dovegreyreader scribbles

Chasing my tail

2009-12-06T00:15:00+00:00

I'm still doing the washing and sorting out a mountain of books that have arrived this week and planning next week on here and oh, hold on, is it less than three weeks to Christmas?
Surely not, haven't done a thing, please don't tell me you've all shopped, wrapped and posted already.
But thought I'd share my Make-It-Up-As-I-Go-Along sock which is coming along nicely after several train journeys.

I'm pleased with that striped heel flap which was 'turned' round about Pewsey.
Plus in true headless woman book jacket tradition I can show you that it's finally perishing cold enough to wear the Rowan jumper.

and fat boy Santa Paws will do some prize drawings tomorrow, he missed me terribly...not.

Inner Child - December

2009-12-05T00:15:00+00:00

'One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of voices I sometimes hear a moment before I sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.'

There was only one book it could be this month and my copy is almost this exact size.

There's something so completely in tune with my childhood about that Edward Ardizzone cover, so many books of the fifties and sixties that bore his trademark illustrative style come to mind.
That's all made me hunt around for them and I'm adding in a few more from the 1960s that possibly came out too late for me to appreciate them as a young child but I still treasure them, the Nurse Matilda series by Christianna Brand, also illustrated by Edward Ardizzone who was her cousin.

'Once upon a time there was a huge family of children and they were terribly, terribly naughty...'

Let's Hang On to What We've Got...

2009-12-04T00:15:00+00:00

I'm trying to recall the last London musical I saw and I think it might be that occasion we took out a mortgage and trekked off to London with three pre-teenage children to see Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat and I feel sure it was at the Palladium, but I can't remember whether it was Philip Schofield's run or Jason Donovan's or someone else entirely.
This is all to demonstrate that I don't go to musicals very often so and so could have plumped for anything and been happy. The other five members of Girl's Night In on the other hand are a well-musicaled bunch and so we were hard pushed to find something that one or other of them hadn't seen as we went right through the list. Billy Elliot, Oliver, Sound of Music, Chicago, you name it they'd seen it twice already so in the end Jersey Boys it was.
At this point I think I have to adopt the Westend Whingers critical template and assess everything from the doorman to the usher to the ice cream seller, except I was too excited to notice as we set foot in the the Prince Edward theatre in Old Compton Street.
Don't you just love these old London theatres and hope they keep on going forever?
Everyone surging into the foyer off the street, the lighting and the carpets all giving that warm, cosy feeling that makes you wish you'd brought your slippers and all adding to that sense of anticipation?
The Prince Edward opened in 1930 so it oozes Art Deco style with a stage that copes with expansive sets which have in the past accommodated a swimming pool or allowed a car to be driven onto the stage. The lights went out for the first few years of the war but were then discreetly switched back on in 1942 for some recordings for broadcasting to the troops.
Enter stage right the greats, Vera Lynn, Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby.
A Cameron Mackintosh £3 million refurbishment in the 1990s upgraded everything except the number of ladies toilets it would seem, and Girls Night In nearly missed their interval ice creams (Haagen Dazs chocolate chip 10/10...the Whingers will be cringing at this, we didn't touch the bar, elbows not sufficiently pointed) In the end one of us claims, in a loud and desperate whisper, 'three babies in four years' (usually me) and bolts into the empty disabled facility, which might all be too much information so please feel free to ignore that....that said the Whingers don't usually describe the facilities so someone has to do it.
For anyone who doesn't know, and I didn't until recently, Jersey Boys is the story of the rise to fame and fortune of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and we all pondered quite how we seemed word perfect on the songs but lacking in any knowledge of much else.
Once those bass notes start and the music pours out we were all away with the fairies and loving it and I'll bet plenty of you know the songs too, Sherry, Can't Take My Eyes Off You, Working My Way Back to You, Bye Bye Baby (own up every single one of you Bay City Rollers fans) Rag Doll, Who Loves You, December 1963 (Oh What a Night), Walk Like a Man, Big Girls Don't Cry.
Fantastic singing from Ryan Molloy as Frankie Valli, love or hate the falsetto he has it to perfection, great stage production and I think we would have been 100% content were it not for the people in the back row across the aisle, behind and to our right.
Now I think back to going to see Godspell in the 1970s.
I'm sure it was the Roundhouse and I know it was David Essex because he autographed my arm in the interval when the audience were invited up onto the stage and the plan was never to wash it again. Sadly Sister had other ideas on duty the next day, but the show was wild, we danced in the aisles and sang along but that was completely de rigueur for Godspell.
I'm not quite sure what's de rigueur theatre singalong etiquette these days?
It didn't seem to say Sing-a-long-a Jersey Boys outside and really we'd paid £52.50 each to hear Ryan Molloy and the others sing, not the back row who had to have been in drink or they might just have stood a chance of being slightly in tune, and nor did we benefit from their running commentary which was hardly sotto voce. Of course everyone joins in for some bits but not the whole lot and it seemed as if it was perhaps their 50th visit
'Oh this bit's really sad'
'Any minute now he's going to sing Cry For Me'
'I love this next one'
'Oh I enjoyed that better last time'
You do that British thing of looking round and glaring all to no avail, someone says something also to no avail and management were called in the interval (not by us, too busy queuing for the Ladies and fretting that we'd miss our ice creams.) A large and menacing looking bouncer was positioned alongside to keep order but could do little but say ssshhhhhh every so often and ended up making more noise. Personally I'd have had them placed in the dungeons (or the ladies toilets) prior to transportation on a convict ship where they could have sung to their heart's content in time to the oars...few rounds of Who Loves You and they'd have been down under in no time.
When the entire house finally stood up to do that arm waving and singing and looking an idiot thing for the finale and the encores, the annoying back row then complained loudly to the bouncer that it wasn't fair because they couldn't see...Big Girls Don't Cry we sang full volume...Walk Like a Man we shrilled along with Frankie. Forget revenge as a song best served cold, we swayed and waved and sang our hearts out along with the rest of the house.
Oh What a Night we trilled as we walked to the tube, fantastic.

