Introducing a new indie press and a debut novelist: Kate Gray/Carry the Sky/Forest Avenue Press

A few weeks ago, a note arrived from Laura Stanfill, the publisher of a brand-new press called Forest Avenue. Laura knew of my interest in the Schuylkill River. She'd been talking with a mutual friend (the fabulous Colleen Mondor, a fabulous author AND indie publisher). She wondered, she wrote, if I'd be interested in taking a look at a new novel by an award-winning poet named Kate Gray, a book, she said, that "is an unblinking look at boarding school bullying based on Kate's first year as a teacher, with a strong rowing emphasis, including a major plot point that happens on the Schuylkill." The book, Laura continued, "celebrates the river's strength and beauty—and its rowers." It has already been celebrated by writers like Hannah Tinti (about whom I once wrote here), Ron Carlson (whose work I love and mentioned here), and Christopher Buckley.

Laura went on to describe Forest Avenue Press, which has recently signed with a division of the distributor PGW/Perseus and which (pay attention to this) is opening nationally for submissions in January.

A new, award-winning press with promise, I thought.

An editor who deeply loves her authors and is committed to finding a broad audience for her work.

A poet novelist.

The river.

I'm in.

Yesterday and early this morning I've been reading Carry the Sky, this newly launched novel. Gray is a poet all right—a fierce one, a smart one, a writer who knows her rowing, her rivers, the claustrophobia of boarding school bullying, the ache of loss, Physics, and origami. She tells her story through the alternating voices of a Delaware boarding school's new rowing coach and the Physics teacher—both of whom are operating within a haunted psychic space. She tells her story with urgency and with details—physical and emotional—that are wholly unexpected. No cliches here, not in this urgent novel.

For example: Here is Taylor, the rowing coach, in a field with a boy who is different, a boy talking about death, a boy around whom the plot will soon turn:

The flocks of geese in these fields made the ground come alive. Their way of feeding and calling made a hum, something steady. "Why are you talking about death?" His face jerked left like a machine, then jerked right. Without looking at his face, I put the dinosaur on his blanket.

"Why do you like rowing?" he asked. The question was drum roll, cymbal crash, horn.

It was something to do with not wanting to feel pain but wanting to know pain. Like wanting to know fire. You light it in front of you, the colors all over the place, the heat all over your skin, but you don't want to burn or anything. I don't know, but I understand him a little more in the middle of that field, with geese all over everywhere, geese getting along with the swans, and all of us finding a place to land.

In a Q and A at the end of Carry the Sky, Kate Gray speaks of the road she took toward publishing. It wasn't an easy one. It required fortitude—eight years to write the book, two years to revise it, a series of rejections, and then the balm of a writing group:

After I had written and rewritten a complete draft, received rejections when I sent the manuscript out, my indefatigable partner gathered a group of twelve friends to our house for potlucks once a month, and we read the entire draft out loud. Their questions and insights were invaluable. Reading the whole thing out loud let me hear the gaps, the promise.

And so, to a riveting debut novelist, to a brand-new press, to the partner who cared, to the friends who listened, to the rivers that haunt and sustain us — many congratulations on a work of art.

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Backstory

I have been thinking about backstory and its choreography—the rise and fall of what is happening right this instant in a story, set against what is remembered, what comes before. Transitions between the present and the past and back to present again become as important as plot. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that perfectly executed transitions are plot.

I've been thinking about those authors who are masters at this sort of thing—Michael Ondaatje, of course. Wallace Stegner. Alice McDermott. Jayne Anne Phillips. Alyson Hagy. Ann Patchett, in her newest novel, RUN, does an exquisite job (I think) of slipping between the now and then of her characters' lives. So does Howard Norman in THE BIRD ARTIST, Ron Carlson in FIVE SKIES, Debra Dean in THE MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD, and Sarah Waters in THE NIGHT WATCH.

Sometimes an author will slide forwards and back, take nearly imperceptible steps through time. How does that happen? And sometimes the transition is declarative, abrupt. Why can that work so well? When does it fail?

I'm interested in gaining your perspective.

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