Writing an Enchanted Landscape with Daniel Mason

Metal detecting in Vermont

0:00Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. I'm Anne Strangehamps. And I'm Steve Paulson. Every so often, you can find the most amazing treasures right under your feet. If you just know where to look. I can get you started and then I'll get it set for you. Sometimes a little technology helps. You're going to hear the ground and the iron that's in it because it's a high, nice, crisp tone. There's no guesswork. It's clear. Okay. We're getting a lesson in metal detecting in our field in central Vermont.

0:33If I hear a tone, I'd say I would definitely dig that. Okay, no. This is our neighbor, Sheila. Sheila Beattie. I bought my first detector when I was 17 in 1986, and I'm still doing it. Ten detectors later. So should we just start walking up the hill here? I'll follow you. Steve and I have been walking up and down this hill for years, and we've found all kinds of remnants of older lives up in the woods. Locking trails, stone fences, cellar holes. But Sheila grew up here.

1:04She knows this place in a way we never will. I sled when I was a kid. I think we sled here and we sled there. My friend Allison, her great-grandparents, had the little house that was here. Hmm. Metal detecting is her window into an even older history. She's found coins and bits of jewelry that date back to the mid-1800s, and sometimes even older. If you found a pewter button, you might think that was a colonial. Have you found stuff that old? I have. I have like 10 to 12 pewter buttons I found out in the field.

1:37Wow. My husband's like, oh great, another button. I was like, but you don't get it. Are you kidding? I would be like so thrilled. I know. The person, what did they wear when they lost it? Those are the things I think about. Yeah. Sometimes when I get lucky enough to find a piece of jewelry, I think to myself that, you know, there's a lady on the other side that's like, great, you brought my favorite pen back for people to see, or you found the ring I lost, and now somebody gets to see it again. Yeah. And I was so proud of it when I had it, you know, or sad when I lost it.

2:08And so I, those are all things that draws me to do this. Am I doing this right? Yep. And I would keep it as low as if you can rub it right along the ground. There's a lot of walking and sweeping the detector back and forth. Lots of jokes about needles and hay fields. But then.

2:27I would dig that. Here's your shovel.

2:33Well, I guess that's just a huge tree. Here, you come dig. Okay. I mean, I don't want to destroy this. That's probably pretty tough. What is the rock doing? Well, we're digging up rocks. I'm like hitting this hard thing here. Sheila finds something better. Uh, an ox shoe. An ox shoe? Wow. Ox shoes are typically from the colonial times.

3:06Wow, that is totally cool. Look at that. I was going to call you over, but it was kind of scrappy. Oh my God. Wow. I didn't want you to come over. No, no, no, that's so cool. So how old do you think this might be? I feel like late 1700s. Yeah. You know, they used oxen like 100 years. And that's in really good shape. You could be one of them. Conversation pieces. Yeah, absolutely. Honestly, a colonial ox shoe would have made my day. But there's a lot of fields still to cover.

3:37And this is what we do. We just wander around aimlessly. None. Oh yeah. Maybe. Under a foot of heavy pack dirt, there's something. Oh, now you gotta dig it out now. A small rectangular shape with an opening in the middle. Kind of green. Made of some kind of thin metal. Worn and tarnished. That looks really old. I don't know what this is. What? What? Are you ready for this? I think this is half of a colonial shoe buckle.

4:07What? Yeah. A colonial shoe buckle? Yep. I've got a couple. So when you say colonial, are you talking 1700s? I am. Oh my God, when the nation was new. Like some colonial dude was walking around in his fancy shoes. You earned that one. Now you're fit by the bus. Oh, absolutely. You don't want to go out more. Yes, I'm going to want to go get my island. Yeah. With these. Wow. Oh my God, that's so true.

Introducing novelist Daniel Mason

4:35Needless to say, that colonial shoe buckle now has pride of place in our house. It sits in a small dish near the front door. Along with the oxen shoe, a musket ball, and half of a bent silver spoon, all found right here under our feet. I mean, it's hard to say what it was. Living alongside all this history is an amazing feeling, and one that's shared by the writer Daniel Mason. His 2023 novel, North Woods, tells the story of a single New England house over the course of several centuries.

