Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

Best Pregnancy Books for Writers

August 23, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 3 Comments

Pregnancy is a time full of joy and wonder. It’s also full of terror and anxiety. If you’re a writer, add to all that the fear that you may never write again. So many famous women writers chose never to have children and I worried I couldn’t balance my all-consuming creative self with creating a whole new life. Sarah Manguso expresses some of this anxiety better than I could in a fantastic essay in Harper’s, but I wanted a baby badly enough to try to balance the two. One of the things that got me through the pregnancy and helped me nourish my creative self while transitioning from baby vessel to writer mama was surrounding myself with excellent and thoughtful books about pregnancy and parenthood by writers I respect and admire.

If you are pregnant, thinking of becoming pregnant, or know a creative person who is either, these are the books I recommend to nourish that creative soul while preparing for parenthood.

The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood by Louise Erdrich

I’ve written more extensively about this book here. It’s a gorgeous amalgam of thoughts and essays about parenthood and writing by Louise Erdrich. She weaves together narratives from her three pregnancies with glimpses of how this National Book Award winning writer manages to write and parent at the same time. The book is also filled with quiet yet poignant observations of nature. The Blue Jay’s Dance is an excellent meditation and it’s easy to dip in and out of the book as you need inspiration and the comfort of seeing how other writer-parents do it.

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich

Most famous as a poet, Adrienne Rich is a deliciously rich thinker and this frank look at motherhood and the female experience from a feminist perspective helped me think more deeply about my own life experiences. It helped me understand how to inhabit myself as a woman and it gave me insight into my relationship with my mother. It was a healing book and one that made me think more deeply about the roles all of us play as parents, children, and fellow citizens. I will be a better parent because I read this book. I will also be a better wife and stronger in myself.

While looking at everything from literature to societal norms, Rich doesn’t shy away from difficult topics like abortion, but she also does not thrust an agenda upon the reader. This is an excellent book for any woman (or interested man) to read, it’s a must-read for any pregnant writer to find her own center and feelings about some very important issues.

Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother by Beth Ann Fennelly

One of the blurbs on this book reads, “The best book ever to give for a baby shower” and I am so grateful that a writer friend gave me a copy at one of my baby showers. Originally written as a series of letters from Beth Ann Fennelly (then a newish parent) to a dear friend, it’s easy to feel like you are the dear friend as you read Fennelly’s stories about parenting and gentle advice. Advice is such a tricky thing for the pregnant woman (it’s everywhere but so rarely does an advisor allow space for the advisee’s experience rather than rehashing theirs) and Fennelly gets it just right. This poet writes beautifully about everything from conception to labor, with the occasional book recommendation along the way.

I actually read this book in the week following the birth of my son and in the reading rediscovered all sorts of memories from my pregnancy that might have gotten lost otherwise.

My Creative Work

He’s not a novel or a book of poems, but my son, Remy Lucas, was (finally) born just over a week ago. I’m realizing that what everyone says is true—nothing I’ve read could have prepared me for this experience. But each of these books opened me up to the experience in their own way and helped me think more deeply about this amazing life change.

early morning reading — Reading, writing, and parenting in the pre-dawn hours

Oh, and I’m still writing. Even with an infant napping in my lap in the hours before dawn. I think, like Manguso, that becoming a parent has deepened the way I experience the world and will continue to do so. It’s certainly changed what I write about for now as I’m working on a series of poems about pregnancy and parenthood. I think, with time, that I’ll get better and better at incorporating the writing me and the parent me so that even when I write about other subjects, I can carry the things Remy teaches me into my writing.

What books have you read that blend parenthood and the creative life? I’m slowly rebuilding my to-read shelf and need your help…

Creating and Sustaining Empathy in Alphabet by Kathy Page

August 9, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Picking up Alphabet by Kathy Page, I had no idea what to expect. I hadn’t read the back or the press release that accompanied my review copy. For all I knew, it was some experimental work based entirely on word play. It wasn’t, the narrative and language are much more conventional than that, but I’m so glad I went into this book blind because it allowed me that rare chance to encounter the story and the characters on the author’s terms with all the craft of reveal that entails. So if you want to read this excellent book as blind as I did, stop reading here. Trust me, it’s worth it.

