Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

Revisiting a Beloved Childhood Favorite for #TheDarkisReading: The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper

December 23, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

When I saw on Twitter that Robert Macfarlane had proposed a book group where we all start reading The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper on Midwinter’s Eve (the day the book starts) and share our experiences under the hashtag #TheDarkisReading, I was in heaven. He’d brought together my so many of my favorite things in one simple idea: my favorite social platform, sharing thoughts about books, and a beloved childhood classic. What a wonderful trip the past few days have been.

The First Time I Read The Dark is Rising

I can’t remember if I was nine or ten when I read Greenwitch, the third book in this series, for school, but I was instantly hooked and read the whole series. Though I’ve always been a reader, this was my first “gotta read ’em all” experience. I don’t remember a lot else from that first exposure, except a swelling pride in my Welsh heritage and maybe (just once I swear) asking my mom if we were descended from Welsh magicians. And when I saw the word “rook” in this text, I remembered these books were my introduction to that word (and others) and what that quest to understand first felt like.

The Dark is Rising in the Past 30 Years

I may have re-read the series once since I was a child, but my main relationship to the books since then has been forcing them on anyone I cared about who I thought would enjoy the books themselves and maybe also sharing in this magical other world that I carried in my heart. My victims included my brother (who lost my copies but eventually bought me the new ones I’m reading today), my now husband (who probably never actually read the books but humored me with Salinger so he’s forgiven), and my stepbrother (who found the books too scary at his tender age and was the reason I stopped forcing them on people). I’ve been saving my (new, thanks Tosh!) copies in my son’s closet for the day I thought he might be ready for them, but at the age of two he thinks Gruffalo is scary, so we have a ways to go.

What Re-reading The Dark is Rising Felt Like

The Old is New Again

In opening The Dark is Rising for the first time in decades this past week, I realized how little I remembered and how much this book now reminded me of other books. From echoes of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse on the first page to more expected similarities between Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Grossman’s The Magicians and L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Some of these convergences are unavoidable coincidences of trope and some are loving tributes (in all directions because some of those books predate The Dark is Rising, one is a contemporary of the book and one is modern to now). Regardless, The Dark is Rising manages to feel fresh and compelling throughout. Even to someone who’s read it before.

Coming of Age, Coming to Light

“As he stared at the fierce, secret lines of that face, the world he had inhabited since he was born seemed to whirl and break and come down again in a pattern that was not the same as before.” – Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

Perhaps one of the most important things The Dark is Rising made me appreciate was the way books written for children use the specialness of one child to inspire generations of children on their own individual quests for greatness. This should have occurred to me with Harry Potter (which I still haven’t read) or any number of other books, but the craft in The Dark is Rising is such that I could see how other children could aspire to be like Will, an otherwise ordinary boy among a passel of siblings, who happens to be born on Midwinter’s Day as the seventh son of a seventh son. It isn’t until his eleventh birthday that he starts to realize he is special, the last of the Old Ones to be born, and even that realization takes much coaching from a mysterious old fellow called Merriman Lyon (a name that made my heart leap with glee and reminded me instantly of his true name—but that’s a story for another book).

“He was crystal-clear awake, in a Midwinter Day that had been waiting for him to wake into it since the day he had been born, and, he somehow knew, for centuries before that.” – Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

This type of story reaches into the heart of every child at an age where they’re growing from the light of their mothers’ eyes to being parts of a much larger world. It’s a tricky age and a difficult transition and, while a standard formulation for a coming of age novel, Cooper does a better job than most of creating that atmosphere where each of us is special enough to become something more than we are today. She shows us some of the struggles and the work, specialness isn’t simply handed out, and that we each have a role to play. Whether we’re descended from Welsh magicians or not.

