Diane Wald Delivers a Literary Novella in 'The Bayrose Files'

In The Bayrose Files, award-winning poet and novelist, Diane Wald, writes an intriguing novella about a young journalist named Violet Maris who attends an artists’ and writers’ colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the 1980s. In order to be accepted into the residency, Violet deceitfully applied using her friend’s short stories with the intention of writing an exposé about the colony while there. However, her friend, the real author of the stories passes away, and Violet is consequently left with the guilt of her duplicitous behavior. According to Wald, “…[Violet] didn’t really know what she was doing until the end of the book. She had to get slapped around by fate a bit before she came to her senses… you know, at the beginning of the book she starts out by saying, ‘My name is Violet Maris and I’ve done a terrible thing.’ Well, she didn’t really realize how terrible the thing was when she was doing it, and she should have at that age… it took her awhile to figure things out and she had to be, kind of, shocked into realizing what she had done and how it was affecting people.”

Growing up, Wald had the joy of visiting Provincetown yearly with her family and writing The Bayrose Files gave her the opportunity to write about her experiences of this beloved place. As she described it, “It’s known as a haven for gay people, but that’s not all it is. What it really started out as is an incredibly colorful fishing village and a place where artists and writers from long, long ago have always gone because it’s so isolated, it’s so quirky and interesting… it has amazing, really interesting history to it… so then it became a place where gay people could go or any people could go and be accepted, that’s what I loved about it… they don’t have to put on airs or try to be something they’re not and it’s very, very accepting… I just found it to be a very compassionate place to live, not to mention beautiful.”