Total Immersion in The Waters
32 Days until Publication of the Waters
Thank you, Pamela Grath, for reading the ARC of The Waters and for writing your generous blog post about it, suggesting that other readers may want to immerse themselves in the book as you did. I’m so honored that you featured me, Pamela, and that you liked the book.
For those of you who are not Pamela, Here is the link to the whole thing, with inspiring photos of a lower Michigan swamp!
Pamela Grath is the owner and proprietor of Dog Ears Books in Northport, Michigan, located near the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula, and has been so for thirty years. On the store’s FB page, it says: “Dog Ears Books invites visitors to browse a curated selection of new, used, and rare books,” and so if you are in the area, you really should visit.
I have visited the bookstore after the publication of each of my five previous books, and I look forward to visiting again with The Waters. Pamela, a writer, and her husband David, an artist), have always greeted me warmly, made me feel welcome way out on the edge of Michigan. (To read Pamela’s moving tribute to David Paul Grath, RIP, click here.)
When a writer like me is given a rave review that is in depth and detailed like Pamela’s, it makes the whole project of the writing life, with its challenges, make sense. I sometimes say that writing a book of fiction is more like cooking than like any other art. Cooks and writers both study their artforms, learn the basics, and eat and read widely. And we also have our own ideas!
When we set about cooking our own meal or writing our own book, we want to make what we love, but we also consider the tastes of our particular audience, the one we are inviting to the table. We choose our ingredients with care, hoping they are of the right quality and combine them in what we hope will be a pleasing way, a way that our guests will find enjoyable.
If we are trying something new, it’s possible we might fail. Even if we are cooking an old favorite, we could get something wrong—even humidity, a slamming door, or the mood of the cook might have a damning effect on the final product. And if after the meal, the guests are dissatisfied for any reason, we are truly sad.
Reading Pamela’s essay about The Waters lets me know I’ve gotten it right for at least one guest at the table. Also, Pamela manages to write her lengthy review without giving away any spoilers! Amazing! Here are a few paragraphs:
“The Waters is a different kind of story. Large and ambitious, containing themes and worlds both mythic and postmodern, The Waters gives us from Campbell, for the first time, an entire community, bound together -- and torn apart – and bound together again -- by its own unique history. A community seeking redemption and a way forward in difficult and uncertain times. They often have a hard time showing it, but these people care about each other.
The home of Hermine (not Hermione) Zook, healer and matriarch, is a bog island protected by a drawbridge. When local people come to her for healing medicines, consultations take place off the island, out by the house built and formerly lived in by Hermine’s husband, the legendary Wild Will Zook (long ago banished by his wife), a house he lived in alone until joined by Hermine’s oldest daughter, Primrose, who has also disappeared, moving across the continent to California. Molly, a nurse of modern medical ways, is the practical, nearby (and only biological) daughter. Finally, there is the lazy, lovely, magical Rose Thorn, golden-haired mother of eleven-year-old Dorothy, known as Donkey, a mathematical genius made nervous by infinity, a child being raised on M'sauga Island by Herself (Hermine).
Donkey milks the cow, avoids eating meat, eavesdrops and spies on adults, and longs for a father. Titus is the father she wants, and the choice is logical (passionate Donkey tries hard to be logical), given the electricity that has always crackled between Rose Thorn and Titus. In this postmodern rural Michigan fairy tale, as in European fairy tales of old, however, missing fathers are a recurring theme. Never mind that the entire community of Whiteheart, Michigan, longs to see Titus and Rose Thorn together.”
Click here to read the whole blog, and maybe I’ll see you at Dog Ear Books in Northport this summer!