Varley O'Connor | March/April 2012

Paul Harding

EXCERPT

Paul Harding is the author of the novel Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His second novel, Enon, will be published by Random House in 2012. Harding was the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the 2010 PEN American Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers.

Harding received his BA from the University of Massachusetts and his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College. Before he began to write, Harding played drums for the rock band Cold Water Flat.
Harding spent 2011 on a world book tour for Tinkers while finishing Enon.

Varley O'Connor: I perceive an abundance of influences in Tinkers, and I mean this as a compliment. At some points I hear Faulkner, but then suddenly, and seamlessly, the writing shifts and I think of Bruno Schulz, his wonderful expressionist quality, in which the interior life is painted onto the world. Could you speak to this shifting and melding in your work? And am I right about Faulkner and Schulz?

Paul Harding: You're right about Faulkner and Schulz, although I'm more consistently conscious of having to resist lapsing into Faulkneresque prose. Faulkner was such a formative influence, as he is for so many writers, that for a long time I thought that his was the only sort of prose you could or should write in if you were serious. What I find is that I'm interested in time-existing in it-and that the foreshortenings and explodings of time, in narrative, as functions of character, perception, memory, are what underlie a lot of Faulkner's prose. I wasn't as aware of Schulz as I wrote, but I love his writing, the interior topography, the world constricted to the mind-or reconstructed by it. There's a specific beauty to what I perceive of and sympathize with as his miniaturist aesthetics. There's a gentleness and delicacy and solicitude for these fragile interiors (which I think the Quay brothers captured in their own amazing, eerie way, too, with the movie they made out of the Schulz stories). I very much tend toward little, personal landscapes, like terrariums and dioramas and picture boxes and those hollow sugar eggs decorated for Easter. As in some of the passages in Tinkers, I spent a lot of time as a kid making little realms out of twigs and grass, boats made of bark, stuff like that. I'm actually writing about an old dark diorama set behind glass in a wall around a remote corner in a town library at the moment.
But I kind of think that every author I've read shows up in my writing, in varyingly attenuated degrees, as I think that this is the case with most writers. I see as much if not more of Wallace Stevens and Emerson as I do Faulkner. And that delights me. So long as the writing is not merely imitative or derivative, I experience influence as one of the joys of artistic fellowship and decidedly not something that produces anxiety. I'm in conversation or a dialogue with my favorite people, on the great, democratizing page, you know?
In terms of the shifting and melding, I think of that as a matter of technique that arose out of not being all that interested in plot. I'm interested in character. It's a matter of taste, of disposition, of course, but when I write, plot is a predicate of character. Character is the subject of my attention, and as a consequence, perception is a huge deal. Therefore, so is consciousness, so is mind. The mechanics of the narrative shifts in the book are meant to portray and accommodate the movements of mind-of thought, of memory-which, in my experience, do not proceed linearly but associatively. I think of the difference, as far as the analogy is useful, as that between Newtonian physics and quantum physics, at least roughly along the lines that Newtonian mechanics are, for all their elegance, bounded by more or less linear, determined cause and effect, whereas quantum mechanics proceed in a much more observer dependent, supraluminal, temporally flexible manner. At any rate, the quantum model seems more compelling to me when I think of it in terms of a character's mind-his emotions, his habits of association, the totemic images and feelings that occupy, and in fact constitute, his thoughts. The permutations of those thoughts and feelings are dictated not by logic, which seems to me an applied construct, but by something deeper, something that is in fact mysterious. That deeper, mysterious something is the subject of fiction, of art, and it is the human self. So, anyway, those narrative shifts are my attempts to render-poetically and aesthetically-a description of the experience of having a mind, in time, which is synonymous with being a person.

O'Connor: I see your method of creating mind, so to speak, as creative of story, which makes sense, since we are fiction-making creatures, especially in the realm of memory. The "mind" of Tinkers is that of a dying man, George Washington Crosby, and the larger portion of the novel, the innermost portion, recreates his father Howard-as a dying man might reconstitute important people and scenes of his life during his leave taking.
We learn that Howard left the family when George was a boy. The novel dramatizes two losses: the loss of his father, and the loss of George's own life as he dies. Yet this parallel brings the two losses to rest. The book ends with the scene, within memory, of Howard's return visit, after many years, to the grownup George in his young manhood. So I think you plot very well! How consciously did you structure Tinkers? Or where in the process did the structuring occur?

