Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

Celebrating Christmas with Literature

December 22, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

You might have guessed, reading was a very important part of my upbringing and the holidays were no exception. Besides the requisite viewings of whatever interpretation of A Christmas Carol we were ready for that year, I always remember my dad reading aloud to us on Christmas Eve. It’s a tradition I brought with me as I made a new home in Seattle.

The Gift of the Magi

“One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.” – “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry

So this year, as in all the years past (and future?), I will be snuggled up by our tree with some cider reading aloud to my husband. The set list hasn’t even varied. I’ll start with O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” and weep my eyes out. The “the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house” has always touched me very deeply and every year I better understand how wise Della and Jim were in their love and their sacrifice.

Christ Climbed Down

“Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck creches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery”
– “Christ Climbed Down” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Once I’ve somewhat recovered, I’ll pull out Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, turn to page 69, and read “Christ Climbed Down.” In the twinkling light of our (natural) tree, I’ll think about what’s important to me about the holiday. I wasn’t raised with religion (although I dragged my mom to a different church every Christmas and Easter), so I don’t really have a relationship with the Baby Jesus (even though I display a creche every year). That makes it especially important for me to question my relationship with the commercial Christmas and Ferlinghetti’s poem is the perfect start.

I’m missing my “clever cornball relatives” already.

Regardless of how you spend the holidays (and which holidays you celebrate), I hope the coming days find you snug and surrounded by love. And if your holiday traditions involve books, I’d love to hear about your favorites in the comments.

Layers of Linguistic Meaning in Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes

December 8, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 6 Comments

I’ve been writing long enough to notice some patterns in my process. Recently I’ve been in the “read big thinkers because you’re ready to take a big leap” phase. It has something to do with the morass that my second novel has become over the last three years. Enter Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes.

As a literary theorist and semiotician, Barthes writes a lot about signs, and reading his work always gets me excited about the ways we as writers, readers, and humans construct meaning. So although this book contains interesting observations about Japan, it was the meta-level reading that really interested me.

Layers of Meaning Across Languages

One of the first things I noticed when opening this book, is that it had been heavily annotated by its previous owner, Nobuko Yamasaki, a Japanese student at Cornell. What should have been clean white pages with black type were instead highlighted in yellow and underlined in various colors of pencil and pen. And there were notes scribbled in the margins. In Japanese.

As I added my own notes to the pages, all I could think about was how much Barthes would love this. Here was a book about Japan, written in French, translated to English, and then Nobuko translated some of the more difficult words back into her language. In three separate language we are using characters to assign meaning to words that then assigned meaning to a culture. And Nobuko’s notes were making me reconsider not only Barthes’ observations and the translation, but my own language as well. When she circles “infinite” and writes “So many negative words,” I see a prefix I had never even considered.

When I found reproductions of Barthes’ own translational notations reproduced inside the book, I felt a kinship for him–that Barthes, Nobuko, and I were all on equal footing in this world as we tried to make meaning and expand our understanding of the world.

I thought about the connotations of words that would be lost and gained as they were translated across all these cultures and languages, and the richness of that experience made me happy. Of course some meaning would be lost along the way, but an equal amount would be gained. A real linguistic nerd (I’m only a pseudo nerd in this area) could tell you about how the imprints the writer, translator, and readers left as we transformed objects into language are affected by our respective cultures. It’s a conversation I wish I could have with Barthes.

On Japan and Japanese Culture

Living in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, I feel like I am surrounded by Japanese culture and that I understand it. Aside from Narita Airport, I haven’t actually been, but I am surrounded by friends who have (my mom just got back from Japan a few weeks ago) and the imprints of Japanese culture from decades of immigration on Seattle abound. Reading this book, I realized that I wasn’t actually as familiar with Japanese culture as I thought I was. By looking at the country through the eyes of a Frenchman, I realized I was only familiar with other people’s interpretations of the culture. I’ve traveled enough to know that cultural understanding grows with time and direct experience, and I was grateful for that reminder.

Of course, Barthes can only recount the Japanese culture through his own eyes as well, but I found from reading his thoughts on everything from Japanese architecture to the way gifts are packaged and exchanged, I learned more about my own slanted and limited views.

