Exploring The Woods with Janice Obuchowski
Through excellent description and fascinating characters, Janice Obuchowski (Saranac Review 16 contributor) crafts a unique world in her debut short story collection, The Woods (Iowa University Press). Although not a linked collection, exactly, each of these stories take place in the same small college town in Vermont. In “Cat,” a lonely college professor, discontent with living in her small town, is visited by a feral cat who offers surprising and welcome comfort. In “The Chair,” Cappie grapples with her new role as caretaker for her husband Morty, who has a broken ankle. Things are complicated by an Adirondack chair—a decades-old wedding gift that Cappie wants to keep but Morty wants to get rid of.
The town is brought to life not only through these characters but also Obuchowski’s wonderful descriptions of nature, the very woods that the collection is named after. In “The Cat,” the narrator reflects on the land:
Running down from one mountain is a sinuous, rough river that winds past my apartment, which is on the second floor of what once was, the locals tell me, the old general store. When the weather holds, I sit on my back porch and watch the water—wide and shallow and eddying around large rocks—create its constant cascade. On its far side, the land slopes down, greenery turning to small boulders. On my side, where houses have slivers of backyards, there runs a low concrete wall cracked and patched with moss.
All this attention to detail works to make the New England town feel like a real, lived-in place. It almost feels like an episode of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, as we peek into the lives of different people within this one small town. Each story feels incredibly personal, as if we’ve been given a chance to examine people’s lives without their permission.
This intimacy is showcased in stories such as “Mountain Shade,” in which a woman struggles with grief and self-pity after her husband’s sudden death. The story has very few lines of dialogue. Instead, it mostly focuses on the introspection of the woman, Hannah, whose husband Nathan died of a heart attack. Reliving the memory of the day he passed, she goes for a walk in the woods and then gets lost. Here we get more of Obuchowski’s vivid description of nature: “She zigzagged about trees, pushing herself to keep her pace brisk. Her heart was high in her ears…She still couldn’t find a path. Her mountain was just a wall of rough spruce and pine, bare-limbed snatches of deciduous trees, ugly and overcrowded.”
Hannah has a thought that she got lost because her husband died, equating her situation to her mental state. All the while she needs to get to the college to teach her class. Eventually, she comes upon a farm tended by a man who sends her in the right direction, suggesting she is on the way to recovering from her grief.
That is the sort of humanness that is present in this collection. As we are looking at the lives of various strangers, we also look into our own lives. We all get lost in the woods sometimes. Through this collection, Obuchowski demonstrates that we can still find a way out.