Harding: I think of structure as what physicists call an emergent property. I didn't start with much structure in mind, beyond the idea that the novel would have the form of a kind of countdown to George's death, and that the last word would be coincidental with the instant of his passing. With that general course set, I just allowed the prose to pile up, in no particular order, according to what interested me at the outset of any given day's writing. When I felt like the material was getting a bit too uniformly funereal, I'd write something lighter. When I felt like a scene was a bit surreal, I'd switch to something more concrete. If I wrote too much about red, I'd write about blue. I just proceeded according to the general principles of contrast and juxtaposition. It wasn't quite dialectical, but almost. That was especially true with the more cosmological material; I had a great time moving back and forth between more deterministic models of the universe and the maybe slightly more mystical or intuitive senses. One wonderful thing about being a fiction writer is that you're not under the obligation to prove or advocate any single model of humanity or reality. You write compelling, engrossing, rich, beautiful versions of whatever visions come up, lay them alongside one another, in a way that demonstrates that even apparently contradictory experiences are not exclusive of one another (and often in fact mean nothing without their own antitheses at their sides), and allow the reader to experience the grand, amazing, fortuitous chords of meaning-the over- and undertones-that sound and resound and reverberate as a consequence of the synthesis of the juxtaposed passages. I guess the book's structure emerged out of a process of improvisation. Once it did emerge, or began to make itself apparent, I certainly worked on shaping it, coaxing it, deepening it, all while trying to take care not to over-determine anything.

O'Connor: Is what you describe how you always work as a writer? Or is it particular to this novel and its subject matter? I would imagine that such a fluid process might preclude showing the work until it is very far along. Might a workshop environment prove antithetical to such a method?

Harding: It has been interesting to work on my second novel and discover what was more or less ineptitude when writing Tinkers and what seem to be proving my own artistic habits or processes. It looks like that improvisational method might be a constant. I like the freedom of moving around wherever and whenever I like within the manuscript, and writing about whatever catches my attention. One analogy I've been using to describe the process lately is that of those robot vacuum cleaners they have, where you switch the thing on and it just starts knocking around your living room in a random pattern, but it eventually cleans the whole floor. Likewise, I just knock around inside the world I've bounded until I, er, vacuum the whole living room.
You're right, though, that such a process can make for choppy reading during intermediate stages. I regularly go through the pile and try to put it in rough order, not only for my editors and my agent, but for me as well. But, other than my editor and my agent, no one else sees the thing anyway. If I could, I wouldn't show it to anyone at all, until a whole, viable draft was finished. I'm amenable to being edited, especially by the wonderful folks I've worked with so far, but there's a kind of inner logic, inner necessity, inner integrity that the work dictates for itself, to which it is one of the writer's fundamental jobs to pay the closest possible attention. It's easy to be distracted from that with other people making comments from the outside. Some of the best, newest, most beautiful revelations a work of art might have to offer could be obscured in their birthing if, in their nascent stages, they are handled according to applied or received wisdom.

O'Connor: How did you fare at the Iowa Writers' Workshop?

Harding: I fared fine, and I thrived, even. It's just that the novel is a tough form to work on in workshop settings, because it's bigger and takes longer to conceive and assemble and needs longer periods during which it elaborates itself without outside influence. Or, that was my experience. Plenty of other people might flourish with continual input for a larger project. Teachers and students need to be careful about what they present and receive as normative; you have to get things down any way you can. At any rate, the experience has made me especially amenable to looking at novel excerpts in the workshops I teach.

O'Connor: I read somewhere that Mann's Magic Mountain is one of your favorite novels. It is a visionary, highly philosophical novel, and yet at its center is illness, and the passages I most remember are concrete, like the moment when Hans Castorp is brought to tears at the sight of the inside of his own hand in one of the first X-rays in history.
Your bodily descriptions in Tinkers are powerfully convincing and shocking, in the way the physical does astonish, and subvert, in extremity. The final failing of George's body at the end the book, rendered in clinical and subjective terms, is an example. Another is the extended scene at the family dinner table when Howard, who suffers from grand mal epilepsy, undergoes a seizure.
Could you address this aspect of your novel? Do you have a particular interest in writing about illness and the body, or was this part of the vacuuming process? I mean, did you research and sculpt those events out of necessity to the story?

