From Amazon
Set near St. John, New Brunswick, Beth Powning's debut novel is a profound meditation on the nature of grief and memory. Kate, 52, has recently lost her husband, Tom, a painter, to a heart attack. Even as Kate mourns her tragic loss, she receives nine antique hatboxes filled with letters and documents from her ancestors in Hartford, Connecticut. Kate then commences an interior journey through her past, recalling when she would visit her grandparents in the great summer house of Shepton, where five generations of her family had lived. Sudden death at a young age is a recurring theme, and it is a tribute to this novel that the author is able to avoid any sense of the maudlin. In fact, when she relates the story of an eight-year-old relation dying of measles early in the century, the writing is riveting and the period scenes perfectly drawn.
What marks this novel as exceptional is its lyrical language. As Kate goes about her daily tasks and struggles with her memories, she sees the objects of the world--flowers, dew, clouds--with a near-painful clarity. Old envelopes are "embroidered by the teeth of mice." Adolescence is a time when "one has no idea that one is in mourning for childhood itself." Each leaf in her shining garden "holds a spear or prism or cup of light." Kate ultimately must find her own way to deal with the ghosts of her past, including a troublesome, heavy-drinking man she once knew who returns to her town to take a newspaper job. While the themes of this thoughtful novel might not appeal to every reader, it is beautifully, tenderly written. --Mark Frutkin --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
In this muted, measured debut, Powning captures the sorrow of a grieving widow as she revisits the past to heal present-day wounds. For 30 years, Kate's one constant has been Tom—her husband and best friend. A year after his death, 51-year-old Kate, alone in her lovely Victorian house in the Canadian countryside, is still having trouble acknowledging that he's gone. Distraction arrives in the form of a number of hatboxes from her grandparents' attic, full of letters smelling of apples and smoke that take Kate back to the simplicity of her childhood and Shepton, the family's rambling Connecticut home. But when Kate reads of a family tragedy, she sees a parallel between it and her own sorrow, and she begins to work through her feelings. Meanwhile, she grows close to Gregory, an old family friend who can't recover from his son's suicide, though she struggles with her feelings of pity and disgust for him when he makes some clumsy advances. Only a final calamity forces Kate to finally let go of the past and to start living in the present. The novel's leisurely pace takes some getting used to, but Powning does an excellent job of portraying Kate's sadness, divulging the tales of her family and focusing on the quiet beauty of her surroundings.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
First-novelist Powning offers a slow-moving yet thoughtful dissection of a widow's attempts to adjust to the untimely death of her husband. Living alone in rural Canada, Kate Harding is still suffering deep emotional pain a year after her husband's death. Because she finds the immediate past so distressing, she immerses herself in sorting through family papers, some dating back to the 1800s, which are stored in hatboxes. And within the faded letters of her grandparents, she finds unexpected parallels to her own life. In addition, Kate meets an old family friend, Gregory Stiller, who is still grief-stricken over the suicide of his son. A troubled soul who often drinks too much, he is forever urging Kate to join him on nature walks, but his sometimes dismissive attitude only makes her miss her husband more. Powning (Shadow Child, 2000) has a real affinity for crafting delicate descriptions of the natural world, but her story moves at a glacial pace. People dealing with loss or those with an interest in nature writing are this book's natural audience. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
“The imagery is evocative and clear, and the feelings of love and loss are transmitted effectively and elegantly. The Hatbox Letters conveys a sense of wonder and wisdom.”
—The Vancouver Sun
“[A] novel of stunning beauty ... The Hatbox Letters is a moving elegy to things lost and found.”
—New Brunswick Reader
“Powning’s descriptions of gardens and birds rival any Audubon painting. The Hatbox Letters is not only an absorbing literary experience, but an exquisite visual experience as well.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“The writing is highly sensual, painterly even, vividly portraying the natural world and its changing seasons.… [T]he depth of detail feels appropriate, mirroring the deliberate pace of Kate’s recovery and regeneration. Powning’s subject here is no less than the relationship of life and death, and she engages it with rigour and grace.”
—Quill & Quire
“Beth Powning reminds us of the essential links and threads that bind family and loved ones, past generations to future. In gentle prose, she illuminates passages through grief, yet the novel is studded with vitality. A story of unexpected endings and new beginnings — of life surging forward.”
—Frances Itani
“Like Annie Dillard, Beth Powning is a keen observer of the natural world. In language both erotic and exact, she explores the conflicting emotions of love and loss in a novel redolent with memory and the truth of experience, hard won.”
—Joan Clark
“Beth Powning’s language is lush with stunning images that linger long after the reading experience — and with soothing insights, especially of the healing potency available in family histories and connections with friends. She takes us by the hand and leads us through the landmines of grief. We can trust her: she knows the way back to the safety of emerging hope and belief in renewal.”
—Marjorie Anderson, co-editor, Dropped Threads
Praise for Shadow Child and Seeds of Another Summer
“Tenacious, unsparing, in anguish sometimes, but mostly with moving lyricism, Beth Powning pursues and completes what she calls her ‘apprenticeship in love and loss’, a long and not easy journey that we all, women and men, in our way, try to carry through.”
