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  Stepping inside Hugh’s world will change everything.

  “Sure,” I say, not understanding a thing. “Why not?”

  INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE GODDESS

  It starts with paper, but it won’t end here.

  When my firstborn son, Karl, was five, we moved in the middle of the school year. He didn’t much like kindergarten in his old school, and he hated it in the new one. I was lonely, stuck with a baby in a big drafty house that had once been a garage on a bleak northern Ontario highway, and so I’d often let my older son stay home from school. The three of us would do things together: make cookies; read stories; sing along with Sharon, Lois & Bram; visit the Acadian woman down the road who made doughnuts by the dozens, heaping them in her roasting pan like a sweet, lumpy turkey.

  I don’t remember why we decided to make paper. Karl balled up Kleenex and mounded it in a mixing bowl. I poured boiling water over it; then we took turns pounding the goop with a potato masher and stirring it into a thick pudding with a wooden spoon. He liked that part a lot: the stuff was good and messy.

  “We’ll have to strain it,” I said, trying to sound as though I knew what I was doing. This was in the days before the Internet. We had to figure things out for ourselves.

  “And we have to make the sides straight,” Karl added wisely. The baby gurgled his approval.

  I pushed a dusty print out of an old picture frame, stapled some fine muslin taut across it, set the frame over a brownie pan, and poured on the goop. The muslin was too tightly woven: the goop sat there in a slimy, dripping pool, rivulets of grey water running off the dense sieve onto the counter. I scraped the mushy stuff back into the bowl and hitched the baby onto my hip for a prowl around the rented house, our eyes peeled for something, we weren’t sure what.

  “How ’bout this?” Karl shouted, pulling me to an old window screen leaning against the furnace.

  We propped the screen over the sink and poured on the mush. He stirred it around until it was vaguely the shape of a piece of paper, which is a ridiculous thing to say because, of course, paper can take any shape. But to us, paper meant books, and books were rectangles, so that was the shape of the soggy mess in our kitchen on that drizzly November day. In a moment of inspiration, I grabbed some petals from the roadside flowers I’d hung upside down over the stove to dry and sprinkled them onto the goop: golden brown-eyed Susans, deep purple asters.

  I knew next to nothing about making paper. I didn’t know that, 1,600 years ago, the goddess Kawakami Gozen—“the spirit who lives above the stream”—came down to the Japanese village of Echizen and said, “This place has such small fields, it must be difficult to make a living cultivating rice. However, this land has beautiful clear water. I will teach you to make paper so that you and the generations following you can survive.” Ever since, in the spring, the citizens of Echizen lift a likeness of the goddess into an ornately decorated litter and carry her down from the summit of Mount Omine and through the papermaking districts of the town in a three-day festival of paper that celebrates the goddess who was a “harbinger of good fortune and the bearer of an enduring gift.”

  A hundred years ago, there were 70,000 papermaking workshops in Japan. Now, there are fewer than 300, a number that shrinks every year. The goddess would not be pleased.

  She must have learned her craft from the Chinese, because that’s where the world’s oldest fragments of paper have been found. I think I knew that much: the Chinese are famous for their invention of paper, gunpowder, and that brilliant interface of gunpowder and paper, firecrackers.

  Paper made its debut in written history in 105 CE, when Cai Lun, an official at the Imperial Chinese Court, announced its invention in a report that laid out precise instructions for manufacturing paper from tree pulp, hemp, old rags, and frayed fishing nets. Bits of paper at least 250 years older than that have been found in Chinese tombs but, even so, Cai Lun has held his place as the inventor of paper, his name known to every Chinese school child in much the same way that North American children hail Thomas Edison as the inventor of electricity, glossing over centuries of experimentation by scientists before him.

  My son and I had unwittingly followed Cai Lun’s instructions for making paper: mix fibrous material with water and beat it to a pulp—papermakers call it “stuff,” and in our wise ignorance, we did, too—then ladle it evenly over a screen mould.

