Cutter Wood
Photo by Erin Shaw
Bio
Cutter Wood was born in Central Pennsylvania and received his BA from Brown University, where he was awarded prizes for nonfiction and poetry. Wood completed an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa in 2010, during which time he was awarded numerous fellowships and had essays published in Harper’s and other magazines. After serving as a Provost Fellow at UI and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Louisville, Wood moved to New York. His first book, Love and Death in the Sunshine State, will be published in 2018 by Algonquin Books. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
I don’t know if there is ever a bad time to receive a call from the NEA, but mine could not have come at a better moment. My wife and I had just brought home our first child, and we were facing down some of the hard realities of new parents when one afternoon the phone rang. There’s no greater gift for a writer than time, and at that moment, it was difficult to find even a few minutes to work. In the months since, the fellowship has allowed me to devote a substantial part of each day to my writing. It has altered my course so drastically that, looking back, I can’t imagine what I would have done without it.
Excerpt from Love and Death in the Sunshine State
The evening of the fire had been unusually cold. There was a strong wind, and the sky was empty of clouds. As the sun began to drop into the Gulf, the water turned bronze, and a woman driving home didn’t understand at first how the sun could be reflected so brightly in the windows of the motel. Only when she drew near did she realize it was flames.
As happens sometimes at the lower latitudes, it was dark before anyone realized, and when the fire department arrived shortly after seven, one of the motel’s buildings was wholly engulfed. The roof groaned. The palms crackled and swayed. The wind came in steady off the water, carrying smoke across the island, and for blocks around, the air had the sharp smell of melted plastic and polyester. Their gear clanking, a few firefighters walked the perimeter to assess the situation, while the rest began the work of unfurling the heavy hoses and loosening the hydrants’ caps. A crowd had already begun to form: couples out for a sunset stroll, retirees on their way home from an early dinner, children on bicycles and scooters with nothing better to do. Soon a car from the sheriff’s office arrived, and a thin deputy began asking the onlookers, for their own safety, to step back, please, and allow the crew to do its work.
The rumor of arson always attends a fire, and this was no exception. The crowd murmured, and when a van pulled up from the local TV station it was clear the reporter hadn’t come to tell a story about an accidental blaze. The deputy smoothed the air with his hands. This was a fire, nothing more and nothing less, and there was not yet any reason to believe it was a case of arson. But, he said, you had to admit it was suspicious, considering the circumstances.
The circumstances, in the most immediate sense, were a white 2000 Pontiac convertible. It belonged to one of the owners of the motel, a woman named Sabine Musil-Buehler, and it currently sat in the sheriff’s impound lot. It was not a particularly nice car, but it contained a good deal of blood, and this, combined with the fact that the woman had been missing for nearly two weeks, gave a certain amount of credence to the more macabre fantasies of the crowd. As the fire department began sending sprays of water onto the building’s roof, an elderly woman still dressed in her pajamas declared that she was frightened and was leaving the island this instant, and for a long while after, she continued to make this declaration to anyone in earshot. It was hard not to stay around and skim the gossip. Who had set the fire, after all, and more importantly, why? For a time, the onlookers pursued these questions, picking up the various theories, turning them this way and that, and putting them back down again. But it was a cold night for Florida, and windy, and getting late, and there are limits to what reasonable people can be expected to ask themselves after dark. A little past eight, the fire chief declared the blaze under control, and the people, in ones and twos, began picking out paths home along the puddled road. A whole town runs to be present at a fire, as Hazlitt notes, but the spectator hardly exults to see it extinguished.
(Used with permission from Algonquin Books)