Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

The Price of The Pearl by John Steinbeck

December 13, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

The first time I read The Pearl by John Steinbeck was in junior high. It was the book that made me hate symbolism. All I can remember is my teacher going on and on about the pearl of great price—a litany that landed with such a thud in my heart that I decided never to study literature lest I come to hate books.

So I don’t know what made me re-read the book this week, but I’m glad I did. I still heard that “pearl of great price” echo throughout my read, but I also learned to appreciate the book as a work of art, and I fell under the spell of the symbolism after seeing it in its natural environment and getting to experience the metaphor and message rather than have them dictated to me. The book opened up for me and helped me attach language to the experience of being a new mother.

The Sound of a Fable

The prologue to The Pearl immediately set me in the fabulous or folkloric space:

In the town they tell the story of the great pearl—how it was found and how it was lost again. They tell of Kino, the fisherman, and of his wife, Juana, and of the baby, Coyotito. And because the story has been told so often, it has taken root in every man’s mind. And, as with all retold tales that are in people’s hearts, there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere.

This paragraph is a gorgeous piece of expectation setting. I knew something about the characters. I knew the story would be filled with archetypes. And I knew it would have the weight of a moral. All of this information is gorgeously wrapped up in that tiny paragraph and still it feels like literature rather than a lesson.

The book then opens in a scene of Kino waking. Within the first page we see the dawning of a family’s peaceful day with the baby in a hanging box and Kino’s wife pleasantly by his side. Steinbeck calls their rhythm “the song of family” and there is no better description for it. And although the nature of such a story is that the song must change, the interruption of a scorpion climbing down toward Coyotito’s crib is no less menacing than the introduction of the wolf in Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”

Steinbeck weaves other “songs” into the narrative including the (siren) song of the pearl. I kept wanting to have the skills to create a movie from this film that was scored entirely with these songs. It’s a gorgeous way of telling a story that works especially well for this form and I could feel the threads coming together as the baby gets sick, Kino fishes for (and finds) a great pearl, and the town reacts to their newfound wealth.

The Song of Family

I could not have appreciated the song of family in the same way the first time I read this book as a teenager. The family you are born into is more of a given and it’s hard to know what life would feel like without that family. But having recently given birth to a child, I had a whole new appreciation for exactly what that song of family is. The song of family is the daily rhythms of the things we do to sustain our lives with the ones we love. For Kino and Juana it’s cooking and cleaning and nursing the baby. For me it’s waking and feeding and changing. It’s going downstairs mid-day to relax on the couch and do tummy time. It’s working with my husband to make sure the bottles are clean and it’s singing to the baby in the evenings to try and get the baby to sleep. It’s curling up with my husband for an hour or two after the baby finally does sleep.

The song of family is the most beautiful thing in the world and the most important to me. Reading The Pearl, I thought of my own impending interruption to this song (enter Peter’s wolf) when my (very generous) maternity leave is up at the end of this month. I hope I will remember every day how beautiful and important this song is and how lucky I have been to be immersed entirely in it for the past four months. It’s a dream I’m not ready to wake from and I keep thinking that there’s an alternative narrative where I don’t have to (like if Kino had followed Juana’s wishes early on or they had been able to escape the song of the doctor), but at least the real world is not black and white like a fable and I can enjoy the greys of getting to experience both the song of work and the song of family.

There is much, much more to The Pearl. Like all great literature, it’s a book that will grab onto and speak to different readers in different ways. It’s also a very short book—I read it in the space of a rare but much appreciated afternoon bath—and I highly recommend you revisit it sometime soon.

If you want to experience the magic of the song of family or the song of the pearl, pick up a copy of The Pearl from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Rediscovering Language in Poems by Maya Angelou

November 22, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I might be the last person on the planet to actually read Maya Angelou’s Poems, but I’ve finally done it and I’m so glad I waited because in reading this book aloud to my newborn son I was able to fully appreciate not only the content of her writing but the musicality as well.

Rhyme and Cadence

Is there anything more enjoyable to read aloud than intelligently rhymed poetry? I’ve been stuck in a rhyming rut with my own work for over a year now (where the rhymes come—dumb or not—and I can’t stop them no matter what I try) and it was such a relief and an inspiration to see how well Angelou works with rhyme and its cousin, cadence.

