The newsreel that the visiting crew had filmed on Independence Day in Cascade played in theaters the week of July 29, and America sighed. Because what small town did not have a Criterion Theater? A Brilliant Lunch Bar? A tiny cemetery with rain-worn tombstones toppling over behind a steepled church? And who could conceive of the destruction of such permanence?
–From Cascade
The last time Dez had visited New York was in the fall of 1928, and as busy as the city was then, it seemed to have grown more hectic. A vast bridge, made completely of steel, now spanned the Hudson, allowing a flood of cars to pour onto the island each morning. Taxis joined the cars in clogging the streets, and their drivers all seemed to be in a contest to see who could blow his horn the longest. Dance palaces, billiard halls, and movie palaces all blazed with electric light. Street peddlers sold anything they could get their hands on: apples, pencils, neckties, and every block had its shoeshine boys, even though many were grandfatherly age, old men sitting patiently on their wooden boxes, shine kits at their feet. Everywhere was stark contrast: bread lines so long they snaked around corners at the same time that women wearing smart hats stepped out of taxis to enter the dozens of restaurants that seemed to be doing a thriving business despite the hard times.
Dez walked down to the new Empire State Building, tallest in the world, as soon as she had settled in, just to gawk at it, at its modern, stainless-steel entrance canopies, at its sleek, tapered sides that led up to an observatory that maybe she would visit with Jacob. She remembered reading about its official opening a few years back, how President Hoover was able to light up the entire 1250 floors by pressing a single button in Washington, DC. What an extravagance it seemed, to build such a thing in the middle of economic depression. Dizzying, to peer up at its needle-top. Much of it still stood empty, said a man who paused to join her in admiring it. ‘Tenants are few and far between, they say. People are calling it the Empty State Building, but you have to admire its permanence, don’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s not going anywhere, is it?’
–From Cascade
One day, I took a ride out to the Quabbin Reservoir and got stuck behind an antique maroon Ford, which seemed cool and odd. A maroon Ford makes an appearance in the pages of CASCADE. When I think of old cars, I don’t automatically think maroon, but there it was, and I was behind it for quite a few miles. (I’d made the car maroon in the book because I am always trying to make my details vivid, concrete. But really, when I think of old cars, I think black.)
Much later, after I’d finished writing the book, and my wonderful agent sold it, Penguin’s art department was working on designing the cover. They originally thought it would be good to use old postcards in the design. They had acquired some old cards randomly, off of eBay, etc. When I saw this one, with the maroon car, I thought, “Wow, cool coincidence.” But what they’d sent me wasn’t the whole postcard—it was just the photo. The “Greetings from” part cropped out.
A month or so later, when we were deciding on art for the inside pages, I asked about that maroon car photo. It represented how I imagined Cascade. At that point, Penguin sent the whole card, and that was when I saw that the photo was from Belchertown, MA.
The Quabbin Reservoir’s legal address is Belchertown, MA.
There’s not much of a point to all this, except to shiver a bit.
I’m in Washington doing some research on my new book and it was a bit uncanny to walk into the National Gallery of Art and see a big Pre-Raphaelite show going on. I wrote about some of these paintings in Cascade, and had tried to see them in London the last two times I was there, but the Tate didn’t have them on display. Here they were, without my even knowing! This cover on the book of postcards the NGA is selling is the Dante Rossetti painting that Dez and Jacob talk about:
“You know,” Dez said, “the only Rossetti painting I can clearly see in my mind’s eye at the moment is one of a redhead combing her hair, and she was frightening-looking, as I recall.”
“Lady Lilith. His wife didn’t model for that. His mistress did. That’s another whole story.”
Earlier, Jacob remarked that he had seen Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix (below) in London, and that his memory of it reminded him of Dez.
“It’s a stunning painting, in person,” he said. “It glows. Beatrice glows. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”
–From Cascade
A few weeks ago, the wonderful shereads.org site asked me to write about Cascade, but to write about something “true.” I wrote down a story that readers at my events always love to hear:
Way back when Cascade was a short story idea—an idea about artists in New York in the 1930s—the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum put me in touch with a few people who had painted for Roosevelt’s “New Deal” art projects during the Depression. I was interested in the fact that the government, for the first time, had said, 1, that putting artists to work was just as important as putting bridge builders to work, and 2, that art was for everyone.
