One of the many things I worked hard to get right in Wilderness was landscape description. At the beginning of the book my character, Abel Truman, is living as a recluse on the wild northwest coast of Washington State. One of the reasons I chose to set much of the novel in that locale is the striking other quality to the landscape; to visit there—let alone live there—is alienating and strange and suits the character of Abel.

Here are some passages from Wilderness, paired with photographs of the landscape that inspired them:

“Within the bounds of his little cove stood sea-stacks weirdly canted from the waves.  Tide gnawed remnants of antediluvian islands and eroded coastal headlands, the tall stones stood monolithic and forbidding, hoarding the so by moonlight their rough, damp facings took on a soft, alien shine: purple, ghostblue and glittering in the moon- and ocean-colored gloom.  Grass and small, wind-twisted scrub pine stood from the stacks in patches…”

“All along the shore, behind the cabin and down the banks of the river, stood the dark and olden wilderness tumbling in a jade wave to the shore.  Numberless, green centuries of storm and tide had stranded massive logs of driftwood against the standing trunks so they lay in long heaps and mounds.  Strange, quiet citadels of wood, sand and stone.  Natural reliquaries encasing the dried bones of birds and fish, raccoons and seals, and the sad remains of drowned seamen carried by current and tide from Asia.  Seasons of sun over long, weary years, had turned the great logs silver, then white.  The endless ranks of wood provided the old man’s home with a natural windbreak in storm seasons, and he spent many nights awake, listening to the mournful sound of the wind at play in the tangle.”

“Their meal finished, Abel threw sand on the remains of the fire before walking with the dog out across the beach into the surf.  The massive, dark sea stacks rose from the water like strange teeth from the floor of the ocean’s jaw.  Occasionally, the setting sun would come flaring through the clouds to silhouette a tiny hogsback island farther out to sea.  The old man and the dog sat together on a boulder and watched the tide come in all around them.”

“A thick, wet mist clung to the forest at his left and a cool wind slowly tattered it.  The tide lay far to sea and the sand was crossed and recrossed with the rolling, wheel-like tracks of hermit crabs and the precise, pencil-thin prints of oystercatchers.  The smell of beached kelp and broken shells, of damp sand that had never been dry and rock pools astir with tiny fishes was as heavy as the sound of crashing surf was constant.  And wind never-ending.”

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Join us TODAY at 5:00 for a signing and reading to follow at 5:30 with Lance Weller. Wilderness is one of our favorite books of the year and is our September pick for First Editions Club.

Wilderness is published by Bloomsbury and signed first editions will be available at Lemuria for $25.

Check out Lance Weller’s blog here.

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I was born in 1965 in Everett, Washington to parents too young. I was born small but still too large for my mother and my birth was hard on her. My father, side-by-side with his father, worked the freezers of a local dairy company and to this day I feel nostalgic when I drive by a dairy factory. In the end, my parents were equal to the task of raising me and raising me well but the doing of it made inroads into them, into their lives, that scoured away what joys in being young they might otherwise have known. They came home from work tired and went to bed tired and woke in the morning tired still. I remember trailers and mobile homes and tiny apartments but little in the way of conversation or music. I remember quiet and I remember books.

By the time I was old enough to read, I felt old enough to write. I spent weekends that became weeks that, at least once, stretched to months, with my paternal grandparents where my grandmother harbored dreams of writing romance novels. I remember the books from her correspondence courses and her old typewriter that she let me practice on. My earliest memory of writing is of sitting at that typewriter tapping out short stories of Twilight Zone episodes I had watched on my grandparents’ black and white television.

At some point, I came across a picture of Hemingway at his desk. He was still in the prime of his prime, sitting in profile with his fingers upon the keys of his typewriter—you couldn’t even see the desk itself, but you just knew it was there and that it had to be either grand or just some plain table. I kept that picture in my pocket for a long time and the first birthday gift I ever remember asking for was a desk like Hemingway’s, but I never found one.

I fell in love at 20 and at 24 my heart was broken. At 25 I met the great love of my life and married her and, somewhere along the line, she finally convinced me to give up the dreary, desperate world of restaurant work to write since that was all I wanted to do. I wrote a terrible novel and then another. I wrote a few short stories that were alright and that were published and I was paid for one of them and began to feel like a real writer. I began thinking of an old man and his dog by the sea and would tell my wife stories about him before sleep.

