiting libraries around the Upper Valley to read from Finn’s Clock and give PowerPoint presentations — one aimed at adults focusing on the history behind the book, and one for younger readers based on the action, which includes brawls in which one of Finn’s friends, a half-Chinese, half-Caucasian girl, dispatches opponents with martial arts.
“I wanted to do something involved themes like perseverance and loyalty,” Whitlock said. “Something that portrayed somebody up against great odds, somebody working out how to make a life for himself.”
In the epilogue to Finn’s Clock, the title character, now in his 90s, recalls the words that ancient mariner Matthew Lawson shared with him during his teenage quest to chart a life’s course:
Let your heart be your clock. … Live for the moments when it runs full tilt for joy, or slows to the gentle tick of contentment. Treasure it. There is not enough time in life for clocks.
Parish Players will stage Ross Whitlock’s
Dean Whitlock will read from
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.