Part of the beauty of her rhyme is that she breaks from traditional rhyme schemes. While the first stanza of “Song for the Old Ones” she plays with a variation of the classic abab pattern:

My Fathers sit on benches
their flesh count every plank
the slats leave dents of darkness
deep in their withered flanks

Where benches is barely a slant rhyme with darkness but plank and flanks could hardly rhyme more closely. But in the second stanza, she abandons what would be the “c” in the cdcd rhyme you’d expect:

They nod like broken candles
all waxed and burnt profound,
they say, “It’s understanding
that makes the world go round.”

Breaking with those conventions also means breaking up the sometimes sing-song character of rhyme and made for an enjoyable (and instructive) read.

Repetition

Part of Angelou’s musicality is how she’s unafraid to repeat a refrain to the point of near exhaustion. In “Picken Em Up and Layin Em Down” she repeats the title phrase twelve times in two pages. In my own work I’d edit that right on down to a modest number that gives a hint of what I’m saying. But here it’s the sheer excess that works. Not only do you see the narrator’s trans-American journey of tomcatting, but you get to feel its never-ending quality. And for me the phrase repeated enough times to open up a sad, empty feeling beneath the behavior.

Angelou uses this excess of repetition equally artfully in “Ain’t that Bad?” where the refrain shifts just enough to keep me engaged and watching for what she’ll do next:

Now ain’t they bad?
And ain’t they Black?
And ain’t they Black?
And ain’t they Bad?
And ain’t they bad?
And ain’t they Black?
And ain’t they fine?

There’s a complexity of feeling to these lines that evolves as the repetition shifts and I can’t imagine a better way to express that.

Accessible Language

While I’m not a huge fan of overly highbrow language in poetry, I was still surprised by how colloquial Angelou’s poetry can get. And I loved it. From the hybrid verb/adjectives of “Little Girl Speakings” where she channels a little girl admiring her mother’s “cookinger” skills with pie to her frequent use of contractions, she’s unafraid to use just the right word or slang to catch the voice of her narrator and/or audience. This draws attention to the voice. It also shows that the manner of someone’s speech does not in any way indicate the depth of their thoughts or feelings—an important lesson for intellectual elitists like me.

As with everything else discussed here today, it’s clear that Angelou is using those colloquialisms as a tool and because she is, she has a much wider range of language at her disposal. This freedom is something I’d like to experiment with in my own work. I can only hope to capture as much authenticity with my language as she does.

Re-imagining Imagery

Just because Angelou (sometimes) uses simpler language does not mean that her poetry is in any way simplistic. The way she uses images like “wombed room” and “brain-dust / of rainbows” made every little synapse in my head wake up and engage. Sometimes all it took was a slight shift of phrase as in “little dyings” to rock my linguistic world, but Angelou showed me how much can be done with the everyday blocks of language. Of course it can be very difficult to find exactly the right image or a new way of expressing something without making a poem all about that one phrase, but I have a lot to learn from Angelou about how to do it well.

Broadening My Perspective

As a white woman, the things I have teach my son about the world are limited. That’s not because I’m white or because I’m a woman but because I have one set of life experiences to share. And the lily white shade of my reading tastes was never more obvious to me than when I was teaching a class at Mary’s Place, a local shelter for homeless women. Although I brought in textbook-ready poems like “We Real Cool” by Geraldine Brooks, I failed to really venture into anything that wasn’t already in the mainstream—something my students were (rightly) quick to point out.

Reading Angelou opened up a world of understanding to me of both how an African American woman might see the world and also some historical events that were merely history book entries to me before. Yes, her work has been accepted into the mainstream, but Poems allowed me to read far beyond “Caged Bird” (which is a gorgeous starting point to discussing race in America, but only a starting point) to the pained, angry cries of “Africa”:

brigands ungentled
icicle bold
took her young daughters
sold her strong sons
churched her with Jesus

And I loved how she juxtaposed that with “America,” starting with how “The gold of her promise / has never been mined” and delving into the abundance and justice that so many never experience. And I’ll never look at Gone with the Wind (or Antebellum history) the same way after reading “Miss Scarlett, Mr. Rhett and Other Latter-Day Saints.”

