North of Hope by Jon Hassler

Jon Hassler!!! - Link to his official "Writing Room"
North of Hope is being re-released in paperback!

January, 2006
I just happened to re-read North of Hope over the last few days because I felt like it, and then was really happy to see at Keplers that he has written a new book The Good Woman which I will also write about when I have finished it.

I have been reading and enjoying Hassler's books for at least 15 years. In 1990 around the time that North of Hope came out (and after reading A Green Journey) I also started writing letters to many people quite frequently. Uncles, aunts, cousins, pen pals, and also Jon Hassler. Perhaps I was inspired by all the letter writing in A Green Journey, I think I was.

Most people that I knew responded, and to my surprise, so did Mr. Hassler. The initial letter was on two pages of white note paper, which I still have at home in Valley City, and then I also got several other postcards in response to my chatty letters telling him what was going on with me and asking him what he was writing. The postcards of course I have also saved too.
On the first letter he had responded to one of my questions about being a writer, and he said something like "You needn't decide whether to become a writer or not. " and said something about how the voice would become too insistent to ignore, but I'm not remembering exactly how he worded the last part.
I'm not sure, maybe my voice is getting more insistent but it's certainly not loud enough yet to keep me from ignoring it (although I almost did the "write a novel during November" challenge this year.)

Rookery Blues was written during the time of the postcards, and I know from the postcards that he was thinking of calling it The Icejam Quintet. It felt like I was on the inside track when it came to what he was planning to write, which was fun.
We met once at least at a book signing, he remembered one of my letters from one of the teacher descriptions I wrote. ("that crazy teacher!")

His books are really well drawn from life in the Midwest, specifically in small towns in Minnesota -- about teachers and priests, old ladies and teenagers. And most of them are Catholic, which I am not but I found fascinating then and also now as well.
I was just reading his new intro to the North of Hope paperback where he was talking about being a "priest-watcher" all his life - I think perhaps I have been a bit of a "teacher-watcher" as well.

His first book, Staggerford, came out in 1977 when Hassler was 44. Staggerford, and the other books set in and around that town, including A Green Journey, The Love Hunter, and Simon's Night, all have their dark moments but they have much more of a cozy humor to them.

North of Hope is probably the darkest of all his books but it may also be one of the best. You want things to work out better for the characters but if they did it would just be a pretty sappy love story just like anything else.

(His book A Green Journey was made into a TV movie starring Angela Lansbury and Denholm Elliot. This was a bit cheesy - the movie, not the book, which I loved. The biggest problem I remember was Denholm Elliot, who was not believable to me as James O'Hannon because I had just seen him as a bumbling fool in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We (my sisters and I) had our own casting for James O'Hannon but I can't remember now who it was. Definitely better than Denholm. It was someone tall, white hair, piercing blue eyes, but not Paul Newman as he wasn't old enough at the time I think).

When I got to Stanford I took a class from John L'Heureux, who writes even darker novels about priests, teachers, and professors. L'Heureux is almost like the other side of Hassler it seemed to me. I wrote to Hassler about L'Heureux and told L'Heureux about Hassler but neither seemed to know anything about the other.