Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

Spiraling through The Incredible Sestina Anthology

May 31, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I have a confession to make. I’m only halfway through The Incredible Sestina Anthology so I really shouldn’t be reviewing it here yet, but my brain is so wrapped up in the book and the form that I wanted to share my feelings about it now both so I don’t lose the threads of what’s so exciting and so I can delve deeper into understanding the nature of that excitement. Since it’s a book of poetry, let’s bend the rules a little today, shall we? At least I know the plot won’t shift radically when I turn the next page.

What’s a Sestina?

If you’re like me, you did not get much of an education in the forms of poetry in school so “sestina” aside from being a pretty word, could sound a little like gibberish. I feel that way about a lot of poetic forms—especially the ones I haven’t read many examples of yet. A sestina is based on repetition of the last words of a stanza in a particular order. There are six stanzas in which this occurs and then a final, shorter stanza where those end words are mixed up all over again. Cribbing from Daniel Nester’s intro, that form of repetition looks like this:

Stanza 1: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Stanza 2: 6 1 5 2 4 3
Stanza 3: 3 6 4 1 2 5
Stanza 4: 5 3 2 6 1 4
Stanza 5: 4 5 1 3 6 2
Stanza 6: 2 4 6 5 3 1
Envoi: 2/5 4/3 6/1

But you only really need to know the form in that kind of depth if you’re going to write one. To enjoy sestinas, it’s more essential to understand that the repetition is intentional and that there’s no other set rhyme or rhythm in the form (although most poets find their own rhythm. As with most formal poetry, the fun in being a spectator is seeing what each poet unleashes from within those walls.

Relishing Repetition

Blah blah blah stanzas, right? It’s hard to appreciate the form of a poem without getting inside it so let’s look at the first stanza of “Mother Worries” by Shane Allison:

Lord, how we gon’ pay these bills in this
How we gon’pay these bills,
Lord. How we gon’ pay these bills in
We gon’ pay these
We gon’ pay
Lord how we gon’ pay these bills in this house?

Looking at just the last words of each line, the end words that will repeat (in a different order, of course) in the next stanza are: this, bills, in, these, pay, house. Poets take a lot of leeway in how they repeat their end words and sometimes substitute the noun version for a verb or shift the tense of a word or use a homonym. The lines can be short or long.

What I love about Allison’s piece is that the entire poem is really built on the repetition of the line “How we gon’ pay these bills?” It takes many many forms, but if I counted how many different words he uses in this poem, I wouldn’t guess it’s more than 30, which, in a 39 line poem, is not a lot of words. This total repetition (and the subject matter) lends the most gorgeous lament to this poem.

Variations on a Form

There are poems by sestina purists in this book (Like Ashbery, Auden, and Bishop), and that’s all well and good, but where I started to learn most about the form (and what can be done with language) is from poets like Geoff Bouvier and Casey Camp who redefined the form for themselves. Bouvier’s “Refining Sestina” condenses the entire stanza structure down into six lines where the end words are instead repeated inside the lines. And Camp turns his poem into a graphic sestina where each line of the poem gets its own illustration.

Others, like Denise Duhamel, use a double sestina form where they’re playing with twelve end words. This means they get thirteen stanzas in which to explore their topic. I found, because I’m not the best reader, that I actually lost the end words in these longer sestinas and would sometimes be surprised halfway through with thoughts like “Have I really already read the word ‘seesaw’ six times? How did that fit in.”

There’s also an incredible variation in subject matter in this book. Some poets take their work so seriously as to write ars poeticas – sestinas about writing sestinas. And some, including writers I have admired in other contexts like Steve Almond and Jenny Boully, are obviously playing as they are writing about Elton John and the missed connections part of the newspaper (respectively).

Your Brain on Sestinas

I read about thirty pages of sestinas last night (approximately fifteen separate poems) and another seventy pages this morning. What I can tell you is that those end words, which sometimes feel very random, become embedded in your mind. They suddenly feel very important. And, if you read them before bed, you might compose dreams that pull together all that randomness. It’s a wonderful exercise to shake up those sleeping hours.

In general, reading sestinas is making me pay more attention to the ways language can be worked and how very much can be accomplished within the constraints of form. I suppose that’s why poets across the ages have continued to write in particular forms (at least some of the time).

I don’t know if I’ll be writing a sestina in the near future. But I am carefully thinking about the way I use repetition and enjoying the possibility of writing in a new form. Because The Incredible Sestina Anthology is arranged alphabetically, I’m looking forward to seeing how the rest of the poets can surprise me and stretch my thinking.