—Ernest Hillen, author of Small Mercies: A Boy After War
“Beth Powning’s. . .pure, powerful prose lure us into [its] embrace, laying bare our desire for a union with the natural world. This is the work of a gifted artist.”
—Courtney Milne, author of Prairie Skies
“One of the most appealing novels to be published in Canada in the last decade. . . . Beautifully written and emotionally wise, this is a debut novel with a difference. Its melding of past and present in the life of its protagonist is so well woven it will prove a boon to readers with a taste for fiction and non-fiction alike. . . . Rich, elegiac and full of resonance, her novel is more than impressive. It is a winner.”
—The London Free Press
“Beth Powning’s extraordinary new novel, The Hatbox Letters, is both an ode to joy and a lamentation.”
—The Chronicle Herald
“Powning’s exquisite novel sings. . . . [She] has created a novel as brilliant as the light towards which it reaches.” —The Chronicle Herald
“There is an elegiac quality to Beth Powning’s writing, derived from her immersion in the rhythms of the natural world. . . . Few writers so stress the ties that bind a life lived to the place where it’s lived; Powning’s central artistic concern, both as photographer and writer, has always been to locate herself–and her characters–along the great chain of being.”
—Maclean’s
“The Hatbox Letters will appeal to anyone who enjoyed the charming correspondence in Richard B. Wright’s recent literary bestseller Clara Callan. But Powning’s novel features a sincerity that Wright’s narrative never quite musters. The Hatbox Letters is sure to win accolades in CanLit circles and [with] regular readers alike.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“The narrative of The Hatbox Letters is as warm and vivid as actually sitting next to the wood stove of Kate’s Maritime kitchen. Powning also has a knack for imagery that drops the reader firmly into the musty comfort of a Connecticut summer home in the early part of the 20th century. Other authors bring us close to historical periods; Powning puts us there.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“Powning writes about grief with uncanny precision; she gets all its ambushes and piercing aches exactly right. She shows how grief can become more acute with the passing of time, rather than less painful as one might expect, and how its constricting grip can slowly paralyze the person left behind.”
—Lisa Moore, National Post
“While delineating the sere interior landscape of mourning, Powning has crafted a deeply beautiful book, one planted in the natural world, abundant in imagery that firmly roots Kate and the reader in the fecund cycle of life. A novel about death that makes you glad that you are alive, The Hatbox Letters is both elegy and song of joy.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Powning is a superior writer, with startling powers of description.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
—The Vancouver Sun
“[A] novel of stunning beauty ... The Hatbox Letters is a moving elegy to things lost and found.”
—New Brunswick Reader
“Powning’s descriptions of gardens and birds rival any Audubon painting. The Hatbox Letters is not only an absorbing literary experience, but an exquisite visual experience as well.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“The writing is highly sensual, painterly even, vividly portraying the natural world and its changing seasons.… [T]he depth of detail feels appropriate, mirroring the deliberate pace of Kate’s recovery and regeneration. Powning’s subject here is no less than the relationship of life and death, and she engages it with rigour and grace.”
—Quill & Quire
“Beth Powning reminds us of the essential links and threads that bind family and loved ones, past generations to future. In gentle prose, she illuminates passages through grief, yet the novel is studded with vitality. A story of unexpected endings and new beginnings — of life surging forward.”
—Frances Itani
“Like Annie Dillard, Beth Powning is a keen observer of the natural world. In language both erotic and exact, she explores the conflicting emotions of love and loss in a novel redolent with memory and the truth of experience, hard won.”
—Joan Clark
“Beth Powning’s language is lush with stunning images that linger long after the reading experience — and with soothing insights, especially of the healing potency available in family histories and connections with friends. She takes us by the hand and leads us through the landmines of grief. We can trust her: she knows the way back to the safety of emerging hope and belief in renewal.”
—Marjorie Anderson, co-editor, Dropped Threads
Praise for Shadow Child and Seeds of Another Summer
“Tenacious, unsparing, in anguish sometimes, but mostly with moving lyricism, Beth Powning pursues and completes what she calls her ‘apprenticeship in love and loss’, a long and not easy journey that we all, women and men, in our way, try to carry through.”
—Ernest Hillen, author of Small Mercies: A Boy After War
“Beth Powning’s. . .pure, powerful prose lure us into [its] embrace, laying bare our desire for a union with the natural world. This is the work of a gifted artist.”
—Courtney Milne, author of Prairie Skies
“One of the most appealing novels to be published in Canada in the last decade. . . . Beautifully written and emotionally wise, this is a debut novel with a difference. Its melding of past and present in the life of its protagonist is so well woven it will prove a boon to readers with a taste for fiction and non-fiction alike. . . . Rich, elegiac and full of resonance, her novel is more than impressive. It is a winner.”
