Looking Forward, Looking Back: Road Trip

Kevin Tomasic, Dory Adams and Kevin Scanlon
copyright 1978 by Kevin Scanlon

(click on image for larger view)

That’s me in the photo above, seated between two Kevins (Tomasic and Scanlon) who were at the end of a long journey. They’d just spent the first half of the summer of 1978 on the road after graduating from college, traveling from Pittsburgh into the Canadian Rockies and British Columbia, then down the Pacific coast to California.

I'd moved to Los Angeles after graduation, where I stayed with a good friend while finding a job. I was about to sign a lease on an apartment when the two Kevins rolled into town. That changed those LA plans and I ended up moving to San Francisco instead.

I love this photo for many reasons, one being that we were so very young then. But mostly I love this photograph because we were at a turning point, each of us about to set off on a new path. It turned out to be only the beginning, not the end, of a great trip.

More than 30 years down the road from when that photo was taken, the two Kevins and I are heading out on a new road trip – this time to Woodstock. We were too young back in ’69 for the original Woodstock festival, but this time we’re headed to a Midnight Ramble at Levon Helm’s studio. Levon was a member of The Band, the legendary group who backed Bob Dylan. They'd played together as The Hawks in the pre-Dylan days, then went out on their own again as The Band in 1969, opening their tour at San Francisco's Winterland, which would also be the site of their final show, The Last Waltz, in 1976. After recovering from throat cancer a decade ago, Levon put together a new band, which includes his daughter Amy, and they've had two very successful and critically acclaimed CDs, Dirt Farmer and Electric Dirt.

I missed seeing The Band perform back in the 70s, but Kevin Scanlon and I have seen various Band members play over the years. When we lived in San Francisco, we saw Rick Danko play several times at small clubs in the Bay Area -- once when he played with Richard Manuel at the Old Waldorf, once with Paul Butterfield and Gary Busey at a small club in Berkley. Later we saw Danko play in Chicago with Levon Helm.

Last summer, the two Kevins and I caught Levon's show when he came through Pittsburgh. He was having throat problems and couldn’t sing that night, but it was nice to see him play on stage with his daughter, Amy, and surrounded by his new band -- all fantastic musicians.

As for that road we're on -- it ain't over yet. Kevin Scanlon and I have been married 30 years now. Kevin Tomasic, who raised two sons with his wife Sue (who he lost a little more than a year ago after a long battle with cancer), remains a lifelong friend. If I could choose one decade to live through again, it would be the 1970s -- for the clothes, the music, and free-spiritedness. We're hoping to catch a glimpse as we search for Big Pink and visit the site of the original Woodstock festival on this leg of our journey. We'll photograph, as always, and no doubt take a few sidetrips along the way. I’m looking forward, looking back – continuously fascinated by how things look in this light.


Around the Blogosphere:

“David Foster Wallace at the Ransom Center” by Lisa Peet (3/9/2010) at Like Fire.


“My First Electronic Book . . .” by Meredith Sue Willis (3/9/2010) at Literature and the Web: Meredith Sue Willis Thinks About the Intersection.


3QD Arts & Literature Prize 2010 Finalists (3/10/2010) at 3 Quarks Daily.
Congratulations to the finalists!

We Made it to the Semifinals for the 3QD Prize in Arts and Literature!

Thank you to all who voted for the nominees in the 3 Quarks Daily 2010 Prize in Arts and Literature! Misko Kranjec’s guest post, “Lens and Pen as Mirrors,” is a semifinalist.

The editors at 3QD will now select the finalists and announce them on March 10th. The contest judge, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, will then select three winners.

You can see the list of semifinalists here.

Congratulations Misko!

Watching The Rivers Flow

Pittsburgh Dawn, copyright 2008 by Dory Adams

It’s easy to find ourselves on autopilot, mindlessly going through routine motions. We’re preoccupied by deadlines to meet and problem solving tasks for our jobs, and by items to tackle on our “to do” lists – already mentally at the next destination before we’ve physically arrived. Everyone seems to be in a hurry, rushing to the next thing – get in, get out, get it done, do more and more and more. Instead of rushing toward the next thing, instead of living in a state of distraction, we need to spend more time living in the moment. Slow down. Pay attention. Tap into simple joys. Notice our surroundings. Stop crashing through life and allow ourselves time to watch the river flow.

