For his newest project, “The Year of Living Constitutionally,” journalist A.J. Jacobs donned a tricorne hat, lugged a musket around town, and shunned electricity in favor of reading by candlelight and writing with a goose quill pen. The goal was to climb inside the heads of America’s Founding Fathers and explore the logic of basing today’s Supreme Court rulings on an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.
Mr. Jacobs practices a modern form of “stunt journalism,” in which the reporter directly participates in a story instead of merely observing it. “I like to understand things by living them,” he says. Immersion journalism, as it is also called, dates to the 1800s in the U.S.
Our brains never see the past clearly. They are like painters who are never satisfied. They constantly retouch the past with the colors of the present, putting a fresh version of ourselves on display for us to ponder.
On a steamy June evening, Curtis Eckerman embarks on a mothing expedition in the Bauerle Ranch greenbelt, in far South Austin. Towing a wagon full of supplies, he follows a narrow trail that leads between mesquite trees and into a secluded oak grove suffused with golden late-afternoon light. Eckerman, the chair of the biology department at Austin Community College, parks the wagon and begins to wrap a tree trunk in white cloth. Next he suspends a battery-powered ultraviolet light from a low branch. He’s optimistic we’ll see lots of different moths tonight; it’s been a warm, humid day, conducive to plant growth and, by extension, activity by plant-eating creatures. The oak grove is full of frostweed, persimmon trees, and various grasses, each vital to different moth species. That’s another good sign: a wide variety of plants will draw a variety of moths.
When he finishes his preparations, it’s about eight o’clock. Moths emerge to eat, mate, and lay eggs once it’s completely dark—and fellow moth-ers will arrive any moment now. Eckerman mops his brow and takes a swig from his water bottle. “Now we just wait.”
Like most estuaries, the Chesapeake Bay varies greatly in salinity levels from season to season and year to year. Rainstorms and snowmelt in the spring can make the water fresher or, as locals sometimes say, sweeter; droughts and hot spells in the summer can make the water saltier. A dry year can cause slower river flows and more sea nettles during your afternoon swim; heavier rains in other years might lead to an oyster die-off and push crabs farther south. The technical word for this kind of water—saltier than fresh, fresher than salt—is brackish. And there’s a technical definition as well: any water with between half a gram and thirty grams of salt per litre.
I’ve never really consulted a doctor about this, but it’s my sense that this is roughly the salinity level of the blood of any given Marylander as well. That’s because of our exceptionally liberal use of the regionally beloved substance known as Old Bay. It’s a spice-and-herb mix that’s super salty and oh, so slightly sweet, a perfect culinary simulation of late summer and early fall—not too hot, with the hint of a breeze. Appearance-wise, it has the deep brick red of Southern roads and flecks of gold like grains of sand. Like sand, too, it has a habit of getting everywhere—on hands, trousers, tables, chins, and, of course, every food you can imagine.
But there has to be a balance between vagueness and detail. I have come to see writing recipes as akin to writing short stories. They need a beginning, a middle and an end. They need a strong narrative arc. But most importantly the reader needs to feel they are at the heart of the action. They need to feel empowered. If a recipe is too doctrinaire it’s as dull as assembling an Ikea table. There needs to be space for interpretation, room for the cook to recognise something fundamental: that it’s no longer the writer’s dish. It’s now yours. It’s your glug of wine, your splash of vinegar, your pinch of nutmeg. Taste the dish. Does it need more? Then put some in. It’s as simple as that.
So, your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.
A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you looked back from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.
Lee set The Dark We Know in a dried up mining town in the middle of winter, when everything is cold and dreary and dead. Slater is the kind of place where everyone is all up in everyone else’s business and the only places to hang out are the local diner and the woods. The plot unfolds slowly (perhaps a little too slowly), before ratcheting up in intensity and fervor until it’s got you hooked. While I remain unconvinced by the handwaving that goes on to explain what’s actually happening in the town, the confrontations with the monstrous being are entertaining and chilling.
Fear often stems from truths we don’t want to face, like the truth of our inevitable death or the senseless violence that’s all around us. Our own pasts haunt us more than a horror movie’s absurdity. Lena Valencia’s debut short story collection, Mystery Lights, is particularly eerie as she expertly pulls the horror from reality. Again and again, she hits too close to home: a woman feeling scared on her own in a trailer in the desert, even while she fights that feeling. A dormitory haunting that becomes sexual assault. The rich and successful exploiting the young and poor. Online fads that turn into violence.
People disappear, during war, in crimes, from accidents, even by choice. Juliet Grames explores how each disappearance comes with secrets in her sophisticated second novel, “The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia.”