North Woods
North Woods
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Daniel Mason on North Woods
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Stone walls in a pandemic forestMason grew up in Palo Alto, where, as he has noted, most buildings are younger than the people in them. New England’s buried past was genuinely foreign to him, and what he found during pandemic walks stopped him.
I came to stay in upstate New York during the pandemic and spent a lot of time wandering in the woods. I was astonished by the evidence of land use and human history in the Northeast, as well as the dynamic seasonal changes. I thought it would be fun to explore a single plot of woods and the changes that happen over time.
The woods gave him a subject, but he needed a way to read what he was seeing. Tom Wessels’s book “Reading the Forested Landscape,” which teaches readers to decode a forest’s past from species mix, tree shapes, and old wall positions, became his key. Once he had it, the experience of walking became addictive in a specific way.
The more time I spend in the woods, the more in awe I am at the richness of the natural world. I had written about people in nature before, and yet we are surrounded by other non-human beings whose lives contain narratives so different from our own.
The book’s opening chapter, which follows two Puritan lovers who flee into the forest rather than face punishment, had a specific literary argument behind it. Mason had grown up reading “The Scarlet Letter” and wanted to imagine what happens to the figure who refuses the story Hawthorne tells, who escapes into the woods and founds something else entirely.
I love writing about nature, I had previously really mostly written about nature as a kind of setting. And this time around, I thought, I want to write about it as a kind of protagonist. What would it be like to treat it like I treat my human characters?
That shift, from nature as backdrop to nature as a character with its own arc across four centuries, is what turns the book’s colonial-era opening into something more than historical scene-setting.
How he wrote it
The rule he invented to avoid fourteen more yearsHis previous novel, “The Winter Soldier,” took fourteen years and was, by his own description at the Square Books reading, “a total torture.” The seasonal writing rule he invented for “North Woods” was partly a defense against repeating that experience. It was not planned in advance: he had begun in summer, the book opens in summer, and when autumn arrived in New England while he was drafting an autumn chapter, the constraint formed on its own.
The magic that I didn’t really expect would happen is that it meant that nature totally dictated the structure of the book because if I wanted to know what the landscape around my house looked like, what the woods looked like, basically the research consisted of going outside with my dog and walking around in the woods and noticing, and then putting it into the pages. [paraphrased from audio]
The Guggenheim Fellowship gave him a year based in Western Massachusetts, and the daily routine that emerged from it made the seasonal rule concrete. He verified details in editing by scrolling through iPhone photos taken during those same months and watching the colors shift.
I would write in the mornings, and then go into the woods in the afternoon, where I would take notes and think about the chapter I was working on. The book was also profoundly influenced by the seasons: it begins in June, passes through the fall, winter, and spring, and ends again in June. I tried to only write during the seasons of each chapter.
The multiple historical voices, ranging from an 18th-century epistolary letter to a colonial captivity narrative to a 1970s true crime magazine, were not in the original design. The book began as a linked story collection, and the voices arrived as Mason read deeply into historical source texts. Each register felt like a separate instrument he could pick up and learn.
When I started the book, I didn’t think it would necessarily be these different kinds of voices. I wanted a series of short stories that took place in the same place, but I had yet to imagine them being particularly connected. As I read different sources, I was very drawn to the various sounds and melodies of the source language.
The captivity narrative chapter, for instance, was modeled on a real genre: accounts by colonists taken during the French and Indian War. Mason worked against the propaganda those published texts typically performed. His narrator writes in Bible margins rather than for a public audience, and develops sympathy for her captors. The book’s capacity to hold comedy alongside that kind of darkness required years of calibration.
I love the power of humor in fiction, and tried, whenever possible, to lighten some of the heavier moments of North Woods. But humor can be hard to write, as something that’s funny on a first read is definitely not by the sixteenth. My editor, Andy Ward, helped me in too many ways to count, but a common theme was guidance on when to lean into humor, and when it was too much.
On what the book is wrestling with
Medicine explains; fiction stays uncertainMason teaches psychiatry at Stanford, and the tension between his two professions runs through the book’s treatment of Robert, a character with schizophrenia. The clinical reflex is to organize a patient’s behavior into a diagnosis. Mason built Robert to resist exactly that reflex.
Broadly speaking, medicine tries to understand and explain, while I feel the best fiction maintains a sense of mystery about a character’s internal world.
That resistance was not abstract. When Mason spoke to the Columbia Missourian about the One Read selection, he described a deliberate choice to keep Robert from becoming a case study, even though the author writing him is trained to produce exactly that.
It is very important to me that he remains a person really distinct from the kind of diagnosis that I might bring to him in my more clinical life.
The forest itself works the same way Robert does: it accumulates history that cannot be neatly explained, only perceived. At Harvard Magazine, Mason found an image for this that comes from his own dog, who accompanies him on those afternoon walks.
When a dog is in a forest, the dog is not just experiencing it in the moment, but they’re experiencing the history of the forest.
The book asks its human characters, and its readers, to move through the woods that way: aware that the present moment is layered over centuries of vanished lives, perceivable but not fully explainable.
What he wants us to sit with
Solace in what the ground remembersThe environmental grief in the book came from something Mason was living while writing it: the daily experience of falling in love with a world he could simultaneously watch disappear in the news. He described the feeling at Brookline Booksmith by way of a character who is a graduate student studying the woods.
I’m sort of cultivating a love for this thing, which at the same time, like every day in the newspaper, um, is telling me, um, is increasingly being lost...I sort of put into the words of the character...who’s a grad student and...falls in love with the woods, it sort of feels like...she just fell in love with someone only to be told that person was dying. [paraphrased from audio]
He resisted writing an elegy. The historical record of the woods is, in his view, simultaneously a story of loss and a story of ongoing life, and he wanted the book to hold both without resolving the tension between them. What he most wanted to give readers, though, was something he had found personally during those pandemic walks.
I think one of the fun parts of writing ‘North Woods’ was thinking about how so much of the world around me right now is filled with meaning that I actually am not aware of. All the houses that I’ve lived in, all the places that I walk are places that have these tremendous histories, tremendous amounts of drama, all of which has been lost for time...that gives me a lot of solace, not only a connection to people around me at a particular period of time, but the sense of a connection to the people and plants and animals who went before me.
The book’s final hope, then, is less about preserving a particular forest than about restoring a kind of attention: the habit of reading the present as the surface of something much older and still alive beneath.