Meeting and Making Mutual Friends

"Isn't it all about me?" Not always, girl!

New England is a long way from Michigan, and I’ve never been closer to the former than New Jersey (which doesn’t count at all, I’m sure). Neither has New England been part of my dream life, a place I’ve longed to see. My parents made the trip once to see the famed New England autumn and were appalled by the traffic and the difficulty of finding overnight accommodations, not having booked ahead. My father’s conclusion was: “Michigan is better.” And October 2024 in Michigan was certainly one of the loveliest ever. But this is all beside my point, which is that A Memory of Vermont as a book title would not necessarily draw me in, except for the subtitle, Our Life in the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Now that’s more like it! 

My outdoor winter world, as of a day ago --

Poet Walter Hard’s drugstore, following a tradition begun by his own father, featured a table of books, so when Walter and Margaret’s daughter wanted experience in the book world before graduating from college, her idea was to have her own summer bookshop in their little town of Manchester, Vermont. As a bookseller and reader, I am always interested to learn how someone else got into the business. What happened with Ruth’s seasonal shop was that after she graduated and went on to a career in publishing, her parents continued the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop. Her father even sold the family drugstore to have more time to devote to his own writing (a decision that shocked many in the town), and he and his wife, besides their other writings in poetry and prose, collaborated on a travel book called This Is Vermont. 

Well, there she is again!

As I read their story, which inevitably includes many other writers and mention of many books, what strikes me over and over is all the connections books make in a reading life – connections to other writers and other books. Walter Hard, for example, was asked to write The Connecticut for the “Rivers of America” series, and only just the other day I finished Hodding Carter’s The Lower Mississippi from the same series, having been led to Hodding Carter by Albert Murray, after having been led to Albert Murray by some other author’s book, though now I forget which book or author. And imagine my delight to learn that Ruth Hard, in stocking her original Johnny Appleseed Bookshop, carried all of Mary Webb’s books then in print, having fallen in love as I did with Precious Bane after reading about that book in yet another book, so that when I read of Ruth's love for Precious Bane, I feel I am meeting a friend with whom I share something important.

In their winter caps....

And then Hendrik Willem Van Loon himself pays a visit to the Johnny Appleseed Bookshop and inscribes his book on Rembrandt to Margaret (after she procures 10 copies of the remaindered volume for him and one for herself) with a wonderfully detailed drawing of Rembrandt in his studio! Van Loon! The first of his books I had a chance to obtain was his Geography, found at a yard sale in Leland one summer long ago, so long ago that the author’s name was then still unfamiliar to me, but the art on the pages captured my eye, and I was very happy years later to have in my own shop, for a while, a first edition of his The Story of Mankind, the very first Newbery winner (1922), written for children and so popular with grownups that a paperback edition had to be issued issued for adults.

The trees in their winter white....

My favorite Van Loon, though, has to be Lives. In Van Loon's Lives, the narrator and a relative decide to give a series of dinner parties with the most interesting guests they can think to invite. Following a brilliant decision that invitations do not have to be limited to the living, the first guest they invite is Erasmus. For each social evening planned, there is discussion of the menu and what aspects of “modern” life might most interest their guest or guests from the past. What intrigues the guests is not always what the hosts expected! But again the charm of the illustrations -- ! For instance, Descartes with his cape blowing in the wind! I have always wondered if this book might not have been the inspiration for the old television show, Steve Allen’s “Meeting of Minds.” 

 

Reading books and finding in them mention of other familiar books and authors, as well as encountering titles and names one is inspired to seek out, is only one aspect of the meeting of minds that takes place in reading, but I find it endlessly enchanting. 

 

In the more than three decades of my own bookshop, I too have met many interesting and delightful people from all walks of life, not only writers and other booksellers but people with backgrounds and callings very different from my own. Sometimes in the morning before we began our days in Northport, the Artist would muse, “I wonder who we’ll meet today.” For me, there has always been the additional question, What books will find their way to me today? Other minds, many connections, old friends and new.

