Perhaps they were even more mysterious because of my age, but I listened with a confused fascination as I was told of the village that had been swallowed by forest. I was young when I first heard vague stories about Planeville. With this latest novel I am tasked with trying to evoke both a village about which almost nothing is known and a feeling from my childhood upon hearing its story, and that is much more demanding. My novels are either strictly realist-like my science fiction thought experiments about the potential application of technology-or various forms of interpersonal explorations of relationships and travel narratives. In some ways that project was more difficult than others, although much of that had to do with both the techniques I chose to use as well as how little was known about the village.Īlthough I sometimes write stories with magic realist elements, I hadn’t yet applied them to a sustained project. I spent a few years-when I could spare a moment from teaching and marking-working on this novel about the now extinct village of Planeville. Introduction: Working on the Birth and Death of Planeville This story is an examination of what Planeville meant to the people who lived there, and how the village so completely disappeared from memory and the public record. It enjoyed a brief prosperity and then disappeared when the forest loam closed over the rotting houses and abandoned machinery and graves, leaving behind only stories and misplaced stones. A capsule of our dreams and a symptom of our discontent, Planeville erupted from the wilderness. This is the story of the river people and the village founded by their adventurous son. He went into the woods and built his village, and his descendants lived there for four generations until Planeville was abandoned. The founder of Planeville, Wilhelm was an enigma to his peers. They might have lived that way forever if Wilhelm hadn’t looked at the high ridges that surrounded them and wondered what lay on the other side. Traumatized by the loss of their homes, they retreated into the placid life of the river and hid from the outside world for long generations. The first settlers along the river had fled the Miramichi fire in the late fall of 1825.
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