The Fires of Edgarville
Craig Joseph Danner



This intriguing novel tells the story of a Japanese boy adopted by a Caucasian woman. As an adult, he and his wife return with his mother, now suffering from Alzheimer's, to the town from which she was banished by her father. It is a story that explores the impermanent nature of both physical places and human memories.

Craig Joseph Danner, author of the award-winning "Himalayan Dhaba," explained some of the inspiration and history of the "Edgarville" book.

According to the author, "Edgarville" is loosely based on an area known as Dee, or Dee Flat, in the upper Hood River Valley of Oregon. One of Danner's great-grandfathers was the original manager of the Dee Mill, built in the 1890s and sprouting what eventually became a town of around 600 citizens, mostly loggers, millworkers, and their families.

"My grandparents and great-grandparents had homesteads there, and it was where my mother was raised until she was sixteen," he continued. "My wife and I moved there in the mid-90s, buying a defunct 10-acre farm about 1/4 mile from where my mother was born."

"I remembered being told stories about the town of Dee from my mother as I grew up, but once I was living there, I did some research and found that so much of the original town of Dee had been destroyed that, aside from a few old photographs, there was really almost no evidence that there was ever a town there at all. It amazed me to realize how brief our history is here in the Northwest. In less than 70 years, a town of 600 people can develop and decay to the point of invisibility," said Danner. "I spent some time in Italy a few years ago, and stayed in homes built centuries before and still owned by the original families. But in the Northwest, we build with wood, and if neglected, our houses simply burn or rot away to nothing...along with the physical record of our history."

Danner conceived of "The Fires of Edgarville" in part as a vehicle to describe that phenomenon, adding the element of the "unreliable" historian: what if the only link to your past is held by someone you can't trust or believe?

His experience with dementia and Alzheimer's disease is mostly from medical training in psychiatry and geriatrics. However, he shared that writing from the perspective of someone with an impaired short-term memory was one of the most interesting challenges of this book.

"When writing from a particular character's point-of-view, I always try to get 'inside their head' so I can imagine what they might be experiencing in a given situation, and therefore how they might react and what they might do next," he explained. "I call it my 'writing trance.' When writing about Myrna, my protagonist's mother, it was a difficult trance to get into, trying to make sense of a world where she can't remember where she is or who she's talking to, and yet still having a very clear memory of what she'd done 60 years earlier."

He continued, "We often think an Alzheimer's sufferer is confused or acting crazy, when really they are simply trying to make sense of their world. 'Who is this person, and why is he talking to me this way? What do I need to do to take care of myself?' What may seem like bizarre behavior may simply be the afflicted person's best guess on how to react normally to a bewildering situation."

Mary Burns is owner of The Bookworks, located at 1510 Third Street in downtown Marysville. (360) 659-4997. Comments or requests are welcome at [email protected].