Home again...

2009-12-03T00:15:00+00:00

Well, I've been there and done all that and now I'm home and today's that day...1.30pm Radio 4 and if perchance...well I suppose it could happen...someone hears it and decides to pay us a visit expecting something erudite and bookishly interesting, I can only apologize because this is about as good as it's going to get today and I don't know about tomorrow either because I'm telling everyone I might have left the country.
But I have to say a huge thank you to all of you and to David Vann for some wonderful comments after that amazing dovegreyreader asks... on Legend of a Suicide this week and perhaps any new arrivals who have wandered in and are wondering how all this works could scroll down to Monday and pick it up from there.You are most welcome, you'll soon get the hang of it all and this week is a perfect example of what a blog and its readers can do, i.e. I go away for five days and leave you all to it.
Meanwhile I have had the best time in London, done that third theatre trip and had a great weekend, and then stayed on and met lots of people who love and read dovegreyreader and that's all been very humbling to be honest. I tap away in splendid isolation down here in Devon and feel as if I'm talking to all of you each day, here and in comments much as we would if we met face to face, but it's also good to get out from behind my desk and meet people and as they all now know to their cost I can talk for England about books and the blog and how it works and so much more besides.
I've had quite a few meetings with publishers to see behind the scenes and let them know I'm a real person (I think they do know that now) and have set up all sorts of prize draws for the next few weeks and heard about plenty of very exciting new books in the pipeline. My thanks to everyone for their kindness and hospitality, their conversation and their enthusiasm for what happens here and I'll tell you more as we go along. I've been into some very interesting inner sanctums as well as a visit to a publisher's archive where I'd have been quite happy if the door had slammed shut and I'd been locked in for a week...well with tea and cake being passed in through the window that is. I'll give you a clue, there was a very nice picture of Ted Hughes in there.
Five days in London, have Oyster card and feet and will travel, it's clear London is gearing up for 2012 but the city never ceases to excite and impress me, even if my feet don't quite feel as if they belong on the end of my legs at the moment.
Picture to prove I really went and did London things with Girls Night In and my apologies for any blurriness, just blame the London Eye it kept moving.

