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Author On the Bookcase: Jay Varner, author of Nothing Left To Burn
Submitted by Barbara on Tue, 08/02/2011 - 13:09
I'm so excited to welcome Jay Varner, author of Nothing Left to Burn, to On the Bookcase! Jay's memoir eloquently tells the story of a son’s relationship with his father, the fire chief and a local hero, and his grandfather, a serial arsonist. Jay returns home after college and lands a job at the local newspaper writing the police and fire beat. Three men of the same family share a passion or obession with fire. In digging into the past, Jay's story reveals layers of family secrets, lies, and half-truths about fire-fighting and arson. It is only when he finally has the truth in hand that he comes to an understanding of the forces that drove his father, and of the fires that for all his efforts his father could never extinguish.
In this post, Jay shares his high school struggles to get a girl and be accepted. These struggles lead to an enlightment of Jay's ultimate goal to "write a book."
In ninth grade, I was bused an hour away to a high school that mixed camouflaged country boys like my friends and I with Gap-decked city kids. My freshman class had 250 students, the most visible of which came from a wealthy neighborhood of lawyers and doctors. Oceans of them swarmed the halls between classes, talking about things like beer, pot, fights, automobiles, and sex. I watched spaghetti westerns, collected baseball cards, played video games, and stayed home Friday nights to read about the Civil War. I was an anonymous weirdo in a school, like most, defined by social hierarchy. Unless I wanted to end up like Grover Hutchins, the curly-haired senior who sat by himself at lunch and read fantasy dragon novels, I had to distinguish myself.
Nothing would better redefine my identity than a girlfriend. The logic behind my quixotic conquest was hazy. In middle school, as boys with peach-fuzz mustaches and Skoal-breath snagged the prettiest girls, I marveled at the Sport Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and endured taunts of “Gay Jay” from mullet-headed boys. I didn’t chalk off the calendar days until the arrival of deer hunting season or ride four-wheelers and, thus, failed to meet the accepted definition of a real man. But, it seemed real men always had a woman by their side. Looking back, I think I needed to prove to myself that I could find a girlfriend—perhaps it really was the chase that gave me the greatest thrill. Beyond announcing that I had finally captured this long sought-after fantasy girl, I would have had no idea what came next.
You lived and died by lunch in high school. If you spent a month careening like a pinball from girl to girl in the hopes of receiving basic eye contact only to meet constant failure, you might as well consider seppuku. It’s hard to tell how much of what came next could be chalked up to adolescent angst and how much of it really was a black-eyed dog scratching at the door. I was depressed—or, rather, immersed myself in the things I imaged a depressed person would do, such as wearing black and reading the darkest and most cynical pieces of the canon. In a matter of weeks I tore through The Bell Jar, Catch-22, and The Catcher In the Rye. When I was in a bookstore, I saw something called Prozac Nation—how could I resist? This was my nation and the author, Elizabeth Wurtzel, became my first true, painful celebrity crush. I needed my beloved Elizabeth, just like the many girls at school, to finally notice me.
Perhaps this is why, not long after that my bacchanalia of depressive literature, I wrote a story for English class called “The Box.” It was an allegorical mish-mash between Matheson’s “Button, Button” and Stockton’s “The Lady and the Tiger”—someone finds a mysterious box and what’s inside answers questions and fills desires. “But what, dear reader, is inside the box?” Even though the story amounted to petty theft, my classmates loved all of it, especially that final line. I thought they would raise me onto their shoulders and carry me through the halls amidst a blizzard of confetti, celebrating a literary genius that had lay dormant for years. The slightest hint of acclaim was like heroin—I needed more fast.
The great scam of my adolescence started the following Sunday night, when I sat on the La-Z-Boy and tried to write a follow-up. I thumbed through the radio dial and found something called Dr. Demento, a syndicated radio show dedicated to novelty songs in the vein of Weird Al or Stan Freeberg. In the best of cases, they satirized society; in the worst, they featured harmonized burps. After a few minutes, I hit the record button on the tape deck. The first song I remember was called “God Told Me to Rob the 7-11” by Dick Price. Throughout that next day at school, the bouncy piano chords stuck in my head and when I stormed home that night, I rewound the tape and typed up the lyrics because they made me laugh. But—and to me, this was a vital distinction—I didn’t put my name underneath the title. When I handed out copies to my busmates the next morning, they laughed just as I had intended. But after they complimented me for writing the poem, I never exactly said that I didn’t write the words. And this is how it went, more or less, for the next two years. I was a regular Thomas Paine, if rather than extolling the virtues of freedom Paine had instead plagiarized novelty songs for his pamphlets and handed them out to his classmates in the hopes of becoming popular enough to net a girlfriend. Despite my continued defeats on the romantic front, it somehow seemed logical that a girl would fall in love with some lanky zit-faced kid who wore silk-screened sweatshirts and wrote funny poems. They did not and, when the radio station took Dr. Demento off the air, I felt the pressure of my audience—I needed to give them something. There would be no more jokes, I announced. I was going in a new direction and, for the first time, I put my name on the verses.
I should be in the gray clay
Of the frozen terrain.
Instead I keep breathing,
And things keep falling like the rain.
I turned that poem in to my senior-year English teacher, who passed it along to the office. As I made my case to the concerned principal, I told him it was only a poem, that plenty of poets expressed dark emotion in poetry.
“Take Sylvia Plath,” I said. “Her poems are loaded with stuff like this.”
The principal folded his hands, cocked his head. “True, but I remember it not ending well for her. Maybe you should write something else?”
So I did. First, there was my version of The Onion which satirized issues common to my school like heroin addiction with such knee-slapping hilarity that the principal threatened to sue if I used the school’s name again. When the late-90s rash of school shootings hit, I wrote a skit about competing school shooters who had all picked the same day for their rampage—eventually, they worked out a passable time-table. My English teacher sent that one over to the principal, who again saw no humor.
“It’s satire,” I said. “And great satire should push the envelope?”
“True, but this is a little scary,” he said. He leaned back in his chair. “You thinking about college?”
I wasn’t. Some of the parents where I grew up didn’t exactly swing for the fences when it came to dreaming about their kids’ futures. Employed, out of jail, and not dead from a bar fight or car accident was usually good enough. It seemed that so long as I was happy, my family would be proud. Problem was, I had no idea just what would make me happy. I had toyed with a few career options—farmer, movie director, police officer, mercenary, helicopter pilot, sniper—but, after losing interest in them all, I more or less assumed that after high school I’d put my name in at the local factories, a perfectly respectable life spent in the echoes of clanging hammers and cracking timber.
“You could major in creative writing,” the principal said. “You’d do pretty well with something like that.”