The Craft of Unfolding

The biggest literary lesson I’m taking away from The Dark is Rising is how Cooper uses Merriman Lyon to teach the reader about the world Will is newly entering. On the surface, Merriman is teaching Will with lines like “Expect nothing and fear nothing, here or anywhere” because the Dark cannot kill an Old One, but these words also tell the reader what to expect. From direct instructions on what will come next to advice on how to cope, Merriman imparts these lessons throughout the book which keeps Will from bumbling through a disorganized quest and also helps us understand the rules of the book we are reading. This is not a tactic I’d actually recommend to most writers because it’s far too easy to end up telling the reader things you want them to experience instead, but Cooper’s allusions are just delicate enough and the rest of the text enthralling enough that it’s the perfect choice here.

About the Magic

I start to crave magical stories at this time of year. Maybe it’s because I’m not religious but would like to be. Maybe because my dad read Lord of the Rings to my brother and me at a very early age. Or maybe it’s because it’s easy to get a little cooped up in a Seattle winter. But I had just finished binge-watching the latest season of The Magicians on Netflix when it was time to read The Dark is Rising and I didn’t see the connection until I read this piece in The Guardian and understood that this is a season when many of us seek wonder. Because virgin births and a man who can fit through every chimney don’t quite do it for me (though my son thinks Santa is the shit), I’m glad for a great series of books that can connect me to a more ancient form of wonder.

I sometimes wish I could write books like these—full of wonder and eschewing the boundaries of our world. I can’t, yet, but I can run back and start this series over again with Over Sea, Under Stone. Maybe we can re-read it together.

Buy The Dark is Rising for a young person, buy it for yourself. If you buy it from Bookshop.org using that link, your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Revisiting My Roots with Energy by Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: On Finding My Center

December 9, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Not many people have the fortune to read a biography of their grandfather. I feel especially privileged to have just finished reading Energy: The Life of John J. McKetta Jr. while my beloved grandfather, a man I call Djiedo, is still alive at 102. Written by my cousin, Elisabeth Sharp McKetta, this loving portrait not only brought me closer to my roots, but in doing so helped me find comfort in a time gone awry. It is impossible to impartially review this book, but I do want to share some of the lessons I learned while reading it, because, while some are very personal, I think they can help more than just me.

Humans Are the Best of What We Have

One of the lessons drilled into me as a child by my father who learned it from Djiedo was how a person’s worth was not tied to what they did for a living. This is something that’s been top of mind lately as the Republican Party seeks to reward donors and reinforce the growing divide between rich and poor in the US. And it wasn’t until I read “wealth can never be a measure of worth” in Dan Rather’s poignant Facebook note that I could pinpoint exactly what my discomfort with recent events was. I assumed we all thought that wealth wasn’t a measure of worth. Naive, perhaps, but also a worldview that forms who I am.

The value of humans rather than wealth seems natural for a man who rose from coal miner to university chancellor and presidential advisor, but it’s one that’s all too easily forgotten. It’s one we mask by talking about “a man being the sum of his actions and not his inheritance,” but judging by how much of Djiedo’s admittedly fantastic rise was influenced not just by his drive but by the support of others, human connections are the only real wealth in the world.

Material Wealth is Impermanent

Something I’ve feared desperately since I got laid off last year and Trump was elected is how I would take care of my family in an economic downturn, or worse, a war. Reading Energy, I realized that worry itself was a luxury. When the Great Depression hit the McKetta family, they were poor enough to not have much to lose. It was the Smith family, my grandmother and her parents, whose fortunes fell because they did. I have a home, bank accounts and a cushy corporate job, but this book reminded me that it’s my loved ones who matter. Tragedies can happen there, too, and did to my Djiedo, but I can’t live in fear of those, either, because life goes on and we carry our people with us.

Connections Can Last a Lifetime—Or More

Speaking of people I love, this book reminded me that family is what you make it. I did know that, but in the past three years of pregnancy, birth and raising an infant without any close family nearby, I’ve let myself get pretty isolated. What a wonderful feeling this week to pair the addressing of my Christmas cards with reading in Energy about how Djiedo kept in touch with so many people who touched his life for so long.

