The novelist talks small-town Maine, assertive characters, and mixed emotions over completing a trilogy.
Shannon Bowring’s Where the Forest Meets the River is the sequel to her stunning debut novel, The Road to Dalton. Often compared to Elizabeth Strout, Bowring renders the interior and exterior worlds of an interconnected group of characters in a small Maine town with compassion, tenderness, and a great gift for writing about the natural world. The Road to Dalton was a 2023 NPR Best Book and won the 2024 Maine Literary Book Award for Fiction. No doubt, the sequel will garner more such honors.
It’s been a thrill to see so many nice things happen for The Road to Dalton. When, why, and how did you decide that you were going to create a Dalton series? What has it been like to continue to reside in this place over the course of several books?
At the risk of sounding hokey, I’ve always felt destined to write about Dalton, which is inspired by the tiny town where I grew up in Aroostook County, Maine — as far north as you can go in the state before hitting Canada. While all the characters and events in the books are fictional, the beautiful yet isolated setting is borrowed from real life.
From the time I started writing stories when I was a kid, much of my fiction has revolved around this place and my complicated feelings toward it: As much as I have always held a deep adoration of the land, I have also often felt somehow separate from it. Writing about Aroostook allowed me to discover my familiar world through different perspectives and to explore the ways such a secluded landscape can shape, inspire, unite, and limit the people who call it home.
The more I write about Dalton, the more it has grown into its own universe. This was especially true in both the sequel and the [forthcoming] third book. The landscape has become more fluid, expanding to suit the arcs of my characters. Though it is still reminiscent of Aroostook, both in sensory detail and overall feel, Dalton — just like the characters who live there — continues to surprise me with its evolution. In many ways, I feel more at home in Dalton than I did in the town that inspired it, which is both comforting and surreal.
As an aside, I hope my work will contribute to the rich tradition of Maine-based literature, introducing readers to a region of the state largely underrepresented in fiction. We’re more than just a drop-dead-gorgeous coastline.
What were some of the joys and challenges you experienced while returning to the characters you introduced in The Road to Dalton?
It was a joy to write any scenes with 5-year-old Sophie Theroux — her curiosity, affection, and unapologetic sass remind me of my nieces. Most of my challenges arose when I thought the characters should be doing one thing, while the characters knew they should be doing something else. That is a lesson I keep learning as I grow as a writer: The characters understand more than me, and I’ll be doing all of us a favor if I can just trust them and follow their lead.
Wise words regarding creating individual characters. How did you approach weaving together their stories?
With The Road to Dalton, I initially imagined the book as a linked collection. While the plot unfolds linearly, I didn’t write the chapters in chronological order. I focused on one piece at a time, depending on which character persisted loudest that I write from their perspective.
I always knew Where the Forest Meets the River would be a novel proper, and I wrote it straight from beginning to end. I found this method effective in helping me maintain momentum and hold to a more consistent narrative. This remained the case as I wrote the third book as well.
In all three books, I paid close attention to how each chapter would segue into the next. This could be plot-related, but it was often more about the characters’ relationships to each other, the ways their stories are indelibly tied together.
I’ve heard you refer to Where the Forest Meets the River as a standalone book (which I think it definitely is). How did you determine how much backstory to include from The Road to Dalton in order to give your new readers enough context to engage with the sequel?
I envision Dalton as a world you can drop into at any given moment, whether you’re a longtime resident or a first-time visitor. You might not have all the details of what happened before you got there, but you can gather enough context to understand the place and its people.
A lot of what I put in and what I kept out came down to an instinct about what explanations were necessary and what information would feel superfluous or overwhelming to readers. It was a tremendous help to have my agent, Judith Weber, and my editor, Autumn Toennis, help me find that balance as we worked through the revision process. As for surprises, if I mentioned the most significant ones, I would be giving away spoilers. So I’ll keep mum on that for now.
Fair enough! Can you tell us anything about book three?
In the third book, readers can expect to be reunited with their favorite characters, relationships, and Dalton landmarks. And I will confess that I cried when I wrote the final lines — it was an emotional moment to see all these lives and stories through from the first book to the end of this one.
Michelle Brafman is the author, most recently, of Swimming with Ghosts: A Novel.