There was the seed. There was the thing that would define me more than any girlfriend. When we were instructed to pick a quote to include under our photos in the high school yearbook, most people picked something trivial to sum up their high school experience—quips from Meet Joe Black or lyrics to a Matchbox Twenty song. I wanted mine to carry some metaphysical weight so I chose a line by Phillip Larkin—or, as it was erroneously attributed, Phillip Carkin.
I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any—after all, most people are unhappy, don’t you think?
In my picture, I wore a drab gray shirt and a thin red tie that was not in style in 1999 nor anytime since. The severity on my face matched one of those stiff men in Civil War Daguerreotypes who tucked his hand into his jacket and looked bloated by indigestion.
Underneath Larkin’s quote was my life’s ambition. Many classmates wrote something like “To love Gina forever” or “Keep my truck running real good.”
Mine: “To someday write a book.”
Jay, thanks so much for revealing your trials and tribulations of high school. I'm so glad these issues finally led you to be a writer instead of "farmer, movie director, police officer, mercenary, helicopter pilot, sniper." Nothing Left to Burn has excellent discussion points for reading groups -- family dynamics, coming-of-age, faith.
Praise for Nothing Left to Burn
“Varner traces a scorched circle of memory in this affecting memoir, looking to fire to both destroy and purify the past.”
--Publisher’s Weekly
"At its core, the book is about the way we spend half our lives trying to understand the people who brought us into this world ..."
--Time Out Chicago
Jay Varner is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he earned his MFA in creative nonfiction. He currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. This is his first book.
Find out more about Jay.
Author On the Bookcase: Jael McHenry, author of The Kitchen Daughter
Submitted by Barbara on Mon, 08/01/2011 - 14:04
Author On the Bookcase
Jael McHenry
I'm thrilled to welcome Jael McHenry, author of The Kitchen Daughter, to On the Bookcase. Reading and recipes -- perfect for reading groups! After the unexpected death of her parents, painfully shy and sheltered 26-year-old Ginny Selvaggio seeks comfort in cooking from family recipes. (Midnight Cry Brownies -- yummy!) She learns her cooking will lure family ghosts and these ghosts leave clues to some family secrets. As Ginny deals with her loss, she faces another challenge -- her sister wants to sell the house Ginny has ever known. Ginny unravels the family secrets from the ghostly revelations while discovering her own identity. A coming-of-age story featuring evocative and mouth-watering descriptions of food!
Jael's reading group picked The Kitchen Daughter as their May book selection. "What would it be like? For them and for me? What if they didn’t like it?" Jael chats with us about the worries she had.
In my many years as a member of different book groups in different cities, I’d always made it a point to read the book, but this month for the very first time I didn’t have to worry about that at all.
I hadn’t just read the book. I’d written it.
My novel The Kitchen Daughter came out in April, and as publication approached, I’d pictured readers of all stripes enjoying it, especially book groups. It’s the story of a shy, sheltered young woman with Asperger’s syndrome who discovers she can invoke ghosts from dead people’s recipes. In a time of grief – the unexpected death of both her parents – Ginny turns to family recipes, cooking to comfort herself. There’s a lot for a book group to discuss – food and memory, grief and reassurance, family dynamics, how the narrator’s autism affects the form and content of the story. I’d hoped that book groups would pick it up and discuss it. I’d imagined them cooking along, making the recipes, and serving the dishes named in the book as their discussions unfolded.
But somehow, I’d never really thought about my book group discussing it.
My book group here in New York City is a group of about 10 women, meeting every month or two, discussing both fiction and nonfiction, as we choose. As many book groups do, we eat and drink along with our conversation. The hostess generally makes a main dish and the rest of us bring appetizers, salad, desserts, and of course, wine. And there’s generally a discussion at the end of each session about what book we’ll read for the next session, but in April, that discussion was very short. “And of course, next, we’re doing Jael’s book,” they said, and I said, “Okay.” (Well, I also said “Are you sure?” and “Don’t feel obligated,” but it came around to “Okay” pretty quickly.)
But I wondered – what would it be like? For them and for me? What if they didn’t like it?
I was worried both that they’d be too honest and not honest enough. The big night came. I made Midnight Cry Brownies, a recipe from the book, and I knew the hostess was undertaking aji de gallina, a Peruvian chicken recipe – also in the book – that is without a doubt the most complicated and time-consuming dish in there. I arrived, grabbed my glass of Riesling, and braced myself.
And it was fine. Better than fine. As a matter of fact, it was wonderful.
Having the author in the room changes the dynamic, of course, but it doesn’t make the conversation any less lively. It just changes the focus. (Or at least it did in our case.) We drank glasses of wine and Georgia Peaches (once again, a book recipe) and ate our way through a delicious spread of Peruvian chicken, black bean salad, cheese and crackers, those brownies, and much more. And instead of declarative statements, which sometimes dominate the conversation – I didn’t like ABC, or I wish the author would have talked more about XYZ – we expressed ourselves in the give and take of questions – Did you always know the book would end with ABC? Who thought the explanation for XYZ would be something else?
I got to talk about my research and my revisions, and if I spoke more than I usually would at a meeting, I’m sure next time I’ll talk less. After all, next time I’ll be a reader again.
Thanks, Jael, for being a reader and an author! And, supplying great discussion points and awesome recipes for a book group meeting. Still thinking about the Midnight Cry Brownies . . .
Praise for The Kitchen Daughter
"For Ginny Selvaggio, the protagonist of Jael McHenry's captivating debut novel, food is a kind of glossary and cooking provides its own magic, whether it's summoning the dead or softening the sharp edges of a world she finds neither comfortable nor familiar. The Kitchen Daughter is sweet and bitter-sharp, a lush feast of a novel about the links between flavor and memory, family and identity." --Carolyn Parkhurst, New York Times bestselling author of Dogs of Babel and The Nobodies Album
Jael McHenry is a talented and enthusiastic amateur cook who blogs about food and cooking at the SIMMER blog. She is a monthly pop culture columnist and Editor-in-Chief of Intrepid Media, online at intrepidmedia.com. Her work has appeared in publications such as the North American Review, Indiana Review, and the Graduate Review at American University, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing. She lives in New York City.
Man Booker Winners Become Reading Groups Picks
Submitted by Barbara on Sun, 07/31/2011 - 10:47
2011 Man Booker Prize Longlist Announced
The Man Booker Prize, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008, aims to reward the best novel of the year writte
n by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The Man Booker judges are selected from the country's finest critics, writers and academics to maintain the consistent excellence of the prize.