One of the artists, James Lechay, lived down on Cape Cod. I arranged to interview him one summer Saturday, and although I was looking forward to it, I dreaded the five-hour round-trip trek. My plan was to zip down as fast as I could, interview him, then zip home in time for my evening plans.
But when I arrived in Wellfleet, the loveliest man was eagerly awaiting my arrival. Indeed, he had planned his whole day around it.
James Lechay was 91, and he would live only another three years, but nothing about him seemed particularly old. Even his house was cool and edgy—gunmetal gray, with modern lines and a flat roof, built to his specifications years earlier. He himself was tall, elegant, with soft white hair that fell to his shoulders. Inside, the house was serene and spare. A wall of glass overlooked pine thickets and the distant sea; his semi-abstract paintings lined other walls.
I saw that he’d set the table. He’d made us lunch. He had wine.
No, I didn’t zip anywhere that day. Instead, I spent a long and precious afternoon talking about New York in the thirties, and painting, and about the drive to create that never gets quite satisfied and which never goes away. In fact, I later read that he painted right up until a few days before his death.
My interview with him and two other artists turned into an article for an arts magazine, not a short story. But years later, I incorporated much of that research into Cascade. Some of James Lechay’s spirit inspired the character of Dez, and he completely inspired the novel’s last line.
The nicest true thing? Last year, when Cascade was in production, my husband and daughter gave me one of his paintings, the above “Barrels on the Beach,” for Christmas.
People ask me where I got the names for my characters in Cascade. Some are unusual: Desdemona, Addis, Asa, Popcorn.
Desdemona came from Shakespeare.
Asa? I liked the sound of the old-fashioned name, but I particularly liked the story of a long-ago resident of one of the four towns flooded to create the reservoir in Massachusetts that I use as the model for my Cascade.
Asa Snow lived in Dana, Massachusetts in the 1840s. His nickname was “Popcorn” because he was a vegetarian who survived on popcorn and milk. He, like me, had a terrible fear of being buried alive, so he had a metal casket built for himself, with a glass window at the head. He instructed the undertaker to check on him for a week after his death, to make sure that he was well and truly departed. But stories followed Asa long after his death: he walked the earth every November 15. His body, seen through the glass, did not decompose.
Then there’s Jacob Solomon. That name just came to me one day when I was working on a short story–a story that would eventually turn into Cascade–about artists in New York City in the 1930s. I had decided that Jacob would end up in a tenement on the Lower East Side, and I was looking forward to seeing an exhibit of 1930s photographs at the New York Public Library.
Okay, the VERY FIRST photograph in the show just happened to be the “tenement belonging to Jacob Solomon.” Another ghost?
Maybe. The attached is Jacob Solomon’s tenement on Avenue D, photo by the great Dorothea Lange, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
And for more stories about Asa “Popcorn” Snow, check out the small-press books of J.R. Greene, and this page: Quabbin page.
We die, we know we must die, she thought, and still we treat death as surprise, as tragedy, as punishment. How many painters had seized on Shakespeare’s image of Ophelia floating among the flowers? How many maritime paintings had captured, for one transfixed moment, sailors going down at sea? People were fascinated by drowning—and here she herself had proof of that, with people from across the country responding to the mesmerizing prospect of a town drowned. A “great deluge” was part of the myth and legend of almost every culture on earth.
–From Cascade
“Ophelia” by John Everett Millais, on view at the Tate Gallery, London
The morning Abby was due to stop by on her way to her new life in New York City, Dez woke with a thought running through her head: one of many, one of many. How did one stand out among many? Because one did, undoubtedly. But how to convey the idea with paint? The viewer’s eye would need to be drawn to that blade, forced to reflect on how alike it was to all the others, while still uniquely itself. —From Cascade
Yesterday, Randy Susan Meyers published an essay about the difficulty of making one book stand out among the many: Beyond the Margins: “Writers Wearing Costumes, Baking Cookies, & Other Mad Men Tricks.” It makes for amusing, sobering, and true reading. I urge anyone interested in what publishing a book is really like to read it.
