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

Stories from the Portuguese: Reading Mia Couto Against António Lobo Antunes

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Rain and Other Stories - Mia CoutoAfter reading more of Bolaño’s 2666 than I ever should have, I cleaned my bookshelves of all the to-read have-tos that I’ve held on to for far too long. And found myself without anything to read. Failure to read good books generally puts me in a state of existential crisis, so I decided to return to an old favorite—Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes. Even after leafing through a few chapters in random order, I could feel myself restored. And I wanted more, so I turned to my shelf of books to review and found Mia Couto, a writer from Mozambique who also writes in Portuguese. I’ve spent a few wonderful days now with Rain and Other Stories and want to share with you the experience of reading this man’s work with Lobo Antunes in the background.

Writing and War

Land at the End of the World - Lobo AntunesI’ve read many books by Lobo Antunes, a physician who fought in the Angolan war. His language is as lyrical as his thought and the books I’ve enjoyed most shift almost imperceptibly back and forth between African memories and European presents. On this read, I found myself immersed in sentences like “Lisbon, even at this hour, is a city as devoid of mystery as a nudist beach” and “I’m traveling the gentle geography of your body, the river of your voice, the cool shade of your hands, the pigeon-breast down of your pubis, but me and Xana and you, the Saturday rain, we are the only ones who truly exist…” Swoon. With a translation it’s always hard to tell whether to credit the author or translator (here, Margaret Jull Costa) but I suspect both contributed heavily to the magic of the flow of this book.

In Lobo Antunes, Africa is half of one whole. It’s either the immediate present of a man immersed in a memory of war or the tortured background against which the luscious European present unfolds. For Couto, though, Africa is everything—the tortured past and the luscious present, the luscious past and the tortured present. Rain and Other Stories was written after Mozambique’s war, and Couto writes in the introduction, “After the war, I thought all that was left was ashes, hollow ruins… Today I know that’s not true. Where man remains, a seed, too, survives, a dream to inseminate time.” Forgiving the decidedly visual metaphor, this is very much a book for our time, a time when we need to see the future beyond the [INSERT HYBERBOLIC ADJECTIVE HERE] headlines. Couto finds magic in those after-war ashes (literally and figuratively) and so shall we.

The Richness of Africa

Most of the books I’ve loved about Africa have been the books of the colonizers… partly because those were the books I was exposed to and partly because they reinforced the ideas of Africa that I grew up with during the “Feed the World” generation. Couto, too, is white. Born in Mozambique to Portuguese immigrants, he could be writing colonial books as well. And maybe the magic and use of folk images that I’m responding too is appropriated, but Rain and Other Stories feels written with the honest respect of someone who loves a country and a culture. Because Couto is Africa born and he lived through the war there, his experience, too is authentic and I wish I could have read this book without thinking so hard about race—because it’s good. I should (and will) read other narratives of different life experiences in Mozambique, but for now let me tell you about this gifted storyteller.

In “The Waters of Time,” the first story in this collection, a child rows down the river with his grandfather. It’s a simple set-up that quickly opens into another world as the narrator describes the lake they would row to:

“This was the realm of forbidden creatures. All that showed itself there, after all, invented its existence… Everything around us bathed in cool breezes, shadows made of light itself, as if the morning were eternally drowned in dreams.” – Mia Couto, Waters of Time

This fantastical world where they go to watch white cloths dance in the distance contrasts sharply with the quotidian rituals home. Through his use of tense, Couto manages to make both realms feel habitual and yet his images are rich enough to make both alive. I won’t tell you how the story unfurls because the pleasure of experiencing it for the first time was simply too great. But I want to… Suffice it to say that the river and water are recurring themes in this book in a way that feels very of the place and also ancient and of all of us.

“Water and time are twin brothers, born of the same womb. I had just discovered in myself a river that would never die. It’s to that river I now return, guiding my son…” – Mia Couto, Waters of Time

Aphorisms Abound

Like Portuguese writer Paulo Coelho, Couto makes liberal use of aphorisms, but unlike Coelho’s aphorisms (which can seem canned and cheap), Couto’s sound deeply across time and experience:

  • Fear is a river one must cross wet.
  • The illusion of being right is born when everyone is wrong at the very same time.
  • Work is like a river: even when it’s reaching an end, what comes behind is more and more river.
  • Snakes are bilingual to show that every animal contains a second creature.
  • Love is the world divided by zero.
  • He who tastes unripe fruit soon wants to try its flower.
  • Beauties subtract from one another: we see the butterfly and forget the flower.

