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Author Picks: 6 Literary Quotes That Stuck with Me

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Ash Davidson was born in Arcata, California, and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and MacDowell. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

I read about 300 books in the 10 years I spent writing my first novel, Damnation Spring. Teaching myself to write a novel changed the way that I read. Sure, I still read to find out what happens next, and how it ends. I’m still savoring a beautifully constructed sentence and struck by observations that touch me, that resonate in the world of the novel and cross over into my own.

The difference is that now when I pick up a novel, I also open a drawer in my brain that I’m filling with index cards. I note how the beast is sewn together, and the narrative techniques—things I want to learn to do. Here are a few quotes tucked away in that brain drawer.

Memory Wall
by Anthony Doerr

“You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.”

Anthony Doerr may be best known for his beloved novel ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, but his earlier collection, MEMORY WALL, thrilled and terrified me, for all the ways it speaks to how we build memory, and how we lose it. I grew up listening to my parents’ stories of chemical sprays and logging in the redwood forest, and, through their memories, loving a place I barely remembered. Those stories were always there, waiting for me to come back and dig them up, and I returned to this Doerr quote in moments of doubt.

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Memory Wall
Anthony Doerr

In the wise and beautiful second collection from the acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning #1 New York Times bestselling author of All the Light We Cannot See, and Cloud Cuckoo Land, "Doerr writes about the big questions, the imponderables, the major metaphysical dreads, and he does it fearlessly" (The New York Times Book Review).

Set on four continents, Anthony Doerr's new stories are about memory, the source of meaning and coherence in our lives, the fragile thread that connects us to ourselves and to others. Every hour, says Doerr, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear. Yet at the same time children, surveying territory that is entirely new to them, push back the darkness, form fresh memories, and remake the world.

In the luminous and beautiful title story, a young boy in South Africa comes to possess an old woman's secret, a piece of the past with the power to redeem a life. In "The River Nemunas," a teenage orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her grandfather, and discovers a world in which myth becomes real. "Village 113," winner of an O'Henry Prize, is about the building of the Three Gorges Dam and the seed keeper who guards the history of a village soon to be submerged. And in "Afterworld," the radiant, cathartic final story, a woman who escaped the Holocaust is haunted by visions of her childhood friends in Germany, yet finds solace in the tender ministrations of her grandson.

Every story in Memory Wall is a reminder of the grandeur of life--of the mysterious beauty of seeds, of fossils, of sturgeon, of clouds, of radios, of leaves, of the breathtaking fortune of living in this universe. Doerr's language, his witness, his imagination, and his humanity are unparalleled in fiction today.

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The Round House
by Louise Erdrich

“Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation. They were just seedlings with one or two rigid, healthy leaves. Nevertheless, the stalky shoots had managed to squeeze through knife cracks in the decorative brown shingles covering the cement blocks.”

Erdrich is a linguistic virtuoso, and while I gravitate to her books for her intricate plots, the brilliant way she braids the personal and the political, and her complicated, often flawed, characters, her language itself is full of revelations. I was struggling to describe the chinks in a cabin wall when I ran across these opening lines and the “knife cracks” in the brown shingles of Joe Coutts’s boyhood home. With precision and economy, Erdrich skips straight over “cracks just large enough to slide a knife through” to “knife cracks” and slyly evokes an act of violence, a harbinger of how Erdrich’s gorgeous novel about an ugly crime will cut you to the bone.

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The Round House
Louise Erdrich

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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
by Ayana Mathis

“The journey had lifted her out of the plainness of her life. In Georgia she was one of many, undifferentiated from others, even in her own mind, but on the train to Philadelphia she became acutely aware of what was inviolate in her. She felt herself a single red flower in a field of green grass.”

Ayana Mathis’s novel of the Great Migration will bind you to its matriarch, Hattie Shepherd, a young mother who desperately fills a room with steam in an attempt to save her twin babies. But with all the tragedies, triumphs, and heartaches in this book, it also changed my understanding of history, its luminous characters lighting a path through an era I knew little about.

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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
Ayana Mathis

This debut of extraordinary distinction tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family. Beautiful, devastating, and blazing with life, this novel is a searing portrait of surviving in the face of insurmountable adversity.

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Salvage the Bones
by Jesmyn Ward

“What’s done in the dark always comes to the light.”

Jesmyn Ward’s novel of the days leading up to and the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is one of my all-time favorites. It invites you into the world of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and into the intimate lives of teenage Esch and her brother Skeetah, whose big-hearted love for his dog, China, mirrors the love Esch yearns for. SALVAGE THE BONES has a perfect ending, and I think about it at least once a week.

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Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward

Set in the 12 days leading up to Hurricane Katrina’s arrival in Mississippi, a family of motherless children do everything they can to protect and care for each other. SALVAGE THE BONES is a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty.

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Perma Red
by Debra Magpie Earling

“When Louise White Elk was nine, Baptiste Yellow Knife blew a fine powder in her face and told her she would disappear.”

Set on the Flathead Indian Reservation in the 1940s, PERMA RED chronicles the complicated histories and power dynamics of rural life in a small town and the currents of danger that run underneath, especially for a young woman. Earling is a master of speeding time up and slowing it down—including one of the most beautifully written car crashes I’ve ever read. This novel captures what it feels like to be trapped by one’s circumstances and the courage it takes to want more.

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Perma Red
Debra Magpie Earling

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Author Picks: 6 Literary Quotes That Stuck with Me

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The Lobster Kings
by Alexi Zentner

“We’re named the Kings, and we’re the closest thing to royalty on Loosewood Island.”

Alexi Zentner had me at hello with this first line of THE LOBSTER KINGS. Loosely based on King Lear (the heir to the family lobstering dynasty is named “Cordelia”), Zentner does with the lobstering what I wanted to do for redwood logging: he introduces you to a family, a place, and an industry that is so vivid and insular that suddenly you’re out on boat, hauling up traplines. Zentner also writes his female protagonist so confidently that it made me think, hey, if he can do that, maybe I can write a 53-year-old logger.

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The Lobster Kings
Alexi Zentner

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Author Picks: 6 Literary Quotes That Stuck with Me

By Ash Davidson | November 29, 2021

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Damnation Spring
by Ash Davidson

DAMNATION SPRING is out now!

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened. Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall—a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son—and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient redwoods. But when Colleen, grieving the loss of a recent pregnancy and desperate to have a second child, challenges the logging company’s use of the herbicides she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community, Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict. As tensions in the town rise, they threaten the very thing the Gundersens are trying to protect: their family.

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Damnation Spring
Ash Davidson

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Named a Best Book of 2021 by Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times

“A glorious book—an assured novel that’s gorgeously told.” —The New York Times Book Review
“An incredibly moving epic about an unforgettable family.”CBS Sunday Morning
“[An] absorbing novel…I felt both grateful to have known these people and bereft at the prospect of leaving them behind.” —The Washington Post

A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future.

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened.

Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall—a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son—and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient redwoods. But when Colleen, grieving the loss of a recent pregnancy and desperate to have a second child, challenges the logging company’s use of the herbicides she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community, Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict. As tensions in the town rise, they threaten the very thing the Gundersens are trying to protect: their family.

Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love—between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. An essential novel for our times.

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Author Picks: 6 Literary Quotes That Stuck with Me

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