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CASCADE

Postcards related to Cascade, the book.

CASCADE GENERAL WRITING

A POSTCARD FROM ANAHEIM

June 25, 2012

I received a postcard of sorts from California this past weekend. My friend, YA author Janet Tashjian, sent me this photo of galleys of my novel, Cascade, on display at the American Library Association’s annual conference out in Anaheim. I am new to novel publishing, and had no idea that my book would be out there. It was a thrill to see it looking so real and official, set against the glowing orange and white Penguin Group display.

Seeing it out in the world seemed particularly fitting because during the summer heat of last week, I spent a lot of time clearing out ‘the old’ from my attic office. I worked on Cascade on and off for the better part of a decade, and a lot of fits and starts and drafts sat in piles in my bookcase. With the book almost ready to launch, it seemed time to tidy all that paper up, discard a lot of it, and mentally move on to the next project.

But to sort through the old drafts was a revelation! I’d forgotten so much. It was surprising to see the draft of the short story that I originally thought the novel would be. There were early chapter drafts that took place entirely in the present, rather than the 1930s setting I eventually settled with. The characters had different names, and, I realized, entirely different personalities. Henry and Emilia were not the people Dez and Asa turned out to be.

But most of all, I was reminded of just how long I worked on Cascade, and how for most of that time, I had no idea that it would ever be published. Writing a novel was so uncertain;  it was isolating and daunting and an act of faith.  It was also wonderful—to drop into a world at will, my fingertips on the keyboard my portal to that world, exploring a time period and issues that fascinated me.

To see Cascade on that table out at the ALA conference was to realize that the book is truly on its own now. Some people will pick it up and want to read it; some will simply set it down and move on. The story will resonate with some readers and for others, not so much.

But to those for whom the book does resonate, how wonderful it is, as a writer, to be able to connect with other people like this. I received small tastes of this connection as a short story writer, and always had to blink, surprised and a bit taken aback when someone contacted me. How gratifying it is to know that yes, our writing is out there and people do receive it.

 

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CASCADE TRAVEL

POSTCARD FROM LONDON: IMPOSSIBILITIES

May 31, 2012

So much in life happens because one person has a vision, and the will to realize that vision no matter how impossible it may seem.

The recreated Globe Shakespeare Theatre in London exists today because actor Sam Wanamaker had a vision. From the Globe’s website: “In 1970 Sam founded the Shakespeare Globe Trust….the final attempt to build a faithful recreation of Shakespeare’s Globe close to its original Bankside, Southwark location…. While many had said that the Globe reconstruction was impossible to achieve, he had persevered for over twenty years, overcoming a series of monumental obstacles.”

Wanamaker died before the theater was finished, as Henry Folger died before his dream, The Folger Shakespeare Library, was complete.

CASCADE TRAVEL

POSTCARD FROM NEW YORK, 1922

May 3, 2012

One of the best parts about writing Cascade was doing all the research, especially the New York City research. Here’s the NYPL 90 years ago.

The library recently ended an exhibit celebrating 100 years of existence. The show was full of fascinating treasure: Jack Kerouac’s notebook, his pipe, Virginia Woolf’s 1941 diary, her walking stick, my May 19 birthday buddy Malcolm X’s battered suitcase, and the notebook he kept full of notes for self-improvement. I went on a rainy day and stayed, mesmerized, for hours.

The New York Public Library

CASCADE GENERAL WRITING TRAVEL

POSTCARD FROM KEY WEST

April 10, 2012

Ernest Hemingway is ‘current’ again, the way Shakespeare was for awhile. There’s the success of Paula McLain’s “The Paris Wife,” and the lovely, forthcoming “Hemingway’s Girl,” by Erika Robuck. The JFK Library has released previously unpublished correspondence that reveals the writer’s softer side. We’re all taking a second look.

I grew up with a mother who considered Hemingway larger than life. I learned to revere him long before I was old enough to read him. When I arrived in Key West a few days ago, I went straight to his house.

There, among the Life magazine covers and photos of hunting trophies and fish-fighting chairs, you can see how powerfully the Hemingway image played out. But there, too, is his kitchen: a still life now, preserved behind a museum rope; there is the bathroom corner sink, with its opposing taps, where he would have washed his face, brushed his teeth, checked himself in the mirror.

I’ve always been a little obsessed, a little bit undone, when I find myself in preserved spaces. As my character, Dez, in Cascade, thinks: We people take up space and then when we’re gone, there is just the space left. And sometimes you can’t comprehend how that can happen.

When the JFK Library released the new letters, the Ernest Hemingway curator, Susan Wrynn, said, “We think of him as a hunter or as machismo image. But in the letters, we see a warmer side.”

But are we really surprised by a softer side? I can’t look at this postcard photo of him, patting that scraggly little cat, without choking up. He was a man who liked cats, a man who killed himself. Painful stuff.

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CASCADE GENERAL WRITING TRAVEL

GRAFFITI AS ART, AS MARK OF EXISTENCE

March 16, 2012

Cathedral at Chartres, France: graffiti from high atop the north bell tower.

“You ever sketch people?”
“Sure. Sometimes.” Was he angling for a picture? Did he want to inspire art, did he want to be immortalized? Did everybody?

–From Cascade

CASCADE

PARIS, REVISITED

March 12, 2012

When I’ve imagined a character somewhere, and then actually visit that location, the sensation is a bit surreal and heady. I’m both in the moment and in my imagined world.

Sennelier is an artist’s supply shop in Paris, where my main character, Dez, bought her supplies in the late 1920s. I love that it still exists. I took this photograph last November, on an unseasonably warm and beautiful day.

In Paris, she’d loved Sennelier, its cramped aisles, loved opening tubes of paint and inhaling them, fingers itching to squeeze them. Paris was a memory even more remote than Boston. Not quite real anymore, that year and a half of classes, the school’s high-domed studio, sharing the tiny rue de Fleurus flat with the wry and wonderful Jane Park from Bristol.

Jacob would be like this, and soon: gone, turned to a memory, not quite real.

—From Cascade

CASCADE Uncategorized

NYC, 1938. Street Scene

March 7, 2012

61st Street between 1st and 3rd Avenues.
I liked the quirky, old-fashioned quality of the name “Brilliant Lunch Bar,” and used it for Cascade.

Walker Evans photo, public domain, courtesy of Library of Congress.

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CASCADE Uncategorized

DUST STORMS OF THE 1930s

March 4, 2012

Part 1 of Cascade takes place in 1935, when dust storms were devastating the Great Plains states, and adding to the general worry everywhere that the United States was falling apart.

Public domain photo courtesy of:
The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

CASCADE

GREETINGS FROM CASCADE

February 26, 2012

My publisher found this old postcard, which will appear as art in the book. I doctored the caption, but it’s really an old postcard of Belchertown, MA—-strangely, where the Quabbin Reservoir is located. One of many coincidences that have happened with this book!