Night Crossing
by Don J. Snyder

List Price: $13.95
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345438043
Publisher: Ballantine Books

Don J. Snyder lives in Maine with his wife and their four children. He is the author of two memoirs, The Cliff Walk and Of Time and Memory; a biography, A Soldier's Disgrace; and the novels From the Point and Veteran's Park.

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Melissa Falcon was the 2000 Outstanding Graduate of the Southwest Texas State University's MFA Program in fiction. She was the recipient of the Katherine Anne Porter Fellowship for two consecutive years and has recently completed her first novel, Ink Poison. Her short stories and essays have appeared in various literary magazines and journals. Currently, she is writing and teaching in San Jose, California.

Melissa Falcon: Don, although you were not in Northern Ireland at the time the bombing in Omagh took place, you heard news of the devastation there while sitting with your wife and children at home. It affected you so deeply that you immediately left home for Northern Ireland. Who or what inspired you to tell the story of an anguished city through the eyes of your protagonist, Nora? What caused you to see the connection between this broken woman and a betrayed city?

Don Snyder: I was in my home in Scarborough, Maine when news of the bombing in Omagh came over the radio. It was just another report of a far away tragedy until the reporter said that many of the victims were children shopping in town that Saturday morning for their new school uniforms. Four years earlier I had taken my children to Ireland to visit the town where their mother and I had lived one winter soon after we were married and we had seen those beautiful Irish children in their school uniforms. As I listened to the news, I recalled my own children walking through the streets of Ireland, and I felt such a profound sadness that I told Colleen I had to go to Omagh and bear witness to the loss and the sorrow. That was my intention.

I attended thirteen funerals in three days, following the mourning processions through the streets of the town, and out into the countryside to the cemeteries where, spread out before me was this lovely country, betrayed and broken to pieces beneath her beauty. This led my imagination to a beautiful woman with a broken heart. That was the point of origin for Nora and for the novel.

MF: In NIGHT CROSSING, does Nora's character reflect some of the struggles you endured as a boy whose young mother died in childbirth, leaving her widower to raise his twin boys? It seems that from your loss as a child, you understood early on the fallible attempts at intimacy made in the context of family. Do your childhood experiences allow you to create characters like Nora, James Blackburn, and Father Conlon--characters who are forced to reinvent themselves and pull from their dark histories a belief in self-worth?

DS: I was forty-five years old before I discovered that I had a mother who gave up her life in childbirth so that I could live. Learning this finally explained why I have lived my whole life feeling unworthy, and why I became a writer who creates characters whose only deliverance from their own feelings of unworthiness is the touch of someone they love. That touch illuminates a path through the darkness.

MF: I believe you mentioned that when you were in Omagh in August 1998, it was the image of Avril Monaghane's grave, the square shape needed to bury the young mother and her three children, that really illustrated the horror of what happened. Were there other images as well, actual scenes that you experienced during your time in Omagh, which remain in the book as documentation what you saw?

DS: The images in the streets of Omagh are still vivid to me. People standing in the rain with their heads bowed as if the rain itself had weight. Along the sidewalks thousands of bouquets of flowers and photographs of the dead like shrines set in the broken glass. Wreckage from the blown up buildings strewn along the river banks as if it had been carried to this peaceful town from some horrible, distant place. People weeping in one another's embrace. And the apologetic faces of the young British soldiers.

MF: What was it about the apologetic faces of the young British soldiers that led to the creation of James Blackburn? Did you find the essence of him there in the rain?

DS: I will never forget the faces of the British soldiers patrolling the streets of Omagh after the blast. They were young faces, of course, far too young to fully comprehend the history and the political intricacies of the conflict they had been ordered to mediate. You could see in their eyes reluctance, an apologetic expression, and though they walked along the sidewalks with their fingers on the triggers of their automatic weapons, they were not menacing in any way. I saw no eagerness on their part, and I began to imagine my central character, James Blackburn, as a British soldier who cared deeply about the people of Northern Ireland and their struggle. So deeply that he was cast into an emotional conflict that nearly caused his destruction.