These aphorisms were rich enough that I wondered if Couto was borrowing from Mozambican folklore, but while that may be true (I know woefully little about Mozambique), the way he (and translator Eric M.B. Becker) work around language to bring it to life, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the aphorisms were original. A few favorite examples are:

  • swallowed up into never
  • a walking beer-sponge
  • nestled in the night’s womb
  • the dictionary of her footsteps

Honestly I’ve struggled while writing this review, because every time I open the book to find more examples of things I want to share with you, I get so sucked back into the writing that I simply want to read it all over again. That is to say that I’m so enjoying being lost in Couto’s craft that I don’t really want to deconstruct it. Stories I keep returning to are: “Blind Estrelinho”, “The Delivery”, “The Flag in the Sunset”, “Beyond the River Bend” and “High-Heel Shoes”. Each story captures in its own way a very different life, a different experience and yet Couto manages in every single one to seduce me with language and then upend my expectations. The surprise is so much a part of the enjoyment that I don’t want to spoil these stories for you. I want you to read them for yourself. Immediately. (That means you, Dad… I’ll send you a copy.)

Luscious Characters

There’s one more story in Rain and Other Stories I can’t not tell you about. This part does contain spoilers. “The Perfume” is the story of Gloria, a woman “accustomed to living low” whose husband comes home with a present and announces they’re going dancing. In the first paragraph, Couto fully unravels the accumulated staleness of their marriage which contrasts beautifully with Justino’s gift to make us as surprised as Gloria. We’re with her as she warily dresses in the given dress and eventually throws a bottle of perfume Justino gave her when they were courting but that she’s never had occasion to wear out the window where it breaks on the sidewalk.

The strangeness between the pair continues as they leave the house and travel to the dance where habitually jealous Justino encourages her to dance with other men and then leaves her. It’s a confusing and somewhat devastating story as we’re locked inside what Gloria must be feeling at this humiliation, this parting. Except Gloria is a richer character than that. She arrives home, alone, to find her husband certainly gone, and in the morning she wakes in her bed to the smell of that perfume wafting though the window. She steps outside and cuts herself on the bottle and this is how the story concludes:

“To this day, one can find the indelible tracks on the living-room floor from when Gloria shed the first drops of her bloody glee.” – Mia Couto, The Perfume

I have noticed that both of these authors are male and I’m trying to read more broadly than I have in the past. Thankfully someone (@DeepVellum) approached me on Twitter and recommended Maria Gabriela Llansol and Noemi Jaffe. I’ve read neither yet, but they’re on my Goodreads list. And I’ll continue to seek out Mozambican and Angolan authors with different sets of life experiences. If you have recommendations, please leave them in the comments.

To immerse yourself in some of the magic of these books, pick up a copy of Rain and Other Stories or Land at the End of the Worldfrom Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reading in the Aftermath of the Kavanaugh Confirmation

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Depression robs me of feeling and enjoyment. It can also be a strong wake-up call to get back in touch with the things I value quick quick. Listening to the Kavanaugh hearings and all the blather afterwards I felt all the emotions—from the hope that a woman’s voice would be heard against the establishment to the devastation of having my worst expectations confirmed. I tried in those first few days to engage with my family and to touch the thing that always brings me back to myself—books—instead I found myself changed. I don’t know yet if for the better or the worse, or even if this change is permanent, but it’s big enough to explore, here, with you.

Silencing the Cacophony of Mansplaining

a feast in the garden - george konradThe first thing I noticed about how my reading was changing was that I suddenly wanted to throw A Feast in the Garden by George (Gyorgy) Konrád against the wall. I’ve had this reaction before when reading Roberto Bolaño—I loathed his narrator’s didacticism and the way it put me directly in touch with the (male) narrator’s thoughts about the story while distancing me completely from the (female) protagonist’s actual experience. Yes, this could have been done for effect, blah blah blah, but as a woman in this society I’ve had my fill of men explicating something I could or have experienced. I actually loathe the phrase “mansplaining,” but even more so I loathe the male voices that seem to find their only personal fulfillment in explaining—especially when they’re explaining my own experience (or something I know more about than they do) to me. This is not all men, but it’s too many. And I think it’s part of my on-again, off-again beef with Hemingway. Something I did not realize until this week.

