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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

Why I No Longer Make Visual Art (A Love Letter to Ursula von Rydingsvard)

August 4, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I’d already given up on being a writer when I entered the University of Washington as an undergrad. There was something about deconstructing a text (which is all I thought English majors could do) that made me worry I’d learn to hate reading (the one thing that sustained me always) forever. But I was still a maker. And I needed to put that energy somewhere, so I became a sculpture major. I fucking loved it. Until I stopped.

Asking the Important Questions

I don’t think about drawing, painting, and sculpting much these days, but while wandering the Seattle Art Fair yesterday my artist husband gently nudged open the wound I didn’t want to acknowledge was there. It started with him mentioning that I never draw anymore, talking about how much he liked my drawing, then hinting that some people make work for the very sake of making (a revolutionary concept amidst what felt like the den of art as commerce), and as I shared with him how much I loved just the process of playing with materials, I could feel my hands making the gestures I used to make when sculpting things from clay. I showed him the part of his hip that I had shaped over and over again in object after object and we talked about how much I like textures and which ones.

Why I Stopped

Eventually we got around to talking about what made me stop. See I never cared about the end result. I could shape clay and plaster all day long. I could run a brush or my hands through thick, goopy paint. I could build furnaces and melt metal. I could do anything except finish a project. Because I didn’t care about finishing a project. I cared about the process of making it and the more I worked with the materials, the more I wanted to stay inside that world forever.

This is the photo I post of myself when I want to impress people. Because it is one of the times in my life I was most impressed with myself.

I organized other artists as the “cupola captain” as we melted iron in 100+ degree weather, and one of them got burned with molten metal because I wasn’t good enough, but it was okay because none of us knew what we were doing and we loved it. I gave constructive feedback and thrived off of the ideas and creative energy of those around me.

But we got to the end of the semester and I had no work to present. I had melted it all back down. And my professor suggested I go back up on the hill and try painting for a while. Which I understood, but which also broke my heart. So when scheduling art classes got hard the next quarter (and the university gently suggested I had more than enough credits to graduate already) I switched back to the sociology and political science degrees I’d nearly completed and got ‘er done.

I never made sculpture again.

The First Time I Quit

This wasn’t the first time my love for visual art had been thwarted. In the eighth grade I’d made a scratchboard picture of a KKK rally that was really good. A fellow student pulled it down off the board and tore it up. In the ensuing school meetings, he stressed that he’d been offended by the work (understandable) but (as much as I believe good art has every right to offend) offense had never been my point. I thought the image of white-clad men around a huge bonfire in the dark was beautiful. I knew the KKK was abhorrent and I never intended to celebrate them, but by making the work I felt like I was coming to understand something about humanity that I could not explain. I didn’t have the words then to explain any of my artistic intentions either or the ways art can and should be myriad, but I could walk away. And I did. In high school I tried art again and made some work that was meaningful to me, but nothing that pushed me (or anyone else for that matter).

About Ursula von Rydingsvard

One of the first things we saw at the Seattle Art Fair that I really connected with was a sculpture by Ursula von Rydingsvard. Better yet, Galerie Lelong also had some of her drawings—charcoal works on paper that she’d woven maroon textiles through and sewn roughly with black thread. I’ve seen (and loved) Ursula’s pieces all over the US, but this work on paper was new to me and spoke to a project that I’d been working on when my grandmother died so many years ago.

I’d read that some number of thousands of people had died in Africa from a preventable disease and I wanted to know what that many lives felt like in my body, so I made a painting and crisscrossed it with monofilament onto which I began tying French knots in red string. Because I lied earlier—I do still think about drawing, painting, and sculpting, and this was the first thing that had compelled me back to work. Each time I pierced the canvas to start a new knot it felt violent (and caused me physical pain because I’m not always careful about how I work). I never finished the piece (I’d rushed the underlying painting and it was bad) but I did feel what I’d needed to feel.

