Our Lady of the Forest

About David Guterson

Photo © Tom Collicott

Author Q&A

A Conversation with David Guterson
Author of OUR LADY OF THE FOREST

Q: How did you come to write a novel about marian apparitions?
A: Hope, faith, desperation, doubt, and greed all coalesce quickly around marian events, and those were all things I felt compelled to write about. More, when I started to read the historical narratives—the stories that unfolded in places like Lourdes and Fatima—I saw that these stories had predictable conventions, and this interested me, because I love to work in existing forms, and I began to feel enthusiastic about the artistic challenge of telling an apparition story in a modern context. In sum, it was just a matter of giving more thought than I previously had to a phenomenon I was already aware of and always interested in.

Q: Always interested? Why?
A: Because like most people I’m psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually dissatisfied with the notion of the divine offered up to us in the west, which is divinity devoid of the feminine. We all know at some level of deep disturbance that the God put before us by Judaism and Christianity—the image of Jehovah as a wrathful male, the image of the son of God as a merciful presence, the notion of the Holy Spirit, which feels genderless—doesn’t square with what we sense at the level of the unconscious, which is that no conception of the divine can be complete without a feminine component, and probably not without a major feminine component. The Gnostics knew this, and that’s one reason the early church squashed them. For the Gnostics, or at least for some of the Gnostics, Jehovah was a sub-deity; at the center of the universe was the Divine Mother, the embodiment of wisdom. The worldwide and enormously popular cult of the Virgin Mary exists because at a grassroots level human beings yearn to give expression to the feminine divine, and to worship it, and this explains why to this day we have cult-like apparition events, even in modern countries.

Q: Are you Catholic?
A: I’m not. I was born to Jewish parents and grew up in an atmosphere of secular humanism and general agnosticism. I remain to this day agnostic myself and am not a member of any organized religious group and don’t attend a house of worship. So in this book I do what novelists do. I get outside myself, away from my own experience, and write about people who are not like me—in this case, I write about Catholics.

Q: You mentioned that historical apparition narratives, such as the story of Bernadette at Lourdes, have conventions.
A: That’s right, and they’re as follows: First, the apparition usually unfolds in a time and place where there is a particular travail at work, such as famine, economic hardship, or upheaval in the established church. Second, the seer is generally a young person, often a girl, or a group of girls, or a group of children, generally of very modest means, humble, incidental, maybe even illiterate—barefoot children. Third, the seer is doubted, and doubts herself, and is inclined not to speak of what she has witnessed, but Fourth, is compelled to speak of it by Mary herself. Fifth, there is grassroots interest and support, Sixth, there is official church doubt and official church investigation. Seventh, there is a message and sometimes a miracle, such as the discovery of holy water, and Eighth, the church is finally forced to come to grips with popular support for the seer and make some accommodation to reality.

Q: Is there any connection between your novel and the scandal in the Catholic Church involving pedophile priests?
A: None. It may be in the news, it may be about Catholics, but it has nothing to do with my book whatsoever, which I started writing years before these stories about priests emerged in the press. Just a coincidence, I suppose.

Q: What reaction do you expect from the Catholic Church or from Catholics generally?
A: Some people may be aghast to find that the priest in my novel, Father Collins, is a human being who doubts his vocation and experiences sexual desire. There are plenty of people who would prefer the priest they’ve learned to expect from television and the movies—a priest who isn’t really a human being, in the end, someone flawed and conflicted. There are probably people who will be aghast to find that the seer in this novel is a 16 year old drug-addled runaway, a girl who has had an abortion, a thief and in her own mind a whore, a rape victim addicted to antihistamines—people were aghast about Bernadette too, at first, people were aghast at Saint Francis of Assisi, many were aghast about Jesus himself—and maybe some of the people who will object to the portrayals in this book would have scoffed at Jesus if they’d met him.

Q: Your story is set in a depressed logging town in Washington State.
A: Yes. I lived temporarily in a very small logging town and took a lot of mental notes. And what I found was a lot of unhappiness, a lot of physical and emotional abuse, a lot of self-abuse, alcoholism, violence, masochism, irrationality, political extremism, a general brutality of the spirit that was very disturbing. Put that together with rain, gray skies, federal policy conspiring against you, unemployment, and the presence nearby of many flourishing high tech liberals with coffee cups—it all makes for something very bizarre and for me, tragic, captivating, and finally ironic—ironic in the sense that such a horrifically depressing community sits in the middle of an exquisitely beautiful rain forest. Ann’s apparitions unfold in this forest, which is appropriately moss-hung, dense, and mysterious.

