When they got off the river, the dogs ran ahead. As they traveled down the Hudson, Alison sat toward the middle, behind the dogs, and later could hardly remember the trip. They walked down the road and loaded everything in Lottie’s little aluminum boat with the outboard motor, which she’d left tied to a post near the boat ramp. Lottie came out with a bag of groceries, followed by the dogs. She woke to an empty pickup and panicked for a moment until she realized they were parked outside the general store in Newcomb, which hadn’t changed in 12 years. In other mountains, the Adirondacks, I’ve felt that without irony, on its gray cliffs, clear rivers, and approaching unbroken snow in deep forests - and then in the company of people who found there new or stronger or forgotten versions of themselves.Īlison slept on the ride north. Eliot wrote, in the voice of an elderly woman recalling an outing from her youth in the Bavarian Alps, “In the mountains, there you feel free.” It’s the wistful note from the modernist masterpiece about discordant civilization, which Professor Joseph Slater deconstructed and read to us in his elegant cadence in London. In the opening passage of “The Waste Land,” T.S. In light of that interesting confluence, we share selections from several of those alumni books, along with thoughts from the authors about how real places inspire the mind’s eye of the storyteller.
(As it happened, the lineup for this fall’s Living Writers course also reflects a global iteration of that theme.) Recently, we noticed a particularly strong sense of place - and displacement - in several works of new fiction by Colgate alumni. Point of view is a sort of burning-glass, a product of personal experience and time it is burnished with feelings and sensibilities, charged from moment to moment with the sun-points of imagination.” And, maybe partly because of the setting of our campus - rural, and yet a center of learning and exposure to ideas and culture the world over - Colgate alumni also know the power a particular place can have, in life, learning, and literature.Īs Eudora Welty, fiction luminary of the American South, put it, “Place, to the writer at work, is seen in a frame. No surprise: there are a lot of great writers among our alumni. New books of all kinds regularly roll into our office.
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