So for one moment I feared I was off male narrators forever. Thankfully, Konrád is a brilliant artist and I came to see the effect of what he was doing in this book (which I am still reading, slowly, as his writing demands and deserves). I do, however, feel a lot more comfortable chucking narrators who don’t earn their keep right out my damned window…

Do I sound angry? I am. And embracing my actual feelings instead of trying to make them palatable was something that led me to this next book…

Getting Intimate with Women’s Darkness with Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories

toddler-hunting - kono taekoI felt a little dumb when Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories arrived and I realized it was not by Yōko Ogawa (whose dark short stories in Revenge I adored) but instead by Kōno Taeko, a completely different female Japanese author who is also not afraid of taking readers to dark places. But Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories was fantastic, so much so that I wish I could give proper credit to whomever recommended it to me.

What made this the exactly right book for me exactly right now is that listening to Dr. Ford’s honest, gentle, people pleasing ways in that hearing I honestly believed someone might hear her. But that too-common female approach to power got bowled the fuck over and I needed to experience a completely different approach to female power. Do Kōno’s protagonists feel even a little bit guilty about how damned bad they are as they do things like stalk other women’s children? Maybe. They don’t feel at all bad about asking for whatever they want in bed, though, and I loved them for that (even though I wish at least one was the dominant rather than the submissive in the recurring BDSM scenes in this book). I loved being inside the experience of women who felt real to me in their myriadness.

By far my favorite story in this collection is “Snow,” a tale whose psychological underpinnings are so on point I gasped and felt physical pain when I figured out what was going on. It delved deep and unashamedly into the ugly that can be relationships between women—something I fear will prevent the kind of voting backlash I hope for in November. Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories is fantastic. Read it.

Embracing Allegory in Playthings

playthings - alex phebyI’m not going to presume that Alex Pheby’s Playthings is a tightly scripted allegory of our present day (partially because it was originally published in 2015 and also because it’s actually about one of the most famous cases of paranoid schizophrenia in history), but let’s pretend for a moment it is. At first I was not sure that I could delve deeply into Schreber’s all-consuming self-centeredness (for example, he so completely can’t deal with the fact that his wife has a stroke that the action in that scene then has to completely center around him), but I went with it long enough to get immersed in this superb example of what it feels like to be gaslit by everyone around you. Pheby does a wonderful job of draining the life (at least from Schreber’s point of view) from all the characters around the protagonist and of portraying this man’s madness. I guess that’s the secret sauce of gaslighting, isn’t it? We all have some secret weakness that can be turned against us and drive us to madness. The fact that Schreber is in fact mad makes it just that much easier.

The old-timey feel of this book belies its modern effectiveness. I loved the way Pheby played with chapter introductions—using the length of 18th century-like chapter titles and the feeling of interludes—to transition us through this strange story. The historical setting also contributes to this effect. I was glad we never quite get Schreber’s diagnosis because experiencing the symptoms (and getting to wonder how much the people around him were exacerbating them) was much more powerful than having a concrete, rote, dead name applied to that experience (maybe because I don’t like things being explained to me). Telling myself that this book was an allegory made getting through the day a lot easier and I was enthralled enough by the middle of Playthings that I stopped taking notes. That’s a good sign. Check it out if you want a fictional look at what it feels like to feel completely insane.

I have not recovered from the depression or the related dashing of my hopeful illusions (over and over and over), but I’m no longer letting the current political crazytown keep me from my favorite coping mechanism, either. What are you reading to put light in these dark days?

If you need a good literary escape, pick up a copy of Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories, Revenge, or Playthings from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Nobody Told Me | After Birth | Like a Mother

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How often do three titles coalesce into a relatively coherent expression of the experience of reading them? I was going to call this review “Revisiting Pregnancy Narratives After Three Years of Motherhood” because something made me delve back into this topic almost exactly three years after the birth of my son, but somehow Nobody Told Me, After Birth, and Like a Mother was just perfect. Even (especially?) in its semi-coherence.

I feel blessed to live in an age where such a wealth of literature (fiction and non-) is being produced to counter some of the crap that our culture has converged around as our vision of motherhood. There are precursors, yes, and I’ve written about some of my favorite pregnancy books for writers previously, but Nobody Told Me, After Birth, and Like a Mother spoke hard to my mother self, writer or not, and I wanted to share why.

