Rebecca Kaiser Gibson admits she wrote a novel by accident. 

In her talk to the Monadnock Writers’ Group Nov. 21 at Peterborough Town Library, Kaiser Gibson, a poet and retired professor of creative writing, said the question she is most-frequently asked when she discusses her novel, “The Promise of a Normal Life,” is “How did you make the switch from writing poetry to writing a novel?”

“I don’t see any switch,” Kaiser Gibson said. ‘"I never really understand this question. Writing poetry and writing a novel are no different; you are just getting what you need to write out there.”

Kaiser Gibson, a former MacDowell fellow,  has published several books of poetry as well as essays, book reviews and hybrid works throughout her career. Her works of poetry include “Girl As Birch,” “Admit the Peacock” and “Inside the Exhibition.” She is also the founder of The Loom: Poetry in Harrisville, a series of poetry readings by local writers. Kaiser Gibson noted how different it is to be promoting her novel as opposed to her poetry.

“I have noticed it is much easier to talk about my novel with an audience than to talk about poetry. People feel that can relate more to novels. Ninety-nine percent of the time when  I tell someone I’m a professor of poetry, they say they don’t understand poetry. But then when I read them a poem, they always have something to say. It always speaks to them,” she said.

Kaiser Gibson never set out to write a novel, but over the years, a character, originally named Helen, kept coming to her, and she would sporadically write pieces of Helen’s story.

“I just wrote my unspoken thoughts over the years and filed them away,” she said.

Kaiser Gibson had forgotten about her fragments of stories about  Helen, until one day, cleaning out her filing cabinet during COVID lockdown,  she came across the scenes and began to read them. During the spring of the pandemic, she pulled the story together.

“I realized I could put these bits and pieces in order and number them like chapters,” Kaiser Gibson said. “And it became a novel. It wasn’t so different from putting together a book of poetry, really. In a poetry book, you think about what poem reflects or echoes another, how they start and end. The order really matters.”

Kaiser Gibson began to see the patterns in the story, and then figured out how to arrange the scenes chronologically.

“Getting the dates nailed down was really hard. You really need to understand exactly when every scene happened in time, it doesn’t make sense. That was really challenging for me because I just had not been thinking about it that way,” Kaiser Gibson said.

The resulting book, the “The Promise of a Normal Life,” is timely. The story starts in 1967, with an incident of sexual assault on a boat, and goes back and forth through time.

“As I was putting this book together, the Brett Kavanaugh trial had just happened, and the ‘Me Too’ movement was starting,” Kaiser Gibson said. “And my character, her experience is the same as the experience of so many of these women.”

Kaiser Gibson ultimately did not give the main character a name; instead, she is referred to only as “I.”

“It’s confusing, because always people assume ‘I’ is me – Rebecca – but she isn’t me. She is me only in the sense that there is some of every writer in all of their characters, but she is not me. Her story is not my story,” Kaiser Gibson explained. “I can see around her, as I cannot see around myself.”

Kaiser Gibson did not consciously follow any standard writing advice when she put the story together.

“I didn’t write it according to a structure, I didn’t intentionally put any themes or symbolism or deliberate patterns in there. It was all about the reader wanting to know what happens next,” Kaiser Gibson said. “My advice to writers is, you know more than you think you  know. Just write.”