Dogtown, The Book

PEN New England honors Elyssa East for Dogtown as best non-fiction set in New England.  The relevant part of the press release is below. Just look at the great company that Elyssa is in!

You can see our take on Dogtown, the first inspiring travel literature in our Great American Road Trip Series.

The ceremony will also honor writers Anne Sanow, Meg Kearney, and Elyssa East as recipients of the 2010 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Awards, given annually to a New England author or a book with a New England setting. Ms. Sanow is being honored in the fiction category for Triple Time (University of Pittsburgh Press); Ms. Kearney in the poetry category for Home by Now (Four Way Books); and Ms. East in the non-fiction category for Dogtown (Free Press/ Simon & Schuster). Judges for the Winship Awards this year were authors Dorothy Allison (fiction), Tim Seibles (poetry), and Michael Steinberg (non-fiction).

The L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award was established by The Boston Globe in 1975 to honor long-time Boston Globe editor Laurence L. Winship. It has been awarded in the past to E.B. White, Andre Dubus, Susan Cheever, Tracy Kidder, Mary Oliver, Susan Quinn, Jill Ker Conway, Jan Swafford, Anita Shreve, Stanley Kunitz, Leo Damrosch, Jennifer Haigh, K.C. Frederick, Sebastian Junger, Louise Glick, Rishi Reddi, Kristen Laine, Ann Killough, Nancy Pearson, Patrick Tracey and Margot Livesey.

Ceremony at the JFK Library in Boston on March 28.

Yaaay!

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Dogtown, the book

Destination: Cape Ann, Massachusetts

Book: Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town (2009) by Elyssa East

Here we are in a wild, wooded 3,000 acre area next door to Gloucester MA. It may come as a surprise that we are not visiting Gloucester, a tourist mecca and authentic fishing town, or Cape Cod, or the historic and charming city of Boston.

I picked this new book because when I read it I was hooked from the very start. And it makes a good first step on our Great American Road Trip, because it reminds us of the great variety to be found in any state. You want to know about the whole state? Buy a guidebook. Here, we look for good reads that will also give you a sense of place.

Elyssa East, the author of [amazonify]1416587047::text:::: Dogtown [/amazonify] goes looking for the inspiration reflected in paintings by Marsden Hartley. She seeks a place of peace and healing. She finds a ghostly deserted colonial village, witches and warlocks, a cultivated wilderness, words of wisdom carved on immense boulders and an eerie landscape. And she follows the tracks of a gruesome murder and its impact on people’s feelings about Dogtown.

In this extensively researched literary non-fiction, East weaves together her many different tales in the way that underbrush tangles around the base of those glacier-tossed dolmens that dominate her thoughts and the landscape.

Does it make the reader want to go there? Depends.  I am willing to state that the next time I go to Boston, I’ll head north to Cape Ann and explore not only the usual tourists destinations of beach and quaint fishing village of Gloucester, but also hike into the woods of Dogtown.

The only fault I can find with the book is that I longed to see the paintings that inspired Elyssa East’s journey.  They probably are restricted by copyright so that they could not be reproduced. And heaven knows we can see plenty of them on Google images. In addition to his painting, Hartley wrote poetry, and here is what he had to say about Dogtown and its rocks.

Hartley, whose story gets buried (excuse the term) by the murder and subsequent trial, has words of wisdom that all travelers might well ponder. East says, “when he found a place he wanted to paint, he said that he ‘did as I always have to do about a place–look at it–see–it–and think of nothing else.’” He also quote T.S. Eliot:

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

Even among these rocks.

Those words strike me as more inspiring than those preachy ones Roger Babson, economist and philosopher, had carved on the boulders. “When work stops, values decay,” “Keep out of debt, “Help Mother.” …Well, on second thought, I might carve that last one on a rock outside my door.

East does a good job of recreating this sometimes scary, sometimes peaceful landscape, but she also knows that you cannot comprehend a place without understanding its people. She talks with and introduces us to a fascinating parade of personalities. All in all, it makes wonderful travel literature for a road trip to New England.

For another view of Dogtown, you can read Anita Diamant‘s (author of The Red Tent) novel [amazonify] 074322574::text::::The Last Days of Dogtown (2008)[/amazonify] See a clip here of an interview with Diamant and some scenes of Dogtown.

You can always strike up a conversation with Elyssa East, author of Dogtown, on Twitter where she is [twitter]elyssaeast[/twitter].

MUSIC FOR THE ROAD

Get the music to go with a road trip visit to Cape Ann over at Music Road, where Kerry Dexter has some fisherman’s chanties and maybe more waiting for us.

MORE ON THIS STATE

And, if you want more of Massachusetts, see our post on Jaws at Martha’s Vinyard, Wellsfleet, Transcendental New England, France in Boston, Spenser’s Boston and the Pilgrims. See, didn’t I tell you? A lot of variety in one small state.

And thanks to Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster for providing me with a review copy.

Did you know about Dogtown? Have you visited it? Or is this all new to you?

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.