Outside, the day was grim and overcast, a few stray snowflakes starting to drift down from the sky. It was the kind of day that would turn to night without fanfare, with a gradual extinguishing of light, the kind of day that pierced you with melancholy and reminded you it was only December, that a whole winter had still to be gotten through.
–From Cascade
So much goes into a book, yet never finds its way into the book. As Hemingway said, “If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.”
From Dez’s diary, a ‘darling’ I had to cut from the final version of Cascade:
Each day I get no farther than scratched-out sketches that accumulate in the trash—balled-up sheets of valuable paper that trigger so many waves of self-doubt.
How can I be any good if I can’t even capture my own father? If my mind’s eye is already losing the precision of his features—the sharp length of his nose, the weak blue of his eyes, how then, to grasp the intangibles? The heavy grace of his stage presence? The disquieting boom of his voice? The chills he could deliver to an audience?
Sometimes I am afraid that inspiration has shrugged at me and will never return. And words—inky marks!—look paltry. They’re no better than paint. Even the date, so meager: January 24, 1934. Today. Now. Even as I complete the w, now becomes then.
Time is so slippery, it doesn’t even bother to laugh at the human desire to grasp it—it simply does nothing but pass.
Intellectually, Dez had understood that in order to turn the valley into a bowl of water, every structure, every tree would have to be leveled, but intellect had not prepared her imagination.
–From CASCADE
This photo, courtesy of the Quabbin Visitor’s Center, shows the town of Enfield as it was being razed to make way for the flooding.
The storm started dramatically, with a darkening of the kitchen and thunder that rattled the shutters. Rain spattered the windows as Dez put away the sketches that she and Abby had drawn, as she washed their plates and cups, scrubbing where Abby’s lipstick had left a stubborn mark. She had expected Abby’s visit to be cheerful, nostalgic, a little gossipy. She had even expected a bit of envy—she was, after all, married and living in a fine house with a studio of her own. Instead, Abby had turned her unimpressed eye on Asa; she had made sly remarks about Jacob.
–From CASCADE
The empty hours stretched ahead of her…. A walk would be good. A walk to the falls, which felt wonderful once she was out there on the road, the breeze rippling her blouse, the pavement solid under her feet. She should walk every day. She had loved walking in Paris—along the river and up over the Pont Neuf to wander through the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis.
Sometimes you needed to look up from your work, from yourself, blink your eyes—there was a sky up there, a vast expanse of air to breathe.
–From CASCADE
“You know,” he said, “you sometimes remind me of a painting by Dante Rossetti. You just did, the way you looked up and closed your eyes. The light made a kind of halo around your hair.”
“Really?” Hadn’t the models for all the Pre-Raphaelite paintings been pretty much the same—ethereal, long-haired? Dez’s hair contained the requisite red tones but it was unruly, shoulder-length now. And her features were modern-looking: strong nose and chin, clear eyes. Far from ethereal. In fact, she often felt like the subject of an early Picasso, the plate of which sat in a book on her studio shelf: a downtrodden woman slumped over an ironing board.
–From CASCADE
The characters are talking about Woman Ironing, by Pablo Picasso (1904), painted near the end of his “Blue Period.” You can see it at the Guggenheim in New York.
“It’s a stunning painting, in person,” Jacob said. “It glows. Beatrice glows. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”
Was he flirting or simply making a statement? Something was happening and she wasn’t sure it was real.
–From CASCADE
The characters are talking about Beata Beatrix, by Dante Rossetti (1870), which Jacob has seen in London. The TATE owns it still.
When I found out that the Boston Globe had assigned the brilliant Caroline Leavitt to write the review for Cascade, I was thrilled—and relieved. You hope that the kind of person who is asked to judge your book will also be the kind of person who will ‘get’ your book. And she did.
I am doubly thrilled to be featured on her blog this week, as she asks questions about how I came to write Cascade.
Writer David Abrams runs a great blog called The Quivering Pen (Zola!). He’s extremely supportive to other writers and back in July, featured Cascade‘s book trailer in his Trailer Park Tuesday column.
He also runs a My First Time series, where he asks writers to talk about their first writing-related anything–first rejection, first acceptance, first success, failure. I’d wanted to do one for a while, but I’d also had so many writing firsts that it was hard to choose.
I could write about my first rejection letter, which was also a handwritten one from the New Yorker, and how at my fiction workshop, we passed it around like a pie we all wanted to bite from. I could write about my first acceptance–from Redbook magazine, back when Dawn Raffel was the editor and they still published serious fiction. There was even a big check involved (a first AND last). First surprise rejection: the time the Missouri Review asked for two rounds of edits, then said, um, sorry, no. First crushing disappointment: The New Yorker editor who left me a voice mail asking me to call, and when I did, heart batting against my chest, had this to say: “I just want you to know I fought for this story.” Then she quit the magazine.
As an editor at Ploughshares, I had many painful firsts. It’s never pleasant to reject someone’s effort, and particularly hard to reject an almost-right story, or a famous person, or an editor that published you. The best parts of that job were always discovering a wonderful surprise by a new writer, and then seeing that story end up in BASS or Pushcart.
So many firsts. How to choose? Well, it turned out to be easy, in the end. I received my first copy of Cascade from Viking, solid and real. A book with an ISBN number, a book that is catalogued at the Library of Congress. I experienced my first, joyous, book event and that my friends, is My First Time.
“It was all happening so fast. Her paintings, even now, were being rushed into production, printed and duplicated, ready to be shipped off all over America.” –From Cascade