Scott Nadelson and his new novel, “Trust Me.” Photos courtesy Forest Avenue Press.

If Scott Nadelson had to describe his new book in three words, they’d be: “Father. Daughter. Woods.”

Those are the key elements in Trust Me, Nadelson’s ninth book, which comes out Sept. 2 from Portland’s Forest Avenue Press. It’s a novel in vignettes, a format that grows naturally out of the half-dozen story collections he’s also published. The 52 vignettes portray the awkward weekly dance between a middle-aged father and his middle-school daughter after his divorce from her mother. Every Friday, Lewis picks up Skye in Salem and they drive 45 minutes to his place, the family’s cabin in the woods, where they live without TV, internet or reliable cell service until Sunday. 

Nadelson, a professor of English and the Hallie Ford Chair in Writing at Willamette University, will appear Sept. 4 at Powell’s City of Books. He discussed Trust Me in a recent interview; here are seven takeaways. 

1. Trust Me began about 10 years ago with the idea of a father and daughter, whom Nadelson placed in a landscape he loved. 

Nadelson’s child was about 4 at the time, and he was imagining what it would be like to have a preteen. He’d just read Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, about a granddaughter and grandmother living on a Finnish island. 

“I was so struck by the story and the way that it was told that I was just trying to imagine, all right, what’s my version of that?” Nadelson said. He thought, “What place do I know and have this kind of mystical feeling about, that feels magical to me?”

The answer was the Little North Fork of the Santiam River, east of Salem, where he’d once spotted a cabin for sale and fantasized about buying it. “That fantasy started playing out in this father-daughter relationship, imagining the two of them spending their time there. And that’s the way it really developed.”

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2. The title captures what the book is about.

It’s no accident that Skye – whom her father calls Sills, short for Silly – is 12 and a half when Trust Me starts. She’s at an age when, as Nadelson put it, “her natural trust of her parent starts to get more complicated.” 

Meanwhile, Lewis is “kind of a mess and doesn’t really know what he’s doing much of the time,” Nadelson said. He forages for mushrooms with more bravado than confidence in which ones are safe to eat. He spends hours planning a stone path that his daughter quickly realizes he’ll never finish.

“Right from the start, there’s a kind of fragility to the relationship,” Nadelson said. Skye could decide she trusts her mother more. She could give up on Lewis, which both he and she fear. 

“I think it was that fragile nature of the relationship that really drew me to the story, more than anything else: Are they going to make it? Are they going to make it together?” Nadelson said. 

Especially given all the time they’re spending in the woods. 

“That is the other relationship,” Nadelson said. “They have to trust the woods, they have to trust this place, and the place has to trust them, right, that they are caretakers of this place. And then there’s so much that’s out of their control.”

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3. The most difficult part of writing Trust Me was trusting its structure and characters. 

“I’m a short story writer in my heart, and I’m a sprinter, and that’s what feels most natural to me,” Nadelson said. “And I kept finding myself running up against what I imagined as the needs of a longer narrative, to have a kind of more conventional narrative arc and plot.”

It was a challenge to trust the vignettes and trust the characters “to teach me who they were,” which took time, he said. “Every time I tried to rush it, it didn’t work.”

4. The most fun part of writing Trust Me was the dialogue and the dynamic between father and daughter.

“I love the comedy that kind of naturally evolved in the way that they talk to each other, the way that they saw each other, and their weird little competitions,” Nadelson said. 

One of his favorite scenes is one in which Skye makes a meal for her father with ingredients she’s found in the woods. 

“Everything is sour, and she just keeps raising the stakes by giving him lemonade with no sugar in it, and he refuses to show his discomfort,” Nadelson said. “They sort of keep pushing each other.”

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5. He’d advise the main characters in Trust Me to relax.

Nadelson said he’d tell Lewis, “She’s not going anywhere,” and that he can trust his daughter more than he can trust himself.

He’d tell Skye to “have a good time and don’t worry about these friends you’re with now, because a year from now, your life is going to be in a totally different place. You know, every year of adolescence is like a whole new world. And so try to be yourself as much as you can every day.”

6. He hopes readers enjoy living for a while with the characters in Trust Me.

Nadelson said he hopes readers see themselves in both Lewis and Skye.

“The adult and the adolescent are basically the same,” Nadelson said. “None of us know what we’re doing. You know, we’re just faking it all the time.” He hopes readers recognize that and see the comedy of it. 

He also hopes readers come away from the book appreciating the people and places that are precious to them, and how fleeting that all is.

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7. He hopes readers seek out other vignette novels.

As Nadelson worked on Trust Me, he looked for other novels written in vignette form. Among them was poet Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, which tells the story of a Black woman in Chicago in the 1940s. “It’s such a gorgeous book,” he said.

He also cited Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, saying, “I went back to that quite a bit. Those are really very brief vignettes.”

Then there are the vignettes he didn’t even realize were influencing him until he was well into his novel: “Basically, this book is Frog and Toad for adults.”

“I love those stories,” Nadelson said of the Arnold Lobel classics. “I loved them as a kid and then I got to read them to my kiddo when they were young, and I think there’s something about that, the timelessness of those vignettes. Just these two characters isolated in their relationship.”

Author event

• What: Scott Nadelson and Matt Young discuss their novels, Nadelson’s Trust Me and Young’s End of Active Service.
• When: 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 4
• Where: Powell’s Books, 1005 W. Burnside St., Portland