When a Shark Comes to Town: A Guest Post from The Line Tender Author Kate Allen
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The Line Tender began with a girl and a shark. I had a summer job in 1996, working for a chocolatier in Beverly, Massachusetts, my hometown. One day, I was behind the counter and a customer came into the shop. He told everyone that a fisherman had caught a great white shark and was towing it into Beverly Harbor. He could have said that an alien had just walked into City Hall to apply for a dog license and I wouldn’t have been more surprised. Beverly had an ocean, but not one that included great whites. Those sharks lived somewhere else.
The Line Tender began with a girl and a shark. I had a summer job in 1996, working for a chocolatier in Beverly, Massachusetts, my hometown. One day, I was behind the counter and a customer came into the shop. He told everyone that a fisherman had caught a great white shark and was towing it into Beverly Harbor. He could have said that an alien had just walked into City Hall to apply for a dog license and I wouldn’t have been more surprised. Beverly had an ocean, but not one that included great whites. Those sharks lived somewhere else.
Hundreds of people went down to the dock at Beverly Harbor that day to watch biologists dissect the shark and collect samples. Everyone was curious about the enormous fish that had been brought ashore. They stayed long enough for the tide to change and to see the end of the necropsy.
Twelve years later, I was taking a novel writing class at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. The last assignment of the course was to write the beginning of a novel. I had nothing in mind. But I remembered the Beverly shark and what a disturbance it had created in my town. I wrote fifteen pages about a girl named Lucy and her best friend, Fred, goofing around on a summer day in a coastal town, when a fisherman snags a white shark in his net and hauls it in. It was the beginning of The Line Tender.
When the class was over, I tracked down and interviewed the fisherman who caught the Beverly shark and one of the biologists who performed the necropsy on the dock. The research spiraled from there. The Beverly shark had seemed like a fluke to me, but as it turned out, it was probably a sign of the changing ecosystem in the North Atlantic.
About a year after I had started writing The Line Tender, an Atlantic white shark was tagged off Cape Cod for the first time by a biologist named Greg Skomal. For several summers, I read articles about the work that Skomal’s team was doing to track white sharks and observe their behavior. And I began to imagine Lucy’s mother as a biologist, inspired by Skomal and several women scientists, including Eugenie Clark, the pioneer ichthyologist. Once I finally understood Lucy’s mother’s character and the powerful connection they could have, the middle and end of the story started to emerge.
The book is about a shark that comes to town, causing a girl to long for her mother. White sharks are certainly central to the story, but it’s also about how some connections never break, even when someone dies. It’s about the enduring pieces that Lucy’s mother left behind and how Lucy is both an extension of her mother and uniquely herself. For both Lucy and me, these revelations all began in a candy store with one shark.
The Line Tender is on B&N bookshelves now.