A Library, a Story, and Hometown Stillness
This post was written on June 14, 2016.
In 2011, I decided to revise my favorite piece of writing: a 100-page novella that I’d written, and considered finished, in 2002. The characters had been with me for years, and were close to my heart; their story was haunting, and sad, but complete. When an enthusiastic literary agent suggested she’d take me on as a client if I turned the novella into a full-length novel, I felt I had no choice but to agree to the challenge. And so I pulled up the Word file--which I hadn’t touched in any significant way for years--and prepared to crack Ramsy and Stella’s world wide open. The novel would eventually become Each Vagabond by Name.
I was living in Brooklyn at the time, six months pregnant and with a toddler underfoot. I didn’t have a lot of spare time to write two hundred pages of new content. But I squeezed it into naptime and evenings, and on weekends I’d slip away to a cafe for a few hours to write. Eventually, I had a mass of new scenes and a printed-out manuscript littered with arrows and cross-references and cuts and scribbled notes. Ironing out this mess into an actual draft of a novel would require hours of sustained concentration.
It was time to go to Connellsville.
More specifically, it was time to go to the Carnegie Library in Connellsville, one of the most beautiful and atmospheric places I could imagine for writing. Each morning, I left my daughter with my parents and waited outside the library for the door to open at ten. Then I’d lay claim to a table in The Gettys Room, one of the tables with a lamp and an outlet, and I’d sit there for the rest of the day--until my motivation and energy gave way to aimless staring at the page.
So much of Each Vagabond by Name was created in--and depended on--this library. Each chapter of the novel opens with a street address, and in my story each street name is a wildflower native to Pennsylvania. I found the names of these flowers in a worn field guide I discovered in the reference room where I sat. There’s a scene in the novel when Stella gets a palm reading from a young girl outside the local supermarket--I found the language and details for the reading in a palm reading guide I hunted down in the stacks. Gloriously, I found the guide using an actual card catalog. Could I have Googled these things? Of course. But finding the information in physical form, turning pages and looking up call numbers, gave it substance, gave it heart.
Most significantly for me, I wrote the entire last chapter of the novel while sitting at my creaky wooden library table. The novel needed a new ending: some tying-up not of loose ends but of raw, stray feeling. My characters needed a coda. They needed an afterlife. In my original novella, the story ends on a tragic night where anger reaches a violent peak and everything unspoken finally comes to light. But now--with three hundred pages behind them--that didn’t seem like enough. And so I began writing (in longhand, which is what I do) new scenes in a new season, when conflict has been shaken out like dusty rugs and the air is beginning to clear. To do this, I needed my characters to talk to me. I needed to see them move, hear them think. I didn’t know, when I began writing the chapter, where it would end up. I had to trust the story to move forward; and I had to have the kind of quiet where that fictional world was the only thing I could hear.
(I’ll digress for a moment: Writing a chapter like this is the payoff for the years of work, the endless cutting, the at times physically painful forcing of not-right words onto the page. Having characters take over, and the story nearly tell itself, is when the writing is something other than typing or scrawling. It’s a kind of fortune telling. A whole life built from cups and wands that fell from the deck the way they had to. Were meant to.)
But back to the quiet: the mystical, generative quiet. I couldn’t have found it in a Brooklyn cafe with city life bustling; I couldn’t have found it in my parents’ house with my kid giggling in another room; I couldn’t have found it in the tiny city apartment where I lived at the time, at my desk squeezed between a bookshelf and baby swing. The right kind of stillness was available only at the library, in the town where I’d lived for eighteen years.
I’ll be doing a hometown book-launch reading on Saturday, June 18, 2pm at the Carnegie Library, returning to read from a real book to the place where the story was just a dream and a pile of pages. Few things in life offer so exquisite a sense of fulfillment. When I get there, I’ll sit for a moment at the table where my characters whispered their final movements. And the paragraphs I’ll read to my Connellsville friends and family will be an offering of thanks.
Join me on Saturday, local Pennsylvania readers. The reading is free and open to the public. I’ll have books for sale, and after the reading you can say hello while sampling from a bonafide southwestern Pennsylvania cookie table. Carnegie Library in Connellsville, Saturday 6/18, 2pm.
PS: There are no more card catalogs at the Carnegie Library. The library switched to digital a few years ago and offered their card catalogs--there were five, three full-size, two partial--to whomever submitted the highest bid for the whole group. Where are they now? Lovingly housed in New Jersey, of course. Come and visit sometime: you’ll see them as soon as you walk through the door. There was no way I would have let them go.
