Elizabeth Graver's Blog - Posts Tagged "graver"
Dear Reader,
My new novel, The End of the Point, begins in 1942 and ends in 1999 and is set almost entirely in a summer community on a two-mile long spit of land on Massachusetts’ Buzzards Bay. Inhabiting this story was, for me, an intricate and steady pleasure. Some of the time, I became the Scottish nanny character, Bea. Other days, I was a troubled young man, Charlie, born into privilege, trying to find himself during the Vietnam War, or his mother, Helen, a restless, fiery intellectual who loses her brother in World War II and later pins her highest hopes on Charlie, her eldest son.
Through all the time travel and imagining, my mind kept returning, again and again, to the paths, rocks and wind-scoured ledges of the little peninsula—the “almost island” of Ashaunt Point. Ashaunt takes its inspiration from a real place where my husband’s family has spent summers for generations; my relationship to both the real place and my invented one began as that of an outsider. Over time, as my writing brought me closer, I began to experience Ashaunt Point as the fourth central character in my book.
If place is central to The End of the Point, so, too, is the power of the written word. The people in this novel read. They read Wallace Stevens and W.H. Auden, nature guides, A Farewell to Arms, A Secret Garden, Anna Karenina, the Johnny Chuck books. They read romance novels, newspapers, real estate ads, and⎯oops!⎯each other’s diaries. And they write. Diaries, but also nature journals, letters of complaint, love letters, war letters. Postcards. Protest signs. Elegies. Messages in bottles, bobbling out to who knows where.
Place. The written word.
It is with particularly keen pleasure that I picture this novel making its way to its readers. Thank you for welcoming it.
Warmly,
Elizabeth Graver
Through all the time travel and imagining, my mind kept returning, again and again, to the paths, rocks and wind-scoured ledges of the little peninsula—the “almost island” of Ashaunt Point. Ashaunt takes its inspiration from a real place where my husband’s family has spent summers for generations; my relationship to both the real place and my invented one began as that of an outsider. Over time, as my writing brought me closer, I began to experience Ashaunt Point as the fourth central character in my book.
If place is central to The End of the Point, so, too, is the power of the written word. The people in this novel read. They read Wallace Stevens and W.H. Auden, nature guides, A Farewell to Arms, A Secret Garden, Anna Karenina, the Johnny Chuck books. They read romance novels, newspapers, real estate ads, and⎯oops!⎯each other’s diaries. And they write. Diaries, but also nature journals, letters of complaint, love letters, war letters. Postcards. Protest signs. Elegies. Messages in bottles, bobbling out to who knows where.
Place. The written word.
It is with particularly keen pleasure that I picture this novel making its way to its readers. Thank you for welcoming it.
Warmly,
Elizabeth Graver
Giveaway, The End of the Point!
http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sho...
Starting today and running through March 2nd, a Goodreads Giveaway of 25 copies of The End of the Point (out in the "real world" on March 5th).The End of the Point
Starting today and running through March 2nd, a Goodreads Giveaway of 25 copies of The End of the Point (out in the "real world" on March 5th).The End of the Point
On Place in Fiction
n her 1956 essay, “Place in Fiction,” Eudora Welty writes about the underlying bond that connects all of the arts with place: “All [the arts] celebrate its mystery. Where does this mystery lie? Is it in the fact that place has a more lasting identity than we have?”
The setting of my new novel, The End of the Point — a fictional two mile spit of land on Massachusetts’ Buzzards Bay — does indeed have a more lasting identity than its people. I begin the book with a land transfer from the Wampanoag Indians to the Colonists in 1652 and end it in 1999, when a summer community is under some threat from human and natural forces alike. Place in my novel is a kind of central character — the rocks, the paths, the land in nature and outside of it. People in The End of the Point beg, borrow, steal, gift, set ablaze, mythologize, tear down, reject and love their rocky, windswept little jut of land.
