If you’ve read my recent posts, you know I’m asking a lot of questions right now, trying to find the next steps in my path as I wonder about the world we’ve built. As I’ve been reading and touching base with other people these past few weeks, though, I’m realizing how essential questioning is to my worldview, how much respect I have for people who ask big questions, and how little patience I have for people who ask few. This week I’m reflecting on what that means in Fahrenheit 451, A Sorceress Comes to Call, A Burning, and The Bat-Poet.

Good and Evil in A Sorceress Comes to Call

I have no interest in dogging on books that make lots of people happy but just aren’t my bag. But am interested in learning from these books, as something can be learned from anything. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher was one of those books for me. Loaned to me by a beloved relative, I read the book even after I figured out I was the wrong reader, because I was interested in why the book didn’t work for me.

I realized that my main rub was with the way the titular character and her daughter were portrayed, in that one was a perpetrator and the other a victim. Simply that. They were both effectively written as such and the pacing was solid, but I wanted more layers in each of them. More nuance to the story. I wanted to be able to ask why they were acting the way they were and to find interesting back stories therein.

Sometimes I worry I can dig too deep, look for too many reasons why people are the way they are, to the point that excuses can be made for anything. This is something I explore in my most recent book, Naked Driving to the Witches’ Graveyard (working title as I’m looking for a publisher) as consider what it’s like to grow up in an environment where all ideas are weighed and accepted, and the hurts that can have. Like the fact that my husband asked me what it was like to grow up near the Aryan Nation in Hayden Lake, Idaho (he was watching The Order last night) and all I could say was, “We didn’t agree with them, but we respected their right to their own worldview.”

While I wanted to know more about the characters in A Sorceress Comes to Call and to see some nuance in their humanity, there was nothing that was going to make me excuse the actions of the sorceress. Or was there?

Archetypes in A Burning

Speaking of political violence, which is on a lot of our minds lately, I found a copy of A Burning by Megha Majumdar at the Little Free Library and dove right in. I’m not quite done with this one but it was interesting to feel how differently I related to the characters in this story of a young woman (Jivan) in India who is imprisoned for a terrorist act she did not commit.

I was particularly interested in how I accepted Majumdar’s portrayal of PT Sir, Jivan’s once PE teacher, as he finds meaning and power in a fringe political party. Where I questioned myself while reading this book was that these characters are as much archetypes as those in A Sorceress Comes to Call. But I think the difference is that Mamjudar uses this as a tool to shift the weight of the story from the individuals (who do have interesting reasons for what they do) to the society (which is richly detailed in the ways it fails its citizens, especially the non-Hindu ones).

I’m not sure yet that A Burning is asking a question. But it is definitely exploring the layers of why and how, and it’s a compelling read during this time of the rise of Modi.

Fahrenheit 451 and the Mirrors of Today

Some dystopias are fictional and I got the chance to revisit this classic by Ray Bradbury recently as my 10-year-old son picked it out as one of his birthday books. I can tell he’s exploring someone’s canon of great books because he checked Frankenstein out from the school library more than ten times last year (and it’s in our home again already this year—though I have offered to buy him a copy). He struggled in the beginning as he couldn’t tell what was metaphor and what was a mapping of an unfamiliar world (someday he’ll be the book reviewer, I tell ya), but I think we were both enriched by reading this book (and by watching the Simpson’s Treehouse of Terror takeoff, though picturing Montag as Homer did shift things a bit for me).

At first I was drawn in by the uncanniness of the “parlors” with their “families” of talking heads that fill the citizens’ brains with pablum only gently personalized with their names. I related to this both from an addiction to SimCity standpoint and also because I’m starting to work more with AI in my freelance life. Both of which make me think about how simultaneously engaging and shallow these digital worlds are.

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam. Even fireworks, for all their prettiness, come from the chemistry of the earth. Yet somehow we think we can grow, feeding on flowers and fireworks, without completing the cycle back to reality.” – Faber in Fahrenheit 451

In all, there are so, so many things in this book that reflect on now. The one that sticks with me, because we can all feel it coming, can’t we? is the war. Like Granger says about the Phoenix:

“Every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we’ll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them.”

Asking Questions Now

I was at a reading this week where poet and translator Jake Syersak was reflecting on the work of Moroccan poet Tahar Ben Jelloun who was imprisoned during the 1960s. Syersak said something about how the magazine that Ben Jelloun had made with friends, the one that the government hated so much that it outlawed the magazine and chased down all the contributors. Syersak spoke of the power of that and of the power of the uncertainty literature creates. He talked about people who want us to be certain and how they want to shape what we are certain about. I could only think of the “family” Bradbury described and how the noise of the questions in my head is one million times better than the noise they are creating trying to make the questions stop (Harrison Bergeron-style).

