an archive of woodsmoke

This morning I am in Easthope, a semi-imaginary village on this Coast, I am sitting by the fire with the newly-printed first draft of my novel of the same name, I am using a pencil to make little notes to myself: this needs to happen later or you have to fill in this gap or maybe add a paragraph here or maybe you need to rearrange these bits because they are seasonal. My editing is analog, I guess that’s what I’m saying. And it’s visceral. This morning, making the fire, using some cedar kindling and bark, and a fir log, I remembered a little bridging passage in Easthope, and I realized that it could also serve as a title for the third (and final) section of the novel. So I put a line through the title I was already using and pencilled in “an archive of woodsmoke”.

An archive of woodsmoke: the rich incense of cedar burning; sappy pine heady with spice; an occasional whiff of dark coal or peat, mysterious, until you remember spruce; the sweetness of apple prunings dried for a year; cherry from a tree knocked down by a bear in late summer, also sweet but lasting; little curls of its smoke wrapping around the high boughs of Douglas fir; the urine-y scent of willow; maple with its reminder of syrup.

Once I’ve gone through the manuscript with my pencil, I will lay out the novel like Tarot cards on the dining room table and see what it tells me about itself, about me.