Harding: I've read The Magic Mountain at least eight times, in both English translations. It is dense, encyclopedic, glacially slow, deeply fascinating, and also just plain bizarre. One of the strangest and unsettling aspects of the book is how it treats illness. Mann treats the romanticizing of illness with irony, but he also romanticizes illness himself. It makes for a weird superimposition. You find it in his other works as well, especially in his Doctor Faustus. For him, there's this mesmerizing dialectic between an attraction to illness that he finds diabolical and the sense that it is aristocratic, a mark of aesthetic refinement. Of course, tuberculosis, which is what everyone has, or fancies he has, in The Magic Mountain, has a long history of being romanticized, and in Mann you also have his negotiations with gay, or bisexual, impulses, which have also been subjected to all sorts of assessments along aesthetic, diabolical, and, shall we say, hygienic lines-is it a disease, a moral lapse, a mark of high artistry? So, you have all of these now outdated versions (even as the atrocious motives behind some of them persist) of these subjects explored by Mann in a powerful, ambivalent fashion.
At any rate, I've been fascinated by his fascination with those subjects for a long time, but I also had his treatment of them as a kind of personal artistic cautionary tale in front of me when I approached illness in Tinkers. I was especially averse to using any kind of au courant philosophies of illness, which would be sure to date badly and quickly. But I also knew that, being very interior and very much centered on consciousness, I had to keep the book embodied, immanent. People had to have bodies that moved in a physical world. And, because of the dramatic premises of the book, they had to have bodies that suffered the usual mortal decay and affliction. In the case of Howard Crosby's epilepsy, I simply avoided any kind of clinical or pathological description of the disease itself. I wrote about it from a purely experiential angle. His seizures are described physically as if they are instances of electrocution, and they are personal, physical catastrophes for him. They yield no transcendence whatsoever, only obliteration. It's strange that in some ways, such seizures are so reflexively presumed to be ecstatic that some critics miss the fact that Howard's fits are explicitly and deliberately constructed to contradict that very assumption. With George's death, I tried to describe his body shutting down in a precisely observed, somewhat detached manner that went along with the sense that losing your body is losing the condition of your humanity, that the body starts to be something like a carcass, and that is horrifying. I also blended the failing human body with the image, the anatomy, I guess, of a worn out clock, since that is the analogy that George uses for himself.
All of this is of a piece with the fact that fiction is essentially an art form that deals with the embodied state of things. I am fascinated with the immanent, the phenomenal, even as I have a corresponding fascination with the idea that these things manifest out of some deeper, unknown substratum. I am fascinated with material, with matter, because, really, we have very little idea of what it really is.

O'Connor: The poet and creative nonfiction writer Patricia Hampl has written about her mother's dismay at being revealed as an epileptic in Hampl's first poetry collection. Evidently the mother had always kept her condition secret. She believed she would lose her job; she had stories of people crossing into Iowa from Minnesota, her home, because "not so long ago," as Hampl writes, "Minnesota refused to issue marriage licenses to epileptics."
Your character Kathleen, Howard's wife, is described-and I interpret this description as being filtered through Howard's consciousness, via George's-as a bitter and secretive woman. After a seizure in which her husband severely bites his son's hand, Kathleen goes to the local doctor for advice and the doctor gives her a brochure for "Northern and Eastern Maine's facility for the insane and feebleminded." She leaves the brochure on her dresser at home, ostensibly for Howard to find. This prompts Howard's departure from the family, and Kathleen comes off as most unsympathetic and callous. Yet I questioned Howard's-and George's-reading of her. I can appreciate Kathleen's concern for her children. She is also, of course, a person of her time, the 1920s, decades earlier than when Patricia Hampl's mother would have come of age, and in Kathleen's rural Maine, where even the doctor associates epilepsy with feeblemindedness, ignorance and superstition could be even more of a factor.
Will you speak about the construction of this character and her purpose within the novel?

