♪♪ -In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

This is the New Hampshire Authors series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

♪♪ -Welcome to the New Hampshire Authors series.

I'm Marie Harris, sitting in for Becky Rule.

It's my pleasure today to introduce to you Edie Clark.

Edie is one of the best known writers in New England, perhaps especially for her long running column in Yankee Magazine, Mary's Farm, and the book in which many of these essays are collected, The View from Mary's Farm.

In addition to having been a senior writer for Yankee, she's been a senior editor and is currently a contributing editor.

Her other books include an elegant collection of poems that serve as a kind of libretto to the music of Larry Siegel, a hymn to one of New Hampshire's iconic mountains, entitled, Monadnock Tales.

She's the author of Saturday Beans and Sunday Suppers, a memoir spanning more than four decades with recipes and a new book, States of Grace: Encounters with Real Yankees, a collection of stories about ordinary people leading extraordinary lives, and the book that, in my opinion, defines her as an original and deeply compassionate writer, the book that The New York Times Book Review called a triumph of a human spirit, which may take its quiet place among the best of literature.

The Place He Made, her memoir, her Love Story, an elegy.

Please join me in welcoming this ordinary person and documenting her extraordinary life, the writing life, Edie Clark.

[applause] So perhaps we could start with, something from Saturday Beans and Sunday Suppers and the reason I'm asking you to read from this book is because it's an extraordinarily interesting combination of memoir and cookbook, and it's satisfying in a way, I felt it to be satisfying in a way that, dinners with friends are a kind of combination of conversation and wonderful food.

And I also read that you said somewhere that all of your kitchens are the same kitchen, despite the fact that you've renovated or made many of them and so I was hoping that perhaps you could start by reading, a kitchen piece out of Saturday Beans and then talking a little bit about that context.

-Absolutely.

I'd love to.

This that I'm going to read is at the very end and it's a bit about Mary's Farm as well, but it's also about these kitchens.

I have done five different kitchens in different houses for different reasons.

The one galvanizing factor about the house, likely what attracted to... me to it in the first place, and also what made it the place the neighborhood thought worth saving was the view.

The view from Mary's Farm is a dramatic, up close look at Mount Monadnock, the long ridges that lead to the summit stretching out on either side.

It's the full view of the mountain.

I sometimes call it the full Monty, as it seems like all of it is exposed, nothing hidden As the crow flies, the mountain is about six miles from my front window, and thanks to all my forward thinking neighbors, past and present, the land that we all look at is preserved from development for all times.

And so at night there are no lights visible from my house, just the solemn, peaceful, dark hump of the big hill.

The view and its wild surroundings, once home to wolves and now to coyotes, were why I came here.

While living in the back kitchen it disappointed me greatly to discover that in order to enjoy the view, I had to walk outside.

I wanted this kitchen to have the same elements of my other kitchens, the ones I had created in other old houses I'd had the privilege to live in long enough to bring them back from the brink.

I wanted the open shelves where I could show off my collection of bowls and pitchers, and I wanted good, solid handmade cabinets.

A sink that felt in keeping with the age of the house, a big pantry, and a place for my wood cookstove and the big old Glenwood gas range, which had become the useful pair I'd kept going for so long, and a big space for a good sized table and chairs.

Room for at least six people to sit around the table comfortably.

I had no intention of making this a kitchen for one.

That big old living room lent itself to all that, and so the work began on the new kitchen, which was to be warm and facing the mountain.

-Very nice.

Place, of course, is completely central to what you, what you do, and it's woven into everything that you write one way or the other.

Would you like to talk a little bit about place, the place where you are now, perhaps where, where you started from?

- Sure.

-And how you got here?

- Sure.

I grew up in New Jersey.

I always, I always say... [laughter] I always have to say, don't hold it against me.

[laughter] But I have lived here most of my adult life, and, I was inspired to come back here because, my, my aunt and uncle lived in Shirley Center, Massachusetts, where I often visited growing up, and it inspired me a deep love for New England, which I still have, and, I was living in Philadelphia, and we came up my husband, my first husband, and I, and, we homesteaded, so to speak.

We bought a piece of land, built a house.

That was my first kitchen.

Did all the work ourselves.

Very proud of that.

And, needed to, make a living.

It's always been the the bottom line for everything I've ever done.

I hate to say it.

It sounds so materialistic, but you know, I've never been able to lead that lovely, idealistic idea of an artist's life.