The Man Behind the Crime

When we first meet Simon Austen, he’s being inducted into prison. His clothes have been taken and a guard is examining his property, which seems to consist solely of a sealed letter written by his mother and given to him by a social worker. We can tell from the language that the story is taking place in Britain. Simon seems young and shell-shocked. We have no idea what crime he’s committed or how long he’s in for but already Page has made him seem vulnerable and already it’s easier to care more about the man than what he did. An unusual slant in today’s society and one that makes the book.

“He thinks how he could die here. Be killed. Start using drugs and do the job himself. Just get old… and all of a sudden, how badly he wants what he’s not had, all of it, even not knowing what it is!” – Kathy Page

In the second chapter we see Simon trying to learn to read. I immediately had sympathy for someone who the system had failed and who was trying to make better of himself. It might help that my grandfather taught inmates to read, but watching Simon, at an age where he’s eligible for prison, learn the alphabet and how letters make sounds is truly poignant (without being sappy). We see touches of his concern for the health of his tutor and then we see Simon succeed well enough that he begins writing letters for others.

We’re getting to know the man behind the crime and we’re learning to empathize with his situation, even before we have any idea what landed him behind bars in the first place.

Ambiguity

Simon is not always on the up and up, and (based on my coursework in criminology rather than my own personal experience) this book shows a realistic picture of prison and prisoners. Simon tries to fill his need for human connection by starting a correspondence with a stranger. Trouble is he lies about who (and where) he is. As a kid, I remember my mom’s Avon lady was married to a man in prison so every visit we had with her included at least some amount of time talking about his wrongful conviction. This turn in the story made me deeply uncomfortable, but because I’d already bonded a bit with Simon, it served to flesh him out as a three dimensional character rather than turn me off completely.

We do eventually learn what Simon’s done, and it is not pretty, but by that time we understand who he was when he did it and where he was coming from. It doesn’t excuse his actions, but it does give a lot of context especially as he tries and both succeeds and fails at bettering himself.

One of the things I’m finding most interesting about writing this review is how much I want to judge him even as I want to humanize him. I think that says a lot about how we perceive prisoners/criminals in this society. Even though Simon is deeply human (aren’t we all) and in many ways a victim of his circumstances, a part of me still deeply fears his early lack of control.

The beauty of Page’s writing is she allows the wholeness of Simon to evolve in front of us without passing her own judgment. The story is carefully crafted, but because the range of experience was so rich, I never once felt emotionally manipulated. Instead I felt opened up and like I was being allowed to see Simon and his experience from new and interesting angles.

The Alphabet

One of the things I’m going to continue to ponder about Alphabet is the relationship of the title to the book as a whole. There are easy references like when Simon is learning the alphabet in order to learn to read or later when he constructs an alphabet-type narrative for a prison newsletter. There are also deeper references including the alphabet of women he learns from along the way and the alphabet of the words he tattoos upon his body. Still, I think there’s something more here and if you read the book and want to share your ideas, I’d love to hear them.

It’s not often that I read a book set in prison. It’s even less often that I read a book set in early 1980s Britain. Even more rare is that I’d enjoy the combination of the two, but Alphabet is a stunningly well written and deeply human book. The nuance of relationships and character development is hard to equal. Yet another first class book from Biblioasis that’s stretched my reading horizons, even if Alphabet falls as far from your normal reading subject matter as it does mine, I highly recommend trying out this book.

If this review made you want to read Alphabet, pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reading Edith Wharton Against Henry James

August 2, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

How many times in life do we really get to devote ourselves to tomes anymore? One of the projects I’ve been working on as I prepare to have my first child is getting through my to-read shelf, and, not surprisingly, some of the thickest hardbacks are the very last ones I’m getting to. That includes The Selected Short Stories of Edith Wharton (390 pages) and a collection of five novels by Henry James (Daisy Miller, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, and The Aspern Papers) (892 pages). Admittedly, I’m still working on the James collection, but after facing a truly embarrassing confusion between the two writers, I knew I had to write about it here.