Through all the times my husband and I wandered in and out of the booths in the fair, he had been trying to tell me that more artists than I knew (if they could admit it) were really making their work for that feeling they had while creating. And that Ursula was unabashed in celebrating and focusing on her love for the materials.

When he said that, I felt the kind of opening in my body that you should always pay attention to—weepy grateful and like my limbs were limbering to work again.

ursula von rydingsvard in san francisco
(This is how much I love Ursula… I stalk her sculptures wherever I go.)

Will I Ever be a Famous Sculptor?

Unlikely. I love writing and I’ve gone far enough down this path of specialization that my visual art muscles are desperately rusty. I might polish them off again someday, but right now I’m lucky to have a few hours a week to work creatively. Still I can see now how important visual art is to my creative self and that I’ve been missing it. I never really stopped making (because I use that same generative energy in writing, gardening, baking, and making and raising a child), but I better understand the ache I’ve felt in the early mornings when I try to capture the shape of my son’s cheek in crayon on newsprint before he moves… again.

And though I’ll forever be 30 credits short of a degree in sculpture, the ways I learned to think about form, negative space, and the importance of the marks makers leave on their work inform everything I create for myself and for others. I’ve also learned to be myriad and expressive, to be comfortable provoking (at least sometimes).

I can’t promise that I won’t stop making visual art again. But I can say that I won’t be so quick to forget its importance to the writing I do and the person I am. Thank you, Ursula, for being you, and Clayton, for keeping art in my life and yours.

If art is important to your process, I recommend visiting the Seattle Art Fair this weekend. There’s a lot of commerce, a lot of pretense, and also a lot of art. You might just find what you need, too.

Filed Under: Art, USA & Canada Tagged With: making, Ursula von Rydingsvard

Auditing the Diversity of My Son’s Bookshelves – VIDA-style

July 29, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

child and bookshelvesEvery night my son gets to choose a bedtime book from his vast library—a library I’ve very carefully built to represent a world larger than he’s been exposed to so far. He’s a beautiful, bright, curious little white boy who spends a significant amount of his time in a class that’s 95% other white boys and I want him to know there’s more to the world. I can’t change the makeup of his class, but I can bring a wide variety of colors and cultures into our home and introduce him to some awesome female figures along the way. And I thought I was doing a pretty good job, but the other night he confused Love Is for Come on Rain (the only two stories on his shelves that star African American girls) and I realized I might have fallen into the trap of tokenism.

So I decided to count his books, VIDA-style.

ask me - bernard waber and suzy leeI looked at the gender and race of main characters and also the gender and race of each book’s author and illustrator. It wasn’t an exact science—I found myself making some assumptions about both race and gender (some of which I was later able to clarify) and the counts are a little iffy (you try wresting a little boy’s books from his grasp) but the patterns are clear and I’m so glad I went through this exercise, because I learned a lot.

The Characters

Looking strictly at the race of main characters, I found a better mix than I worried I might have. There’s still a lot of white kids in there, but we also read a lot of classic books (read: books from a time when whiteness was presumed). I could certainly be doing better in the Black and Brown (a poor catchall I know) categories, particularly as I begin to teach my son Spanish. And the Asian characters come too heavily from a handful of favorite Asian author/illustrators to be truly representative of a larger world (more on that later).

The Humans
White Black Brown Asian Many
29 5 4 8 3

blueberry girl - gaiman and vessMy favorite thing about this table is the “Many” category which I had to scrawl into a margin because of three books: Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess (where the main character shifts race and appearance throughout the book), Love by Matt de la Peña and Loren Long (where technically “love” could be the main character but the rest of the book is so representative of so many lived experiences, it deserves massive credit) and Peace Begins with You by Katherine Scholes that follows a similar pattern.

Why can’t more books transcend race this way? It’s not the answer for all books, because getting inside specific experiences is important, but I believe it’s important to balance specificity with universality and the three books I just mentioned do a great job at universality (even if my husband does find my reading of Peace Begins with You to be a fantastic sedative).