Am I sorry that I waited so long to read Maya Angelou? Not really. I’ve loved stumbling through poetry on my quest to understand it and I’ve found some real gems along the way. But I’m sure glad that I read Angelou now. I can’t wait to incorporate what I’ve learned as I edit my growing manuscript of pregnancy and early parenting poetry.

If you want to rediscover language yourself, pick up a copy of Maya Angelou’s Poems from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Shimmer of Truth in The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

November 8, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

The first night my husband read me a chapter from The Ocean at the End of the Lane by lamplight as I nursed our son, I was certain the story was more than made up. As the narrator returns to his childhood home, I could feel Neil Gaiman flashing glimpses of his childhood into the story. Something about smudging the line between truth and fiction made the book even more of a joy to read (and to listen to) as we followed the fantastic journey of a man reliving a few magical and terrible days in his childhood.

Metafictional Clues

The dedication was my first clue that this book was not as fictional as we usually consider fiction to be. Gaiman writes, “For Amanda, who wanted to know.” I could just picture his wife asking him about his childhood one night and Gaiman spinning this elaborate tale. The epigraph, from Maurice Sendak, deepens the impression that we’re reading a somewhat true story. It reads, “I remember my own childhood vividly… I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew them. It would scare them.” That epigraph also happens to capture perfectly the feeling of this entire book.

The story begins with a man (unnamed) returning to a half-remembered English hometown for a funeral. There is something so hauntingly true as Gaiman writes about answering the standard questions asked by people who knew you once. They ask about your “work (doing fine, thank you, I would say, never know how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all).” Although Gaiman never specifies what type of art the narrator makes, I felt like he was opening his soul in those lines and that coupled with the biographical similarities meant that for me the narrator could not have been anyone else but Gaiman from there on out.

In the end it’s not at all unusual for writers to put themselves in their work whether it’s gathering small observations from their daily lives, mining emotions they have felt, or drawing on actual events. But I was delighted to hear in the acknowledgements, “The family in this book is not my own family, who have been gracious in letting me plunder the landscape of my own childhood and watched as I liberally reshaped those places into a story.”

While metafiction is often defined as a work that brings attention to that work’s status as an artifact, in this case the metafictional elements were subtle enough that they made the story feel more like real life. If you’re familiar with Gaiman’s love of the fantastic, you know what a wonderful feat this is.

Shimmering Truth

The line between fiction and truth isn’t the only one Gaiman dances in The Ocean at the End of the Lane. He also plays with the way memory affects truth. This starts with how memories start to unfold on the narrator as he drives to where his childhood home once stood. The story opens up and we meet a wonderful cast of characters including his childhood friend, Lettie Hempstock, who isn’t as young as she may seem.

I absolutely will not spoil the story for you here, but it’s interesting to note both the way certain memories and events are (almost literally) snipped out of the narrative and the way the narrator’s recollections shift (especially as the story comes to a close). Even the characters change shape between the narrator’s youthful and adult interpretations of them.

As old Mrs. Hempstock says, “Didn’t I just say you’ll never get any two people to remember anything the same?” Sometimes those two people are who we were then and who we are now and I’ve never seen a book capture that difference more perfectly.

Reading Aloud

Ever since my dad read my brother and me the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, I’ve loved being read to, but it’s an act that takes a lot of dedication on the part of a reader—especially when you’re dealing with novel-length works. For example, I’ve been reading Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman to my husband since April of 2013 and we started The Arabian Nights way back in 2011. So when my husband settled cross-legged on the floor of the darkened nursery and unfolded the case for his Kindle, I scarcely dared to hope that reading was on his mind. And I never thought we’d finish the whole book in under two months.

Being read to is a different (and not always positive) experience. For one thing, I couldn’t picture the names of the characters which made them seem more ephemeral to me. I also found that by not seeing the words of the text I had more trouble recalling what happened the time before.

But the upsides were so amazingly wonderful that I’m already begging my husband for the next book (and may even finish reading those other books to him someday). For one thing, that ephemeral feeling that came with not having seen the words on the page worked for this book. Because I wasn’t turning pages, I felt like I was being told the story by the person who experienced it. Secondly, because we were experiencing the book together, we’d sit after each chapter and talk through what just happened. He was reading the book for the second time and was loving seeing it new through my eyes and I was loving digging for hints and clues about what was to come.

