Welcome Readers! I am so excited you are here for the debut edition of my weekly newsletter, Tidal Shifts. In this newsletter I will share my writings with you, both fiction and non, that are greatly influenced by my growing up on Cape Cod. My writings explore the darker side of being a full timer in a vacationland, and also the beauty, resilience, and hope that comes with it.

I am an agented author with a thriller novel in the submissions process. When I am not writing, I am a single mom to three kids and a gigantic black lab, building anew after a few years where everything fell apart. I am thrilled to be here with you and share my writing world, build relationships with you, and experience community. I can’t wait to get started.

After the first three newsletters some of my writing will be available to paid subscribers only, so I hope you will consider subscribing today!

Keri Ann McLaughlin

I didn’t just leave my small Cape Cod town, I fled it, as soon as I could. When I became settled in the “big city” as a young adult people would ask where I was from, and when I told them they would gasp over how lucky I was.

“Oh my god we love the Cape!” was often the exclamation, hands over the chest, eyes wide with delight.

Me too, I would reply. But in my head there was always an “I think” that never got verbalized.

Everyone has a complicated relationship with home, and I am no different. It’s so difficult to describe what it was like to grow up on the Cape. It had a feeling of pressure, like the hot, humid air of summer but more constant, as though something was always sitting on top of you, keeping you suppressed. There was also a sense of invisibility, of moving under your heavy space with a muted, blurry step.

  The main color that comes to my mind when I think of my growing up on Cape Cod is gray, which is surprising to anyone who loves the Cape and has the memories of soaking up the sun on the beach. But for me, the Cape is gray. Gray beaches in the off season, gray skies in the winter, gray ambiguity about the present and the future. Mine was not a childhood of sunshine and pastels, golden sea star charms dangling and clinking together off a thin bracelet, the scent of sunscreen on a hot summer day. It was a childhood of gray skies and deep woods, the scent of pine needles baking in the heat, bats swooping over my head at dusk as I pedaled my bike furiously, the crashing waves sucking at my knees and threatening to pull me down as I waded into the ocean in April, the water so cold it made my shins ache.  My strongest memories are from winter and spring, the harshest months where the weather is the most unforgiving and everyone’s bank account is strained. 

There’s a hierarchy in a tourist town, and those at the bottom remain suppressed even when those at the top are not physically present. The end of summer meant an end to deadlocked traffic, skyrocketed food and gas prices, and beach stickers so pricey few locals could afford them. It should have also meant an end to invisibility residents were painted with in the summer; in an ideal world I imagine locals shaking off the heavy burden of summer and emerging ready and eager to participate in their communities. But that never happened, the invisibility paint was permanent.  Residents emerged from summer battered and fatigued, and rolled into Autumn with a quiet acceptance which quickly turned to despair once winter came. Our lives never became sun soaked, or full color. 

The town I grew up in is bookended by a nuclear power plant and a sprawling military base. Over the years, each has been accused but never found guilty off poisoning the environment of the Cape. Cancer clusters are carefully document in this area, and many strongly believe they are linked to this pollution, but nothing has ever been proven. This paradox of the beautiful coastal landscape against the backdrop of a belching power plant and the sprawling barbed wire and constant booming detonations of a military base have shaped my writing today-I love exploring the barbed wire surrounding the beauty in a life, and the dangerous detonations threatening it from within.

Perhaps the most destructive detonation that shaped my life on the Cape was the opioid epidemic, of which Cape Cod was an epicenter. Addiction was always present on the Cape, and like many economies dependent on tourism for survival, addiction tended to erupt in the cold winter months where jobs were basically non existent and the days felt endless. Families would whisper quietly about the struggle of “the drink” and how various members of the community were drowning in it. Drugs were there, but in my memory the winters were primarily doused in booze, and the lucky ones managed to crawl out into the summer sunlight every year and peace together some work until the winter hit again. The 1990’s brought prescription painkillers, and opiates were napalm on an already burning fire. Like many economically depressed areas, the 1990’s through the mid 2000’s on the Cape saw prescription pain killer rates at nearly 25% above the national average. For me, those decades can only be described as carnage. Absolute destruction of families and livelihoods and communities. A dividing line between before the arrival of opiates and after is seared into my heart. My writing, both fiction and non, explores this dividing line, and the stories that lie on either side of it.

What I love about my hometown, and my writing, is that amongst all of this pain there is great beauty and a gorgeous sense of hope, tales of survival that soothe the burns and heal the heart. The barbed wire is there, but so is the shore, and that’s everything.

Thank you so much for joining me on the first step of this Beehiiv journey! I am glad you are here, and I am so excited to share writing with you again next week. I hope you’ll subscribe and consider a paid subscription!

Until next time,

Keri Ann

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