Of course I've been phoning Bookhound here and there and he'd been a bit vague about what he'd been up to and driving home he was even less specific...oh well a bit of this and that...and I've been on to the insurance company because the Kayaker turned his back for five minutes to look at a promising New Zealand river and his camper van was broken into and he's had everything stolen (this is a first, he has paddled the world, who'd have thought it in NZ?) passport, kayaking gear, all his clothes, the camera (yes the very one I'd held hostage) the lot ...and went to the market and had a wander...and the Gamekeeper lost his car keys in the grain store.
And I'm thinking well that's odd, who'd have thought it, give me five days home alone and I'd have had a project on the go.
So I walk in the door and think, hmmm see the kitchen floor's in need...then I smell the paint and I follow my nose up the stairs and it's done, he'd been planning it for weeks apparently.
After fifteen years of living here Bookhound has finally decorated the bedroom.

The Nightingale's Song by John Caple

2009-12-02T00:15:00+00:00

I'm hard-pushed to describe exactly how I felt when a stunning catalogue and an invitation to the London preview of Somerset artist John Caple's solo exhibition, The Nightingale's Song arrived.
My first introduction to the paintings of John Caple was through Nell Leyshon and the hardback cover to her novel Black Dirt and the pictures quickly connected with me in a way that one artist rarely does.
Nell very kindly sent me a copy of John's book Somerset which has been perched open on a bookstand by my desk every since. I stare at it, disappear into it, turn the page to a different picture every few days but it's been a book that I have completely and regularly immersed myself in from the moment it arrived.
Something seems exactly right when I look at John Caple's paintings, from style to colour range to atmosphere, I pick up an honesty there making that deeper significance very available, and to someone like me who can stare at a picture for ever and not see what I'm supposed to, that's all very heartening.
In John's own words...

'I have looked for descriptions that have sensed the invisible hand of nature shaping everyday lives and the fascination this inspired.'

The Nightingale
mixed media on board
32 x 44ins

There is something genuine and unpretentious to these paintings and perhaps this biographical detail explains that,

"He is entirely self-taught and as untroubled by contemporary art as he is unbothered by academic training. His work requires neither. He has worked out the way he paints entirely for himself, a manner of painting that is straightforward, simple and perfectly suited to the job. It belongs to that long tradition of English folk art that one sees in medieval church carving, samplers and early English pottery."

Initially I sensed a likeness to the St Ives paintings of Alfred Wallace but there's a vast difference and this information from the JM Gallery website confirms what I thought I knew but couldn't quite express,

"In the twentieth century the folk tradition was often confused with naïve art, yet an important distinction exists between the two and that distinction in many ways helps to understand John's work. Whereas a naïve artist paints entirely from within a private, enclosed world, an artist like John Caple is expressing stories and sentiments that have a shared ownership. In the twenty-first century he is an oddity amongst painters - though that is an observation that will trouble him little."

Now imagine how I felt when I discover that the preview is to be held from 6-8pm this evening on the day that I will be boarding my train home from London at 3pm....parrot...sick as etc and how grateful I am that the gallery have very kindly said I can go in and sneak a preview of the preview and just see John's paintings for real.
I'll report back, but for anyone in London between 3-22 December 2009 don't miss the chance to see these paintings if they strike a chord with you too. The exhibition is on at the John Martin Gallery, 38 Albermarle Street W1 (Mon-Fri 10 - 6 Saturday 11- 4) just around the corner from the Royal Academy.

Final words to John Caple

'In the west country there is a word Wisht which describes all that is uncanny, mysterious and enchanted and can be applied to pretty much anything...the cusp between dusk and dawn, the edge of a wood...Heard but rarely seen, the nightingale's song represents the numinous presence of nature, conveying the awareness and the enchantment of these unseen realities.'

dovegreyreader asks... David Vann (part two)

2009-12-01T00:15:00+00:00

Who should we read? Which books mustn't we miss?

Here’s my Tuesday Top Ten from The Book Depository blog. I also have to add Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which has had such a tremendous influence on me, and Ross Raisin’s God’s Own Country, which has an amazing voice. He’s truly talented, a gifted story teller. I’m envious of his use of language. I’ve always been a big fan of Tobias Wolff, also. And for new hardcovers this year, I loved Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, Penelope Lively’s Family Album, and William Trevor’s Love and Summer. So many great books.

