With the publication of his first novel, Haines resident Tom McGuire is following in the footsteps of his daughter.
“Steller’s Orchid,” McGuire’s first published fiction, was released this month by Boreal Books, an Alaska-based imprint of independent California publisher Red Hen Books.
The novel takes place in 1924 and follows John Lars Nelson, a young botanist, who embarks on an expedition to the Shumagin Islands in the Aleutians in search of a fictional Alaska orchid. “Steller’s Orchid” explores a little-known time in Alaska history, said McGuire, the period after the Nome gold rush when the fur trade with Siberia was flourishing.
“I don’t like genre,” McGuire said. “But I’d like to think of it as being a literate adventure story.”
The penchant for creative writing runs in the family. Tom McGuire’s daughter, Rosemary McGuire, has won accolades for her own writing. She has written a book of short stories, “The Creatures at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea,” and a memoir, “Rough Passage,” which won the River Teeth Nonfiction Book Prize and was a nonfiction finalist for the WILLA awards presented by Women Writing the West.
“It has been really special to see this book come out,” Rosemary McGuire said of her father’s novel. “I was really impressed by it.”
“Steller’s Orchid” was partially inspired by Tom McGuire’s own experiences in Alaska. “It’s not autobiographical, but I did come to Alaska at about the same age as my main character,” he said. While fishing in the Shumagins one summer, he was inspired by the beauty of the landscape and chose the islands as a setting for the novel, using his own journal as a reference. And the novel’s characters are “loosely based on the kind of people I know,” he said.
Rosemary McGuire said her father’s writing practice had an impact on her while she was growing up.
“I remember him banging away on the typewriter whenever he’d get a chance,” she said. “I think that did influence me, to think that writing was something a normal person would do.”
The younger McGuire grew up in a house with no electricity, which precluded the possibility of watching TV. “We’re very much a reading household,” Tom McGuire said. “In that way, it’s kind of a family affair.”
The two read each other’s work and give comments, but sometimes there are differences in opinion, the father said. “I don’t always follow her advice and she doesn’t always follow mine,” he said, adding that mostly they give “mutually psychological support.”
“Writing’s kind of a lonely business, so it helps to have someone else you care about who’s also doing it,” Rosemary McGuire said.