5:05It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times and the Washington Post. And he's just come out with a brand new novel, Country People, also a bestseller, about a California family who moved to southern Vermont. Though I think it's set in the present day, right, Steve? Yeah, and it has a much lighter touch. It's more of a comedy. But both novels are asking similar questions about what it means to have a deep sense of place. And both North Woods and Country People take an almost mythic approach to this New England

5:36landscape. They're steeped in natural history, in the geology and the native plants and animals. It's almost like they're part novel, part field guide. Which is interesting, because isn't Daniel Mason a native Californian? Yeah. He's a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, and part of that long tradition of doctors who are also writers. And that's worth mentioning because one of the themes of Country People is the thin line between imagination and delusion. And some of the characters believe that the earth is hollow, and they're searching for

6:07a cave that leads into a magical kingdom. Realistic novels that conjure an ecology of enchantment. Let's listen.

Reading from Country People

6:16So, Daniel, I would love to start with a reading from the very beginning of Country People, which I think really sets the place that you are writing about. Could you read that? Sure. So, this is an excerpt from an article called Local Legends, supposedly published in the Greensbury Trumpet on July 17th, 1982. Spend any time in this corner of Vermont, with its lonely woods and narrow roads. Talk to the hunters, to the old loggers, or the farmers.

6:48And sooner or later, you're going to hear the story. At first, it will come to you in scraps, the quarry where a body was found, the cavern with its strange echoes, the old windmaker farm, its silo overgrown with creeper. Long abandoned, everyone says, and yet you'd swear you'd seen, you'd heard. Or maybe you'll find one of the objects, like melted knots of iron, turned up by your shovel or denting your sights. So, you have invented this whole fictional universe for the story set in southern Vermont.

7:22And it's not just the characters. It's not just the fictional town where it's all set. There's also a kind of mythology of local lore. And as someone who spends part of the year in Vermont, I can tell you, you have really nailed it. I've sort of wondered what it is that's so distinctive about this. I think it's because of all the history that's right under our feet. Yeah. It's lovely for me to hear that. I think that the landscape is striking, not just because of its natural beauty and its changing seasons and so forth, but also because how sort of ever-present a human past is.

8:00So, like, you know, you walk around in the woods and you encounter old stone walls. You know, you encounter a cave, but you also find something in the cave. Your friend was just telling me the other day how he had sort of turned up the ruins of an old carriage on his property. And so there's this past that's very present no matter where you go. So what I find so remarkable about being here is history is not just sort of out there far away. It is, like, right on top of me. I mean, there are cellar holes in the woods right above our house here. There is a cemetery a mile away that's hidden.

8:32You can't see it from the road. But if you go up there, you find gravestones dating back. I mean, there are men who fought in the Revolutionary War there. The headstones go up to the 20th century. But no one's been buried there since. But the town still maintains it. And it's just sort of amazing that it's just like, it's all right here. Right. For a novelist, it's a bit of a dream, right? Like, you could go to a cemetery like that and look around, and every single one of the gravestones suggests some kind of story. And I remember many times in writing both Northwoods and writing Country People, where

9:03I would just wander into a cemetery, which is there, which is present in every town, often present just alongside the most common roads anywhere in New England. And you might find, you know, a couple who die in the same year, or a child who dies very young, or a person who dies during the period of a war. Like, every single one of those suggests a kind of story. I think also what's very striking to somebody who's from the West and doesn't live around cemeteries. It suggests that death is, I don't want to say common, but it's presence.

9:34It's not something, a person doesn't just disappear when they go away. They remain somehow nearby alongside of the road, but also then interspersed with natural life, which I think is something you've probably observed many times in Vermont as well. Even though the cemetery is maintained, it doesn't mean that there are not wildflowers growing between the graves. There's not apple trees growing next to the graves, between gravestones. And so you have this mixing of human and natural life, which is very alive, you know, despite it being in this sort of territory of the dead.

10:05So, I mean, what I find so interesting about all of this is you're a Californian. I mean, you grew up in Palo Alto, right? I mean, you teach at Stanford. Is it the contrast with California? Is that the thing that's interesting? There are a lot of contrasts. So there's the history, which I think is very noticeable to somebody who's grown up in California. In California, everything is new. Every home that I lived in in California has been younger than I am. Every apartment building younger than I am. You know, every once in a while, you'll find a historical marker sort of tucked away behind

10:35a mall. But there's much less of that. Certainly, there was a long history before Europeans came, and there's a long history when Spanders came. But you just don't see it very much, certainly not in the same way that you see it in New England. And I think that the other thing that was quite striking to me was the presence of the seasons. To be in a place where every month it changes, and there's a different group of plants that come along. The weather changes, and the clouds are different. There's something about the natural year, the calendrical year, which itself is a narrative, right? Like the plants are born, the plants grow, the plants die.

11:09The animals come and eat the plants. The trees, the leaves, like these are all active verbs. This is not just a passive static landscape. And so I think that having that sort of moment of contrast and sitting down and really noticing it for the first time was quite striking to me, still is.

