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A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Cora’s Kitchen, The Equivalents, Lessons in Chemistry and Carving Out a Life Less Ordinary

August 12, 2023 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

If I knew the journey I’d be on once I opened the copy of Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry that my mom sent to me, I would have started reading it sooner. What I didn’t foresee is how Elizabeth Zott’s forceful way of being herself would lead me to the creative community of Maggie Doherty’s The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, which evolved naturally into reading Kimberly Garrett Brown’s Cora’s Kitchen, a book by someone I love. I didn’t know how much I’d learn about the feminist struggle or the reminders I’d find about what it takes to create and protect a creative life. It’s been an excellent journey and I’d love to share with you the highlights.

Elizabeth Zott and the Force of Will

lessons in chemistry - bonnie garmusThe hero of Lessons in Chemistry, Elizabeth Zott, is brilliant, accomplished, and under-recognized chemist in early 1960s America. While she has a deep understanding of chemistry, she is seemingly blind to a society that is trying to limit her from all angles—even though she brutally experiences those limitations over and over. I loved her hardheadedness (maybe my mom was trying to tell me something?) and the book was an all-too-familiar reminder of how many of the feminist (pronounced “women are people too, equally”) struggles of then still occur now. The story is engaging but this was not my favorite of these three books, I think in a lot of ways because while Zott stumbled her way to a better life by speaking to women’s intellect, marrying chemistry and cooking, and there were some happy triumphs, Garmus couldn’t rewrite the realities of society as a whole—sexist realities I’m still impatient to see resolved.

Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, Tillie Olsen and the Creative Life

the equivalents - maggie dohertyThe Equivalents was the perfect followup to Lessons in Chemistry because it’s a nonfictional account of women’s experiences during the same era. For example, I learned by reading this book that (the fictional) Zott filled much the same role as Betty Friedan when she published The Feminine Mystique, prompting women to see that the oppression they felt was part of a larger pattern. But I also read this book for the creative community—something that grew here from something called the Radcliffe Institute, an entity that was created for extraordinary women to take time away from their household duties and get back to the intellectual and artistic pursuits they may have abandoned. The spine of this narrative is the (pre-existing) friendship between Sexton and Kumin, two poets, mothers, and wives and how they navigated their complicated friendship while building a sustaining creative community with each other and others at Radcliffe.

Of particular interest to me about this book was the role of Tillie Olsen, a working class writer who tested the limits of what the Radcliffe Institute could do. Because she was a main source of income for her family (which had no generational wealth) and lived on another coast, she wasn’t really what the Institute was set up to support. But her friends helped her find her way in and she advocated for writers like her from the inside. I’m thinking a lot right now about the ways class can be a barrier to a creative career and it was helpful to me to see the ways Olsen challenged that (and the ways she couldn’t). Along with reinvigorating her own career (that had fallen prey to the need to feed herself and her family), she was especially interested in championing the work of women of color, another group that was not necessarily at the top of mind for the Institute. I also loved reading about how Olsen’s own marriage was more equal, with two creatives trying to support each other while getting by (an experience that mirrors my own).

There was something about the way the women’s struggles were positioned in The Equivalents that was easier for me to exist with. I think part of this is that I could see particular progress in each of their real lives and think about how that might be applied to now. Halfway through this book I remembered that I’d once dreamed of setting up a creative colony or residency of sorts and it’s all I can think of since. I don’t have the funds but I have the passion and I know what even a week away at a residency like Centrum (deadline for application on Tuesday!) can do for a creative person, particularly one with family and work responsibilities.

Cora James and the Complexities of Patronage

coras kitchen - kimberly garrett brownBecause women of color were really the ones with the least access to something like the Radcliffe Institute, I reached for Cora’s Kitchen next. I own this book because I went to school with the author and because we’ve kept up a friendship (although often too distant) ever since. I remember Kim describing the general idea of this book to me at a bar in D.C. during AWP in 2011 as I wept over my grandmother’s death that morning and Kim continued to pour me amazing wine. Although I saw her again at AWP in Seattle this year, I’ve had her book on my shelf for much longer than that and it was a joy to finally have the right occasion to open it.