Harding: I'm very loyal to Kathleen. Her response to Howard's epilepsy is the story's dramatic center of gravity. It was one of the non-negotiable givens of the book. So, it was incredibly difficult to write because, if I'd had my own way, I would not have made her such a tough character. It's for the best that I didn't have my own way, because writers negotiating the greatest difficulties of their work is largely how they come up with stuff worth reading. It so happens that the family member upon whom Kathleen is very loosely based, my great-grandmother, was a just plain miserable, vindictive, bitter person. The challenge, then, was to have Kathleen do what she did, but from motives that were actually more subtle and complicated and ultimately available to readers' empathy (if not sympathy) than those of the actual woman upon whom she was modeled. The twist I came upon was her leaving the brochure out for Howard to see. As modest and as limited as the gesture is, I see it as an act of love. You're right that she is concerned for her children, and she is in a sense marooned within her time and place and impoverished circumstances, and the option that the doctor offers, as terrible as it is, might well seem desirable, if only for the fact that it would be a solution, and anything remotely resembling a solution to such an affliction would be bound to have its attractions. She of course does not follow through on the option, but uses it to signal to her husband that he must escape. The hard, almost impossible thing that she and the reader know, but her husband and children don't, is that she left the brochure out for him to see on purpose. Howard flees thinking she left it out inadvertently, and for all he ever understands, she was proceeding with the plan to have him institutionalized, something he (rightly) thinks of as cruel and traitorous, even given the norms of the time.
Hopefully, that is just a description of the circumstances in the book, and not an interpretation. I cannot presume to say for anyone what such impossible options and acts and misunderstandings mean. I feel strongly as if those are true mysteries of the human heart, which good art ponders but for which it would never offer fraudulent explanations. Such explanations probably have to do with the essence of sentimentality and melodrama.

O'Connor: In a sense, the brochure functions as an objective correlative, to use T.S. Eliot's term, for the difficulty of Howard's illness. A more obvious example of correlative in the novel would be your use of clocks, which both underline and act contrapuntally to George's death-in addition to linking the different generations and times you employ.
So while I'm on Eliot and the density of Tinkers, is there an intentional pushing of the boundaries between poetry and prose in your work? It would certainly correspond to your preference for nonlinearity and the explodings of time you mentioned earlier.

Harding: I find that I have a natural inclination for pushing the boundaries between poetry and prose. Or maybe more exactly, I deliberately reject boundaries because I think of them as largely theoretical, as demarcations, which, if they must be assigned to works of art, should be assigned subsequent to their creations. That's not to say that there are not clear delineations. Wallace Stevens's poetry is poetry. But there are cases where making the distinction, especially before composition, defeats what's on or what emerges onto the page, imposes terms on the writing rather than allows the writing to evolve its own terms. I think of a lot of the writing in Tinkers as unlineated poetry, or lyric prose. As with all writing, lyrical prose comes with its own set of predictable potential pitfalls. One of my main concerns when I'm writing is that it not lapse into mere prettiness, but remain beautiful in the sense that Keats articulated it and explored it as a synonym for truth, and like Emily Dickinson, who has that line about truth and beauty: "Themself are One." But, when I'm actually doing the writing itself, I don't think about boundaries; I think about the tree I'm trying to describe, or the man in the rowboat, or whatever. If it later proves that in the course of capturing those descriptions, the writing pushed at commonly understood boundaries between this or that sort of writing, fine. Let the marketing department name it. Or the English department.
It's also a matter of density. I want to make rich, nutritious writing-stuff that'll sustain readers who want art that can nourish and delight a lively, engaged mind. I want to write stuff that can sustain second, third, or even more readings and still yield new meaning. And, I want to write for readers who find that quality a virtue, not a provocation or self-indulgence. When it works, aesthetic complexity is elegant and a mark of generosity. I think maybe it's less common lately for people to question their competence as readers. I have very moving and vivid and pleasant memories of the efforts to be equal to reading books like Absalom, Absalom! I wouldn't compare Tinkers with that novel, but I write with that kind of ideal in mind, and in the spirit of Faulkner saying in that famous (and infamous, in some ways) Paris Review interview that novels are a kind of species of splendid failure. Good novels fall short of their goals, so long as their goals are worthwhile of art and fine thinking, and in some senses how they fall short is integral to what makes them satisfying. I'm starting to mix metaphors, but I want neither to serve nor to be served gruel. Good writing should be a banquet!

