Storyteller at the Fire
Jonathan Lethem is the author of eleven novels, five short story collections, and several nonfiction books, for which he has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is presently the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he teaches creative writing and literature.
Outside the academic year, Lethem lives in Maine, a place that has always drawn artists and writers to its pristine landscape, including Lethem’s artist father, who eventually sold his Brooklyn brownstone and bought a farmhouse there. So began the chain migration for Lethem himself.
A little over ten acres of forest and fields surround Lethem’s humble antique farmhouse in Blue Hill. Inside, a warren of rooms and slanted, shifty floors hold the history of its previous owners, whom Lethem respects by not doing too much modernization to the house’s overall design. His fridge is stuffed with vegetables he gets from local farmers, whose antecedents are Helen and Scott Nearing, the radical socialists who moved to Maine in the ’50s and fostered a “back-to-the-land experiment” based on a pacifist, vegetarian, environmentalist creed.
Lethem’s thoughtful recognition of his house’s history, the homesteading in the form of organic lettuce he’ll eat for dinner, the Nearings’ advocacy for sustainable living, and the fierce independence he encounters every day in Maine also form the nuggets of his forthcoming book, The Arrest.
KA: Do you feel there’s a connection between California and Maine, the two landscapes in which you live?
JL: They are incommensurable worlds, and it fascinates me that I am, just even within myself, translating one to the other. When I get to show a friend from California this place, or the reverse, I’m unfolding different peculiar, paradoxical aspects of my experience and myself, of the simultaneity of different realms, different realities.
KA: I ask about these landscapes because you said you have climate change on your mind. What does that mean?
: We’re collectively experiencing it becoming a manifest and tangible consciously acknowledged thing, individually and collectively, which makes us realize how much it’s been a subliminal