To support us, my wife remained with restaurant work I’d abandoned and I would drive her home every night after closing. While waiting for her, I’d sit and drink coffee and I’d often see a man sitting alone in a booth with his own books. He was architect and he was the loneliest man I’ve ever known. One night, apropos of nothing, he started talking about the audacity of General Lee dividing his army in the face of the enemy at Chancellorsville. I knew nothing at all of the Civil War and he shamed me for it asking why I didn’t know the first thing about my own country. So I picked up a general history and then another and a third and then gathered books on specific battles. The old man who I’d tell my wife stories of began to take better shape, gaining a history and, finally, a name. After a summer of reading, I sat down and began to describe Abel’s shack and his dog, his rifle and his crippled arm. Slowly, the book accreted detail to itself.

I worked steadily, producing a draft and then another. I managed two trips back east to visit the battlefields for research on Abel’s war and drew on what was outside my window for his northwest world. Sometime after high school, my father introduced me to the outdoors and together we hiked in the Cascades and the Olympics and on the wild north coast of Washington State. Something stirred within me, out in the wilderness, something in the breeze and the green and the moss and the stones resonated within me. I took trips alone into the backcountry where the stars were nothing like the stars over town and the darkness seemed somehow more absolute. I twice hiked the Wonderland Trail, which circles Mount Rainier, and came off the trail once at a high place and almost died for it. On a solo hike above Mowich Lake on Rainier, a black bear surprised me as I was eating a ham sandwich and I’ve seen coyotes slinking through the blasted fields around the ruins of Mount St. Helens. And as I walked in these places, seeing these things, I was crafting sentences and paragraphs and pages. Soon enough, the manuscript gained a title, Wilderness, and Abel Truman found a home amidst the sea stacks and weird rocks of Washington’s north coast.

But then I got sick. For weeks I barely left the house and for months I wrote nothing at all. I’d had no real success for years of work. I put the book away because what faith I’d had in it and in myself was lost and they were lost a long time. I was lost a long time. Eventually, I stumbled across a call for manuscripts for a magazine dedicated to Lincoln’s literary essence and recalled I’d once had a single paragraph in Wilderness (long since stripped out) where Abel watched the lonesome funeral train pass by in the distance. Finding the fragment, I rewrote it, researching the train’s route and making a story of Abel encountering it and, just like that, Abel came back to me. The writing was easy and it felt good; my fingers felt good doing it and my health improved. I sent the story in and it was accepted right away which gave me the confidence I needed to give Wilderness a final rewrite and sent it out into the world.

But I’m still looking for the right desk.

-Lance Weller

Join us Wednesday at 5:00 for a signing and reading to follow at 5:30 with Lance Weller. Wilderness is one of our favorite books of the year and is our September pick for First Editions Club.

Wilderness is published by Bloomsbury and signed first editions will be available at Lemuria for $25.

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Magnificent, Masterful, Stunning: I remember reading the praise on the front of Wilderness. I also remember finishing it and thinking that it lived up to every bit of it.

Our bookstore friend and author Jeffrey Lent is responsible for some of the praise. Jeffrey, author of In the Fall, Lost Nation, A Peculiar Grace and After You’ve Gone, shares his thoughts on Lance Weller’s Wilderness.

After reading a bound manuscript copy of Wilderness, I used the word ‘magnificent’ to describe it. But in the several months that have passed since that reading, another more potent word has come to mind. Majestic. Majesty settles over this novel following patient but inevitable contemplation. Such meditations aren’t thrust upon you, it’s simply part of the novel’s stark beauty that returns to your mind over and over. Unbidden, scenes flash in memory, narrative threads tangle and clarify, only to re-tangle again, as other clarities press in. And it occurs to you that you have been changed, perhaps profoundly so, by reading this lovely, heartbreaking novel.

The usual places in print and electronic media will soon enough fill up with myriad plot descriptions and analyses debating textual choices and Lance Weller’s prose. Such is the nature of modern life. I’d interject only to offer a quote from Thoreau: A critic is a navigator who has never sailed from sight of land. And Weller takes us out onto wild and choppy seas with the calm assurance of one who has charted a careful thoughtful course and then masterfully pilots us through the voyage.