A favorite part of my day is the drive along the rivers on the way to and from work. Regardless of which route I take, I always cross one of Pittsburgh’s rivers, and usually see one, if not both, of the other two. My favorite route takes me over the Allegheny and across the middle of the city to the other side where I then follow the Monongahela from high above as I drive along the bluff.

There’s a rhythm to this commute that changes from morning to evening, and also with the seasons. These past two weeks have brought significantly more daylight to my evening journey. For most of the winter months it’s already dark when I leave the office at the end of the day. Last month marked a shift of seasons when a trace of light remained as I headed out into the evening. It was still dusk as I left work, but dark before I got across the city. Last week, a few minutes of daylight still lingered after I arrived home.

The rivers themselves are part of the rhythm. The Allegheny usually looks steely gray because of its gravel bottom. Even on the coldest days of winter when it is frozen over, there is a tinge of gray to the ice. Because the Monongahela has a mud bottom, it is usually brown in color – especially in the rainy spring months which tend to stir up the bottom. When the Mon calms down, it turns green.

The Allegheny and the Monongahela converge to form the Ohio River at the very tip of Pittsburgh’s downtown area at The Point. Depending on morning traffic, I sometimes follow the Allegheny and cross it near The Point where I can also see the Ohio River. Driving this route in summer, I often see sculling crews rowing on the Allegheny.

Several summers ago we had the most extensive road construction projects that I can remember. It seemed as though every major artery was being repaired, and it made the commute twice as long. I tried alternate routes, many of which didn’t follow the rivers, trying to escape the inevitable gridlock. Although I still had to cross the Allegheny to get to my destination, I tried shortcuts over the hills instead of around them, and tried crossing bridges further upriver. But, on days I didn’t cross one of the bridges close to downtown where I could see the details of the skyscrapers and not just the skyline in the distance – and especially if I didn’t get to look down at the wide curve of the Mon from the vantage point up on the bluff – I realized it had a negative impact on my mood all day. I needed to see the city waking up and coming alive from close up.

When I realized how much seeing those rivers affected my days, I stopped looking for alternate routes. Instead, I used the time stuck in traffic to savor watching what was happening on the rivers. I no longer cared if I was at a complete standstill as long as I could watch the river flow.

The Mon is different each day. Some mornings I would see the Delta Queen, but now that she’s been forced into retirement she no longer comes to town. A lot of coal moves along the Mon, each powerful towboat pushing up to sixteen barges (4 across, 4 ahead) and trains hauling coal along tracks on the far side of the river. In summer, fishermen drift close to shore. On some winter mornings when we’ve had a sudden cold snap and the air is colder that the river, I can even see the river’s breath as wisps of mist rise up to meet the air, the river seeming to exhale.

Evenings have a different tempo. In winter it’s too dark to see the water, the rivers a black void in the city lights, except where the bridges cross. These past few weeks watching the daylight linger a few minutes longer during each drive home has lifted my spirits. The hillside houses look especially lovely in the changing evening light with their windows glowing golden, the sky more dramatic above them, and the hillsides they cling to still white with the last of the winter snow.

The changing light is the best, whether it is in morning or evening. The shifting color in the sky exhilarates the senses – something is changing, in transition, becoming. In some ways it’s like watching an image develop when making a photographic print in the darkroom, seeing the details emerge from the darkness.

My husband once described dusk as a shifting of gears. That description seems especially fitting to me on the commute home when I’m trying to empty my mind of the day’s challenges and shake off the work day, to give space to my other lives – my creative life and my home life.

I’m happiest when I quiet my mind and make a conscious effort to look at the world around me. It’s when I discover my best story ideas or have insight about a character’s motivation or behavior. There’s a lot more than meets the eye to watching the rivers flow.

Photo Credit:
“Pittsburgh Dawn” Photograph © 2008 by Dory Adams


Around the Blogosphere:

Good advice from Christina Baker Kline about The Curse of Multitasking at A Writing Life: Notes on Craft and the Creative Process. She truly nails it with this: “But writing is not about keeping the balls in the air. It’s about letting them drop. To unspool a story is to inhabit a different space altogether. You have to let the world in your head grow until it becomes more important than the world you inhabit. You have to calm your heartbeat, slow your skipping brain, become comfortable with silence. You have to accept that you will get nothing done except this one thing – this one paragraph or page or, perhaps, on a good day, a chapter – and possibly not even that.”

