READERS GUIDE

Questions and Topics for Discussion

1.     The stories in The History of Sound are linked in clever and surprising ways. What did you think of this puzzle-like structure? How did these connections between stories enhance your reading experience? Were there any narrative threads from these pairs that you’d like to see continued in another story?
 
2.     The collection is deeply concerned with what we pass on, knowingly or unwittingly, over generations. Is there a particular object in your life that you think might have significance on a future generation?
 
3.     Several of the stories are concerned with the lasting imprint of first love. What role, if any, does first love play in your life? How do you think about that relationship and time?
 
4.     How does the northeastern landscape contribute to the overall atmosphere and mood of the book? Can you draw any parallels between the physical setting and the emotional or psychological state of the characters? How does your immediate environment impact your life?
 
5.     Have you ever uncovered a hidden or unknown family story or history? How did it impact your understanding of your family’s past and your own identity?
 
6.     Discuss the theme of home and belonging as it appears across these stories. How do the characters define and redefine home over time? How do you think about home?
 
7.     Many of the transcendent moments in The History of Sound are spurred by a character’s realization about the natural world. Do you turn to nature when you’re seeking clarity? What have you found there?
 
8.     Considering the dialogue between past and present that connects each story, did reading this collection make you think differently about how you view the past? Do you think that misunderstandings and longings have a way of coming back to us in unexpected ways?

About this Author

The stories in this collection are full of beautiful writing about the natural world and the impact the land and region have on us. Could you share a bit about your own relationship with nature and New England, and how they influence your writing?
 
In many ways, this book is an ode to New England. Unlike the Midwest or West, New England’s landscape varies so widely across relatively short distances, from the sand-made island of Nantucket to the granite mountains of New Hampshire to the endless evergreen forests of Maine. The landscape of coastal Massachusetts naturally became the foundation of my writing because it was the foundation of my upbringing and sensibilities—one of my earliest memories is standing on a beach during a snowstorm. Characters in this book are affected by landscape in ways that I see around me all the time, like how we are hemmed in for months by cold weather, or experience flares of introspection during long walks, or are drawn to the sea, or isolated in rural settlements, or feel anchored in place because of family ties and inherited land, or become euphoric and generous on the first real day of spring after an endless winter. Many of these stories simply put words to unspoken relationships between people and nature—how, for instance, living at the end of a long and wind-battered peninsula can shape feelings almost as clearly and profoundly as one’s own subconscious.
 
 
The History of Sound movie is set to be filmed in winter/spring 2024, directed by Oliver Hermanus, starring Paul Mescal (Normal People) and Josh O’Connor (The Crown), and written by you! What was it like adapting your short story for the screen?
 
Writing the adaptation was a gift! I loved bringing my characters from a short story into a much longer story, introducing them to new circumstances and settings. Of course, there were surprises along the way. I remember writing a scene for the film in which the protagonist is caught in a snowstorm on a hillside. Oliver (the director) said that the scene was fine but that “snow is very expensive,” and was there any way we could keep the scene but lose the snow? I don’t think I’ve ever been writing and thought of how much the weather would cost! (In the end, I changed it to a windstorm.) And then there was the surprise of realizing that the story wasn’t really mine anymore. Like, when I was talking about the screenplay with Paul Mescal last winter, he suggested that his character, Lionel, would react perhaps a little differently to another character than what I’d written. What he suggested as an alternative was much, much better. That was just one of many times I felt the collaboration inherent in screenwriting. I liked that expansive feeling, compared to the very solitary experience of writing fiction.
 
In terms of the process, screenwriting felt a little like cheating. When writing fiction, I build everything from the ground up—the characters, the setting, plot, and dialogue—even if they are inspired by historical or present events or people. I then have to set the story in motion, with an eye on character development and change. After that, I need to make the story have some impact on the reader, some emotional resonance, have it be more than just people acting in space. It’s a lot to bring together, and can feel overwhelming. But when I sat down to write the screenplay of The History of Sound, most of the invention and heavy lifting was already done. Or, another way to put it: all the seeds were planted, and all I had to do was shed a little more light on each to watch them grow and divide into bigger or branching scenes.
 
 
The collection includes so many rich historical details. How did you strike a balance between historical accuracy and creative storytelling, and what inspired you to explore these dual timelines within one book?
 
When I started writing historical fiction years ago, I spent a lot of time reading nonfiction, searching for facts that could be put into a story. “The Silver Clip” is a good example of this. I came upon a tidbit in a history book that described how wives of whaling captains in Nantucket would sometimes be gifted “he’s-at-homes”—nineteenth-century dildos—to promote fidelity while the captains were out at sea for years. An artifact or event like that would become the occasion for a story. It was an oddity, a bright point of contrast in my assumptions about a drab, conservative, buttoned-up past. But as the years passed and I simply read more, I saw that things were often way, way weirder and more unexpected than I assumed. For example, to name a very few, I read about hexes hidden away in eighteenth-century homes to ward off evil, about men in New England communities who had multiple families spread across towns, about orgiastic and ‘magic’ rituals performed on fields in the eighteenth century during planting seasons, about a pig being put on trial in Connecticut for bewitching a man, about secret messages being broadcast to neighbors by how someone hung their laundry. The past was a constellation of bright points, of oddities that turned out to be, in a way, quite common. It gave me permission to expand stories, because the edge of what I predicted was historically accurate was likely not even close to being the edge; and what I thought might sound more like fiction was well within reasonable fact. The resulting collection is a jumble of ordinary but invented facts that might never be doubted by a reader, mixed with lots of stranger-than-fiction but verifiably true and historical facts. The blur between those two is intentional—to push the reader to question the stories we’re told about what really happened. That said, I did feel it was necessary to remain truthful to historical context and technology (how information was spread or contained, for instance), and to write believable reactions within a character’s culture and time.
 
