In The Bayrose Files an ambitious young journalist plots to infiltrate a writer’s retreat in order to report from within. Her plan goes awry as she makes new friends and finds herself conflicted by the fraud she is committing.

My name is Violet Maris and I’ve done a terrible thing. It didn’t start out terrible; it started out clever and intriguing. Only later did I realize how much I’d confused and hurt people, including myself. Only later did I realize there were probably better ways to get things done. At twenty-six, you’d think I would have been smarter about life, but I wasn’t. I was the last person anyone would ever suspect of doing such a thing. Almost everyone I knew would have described me as a nice, sane, talented young woman. All that made everything easier, or so I thought.

Violet Maris is a young journalist working as literature critic for an alternative Boston newspaper. Eager to do something unique and important, she believes she may have found something when she interviews a young poet.

The poet tells her about PHAW – The Provincetown Home for Artists and Writers, better known as ‘The Home’ – and its impact on his career. Violet imagines herself doing an investigative piece on The Home, uncovering its inner workings.

It helps that The Home is located in Provincetown. Within driving distance of Boston, Violet has fond childhood memories of the town and is familiar enough with it. But when she makes a trip there to make some early inquiries about The Home, she mostly gets a cold shoulder.

Spencer Bayrose has an idea. Spence is Violet’s former college journalism professor and has remained a friend and a mentor. Spence has dabbled with writing fiction and has a collection of short pieces that he has not shared with anyone. If Violet was willing to commit a minor bit of fraud, she could claim these pieces as her own to use in an application to The Home.

But can Violet, a twenty-six-year-old woman from Boston pass off Spence’s work, written from the point of view of a gay man from the South, as her own? Can a journalist, even a literature journalist, mingle with artists, discuss the technicalities of their work, without seeming like a fraud?

More difficulties arise once Violet arrives at The Home. The friendships she forms with those she meets in Provincetown makes the work she has to do in secret more troubling. Meanwhile more complications arise back home in Boston further disturbing her conscience.

The Bayrose Files is a new novella by Diane Wald. Perhaps better known as an award-winning poet, The Bayrose Files benefits from a concise, spare technique from Wald with nothing superfluous. Given how she describes her method, working from word to phrase to sentence to paragraph, this comes as no surprise.

The Bayrose Files also benefits from Wald’s intimate knowledge of Provincetown and of writer’s retreats. She spent two years at the Fine Arts Work Centre (FAWC) in Provincetown in the 1970’s and The Bayrose Files is inspired by her time there. Like Violet, Wald spent childhood holidays in Provincetown and her affection for the location and period come through in her writing.

Being a novella, The Bayrose Files can be read and enjoyed over a weekend. Yet, it does contain themes for the reader to think about if you scratch below the surface. It raises questions about the ethics of investigative work including journalism. Conflicts that arise where personal and working relationships collide is another. And, naturally, the question of the use and abuse of work and art that is not your own, with or without permission, is an important one in the story.

As well as the prose style, the setting and the themes, I think readers will also enjoy the focus on character, the humour, the tension and the tenderness of the story.

Diane Wald is technically retired yet that has not stopped her from continuing to write and publish. Having read The Bayrose Files I hope she writes more in the setting of Provincetown. She has even said she is considering a sequel to The Bayrose Files.

The Bayrose Files will be published on May 27 2025. We Need to Talk About Books was provided with an advanced copy in return for an independent review.