My partner and I acquired the painting from Michael in 2014, just before I started working on Ancestor Trouble as a book. As in Hawthorne’s fiction, Lee’s hellish thicket might be an external landscape, but is more likely an internal one. The landscape seems ripped from a Nathaniel Hawthorne story, reminiscent of the woods the minister in “Young Goodman Brown” wanders, where Satan seems to lurk behind every tree. I first encountered my friend Michael Aaron Lee’s “Forest #4 (Three Dee)” in 2015. Third in the series is Maud Newton, author of the memoir-history Ancestor Trouble. Jumping off Wallace Stevens’s classic poem, “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” 13 Ways of Looking asks authors to show the visual inspirations for their latest projects, with accompanying background on how these images directly or indirectly influenced their book.
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