Biographical Comparisons

Both transatlantic writers writing about a certain social class in the northeastern US and in England, I was a little surprised to learn (though I shouldn’t have been) that James (1843-1916) and Wharton (1862-1937) knew each other and that James was a mentor of sorts to Wharton. Both were American and spent considerable time abroad although I would have sworn that James was British. Their writing shares a similar sensibility cultivated by a social class where there are a lot of tacit rules to be followed and this gives the work of both writers a lot of subtext.

The Portrait of a Lady vs. The Age of Innocence

Was that biographical snippet included here just to absolve myself of the embarrassment I’m still feeling over conflating the two writers? Maybe. What happened was that late one night I started reading The Portrait of a Lady and, having watched more film adaptations of the work of Wharton and James than there could ever be books, I assigned Winona Ryder to the character of Isabel Archer. I was a little confused that the story was taking place on the wrong continent (in England) and eventually started to get annoyed that the introduction was so very long and became impatient to see the character of Countess Olenska.

I had completely conflated The Portrait of a Lady and The Age of Innocence.

My excuse (besides the fact that I’m sometimes a very poor reader) is that I strongly remember Ryder saying “Archer” a lot in the film (which makes sense because it’s her husband Newland’s last name). But it’s a pretty poor excuse considering I actually have read The Age of Innocence (though it’s been nearly a decade).

Not surprisingly, my relationship with The Portrait of a Lady changed a bit once I started reading it for itself. The book still feels overly long (I’m still reading it), although it’s a relief to read for what is happening on the page rather than what I think will happen. I can’t quite place Nicole Kidman in the book (that’s one adaptation I actually haven’t seen), and maybe that’s for the best.

I haven’t completely learned my lesson, though. I “watched” the miniseries for The Buccaneers this weekend while needlepointing a stocking for my son. God help us all if I ever pick that book up and try to remember if I’ve read it 🙂

Roman Fever

If I were to write a dissertation on James and Wharton, I’d no doubt find countless similarities (and differences) in their work. What struck me most, though, in reading these books so closely together is when they both brought up Roman Fever. I’d never heard of this curious thing before, but it seems to have been a fear that tourists had of Rome and particularly the area near the Colosseum that could prove deadly.

James wrote about the phenomenon in Daisy Miller, but Wharton’s treatment of it in “Roman Fever” is even more interesting where the fever has multiple meanings. The story really is quite wicked (in the most wonderful ways) and merits a re-read when I’m finally done with all these Jamesian novels.

Scary Stories

Both Wharton and James wrote ghost stories, they lived in a time where mediumship and the supernatural were part of high society. James is of course famous for The Turn of the Screw which I have not read but I’ve seen at least one film of. Wharton wrote enough ghostly short stories to devote an entire collection to them and while reading The Selected Stories I have to say that those ghost stories were still some of my favorites. “Mr. Jones” in particular chills me every time.

My Real Love

I’m probably always going to be team Wharton. Although both writers carefully observed the manners of their time, there’s something warmer and perhaps more human about the way Wharton portrays her characters. I believe she actually has sympathy for them, whereas I don’t think James always does.

It’s funny, I actually wrote about Wharton in my graduate school application essay because I so admired her work. I thought in my reading of all of this contemporary fiction since that I’d moved on from my somewhat archaic tastes, but in re-reading Wharton I found I still love and relate to her work whereas reading James feels more to me like wandering through a show of John Singer Sargent portraits—there’s beauty and I can relate to the pictures a little, but the characters and their time seem so far away.

