Coomer’s Stonington Texan novelist spellbound by coast relates his appreciation by setting his “Pocketful of Names’ on Maine harbor

Two summers ago, an old man in Stonington stood on a street near the harbor and pointed up to the old John L. Goss house. Goss was the king of granite in Stonington in his day. He made his money selling the light-gray-flecked-with-pink granite he called “Goss Pink,” and from his spoils, he built one of the town’s finest Victorian homes in the 1880s. Or at least it was one of the finest, until the 20th century when another owner converted it into apartment units, and parts of it, including the front porch and a tower, were lopped off along the way.

“Some writer bought it,” the old man said.

What he didn’t know those two summers ago was that the writer, Joe Coomer, a Texan, was not only deep into restoring the Goss building (including the tower), but he had also taken long gazes into the harbor, imagining a story taking place on one of those little islands in the distance. In 2000, Coomer started writing “Pocketful of Names,” a novel set in the environs of the fishing village he now calls home half the year. He finished the book six months after buying the Goss house in 2002. The book comes out next month and will be available locally at a benefit reading for the Stonington Public Library on May 28.

“I always thought these islands huddled here were the prettiest part of Maine,” said Coomer, sitting at the long table in the dining room of the Stonington house he shares with his wife Isabelle Tokumaru, an artist and art conservator. “I found it first by boat, and then fell deeper in love from land.”

But Stonington wasn’t Coomer’s inauguration to Maine. He has sailed its waters for many years, and since 1991, has lived part of the year in the state, first in Eliot and then in Stonington. The other six months he spends in Fort Worth, Texas, his home state and site for two antique malls he owns. “I tell all my friends to get antique malls,” he said, essentially explaining how he is able to support his work as a writer who, with 10 books, has not yet broken through with a major commercial success.

That’s not to say, however, that Coomer, who is 46, hasn’t had success. An earlier novel, “The Loop,” is currently in production for a film version starring Penelope Cruz and Matthew McConaughey (a fellow Texan) to be released in 2006. Often, the books show up on literary lists such as the Book Sense “picks,” where “Pocketful of Names” appeared for June 2005. Readers drawn to quirky stories about loners, eccentrics, family secrets, odd coincidences, heartwarming moments (both comic and tragic) and a heavy dose of metaphor find Coomer.

Consider “Pocketful of Names.” The main character is Hannah Bryant, a thirtysomething artist who meets with early success and forsakes the glamour of New York City for an island left to her by her uncle, a crusty fisherman. She lives there alone with almost no outside contact until a teen boy, fleeing from his abusive father, ends up on her island. A new world slowly but shockingly unfolds for the reclusive damsel not quite ready to admit her inner distress. Her uncle’s shady past, the island’s buried treasures, a wayfaring black dog, a trapped whale, a rich conservationist, a religious cult, a dilapidated lobster boat and a fisherman with prosthetic hooks for hands challenge her certainty about her life’s choices and her value as an artist.

Details aside, in the end the book is more about personal fear, family and community relations, artistic sensibility and religious zealotry than it is about its fictional setting. (Stonington is real, Hannah’s Ten Acre No Nine Island isn’t.)

Yet the setting, said Coomer, is the initial launching point for his books. He begins with place, moves on to tone and then to characters. “The plot is the last thing I think of,” he said. “My books are not always plot driven. They’re about characters and tone and ideas.” All of that starts in a journal Coomer keeps for six months before creating the last two pages of the book, which he always writes first.

“This time, I wanted a character who lived alone on an island and was vulnerable. I don’t have an answer for exactly why I wanted the character to be a woman. There are a lot of women in my family, and they’re all talkers. It was much more interesting to sit with them in the kitchen and listen than go watch football with the guys in the living room,” said Coomer.

Coomer has written about Maine in other books, but “Pocketful of Names” takes place almost entirely just beyond the harbor he sees from the windows of the Goss house. (Blue Hill graphic artist Darel Bridges, who designed the cover, added the island to an actual nautical chart on the inside covers of the hardback book.) His neighbors have asked if they will recognize any of the characters, and – this may be true for all writers who depict their own neighborhoods – he’s likely to face more questions about his characterization of local color. As any writer might say, the work is finally truest to the story that develops in the imaginations of the writer and the reader, and emerges for each like a portrait through the brush strokes of a painter.

“I never try to insult anybody,” said Coomer, whose mild voice and easy smile suggest that very point. “You want to get it right, not for the town’s sake but for me as a writer. And I love that water out there as much as anybody on the planet. I know the fishermen love it. We have that in common.”

Coomer made another important point about regional fiction. “I’ve written books where the town doesn’t exist at all,” he said. “You can drive through 50 of those towns and they’re all alike. And there’s no place like Stonington that I know of.” But the people in both cases, Texas or Maine, truth or fiction, have more similarities than they realize. And therein lies the story for Coomer.

Now that he and Tokumaru are settling into their warm-weather home and their boat Yonder is about to go back in the water, Coomer is looking to his neighborhood for the next book – about the John L. Goss house.

Joe Coomer will do a reading and book signing of “Pocketful of Names” at noon Saturday, May 28, at the Stonington Public Library. The event is a fund-raiser for the library. Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.