For this is a novel of a voyage; of several journeys that ultimately become the single journey of a lifetime. Of an old man, who many years after losing the war in the battle that gives the novel its name, sets out from the coast of Washington to make his way east over the winter mountains, on a quest he suspects he’ll fail at but must nevertheless attempt, to the much younger man who found his way from his home in upstate New York to a life in the south, where, even before the dreadfulness of the war descends, has been visited by the depths of horror in the destruction of a daughter, and then his wife. With the war, he fights because he must, and learns also that he can; the warrior emerges. In the most terrible of ways, the war restores his humanity, and then strips it away again, from comrades standing and fallen, from the slaves who save his life but at the cost of their own, from the wounds he sustains, and that remain, daily, during his long years of self-exile on the north Pacific coast, where in the weeks we travel with him he takes one last stab at life. It stabs back. Hard. This is not a man who is healed, he simply hasn’t yet died.

In the end Lance Weller has given us not simply another Civil War novel but a deeply and profoundly American novel. In the years after that conflict the country was filled up with tens of thousands of broken men, with rudimentary prostheses, or none at all. Look at the photographs of those veterans in old age, at the hard staring eyes, and know it’s not the camera, the photographer, their glare lies upon. Consider our own grandfathers and fathers, veterans of the First and Second World Wars, of Korea. Of the heartbreak that was Vietnam, a war that divided and broke the nation in ways not seen since the Civil War, and that I’m far from alone in thinking led in ways both dire and stunningly obscene to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And of the years that now lie ahead for those damaged service men and women, our sisters, brothers, children, neighbors.

It is them, finally, all of them, that inhabit Wilderness.

And yes, the man, while struggling with humanity, does maintain an ongoing link with love, creation, and life, through the shared devotion and dependence with dogs, from the war to the mountain trek at the end of his life. I hesitate to belabor a point but can’t help but be reminded of the strong bonds between our present military personnel and their service animals- see the Wounded Warrior Project website or related ones.

I know I intimated I’d leave comments about Lance Weller’s prose to all those who’ll otherwise chime in, but can’t let myself sign off without a comment of my own. Weller writes a graceful seemingly effortless but lyric and thoughtful line. Followed by another and yet another. In his hands the ordinary appears extraordinary, the extraordinary nothing beyond what is called for. A stylist of the highest mark, bringing subtle but tactile delight to the page, to the work entire. And thus, rarely but time to time, we’re offered a gift. With Wilderness, you face such a moment.

Reach out your hands and take it up.

-Jeffrey Lent

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Lance Weller will be signing and reading at Lemuria on Wednesday, September 5th at 5:00 and 5:30.

Wilderness our September selection for First Editions Club and is published by Bloomsbury We’ll have signed copies available for $25.

Click here for another take on Wilderness.

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Wilderness by Lance Weller is Lemuria’s September First Editions Club choice. In April Wilderness caught my attention when my pal Jeffrey Lent sent me an e-mail proclamation about this novel.

It was many years ago when Jeff became a Lemurian. Over the years Lemuria has chosen three of his titles as First Edition Club selections. Jeffrey was our first reader to suggest two other authors for us to read which then became First Edtions choices: Edward P. Jones and David Anthony Durham.

Jeffrey has traveled to Dixie, stayed with me, and we have talked books over much beverage while sharing our joys of reading. Jeff has not been shy about offering reading suggestions. Over the years he has shared many of his favorites with Lemuria.

Jeff, our fine author and friend, has another trait he likes to help other writers he admires. He is a champion in trying to get authors a bookstore home. He understands the sense of bookstore place and what that means. He can match tastes so well. I cannot figure out how he evaded becoming a bookseller.

With all that said, you can see why I took note when I received an e-mail about Lance Weller’s Wilderness. When I got my advance reading copy with his quotation on the front–“Magnificent!”–that meant something to me.

I agree Wilderness is an astonishing first novel with a large scope, conveying fictional reality. By large, I mean this beautifully written novel is set in 1965, 1899 and during the Civil War. Expert writing keeps the reader from being jerked by time.

I’m not really interested in talking about the fine plot or the journey of this story. However, I will mention the humanity of these characters, about how well they seem to convey something hidden about life. Wilderness lets the substance of man unfold. An evolution of the human core is expressed as souls travel through physical action. The reader experiences relationships in hard, trying times. Somehow Lance lets Abel, the main character, and others convey a heart essence of living experiences while experiencing turmoil and extremes.