I’m going to try harder here. Representing a variety of cultures is important to me because my own experiences living abroad taught me so much about being human. Representing a variety of races is also important to me because my little kiddo needs to see that people are people, and although I live in a city that is more diverse than the town where I grew up, it is largely a segregated city.

Non-Human Characters
Animal Vehicle
51 9

choo choo - virginia lee burtonI was surprised to discover just how many books we read that feature non-human characters. Unfortunately, the default gender for animal and vehicle characters seems to be male. Some of this is due to the English reversion to “he” as a generic pronoun (read: patriarchy) but some of it is just laziness.

Here I give massive kudos to Virginia Lee Burton, author and illustrator of both Maybelle the Cable Car and Choo Choo two stories about female vehicles. They’re fantastic stories and I’m happy to report my son loves them as much as he loves another classic Burton story, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel (which also features a female vehicle). Another book we love that features a female character is Octopus Alone by Divya Srinivasan.

Does it matter that these characters are female? Maybe not specifically in these books, but it does matter that my little boy is exposed to the idea that females are also functional members of society in all the ways that men are.

Speaking of gender, the table below combines the human and non-human characters.

Gender of All Characters
Male Female Both Indiscriminate
76 25 3 7

There’s no excuse for the results of my gender count. Even including the number of classic books we read. Yes, a lot of this is also due to the male animals and vehicles, but clearly I need to do better in selecting books. The “both” category comprises books like The Look Book by Chris Sickels where there are two main characters, one of each gender. And “indiscriminate” accounts for books like Love where there are many main characters, the main character is an animal that doesn’t have a gendered pronoun like Hoot Owl, Master of Disguise by Sean Taylor and Jean Jullien, or I simply can’t tell from the text if the character is male or female as in What Do You Do With an Idea? by Kobi Yamada and Mae Besom.

The takeaways here are that authors and illustrators can and should think about the gender of the character of their main characters. They can even get around gender if they want to. And I can do a lot better in diversifying the characters my son reads about. In terms of race, culture and gender. Likely sexuality, too, but we really aren’t there yet.

The Authors

Do the race and gender of authors matter? I believe they do. While I champion authors like Jonathan Evison who truly attempt to get inside the head of a character with a different life experience than theirs and to convey that experience with deep empathy, I also strongly believe that readers benefit from having access to a variety of voices (in this case in text and visually).

Author’s Race
White Black Brown Asian
84 1 4 10

boy who didnt believe in spring - cliftonSo the fact that almost all of the authors my son has been exposed to are white is a fail on my part. I can name the one Black author—Lucille Clifton—and the excellence of The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring is argument enough for actively seeking out more diverse voices. It’s a gorgeous book that gets to the heart of male friendship better than anything else I’ve read.

Another fail is that (because I counted an author each time they appeared) I know that Dan Santat and Suzy Lee account for most of the Asian category. Shaun Tan and Kobi Yamada are nearly all of the rest. As amazing as these authors are, that’s only four voices to represent a wide variety of cultures.

Author’s Gender
Male Female
68 33

I’m doing a little better on the gender front when it comes to authors, but clearly there’s work to be done.

The Illustrators

Illustrator’s Race
White Black Brown Asian
87 0 3 13

beekle - santatCan I admit yet that I’m starting to feel a little demoralized? How can I not have one single book in my son’s collection that’s illustrated by an African American? And that this category is looking very white overall. The same note from above about Suzy Lee, Dan Santat and Shaun Tan still applies—fantastic illustrators that I might have overemphasized in my son’s collection.

Illustrator’s Gender
Male Female
75 28

Where have all the ladies gone? Enough said. That’s especially disappointing because I’ve found that the books we have that are written and/or illustrated by women are much more likely to present characters that are not white and/or female.

What I’m Going to Do Next

Let’s be real, I’m still going to run out and buy Suzy Lee’s next book because I love her work. And I’ll probably buy all the Richard Scarry and Dr. Seuss my son can dream of (though we have more than enough Thomas the Tank Engine for a lifetime). But I’m also going to actively seek out books with more diverse main characters and those that are written and/or illustrated by women and people of color.

