MONTAGUE — Authors write a lot of words. However, the final edition of this summer's Book Talk series at the Book Nook & Java Shop, which took place Wednesday, Aug. 6, saw an author maybe just as focused on the words authors don't write.
Miles Harvey, who in 2024 published a collection of short stories called The Registry of Forgotten Objects, spent much of his talk discussing the importance of not just text, but subtext. In addition to writing, Harvey teaches and chairs the English department at DePaul University, where he also is director of the publishing institute. Appropriate to the theme, he titled his talk "Writing the Void."
As examples of that void, Harvey discussed two very different things from writing - paintings and astrophysics.
One of Harvey's favorite paintings is New York Movie by Edward Hopper, an unusual painting in that it does not center its ostensible main attraction, a movie being viewed by a crowd at a theater. Instead, the actual movie is well off-center, with the spotlight instead on a female usher and a disconnected crowd. (Fittingly, art historians have determined the movie being screened in the painting is likely Lost Horizon, an epic 1930s film about a group of people who, while fleeing an uprising, disappear from civilization.)
"Absence is a kind of presence in this painting," Harvey said. "It puzzles me that I love this painting."
His scientific examination was of dark matter, an as-yet invisible substance no one knows for a fact exists but whose existence is theorized because of otherwise unexplained gravitational activity in the universe. Harvey said dark matter significantly outweighs visible matter and that it makes up some one-fourth of the universe.
"This nothingness holds everything together," Harvey said.
These ideas served as the backdrop to Harvey's talk, which included brief readings of some of his other published works by his wife, actress Rengin Altay, who has also narrated audiobooks of Harvey's. In his works, he attempts to use subtext to help tell his stories. He cited Ernest Hemingway as an authority on the matter; Hemingway once said that if a writer knows their subject well enough, they don't have to say everything they know in a work for the reader to pick up on what is meant.
While Registry of Forgotten Objects is Harvey's most recent work - and much of it also revolves around disappearances, further befitting his theme Wednesday - much discussion centered on a previous book of his, The King of Confidence, perhaps due to its Michigan setting. The historical nonfiction book recounts the story of James Jesse Strang, who established a Mormon sect on Beaver Island in Michigan in the 1840s and appointed himself "king of heaven and earth," claiming Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith had himself determined Strang as his successor. While Strang is long gone, there remains a small number of Mormons who are Strangites even today.
It's perhaps unsurprising given Harvey's eclectic career - his first book, The Island of Lost Maps, is about notorious map thief Gilbert Bland and his life of crime in the 1990s stealing maps from libraries to sell them - that he enjoys "rabbit holes," which he says authors generally try to avoid for fear of losing time putting together a story.
"I've wasted so much time in rabbit holes, and I love it," Harvey said.
In delivering Harvey's introduction, Susan Newhof of the Friends of the Montague Library said the Book Talk series has been going on for 40 years and praised Book Nook owners Brooke and Andrew Kuharevicz for providing space for the event to continue.
