Every morning, Makenna Goodman walks her dog, Pigeon, in the woods behind her house in Montpelier. Midway through her loop, she passes through a clearing that looks like a set from a movie about a post-humanity world returning to its primordial state. A lichen-crusted pickup truck molders in a sea of ferns; a few yards away are a small bistro table and two wrought-iron chairs. The table and chairs appeared over the winter, Goodman said. She has no idea who put them there. On one of her recent walks, she came upon a dead fox, curled up in the middle of the path. “No rigor mortis or anything,” she said. “I was like, What the hell is this? What does a fox mean? It was extremely uncanny.” Goodman, a novelist, is obsessed with the question of what is real and what is a story, and the thin line between the ordinary and the sublime. Last month, her second novel, Helen of Nowhere, was one of 13 titles long-listed for the Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in English-language fiction. Past winners include Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Marlon James and Iris Murdoch, and the roster of long- and short-listed writers is every bit as impressive: Patricia Lockwood, Percival Everett and Sally Rooney, to name just a few recent ones. Finalists will be announced in September at a ceremony in London; the winner, named in November, will receive £50,000 and an all-but-guaranteed boost in book sales and name recognition. The first Vermont writer to receive a Booker nomination, Goodman is the author of two slim novels, both clocking in at fewer than 150 pages and published by nonprofit indie presses. When Seven Days interviewed her at home in early August, about two weeks after the Booker announcement, she seemed deeply ambivalent about this attention. Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman, Coffee House Press, 141 pages. $18. “There’s nothing to say about it, except that it’s a huge honor,” she said. “I mean, I can’t even think about it. I just live as if it’s not happening.” Goodman, 41, makes prolonged eye contact. She tends to speak as if she’s honing a thesis, even as she’s offering you a dandelion latte. “She’s just one of those people who puts out a beautiful salad in a beautiful bowl, and you’re just like, This looks like a magazine. Everything she touches is beautiful,” said Goodman’s friend Rose Friedman, of East Hardwick, whom she’s known for almost two decades. “And then you scratch the surface with Makenna, and it’s like — whoa! There’s this roiling lava lake of really intense ideas, filled with darkness and truth-telling and seeing. She’s very fun to do normal things with, because it’s like being high. She’s turned up.” Goodman works full time as executive editor for Portland, Ore.’s Timber Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, which publishes books on gardening, horticulture and sustainable living. She has no consistent writing schedule; sometimes she’s doing it a lot, and sometimes she’s not doing it at all. “I don’t have a relationship with writing that feels like work,” Goodman said. “I go through spurts, and then it stops, and then I just don’t worry about it.” For her, writing is an essentially furtive activity, cordoned off from the rest of life. She writes longhand in journals, at night, in bed, by headlamp, after everyone else in the house has gone to sleep. From these nighttime vigils, Goodman has produced her two acclaimed books: The Shame, published in 2020 and named a best book of that year by the Harvard Review and the White Review; and Helen of Nowhere, released last September. Both take place in some version of rural Vermont, but their real setting is the consciousness of the narrators, who are consumed with, or by, the question of what makes a good life. Goodman’s novels have a synaptic quality; their motor isn’t plot but the restlessness of the mind grasping for answers to unanswerable questions. The narrator of The Shame is an artist, homesteader and mother who becomes obsessed with a Brooklyn influencer and embarks on a deranged mission to find her, or become her, or some combination thereof. The Shame is about social media culture, which asks us to be both the story and the storyteller, but also about the flailing we occasionally do in the face of the fact that we only get to live one life at a time. As writer and Dartmouth College professor Alexander Chee wrote for the Paris Review, “This is a novel about how you can feel driven to take risks that don’t matter in order to avoid taking the risks that do matter.” In Helen of Nowhere, Goodman recasts the myth of escaping it all through a parable of a man considering buying a home in the countryside. Four characters take turns as narrator: the Man, a once-esteemed college professor who has been sidelined in his field for a vague transgression, which has to do with failing to see women as real people; the Realtor, an earthy, free-spirited woman; Helen, the aging owner of the country house; and the Man’s Wife, from