Cora James is a Black mother and wife in Harlem in 1928. She works at a library and has an epistolary relationship with Langston Hughes, but she doesn’t really have time to fulfill her own creative dreams. Then she takes over her cousin’s job for a bit of time (because her cousin was beaten terribly by her husband) so her cousin won’t lose her job. What Cora finds during this time as a cook in a white household changes her life. The work is more menial but less constant and she is suddenly free to write for part of the day. The racial politics of the household are complicated and Cora makes an unexpected friend. Eventually Cora even finds a patron, someone who has the power to lift the burdens of running a family and a household (a burden her musician husband is not interested in sharing). The Awakening plays an important role in this book as Cora is also reflecting on literary models of women freeing themselves.

I won’t tell you more about what happens in the book because it’s beautifully complex and I’d spoil it by trying to reduce it. What I will say is there are moments I was afraid some of Cora’s relationships would be a crutch or that she’d fall into clichés, but Brown deftly navigates all of this, giving Cora the power and intelligence to create a life less ordinary for herself, despite the limitations of racism, sexism, and class.

Three Good Books, One Big Message

I guess I’m trying to work something out for myself. While I’m able to sign my own mortgage or get a credit card that’s not in my husband’s name, I still encounter sexism every day. While I have a very supportive partner with whom I can balance a family and the idea of creative lives for both of us, there’s never enough time or money to really dig into what we could be. While I’ve been grateful for the conversations about race that were pushed to the forefront during the pandemic, I’m devastated about how far we haven’t come there either. Wheel of progress long, etc. I am impatient for better. For women, for creatives, for people of color, and most of all for those of us who fall into more than one of those categories. I’m grateful to Brown, Doherty, and Garmus for reminding me I am not alone in my impatience and that I need to find ways to do more for myself and for others, when I can.

What are you doing to sustain a creative life? How do you keep your friends close? How do you pay for it? How are you helping others? Please inspire me in the comments.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada

Jami Nakamura Lin Re-imagines Memoir in The Night Parade

July 15, 2023 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Confession time. I am so indoctrinated into the Western way of storytelling with its Aristotelian plot arc that I forget I’m always looking for the next conflict and how that will get resolved. So when a book comes up that makes me fundamentally rethink that form AND it’s superbly written… well, let’s just say that reading The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir by Jami Nakamura Lin was a deeply pleasurable education. To say that the memoir envelops stories about bipolar disorder, childbearing, and losing a parent to cancer feels reductive, because the book is so much more expansive than any other memoir I’ve read on any of these subjects. It’s a beautiful book that’s been upending my thinking ever since I first opened it last weekend.

Subverting the Expectations of Form

“I choose kishōtenketsu, the Japanese version of the four-part narrative structure that flows from Chinese poetry. I need something. I have too much story and not enough shape. I overflow my banks.” – Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade

Throwing a literary form on a writing project can be a good way for a writer to organize themself and to kick-start their thinking. To see what is and is not working. It can also turn into a gimmick where they’re shaping the work to fit the form rather than finding the right form for the work. Instead, Lin wields form in The Night Parade as a tool to both unlock the narrative and to rethink assumptions.

I can’t speak to the kishōtenketsu form Lin uses (which I have no experience with), but I can tell you that the way she applies this structure feels natural and compelling. Which is to say the form definitely supports the work rather than the other way around. Lin explains each of the four parts as we encounter them in the book (in a similar gentle way to the quote above) which gives entry to those of us with little experience with Japanese literature. What worked best about this for me (among many things) was that she immediately subverted my expectations—I didn’t realize the weight that expecting the next conflict (as in the Aristotelian model) carries. Because I knew from the outset that this book is different, I was free to float along on the journey Lin is taking us on.