Homeward bound

As you can see from the images in today’s post, winter has arrived at last Up North. I drove to Traverse City on Tuesday morning through the most beautiful scenes imaginable: sun-kissed, snow-laden branches glistening bright, blinding white against ominously dark masses of clouds. I’d been in my bookshop on Sunday and Monday, both supposedly days off according to my winter schedule, but there were still a lot of holiday visitors in town on Sunday, and I had deliveries to meet on Monday. Tuesday, then, was my first chance to get to Traverse City to pick up the new order of book bags, and Sunny and I made it to the dog park in Northport by noon, where we saw several of our mutual friends. Nice!

I thought I might be snowed in on Wednesday, but my plow guy had come, and the winter storm warning was from 7 p.m. on Wednesday to 7 p.m. on Thursday, so I went to Northport, picked up mail, bought some groceries, and opened my shop for four hours. One in-store customer and one phone order made my being there worthwhile. Now, will Thursday will be a snowed-in-at-home day? 

Back way into the village on Wednesday

Coming down the hill

Our beautiful village tree!

Postscript: All right, that is the bookish part of my life, but what of the rest? Here in the dark of Thursday morning, I am sitting up in bed with my dog leaning up companionably against my side, the wind “howling” (it doesn’t really howl; there must be a better word for the way it wraps itself insistently around our old farmhouse), and the furnace blower coming on at intervals, thinking about my life and the lives of others. 

As for people I meet in my bookshop (a big part of my life), the first batch of holiday greetings I rushed to the post office contained an egregious error. I had reported a visit by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as one by Michigan Senator Carl Levin! Impossible, since Levin died in 2021! All I can say in my (feeble) defense is that both are on my “good guys” list, and I have been, after all, since January 1967 a “Michigan girl.” Senator Durbin, please accept my apologies!

And yet -- there they are together, connected, in my bookshop!

Widow brain? Lack of focus? The perils of haste?

I talked to a dear friend last night whose husband died on Thanksgiving Day, a week ago today. One week into widowhood, she is in no hurry to clear away his piles of books and papers and says that being in their home, surrounded by the life they made together, is a consolation to her. I had a letter from another dear friend on Tuesday who thinks I am “brave.” I am not brave. I get up in the mornings and do what has to be done and arrange for little treats for Sunny and me, e.g., dog park on Tuesday, potato chips on Wednesday, and look around at the beautiful world and feel gratitude for my life. 

At the same time – Tuesday’s drive to Traverse City, for instance, one of the most beautiful mornings I have seen in my entire life: Every moment of that lovely morning, drinking in its loveliness, awed by the world’s beauty, I also felt the pain of the Artist’s absence. He was not seeing it. We were not sharing it. Joy and sorrow commingled, the bitter and the sweet. Life is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “a dappled thing,” no less lovely for its mixed and paradoxical nature. 

And yes, I am taking today, Thursday, as a snow day, staying home and off the roads.

Taking Time to Find Ourselves

A Bookish Kind of Social Life

 

Since last I wrote, my sisters were here from Saturday evening to Tuesday morning, which meant that on my two days off (bookstore closed Sunday-Monday) I got to play at being on vacation with them. Summer vacation! What a concept!

 

Sunday Bettie and Deborah and I drove almost as far north on the peninsula as it’s possible to go in order to join a group of women fiction writers at the home of one of them for an annual lunch gathering -- lunch in this case lasting until 4:30 p.m. -- and a happy gathering it was, with progress reports, mutual encouragement, tales from all aspects from the book world, and gales of laughter interrupting the conversation to punctuate moments of hilarity. I was happy and proud to be able to introduce my sisters to this aspect of my wonderful world of books: these fabulous writing women!

Monday the sibling trio went south, first to Lake Leelanau for a wine tasting on the porch of the Boathouse, overlooking the Lake Leelanau Narrows, a nice slow-down from my usual summer routine, and after wine and crackers and salmon spread  continuing south through Cedar and Maple City over to Good Harbor beach for a walk along the shore and to wade in Lake Michigan. We spotted this little frog hopping in the shade of an old log on the beach where we made our own temporary camp. My sisters enjoyed their Michigan getaway, brief though it was.