And then there’s the experience of being read to. Each night that my husband sat on that floor I felt so surrounded by love. I can’t wait until we can share that experience with our son (in any way that we think he might remember it). For now, as I finish off the brutal mystery of The Snowman I’ll just be grateful that we can read as adult of material as we please for a few more months.

It turns out that Gaiman read The Ocean at the End of the Lane aloud to his wife each night as he was writing it. Some stories just come alive that way. We’re still looking for the perfect next book to read aloud. If you have any recommendations, I’ll gladly take them.

If you want to embark on an adventure with a Gaiman-like boy and the Hempstock family, pick up a copy of The Ocean at the End of the Lane from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Power of Family Lore in Carrying Albert Home by Homer Hickam

October 17, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I was delighted when my review copy of Carrying Albert Home by Homer Hickam arrived in the mail. Not only was I not expecting it, but I’d felt such a close connection with the film October Sky (based on Hickam’s memoir Rocket Boys) that I was looking forward to learning more about his family. And the timing could not have been more perfect.

Family Epic: Novel or Memoir?

Billed as “The Somewhat True Story of A Man, His Wife, and Her Alligator,” Carrying Albert Home is what Hickam calls a “family epic.” Coming from a family of storytellers, I’m very familiar with this genre—although I hadn’t before considered it could be a genre—and this book helped me understand what I loved so much about the novel and film Big Fish.

We’ve all been told stories of how our forefathers walked dozens of mile to school in snow up to their necks and uphill both ways. The exaggeration of these tales somehow helps us remember undercurrents of who our ancestors were. Hickam captures the spirit of family lore with the epic tale of his parents’ journey to deliver their pet alligator back to Florida.

Although the details are too good to be true, I wanted them to be, and as Homer (the elder) and Elsie encounter John Steinbeck, Communists, bootleggers, and bank robbers during their quest I felt like I was getting to know the core of those two characters—Homer who endures all and Elsie who wants to experience every possible excitement life has to offer. Although the book is packed with greater truths, I was so glad I didn’t have to care if the details of the story were accurate.

The Art of Plotting a Journey

Hickam’s folksy storytelling style and the ever-escalating events reminded me of that other Homer’s The Odyssey and like that classic work, this book is a textbook example of Aristotle’s plot arc.

The ground situation—Homer living with a restless Elsie in Coalwood with a rapidly growing alligator—turns into a story when they set on the road to deliver Albert home. Each new plot complication (the aforementioned bootleggers, bank robbers, and more) is a struggle Homer and Elsie have to overcome to get Albert back where he belongs.

What makes this book an exceedingly good example of how to structure a story, though, is how clearly you can trace not just Albert’s physical journey, but also the emotional journeys of Homer and Elsie. Hickam uses each of the plot points is a new opportunity to examine and shift their desires and the possible outcome of their love story.

If you want to get even headier about how this book exemplifies story structure, read up about Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and use that information to trace Elsie’s “hero’s journey.” It’s an excellent exercise to learn how to refine a plot.

My Own Family’s Epic

When I said I felt a close connection with October Sky, it’s because my grandfather was a coal miner who broke free from his small town by becoming a chemical engineer like (a generation later) Hickam broke free from his coal mining destiny by becoming a rocket scientist. But that’s the boring version of my Djiedo’s story. In his self-published memoir My First 80 Years, Djiedo (Dr. John J. McKetta) details a wild lifetime of anecdotes starring everything from beating Perry Como in a singing contest to being bitten by a blue-footed booby.

Although some of the stories seem far too large to be true, I want them to be, and they’ve become such a part of the family lore that I want my son to know the stories as they are—somewhat outsized versions of a fabulous life. And I get a special chance to make him part of that epic as we all converge on Austin this October to celebrate Djiedo’s 100th birthday. The coal mining boxer-engineer-trumpeter-presidential advisor will be feted by a family including my father the pilot-sign carver-forester-economist-bookseller and me the novelist-marketer-reviewer-mother (as a younger member of the family I still have some time to catch up on my dashes). Storytellers all, whatever unlikely events happen during the weekend celebration, the version we later remember will be one hell of a story and I can’t wait to enlarge and improve upon it as I retell it to my son over the years.