—The London Free Press
“Beth Powning’s extraordinary new novel, The Hatbox Letters, is both an ode to joy and a lamentation.”
—The Chronicle Herald
“Powning’s exquisite novel sings. . . . [She] has created a novel as brilliant as the light towards which it reaches.” —The Chronicle Herald
“There is an elegiac quality to Beth Powning’s writing, derived from her immersion in the rhythms of the natural world. . . . Few writers so stress the ties that bind a life lived to the place where it’s lived; Powning’s central artistic concern, both as photographer and writer, has always been to locate herself–and her characters–along the great chain of being.”
—Maclean’s
“The Hatbox Letters will appeal to anyone who enjoyed the charming correspondence in Richard B. Wright’s recent literary bestseller Clara Callan. But Powning’s novel features a sincerity that Wright’s narrative never quite musters. The Hatbox Letters is sure to win accolades in CanLit circles and [with] regular readers alike.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“The narrative of The Hatbox Letters is as warm and vivid as actually sitting next to the wood stove of Kate’s Maritime kitchen. Powning also has a knack for imagery that drops the reader firmly into the musty comfort of a Connecticut summer home in the early part of the 20th century. Other authors bring us close to historical periods; Powning puts us there.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“Powning writes about grief with uncanny precision; she gets all its ambushes and piercing aches exactly right. She shows how grief can become more acute with the passing of time, rather than less painful as one might expect, and how its constricting grip can slowly paralyze the person left behind.”
—Lisa Moore, National Post
“While delineating the sere interior landscape of mourning, Powning has crafted a deeply beautiful book, one planted in the natural world, abundant in imagery that firmly roots Kate and the reader in the fecund cycle of life. A novel about death that makes you glad that you are alive, The Hatbox Letters is both elegy and song of joy.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Powning is a superior writer, with startling powers of description.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
Book Description
Beth Powning offers readers an unforgettable story of love, grief and renewal — both past and present — as well as her extraordinary perceptions of the natural world.
At the age of fifty-two, Kate Harding has hit a crossroads: the pain that overwhelmed her when her husband died suddenly from a heart attack the previous year hasn’t diminished, and she is at a loss as to how to go on with her life. Living alone in her large Victorian house, its emptiness magnified by memories of better days, Kate can only dream of a time when her grief will abate, at least enough to allow her to hope for change.
When Kate’s sister drops off nine antique hatboxes of papers recovered from Shepton, their grandparents’ eighteenth-century home in Connecticut, Kate isn’t sure she is ready to face the remnants of her family’s past. She’s having enough trouble going through Tom’s things. Soon, though, the smell of the hatboxes — of her grandparents’ musty attic, of old quilts and satin ribbons — begins to permeate the air in her home and “awakens a feeling in Kate that she remembers from childhood, composed of odd emotional strands: love, sorrow, pain, contentment.” As she slowly sorts through the letters, diaries and photographs, Kate begins to find some solace in the past, in her childhood memories of Shepton when every home was a comfort, every relationship untinged by pain. But the further she delves into her grandparents’ history, the more Kate realizes that her perfect world had its own dark side — an undercurrent of tragedy, personal loss and eternal grief.
Then an old acquaintance moves back to New Brunswick, and Kate begins to edge out of her solitude, surprising herself by accepting his invitation to dinner. Gregory and his wife were friends with Tom and Kate when the kids were young, a time of camping trips and days at the beach. But Gregory, now divorced, is also carrying the weight of grief, from the suicide of his son many years earlier. At first, Gregory represents a chance for Kate to capture some of the simple joy of her past, but when she realizes that Gregory is still living in it, his memories and pain warped into self-destructive anger, she knows she has to back away. And when Gregory’s determination to return to the way things were proves unshakeable, a new tragedy forces Kate to begin picking up the pieces of her shattered life.
At the age of fifty-two, Kate Harding has hit a crossroads: the pain that overwhelmed her when her husband died suddenly from a heart attack the previous year hasn’t diminished, and she is at a loss as to how to go on with her life. Living alone in her large Victorian house, its emptiness magnified by memories of better days, Kate can only dream of a time when her grief will abate, at least enough to allow her to hope for change.
When Kate’s sister drops off nine antique hatboxes of papers recovered from Shepton, their grandparents’ eighteenth-century home in Connecticut, Kate isn’t sure she is ready to face the remnants of her family’s past. She’s having enough trouble going through Tom’s things. Soon, though, the smell of the hatboxes — of her grandparents’ musty attic, of old quilts and satin ribbons — begins to permeate the air in her home and “awakens a feeling in Kate that she remembers from childhood, composed of odd emotional strands: love, sorrow, pain, contentment.” As she slowly sorts through the letters, diaries and photographs, Kate begins to find some solace in the past, in her childhood memories of Shepton when every home was a comfort, every relationship untinged by pain. But the further she delves into her grandparents’ history, the more Kate realizes that her perfect world had its own dark side — an undercurrent of tragedy, personal loss and eternal grief.