I wrote to a friend this weekend that, for a reality TV aficionado, The Night Parade is to the Great British Bake-off what most books are to Making the Cut. That itself is reductive, but it starts to hint at the gentle layers one can enjoy in a story when unnecessary drama is stripped away.

When the Art of Storytelling is the Story

“Each time you tell a story, you can manage the tale to fit your needs. You can gauge the audience’s reactions, alter the form or the tense or the point of view. With a little maneuvering, a little emphasis here and a little de-emphasis there, you can make an ending seem happier.” – Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade

Lin is not only a master storyteller, the fact that she’s telling a story also becomes an important part of the writing. Throughout the book she inserts small breaks with the fourth wall, pulling back from the narrative enough to remind us that she is structuring this story and how. In lesser hands this could feel jarring. In The Night Parade it feels honest, like Lin is acknowledging how artificial our constructs are and bringing us in on the making so that we can see the nuances in the choices she’s making.

For a writer, this book is pure heaven because those moments are like the best conversations you’ve ever had with a really great editor. If you are a reader who doesn’t write, I think you will also enjoy these opportunities to learn more about the art of storytelling.

“She: a distancing. She: a way to get close. I’ve tried to tell this story so many times, but when I use I—when the girl is me—the story sputters in my mouth. Becomes too big or to small or too askew. It is wrong. I promise I am not telling this story like this to keep you away. I want to invite you in, the only way I know how.” – Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade

The Mythologies We Inhabit

Lin bases each chapter of The Night Parade around a character from Japanese, Okinawan, or Taiwanese (the three strands of her geneology) folklore and then gently weaves the story around these tropes, forming juxtapositions it could take many re-readings to fully unpack.

“You are drawn to these myths because they change. Unlike static texts, folklore, legends, and oral histories are living tales that transmogrify with each subsequent retelling. We understand and understand again based on contemporary lenses and frameworks.” – Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade

I loved that these mythologies existed fully enough in each section to function as their own stories. I imagine this is because Lin was learning them as she was writing and researching this book, but it also helped this reader more fully see the parallels between the mythologies and the family stories. I loved learning more about each of these characters and there were times I felt glimmers of understanding bits of what I had missed in reading about characters like these in the works of Sayaka Murata and Isabel Yap.

Humility is Underrated

Maybe it’s the gentleness of the form, the way that it made conflict feel secondary to experience, but The Night Parade felt like a deeply humble book. Don’t get me wrong, it takes a certain amount of ego for any writer to sit down and decide that their work belongs on the page, let alone that their life story is a story worthy of sharing. But “ego” doesn’t have to be pejorative. While this is Lin’s story and she fully embodies the narrative with her experiences an her analysis, she has also very carefully worked beyond herself to tell a larger story.

For example, Lin recounts the night of a teenage suicide attempt that got her hospitalized (one of the few times she goes deep into the more dramatic side of being bipolar) but she also includes nods to what the night may have done to her younger sisters. Rather than a blood-on-the-page recounting of individual trauma, Lin’s stories always exist in context—in the context of the reader, the context of her family, and the context of a world that is, in general, larger than each of us individuals.

I want to spend thousands of words describing the threads of this book to you—the strands of miscarriage, pregnancy, parenthood, childhood, a dying parent, exploring your roots in a culture that wants us all to blend—but I wouldn’t do as good of a job as Lin does and if you thought I was, you’d be robbed of the true beauty of reading this book for yourself. Trust me. When I tried to explain to my husband how much I loved this book I just cried all over our couch.

The Night Parade isn’t released until October, but you can pre-order it now. Meanwhile, I’ll be looking around for other things Lin has written, because I want more of her voice in my life.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada

Girl, Interrupted or Mother, Interruptible? Reading My Body and The Poetics of Wrongness

May 20, 2023 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In the days leading up to Mother’s Day I treated myself to extra reading time, time I spent with two books that helped me think more deeply about the female experience: My Body by Emily Ratajkowski and The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker. While I picked them up in an effort to shorten my (usually less beloved) non-fiction to-read pile, reading these two books in sequence enriched my experience of both and my experience of Mother’s Day, my manuscript, and the ways I want to move in the world going forward.