Plot of Country People

11:26So we should talk some about your book. Can you give a brief summary of country people? Sure. So the impetus is very autobiographical. It's the story of a family of four Californians who spend an academic year in New England. Apart from that, it sort of takes off on its own. So in this story, there's the husband, Miles, who is a troubled academic. He's a man who's been trying for 14 years to write a dissertation and constantly is sidetracked. He's changed topics a dozen times.

11:58And right now is writing about the concept of the peasant in Russian folktales. And the family somewhat humorously believes that they can learn about Russian peasants by going and living among country people. Country people in Vermont. Right. And really shows what kind of city people they are. His wife is a much more successful academic. She's an expert in Milton and Blake. And she's the one who's been given the academic appointment. And so they travel across the country with their two kids, their dog significantly. The dog plays a significant part in the book.

12:30And it's set up in this fictional town called Greensbury. And Miles, the husband who's supposed to be finishing his dissertation, soon finds himself utterly distracted like he is most of the time. And in this case, it means meeting anyone he can, learning about the local area from anyone he can, and then increasingly finding himself on a series of absurd adventures that eventually veers into the fantastical. So one of the things that I love about country people is you really get the quirky nature of Vermont.

13:04I mean, my experience is there are a lot of very smart, often quite eccentric people. I'm not always sure where the line between brilliant and crazy is. To take one example, you have this character who goes by the name Snowflake Bentley, who's a real figure in Vermont history who mastered the art of taking photographs of snowflakes. Right. You can't think of a more wonderful historical character. He dedicated himself to this apparatus that involved a black piece of velvet that caught snowflakes and put them underneath a microscope.

13:35And he's the person who we owe this observation that no two snowflakes are alike. In the book, it's a very different Snowflake Bentley. So Miles has injured himself skiing, ends up in an emergency room in the middle of the night, and in typical Miles fashion decides that he's going to pass his time by sitting next to the person who he thinks is going to be the most interesting person to talk to, who in this case turns out to be this man who believes that he hears the voice of the original Snowflake Bentley, and in fact, maybe a kind of reincarnated version of the original Snowflake Bentley.

14:08So he's the second Snowflake Bentley. Miles, instead of being frightened by this man and this, like, what seems to be clear delusion, and instead is fascinated by him, and the second Snowflake Bentley ends up being a kind of guide to Miles to show him around the countryside and introduce him to other people and eventually explain some of the stranger goings-on in town. He's one of a few people in the town who have formed this kind of semi-secret society which believes that the Earth is hollow and there's some sort of magical kingdom inside the Earth.

14:43Can you tell me what it is that these people believe? They believe that the geology that we were all taught, which is that the Earth is solid somehow at its core, is actually not the case. And instead, the Earth is like a giant sort of tennis ball, and if you tunnel in through a series of caverns, which they think can be found somewhere in southern Vermont, you'll find yourself on the inside of this hollow Earth, beneath this other sort of internal sky, where there happen to be these kingdoms, and you can find animals that have gone extinct in New England still continuing to live there.

15:16And I should say, this is a belief that's in the book. Jeremiah Wilkes, the man who supposedly found his way down these tunnels into the center of the Earth, is a fictional character. But the belief that the Earth is hollow is one that I found right in the book. One has encounters across all literatures and myths and great classic literature like Dante, but also lots of science fiction. Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth. Right. Or the fairies in Celtic mythology who live underground,

15:46but then come out to make mischief for the rest of us. Right, right. So they believe this thing, which is in some ways on the surface seems pretty wacky, but has these very deep connections to a lot of what's so important to us. And I mean, the other thing that's striking is, I mean, the idea in your book is that if they just find the right cave, they can enter into this magical world. And there are a lot of caves around here. And I know stories of people who have gone exploring in caves and have not come out.

16:19That is part of the local lore here. Yeah, that's great.

16:24Well, not so great if they never came out. But anyway, but yes, but the stories, I mean, the stories are incredible and they live on here. No, not so great if they got lost. Although if they found themselves to a beautiful underground kingdom, maybe it is. Yeah, maybe.

Stone structures and local mysteries

16:38So one of the reasons why I related so strongly to your book is that we have this mysterious stone structure on our land, sort of in the woods right above our house. It's this six foot tall, it looks like a cairn, pile of rocks. And I know it's at least 70 years old because our next door neighbor saw it as a boy. And I've asked all kinds of people around here, what is this thing? Like, why was it built? And no one knows. I emailed an expert on New England stone wall, sent him photos, and he didn't know.