Some of past winners have become reading groups favorites -- The Finkler Question, Wolf Hall, The White Tiger, The Gathering, The Inheritance of Loss, The Life of Pi
THe 2011 Longlist
Julian Barnes–The Sense of an Ending
Sebastian Barry–On Canaan's Side
Carol Birch–Jamrach's Menagerie
Patrick deWitt– The Sisters Bothers
Esi Edugyan–Half Blood Blues
Yvvette Edwards–A Cupboard Full of Coats
Alan Hollinghurst–The Stranger's Child
Stephen Kelman–Pigeon English
Patrick McGuinness–The Last Hundred Days
A.D. Miller–Snowdrops
Alison Pick– Far to Go
Jane Rogers–The Testament of Jessie Lamb
D.J. Taylor–Derby Day
The shortlist of six authors will be announced on September 6 and the winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction will be announced on October 18.
Which book do you choose?
Third Installment of Novel-in-Progress from the Sisters of the Traveling Computers
Submitted by Barbara on Thu, 07/07/2011 - 14:35
Third Installment!
Sisters of the Traveling Computers
Novel-in-Progress
Eight great writers are going to produce a progressive novel -- like a progressive dinner! Each one will write a couple paragraphs, a chapter, two chapters (whatever strikes her fancy) round robin style without discussing it with each other. This novel-in-progress will continue through the rest of the year. The scribes are Eleanor Brown (The Weird Sisters), Heidi Durrow (The Girl Who Fell From the Sky), Siobhan Fallon (You Know When The Men are Gone), Therese Fowler (Exposure), Tanya Egan Gibson (How to Buy a Love of Reading), Caroline Leavitt (Pictures of You), Sarah Pekkanen (Skipping a Beat), and Rebecca Rasmussen (The Bird Sisters.) All great books for reading groups!
First installment (May 15)
By midnight, he still wasn’t home. Or he wasn’t picking up the phone, which he knew would make her frantic with worry. She couldn’t leave the Martin’s now. Already, Mrs. Martin had told her that just cleaning up after the party wasn’t enough, that she wanted her to also redust (redust!) the figurines on the mantle because “You didn’t take enough care last time.” Should she tell Mrs. Martin how Mr. Martin groped her as she trying to arrange the baby chocolate éclairs on a plate? Should she tell her how Bobby, Mrs. Martin's son, called her a stupid bitch and kicked her out of his room so she wouldn’t catch him doing Jesus knows what?
She wasn’t supposed to use her phone when she was working, but she dialed again. Maybe he was with Bette, his terrifying girlfriend. Maybe he was walking again, clearing his head about what had happened.
Second Installment (June 22)
Maria wasn’t ready to become a grandmother at 42. And that was what she said first when--with his lips trembling—Mark told her that Bette was pregnant. She should have held him. He looked so scared. How could her teenage son become a father before he had a chance to become a man?
That was just five weeks ago, and now she wouldn’t have to be a young grandmother. She wouldn’t have to watch Mark struggle to take care of a family too young. Why couldn’t Mark see the miracle in this moment?
The phone went to voicemail again.
It was a thirty-minute drive home from the Martin’s. Let him be home by then, she thought. Just please let him be safe.
Third Installment (July 1)
“Dammit!” The most ghoulish figurine, the one with the trio of black-eyed children gaping up as if caught forever in the middle of wailing some god-awful song, skittered across the Pledge-shiny mantle and shattered on the floor below.
Maria dropped to the marble and quickly swept the delicate porcelain into the dust rag. Her right knee grinded roughly and she winced, maybe she would have been old enough to have been a grandmother after all.
“What have you done?”
Maria looked up at the doorway and saw Mrs. Martin standing there in that blue dress of hers, the one that had the extra padding in the front and made the woman look top heavy enough to fall on her face. What Maria would give to see Mrs. Martin fall on her face. Though it looked like tonight just might be the night as Mrs. Martin tottered over the smooth floor toward her. Maria tried to judge the distance between the door and the mantle—would Mrs. Martin, who clearly looked like she had finished off every wine bottle in her cellar, notice the missing figurine? Should Maria pretend she was just wiping up a speck of dirt on the marble and get herself to the department store tomorrow to find one of these ridiculous chatkas, get it back on the mantle before Mrs. Martin had finished nursing her hangover and got out of bed at noon? Whenever she had broken something in the past, Mrs. Martin docked her pay a good fifty percent more that the true price of the broken item. Maria knew that vase the cat knocked over, the one she got blamed for, had been a Wal-Mart special rather than any Shannon Irish Chrystal from Macy’s, but she had let it slide.
Now she curled those shattered little goth kids into her palm. “How was the party, Mrs. Martin? Did your guests just love those éclairs?”
“I thought I heard something break in here.” Mrs. Martin seemed unsure. Then she slipped, looked like she was about to do a split and quickly righted herself. That’s what she deserved for wearing those three inch hooker heels, Maria thought. Clear heels! No one could get away with clear heels except… well, hookers. Didn’t Mrs. Martin know that a fifty year old woman had a better chance of keeping her man if she let herself age gracefully instead of buying out Victoria Secret push-up bras and over-botoxing her face?
“Did you say something broke in the kitchen? I’ll get right on it.” Maria rose, again feeling that weakness in her knee. For a moment she felt a rush of sympathy for Mrs. Martin and the skin stretched too tightly across her face, the highlighted hair that only seemed to emphasize her grey, the manic way she held her wine glass as if it’s contents was the only thing allowing her to think that she was still young and lovely in the eyes of her husband.
“The kitchen is a disaster,” the woman sneered, and Maria felt her spine straighten, her sympathy evaporate. The kitchen had been pristine ten minutes ago, all the party’s washing up done and put away. The only thing left should be a few coffee cups from the hanger-ons who pretended to sober up before drunk-driving their Hummers and Mercedes home.
“I’ll take a look before I go,” Maria whispered, eyes down. Then she glanced up, rearranging her face as sweetly as possible. “Oh, Mrs. Martin, I think Bobby wanted you to go on in and say goodnight when your guests left, he seemed like he was waiting up for you.”
Maria left the room, shoving the rag deep into her pocket. She hoped Mrs. Martin walked right in on that little pervert and caught him watching whatever sicko pornos only rich tech-savvy kids had the time and money to become addicted too.
She peeked into the kitchen; the gleaming granite was just as clean as she left it. Two dirty coffee cups in the sink. Two dirty coffee cups now constituted a “disaster.” Maria shook her head and quickly put the mugs into the dishwasher. This family didn’t know the disasters that knocked them upside the head every day: Mr. Martin chasing anything that peed sitting down, Bobby talking to topless girls in Thailand through a web-cam, Mrs. Martin with a liver that wouldn’t see the next decade. Oh no, the only disasters the Martins recognized were the fluctuation of stock prices, a new wrinkle on Mrs. Martin’s rigid face, Bobby not getting into Princeton.