Q: Church officials in your novel undertake an investigation into the authenticity of Ann Holmes’ apparitions, and there is much discussion of a protocol for this. Does the church indeed have formal guidelines for investigating marian apparitions?
A: It does. There is an official process known as “discernment” which informs every significant report of a marian apparition. It is the church’s position that the entire body of divine revelation is offered to us in the person of Christ, and that nothing new can follow, so instances of private revelation, such as marian apparitions, are either false or, at best, visitations that only confirm his teachings. The seminal texts on the discernment process are Father Augustin Poulain’s The Graces of Interior Prayer, published in 1901, and more recently, Father Benedict Groeschel’s A Still, Small Voice. These texts guide the process of discernment and give a sense of structure and definition to priests and diocesan committees charged with determining whether an apparition has any validity. They are in character conservative and rigorous but they do not close the door altogether on the possibility of valid apparitions and they remind us that the church has to some extent sanctioned prior apparitions, such as Bernadette’s apparition at Lourdes.

Q: Has the church sanctioned any of the marian apparitions reported in this country?
A: None. And we’ve had our share. It’s interesting to note the peculiarly American Nature of apparition events here, the tackiness and commercialism, the strange Polaroids people exchange, the videotapes, motels, campgrounds, muddy parking lots, the rosaries and chaplets for sale—I tried to bring this element of it into my story, and I enjoyed the nexus of spirituality and contemporary culture as I wrote. But the church has sanctioned apparitions elsewhere—most notably at Lourdes, but at places like Fatima and Garabandal, too. Fatima is interesting because it generated a set of secrets—information from Mary which was to be held by the church until such time as it could properly be released—possibly an apocalyptic message. There is often something apocalyptic about marian apparitions, the sense that we are being warned by Mary that God is angry and that she can only intercede for so much longer before His wrath descends.

Q: This is a common role for Mary—Mary as intermediary. Standing between us and the wrath of God.
A: That’s just one of her myriad roles. Over the centuries she has been manifested in a variety of female permutations. As the subservient handmaid of the Lord often, but also as a mediator, as the Queen of Heaven, as the Mother of God, and also as divine in her own right and not merely human. It took centuries of pressure from ordinary people who insisted on it by their very worship, but finally the doctrine of Mary’s immaculate conception, her divine birth, became church doctrine, and then, after more centuries, the Church finally affirmed, in 1950, what millions of Catholics already believed—that Mary had ascended, body and soul, into Heaven, like her son before her.

Q: In an era when religious zeal has become central to global politics, your story seems perhaps pertinent to the moment. Is that what you intended?
A: No. I wrote 90% of this prior to 9/11. I didn’t conceive or develop Our Lady of the Forest in the post 9/11 context, and I didn’t revise or re-think it in light of 9/11. Although I must add that the events of 9/11 produced in me an excruciating period of inactivity as a writer. And during that time, I did note that what I’d been doing in Our Lady of the Forest might be relevant to where we find ourselves. We feel, as a nation, that peculiar and unsettling sensation of the lost, and like the seekers in the forest who inhabited this story in droves, we’re inundated by both desire and fear.

Q: SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS is a mystery. OUR LADY OF THE FOREST is a mystery too of sorts. It asks if miracles really do happen, or if they are the product of real life ingredients (antihistamines, pot, etc.) as they come up against the human condition, all propelled by the only thing we have to hold on to—hope. Does it matter if the miracle is real or imagined? Your novel doesn't direct the reader to believe one way or another. Why did you choose to remain open ended about this question? Talk about our "need to believe."
A: Whether the Virgin is literally present is irrelevant. What matters is that people believe she is, and because they believe it, their lives are altered. The fact that passionate belief can generate this kind of transformation constitutes a kind of miracle. We don’t believe because there are miracles; on the contrary, there are “miracles”—complex, gradual, nuanced changes in our lives — because we believe. And as you say, I don’t direct readers to believe anything one way or the other. That, of course, is not the novelist’s role. I’m not a preacher, a priest, or a rabbi. And stories aren’t sermons. They exist to prompt in readers a confrontation with the human condition. They raise questions, but they don’t answer them. They entertain, and in so doing, they create a context for reflection. Reading, we pause in the course of our lives to ponder insoluble questions.

