Consecration Pond: A Novel in Stories

Consecration Pond is a collection of eleven linked short stories that all take place along the shores of the same pond in Maine. Together, they offer a meditation on the nature of wisdom, the risks and gifts of allowing ourselves to be seen, and the challenge of creating meaning in the wake of loss. Consecration Pond is about the experience of being human. It's about people who are haunted by guilt or regret or unresolved grief. People who love deeply, but can't act on their love. People who carry a darkness so deep that it breaks them. And people who, while overcome with gratitude for their life, acquiesce to their death. It's about you and me and everyone. And it's about dragonflies and frogs and stars and the pond above which they fly and leap and shine.

In many of the stories, some aspect of the natural world serves as metaphor for the character's situation or challenge, or the story's theme. For instance, in "Wild Geese," the narrator, Gus, encounters both the stiff body of a dead cat and a huge and raucous flock of wild geese. These creatures, one solitary and the other communal, reflect both the costs of our individualistic culture and a path forward. In a few stories, an incident in the natural world actually shifts the narrator's consciousness. This happens, for example, when Evelyn in "Paper Lanterns" sees a falling star. Most importantly, some of these stories reveal the natural world as teacher. Howard Nemerov's poem "The Pond" was an important influence on the book, especially the story "Spring Ice." The poem's speaker tells of a pond that appeared at the end of a meadow after one rainy October, and of a boy named Christopher who went skating there that winter and drowned. The following summer, the narrator sees a dragonfly, a "winged animal of light," that had once, as a nymph, been a "killer" on the floor of the pond, and his recognition of this duality, this casting off of one identity for another, brings the speaker not consolation, he says, but acquiescence. That message of acquiescence to loss and change runs through many of the stories, probably most strongly through the title story.