MY FATHER FREDERIC OATES, NOVEMBER 1988
A LETTER TO MY MOTHER CAROLINA ON HER
SEVENTY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1994
EXCERPT, TELEPHONE CONVERSATION
WITH MY FATHER FREDERIC OATES, MAY 1999
NONFICTION BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
The Lost Landscape is not meant to be a complete memoir of my life—not even my life as a writer. It is, for me at least, something more precious, as it is almost indefinable: an accounting of the ways in which my life (as a writer, but not solely as a writer) was shaped in early childhood, adolescence, and a little beyond. Its focus is upon the “landscape” of our earliest, and most essential lives, but it is also upon an actual rural landscape, in western New York State north of Buffalo, out of which not only much of the materials of my writing life have sprung but also the very wish to write.
Because it is essential to The Lost Landscape, “District School #7, Niagara County, New York” has been reprinted from The Faith of a Writer (2003), in a slightly different form. In a more substantially altered form, an updated “Visions of Detroit” ([Woman] Writer, 1988) has been reprinted under the title “Detroit: Lost City 1962–1968.” Other chapters have been revised significantly from memoirist pieces published in a variety of magazines, journals, and books, often in response to an editor’s invitation.
To the editors of these publications, heartfelt thanks are due:
“Mommy & Me” originally appeared, in a shorter form, in Civilization, February 1997.
“Happy Chicken” originally appeared in Conjunctions 61: A Menagerie, 2013.
“Discovering Alice” originally appeared in AARP Magazine, 2014.
“Piper Cub” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Rhapsody, November 2013.
“After Black Rock” originally appeared in the New Yorker, June 2013.
“Sunday Drive” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Traditional Home, March 1995.
“They All Just Went Away” originally appeared in a substantially different form in the New Yorker, October 1995. Reprinted in The Best American Essays 1996 and in The Best American Essays of the 20th Century. This essay incorporates “Transgressions,” originally published in the New York Times Magazine, October 1995.
“Where Has God Gone” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Southwest Review, Summer 1995, and was reprinted inCommunion edited by David Rosenberg, 1995 under the title “And God Saw That It Was Good.”
“An Unsolved Mystery: The Lost Friend” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Between Friends edited by Mickey Pearlman, 1994.
“Start Your Own Business!” originally appeared in substantially different forms in the New Yorker under the title “Bound,” April 2003; and in Conjunctions 63 (2014) under the title “The Childhood of the Reader,” which will be reprinted in Pushcart Prize: The Best of the Small Presses 2016.
“The Lost Sister: An Elegy” originally appeared in Narrative.
“Nighthawk: Recollections of a Lost Time” appeared originally in Yale Review, 2001, and in Conjunctions, 2014; reprinted, in a substantially different form, in Narrative, 2015.
“Story into Film: ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ and Smooth Talk”appeared originally in the New York Times, March 23, 1986.
Detroit: Lost City 1962–1968” appeared originally, in a shorter form, in (Woman) Writer, 1988.
“Photo Shoot: West Eleventh Street, New York City, March 6, 1970” originally appeared, in a shorter form, under the title “Nostalgia” in Vogue, April 2006; reprinted in Port, 2014.
“Food Mysteries” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Antaeus 1991; reprinted in Not By Bread Alone edited by Daniel Halpern, 1992.
“Facts, Visions, Mysteries: My Father Frederic Oates, November 1988” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in the New York Times Magazine, March 1989; reprinted in I’ve Always Meant to Tell You, edited by Constance Warloe, 1996.
“A Letter to My Mother Carolina Oates on Her Seventy-eighth Birthday, November 8, 1994” originally appeared, in a slightly different version, in the New York Times Magazine, 1995; reprinted in this version in I’ve Always Meant to Tell You edited by Constance Warloe and in The Norton Anthology of Autobiography edited by Jay Parini, 1999.
“My Mother’s Quilts” originally appeared, in a slightly shorter form, in What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-One Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most, edited by Elizabeth Benedict, 2013.
WE BEGIN AS CHILDREN imagining and fearing ghosts. By degrees, through our long lives, we come to be the very ghosts inhabiting the lost landscapes of our childhood.
Carolina Oates and Joyce, backyard of Millersport house, May 1941. (Fred Oates)
MAY 14, 1941. IT was a time of nerves. Worried-sick what was coming my father would say