Levi Asher at Literary Kicks maps fiction In Gatsby’s tracks: Locating the Valley of Ashes in a 1924 Photo

Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer offers a belated 100th birthday to social documentary photographer Milton Rogovin with Milton is 100! More about Rogovin’s lifetime of photography can be found at Milton Rogovin’s website.

We Need Your Vote!

Misko Kranjec’s photo essay “Lens and Pen as Mirrors” posted at In This Light last November is a nominee for the 3 Quarks Daily 2010 Arts & Literature Prize. You can vote to determine the semi-finalists until March 7th. The editors at 3 Quarks Daily will then choose the finalists in the next round. The three winners will be chosen by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. To see the details and full list of nominees, please vote here. Help us get the word out to others so that they can vote too.

Bookshelf Revelations

(click on images for larger view)

Last week The Millions ran an interesting article, “In Our Parents’ Bookshelves” by Kevin Hartnett, about the effect E-readers will have on the books people buy in hard copy vs. electronic version and how that will have an impact on what we see on personal bookshelves. Hartnett realized while watching his young son play with a pile of books that “the clunky objects he was playing with seemed like relics.” Bookshelf contents reveal much about their owner. After examining the books on the shelf in his mother’s bedroom at the house where she’d grown up, Hartnett describes them as resembling “a type of monument.” He writes, “I got the clearest glimpse I ever had of my mother as a person who existed before me and apart from me, and whose inner life was as bottomless as I knew my own to be.”

I do not yet own an E-reader, but I imagine that day is not far off. I already buy Kindle downloads for my iPod Touch. I downloaded the free app for iPods last year while recovering from hand surgery, during a time when it was difficult for me to hold a book. I read my first Kindle books holding the iPod in my good hand while my other hand was immersed in the fluidotherapy machine at physical therapy.

I’m not an earlier adopter of gadgets, however, simply because I don’t have the discretionary income to be one. My budget tells me I have to wait to see what the best option will be, and it’s still too early to tell. I want an E-reader that will allow me to make annotations onto the page as the Kindle does, yet I’m reluctant to buy a Kindle simply because I’m leery of having a bookseller as powerful as Amazon have that much control over what is published and how it is stored (and considering how Amazon went about removing Orwell’s 1984 from Kindles last year – copies which the Kindle owners had purchased – that is a serious concern). I was counting on Apple to come up with an E-reader that would dazzle me, but the iPad seems not much more than I already have with my iPod. In fact it even looks like a big iPod – maybe too big. I want an E-reader that is light in weight that will fit in my purse, something about the size of a trade paperback.

One reason an E-reader appeals to me is simply that I’m running out of space for more bookshelves. We’re at a point in our lives where we should be downsizing, but if we bring many more books home we’re going to need to build on an addition just for books. I’m thinking of attaching a silo as a circular library equipped with a very tall ladder. Seriously. I once saw a photograph of one and immediately asked Kevin, “Can we get one? Huh? Huh? Can we get one this weekend?”

I’ve loved books since I was a very young girl. My grandmother had a bookcase in her living room filled with Book of the Month Club editions, which I now realize must have been a huge luxury considering my grandparents’ income. They lived in a very small town in the mountains where the nearest library was twenty miles away. Before I could read, I used to take books from Grandma’s bookcase and turn the pages, amazed that those black markings on the page were words that held a story – knowing that someday I would be able to read them myself. Grandma had grown up in a house with a library room, which I remember well from visits to my great-grandmother’s house. The library table from her house is now in my own home. I used it for many years as a desk, but now keep it in the guest bedroom where the bottom shelf of that table is filled with stacks of books I haven’t found shelf space for yet.

In the small house where I grew up, my parents didn’t have many books of their own. They subscribed to Life and Look, though, and I suspect that looking at the photographs in those glossy magazines had an influence on me wanting to study photography later. After my dad’s retirement he had more leisure time to read, and he then bought books on history and religion which began to accumulate in their house.

The first bookshelf of my very own was built into the headboard of my bed, and I gradually filled it with books from the Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden series, as well as paperbacks from Scholastic Books which were available for students to buy through our school. But most of the books I read as a pre-teen were borrowed from the local library, which my mom drove me to during the summer months when I couldn’t get books from my school library.

