By Sarah Opdahl

New Fairfield High School (NFHS) English Faculty Bill Bless tends “to get obsessed with whatever I happen to be working on at the moment,” he said, which runs the gamut of creative writing pursuits. With a full-time teaching position at NFHS and an adjunct professorship with Connecticut State Colleges and Universities, he is more strapped for time during the academic year, but Bless is keen on challenging himself to create. And when time is in abundance, as it is in the summer, he pursues ambitious projects, such as his recently published novel set during the French and Indian War, Salmon River Gauntlet, which was largely written during the pandemic’s height. 

The novel follows beaver trapper Elijah Collins, who witnesses the massacre of a Mohawk village by Algonquins allied with the French and saves a nine-year-old Mohawk girl, Ojistah. The two face brutal conditions and struggle for survival while navigating the river in a birch bark canoe. “It was ten months of research; the first draft took nine months, then two years of revisions, for a total of sixteen drafts,” Bless shared, explaining that he became inspired to research and write about this time period following a hike he took with his wife, two years before he began writing, along the West River in Jamaica State Park in Vermont. The lightbulb moment for the historical novel came from a “marker that said there had been a skirmish there…at a spot called Salmon Hole.” In time, the story began to take shape in his mind “and when I felt ready enough, I began to write, and the story gradually took on a life of its own. Another inspiration is a life-long fascination with Native American culture and mythology.”

The novel’s setting was natural for Bless to channel, as he has spent a large amount of time in the Adirondacks, both fly-fishing on the Ausable River and hiking. “Although the river in my novel is fictional, it is really an amalgamation of several rivers that I fish, including a few in Montana.” In general, flowing water holds great meaning for him as his “family took many canoe trips to the Delaware River when I was young, up until I was 25 or so. These days, my wife and I are avid kayakers and paddle-boarders.” He reflected, “Wild flowing rivers, wilderness areas, and National Parks are never far from my thoughts.”

To further strengthen the novel, Bless took research trips to Fort William Henry at Lake George and Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain. In addition, he added, “I steeped myself in letters from the colonial period, trying to absorb the idioms and vernacular.” Bless observed that “Elijah, the protagonist-anti-hero in the novel, has turned up in other stories that I’ve written. It’s not me, but probably a composite of people that I know or have met, maybe some kind of fictional alter-ego.” While Ojistah “emerged from reading Joseph Campbell’s book Primitive Mythology, immersing myself in indigenous languages, and from a dream.”

“I need a lot of solitude and privacy to work, so I do most of my writing in a small office space at my home in Woodbury—the equivalent of a ‘writer’s garret’ I suppose,” Bless commented, noting that he dives deeper in the summer when he spends “a month on Cape Cod in Truro and do most of my writing in a small bungalow.” Bless writes every morning for three to four hours, “rain or shine.” And during the school year “I often write to the prompts I assign my students, and it helps to keep me from getting rusty.”

In addition to this thriller novel, Bless has published stories, essays, and poems in numerous publications, such as National Geographic: Intelligent Travel, The Culture-ist Magazine, and the Iconoclast Literary Journal. He noted, “I’m interested in all genres of writing, including short stories, novels, as well as nonfiction articles and essays. Two years ago I became interested in drama and read as much Eugene O’Neil, Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, and David Mamet as I could.” Following down the rabbit hole, Bless “ended up writing a three-act play.”

Bless happily encourages creative writing with his NFHS students, saying it is “a privilege to teach the literature that I have always loved and appreciated and to transmit some of that enthusiasm to my students.” He shared, “Up until my senior year in high school—Mahopac High School in New York—all I read were Stephen King novels (whom I still occasionally read for his storytelling). A creative writing teacher liked a story I had written, shared it with the class, compared it to Faulkner, and recommended that I read Faulkner’s novella The Bear, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.” When a student tells Bless that they are interested in becoming a writer, he advises that they “Read everything. Read widely in many genres, including poetry. If you find a writer who really resonates for you, read their entire oeuvre. Keep a journal of quotes you like, descriptions, even conversations you overhear. Also, I tell them they will need resilience and perseverance,” to weather the publishing marketplace.

Branching out from King, Bless counts amounts his favorites, “Ironweed by Kennedy, the short stories of Canadian writer Alice Munro, The Crossing by McCarthy, Walden by Thoreau, The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, James by Everett, The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway, To the Lighthouse by Woolf, Picnic at Hanging Rock by Lindsay, Anna Karenina by Tolstory, the Bhagavad Gita, the historical works of Rick Atkinson and Nathaniel Philbrick, and the nature writing of John Hay, Loren Eiseley, and Peter Matthiessen.” He also reads broadly in poetry and recommends Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, Seamus Heaney, Robert Frost, and Jim Harrison.

“I’m currently working on a new essay about Lake Champlain, and a new novel, which I started last summer—the most ambitious and challenging piece I have ever attempted.” In the meantime, he will continue to encourage students to keep finding joy through time spent both in creative writing pursuits and in copious amounts of reading, and he commits to doing the same. In the end, as a writer, “More than anything, I hope that whatever I write entertains and transports the reader, and that for a moment, the work will cast an aesthetic and imaginative spell.”

Salmon River Gauntlet is available at Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington Depot, Honeybee Books & Tea in New Milford, Canfield Corner and Soulbury in Woodbury, and on Amazon.com.