I’m launching a new weekly series each Monday to highlight what I’m reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing in public history. Stay tuned on Mondays for these “Monday Dispatches.”

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My first dispatch covers a book I recently finished. I’m not much of a fiction reader – there are so many true stories, why spend time on made-up ones? But I realize this misses the point of great fiction: fantastic storytelling that illuminates the human experience in ways nonfiction can’t.

People have told me for years to read North Woods by Daniel Mason, but I kept putting it off. A few weeks ago, I finally dove in and listened to the audiobook courtesy of Frederick County Public Library (FCPL). Quickly, I realized I couldn’t turn it off or put it down.

The novel focuses on the stories of the forest, wildlife, and people occupying a plot of land in the mountains of western Massachusetts from the years after the English settlement of the Massachusetts Bay colony to the present day and beyond.

Mason intricately weaves the narrative, highlighting different eras of American history and the personalities of often eccentric people drawn to the land, sometimes by seemingly supernatural forces.

The book opened my eyes to a new way of interpreting history – focusing on one specific place and keeping that focus there as centuries pass. Many things change: People are born. Storms come. Disease spreads. Wars rage. People love. People live. People die.

North Woods explores time, change, and varied concepts of ghosts and hauntings.

I was struck by a thought the narrator shares while exploring a character’s reflections on life and death late in the novel: “[Nora] comes to find that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”

Those words resonated deeply with me – reminding me as a historian to reflect on the humanity behind the stories I share, and to recognize that we, myself included, are actively part of the ongoing history around us, with all its vulnerability and impermanence.

North Woods encouraged me to step away occasionally from exclusively reading nonfiction and history, embracing instead what an author or artist can uniquely reveal about the past, life, and death.

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This is the first in the Monday Dispatches – let me know what you think in the comments below.

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