When I was a teenager, my dad built a pine bookcase for me which I quickly filled with paperback copies of favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, and The Yearling among them – as well as more popular best sellers of the time such as Love Story, which all the girls at school were reading. Someone searching through my bookshelves back then would’ve seen a mind trying to figure out her place in the larger world – moving from fashion and advice in magazines such as Ingénue and Seventeen, to the novels of Hemingway and the Bronte sisters, and back to teen idol magazines such as Tiger Beat and 16 Magazine (hello David Cassidy) until I outgrew and replaced them with Rollingstone Magazine (hello James Taylor and Jackson Browne).

College friendships were formed in part by seeing what LPs (those were the final vinyl days) and books were on someone’s shelves and determining what interests we shared, and by seeing what new books and music their interests opened up to us. Now, books are about to go the way of LPs and CDs. Have you noticed how small the music section is getting at stores lately? No? Perhaps you’ve stopped browsing and shopping there too, just as happy to purchase and download the files from iTunes for your iPod.

When Kevin and I first joined our lives together and were barely eking out a living in San Francisco back in the late 1970s, one of the first pieces of furniture we purchased was a bookcase. This was not a bookcase we bought in a store, but rather one that Kevin built after borrowing tools to cut and sand the planks of pine we carried home from the lumber store. We didn’t have a car back then, but somehow managed to get the lumber home on a Muni bus – the 38 Geary, to be exact. Those were the days! Our other furniture had been borrowed from his sisters, but that bookcase was ours. We filled it with used paperbacks we bought for about a quarter apiece at Green Apple Books, which I’m happy to say is still in business and still in the same location on Clement Street.


What my bookshelves reveal about me today would depend on which bookcase you were inspecting. We have books in nearly every room of the house, including the basement. In the study, which Kevin and I share and is the room where we spend most of our time, there are three long bookshelves above our desks. The bottom shelf is filled with reference books and books on writing craft, the upper shelves filled with novels. Lining the top of the credenza are oversized volumes, mostly photography books. In the living room is an oak bookcase with glass doors containing the signed and inscribed books we’ve acquired, many of them by West Virginia writers. That bookcase also holds most of our Beat writer collection, as well as numerous talismans related to the imagery in the novel I’m working on – a miner’s head lamp and coal mine core samples, a mastodon tooth (which can be seen on the shelf in front of the Kerouac books) and various other fossils too fragile to keep on my desk.

Kevin Hartnett closes his article by saying, “It remains to be seen how many more generations will have the adventure of getting to know their parents this way. . . To the extent that bookshelves persist, it will be in self-conscious form, as display cases filled with only the books we valued enough to acquire and preserve in hard copy. The more interesting story, however, the open-ended, undirected progressions of a life defined by books will surely be lost to a digital world in which there is no such thing as time at all.”

What do your bookshelves reveal about you? In what ways do you think the new digital book technology will change how you read and acquire books?


Around the Blogosphere:

A Conversation with Irene McKinney
Watch Kate Long’s wonderful interview with West Virginia poet laureate Irene McKinney on YouTube (WV public broadcasting). Part 1 is here. I love hearing these two distinctive regional West Virginia accents as they discuss McKinney’s work and the discoveries which come out of the writing process itself. More than twenty years ago after earning her PhD, McKinney returned to her home place in West Virginia to finish two books of poetry while on a six-month sabbatical from the university where she was teaching in New York. She ended up moving back to West Virginia permanently. From the window of her home, she can see the house and barn that were her home place. The house she built is filled with books, which you can see in parts 2 and 3 of the interview (note to self: stop worrying about space for additional bookshelves, just start stacking them on the floor). I’ve long admired McKinney’s poetry, and have mentioned Kate Long’s radio series In Their Own Country (which includes an interview with McKinney) in previous posts here at In This Light. McKinney reads several of her poems in the interview and speaks of the memoir she is writing, which she calls “a memoir of place” because she believes describing the region and people she comes from is the best way to say who she is. (link via Meredith Sue Willis)

Literature and the Web
Meredith Sue Willis has launched a new blog, Literature and the Web, and the latest edition of her Books for Readers is now posted online. Information on upcoming appearances and her two new books, Out of the Mountains: Appalachian Stories from Ohio University Press, and Ten Strategies to Start Your Novel from Montemayor Press, both to be released in summer 2010 can be found here.

