Work, Love and Beauty

I recently had the great fortune of finding myself at the Codex International Book Fair, a spectacularly dizzying landscape of one hundred and eighty tables displaying artist’s books, private press publications and fine art editions. What a feast for a book lover! I stopped to talk with a number of the book artists—people who make exquisite hand made books that sell for anywhere between twenty-five dollars and six thousand dollars. These are not commercial books to be broadly shared, but books to be purchased by collectors and art book lovers. They are to be cherished as pieces of art.

One of the pieces I loved so much was Sue Higgins Leopard’s gorgeous book Girl Struggles, an eighteen page accordion book housed in a beautiful clamshell box. The artist describes the book here: “Conceived as an artifact that might be passed down to future generations of women, my story includes a hand written letter that begins: My Dear Girl, I am getting to be an old woman now. Old enough to have imagined who it might be that comes after me. It must be you…”

What a lucky girl she is who ends up with this book.

Another of Leopard’s more whimsical pieces is a bound book with pages of velum that are mysteriously coded in pastel smudges. It sits in a long box and when you turn the last page, there is the white glove with pastel stains on the fingertips. Her website is under construction but you can still see a wonderful slideshow of some of her other work at http://sueleopard.com

Another artist whose work I loved was Laura Davidson. Shown here are two of her books: Book Of Hours and Natural Beauty. Check out her beautiful website (www.lauradavidson.com) for a more comprehensive look at the impressive span of her work.

One artist had created a wooden box with drawers that house alternate hand-painted views of the Seattle skyline to be slid into a tunnel book made to look like a living room. She said that this piece had taken her three years to make.

Now, writing a novel is a lot of work. It takes an enormous amount of time and patience and faith. It can take years. It takes layers and layers and layers, like building a mountain, one layer of silt at a time. But once it’s published, hopefully thousands of copies will go out into distribution, out into the world.

I couldn’t help but compare the time and degree of skill it takes to write a novel with the time and skill poured into some of these handmade books. Some which sell for thousands of dollars each. Hour for hour, minute for minute, a writer stands more chance of making a better wage. And we all know that nobody except a chosen few makes a living as a writer. It’s not why we write.

Nor, I would venture to say, do these book artists make books to earn a living. They do it for the beauty of the piece, for the process of creation, for the love of the work and the community that their work allows them to belong to.

Which is also the very best reason to write. I left the show in awe of the dedication these artists have to their craft. They inspired me, reminding me to try and work with more love for the process of the work I do, for the writing itself, for the beauty of the story and for the community that it allows me to belong to.

Take Good Care,

Sharry 

Interview with Amy McNamara

I was recently fortunate enough to review Amy McNamara's debut novel Lovely, Dark and Deep. The book is gorgeous. It is full of unspeakable pain, oh yes, but it is also buzzing with truth and hope and love. The rugged coastal Maine landscape mirrors the story in its raw beauty.

I asked Amy if she would be interested in being interviewed here about landscape, and she couldn’t have been warmer or more enthusiastic about it. It has been a gift to connect with her. I am ridiculously excited and honored to have Amy McNamara here today.  Welcome Amy!

I will just jump right in…

KTE: Lovely, Dark and Deep is so rich in its attention to landscape. It was impossible not to feel like I was right there with Wren, feeling the cold of the wind off of the ocean, smelling the salt and pine, seeing ocean-landscape crash up against forest-landscape. How did you gather and then articulate the details of this rugged Maine Coast? 

Amy: Thanks for saying so! That’s great to hear. I didn’t actually travel to the real Maine for the first time until after I’d written the book.

Maine has been a fictional setting for me since I wrote my first “novel” when I was twelve. I’ve always loved the ocean and I guess whatever I discovered about Maine in the encyclopedia at the library (likely photographs and articles about lumber and lobstering) helped me imagine a vast forest shouldering up to the rocky coast. Sometimes it’s best not to have too much information when you’re working with your imagination.

Wren's Maine

After I’d finished a draft of the novel, I drove myself up there to see if the real place bore any resemblance to the one I’d described. To my utter amazement, it did.