17:10And he said, maybe it's like some sort of folk art. And I have this one relative who's a member of kind of this fringe archaeological society. And he said, oh, it's the Vikings who built it. Because there is this lore that the Vikings or the Celts came to Vermont, you know, before Columbus here. And I just find it fascinating that there is this thing, this stone structure on our land, no one knows what it is. And it's kind of glorious, this mystery. Right. What's your theory? I honestly don't know.

17:41I mean, it's beautifully preserved. Yeah. So as you say, I mean, getting back to your book, there is a literary angle. You mentioned Miles has been working on Russian folktales. So he is naturally drawn to the fantastic. And then Kate, his wife, is she's a professor of Milton and Blake. And so you were conjuring up the visionary writers here. It's like a literature of wonder is what it sounds like. Right. But they are very different people. So she studies her topics with a rational mind.

18:15She's disciplined. She's rigorous. She reads all the secondary literature. She loves Milton. In fact, Miles falls in love with her watching her read Milton and feels jealous that other people can be in the room and watch her read Milton at the same time as him. But she's an academic. She's serious. Miles starts out that way. But part of his problem, as I came to know him, is that he's not interested in this whole secondary apparatus. He's not interested in studying them. He's not interested in explaining them.

18:45He wants to experience the stories fundamentally as stories, as a child would experience the stories. He's an unrepentant teller of stories to his children, constantly. Every night, you know, we'll tell the different stories, invent a different world to the children. And I think very much sees the topic of his academic interests in the same sort of way. These are great tales that open up exactly, as you say, a kind of wonder at the world of the fantastic, of the possibility for creation and for imagination.

19:17And he just can't seem to understand these other adults that need to explain it. So how much of you is in Miles? I mean, obviously, you're not the failed academic, but, you know, in terms of kind of this love of storytelling. Yeah, I think that I identify with him a lot more than identify with Kate. I admire her. I have colleagues like her that I'm always in awe of. But at the same time, I think that in some ways, a novelist is a person who exists in a state of uncertainty, exists in a state of wonder, exists in a state of possibility.

19:54And the books that I've always loved have been ones that don't explain a way, where books in which characters remain somehow slightly beyond our reach, in which plot remains, all sort of there are possibilities that, you know, may or may not be real. But there are many possibilities. Those are the stories that I like. And so Country People, in many ways, explores ideas that I love. Like, so, for example, the question of what's the difference between a delusion and imagination,

20:25you know, is an academic question, which people have thought about very rationally and cogently. And I find their arguments fascinating. But at the same time, when I come to the topic, I don't know the answer to a lot of these questions. And so what I can do is create characters who live in this world and grapple with the same sort of questions, but never really come up with a definitive answer.

Psychiatry, imagination, and delusion

20:48Well, we should mention that you are also a professor of psychiatry at Stanford. And I do know that you have taught a class with an anthropologist there, Tanya Lerman. This is exactly her area of study. Where's the line between delusion and reality? And she studies psychosis, among other things. Looking at people who, you know, say they hear voices or have visions from the beyond. And, you know, what do you do with that? Tanya has been a wonderful colleague. We've been teaching this class almost a decade now.

21:20And the class really asks, how can we understand this very broad range of human experiences? And while it does offer some kind of explanatory framework, I think that neither of us are really interested in saying this is a hallucination and this is a vision, say. But rather to take an approach looking at what the subjective experience is like and really try to capture as broadly the kind of amazing diversity of perceptual experiences that people

21:55have both now in our culture and cultures around the world. And this is where Tanya is really an expert is looking at the broad diversity of these unusual or one might say usual since they're very common experiences, but, you know, sort of special sensory experiences around the world. But also then thinking about how people have experienced these different kinds of experiences across time as well and how central experiences, which may be clinical in some contexts like hallucinations, in other contexts can be experienced very differently.

22:26Right. I mean, maybe they're visions of the divine. You know, Teresa of Avila, who, you know, had this vision or this experience supposedly of being pierced by an arrow from an angel. Right. There's a wide range. And the fascinating part is that many people have tried to understand this, right? So even religious visionaries, they have their own explanations for something which might be a vision versus, say, something caused by an illness. Like, it is a distinction that cultures around the world make. So as a novelist, I totally get why you'd be fascinated by this, but you're also a psychiatrist.

23:00And I'm assuming that part of your job is to sort of assess the mental illness of people who might come to see you. I mean, do you approach these questions differently depending on what hat you're wearing? It's a great question. The most important part of my job as a psychiatrist is I'm assessing these questions when a person is in distress. And so that's a big difference from, say, a character in my book who might have an ecstatic vision, for example. In a clinical context, a hallucination is not an illness until it's causing suffering.