I’m officially on maternity leave right now and it’s about 90 degrees in Seattle, so while I have loads of time (at least until the little one decides he’s ready), I can’t really go outside and no excuse not to read. I might actually finish this James collection. Although I’m not sure I’ll make it through that Peter Nadas book I’ve been looking forward to (1100+pages)…

If this review made you want to read turn of the last century literature, pick up a copy of the Henry James collection or The Selected Short Stories of Edith Wharton from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Legacy of Family and I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson

June 21, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

When I pulled I Married Adventure with its rough, zebra-printed cover from my rapidly-thinning to-read shelf this week, I did it because I remember my dad loving the book. I remember how he’d buy copies and sell them along with his other Africana at gun shows. I remembered entering and re-entering that book into his sales database back when Lotus 1-2-3 was a thing.

But on opening the book, I found torn pages held together since long-ago with cellophane tape. This could not have come from my dad’s inventory. I flipped to the inside cover and saw this:

That’s my Baba’s (my father’s mother’s) bookplate. In her maiden name. It had never occurred to me that the love of this book could have had a deeper origin. I started thinking about the quiet, gentle woman my Baba was and how once when I told her that a picture of my Djiedo (grandfather) looked like trouble, her eyes glimmered.

As ever, there was so much more to her than she showed on the surface, and suddenly the image of her reading about a small-town Kansas girl who marries a small-town Kansas boy and sets on a life of real adventure made a lot of sense. I kept this feeling throughout the book and so I felt like I was rediscovering my Baba as I was discovering Martin and Osa Johnson.

A Loving Memoir

I confess, part of the reason I’d avoided reading this book all these years is a niggling fear that the book would be filled with doting accolades from a wife who never felt like she could equal her husband. I’m all for sweetness, tenderness, and love, but overt fawning and the failure for a woman to see her own value make me uncomfortable.

This is not that book. Instead, while Osa Johnson clearly loves and admires her adventurer husband, she devotes equal energy to telling of her own exploits and triumphs. Although Martin was a world traveler before he met her, you get the sense that much of what they achieved together was due to the magic of them as a pair. I loved that. I loved how much they loved each other. I loved what each of them contributed to their adventures from the South Pacific to Africa.

Undiscovered Savages

The one part of this book that’s harder to read in the “modern” age is the way other cultures and races are viewed. This book, although very much of its time, is far less offensive in that way than say Travels With Myself and Another. The Johnsons do traipse into almost undisturbed tribes and they have some uncomfortable adventures along the way. The language is not always politically correct, but she does have respect for the cultures she encounters. And it’s educational to read into how much our perspectives and the way we talk about things have changed in the last 100 years.

There’s also a tension in the book between the Johnson’s love of the animals they are filming. Although they want to educate the world about these animals so they can be preserved, there are moments when they must kill them or be killed and others when they bring friends in to “complete a museum’s collection” with a few key trophies. But Johnson’s un-glossed look at survival among large and sometimes dangerous beasts like elephants and lions helped me realize how complex some of these issues are and the meat from the animals they killed was never wasted like I throw out a steak left in the fridge for too long.

My Father the Adventurer

It felt wonderful to read this book in the few days leading up to Father’s Day. Partially because I finally got to see what he loved in this book. Partially because I gained this warm vision that maybe my quiet, unassuming Baba had encouraged him to become the man he is. And partially because I realized I might be able to do the same for my own son.

My dad has always been a bit of a restless adventurer. When I tell people what he does, I sound like a liar because I say only the part that is relevant to the (always shifting) conversation. While all true, that means I sometimes call him a pilot, forester, economist, woodcarver, bookseller, and more. He took my family to Chile for a year when I lived in second grade. He threatened to take us to Rome when I was in high school. His stories are as big as his laugh and most of them are at least partially true 🙂

My Son, the ?

In contrast, while I’ve traveled extensively on four continents and lived on three, I feel like a homebody. Like my Baba, I do most of my exploration through the pages of books. She visited over 100 countries in her life and saw many things, but I think she was most at home at her melamine breakfast table in Austin, Texas watching the birds, squirrels, and deer feed off the treats she left for them.