Happy birthday, Djiedo! Thanks for setting a fantastic example. May all our stories be as long and rich as yours.

If you want to set on the adventure of a lifetime with Hickam’s family, pick up a copy of Carrying Albert Home from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Calculus of Grief in Enon by Paul Harding

October 5, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I picked up Enon by Paul Harding on a rare trip to the bookstore in the first few weeks of my son’s life. I did not know then what the book was about, but I had so enjoyed Tinkers that I was glad to take a chance on what I knew would be a solidly written piece of fiction. I did not know that it was going to make me question how emotion is and should be conveyed in literature.

The Structure of Loss

Three sentences into reading Enon, we already know that Charlie Crosby has lost his only child, thirteen-year-old Kate. Killed while riding her bicycle, we’re quickly immersed in the downward spiral of Charlie’s grief as he pushes away his wife and begins to lose himself.

The book is very well structured. Harding weaves together the progression of time with flashbacks from Charlie’s life, insights into the history of the town of Enon, and ever more intimate looks at Charlie’s guilt—both the destruction he’s currently wreaking on himself and flashes of how he might have prevented Kate’s accident—so that with each page the reader is drawn deeper into Charlie’s world and the experience of losing a child.

Intellectualizing Grief

There is only one thing missing from Enon—emotional connection. You’d think with a first person narrative and a subject as wrought as the death of a child that it would be easy to connect with Charlie. As a new mother who basically worries every second that something will happen to my child, I was actually terrified to read beyond the first page of this book because I thought I’d be devastated by it.

Instead, because our experience of the events relies entirely on Charlie and Charlie wants nothing more than to escape the pain of grief, I felt distant and cold while reading this book. I could intellectually engage with the horrors of losing a child, I could conceive of how the path Charlie was on could ruin his life even further, but I could not feel much of anything about any of it. Which turned out to be a disappointment and my mind wandered a lot as I read the book.

Imparting Emotion in Narrative

So how was it that Harding failed to create an emotional connection between the reader and Charlie? The last thing Charlie wants to do is feel the loss of his daughter. Pulling back from that kind of horror is a natural human coping mechanism, but by running us through every thought in Charlie’s head, we don’t get to make jumps, leaps, and emotions on our own. It becomes difficult to engage with Charlie and the situation. And when Charlie is describing the feeling of loss, it’s still difficult to connect because we see what Kate’s death is doing to him, but he wants to self destruct and provides no entree into reaching out to him. It feels as though Harding is pushing us away as much as Charlie pushes away his wife.

Could it be any other way?

If Harding wanted us as readers to empathize with Charlie on an emotional level, he could have interspersed third person perspective. If we witnessed Kate’s death without the filter of Charlie’s distance, it would be impossible not to feel his pain. We would travel down that emotional spiral with him and his actions seem inevitable. It would be harder to judge him and wish he would make different choices. If we saw how neighbors saw him—again without the filter of Charlie’s rationalizing—we might pity the poor wretch he becomes.

Should it be any other way?

I don’t know. I was horrified by how dead inside I felt while reading this book, but I’m not sure complete emotional devastation would have been the best tack either. I would have preferred a blend of emotional and intellectual appeal. In fact that pulling between our two ways of dealing with life could make for an unequaled depth of engagement.

As a writer, I’d find trying to create that perfect balance between the two a wonderful challenge. Although I know it would not be easy. In fact it’s something I struggled with in writing Polska, 1994 which in early drafts came off as a lament which also kept the reader at a distance—if only because it veered too far in the direction of emotion. And this balance between reason and feeling is something I’d urge you to think carefully about in your own writing—at least in the editing stage.

Harding is a gifted writer and I can only imagine he created the exact level of emotional engagement he wanted. Which only leaves me to wonder—why show me so much of Charlie’s devastation while holding my heart so far away from him?

If you want to unpack Harding’s use of emotion or just see if I’m a cold fish of a reader, pick up a copy of Enon from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.