  Our paper came out lumpy and grey. After days of drying and pressing under a stack of encyclopedias, it still resembled a grey mass of used Kleenex. When we tried to draw on it with a pen, the ink spread like freshly hatched spiders. Crayons humped off the paper landscape, leaving gaps in the coloured contrail. My delicate petals looked like specks of splattered mud.

  What I was hoping for was something more like the paper of Xue Tao, a poet of the Tang Dynasty and China’s first female papermaker. Xue Tao added red hibiscus flowers to her pulp, producing paper that was a delicate, distinctive pink.

  We didn’t have hibiscus blossoms. Our water wasn’t pure. We didn’t know enough to size the paper to close the fibres so that ink would stand boldly on the surface instead of tunnelling every which way. Worst of all, we did not enter our papermaking project in the correct frame of mind. By the time we found the basement screen and got it centred over the sink and the stuff smoothed over the surface, the baby was fussing and my son’s interest was waning at approximately the same velocity as my patience. I just wanted the thing over and done with so I could drive to the store and buy a nice thick pad of newsprint for the kids to scribble on.

  “There can be no anger, and no irritation,” says Ichibei Iwano IX, Japan’s most famous contemporary papermaker, named a Living National Treasure for his papermaking skill, which he learned from his father, also a Living National Treasure. (Picasso drew on paper made by Ichibei Iwano VIII.)

  “My paper is closest to the paper taught by the goddess,” Iwano IX told Nicholas Basbanes, author of the brilliant history On Paper. “This paper will last for a thousand years.”

  Recently, the last independent papermaker in China, a man whose family has made paper on the same site for six centuries, went out of business. In Japan, as in China, papermaking runs in families, and those families are dying out. In the Iwano family, the name Ichibei is reserved for the heir who declares a desire to continue in the family papermaking business. Ichibei Iwano IX is the ninth in his family line; his son has recently agreed to become Ichibei X.

  I watch Ichibei Iwano IX making paper on YouTube. If I close my eyes, I can almost feel him in the room with me, the rhythmic slosh, slosh, slosh of his screen dipping through the pulp—lifting, dipping, sloshing, the soft percussion of papermaking.

  My son and I were crude, clumsy beasts by comparison, our paper stuff thick as gruel, no sloshing, only scooping, the paper heavy as oatmeal—not at all what Hugh hands me one day as I enter his print shop. Gorgeous green and gold and russet fibres thread elegantly through the sheet. If the movement was more regular, you’d think it was woven by a hundred-handed goddess from exotic plants she gathered on a forest floor.

  “It’s from Japan,” he says, handing me another page, this one like shells overlapping on sand, tiny translucent rounds pink as a baby’s fingernails. “What do you think?”

  Who made this? is my first thought, a thought that has never before whizzed through my brain, not in the thirty years I’ve been a writer, not even on those days I sat in publishers’ offices discussing the production of a new book. “Who made this lovely paper?”

  Hugh beams. He knows he’s got me now. “The first one is called ‘Storm.’ This lighter one is ‘Hyacinth.’ I’m thinking of them for the cover of the book.”

  “Really?” They seem too beautiful to be put to such a utilitarian purpose. I want to frame them and hang them on the wall.

  “Really,” Hugh says, pulling me deep into the print shop and closing the door behind us. “And this is just
the beginning!”

  FUGITIVE PIECES

  The papermaking process was mechanized, like most everything else, during the Industrial Revolution. Even at the height of that love affair with the machine, however, handmade paper never entirely disappeared. During the second half of the nineteenth century, “luxury papers” were all the rage, used to make everything from toy theatres to brightly coloured, glossy miniatures of carriages, drawing rooms, soldiers, and Persian princesses.

  The Arts and Craft Movement, which began in Britain around the 1880s and moved into Europe and North America in the early part of the twentieth century, elevated traditional crafts such as hand papermaking to an art. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque used newspaper clippings and wallpaper scraps for their collages, and from this developed décollage, tearing away at the layers to create an image thrown into relief by the surface structure of the paper.

