The Search for Community
After the success of Home Ecology, I got a literary agent and then a contract to write A Smaller Circle: The search for community for a new imprint at a big London publishing company, Random Century. I was to join Wendell Berry and Edward Goldsmith on the new list, but by the next year the commissioning editor, Tessa Strickland, left the firm. (She went on to cofound Barefoot Books, which in 1995 published my only children’s book, Rachel’s Roses.) I had moved to the United States with my two young children at the behest of a lover in New York, and was unable to finish the book on schedule, which led to its being canceled.
Tessa sent me the woodcut she’d commissioned for the cover, which you can see below. It’s a lovely piece of original work, but Tessa’s vision wasn’t the story I had to tell: the search for community doesn’t end in a fairytale cottage, or an escape from the modern world, symbolized by the factory belching black smoke. Not to mention all those cows! Even then I knew about cows producing methane gas that contributed to climate change.)
A Smaller Circle led to me to Great Barrington, to the creation of the Encyclopedia of Community and to my work on third places. I am still looking for an answer to the ancient question “What is the Good Life?” and after The Great Good Place II is published I hope to have time to wrap up the story I began in 1991.
In 2013, I wrote an essay with the same title for Resurgence, available here. The way life comes in full circle, and that long-ago lover’s name surfaced in a farmhouse kitchen in Connecticut, is told here.
Not long before this photo was taken in 2013, Bill (William H.) McNeill decided to write my life story, interviewing me with surgical precision. It was a dramatic experience for both of us because of a strange intersection in our lives that took place years before we met, connected with my failure to finish A Smaller Circle. Having a famous historian examine my life, was ultimately transformative. Weekly suppers with Bill were part of my life until his death in 2016, at nearly 99. My preoccupation for years has been the intersection of ecology and community, and these were subjects Bill and I always came back to. Read more about him: W. H. McNeill (1917-2016) [obituary] in the New York Times and my reflections, “Celebrating William H. McNeill.”
This text appeared in a Random Century catalog, and still turns up on the internet.
“The Jane Austen of the alternative world.” –Kirkpatrick Sale
The quest for a smaller circle in which to share and grow may be the quintessential search of our time. In this moving and exploratory narrative, Karen Christensen undertakes that journey, led on by the sense that a life which is simple, sustainable, and satisfying must be achievable. Passionate, perceptive and often funny, A Smaller Circle will challenge all who ask themselves whether, and in what conditions, community is possible.