Then an old acquaintance moves back to New Brunswick, and Kate begins to edge out of her solitude, surprising herself by accepting his invitation to dinner. Gregory and his wife were friends with Tom and Kate when the kids were young, a time of camping trips and days at the beach. But Gregory, now divorced, is also carrying the weight of grief, from the suicide of his son many years earlier. At first, Gregory represents a chance for Kate to capture some of the simple joy of her past, but when she realizes that Gregory is still living in it, his memories and pain warped into self-destructive anger, she knows she has to back away. And when Gregory’s determination to return to the way things were proves unshakeable, a new tragedy forces Kate to begin picking up the pieces of her shattered life.
From the Back Cover
“The imagery is evocative and clear, and the feelings of love and loss are transmitted effectively and elegantly. The Hatbox Letters conveys a sense of wonder and wisdom.”
—The Vancouver Sun
“[A] novel of stunning beauty ... The Hatbox Letters is a moving elegy to things lost and found.”
—New Brunswick Reader
“Powning’s descriptions of gardens and birds rival any Audubon painting. The Hatbox Letters is not only an absorbing literary experience, but an exquisite visual experience as well.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“The writing is highly sensual, painterly even, vividly portraying the natural world and its changing seasons.… [T]he depth of detail feels appropriate, mirroring the deliberate pace of Kate’s recovery and regeneration. Powning’s subject here is no less than the relationship of life and death, and she engages it with rigour and grace.”
—Quill & Quire
“Beth Powning reminds us of the essential links and threads that bind family and loved ones, past generations to future. In gentle prose, she illuminates passages through grief, yet the novel is studded with vitality. A story of unexpected endings and new beginnings — of life surging forward.”
—Frances Itani
“Like Annie Dillard, Beth Powning is a keen observer of the natural world. In language both erotic and exact, she explores the conflicting emotions of love and loss in a novel redolent with memory and the truth of experience, hard won.”
—Joan Clark
“Beth Powning’s language is lush with stunning images that linger long after the reading experience — and with soothing insights, especially of the healing potency available in family histories and connections with friends. She takes us by the hand and leads us through the landmines of grief. We can trust her: she knows the way back to the safety of emerging hope and belief in renewal.”
—Marjorie Anderson, co-editor, Dropped Threads
Praise for Shadow Child and Seeds of Another Summer
“Tenacious, unsparing, in anguish sometimes, but mostly with moving lyricism, Beth Powning pursues and completes what she calls her ‘apprenticeship in love and loss’, a long and not easy journey that we all, women and men, in our way, try to carry through.”
—Ernest Hillen, author of Small Mercies: A Boy After War
“Beth Powning’s. . .pure, powerful prose lure us into [its] embrace, laying bare our desire for a union with the natural world. This is the work of a gifted artist.”
—Courtney Milne, author of Prairie Skies
“One of the most appealing novels to be published in Canada in the last decade. . . . Beautifully written and emotionally wise, this is a debut novel with a difference. Its melding of past and present in the life of its protagonist is so well woven it will prove a boon to readers with a taste for fiction and non-fiction alike. . . . Rich, elegiac and full of resonance, her novel is more than impressive. It is a winner.”
—The London Free Press
“Beth Powning’s extraordinary new novel, The Hatbox Letters, is both an ode to joy and a lamentation.”
—The Chronicle Herald
“Powning’s exquisite novel sings. . . . [She] has created a novel as brilliant as the light towards which it reaches.” —The Chronicle Herald
“There is an elegiac quality to Beth Powning’s writing, derived from her immersion in the rhythms of the natural world. . . . Few writers so stress the ties that bind a life lived to the place where it’s lived; Powning’s central artistic concern, both as photographer and writer, has always been to locate herself–and her characters–along the great chain of being.”
—Maclean’s
“The Hatbox Letters will appeal to anyone who enjoyed the charming correspondence in Richard B. Wright’s recent literary bestseller Clara Callan. But Powning’s novel features a sincerity that Wright’s narrative never quite musters. The Hatbox Letters is sure to win accolades in CanLit circles and [with] regular readers alike.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“The narrative of The Hatbox Letters is as warm and vivid as actually sitting next to the wood stove of Kate’s Maritime kitchen. Powning also has a knack for imagery that drops the reader firmly into the musty comfort of a Connecticut summer home in the early part of the 20th century. Other authors bring us close to historical periods; Powning puts us there.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“Powning writes about grief with uncanny precision; she gets all its ambushes and piercing aches exactly right. She shows how grief can become more acute with the passing of time, rather than less painful as one might expect, and how its constricting grip can slowly paralyze the person left behind.”
—Lisa Moore, National Post
“While delineating the sere interior landscape of mourning, Powning has crafted a deeply beautiful book, one planted in the natural world, abundant in imagery that firmly roots Kate and the reader in the fecund cycle of life. A novel about death that makes you glad that you are alive, The Hatbox Letters is both elegy and song of joy.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Powning is a superior writer, with startling powers of description.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
—The Vancouver Sun
“[A] novel of stunning beauty ... The Hatbox Letters is a moving elegy to things lost and found.”
