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CASCADE

Postcards related to Cascade, the book.

CASCADE

THE GHOST OF ASA SNOW

February 26, 2013

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.

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CASCADE

POSTCARDS FROM CASCADE–OPHELIA AMONG THE FLOWERS

February 12, 2013

 

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

CASCADE GENERAL WRITING

ONE OF MANY

January 4, 2013


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.

 

CASCADE GENERAL WRITING Life

POSTCARDS FROM CASCADE

December 5, 2012

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

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CASCADE GENERAL WRITING

POSTCARDS FROM CASCADE: WHAT’S LEFT OUT

November 30, 2012

 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.

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CASCADE

POSTCARDS FROM CASCADE

November 25, 2012

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.

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CASCADE

POSTCARDS FROM CASCADE

November 14, 2012

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

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CASCADE TRAVEL

POSTCARDS FROM CASCADE

November 2, 2012

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

 


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CASCADE GENERAL WRITING

POSTCARDS FROM CASCADE

October 24, 2012

“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.

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CASCADE

POSTCARDS FROM CASCADE

October 2, 2012

“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.

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