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

Proulx is a master stylist. Using Anglo-Saxon diction and meter (in the second paragraph, for instance, "hive-spangled, gut roaring" and "ham knuckle, buttered spuds"), she heaps up content. Sentence fragments and lists cut away everything grammatical, everything unnecessary. And this is appropriate for a protagonist learning to be a reporter, learning to write newspaper headlines. Quoyle is a fabulous creation, unwanted and unloved in a novel that finally is a love story.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

In my opinion, our greatest American novel of the last fifty years (despite Beloved's great scope and considerable claim), an heir to Melville and Faulkner. Takes a garbage genre, the western, and raises it to high literature. Offers no access to thoughts or feelings but tells character entirely through landscape and violence written as landscape. Borrowing from Faulkner, extends literal landscapes into figurative landscapes. As with Proulx's The Shipping News, I reread this book simply for the sentences, for their unlikely existence.

The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop is a great poet accessible to all. In her poem At The Fishhouses, she often chooses one fine detail to evoke a larger space. The sparse bright sprinkle of grass, for instance, creates a hillside. She was a painter as well as a poet, and she unifies her opening scene with silver moonlight, then emerald. We watch brush strokes and don't become distracted. Our attention is held by the shift in the quality of light, from opacity to translucence. This is theme developing, leading toward the moment we'll reach into "absolutely clear" water and taste it on our tongues, encountering a kind of knowledge.

The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

Every sentence in O'Connor is about character. In Everything That Rises Must Converge, for instance, Julian is a model for what a divided protagonist can be: he can never speak of the old family mansion without contempt nor think of it without longing. As in Faulkner, O'Connor's characters are driven by race and class, many of them longing for a return to the Old South, but in O'Connor, the battle is more desperate and vicious. She's the writer that every American short story writer has to contend with.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

This is the novel declared the greatest American novel of the last 25 years. Not only does she extend literal landscapes into figurative landscapes, she also uses ghosts and other doubling as a way to reveal the stories behind her characters. Truly epic in scope, and gorgeous in every sentence.

The Riverside Chaucer

All of Chaucer's works in Middle English, with extensive notes. Everyone should memorize the opening 18 lines of The Canterbury Tales, because this is the beginning of literature in English after the collision of Old English and French. These lines show our language at the most beautiful it ever was or will be. The Germanic sounds not yet gone silent, the French vowels not yet shifted and made smaller. A remarkable event, two languages collided together, not just one borrowing from the other. A double lexicon, double metrical heritages, two ways of speaking and imagining, two class structures. All that was possible lives in Chaucer, and since then we have steadily turned the language into a doormat.

Beowulf: A Student Edition edited by George Jack

This edition in Old English is the most accessible, I think, because there are vocabulary notes beside every line. This is the easiest way to read our oldest English epic in the original. And why read Beowulf? Not only because of the uneasy relationship to Christianity and the look into an earlier culture, but also because the poetic line shows a different way of conceiving of experience and story. Hronrade is a whale-road, for instance, a name for the sea, and the syntax is different: Often Scyld Scefing, enemy bands, many peoples, took away mead benches, terrified earls. Beowulf offers a link to how we imagine story and self, people and place.

The Aeneid by Virgil

Maybe it's because I'm American, and our empire is corrupt and dying, but this epic which calls into question the founding of Rome seems particularly relevant. Most beautiful in the original, because a Latin sentence is far more flexible than an English sentence (mostly because of declensions but also because of poetic conventions and sound), but there are many great translations. The abandonment of Dido, Turnus in the end: there are many dramatic moments here that still feel current.

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

Can there be a better subject for a novel than the fall of aristocracy and the rise of the middle class? Ornate but not burdened, lovely and elegant, this one can make you want to hand all your money back to the aristocracy. Like rare birds. Maybe we should keep them.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins played in the movie based on this novel, and they are truly great, but the movie fails anyway, because this novel does something a movie can't. The final crisis is a slip in narrative voice, a dissolution of syntax and diction as the butler admits his heart is breaking. This elegant and subtle voice, in its great formality and distance, allows the exploration of all that is most private in us, and its look back on a life wasted really is heartbreaking.

