Ginger Strand @ MacDowell, Redux

Ginger Strand, the author of Flight, sent me a “postcard” from the MacDowell Colony last week. That guest essay is now the second-highest ranking item when you Google her name, right behind her own home page! I’m delighted to get another note from her about what’s been going on since then…

If a tree falls at MacDowell and everyone sees it, does it mean anything? That is what we had to ask ourselves last night.

Observed with due eloquence at dinner–“Oh my god, a tree just fell down!”–the downed tree was quickly surrounded by agog artists. A huge and stately white pine, the tree had divided itself at a rather low crotch, and what looked like one half of it had snapped off and crashed to the ground. We gaped. Trees are really very big when you suddenly see them horizontal.

I had been writing about deforestation for two weeks, and couldn’t help but feel a flicker of fear–could I be personally responsible? Could my 27 pages on the decimation of white pines and silver firs have summoned a malignant spirit of tree-felling that was going to work on the Peterborough woods? Other explanations were floated: the tree was being choked by vines; lightning had struck it; illness had rotted it for years.

We couldn’t help but speculate about what would have happened if the tree had fallen forty-eight hours earlier, on Medal Day, when a donor family had been spotted happily lunching in the sylvan poison-ivy grove beneath that very tree, oblivious to the fell doom poised just above them.

Earlier this summer, in Michigan, I came upon a hawk taking flight with a rabbit in its claws. Knowing the ancients would not fail to interpret such an obvious prognostication, I had muddled for weeks about this sign’s meaning. Would my plane home fail to take flight for lack of wind? Should I inform my pilot? What did the bunny stand for, and what the hawk? Now, added to the hawk-bunny conundrum, there was the tree conundrum.

And then something funny happened. Slowly we drifted away from the tree. We finished dessert. We had postprandial cigarettes. We went to the library and watched a film made by one of our number. We laughed. We came back to Colony Hall and discussed sexual politics. We played a little pool. Eventually we drifted back to our studios or bedrooms to sleep, or read, or work.

The tree, we all seemed to realize, was a sign, but it wasn’t a prognostication. It was more like a reminder of something we already knew, something built into the spirit of MacDowell. Expect the unexpected. Admire the world. It doesn’t always work the way you think it will. Pay attention and you will see that sometimes water flows up, the sky falls, trees lie down at your feet. Sometimes you speak in the forest, and someone else hears you.

18 August 2005 | guest authors |

Don’t Forget the Scorn Unleashed on John Irving!

AP book reporter Hillel Italie considers “the lack of great fiction” this year, with soundbites from industry insiders like HarperCollins’ Jonathan Burnham:

“Looking across the landscape, there were supposed to be some literary novels that blew everybody away. But for various reasons they didn’t quite perform.”

Can we really assume a lack of aesthetic success from a lack of financial success? Or when Burnham says “they didn’t quite perform,” does he mean something closer to what Italie gets at by observing that even “anticipated novels such as Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close received mixed reviews at best and the fall doesn’t look a lot better”?

“I think a lot of editors will tell you that 2004 and 2005 haven’t been very good for fiction acquisitions. There weren’t a lot of huge auctions or books that publishers got really excited about,” says Geoff Shandler, editor in chief of Little, Brown and Co. “I’m afraid I must agree with that,” says HarperCollins’ Burnham, who adds that the number of “standout literary debuts have been disappointing.” Notes [John] Sterling [of Henry Holt]: “There were no dazzling debuts.”

From this,we can infer that Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep wasn’t literary and all that hoopla didn’t translate into a “dazzling debut.” Now, I’m not buying that premise any more than you are–and before you naysayers point out that Sittenfeld got her share of pans, let’s remember that no book gets universal acclaim; even critical darlings like The Plot Against America got dissed in certain circles. So this idea that books that get bad reviews “didn’t quite perform” strikes me as somewhat odd.

And as far as the fall’s concerned, I don’t know about you, but I’ve got my eye on Paul Auster and Rick Moody, just for starters.

17 August 2005 | uncategorized |