If you have any recommendations, please leave them in the comments. He’s nearly three, but he’s willing to sit for stories that are at least at a four- or five-year-old level.

My Recommendations

If you’re trying to diversify your little kiddo’s shelves, here are some of our favorites:

The Adventures of Beekle, the Unimaginary Friend by Dan Santat
Ask Me by Bernard Waber and Suzy Lee
Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess
The Book of Mistakes by Corinna Luyken
The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring by Lucille Clifton and Brinton Turkle
Choo Choo by Virginia Lee Burton
Come on Rain by Karen Hesse and Jon J. Muth
A Different Pond by Bao Phi and Thu Bui
Love by Matt de la Peña and Loren Long
Maybe Something Beautiful: How Art Transformed a Neighborhood by F. Isabel Campoy, Theresa Howell, and Rafael López
Natsumi! by Susan Lendroth and Priscilla Burris
Now by Antoinette Portis
Octopus Alone by Divya Srinavasan
Old Turtle and the Broken Truth by Douglas Wood and Jon J. Muth
The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats
This Beautiful Day by Richard Jackson and Suzy Lee
Wave by Suzy Lee

Those are affiliate links, so if you buy from Bookshop.org you’ll be supporting a great bookstore (and also my book-buying habit).

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: gender, kids lit, race

Carmen Maria Machado, Paige Cooper, Siri Hustvedt and What We Expect of Women Writers

April 14, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

The recent “describe yourself like a male author would” meme is a reminder not just that there’s a whole lot of bad (read: thoughtless) writing out there, but that we love to apply categories to understand the world. This completely reasonable coping strategy for our overloaded brains comes with a danger, though, of not only dismissing some potentially great work because the author is male, but (more importantly) of failing to question and confront what’s expected of us as women writers. Don’t get me wrong, I love myself a rainy afternoon with the comforts of Austen and Wharton, but (brilliant as both are) it’s writers like Siri Hustvedt, Carmen Maria Machado, and Paige Cooper that are pushing me to be my best author (and self). Here’s a small subset of what they’re teaching me.

Smart is Sexy

woman looking at men looking at women - siri hustvedtI’ve long admired Hustvedt’s writing and was very excited when A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women arrived in time for a lengthy convalescence earlier this week. But the best thing I did for myself was to not read all 500 pages in one go. Instead, I’m going to savor her signature intelligence. So far I’ve read about the differences in modes of knowing between scientists and artists and the contextual coding (and unconscious bias) in how we view art which has led me to question everything about how I encounter arts of all kinds and to better appreciate the instinctual approach to my work that’s been evolving over the last decade.

Hustvedt wonderfully spans the line between wonky academic and literary powerhouse and though her essays are my favorite of her work, her fiction is flat out great, too. She has a keen eye for observing the world and isn’t afraid to say what she thinks, no matter how that sits with contemporary conversations.

I’m only 24 pages into A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, but up next is an essay on Louise Bourgeois (one of my favorite artists!) and I can’t wait to savor every last word.

Louise Bourgeois at SFMOMA
Louise Bourgeois at SFMOMA

Sexy is Sexy

her body and other parties - carmen maria machadoIf you haven’t already read “The Husband Stitch” by Carmen Maria Machado, do it now. It’s okay. I’ll wait.

Actually, I couldn’t wait, I went back and read it again, too, because this story, and the book it’s collected in, Her Body and Other Parties blew my fucking mind. Machado’s writing is very intelligent and beautiful, but the thing that stretched me in all the right ways is that it’s really unapologetically, lusciously sexy. So much so that when I shared “The Husband Stitch” with a friend at work, I had to go back and blushingly mention (for the sake of HR) that I’d forgotten just how sexy it is.

