Books Downtown

Books allow us to explore. They offer time for reflection.  Through books we learn about our history and can contemplate and speculate on the future.  We never know, do we, what we will find when we crack open the covers of a book.  We can get lost in the pages exploring the mystery of a place, sorting the relationships between men and women, youth, and elders, through the lens of a writer, a poet, or a storyteller.

For too many years when I walked downtown in Laconia, past empty storefronts, it was always my thought there should be a bookstore.  I was filled with joy when I first noticed a sign announcing the opening of the Innisfree Bookshop. Now, there is the Laconia Public Library, Innisfree, and places to have a coffee and read.  Even enjoy a glass of wine and read.

The book that has enchanted me since I was in New Hampshire this summer is Diane Glancy’s book, A Line of Driftwood, The Ada Blackjack Story. Diane is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwriter and a professor emeritus at Macalester College. It was the design on the cover that attracted my attention as I was looking through the Turtle Point Press catalogue.  Turtle Point is an independent publisher who promotes literature by classic and contemporary writers, and the work of emerging and neglected authors, revealing lives not usually seen in books that are playful, poignant, and poetic.  Turtle Point published A Line of Driftwood.

Ada Blackjack was a young Inupiat woman who was hired to accompany four explorers on a trip to Wrangle Island in the Artic Ocean in 1921.   When their rations ran out, the supply ship didn’t arrive because of the ice and the men couldn’t kill enough game to survive, three of the men left, hoping to cross 200 miles of frozen sea and reach Siberia.  Ada was left with the fourth man who was ill and died from scurvy, leaving her to spend wo months alone until the rescue ship arrived in 1923.

Ada kept a diary of her daily activities yet wrote nothing about what she was feeling.  The diary, purchased by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who organized the expedition and paid Ada $500 for it, is included among his papers is in the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College. It was at Dartmouth where Diane Glancy was able to read the original and then to contemplate, through her own poetry, what Ada must have been feeling as a young woman facing danger, loss, and hardship in a frozen barren landscape. Not knowing from day to day what might happen.

“Breath is nothing more than thread that follows a needle through a piece of cloth.”

I visited the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth this summer so I too could hold Ada’s diary in my hands. Reading Diane’s poetry and Ada’s words led me to think about silence, in our lives.  Where do we find it?  About being in “solitary” without talking or communicating with another human being for days on end.  About having one’s identity erased as a Native American as a woman.

Earlier this week I was in conversation with Diane Glancy through the Portsmouth Athenaeum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  It was held on Zoom and will be posted online.

Casey Gerken, the owner of Innisfree, was enchanted by the book as well and you can purchase a copy at Innisfree in Laconia.

Independent bookshops struggle against Amazon. Please do stop by and say hello. You are supporting the poets, writers, illustrators, and book designers. The people who tell our stories.