KTE: Somehow I'm not surprised by that…

Amy: On that trip, I photographed everything that made me think of my characters. The setting was so familiar, I caught myself expecting to spot one of them. (It was a surprise to see there is a Wells, ME.) Yet when I returned, the pictures felt more like a distraction from the book than a help. They pulled me out of the imagined setting and anchored me in my own life as opposed to the lives of my characters. While I revised the book, I set the photos aside. I needed to stay with the dream of the story, the landscape as I’d written it. I didn’t look at them again until after the book was released. Taking that time away from looking at them allowed the images to become less literal for me and more evocative.

KTE: What does landscape mean for Wren?

Amy: It changes throughout the book, but initially for Wren the landscape and her father are almost a single entity. Her father’s place used to be somewhere she felt free, but it also holds her father and his desertion of her. In that regard the landscape is initially a place she can go to be overlooked, a place she hopes will diminish her, and in so doing, contain her, help her to deal with the enormity of her feelings.

KTE: Does it turn into something else as she begins to heal?

Amy: Well of course there’s that whole idea of pathetic fallacy –

KTE: Pathetic fallacy?

Amy:  – Writers assigning human feeling to nature or to inanimate objects (the commonly taught Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”). I certainly used that throughout the book – there’s a spring feeling in the air toward the end, yet this is also part of what Wren’s railing against, the notion of a sorrowful sky, cruel ice, &c., &c. Wren is struggling to see the world as it is, what is true about it, to understand her place in it, which of course has recently been made clear to her as something far less secure or important than she’d previously thought. She experiences a diminishment of herself before nature that seems appropriate to her now that she’s had a brush with a swift and powerful arrival of the end of life.

KTE: Yes!  And as a reader I couldn't help but feel that about myself too, you rendered those feelings so clearly…

But back to you for a minute. What is your personal relationship to Maine?

And more Wren's Maine

KTE: Landscape is often, to me, an actual character. What do you think of that?

Amy: I like that idea – thinking of landscape as a character. I don’t know that I do that, literally, or set out to do that, but feeling located in terms of joining the dream of the story is very important for me as a reader and by extension as a writer. I'm always thinking about process and wondering how other people sit down to do it.

When I wrote Lovely, Dark and Deep the setting just was. I didn't think about the work it was doing until after I finished a draft and saw how it functioned. That said, having a sense of place, of my surroundings, believing that it exists reinforces the work of the story. It is, for me, an essential part of the joyful leap I make when I leave myself and join a fiction. When you say it's often an actual character to you, are you speaking as a reader or a writer or both?

KTE: I think I am speaking about both. I had to think for a minute there... but yes, I think as a reader I need to feel connected to the landscape of the story by way of my senses (can I see, hear, smell, feel the place) which is very similar (perhaps the same) to the way I need to feel connected to the characters. This is, no doubt, the reason why I think of landscape as another character. And really, this is not a conscious thing at all.  It is why I FEEL landscape as another character without even realizing it.

The way you say it "feeling located in terms of joining the dream of the story" resonates strongly for me. Yes! If I can leap into the story and land on ground that I can touch and see and smell then I can stand with the characters who reside there. Is that what you mean?

Amy: Yes! I need to feel oriented in one way or another before anything else can happen. As a reader and as a writer. If I’m oriented in some way, I’ll go anywhere with the text, but if I don’t have a sense of the basic rules of the given world, then I find myself struggling to follow or imagine other details. This is not to say I need or want art to be particularly concrete or literal—I list toward the abstract—even so, I need to know what the overarching structure is, the frame of the thing, before I can easily wander in and join the fun.

With characters sometimes less is more. If a writer provides me with too much information about a character’s appearance, information that’s not necessary to the theme or plot, it puts me off. I think there’s a danger of robbing the reader of the chance to participate in the making of the thing. The imagination we bring as readers to a text is a large part of the joy of reading, part of how we internalize story, how it comes to life for us.

