® BOOKLIFE PRIZE
80 BOOKLIFE, JANUARY 27, 2020
hesitant to embrace the title. “When I hear writers
talking about how, even as children, they’ve wanted
to write, how they knew they would be writers, I
wonder how I came to write,” he says. “I don’t think
of myself as a writer with a capital W. I like the
work. I have always found great pleasure in making
things, and writing, for me, is making something.”
Bragg, who lives in Maine and has worked as a
carpenter and in outdoors industries, is an avid
mountain climber. Such a highly physical, tactile,
perilous hobby might seem to be the polar opposite
of the cerebral art of writing. Bragg nevertheless
sees some overlap between his two passions. “I can
see that there is some similarity in the willingness
to devote energy and time to something without any
certainty of success or surety that it will matter,”
he says. “You plan out a route on a mountain know-
ing that you could get halfway up and it won’t go.”
Writing, meanwhile, promises nothing beyond
arduous effort and, perhaps, catharsis, Bragg says.
“You spend years on a project with no assurance
that anyone will ever read it—and, even if they do,
will they get what you were trying to say? For me,
it’s the work, the effort, not the finished thing,
that matters.”
That said, one aspect of self-publishing that Bragg
particularly appreciates is the freedom to make
choices about what the book will look like. “I designed
and typeset both of my novels, and producing the
actual physical object of the book has been almost
as rewarding as creating the text itself,” he notes.
Bragg’s process is a bit piecemeal. He writes in
fragments and rarely starts at the beginning. “I don’t
plot things out, and the few times I’ve tried to outline
the book ahead of time, I ended up off on a sidetrack
and went back
to creating the
pieces,” he
says. “Maybe
it’s my work as
a carpenter,
where you
build a porch,
a deck, a house
one piece at a
time.”
Exit 8 is a
decidedly
quiet novel,
both in termsof its focus and its tone. The quality of stillness
that Bragg achieves was by design, he says, but
he sometimes wonders how he managed to capture
it: “At some point, I decided I wanted to tell the
story with as few words as possible—can’t remem-
ber exactly when or why. The voice, the language,
the characters, the story, and the pervasive sense
of quiet all evolved naturally after that. Sometimes,
when I read from Exit 8, I wonder who wrote it and
where that sense of stillness and quiet came from,
because my life is anything but.”
Though Bragg doesn’t always know the beginning
or ending of his novels when he starts writing, he
tends to locate the settings for his stories quickly.
Both of his books initially came to him via single
images. For his mystery novel, The Broom of God,
“it was a gaucho on a horse high above a vast
Patagonian lake.” For Exit 8, Bragg saw “a farmer,
an older man, standing in a hayfield looking south
down the Connecticut River Valley.”
Bragg says he believes that the time he spends
outdoors allows him to be particularly attuned to
his surroundings: “Place is very important to me,
but it’s more than a place. It’s place in the sense
of everything around me. How I look at and see
what’s there is, I think, a large part of who I am.
In the same way, what my characters see, and how
they see it, what they notice and what they don’t,
is a big part of who they are.”
With two books written and his BookLife Prize
win, Bragg is in a prime position to draw the atten-
tion of agents and publishers, but he’s not champ-
ing at the bit: “I would be thrilled to have a publisher
who believed in me, who believed in my desire to
build a career as a writer of novels. It’s difficult to
gain widespread distribution when one publishes
independently, but at least some folks have read
Exit 8 and been touched by it. Do I wish more have
read it and will read it? Of course, but if I had insisted
on finding a mainstream publisher, the manuscript
for Exit 8 would still be in the proverbial drawer.”
Bragg is currently working on a third book, which,
as with his other novels, begins with an image. “I
saw a man returning for the funeral of his great-
aunt to the small, dark New England village where
he spent his youth,” he says. He’s still finding his
way with that story, but, like a climber reaching
blindly to take hold of the rock face above, Bragg
doesn’t mind that the path forward is uncertain;
it’s the work to get there that counts. ■Jason Bragg