So I got a job proofreading at Yankee Magazine.

And I liked Yankee I was surprised because here I was, this back to the lander.

But it was interesting to me that everybody I worked with there was my age, and we all got along really well.

And, you know, I thought, Yankee Magazine, isn't that for old people?

[laughter] But it wasn't run by old people, and it was a wonderful place to be and I was very inspired to think that I might be able to write something for them.

I always wanted to be a writer, all my life.

-And you started as a copy editor first?

-Yes.

I mean, I had to fight my way into that writing rank.

-Now how did you do that?

-Oh, I -Did you slip things under the door?

-No, I, you know, we were I mean, it's a small staff and I read and read and read, which I have always told all my students that's the best way to learn, not, you know, don't, don't get those textbooks on how to write.

It doesn't work.

But read people that inspire you, people whose work you love, and, so I read a lot of the Yankee stories and, this was in 1978.

So that was a long time ago.

And the magazine has changed dramatically since then.

-In the process of writing these essays for Yankee and other essays, you've started with place, but, it seems to me, as is always true in the very best essays, the, the, the ostensible reason for beginning or for writing the essay is not necessarily where it ends up.

And one of the essays that I think embodies that so well is the one called, The Night Sky.

- Oh, yes.

- From, from, Mary's Farm and if you could read that, I think that, that’d be wonderful.

-Absolutely.

It's one of my favorites, actually, Night Sky, The view of the night sky up here... and this was written about, the first year that I was living at what's known as Mary's Farm.

It's known that because Mary and her family and her clan owned this farm since the 1940s.

And I came upon it, with, bought it along with my neighbor who I didn't know.

So that's a whole long story, but, this was written the first year of my living at Mary's Farm.

The view of the night sky up here on the hill is so spectacular.

The two of my neighbors have taken note of it in naming their places.

One is called Sky field, the other, Sky Hill.

It took living here to understand the effect that a clear night sky can have.

The night sky, with all its sparkling constellations, is indeed the one unchanging aspect of our planet, the only physical terrain we share with other nations.

I remember distinctly the first time I discovered the beauty of the night sky on this hill.

The first time I realized why my neighbors had named their places with reverence to the sky.

When I first moved here, there were a seemingly unending array of problems to be dealt with.

Broken pipes, a faltering foundation, insufficient heat, an overwhelming amount of debris from a devastating ice storm, a barn that had begun to collapse.

The list was long and my resources were short.

One night, these difficulties pressed into an almost unbearable degree.

It was a very dark night in January and I was very cold staying deep under the covers.

I turned this way and that, but sleep would not come.

At last I got up and walked down the hall.

One of the windows in the bathroom had a broken pane and I went over to it and with a towel I tried to stem the flow of cold air, but my attention was instead drawn outside, way outside, up into the darkness where the stars virtually burn toward earth.

The beauty was so startling.

I remember saying, oh, out loud into the silence of that difficult night.

The stars shimmered in their places, each one distinct, each one representing an eternity of its own.

I knew at once why I was here, whether from a tent in Africa during a World War, or from a cold farmhouse on a New Hampshire hill at the teetering end of the 20th century, we need these celestial guides to keep us from despair.

The stars tell us other things, too, but maybe the most important thing that they tell us is how close we really are to each other.

-Wonderful.

Really wonderful.

- Thank you.

Thank you.

[applause] -We're going to skip the place, for the moment, and, speak a little bit about your newest book.

Which is an extraordinary collection of, small biographies, mini vignettes, character studies, which you said were, inspired by the wonderful writer Joseph Mitchell, who wrote similar stories years ago about the New York characters.

And so talk a little bit about, how you came to collect stories of New Englanders, and then we'll have, a chance to hear a little bit from one of them.

-Great.

Yeah, well, I have to do the thing you know, my new book, States of Grace.

Yeah, I mean, this is a, a collection of stories that I've written mostly for Yankee, not all, over the years it spans 30 years, and it's about 30 people not that I, they're represented for each year or anything of that sort.

I chose this just because it's, I just I love reading this.

This is, Ruth Farris who to me is very much what we think of, what I think of when I think of a Joseph Mitchell character.

She just embodies the whole town of Cutler, Maine.

Whenever I arrived back to Cutler, I close my eyes and just listen.

Mama tells me about her garden and the things that we share in common.

Delia Farris lives in Warren, mid-coast, about three hours from home.