Maria set the alarm system in the foyer and shut the front door without further ado. She was reaching for her cell phone before she was at the end of the driveway and felt a sudden stab of pain. She tugged her hand out of her pocket, heard the chime of glass hitting the asphalt. A shard of figurine had sliced into the pad of her thumb and now jutted out of her flesh. Part of a face hung perpendicular from her finger, and one of the black eyes, souless and cold, stared up at her. It made Maria hesitate and stare back, jolted and afraid. That eye looking at her felt like a bad omen. She tugged it out, threw the piece on the drive, stuck her bloody thumb in her mouth. Then she started jogging to her car, her heart tight in her chest.
Mark, she thought, dear God, Mark, please be all right.
Bette answered the door, looking peeved at Maria for trying to get into her own home. Maria would have naturally apologized for waking anyone up, but the glint of Bette’s eyebrow ring, the twist on the girl’s perpetually red-lipsticked mouth, made Maria itch with irritation instead. First of all, Bette was not allowed to be in the house when Maria was not. Call her old-fashioned or absolutely ridiculous, Maria didn’t care. It was her number one rule. Second of all, there were plenty of bolts on that door that the kids could have locked that Maria had a key to open, but they had decided on using the chain, knowing Maria couldn’t get in, which made her think that they had deliberately locked her out so they could do the sorts of things Maria told herself sickos like Bobby Martin got up to. As if getting Bette pregnant once just wasn’t enough for these two. As if a miscarriage, yes, horrible, but in this case it felt like it was the will of God Almighty Himself, as if a miscarriage hadn’t spared them already.
“Mark’s here?” Maria asked immediately. Bette shrugged in that sullen way that made Maria want to wring her neck.
“Bette, is he here or not? And why weren’t either of you answering your cell phones, I was worried sick—“
“He hasn’t called me since ten,” the girl said. “I don’t know where he is.”
Maria blinked at Bette, noticing for the first time that she was wearing a pair of Mark’s boxers. “What do you mean you don’t know where he is?”
The girl followed Maria’s eyes. “He told me I could stay here, to make myself comfortable.” She put her hand on her hip. “It’s not like I could go home now that everyone knows Mark knocked me up.”
Maria felt exhausted, the room tipping to the left for a moment. It was too much. “Bette, where is my son?”
Bette sighed forcefully in reply, her thick fringe of bangs lifting off her forehead with the effort, and it reminded Maria that the girl was only a teenager after all. Granted, a seventeen-year old, and she lorded that extra year of experience over sixteen-year old Mark, it was part of her strange power over her son, Maria knew. But she was still a girl, at least in calendar years, and she had been through a lot, had been pregnant and lost a baby and now it seemed as if her parents had kicked her out of her home, all before her senior year of high school. If Maria had been a better person, she would have embraced Bette immediately, asked her how she was feeling, offered to make her an ice cream sundae. But Maria didn’t feel like being a better person tonight, she felt the taint of the Martin’s still on her skin, making her impatient and cruel. “Goddammit, Bette, don’t you sigh at me. If you don’t tell me where Mark is I will call the police and tell them to take you with them.”
Bette’s arms dropped limply to her sides. “He went somewhere with Figgy. He didn’t tell me what they were doing but he said not to worry about them unless they didn’t come home by morning. He told me to make up a lie to tell you but… but I couldn’t.” She glanced at Maria and Maria thought maybe there was something scheming in the girl’s eyes, something that didn’t match the poor-little-worried-me story.
Maria sat down at the small kitchen table.
Figgy. That name rang some vague bell. Was he one of Bette’s cousin’s? Yes, that’s right, he was the eldest Figuera boy, eighteen, the one who had repeated his freshman year of high school twice. Mark had never been friends with any of the Figueroa boys before. Before Bette. Maria should call the police right this minute, tell them her son was missing. Mark, her beautiful boy. She thought she had done things right with him, he never missed a day of school, teachers always telling her how good a kid he was with his ‘yes ma’am’, ‘please’ and ‘no thank you’s, his noble attempts at chess club, his weekend work at the Books and Boogie store downtown. And then this girl, this Bette-- who would give a child a French whore name like that anyway? -- always looking like she was laughing at the adults, like she knew something no one else knew, with her lip gloss and frightening piercings and tight black t-shirts that showed the small star tattoo just above her hip, this girl ruined everything. Maria thought of the first time she met Bette, how she was certain she had smelled alcohol on the girl’s breath, how the girl seemed impaired by something more than youth, and when she asked Mark about it the next day, he claimed Bette had had the stomach flu and the anti-nausea pills weren’t sitting well with her. It was the most preposterous thing Maria had ever heard but her son said it with such certainty, so hurt when Maria laughed at him, that Maria thought Mark himself believed the ridiculous story. Now Maria assessed Bette and wondered if she had even been pregnant. She certainly didn’t seem weak or fragile for someone who had miscarried just two days ago.
Maria put her hands over her face. They were only kids. Surely Bette couldn’t have lied about something like that just to tighten her grip. But Mark, where was he? One o’clock in the morning, off with a dumb-as-mud eighteen year old named Figgy, up to God knows what.
Suddenly Maria thought again of the Martins, of Mrs. Martin thickly snoring in her king sized bed, of Bobby on his computer all night, of Mr. Martin sending suggestive text messages to his secretary, and, for the first time in the eight years that Maria had worked for them, she envied them their minor disasters after all.
The first eight installments will be anynomous as the writers would like to guess who is writing that passage solely on sytle of writing. How fun!
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Author On the Bookcase: Karen Essex, author of Dracula In Love
Submitted by Barbara on Tue, 06/28/2011 - 15:44
Author on the Bookcase
Karen Essex
Vampires Fly On the Bookcase! I'm so excited to welcome Karen Essex, author of Dracula In Love. Karen's novel reveals Mina, the muse behind Stoker's Dracula, and brings her to life. Mina Murray Harker recounts the intimate details of what really transpired between her and the Count -— the joys and terrors of a passionate affair. Mina's tale is a visceral journey into Victorian England's dimly lit bedrooms, mist-filled cemeteries, and asylum chambers. Karen has turned the classic Dracula inside out!
Karen chats about her research of the asylums of Victorian England and the symptoms and behaviors deemed a patient insane.
Take us back, Karen, when "it was not a good time to be a woman."
When the Only Safe Sex was with Vampires
When doing book club chats for Dracula in Love, I am inevitably asked about the sequences in the novel that readers find the most chilling and frightening—the scenes in the Victorian insane asylum. Surely those shocking scenarios, like the fantasy scenes of vampirism, are products of the author’s perverse imagination? Ironically, the answer is no; the asylum sequences are based on painstaking research. Truth, as it turns out, is always is stranger than fiction.