I’d love to hear about your investigations into form and repetition. Please tell me more about your projects or what you’re reading in the comments.

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

Clarice Lispector and A Breath of Life into Characters

May 17, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

The act of writing is one of expression as much as it is an act of creation. An author finds something within him- or herself that feels worthy of saying or investigating and then spends hours, months, years delving into and perfecting that expression. At the end readers like to think we see the author in the finished work, but sometimes it’s difficult to tell what’s polish and what’s raw glimpses of the author. With A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector, the mystery of author remains, but even as we ponder who she was and what of her remains in the work, she gives us a surface story to contemplate.

In fact the entire book is a meditation on authorship and what it means to create and we readers watch Author (a male character) struggle to give life to (and to control and also to free) his character, Angela. It is a struggle that will be familiar to anyone who has ever created a character and this story reveals more about why and how we create than any plot about a writer ever could.

Battle Between Author and Character

“I had a vivid and inexplicable dream: I dreamed I was playing with my reflection. But my reflection wasn’t in a mirror, but reflected somebody else who wasn’t me.” – Clarice Lispector

Are our characters part of ourselves? Are the opposites we explore through writing because we cannot, will not live their way in life? Or are they some hybrid on which we work out those inner struggles? The answer is probably different for all writers, but I’d imagine that it includes some measure of all three.

In A Breath of Life, Author writes of his character Angela, “I got along well with her. But she started to disturb me and I saw that once again I’d have to take on the role of writer in order to put Angela into words because only then can I communicate with her.” This implies some sort of externalization of self whether it’s the actual self or the desired self. But later he writes, “It’s no use asking her to avoid recklessness since she was born to be exposed and go through every kind of experience.”

It’s fascinating to watch Author struggle with his relationship with Angela as it evolves. He knows she is a part of him: “I’ve been wanting to write about a person I invented: a woman named Angela Pralini. And it’s difficult. How to separate her from me? How do I make her different from what I am?.” But at times he cannot stand her: “I’ve discovered why I breathed life into Angela’s flesh, it was to have someone to hate. I hate her. She represents my terrible faith that is reborn every single morning.”

What’s truly brilliant about this relationship is the moment that Angela takes control from Author. He’s declared early on that she cannot write and that he abhors her style, but still she grows stronger than he does: “I don’t know what the climax of this book will be. But, as Angela goes on writing, I’ll recognize it.” And eventually (at least for a few moments), he cedes to her completely: “I realize with surprise but resignation that Angela is controlling me. She even writes better than I do. Now our ways of speaking are intersecting and getting confused.”

My Battle with Characterization

I don’t know how familiar this push-pull between writer and character is to other writers, but for me it brought back so many memories of writing Magda in Polska, 1994. A young girl of my age but a different nationality than me, the only year we experienced of her life is one that I too experienced in Poland. I remember poring over my diaries from that year for pertinent historical details to include, and at times some of my own angst and experience slipped in. But there were times, too, that Magda surprised me—even shocked me with things I would never dare say. As I wrote, she became her own person. And though I still tried to control her at times, she would not let me and I learned from her.

Writing: Raising Ourselves or Parenting?

“I am alone in the world. Angela is my only companion. You must understand me: I had to invent a being that was entirely mine. But it so happens that she’s becoming too powerful.”

I’m thinking a lot about creation of character these days, but from a completely different angle. I’m trying to imagine who this fetus growing in my womb will become. My husband and I are dreaming of activities and names for him, and we’re trying to maintain a space around him too to see who he will want to be.

Still, I imagine some of the struggle with raising a child will be some of the same struggle I had with Magda. As creator (and adult), I think I know best, but I will have to remain open to letting this little guy determine who he is and how he sees the world. I will have to resist telling him how it is because that closes him and me off to the opportunity of me learning from him. And I will have to restrain myself from putting my baggage onto him because he’ll have his own struggles and his own life and it’s up to me to work out mine in my own space.

I imagine this teeter-totter of shaping a child and allowing him to become is something I’ll struggle with for the rest of my life, but I’m glad I’ve had this perspective of the wonder of seeing a character become herself to look back on and remember the joy that can happen when I loosen my control.