23:34And so that's, I think, a situation that I sometimes will find myself in. There's this amazing Brazilian artist named Arthur Bispo de Rosario who did this most extraordinary piece of artwork gathering garbage from around the world on the command of voices that told him that he needed to do this. And he, you know, he'd collect, I shouldn't say garbage from the world, garbage from around the asylum where he lived for most of his life. And there's this amazing moment in this interview with him where this woman comes by and says, like, this is extraordinary. You create all this beautiful art.

24:05And he says, I'm doing this because I'm told to do this. I don't want to do this. I would stop, but the voices drive me on further. And it's this very poignant moment I share with my students when I teach because it's very easy to have this romantic vision of him as this visionary artist. And yet at the same time, we have this testimony for him talking about how this vision that allows us to see this very beautiful art is also something that causes great suffering for him. Well, going back to your novel, Country People, I mean, my reading of this society, you know, ones who believe that there's this magical kingdom in the center of the earth, they seem pretty

24:41happy about chasing after this imaginary world. They don't necessarily exactly believe it, but they like entertaining the idea that it's possible. And that seems, I mean, I'm very interested in sort of the experience of enchantment. And that seems like a bit of enchantment to me to sort of hold on to something like that. Right. No, absolutely. And I think that people in that group, some of whom absolutely believe this is the case, and they're totally certain. And there are people who are incredibly skeptical of it, but are sort of there because they're

25:13curious, but that the large majority of them sit somewhere in between in this space that you describe, in which they have this sense somehow that the world is not just the world as we see it, that there is some kind of magic in it. And that in the woods, which seem instantly magical to anyone who goes into those woods, or in a cave, which seems instantly magical to anyone who goes in a cave, like you can argue against enchantment all you want, but then just go into a cave in the middle of the forest and try to argue against enchantment.

25:43It's very hard. And so they come from that space of believing that there is something else. And for them, it's taken the form of this possible underground world. They've also found a lot of community there. And I think that that's a big part of Miles' experience in this search to find this enchanted kingdom. These people find each other. And it's that kind of connection, which I think drives a lot of their participation in this project. And I think something that always made me wish that there was a similar sort of society

26:17around me, because I would love to be off in the woods, spelunking, studying old manuscripts, trying to find where a grave was. Even at the end of the day, I believe the earth has a solid core. Still, I would happily take place in this kind of adult play in imagining the woods is containing so much more. So I have to tell you about an experience that I have walking in the woods right around our house in Vermont. So a couple times a week, I go out. There's this one-hour loop walk I do with my dog.

26:48And it's high up sort of on this baby mountain. I never have seen another person there. So it's kind of remote. I sometimes try to imagine being in conversation with certain trees. And I don't know, are you familiar with, there's a chapter that C.S. Lewis wrote called Let's Pretend. Are you familiar with that? No. So he wrote this chapter. I mean, he was a Christian. He wanted people to sort of, you know, become Christians. And he said, you know, imagine talking to God. And so for me, it's not trying to imagine talking to God, but trying to imagine talking

27:21to trees. You know, not literally, but, and it's hard to do for me. I mean, yeah, it's sort of like it takes a certain mindset. The woods do feel a little more enchanted like that. And does this make any sense to you? It resonates so strongly with me. So I found I had the habit, like when I wander in the woods and I find, for instance, a moth or a caterpillar, something that I didn't expect, I often find myself speaking to it, addressing it in a kind of astounded sort of way.

27:54Like, I mean, people would probably think I sound a little crazy, you know, hello, little friend, like saying to it, but it seems like this other creature who's sort of in the forest occupying this space at the same time is perceiving me at the same time that I'm perceiving it. Like we have this moment of, you know, sort of Martin Buber's concept of I-thou-ness. Like, I mean, it may be frightened of me, or it may think that I could be dangerous somehow or disinterested to me. But like there is, we're there in that space. And so that feels very magical. And I also think that I'll find myself in these moments thinking about what it's like

28:29for a child to be there. And this is why childhood ended up being such an important part of country people, is that for a child, a fantastic creature is often indistinguishable from the kind of creature that you would encounter in the woods. Like if you were to say that there was a creature with gigantic wings the size of a hand, but they were thin as paper and, you know, colored with all sorts of spots that looked like eyes and hung from the undersides of trees and made itself look like a leaf.

28:59Like this sounds like a completely imaginary beast, right? And then you see a luna moth. And I saw my first luna moth for the first time last year. And it's completely astonishing. Like I couldn't have come up with a stranger, most wonderful creature than this luna moth. I discovered the magic of a loop, like a little microscope, traveling over the microscope and seeing how small things can become even more extraordinary. Like you couldn't have thought of it, even if you're creating sort of the most strangest creatures you could imagine. We're going to take a short break.