I ended my novel in 1999 because the year felt like a way to mark a time before: Before the century turned, of course, and before 9/11, but also before the rapid acceleration that marks our 21st-century and that I view as having a profound impact our sense of place. We live in a staggeringly mobile age, where place is increasingly as much virtual as real. These crossings bring many gifts and possibilities, but they may also carry a danger of rootlessness, of disembodiment, of an “everywhere” that is, paradoxically, neither here nor there.
My novel’s four main sections take place in 1942, the 1950′s and 60′s, 1970, and 1999. People communicate with each other and themselves in the most material ways – with telegrams, letters, diaries, a message in a bottle. No one has a cell phone. When the characters are alone, they are truly alone. When they talk, they, well, talk (understanding each other is another thing, plus ça change).
What, I wonder, would Welty make of where we are now, roaming the internet on our warming planet, where actual, physical place as we know it may well not have a lasting identity, at least if we don’t radically change course? The title The End of the Point carries a double meaning – “end” as in furthest point on a peninsula, “end” as in demise. In my book, I celebrate the “there-ness” of a beloved place, even as the second meaning, the demise, hovers just outside the margin, too close to home.
The setting of my new novel, The End of the Point — a fictional two mile spit of land on Massachusetts’ Buzzards Bay — does indeed have a more lasting identity than its people. I begin the book with a land transfer from the Wampanoag Indians to the Colonists in 1652 and end it in 1999, when a summer community is under some threat from human and natural forces alike. Place in my novel is a kind of central character — the rocks, the paths, the land in nature and outside of it. People in The End of the Point beg, borrow, steal, gift, set ablaze, mythologize, tear down, reject and love their rocky, windswept little jut of land.
I ended my novel in 1999 because the year felt like a way to mark a time before: Before the century turned, of course, and before 9/11, but also before the rapid acceleration that marks our 21st-century and that I view as having a profound impact our sense of place. We live in a staggeringly mobile age, where place is increasingly as much virtual as real. These crossings bring many gifts and possibilities, but they may also carry a danger of rootlessness, of disembodiment, of an “everywhere” that is, paradoxically, neither here nor there.
My novel’s four main sections take place in 1942, the 1950′s and 60′s, 1970, and 1999. People communicate with each other and themselves in the most material ways – with telegrams, letters, diaries, a message in a bottle. No one has a cell phone. When the characters are alone, they are truly alone. When they talk, they, well, talk (understanding each other is another thing, plus ça change).
What, I wonder, would Welty make of where we are now, roaming the internet on our warming planet, where actual, physical place as we know it may well not have a lasting identity, at least if we don’t radically change course? The title The End of the Point carries a double meaning – “end” as in furthest point on a peninsula, “end” as in demise. In my book, I celebrate the “there-ness” of a beloved place, even as the second meaning, the demise, hovers just outside the margin, too close to home.
The Page 69 Test
I was asked to do this fun blog entry for a site called The Page 69 Test, where writers examine how Page 69 of their books shed light on the larger work.
http://page69test.blogspot.com/2013/0...
http://page69test.blogspot.com/2013/0...
Nomad Reader Blogs on The End of the Point
Monday, March 11, 2013
book review: The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver
The basics: Spanning three generations of the Porter family and fifty years of their relationships with their hired help, The End of the Point focuses on the family at four different times in history, beginning in the 1950's. Much of the novel takes place at their summer home in Ashaunt, Massachusetts.
My thoughts: Reading The End of the Point made me realize how much I love present-future narrators. As the story of the Porter family unfolds, the reader gets hints of how things are now, even though the story is told in the moment:
"If things had turned out differently, she would have begun the story here--or no, Smitty would have told it; unlike Bea, he loved an audience, he'd have made it funny, drawn it out."
These moments aren't frequent, but as I encountered each one, it felt as though I was unwrapping a present. We don't have the certainty of the future in our own lives, but literature can provide us with one for these characters. It's a testament to Graver's writing and character building that this technique feels so real. I was utterly absorbed in this family that kept growing in number as the generations increased. Graver infuses so much richness into each of them, it's astonishing the novel is as short as it is. It feels more epic than its number of pages, and it feels like a complete story of the people in their time and place. Ashaunt is a character itself:
"She loves her house with a tenderness that makes it feel almost human."