Tuesday evening the Artist and I caught up and reminisced with an old friend from Kalamazoo; Wednesday evening I mowed grass after supper; and on Thursday our reading circle (a.k.a. the intrepid Ulysses reading group) met to discuss Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, a novel everyone in the group loved so much that we pretty much stayed focused on it all evening without veering off onto more personal topics. We’ll take August off and reconvene in September to discuss The Waves, by Virginia Woolf, which you won’t be surprised to learn (if you read this blog regularly) was my recommendation.

 

Our hostess on Thursday evening shared with us, toward the end of our time together, that since the pandemic she has discovered her inner gardener for the first time. This came up in connection with what we had been discussing earlier about Janie gradually finding her voice and discovering herself. Someone speculated that Janie’s self-discovery might have been more difficult or perhaps even unattained had she had children, and that led (as I say, this was as we were wrapping up the evening) to our busy world and the importance of finding quiet time for ourselves. 

 

 

Quiet Time

 

My quiet time is often before sunrise, even long before the sky is light. Was it nothing more than serendipity that on Friday I picked up Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s classic little volume, A Gift From the Sea, to read with my pre-dawn morning coffee? It was certainly a delightful surprise to find the author quoting from The Waves in one of her chapters!

 

As calm and quiet and focused on Lindbergh’s words as I was Friday morning, though, I couldn’t help thinking of painful aspects of her life that preceded the 1955 publication of Gift From the Sea, the horrible nightmare kidnapping and murder of her first child and, following that, her famous husband’s antisemitism in the years leading up to World War II. Ann Lindbergh herself was also an isolationist and, at least early on, an admirer of Hitler. She says they were ''both very blind, especially in the beginning, to the worst evils of the Nazi system.” How horrible, to look back on having admired that! And she probably had more serious challenges in the everyday life of her marriage than her quiet meditations on shells suggest. There is a hint, when she quotes Rilke and then writes, 

 

This is a beautiful image, but who can achieve it in actual life? Where has one seen such a marriage except in a poet’s correspondence?  

 

Strange, then, to read the calm, reflective beach essay and feel the power of its quietness. Anne Morrow Lindbergh had five children after Charlie, and she lived to be 94 years old, so one wonders how many times she sought and found herself and if she found a succession of selves over the course of time.

 

Books Read Since Last Post: 

 

97. Hurston, Zora Neale. THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD (fiction)

98. Daly, Herman E. STEADY-STATE ECONOMICS (nonfiction)

99. Lindbergh, Anne Morrow. GIFT FROM THE SEA (nonfiction)

 

 

 

How is Peasy-Pooh?

 

He still has issues, and they are not trivial. He is affectionate and sweet with us but nervous and unpredictable with strangers, especially men. We have a new rule for him, which is that he cannot be under a table where we’re eating. He is good about limits, as long as we set them clearly. 

 

Also on the plus side of the ledger is the way he doesn’t fight over having me handle his feet. I clipped five toenails at one sitting the other day and also clipped the long fur between his paw pads, giving him a much more respectable, cared-for look.

And Saturday morning's monsoon rain did a good job of filling up his wading pool for evening fun!

 

Northport Was Quiet!

 

Yesterday and today we have company from Brooklyn, New York, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. That is, a husband and wife who divide their year between the two places. They are staying in Northport. This is a picture of Peasy before our company came. I'll need to take some photos of the company today, I see!

Following a long, leisurely cold luncheon at our place, we two couples separated for two or three hours and reconvened back at the Artist’s gallery, and after a long visit there over art and wine we walked down to the harbor. All the bar-restaurants in town were closed! Northport Pub and Grill, the Garage Bar and Grill, the Mitten Brewing Company! Paris, France, used to be like this in August, when the entire country went on vacation, and tourists from elsewhere found themselves with few resources to sustain life. Paris finally got its act together, and now the food purveyors stagger their vacations so that every neighborhood has something to offer, even during traditional vacation times. I think that would be a good idea for Northport.

Below is my "flight" from last Monday, a mix of whites, rose, and a red. I don't have photos of Northport's empty Sunday evening streets. It was just too weird!