29:30And when we come back, we'll talk about creating enchanted worlds and how we might imagine life from the perspective of the animals around us.

29:47Hi, it's Anne. I am so glad you're joining us. We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead. I'm really excited about them. And here's a tip. Maybe you know this already, but if you follow Wonder Cabinet on Apple Podcasts, those new episodes will show up automatically, like a little weekly gift in your podcast feed. I hope you like it.

30:12This is Wonder Cabinet. I'm Steve Paulson. Let's get back to my conversation with Daniel Mason, the author of the novels North Woods and

Writing the natural world in North Woods

30:20Country People. How do you conjure all of this up in your novels? I mean, you have these, often these fantastic elements, you know, these imaginary worlds. Back to your earlier book, North Woods, I mean, there are ghosts and spirits there. And does that come naturally to you? Or do you kind of have to work at really coming up with such vivid imaginary details? In North Woods, it was a surprise for me. So I was writing and I was thinking that it was going to be a completely natural story. And then all of a sudden, you know, in the fourth or fifth chapter, the supernatural element

30:51comes in. And I realized that ghosts were going to play a role. And it felt right because it's a book about how the past remains present in the future. And so it sort of made sense that ghosts would remain not just ghosts of people, but ghosts of animals, ghosts of trees, those that remain also. And in Country People, I think it was a similar experience. I began wanting to write a domestic novel. I wanted to write a comedy. I wanted to write something very contemporary. None of these were things that I had done before. But then it started out and perhaps it's because of things that we've been talking about.

31:23They're in the forest. The forest feels like an enchanted place. A person who loves stories like Miles is going to find himself drawn to these enchanted elements of the forest that like true enchantment began to sneak its way in. You mentioned that Kate, one of the main characters in Country People, is a scholar of John Milton. And I will say the sort of the notion of paradise lost figures prominently in both in this book and in your previous book, Northwoods. And we should talk about Northwoods for a moment. I mean, it's the story going back to colonial times.

31:56It's all sort of set in this one place where this one house was deep in the woods. And then there are successive groups of people who come up to the present day. There's a sense that at one point it was paradise. It was primeval nature. But it's, of course, not that simple. Right. No, there's been tremendous changes. And Northwood's really about those changes. There are certainly changes to the land before the first European characters in the story arrived. Native people who were in New England were using the land, were burning,

32:28were altering the landscape long before Europeans arrived. And when Europeans arrived, they accelerated on this extraordinary scale. I was astounded to be in this deeply forested landscape in New England that year. And then to find our photographs showing that it had been completely deforested 150 years ago for sheep farming. And to imagine that it was pasture land. And that as that industry declined, then there was a return to the forest. So it's like there's been this sort of series of paradise is lost if we're to continue with that theme.

33:01And then paradise is regained. And then paradise is lost again. I think that that's something that haunts country people as well. So even though it's an upbeat book, like I wanted to write a book which headed towards a direction which I think the reader always has a sense that this book is going to end hopefully well for the characters. I was worried there for a while, but I kind of thought that it was going to end well. Yeah. Good. Okay. Yeah. For a moment, you have a suspension of disbelief, I hope. But they're good people. We wish them well. You know, especially right now where there's a lot to worry about in the world.

33:32I felt like maybe in this book that there won't be. But at the same time, hanging over all of this in the story is the sense that development is encroaching on these forests. It's privatization is, you know, leading to sort of increasing seclusions of areas where people historically have been able to wander free. And so there always is the kind of risk. And of course, with climate change, there's a risk that all of these many paradises, and truly parts of New England forests are like paradises, but there's the risk that they'll be lost.

34:05Yeah. I mean, part of the history of land is that there was violence, you know, going back to conflicts between the English settlers and the Native Americans. You have killings in the book as well. So, I mean, that's a piece of paradise, I guess, or paradise lost. Yeah. The one thing with Northwoods is that it covers a long period of time. So everybody dies eventually in Northwoods. Each character meets their fate. You know, some survive as ghosts, but there's going to be death, and a lot of the death is violent death.

34:35In an area like New England, which has seen a lot of human history and a lot of wars, it means that you can be walking along the street in the forest, or you could be in a Walmart super center, but you could be standing on the side of a battlefield. And there may be many battlefields going back in time. Yeah, yeah. So I'm curious, going back to how you write about the natural world, you are sometimes telling these stories not just from the perspective of the people, the humans, but from other creatures. I mean, one of my favorite chapters in Northwoods was, it's a short chapter about two bark beetles who are mating.