MF: Was it difficult to weave the nonfiction elements of this novel with the fictional story?

DS: Everything I have written in Night Crossing, the fiction and the nonfiction, is in the service of revealing some important truth about the human condition, about the way we love and betray one another, about the losses we suffer and the dignity with which we struggle to believe in ourselves. What I imagine in my fiction has the same resonance to me as what I actually see and hear in the real world. One is no more or less true than the other. And both are sewn through the narrative.

MF: How have your experiences as a husband and father contributed to your portrayal of writing from an expectant and betrayed woman's point of view? I know you very much enjoyed and celebrated your wife's four pregnancies and the child-rearing years you spent along the coast of Maine. Did the entry of your children's lives into the "teenage years" give you perspective on what Nora felt like as woman who finds that "time runs into itself" as the "straight line between past and future [are] broken . . .?"

DS: It is a question of hope. The hope that accompanies small children. I was unprepared for how I fell in love with my four children from the moment they were born. I don't think any father in the history of the world needed the touch of his children the way I did, or cherished this touch the way I did. I sometimes awake in the night, dreaming that they have turned back from their teenaged years and are little again, their small hands patting my face, their feet as long as they are wide. Those beautiful square feet at six months.

And just as I was unprepared for the blessing of the touch they bestowed upon me when they were small, I have been unprepared for the emptiness I have felt as each child became a person in his/her own right and began to walk away from me. Everyone tells you that you never really lose your children, and that they will come back to you after they pass through the difficult teenage years. But this is not true because you will never get to hold them again as you once did. Nora certainly feels both the blessing and the loss of her children, and her journey through the world is shaped by both.

MF: You address this notion of loss, both in the characters and in your acknowledgements at the end of NIGHT CROSSING, where you thank the real people of Omagh who opened their hearts to you in the days following the despair. In that list you also acknowledge "two IRA members in Portrush" who helped you to research NIGHT CROSSING. Can you explain what they helped you to better understand about Northern Ireland and the politics there?

DS: Once I committed myself emotionally to write about the bombing in Omagh and the history of the troubles in Northern Ireland, it was important for me to hear the IRA's justification for the slaughter of the innocent. Their justification convinced me of nothing, but it was still important for me to hear it so that I could reveal it in the narrative in an even-handed manner. And it was during this meeting in Portrush, where I decided that neither side in this conflict was without guilt and that both sides had betrayed the people of Northern Ireland.

MF: The book gives us a clear, double view of the politics in Northern Ireland. While researching in Omagh, did you ever consider writing the story as a documentation of your findings? Or did you know right away that fiction would be the best form to carry this story of struggle and rebuilding?

DS: In the name of truth countless lies have been told about the conflict in Northern Ireland by all sides lying to serve their own purposes, lying to themselves in order to survive the hopelessness and the pain and the loss. So, it seemed right for me to create the lie of fiction in order to reveal the truth, a lie broad enough to encompass all the other lies that preceded my book.

There was that, and also the fact that I did not want to present a nonfiction book, which either side could then claim as a document to corroborate their particular lie.

MF: What venues for your work are you exploring now? You've had some exciting things on your plate--the fiction you studied at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, followed by five novels and the two memoirs you have written over the course of our friendship. What is next for you, where is your heart at work?

DS: I have a new novel coming out in January 2004. It is called Winter Dreams, and it is the story of a man dealing with the loss of the only woman he ever loved. They were in college when they fell in love and then lost one another. They are nearly fifty years old when they meet again. The novel covers everything I've learned about love in my lifetime.

Also, this past year I was hired by Hallmark to write a screenplay of my last novel, Fallen Angel. That screenplay became the Hallmark Hall of Fame Christmas movie for 2003, starring one of our great actors, Gary Sinise. My plan now is to write two more screenplays this year of two of my books, Of Time & Memory, and The Cliff Walk. Then, on to a new novel.
Excerpted from Night Crossing © Copyright 2009 by Don J. Snyder. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine Books. All rights reserved.

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