That actually brings up a funny story. Dr. Eugene P. Schoch started the Chemical Engineering department at the University of Texas that’s now named for Djiedo, and when Dr. Schoch recruited Djiedo, he, Baba and my infant father lived in a building behind Dr. Schoch’s house. On my Christmas card list is a Stephanie Schoch—the great-granddaughter of Eugene. I met Stephanie two years ago when I used AirBNB to book the building behind her house so that my husband, my infant son, and I could attend Djiedo’s 100th birthday party. Point being that the world is small and we can let it feel large and unmanageable or lonely but it doesn’t have to be. Those connections are there if we preserve them—as Djiedo has and as I’m relearning to.

Honestly Learning from Anyone You Can

Some of the people Djiedo kept in touch with were his mentors. One of the most beautiful things Elisabeth did in Energy, and I’m sure this was blessed by Djiedo’s stellar recall and generous willingness to share attribution, was to trace some of the most important and memorable parts of Djiedo’s character to his mentors.

This is an excellent reminder that not only are our lives touched every day by people we can learn from, but we touch lives too. In a time when so many “mentors” and men in power are being called out for sexual harassment, abuse, and assault, perhaps one of the most important things we can all do is to look at our own behavior and see where we have failed those who looked up to us and how we can not fail next time. There’s an anecdote in Energy about Djiedo being confronted with his own sexism. While I think he came by his beliefs honestly (from his culture, his family, his time), what is very much to his credit is how open he was to learning a new way to be. I hope I have the courage to learn as well from my own mistakes.

The Advantages of Staying Busy

Busyness is what makes Djiedo the man he is. On days when you’re not prepared for this energy, you might call it frenetic, but it’s also a key to his success and to who he is. Instead of going off to college to find himself like so many of us do, Djiedo launched a personal campaign to get himself admitted to a university and then worked three jobs to ensure he had food and shelter while he obtained that degree. As a professor he was an editor (something I did not know), a lecturer, a board member, and also a presidential advisor. This is a pace I believe he sustains even now. Though at 102 he sleeps many more hours than he used to, I know from personal experience that there is not a minute wasted in his day as he keeps up with old acquaintances and feeds his busy brain.

As an inheritor of this type of energy, it certainly feels frenetic in my chest, especially as I woke at 4am all week to read about Djiedo during hours I usually describe as “McKetta early” because so many of Djiedo’s descendants greet the dawn way before the sun is ready to get up. But I know this energy is also what allows me to find time in the week to have a corporate career while spending time with my son and also writing books.

What’s painful to admit is that I’ve let my own busy life become an excuse for avoiding visiting Djiedo. I wondered often while reading Energy how the type of career that allows one to become a presidential advisor affects the family back home. Although Djiedo lived the ideal male role of his time, I’m not sure the time away from family is something I want for myself and I see that my choices aren’t reflecting my values. I’m afraid of losing him the way we lost my grandmother, Baba, but we will lose him eventually and staying away only squanders an opportunity.

Baba, the Heart of it All

The hardest part of this book for me to read was the section about Baba’s decline and death. Not because she wasn’t ready to die, she had been for a long time, but because she was the heart of us all. I witnessed Baba’s moderating effect on Djiedo that Elisabeth describes in Energy and I know that from my love of reading to the deep patience and quiet I am capable of, a good share of who I am comes from her as well. Being in Baba’s very presence was a grounding, healing experience for us all, and while she was more than ready to go, I think we all will miss her always. I’m grateful to Elisabeth for the ways she wove Baba’s story in with Djiedo’s because I think I, and my son, have lessons to learn from incorporating both types of energy into our lives.

We Are the Legends We Leave Behind

As I was reading this book, my son slept down the hall, and I kept thinking what a privilege it is that he’ll have a book about his great-grandfather to pore over when he’s ready. He’s even in one of the pictures. Though the audience for Energy might be limited to the people whose lives John J. McKetta has touched, that touch is profound and the audience engaged.

If you are a parent or a grandparent, please write your stories down. Not in ones and zeroes but on paper where a curious child or grandchild can find them later and begin to understand where they come from and how that has made them. This is not the first book I’ve read about Djiedo—two decades ago he gave our family individual copies of an autobiography entitled My First 80 Years—but Energy gave me a rounder portrait of my family in a time I most needed it and I will read it again.