My Body by Emily Ratajkowski

Before I get into this excellent book, I want to share with you why the title makes me giggle happily. When my son was in preschool, he came home with the words “my body” to express his personhood. If he didn’t want to be touched or touched in a certain way, “my body” implied his ownership of himself. If he wanted to show off, he could say “my body” and smile and I’d smile right back at this most beautiful creature. My husband and I have carried the phrase forward as a loving goof about that second use case but it also serves as a reminder to us that he does own that little body. And we own ours, even if we never had the same language to express it. We’re in awe of that kid and in awe of this age of talking more clearly about our bodies in the world.

Ratajkowski thoughtfully expresses the same duality of self containment and observed self in the essays in My Body. A model and actor who spent significant parts of her early career as an Instagram influencer, Ratajkowski is very aware of beauty—what it means to be beautiful as well as what it means to use that beauty as currency. The essays explore everything from parental expectations to sexual assault to living an Instagrammable life on someone else’s dime.

What I liked most about this book, though, is how layered and nuanced Ratajkowski’s writing is. She’s beautiful and aware of (and honest about) the best and worst of that. She’s empowered in her body and also (unfortunately) experiences the limits of that power in a patriarchal society. She’s doing her best to be strong in the world and also one (at times very young) girl with no one looking out for her.

I’m trying to pick a favorite essay, but I can’t. I just know that I’ll be returning to this book again and again as I write about girls who are trying to find their ways in the world even when society feels like it’s working against them.

The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker

the poetics of wrongness-rachel zuckerThe Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker was referenced over and over at AWP this year, so I ordered it and added to the to-read pile in the middle of my office floor. But something called to me about this book so I lifted it from that messy stack of somedays just after finishing My Body. The title essay is incredibly good—another instance of layered, nuanced thought that is worth reading and reading and reading. But what I loved most about this book was reading”Why She Could Not Write a Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood,” especially since I read it in the wee hours of Mother’s Day as I was hoping my son would not wake up quite yet.

“It was thirteen days before she was supposed to deliver a lecture called ‘The Poetics of Motherhood’ at the Portland Literary Arts Center, and she had not written it. She had written parts of it in her head and she had written notes on small pieces of paper that she had misplaced somewhere in the apartment. She was even teaching a class in which she had delivered four mini-lectures in the first four weeks of the semester in preparation to write this lecture, but she had not written the lecture.” – The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker

The essay goes on to detail the millions of things Zucker is doing instead of writing the intended lecture, all while trying to write the lecture. She invites a former student over to help her write the lecture and instead they write a list of all the things she needs to do before writing the lecture. She realizes she needs to triage but her son needs her because he’s trying to do too much so she takes the time to teach him about triage and helps him get through part of his list. She consults writers she would like to lecture about and she tries to get away to think but a myriad of life experiences keep intervening. What never manages to prioritize in the triage is writing the lecture. Which is to say that reading this essay is like being a mother. Progress is being made all the time, but not always toward what you wanted to finish. Needs arise all the time, and you have to figure out how to keep everyone alive. Help is available but the pile is still too big. And everything is interruptible. ALL THE TIME.

looking up through chestnut leavesThis interrupted, all-over-the-place essay is of course very artfully structured to achieve this feeling, and there are nuggets of information in it about specific poets and their experiences as mothers. But most of all this piece is incredibly effective. At the end I felt seen and also wondered how mothers (or involved parents of any gender) manage to create anything at all for about two decades in the middle of their “most productive” years. I read whole sections of it to my husband that morning because he’s also an artist serving as a caregiver (and felt myself growing increasingly manic as the work piled up). The essay made me think about the choices we’re making and the choices that are being made for us. It made me remember that part of the reason I felt like I could write at all during my cherished Saturday morning writing time this weekend was because I had spent many hours during the week reading and lying in the grass staring up at the chestnut leaves expanding over my head.