Dracula in Love, which I describe as a romantic Gothic thriller, retells Bram Stoker’s original story from the perspective of the vampire’s muse, Mina Harker, and in the process, turns the story on its ear, freeing Mina from her role as “victim,” and putting her at the center of her own story. A good deal of Stoker’s book takes place in an asylum. I wanted to use the Gothic setting, but I also wanted to paint the asylum as it actually would have been at the time—full of women incarcerated for having what we today would consider normal sexual and other desires.
In the course of my research, I quickly discovered that women in the 1890s had a lot more to fear from their own culture than from vampires. I read the psychiatric journals of the period, which prescribed bizarre treatments for ladies who were “hysterical,” which turns out to mean that they were “excitable in the presence of men.” In many instances, the desire to read all day or engage in intellectual studies, were also regarded as symptoms of mental illness. Young women were committed to asylums for doing cartwheels in mixed company, or for staring seductively at a man. Any behavior that showed spunk, spirit, or sexual needs, was pathologized.
All sorts of harrowing and torturous cures were developed to “settle” these women—restraints, forced housework (to help them remember their true natures), repeated plunges in ice water, and force-feeding, to name a few. As mental illness in females was thought to originate in the womb, doctors also were obsessed with menstrual cycles, figuring that if a patient’s cycle could be made precise, the “illness” of wanting to have sex or read books all day, would disappear. Not coincidentally, an irregular cycle was considered a sign of mental illness and required treatment.
Curious as to whether these practices were actually carried out, I went into the archives of Victorian mental asylums and read physicians’ reports, often in the doctors’ own handwriting. The following short excerpt is taken from these cases. Here, Mina is on a tour of the institution with its director, Dr. John Seward:
Seward led me further down the hall to a mezzanine area, where we turned a corner. With a key, he opened a door, and we entered a room. Light streamed in through the single source of a small arched window. The room smelled of chemicals. He must have heard my little sniff. “It’s the ammonia used to clean the leathers. We sterilize them after every use. We are very modern here.”
Leather cuffs and straps of many sizes hung in bundles on hooks on the wall. He opened a closet, taking out a heavy linen garment with long sleeves that ended in mitts and a complex system of tie strings that dangled chaotically.
“Whatever is that used for?” I asked.
“We use the jackets in the more difficult cases to prevent the patients from harming themselves and others. In less severe cases, we use them to pacify.”
I cocked my head. “Pacify?”
“With male patients, we use them to control violent behavior. But with female patients, we have found that confinement of the arms and hands soothes the nerves. So many things cause ladies to become overexcited. You are such sensitive creatures. Prayer, which settles the male conscience and soothes his soul, has the opposite effect on ladies. We do not know why this is. Reading novels can have the same effect. We call these jackets camisoles because they calm a lady’s nerves in the same way that a putting on a lovely garment might.”
Think about that next time you slip into a bustier! The more harrowing excerpts are rife with spoilers, so I will let the reader discover them in the pages of the book. Though the Victorian era had its charms and pleasures—and I do explore those as well—it was not a good time to be a woman. If I were living in those times, I would surely have been committed. And I’m guessing that if you are reading this, you might have been my cellmate.
Thanks so much, Karen, for sharing some of the background on Dracula in Love. "Truth is always stranger than fiction!" Reading groups can cetainly sink their teeth in the research and themes of Dracula in Love -- Victorian women's lives and identity, feminism, history, sexuality, folklore, mental illness treatment.
Praise
"Like The French Lieutenant's Woman, the novel explores and exposes the stifling confines of Victorian society, especially upon women. But the means of deliverance is altogether different."—Margaret George, bestselling author of The Memoirs of Cleopatra
"If you read only one more vampire novel, let it be this one."—C.W. Gortner, author of The Last Queen and The Confessions of Catherine de Medici
Karen Essex is the author of Kleopatra, Pharaoh, and the international bestseller Leonardo's Swans, which won Italy's prestigious 2007 Premio Roma for foreign fiction. An award-winning journalist and a screenwriter, she lives in Los Angeles, California.
Please learn more about Karen.
Author On the Bookcase: Gabrielle Burton, author of Impatient With Desire
Submitted by Barbara on Mon, 06/27/2011 - 16:59
Author On the Bookcase
Gabrielle Burton
I'm so excited to welcome Gabrielle Burton, author of Impatient With Desire, to On the Bookcase. Gabrielle's novel tells the story of Tamsen Donner, a real-life pioneer woman. In 1846, after months of research and preparation, she and her husband George, along with their five daughters and eighty other pioneers, headed west on the California-Oregon Trail in eager anticipation of new lives in California. But everything that could go wrong did... and an American legend was born.
The Donner Party. We may think we know their story—a cautionary tale of starving pioneers trapped in the mountains performing an unspeakable act to survive—but Impatient with Desire brings to stunning life a woman—and a love story—behind the myth.
Gabrielle shares with us her "tortoise's handbook to success."
On your mark, get set, go!
The Long and Winding Road
After writing off and on about Tamsen Donner, the pioneer heroine of the ill-fated Donner Party of 1846, for over 37 years, I won the writer's lottery--publishing TWO books about her in one year, a memoir, Searching for Tamsen Donner, and a novel, Impatient with Desire.
I started writing in 1971, dreaming of being a literary sensation at any moment. But life and years have a way of sneaking up on you and lobbing a few water balloons.
My publishing history reads like a tortoise's handbook to success.
In 1972, I published my first book, I'm Running Away From Home But I'm Not Allowed To Cross The Street.
For the next six years, a short story that turned into a novel consumed me, until I decided that the raised and dashed hopes were taking too large a toll on me and on my family. (Every rejection, I took to my bed and, like an Irish warrior, bled for a while, then rose to fight again.)
In 1979, I put away that 550 page novel--30 pages of it about Tamsen Donner and her lost journal--and started a new novel. I finished the first draft in two years and thought, Hey, I'm getting good at this stuff.
Well, not that good. It took until 1987 and twenty-eight rejections to get Heartbreak Hotel published.
In 1988, I transcribed my tapes from my family's retracing the CA/Donner Trail ten years before and wrote a non-fiction book. My editor wanted more personal revelations than I was willing to write, so that one went in the attic too.
In the mid 90's, I was in film school in Los Angeles and, after my family badgered me to attend the Donner Party Sesquicentennial in Donner Pass, I wrote a screenplay about the Donner Party. Now there are 87 characters in the Donner Party and, countless drafts and some years later, I realized that I didn't want to write about the Donner Party, but about Tamsen Donner, and not in a historical way, but to be true to her spirit. Easier said than done. I kept at it, and also wrote other screenplays, articles and reviews.
