AD: Sure, exactly. A writer asks a reader to believe in an imaginary world, a world made out of letters and words, and if the reader gets the slightest sense that the world is false, then the contract is broken.
LA: There seems to be a bookend quality to your first two published works. In About Grace, you are interested in the properties of water in extreme cold conditions; the protagonist, David Winkler, travels to the Alaskan tundra to photograph snowflakes. You organized the novel in six books in correspondence with the six corners of a snowflake. In The Shell Collector, you begin with the story of a man in self-exile in the tropics who is obsessed with exotic shells. Two men, two obsessions, two ends of the earth, two products of nature that seem to simultaneously possess both pattern and random properties. What is the story behind the twos?
AD: Thanks for noticing. It’s a hard question to answer, since, as you know, lots of decisions you make when you’re writing a story are subconscious. I try to write about, and research, the things I’m most passionate about, and for some reason or another, among lots of other things, I’m interested in shells and snowflakes. Spider’s egg cases, hummingbird’s nests, pebbles: little artifacts of the world. It’s hard to say why, though a lot of my fascination probably started in childhood. Every spring, growing up, my mom and dad used to drive my brothers and me back to Ohio from Florida in a big, rusty Suburban, and in the backseat we would have all sorts of stolen sea-bounty for our aquariums: anemones in gallon jugs of seawater, octopi in sloshing pails, murexes and stone crabs. And I’d usually have a tennis ball can stuffed with shells.
It was only after rediscovering one of those tennis ball cans, two decades later, that I got started on the story “The Shell Collector.” Likewise, when I was a kid, I had a copy of Wilson Bentley’s 1931 book, Snow Crystals (I give this book to Winkler in About Grace.) For fifty years Bentley, a Vermont farmer, caught snowflakes on a smooth black tray, transferred them to a glass slide, brushed them flat with a feather, centered them over a low-powered bulb, and took photomicrographs of them. He never sold any of his prints; his neighbors made fun of him. Who would study something so ordinary and troublesome as snow? In all that time Bentley managed only about 5,000 successful prints.
Two thousand of them are collected in Snow Crystals, and to page through this graveyard of long-vanished crystals is to be astonished, once more, by the sheer inventive power of nature. And also by the man, the unique kind of assiduousness Bentley possessed, his almost religious dedication to beauty. These are the things I’ve been drawn to for a long time: those miracles of the world that we sometimes need to be gently reminded to pay attention to, and the kinds of characters who are interested in them.
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