Weaving and Interweaving: Anything Can Happen
Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning?
—Seamus Heaney, “Anything Can Happen”
Between deadheading roses and helping with the housekeeping, between playing cribbage with my wife and considering the submissions of folk in the writing groups I frequent, I’m often enough reading a novel. Just now I’m working through Maggie O’Farrell’s Land (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2026). Unique in its narrative and characterization, Land includes a few coincidences some might consider unlikely. Just a few pages back, for instance, one of the main characters, Enda, plays violin. She leaves her family, crosses the ocean to Quebec, and, unbeknownst to her, encounters her grandfather playing pipes in a cafe. The narrative points out the encounter—Enda’s mother had been put in an orphanage when her family died in the famine with her father an emigrant to America. He returned, but his daughter was not found for him.
Some would consider such a thing unlikely, even impossible.
Yet such things do occur.
I graduated from Central College in Pella, Iowa. My graduating year, my wife and I rented the second floor of the house owned by my faculty advisor, Robert O’Dell, Professor of East Asian history, and Susan, his wife. Several years later, five years of graduate school, I taught high school in Dayton, Ohio. In closing how Asian history and western history had come together, after talking about the anti-Vietnam war protests prominent when I was in college, “even in a sleepy place like Pella, Iowa,” one of my students, David Wilson (picture a freshman version of John Denver only shorter) asked me if I might have known his uncle, Robert O’Dell. So, there, more than five hundred miles and four states away, I found myself teaching a young man the very content I had learned from his uncle.
That incident comes to mind, but there have been others—other students I’ve taught, children of high school classmates of mine; folk my wife and I have run into while traveling; other things.
Coincidences do happen.
Rather than dismiss them out of hand as preposterous, the reader is better to examine how things happen, what they mean, how the narrative falls. In other words, it is the craft that matters.
Intricate and untraceable
weaving and interweaving,
dark strand with light:
—Denise Levertov
Reading and Writing Kramer 