Talking Location With author Carol Goodman – The Catskills, New York State

5th April 2019

TalkingLocationWith… Carole Goodman, author of The Night Visitors, set in the Catskills, New York State.

At the beginning of my novel The Night Visitors a young woman, Alice, and a ten-year-old boy, Oren, are on a Greyhound bus heading into the Catskills.  It is snowing, as it often is in the mountains.  They alight in a town called Delphi to seek shelter, just as Orestes seeks sanctuary at the temple of Apollo at Delphi after committing a terrible crime. Alice and Oren are far from the Delphi of Greek myth, but they are in a land of myth.

The Catskills—the name evokes Rip van Winkle, the Borscht Belt, and Woodstock Nation.  The region was the home of the first American Resort, the Catskill Mountain House, the film Dirty Dancing, and the 1969 “Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music”—albeit not held in the town of Woodstock, but in the village of Bethel, now home to the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.   Washington Irving sent his Rip van Winkle into the mountains where he met the ghosts of Henry Hudson’s crew having a keg party and fell asleep for twenty years.  Washington Irving later admitted he’d never been to the Catskills when he wrote the story.

When I began writing novels Long Island, where I lived, felt too crowded for the fictional places I wanted to create.  I remembered, though, the view of the Catskill Mountains from the roof of Main Hall at Vassar where I’d gone to college and the small town in the Adirondacks, close to the headwaters of the Hudson, where I’d spent a year in my twenties. The Hudson Valley and the Catskills seemed to hold enough misty, forgotten pockets into which I could slip an imaginary village, boarding school, or hideaway for two runaways.

Many of its villages look as though they might have sprung Brigadoon-like out of the mists of time.  There’s Woodstock, which appears to be stuck in a tie-dyed, rainbow hued time warp, but is also thoroughly up-to-date with artisanal coffee shops and a thriving music scene.  Travel west to find Phoenicia, home to tubing on the Esopus and the Phoenicia Festival of the Voice held every August, Andes, an alpine hamlet perched atop a mountain, and Roxbury with its Gothic Jay Gould Memorial Church and retro-chic boutique motel The Roxbury.

And then there are the drowned towns, marked by “ghost” signs along Route 28, which were submerged when the Ashokan Reservoir was built in 1915. You can walk around the reservoir itself for spectacular sunsets and bald eagle sightings, and then head to Woodstock for dinner at the Bear Café beside the fast running Sawkill and catch a concert at the Bearsville Theater.

Woodstock, home to billionaires and old hippies (and some old hippies turned billionaires) also houses a place called Family—the oldest continually running crisis hotline in the country.  It was founded in the years after the music festival when the region was inundated by young people looking for Woodstock Nation.  In addition to the hotline, it now operates a food pantry, hosts a community-wide free Thanksgiving, and runs homeless and domestic violence shelters.  I began volunteering there two years ago and it’s the basis of the fictional Sanctuary where Alice and Oren seek shelter.

I’ve been setting stories in the Hudson Valley and the Catskills for twenty years—the time span of Rip’s nap—and now live across the river within view of the mountains.  Whenever I drive across the Rhinecliff Bridge or take a walk at Scenic Hudson’s Poet’s Walk, I’m struck anew by the beauty of the landscape—celebrated by a whole school of painting—and the mystery of the ever-changing face of the cloud-shrouded mountains.  I can almost glimpse the Henry Hudson’s ghost ship sailing on the river, and hear the roar of his crew playing nine pins in the mountains.  And just when I think I’ve reached the end of the stories I can tell here I discover a place like Family and realize I haven’t even begun.

Thank you to Carol for such great insights into this amazing part of the world.

You can buy her book through the TripFiction database and follow her on Twitter, Facebook  and connect via her website

For more books to transport you to New York State, just click here

Join team TripFiction on Social Media:

Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction)

Subscribe to future blog posts