—New Brunswick Reader
“Powning’s descriptions of gardens and birds rival any Audubon painting. The Hatbox Letters is not only an absorbing literary experience, but an exquisite visual experience as well.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
“The writing is highly sensual, painterly even, vividly portraying the natural world and its changing seasons.… [T]he depth of detail feels appropriate, mirroring the deliberate pace of Kate’s recovery and regeneration. Powning’s subject here is no less than the relationship of life and death, and she engages it with rigour and grace.”
—Quill & Quire
“Beth Powning reminds us of the essential links and threads that bind family and loved ones, past generations to future. In gentle prose, she illuminates passages through grief, yet the novel is studded with vitality. A story of unexpected endings and new beginnings — of life surging forward.”
—Frances Itani
“Like Annie Dillard, Beth Powning is a keen observer of the natural world. In language both erotic and exact, she explores the conflicting emotions of love and loss in a novel redolent with memory and the truth of experience, hard won.”
—Joan Clark
“Beth Powning’s language is lush with stunning images that linger long after the reading experience — and with soothing insights, especially of the healing potency available in family histories and connections with friends. She takes us by the hand and leads us through the landmines of grief. We can trust her: she knows the way back to the safety of emerging hope and belief in renewal.”
—Marjorie Anderson, co-editor, Dropped Threads
Praise for Shadow Child and Seeds of Another Summer
“Tenacious, unsparing, in anguish sometimes, but mostly with moving lyricism, Beth Powning pursues and completes what she calls her ‘apprenticeship in love and loss’, a long and not easy journey that we all, women and men, in our way, try to carry through.”
—Ernest Hillen, author of Small Mercies: A Boy After War
“Beth Powning’s. . .pure, powerful prose lure us into [its] embrace, laying bare our desire for a union with the natural world. This is the work of a gifted artist.”
—Courtney Milne, author of Prairie Skies
“One of the most appealing novels to be published in Canada in the last decade. . . . Beautifully written and emotionally wise, this is a debut novel with a difference. Its melding of past and present in the life of its protagonist is so well woven it will prove a boon to readers with a taste for fiction and non-fiction alike. . . . Rich, elegiac and full of resonance, her novel is more than impressive. It is a winner.”
—The London Free Press
“Beth Powning’s extraordinary new novel, The Hatbox Letters, is both an ode to joy and a lamentation.”
—The Chronicle Herald
“Powning’s exquisite novel sings. . . . [She] has created a novel as brilliant as the light towards which it reaches.” —The Chronicle Herald
“There is an elegiac quality to Beth Powning’s writing, derived from her immersion in the rhythms of the natural world. . . . Few writers so stress the ties that bind a life lived to the place where it’s lived; Powning’s central artistic concern, both as photographer and writer, has always been to locate herself–and her characters–along the great chain of being.”
—Maclean’s
“The Hatbox Letters will appeal to anyone who enjoyed the charming correspondence in Richard B. Wright’s recent literary bestseller Clara Callan. But Powning’s novel features a sincerity that Wright’s narrative never quite musters. The Hatbox Letters is sure to win accolades in CanLit circles and [with] regular readers alike.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“The narrative of The Hatbox Letters is as warm and vivid as actually sitting next to the wood stove of Kate’s Maritime kitchen. Powning also has a knack for imagery that drops the reader firmly into the musty comfort of a Connecticut summer home in the early part of the 20th century. Other authors bring us close to historical periods; Powning puts us there.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“Powning writes about grief with uncanny precision; she gets all its ambushes and piercing aches exactly right. She shows how grief can become more acute with the passing of time, rather than less painful as one might expect, and how its constricting grip can slowly paralyze the person left behind.”
—Lisa Moore, National Post
“While delineating the sere interior landscape of mourning, Powning has crafted a deeply beautiful book, one planted in the natural world, abundant in imagery that firmly roots Kate and the reader in the fecund cycle of life. A novel about death that makes you glad that you are alive, The Hatbox Letters is both elegy and song of joy.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Powning is a superior writer, with startling powers of description.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)
About the Author
In one interview, Beth Powning commented that in order to write fiction, “You have to be living in it; it’s almost happening to you as much as you’re making it.” In this sense, writing is inseparable from personal experience for the author, and it’s no surprise that many of the themes that run through Powning’s own life — the importance of home and family, love for the natural world, learning to live and create in spite of loss — become central themes in her writing. In the case of The Hatbox Letters, the parallels between Powning and her protagonist are many. Powning researched her own family history for this novel, reading letters and papers found in her family’s historical home in Connecticut, and even discovered an old box of her parents’ papers that included everything from piano lesson receipts to the death certificate for her grandfather’s sister, who died of measles at the age of eight. Such details provided the historical base for the story of Giles and Hetty at the heart of this novel. Just as Kate’s journey through the hatbox letters leads her to imagine the lives of her grandparents, Powning’s discoveries inspired her to honour her family’s history and the riches of her own life in fiction.
