The coast is clarity Writer Anne Rivers Siddons finds similarities between South Carolina’s Lowcountry and Maine

“I always feel in Maine like I’m walking on the surface of the Earth. In the South, I always feel like I’m knee deep.” – Anne Rivers Siddons

In her new novel “Sweetwater Creek,” Anne Rivers Siddons is waist-deep in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Already a best-seller, the coming-of-age novel is set on a modern-day “plantation” on the banks of the Wadmalaw River.

Siddons, who divides her time between Brooklin and Charleston, S.C., understands the tidal creeks and muddy banks of the farm country along the southern coast of the Palmetto State as well as she knows the rocky shoreline of the summer retreat she has shared with her husband for almost 40 years.

That tidal basin, in many ways the main character in “Sweetwater Creek,” and the tide pools visible from her home on Eggemoggin Reach are near opposites. Yet both landscapes, “call out some kind of deep response from me,” Siddons said recently from her Brooklin home.

“There’s something about the sparseness, the starkness that calls out a whole different kind of writing for me,” she said.

Although she does write during her sojourns north for five or six months each year, summer brings a constant flow of vacationing family and friends. When she is working on a book, as she is now, Siddons carves out time to write every day, but it’s not easy.

“Maine pulls out a great indolence in me,” she said. “I had to move my office, which overlooked the beach, to the back of the house. I wasn’t getting anything done. I kept staring out the window to the water.”

Besides the water and the wildlife, there is the light. In “Saltwater Creek,” Siddons aptly describes the special quality of sunlight when it touches moving water. Maine’s painters often try to explain why they seek the coastal rays for their work. Although she wrote the passage about the Lowcountry, Siddons said recently that it applies to Maine as well.

“People who live beside moving water have been given the gift of living light, and even if they never come to recognize it as such, any other light, no matter how clear or brilliant, is pale and static to them, leaving them with a sense of loss, of vulnerability, as if they have suddenly found themselves without clothes.”

“Sweetwater Creek” is the story of 12-year-old Emily Parmenter. She lives inside a familiar triangle bordered by light, land and water. The youngest and only girl in her family, her true friends are the Boykin spaniels her family breeds and trains as hunting dogs. Sometimes, she communes with them telepathically.

Siddons creates a girl for whom animals are more important than family. People have disappointed Emily. She barely remembers a mother who left the family when she was still a toddler. Her best friend and elder brother Buddy committed suicide rather than waste away from a degenerative disease.

Less than an hour’s drive from the bright lights and glittery society of Charleston, Sweetwater still is more connected to the salt marshes surrounding it than to the old plantation culture of the city.

In lush, lyrical prose and loving detail, Siddons describes the Lowcountry’s sea creatures, including the bottlenose dolphins that dance a synchronized ballet when they come fully out of the water onto the salt marshes in a performance for Emily.

Siddons knows well the aching, painful loneliness she saturates Emily with. The only child of an Atlanta lawyer and a high school secretary, the writer said that in retrospect it helped her become a novelist.

“I didn’t have that kind of family,” she said, referring to the Parmenter clan, “but I was the only child in a neighborhood with no children. I can remember a great sense of aloneness, so I peopled it with anybody I wanted to in the world.”

She seems to have filled up her books in a similar fashion. Her 16 novels have been set mostly along the Eastern Seaboard from Atlanta to Martha’s Vineyard. Siddons is considered by critics to be a modern Southern writer on par with her friend Pat Conroy, author of “The Prince of Tides.”

Despite her tender age, Emily exhibits many of the qualities typical of Siddons’ female characters. She is a rebel, tied to but not bound by tradition. Emily is also a survivor with a link to the natural world that is more important than her connection with human beings.

In spite of their age difference – Siddons is nearing 70 – the girl opens a window to the writer’s soul. In one passage, Emily, in a rare conversation with her father, gives voice to the character’s and the author’s deep connection to water.

“‘Do you remember that time you had to come get me at camp in the mountains, and everybody thought I was just homesick and being a baby? It wasn’t that at all. It was that I just couldn’t breathe away from saltwater, from the river and the creek. I still can’t, really.'”

That is the invisible but unbreakable bond that binds Siddons the Southern writer to the jagged shores of Maine.

Judy Harrison can be reached at jharrison@bangordailynews.net.