Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

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.

Crafting Emotional Honesty in In the Quiet by Eliza Henry-Jones

August 20, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

It’s not hard to trigger a newish mom’s “what would happen to my family if something happened to me” fears, but it is hard to sustain a quiet story over 350 pages. In In the Quiet, Eliza Henry-Jones does both so beautifully that not only did I feel immersed rather than manipulated, but I stayed up many hours past bedtime to surrender to the world of this book and to the life of this family.

When the book begins, the narrator, Cate Carlton, is already dead and looking in on her family in poignant moment after poignant moment—like when her daughter (Jessa) gruffly stonewalls a grief counselor or a son (Rafferty) pulls a box of the last flowers Cate ever picked from beneath his bed. We don’t know how Cate died—the detail that ends up forming the central mystery of the novel—but the family moments are so touching and real that we quickly focus all our attention there and nearly forget that Cate is also missing this critical piece of information. Perhaps because the family story is so strong and each member so individual, the book is satisfying all the way through and I only occasionally noticed the bumpy edge of a clue being dropped on the page and when all is gently revealed, I realized I already had all the information that truly mattered.

The Objective Correlative

The jacket copy of In the Quiettalks about the grief this family alternately endures and learns to cope with, but the story is a lot richer than that. There are daily rhythms to be maintained and reinvented—specifically (and symbolically), there are horses to be fed, trained, and potentially sold to pay some of the family’s expenses.

One horse, Opal, is the most valuable, the most wild, and is lost to the family around the time of Cate’s death. Bass, Cate’s widower husband, is looking for Opal because she could help ease the family’s financial burden. Family friend Laura cares for Opal the way she once cared for Cate. Jessa’s relationship with Opal is the most dynamic—clinging hard to the horse even as others are trying to get Jessa to let go and ultimately making some strong, hard decisions. All this while Rafferty shies away from Opal for reasons that don’t become clear until much later. I thought I knew why pretty early. I was deliciously and wonderfully wrong.

By using Opal as an objective correlative like this, Henry-Jones’s displacing the family’s emotion onto the horse. Not only is this something that happens frequently in grief (you should have seen my family with a pile of jewelry and a stop watch after my grandmother’s death), this literary device allows Henry-Jones to explore on the surface what’s happening deep inside each of her characters. This is one crucial element of what makes In the Quiet heartfeltly intelligent rather than sappy and sad.

Characterization

If I had to pick a favorite character in this book, I couldn’t. And if I had to pick a least favorite, I also could not. Both, to me, are a sign that Henry-Jones’s created a well-written, round cast of characters by exploring their humanity and idiosyncrasies at a depth which does the characters, and the reader, justice.

If we look for a moment just at Beatrice and Laura, the two women who grow closer to Bass after his wife’s death, the healing and stealing of the widower being a trope in both literature and life, we find strong, interesting characters with motivations far beyond getting the guy. That’s wonderful in its own right, but it’s much more extraordinary when you consider that this book is being told first-person through the eyes of the woman who lost Bass when she died. Cate’s exploration of her history with both of these women, one her sister and the other her best friend, gives an understanding of the gifts they bring to the world of the book and to the wounds that they themselves are trying to heal. It also gives Cate a chance to heal and for us to care about and cheer for both women.

Narrative Time

As with blending bits of Cate’s history with Laura into the narrative of the present, Henry-Jones gently drops bits of flashback amidst the forward-moving momentum of this book. The result is a lovely, patterned collage of what Cate is seeing after her death and what she experienced while living. I have not taken the time to diagram the placement of the flashbacks, but the book’s rhythm is so soothing that I’d wager they happen at very regular intervals. The mastery of Henry-Jones’s prose is that the rhythm doesn’t feel episodic or repetitive and I don’t think most readers would notice it unless they went looking.

Tears were shed in the reading of this book, but not in the way I’d expected. Instead, my husband found me weeping only as I was wrapping up the final pages. Because of the craft and emotional honesty of In the Quiet, I was so engaged in the tender family portraits that I scarcely had time to mourn the family’s loss until the end. Or maybe it was that the family didn’t really lose their mom until the end. Or at least she didn’t lose them.

In the Quiet is a quiet, beautifully crafted, engaging book. I’ll admit I put off reading it because I didn’t know how good it would be. Don’t make the same mistake.

If you want to see how to transform a potential tear-jerker into a work of literature, or just read a really heartfelt story, pick up a copy of In the Quiet.

