The Bell(s) of St. Alban’s

Robert Finch has published eight collections of essays, most recently The Outer Beach: A Thousand-Mile Walk on Cape Cod’s Atlantic Shore (Norton, 2017), and is coeditor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing (Norton, 2002). Since 2005 he has broadcast a weekly radio essay, “A Cape Cod Notebook,” on WCAI, the local NPR station in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. Finch is the author of Summers in Squid Tickle, forthcoming from W. W. Norton, in which “The Bell(s) of St. Alban’s” appears in somewhat different form.