Praise

About the Book

About the Guide

About the Author

Discussion Guides

1. The book’s opening echoes the tone of official reportage, using “the girl” instead of naming Ann Holmes. Elsewhere in the narrative Ann is called “the visionary.” Why? Does this create a sense of distance from her? Does the narrative tone of voice, as well as the narrator’s stance, shift throughout the novel? Is the tone of objectivity about the events and characters maintained?

2. What role do sexuality and sexual desire play in this story, particularly for Tom Cross, Father Collins, and Ann? What attracts Father Collins to Ann [p. 38]? Are beauty, sexual desire, violence, and victimization interrelated in this novel? If so, how?

3. Does Guterson expect his readers to believe that Ann’s encounters with the Virgin Mary are real? Does he seem sympathetic to the position of Father Collins, who is skeptical and yet open-minded, or of Carolyn, who is entirely analytical and cynical about the visions? Is there a character with whom readers are most likely to identify? Who is it?

4. What kind of person is Carolyn Greer? Is she an opportunist, an intellectual, a cynic, an actor, a thief? If she is talented and intelligent, why is she living in a campground in North Fork? Is she a more intriguing character than Ann?

5. Why did Father Collins decide to become a priest? Does the priesthood solve his personal dilemmas? Does he have the necessary qualities of leadership to be a priest? A year after Ann’s death, what effect have Ann’s visions and their aftermath had on Father Collins? Has he become a better priest or a wiser person?

6. What does the extended passage in which Tom Cross thinks about his family life, and particularly his son, tell us about him [pp. 96–105]? Is Tom Cross responsible for the accident that paralyzed his son? With his anger, desperation, and self-loathing, how dangerous is he? Is there anything admirable or positive about him? How does he change?

7. How does Guterson evoke the unique locale of the Pacific Northwest, with its local economy that pits loggers against “jogging-shoed, tree-hugging, latte lovers” [p. 107]? In what ways does he evoke the feeling of life in a rainy, foggy place? How important is the setting to the story, in terms of the local economy, weather, and landscape?

8. Is there any connection between Ann’s visions and the fact that she has been repeatedly raped by a drug addict who was obsessed with religion [pp. 131–32]? Does the novel suggest that her devotion to the Virgin results from a need to cleanse herself of her own past and to make amends for the abortion she had [p. 133]?

9. The narrator shares with readers the information that Ann is a victim of violent sexual abuse; this fact is not made known, however, to Father Collins or to the public, and so it is not a factor in the inquiry into her case. What are the effects on the reader of knowing Ann’s history?

10. How relevant to her credibility is the fact that Ann wasn’t raised as a Catholic, like Bernadette at Lourdes or the children at Fátima? Do her followers care? Is this a story about Catholicism or about a larger phenomenon in America today? What is Guterson suggesting about religious faith or about the need for it?

11. Father Collins and Father Butler know that Ann has used psilocybin mushrooms, and this leads them to suspect that her visions are hallucinogenic flashbacks [pp. 285–87]. The evidence gathered by Carolyn, however, points to side effects of the allergy medication Ann habitually used. How does Father Collins respond to Carolyn’s outrage when she realizes that “Phenathol’s behind this massive spectacle. This multimillion-dollar film-set church” [p. 321]? Given their conversation, what is the effect of the novel’s final scene [pp. 322–23]?

12. Does Guterson suggest that there is a point at which hysteria and faith overlap? What are readers to make of the thousands of believers who come to North Fork to follow Ann to the site of her visions? What does Guterson suggest about the psychology of large groups and the behavior of crowds [pp. 136–48]?

13. Why does Carolyn come back to visit North Fork for the opening of the church [p. 316]? What effect do Ann’s followers, and the eventual building of the church, have upon the area’s economy?

14. What is the meaning of the Virgin’s dire warnings and of the urgency of her message to Ann? How should readers interpret this aspect of Ann’s vision, as well as Ann’s fear of Satan?

15. There are often moments of humor in Our Lady of the Forest. What incidents or descriptions are particularly funny? What sort of humor do they exemplify?

16. To what extent does Guterson emphasize Ann’s position as a child who is essentially uncared for and homeless, a victim of her mother’s neglect? How important are the social issues that brought Ann to North Fork in the novel? Does Ann’s obsession with the Virgin Mary reflect her need for a caring mother?

17. The novel builds to a climactic scene in which Tom Cross confronts Ann in the church [pp. 300–10]. What are the dynamics of the scene? What does Tom Cross want from Ann, and how close to violence is he? Why does Carolyn intervene as she does?

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