The Chekhov, an edition of his stories edited by Richard Ford, is just for bedtime reading. P.K. Page's Brazilian Journal might, I thought, give me some useful ideas, but the voice seems too plain, the approach too straight.
Since I'm on about books I brought, I mention Steveston, 30+ years old and counting, still the model--one of the best ones, anyway--for how to write a place. Rivered writing, rivered place.
That's going to be a challenge for Hillsdale: no river. But streets, maps, crossroads, tiny schools my children attended 35 years after I did, ideas, photo ops, people who moved in 50 years ago when the area was brand new and still live there, and so on. Steveston can teach us how to find form, how to know a place with an open, language-based kind of knowing.
The original schoolhouse here in Eastend, the one Wallace Stegner attended, still stands but hasn't been used, even for a museum or anything, in years. Two-storey, square, red brick. 1918-20 it was a flu hospice, I guess you'd call it.
In Hillsdale, I'm older than any building.
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