Delia comes home when she can, more so perhaps now than, when she, that she is writing the book.

She's writing a book about her mother.

When she was in her 20s, she left home and she stayed away.

Now she is in her 40s and she is back.

Delia has seen something of the world, has lived in different places, and she knows enough to know that her mother and her aunts and her uncle's, all of them, are a disappearing tribe.

The passing of a culture.

She has come this weekend in time for the supper.

One of her mother's bean suppers up at the church.

Outside the church, the foghorn moans.

Inside, down in the basement where the tables are set, smells of baked beans and casseroles rise.

Ruth is in the kitchen.

It's steamy and warm.

She's slicing brown bread.

Delia is too late to get a chair at her aunts and uncles table, so she and her friends sit two tables down the Corbitt's and the Kates’s take up two whole tables.

The rest of the town has eight to fill, and they do, quickly tucking their knees under the long tables, setting the napkins on their laps and waiting for the bowls to be brought so they can dig in.

This is my best day, Ruth says of the monthly supper day.

She has been up since dawn.

Ruth has managed the Cutler suppers for nearly 50 years, since she was a young bride.

Last night she made two pies, blueberry and apple, and she set the beans to soak.

This morning, she started the beans early in the big canning kettle.

She uses a big bean, kidney beans or Jacob's cattle, and molasses, sugar, onions, pork.

Not so much pork as I used to, she says.

And vinegar.

The vinegar is what gives them so much flavor, she says, she cooks the beans at her house until early afternoon, when she carries them over to the church, which is just a short walk from her back door.

They continue to cook there in the big church oven.

In the meantime, she made a chicken casserole and found time to row out to the island.

The weather was warm and she saw loons.

Her best day.

I'll just stop there.

- That's wonderful.

That's very nice, yes.

-Thank you.

[applause] -So, so that we don’t run out of time, -Right.

-I would like you to choose, an excerpt from this book.

Give it a little introduction if you would and, and perhaps we could end this interview with your reading from this extraordinary work.

-This is a book about my husband Paul Bolton.

We were married, -One eighty is the... -five short years, and, he was diagnosed with cancer after a year and a half of our being married and he was sick for almost four years and then he died.

And, he taught me more in those short years than anybody in my life.

And he still teaches me.

We always planted the garden on Memorial Day.

It was our tradition.

When that day came, Paul got out the tiller, and together we worked the garden soil with a soft bed, into a soft bed of dark loam.

We had done this so many times together.

We worked without talking.

Long before we married we had planted rows together.

When he was done mixing the soil, he silenced the tiller and hauled it back to the shed.

He took the hand cultivator from the hook on the wall and came back out to the garden.

He was wearing his blue cap, the one that promoted Ford trucks, and his Prairie Home Companion t-shirt.

This particular Memorial Day was warm.

I held the cardboard box of seeds, and as Paul started over at the edge of the bed and scored a row, I followed, plunking the puckered green pea seeds in a straight, evenly spaced line.

When he, when I, when he got to the end of the row, Paul came back around and followed after me, closing the earth up over the new seeds with his hands.

We started the whole process all over again with the spinach, then butter crunch lettuce.

I stopped and stood back to look at what we were doing.

I couldn't believe it.

It was only a month since he had been in intensive care.

He was still pale, but he was stronger, stronger and stronger.

I went inside to get the camera and came back out to take pictures.

We were planting our garden.

It was 1988, two years since that first diagnosis on that snowy April afternoon.

It seemed impossible that we could be doing something so completely normal, something so filled with hope as the expectation of a harvest.

A couple of nights before that, on a cool May evening while we were eating supper, we'd been talking about the word remission.

Of course, we had heard it all the time at the hospital.

It had a kind of a whispered status, as in he's in remission, sometimes uttered by the nurses.

But what does that word really mean?

Paul asked.

I went over to the bookcase by the stove, where we kept the dictionary for our Scrabble games, and ran my finger down to remission.

A state or period during which something as symptoms is remitted, I read out loud.

We had a small fire going in the stove and it was warm where I stood.

I looked up at him over my glasses.

He gave me his wise half smile, which meant he needed more.

I moved down to the next word to remit, and read the first definition.

To release from the guilt or penalty of sins.

[laughter] I loved the way Paul laughed.

It was full and easy.

I can still hear the way he laughed at that, the way we laughed about it together.

Okay, I said, closing the book and wedging it back into its place.

We get the picture.