Although I remember some of the legends differently, so goes family lore. I am grateful to have a canonical reference for my son that’s more trustworthy than my faulty memory. And I’ve annotated my copy with extra details where I appear so that he can come to know me better someday.

One of my favorite movies has always been Big Fish, especially the ending when all of the characters from the father’s mythic past converge to bid him farewell. It’s a gorgeous celebration of a full life well lived and also a reminder that the way we choose to remember our history makes us who we are now. I hope we have a long time before Djiedo’s final celebration (and not just because I need to book a plane ticket), but if his 95th birthday party (attended by 650 people) and his 100th (rich with family in an event kept intentionally small) are any indication, it will be sprawling people whose lives Djiedo has touched. I am lucky to be among them.

To read this portrait of a man I love very much, pick up a copy of Energy: The Life of John J. McKetta, Jr. from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Breaking Free from a Writing Rut with Daughters of the Air by Anca Szilágyi

November 25, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

A good book opens you—to worlds you would never know, to the experience of being human, to yourself. Daughters of the Air by Anca Szilágyi did just that. This story that touches Argentina’s Dirty War, the gritty days of Brooklyn, and what it’s like to be alone in the world before your time shows, through one family’s experience, how tragedy and political upheaval can upend lives and alter forever the future we once thought we had.

Writing About Argentina’s Dirty War

Daughters of the Air is not the same kind of blow-by-blow story of Argentina’s Dirty war that Liliana Heker’s The End of the Story is. Though Szilágyi gives us glimpses inside the politics and even the arrests, the story is for the most part one or two steps removed from that main action, and I was glad for the freedom to explore that this separation allowed Szilágyi. Instead of detailed accounts of rallies and resistance, we encounter the fear that surrounds a family and how that affects them for years to come. Rather than a peek inside the torture chambers, we see the moment of flight and what comes next for the exiles. Daughters of the Air is stronger for this separation which also allows Szilágyi’s story to migrate to Brooklyn.

A Teenaged Girl Alone in 1980’s Brooklyn

Basically abandoned at a boarding school in Connecticut after her father disappears from his Argentine university and her mother shuts down emotionally, Pluta takes flight one evening by jumping into a car with a strange young man and heading off to Brooklyn. If the previous sentence reminds you enough of your hot-headed experiences as a young person to bring up some terror-related bile, you’ll know how I entered this book. I will not tell you what happens next, but I will say that Szilágyi pulls no punches with Pluta’s experience as a teen on the streets of a pre-hipster Brooklyn.

What I respect greatly about this narrative, though, is that while Pluta is victimized, it’s never quite what I feared—Pluta is no Law & Order: SVU-style victim who gets smacked down by life and exists only as the object of rescue. Instead, she makes active choices that have actual consequences. As a mother and a former wild teen, this story line was heart-rending to read but I had to admire the strength of the character inhabiting the decisions she made. No matter what happened the page before, Pluta was always trying to make the best choice she could to make a life for herself in a world where all of those who should have been protecting her were gone.

I found myself wanting to shake Pluta’s mother from her stupor. A reaction whose violence I can only credit to the tension Szilágyi builds in this book. Equally so, I wanted to wrap Pluta in blankets and save her from herself and the world, but I don’t think this steely character would have allowed it. She has her own path to walk and she will not stop until she’s reached the end on her own terms.

Enter Magical Realism

And then something completely unexpected happens. I won’t detail it here (because I think knowing in advance would spoil something for you), but I will say that the element of magical realism surprised me and I wish I understood it as more than a metaphor. Part of this is my own expectation as a North American reader because I had a similar reaction when Dylan in Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude began flying (literally) around Gowanus.

I think Szilágyi was experimenting here and trying to stretch me as a reader, which I appreciate, but I wasn’t fully on board. Perhaps I read too quickly to fully grasp the nuance of this element, but I was left wanting the implications of this element to be explored a bit more than it was.