I don’t have a point except that I want to thrust this essay into the hands of all the creative caregivers I know and say “you’re doing great. If you had time to write it all down you might realize just how much you really are accomplishing. Even if none of it is what you set out to do.”

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada

Immersing Myself in Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun

May 13, 2023 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

cover of black sun by rebecca roanhorseFantasy has never been my go-to genre. While I deeply respect the massive creativity that goes into building a strong fantasy world, my own brain doesn’t work that way and I often find fantastic novels hard to engage with—to surrender to. So when I say that I loved Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse with my whole heart, I mean this book leapt over all my fences, grabbed me by the hand, and dragged me (wonderfully) into a richly-imagined world I could not get enough of.

Fantastically American Mythology

In her end notes, Roanhorse describes her own love of fantasy and how there’s remarkably little of it written about the Americas. So she wrote the book she wanted to read. I wish I knew enough about the mythology and folklore of the pre-Columbian Americas to draw direct comparisons between the book and specific tribes, but also I know that Roanhorse took creative liberties in making her own world. The fragments I did recognize—the importance of the sun and crows—put me in mind of the shelves of kachina dolls my mom has in her home, gorgeous representations of immortal beings. So, for instance, when one character wears a cape fashioned from the feathers of a gigantic crow, I had a jumping off point. When Roanhorse describes the regalia and mask of the sun priest, I know enough to take my imagination farther than I normally would and try to soak up the details on the page so I can match the vision she has. An experience totally worth the effort. The various clans, religions, and locations in this book very much became real for me and I had so much trouble putting the book down (ask my kid).

Vivid Characters and a Compelling Plot

The opening scene of this book is visceral. Serapio’s mother is cutting her young son’s body and exposing his eyes to the sun to make him into a vessel for a god. As the mother of a young boy, it was a lot, but it was also richly described and layered enough to be fascinating. This was not gratuitous violence, this was the determined act of a woman trying to change the destiny of her people.

Other characters are equally interesting and nuanced. Naranpa, the sun priest, is a woman from “the wrong side of the tracks” grappling with some fascinating “palace intrigue” while trying to alter the relationship of the priesthood to the population entire. And Xiala, a drunk ship’s captain from a matriarchal culture that may or may not eat their lovers, is the hope on which Serapio’s plan hinges. There are also many side characters—including two nonbinary characters (it took me longer than it should have to get used to the “xe/xir” pronouns)—that complete and complicate this world, each with a story and a motivation interesting enough to earn them a place in the book.

Black Sun is a page turner in the best of ways as Roanhorse takes us from scene to scene in alternating locations from the point of view of alternating characters as the story weaves towards its conclusion. I had the pleasure of being stuck on a train with this book. It was thicker than I would usually carry downtown with me, but I couldn’t part with it. By the time I reached my destination I’d read more than 60 pages and I read another 40 on the way home. I also stayed up late reading because I wanted so badly to know what happens next.

Of course more happens than I can know at this minute because this is the first book of a trilogy. I’m holding off on buying the second book because the third won’t be out until next year and I want to pace myself. But you know if I’m planning my book buying for the next year around a series…it’s really fucking good.

For my friends and family who are fantasy readers and writers (hi Natasha, Roxana, and Nikki!) and interested in pre-Columbian history (hi Tosh and Dad!)—check out Black Sun, I really think you’ll love it as much as I did.

Filed Under: Books, Latin America

What I’m Reading When I Should Be Writing (And Why)

April 22, 2023 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

There are many different ways to avoid writing, even (sometimes especially) when the project is hot and there is nothing standing between you and the few luscious hours you could spend working on your book. I like to tell myself that I procrastinate in these times because I’m trying to stoke that fire even higher—make the writing irresistible so I can really dig in. The likelihood, though, is that I’m spending hours reading or on Twitter because I’m anxious that whoever I am on that day won’t live up to the work I need to do. Which is why I was really pleased to discover that the past few books I’ve read have actually been feeding my work—that even while I thought I was reading for pleasure there was some part of my brain that was actually preparing to get back down to work. Let me tell you about what I learned from Hunger Heart by Karen Fastrup, The Afflictions by Vikram Paralkar, I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai, and The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka and how I plan to apply these lessons to my current work in progress.

