Steven Hendricks
We spent some time touring the citadels of the moon, relating the stories we had memorized, adapting and combining them. We returned to the library. Out again, return again. Thus, we were formed, like candles sunk into the written and the dead. Our new home went on circling the planet for ages, soon empty but for our library, casting its echoes against the world below, nets of sea and light.
Steven Hendricks
Steven Hendricks is a writer and teacher in Olympia, Wa. Steven earned his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has taught at The Evergreen State College since 2002. He is the author of Little is Left to Tell and Now Beacon, Now Sea.
Now Beacon, Now Sea
Now Beacon, Now Sea grew from my interest in writing about Samuel Beckett. The title comes from his novel Molloy: “Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.” I began with a conventional concept for a biographical novel, but I knew that form wouldn’t hold my interest in the long run, and more importantly, I knew that Beckett himself was squeamish about his life and work being overly connected. Ironically, he very much enjoyed knowing about the lives of the authors he admired, and he often made allusion to the idea that the keys to understanding his work lay in the works of others.
Among those others, one of the foremost is Dante. So that’s where I began.
Little is Left to Tell
Readers enter a narrative rabbit hole through bedtime stories that Mr. Fin, a man with dementia, conjures for his long-lost son. Virginia the Wolf writes her last novel to lure her daughter home. A rabbit named Hart Crane must eat words to speak, while passing zeppelins drop bombs. Mr. Fin tries to read the past in marginalia and to rebuild his son from boat parts.
The haunting fables in this lyrical first novel trace the fictions that make and unmake us.
"In LITTLE IS LEFT TO TELL one scene is quietly illuminated and then that illumination glides to the next, equally quiet and wondrous. Like a dream that inhabits an entire life, even a life of reading, this is a deeply rich and surprising novel."—Amina Cain