The Act of Writing

“Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.” – Clarice Lispector

In many ways A Breath of Life is about the act of writing more than it is a story. Lispector was dying as she wrote it (and in fact died before it was finished) so we’ll never know if the book was truly meant to be seen in this form. But I love the rawness of the struggle Author goes through both with Angela and with himself. Like most of us, he sometimes hates writing. He’s digging inside of it to see why he even does this to himself. And yet he doesn’t stop.

Moments in the “dialogue” between Author and Angela end up feeling like character sketches rather than exposition:

“I’m not—I hope—judging myself with excessive impartiality. But I need to be a bit impartial or else I succumb and get tangled in my pathetic form of living. Besides physically there’s something rather pathetic about me: my big eyes are childishly interrogative at the same that they seem to ask for something and my lips are always half-open like when you’re surprised.”

And it’s easy to wonder if Lispector would have gone back and rewritten Angela once she had worked through this kind of information on the page. I would have. Most people would have. But I’m very glad she didn’t, because I really enjoyed seeing her process, even if I cannot know the sequence of it. Because of that rawness, this is not a book I’d recommend to most people, but if you’re a lonely writer toiling away in your garret and wondering how others do, it’s a great book. You may see yourself in it, you may not, but it will make you think more deeply about your craft and about the act of writing.

The Importance of Fiction

It’s been easy to assume throughout this pregnancy that I feel wonky because of hormones and this totally new experience that’s changing my relationships and my whole life. But I realized the other day that I’d given up an essential part of myself along the way. I stopped reading fiction that challenged me. I was reading through discards on my to-read shelf that were only okay and I spent more hours reading nonfiction about labor and delivery than I’ll ever spend in labor, but I wasn’t reading Lispector and Calvino and Pamuk (or any of the other favorites old and new). And I didn’t see, until they were missing from my life, how much books like that help me process the world.

We’ve probably all seen the articles on the internet about how reading fiction helps us empathize. It wasn’t until two friends posted an article about 11 novels expectant parents should read instead of parenting books that I understood how much I need space to process. I don’t need a parenting book to tell me that my baby will try and communicate with me to tell me he’s hungry. I need to see an illustration of the relationship that happens when a child’s needs aren’t met. I will not remember any of the words I read about breathing or birthing positions, but reading Edan Lepucki’s California profoundly affected my idea of what birth means.

So I’m back on the fiction. I don’t know if that will mean I’m blogging more frequently (I hope so, I miss communicating with you in this way), but it will mean a return to a semblance of balance in my life. At least in the mental sense, carrying around this big belly is doing nothing for my ability to stand upright 🙂

Thanks for reading. If you have a moment, I’d love to hear your thoughts on controlling characters and letting them go (whether the characters are on paper or in your home).

If you want to commune with Lispector by reading A Breath of Life, pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Family Dysfunction and Narrative Tension in Bloodline, the Netflix Original Series

April 5, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 1 Comment

Remember the old days when we’d all gather around the water cooler and discuss who shot JR or of Rachel and Ross were ever going to figure things out? Nowadays we’re all watching our own shows at our own paces and unless you’re a fan of Game of Thrones or Mad Men, you mostly miss out on this cultural sharing moment. Well, I finished a fantastic new series on Netflix last night and I want to share it with you here at our virtual water cooler. Let me tell you about Bloodline.

Building Tension

When Danny Rayburn comes home to the Florida Keys to help his family celebrate the dedication of a pier in their honor, the balance of that prominent family is upset and things start to go wrong almost immediately. It starts small as Danny (Ben Mendelsohn) ducks his brother John (Kyle Chandler) at the bus stop only to show up directly at the inn their family manages. But these little upsets are keys to the tension underlying the family dynamic and (as in all good narrative) that tension develops and soon explodes.

The tension seems to center around Danny, the black sheep who wants to be the prodigal son, but Danny is really not just a source of tension but also the Iago—the key to unraveling the smooth facades of everyone around him. Within the first few episodes we see that successful lawyer and youngest daughter Meg (Linda Cardellini) is in a serious relationship with someone else than the guy she is screwing in the backs of cars. Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz) is barely holding on to the pretension that his marriage isn’t headed for divorce. And John is finding it harder and harder to be the upstanding boy scout of a detective that he so desperately wants to be.

I can’t tell you how the story develops (it would spoil all your fun) but I can tell you that after watching an episode or two at night I felt all balled up with tension (and couldn’t wait to watch more). The writers have a very subtle way of focusing each episode around one character’s relationship with Danny even while advancing the story as a whole and it never feels formulaic.

