This is my symphony

What I read

I finally read the book everyone (as in nearly 20,000 reader reviews on Amazon) has been talking about–Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing. And, oh my goodness. It’s worth every bit of the chatter.

You certainly don’t need me to give you a synopsis–and I won’t. Except to say it’s the story of Kya Clark, the Marsh Girl, who lives with incredible loss and isolation and eventually finds her own measure of peace.

I like a good story set in a time and place not my own, and Owens captured the beauty of living in the marshland along the North Carolina coast in the middle of the twentieth century. Kya was an artist (and an accomplished biologist) and I couldn’t help but wish the book had been illustrated with her sketches and watercolors. (I can see a companion volume, modeled on The Diary of an Edwardian Lady. )

I found an interesting interview with the author on this podcast–Owens is interviewed in the first twenty minutes–that includes an interview with Barbara Kingsolver, who also has a profound gift for laying the natural world in the laps of her readers so that we exclaim, “How exquisite … How inimitable … is our world.” There’s talk of a movie, and though I don’t usually watch The Movie of the Book, I might be tempted to in this case if only to see this countryside on a big screen.

Speaking of countryside …

What I lived

A few weeks ago I went on a Hemingway tour in northern Michigan with Chris Struble of Petoskey Yesterday. Many readers know that Hemingway spent his boyhood summers at the family home on Walloon Lake and later, after returning from the war, in Petoskey. But what remains of Hemingway’s time in northern Michigan is really the landscape itself.

So the trip was a wonderful blend of Hemingway lore (Chris is the current president of the Michigan Hemingway Society) along with readings from the Nick Adams stories. We got a feel for Hemingway’s life in Petoskey after the war and went from his rooming house to the library to the City Park Grill. We stopped at the Red Fox Inn and the Horton Bay General Store, both of which he frequented, then drove down a narrow country road to Horton’s Bay. Along the way, Chris read passages from the Nick Adams stories, and while there were no museums–and only one bronze sculpture–we were able to experience the countryside Hemingway loved so dearly.

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[Although I’d highly recommend a tour with Petoskey Yesterday, here’s a driving tour if you’d rather explore on your own. This article from the New York Times would make a great before-tour read. But be sure to bring along a copy of the Nick Adams Stories, and maybe a good Hemingway biography, to get the full effect.]