Casey Scieszka came to West Kill more than a decade ago to build the kind of place she and her husband, artist and writer-illustrator Steven Weinberg, wished already existed: a small, design-conscious Catskills inn where artists, weekenders, and locals might cross paths over a fire pit or a drink. Today, that vision is the Spruceton Inn, a nine-room “bed and bar” in West Kill, a hamlet in the town of Lexington.
Now Scieszka has turned the landscape around her into fiction. Her debut novel, “The Fountain,” published March 17, follows Vera Van Valkenburgh, an immortal woman who returns to the Catskills after nearly two centuries to investigate the source of her family’s condition and, she hopes, undo it. The book blends small-town mystery, romance and historical fiction while asking what gives a life meaning.
For Scieszka, the novel is also rooted in the place she has made home. She is the daughter of children’s author Jon Scieszka, but “The Fountain” feels less like an inheritance than a work grown out of years of close attention to this corner of the region.
That sensibility has shaped the inn as much as the novel. The Spruceton Inn also hosts a no-cost artist residency that awards about a dozen artists five-night stays each fall. The program has welcomed more than 130 artists over 12 seasons, including Chloé Caldwell, Susannah Cahalan, Carmen Maria Machado, and Rama Duwaji.
The result is that Scieszka has built two parallel creative lives in West Kill: one as an innkeeper helping sustain a creative community, and another as a novelist drawing from the same woods, roads and histories. With “The Fountain,” those worlds now meet on the page.
How did this novel come into existence?
I’ve been running the Spruceton Inn for 13 years. We used to be open seven days a week all year long. We closed for a whole year during the pandemic because we were the definition of non-essential travel. And then when we reopened, we had a new model where it was weekends only for just half the year, and only me.
That new balance allowed more time for the other half of my soul, which was writing. I was working on a bunch of different projects before; as many authors do, we all must have the proverbial novel in the drawer. What started as just a short story during the pandemic wound up becoming a whole book.
It’s about a secretly 214-year-old “young woman” who returns to her hometown in the Catskills to figure out what did this to her so that she can reverse it and finally be released. And for anybody who has spent any time in the Spruceton Valley, where I live and where the inn is, parts of it will feel mightily familiar. She is a park ranger in the Catskills Park, so she’s climbing around all these mountains and such. I was really fascinated by the idea of what does and doesn’t change out here over hundreds of years.
How much did the Catskills landscape shape the book?
The mountains do and don’t change. Over the course of 200 years, their size stays the same. But we look at them now, forested in these red pines, and think of them as untouched, when many of those trees were planted in the 1930s as part of a WPA program. So nature is much more constantly changing than we give it credit for. And on a neighborhood level, there are churches, houses and cemeteries tied to Dutch families whose names are still in town. I couldn’t have written this book any earlier in my life. It really did wind up being a love letter to the Catskills. It is so of this place.
The book has been described as “Tuck Everlasting” for grown-ups. Was that book on your mind while writing?
I was about to say yes and no, but it’s really yes and yes. I read that book when I was in fifth grade in English class and had one of those amazing classic English-class experiences where it blew my mind open. It led to such good discussions.
It was one of those first books that really wrestled with big, capital-L life questions: What is the point of life? What is the point of love? What is justice? I loved the way Natalie Babbitt posed all those questions, and it essentially haunted me for decades. So when I was trying to come up with something new, those were the questions I wanted to take my own stab at answering with new characters.
Your main character, Vera, can heal from anything and remain forever 26, but she isn’t trying to extend life. She’s searching for release. When did that become the story?
The longevity world has blown up in the past couple of years in particular, but even over 10 or 20 years, so much has and hasn’t changed. We’ve extended the average American life span by about 10 years since “Tuck Everlasting,” although “average” comes with a big asterisk.
When I first started writing, it was a little moodier. I knew she was coming home. I knew she was dissatisfied and scared and lonely from a long series of very quick and unmemorable lives. I decided it would be, for a lot of people, a really terrifying prospect to have a condition like this. It would be something you’d have to hide and constantly deal with and cope with in really nitty-gritty, tedious, boring ways.
Especially as technology catches up, what does it take in modern life to reinvent yourself? Early on, she could just move three hours away and probably be fine. In modern day, that’s not so simple.
After I got through most of the first draft, I realized: Oh no, she comes home because she wants to die. That’s what she thinks she needs. Which is obviously really dark. But the book is ultimately a meditation on what makes a life meaningful, no matter how long or short, and a celebration of community and the importance of having relationships.
It feels like a counternarrative to the culture of longevity.
Yeah. There is perhaps a certain type of person who thinks the whole world would benefit from them being around longer, versus other folks who are thinking more carefully about the quality of the time they’re spending and the legacy they’re leaving behind.
Did writing the novel change while you were actually writing it?
Yes, because stuff changes. And I think often for the better. As your character crystallizes, as your location settles in, as you really hone in on the big questions you have, it can be easy to rewrite the story of how something was written and think, Oh, I knew all along.
But until you asked me whether I knew what Vera wanted when I first wrote it, I had basically forgotten that I didn’t. I was finding out with her. Then I had to go back and use what I found out in that writing process and revise accordingly.
How was writing this book different from writing “To Timbuktu,” your previous book with your husband?
Completely different. “To Timbuktu” was nonfiction. I had my now-husband as my working partner; he was illustrating and I was writing. It was about the handful of years we spent right after college living and working abroad.
We had actually proposed a completely fictional book to a literary agent, but included a cover letter about how we had wound up living out in Timbuktu. And the agent was like, “You should write that.” And we were both like, ‘What?’
That process was so fun. But the adult publishing world is a completely different arm from Young Adult, so while I learned many things from that process, it also felt like I was starting from scratch with this one.
How did the artist residency at the inn begin?
Like most things with the Spruceton Inn, it was basically that I built a place I would like to go to. And that included the type of residency I would like to do, where it costs nothing to apply, the application itself is super short, and the residency itself is very low-key.
There are no group activities. It’s self-directed. You don’t have to deliver anything at the end. And it’s only a week long, because most working artists are working in many other ways than just making their art.
It was on the literal yellow legal pad of my ideas for when I wanted to open a hotel.
What do artists get from the residency?
Everybody’s a little different, but my hope is that, first, receiving the residency is that good little tap on the shoulder that says, “Hey, you deserve this.”
We try hard to keep a balance of artists in all parts of their careers, very established, emerging, mid-career, whatever it is. Everybody can use a little lift in their step from getting something like that.
And then once you’re here, ideally it’s undivided time—time that only you are in charge of. You can’t break it up to do your laundry, to go do your usual grocery shopping, to let the noise of your daily life disappear so that you can finally prioritize your art. And I say finally because for so many people it is a distressingly hard thing to do, even though it’s what we say we want to do more than anything.
From there, I love that, especially at this point, with 139 artists and counting, it really is a community, an alumni network you can be part of. Some people have gone on to become really close friends or collaborators, which just warms my heart. There are also these cross-pollination moments where an artist from last year asks me about getting in touch with someone who stayed here in 2016, and I love being able to make that happen.
You offer the residency at no cost. How do you make that work?
People call me or write me who want to open their own artist residency, and they ask me exactly that. And I’m like, well, it isn’t sustainable. It’s a philanthropic arm of our business.
In the same way that we donate half of our profits from the bar on site to social and climate justice, all of this can feel like an uncomfortably large amount of money that we are just giving away. But I also kind of wholeheartedly believe in doing that. That’s part of what I want my gift to be.
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.