Aaron Thier is the author of "The Ghost Apple" and the just-released "Mr. Eternity." He is the recipient of a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a columnist for "Lucky Peach," and a regular contributor to "The Nation." A Williamstown native, he lived in Florida (he received an MFA at the University of Florida) until he and his wife, poet Sarah Trudgeon, became parents. Now they live happily in Great Barrington. Thier will be signing his new book at its official release at The Bookstore in Lenox, Mass. on Saturday, Aug. 15 at 7 p.m. Amazon lists my book as satire, which is misleading. It's really literary fiction about climate change, globalization and a guy who’s immortal. I’ve always been interested in history and how it got us to where we are. History is a more subjective thing than we realize. With the distortions of time, daily life gets forgotten entirely, which is the main insight of the book for me. It’s been about two years since I finished Mr. Eternity. I’m always anxious to have another book done before the previous book comes out. I’ve recently finished a new manuscript that’s totally different, more contemporary.
We moved back to the Berkshires to have our baby, who’s now five months old. We wanted to be closer to family and to live in a place where we can get health insurance at affordable rates. We found that so many people in Great Barrington have come up from the city to have a baby in a progressive small town. A friend of mine since I was eight years old returned at the same time and had a baby at the same time we did. Berkshire County is a great place — I have a garden, we have bread made from local wheat. We’re near Main Street, so we don’t even have to drive much. Both my wife and I work from home but, fortunately, poets have a different work rhythm. It’s easier for her to be discontinuous because she can write a draft of a poem in a morning. I have to wake up and write for a longer stretch of time. When I was younger, I could never really appreciate the area or understand why people would vacation here. But now we take it all in — Tanglewood rehearsals, Jacob’s Pillow, Williamstown Theatre Festival, all of the Berkshire stuff. We would like to be able to stay out after 7 p.m., but our baby turns into a pumpkin after that.
