On the shores of Lake Michigan there is a waystation for the dead.
The newly departed make way through the streets of Chicago each night, drawn to the lighthouse where they will reckon with their lives before stepping aboard a boat to be transported to the beyond.
The station master Harosen and his daughter Nera tend to the station and the dead, but one night they discover a visitor who is still very much alive: Charlie, who is grieving over the death of her sister. This is J.R. Dawson’s second novel — The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World — an atmospheric and poignant story.
J.R. Dawson is a writer currently living in Minnesota. In a What We’re Reading interview, she explained how the story was inspired in part by her fascination with the Great Lakes. After growing up in the plains of Nebraska, Dawson attended college in Chicago, where she became in awe of Lake Michigan.
“The fact that this really vibrant city just stopped at the waterfront and at night, there was this huge dichotomy between all of the lights in the city and then just like the blackness of the lake," she said. "And I saw it in Milwaukee, too. And I just went to visit Duluth for the first time and Lake Superior is a whole other monster.”
Central to the story is grief and how we carry it with us as we continue on with life. Dawson recounted the painful deaths of her grandmother and a close friend and noted that despite the years that pass, the grief remains; we never stop grieving in some form or another.
But as with the characters in The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World, Dawson noted that we find ways to carry on with our lives, whether we are grieving our loved ones who have died or grieving things happening on a larger scale.
"Our country is going through a grief and has been going through a grief of, ‘Wow, everything's on fire,’" Dawson said. "OK, well, I can't be on fire the whole time. So how do I allow myself to take these moments of, like, eating a really good pizza or listening to a really good song or connecting with a very cool person, while people are dying and things are crumbling?
"So it's that juxtaposition of, ‘How do we live?’ I bring up the metaphor in the book of a flower growing through concrete. And that was taken from my grandma's favorite book A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. How do we continue to grow when there's cement everywhere?”
Learn more about writer J.R. Dawson and her work on her website.
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