Q&A WITH CO-AUTHORS JOHN ROCCO AND JAY PRIMIANO
Q. How long have you known each other, and how did that
connection serve as inspiration for Swim That Rock?
John: I met Jay when he was rebuilding his
boat at my neighbor’s house. I asked if I could help. I must have worked hard
enough to impress Jay, because he offered me a job on his quahogging boat. I
was eleven at the time.
Jay: We’ve been friends for
thirty-five years. I also started working when I was eleven years old on my
neighbor’s lobster boat. I recall how that chance opportunity came my way when
a huge winter storm brought the tides up high enough to float some wooden
lobster pots onto the salt marsh at the end of the street where I lived. I
hauled the pots back to my house, read the name that was burned into the wooden
frames, grabbed the phone book, and called the owner. He offered me a job on
the spot and said I was “an honest kid.” I saw that same character in John
years later when I met him.
John: So about four years ago
we decided to start writing down our stories; all the things we experienced as
kids. This led to the development of Swim
That Rock.
Q. What was the actual writing process like between the
two of you?
John: We
Jay: wrote
John: everything
Jay: together.
John: It’s interesting because
at first it went very much the same way as when we worked on the boat. Jay
would dig up all the stuff from the bottom, and my job as a picker was to sort
it all out. Put all the quahogs in the right buckets and throw the rest away.
Jay: And that’s how we
started writing. I would write about four thousand words every morning and
e-mail it off to John, and he would cull through it to pick out the literary
pearls.
John: Yes, we started remotely
because we lived about 150 miles apart. Once we had a bunch of stories written
down, we would get together somewhere for about a week and look at what we had.
Jay: When we weren’t writing together,
most of our writing took place between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m., before our wives and
children woke. Interestingly, that is the
same time we used to wake up to go fishing back in the 1980s. The early hours were appropriately inspirational
for a couple of fishermen-turned-storytellers.
John: Toward the end of the
writing process, when we were really honing in
on our story, we would get together and alternate on the keyboard. One of us
would type while the other would pace the room, and together we would talk out every word.
Jay: Talking out the words,
phrases, and use of colloquial language helped us recall some hilarious
experiences that would leave us laughing until our sides hurt. We have a very
unique friendship through the experience of fishing, and by sharing it through
writing we have become even closer friends. We are very lucky.
Q. What is the significance of community and family in
this novel, and was it inspired by firsthand experience?
John: Jay and I both grew up around
fishermen. The men in this book serve as the male elders for Jake.
Jay: And there were the women who worked in
the diner where we ate breakfast every morning. They could be very maternal, sitting in the booth with us
while taking our order just to make us feel good about ourselves.
John: When you’re eleven years
old and you spend ten to twelve hours a day with a bunch of fishermen, the
time, work, and scars become a right of passage. In our culture, this sort of
experience began to decline during the Industrial Revolution. Before the
factories sprung up, boys would go to work with their dads and learn their
crafts. This no longer happens, and as a result there has been a shift in our
culture.
Jay: In the beginning of the
book, Jake starts out as a boy, and by the end he becomes a man. This can only
happen with community and family. The people we knew on the water were, in many
ways, much like our family.
Q. What are the origins of the book’s title, Swim That Rock?
John: When I first
started working on Jay’s boat, he pulled up a giant rock in the bullrake. He
handed the rock to me and told me to swim it over to Billy McCagney’s boat
about 200 yards away. He said that Billy was building a rock wall in front of
his house and
needed the rocks. It was another opportunity for Jay to challenge me.
Jay: Sorry about
that, John. Actually, it’s true,
that’s how we came up with the title, but it goes beyond that. It’s about Jake’s personal challenge in
dealing with his feelings and beliefs, even when he thinks no one else believes
in him. It’s not unlike swimming with a big rock. I think we all have our own
rock to swim.
Q. All fishermen have their “big
fish” story. What is your proudest moment on the water?
John: It was two days before Christmas. I had
my own boat, and I was eighteen years old. Jay was at home because he had lost
his anchor, and he was generally in a bad mood. I was working in Barrington
River, and I dug up the lost anchor. Later that day, I found a great clamming spot to dig. That night I wrapped his anchor in
Christmas paper, brought it to his house, and told him about the spot I had
found. On the day before Christmas, Jay and I went out to my spot and had an
amazing haul of quahogs. We spent all the money we made that night on steak
dinners and Christmas presents for our
family members.
Jay: That may have been my
best day too, because it was such a great gift! Another day of fishing that I remember was when I was with
my dad, who was in his late sixties at the time, and we were fishing for
striped bass. We were out in the middle of a pack of boats, and we were
catching stripers like crazy. No
one else around us caught anything. We caught seventeen striped bass, all more
than twenty pounds! There was a two-fish limit on striped bass at the time, so
we kept the two biggest fish and gave all the other fishermen two fish each. It
felt great.
