BOOKPATHS

Cornish, New Hampshire, U.S.

Katie Zezima writes about Cornish, New Hampshire, and nearby towns, where J. D. Salinger was a neighbor, not a recluse.

Here Mr. Salinger was just Jerry, a quiet man who arrived early to church suppers, nodded hello while buying a newspaper at the general store and wrote a thank-you note to the fire department after it extinguished a blaze and helped save his papers and writings. – from “A Recluse? Well, Not to His Neighbors,” by Katie Zezima, The New York Times

New Hampshire, U.S.

Boyd Tonkin talks with John Irving, whose latest novel, Twisted River, is “set amid the many perils of the New Hampshire logging camps in 1954.”

Via a cousin in the logging business, Irving tracked down veterans of an almost Homeric way of life, of feats and feuds in a 'world of accidents' where death stood no more then a torpedoing tree-trunk, a cracking ice-sheet or a bar-room brawl away. 'These men – they didn't just survive a very rough way of life. The drinking, the diet was so self-destructive. Most of them smoked and drank themselves to death if they didn't die in the rivers.' It took effort to find an old-time log-driver alive, alert and literate enough in English to read Irving's manuscript – many in New Hampshire were French-speaking Quebecois. Meanwhile, he unearthed the buried remnants of transient townships on sites where steam-powered logging engines still sit and rot deep in abandoned woods: 'It is like finding the skeleton of a dinosaur.' – from “Cooking Up a Storm: John Irving’s Latest Saga Reveals the Secrets of Authors and Chefs Alike,” by Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

Margret and H. A. Rey Center and the Curious George Cottage, Waterville Valley, New Hampshire, U.S.

The Margret and H. A. Rey Center honors the legacy of the creators of Curious George “through activities that nurture the mind, body and spirit, and that encourage fellowship, community service and environmental stewardship.” For a list of upcoming events, including nature walks, literary groups, writers workshops, discussion clubs, lectures, and children’s activities, visit the Margret and H. A. Rey Center’s website.

The Reys spent their summers in Waterville Valley, NH, a place that epitomizes Curious George’s spirit of fun and adventure.

The Reys were drawn to Waterville Valley because H.A. was revising his popular astronomy book The Stars: A New Way to See Them and needed a place away from the glare of city lights to do observation. They quickly fell in love with the valley and spent the next twenty summers there, writing, drawing, and charming the community. – from the Margret and H. A. Rey Center Website

Related Website

Town of Waterville Valley, New Hampshire

The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, U.S.

The Library of Congress has an online exhibition about The MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat created by Marian MacDowell in 1907. One of its famous and frequent guests was Thornton Wilder who worked on his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, while in residence, and whose play, Our Town, was inspired by Peterborough.

The MacDowell Colony continues to “nurture the arts by offering creative individuals of the highest talent an inspiring environment in which to produce enduring works of the imagination.” Visit their website for information.

Robert Frost Farm, 122 Rockingham Road, Derry, New Hampshire, U.S.

Derry is drained by Beaver Brook. The highest point in the town is Warner Hill, at 605 feet above sea level, where from the top one can see the Boston skyline on a clear day. Derry lies almost fully within the Merrimack River watershed, with a small section along the northern border of town lying in the Piscataqua River watershed. – from Wikipedia

A gift from his grandfather, the Derry farm was home to Robert Frost (1874-1963) and his family from 1906 to 1911.  Now a National Historic Landmark, visitors can easily imagine the years Frost lived and worked here, teaching at the nearby Pinkerton Academy, raising chickens, and finding inspiration in landscape and labor for his poetry, including “Mending Wall” and “Pastures”.  Furnishings, some original, reflect the Frost years, while an outside trail leads to sites that inspired the poet, including the stone wall and stream.

Robert Frost Farm is open on weekends mid-May to mid-June, 10-5; and mid-June to Labor Day,  Monday-Saturday, 10-5, and Sunday noon-5.  See the Robert Frost Farm website for directions, admission fees, upcoming events, and biographical and historical information.

From “Mending Wall”

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,

One on a side.  It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

Bookpath: Nelson, New Hampshire

Plant Dreaming Deep, by May Sarton (New York: W. W. Norton, reissue 1996; first published 1968)

In Plant Dreaming Deep, May Sarton tells of finding and buying an eighteenth-century house “beyond the church” in tiny Nelson, New Hampshire, in 1958. She describes the needed repairs and renovation, moving in, getting to know the villagers, and finding peace in the natural world. Plant Dreaming Deep is a quiet, tender, beautifully written memoir, one to savor on a New England journey or from an armchair at home. Sarton is buried in the Nelson cemetery, even though her last years were spent in Maine.

‘This,’ Mrs. Rundlett said, ‘is Nelson.’

I saw a tall white church with a tall white spire, a cluster of houses, an abandoned brick schoolhouse beside a clapboarded town hall, a tiny memorial library…and that was all. So silent, so serene, it felt as if we had just pushed a magic door open into the nineteenth century. There was not a soul to be seen.

Beyond the church we turned in under a stand of old maples, and there, a little back from the road, behind its semicircular drive, withdrawn from the village itself, stood the house. Still under the spell of so much light after so much darkness, I drank the sight in – first the pleated green fan over the white door, then the door itself, ample and welcoming, framed in two narrow windows, set off by delicate carved white pillars. I noted the wide granite step and the way it slipped into a grassy slope; the twelve-paned windows, the gently sloping roof above them, a chimney at each end. The whole impression was one of grace and light within a classic form, and I was so dazzled by this presence that for a moment I could only see, not hear. But then I heard it – an oriole, high up in one of the maples, singing his song of songs. – from Plant Dreaming Deep, by May Sarton

Publisher’s Website

Wilmot, New Hampshire

Jen Banbury visits Donald Hall in his Wilmot, New Hampshire farmhouse.

“Mr. Hall has a deep and intense connection to this house, a large, worn-in place with the low ceilings and small rooms of many pre-electricity New England homes. If a place can act as a poet's muse, this house surely does that for Donald Hall.” – from “For a Poet, the Farmhouse as Muse,” by Jen Banbury, New York Times

New Hampshire (and elsewhere)

Collected Poems, by Jane Kenyon (St. Paul, MN : Graywolf Press, 2005)

Now through lace curtains I can see
the huge Wolf Moon going down,
and soon the sky will lighten, turning
first gray, then pink, then blue....
--from Waking in January before Dawn, by Jane Kenyon

Ten years after Jane Kenyon's death, Graywolf Press has "assembl[ed] all of her published poetry" in Collected Poems. Health and illness, home and travel, seasons and cycles, are just a few of the themes moving through Kenyon's work, touching us with beauty, familiarity, and empathy. This is a volume to return to often.

Read an excerpt from Jane Kenyon's Collected Poems on the Graywolf Press website. Find our more about Kenyon's life and work on the Academy of American Poets website and the University of New Hampshire Library exhibit website, Life at Eagle Pond : the Poetry of Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall.

"These things happen...the soul's bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses....
-- from Twilight : After Haying, by Jane Kenyon