Contact Sheets: Visual Poems and Stories

Dory's Contact Sheet and Negatives

“Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem out of America onto film, taking rank among the poets of the world.”
~ Jack Kerouac, excerpt from his introduction to The Americans

One of my favorite things about Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” – Expanded Edition is that it includes 81 pages of his contact sheets. There were hundreds of contact sheets from his project, but these were the ones which contained the 83 images he chose for his book. Frank spent two years editing 760 rolls of film and 27,000 individual images down to the 83 photographs selected for The Americans. From his contact sheets he chose 1000 images to make into work prints, and then he narrowed those down to the final 83 for his book

Contact sheets are rapidly becoming relics of the past as photography shifts from film to a digital format. I’ve always been fascinated by the stories those tiny images tell. Made by placing the strips of negatives directly onto a piece of photographic paper, the images are the same size as the negatives, but appear as positives through the developing process of the paper. Typically the first thing a photographer would make after developing the film, a contact sheet served as the first look at the positive images captured. It also served as a reference index for filing purposes to minimize the handling of negatives, which can be easily scratched and damaged.

Looking at another photographer’s contact sheets brings out the voyeur in me (seriously, every photographer and writer has a voyeuristic side – it’s the drive that compels us to pick up a camera or pen, it’s what makes us watchers and observers). I got out my magnifying glass to examine the progression of images on those contact sheets, fascinated by how he approached his subjects.

Contact sheets impose a sort of history on our days and weeks by showing the order in which frames were shot on any given roll of film. Mine include family shots squeezed in between more serious documentary work. Sometimes I am amazed by how many different things are on a single contact sheet – California beaches, an Amish sale in Pennsylvania, my parents’ silver wedding anniversary, and a train ride with friends and family in Pittsburgh. The contact sheet and corresponding negatives shown in the photograph at the top of this post are from a trip across Lake Michigan on a steam-powered ferry that carried passengers and their automobiles. Deep in the belly of the boat were also dozens of Chessie System railroad cars. My contact sheet from this particular roll contains some family shots of our young nephew who had accompanied us on that trip, which included a stop at the Baraboo Circus Museum in Wisconsin.

Today, digital frames are downloaded and filed in a more individual way which breaks up and divides the chronology. Individual shots are easily deleted now. With the click of a button they’re gone. But back then, those old contact sheets told it all when the only way to delete images was to snip them out of the film strip or cross them out on the proof sheet.

Several of Robert Frank’s contact sheets were of particularly interest to me. The first contains the photograph used for the cover of the new expanded edition of The Americans, an image of an American Flag obscuring the faces of people looking out the window, in the photograph titled “Parade – Hoboken, NJ 1955.” The sequence of shots show parade dignitaries and politicians, faces in the crowd lining the sidewalks to watch the parade, then a few frames of the people at the window above the street where an American flag hangs – a scene which he returns to four separate times over three rolls of film seen on three contact sheets.

In contrast is the contact sheet containing the photograph titled “Trolley – New Orleans, 1955” which was the original cover image for the 1959 Grove Press edition (The Americans was first published in Paris in 1958, then in the United States the following year). There is only a single shot of the trolley, that famous image of the riders framed in the open windows and divided by race with white riders to the front, abstract reflections mirrored in the glass of the raised windows above their heads.

Another contact sheet of a highway accident is surprising for the number of images taken of a single scene. The photograph “Car Accident – U.S. 66, between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona, 1955” had always seemed isolated and desolate to me. Four witnesses stand alongside a remote section of highway, the unmistakable figure of a body shrouded by a blanket at their feet in the foreground. But the contact sheet shows more of the overall scene and reveals far more onlookers, cars waiting in line on the blocked highway, as well as an ambulance and police at the scene.

In all, Frank made three trips across the country between 1955 and 1957 for his project, funded by a Guggenheim fellowship (Walker Evans helped him polish the application). Frank’s wife Mary and young children, Andrea and Pablo, traveled with him on portions of the journey, and they are the figures in the car at the side of the highway in the final image of The Americans.

The original edition of The Americans was a slim volume containing no text beyond an introduction written by Jack Kerouac and the titles of the photographs. I’ve only begun to savor all the extras included in this new expanded edition – essays, maps, letters, work prints and contact sheets, as well as the 83 photographs from original exhibit and book. Expect more in a future post about this gorgeous, heavy, 500+ page monster of a book.

“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”
~ Robert Frank

Around the Blogosphere:

The latest round for National Public Radio’s Three Minute Fiction Contest is based on the challenge of writing a very short story (estimated at around 600 words maximum) which takes three minutes or less to read aloud. The photograph and official rules are posted on the NPR website. Deadline is February 28th, 2010 and the judge is NPR book critic Alan Cheuse.

