The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

48 : The Anchor Lakey

SUKIE:

I think something a lot of your readers have wondered is ... why did you write the book? Did you have a goal when you set out to write it? Was there something you wanted to uncover, or discover?

ELIZABETH:

No. I'm sorry, I know that's not the answer you want. But when I started writing The Key to Anchor Lake, it was from a place of desperation. I didn't know what else to do with myself.

I started writing the book in 1994. I had just lost my daughter Fee ndd my sister, Alison, and I was wrecked with grief. Everyone I loved had been snatched from me – as you know, my parents were murdered when I was eleven. Edward and Nora Martins.

I ... I was lost. I was so lost and distraught and confused, and the only thing that kept the wolf from the door was to write it all down. So I wrote it all down.

SUKIE:

Did you start with your research? Or did that come later?

ELIZABETH:

Much later. I started with what I already knew. I think the first chapter I ever wrote was about the bus crash, actually.

SUKIE:

Really?

ELIZABETH:

Mmm. It was something I knew, but it wasn't so fresh that I couldn't bear to relive it. I bear all those scars, all those reminders of that awful day, but I had come to terms with it – it had been more than twenty years by that point. I could write about the crash and my parents without it ruining me.

You know, I started that book to copy with losing my daughter, but her chapters were the ones I wrote last.

SUKIE:

Is it fair to say that you wrote the book for yourself?

ELIZABETH:

Absolutely. I had no intention of it becoming some kind of, what is it Blaire said ... a cult obsession? And I had no idea, either. Not until recently. I had never heard of your podcast until Blaire started listening to it. The only reason there ever ended up being copies in the library was because there was an error when I had it printed for myself, so I donated the extra copies. I just wanted to get rid of them. I never thought about what chain of events that could set off.

SUKIE:

And now virtually everybody in town has read this book; we see it as a part of our history, a documentation of Anchor Lake's tragedies. We've devoured it, always wondering who wrote it.

[Elizabeth lets out a tired laugh]

ELIZABETH:

There are so many times I've wished I'd never written it. Part of me is glad, I think, that it's had an impact. That it's made you interested in this town's history. I'm proud of that; through your podcast and your enthusiasm, you're remembering all these people who would otherwise be forgotten.

There must be people like Temperance in the histories of so many places, people who go forgotten once centuries pass and memories fade. I worked so hard to find the information I found. It took years of research and hard work.

SUKIE:

That was my next question, actually: what prompted the leap from writing about your own experiences, to those of four hundred years' worth of ancestors?

ELIZABETH:

It was a natural evolution. I never knew much about my grandparents, and it didn't take much to find that my grandmother and my great-great-grandmother were killed by the bomb in 1944; I found records of my great-grandmother dying in 1919. Everywhere I looked, every ancestor I found had died in Anchor Lake, and almost never of old age, or a heart attack. It was always something ... out of the ordinary.