It’s here, now—the novel our friend worked on throughout her adult life. High Tide, by Andrea Fisher Rowland, is complete and beautiful. With her gone, High Tide is what we have left to hold in our hands—a little world of ideas, a collection of words born from her preoccupations and worries and loves and time. While she raised a son and taught school and graded papers and built a life, Andrea also wrote a novel and poetry around the edges of her life. In her last years, even in her last hours, she returned to these writings with hope.
Any writer knows that these are the moments to fantasize about: feeling the weight of your book in your hand, flipping through pages bound together in their final order, running a hand over a smooth, beautiful cover. From that first, hopeful, audacious moment that we set a pen to page, we dream of seeing copies of our book on a shelf in a real bookstore. Through the careful, devoted efforts and expertise of Dorene Fisher and Anne M Carley, Andrea’s dream of having High Tide published has been realized.
Members of BACCA and other writers that Andrea knew gave this novel their time too. Sharing work for critique a little at a time over months or years is an exercise in patience and mind-stretching understanding—for the writer and the reader. Scrutinizing parts of a larger work so closely, while trying to hold the whole of it in our minds over time is slippery business. I read High Tide both ways—piece by piece over months and months and all at once in a few days. After revisiting it, I found that as familiar as it felt, I had hardly known the novel at all. It was like trying to recognize something at a distance that I’d only been viewing under a magnifying glass. Before, I’d missed some of the novel’s dreamy energy, its pull, its soft momentum.
Experiencing it in its entirety, some of us have realized that High Tide isn’t so easy to categorize. Not just a drama or a thriller or a mystery, it borrows elements from these genres, while pressing questions about human impact on the natural world and the repercussions of our fraught relationship with the environment.
High Tide might be best described using words we know from other forms: art, music, and poetry. I think of a tapestry as I follow dynamics between characters, or sort out the interplay between the personal and universal. The voicing is fugal—as the point of view of one character rises and falls, the perspective of another character takes a turn, first doubling and amplifying themes, then diverting focus and introducing new ideas and emotions. In tone, the novel is often elegiac, as characters face moments of growth, love (in all forms), and death or loss. Whatever we name it, however we describe this book, it is best to be experienced—the fulfillment of Andrea’s dream and part of her legacy, a gift from her to us.
While it’s dangerous and lazy to assume that any poem or work of fiction is autobiographical, I can’t deny that writers leave a part of themselves in their work. Without assuming too much, we can still expect to meet Andrea here as we read, to find a trace of her wandering in these pages. For those of us who miss her, this is a comforting thought.
On Saturday, December 7th, we will celebrate the release of High Tide and the life of Andrea Fisher Rowland at Baine’s Books & Coffee, in Scottsville. Friends of Andrea, if you’d like to hold High Tide in your hands and meet the forces that made the publication of this novel possible (Dorene Fisher and Anne M Carley), join us in Scottsville between 10:00 am and noon.
(Baine’s Books & Coffee, 485 Valley St, Scottsville, VA 24590)
Noelle Beverly writes poetry and prose, promotes local writers in the surrounding community, and is a member of the BACCA Literary group. Photos by the author.
BACCA Literary 