Swamplandia!

Acknowledgments

During the years that I spent lost in the swamp, sometimes the only thing that kept me pushing forward was the thought of making it to this acknowledgments page. It’s a joy at last to get to thank the following people:

Huge love and gratitude to: Karina Schmid, Alexis Vgeros, Sharon Bowen, Victoria Bourke, Christopher Shannon, Jessica MacDonald, Kate Hasler-Steilen, Laura Storz, Stefan Merrill Block, Lucia Giannetta, Jess Fenn, Scott Snyder, Stu MacDonald, Dan Chaon, J. R. Carpenter, Stephen O’Connor, Bradford Morrow and Conjunctions, Karen and Jim Shepard, Andrea Barrett, Barry Goldstein, Larry Raab, François Furstenberg, Sam Swope, Andrea Libin and John High, Rivka Galchen, John Tresch, Putney Student Travel and my Putney kids, Becky Campbell and the staff at Symphony Veterinary Center, and to my teachers, my former classmates, and my students, for being a solar source of inspiration.

To Carey McHugh, Kim Tingley, Lytton Smith, Michael White, Brandon Freeman, Lauren Russell, Kent Russell, Vince Ruiz — thank you to the moon for being my first readers and for the lifeline of your friendship. And thanks to Rob, Carey, New Rob, and Russell Haus for my many fellowship stints on your fine sofas. If I could somehow make this page interactive, I’d give each of you an ovation and a Cadillac.

I’m very grateful to the UCross Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Jean Strouse, and my fellow Fellows for the wonderful gift of time and community. Special thanks to Mary Ellen von der Heyden for her friendship and generous support.

Enormous thanks to my incredible agent, Denise Shannon, and to my boundlessly encouraging editor, Jordan Pavlin, for their faith in me and for their tremendous help with revisions. Thanks to the great Leslie Levine and the staff at Knopf. And to the brilliant and indefatigable fiction editor Carin Besser, for parachuting into this novel and helping me to find a way through—thank you.

This book is dedicated to my parents, Janice and Bruce Russell, with all my love and with a special thank-you to my dad for helping me with the Florida research; to my bro and my sis; to Alan and Fran Romanchuck; and in loving memory of Alex Romanchuck. The Bigtrees’ story owes a huge debt to many authors but especially to Katherine Dunne, George Saunders, and Kelly Link. And a final thank-you to the readers of this book.