Dysfunctional Families

No matter what Tolstoy said about unhappy families, there are similarities in the threads of dysfunction and one of the things I enjoyed most about watching Bloodline was trying to tie the characters in this show to members of our own families. It was also instructive to watch the master manipulation of characters like Papa Rayburn (Sam Shepard) as he pits his children (oh-so-subtly) against one another and Mama Rayburn (Sissy Spacek) as she feeds the conflict.

What deliciously complicates the dysfunction is the nuances in the character of Danny (and the excellent portrayal by Mendelsohn) that made me hate him, pity him, fear him, and then flat out wonder. To have a character where our understanding shifts and evolves that completely is pretty much unheard of and it’s the main reason I recommend this show.

As Danny’s poking at his siblings and parents, the whole family starts to unravel and secrets are revealed that make you look at all of the characters in a different light. This is such a gorgeous mirror of how small (and big) changes in life shift and re-shift our family relationships. It’s something I’m thinking about a lot as my pregnancy changes my relationship with some family members (I haven’t felt closer to my dad in a long time) and helps me see others more clearly.

I could go on and on about other amazing craft elements in Bloodline (like characterization) but I’m bound to reveal something I’d rather you get to discover on your own. If you like a good mystery and a well conceived and acted show, go watch Bloodline already. Then come back and tell me what you thought.

Alzheimer’s, Her Beautiful Brain, and the Art of Memoir

March 15, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

Alzheimer’s is in the news again this week with the death of beloved novelist Terry Pratchett. I say again, but it seems as though Alzheimer’s is never really out of the news. And while my own life has (thankfully) not been touched by this terrible disease, reading Her Beautiful Brain, a memoir of a daughter’s struggle with her mother’s early onset Alzheimer’s by my friend Ann Hedreen, I see how personal and how consuming the disease is both for those who are suffering from it and for each and every one of their family members.

Reading Books by Friends

I only know the post-Alzheimer’s Ann. She had already lost her mother when we met. She was already volunteering for research to help others and she was already advocating for awareness and funding to fight this terrible disease. I met the Ann who was writing this very memoir on the first day of grad school as we both sought to get our chops up and find the writer within.

So reading this book at times felt like a revelation—learning about the story of Ann’s family and her life, watching her become the person I came to know—and at times it felt overly intimate—like I was skipping ahead in our friendship to stories she wouldn’t normally reveal for years to come—stories of adultery and spousal abuse. All of these essays together form the picture of one woman’s life as she grapples with the hand dealt to her and her mother.

I’ve resisted writing a review of this book for a long time (so long that I had to re-re-read the book before sitting down to write) because reviewing books by friends is an impossible task. I can’t be objective. I don’t even want to be. That’s not to say it isn’t an honestly good book. It is. I’ve bought extra copies and pressed them into the hands of caregivers I love. It’s also a very personal book, and I struggle to separate the book from the person I know.

Searching for Impossible Answers

In many ways this book is a quest for answers—an exploration of “how could I not have seen what my mother was suffering earlier?” and “is there any way this could have been avoided?” All of that is moot, of course, but it’s so very human.

As Ann recalls a trip to Haiti where she “should have” noticed her mother’s failing brain, we see signs noticed in retrospect, but in Arlene (Ann’s mom) we also get to know a schoolteacher who not only raised the kinds of kids who venture off to Haiti in the Peace Corps and as filmmakers, but also visits them there despite recent lapses in memory she’s started to find troubling.

When Ann delves into her mother’s early childhood in the blighted mining town of Butte, Montana, we see the environmental devastation that may (or may not) have contributed to the Alzheimer’s, but we also get to understand a life much different from our own—one that bred hardy people.

We don’t know what causes Alzheimer’s or how to stop it, that’s part of the frustration. And Ann does a wonderful job in this book of showing how maddening and important that search for answers is.

On Motherhood

(Aside here, my dad says all I write about is pregnancy these days, to which I respond, duh… 🙂 )

One of the things I related most closely to in this book is Ann’s story not just of being a daughter but of becoming a mother in this time where she was watching her mother decline and eventually waste away. It’s a particular space in life where you get to see aging, birth, and the essence of who you yourself are becoming, and I was grateful for the window into that time (especially at this time for me).

In many ways I think this book is more about those relationships between mothers and daughters than it is about the disease (which makes the book all the more universal).