When The Hatbox Letters came out, Maclean’s reviewer Brian Bethune wrote, “Few Canadian writers so stress the ties that bind a life lived to the place where it's lived; Powning’s central artistic concern, both as photographer and writer, has always been to locate herself — and her characters — along the great chain of being.” Powning approaches her fiction the same way that she approaches her nature writing and nature photography, with the knowledge that our lives and our emotions are not separate from the world around us, whether the continuum of our family trees or how our gardens change from spring to fall. As Powning has described her writing process, “The way I write is I close my eyes and I sit and wait until I see the scene and know all the details. Which direction is the wind coming from? How cold is it? Is it snowing? Is the ground frozen, and if it is frozen, how far down? . . . I need to know these things.”
The Hatbox Letters is Beth Powning’s first novel, though she has been a writer for many years. Her previous books include Seeds of Another Summer: Finding the Spirit of Home in Nature (published as Home: Chronicle of a North Country Life in the United States), a collection of lyrical prose and photographs that celebrates the power and natural beauty of her New Brunswick home, and Shadow Child: An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss, a memoir in which the author attempts to come to terms with the stillbirth of her first son. Powning has also been published extensively in periodicals such as Prism, Quarry and Fiddlehead, and is well known for her nature photography. The Hatbox Letters was a national bestseller in Canada and has also been published in the United States.
Beth Powning lives in an 1870 farmhouse with extensive gardens in Sussex, New Brunswick, with her husband, artist Peter Powning. Her next book, Edge Seasons, is a personal memoir about transformation — about seasonal change within the natural world around her and in her own life. It will be published in the fall of 2005.
When The Hatbox Letters came out, Maclean’s reviewer Brian Bethune wrote, “Few Canadian writers so stress the ties that bind a life lived to the place where it's lived; Powning’s central artistic concern, both as photographer and writer, has always been to locate herself — and her characters — along the great chain of being.” Powning approaches her fiction the same way that she approaches her nature writing and nature photography, with the knowledge that our lives and our emotions are not separate from the world around us, whether the continuum of our family trees or how our gardens change from spring to fall. As Powning has described her writing process, “The way I write is I close my eyes and I sit and wait until I see the scene and know all the details. Which direction is the wind coming from? How cold is it? Is it snowing? Is the ground frozen, and if it is frozen, how far down? . . . I need to know these things.”
The Hatbox Letters is Beth Powning’s first novel, though she has been a writer for many years. Her previous books include Seeds of Another Summer: Finding the Spirit of Home in Nature (published as Home: Chronicle of a North Country Life in the United States), a collection of lyrical prose and photographs that celebrates the power and natural beauty of her New Brunswick home, and Shadow Child: An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss, a memoir in which the author attempts to come to terms with the stillbirth of her first son. Powning has also been published extensively in periodicals such as Prism, Quarry and Fiddlehead, and is well known for her nature photography. The Hatbox Letters was a national bestseller in Canada and has also been published in the United States.
Beth Powning lives in an 1870 farmhouse with extensive gardens in Sussex, New Brunswick, with her husband, artist Peter Powning. Her next book, Edge Seasons, is a personal memoir about transformation — about seasonal change within the natural world around her and in her own life. It will be published in the fall of 2005.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1. Kate
Kate leans in the doorway of the living room, arms crossed, the sleeves of a cotton sweater shoved to her elbows. Her forearms are sinewy–brown, dry-skinned, thorn-scratched. She wears two silver bracelets and a thick gold wedding band. Some women, she realizes, remove their rings.
In the corner is a stack of nine antique hatboxes. She has not touched them since they were set down a week ago, delivered by her sister, who drove them up from Hartford. They are oval or round, some tied with string, some decorated with maroon-and-silver stripes, others printed with gothic landscapes – willows, mountains, ruined castles. Their smell has begun to permeate the room even though the windows are open. It is the smell of her grandparents’ attic, a smell she has not forgotten but thought had vanished, like the past itself. That it has not and is still here, this aroma of horsehair and leather, of apples and musty quilts, of old dresses and satin ribbons – that this smell still exists here in this Canadian river valley, six hundred miles north of her grandparents’ house, is disquieting. It awakens a feeling in Kate that she remembers from childhood, composed of odd emotional strands: love, sorrow, pain, contentment.
The arrival of the hatboxes is untimely, since dispossession, like grief, is an act of which Kate has had her fill since Tom’s death a year and three months ago, from a heart attack at age fifty-two. She’s hauled garbage bags of clothes, like lumpy corpses, down to the washing machine, unable to give away anything that might bear his painty, sawdusty smell. Sorting through the clothes, she was relieved whenever she came across T-shirts like Swiss cheese or underpants held by threads to waistbands no longer elastic. Choices made easy: Okay, throw this away. No one in her family has wanted to face making such decisions about the papers in these hatboxes. They have been lugged from place to place, from barn to basement to closet, ever since the big house in whose attic they’d accumulated for five generations was sold.