“When [my grandfather] died, I suddenly realized wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again…He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.” – Granger in Fahrenheit 451

Essential Creativity in The Bat Poet

The book that rounds out the puzzle in my brain today is The Bat-Poet by Randall Jerrell, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. This simple story of a bat who is finding ways to himself through writing came to me by recommendation of Maya Jewell Zeller and I read the whole thing aloud to my family the day it arrived.

The lesson I carry from this book is the nascence of the bat’s voice and how he persists, even as the mockingbird tries to center himself in any attention and to fill the air with his own thoughts (much like the “family”). The bat goes on and on and gets better the more he creates.

“The trouble isn’t making poems, the trouble’s finding somebody that will listen to them.” – The Bat-Poet in The Bat-Poet

For now, like Montag in Fahrenheit 451, I’ll be looking for a glass of milk, an apple, a pear. “Some sign that the immense world would accept him and give him the long time he needed to think all the things that must be thought.” These questions and thoughts are the beginning of my work, the art I am creating. What will you build?

If you want to explore any of these books, pick up a copy of A Sorceress Comes to Call, A Burning, Fahrenheit 451, or The Bat-Poet from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.

It all started with a joke. My family and I were wandering around the neighborhood, touring nearby construction sites to check on our growing city, and I began describing to my son how there used to be a game where you could build a whole city and then set it aflame. Better yet, you could attack it with monsters. He was entranced and I realized how much I had loved playing SimCity all those years ago. He pestered us for over a week before I investigated in earnest, only to find that I could not get the original game for him. I’m shy of installing apps (as someone who used to work for one), so it took a couple more days before I realized SimCity BuildIt would have many of the same features and I could still keep his garden walled enough. So we downloaded it for him. And for me. Just for fun.

A week later (has it been two? oh God it’s been two) and I’m fully addicted. He’s still only allowed to play it during his usual screen time, but I’m on level 28 and I’m giving significant amounts of my free time to organizing this fictional city and producing goods to keep my people funded and fed. But somewhere in between I have to wait as more nails are produced, so I picked up Barkskins by Annie Proulx. I’ve now developed the habit of interspersing the two—setting my city up as far as I can go and then picking up the book to read another short chapter. But what’s truly weird is the way the two go together.

Barkskins, a Family Lumber Empire, and Paving the Way for a Nation

I can’t recall where I read about Barkskins, but as the daughter of a forester, the idea of reading about how timber has shaped our nation appealed to me. The book follows two (entwined, at times) families, one Mi’kmaw and one French from 1693 until almost the present day (though I haven’t reached actual nationhood for either the U.S. or Canada) as settlers clear the newly “discovered” land, first for the value of the timber, then for the sake of clearing.

Proulx does a beautiful job of inhabiting all of her characters, both the good and the bad, and while there are some baddies in here, the world is rich enough to bypass the noble savage and manifest destiny tropes (though the patois the Native characters sometimes conversed in didn’t feel right). The characters can’t get past that last one, though, as they (Native and settler) clear more and more of the land, looking for profit or a better life.

“‘And God said replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and every living thing that moveth, and every green tree and herb.'” – Hitchbone in Barkskins by Annie Proulx

I learned a lot about early timber trade early in this book as one of the characters travels as far as China to capture a market in a niche he foresees. It boggled my modern mind how he could spend years, between the travel and waiting in country, in pursuit of one market. But it was fascinating to think about where different parts of the world were in terms of “progress,” both Europe and China having cleared large parts of their once virgin forests. I’ve learned about the various jobs loggers had and what happens when you start squaring logs rather than keeping them round for transport. Interesting to me because I come from a part of the world where log trucks loaded with with fully round logs with their bark still on are common.

“‘Take what we can get as soon as we can get it is what I say. I am not interested in fifty years hence as there is no need for concern. The forests are infinite and permanent.'” – Edward in Barkskins by Annie Proulx

While I haven’t finished the book yet (I have other commitments, i.e., these trains won’t dispatch themselves), I have gotten far enough into it where some people are starting to lament the change they are helping create. That in itself is interesting to me as I’m wondering a lot lately about the nature of progress and the role I want to play in it.

“‘Whitemen never see it was our work. For them hunt and fish is only to play.'” – Kuntaw in Barkskins by Annie Proulx

I’m also thinking a lot about our family forest. A project my dad manages but that the next generation is starting to get more involved in. I wonder which character I most resemble and whether I should send copies of this book to all the partners.

