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Permanence and Impermanence: A Guest Post by Daniel Mason

By Daniel Mason / October 1, 2024 at 1:19 am

Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason takes readers on a journey through time via the inhabitants of a single plot of New England land. This is a story of how we are all connected, through our environment and our history, and is one that should not be missed. Read on for Daniel Mason’s exclusive guest post on where the influence for North Woods came from.

Paperback $16.00 ~~$18.00~~

North Woods: A Novel

By Daniel Mason

In Stock Online

Paperback $16.00 ~~$18.00~~

One home, four hundred years of history and an unforgettable story of family and fortune, love and loss. Perfect for fans of Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and The Fraud by Zadie Smith.

I’m never really certain where a book comes from. Something starts it off and then it goes about accumulating, a bit like a decorator crab, a character here, another there, a scene, a word, a scrap of dialogue. How these hang on the sometimes wobbling, sometimes scurrying creature that becomes the novel remains a bit of mystery for me, and means that each new project can feel surprising and daunting at once.

In the case of North Woods, the first bits and pieces began to arrange themselves when I was walking in the woods during the pandemic, staying with family in upstate New York, and finding myself intrigued by all the reminders of the inhabitants—human and non-human—who had been there before me. There were old stone walls and cellar holes, but also trees planted in rows and then consumed by the wild forest. Or sudden changes in the canopy that suggested a long-ago planting, the reason lost to time. I was reading a wonderful book called Reading the Forested Landscape, by Tom Wessels, about how the past could be read in the forest of the present. The coming and going— the succession— of these lives seemed to suggest chapters, which would form the structure of the book.

Most of my sources were either biological (whether the pages of a book or walking in the woods) or historical (each chapter offering a chance to read about the history and material world of the time it takes place in). Some favorites included old apple grafting descriptions to help guide some of my favorite characters: Charles Osgood, a British soldier turned orchardist, and his twin daughters Alice and Mary, who grow an apple of perfection inspired by one I found on a forgotten tree in the middle of a Massachusetts field. Or pulp crime fiction, which inspired another character, a 20^th-century, journalist on the track of a murderer. Or some scandalously detailed entomological descriptions of bark beetles, which led to one of the racier chapters of the book.

But I was also influenced by science fiction. At the time I first began to think about natural succession in the New England forest, I was reading Martin Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, and soon after Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. I’d read both when I was in high school, and I don’t know what brought me back to them, nearly thirty years later, during that first autumn of the pandemic. But it was a time when all of us were thinking about permanence and impermanence, and I was struck by the way that both works leapt forward through time, leapfrogging decades or millennia, abandoning characters with impunity, and yet always retaining traces of the past. Their interplanetary worlds are nothing like that of the Massachusetts forest, and yet reading time through those pages made me think about time differently, and wonder what a single spot of woods might have seen over centuries, how many lives would have passed through, unknown to one another, across so many years.