whom he is estranged. After the Realtor shows Helen’s house to the Man, she goes into a trance in which she channels Helen’s spirit, offering the Man a much weirder freedom from the prison of ego than the one he thought was on the market. The strangeness of the novel lies not only in its surrealism but also in its archetypal familiarity — the sense that you’ve dropped into a dream, which could be yours or someone else’s. “You feel like you’re in a place you’ve never been before, but that you always knew you would one day enter,” the writer Sheila Heti, Goodman’s friend, wrote in an email. Helen, inspired by writer and back-to-the-lander Helen Nearing, who lived in southern Vermont, embodies the paradox of the “good life” as a kind of virtuous cosplay — for whom is it “good,” the novel asks, when people with money buy land, then live as if the Industrial Revolution never happened? Makenna Goodman and her dog, Pigeon, in the woods behind her Montpelier home Credit: Jeb Wallace-Brodeur “I do believe one can hoard goodness,” Goodman said in an interview last September with the Chicago Review of Books. “One can become a perpetrator while living in the spirit of ‘good.’ I wanted Helen to serve as an example of a person who is actively living in this juxtaposition but who is not quite able to see herself in it, despite thinking she can.” The seductiveness and impossibility of leaving it all behind has been a central motif in Goodman’s life. She spent her childhood in Durango, Colo., in a family of professional artists. Her father, Miles Goodman, was a renowned composer who scored television and movies, including Little Shop of Horrors and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; her mother, Katherine Leiner, wrote fiction, nonfiction and children’s books. When Goodman was 9, her parents split up, and she moved with her mother to New York City a year later. Shortly after that, her father died of a heart attack. Goodman was already homesick for Colorado, and her father’s death compounded that sense of loss. “I spent my adolescence dealing with grief and a real sense of isolation and sadness,” she said. When she was 16, she attended a semester at the Mountain School in Vershire, where students work on a farm and spend time in nature alongside their academic studies. The experience changed Goodman profoundly. Between her junior and senior years at Wesleyan University, she came back to the Mountain School for a job on the farm. Through a coworker there, she met her future husband, Sam Kelman, a carpenter who had graduated from Wesleyan several years earlier. After graduation, Goodman did a stint as an assistant at Grand Central Publishing in New York City, then moved to a literary agency. In 2008, she was laid off. (Goodman’s Wikipedia page says she was “fired,” to which Goodman takes exception: “[My boss] told me I was too creative, and she needed something more like a robot,” she explained.) The next day, she had a train ticket to Vermont to attend a memorial service for the spouse of a Mountain School faculty member, and she simply never booked a trip back to New York. “I was like, ‘This is it. I’m moving here,’” she said. “Sam came down with his pickup truck, like, three days later and packed up my apartment.” From 2008 to 2015, Goodman and Kelman homesteaded on 90 acres in Washington, where they raised beef cows, chickens, sheep and pigs and tended a massive garden. They made maple syrup, grew Christmas trees and cultivated nearly 2,000 garlic plants, all of which they trucked down to Brooklyn once a year and sold on the street. Both Goodman and Kelman also had day jobs — at the time, Goodman was an editor at Vermont’s Chelsea Green Publishing, and Kelman was running a firewood and brush-hogging business on the farmstead — but their lives revolved around the elaborate ecosystem they’d built. “Everything was about the walk from the front door to the barn to check on the sheep, or the cabbage in the big garden that was going to become sauerkraut,” Goodman said. “Everything felt like it was part of this — what’s the word? Not ‘contrived,’ but the nicer word. It was big. I’ve never been a religious person, but I felt like I finally had something to believe in.” After Kelman got a full-time job at the Mountain School and their son, Theo, was born, they moved to Vershire, where they gradually began to scale back their farmstead. A few years later, they had a daughter, Juniper, and maintaining their livestock became impossible amid the demands of work and child-rearing. They sold off their cows, then their sheep. Then the chickens got eaten. Suddenly there was nothing left to do but brush hog the fallow fields. Without the intense daily activity that had provided the scaffolding of their lives, Goodman said, she felt bereft and somehow exposed. “It felt like leaving the church,” she said. “All of a sudden, the ground falls out from under you, and then you’re like, Oh, I’m just another person in capitalism. Like, I was the whole time, but