I began exploring dual timelines when I noticed the natural binary that existed in “history.” There’s the past, and then the people peering into the past. It’s almost a call-and-response relationship. Researchers, librarians, archivists, academics, historians, the people who find stuff in their attics or uncover a secret about an ancestor—all these people are affected by the past, sometimes in obvious but often in subtle ways. Their stories began to call out to me as the other half of my interest in historical fiction.
 
Finally, there’s the connection between those two sides: the emotions we all feel across huge gulfs of time. Jealousy, rage, depression, the feeling of being exploited or abandoned—these all have the same tones across centuries. I wanted to explore this consistency by creating pairs of stories that were not only connected by something concrete (like a painting, or wax cylinders, or a distant relative) but also by an emotional echo. For instance, “Graft” is about a woman abandoning her son, while its pair, “Tundra Swan,” is about a son abandoning his parents (on the same farm, 150 years apart). Or, another example: “The History of Sound” addresses the fear that you only get one chance at real love, and its pair, “Origin Stories,” is about how staying with your first love can actually become your biggest regret. Connecting those two stories is also the very real artifact of the wax cylinders.
 

There is a lot about birds in the book. What kind of research did you do, scientifically and historically? More broadly, what other books and authors informed and inspired your writing?
 
Most birders will understand that once bird-watching gets into you, it’s hard to not include that passion in many parts of life—writing included. I majored in fine arts at college, and because a degree like that requires barely any homework, I had lots of free time. I started taking classes at The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, following my early interest in birding that started when I was a boy, out bird-watching with my mom. The first class I took was Bird Skinning, which entailed walking into a freezer and choosing a dead bird, then turning it into a specimen. I was hooked. Then I took a class called Birds of the World, in which I memorized hundreds (maybe a thousand?) birds by common and Latin names. Then I spent years after college at research stations as a field technician. I banded arctic tern chicks while living in an abandoned lighthouse in the Gulf of Maine, tracked ovenbirds through the dense undergrowth of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and monitored western bluebird nests in California. (It was at one of those remote field stations, a few years out of college, where I wrote my first short story, in the long hours after fieldwork was done.) All to say, I had to do very little research when writing about birds in this book—I just included what I already knew and loved about them.
 
I do have a few favorite bird books, though. Mark, from “Tundra Swan,” references the Handbook of Bird Biology as the book that got him interested in the wonders of migration. Unsurprisingly, that is also the book that got me interested in the life cycles of birds, in the world that exists right over our heads. But, if there was one bird book that inspired me initially, it would be the one that also inspired so many young birders: The Sibley Guide to Birds—an extraordinary collection of art and science.
 
 
You write so evocatively about the past as well as the present, moving seamlessly between the 1700s and today. How do you think about writing historical fiction versus contemporary fiction? What are the challenges of both?
 
For whatever reason, writing about the past has always come more naturally to me. I like the process of stripping away, finding what essentially connects me to someone in the late 1700s. Like the feeling of leaving a warm bed on a cold morning, or the euphoria in being away from your childhood home for the first time, or the sensation of falling in and out of love. One challenge, of course, is that it takes a lot more imaginative flexing and homework to start—needing to know, for example, what believable literacy rates would be in certain communities at certain times so that someone could be writing or receiving letters, or how a cook would make food in a logging camp in the early 1900s. Another smaller challenge is to resist the temptation to include every little detail of research in the story. Like, the history and process of making rushlights is fascinating! Cutting out facts or events in the name of a better story and depth of a character’s perspective is not fun.
 
Writing fiction that takes place today is the opposite—it takes little research but is harder for me to write. I know exactly how my friends and neighbors would believably talk to each other, but in all that familiarity there’s a blurring of essential experience. There’s so much narrative noise to push through. There are too many examples—and so many possibilities—of how lives are changed, of plots. Also, when I write something set in present day, I feel like someone is standing over my shoulder, watching while I write. That someone is, of course, the imagined reader, who has a fluent understanding of the world I’m describing.
 
 
You also run the oldest general store in America. Could you tell us a little about the history of this place, and what drew you to it?
 
Davoll’s General Store was built in 1793, which means that George Washington could have stepped inside had he visited my hometown! This is the store where my great-grandmother used to buy cheese and meats, and where my brother and I rode our bicycles to buy penny candy. The name has changed many times over the centuries, usually to the surname of the owners, but it has been Davoll’s since the early 1900s. The store sits in the middle of five country roads, near a saltwater river that empties into the ocean a few miles away. It is, to me, like a place from the Shire or The Wind in the Willows.
 
My brother and I own it together. After we bought it, we put in an independent bookstore, a country pub, and reinvigorated the grocery section with local produce. Farmers just drive down the road and drop off their goods for us to sell. We wanted to have a place for our neighbors to run into one another and strike up conversations, a place where you could pick up milk and eggs and stay for a beer. We lamented the loss of the old town square, of our small community gathering places being pushed out by development. The New England general store is exactly that gathering place, what’s also called the “third space”—a place between work and home. It’s just poetic luck that the general store in our town, down the road from where I grew up, happens to be the oldest in America.