Nobody Told Me

nobody told me - hollie mcnishI’ll admit that when my husband gave Nobody Told Me by Hollie McNish for Mother’s Day “because it was on your to-read list” I had absolutely no memory of having ever heard of this book. While people did tell me I’d experience “pregnancy brain,” no one told me (that I remember anyway) my ability to retain information would be permanently altered (or at least that’s my experience so far).

There were so many thing no one told me (and which I cannot remember) that reading McNish’s contemporaneous journal of her pregnancy and first three years of motherhood made me feel wonderfully immersed in that world again. Her voice is gently honest, and whether she’s recounting the everyday indignities (like having no one offer you a seat on the bus when you’re ginormous) or sweetnesses (“When no one is watching, I feel amazing. Like that gigantic, ripe, juicy magic peach”) you’re endeared to her (and, if you’ve been pregnant, to your own memories both good and bad). She’s also deeply generous to the people around her—taking the necessary moments to look at why her grandmother tries to spare her the “embarrassment” of walking around her village pregnant and unwed or when McNish takes pity on her father who is helpless around her child and examines why his generation of men is that way and all the things they’re missing as a result.

I loved that she included her (basically unedited I think) poems in this text, even though I did not always love the poems, because they made me love even more this huge body of work I created while pregnant that I’ve been somewhat embarrassed by (both because I’ve been adding a derogatory “mommy poetry” label to it and because I was new to poetry so a lot of it really isn’t good).

Whether credit goes to me for finding this book (which will be issued in the US this November) or to my husband for having the memory to get it into my hands, I don’t care. I’m just glad I read it and that I read it right now.

Like a Mother

like a mother - angela garbesHow strange and wonderful it felt to find Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy in a newsletter for a local bookstore because Angela Garbes is a local author and though our worlds have not overlapped, I feel like our experiences have. There was not as much revolutionary science as I hoped in this book (partially because I did get to read Penny Simkin and some others who are trying to give pregnant women actual information while I was pregnant), but I still loved the book and I learned a lot of things. Most importantly I learned to trust my own experience.

Garbes is witty and straightforward as she recounts the kinds of stories I have only ever shared with closely trusted family members (maybe I should be better about breaking the “nobody told me” cycle but I might let Garbes do it for me). From breastfeeding to sex to the importance of being cared for during pregnancy and birth, this book touched so many memories (and nerves) for me.

Through the gory (fascinating) details of the function of the placenta to the beauty of the ways that life and death coexist in a woman’s body as she carries with her forever the cells of motherhood, I felt grief while reading this book and I felt empowered. Most of all I felt normal, a sensation that is far too uncommon in these somewhat lonely days of parenting.

After Birth

after birth - elisa albertThough it was Garbes who wrote about how parents “lean into the utter obliteration of their previous selves,” it’s Elisa Albert who dives all the way into exploring that experience in her novel, After Birth. The thing I love most about this book (among many) is how deeply angry new mother Ari is. It’s something I’ve seen lambasted in reviews, which I understand because it’s directly in opposition to the sweet, loving acceptance we all want to think our mothers immediately felt when we were born, but it’s fucking real. Especially in a world where too many of us are too alone in this event that changes our lives completely.

Ari grapples with a birth that did not go how she wanted it to (this is a euphemism because no one except other mothers really wants to even hear about shitty birth experiences), a body that’s irrevocably changed (torn apart), and a community that either does not or cannot meet her needs (in many cases because they aren’t even there). In short, it’s an all-too-familiar tale, but one that many women suffer in silence. I loved how angry Ari was because anger is the last thing we want moms to express and yet it’s a very real emotion (and one that doesn’t get better if we don’t feel entitled to even feel it).

After Birth can be as uncomfortable to read as the title is to imagine. It’s also funny and dark and real and I want all of my friends to read it and then I want us to say, collectively, all the taboo things about parenting REALLY FUCKING LOUD.

If you want to get real about pregnancy and early parenting, pick up a copy of Nobody Told Me, Like a Mother, and After Birth from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Treading Lightly While Traveling through Haiti in Maps Are Lines We Draw

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maps are lines we draw - allison coffeltWhat does it mean to leave no trace? This laudable goal of many a traveler can go awry when we get caught up in the “what does it mean” and forget that “leave no trace” is meant to apply to the outer environment and not to ourselves. In reading Maps Are Lines We Draw: A Road Trip through Haiti, I have no doubt that Haiti left traces on Allison Coffelt’s heart and soul, but the book gets caught up enough in the headiness of her experience that I too often missed what the journey felt like. Worse, I missed the opportunity to feel myself transformed by her journey.

