My name is Jacqui Colt and I’m a senior creative writing major here at St. Lawrence. For the past three years I’ve spent as much time as possible discovering, learning as much as possible in the Adirondacks, including a semester in an Adirondack yurt village and two North Country summers. As I begin my fourth year here, the region feels more like home than ever. It only felt right, after years of hiking, paddling, and otherwise physically investigating the region, to explore the Adirondacks academically. I was privileged to receive a SLU Fellowship, funded by the Daniel F. ’65 and Ann H. Sullivan Endowment for Student/Faculty Research University Fellowship and the Betty Buchanan Dunn ’53 University Fellowship, and thus was able to spend my summer learning about Adirondack literature.
I decided to research the type of literature that most interests me: fiction. I also wanted my research to be beneficial, in some way, to the field of Adirondack fiction. A comprehensive bibliography, I thought, would expose me to a really concentrated subset of fiction over a long span of time—beneficial for my future aspirations to write fiction—as well as provide me with a whole lot of insight into Adirondack fiction and be helpful to the field. I didn’t know much about bibliographies, archiving or exhibits, but I decided I’d give it a shot. My starting point was Dorothy Plum’s Adirondack Bibliography, updated in 1992 by Douglas Welch, and my goal was to update it to 2014, find titles that were missed in these bibliographies, and weed out works that didn’t quite fit the bill of Adirondack fiction.
The end product of my nine weeks of summer research is a 567-entry bibliography. The search for the 345 additional titles I found brought me all over; to the Adirondack Museum’s library in Blue Mountain Lake with the help of Jerry Pepper, to the Saranac Lake Free Library’s Adirondack Research Center with the help of Michelle Tucker, into the deep, dark, online world of WorldCat, and of course to Owen D. Young Library; the stacks, periodicals and special collections, with the invaluable help of Mark McMurray, Paul Hagget and Eric Williams-Bergen.