In 2002, my daughters' film production company, Five Sisters Productions, made my screenplay, Manna From Heaven, and I was heavily involved in the filming, editing, and distributing.
In 2006, feeling the pressure of age and time, I got out that nonfiction draft of our family's Donner Trail trip, horrified to see that my editor had given me notes in 1988! I was sick that so much time had passed and felt sorry for myself and quite despairing. Then I talked sternly to myself--you are the only one who can do something about this, G--and made a plan, working like crazy with a laser focus on rewriting that book. After 19 rave rejections by agents--"love it, but who's the niche?"--the part history/part memoir, Searching for Tamsen Donner, was published by U. of Nebraska Press in 2009. While that manuscript had been going through the rigorous screening process of a university press -- outside readers, committees, boards, a rewrite -- 
I wrote the novel, Impatient with Desire: The Lost Journal of Tamsen Donner, which Hyperion bought in 2010. So ultimately, my writing about Tamsen Donner went through as many metamorphoses as I did and, of course, they all informed the book. Probably a half dozen women wrote those two books, and I'm glad I'm alive to see them come to fruition.
The long and winding road. I never stopped running, but it turned out I wasn't on the fast track to success.
Of course a lot of life intervened. I can look back and tick off events, Well, that was the year we lived in Kuala Lumpur, that year was my husband's open heart surgery, those two years I went to film school, my mother, sister, and dog died that year, that year my five daughters, husband, and I traveled from Branson, MO to Juneau, AK with our movie, Manna from Heaven... I can add it all up, but it doesn't compute in the same way that you can know your age but not recognize that older person in the mirror.
I never intended nor wanted to be the poster child of persistence. Whenever I got rejections, which was all the time because I constantly sent things out, some cheery soul would invariably chirp, "Remember that woman who published her book at 82."
THAT WAS MY NIGHTMARE!
Great, I'd think. I'll hand out lemon drops at the home.
Luckily, when success finally came, I was still in my own home and able to hand out champagne instead. And I was old enough to know that that 82-year-old author was probably drinking champagne too.
Thanks so much, Gabrielle, for chatting about your success. You are the epitome of the classic children's book and female empowerment story, The Little Engine That Could. Impatient With Desire is a great book club pick -- plenty of conversation about marriage, family, Amercian history, parenthood, survival, adventure.
Praise
"Burton's writing tears out the reader's heart as it brings closure to her quest to understand a woman lost to time. Impatient With Desire finally rescues Tamsen Donner from ignominy, bringing her back to us a robust and very alive woman."—Erika Schikel, Los Angeles Times
"Gabrielle Burton brings us
a moving story of human courage and frailty. Tamsen Donner's tale will stay with you long after you've read the last page." —Nancy Horan, author of Loving Frank
Gabrielle Burton is the author of the award-winning novels, Impatient with Desire: The Lost Journal of Tamsen Donner, and Heartbreak Hotel. Her nonfiction books are Searching for Tamsen Donner and I'm Running Away From Home But I'm Not Allowed To Cross The Street. Burton's articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Family Circle, Ms. Magazine. She blogs for the Huffington Post and the Nervous Breakdown. She lives with her husband in Venice, CA.
Learn more about Gabrielle.
Author On the Bookcase: Kate Kerrigan, author of Ellis Island
Submitted by Barbara on Mon, 06/27/2011 - 10:23
Author On the Bookcase
Kate Kerrigan
Thrilled to welcome Kate Kerrigan, author of Ellis Island, to On the Bookcase. In Ellis Island, Ellie Hogan and her husband John were childhood sweethearts, destined to live together on his farm in Ireland. But when John, a soldier for the Irish Republican Army, becomes too injured to work, Ellie must take drastic measures in order for them to survive. Like many other young Irish women in the 1920s, she immigrates to New York City, to work as a maid for a wealthy socialite.
In New York, Ellie is introduced to a sophisticated lifestyle, tempted by this glittering new world of fine clothes and parties, money and mansions. Soon she is faced with the most difficult choice: to stay in a country full of hope and promise, or to return home to a life of poverty … and love.
Kate chats with us about her "Hermitage a place where I can be utterly alone and free to enjoy and explore the characters and adventures that inhabit the strange world of a writer’s mind."
My Writing Den
Today I am sitting in my writing den in my mother’s garden. Built for me as a child by my grandfather, what we call the “chalet” has been converted into my writer’s cottage. In the small back bedroom there is a bed, covered in my grandmother’s old woollen blankets, and a rickety table painted a bright blue to match the windowsill which it sits in front of. On the wide sill itself is a dried nest with a few pebbles and a clay robin sitting in it, and a load of scented candles that my mother leaves for me. At last, until three o’clock today when I have to collect my baby from the childminder, I can hide in my writer’s nest.
I have been trying to get in here and get going on my new novel for weeks now. Family life offers so many distractions--a mischievous toddler, a sick husband that I seem to have gone for months without a proper routine. Writing has happened at the kitchen table between shopping and feeding, in cafés, on trains, fit into short spurts while half-living my busy life. I know I can’t write a novel this way. I need room to breathe, and think, and ruminate. I call it my writing den the Hermitage, a place where I can be utterly alone and free to enjoy and explore the characters and adventures that inhabit the strange world of a writer’s mind.
The laburnum outside my window is in full bloom, the drooping yellow fronds dropping their pod-shaped petals to the ground. There is a blue tit pecking at the bird feeder that hangs from the window, its pert quiff raised as it hammers at the brown nuts, and a half dozen more are flitting in and out of the lush branches waiting for their turn. This tree that my mother planted five years ago is their world. She planted it in memory of her father, but the blue-tits don’t care why the tree was planted, or how it came to be here. Their life’s work is foraging and nesting, feeding their young. Contented opportunists, they scavenge my mother’s shop-bought nuts; I envy the simplicity and sureness of their lives.
My brother who died last year was a musician. Tom’s life was music--his art was transitory; unless it is perfectly recorded music exists only in the moment it is being played. I use words to try and make sense of things, to force shape and meaning onto my feelings. I want everything to make sense so that I can control it, so that I can make myself feel happy and more secure. Writing is my craft, but it’s also my therapy.
I miss my brother Tom and like many bereaved I try to find him now in nature. I listen for him in the whispering of wind through the trees, look up at the night sky and hope he is up there with the stars for company. When I sit very still I can feel him here with me. I’m not angry with him anymore for dying. I am glad he is at peace, and grateful for his sitting quietly with me in my writing den. I look out at my mother’s garden and am reminded how life goes on. The laburnum sheds, blossoms, and sheds again--growing stronger and more beautiful with each passing year.
