Maine author Shannon Bowring used the entire landscape of her hometown of Ashland, and Aroostook County, as the inspiration for her debut novel “The Road to Dalton.”
The culture of Ashland’s mill town and blue collar working class ethos are what informed Bowring’s story.
People in small communities can be really close with their neighbors but also not know everything that is going on in their private lives, Bowring said. It’s an interesting contrast to have in any small town — not just in Maine — of someone living a secret life below the surface of their public life.
“I think I just want [readers] to come away feeling like they read a good book, that they recognize the characters as people they know as themselves and that they feel as deeply rooted in the place as the characters do,” Bowring said.
At one point in the 1800s, the town of Ashland used to be named Dalton, which Bowring used to name her fictional small town.
“The Road to Dalton” follows multiple characters’ perspectives set in the 1990s. Bowring felt that mixing in different perspectives was the truest way to mirror what living in a small town is actually like and wanted to give that experience to her readers.
“My experience in Ashland, but any small town, is that your story is never just your story,” Bowring said. “It’s mingled in with everybody else’s.”
Without spoilers, each character has something different going on, but a single event connects them in the middle of the story where everything is called into question for each of the characters, Bowring said.
One example of a few characters’ stories intersecting is the town’s doctor, Richard Haskell, who’s married to Trudy and is in love with her best friend Bev, who is the mother of a rookie cop named Nate.
Another character added into the novel later in Bowring’s writing process was Greg, a 14-year-old struggling with an eating disorder, who is friends with Trudy. It was a nice surprise to see how multi-generational people connect in small towns in Aroostook County, Bowring said.
“It’s always interesting to write about how things seem to other people and then how they really are from the perspective of the character I am exploring and there is a lot of tension between that,” Bowring said.
This tension is something that Bowring can identify with as part of Aroostook County. She grew up loving the unique landscape, but felt like she didn’t belong there, she said. She wasn’t into fishing and hunting as others were in her area, but loved to read, she said.
Bowring began writing “The Road to Dalton” beginning in 2020 when she began her Master of Fine Arts program through the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program. As Bowring was wrapping up in the fall of 2021, she felt like her novel was finished enough to start querying literary agents.
Nat Sobel of Sobel Weber Associates in New York contacted Bowring because of a short story she had published in Raleigh Review in 2021. It’s the same way Sobel had discovered American novelist Richard Russo, according to Bowring.
“The Road to Dalton” was originally a short story collection, but it became more of a traditional novel when she worked with Sobel’s partner Judith Weber on revisions, she said.
When the work was done, the novel was rejected by 30 different publishers. But in August 2022, Europa Editions accepted it and turned it around in June 2023.
Bowring has just finished writing the sequel to “The Road to Dalton,” and it’s going through the editing process.
Bowring lives in Bath, but has been back to visit Aroostook multiple times over the years.
“I wanted to show The County as I experienced it,” Bowring said.