SimCity BuildIt and the Art of Productivity

“‘Men must change this land in order to live in it.'” – Rene in Barkskins by Annie Proulx

While I have qualms about whether more is always better in real life, I did not hesitate to mow down grass and trees to make my SimCity just as I wanted it to be. I committed to green power but still need to pollute with factories, sewage, and waste management for the city to function. I’ve built up to the edges and want more space to build more. I set aside the lovely parks I built so I could have more space for more houses (houses bring points and Simoleons that I can use to get more services for my people). Someday I’ll have enough space for both. Right? It’s not like I’ve gotten trapped in an infinite quest for more, bigger, better…

Strangely, when I visit other cities in the game it’s the small ones I’m attracted to. The towering skyscrapers all look the same (not literally, the game is more sophisticated than that) and my eyes glaze over them as I look for the gifts that sometimes pop up. It’s their sakura-lined pedestrian alleys that I dream of, not the towering masses of people. But cherry blossoms are expensive, so I travel and sell, travel and sell. At least I can indulge in how small the world feels as I can trade with cities named using all kinds of alphabets with just a tap of my finger.

I haven’t figured out how to specialize yet. I’m too busy trying to make all the bucks to finally catch up on my delinquent power, water, and sewer debt. Don’t even get me started on police and fire (yet alone education). This is something I’m thinking about for myself, too, as I’m trying to remember what I’m good at and what I actually want to do. We watched the movie Lee last night and Marion Cotillard’s character said to Lee Miller something along the lines of, “You get to figure out what you want to do from where you are now,” and I will probably play with those ideas in the coming weeks.

In the meantime I need to start building a healthy relationship with the game. The way I feel myself getting sucked in is interesting because I know all about gamification and I can see how the staggered production times, the multiple quests, the constant change are all designed to keep me there. And I am happily there a lot, including the one night I spent hours looking for a ladder on the global marketplace (I have vowed never to give them my actual dollars). I’ll have to pare back on the game soon or find a system of playing that lets me dip in and out. There are only so many weeks of summer and I want to see my family.

“‘They believe despoiling is the correct way.'” – Achille in Barkskins by Annie Proulx

One actual benefit to SimCity BuildIt is the limited production capacity. Between factories and commercial buildings, I can’t do everything at once. That’s helped remind me that I can’t do it in my daily life, either. I’ve gotten in the habit this summer of throwing myself at all the work so I can throw myself at family time and in reality I’m exhausted. This past week I started writing down the number of things I hope to accomplish each day. I either fill that quota or I don’t, but having some sort of marker makes the effort and the results tangible in a way that’s helping me pull back.

Yesterday I played outside in the hammock, at least. Today I’m going to let my son make his first app friend (me). This is the world we’re building, one block at a time.

If you want to know more about the role of timber in the “taming” of a continent, pick up a copy of Barkskins from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.

It’s no secret that I’m in the middle of an era of transformation. My husband and I started thinking about how to make a big change (and what that change might be) in January 2020. We were somewhat waylaid by a global pandemic and then general corporate upheaval. We started talking seriously again about change when I decided I’d had enough of that particular upheaval. But as much as I know what I actually want (a quiet life with my family somewhere with great community where my husband and I can both afford to be artists), I don’t know how to afford that. Which is a long way to say that Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín landed in my lap at a good time.

Village or Opportunity

In Brooklyn, Eilis is an intelligent young woman in post-war Ireland with very few prospects. Jobs are scarce and most of the energy of the young women in her village centers around getting married. Eilis is given the chance to move to Brooklyn where she encounters a whole new booming world. She has a job with the potential to move up, she has an education, there isn’t even (in the beginning) a marriage market to speak of. And there are exciting new goods to be bought for herself and her loved ones back home. All of her waking hours go to working or going to school, to the extent that I wondered how she would have time to build friendships or romantic relationships at all (I really was exhausted at times reading about the hours she kept, but also she didn’t have kids and I forget what that’s like).

It’s an interesting book because Eilis kind of floats through these experiences and even her choices feel more inevitable than chosen. But Tóibín does an excellent job of showing the juxtapositions between the two worlds and I really felt like I was with Eilis in many of her experiences (even the boat, ugh). I suppose the floating feeling mirrors the feeling of being trapped when we don’t see that there are paths we’re choosing between, consciously or not.

Slight spoilers incoming—if you don’t want to know, skip to the next heading. Eilis does manage to find a partner and then she’s called home to Ireland. The village she encounters suddenly shows what she’s been missing. She’s surrounded by community and a quieter life. There are even better job prospects than before. And Eilis has to choose which she wants.