“That night, I wash myself. The silky suds between my legs are the color and scent of rust, but I am newer than I have ever been.” – Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stitch”

It’s freeing to read this kind of writing, both as a writer and as a woman. There is enough lust in these stories to rival the wildest Harlequin, but it’s the combination of that lust with an achingly acute awareness of the constraints we are subjected to and that we subject ourselves to that makes Machado’s writing so astounding. Like Wharton she showcases society’s unwritten rules with lines like “scoffing is the first mistake a woman can make,” “pride is the second mistake,” and “being right was the third, and worst, mistake.” Also like Wharton, she shows us what happens when we refuse to obey. But unlike Wharton, Machado’s characters trample all over the rules and not only own the consequences of their rebellions but revel in the journeys and the outcomes.

I learned so much from the exactness of descriptions like “a crack that passes through her lip like she is dirt that has never known rain,” the ways Machado breaks the fourth wall, and most of all, from her willingness to morph form to suit her own purposes as with “Inventory.” Seemingly a catalogue of a woman’s lovers, this story unfolds to contain much, much more…

“One woman. Brunette. A former CDC employee. I met her at a community meeting where they taught us how to stockpile food and manage outbreaks in our neighborhoods should the virus hop the firebreak. I had not slept with a woman since my wife, but as she lifted her shirt I realized how much I’d been craving breasts, wetness, soft mouths. She wanted cock and I obliged. Afterward, she traced the soft indents in my skin from the harness, and confessed to me that no one was having any luck developing a vaccine.” – Carmen Maria Machado, “Inventory”

Machado is not writing genre fiction (whatever that is). She’s writing exactly what she wants in order to tell the right story at the right time.

Weird and Intense is Sexy, Too

zolitude - paige cooperAnother writer who demolishes the prejudicial line between “genre” and “literary” fiction is Paige Cooper. The stories in Zolitude are dense, rich, and wildly intelligent. This is not a bedtime book (trust me), not only because of the often chilling plotlines, but because you won’t want to miss a single detail of Cooper’s intricately crafted stories lest you discover, too late, that the women you’re reading about have become animals (or that they always were).

Cooper’s stories cover a wide range of subjects, and she fully immerses herself in each. You’ll find a deeply detailed plan for the quotidian details of colonizing other planets in “Pre-Occupants.” “La Folie” upends stereotypes with the story of a white woman who’d been sold into slavery for the benefit of her sister and the lengths she’ll then go to in order to save that sister. And “Thanatos” takes us to the limits (I hope, though I’m not that dumb) of medical science with the stitching together of two bodies to form one (improved?) whole. There are also vampires, tortured (and torturing) geniuses, and a librarian.

All of these wild stories are wrapped in perfectly wrought and unusual images like “her hair is a trash tide over her head” and “he deletes truth like weather deletes history, imperfectly” paired with spot-on maxims like “it’s not heroism to crawl into someone’s grave with them.” The writing is sometimes sexy, always intelligent and intensely weird (in all the best ways).

I’ll admit I got lost in the density of Cooper’s pages. I liked it.

How a male author would describe any of these women probably depends on the male author. I won’t start pigeonholing them and I think I might finally be ready to stop pigeonholing myself, too. Let’s go write some cool shit.

To expand your view of women writers (or just read some really good work) pick up copies of A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, Her Body and Other Parties, and Zolitude from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: carmen maria machado, her body and other parties, paige cooper, siri hustvedt, the husband stitch, women authors, zolitude

Rediscovering Greek Myths with Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

April 10, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

fates and furies - lauren groffSick this weekend and more than a little desperate to read something that would not further irritate my fevered brain, I pulled Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff from my to-read shelf. Though I cursed Groff when I could not put down the book to fall into a much-needed nap, something I should have expected because her earlier novel Arcadia had kept me up at night, I was also grateful because it’s been too long since a full-length novel incited me to read with such hunger. I even skimmed the last sixty pages as my husband read to my son in the other room—hoping with each new section break that they’d go through one more round of exploring darkest Peru so I could live inside this book until the very end. Fates and Furies also got my brain moving on some topics I care deeply about: marriage, the myth of the lone genius, and Greek mythology.

