Nearly a decade after her book “Rough Crossing” was published, author and Haines High School graduate Rosemary McGuire called into her first Haines community book club meeting to talk about it.
The Chilkat Valley News, which co-hosted the book club meeting with The Bookstore, invited the author to join the club on Sunday, which kicked off a year of reading with McGuire’s book. Just under 10 people, including author Heather Lende, quizzed McGuire on her writing process, how the memoir has been received and details about the commercial fishing industry.
“Rough Crossing” is a coming-of-age story that chronicles McGuire’s first year trying to break into the commercial fishing industry as a 22-year-old woman in a male-dominated industry – first on a cod vessel out of Homer, then on a tender in Prince William Sound and finally, salmon fishing in Bristol Bay.
Some in the book club, who are writers themselves, wanted to know more about the process of getting the book published.
McGuire graduated with her M.F.A. in writing from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2005 and started shopping the book around that year, but it wasn’t published until 2017.
She said that while there was a lot of interest in the subject matter, she was rejected everywhere she tried.
“The sense that I had was that they wanted a much cleaner love story. They wanted a lot more sex, just to put it bluntly, and they wanted a kind of ‘find yourself and fight for women’s rights but also fall deeply in love [story]’” McGuire said. “That kind of impossible conundrum that women are expected to do.”
The book chronicles life on the ocean, in cramped living quarters, with men who oscillate between helpfulness and breathtaking cruelty. There is a romantic relationship that winds through the center of the narrative between McGuire and the man who is now her ex-husband.
She stayed with him after their first season fishing together and ultimately fished for nearly 15 years, first with him and then alone on the Copper River Flats.
She told the group that her evolving understanding of it played a role in why it took so long for her to finish the book and get it published.
“I realized that it had been an abusive relationship,” she said. “It wasn’t until I got a lot of maturity and made some strong women friends that I could talk about it with … that I understood what had really happened. I think it’s also fair to remember that, culturally, I think our understanding of abuse has shifted.”
But she also said that despite the chronicle of the beginnings of that relationship, alongside details of sexual harassment and gendered mistreatment of women in the fishing industry at the time, she did not set out to write about gender relations, so much as fishing.
“All I ever wanted to do was just go fishing,” she said. “I had, I think, a lot of naivete about how much sexism there still was in the world and how difficult to confront it would be and how it would affect me.”
If she had the book to write again, McGuire said she might try harder to get across how powerless she was during her first year in the industry.
“That actually was not just because of being a woman. The fishing industry and specifically the demographic that I found myself in, can be extremely hierarchical and I’ve seen a lot of really poor behavior in skippers since then,” she said. “There’s just not a lot of recourse because they’re independent owner-operators and if you speak up too much, you definitely run the risk of getting blacklisted.”
Lende, and other members of the book club, mused about how McGuire’s gender changed the way the book was received by potential publishers and readers as well.
“If I had sent it out under a male name, maybe they would have evaluated it differently. I think they would have seen it as maybe a fishing story and there would not have been this expectation that I would confront people on the boat or that I would have a romance,” she said. “You can disappear in a way if you’re a guy. Your experience can just stand as normative. But if you’re a woman, you’re always representing women.”
From her home in Fairbanks, McGuire said she’s not working on any writing projects currently. She has a newer book of essays about working in the Alaska Arctic and Antarctica, “Cold Latitudes,” which came out in 2021.
“That was a really difficult experience for me. I’m happy with the way the book came out, but getting it published and getting the permissions from the people I had worked with to publish those stories was intensely difficult,” she said. “It just took years to feel like I had gone back and forth enough times that I had produced a book that wasn’t going to cause harm, but was also true.”
McGuire said she plans to be in the Chilkat Valley for a visit in late March.
To find out more about the book club and what the group is reading next, follow this link.