What I See in Our Economy Now

The stock market is swinging high because corporate profits are high (in part) because layoffs are high. Everyone is being asked to do more with less. CEOs are doubling down on unproven technology (AI) because they see the potential for more profits and more cost savings. Those cost savings mean more layoffs.

It’s a squeeze. And it’s coming from all sides trying to get the most almighty dollars for someone, somewhere.

AI is a Bubble

Many AI projects I’ve seen are top-down demands rather than creative applications from the workers who could be working in partnership with the technology (and thus are best equipped to plan for implementation, if only they had the space to have a creative thought on how to do so). Don’t even get me started on the automated systems behind stock market bidding.

Diminishing Returns

Also, the potential wins are finite. The workers losing jobs won’t be in positions to buy the goods or services that keep our economic engine rolling. Nor do the white collar workers in the industries they were conditioned to covet want to suddenly become blue collar workers in completely other states, no matter how many jobs are opened up by the current administration ejecting the workers already doing those jobs. So the goods won’t get made, which is okay if no one can buy the goods. We won’t be able to import them, either, at least not at any price close to what we used to pay.

There is a diminishing return on the choices that are being made right now.

To Each His Own (At Our Peril)

It feels like things used to be different. Not in a hazy “heaven” sort of way, but in the idea that there was some collective responsibility. When a company was struggling financially, there were sometimes conversations about choices workers could make (reduced salary, etc.) to keep the company from having to lay people off. Now my friends tell me stories of highly profitable companies that are laying people off just to make the quarterly earnings report look that much better.

Fear Serves No One (Good)

This all strikes me as a bit desperate and short-sighted. At the same time I see workers who can afford it opting out of this extractive system to either make something of their own or wait and see what happens next.

What happens next is my big question. At some point, companies are going to need their best and brightest back in order to envision the creative possibilities that put them ahead of their competition. There was a glimmer of this in the middle of the pandemic when the gloom of the initial “what will even happen to the world” fears wore off and companies were willing to invest in growth through staffing up. So maybe this climate of desperation turns toward one of opportunity when this new global fear lifts a bit.

A Third Option

Still, I keep thinking there is opportunity to make something better now, not just for me and my family, but for all of us. We just need someone who can see what the next first step toward that is.

My son has a book called There Must Be More Than That! by Shinsuke Yoshitake that’s all about choices. At the end the mom offers the daughter two types of eggs and the girl blows up, “Not just boiled or fried! There are more ways to make an egg than that!” and then lists dozens of other options. I love this book with all my heart because it reminds me how much we narrow our lives by just choosing between what we’ve seen before.

I’m an artist. I’m usually good at looking things from new and unexpected angles. I haven’t cracked this one yet, but if you have ideas of how to build toward something better, I would love to hear them. Together we can make rolled eggs, scrambled eggs, an omelet, a painted egg, shakshuka, or even something no one has ever dreamed before. Even if we choose a boiled egg in the end, isn’t it better to at least imagine the possibilities?

If you want to learn more about either of these books, pick up a copy of Brooklyn or There Must Be More Than That! from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.

Is any identity more fraught with social expectation than motherhood? Our culture is as filled with images of gooey angelic perfection as it is with bitch queens who betray their children. My generation has put a special spin on the topic, doubling down on mothers who are aware of this duality and embrace the messy darkness (see Revolutionary Mothering and Nightbitch for a spectrum of how this is handled). There’s a freedom to talk about how hard it is to be a mother that humanizes the idols we’ve created, even if we’re not ready to let our own mothers off the pedestals yet. This week I read two books in the space of 24 hours that dove into this charged topic in ways that stretched and comforted me: Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki and It. Goes. So. Fast. by Mary Louise Kelly.

Woman No. 17 and Being the Mess You are Fighting

No one embraces and embodies the complexity better than Edan Lepucki, and Woman No. 17 delves deeper and with more nuance into the mother-child relationship than anything I’ve read in a long time. Motherhood is an obsession for Lepucki. From You’re Not Yet Like Me to California and Mothers Before, everything I’ve read of hers engages deeply with this topic from a wide variety of angles.

In Woman No. 17, Lepucki introduces a range of characters who are struggling with maternal bonds. Lady is a mom of a newly adult son and a toddler, both of whom she adores and both of whom she can’t get away from fast enough. Her own mother is only seen in retrospect, a woman so toxic Lady cut her out of her life except for a brief period of need during which Lady’s mother paid Lady’s lover (and father of her eldest son) to disappear. Lady hires a nanny, S, to care for her youngest while she writes a book that is supposed to be about her eldest son but is instead about her mother. S is a young artist who has decided to pose for the foreseeable future as a character similar to her own alcoholic mother while she explores various angles of motherhood through a myriad of artistic media.

