Our Story Thus Far

You may know me. You may not. You may be my mother. Most probably of all, you may just have been searching Google for facts about weasels (Fact: They are not stoats.). But who cares? We’re here now. And here requires a bit of explanation…

All the posts labeled ‘Div III’ deal with my novel-in progress, begun as a sort of senior-thesis project during my last year at Hampshire College. The book  is set in an orphanage in a rural area of Romania*, in the foothills of the Carpathians.  The story, which takes place over eight days, is told by three alternating narrators: Hannah, an American medical student volunteering at the orphanage as part of a charitable mission; Vassilike, a twelve year old boy living at the orphanage; and Dog, a stray, one of the multitude that scuttle about on the periphery of the orphanage. Each narrator’s story stands alone; however, as the days progress, we come to realize how interconnected they are. Dogs are poisoned. A precious necklace is stolen. The devil stalks the forest. Cows are everywhere.

If this strikes you as something you’d like to read, you might want to wait until the paperback – I’m working on final edits at the moment, and will probably have at least a PDF version on this site eventually. But if you’re the morbid sort and would like to watch the various organs and appendages of the plot flop around and take life, there’s plenty of opportunity in the archives here. This is what you’ve missed:

A list of scenes, in order, with links the posts in which they were featured, is here.
A complete sheet of character descriptions is here.

* Casalui Domnul Nostru, the fictional orphanage of this novel, should not be confused with Asociata Pro Vita, the Romanian orphanage where I spent my summer. Any resemblances are probably not incidental: as Thomas Wolfe put it, If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. All stories have to start somewhere. However, it is the fiction writer’s solemn duty to commit unspeakable violence upon reality in the hopes of creating something a little more interesting (and perhaps, the artists among us might add, “more true”), so of course nothing and nobody in this story bears more than a passing resemblance to anything or anyone who actually exists, anywhere. The only exception to this is Dog. He looks exactly like this:

Our friend Dog.

And he is wonderful.