Birds, Books, Bookstore Table, Dog with Issues

Birds in Books

 

I picked up and began reading a biography of Gene Stratton-Porter, one of my mother’s favorite writers, and wished my mother and I could discuss the author’s life together. After a while it occurred to me that I sent this book to my mother, who read it and returned it to me to re-sell as a used book (my frugal mother!), and still I had not read it before myself. How illuminating to learn that Gene (born ‘Geneva’) Stratton-Porter was not only a popular novelist but also admired for her nature books (I had her Book of Moths once) by writers as famous as Christopher Morley, who likened her work on birds (she also loved and photographed and wrote about moths) to that of the work of another of my naturalist heroes, Jean-Henri Fabre, on insects. High praise! 

 

In reading of her life and the agreement she made with Mark Doubleday to publish all of her work, exclusively, one nonfiction nature book for every novel (the fiction sold better, but Stratton-Porter was insistent on having her nonfiction published, as well, so the agreement was alternate years for each genre), I was surprised and delighted to learn that Mrs. Doubleday, Nellie, was none other than the writer Neltj Blanchan, author of Bird Neighbors; Birds Every Child Should Know; and The American Flower Garden. It is easy for me to imagine wonderful conversations between these two women naturalists and writers. Stratton-Porter was a devoted gardener all her life, especially devoted to wildflowers, from her Indiana childhood to her later years in California. 

 

My mother fulfilled a dream when she and my father visited the Limberlost (though I think my father may have waited in the car while my mother made the tour), and I shall have to make the trip myself one day (she was always a stickler for “I shall”), as a pilgrimage in honor of my mother. It looks like a beautiful place to visit, anyway.

As it happens, I don’t have any of either Stratton-Porter’s or Blanchan’s nature books in stock at the moment, but I do have The Burgess Bird Book for Children, by children’s author Thornton W. Burgess, whose Old Mother West Wind series and other stories featured talking animals were so popular with child readers of the early 20^th century. His Bird Book is told as stories, also, with dialogue between, for example, Peter Rabbit and Jenny Wren – “intended to be at once a story book and an authoritative hand book,” with illustrations by none other than famous naturalist-artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes.

Never a big Burgess fan myself, I appreciate the Fuertes illustrations more than the Burgess text, but I have had several Burgess fans among my bookstore customers over the years. Chacun à son gout, as my friend Hélène used to say. 

 

 

Quick Bookstore Story

 

And now here, to change the subject, is a little story that is very Leelanau: One of our neighbors came by the bookstore on Monday and said he and his wife were going to pick up sandwiches at the New Bohemian Café and that he’d like to buy me lunch, also. Or I could join them down the street, “but there’s no indoor seating.” No problem, I said. Come on back, and we’ll have lunch at my big table. I moved books to make space, and halfway through our lunch my neighbor slapped his hand on the top of the table and exclaimed, “This is my parents’ old dining room table! You must have found it at Samaritan’s Closet” – a thrift store in Lake Leelanau, as had indeed been the case. “So many birthday parties we had around this table,” he said, and I was for some reason happy to know about the table’s former life and to think of it as progressing from birthdays to books, all here in Leelanau County. 

 

Gotta love these little stories that connect us country people! And the Danish Modern furniture of the 1950s? Yes, I remember!

 

 

Another Quick Bookstore Story

 

This one you won’t believe. I can hardly believe it myself. My first customer of the morning on a rainy Thursday was a man from London, England. His wife is from Traverse City, so they visit every year, and he knows my shop well and goes right to his favorite sections. When he brought his choices to the counter, he said -- he really, really said this! -- “I have to tell you: This is my favorite bookstore.” 

 

I thanked him, so pleased -- thrilled! -- that I didn’t press for more specific information. (Favorite in Michigan? In the U.S.? All-time favorite ever?) Don’t investigate a compliment too closely, I say. Just smile graciously and thank and let the glow warm you for the rest of the day.

 

Recent Books Read (Since Last Post)

 

The first one below was a novel I re-read. Fabulous! Love the Socrates Fortlow character and wish there were more books featuring him.

