My first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, published in 1979, is fewer than 200 pages long. Yet it took many months and much effort to complete. Part of the reason, of course, was the limited time I had to work on it. I ran a jazz cafe, and I spent my 20s labouring from morning to night to pay off debts. But the real problem was that I hadn’t a clue how to write a novel. To tell the truth, although I had been absorbed in reading all kinds of stuff – my favourites being translations of Russian novels and English-language paperbacks – I had never read modern Japanese novels (of the “serious” variety) in any concerted way. Thus I had no idea what kind of Japanese literature was being read at the time or how I should write fiction in Japanese.
For several months, I operated on pure guesswork, adopting what seemed to be a likely style and running with it, but when I read through the result I was far from impressed. “Good grief,” I moaned, “this is hopeless.” What I had written seemed to fulfil the formal requirements of a novel, yet it was rather boring and, as a whole, left me cold.
A novel I once read described a protagonist as the sort of woman who reads a cookbook in bed. I glance at my bedside and ponder the hardcovers sitting there. Hetty McKinnon. Anna Jones. Alison Roman. Are these not the great writers of our time? Steinbeck lies under a glass of water; the essential, reliable storyteller and coaster. But for practical, everyday beauty, for hope, for love, for mind-changing advice, it was always cookbooks.
Several years ago, Ryan Baumann, a digital humanities developer at Duke University, was leafing through an early twentieth century collection of ancient Greek manuscripts when he ran across an intriguing comment. The author noted that there was an undeciphered form of shorthand in the margins of a piece of papyrus and added a hopeful note that perhaps in the future scholars might be able to read it. The casual aside set Baumann off on a new journey to unlock the secrets of an ancient code.
Initially, Baumann told me, he thought that perhaps everything had been deciphered. “I thought to myself, ‘well, it’s been about 100 years, maybe someone HAS figured it out!’ So, I looked into it, and to my delight, the system of ancient Greek shorthand does seem to have been largely figured out.” To his dismay, though, this century-spanning scholarly achievement has also been largely overlooked and underexplored. Very few people are interested in shorthand.
This is an exquisite story told in exquisite prose. In it, we sense a world troubled by the most essential kind of trouble. Yet, because of her great gifts, Claire Keegan has given us a tale that affirms life and gives us hope. And, even more important, she has created an unforgettable character whose courage can give us courage. This is a story that makes it clear that no act of bravery is ever futile and, by extension, we must each do our part, however small. Her moral message is timely, and our gratitude should be boundless.
When my niece was 4 years old, I introduced her to a swamp — in a park east of Seattle on a trail for kids that was posted with a series of illustrated signs narrating a story called “Zoe and the Swamp Monster.” The word, “swamp,” in all its mystery, beauty, and monstrosity, was new vocabulary to her. We tromped into the dark greenery toward the sedge meadows and read Zoe’s story aloud to each other, about a little girl who befriends a series of swampland animals. I also showed her how to identify bedstraw — a plant with tiny Velcro-like hooks — and attach it to her parents’ clothing, much to their annoyance and her amusement. We stared at mud puddles, mushrooms, leaves, birds’ nests, ferns, and willows, and searched for swampy bogeymen — though none appeared. At the end of the walk, she shouted into the trees, “I’m not afraid of you, Swamp!” It was the lesson I had hoped she’d find there.
It was also a rare moment — both the kind of kid-nature experience that is becoming scarce as everyone spends far too much time with screens, and a quiet revelation about the magic of swampy places. As Annie Proulx reminds us in her new book, “Fen, Bog, and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis,”wetlands are stigmatized in common language, stories, and rhetoric. Quagmires and morasses, for instance, should be avoided.