The New Novel

Some of you have kindly asked what I've been writing lately, what project percolates. There's one I've been working on for quite some time, a novel-in-progress that takes place in 1876. I share a few lines from it here with the hope that I might soon return to it:

From up high, everything seems to spill from itself. Everything is shadowed. The cool at the base of trees. The swollen lip of river. The dark beneath the cliff stones at Rockland, where she had gone last week—taken the steamer, hiked to the summit, and stayed until almost too late. “Oh, Katherine,” her mother sighed the next day, her hand on the door, the velvet streamers falling crooked from her pale straw hat, her eyes on the mud on Katherine’s skirt. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I know what you wish.”

“I’m off to Mrs. Gillespie’s.”

“I know that, too.”

Never enough sky. Never near enough to the scooped-out wings of the hawk, or to the weather. She envies steeples and shot towers. She walks the ridge at Lemon Hill or goes all the way to George’s Hill and stands 210 feet above high tide—keeping her distance from the boys and their kites, the foreigners with their funny talk and funny way of climbing. It is never about getting away from. It is about getting closer to, because Anna had died, and she’d had no business dying. Because maybe her body is in a cherry-wood box dug deep into the side of Laurel Hill, but Anna is still air and height.