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Mark Wiklund, writer and artist, read
Donald Hall’s String Too Short To Be Saved

My favorite author is Donald Hall. He’s been the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire and of the United States. He has written essays, stories, and children’s books. I love his
Ox-Cart Man, a poem about the cycle of seasons and life; as a children’s book that Barbara Cooney illustrated, it won the Caldecott Award. I remember discovering Mr. Hall’s slim volume of poems Kicking the Leaves while on an autumn overnight in the Granite State. I read it inside while outside a driving rain stripped the leaves off the trees. I remember thinking, ‘this sentimental, astringent, happy, angry, sorrowful, elegiac writer – he’s better than Frost!’

My favorite book of Donald Hall’s is String Too Short To Be Saved, a memoir about his boyhood summers on his grandparent’s dairy farm in New Hampshire. Each chapter has vignettes about haying, milking cows, picking blueberries, going to town with his grandmother, and taking walks with his grandfather to visit the old bachelors in the hills. The book’s title comes from a box he found in his grandparent’s attic. The label on it read ‘String Too Short to be Saved,’ and inside were small bits and strands of thread and yarn and string. Sadly, much of the rural way of life that Mr. Hall has written about – purposeful, frugal, generous, dignified, and graceful - has passed. Memoirs are sometimes all that’s left.

We each have big stories about hometowns, new towns, family, struggles, losses and wins. Sometimes, they’re too much or too hard to tell all at once. It’s easier to start with the smaller 'pieces of string,' like having coffee with Dad or chatting about school with Mom, eating Grandma’s burnt French toast, or listening to the Red Sox on a cranky radio. Somewhere in there, the important stories will out.

I love writing and wish I was better at it. I’d die to write as well as Donald Hall, and I live to read anything new of his. I’ve heard Mr. Hall many times at public readings. The more I see and read him, the more of a mystery he becomes. Writers don’t tell you everything. They pick and choose. The really good ones, you know, mostly tell you about yourself.

To Learn More ...

Learn about Donald Hall online. Read an Atlantic Magazine conversation with Mr. Hall. If you're curious, investigate the New Hampshire Farm Museum.

Let us know if there are other sites you would like to see listed about this book and its topics.

Mark Wiklund is a technical writer at MIT, pastel artist, and monthly columnist in the Region section of the Sandwich Enterprise. He is also involved in the Grange Hall Coffeehouse and with Sandwich Reads Together. He was interviewed for this article by his wife Maureen Wiklund.