Reading Dystopias: Both Fictional and Not

June 11, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I just updated my Goodreads for the first time since early May and realized that in a time of what feels like not-reading, I’ve been reading a lot. Not the volumes of fictions or poetry I’d usually be immersed in, though some of those. I’ve been immersed in all things political. Some of that, like When the Emperor Was Divine, was fiction, and some of it, like James Comey’s statement to the Senate, I can only wish was fiction. Still, it’s been an interesting mix of media and I thought maybe it was time, after three months of not writing a book review, I reflect on what I’ve been reading.

When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

Of all the things that have happened in the months since Trump was inaugurated, none has hit me as hard as the Muslim ban. A lot of things have upset me, but that one struck at my core values. For days after it was announced that America was no longer going to be the land of opportunity for all but instead was going to start openly turning away legitimate immigrants en masse, I was glued to the news and Twitter just waiting to see if we’d come to our senses. I was so tuned into events that I tuned out of my family and simply waited.

I know the whole land of opportunity thing is a story we tell ourselves just like we tell ourselves that those opportunities are open to everyone. Until that day, though, the story was intoxicating enough that I believed it. I believed we all valued it and were working toward it, even as we struggle with our own racism and anti-immigrant swells.

I don’t know whether When the Emperor Was Divine was sitting in my to-read pile or if I purchased it then or found it at the Little Free Library. I do know that I needed this book this year. Julie Otsuka’s story of a Japanese family living in California then interned during World War II made me look straight into what our country does, not what we say. It made me look at the people we do it to.

The book opens with a Japanese woman, a mother, we later learn, seeing the evacuation order near her home in Berkeley. She returns home and begins packing and preparing her home. Her acceptance seemed strange to me until I understood that her husband had already been arrested. She takes down their artwork, hides their valuables, feeds the stray dog her children cared for a feast and then kills it. When she killed that dog I understood a lot more about her character. This was not a woman who had given up. This was a woman who had no choice and she was going to do the best she could to help her family survive. She knew that dog could not survive alone on the streets and so she gave him the best ending she could. There are glimpses of neighbors helping her in small ways as there are glimpses of the racism her family encounters. But no one can change anything.

Spanning the entirety of the family’s internment and until they and then their patriarch return home, this book is filled with quiet details that speak loud. Otsuka lets us peek inside the experiences of each family member and we see not just the freezing cold, flu and diarrhea of the camps but also a boy’s ritual probing of his imprisoned father’s shoes, the missing of plums, and the worry of whether the porch light was left on or off. We see the family’s strength, their endurance. When the family returns to their wrecked home and works to clean and rebuild it room by room, we think it might be okay, this awful thing that our country did, because they were strong enough to withstand it. But of course it isn’t okay, not that it happened, not that it could happen again. We see this in the father, once a gentle man now broken. All because he had the wrong blood.

As a mother, I admired how well the mother took care of her family even as I ached at how she had to. As a patriot I was disgusted that we ever let this happen. That it could happen again. Sometimes, maybe even most times, we are better at conquering our fear and uncertainty and at becoming the welcoming country I grew up believing in. For example, I’m very proud to be living in one of the first states to push against Trump’s travel bans. But Otsuka reminded me that this impulse to give in to fear is something we have to fight every day or it will bubble right up in the most horrible ways.

Poetry, June 2017

Speaking of people we don’t treat all that well, I’m glad we’re finally having more concerted discussions about race. We need to do more. I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about my own racism, but I have much to learn to become the person I want to be— to appreciate the beautiful array of people and experiences in the world. I was delighted, then, when the June 2017 issue of Poetry arrived in my mailbox and it was a tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks. More importantly, it was filled with voices and experiences I don’t always encounter on my own.

I’ve read Patricia Smith and even seen her speak, but images like “our someday plans / grayed and siphoned flat” and “drown your baby in the mama-eye” reminded me that I haven’t read nearly enough Patricia Smith. CM Burroughs looks into the hypocrisy and humanity of us all by imagining the strong Brooks as lover with “how many times did / you posture yourself for the broad body of him or him and open // like home” and then shows me by her use of forward slashes that I know nothing about experimenting with language. Reading Roger Reeves I discover that the King Shabazz character in my son’s favorite book is actually named after Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Jacqueline Jones Lamon’s line “I take a sip of water and tell them / every true thing that I know — that they are // the power who will save what needs saving” is everything.

Though I always enjoy reading Poetry, this is an especially fine issue and it’s expanded my reading list in all the right ways.