I pictured it so vividly and delighted in seeing how the bedrooms changed hands over the years and depending on which siblings and cousins were there on a given weekend. In fact, as the narrative moved forward to the next moment in time, the house provides the structure, both literally and figuratively, as the reader takes stock of what has changed since the last moment in time.
As I read the last pages, I wept openly and publicly in the airport terminal. When I turned the last page, I was immensely satisfied, yet sad to say goodbye to these characters who felt like family in the two short days I spent with them. Most of all, I wondered how I had not heard of Elizabeth Graver until this, her fourth novel.
Favorite passage: "Largely, now, it was not anger he felt, but rather a kind of bone-scraping, quiet, ever-present sorrow. To come to the place that was supposed to stay the same, to come and find it changed. Dr. Miller had warned him against what he called the "geographic cure." You can't fix yourself by going somewhere else, he'd said. You'll always take yourself along."
The verdict: The End of the Point is a beautifully written, deeply moving portrait of three generations of the Porter family and the their evolving relationships with their servants and caregivers.
http://nomadreader.blogspot.com/2013/...
book review: The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver
The basics: Spanning three generations of the Porter family and fifty years of their relationships with their hired help, The End of the Point focuses on the family at four different times in history, beginning in the 1950's. Much of the novel takes place at their summer home in Ashaunt, Massachusetts.
My thoughts: Reading The End of the Point made me realize how much I love present-future narrators. As the story of the Porter family unfolds, the reader gets hints of how things are now, even though the story is told in the moment:
"If things had turned out differently, she would have begun the story here--or no, Smitty would have told it; unlike Bea, he loved an audience, he'd have made it funny, drawn it out."
These moments aren't frequent, but as I encountered each one, it felt as though I was unwrapping a present. We don't have the certainty of the future in our own lives, but literature can provide us with one for these characters. It's a testament to Graver's writing and character building that this technique feels so real. I was utterly absorbed in this family that kept growing in number as the generations increased. Graver infuses so much richness into each of them, it's astonishing the novel is as short as it is. It feels more epic than its number of pages, and it feels like a complete story of the people in their time and place. Ashaunt is a character itself:
"She loves her house with a tenderness that makes it feel almost human."
I pictured it so vividly and delighted in seeing how the bedrooms changed hands over the years and depending on which siblings and cousins were there on a given weekend. In fact, as the narrative moved forward to the next moment in time, the house provides the structure, both literally and figuratively, as the reader takes stock of what has changed since the last moment in time.
As I read the last pages, I wept openly and publicly in the airport terminal. When I turned the last page, I was immensely satisfied, yet sad to say goodbye to these characters who felt like family in the two short days I spent with them. Most of all, I wondered how I had not heard of Elizabeth Graver until this, her fourth novel.
Favorite passage: "Largely, now, it was not anger he felt, but rather a kind of bone-scraping, quiet, ever-present sorrow. To come to the place that was supposed to stay the same, to come and find it changed. Dr. Miller had warned him against what he called the "geographic cure." You can't fix yourself by going somewhere else, he'd said. You'll always take yourself along."
The verdict: The End of the Point is a beautifully written, deeply moving portrait of three generations of the Porter family and the their evolving relationships with their servants and caregivers.
http://nomadreader.blogspot.com/2013/...
How Did The End of the Point Originate?
How did The End of the Point originate?