 

Mosley, Walter. WALKIN’ THE DOG (fiction);

Covington, Kathryn Rankin. THE RIPPLE OF STONES (fiction);

Roth, Michael. TIME BETWEEN SUMMERS (fiction/nonfiction);

Green, John. THE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED (nonfiction);

Lively, Penelope. TIGER MOON (fiction)

 

 

Peasy Report: A Milestone, a Message, a Sigh

 

The new wading pool wasn’t a milestone, but Peasy loves it. He loved splashing in his dog-friend Molly’s wading pool (bigger than the one he has, the only one I've found so far) after a long run-and-play session in the high desert, so when the weather warmed up (and it will again, I’m sure, despite the current cool spell) I figured he would love a wading pool of his own here in Michigan.

 

The milestone, however, is something different, and what made this particular red-letter event even more special was that it was practically a non-event. Did Peasy even notice? 

 

A little background first --.

 

Peasy, like Sarah, is not nuts about being groomed. To brush him at all, I resort to a soft curry comb made for horses. It won’t do much when he starts shedding and needs his undercoat combed out, but he tolerates the brush and is becoming accustomed to having it used on him, which is more than half the battle.

 

Toenails, though. That’s another story. (Do you know any dog that likes toenails clipped?) My old Nikki was so submissive that she didn’t put up a fuss, but Sarah was a real rebel when it came to her feet, and that was Sarah, the practically perfect dog, who never had anything bad happen to her in her whole life! So what to do with a dog-boy who has had as many rough challenges already as Peasy in his young life? 

 

Well, I am following the wisdom of Patricia McConnell on “reactive dogs” and that of Jean Donaldson, author of The Culture Clash. Rather than resort to a muzzle and a wrestling match (the alternative being outright sedation), I have been slowly and patiently desensitizing Mr. Pea to the clippers. I let him sniff them, I stroke his feet with them, I “clip” the air near his legs, and we’ve been doing that for a couple of weeks. Finally on Thursday morning I decided it was time to try following up the familiar routine with clipping a single nail. 

 

He hardly seemed to notice! Good dog!!! I was so excited! 

 

Working to desensitize a dog to reduce fear in situations the dog has long found frightening is a long, slow process. It takes a lot of patience. It’s time-intensive. But ask yourself: how long do you think you will be living with your dog?  Why not take the time to make both your lives easier and more pleasant? I could say this message comes from Peasy, and if he understood about telling you what makes dogs happy, and if he had even noticed the milestone in his life, I know he would have sent this message.

 

Lest I mislead with partial information, however, I must admit that the dog with issues still has them. The other evening when I retrieved, from under a porch chair, a sock he had stolen and chewed up, he showed me his very scary, snarly, threatening-to-bite face. You wouldn’t want to see it, believe me. I opened the porch door and sent him outside to stay out by himself for ten minutes. We didn’t fight about it-- he just had a time-out. He was then his regular sweet self the rest of the evening. On the other hand, as I say, he had no meltdown over the nail clipper, so I think we are continuing to make progress. I hope so. It isn't always easy-peasy. This dog has issues -- but I believe he has a lot of potential.

 

Who Is Regional, and Who Is American?

She swung her horse about and cantered him to where Johnny waited. When she came up, he grinned at her. “What do you think?” 

“I think,” she said, “you would either die miserably in this place or learn to love it very much.” 

His face sobered and he searched her eyes. Then he smiled. “You won’t die.” 

She smiled back at him. “No, I won’t die.”

The lines above come near the end of Voyage to Santa Fe, by Janice Holt Giles, published in 1962. How have I missed this wonderful American novelist for so long, only now stumbling on her (serendipity again!) and looking forward eagerly to reading much more of her work? The headstone on her grave reads “Kentucky Writer,” although three of her novels have the great American West as their setting, and others are set in her native Arkansas. 

