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| Síle Post |
If you’re yearning for an Irish adventure this St. Patrick’s Day, but your budget has you staying in place, why not set out on a voyage to the Old Country with Síle Post’s courageous Áine O’Connor, as she journeys back to her homeland along the Dingle Peninsula, where a bequest and a mission await her?
The rightness of the move washes over her
as she works to rehabilitate the neglected garden adjacent the stone cottage
she’s inherited. “This was how it felt
to be truly rooted in place,” wild salmon conservationist Áine muses. “To feel
so close to the earth, the sky, and the sea – understanding the very life force
that animates their essence, flows through humans as well, uniting all
creation. Isn’t this the reason to live close to the Earth . . . To experience this life force pulsing through
our veins, invigorating us to feel, to see, to love – real love.”
That real love of Place infuses Post’s
beautifully written Your Own Ones,
recently published by Vermont’s Green Writers Press. In environmental activist Dede Cummings, who
founded the fast growing house just two years ago, Post says she’s discovered
her “kindred literary spirit.”
Cummings, with a long history in
publishing as a designer, agent, and author of seven books herself, felt called
to create a press that would “make a difference.” "Our mission,” says
Cummings, “’to give voice to writers and artists who will make the world a
better place,' relies on building a community around publishing books that
inspire our readers to grow a deeper appreciation, respect, and responsibility
for their natural environment."
According
to Cummings, Post’s Your Own Ones
“fits nicely” with Green Writers Press’s growing list of books addressing climate
change, notable among them Don Bredes’s acclaimed Polly and The One and Only World, brought out by the press in
2014. “Post’s commitment to
environmental sustainability and the local food movement, as demonstrated
through the grassroots movement started in Ireland by her heroine in Your
Own Ones, is linked to our mission and help us to augment a hopeful outlook
for small groups, urban and rural, around the world that seek to work together
to bring about change.”
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| Dede Cummings |
With a Ph.
D. from The University of Chicago, graduate studies in Ireland and Norway, a
decade teaching American Literature and Nature writing, significant
publications with university presses, plus continued work on the boards of several
scholarly organizations, Post brings to her fiction an uncommon intellectual
curiosity, thematic grace, and narrative ease and richness. Steeped as her work is in place and
sustainability, however, it’s never didactic or admonishing.
Not one to
sit idly by, Post has another book due out this spring, also from Green Writers
Press: The Road to Walden North.
Cummings says that this novel (as others forthcoming), “segue with our
mission . . . [and] speak to quality of
life and the beauty of nature, which is why her forthcoming The Road to
Walden North was such an exciting acquisition for us. Post reimagines
Thoreau's Walden through the eyes of her heroine, Kate, and many of us
will be hopefully entertained and inspired by her writing."
The author,
who has spent over half her life living in the White Mountains and Vermont, keeps
that same hope close to heart. “I bring to my writing an overwhelming passion
for Place,” says Post, as she creates “unforgettable characters who so love
their special places, that they scale seemingly insurmountable challenges to
protect them.”
The reward
for her characters – intelligent, fully imagined souls who summon the courage
to face those challenges -- is rich. So
is the reward for readers who travel along with them.
What inspired you to write and publish
two novels almost simultaneously?
As someone who
had taught college literature and writing for well over a decade, I decided,
much like Dr. Kate Brown, the heroine of my forthcoming novel, The Road to Walden North, to move from ‘talking the talk’ to ‘walking the walk’: writing my own fiction.
Living in
northern Vermont, surrounded by my wonderful organic grower/farmer neighbors,
has certainly taught me to adopt a lifestyle based on a ‘local foods-local
living’ philosophy—‘grounded,’ so to
speak, in actual experience. As one inclined to ‘sow the literary seeds of truth and simplicity,’ as it were, I felt
compelled to create stories of local
living in fiction.
While the
Hardwick local food movement—and the
incredible individuals that made it possible—shape the plot and themes of my
novel, Your Own Ones, (though set in
Atlantic Canada & Ireland), the experience of discovering the simple and
the local life in Walden, Vermont, sets the narrative stage for my novel, The Road to Walden North.
Both of your novels have received very
positive endorsements from acclaimed author, Howard Mosher. What links your
writing?
A recent
exchange with Howard Mosher triggered the realization that my decision to focus
on writing fiction actually stemmed from the utterly transformational resonance for me of one of his stories. He had me
at the title—who would not be smitten
by a landscape (place) Where the Rivers
Run North?
For almost a
decade, while teaching college in Boston, I spent weekends and vacation time in
a log cabin deep in the woods of the White Mountains, where I fell completely
in love—with the landscape. Howard
Mosher’s poignant depiction of the haunting, primeval beauty of the North
Country—augmented by Jay Craven’s gorgeous film adaptation, (both of which I
picked up one Saturday morning at the charming Village Bookstore in Littleton),
struck me in some deeply soulful way. Mosher’s moving account of the people who
assumed nearly insurmountable challenges to protect their cherished sense of Place, inspired me to write my own
fictional odes to the special places in my life—and the people who endeavor to
preserve their ways of living there.
Mosher has praised your “courage to write
about big issues.” Tell us about the high stakes at heart in Your Own Ones.