My mind hurries along, worried about the number of words I have to write to meet my looming deadline. Worried about abandoning my baby to the kind childminder he grows fonder of with each passing day, worried that my other son doesn’t get enough of my attention, that my house is too big and expensive to run, that the car tax need renewing, as do the passports, the dog license. Then I remember that Tom is dead, and that, despite all the crazy, terrible, wonderful things that have happened since I sat here last summer, I am still writing. Perhaps life is just, after all, like nature, a process of renewal.
Thanks so much, Kate, for sharing your thoughts about writing, loss, and life. Ellis Island creates so many ideas for reading group discussion -- marriage, American and Irish history, immigration, and the "process of renewal."
Praise
"Kerrigan is excellent at evoking both rustic Ireland and 20th-century New York."—Publishers Weekly
"... A love story shot through with a perfect sense of the period, it is a rare combination of historical enlightenment and sheer enjoyment."—Peter Quinn, author of The Man Who Never Returned
Kate Kerrigan is the author of two previous novels in the UK. She lives in Ireland with her husband and their two sons.
Learn more about Kate.
Sisters of the Traveling Computers: Second Installment of Novel-in-Progress
Submitted by Barbara on Wed, 06/22/2011 - 14:31
Second Installment!
Sisters of the Traveling Computers
Novel-in-Progress
Eight great writers are going to produce a progressive novel -- like a progressive dinner! Each one will write a couple paragraphs in round robin style without discussing it with each other. This novel-in-progress will continue through the rest of the year. The scribes are Eleanor Brown (The Weird Sisters), Heidi Durrow (The Girl Who Fell From the Sky), Siobhan Fallon (You Know When The Men are Gone), Therese Fowler (Exposure), Tanya Egan Gibson (How to Buy a Love of Reading), Caroline Leavitt (Pictures of You), Sarah Pekkanen (Skipping a Beat), and Rebecca Rasmussen (The Bird Sisters.) All great books for reading groups!
First installment (May 15)
By midnight, he still wasn’t home. Or he wasn’t picking up the phone, which he knew would make her frantic with worry. She couldn’t leave the Martin’s now. Already, Mrs. Martin had told her that just cleaning up after the party wasn’t enough, that she wanted her to also redust (redust!) the figurines on the mantle because “You didn’t take enough care last time.” Should she tell Mrs. Martin how Mr. Martin groped her as she trying to arrange the baby chocolate éclairs on a plate? Should she tell her how Bobby, Mrs. Martin's son, called her a stupid bitch and kicked her out of his room so she wouldn’t catch him doing Jesus knows what?
She wasn’t supposed to use her phone when she was working, but she dialed again. Maybe he was with Bette, his terrifying girlfriend. Maybe he was walking again, clearing his head about what had happened.
Second Installment (June 22)
Maria wasn’t ready to become a grandmother at 42. And that was what she said first when--with his lips trembling—Mark told her that Bette was pregnant. She should have held him. He looked so scared. How could her teenage son become a father before he had a chance to become a man?
That was just five weeks ago, and now she wouldn’t have to be a young grandmother. She wouldn’t have to watch Mark struggle to take care of a family too young. Why couldn’t Mark see the miracle in this moment?
The phone went to voicemail again.
It was a thirty-minute drive home from the Martin’s. Let him be home by then, she thought. Just please let him be safe.
The first eight installments will be anynomous as the writers would like to guess who is writing that passage solely on sytle of writing. How fun!
Third installment will be in early July!
Author On the Bookcase: Kate Christensen, author of The Astral
Submitted by Barbara on Tue, 06/21/2011 - 13:42
Author On the Bookcase
Kate Christensen
I'm so excited to welcome Kate Christensen, author of The Astral. Kate's sixth novel relates the story of Harry Quirk, a male poet, and his failures. For decades he thought he created a happy home -- his wife, Luz, a nurse, and their two children: Karina, now a fervent freegan, and Hector, now in the clutches of a cultish Christian community. But Luz has found (and destroyed) some poems of Harry's that ignite her long-simmering suspicions of infidelity, and he's been summarily kicked out. Harry now has to reckon with the consequence of his literary, marital, financial, and parental failures (and perhaps others) and find his way forward—and back into Luz's good graces.
Kate shares her inspiration for The Astral and the book's central theme of "paradise lost."
The Astral was inspired by a building and a book.
The beautiful, enormous, and compelling Astral Apartments is a real rose-colored edifice in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the neighborhood I lived in for many years. Walking by it in the course of my daily life, I often wondered about its inhabitants, history, stories. Finally, I realized that I needed to write a novel about it.
From that real building came the character of Harry Quirk, a male poet in late middle age, cast out of his home in the Astral by his vengeful, irrationally jealous wife, like an old Adam banished by his Eve from a comfortable, domestic Eden. The entire tenor of the book is shaped around this image of paradise lost, and Adam alone, humbled and brought low and wanting nothing more than to get back to the Astral Apartments.
I still have not been inside; instead, I transformed it into an imagined version of its real self. As Harry walks toward the Astral at the beginning of Chapter Four, he sees
“…an enormous, six-story red-brick tenement castle-fortress that spanned a whole block of Franklin between India and Java. The place was compelling to look at from without, blighted from within. Great rock-face brownstone arches curved over the entryways; above them, arched windows were set into recessed arches that rose to the fifth floor of the façade, and above these were crenellated decorative rooftop embellishments. Three-sided bay windows were festooned ghetto-like with webbed metal gates, stubbled with air conditioners, made fancy-looking with decorative brickwork and lintels. The building’s huge corners were rounded and tower-like. No opportunity to decorate had been wasted; even the structural steel storefronts on the first floor, housing a café and a Laundromat, were gussied up by their own rivets. The place had been built by Charles Pratt in the late 1880s to house his Astral Oil kerosene factory workers; Astral Oil’s slogan had been, ‘The holy lamps of Tibet are primed with Astral Oil.’ To which they might have appended, ‘And the refineries of Astral Oil are primed with cheap labor.’ Some claimed that Mae West had been born in this building; I didn’t see why that couldn’t have been so.”
Harry Quirk was also inspired by the narrator of the classic 1944 English novel, The Horse's Mouth, by Joyce Cary. It’s set in the London neighborhood of Green Bank, on the Thames, and is narrated by down-on-his-luck painter Gulley Jimson, a philosophical old rogue. I discovered it in my twenties and have reread (and loved) it many times.
When the novel opens, Gulley is just out of prison and ready to get up to the same old tricks that landed him there in the first place. The opening passage is gorgeously sordid and transformative, the London neighborhood of Green Bank seen through a painter’s eyes: “I was walking by the Thames. Half-past morning on an autumn day. Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried fish shop. All bright below. low tide, dusty water and a crooked bar of straw, chicken-boxes, dirt and oil from mud to mud. Like a viper swimming in skim milk. The old serpent, symbol of nature and love…Thames mud turned into a bank of nine carat gold rough from the fire.”