Stasis in Perfection Lies

I wasn’t sure after finishing Daughters of the Air that I liked the feeling of reading the book, so for my very next read I pulled Emily Ruskovich’s Idaho off the shelf. From the first sentence this story of the world after a mother has killed her daughter is textbook perfect. The structure is well-architected, the prose cleanly constructed and Ruskovich doesn’t shy away from fully imagining and confronting a difficult topic. And yet Idaho completely failed to move me as a mother and as a writer.

Putting these two books side by side made me realize I want to read a book that pushes me so far beyond my own experience as a human and a writer that I’m already off the cliff and halfway to a crushing death before I realize what’s happening. Daughters of the Air took me there. Idaho did not.

Daughters of the Air is not a perfect book, but that’s where its beauty lies. Instead of telling a pat story, Szilágyi reaches into her treasure trove of fiction-telling tools and weaves a story different than any I’d ever read before. The narrative surprised me, the gravitas shocked me, and the fantastical elements challenged me—all of which made for a worthwhile read and will make me a better writer. Daughters of the Air showed me that I’ve become much too safe with my own writing and that I must push myself into new depths and new experiences to create work that is meaningful to me. I must shove off the idea of perfection and instead begin, again, to explore.

If you want to read a book that will surprise and challenge you, pick up a copy of Daughters of the Air.

Finding Home in the World’s Best Bookshops with Jorge Carrión

November 18, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I opened my review copy of Bookshops: A Reader’s History by Jorge Carrión the week I was to finally visit the famed City Lights Books in San Francisco for a friend’s book launch. Like most avid readers, bookshops have long been an important part of my life—from perusing the dusty stacks of Twice Sold Tales with my dad as a child, trying to figure out if I had enough quarters to add another Stephen King to my collection, to discovering that I actually like the new Elliott Bay Books even better than the old as I thumb through the poetry section at its heart. Still, Bookshops had a lot to teach me about my beloved haunts, both those that are familiar and those that are not.

Travelogue in Bookshop Form

Bookshops is not a reassuring collection of thoughts on why bookstores are important like My Bookstore. Instead it’s filled with micro essays and deep contemplation, glimpses of booksellers both longstanding and soon-to-be forgotten and, yes, loving tributes too. This is a curious book and the way that it’s ordered would drive a researcher mad, but if you surrender to Carrión’s particular labyrinthine logic, it’s magical. For example, you’ll find the history of City Lights Books not in “America (I): Coast to Coast” but instead beside its sister shop, Shakespeare and Company in “Shakespeare and Companies,” a pairing that reminds us geography is only one way of finding kinship. But it’s a fascinating psychogeography and I enjoyed learning about Carrión’s way of thinking as much as I enjoyed learning about the bookshops he describes.

Busting Up My Ethnocentrism

Speaking of geography, one of the highlights of reading Bookshops was Carrión’s Spanish perspective. As much as I feel like I read widely, especially in Latin America and Eastern Europe, he exposed me to so many writers I’d never even heard of. It was a pleasure to step outside the echo chamber of contemporary U.S. writing. While there are North American writers writing in English whom I adore, Carrión reminded me that I’d let my world get too small again and my to-read list is now forever blessed by this book.

Covering bookshops on five continents, Bookshops also reminded me of some of the pleasures of other cultures from haggling to the experience of finding a collection of books in your own language while traveling in a distant land.

Book Learning

I very much enjoyed the way Carrión wove historical tidbits about books and publishing into his narrative with lines like “Books depended on the rag-and-bone man until the 18th century,” a note which forever changed my view of the rag-and-bone man, the books I hold, and our current disposable culture. I had also never stopped to consider that “the first publishing houses comprised groups of copyists” or that the bound nature of a book is something I shouldn’t take for granted.

Carrión also thinks deeply about what it means to be a reader and a writer. His assertion that “literary bookshops shape their discourse by creating a sophisticated taste that prefers difficulty” made me reflect on my own reading and writing habits and desires. While a remark on how “changes of abode and language led to a state of artistic extraterritoriality” fell uncomfortably close to home.