So although I am most at home on this couch in our living room snuggling with our dog and listening to the neighborhood birds (all while reading a book and wearing a sweater from Martin + Osa, a brand I only today realized was named for the Johnsons), I now have faith that I’m not limiting my son’s opportunities. Together with my husband, we’ll find new adventures and, I hope, provide a strong platform for this kid to become whoever he wants to be.

There are many ways to adventure, and there are many ways to raise an adventurer. I hope my son finds a life that excites and enriches him. I will take him abroad, eventually, but mostly I will try to emulate Martin Johnson’s mom and just keep my worries about whatever explorations he undertakes to myself. I will trust him to find his way and trust that he knows he always has a safe place to call home. I think that’s part of what worked for my dad as he signed up for the Marines at 17 and flew charters out of Santa Fe in the 1960s.

Conclusion

I Married Adventure ends far too abruptly, but such is life. After all of their adventures abroad, including small plane travel, Martin Johnson was killed in a plane crash on a flight from Utah to California. Osa intimates that they were about to start a new chapter in their lives and maybe settle down. I wonder what that would have looked like. I took comfort in thinking about the richness of their life, though, and the closeness of their connection. We should all be so lucky.

I’m feeling lucky this Father’s Day to live a life filled with adventurers of all kinds. I am grateful to my dad for teaching me how interesting and exciting it is to be abroad in the world. I am grateful to my Baba for showing me that there is adventure at home. And I am grateful to my husband, on his first Father’s Day, for sharing this adventure of life with me. It will be whatever we make it, and there’s nothing more extraordinary than that.

Wishing you a happy Father’s Day too.

If you want to explore the world with I Married Adventure, pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Narrative of Genius in Chef’s Table on Netflix

June 7, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I started watching Chef’s Table because of the “cover” art—a beautifully constructed and impossibly tiny dish of food. Like many Americans, I’ve become enraptured in our recent conception of food as art and this show seemed like the culmination (or at least a new level) of that art. What I didn’t realize is how much I’d learn from this show about our culture of genius worship and how that translates to the characters we seek out in fiction, nonfiction, and life.

There are many sides to the genius character and his narrative, and it surprised me how neatly each of these chefs fit into the categories (or how neatly they were edited into them anyway).

The Misunderstood

I still thought I was watching a cooking show when Massimo Battura showed up on screen in the first episode. Although the voice of a food critic had already been introduced to help me understand that this man was special. We see him in the kitchen of his restaurant, Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy. We see him in the market gathering the best ingredients. We see him in the fields chatting with farmers. But it isn’t until we meet his wife, Lara Gilmore, that we really get to know Massimo. Because she is literally interpreting his actions for the people around them. Don’t get me wrong, their relationship is actually very charming and their love for each other is palpable, but it is their very closeness that highlights how far the rest of the world is from understanding him. At one point, I’d swear Bottura admits that he’d be nothing without her explaining his vision to others.

Bottura is the classic misunderstood genius. Filled with ideas too big for his small town, he has to travel to New York and then Paris to get recognized. He comes home with even bigger, more refined ideas and then he’s really too obscure for those at home who just want their Italian food the way it’s been cooked for thousands of years. A critic comes in and demolishes him. Finally, at long last, an even bigger critic comes in and sees the genius of the man.

Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? In some ways it’s what we all strive for—to be extraordinary and to have the world finally recognize it. You get the feeling that the world will never fully understand Bottura, but once we accept that he’s beyond us, we can worship at his feet and trust in his genius (now that it’s been recognized if not fully understood). In fact, he might lose some of his charm if we did understand him. He might become more like one of us.

The Intellectual

I didn’t understand what rankled me about environmentalist/chef Dan Barber until my husband started talking about him. The man, at least as edited for this series, comes off as a condescending prick. See, he knows things about food and the land that the rest of us are failing to see. He wants to educate us through his food (at two restaurants named Blue Hill in New England) and to help us save the world by eating good ingredients that are actually in season and good for the earth.