She goes into the living room and squats by the boxes. Their papered cardboard is dry as old plaster. How strange, she thinks, that they are here, now. And she finds herself wishing they could have remained forever under the attic’s cobwebbed window, their contents spilled, letters stuffed by children’s hands back into envelopes embroidered by the teeth of mice. Like leaves in a mulch pile. Forgotten, skeletal, slowly reverting to dirt. So it might have been if the house had not been sold, if time had not stalked on relentless legs, like a heron, and bent its long neck.
She slides her fingers over a lid, remembering the excitement she and her cousins had felt about these boxes and the disappointment of finding only papers whose half-read sentences were like windborne music or distant surf, faint hints of a larger sound. The box is so desiccated that its lid is loose and lifts easily, releasing the concentrated mustiness within, so familiar that tears spring to Kate’s eyes. It takes her to the closets, bedrooms, pantries and cupboards of her grandparents’ enormous, white-clapboarded house on the tree-lined street of the village where Kate grew up. She and her sister could leave their own home, walk past the tiny general store, with its wooden porch and post office, past the library and the church, and be on Shepton’s lawn in ten minutes. Shepton House had been named by her great-grandmother for the English town where some branch of the family originated. Shepton, they called the place after awhile, dropping the pretentious “House.” The word, spoken and accompanied by memory, is what a spell might be to a shaman: an evocation, a tumult of associations. She stirs the papers. Like the snow-flattened leaves of early spring, they are brown and soft, overlapping, their corners fanned. Some are in bundles, tied with faded cotton string. Most lie in a dismaying confusion. Kate pauses, looks out the window. River light quivers in trees at the bottom of her lawn. She is still squatting, irresolute. Why did I agree to take on this responsibility? Now – of all times.
She slips into a sitting position, crosses her legs. The house is so quiet. No one will be coming to visit until Thanksgiving. Her daughter, Christy, is in Halifax, her son, Liam, in Ireland. She listens to the sound of an empty house, thinking, Am I still a wife? She sees her future not the way it is now but the way it was supposed to be; this, unlike the bald fact of Tom’s death, is a loss she can’t share, a grief she can’t reveal. She is allowed to mourn the past, Tom as he was, the sound of his voice, the body that once cradled hers; but the future that was theirs – its loss has become like a new death, the death of someone no one else knows. A hidden corpse. It ebbs away, her memory of how it felt to slide her hand into the back pocket of Tom’s shorts, to relate a rambling dream and not care whether he listened, to casually wipe mustard from his chin. This loss of intimacy is the hardest, for with it goes her sense of self. She cannot bear to be with long-married couples: she’s watched a husband lift a strand of windblown hair from his wife’s mouth, has seen a wife peel a hard-boiled egg and hand it to her husband. It is dangerous, as well, to be in places – dinner parties, picnics – where conversational lures may attract memories, or feelings. She feels stripped of some sleek texture, as if she has lost her favourite silk scarf, orange-pink and luminous as sun-filled tulips, that carried in its folds the wife she once was, the wife she would still be.
She leans forward and rummages in the hatbox, knowing that she is being hooked by its sweet smell. She tips reading glasses from her head, settles them on her nose, unfolds a paper and presses it to her face. She breathes deeply. What is it? Lately she finds herself in a peculiar state, slowed, as if floating without impulsion, in which she examines her own feelings. There’s a familiar, disturbing stab in her heart that she remembers from when, as a child, she laid her head on Shepton’s prickly pillows, or lifted the lids of stoneware crocks or opened the games cupboard under the stairs. It’s a small ache, a presage of grief, evoked by the distilled smell of age. It’s a reminder, she thinks, of joy’s sorrow-edge. Of how every moment tilts on the brink of its own decline. There’s something else, though. Responsibility to the past. And flight from its demands. The feelings she’s come to recognize, holding in her hand, say, a small pin that Tom was once given at a ceremony in Ottawa “for service to the arts.” How, she chastises herself, during her process of dispossession, could she think of parting with this piece of silver? Doesn’t she have the responsibility of memorializing Tom?
From the Hardcover edition.
Kate leans in the doorway of the living room, arms crossed, the sleeves of a cotton sweater shoved to her elbows. Her forearms are sinewy–brown, dry-skinned, thorn-scratched. She wears two silver bracelets and a thick gold wedding band. Some women, she realizes, remove their rings.
In the corner is a stack of nine antique hatboxes. She has not touched them since they were set down a week ago, delivered by her sister, who drove them up from Hartford. They are oval or round, some tied with string, some decorated with maroon-and-silver stripes, others printed with gothic landscapes – willows, mountains, ruined castles. Their smell has begun to permeate the room even though the windows are open. It is the smell of her grandparents’ attic, a smell she has not forgotten but thought had vanished, like the past itself. That it has not and is still here, this aroma of horsehair and leather, of apples and musty quilts, of old dresses and satin ribbons – that this smell still exists here in this Canadian river valley, six hundred miles north of her grandparents’ house, is disquieting. It awakens a feeling in Kate that she remembers from childhood, composed of odd emotional strands: love, sorrow, pain, contentment.