“In those moments, I lost myself, forever and hallelujah, and it was like I was stepping back into the womb, tunneling farther away from that even, to before my mom had anyone but herself to fail.” Edan Lepucki – Woman No. 17

What got me about this book is how well Lepucki portrayed the duality of her characters’ desires. Lady wants to be with the husband she kicked out, while a part of her still craves being the person she was all those years ago with her ex. She’s fiercely protective of the normality of her disabled son and also looking for someone to blame for his disability. S wants to find herself in art by being literally anyone else. The list goes on.

“The thing Lady didn’t get, or the thing she’d forgotten, was that being a child was painful too. She was so wrapped up in losing Seth, in the treacheries of him growing up, that she couldn’t remember what it felt like to be the one on the other side. The burden of that. Sure, Seth had left her womb and never returned, but he was the one who had to do the leaving.” Edan Lepucki – Woman No. 17

What Lepucki captures here the torture of of thinking you should be one thing, living another, and not being sure of what you actually want in any of it. It’s a formula that works for any cultural expectation, but it’s especially charged (at least for me) when it comes to motherhood. For a variety of reasons, I don’t have the relationship I want with my mother (and it’s not an accident I was reading this book on her birthday). For a variety of reasons, I don’t see that changing. I am, however, actively working on my relationship with my son, and books like Woman No. 17 give me something to actively ping my own desires, actions, and expectations against, and I found hints of healing in the dysfunction because motherhood IS messy. Our expectations ARE unreasonable. And parenting IS hard. Sometimes just seeing the truth of that complexity makes it all easier to bear.

Read the book for your own messy parental relationships or just to experience a masterful portrayal of human ambiguity. There’s so much in here I did not describe. You’ll love it.

It. Goes. So. Fast.: The Year of No Do-Overs

I first heard of Mary Louise Kelly’s It. Goes. So. Fast.: The Year of No Do-Overs on the radio, duh, as NPR is often playing in my home and she is the much loved host of All Things Considered. I remember laughing at her anecdote about the school nurse calling her when she was on the tarmac in Iraq, insisting that she come and get her son. I remember also relating to the deep push-pull that inhabited her interview (and this book) between living for your children and living for yourself. That sounds selfish to me when I type it, and maybe that’s part of the problem as I’ve been trying for all these years to figure out how to be myself and a mother and an artist and a wife and sometimes Corporate Barbie. It’s a lot. It’s so much less, even, than Kelly is doing, and I loved having this insight into her world and her thought process.

“It is both a relief and a little disconcerting to realize that your kids are going to turn out the way they turn out, no matter what you do.” – Mary Louise Kelly, It. Goes. So. Fast.

The premise of the book is that she is trying to double down on being a present parent during the last year her eldest son will be at home. Her family seems loving, her children well supported, and still there is this tension of how impossible it is to get everything you want. I laughed with Kelly throughout this book, and I wept with her as well. Mostly I felt held, supported, guided, by a woman of my generation who is a bit farther down the parenting line than I am.

“This pain is the cracking of the walls as the room grows.” – Mary Louise Kelly, It. Goes. So. Fast.

It’s been a summer of wrestling around here where my son has been at home for three, camp-free weeks so far and I’m on a bit of a career hiatus while also doing freelance work that could take up most of my time. Each time I’ve been turned down for a job in the past few months (and in this market, I’ve been lucky to have as many interviews as I have), I’ve known that I’m lucky to get to spend that much extra time with him this summer, perhaps the last that he’ll awake with joy, ready to play Legos and “Let’s Make a Movie” in his bed (where we voice play everything from the ideation through the test screening and release of what’s sure to be Marvel’s next blockbuster). I love it.

And also I’ve stopped doing things that I used to do to take care of myself. Instead of the thirty minutes of yoga and Harper’s I used to allow myself in the middle of the day, I pack in one more round of edits so my mind can be free for play when I leave my office. But of course my mind isn’t free, because I allow myself no transitions and I’m simply tired when I get to him. I know better, but it’s hard to find the balance that lets me get done what I need to get done, take care of myself, and soak up every blessed minute of that sweet boy that I can right now. Kelly’s voice was like a balm to me and I was grateful to have saved this book for this time.

“Which choice would you be able to defend to a child? Which choice will allow your eighty-year-old self to sleep at night?” – Mary Louise Kelly, It. Goes. So. Fast.

I’d love to hear more about the complexities you’re navigating, whether in writing or in life, and what’s keeping you going (books or otherwise). Please leave a comment if you have a story or a book rec you want to share.

If you want to explore the complexity of parenting, pick up a copy of Woman No. 17 or It. Goes. So. Fast. from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.