now I don’t have these props around me that are sort of helping me to…” She paused to reconsider the trajectory of this sentence. “It’s not just props. It was a relationship with the land, a real relationship. Forget about whatever artifice is there because of class, or access, or whatever. What is a farm, versus what is a fake farm, versus what is a homestead? Whatever it was, it was a homestead.” Makenna Goodman with her dog Credit: Jeb Wallace-Brodeur In 2022, Goodman and Kelman bought a house in Montpelier, where they can now walk to Shaw’s and buy cabbage. Their house sits near the top of what is essentially a cliff behind Dunkin’ and Cumberland Farms, in a neighborhood some locals have affectionately dubbed “Upper Dunkin’.” Their yard doesn’t get much sun. When I visited Goodman in early August, half a dozen bundles of tiny, anemic-looking garlic heads were hanging up to dry on the front porch. “It’s shitty for vegetable gardening,” she told me. “The only place we could really do it is the front, but that’s where the gas guy needs to fill up the propane.” As we talked, an Irving truck backed up to make a delivery across the street, captivating the neighborhood with its beeping. Then we wandered the trails of Upper Dunkin’ to discuss writing, walking and what even is an ash tree. Have you always had the impulse to write? When did you begin to understand yourself as a person who writes? At the Mountain School, I had this teacher, Jack Kruse. I have to name him. In my mind, he was, like, eight feet tall, like Paul Bunyan or something. He wore suspenders and Converse high-tops, and he had these horn-rimmed glasses. We would chop wood with Jack, and Jack would tell stories, and Jack was incredible. I was this kid who hated New York City and had lost her father, and the world felt small and hard and sad. And here I was in the woodlot with this incredible man, out of a fable. One of the coolest things we did in his class was that everybody had a journal, an old-school composition notebook, and you had to write by hand in it. You could write about whatever you wanted; it didn’t matter. You didn’t have to be personal. But you did have to turn it in at the end of the week, and the teacher would read everybody’s journals aloud, anonymously. It was this amazing, intimate experience we were all in together — hearing the inner monologues of your peers, who were all fronting. Someone over here is desperately homesick; someone over here is dreaming about their future; someone over here is thinking about how their crush doesn’t like them. And someone over here — who was me — was writing short stories. I had no interest in being personal, but I’d had this really cool job that summer working in a café in Colorado, and I just wrote stories about the people in the café. It was the headiest thing for me to hear my words read aloud to the class, and nobody knew it was me. After college, you worked in publishing. Was that a kind of sublimation of your desire to be a writer? I actually ended up not really studying writing in college, because I didn’t find it interesting. I wasn’t interested in the path of being a writer. I did not want to sit in a workshop. I was kind of allergic to it, actually. It was so unmagical and formulaic and competitive and strange. After I graduated from college, I moved back to New York City and lived with my mom and was miserable. I tried to get a job working at restaurants, but I guess I chose really cool ones downtown, so I didn’t get hired, because, you know, those are fucking professionals. And then I randomly got a job in publishing. I wasn’t even looking for it, which is always what happens to me. But yeah, my mom was walking her dog in the park, and someone was like, “My best friend can’t find a new assistant. It’s so hard to find good young people these days.” And my mom was like, “Well, my daughter’s looking for a job!” And this person was like, “She should go interview!” And I went, and I was the last person that they interviewed, and they hired me. And it was like: Dress up, go to work, eat the salads from the soulless salad place where they chop it all up really tiny. By the time I moved to Vermont, all I cared about was living close to the land. That’s all I wanted to do. That’s all I thought about. I didn’t write at all. Didn’t write one goddamn word. I didn’t start writing again until I stopped working at Chelsea Green and had my second baby. And why was that? What made you want to start writing again? I guess it was sort of like when I was 16, when I was in the woods and out of context. I was on maternity leave, so I wasn’t working, and the second kid was a lot easier than the first, because I knew what to do. So I just strapped her up, and I would walk, walk, walk, all the time, just walking and thinking. I’d gone to this astrologer in Thetford, and she’d given me a little book about psychoanalytic theory and the myth of Eros and Psyche. The point was basically that you could see all the characters in the myth