Check out Edd Fuller’s new blog Photography In Place, which I discovered last week when a Google Alert for my name led me to his post about The Photographers’ Railroad Page and my short essay there “Visions Shared.” I’ve added Photography In Place to my list of favorite blogs and websites in the sidebar at the right of the screen.

"The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life" by Lee Maynard

Lee Maynard’s latest book is his best yet. Described as “autobiographical fiction” by West Virginia University Press, it is a road trip that is part interior journey and part physical exploration of the landscape – West Virginia’s hills and hollers, the Sea of Cortez, the desert of New Mexico, and the arctic tundra. Opening with Maynard’s birth in 1936 in the parlor of his grandmother’s home, very short chapters polished like gems cover most of his lifetime between 1941 and 2005.

I immediately connected with the childhood chapters, feeling a kinship in the way that I do with so many Appalachian writers – and those from West Virginia in particular. The best writers have a way of making us think about our own lives through their stories, and the early chapters of The Pale Light of Sunset had me thinking about my own growing up on Jacks Mountain in central Pennsylvania. Maynard’s chapters are short in length, but long on thought – for both the writer and the reader.

Fellow West Virginia writers give The Pale Light of Sunset high praise. Ann Pancake describes the chapters “Arrow in the Light” and “A Death in the Mountains” as “miniature masterpieces” that “chilled my skin in awe.” Richard Currey describes the stories as “infused with a wanderer’s soul” and calls the book a “narrative of the mind and spirit for our own time.” Meredith Sue Willis describes the book as a “fictional memoir – a kind of heightened and imagined life” and says “Lee Maynard writes better than anyone else I know about how a boy is infused with the rules of American manhood.”

I had the good luck of hearing Lee Maynard read in 2003 at the Quiet Storm in Pittsburgh, as he and friend Chuck Kinder set out on their “Outlaw Writers Tour” along with the alt-country band The Deliberate Strangers. Both had new books out: Maynard’s Screaming with the Cannibals and Kinder’s The Last Mountain Dancer.

Maynard had already achieved notoriety with his first book, Crum, which was pretty much banned in his home state of West Virginia. In fact, Tamarack slapped “Adult Content” stickers on two of my favorite books which I bought there after finding them shelved low and in a very dark corner: Chuck Kinder’s Mountain Dancer and Keith Maillard’s Gloria. When I met Keith Maillard a few years back and asked him to sign that copy, he was startled by the neon green adult content sticker slapped on the cover, and gasped “What’s this?” I explained about where I’d bought it and told him not to worry because he was in very good company on that bottom corner bookshelf. When I asked Chuck if he was offended by Tamarack’s actions, he said he’d be offended if they hadn’t put a sticker on his book.

But back to Lee Maynard’s new book. The foreword “I’m still here, Lowenstein, you son of a bitch” intrigued me and by the end of the first chapter “The Parlor” which was barely three pages long, he’d totally hooked me. At times I wanted to savor a particular chapter by putting the book aside and losing myself in thoughts about it, but the momentum of the story propelled me to the next chapter and I could not put the book down for long. I connected most with the early childhood chapters and the later chapters. The rowdy and bawdy young manhood years were interesting and surreal with film noir shadings, and they worked well to make the later chapters all the more poignant. By the end – all the rivers crossed, all the running away from and toward something, all the small details as simple and significant as a treasured button – all those short chapters covering a lifetime of decades add up to one hell of a story.

One of my favorite chapters, “1948: My Mother’s Coat” is about grasping the sense of loss. After running away for the day, Maynard returns home in the evening to find his mother gone: “I charge through the small rooms, breathing the scent of her, knowing that she has been here, waiting for me. There is no fire in the stove and the house is chilled. She is gone. Without her, the house has no meaning.” Another favorite chapter late in the book, “2003: Where I’m From,” is about the images that come to mind as the essence of the West Virginia landscape.

On the page following the dedication, there is a wonderful quote by Lee’s good friend Chuck Kinder: “All Stories are true, if they are well written. The question is what they are telling the truth about.” The stories in The Pale Light of Sunset are truths that I will carry with me for a very long time.

Additional Links:

You can see and hear Lee Maynard talk about The Pale Light of Sunset in this WVU Press podcast.

Cat Pleska interviews Lee Maynard at West Virginia Writers, Inc. which is also available as a podcast.