April Book Club: Librarian Nan Cinnater On Meeting Mary Oliver

Welcome to The Good Dog Book Club, a community that loves books and dogs. Each month, the Good Dog team will pick a dog-focused book we can all read and chat about together. For April 2022, we selected Dog Songs by Mary Oliver. We’ve enjoyed promoting conversations across our social channels over the past couple of weeks, and now, it’s time to hear from one of Mary's acquaintances, Nan Cinnater, the Lead Librarian at Provincetown Public Library. (Mary was raised in Maple Heights, Ohio but later moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts.) Nan knew the beloved poet briefly and shares details of their time together below.

Tell us about yourself! Have you always been working in the literary world?

Not always, but a lot. I have been a bookseller off and on since 1990. I owned, with my partner, an LGBT bookstore in Provincetown in the ’90s, and later managed the venerable Provincetown Bookshop, open in the same location since 1932. In between I taught high school English for a few years, which I guess is part of the literary life as well.

When did you decide to become a librarian? What was that journey like?

Bookselling is not a get-rich-quick or even get-rich-at-all profession, so I took a part-time job at the Provincetown Library as a circulation clerk while I was working at the Provincetown Bookshop. I never had formal library science training, but my training as a bookseller and wholesale buyer served me well in library work. I did some in-service training through the Mass. Library System, and I am now the full-time Lead Librarian. I buy the books for the adult collection and I serve as reference librarian (one way to use my MA in History). The most challenging thing about it is the technology. Libraries are increasingly digital, which served us well during the pandemic, but it is not my natural way of thinking. The most fun thing about it is books, books, books -- reading them, reading about them, writing about them, and talking about them. And getting paid for it.

Do you remember the first time you met Mary Oliver?

I first found out about Mary Oliver as a poet and Provincetown icon after I had opened my bookshop in the ’90s. Customers started asking for her work, so I did some research and found out that she wrote amazing poetry, mostly about Provincetown. She had won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and she lived nearby. But she was famously private, making public appearances very rarely. Over the years, I was able to hear her read a couple of times, once in Wellfleet and once at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, both of them wonderful occasions. I heard from folks who ran into her on the harbor beach walking her dog very early in the morning, and I also heard about sightings in the Stop and Shop, but I never met her and didn't expect to.

When I started working at the Provincetown Bookshop, the shop was well known for its endless supply of signed copies of Mary Oliver's books. My first week, Joel Newman, the 93-year-old owner of the shop, said to me, "Call up Mary and tell her we need her to sign some more books." I panicked. Call up Mary? Mary Oliver, the famously reclusive poet? The second best-selling poet on Amazon? (The first was Shakespeare!) I braved it out, called and introduced myself, and asked Mary to sign some books. She said, "No. I'm too old to come down there and sign books." But, she said, she would sign books if I brought them to her. So I brought several boxes full of books to her house, a two-story condo on the harbor beach, with beautiful views. Her famous dog Percy had died a year or so before, and her new dog Ricky met me at the door. (I later found out that Ricky was a Havanese rescue, and Percy was a Bichon Frise.) Mary was welcoming, talkative, and generally delightful. She asked me to leave the books and she would call me to come pick them up when they were signed.

Thus we got into a routine. I would call Mary every few months when we needed more signed copies, drop off the books, pet Ricky and talk briefly with Mary, mostly about the book business. Mary told me that she would then put opera on the stereo and sit and sign the books. This sometimes took two or three hours. When I picked them up, I would bring flowers or something else as a thank you for her effort. Once, I picked up the books when she was out, but had left the door open. She left me a plateful of orange chanterelle mushrooms, which I had never heard of. She left a note saying that they were delicious sautéed in butter for breakfast. She was right.

Any travel tips or recommendations for someone visiting Provincetown for the first time?

Absolutely. Come to the library. It's a beautiful building dating from 1860, and it's practically a museum, full of art and a very unexpected exhibit on the second floor. (I don't want to spoil the surprise.) Also, of course, free. Otherwise, travel without a car if at all possible, because parking is expensive and a hassle. The town is a great walking and biking town with lots of shops and a gorgeous harbor. Don't miss the big beaches that are across the highway and are part of the National Seashore. Race Point Beach is one of the most stunning beaches in the country, if not the world.

If you want to have a Mary Oliver experience, go to the Beech Forest in the woodsy part of the National Seashore. There is a hiking trail around a pond, which Mary dubbed Blackwater Pond, and wrote about. She walked there often.

Our book club has been reading Dog Songs this month! Do you have a favorite poem from that collection?

Yes, "The First Time Percy Came Back." It was a huge comfort to me after I lost my dog, but not the least bit sloppy or sentimental.

Do you have any book recommendations for people who loved Dog Songs but don’t know what to read next?

If you want more Mary Oliver, you might want to try my favorite collection, Owls and Other Fantasies, which is essays and poems about birds. It contains one of her most popular poems, "Wild Geese." If you want more dog poetry, there's a new book called Dog Poems: An Anthology edited by Christopher Wait, with a really good selection of classic and recent poems, not too many of them elegies for dogs who have died. If you just want a great dog novel, The Friend by Sigrid Nunez won the National Book Award. It's about a woman whose best friend dies and leaves an orphaned Great Dane, so what are you going to do?