Your Own Ones speaks to North Country readers
interested in protecting their special places, as well as in preserving the
cultural traditions and practices long associated with those places, that we have,
for generations, called Home. Set in
agricultural Ireland, the story of a rural place on the verge of losing its
special identity, traditions, and local lifestyle, serves as a cautionary tale
for both the Irish and Vermonters, alike.
The term,
“your own ones,” refers to the
natural elements of those special places—the hillside farms, grazing pastures,
maple bush, forested mountains, and river-bend hollows that distinguish the
landscape of Vermont from other places—as well as to the people who reside and
work in those places: our families, friends, neighbors, farmers, and
townspeople.
Idiosyncratic
places—and the independent people who reside therein—face the daunting
challenge today of losing their individual identity, their time-honored ways,
even the topographical features of those special places, in the face of global economic
forces seeking to homogenize cultures worldwide.
This issue
surely resonates with anyone from such unique places as ours in Vermont, New
Hampshire, (or even the traditional areas of Atlantic Canada & Ireland),
who has traveled to the seemingly endless sprawl of a large metropolitan area, lined
in miles of box stores and shopping malls, followed by residential
‘developments’ with identical houses or apartment buildings, both in this
country and abroad.
Your Own Ones chronicles the success story of how, in
common economic parlance, Main Street
takes on Wall Street, in a deliberate return to their cultural ‘roots’, so to speak—their traditional
and local food practices. Who would have thought that (heirloom) potatoes would
save Ireland once again?
The “big
issues” noted by Howard Mosher refer to the courage of the individuals who
people my novel to confront those forces at work in eradicating the particulars
of their (and our) special places. Your
Own Ones tells the story of how individuals can make a difference, can
shape the future of their special places—by simply trying.
Mosher also
praises your forthcoming The Road to
Walden North as: “Fascinating and original . . . following in
the tradition of . . . Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek.” In what ways
does your novel relate to Dillard’s remarkable work?
Heralded as a tribute to Thoreau, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek described phenomena through the lens of a
naturalist, similar in kind to Thoreau’s essays, yet like Thoreau’s mix of
naturalistic detail with metaphysical and transcendental insights, particularly
in Walden, Pilgrim blends ‘observation
and introspection, mystery and knowledge’—traits resulting in her winning the
Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.
While obviously influenced by and grateful for Dillard’s
example, I attempted to contribute to this tradition by relying on the genre of
fiction, through writing a novel that blends the motifs of each chapter from Walden, with a contemporary story of the
process of awakening for a set of
individuals whose lives intersect, both on the campus of Harvard University and
within the forested hills of Walden North, Vermont.
You might think of it as a fictional ‘Reader’s Guide’ to Walden
for the modern reader. While many claim to have picked up Walden, even more (secretly) admit to not ever completing the book!
It was my intention to provide in The
Road to Walden North, an accessible, inviting, and intriguing story that
illustrates for contemporary readers, the continued resonance of Thoreauvian
themes in our lives today. At the same time, the novel celebrates the natural,
the local, and the simple through focusing on selected unique characters living
in the woods of Walden North, as well as those intrigued by their
lifestyles.
Your heroines
are intelligent, accomplished women who have worked hard to reach a place of
prominence along challenging career paths. Yet they both step off to take the road less traveled. Tell us
about Áine and Kate and the decisions they make.
While some novelists choose to set ordinary characters in
extraordinary circumstances, I prefer to focus on depicting extraordinary
individuals confronted by ordinary circumstances—to see how life experiences,
however un-dramatic, mundane even, might shape their actions, their sense of
self, and their chosen paths in life. After all, often it is the ordinary, the
coincidental, perhaps even the synchronous, events in life that result in
life-altering, transformational, and transcendent changes. Of course, the
subtle, sub-textual theme inherent in the stories of my female (as well as
male) characters is to show that we can all strive to reach what Thoreau called
‘our higher selves’—often by
following, the ‘beat of a different
drummer’ along the ‘road less
traveled’.
At the
same time, though, I’d like to mention that both my novels are not overtly
‘preachy’, but rather humorous, actually—reminiscent of the ‘humor of Maeve
Binchy,’ according to one reviewer. The
female protagonists are depicted as modest, self-deprecating heroines with a
great sense of humor, able to point fun at their own foibles and
misunderstandings, related in witty dialogue. It’s humor, after all, that helps
us cope—even thrive—in challenging times.
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| The Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, VT |
What’s your
next literary adventure?
While
I may have ‘many more lives to live’
as a novelist, like Thoreau, (who separated himself from living amid fellow
Concordians in order to study and write about their culture in solitude at Walden
Pond), I have returned to my special place in the forests of the White Mts.,
where I am completing my White Mountain novel, NorthWoods, as well as writing a sequel to The Road to Walden North, called The Vermonters. I think of
my sojourn here in the Northwoods in the Wordsworthian sense of ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’: a
literal Yeatsian return to my ‘cabin of
clay and wattles made’ in the White Mountains—my ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’.
This interview appears in the March 2016 issue of The North Star Monthly. Check out their site:
www.northstarmonthly.com
For more information on Post and Your Own Ones, see her website: www.silepost.com
And for more on Green Writers Press, their mission, and their books, follow this link: http://greenwriterspress.com/