  In the 1950s, in America, the damp fibrous stuff became an art material in itself, shaped and worked into something hardly resembling paper at all. In the ’60s and ’70s, handmade paper was part of the back-to-the-land, do-it-yourself renaissance—the one my sons and I were part of—and now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, papermaking, like cheesemaking and winemaking, is undergoing a more refined, artisanal rebirth.

  Hand papermaking has endured, I think, because the process is relatively simple. And for the person willing to hone the skill, it offers lavish aesthetic rewards. Handmade paper is now produced, sheet by sheet, in studios around the world, though most of it does not end up in books. This is not paper in the service of story. It is art paper. Paper for paper’s sake.

  Emily Cook makes art paper. We first meet in our favourite Kingston restaurant, at a table tucked in a corner under the stairs. Hugh has made the arrangements. He hovers like a matchmaker as we shake hands and settle in.

  I am immediately charmed. Emily is beautiful, her skin the most luminous alabaster I’ve ever seen, smooth in a way that only an older woman can truly admire. She has the broad cheekbones and wide eyes of a Slovak princess, but her hair is platinum, as white as mine, although she can’t be more than thirty. A barely controlled wave dips playfully across her forehead.

  Within minutes we are comparing hairdressers and life with curls. I tell her my hair went white in my thirties. She tells me hers has been this colour always.

  While we wait for our food, Emily reaches into the black portfolio case leaning against the wall. My baby son has grown into a visual artist, but I’ve never seen a case like this, big as a card table. She dives into it, rifling through until she pulls out two sheets of paper, one for Hugh and one for me.

  The sheet seems more like a weaving, fashioned from the filaments of exotic plants or gigantic silkworms or the nests of fantastical birds. I’ve always thought of paper as flimsy, fragile, easily torn and bent. Even the Japanese papers Hugh handed me seemed vulnerable, needing protection. But Emily’s sheets are something different altogether: robust, stroppy, bursting with character. More like worsted woolens than tissue.

  I am stunned. Emily has accomplished in paper what I have tried to do in The Paradise Project: forget what stories are supposed to be and let them come out rough and ragged, not necessarily lovely, but true. True to themselves, at least.

  “It seems wrong to call this paper,” I say. “The word is too mundane.”

  “Let’s see some more,” booms Hugh. “Show us everything you have in there.”

  I realize, suddenly, that this is an audition. I am only an observer; Emily is performing for Hugh. She pulls out sample after sample until the exquisite mats of fibre take over the table, the extra chairs, our laps.

  Hugh waves the waiter away: there is no room here for salads.

  Hugh commissions Emily to make the endpapers for The Paradise Project.

  Publishers don’t make much of a fuss about endpapers anymore: the sheets that join the cover to the bound pages are most often simply plain white or coloured stock chosen to match the cover of the book. It wasn’t always like that. I remember the books in Mrs. Ronald’s stone farmhouse, which I visited each spring and fall throughout my teens to help with her semi-annual housecleaning. In the evenings, I’d plunder her bookshelf, lifting the glass front to pick out Helen of the Old House or The Wayside Cross, The Book of Ultima Thule. The endpapers of books of that era were often lavishly marbled, but these volumes opened with woodcut landscapes or interlocking patterns of wild birds, designed by Thoreau MacDonald, Frank Johnston, or some other artist of the Group of Seven. The Everyman books were my favourites, with their maroon leather covers and gilt-edged pages, the endpapers drawn by the great nineteenth-century British Arts-and-Crafts designer William Morris: wildly swooping stems and leaves embracing a pilgrim on the right and, on the left, the words Everyman I will go with thee and be thy guide, in thy most need, to go by thy side. No wonder I thought of books as my friends.