It’s odd, I think, that her Western novels did not break Giles out of the “regional” category. They did it for Jim Harrison. As long as his stories had Michigan for their setting, his work was considered regional, but when Jim and his novels moved out to Montana he became “American.” Is Montana more American than Michigan? The West more American than the Midwest? But even if the West is so all-American, so much more American than the Midwest (which I deny accept momentarily for the sake of argument), why did Voyage to Santa Fe, the story of an epic wagon train traveling from Three Forks in the Arkansas Territory to Santa Fe, a city in Mexico only just freed from Spanish dominion, not establish an already popular novelist as an American writer?

(Is it more difficult for a woman than a man to break out of the regional category? Knowing male writers who have chafed being geographically segregated, I’m not sure. The question was raised by one of my bookstore customers, who cited the case of Willa Cather, but we agreed that in recent decades that writer’s work has become much more highly regarded and widely known.) 

New York, Boston, Baltimore … Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle … New Orleans, Savannah — among American cities, these have their shining places in national literature, while the Midwest and Great Plains seem, with the exception of Chicago, to present themselves to literary criticism as one large, blank expanse, with here and there a small regional twinkle. Ah, yes, Detroit! St. Louis! Kansas City! But the small towns, the woods and farms and lakes and prairies? Where are they? Are they not as much America as places fronting Atlantic, Pacific, or Gulf of Mexico?

Nor is the question of literary regionalism limited to fiction. Essayists — whether working in large themes or small; with nature, human nature, or the inevitable combination  of the two — are also hampered not by a glass ceiling but by glass walls that keep them within their own geographical regions. Eastern, Western, and Southern writers seem to break through. No one would think Wendell Berry’s work applicable only to Kentucky or that of Edward Abbey only to Utah. Kathleen Norris has brought Dakota to national awareness, and Terry Tempest Williams has done the same for the Great Salt Lake. But of all the Great Lakes writers, fiction and nonfiction, writing here today in America’s heartland, how many names are recognized on the East and West coasts? 

It is baffling (and frustrating) to me. Does not the best writing take us out of ourselves and usher us into a different world, and to do this must it not provide all manner of sensual detail — sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and textures? In other words, is not the specific place where a story is set as important as the characters living there? After all, we are shaped as much by the places we inhabit as by our times.

What do you think?

If You Seek…

This is one of the many times of year when Michigan’s state motto keeps coming to mind: If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you. Hills and woods and water and sky — and everywhere, right now, in the sun and in the rain, cherry orchards in bloom. Although I know cherry blossoms were not that different when I photographed them last year (and will be equally beautiful next year), I can’t help grabbing for my camera again and again. Since they speak for themselves, however, I’ll let them do just that for the remainder of today’s post.

Another of last year’s themes that will repeat in 2019 is my Thursday Evening Author series (TEA). I’ll be welcoming back three guests from former years and introducing to my TEA audience two seasoned writers new to Northport, with one change: this year series guests will appear only every other week, for a total of five rather than last year’s eleven. 

We will begin with Kalamazoo poet Jennifer Clark on June 27. Jennifer is coming back with a new book of poetry, A Beginner’s Guide to Heaven. Her previous visit was lively and full of surprises, and I expect no less this year. We look forward to having her with us to kick off our 2019 season — so glad to have a returning poet as our opening headliner!

Leelanau’s own Kathleen Stocking is no stranger to Dog Ears Books, and you certainly won’t want to miss her event in Northport on July 11. Kathleen is a Leelanau treasure, and From the Place of the Gathering Light: Leelanau Pieces is destined to join Letters From the Leelanau as a Michigan classic. Need I say more?

Our third returnee is Dorene O’Brien from Detroit. Dorene’s new collection of short stories, What It Might Feel Like to Hope, has been gathering praise right and left, so we are delighted that she will be with us to do a reading and signing on July 25 on her annual Leelanau visit. Also, as a writer who also teaches writing, Dorene will no doubt have some words of wisdom in the Q&A following her reading.

Another Detroit writer, Michael Zadoorian, comes to us for the first time on August 8, with his new novel, Beautiful Music. Did you read The Leisure Seeker? (Maybe see the movie?) Michael’s reputation has been building for a while now, so it will be exciting to welcome him in Northport. 

