Good news: I’ve started packing up preorders! They will ship at the end of this month, in time for our September 1 release date. To tide you over until then, I wanted to share Ed Park’s cabin story, which is the very first story in the zine. The story is followed by an interview with Ed that gives us a peek into his creative process.
Park’s new memoir, Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties, publishes today. Be sure to pick up a copy at your favorite independent bookstore. Happy pub day, Ed!
Thirty Cabins publishes September 1. If you preorder a copy of the zine today, it will arrive in your mailbox in just a couple weeks. What a nice late-summer treat to yourself!
a CABIN in the CLOUDS
by Ed Park
I was driving a rental and it was winter. There was still gas in the tank. Bare black trees coated the hills, like quills, like fur, except for two bright patches. For a moment, I thought the paleness was from the sun coming through two gaps in the clouds, meaning the darkness of the other trees was because they were in shadow. But the whole sky was gray, a whale, and the area of white trees below did not change shape as I drove past. It was just that most of the trees were dark save for two spots where all of the trees were white. It was like the entire landscape had evolved this camouflage, toward uncertain ends. I wondered who it might be trying to trick. Maybe certain birds. Maybe just me. ¶ The road wound through the hills with maddening patience, or I was the one who was mad. The radio came in and out. I explored the AM band and I heard angelic harmonies and a lyric that I swore went: Please don’t murder me. ¶ Then all was static as flurries thickened the air. Flakes and clusters of flakes came at the windshield like a thousand comets, and for a minute I lost all sense of scale. I was an interstellar pilgrim on a generational space ship, I was a hideous fish in the lightless reaches of the ocean, adrift in stars, adrift in plankton, I was the lone surviving blood cell reporting for duty in the dried veins of something once alive. ¶ Lost in these reveries, I caught the sign for the off-ramp. I was driving too fast and it was gone in seconds, half the letters peeling, but I knew this was the place. I had been activated at midnight and come all this way, so many anonymous miles. I eased off the gas and let the car coast on the smaller paved branch. Almost immediately I had to pump the pedal to make the grade. The road was narrow and steep. Now I was in the midst of the dark trees, a flea making its way through the fur of the beast, the whole shape of which it will never know. I was on a hill on top of a hill. I was approaching the top of the world. ¶ A bright square burned ahead, the picture window of my destination. I killed my lights and pulled onto the shoulder, a hundred yards from the house. I felt the snow on my face. It was coming down harder now. ¶ My coat was gray and my gloves were gray. I stayed to the margin of the road, walking toward the target, searching for a large stick or rock. It was just pebbles and twigs. Trees creaked in the wind and on the road the thin covering of snow shifted like a gown, creasing and uncreasing. ¶ I did not know who was there in the Cabin in the Clouds, how many or how few, what words I would say or not say. It was my job not to know. ◆
An Interview with Ed Park
When I received Ed Park’s submission for Thirty Cabins, he included a fascinating peek into his creative process:
For months, I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do — I would write a story that would double as a section of the novel I’m working on. Then I remembered (too late) that the word limit was 500! So I scrapped that plan and tried to figure other ways into the story. Somehow, this font (Desdemona) unlocked something—and a plot of sorts emerged....You’ll also see that some of the letters are white — no need to replicate that in the finished version, but it seemed fitting at the time.”
Here is the original Word doc of the story you just read, in all its blue (and white) Desdemona glory:
Thirty Cabins: People often ask writers if they write by hand or on the computer (or typewriter or voice memos). The computer can come across as the more efficient choice. You drafted this story on your computer, but your process is more playful than efficient. Do you always play around with font styles? Can you remember another time that a font unlocked something for you? What was it about Desdemona that was fitting for your cabin story?
Ed Park: I’m often a typewriter person, especially in the drafting stage, but for the past six months my paper-blackening machines have been in storage, and I’ve been writing directly on my laptop. I remember when fonts “happened” to me, after getting the first Macintosh ca. 1984. Mac Word had just a couple of choices (named after cities), but these were incredibly fun to have at your command, like the difference between black-and-white and color. You could better visualize what a professional story might look like—how your words might appear in a book.
In the mid-90s, I generally wrote in Times (or Garamond or Hoefler), with font detours along the way to reproduce signs, diaries, etc. Obviously generations of writers have taken this ability for granted, but it’s still pretty magical for me. As my novel Same Bed Different Dreams (2023) was going into production, I got a note from a designer saying it had the most fonts of any book they’d worked on—something like 17 or 22! I hadn’t realized it was that many.
So clearly fonts unlock something for me. In Same Bed, I have a sequence in which a Korea character, in America in the early 20th century, is learning how to type. I was inspired by an instructional book I picked up from the cheap carts outside the Strand a million years ago—basically lists of words (and sometimes just meaningless letter-clusters) that the student is supposed to reproduce on her own. And the words in the test book actually appear typewritten (rather than set in a more normal typeface). For these sections of the novel, I used a font called Royal Vogue, designed by my friend Richard Polt, a typewriter proselytizer. It was a different experience, using a typewriter font (that was not just “Courier”) to replicate what those letters might have looked like. I felt I was accessing my character’s mind-state, seeing what he would see as the words materialized on the page.