Writing about Marriage

I had a creative writing teacher who told me once that there were no novels about happy marriages. I begged to differ but looked around and struggled to find any. His point was about how conflict makes a story, mine was that conflict is not the only thing that makes life interesting. Fates and Furies may be the final answer to our conversation—we were both right, in a way.

When we first meet Lotto and Mathilde, newly married and freshly fucking on a beach, everything is right in their pair. Throughout the first half of the book as we explore the life of this charmed boy and his quiet wife it seems as though the tempest is outside their relationship. He, an adored first son, loses his father early and his overbearing mother has trouble letting go until he does something teenagerish and she sends him away to try and charm another part of the country. Lotto suffers, yes, but he always seems followed by some glance from the gods that shields him from the very worst. Mathilde is part of that shield.

I won’t say what causes the shift in the second half of the book, but I will say that I haven’t been as rocked by a change in point of view since reading Jonathan Dee’s Palladio. To put it gently, we suddenly begin to see Mathilde’s side of the story and I’m so embarrassed to say (and yet it is so telling) that I hadn’t realized how absent she is as a character from the first half. Help meet, yes, wife too, but never a person in her own right. I don’t know which is more shocking, that she is a full, rich, fascinating character or that she was able to stay behind the scenes so long.

The Lone Genius

But we do love ourselves a lone genius, don’t we? Especially if that genius is male. Norman Rockwell toiling away in the barn making culture-shaping images while his wife tends to the kids. Hemingway working his way through all kinds of wives never failed to stop halfway through a sentence each night and get up to finish that sentence the next morning. And then there’s Salinger lingering in the woods with a nymphet acolyte. Of course they aren’t alone but their work exists on the backs of people whose contributions will never be acknowledged. It’s a trope I’ve studied carefully as I tried to model my own success, one it took me far to long to realize is bullshit. Yes, someone has to clean the toilets and pay the bills and wipe the butts, but failing to be a part of those activities is failing to understand (and participate in) essential parts of life.

Which makes me mad at Mathilde. Because as much as Lotto was a beloved, coddled boy, she continued to infantilize him through adulthood. Don’t get me wrong, Lotto should have grown up on his very own accord, but that’s on him. Mathilde wasted her life cleaning up after Lotto and I think she did it out of penance. The backstory to how Mathilde became the person she is is deeply saddening, but she could have been so much more. Maybe I’m just worried because I have my own beloved, coddled boy and I want very much for him to grow up to be a strong individual and if he finds a strong partner who’s also a strong individual, so much the better.

The Magic of Greek Myths

Something else I want for my boy is to have a strong understanding of Greek myths. I was raised on them and I have tomes to share with my son when I think he’s ready. To me, they are as important as the Bible to understanding the underlayment of our culture.

But my idea of an ideal education may have been shaped by some 19th century novel or other and making in-jokes about Sisyphus to my coworkers is often a futile effort—no matter the caliber of the private schools they’ve attended. So I loved how rife Fates and Furies is with allusions to these wonderful stories, from the obvious (a play based on Antigone) to the less so (a mother sitting forever at home as though that home were Mount Olympus). I’m going to blame my illness for the fact that it took me so long to understand the knowing asides were like the classic Greek chorus or the gods looking down from on high (or both), but I loved the effect before I got it and even more so after.

And when I realized on the last page which mythological character Mathilde was, it changed everything for me. And I wept.

To immerse yourself in Fates and Furies, pick up a copy from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: Difficult Women, genius, Greek Myth, Lauren Groff

How The Immigrant’s Refrigerator by Elena Georgiou Could Save the World

February 17, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

the immigrants refrigerator - elena georgiouI had the privilege on Thursday night of moderating a discussion between three authors I deeply respect: Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Rebecca Brown, and Elena Georgiou. On the stage at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, I asked Elena about her recent collection of stories, The Immigrant’s Refrigerator, specifically about how she’d managed to fully explore the humanity of every character in the book. Turns out I lucked into something because she said that was the kernel of what made her write the book, that long ago in her London-centric life the experience she’d had of reading The Song of Solomon and getting so inside the life of an African American family in the faraway U.S. had shown her the power of words to inhabit the experience of another. We need that right now.