The Art of Memoir

I’m not a memoirist and any attempts I’ve ever made in that direction have been failures, so I often wonder what makes a good memoir. In Her Beautiful Brain I learned about telling a bigger story than what you think you’re telling. I learned about staring hard at the particular to ground a reader in the moment. And I learned about building analogies between the “small” stories of your life and the “large” stories that make the memoir universal.

I am grateful to Ann for revealing herself in this memoir. I am grateful that she shares how hard caregiving and watching a parent subsume to a disease like Alzheimer’s can be. I am grateful that she also shows how much of the joy of life continues no matter what else is going on.

If someone you love has been affected by Alzheimer’s or you just want to know more, pick up a copy of Her Beautiful Brain from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and the Nouveau Roman

March 8, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

I started reading The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro because it’s one of those really thick hardbacks that’s been sitting on my to-read shelf forever, I love Ishiguro, and I’m trying to read through that shelf in the five months before this room becomes a nursery and all the books have to be moved to their new home. What I didn’t realize is how much the book would blow my mind or that I was reading it at exactly the right time.

Big Books

As the tote bag goes, “I like big books and I cannot lie.” Although I frequently leave them sitting on the shelf for far too long because they don’t fit in my purse and a lot of my reading happens on a bus. Ishiguro went with me this week anyway all week because I was immersed in this book.

But what’s odd about The Unconsoled is that it’s the first book I’ve seen by Ishiguro that is long. It’s thicker than the other three books I have of his (An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and A Pale View of Hills) combined. In fact, I swear I have Never Let Me Go around here somewhere and that fourth book would make the inches just about even.

So what’s going on when a writer known for his understatement and his concision suddenly writes a 500+ page tome that spans four days? Something very unexpected. In fact, although I’m no literary theorist, I think Ishiguro was writing a modern version of the nouveau roman.

The Nouveau Roman

What the what? According to Wikipedia, “nouveau roman” was first used in the 1950s to describe the work of a few French writers who were experimenting with form. I think of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras and the way their work can feel so disjointed that you’re entering a new, wonderful dimension.

What happens in The Unconsoled is you think you’re entering a novel about a pianist (Ryder) on tour in a strange city according to a schedule he never quite receives, but it quickly unfolds that the book is just as much about the people around him. Doesn’t sound too unusual too far, except that the book is really about the people around him. As in, the hotel porter goes on for pages about how his profession has been denigrated over the years in the entire chapter it takes to settle Ryder in his room.

It started out as kind of maddening, but when I saw what Ishiguro was doing by creating these huge, looping speeches where the “side” characters used so many words to say so few things, I started to understand the effect (and why the book was driving me so batty). From one angle he’s highlighting how small the concerns of the townspeople are and how wrapped up they are in themselves while from another he’s concealing the trick he’s using to disorient readers. Because as readers it’s our job to follow the narrative, so we get immersed in this winding tale of nothing and then that winding tale of nothing and we’re grasping for information or a toehold at the same time Ryder is. We become the main character.

Meanwhile, Ryder’s experiences shift as he’s talking with these characters. Sent to make peace between the hotel porter and his daughter and halfway through a conversation with her he starts to recall memories of their life together. Eventually he recognizes her child as his child. But it’s not so simple, because this isn’t a “big reveal” kind of novel and Ryder continues to have trouble recognizing simple things like the house they shared, so we (and he) are kept disoriented the entire time.

Reading this book felt a lot like watching Last Year at Marienbad which I also find completely maddening—but fascinating. In fact, I still haven’t finished the book (I wanted to put it down so many times but these effects are compelling). I had to come here to this blog to chat with you about what Ishiguro was doing to my brain before I could go back into that world and see what (if anything) happens.

Where Art Meets Life

I’m enjoying reading this book right now because Ishiguro is currently out in the world touring his latest book, and I can only imagine that The Unconsoled is actually an artistic expression of what it feels like to be on a book tour. Ryder is in a small, unfamiliar town surrounded by people who are all too familiar with him and have all kinds of wants, needs, and desires of him. He’s following along as well as he can but he can’t even remember where he’s supposed to be. And his relationship with his family (who by now has grown somewhat unfamiliar and distant) pulls at him all the time.

It made me not ever want to tour a book.

I don’t know yet if The Unconsoled is about more than that (I still have about 200 pages to read) but I can tell you that this book, like all of Ishiguro’s books, is masterfully done. I may not love the feeling of being inside Ryder’s world, but I am enthralled by the artistry that created it.

If you want to get lost in The Unconsoled, pick up a copy from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.