Lance captures the human side of brutality without giving into the neurosis of fear and revenge. Writing with softness, Lance lets the reader thrive within his characters’ actions and especially their feelings. However, this writing is not emotionally driven and somehow the reader fills in the gaps with their own emotions.

Heminway’s old standard of looking between the lines for what is not said doesn’t fit for me, but it’s real close and different. Wilderness does not offer up what the characters are feeling so the reader must dig deeper. For me, this writer’s skill and touch makes Wilderness unique and extraordinary.

Nature plays a huge role in Wilderness. It’s almost like a character. Man’s fate interweaves the human heart with the soul of nature. Nature seems to offer a God-likeness for life, within life and when life no longer exists.

Complexities within the simple, bigness and smallness all at once. Cosmically, Abel’s story weaved with a universal essence  inside the reader’s mind. What’s amazing to me is that Lance achieves all these elements without becoming mythologically influenced or overly symbolized.

Wilderness is a beautiful novel, harsh and loving. A “magnificent” reading experience there is no doubt to quote Lent. I’ve been moved by many writers who have touched my spirit and help guide my path. Wilderness is  now a guide so to stand with those other fine works who have touched me the most.

I also want to mention Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, both First Edition Club choices, as they have a similar essence. Wilderness is no less of an accomplishment.

Please consider reading this book. With that said, I acknowledge so many fine contributions members of our First Editions Club have been able to enjoy, collect and talk about with other readers.

Study our past selections, if you like our choices, join our club and don’t miss the future. We have our choices. These books are chosen with reason and judgement and we work hard selecting our prize titles.

Lance Weller will be signing and reading at Lemuria on Wednesday, September 5th at 5:00 and 5:30.

Wilderness is published by Bloomsbury and is available at Lemuria for $25.

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“When Will I Be Home?”

When will I be home? I don’t know.

In the mountains, in the rainy night,

The autumn lake is flooded.

Someday we will be together again.

We will sit in the candlelight by the west window.

And I will tell you how I remember you

Tonight on the stormy mountain.

by Li Shang-Yin

Hig is the main character in The Dog Stars by Peter Heller and “When Will I Be Home?” is his favorite poem.

Li Shang-Yin (c. 813 to 858) is considered the last great poet of the Tang Dynasty. Li’s work was a departure from previous Chinese poetry because of his interest and the mood of his poems. Romance began to appear in the poetry of Tu Mu and Li Ho; however, with Li Shang-Yin romance became a central theme, especially in his experimental poetry. Li influenced Tz’u, a new poetry form, with romance and eroticism being the principle concerns.

With his second innovation, Li believed a poem should embody mysteries. Poetry should comprise a consciousness blended with the inner patterns of the cosmos, a primal vitality. Li wanted his poems to create mood and move atmosphere, rather than focusing on clarity and statement. His poems are so elusive and mysterious that when I first read his work in May 2009, I found his poems hard to understand and enjoy. Many readers feel this elusiveness is his poetry’s great strength. For his time, Li pushed experimentation to its limits.

Li’s poems are symbols and they create mysterious worlds which I also found to be an interesting association with The Dog Stars. Li Shang-Yin and Peter Heller concentrate on humanity and both are experimental. Both writers are mysterious and are influenced by the inner patterns of human beings and the primal mentality of the cosmos.

Peter Heller’s odd stream of consciousness style created inner reflection and a mysterious mood, hypnotizing me, his reader, to become a part of his postapocalyptic world. I found reading Dog Stars to be an experience filled with transcendentalism, a collection of bizarre human relationships held together by nature.

The Dog Stars prompted me to read Li and I feel more comfortable now going back to his work. And so I found a favorite of Li’s poetic lines from The Brocade Ch’in:

(Ch’in is a musical instrument associated with romance and love.)

“Moonlight on vast seas–it’s a pearl’s tear”

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For Dog Star readers who want to explore Li Shang-Yin, I suggest Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology edited and translated by David Hinton.

The Dog Stars is published by Knopf and is available as a signed first edition at Lemuria for $24.95. The Dog Stars is our August pick for First Editions Club.