I read a lot of books. I love a lot of books. I love receiving books as gifts. And this year, the experience of publishing my own book has provided me with an enormous and unexpected gift: I’ve connected with so many wonderful, fascinating, funny, supportive, & overwhelmingly generous fellow writers. All of the books on the list below are worthy, good reads, and will appeal to a broad swath of people. Do your friends and family really need that desk organizer, that vanilla candle, that cambray shirt? No, of course not. But what home and heart isn’t warmed by the presence of a book?
Let me say this about what’s it been like to publish a labor of love: There’s nothing like it. All through my twenties and early thirties, I worked at soul-squelching corporate writing jobs. During this time, I saw my father die at 59. Then a cerebral aneurysm took my husband’s brother with a single morning headache as warning. Willie was 29 and smitten with his one-year old-daughter, his lovely, pregnant wife, and the son he would never meet. Finally, we saw our only child diagnosed, on her second birthday, with cystic fibrosis, a devastating genetic lung disease. We listened as a team of pulmonologists at Boston’s Children’s Hospital told us they honestly could not provide us with a prognosis. “She might live to see 30,” they said, “or she could be gone by Christmas.” (She’s been a cat with 9 lives–yes, she is still with us.)
What all that taught me, which I was so grateful to learn at that early age, was that life matters, art matters, doing/being matters. I will never write a bad review of any book, or dismiss a painting or a song or a play, because I am just so grateful for the fact that there are people out there who want to create art.
Thanks to everyone who advised, tweeted, mentioned, applauded, purchased, reviewed, and read my book as I jumped into novel publishing with CASCADE. (If I somehow missed you, please forgive me.)
THE TABLE OF CONTENTS
When I was a kid, I liked nothing better than sitting down with a new book of stories.
I would skim the Table of Contents and decide which title appealed most.
I urge you to do the same–who knows what surprise you might find?
Fobbitt, by David Abrams
Veronica’s Nap, by Sharon Bially
The Unfinished Life of Elizabeth B, by Nichole Bernier
Crash, by Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
The River Witch, by Kimberly Brock
The Exceptionals, by Erin Cashman
Echolocation, by Myfanwy Collins
The Foremost Good Fortune, by Susan Conley
The Quilt Walk, by Sandra Dallas
Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, by Matthew Dicks
The Lake of Dreams, Kim Edwards
The Age of Desire, by Jennie Fields
The Liar’s Diary, by Patry Francis
City of Women, by David Gillham
The Singles, by Meredith Goldstein
Seascape, by Lynne Griffin
Come to the Edge, by Christina Haag
Alice Bliss, by Laura Harrington
Rex and the City, by Lee Harrington
The Whipping Club, by Deborah Henry
Visions of a Wayne Childhood, by DeWitt Henry
Blackberry Winter, by Sarah Jio
Night Swim, by Jessica Keener
The Gift of an Ordinary Day, by Katrina Kenison
Father of the Rain, by Lily King
Friendkeeping, by Julie Klam
The Collective, by Don Lee
Pictures of You, by Caroline Leavitt
Jesse, by Marianne Leone
The Flight of Gemma Hardy, by Margot Livesey
The Baker’s Daughter, by Sarah McCoy
The Murderer’s Daughters, by Randy Susan Meyers
A Good Hard Look, by Ann Napolitano
Deadbeat, by Jay Baron Nicorvo
Cascade, by Maryanne O’Hara
Wouldn’t You Like to Know, by Pamela Painter
Best American Short Stories, edited by Heidi Pitlor
Hemingway’s Girl, by Erika Robuck
Double Time, by Jane Roper
Oleanna, by Julie Rose
The Book of Lost Fragrances, by MJ Rose
The Salt God’s Daughter, by Ilie Ruby
The Art Forger, by BA Shapiro
The Pretty Girl, by Debra Spark
The Light Between Oceans, by M.L. Stedman
The Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles
Game of Secrets, by Dawn Tripp
Clara and Mr. Tiffany, by Susan Vreeland
Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words, by Kate Whouley
The Probability of Miracles, by Wendy Wunder