Crossing the Bar Road
78,000 words. Currently on submission. Made the shortlist of the 2025 Craft First Chapters Contest.
Penelope Singer, a New York writer, returns to a summer resort town in the Canadian maritimes after her mother’s death to sort through her family’s summer home and care for her aging father. Charlie Beasley, a local contractor and Penelope’s lifelong summer friend, newly separated from his wife, is there to help.
Will Penelope rewrite her own history, resume her teenage courtship with Charlie and resolve her relationships with her mother and her summer friends from the past? Those questions play out among three houses and three generations of intertwined relationships, running back and forth along a hillside in the town of St. Andrews, New Brunswick, where Penelope has summered all of her life. Important players include summer neighbors Jack and Lucien as well as Penelope’s erstwhile best friend Ada: their stories develop amidst the cocktail parties and island picnics and church fairs that form St. Andrews’ summer rituals and the daily rhythm of the famous tides of the Bay of Fundy, which cover and uncover the Bar Road, a tidal road to a nearby island that begins just below Penelope’s summer house.
The novel alternates between Penelope’s first-person narration of her childhood memories and a third person current-day narration of her coping with her mother’s death, searching the journals her mother has left behind for answers to questions from the past, and her newfound responsibility for the house and her aging father. This multi-layered approach captures how relationships change over time especially when revisited in the same place during the same time of year over many years. In its evocation of relationships developing over a specific time of year, my book is similar to Three Junes, by Julia Glass, but also the movie “Same Time Next Year” and the Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy “Before” trilogy. I was also inspired by “To the Lighthouse,” by Virginia Woolf and the experience of returning year after year to a summer house like the one in the novel, which I now own.