The novel reminds us that a real artist is neither noble nor heroic, and the artistic life is a solitary, unsavory, scrappy ordeal that never lets up until you die. The best thing to do would seem to be to keep at it, through prison, poverty, and scandal, and when you die, go out laughing. This is a wildly brilliant portrait of the artist as an old scamp.
The Astral is my homage to the building and the novel that inspired it.
Thanks so much, Kate, for your thoughts on your novel, the inspiration, and artists and their "scrappy" life! The Astral has so many discussion points for reading groups -- marriage, art, identity, religion, parenthood, and "paradise lost."
Praise
".... Christensen takes a singular, genuine story and blows it up into a smart inquiry into the nature of love and the commitments we make, the promises we do and do not honor, and the people we become as we negotiate the treacherous parameters of marriage and friendship and parenthood."— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Kate Christensen is the author of five previous novels, including In the Drink, Jeremy Thrane, The Epicure's Lament, and Trouble. The Great Man won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award. She has written reviews and essays for numerous publications, most recently the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Tin House, and Elle.
Learn more about Kate and her books.
Author On the Bookcase: Ann Joslin Williams, author of Down From Cascom Mountain
Submitted by Barbara on Tue, 06/07/2011 - 11:11
Author On the Bookcase
Ann Joslin Williams
I'm excited to welcome Ann Joslin Williams, author of Down from Cascom Mountain, to On the Bookcase. Set in rugged New Hampshire in the aftermath of a fatal accident, Down From Cascom Mountain explores grief, desire and identity. Mary Hall overcomes her grief from the death of her husband. and find new friends and in the process, discovers herself.
Ann chats about the New Hampshire landscape and how "many of the things I experienced in these places eventually found their way into Down from Cascom Mountain, shaping events and details."
Ann, please tell us about the land you love and the novel it inspired.
I started writing Down from Cascom Mountain while I was living in San Francisco, far from New Hampshire, where I’d grown up. As much as I liked living in San Francisco, I often dreamed of being in the woods or climbing mountains in New England. Setting my novel in a landscape I loved and knew so well was one way of being there. Every morning I’d transport myself to that terrain following my characters as they hiked up Mount Cascom, got lost in the deep woods, or crossed the old fields and rushing brooks in Leah, New Hampshire.
Though Down from Cascom Mountain is set in this place, the geographical names—Cascom, Leah, and others—are fictionalized. They’re the names that my father, Thomas Williams, a National Book Award winner, invented to use in his own fiction.
Before I was born my parents had built a cabin in northern New Hampshire, overlooking a granite-domed mountain. This would become the retreat where my father could find time and quiet to write during summers. Later, when I’d started writing, often setting my stories in that landscape, my father suggested I use his fictional names. He passed them on to me, and I am honored to use them in my fiction now.
I spent my childhood summers at that cabin, and sometimes at the nearby lake where I attended girls’ camp. When I was a teenager, I worked as a crew member for the Appalachian Mountain Club at the lodge just down the road from my parents’ cabin, and later, I went farther north to work in the White Mountains’ Presidential Range. Many of the things I experienced in these places eventually found their way into Down from Cascom Mountain, shaping events and details.
As crew at the AMC, living in a small building next to the lodge, we cleared trails, cooked and served meals, washed dishes, cleaned rooms, mowed fields, dug drainage ditches—just about everything you can think of that needed to be done, including taking part in search and rescue. In our free time we loved the wilderness, hiking, discovering different trails, getting to the top of mountains. We’d dunk in the freezing, rock-carved pools in the brook or play king of the raft in the manmade pond near the lodge. Stretched out on our backs in the grass or on the raft in the middle of the pond, we’d name constellations, breathe in honeysuckle. Some evenings we sat around the campfire, playing music, singing along with the guitars and banjo, falling in and out of love. There were nights I snuck from the crew’s quarters, ran across the wet grass to the lodge and up the stairs to the crew boss’s room. I’d be back in my own bed by sunrise, though I’m sure everyone knew.
When I was nineteen, I went to work in Pinkham Notch at the base of Mount Washington—the tallest peak in the northeastern United States and a wilderness rich with ghost stories. While there, I participated in the search for a missing albino man—the spark for the legend of the ghost girl who appears in Down from Cascom Mountain.
There are other events from those days on crew that have crept into my fiction, though in different forms. After I left the AMC for college, I learned that a boy on crew had fallen to his death from a ledge while hiking overseas. Someone told me he lost his balance while stooping for his knapsack.
It was that small bit of information—that he lost his balance while reaching for his knapsack—that haunted me. It seemed so unfair—a kid who knew mountains, had climbed so many, probably very steep and treacherous ones, could fall while reaching for his backpack.
Years later, working on the novel, happily and imaginatively ensconced in my landscape of choice, I’m following Mary and her new husband up Cascom Mountain when, in an instant, he loses his balance at the edge of a cliff. I suppose I knew it was coming, but now I had to imagine what it would take, what it would look like, how it could happen. I had no idea what would take place afterward. That was to be discovered along with the other characters who began to reveal themselves, among them a young girl who works on the crew at Cascom Mountain lodge and a troubled boy who finds solace in the woods of Leah.
Setting my fiction in this terrain is rewarding for me not only because it can be rugged and sometimes dangerous, which is good for creating tension, but the natural world is also beautiful, full of mystery and magic. There’s mica sparkling in the granite, sunlight blinking through the leaves overhead, the thunder of a grouse taking flight, the smell of pine sap, a glimpse of a ghost or two between the trees. It’s a place I like to be literally and in my fiction.
By way of some miraculous circumstances, I have since moved back to New Hampshire, land that’s in my blood. Or is it really miraculous? Maybe inevitable is a better word. It’s as if I never left.
Thanks so much, Ann, for sharing your love of place. Reading Group Alert -- the New Hampshire landscape as a character in Ann's book is a great discussion point along with loss, love, identity.
Praise
"There seems to be no element of these people and this landscape to which Williams is a stranger. She sees straight to the heart of her characters, and it is a pleasure to witness them yearning and grieving and loving their way through these pages, one living human presence after another, the mountain and the forest rising up around them in all their mystery and specificity."—Kevin Brockmeier, author of Illumination and The Brief History of the Dead
Ann Joslin Williams grew up in New Hampshire. She earned her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She is the author of The Woman in the Woods, a collection of linked stories, which won the 2005 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. She was awarded an NEA grant for her work on Down from Cascom Mountain. Williams works as an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire.
Please learn more about Ann.