The Space of Autofiction in Hunger Heart

hunger heart cover imageI’m slow to adopt new ideas so when I started reading about autofiction (telling a story that is close to your real life using fictionalized details) I mashed it together with metafiction in my head and moved on because it just didn’t feel like where my creative energy was at. But reading Hunger Heart definitely opened my eyes to what autofiction can do. Fastrup uses a “fictional” character to delve into a period of her life when she was in and out of mental institutions with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. The book is interesting (not just because the Danish health system is so much more humane than the American one) and well written and I can see how allowing herself to tell what is essentially a memoir in a fictional way really freed her as a storyteller. She always had the option, of course, of telling the true details about her life in her book, but autofiction lets her streamline events and change the surrounding characters enough so that the book flows well and so that she’s putting the (interesting and sometimes uncomfortable) spotlight on herself rather than her then boyfriend or kids.

In my own book, Naked Driving to the Witches’ Graveyard, I’m currently writing about what it was like to be a teenager in the town I grew up in. None of the characters are me but they aren’t not me either, and I’ve been wondering as I write just how fictional I have to get with the whole thing. There are many decisions to be made still, but I appreciated seeing this example of how well autofiction allowed Hunger Heart to get to the heart of the story even if the truth was a little fuzzy.

The Structure of The Afflictions

cover of The AfflictionsAll the blurbs on Vikram Paralkar’s The Afflictions reference Borges because, I think, the story takes place in a library where a librarian is introducing a visitor to a series of tomes on (imagined) afflictions. In truth, though, the book has a lot more in common with Calvino’s Invisible Cities in the way it anchors back to that conversation with the librarian at intervals while exploring lists of these afflictions in between as Invisible Cities returns again and again to the conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. This got me thinking about narrative structure because no one has upended my expectations about structure quite as much as Calvino.

I’ve wrestled with the structure for Naked Driving to the Witches’ Graveyard a lot (sometimes drawing narrative maps as yet another procrastination tool—though a productive one). After a year and a half of writing and 32,000 words, the flow of the first section (of three) is pretty solid as one chapter explores the devolution of relationships over a year and then individual stories start to emerge. I have no idea how sections two and three will be structured, but I’m sure they’ll tell me eventually. It’s a very different book than Paralkar’s, but I’m grateful to him for reminding me that my structural obsession is a valid one.

Memory and Nostalgia in I Have Some Questions for You

cover of i have some questions for youI’d actually been saving back I Have Some Questions for You because I love Makkai’s work and I wanted to give myself time to really enjoy the book. But we went away to Whidbey Island last week and it was the most compelling read I could take with me (and I ate it all up). This book is what prompted this blog post, honestly, because there was a lot I learned from this book. Set just before and during the pandemic, the action also includes significant portions of memory as the narrator, Bodie, reflects on the murder of her roommate while they were at boarding school in the 1990s. Bodie is revisiting that school as a teacher and reconsidering what may have actually happened.

Naked Driving to the Witches’ Graveyard is also set in the 1990s, a time that a lot of women my age are reconsidering in the wake of the #MeToo movement. At first Makkai’s references to that time were so spot-on that I got the “does my book even matter” blues. Her references continued to be spot-on but my anxious brain was soon immersed enough in the story that my creative brain could remember that there’s room for all kinds of books and that while I might miss this wave of 1990s nostalgia in the publishing world, that doesn’t mean my book won’t be relevant—whenever I’ve actually taken the time to finish it. There are many other interesting things in how Makkai handles the memories and misconceptions her characters carry that warrant a read of your own. My own approach (for the moment) is to have a gently retrospective voice with all of the action set in the past which allows me to retroactively re-frame some of the thinking even while the characters experience things as they were. Check out this video below for a little insight into what my generation is trying to process around #MeToo.

