The Garden of Open Mouths

Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2014 The ag rden of open mouths Lindsay D'Andrea Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the Fine Arts Commons Recommended Citation D'Andrea, Lindsay, "The ag rden of open mouths" (2014). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 13698. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/13698 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The garden of open mouths by Lindsay D’Andrea A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Major: Creative Writing & Environment Program of Study Committee: K. L. Cook, Major Professor Stephen Pett Matthew Sivils Julie Courtwright Kevin Amidon Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2014 Copyright © Lindsay D’Andrea, 2014. All rights reserved. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................. iii STORY MAP ........................................................................................................................ vii PART I. RUINS The Bright Lights of Herman City ........................................................................................ 2 What the Wind Left Behind .................................................................................................. 24 Wood and Nails ..................................................................................................................... 29 The Water Seeker .................................................................................................................. 42 PART II. LEGENDS Edna of the Pines .................................................................................................................. 55 Pine Barons ........................................................................................................................... 73 Strange Trajectories .............................................................................................................. 90 The Bottle Tree .................................................................................................................... 103 Fake Fruit .............................................................................................................................. 106 PART III. HUNGERS Here One Day ....................................................................................................................... 130 Wildwood .............................................................................................................................. 145 Half Moon Barge .................................................................................................................. 168 The Garden of Open Mouths ................................................................................................ 184 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................. 269 REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................... 270 iii INTRODUCTION The act of writing about real places and regions demonstrates the power of environment over people, and can have the capability to help readers and writers engage with what it means to be from a particular place. During my time in Iowa State University’s Masters of Fine Arts Program for Creative Writing and Environment, my concept of “a sense of place” has been the primary generator of story ideas. I have dedicated my graduate thesis, The Garden of Open Mouths, to writing stories that feature the New Jersey Pine Barrens—an area that takes up a large part of southern New Jersey, where I am from. The background for these stories is drawn from my personal experience as well as nonfiction-based research. Often my stories borrow from historical or personal events that inform my understanding of what it means to be from the Pine Barrens and interact with that environment. The sense of place developed throughout The Garden of Open Mouths includes notes of ecological and geological history of the Pine Barrens as well as human, cultural, and environmental conflicts. Despite my engagement with the history and mythology of the Pine Barrens, I aim to create an essence of the real place through a fictional representation that may not always adhere to truth, history, or even reality. The Pine Barrens of my stories is admittedly not the Pine Barrens anyone would find if they decided to hike the forty miles of the Batona Trail. In my fiction, I aim to assemble imagined parts, glimpses of history, and snippets of different characters’ perceptions to achieve the essence of the Pine Barrens (today more properly and referred to as “NJ Pinelands”). I want to portray the Pine Barrens I know—historically and personally—as a place both natural and artificial, both dead and alive, both ugly and intensely, truthfully beautiful. iv The stories in The Garden of Open Mouths speak mainly to southern, regional, and gothic American literary traditions. I draw influence from writers such as Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Carson McCullers, Richard Wright, and many others. Although southern New Jersey is not well represented in the canon of regional American literature, the Pine Barrens is a compelling setting for place-based fiction. On one hand, the area harbors distinct natural forms that make up an ecologically rare ecosystem, but on the other hand it resists the label of “wilderness” in that humans have tampered with and claimed the area at many different points in time. In my own attempt at writing the region of southern New Jersey, I use form to weave together the elements of community and place; thus, The Garden of Open Mouths, like many of the regional works that inspired it, is a short story cycle linked primarily by place. In my mind, a successful short story cycle might mimic the workings of an ecosystem. In between the cities of Philadelphia and Atlantic City, the New Jersey Pine Barrens has specific boundaries, and these same boundaries inform the identity of many of my characters and their relation to one another. The attached “Story Map” will provide a visual of specific locations for the thirteen stories in my collection. The goal of a linked short story cycle is for each work to function independently, but take on a larger significance within a web of other stories. In my collection, all stories are connected by place, theme, trope, and texture. I separated The Garden of Open Mouths into three “parts” according to various patterns of theme and trope. The final story in each part is historically based and includes a time marker. The novella—also the title story—anchors the collection. While regional writing is an obvious influence for my place-based work, the American gothic tradition also fascinates me as both a reader and a writer. My choice to integrate gothic elements v in my work stems partially from my interest in American gothic literature (especially such writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Flannery O’Connor), and partially from the essence of Pine Barrens folklore filled with legends, ghosts, and monster myths. In many instances, the folklore of a specific place says much about local perception of an environment over time. In particular, Pine Barrens folklore is tightly bound to the history of the Pine Barrens, which has left many “ghost towns” behind thanks to the feverishly changing industries— including glassmaking, iron-smelting, and paper-milling—that suddenly emerged and just as suddenly disappeared in the 1800s. The Pine Barrens have gone through several periods of rapid change, leaving behind scattered stories and ruins, and these shards of remembrance inspire my approach to regional gothic storytelling. In The Garden of Open Mouths, some stories draw from recorded folklore and some create new mythologies. Despite my attraction to the gothic in these Pine Barrens stories, I am conscious of the problematic symbolic presence of “the wilderness,” a trope visible throughout American literature since the writings of Puritan settlers. Over time, the haunted wilderness has become another theme of gothic literature meant, again, to reflect the instability of the human mind. I am interested, however, in the opposite phenomenon: how the external world affects the internal worlds of my characters. I want to know what happens when a conflicted character settles in a place that complicates the internal landscape. For this reason, several protagonists in my stories are outsiders arriving in a new place or insiders leaving a familiar place, permanently transforming their conception of home. Several of my characters are young and find themselves having to build identities in response to their sense of place in the Pine Barrens. This impulse emerges directly from the gothic tradition, wherein “[t]he American forest appears as a maze-like mystery to which a young innocent is initiated” (White). Initiation and stranger-coming-to-town vi stories—modes defined and detailed by Joseph Campbell—often

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