35:13And it's like, I mean, you are rhapsodic about how these two beetles are having sex. It's like the most erotic chapter in the whole book, I think. It's a very racy chapter, yeah. It's certainly the riskiest thing I've written, but yeah.

35:29How do you put yourself in the mindset of trying to see the world through the eyes, or that's maybe not even the right word, of these animals? I mean, especially that scene, probably it's all smell. It's all probably chemical communication. Who knows? Yeah. When I began Northwoods, I actually had this idea that this would only be a book, that there wouldn't be humans in this book, that it would be a book entirely from the perspective of the natural world. And then humans found their way in pretty quickly, and I kind of left that notion behind. Although it does remain, there's a character in the book who's a painter, who's very enamored of the natural world, sort of waxes rhapsodically in letters to his lover about this.

36:05And he describes wanting to paint the world entirely as seen from tree upon looking at tree, like trying to remove the human from it. So one of the big challenges of both country people and Northwoods was to write about the natural world, but capture what has really been so compelling to me, which is this sense of how active and ever-changing the natural world is. Because I think when I had first grown up, just loving hiking, loving looking at scenery, I'd often look upon it as like a canvas or a landscape.

36:36And then over time, recognizing how everything is changing and how it's filled with so much drama, like the beetle that you mentioned, right? Like there's desire in the natural world. I mean, the natural world's composed of desire. We'd have nothing if it wasn't for every single living creature desiring on some sort of way or another. But also, like we've also talked about murder and competition. I mean, these are very dramatic things. Like this is the stuff of romance novels and stuff of spy stories and war stories. But it's just non-human.

37:08How would you write that book if you could without any humans in it, just from the perspective of the creatures in the natural world? I think at the end of the day, it wasn't really possible. So that's why I abandoned it. But at the same time, I'm still drawn to the idea. And if we think about a non-human creatures who are very close to us, like I spend a lot of time with my dog, lots and lots and lots of time with my dog. As I do with my dog, yeah. Right. So I can imagine it's a similar – these solitary professions means that your main workmate sits on your lap or walks with you in the woods.

37:47And there are times where I think that he and I sort of understand each other. And the other times I look and I think, I have absolutely no idea what's going on in your mind. Like we have this coexistence, but I really don't know. And probably our perceptual worlds are so vastly different because sometimes I think that he's not even seeing things. Like his sensorium is completely overwhelmed by smell, whereas I smell very poorly. So even someone who's close to me like that, what it's like to be him, I have no idea. To live in a world where I'm able to sort of sense these presences wafting through all around me.

38:22I don't know. So to write – there are many wonderful examples. People write from the perspective of animals, but ultimately they're anthropomorphized animals. I mean a reader kind of goes on that journey. Yeah. And we should say that the dog in your book, Giuseppe, plays a very important role. Yeah. It's not just a minor character in the story. No, he's able to perceive things that the humans are unable to perceive, and that makes him a very kind of important guide to the other world. So we've been talking about how you call up the sense of place through the people, through the history, through the landscape.

How to get to know a place

39:01And I'm wondering, for you, what does it take to get to really know a place? It's a wonderful question. I don't know how well I know any of the places that I've lived. To write about a place, I'm not so sure that really knowing a place is good for writing about a place, because part of writing is trying to understand something. Like what drives me when an idea comes to me and I want to spend this time exploring it, it's often because I feel like I don't understand a place. I think that Northwoods is very much a book which is about trying to understand a place through writing about it.

39:38Like I came to understand it better by the end. You know, thankfully, the sort of vast reserves of enchantment did not become depleted, and it remains, this forest remained a wondrous place for me. But at the same time, the process of writing about it was, to some degree, a process of discovery. Was the discovery, I'm sure part of it was, you know, hiking in the woods in western Massachusetts, where you were living at the time. But did you also immerse yourself in local history? I mean, did you read lots of books about the place?

40:09I mean, I'm just sort of wondering how you bring that alive in your own mind. Certainly reading history, lots and lots of natural history. There's a book by a biologist named Tom Wessels called Reading the Forest and Landscape, which was an essential book for me. Completely changed the way that I see the forest, because it taught me that the forest is something that's constantly changing and that you can read the past in the present. Like the way this log fell on the ground tells you about the storms that came through it. Maybe you can even identify the year the storm came through based on the direction that the log has fallen.

