Dissecting New England's long shadows
A young boy whose sister has recently drowned falls in with a backwoods daredevil who throws himself onto the railroad tracks. A man playing hockey falls through the ice. An old logger almost freezes to death in the woods. In Jason Brown's fine story collection "Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work" (Open City, paperback, $14), the inhabitants of Vaughn, Maine, are stalked not by Stephen King horror but by intimate afflictions of blood, accident, and history. Yet their stories are too vivid to be entirely bleak. Maine's woods and rivers, its changing light, are the beautifully rendered constants in a harsh, even malevolent, world.
Brown, whose first book was "Driving the Heart and Other Stories," spoke from the University of Arizona, where he currently teaches.
Q: How did the sequence of these stories develop?
A: Only gradually. The linked story collection based in small towns was my model, and I read everything I could get my hands on starting with [Sherwood Anderson's] "Winesburg, Ohio." Ideally each story would have had characters reappearing, but in eliminating the weaker stories I lost some of those that had characters in common. In the end it's the place that holds them together.
Q: Where did you get the title?
A: It's a combination of phrases from "The Wonders of the Invisible World," by Cotton Mather, in which he talks about witchcraft and why New England was ripe for the devil's business. My family history goes back to that period; they were involved in the witch trials and afterward moved up to Maine. It turns out some of the witchcraft business was about real estate; some judges who were speculators in Maine built on land seized from witches they condemned to death. [Laughs.] That explained a lot about my family, first of all. But I also became more and more interested in that period and the shadow it cast through the generations.
Q: How do you react to the label "New England Gothic"?
A: I guess I haven't rebelled against that. I feel the influence of [Nathaniel] Hawthorne, he was very important to me. People have mentioned the importance of allegory in my work, but I have a mixed relationship with it. I'm drawn toward the archetypal, to detecting past mythologies running through the present, so I think I start off with allegory and then try to complicate it.
Q: But your stories are rooted in a particular town. You even include a map of Vaughn. Why?
A: I hoped that the map would make readers feel the importance of the place in the lives of the characters. I grew up in a town like Vaughn, near Augusta, and I had a 19th-century map of the streets, so I took that as a template. There are a lot of little towns on the Kennebec River that were very powerful in the 1700s because of their location for shipping lumber and ice. When I grew up there in the early '70s, though, the town was economically left behind, isolated.
Q: Are your characters disabled by the past?
A: Certainly they feel - as I felt - the long shadow cast by Puritanism. One character says that every other building in the town is a church. They're not particularly religious people, but the churches are everywhere. And old mansions are everywhere, ship captains' houses. It's a bit like Faulkner's world in that way, people living in the decaying shells of an affluent past.
Q: You write so well about logging, about sailing. Is that from experience?
A: The logger character in "A Fair Chance," I worked for a guy like that. Not for terribly long, but in a way I really loved it. I also grew up with boats down on Sheepscot Bay. My grandparents lived down that way. In the age of schooners my grandfather's family had been sea captains, and I absorbed the mythology of the sea and of that era from him.
Q: When you were logging, were you also writing?
A: When I was cutting for that 60-year-old logger who could run rings around me I was already writing. I romanticized it while I was doing it and iced my back at night. I had grown up with the romance of the river runner and these woodsmen. My uncle is a carpenter in Arrowsic, and I also worked with him. In many ways the satisfaction that comes from working with wood runs deeper than anything else I know.
Q: In your stories it also seems that there is redemption of sorts in that skill.
A: I do believe that. That winter I went to work in the woods, a few years ago, I thought I might give up on writing. I was too slow at it, and I didn't write things that seemed likely to make money. I didn't know what I was going to do. That time in the woods certainly restored me to the kind of writing that I wanted to do, put me back on track, and not just because working in the woods is the hardest work I've ever done. But I hadn't thought of that coming through in the stories. That's good.
Q: You write about characters "never straying too far from Vaughn but never going back." Is that true of you as a writer who moved to California, is now in Arizona?
A: I don't know. I felt trapped in the town, I was preoccupied with escaping. Yet once you do escape, no other place ever feels quite as real. I go back and it's not the town I grew up in. But every place I've lived after that - nice places like San Francisco, the desert - they just feel like movie sets by comparison.
Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com. 