Here’s why you need to go read The Immigrant’s Refrigerator and then buy a copy for a friend who might not buy one for themselves.

Reading Builds Empathy

You’re a reader. You’ve probably seen the studies that say reading literary fiction builds empathy. If you’re like me, you read a summary of the study, felt good about yourself and went on your reading way. Trouble is that I didn’t really change what I read as a result of those studies. I just kept empathizing more and more with the people I’d already been reading about.

Reading=good. Now let’s take it one step further.

Exposing Ourselves to the Other

I’m proud of the fact that I usually read stories about people who live far away from me. What I’m too often missing in my reading list, though, is stories about people whose life experience is not that of a middle to upper class intellectual-type. I read about countries I’ve visited or lived in that I miss or countries that remind me of them. Occasionally I lament that I don’t read enough about Africa, but I haven’t mended my reading ways.

The Immigrant’s Refrigerator pushed me into reading about all kinds of lives I’d never considered exploring. And I loved every page of it. I picked up the book because I wanted to be prepared for the event at Elliott Bay. What I was not prepared for was entering—on the first page—the life of a man who makes soup for children who are riding atop trains to cross into the U.S. from Mexico and to those who’ve returned. “Gazpacho” is emblematic of the rest of the book in that it’s compact, revolves around food, and drops the reader deep inside the experience of another.

Georgiou does this again and again in the book. From the life of a Northern Irish rent boy in New York City to a Somali refugee who’s terrorized by an intended act of kindness by an employer, to a lonely baker who finds connection and companionship with a refugee from Niger, Georgiou fully realizes the widest range of experiences I think I’ve seen together in one book. But you almost don’t realize how disparate the events that got these characters to their moment on the page are, because rather than playing to any of the expectations we’ve already set about what the other is, the stories in The Immigrant’s Refrigerator focus so deeply on the characters’ human commonalities. This makes it easy to empathize with all of them and the result is as beautiful as the writing.

As easy and pleasurable as The Immigrant’s Refrigerator is to read, it’s not a facile book filled with happy glossy images of what people could be. Some of the stories I ended up loving most were the ones I initially resisted because the characters were too tetchy or far from my own experience (or too close to experiences I’ve tried to leave behind). One of these was “Pork is Love” where a rural Vermonter challenges his Nigerian pastor to preach a sermon about pork fat. Throw those three elements in a story and you could feel very much like you’re in a blender, but with Georgiou’s approach of reaching first for what is human, she finds unexpected light and darkness in both characters and ways of weaving them together that surprised, delighted, and challenged me.

Step Three: Changing the World

Easy peasy, right? Of course not. But if you need a refresh on looking beyond your bubble (and I think we all do right now) take a few hours to sit with The Immigrant’s Refrigerator and remember the things that could bring us together. It’s the only act that can truly put us back on the right path. The challenge I’ve set for myself right now is to look inside of people whose views I disagree vehemently with and try to understand what they most want. Usually it’s things like a better life for themselves and their family, freedom from fear, a genuine moment of feeling seen. I can relate to all of those, and we can build from that.

Acknowledging the humanity of the people around and across from us is a gift we can give them, and it’s a gift we can give to ourselves. It’s the smallest and biggest step toward rebuilding our society and it’s time we take it.

I’m going to go read The Song of Solomon now, you go pick up your copy of The Immigrant’s Refrigerator from Bookshop.org and then recommend this book at your next book club. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission. Bonus points if we change the world along the way.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada Tagged With: elena georgiou, humanity, the immigrant's refrigerator

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Polska, 1994

Polska 1994

Clear Out the Static in Your Attic

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Isla's bookshelf: currently-reading

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