I won’t go into how many of the bookshops Carrión describes closed before he could even put their glory down on paper—it makes me too sad—but maybe that’s part of the importance of experiencing our favorites now and of this loving documentation of the ones that once were. In that way they don’t leave us at all.

Visiting the Hallowed City Lights

“You create books solely to forge links with others, even after your own death.” – Stefan Zweig

Because of my father, the first poet I ever loved was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which led me to love the idea of the Beat Generation and developed in me a reverence for City Lights Books. But, after a brusque encounter with the man himself at a reading one night, I was reminded of Flaubert’s maxim: “Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles, la dorure en reste aux mains,” which translates loosely as “don’t touch your idols because the gold might come off on your hands.” So as many times as I’ve walked past this landmark while visiting San Francisco, I’ve never let myself walk in so as to preserve my reverence. But when my grad school advisor and friend was launching her newest book there, I thought it was probably time to get over myself. It seemed too much like one of those confluences of the universe that you probably shouldn’t avoid.

I’m a little shy to say that I rushed into the store and up to the poetry section where the reading would be held, but that particular trip was stretching me in a lot of ways and it’s what I could manage at the time. What I found in that bookstore, though, was better than anything I could have expected. The building that had been built up into some Sacre Coeur-like icon shining brightly from a hill was, once I crossed the threshold, approachable and homely. It felt small and cozy and the reading was mercifully easy to find. The stairs creaked familiarly and I wanted to take pictures of each and every hand-lettered sign encouraging readers to sit and enjoy or the posters for iconic events. But I didn’t. I didn’t have to. City Lights Books became to me one of those places I could sit and absorb. I was at home there. I read an entire book by Kimiko Hahn while waiting for the reading, I met writers old and new. I even met the proprietor of a bookshop whose balcony table became my momentary home—sustaining me during the precarious year after grad school as I scribbled letters to fellow writers trying to keep hold of the community I felt slipping away.

So while for Carrión City Lights was an anchor and a genesis for “new levels of literacy and sophistication in The West after the Second World War,” for me it was a reminder that the bookshop is my home and that when I feel lonely and far from myself, I’d do well to return there. I don’t know if I can make time for weekly letter-writing (and book-buying, let’s be real) field trips to Elliott Bay right now, but I think I’d better try.

To travel the world’s bookshops with Jorge Carrión, pick up a copy of Bookshops: A Reader’s History from the magnificent Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Dreaming of The Brick House by Micheline Aharonian Marcom

October 28, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Years ago, when I was still waiting for someone to tell me what it meant to be a writer, I read a panel discussion in Poets & Writers with a group of agents who said you only get one dream per book because dreams are too easy a way to spell out what a character is feeling. The Brick House by Micheline Aharonian Marcom showed me what was really too easy was that quote. By dedicating an entire book to that most revealing condition, she’s shown how complex our dreams, and our lives, really are. My mentor in grad school, I’ve learned a lot from Micheline about how to find my own way as a writer and reading this book showed me not only how far I’ve come but how much farther, still, I can go.

The Brick House, Real and Imagined

There is a magical place I go to fill up, to find myself when I’ve strayed too far from who I want to be. It is the place I was conceived and the place I learned to accept and celebrate myself as a writer. This place sometimes calls me so hard I consider dropping everything and rushing there to teach (or just to be). Now Micheline has written a book set in this place, and when I touched the book, when I read it all late the night it came in the mail, I was nearly home again. Though The Brick House is strange and unsettling, this beautiful book helped return me to me.

The brick house I know is at the end of a lane on officer’s row. A strange building known for the visions and nightmares it imparts to women. A house I once missed exploring because I did not have the courage to enter the front door, let alone climb aside the staircase to pass the barrier that hides what is in the attic. The house was so renowned for its haunted nights, that my school eventually stopped housing women there altogether. But not before Micheline got to sleep there.

The Brick House Marcom imagines is an isolated place beside the sea where those in need come for one night to dream the portentous dreams they need to change their lives. Not a well-known or fancy retreat center, but rather the kind of place that strangers seek you out in your worst moments to whisper an invitation. We meet first the house and then a traveler who was invited here to dream.