Yeah, I said, Paul.

It sounds like a good place to be.

[applause] -I think we have time for you to read another excerpt that would be really nice.

- All right.

I wonder now how much of our lives are preordained and how much are random events scattershot and without order until the storyteller takes over.

How much is in the mind of the storyteller?

I could never have remembered all this.

A lot of what I've written here comes from letters I wrote in journal entries, notes to myself It was amazing to me what happens when I organize these details, make them into a story.

Our lives, all of our lives, are simply an accumulation of details and events and are all but senseless until this is done.

And I believe that some lives, even if the details are put in order, remain a random assortment of oddities like what we find when we empty our, empty our pockets at the end of the day.

We do those miscellaneous... Do those miscellaneous coins and gum wrappers and paperclips and pens truly have anything to do with one another?

It was this accumulation of the details of Paul's life as they fell into place that awed me, because to me, they had not only order, but purpose.

And through the sorting of them, I see that the mystery of his life was solved through his death.

What would be this... What would this story be if Paul were still alive here with me?

It would not be a story.

I would never write it.

I would be living it instead, and it would not be the same story since his illness and his death were what extended him beyond what I thought I knew about him when he was live... alive, when we were together.

-Thank you.

One of the things that, fascinated me about this book is that you could say, this is a book about cancer.

You could say, this is a book about someone dying.

It doesn't sound very, appealing to a reader and yet, every page of this book, I found something to think about, something to ponder, something to compare to my own life.

What has been the response of, of your readers?

-Well, it's, you know, again, I was very focused on the reaction of Paul's family and -What was the reaction of Paul’s family?

Would you tell us that?

-Well, I knew in advance I had given his sister this book to read and she said, you know if you publish this book, my mother will never speak to you again and, I had to accept that.

She was right.

Paul’s sister was right.

His mother and father never spoke to me again and his, other sister never spoke to me again.

But, his aunts and uncles and cousins wrote to me, called me and told me, thank you for telling Paul’s story.

-And the wider audience, what... - Everything, just what you said.

People who have suffered from cancer and been cured, people who are under treatment.

I mean, I thought those people would never want to read this book.

It's too painful to go back into that place.

People have never experienced cancer.

They said it makes me love my loved ones even more.

It was just a, a wide range of response that I never would have expected.

I, I still am completely, surprised by this and a love for Paul, which I, you know, hadn’t, manufactured but... - Strangers... -people just, you know even before the, in his fall.

I mean, people visit his grave that - Wow.

- Don't never knew him.

They leave things, they, they call for directions -To, to, to have that happen, it must be realized that this isn't really a book about cancer or death this is really a love story and that's I think why, -It is a love story.

-it's a book that people can read without turning away and that, and that, people will in fact call to come and see the place where this love story happened.

-To think that people would remember Paul 21 years after he’s died, I mean, I will, but in a normal, in most people's lives that doesn't happen, and that's such a joy to me to think that he's remembered in this way.

-Do you think that that is one of the, one of the gifts that a writer, has to be able to, to, to keep someone or something, a place, a person, alive for the ages?

Because, in fact, you're not a tape recorder you're, an artist, -Right.

-and to tell this story in a way that would cause this sort of reaction in readers, takes being an artist, not simply a chronicler.

-Right.

And, what happened I mean, I had, as I said, I had these journal entries, I had letters, I had, all kinds of things.

And under normal circumstances, well, you have them, but you don't go and look at them.

You know?

You’ve, oh, they're over there and, you know, so I did write it down, but I, you know, I don't even notice that.

But once he had died, I was, bereft, what else can I say?

You know, you have time and all these thoughts going on in your mind and when I returned to those letters and diary entries... -And it was your job to transform that... - Well it became, because I began to see as a writer, I saw an arc in his story, you know, I saw his life like this, and I thought, first of all, to write this is to spend time with him.

So that was selfishly what I wanted to do.

I wanted to record his story because I never wanted to forget and I know about memory.

- Yeah.

- You let a little time go by it, it changes and then you remember a little more oh it changes again, so, I knew that I had to work with speed, and, I did, and I had the help of, Andre Dubus, the, -Wonderful short story writer.

Well, it's, it's a, it's a wonderful story and I thank you so much for giving us at least a little part of it to whet our appetite for reading more and, I want to also thank you so much for... -Oh, thank you, my pleasure, absolutely.

- Being here today, thank you so much.

[applause] ♪♪