RUMFORD— Katrina Ray-Saulis, a 2002 graduate of Mountain Valley High School, says she hand-writes entire novels before anything is written on her computer. “I think it slows you down and there’s something that makes your brain work differently when you’re writing by hand than on a computer,” she says. Ray-Saulis read excerpts from her recently published book of short stories, “By the River,” last Tuesday evening at the Rumford Library. The book is a collection of short stories based on Maine history and landscape.
Her story “By the River,” which shares the book’s title, is about the historical event which took place in Bangor in 1954, when two Beluga whales swam up the Penobscot River. The two characters in Ray-Saulis’ story are a Native-American Indian girl and a white boy, who both happen to be by the riverside at the time of the whales’ trip up the river. The story depicts the girl’s ease with the whales and nature, as she jumps into the river to be near them, while the boy and the gathering crowd express fear regarding this highly unusual event, with a man yelling that he thinks the whales are enemy submarines.
According to a Bangor Daily News photo caption of April 1954, “Some wanted to harpoon the first white whale spotted.”
Ray-Saulis also read an excerpt from her story, “A Death in Four Parts,” saying “There are stories you grow up hearing all the time, about your family, and growing up I heard about my grandfather’s death a lot.” Her grandfather died while away at war, just a week before her father was born. “The thing that always stuck in my mind was that my grandmother was nine months pregnant at the time,” and Ray-Saulis wondered about what could have been going through the mind of the man delivering the message to her grandmother. “This man who’s just come back from war himself, going up these front steps to tell a woman that her husband has died, and realizing that she’s nine months pregnant; it’s sad.” She based the story almost entirely on the soldier, she adds.
Noting that “There’s a lot of history that gets ignored because we don’t like to face what society has done,” she says the whole inspiration for her book came to her when she came across the history of Malaga Island. Her story “Degenerate Island,” was inspired by events which took place there in 1912. Located off the coast of Phippsburg, Maine, there were “about 75 people [of mixed-race] living on that island. Gov. Plaisted kicked off all the residents [with the] promise that they were going to build a hotel on the island, [since] nobody legally owned the island,” she said.
She adds that her uncle-in-law and aunt who lived on nearby Orrs Island “both kind of cringed” when asked about the history of Malaga Island; noting that this event in Maine history is one that Maine people prefer to ignore.
Currently, Ray-Saulis has three books in various stages: One is almost complete and she’s doing final edits on it, another is on its way to a publisher, and the third is in the first draft stage. She keeps a blog and she also writes plays; currently her play is number seven on the waiting list for the Portland play festival which draws by a lottery. Her next book that she hopes to publish is a fantasy fairy novel about a fairy born without wings.
mhutchinson@sunmediagroup.net
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