Walks with Walser by Carl Seelig

One of the most reassuring and also unnerving things about Walks with Walser, the book I’m currently reading, is seeing that art can both endure terrible times but that it can also remove itself completely from life. Chronicling conversations during the 27 years Robert Walser spent in an asylum after a breakdown, this book spans World War II and yet, because it occurs in Switzerland, barely even acknowledges what’s happening next door. There are some really gorgeous reflections on the life of an artist in this book, but it’s also an important reminder to me that I am not content to check out on the real world. Though I could benefit from a few more long walks.

Harper’s

A former student of political science, I’ve long subscribed to Harper’s to keep my political muscle active. It’s been an important lifeline since the election. I’m not one of those liberals who was completely surprised Trump won, I think the Democratic Party ignored the growing dissatisfaction of lower-income and blue collar Americans. But I am appalled that Trump was elected.

“Commitment to anything larger than your own life… [is] messy and chaotic and imperfect—which isn’t the flaw of it but the glory of it.” – Leslie Jamison

Though I chose not to attend the Women’s March, a thoughtful and moving essay by Leslie Jamison allowed me to experience the day and also her gorgeous reflection on the lifelong activism of her mother and to understand my own role in making a difference. In the same issue, I learned about an underground movement of ordinary women that had helped women get abortions. and read an excerpt of an essay by Mary Gaitskill that helped me understand how I can raise a son who sees “that rape is a violation of his own masculine dignity as well as a violation of the raped woman.” And I saw a revealing photo essay on what life is like in the projects now, not in some memory of the bad 80’s.

“At it’s best, [feminism] has also been about women recognizing the shifting contours of their own ignorance, and trying to listen harder.” – Leslie Jamison

That was all one issue. I’ve also been catching up on back issues with articles warning of things to come that, by the time the issue’s gone to print, or at least by the time I’ve read it, have already happened. The prescience is reassuring. It makes me believe that although I may feel like the bottom is dropping out, I am not living in unpredictable chaos and if we all think just a little harder and more clearly, we can make the nation as great (in the cooperative, generous, open, humanistic way) as I believe it can be.

Comey’s Statement

One step toward becoming that nation is understanding what’s happening now. I listened to the entirety of Comey’s Senate testimony on Thursday. This time I at least sat with my family while dwelling on current events. Though I hesitate to trust the straightforward earnestness Comey seems to present in that testimony and in his written statement, he made an excellent point about credibility being tied to consistency and Comey is consistent while Trump…

I don’t know what my role is right now in this messy time, but I can bear witness. So can you. If half of what Comey says is true, and I believe much more than that is, Comey is telling us that we have a president who is willing to lie and squeeze his employees and the values our government is founded on to get his way. That should not be a surprise. But it’s time we did something about it.

The Assault by Reinaldo Arenas

I thought I was escaping back into fiction when I pulled The Assault off my bookshelf. I remembered Arenas’ languid, gorgeous language and I really needed a little kick to get back to writing. But of course this Cuban-born novelist who was persecuted by his government is famous for writing about that experience.

This book truly is gorgeous. It’s also a terrifying reminder of what happens when democracy fails. The story of a government agent’s search for his mother so he can kill her before he becomes her, this book shows a country where humanity is reduced to means of production. For example, in one chapter we see the line of people who irrigate the fields with their spit. If they fail to spit, they get juiced and that juice is then used for irrigation. Wild and dark, nothing about the not-night portrayed in this book is wholly implausible. That’s the worst part.

West of Here by Jonathan Evison

West of Here is not a dystopian book. That might be why I sandwiched it somewhere in the middle of all this heavy reading. In fact, it contains elements of the utopias white people wrote about in the 19th and early 20th centuries as explorers went off to conquer new lands and found paradisaical locales with unlimited natural resources. It also contains stories of the people who were already here and a view into what life is like in those same paradises 100 years later. I love reading Jonathan Evison’s descriptions of places I love. I love his understanding of the simplicity and complexity of human motivations. And I love that a strange mystical vein runs through the story. Dams go up, dams come down. People settle, people perish, people endure.

This is not a dystopian book, but it is a good reminder that while our goals may seem simple, reality is not.

Not everything here counts toward my Goodreads reading goal, and I still don’t have the answers to making this country the place I dream it might be. But the somewhat odd selection does reflect the writer and the human that I am, and I’m choosing to embrace that. For better or worse, I’m going to take a little hope from Evison, a little inspiration from Comey, doses of reality from Jamison, strength from Otsuka, seeing from Poetry, and a prod of fear from Arenas and try to live my own values. I hope I can be at least a little part of the power who will save what needs saving.

And now that I’ve put that vow in print, I can finally clear this stack off my desk.