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

In the title essay, Baldwin combines three portraits -- of his father, of himself, and of Harlem in the 1940s -- to devastating effect. A great short story writer, also, he builds to a scene in a diner in which he realizes he could have been murdered and also that he was willing to commit murder. His analysis of race and rage takes as its target, finally, his own heart -- and because of this I've always thought of the personal essay as having this aim -- but it is no less an indictment for that. Perhaps because he was the ultimate outsider, black and gay and an ex-pat, his portrait of America is still true in nearly every respect.

dovegreyreader asks... David Vann

2009-11-30T00:15:00+00:00

I am so incredibly grateful to David Vann for taking a seat in the virtual armchair and answering the dovegreyreader asks... questions on his book Legend of a Suicide today, and I hope you'll understand why when you read what he has to say. I have been moved beyond words by David's responses here and will be reading the book again very soon in the light of them. I have also divided the post into two, the answers to the fourth question about reading recommends will appear tomorrow, when David has also very kindly agreed to stop by and reply to any questions of your own or comments you may wish to leave after reading this.

David, where did Legend of a Suicide come from? Can you tell us the whys, the hows, and also the highs ad the lows of writing this book?

For three years after my father killed himself, I told everyone he had died of cancer. This was because what he did felt shameful and dirty. He killed himself while talking on the phone with my stepmother (the second marriage he had broken up through infidelity), telling her “I love you but I’m not going to live without you” and having to repeat it since she was at work and couldn’t hear well. This was eleven months after she’d lost her parents to a murder/suicide, so it was an especially cruel thing to do. And then she received flowers from him a few days later, on her birthday. I felt that what he had done transferred to me, became my shame.

I also lied because I didn’t want to cry in school. I didn’t return to school for two weeks, but for months after that, anytime anyone said something kind to me, I would cry. Or I’d just suddenly think of him and start crying. I was afraid of this lack of control, and I think that’s why I became an insomniac for 15 years. I also didn’t have my first alcoholic drink until I was 22, and I believe that again was about control. What he did came as such a shock, I just couldn’t sleep or drink, and I didn’t want to talk about him and wouldn’t tell the truth. Instead, I wandered the streets at night with his guns and shot out streetlights. I led a double life. By day, I was a straight-A student, in student government, sports, band, etc., but at night, I roamed our small suburbia with a .300 magnum rifle, which is why I have trouble now believing that any 13-year-old boys are not up to something (unfair of me, I realize). During this time, I also lost all my friends.

So that’s the background behind the 3rd story in the book, “A Legend of Good Men,” which is the most autobiographical. The title comes from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, and the word “Legend” means a “legendary” or series of portraits, from the hagiographic tradition (saints’ lives). That’s what “Legend” in the title of the book means, also, a collection of portraits of my father’s suicide, his despair, and my own bereavement. The book also borrows from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in that it’s a collection of pieces which debate each other in style and content. Taken together, they gain their full meaning and present the overall story.

The other very autobiographical story is the first one, “Ichthyology.” I really did vandalize the neighbors’ house with the contents of their refrigerator when I was four years old and my parents were fighting, heading toward divorce. And my father did have a commercial fishing boat. But the event at the end is made up, and many events are made up in “A Legend of Good Men,” too. The novella (“Sukkwan Island”) at the center of the book is entirely made up (we never went homesteading, I’ve never been to that particular island, etc.).

In my experience, fiction can be truer to a life than what was actually lived. The moments in the novella better represent how I experienced my father than any of the real moments I can remember. And fiction has the power to work beyond the conscious mind. There’s a startling turn at the center of that novella, and I was shocked by it. I didn’t see it coming until partway into that sentence. But once I wrote it, I could see it was inevitable and was where I had been headed all along without knowing it. And that moment provided such a perfect and satisfying psychological revenge after all the years of carrying his suicide around. So that’s why I write, for moments like that when the work comes alive and speaks on its own, forms pattern beyond what I had imagined.

