The Best Path Forward
On a recent sunny Saturday, as my wife and I drove southeast across southern New Jersey, then abruptly reversed course and headed northwest, Mary turned to me and said, “What we’re doing makes absolutely no sense, you realize that, right?” She was correct, of course, and we both chuckled. Earlier in the year we had embarked on an odyssey to visit used-book stores in the Garden State, my complaints about the relative paucity of such shops in New York City pushing us to venture farther afield to find more old books, which, okay, we most certainly do not need. Over the course of twenty-plus years of marriage we’ve amassed a library that really should be enough already, with new books introduced to our collection every week through our jobs—she is the executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. And yet how we both love a good used-book store. The sweet smell of degrading paper, the unusual finds, the eccentric owners. What’s not to love?
But that’s not the only reason we were crisscrossing South Jersey. We are also both admirers of John McPhee, the legendary New Yorker writer and author of more than thirty books—two of which we had just found in early hardcover editions at an unassuming shop near a hot dog stand in Mount Laurel—including deep explorations of geological wonders such as the Pine Barrens, the 1.1-million-acre wilderness that provides the title and subject for McPhee’s 1968 book, in which he wrote, “The water of the Pine Barrens is soft and pure, and there is so much of it that, like the forest above it, it is an incongruity in place and time.” That last part is also an apt description of our search for an entrance to Wharton State Forest and a glimpse of the vast wilds. One might think a million acres of wilderness would be easy to spot in the country’s most densely populated state. We did eventually find our way to a beautiful lake surrounded by pitch pines and white cedars, and we marveled at the sight. “Several county roads...connect the pine communities, but it is necessary to get off the paved roads altogether in order to see much of the forest,” McPhee wrote nearly sixty years ago.
As writers we chart our own path to a literary education, and as readers we follow our bliss. Our special section begins with some advice: “If you are in pursuit of a writer’s education, the best path forward is the one that embraces who you are, in your literary life and beyond.” There are countless ways to find what you need: books, laughter, wilderness, wildness, love. I’m not sure you can ever have enough of any of it. So I wish you luck along your way.