Finally, on August 22, we will host Charles R. Eisendrath, a “reporter’s reporter” (according to Tom Brokaw), formerly on the staff of Time magazine and now making his home in northern Michigan. Charles comes to us with a beautiful nonfiction book, Downstream From Here: A Big Life in a Small Place, addressing experiences from fly fishing and making maple syrup to witnessing assassination. Really!

I’m very pleased with and proud of our TEA lineup for 2019 and proud to bring authors and new works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to my bookstore audience.  These events are an opportunity for those of us in a small town on the end of a quiet peninsula to hear seasoned, published writers from all over the state read their own work aloud to us in a live, intimate setting. Having guest authors sign the books you purchase adds another dimension to memories of each occasion, as does the general give-and-take of questions, answers, and conversation.

So please put all five dates on your summer calendar now! And if you do not usually read fiction or nonfiction or poetry, make this the season you will step outside your reading comfort zone and try something new, because all of our TEA guests have already given richly of themselves in their books and now give of themselves additionally with these guest appearances in Northport. We are so fortunate! 

Book Review: TERRARIUM: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES

Fresh ARC in hand from a writer whose work I have long admired -- always exciting! 

Valerie Trueblood’s new collection, to be released on August 7 of this year, will be a joy to those encountering her work for the first time, as well as to her long-time admirers. To call the book a “joy,” however, is in no way to suggest escapist fiction. Far from it. New stories in the Terrarium section, like those from earlier collections and from her novel, Seven Loves, run the gamut in tone from quixotic to grim, but all are realistic and compelling. This writer’s characters are real people — dreaming, trying, stumbling, falling, and going on as long as they can.

In any collection, it’s difficult not to have favorites, and the story that hit me hardest in this new group was “Crisco.” In only four pages, the author weaves different strands together — the global world of spies and other news, a local high school basketball star, a young reporter, a beautiful killer horse, a baby given up for adoption, losses inflicted by a distant war —  to form a complete world. 

“She did talk about her work,” Madeline told me when I asked. “Who, what, when, where why.” Was that all? “Well, she said you have to do that in her job. Know what the story is. She said that to John when he was shy.” But how, that was my question, how do you know what the story is? And if you do, how do you pull it, like a Slinky in the toy bin, out of the mass of everything else?

The quote above comes from the middle of the story (nearly its geographical center), and the question recurs in the final paragraph, where the narrator suggests possible answers to “What is the story?” That list of possibilities was nearly enough to break this reader’s heart! As always with Trueblood’s writing, however, all remains simplicity, even the all-too-human confusion brought to the question — and this is a paradox, friends, not a contradiction. Again, realistic.

As a terrarium is a small, enclosed world, a miniature portion of earth, just so do many of the Terrarium stories show the author experimenting with more condensed pieces than appeared in her earlier short story collections, Search Party; Marry or Burn, and Criminals: Love Stories. One of the stories in the volume Criminals, “Sleepover,” almost feels like novella, whereas “Harvest,” in the new book, is a single paragraph, and neither, of course, is wrong. A story (like a poem) should be as long as it needs to be and no longer. It is Trueblood’s gift to have such an unerring feel for what is necessary and to pare away the rest.

I’ve been thinking once again in general about short stories, a recurrent subject of my bookseller musings, and it strikes me that the readers who most appreciate the form are other writers. Whether their own work is fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, long or short forms, writers are more aware than any other readers of the level of craft that short fiction (like poetry) demands. A novel may wander or digress, without injury, but the writer of short stories must deny herself that self-indulgent luxury. In a short story, every word has to count.

And here’s something else I noticed in the Terrarium stories. While not every question is answered and many puzzles are left unresolved, at any particular story’s last line I never had the feeling of having been pushed out of a speeding car and left on the side of the highway. I felt satisfied. Not necessarily in every case optimistic or relieved but always, in a literary sense, satisfied. 

Shall I add that dogs figure into many of the stories? Is that an extraneous, irrelevant detail? I have nothing like Valerie’s gift for writing, but her stories are gifts to all readers.