Under the Cover: A Poetics of Place in Danny Jacobs’s The Ignis Psalter

Petitcodiac: A Village History by John Burrows—a slim blue book published in the early eighties— contains within it a tiny gem of a detail, a mere two sentences, a tidbit of speculation I felt I had to run with. How a novel might come to pass—you find a little detail and you run with it, or you try to run with it, hobbling at first, blood filling your shoes. The detail, laid out by Burrows, goes like this:

The most serious question, which might seem a bit far-fetched at first, upon deeper reflection causes one to wonder if perhaps for some bizarre reason there weren’t just too many unexplainable fires to chalk up to coincidence. Is it, in fact, possible that a closet arsonist was plying his craft in Petitcodiac—perhaps even for decades? (69)

So: an arsonist in Petitcodiac, New Brunswick. For decades. Maybe? Burrows says, “far-fetched.” Burrows says, “bizarre.” Perfect. A spark ignites, grows into a taper of a flame. This is how so many writing projects start for me – a line in an obscure history, a stanza in a poem, a painting’s oddly-placed brushstroke. Maybe I can do something with this, I think. Maybe something small will crystallize and send out its shards of association. I love that Burrows— who is prone to speculation throughout his history—comes to this conclusion, and I’d like to go further, to speculate about his speculations (I don’t think he’d mind), to suggest that maybe he had some hidden knowledge of the fires but was unwilling to share. Who knows. But Burrows dangled this carrot, and I spooled out pages trying to catch it. I made up a bizarro gothic prewar Petitcodiac. I made up a boy in 1913, I made up a boy in 1993, I made up a monster named Lester Mansard. I made up a fox tower painted matte black.   

For over a decade, I worked as the librarian in Petitcodiac, and spent more time there, awake, that I did in my own town. I suppose, as a writer, I was bound to write something longer about the village and its many fires. I no longer work in Petitcodiac, I was never a local, but now its streets are a part of my psychogeography. I haven’t been back in some time, and I wonder if, when I think of the village, I’m not overlaying it with the mirror village of my novel—Cotton Steeves, Lester Mansard, and Morton Lounsbury perpetually walking its streets.

To be clear: The village of my novel is not the village as it exists within consensus reality (whatever that means). Need I say this?  But I did try for geographical verisimilitude, I tried to make the reader feel the place—the triangle of Main, Kay, and River Rd.; The Soldier’s Memorial Hall; the church; the businesses that burnt. I consulted the histories and I consulted the archives. And upon those foundations, I invented. I got things wrong. I winged it. Novels are about a different type of truth, right? I hope I did the place justice. Do we ever?

I’ve always been interested in writers and the places to which they go back, those zones of obsession and occlusion, those streets and spaces that enhance the atmosphere of the strange and the speculative—I’m thinking here of Stephen King’s Castle Rock, Maine; Ray Bradbury’s Green Town, Illinois; Shirley Jackson’s Bennington, Vermont; the unnamed dreamtown in the surreal nightmares of Thomas Ligotti.  These are enchanted places, to be sure. They are also characters unto themselves. And I hope some of that comes through in The Ignis Psalter.