To be fair, much of Coffelt’s most obvious travel transformations probably happened before she even left home when she read Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, the book that inspired Coffelt’s trip and in the international journeys she undertook before this one. And I deeply appreciate that she was trying to give us a more complex experience than the standard “I went abroad, I saw a lifestyle unlike my own, I was transformed” trope, but the fact that she’s visibly still processing this complex experience makes it harder to follow along with her, as does the fact that we are exposed as much to her thoughts about events (or even her thoughts on thinking about events) as we are to events themselves.

Scene vs. Summary

One of the lessons drilled into me in an early writing class is that readers need scene (the depiction of events) in order to engage with events rather than summary (the narration of outcomes) which can keep a reader on the outside of a story. It’s a lesson I rebelled against (like most lessons) and we can all cite examples of long, in-depth narrations that made a book for us. In truth, though, those examples are rarer and in our modern life of direct access to video and other first-person accounts, not to mention the unreliability of many “truths” spouted at us from innumerable political mouths, scenes connect readers with events in ways that allow us to both feel what’s happening and to trust the experience (even though all books, like all photographs, are in some way framed). Or maybe I’m just one of those “need to see the foreign brilliance before it’s spoiled by visitors” kind of people.

So in the moments when Coffelt is sharing glimpses of the scenes she experienced while in Haiti, I’m right there with her as she and Dr. Gardy pull to the side of the road to sample douce macoss or as she uses a headlamp to illuminate a man’s medical treatment. These scenes allowed me to feel like I myself was the traveler (without even a single visit to the travel clinic).

Contrast that with the moments where she’s reflecting on the tropes of the mission-trip story or the self-interrupting nature of travel writing (something she’s consciously doing). This latter brings me as a reader back to the level of watching the book being constructed—separating me from experiencing what I think Coffelt wants me to experience of Haiti.

Other Comments on Craft

Because I was often engaged with this book more at the craft level than the experience level, I was very interested in what Coffelt was doing with tense. In the moments when she does use scene, especially as she’s traveling with her guide, Dr. Gardy, the action that makes up the spine of this book, she uses present tense narration, which is a wonderful way to squeeze the most immersion possible from those scenes and a strong way to counteract the distancing effect of the rumination that intercedes. It’s a trick a lesser writer would not have thought to use.

Coffelt also knows her way around a metaphor. Whether it’s turning a moment of crushing garlic into a commentary on the messy history of Haiti or the staging of a photograph that encapsulates what it means to even write a book like this. These comparisons can allow us to fathom some of the complexity she’s grappling with without having it narrated for us.

Travel is Complex

Was it Pico Iyer who called out the difference between a tourist and a traveler? Maybe not, but it’s an important distinction in this type of literature. While many will feel that a book like Eat, Pray, Love delves into the realm of traveler, I’m actually looking for narratives that go even deeper than looking at how experiencing other cultures changes us as humans. I want the Anthony Bourdain effect of literature—to see those cultures as much as possible as they are and to learn from them what I’m missing about the world at large. This is something Lindsay Clark does brilliantly on No Madder Where and it’s something Coffelt clearly values as well.

I loved the way she included quotes like “The poor don’t want you to dress like them. They want you to dress in a suit and go get them food and water.” reminded me of the Mormon missionaries we came to know in Chile. There was something so interesting and complex about these young, white, tie-wearing boys’ success in converting the poor that continues to inform my own (evolving) thoughts about religious fervence. I also appreciated her reminder about the roots of travel: travail (to work), and I was interested to learn about Haitian’s relationship with the American culture of disposal and the dependence of relief organizations on having a population that needs relief.

Before reading Maps Are Lines We Draw I knew about Haiti only from one chapter in Ann Hedreen’s Her Beautiful Brain and from decades of news accounts of disasters there. I’m glad to now have a fuller picture of the place. Do I love how honest Coffelt was about the inability to form a pat narrative about her Haitian experience? Yes. I actually do. Do I also wish that I’d been able to engage deeply enough with the book to come away with my own picture of Haiti? Yes. That too. But I did learn a lot about Haitian history, watch a fellow traveler grapple with some larger questions about travel, and get to pay some careful attention to craft, so there’s a lot to recommend in this book.

If you want to learn more about Haiti or just the intricacies of structuring a travel memoir, pick up a copy of Maps Are Lines We Draw from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

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

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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.