About
Marcia Peck

​An Interview with Marcia Peck

1. What is your award-winning novel, Water Music, about?
   ​When eleven-year-old Lily Grainger crosses the bridge at Buzzard’s Bay—the bridge that tethered Cape Cod to the mainland—that summer of 1956, she finds her family suddenly adrift. That was the summer the Andrea Doria sank, pilot whales stranded, and Lily’s father built a house he couldn’t afford. Target practice on a nearby decommissioned Liberty Ship echoed the rancor in her parents’ marriage, a rancor stoked by Lily’s competitive uncle, and Lily tries to understand who belongs to whom. She discovers betrayals beyond her understanding as well as the small ways in which people try to rescue each other. Drawing on her music lessons and her love for Cape Cod, she seeks safe passage from the limited world of her salt pond to the larger, open ocean.
    

2. What inspired you to write it?  
   Summers spent with my family on Cape Cod were a powerful formative experience when I was growing up. My father was a school teacher, with summers off, and so my family could leave our “normal” lives behind and “rough it” on a plot of land beside a salt pond. Those woods and pond became the center of my world. There is something about being unmoored from “normal life” that has haunted me ever since those girlhood summers: small things become big things, personalities become bigger-than-life, the impossible becomes possible.  When I began WATER MUSIC, I thought I was writing a few short stories, but they soon exerted their wish to find connection and grow.  

3. You are not only a talented writer, but you have a musical gift. Please tell us about that. 
   
   You are very kind to call it a “gift.” It feels much more like simple hard work. I’ve been extremely fortunate to have spent my entire professional life as a symphony musician, performing every day with extraordinary colleagues, playing the music of the great composers.  At the same time, I’ve always been an avid reader. After all, literature and music are both languages. As a musician, I began to look for the rhythm in language. I had to learn to “phrase.”  That is, to study the shape of a musical phrase, where it wants to go, where it might peak, how it resolves. Not at all different from the shape of a sentence, or a paragraph, or for that matter, a book.
    

4. Why cello?
   My father chose the cello for me when I was eight years old. He always said it was because of my big hands, and—to be sure—long fingers are certainly not a drawback. But I think his choice had partly to do with the availability of Joseph Furia, my first teacher, and mostly with the fact that my parents’ closest friends before they moved from Boston to New Jersey had been a couple: Wes was an organist and Mabel a fine cellist. I think he cherished the memory of conducting her performance of Dvorak Concerto with his community orchestra.  That, and the fact that cello is the absolute best, most beautiful instrument of all.  Hands down.  
    

5. Both of your parents were pianists. Did they inspire you to play? Was there pressure for you to perform like they did?  
   I think my father put his faith in the practice-makes-perfect school of thought as opposed to “inspiration.” He was a conductor and an educator as well as a pianist, and considered “time served” to be a more accurate indicator of ultimate success. Not unlike—I might say—time spent at ones writing desk.  My mother was the (universally acknowledged) more talented, but she struggled as a mother of three in the 50’s to realize her potential. Nevertheless, it gave her great pleasure to play Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” three times in succession to time a soft-boiled egg.   
    

6. What similarities/differences do you see in the process of writing vs. playing a musical instrument?  
   Aha! Practice, practice, practice!  Revise, revise, revise! I should also add: listen, listen, listen, and read, read, read. I wish when I was growing up, I had listened to more recordings of the core repertoire that forms our classical music canon. Nothing compares with having those great performances in one’s bones, informing our choices later when developing our own interpretations. By the same token, reading widely helps us to hone our writing chops. Even before we learn to parse how an author sets up a plot or structures a sentence for full effect, the shape and sounds and rhythms of good writing start almost magically to help us recognize what we like as readers. And then to seek a voice of one’s own.
    

7. What does the title mean? 
   Even though the title WATER MUSIC is not unique, and in spite of Handel’s well-known Oratorio and nearly a dozen books for sale on Amazon today that contain the words “water music,” it was more than important to me to have that title for my book; I saw it as a deal-breaker.  For me, “water” describes the outer landscape of Cape Cod: the beaches, the relative safety of Lily’s salt pond, the habitat of sea creatures that Lily encounters, the danger of open water.  On the other hand, I see “music” as Lily’s inner landscape, where she goes for safety, where she looks for both challenge and redemption.   
    