40:43Or the species composition in a particular glade can tell you something about what was there beforehand, can tell you about human use. The kinds of stones in a wall can tell you about what people used to land beforehand. I would assume you're kind of a naturalist yourself. Do you know how to identify the birds and the plants that you see? I've learned over time. It's become a great love. You know, probably about 20 years or so ago, I was at a writing residency and I was stuck. I couldn't figure out what to write.

41:13I was working on my second book and I was completely stuck. And I found a Plants of Europe plant guide, like one of these big brick of a guide. And I'd spend time just looking at it and decided, like, I'll try to learn. And there became this pleasure all of a sudden beginning to recognize, you know, first broad families, but then species. And I came home and I continued to do that. And since then, there are these wonderful apps. You probably know about an app called iNaturalist, which allows for visual recognition. And then this amazing app called Merlin, which allows you to learn the sounds of birds, which I'd never been able to do before this piece of technology came along.

41:51So now it's a big part of my life to go someplace and to see a plant that I've never seen before. And then to try to make sense of where it belongs in the world. And if it's a forest that I know, maybe, you know, maybe I've come to recognize a number of species. Although I have a friend who's a botanist who at a certain point, when I was telling him how proud I was to now be able to recognize many of the species in the forest where I was walking, he said, that's just the first step. Now you have to know the individuals. Wait, what does that mean? You have to know the individuals?

42:21Like the individual trees. Like you may think that you know the coastal live oak, but there's a difference between, that coastal live oak and that other coastal live oak. Because it's like you talking to your tree, right? Right, right. It's like they are individuals. So we were talking about how to get to know a place. And I'm wondering if you might have any sort of practical takeaways for our listeners in terms of, let's say I'm going to a new place. I haven't been. I'll be there for a couple of weeks, two, three weeks. And I kind of want to get under the skin of that place.

42:53What suggestions would you have?

42:57Oh, wow. Well, I think leaving electronics behind is important. I think that there's a stage of just noticing. Walking always, if one's able to walk and physically can get out. And, you know, even if you can't, just going to the edge of where you're comfortable going and observing. I think allowing time to move slowly, allowing time to wash over you. So in writing, one of the first things that I was taught was about using all the five senses. I think that that helps, like, to be in the moment and notice what you're smelling, notice what the ground feels like.

43:32I said that one should leave one's electronics behind. But then earlier I talked about these programs like iNaturalist or like Merlin, which I think really can enrich the world if a person's inclined to liking names, liking labels, feeling like sorting the world helps understand it, helps see more of it. It's kind of amazing. Do you also carry around a notebook just to jot down thoughts here and there? Yeah, a notebook or a lot of times I'll take a voice memo. So that's another piece of technology that I think I found sort of helpful, which is sort of lovely, too, because sometimes when I go back and listen to it and to transcribe it, you can hear the sound of the wind or you can hear the sound of birds calling.

44:14And so there's this other sense of what that landscape was like. So I would love to end with having you read another passage from your book, and it's from the very end, from actually the epilogue, and it's told from the point of view of the dog in the story, Giuseppe, who's, as we've said, has had a major role in how things have turned out.

Epilogue reading from the dog perspective

44:35So could you read that? Sure. It had been a long day. He'd only been outside once, but in that short time he'd gathered from the winds a tale of roots and moles and worms, of ghosts hidden within the leaf fall, of rats and springtails, mosses, snakes. It had come down from the mountain to the trees where lumbermen had labored, through the scars torn deep into the earth, through dens of bear and fox and wolf and lion, down, down, through the paths that turned and twisted,

45:06through cities, seas, and silvered forests, before it rose again, into the corridors of pine and maple. And meadows then, green with young spring grasses, past apple trees and hawthorns, trunks scarred by the secret scripts of sapsuckers, down past gall and wasp and tumbling water and dragonfly and nymph, the world trembled in his nostrils. Some of this was new and some familiar. Closing his eyes, he took it all in, and then he pricked his ears and stared into the darkness.

45:42Something extraordinary was coming. What a wonderful way for you to end the book and for us to end this conversation. Thank you. Thanks so much. It's lovely talking to you. That's Daniel Mason. He's a professor of psychiatry at Stanford and the author of a number of books, including Country People and Northwoods. Wonder Cabinet comes to you from Versher, Vermont, where we've been enjoying one of the most spectacular fall leaf seasons in years. We'll be off next week as we make the drive back to Wisconsin, but you can look for a new episode on October 24th.

46:16Thanks, as always, to our audio engineer, Steve Gotcher, and our digital producer, Mark Rickers. I'm Steve Paulson. And I'm Anne Strainchamps. You can send questions or comments to us at wondercabinetproductions.com. Don't forget to sign up for the newsletter while you're there. Until next time, be well.