.@BrookeShields talks to Drew about the "Me Too" movement and being sexualized in Hollywood at a young age.

Watch #PrettyBaby: Brooke Shields now on @hulu. pic.twitter.com/F2Y9scpEnM

— The Drew Barrymore Show (@DrewBarrymoreTV) April 11, 2023

A Chorus of The Swimmers

cover of the swimmersI randomly picked The Swimmers from my to-read pile after I Have Some Questions for You because I’ve loved Otsuka’s other books. What I did not know was that she was working directly with something I’ve been experimenting with for this book (despite great fear)—the choral voice. The Swimmers explores the collective experience of a group of swimmers at a public pool from a “we” point of view.

“Most days, at the pool, we are able to leave our troubles on land behind. Failed painters become elegant brushstrokers. Untenured professors slice, sharklike, through the water, with breathtaking speed. The newly divorced HR manager grabs a faded red Styrofoam board and kicks with impunity.” – The Swimmers, Julie Otsuka

I loved the specificity here and the way Otsuka overlaps multiple individuals in this chorus without losing the particularities of each. The characters recur and we get to know them, somewhat, as individuals, though what is most important (from what I have read so far) is this shared experience.

Makkai did something similar in I Have Some Questions for You where she used the specific details of crimes against women to create an experience of the multiplicity as one greater event.

“It doesn’t matter which story.

Let’s say it was the one where the young actresses said yes to a pool party and didn’t know.

Or no, let’s say it was the one where the rugby team covered up for the girl’s death and the school covered for the rugby team.

Actually it was the one where the therapist spent years grooming her. It was the one where the senator, then a promising teenager, shoved his dick in the girl’s face. She was also a promising teenager. It was the one where the billionaire pushed the woman into the phone booth, but no one believed her.” – Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You

This has the effect of reinforcing the terrible volume and banality that we’ve allowed these events to accrue. This agglomeration is an effect I am working with in my own book, Naked Driving to the Witches’ Graveyard, albeit for different reasons.

“We’ve traveled far enough now, in distance (for those of us who could leave) and time (for all of us) that the memories of who we were and why are starting to fade from everything but our yearbooks, gathered dusty in shelves and dank basements. Red, black, and white covers full of pages of mostly black and white photos. All of these rural-beautiful faces, posed gauzy (those who could afford it) in the outfits they loved best. Each one a mother’s child longing to be loved, remembered. But that one raped our friend and that one ran someone over, that one was shot in the face by drug dealers out of state, that one shot by a man on her doorstep because she was nice to him. That one made it to Broadway and that one is a mom who never left town. That one joined the CIA, allegedly. One sold pharmaceuticals and another played pro ball. Astrophysicists, exchange students, another whose weird face forever condemned him to outsider. The special ed kids we never saw except in a hospital hallway thirty years later when our parents were dying. Missing from the “we made it together” photo of those who attended all twelve years was the kid who died of cancer, the one hounded out of school for being gay, the girl killed by a moose. Those who stayed versus those who left, a decision made for us based on the size of our parents’ worlds. Some came to the city. Some slipped into the hills, only to be seen again at their infant’s funeral. So many now untraceable, nicknames lost to obituaries of whole families who died young, despite their Scandinavian heritage. Most of these faces are lost to memory. All of us repeating archetypes who thought ourselves individual.” – Isla McKetta, Naked Driving to the Witches’ Graveyard

What are you reading now? How is it feeding your writing? Tell me everything in the comments below.

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My Books

Polska, 1994

Polska 1994

Clear Out the Static in Your Attic

Clear Out the Static in Your Attic_cover

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What I’m Reading

Isla's bookshelf: currently-reading

Birds of America
Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
by Jonathan Lethem
The Souls of Black Folk
The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois
Bomb: The Author Interviews
Bomb: The Author Interviews
by BOMB Magazine
On Writing
On Writing
by Jorge Luis Borges

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