I worked on the book for ten years from when I was 19 years old until I was 29, and finished revisions just after I turned thirty. Then the book sat for about 12 years and no agent would send it out, so I finally sent it to a contest, and it won the contest. During the years I worked on it, I mostly failed. I threw everything away from the first 3 or 4 years, in which there was far too much emotion on the first page. But then I heard something more generous and lovely in the voice of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, and in Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, and I wrote “Ichthyology” very quickly, in a day. I knew the material from all the failures, and I just needed the right voice, something more distanced. Over the rest of the years, everything I labored over was finally cut, but the pieces that came quickly remained. I wrote most of the novella in 17 days of sailing from San Diego, CA to Hawaii, for instance, in waves with my laptop strapped to my legs. It came all in a rush as I was reading six novels by Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner.

“Ketchikan” works in the collection as the final story. “A Higher Blue,” which follows, is an epilogue, telling the same story as “Ichthyology” but in a different mode, as fabulism. But Ketchikan tests how close I can ever come to understanding the origins of ruin or recovering my father. It also pushes landscape description and style as far as I can take it, borrowing from Elizabeth Bishop’s “At The Fishhouses” and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship.”

So the stories were a journey, a test, and finally the biggest truth I could tell. And I’m so grateful for how the book has been received in the UK and Ireland. The generosity has been overwhelming, and this has been the best time in my life.

We are very inquisitive here and love to know about the process of writing for you, is there a ritual involved, special space, special pen, special jumper (yes we've had pictures of those) Does the house have to be painted and the dog walked before you can sit down to write? Can you tell us about your writing day?

I recently finished a new novel, Caribou Island, which will be published by Viking/Penguin in January or February 2011, a little over a year from now. I worked on that book every morning for about two hours, 7 days a week, not skipping days even for holidays. I made no lunch dates. I did nothing else for quite a while, because I wanted to ruminate on the book for much of the rest of each day.

I don’t write for more than two hours because I’m afraid the work will suffer as I tire. I wake up, grab a bowl of cereal from the kitchen, and return to sit in bed propped up with two pillows and my laptop. I wear ear plugs, the bedroom door is closed, and my wife doesn’t come in. The phone is off. As I eat the cereal, I start reading through previous pages. I read anywhere from 20 to 50 pages up to the point where I need to add new pages, and when I hit that point, I always feel afraid that nothing will come. And the first paragraph is usually slow, taking about half an hour. Then I write an additional two or three pages in the next half hour or hour and that’s it for the day. I stop even if I know where I could go next, because I know it will work out better the next morning, when I’m fresh again. And every two or three pages, every day, I try to find something. Some richer moment, an image that becomes significant or a moment when one of the characters slows down and is revealed. A story is always about something else, and I try to find some hint of that something else each day, or I feel I’ve failed. It’s an emotional rollercoaster, and I do believe that if I don’t feel anything when I write, the reader won’t feel anything either. I believe in the power of the sentence to communicate how it was created.

What do you do when you're not writing...and if there's a mention of salmon and fishing Bookhound will be very interested

The perfect day for me begins with writing but ends with a long walk for several hours right before sunset, when the shadows are longest and the light is warmest. And my favorite place to go for this walk is in New Zealand, where my wife and I have been residents since 2003. So few people there, so friendly, and such beautiful land and sea. My perfect yearly schedule would be Dec-May in New Zealand, May-Sept in Europe, sailing the Med or visiting the British Isles or other parts of Europe, then two months at most in California. An occasional summer spent sailing and hiking Alaska. But alas, I have to work. I have a good job as a professor at the University of San Francisco, and so I live in California for 7 months of the year, with only 6 weeks in December and January for New Zealand. Very sad. Plenty of time in the summer for Europe or Alaska, and I’m very lucky in my job and should never complain, I realize, but I really am sad that we’ve never been able to fully live the New Zealand dream. I can’t even get an interview for a job there for some reason. Our bit of land is 5 minutes from the most beautiful harbor, deeply crenellated with bays and inlets, exposed dark South Pacific rock and lush tree ferns. A place Bookhound would love to fish, I’m sure (and we must talk Alaskan salmon). My wife and I have gone fishing at the mouth of the harbor, and even as we look at the mountains towering around us, we can’t believe the scenery. It’s too beautiful to be real.

Scroll down for prize draw copies.