O'Connor: Toward the end of Tinkers, after Howard has left his family, we learn that Howard also lost his father as a child. In the wonderful passage where the child Howard tries to find his father deep in the rural Maine landscape, he imagines, in a corn patch, "breaking an ear from its stalk, peeling its husk, and finding my father's teeth lining the cob," his father's hair encasing the teeth instead of corn silk. As he hikes through the woods, he imagines the outer layers of birch trees as "supple, like skin."
The child attempts to comprehend the absence of what was once emphatically material in the correspondence between landscape and body. But it is also a natural extension of the interpenetration of consciousness and world, character and setting that is there from the novel's start. Is this sort of boundary crossing magical realist? Or, to your mind, is it closer to your engagement, as you mentioned earlier, with Wallace Stevens and, in another way, Emerson?

Harding: I guess it's not really magical realism, because the concrete, literal relics Howard goes looking for are products of his own imagination, not of the real, objective world. I forced myself to be concrete in passages such as that, and in the earlier sections of that chapter when Howard's father is fading from the world. Howard's father's fading is figurative-a matter of mental illness, I guess-but I wanted to keep the prose full of concrete nouns and verbs. The whole book is so interior and so vulnerable to abstraction that I set a goal for myself that anyone fanning through the book could drop her finger down on any word and it would be a tangible, solid, immanent word. I suppose immanence is a preoccupation of mine, if only because I'm so prone to drift off into the ether, which is not great for fiction. I think that some of the oddest and deepest and most revelatory moments in the book are happy accidents that evolved onto the page as I simply disciplined myself to keep everything anchored in the physical world. There's a type of wonderful aesthetic phenomenon, too, in the concrete description of things that still cannot be imagined or seen fully despite being precisely described. So long as you don't lapse into coy obscurity, I think that you can end up rendering some engaging visions. Stevens's "Auroras of Autumn" comes to mind.

O'Connor: I find it heartening that a writer of your rigor and ambition is being widely read. Even prior to the Pulitzer, Tinkers received fine reviews and sold 12,000 copies. Not bad for a first literary novel published by a tiny literary press. Bellevue seems to be doing a fine job keeping the book available. I see it everywhere. It's a "best pick" at a bookstore in the Portland, Oregon airport!

Harding: Yes, before the Pulitzer, the book did pretty well for a first novel. That speaks to a vibrant culture of readers and independent booksellers larger than people suspect. It might also have something to do with the viability of straight-to-paperback publishing. Thirty dollars is a lot of money to drop on a hardcover book, even if you know and like the author. Tolstoy? Well, okay. Edith Wharton? Yes. But Harding? Pass. Tinkers can be had for ten or twelve bucks in most stores, though, and even less in some. And, of course, you can always check it out at the library.
It's sort of comical, seeing the book in airports and at big box stores and places like that. It always seemed like such a low key, boutique kind of project to me. But, absolutely, Bellevue has risen to every occasion, as unlikely as some of them have been. And that's attributable to Erika Goldman, publisher and editor extraordinaire, and her assistant, Leslie Hodgkins. The book's publicist, Molly Mikolowski is also just fantastic, more than fantastic, in fact. She's kept me on a perpetual book tour, which I love, since I feel like a kind of ambassador for a whole group of people in the independent bookselling and publishing industries that can lay fair claim to a share in the book's success.

O'Connor: So the initial groundswell was attributable to the support of independent booksellers-am I correct?

Harding: Absolutely. Lise Solomon, a sales rep in San Francisco, took the book under her wing and sort of spread the word to independent booksellers in the Bay area. Sheryl Cotleur, at Book Passages, chose it for their signed first edition club and did a run of 500 hardcovers. Powell's in Portland, Oregon did a similar thing. So word got around almost one store at a time. On the East Coast, people like Michele Filgate, then at RiverRun books in Portsmouth, New Hampshire helped it along by word of mouth as well. The Harvard Coop, which is run by Barnes & Noble but has a fair amount of autonomy, has a great fiction person there named Santhi Tsingos. She has a lot to do with the book being the Coop's best-selling title of 2010. So there's this network of incredible booksellers out there, keeping the world safe for art, so to speak.

O'Connor: This may sound like a funny question, but how are you doing with all this success? Your second novel is forthcoming. Was it hard to write when you were so busy publicizing Tinkers? You wrote while touring?