KTE: What does landscape mean for you? What is your belief about landscape? How do you manifest this belief in your work?

Amy: That’s a huge set of questions. I am very affected by place. Everything about it, the quality and cast of light, what scents are on the air, whether or not it’s moist or dry, if it’s filled with evidence of the human spirit, the natural world, or some combination thereof, all of that plays into my general outlook. I can be undone by something as ridiculous as a battered and abandoned plastic toy bumping against a curb, then buoyed again by a great swath of red paint someone’s thought to draw across a surface for only the reason of placing red somewhere it wasn’t yet. I drive my husband nuts by pushing our furniture around when I need a change of perspective. I don’t know why my surroundings work on me in the way they do; I certainly know people for whom it is not important, yet to me, it’s always the place to begin.

KTE: I am just the same way!  Both in terms of being undone or buoyed by a tiny great detail and in terms of moving furniture!  (And driving my husband nuts!)

Amy: Does that count as a “belief about landscape?” I’m not sure it does, but I’m sure it informs how I work. Before I can tell the story of an imagined place, I have to see it in my mind’s eye. I tried, for a few months, to write a story about a girl who lived in a house I’d seen in a dream – I could picture the house so clearly, I even drew it, yet when I tried to write about it, it remained elusive. I couldn’t approach it through language head-on. It was the strangest experience. Eventually I took that to mean the house didn’t belong in the piece I was writing. I had to let it go (though I can see it yet) and trust that if it’s important it will come back to me at some point. Sounds pretty mystical, doesn’t it? But it feels like that – like if the setting isn’t present, nothing else is going to adhere – I need to see where I am before I can begin doing anything meaningful there.

KTE: Yes! I have thought a lot about the ways we are affected by landscape and continue to ponder it...and I am very curious to get a little deeper with you here. Do you think that one of the reasons, perhaps, that landscape (light, scents, evidence of human spirit, etc) plays into your outlook is because you feel very connected to it?  Like you are in a constant relationship with it?  It penetrating you, you penetrating it?  I feel like there is something essential in humans being more connected to our landscapes than we think we are, and I wonder what you make of that...

Amy: I suppose that’s true – we are animals and as such part of the whole natural cycle, including our incredible talent for innovation and our clearly formidable powers of destruction. And at the rate we’re going we’ll drive ourselves to extinction, the planet shrugging us off like a pest.

So do I feel very connected to landscape, in a constant relationship with it?

And Wren's Maine again

Yes, I guess I do, definitely in terms of my immediate physical surroundings, especially where beauty or the absence of beauty is concerned, but not in a way I like to look at very closely. It’s kind of like thinking about your heart beating or the way we breathe without having to remember to do so. In terms of writing, I find some things are better left without scrutiny. I don’t know if that really answers your question, though. So, yes. I can only speak for myself but I do feel deeply connected to my setting. Whatever that might be. City, country, subway, office. But I wasn’t consciously building the landscape around Wren when I first wrote it. When I try to do something only the trying shows. But because I wasn’t counting heartbeats, so to speak, they were able to flutter along in their own rhythm. I find when I loosen my grip on the reins, things float to the fore. 

KTE: But because I wasn’t counting heartbeats, so to speak, they were able to flutter along in their own rhythm.  Oh wow.  Thank you, Amy, for this incredible interview.

Amy: Thanks so much for asking me these terrific questions and giving me the opportunity to examine the role of setting/landscape in fiction. I enjoyed it immensely!

Thanks for reading everyone!

Tam

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Photo by Stephanie Colgan

amymcnamara learned to read at three and hasn’t put the book down since. she holds a ba in french lit and an mfa in poetry. her poems have appeared in numerous journals and have been nominated for a pushcart prize. her manuscript of poetry, the new head chronometrist has been a finalist for many book awards but still needs a home. lovely, dark and deep is her first novel. when she’s not reading stories, telling stories, or thinking about stories or poems, she can be spotted, camera in hand, for pay and for pleasure, documenting the incredible city she calls home. she lives in ny, ny with her honey and their two kids.