I can’t disagree with his basic premise, what tastes best about a strawberry in January is the memory of strawberries past, not the greenhouse grown, artificially huge one in front of you. But the way that Barber positions himself as a preeminent thinker (espousing ideas that got lost somewhere between my great-grandparents and me) drives me nuts. And I think it’s because I’m preconditioned to want to be this type of genius‐so I want to take down others I see as false.

It wasn’t until my husband remarked on how awful he was to the people around him that I realized both the fault in Dan Barber and how closely it relates to my worst days.

The Loner

The most beguiling genius of the series so far is Francis Mallmann—Patagonian-raised, French-educated. When I saw him make a panqueque con dulce de leche over open flame on an island surrounded by snow-capped peaks hundreds of miles from anywhere, I nearly bought a plane ticket.

Mallmann’s narrative focuses very much on him as a restless loner. It’s the only episode where we barely see the inside of a restaurant. The mother of his youngest child lives a country away and they see each other for maybe ten days a month. He espouses the open relationship and likes his freedom. But there are holes in this narrative, because out on La Isla (yes, I love the name of his island), he’s surrounded by acolytes. And it seems that he never actually stays out in that paradise of “isolation” for more than a few days at a time. Mallmann is a loner, but he is never alone. Because what is genius in isolation?

By far the most beautiful of the episodes of Chef’s Table, I wrestled with the distance between the image of his life and the actualities and this is the episode that got me thinking I need to write about this series. I needed to understand what was the call of these geniuses. I needed to know if their lives were really what I should strive for.

The Masculine

Niki Nakayama is the first female chef to be featured in the series. So why did I put her under the title “The Masculine”? It’s because in the world of genius (and even much more so in the world of chefs), the true genius is expected to be male. Nakayama has fought against that perception, but very quietly. She comes from a patriarchal family (her brother was supposed to succeed, they let her play at chef to get it out of her system) and was educated under sexist conditions (every one of her mentors, even the proudest, is still a little shocked that she’s a woman). There’s even stories of people walking out of her restaurant when they find out that the chef is a woman.

So what does Nakayama do? She closes the shoji screens and cooks quietly in the background. According to the critic assigned to her episode, she is no less of a genius chef than any man, but she fits outside the narrative enough to actually highlight how constrictive our expectations of greatness are.

The Cult of Genius

What I found interesting about each of these four types of genius is that each of these people actually has all of the characteristics to some degree. Nakayama is deeply misunderstood, Bottura is an intellectual, Mallmann fits a wide range of male stereotypes. It made me wonder if there are actually different types of genus, or if there is one archetype sitting atop a mountain that we’re striving for.

I also began to wonder why we’re striving to be at the top of that mountain and if we should be. There is great joy in the lives of some of these chefs (especially Bottura and Nakayama) but there also appears to be great pain either in getting where they are or in staying there. And there are so many people working with and for them who will never achieve those heights. Are we creating a culture of Captain Kirks when we really need are more Uhuras, Boneses, and Scotties?

The Genius in Literature

And of course the genius ties in so closely to literature. Our archetypal hero (and writer for that matter) is so often this brilliant, misunderstood loner—so beguiling, so out of touch with the world. He’s a godlike figure we strive to get to know even when he cannot know himself. Why do we worship this?

My Family, My Son

I was raised in a family of geniuses. Brilliant, highly educated parents, aunts, and uncles. Even more brilliant cousins and siblings. Our intellect and superiority was cultivated and honed (often at the expense of our emotions and communication skills). I like this world. I like the idea of mastering something and using that to express what’s deep in my soul. But I wonder, too, if that expression would feel even better, more natural, if it wasn’t such torture to access it and then express it. Could I be satisfied with good enough?

It’s something I think about more and more as my son’s due date approaches. I hope he’s brilliant and creative. But most of all I hope he’s happy and fulfilled. I wrestle with what happens if he decides that frying potatoes is his highest ambition and he gets really good at it, but I also think I’d envy some of that inward looking satisfaction.

I’m going to go eat some strawberries from my back yard now (Barber sank in a little), but I’d love to hear your thoughts on genius below.