8. Why was your book set in 1950's Cape Cod?  
   Like Lily, I fell in love with Cape Cod of the 1950s. It felt mythical to cross the Cape Cod Canal when the peninsula was still something of a backwater compared to the wealth of Newport, the vogue of Long Island, or the accessibility of the Jersey Shore. Only after Kennedy was elected president and established the National Seashore, I would argue, did the Cape appear on the radar of the mainstream vacationing public. Only a dozen years earlier the Cape had played a role in the country’s defense during World War II. The rumble of guns running target practice on a scuttled Liberty Ship in nearby Eastham seemed to echo the rancor in Lily’s parents’ marriage.
    

9. How much of the family drama presented in your book has a basis in your real-life family?
   Friends who know me will argue that much about Lily’s life mirrors mine. My family, like Lily’s, camped by a salt pond summers until my father could afford to build a cottage. I, too, took cello lessons with a very elderly and extraordinarily memorable cello teacher. My father’s brother and his family had a cottage across the pond from us and there is no doubt we tuned our lives to theirs.  When I began writing, I needed those similarities to ground me in the characters and sense of place. Soon though, as the story began to take hold, I found myself asking “but what if…and what if…”  It sounds counter-intuitive, but I think I needed those solid markers to allow my imagination to take over.
    

10. What messages do you want to share in your book about family importance and complications?  
    Would it be fair to say that I don’t have a “message” per se? Except to say that “it’s complicated!” I tried to allow the characters to be complicated, to allow them their strengths and their weaknesses. Their faults and virtues. Even Lily’s grandmother, perhaps the most unlikeable character in the book, has a pardonable side, having grown up in a time when she had no real choice about marriage and becoming a mother.  For eleven-year-old Lily, family is everything, and even her budding curiosity about Nick, the boy from the nearby boys’ camp, pales compared to her attempts to “read” her parents and understand their struggles.  
     

11. How would you describe your writing style?
    Funny you ask! I read pretty eclectically, and didn’t set out to emulate any particular author or any particular genre. At least one beta reader faulted me for not positioning the book squarely in a particular genre. If it was a romance then I needed this, if a historical novel, then I needed that.  I knew I had an emotional—as opposed to academic—story to tell. Of course I wanted it to be “readable,” able to engage an audience not limited by age or sex. But I was unwilling to write to a formula.  And in the end, I let my love of music guide me. I paid attention to rhythm, proportion, sound; looked for the beauty and emotion possible in prose. Since publication, I’ve been gratified to hear my writing referred to as “literary fiction.”  I’ll take that! 
     

12. What books or writers would you say influenced you -- or seem similar to yours?  
    I absolutely love Arundati Roy’s The God of Small Things. When sitting down to work on WATER MUSIC, I often would start by rereading a random paragraph from that book, just to put me in mind of the tone I was working toward.  Similarly, if stuck, I would often start by rereading Jane Hirshfield’s poem, “In a Net of Blue and Gold.” That poem never failed to remind me what it was my book was reaching to say.  And this may sound unlikely, but Don Marquis’ The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel has never failed to inspire me and help me find my voice. Archy, the cockroach, and Mehitabel, the alleycat, always remind me not to take myself too seriously.  
     

13. What challenges, if any, did you have when writing your book and telling your story?
    Time! I’d be surprised if every writer under the sun in the history of the world didn’t say the same thing. For me, it was necessary to have the entire book in my head in order to write or revise any part of it. I needed to have the voices fresh in my mind, and the verbal “motifs” within reach. But with a full-time job, I often had to put writing aside for months on end while I caught up on laundry!  At the same time, I am lucky that I didn’t have to rush to meet a deadline. I could let the pot simmer. I’ve also been very lucky to have a rich writing community in Minneapolis, smart writer friends I can rely on for honest feedback, and a State Arts Board that granted me the gift of uninterrupted time to concentrate.
     

14. Were you surprised when one reviewer, from Midwest book Review, said your book was "impossible to put down" and "an extraordinary standout"?
    Wow. It’s impossible to say how much a good review counts! I remember the moment when I opened my email and saw that review. My husband and I were about to take the dog to our favorite county preserve.  It’s what every writer dreams of… ”They got me!” I must have shouted. “What’s wrong?” my alarmed husband asked.  I try to tell myself that not everyone will “get” my book. The important thing is to stay true to my own voice. But, boy, there is nothing like hearing that someone read, really read, Water Music. There’s nothing like the astonishing elation of a good review.
     

15. What do you think it is about historical fiction that is so popular with readers today?  
    For me, reading historical fiction reminds me of that old song, “the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone.” Nothing happens that isn’t somehow connected to our past.