  Late in the summer, Hugh meets Emily at the Kingston train station and drives her out to The Leaf, our property in eastern Ontario where we’ve spent fifteen years converting grass to gardens on the verge of a maple wood. We moved here from a small city lot that backed onto an old stone quarry, a grotto that I filled with gregarious shade-loving plants. At The Leaf, I plant in great, sunny swaths: one garden alone is 160 feet long and 40 feet wide. The beds were populated first with fast-growing, spreading species such as creeping Jenny, brown-eyed Susans, and grasses, the plants every gardener hauls out by the wheelbarrowful each spring. Over the years, I’ve replaced those aggressive spreaders with more delicate blooms, flowers I babied into existence, coddling them through the winter, shielding them from the summer sun.

  I offer Hugh and Emily peach cream pie and coffee on the screened terrace, then invite them into the gardens.

  “How many varieties do you have?” Emily asks.

  “Of plants? Goodness, I have no idea.” I have never thought to count. Mentally, I tote them up: a few dozen kinds of hosta, at least as many daylily species, scores of sedums planted in a mosaic, grasses, hibiscus, echinaceae, peonies, roses, campanula, hydrangea, spirea, lilac, magnolia, violets, polygonums, ferns, mosses; really, it’s too much to contemplate. “Thousands, I imagine.”

  During our years at The Leaf, I dreamed of picking a stem and flower from every variety of every species that grew there. I’d tape them neatly in a book, the dried plant on one side and a pencil drawing on the other to show the reproductive parts, the flower in full bloom, delicate renderings like the ones Agnes FitzGibbon painted for Catharine Parr Traill’s book Canadian Wild Flowers. Under the specimen and the drawings, a description of the plant’s preference in soil, light, temperature, mating, the traits I like best and what I find irritating, disappointing, hard to control. A botanical diary. A dry garden—Hortus siccus—that’s what these albums of desiccated, labelled specimens were called. Years ago, in a used book store somewhere along the Atlantic seaboard, I discovered a photography book based on just such a diary that had been created by an anonymous young woman in the late nineteenth century. The photographer, entranced by the way each plant specimen left its imprint, its shadow self, on the opposing page of text, had captured perfectly the overlay of nature on human words.

  I’d like to gather such a plant collection, and I’d like someone to find it, to write a book about it, and someone else to find that book and write another book inspired by it. I love these creative daisy chains. But I am not a collector at heart. There is no order to my gathering. I am a magpie. I’m the one who finds the odd books and carries them home to rest higgledy-piggledy on my shelves. The writer who tucks a found story into another story, the way I embedded that botanical journal into my novel Refuge.

  I find it hard to admit: I will never draw every species in my garden.

  Emily is fondling leaves as we walk among the plants. Not fondling—that implies a kind of seduction. Her touch has more practical purpose to it. She holds a leaf the
way a tailor might finger a length of cloth, assessing its texture, its weight, its willingness to be cut, to drape the human form.

  “This might work,” she says, sliding her hand along a length of daylily leaf.

  I grow great swaths of daylilies, which aren’t really lilies, although they are members of the genus Lilium. True lilies grow from bulbs, daylilies from crowns with roots that thicken to look like tubers. The daylily she is holding is a Hemerocallis, a genus of plant that roots and reproduces as profligately as teenagers. Unlike true lilies, they are immune to the appetites of the scarlet beetle that has recently made its way north. Tolerant of poor soil, summer heat, and deep shade, daylilies serve as excellent fillers for out-of-the-way places: a forty-foot swath by the old stone turkey shed on the eastern edge of the property, a waterfall of colour that flows down from the woods onto the lawn behind the house, a railing of pale pink Mrs. Bradshaws to flank the curving steps that lead down to the stone terrace.

  I’m not sure whose idea it was to make the endpapers from plants from my garden. Not mine: I didn’t know such a thing was possible. And probably not Emily’s: she had no way of knowing my gardens were of a size to accommodate such a scheme.

  The idea has Hugh’s fingerprints all over it. He is never content to do things the easy way, the practical way, the way everyone else has done it. “Tried and true” is a not an adage that will ever hang on his wall. He has an almost miraculous capacity for seeing with fresh eyes and a stubbornly iconoclastic desire to try the untried. He isn’t interested in new for its own sake: rather, he wants each phase of his project to be perfect unto itself, the pages as unique as the stories.