as a projection of the archetypal woman. There was something about that book that made me realize I could create a story in my mind that was loosely based on the Eros and Psyche myth but that had elements of contemporary life. And so I would just talk this novel [The Shame] out to myself aloud while walking, and then I would go home and I would write, and it felt therapeutic. I feel like I write because I have to figure something out. It’s less about writing for the purpose of writing a novel and more for the purpose of developing a theory. What’s happening in your mind on your walks? What is it about walking that helps you structure your thinking? For me, walking is about having a nonverbal being to be in constant relationship with. Having a baby was really important for me to write the first book, and having a dog was really important to me for [Helen of Nowhere]. And I’m also in relationship with all these incredible beings here. [Goodman gestures at the woods along the trail.] I’ve tried to take pictures in these woods, and I can never capture the feeling of the shift in a season or what happens after a rain. So I just witness it. Nature writing is so interesting to me. The desire to describe something that is beyond language — like, how do you… Yeah. How do you describe something without being reductive? Or imposing yourself on it? Yeah — imposing a story on it. Like, what even is an “ash tree”? An ash tree is a story. The ash tree does not know itself as such, nor does it need to in order to be itself. So we’ve just created and concocted all of these things to make sense of the world where we are. Oh, my God, I’m all tingly thinking about it! Tell me about your writing process. What’s it like when you’re working on something? My writing process is mostly not writing. It’s just living, existing, observing, immersing myself in whatever world I’m in and then writing freehand in a journal. Honestly, it’s just like going right back to Jack Kruse’s class. I’m not writing in, like, trains or something. It’s always in the dark, always in this very solitary space, just writing from a place of emotion, whatever comes out. I’m not by myself physically, but I am by myself psychically and energetically. Sam’s asleep. He goes to bed so early. I love writing in bed. I love bed. There’s something about bed that is entirely separate from life. That’s where the subconscious takes over. Later, when I’m putting it all together, it’s like quilting. I’m not a quilter, so I’m not sure this is exactly the right analogy. But you put on your backing fabric, and then you decide to get rid of all your circular shapes, and then you realize that this whole thing was actually meant to be diamonds, or whatever. And you keep going back to the question at the beginning, which is: Well, what even is a quilt? Do you ever dread writing? What arrangements do you have to make with yourself in order to do it? I don’t dread it. It comes when it comes, and then it doesn’t when it doesn’t. I have no interest in developing a structure for what I think is magic. I don’t know how long this will work, or even if it’s working. Maybe I’ll change things up for the next book, because I’m not sure that it’s working in the same way anymore. I don’t know. I’m kind of just letting it happen and trusting that in the living is the writing. So I’m writing right now. ➆ This interview was edited for clarity and length. From Helen of Nowhere I think a lot about fires, floods, the end of the world, don’t you? Seems like every day the end of the world gets closer and closer, and yet, it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it will happen today! Maybe we’re done for. Maybe our demise is just outside that door, and we’re just biding our time until it comes to call. I think the end of the world is the most compelling thing to think about these days. And we keep waiting around for it like we want it to come. You know, professor, I’ve been talking, and I’ve been noticing this whole time that you look depleted. You look lost, completely burned out. I told her yes, completely burned out. I feel dead, I told her. I’m so tired. Perhaps there’s another way I could be of help. I have a service that I don’t usually mention when I’m selling a house. But I think I could let you in on it. It’s something private, something very intimate. It’s not what you think it is, but it’s not unthinkable either. It’s outside of what’s normal, I mean. I couldn’t help but find this proposition sexy. I have a gift, the realtor said. But I was scared. I had learned to be frightened of my own desire. The original print version of this article was headlined “Road to Nowhere | Montpelier author Makenna Goodman, long-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize with Helen of Nowhere, talks about how walking feeds her work, the complexities of simple living and writing from bed” The post Inside the Mind of Booker Prize Nominee Makenna Goodman appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less