The arrival of the hatboxes is untimely, since dispossession, like grief, is an act of which Kate has had her fill since Tom’s death a year and three months ago, from a heart attack at age fifty-two. She’s hauled garbage bags of clothes, like lumpy corpses, down to the washing machine, unable to give away anything that might bear his painty, sawdusty smell. Sorting through the clothes, she was relieved whenever she came across T-shirts like Swiss cheese or underpants held by threads to waistbands no longer elastic. Choices made easy: Okay, throw this away. No one in her family has wanted to face making such decisions about the papers in these hatboxes. They have been lugged from place to place, from barn to basement to closet, ever since the big house in whose attic they’d accumulated for five generations was sold.
She goes into the living room and squats by the boxes. Their papered cardboard is dry as old plaster. How strange, she thinks, that they are here, now. And she finds herself wishing they could have remained forever under the attic’s cobwebbed window, their contents spilled, letters stuffed by children’s hands back into envelopes embroidered by the teeth of mice. Like leaves in a mulch pile. Forgotten, skeletal, slowly reverting to dirt. So it might have been if the house had not been sold, if time had not stalked on relentless legs, like a heron, and bent its long neck.
She slides her fingers over a lid, remembering the excitement she and her cousins had felt about these boxes and the disappointment of finding only papers whose half-read sentences were like windborne music or distant surf, faint hints of a larger sound. The box is so desiccated that its lid is loose and lifts easily, releasing the concentrated mustiness within, so familiar that tears spring to Kate’s eyes. It takes her to the closets, bedrooms, pantries and cupboards of her grandparents’ enormous, white-clapboarded house on the tree-lined street of the village where Kate grew up. She and her sister could leave their own home, walk past the tiny general store, with its wooden porch and post office, past the library and the church, and be on Shepton’s lawn in ten minutes. Shepton House had been named by her great-grandmother for the English town where some branch of the family originated. Shepton, they called the place after awhile, dropping the pretentious “House.” The word, spoken and accompanied by memory, is what a spell might be to a shaman: an evocation, a tumult of associations. She stirs the papers. Like the snow-flattened leaves of early spring, they are brown and soft, overlapping, their corners fanned. Some are in bundles, tied with faded cotton string. Most lie in a dismaying confusion. Kate pauses, looks out the window. River light quivers in trees at the bottom of her lawn. She is still squatting, irresolute. Why did I agree to take on this responsibility? Now – of all times.
She slips into a sitting position, crosses her legs. The house is so quiet. No one will be coming to visit until Thanksgiving. Her daughter, Christy, is in Halifax, her son, Liam, in Ireland. She listens to the sound of an empty house, thinking, Am I still a wife? She sees her future not the way it is now but the way it was supposed to be; this, unlike the bald fact of Tom’s death, is a loss she can’t share, a grief she can’t reveal. She is allowed to mourn the past, Tom as he was, the sound of his voice, the body that once cradled hers; but the future that was theirs – its loss has become like a new death, the death of someone no one else knows. A hidden corpse. It ebbs away, her memory of how it felt to slide her hand into the back pocket of Tom’s shorts, to relate a rambling dream and not care whether he listened, to casually wipe mustard from his chin. This loss of intimacy is the hardest, for with it goes her sense of self. She cannot bear to be with long-married couples: she’s watched a husband lift a strand of windblown hair from his wife’s mouth, has seen a wife peel a hard-boiled egg and hand it to her husband. It is dangerous, as well, to be in places – dinner parties, picnics – where conversational lures may attract memories, or feelings. She feels stripped of some sleek texture, as if she has lost her favourite silk scarf, orange-pink and luminous as sun-filled tulips, that carried in its folds the wife she once was, the wife she would still be.
She leans forward and rummages in the hatbox, knowing that she is being hooked by its sweet smell. She tips reading glasses from her head, settles them on her nose, unfolds a paper and presses it to her face. She breathes deeply. What is it? Lately she finds herself in a peculiar state, slowed, as if floating without impulsion, in which she examines her own feelings. There’s a familiar, disturbing stab in her heart that she remembers from when, as a child, she laid her head on Shepton’s prickly pillows, or lifted the lids of stoneware crocks or opened the games cupboard under the stairs. It’s a small ache, a presage of grief, evoked by the distilled smell of age. It’s a reminder, she thinks, of joy’s sorrow-edge. Of how every moment tilts on the brink of its own decline. There’s something else, though. Responsibility to the past. And flight from its demands. The feelings she’s come to recognize, holding in her hand, say, a small pin that Tom was once given at a ceremony in Ottawa “for service to the arts.” How, she chastises herself, during her process of dispossession, could she think of parting with this piece of silver? Doesn’t she have the responsibility of memorializing Tom?
From the Hardcover edition.