This book took me a long time to write, both because of the particular challenges and pleasures that went into it and because over the past decade, my non-writing life has been very full—with the birth of two children, the illness and death of my father, the daily routines of teaching and family life, and, perhaps most centrally, the growing sense that I didn’t want to rush; time moves fast enough on its own. Over the years, as the story took shape, I spent a part of every summer and many fall and spring weekends at the real place that my fictional place grew out of. Often,while I was there, I wrote. I walked the paths, navigated the rocks to swim in the ocean and began to feel that the land—and the one-room cabin my husband had built on it—was a kind of home to me—not (as it is to my husband and our daughters) a first home, but a surrogate second home, at once alluring and vexed. I watched my children learn to walk, swim and live in nature there, the place a great gift for them but also a complicated privilege and even a danger—for how fully it can shelter and how much it can exclude. I used this real place as a way to begin to imagine my fictional Ashaunt Point.
This book took me a long time to write, both because of the particular challenges and pleasures that went into it and because over the past decade, my non-writing life has been very full—with the birth of two children, the illness and death of my father, the daily routines of teaching and family life, and, perhaps most centrally, the growing sense that I didn’t want to rush; time moves fast enough on its own. Over the years, as the story took shape, I spent a part of every summer and many fall and spring weekends at the real place that my fictional place grew out of. Often,while I was there, I wrote. I walked the paths, navigated the rocks to swim in the ocean and began to feel that the land—and the one-room cabin my husband had built on it—was a kind of home to me—not (as it is to my husband and our daughters) a first home, but a surrogate second home, at once alluring and vexed. I watched my children learn to walk, swim and live in nature there, the place a great gift for them but also a complicated privilege and even a danger—for how fully it can shelter and how much it can exclude. I used this real place as a way to begin to imagine my fictional Ashaunt Point.
New York Times Review
The End of the Point received a lovely, smart, perceptive New York Times review by Alida Becker today. It's an amazing feeling to work so long and so hard and in such a private, largely solitary way on a book--this one took me over seven years to write--and then to send it off into the world and have it find readers who GET it. For me, this is a very particular sense of being seen, not for your own self--for the writing is not my self, exactly--but for some essential soul-ness that is and is not the self, that is, perhaps, the self combined with the world and the imagination, the book a little piece of architecture born from the long process of coaxing and knocking down, of reworking, dreaming, doubting, trusting and (mostly) returning and returning to try to get it right.
I remember going back to give a reading from my first novel, Unravelling, at Wesleyan University, where I'd been an undergraduate some years before. My mentor and teacher, Annie Dillard, was there, and she pulled me aside moments before the reading and said, "We've known each other socially over the years, and as student and teacher, and now I've read your novel. Which way do I know you better?"
"Through reading the novel," I said.
"Knock 'em dead, kiddo," Annie said and sent me out to read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/boo...The End of the Point
I remember going back to give a reading from my first novel, Unravelling, at Wesleyan University, where I'd been an undergraduate some years before. My mentor and teacher, Annie Dillard, was there, and she pulled me aside moments before the reading and said, "We've known each other socially over the years, and as student and teacher, and now I've read your novel. Which way do I know you better?"
"Through reading the novel," I said.
"Knock 'em dead, kiddo," Annie said and sent me out to read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/boo...The End of the Point
Literary New England Radio Show
Call in to talk to the host and enter to win a book!
Interviews with Elizabeth Graver, Emily Rapp, Joyce Carol Oates, and Ruth Ozeki.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/literary...The End of the PointThe Still Point of the Turning World
Interviews with Elizabeth Graver, Emily Rapp, Joyce Carol Oates, and Ruth Ozeki.
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/literary...The End of the PointThe Still Point of the Turning World
Q&A with Deborah Kalb
In her wonderful essay, "Place in Fiction," Eudora Welty writes, "Place in fiction is the named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced, in the novel's progress. Location pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling about history partakes of place."
Welty gets at the compelling mix of the particular and the vast that a focus on place can provide for a writer, as well as at the emotional pulse of place. I'm very attached to the natural world of New England, and I view this novel as a kind of (complicated) love song to that world...
read more of the Q&A at....
http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/...
Welty gets at the compelling mix of the particular and the vast that a focus on place can provide for a writer, as well as at the emotional pulse of place. I'm very attached to the natural world of New England, and I view this novel as a kind of (complicated) love song to that world...
read more of the Q&A at....
http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/...