Harding: I'm not taking any of it for granted. It's incredibly humbling and it's an opportunity to work harder than ever, to redouble the effort at art. I understand very clearly that what has happened with Tinkers is in some ways like winning the lottery. It's such good fortune that it can make me queasy sometimes, but the worst thing in the world would be to squander it, to fail to be equal to it, or to be coy about it. So, I've worked my butt off on the second novel, mostly in hotel rooms around the world. Whenever I caught myself getting uptight about not being able to write in the solitude of my own study, at the ideal hour, I just said to myself, Poor baby, you have to work on the follow up to your Pulitzer Prize-winning book in a hotel room in Milan! That set me straight; put things in the proper perspective. The bottom line is that I've had the chance to aspire to degrees of gratitude and humility and art that I never could have imagined, and it's just plain wonderful.

O'Connor: Could you tell us a bit about the next novel? Are its seeds again autobiographical?

Harding: The next novel is titled Enon. Enon is the small Massachusetts village where George Crosby dies in Tinkers. The protagonists are Charlie Crosby, one of George's grandsons, and Charlie's daughter, Kate. Certain elements of the novel are autobiographical, but they have to do with the setting. Enon is the original, colonial name for the town I grew up in on the North Shore of Boston, Wenham. That's where I had the fundamental lights and landscapes and seasons imprinted on me as a kid, knocking around in the woods and the meadows, along the paths and the edges of ponds and streams. With the new book, I wanted that reservoir of experience to draw on again, to use as a medium through which I could refract character and experience. The novel is in first person, so Charlie gets some of my own memories of growing up in Wenham, but only very generalized ones. The book is not a means for me to explore my autobiography. I am not in the least interested in memoir or that sort of thing. As with Tinkers, I continue to be most interested in time and memory and family and belief-the usual stuff-the human heart, this human mind, for which nothing is more fascinating and maddening and delightful and mysterious and alien than itself.

AWP

Varley O'Connor's new novel, The Master's Muse, will be published by Scribner in May. Her other novels are Like China, A Company of Three, and The Cure. She teaches fiction and creative nonfiction writing at Kent State University and for the Northeast Ohio MFA program in writing.

From Tinkers

Kathleen chopped wood, shaken. Howard was still on his rounds. The girls were in the parlor, doing needlepoint and keeping an eye on Joe, who was having a conversation with Ursula, a bearskin rug that he treated like one of the family pets. George slept upstairs, on top of Kathleen and Howard's bed. The wind was still up. But it will soften and die down when it gets dark, she thought. Wisps of snow were still on the wind, too, sweet and sharp. The sun was going down. It sank into the stand of beech trees beyond the back lot, lighting their tops, so that their bare arterial branches turned to a netting of black vessels around brains made of light. The trees lolled under the weight of those luminescent organs growing at the tops of their slender trunks. The brains murmured among themselves. They kept counsel and possessed a wintery wisdom-cold scarlet and opaline minds, brief and burnished, flaring in the metallic blue of dusk. And then they were gone. The light drained from the sky and the trees and funneled to a point on the western horizon, where it seemed to be swallowed by the earth. The branches of the trees were darknesses over the lesser dark of dusk. Kathleen thought, That is like Howard's brain-lit and used up and then dark. Lit too brightly. How much light does the mind need? Have use for? Like a room full of lamps. Like a brain full of light. She patted her coat pocket to feel the folded prospectus for the Eastern Maine State Hospital in Bangor, located on top of Hepatica Hill overlooking the beautiful Penobscot River. When Dr. Box had given her the brochure, her first thought had been to remember that the hospital had originally been called the Eastern Maine Insane Hospital. But the pictures in the brochure showed clean rooms and a broad, sunny campus and a huge brick building with four wings that looked to her like a grand hotel. The idea of a hotel seemed benevolent rather than cruel, seemed, in the suddenly alien backyard, full of glowing, leaky, vanishing brains, a warm, safe shelter that she envisioned as if she were a famished and half-frozen traveler on a planet made of ice, breaching a hill and catching sight of a lodge with lights in every window and smoke pouring from the chimneys and people gathered together, luxuriating in the dreamlike delight that comes from grateful strangers sharing sanctuary. crocodiles break the surface-their musky smell rising first. Here I am, she thinks. Pleased to make my acquaintance.

Excerpted from Paul Harding's Tinkers. © 2009 by Paul Harding. Published by Bellevue Literary Press: http://www.blpress.org. Used with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.