Desdemona is a recent discovery. Sometimes when I’m stuck on something, I’ll sample the font menu—there are so many amazing fonts! Desdemona, a “high-waisted” font, reminded me of the text on Penguin’s boldly designed “Great Ideas” series, though looking at it now, there isn’t an exact equivalence—but something along the lines of the fonts used for Nietzsche’s Why I Am So Wise and Ruskin’s On Art and Life. Desdemona was striking—the letters looked etched, painstaking, beautiful, grandiose. Sometimes you need that. It fools you into thinking the story is not only already finished, but important!
TC: I love that we kept the pilcrows in this story. For me the pilcrows are like dark trees, and their inclusion makes me see the text on the page differently, so that the letters, too, become dark trees. Were the pilcrows also a part of unlocking the story, or did they serve another purpose for you?
EP: I’m sure my fondness for pilcrows is carried over from my work as an editor—marking up proofs and printouts with a pencilled line and pilcrow to indicate where a new graf should start. Sometimes even when I’m jotting in a notebook, I’ll use a pilcrow rather than indenting. Also: Back around 2006, I started something called The New-York Ghost, a free weekly e-zine, “the newsletter you print out at work,” and the text was done with pilcrows. It seemed to encourage the flow of a piece—these were essentially humorous, free-associative musings—and I liked how distinctive it looked. ¶ You’re right, they do look like trees! And I think the overall feel of a mass of text, unbroken, is a subtle way to make the reader visualize the forested landscape the narrator is driving through. Every character is a tree.
TC: Talk to me about the white letters.
EP: There’s a sense of mystery as to what the narrator is doing—a mission in which they’ve been activated, à la The Manchurian Candidate. And the reason might not be known to them, but it’s buried in their instructions. Highlighting certain letters is an invitation to the eagle-eyed reader to piece together a clue as to their destination.
TC: Your memoir Three Tenses comes out today. Is there anything in this cabin story that is autobiographical? Have you ever driven a rental car in winter to a cabin in the clouds?
EP: Something about driving in winter is captured here—being extra cautious because of hazardous conditions, while being in awe of the way snow transforms the landscape. In a way this story is a distillation of years of notes taken while driving across New York State. On a recent drive with my sister, we noticed a strange bright patch of trees among a sea of darker ones—was it the play of light, or just an illusion of light? I had been stuck on earlier iterations of this story (when I thought it might be a longer piece that would fit into my novel), and somehow actually seeing a lot of trees helped me switch the focus, make it smaller but also grander.
TC: You wrote Three Tenses after finding a printout of the manuscript that had been lost for twenty years. What font had you used in the printout? Did you change the font as you worked on the book that publishes today?
EP: In 2020, I found a printout of the MS in a manila envelope; since I lacked an electronic version, the archivist in me decided to retype the entire thing onto my laptop. (I know that I had saved it, long ago, to floppy disk—but even if the disk were to turn up, I no longer had a compatible external disk drive, so I wouldn’t have been able to read it.)
The font was straight-up Times. (My memory was that in 1998 it was just listed as Times, not Times New Roman.) One amazing thing, though, is how beautifully dark the letters were—the original printout would have been done when I still had an Apple LaserWriter. When I retyped it, I kept the same font, to match the vibe. I wanted to be fully in that headspace. But of course, as I was retyping it, I didn’t expect it to be published. It was unclear what I was doing. Perhaps it was a little bit like that Borges story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” except I was Cervantes as well as Menard. Or maybe it wasn’t like that at all. But it’s a metaphor for something, surely—retyping the words (and thus conjuring the mental state) of your younger self.
TC: Have you ever tried to switch up your own handwriting?
EP: I have far too many notebooks going at the same time, generally all swarming around the same project. These days, if I’m not careful, my handwriting sprawls toward unreadability. I switch up pen colors and resort to all caps, to keep things legible. But a few pages later, things start getting too loose again.
TC: You originally thought your cabin story would double as a section of the novel you're working on. What is the novel you're working on?
EP: I’m still working out how expansive or concise the book should be...but earlier this year, when I was in a more-is-more mood, I thought “Cabin in the Clouds” would be a way to test-drive a skiing-related horror story within a longish, multi-part novel. I have several false starts for “Cabin in the Clouds” in my files—I’m experimenting with tense, point of view, and so on. I don’t quite know when to start the story. Virtually nothing of those early attempts remains in the finished product—it’s a completely different story. It’s a little perverse that, in this version, we don’t even get to go in the door!
Pre-ordered Thirty Cabins after Tom Comitta post about it in June. Reading selections here are making me very excited to receive the book in a couple weeks.