For Mary Hopkins Moore, the transition to writer from avid reader happened suddenly. After 17 years of teaching high school English at The Hyde School in Bath, she retired in 2022 and thought, now what?
“I had no idea what I was going to do,” confesses Moore, but “two weeks after I finished, I was watching this really dumb TV show about this woman who was a writer.”
She remembers thinking, “Well, I can do that.” Six weeks later, she had a rough draft of a novel.
“The Watsons of Tethertown,” which Moore self-published and released this spring, follows multiple generations of the same family in late 1800s and early 1900s Missouri. Moore, who grew up in Kansas, drew inspiration from learning about her great-grandfather Joel Watson on Ancestry.com.
“I always like reading historical fiction because it’s like a snapshot of what life was like at a different time,” says Moore, adding that it helps her to appreciate “what we have now.” She can remember reading “Gone With the Wind” all day in her room one summer when she was a child, avoiding the Kansas heat.
“When I was growing up, that was my entertainment,” explains Moore, who says she has read a book or two a week most of her adult life. But although she wrote every assignment she gave to her English students at Hyde, she had never tried her hand at fiction.
Then, Moore remembers, one day in June of 2022, “I bought a little desk and a chair and brought it upstairs where I overlook the ocean.”
“I had no idea I could do it,” she says.
Then Joel’s story took hold. “I swear to God,” Moore says, “It (the story) was in there and I was just dictating.”
There were places where she had to backtrack and do research. “I had to figure out how a farmwife would wash dishes,” she says.
“The Watsons of Tethertown,” which alternates between the voices of a half-dozen characters, takes place in what is now Stewartsville, Missouri. But at the turn of the century, it was called Tethertown.
Moore visited a year and a half ago, when the book was finished, while on a road trip to visit family.
Stewartsville has just 733 inhabitants and may not top any lists of vacation destinations, but Moore views the place with affection. “When I was a little girl,” she says, “it was my favorite place on Earth.”
For Joel, the son of a devoted mother and tyrannical stepfather, it’s the place where he works the land, falls in love, and raises a family whose voices crowd the pages of Moore’s book.
Moore credits Harpswell, in part, for prompting her to start writing. She can remember the day she and her husband moved to High Head in 2006. It was April Fools’ Day, and it was snowing.
“It felt so familiar when we moved here,” she says, adding that the close-knit community reminds her of growing up in Kansas. “Harpswell inspires me. It’s just the most beautiful place.”
Now that “The Watsons of Tethertown” is finished, Moore has shifted focus to other projects. Her second book — a young adult novel about time travel — will be coming back from the editor any day now. In the meantime, she’s hard at work on a third.
Her drive to keep working? Simple. “Writing is really fun,” Moore says. “I like it almost as much as reading.”
“The Watsons of Tethertown” is available in paperback and on Kindle and Audible from Amazon, or in hardcover direct from the printer, Ingram Sparks. It is also for sale at Mockingbird Bookshop in Bath.