As in Marcom’s other two more recent books, this traveler, the mysterious caretaker and the place itself are not named. This anonymity opens the book to a reader’s own willingness to add the final details that make the book our own. For me, the eponymous brick house could not be separated from the one in my memory, but I enjoy imagining the myriad brick houses other readers will bring to this book. I wonder now if the not-naming comes from Marcom’s multicultural background, if it was a realization that once an author adds a name like Peter or Issa to a character, a reader layers on assumptions. Instead, Marcom pulls back and allows us to enter and assign the cues that pull us deeper into the book than any prescribed identifiers could.

The traveler finds the brick house unnerving, from the jumble of room numbers to the art on the walls everything makes him feel “as if he might lose himself inside of this building, as if he will not return or resume after he crosses the threshold to the room because the man that he is (that he thinks he is) might come apart or will not hold inside its walls”.

Pushing My Writing, Still

Writing into the Heat

One of the things Micheline taught me that I always return to in times of fitfulness and bad writing is to write into the heat. That means both to write into what feels worthy at the moment but also to continue exploring your long-term obsessions. I’m good at remembering to write about what’s burning at the moment, but I’ve been neglecting my long-term obsessions. The Brick House reminded me that the magic of the words we put together on the page is that personal brew of ideas and triggers and explorations that are unique to each of us. The words are full of life if we write into our excitements (negative and positive) and the words build into an opus if we follow our obsessions.

Marcom’s obsessions include labyrinths and love affairs, houses invaded and the toxicity of capitalism. By reading how her obsessions have evolved and endured in this new work, I saw that the tiny chunks of projects I’ve been breaking off for myself are selling short the greater ideas I’m grappling with. Marcom helped me see that my explorations of what it means to see oneself as and be seen as a woman are related to my “mommy poetry” which is related to my struggle with algorithms as actors in shaping who we are, how we are seen, and how we see others. In the days since reading this book, I’ve already had one breakthrough in my writing (and, more importantly, my thinking) that could not have happened without bringing all of myself to the page at once.

Bending Genre

Speaking of bringing all of yourself to the page, The Brick House is the first work in which I’ve ever seen Marcom explore genre and it’s wonderful to behold. One of the things I liked most about our grad program was the agnostic approach to genre, but there were not many advisors who wrote in genres themselves. Perhaps it’s because of the freeing aspect of writing about dreams, but The Brick House contains some exquisite examples of horror, sci-fi, folklore, and erotica.

Rethinking the Cadence of Language

One of the tricks I’ve cribbed from Marcom along the way is the pushing together of words that we generally see separated. It’s something she explores still in The Brick House, pairing it with a repetition that turns the words into music with lines like:

“Paying notpaying paying the bills and collectors and more bills”

The touch here is subtle enough not to distract from our understanding of the sentence, but the effect of removing the commas, smashing the words together, and repeating “paying” with only slight alteration throws us deep into the gnawing rhythm of everyday life that this character is either trying to escape from or drown himself in.

My Dreams

“The strangest dream was the one you dreamed before you arrived: of lonely, unnatural men.”

I dreamed last night that a friend won a major literary award. While I got to spend time with her before the event, I spent the duration of her reading worrying that I should not have brought my toddler. This quotidian dream is not worthy of the brick house. But it is relatively revealing about my current fears as I prepare for the privilege of flying down to San Francisco for the release of The Brick House, leaving my family at home for a night to embrace the writer life. Despite the incredible generosity and support of my husband, this time to be just me feels like an emotional extravagance. Although I’m thinking more and more a necessary one, because life is short and it’s very easy to get caught up in “paying notpaying paying the bills” and forget the person I could be.

With two books under my belt since I first visited the isolated peninsula where I began and began again, I do know now what it means to be a writer, but sometimes it helps to have a reminder. The Brick House was that reminder for me, in more than one way, and now that I know who built that house, I’ll return to it again and again.

To dream your own most important dreams, pick up a copy of The Brick House.