Haiku

“Haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that! with a movement so immediate (so stripped of any mediation: that of knowledge, of nomination, or even of possession) that what is designated is the very inanity of any classification of the object… in accordance with the spirit of Zen” – Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs

Haiku is a form I’ve been increasingly interested in as I write more poetry. By looking at this form from a linguistic perspective, Barthes helped me understand the construction and how to write better. He showed me that I was trying to express deep emotion in a form that might not be suited for it. That doesn’t mean I won’t try, but it does change how I will play with the language.

Because of the inability to strip out our inherent cultural views, I did find myself doubting some of Barthes’ interpretations, but it doesn’t matter, because I can learn from the way he approaches the subject. I simply have to remember that we all have our cultural frames that we bring with us and not blindly accept the teachings of others as I sometimes want to do.

I realize I have told you little of the book itself. That is intentional. Although I think Barthes would have enjoyed the idea of the extra layer of meaning a reviewer adds to the work by interpreting it, I also think I’m too far from the text. Although the meaning would not get watered down (one thing I’ve learned from Barthes is that meaning like energy doesn’t dilute, instead it changes). I can signify the book, but I cannot represent it.

If you want to return to the source material, pick up a copy of Empire of Signs from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

You Can Hear the Echo by MK O’Donnell: Revisiting the Day Kennedy Was Shot

November 22, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Very few events shake a nation to its very core. In my lifetime there was September 11, 2001. I remember catching the Today show that morning after the planes had hid but before the towers collapsed. I sat riveted and watched wishing I could reach out to Clayton who was already away at school and without a cellphone. In my parents’ generation, fifty years ago today, event that changed everything was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. You Can Hear the Echo by MK O’Donnell drops in on a family in a small Texas town just as shots are fired from the book depository on that Friday and follows them throughout the subsequent weekend.

Why this Book Now?

Although today is the fiftieth anniversary of that unforgettable day, that is not why I bought or started reading this book. I found it used at a local store and I was entranced to have a look into how events like this shape our lives and our culture. I’ve been unable to read fiction about September 11 even now, and I was curious what and how O’Donnell had captured as she wrote this book just two years after Kennedy was shot.

I also wanted to know more about my family. My parents both grew up in Texas, though I’m not sure if my mom had already moved to New Mexico by then. I know she was in school when the news broke. My father though was 19 and already in the Marines. Because I once asked, they’ve both told me exactly what they were doing when they heard the news, but the memory wasn’t visceral for me so I promptly forgot. I am sure their memories of 1963 are as clearly imprinted on their minds as 2001 is on mine.

It wasn’t even until I was nearly finished reading the book that I realized this anniversary was near.

What Did I Learn?

O’Donnell presents a wide and representative array of characters in this book. From the conservative father to the new wife who worries that he could have been part of the plot and the liberal son who loved Kennedy and suffers greatly and openly for it. They have neighbors who are former communists and a former maid who rounds out the story with a look at an African American woman in the still-segregated South. I was not emotionally invested in these characters. Even when the son nearly shoots his father, I was not roused. Instead they feel like set pieces laid out to each show what that type of person would have felt. That was a failing of the book, but a part of me understands creating that kind of emotional distance from a tableau that must have felt fresh. Still it surprised me because the setting of this book was so domestic and I expected to empathize more with the characters.

What surprised me about the book was that the conspiracy theories about Ruby were surfacing so early. I’ve read Libra by Don Delillo and American Tabloid by James Ellroy, but I always just assumed (regardless of the truth or fiction behind either book) that all of that information surfaced later. I found myself wondering throughout the book what else the characters had access to because when I think of that day in history, all I can see is the Zapruder film, but how different it must have been to hear the news first. I wondered also if that footage would have even been shown on television then in all of its gory detail.

What I Still Don’t Know

As much as I love fiction and prefer it both to nonfiction and in many cases real life, I am not sure if fiction can capture the full or true essence of events this momentous. Poetry can, and I found some solace in Poetry After 9/11 even as I failed to connect with Falling Man by Don Delillo and chose not to read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. Even in War and Peace I skim over the war bits to read the juicy love story.

It’s not that I don’t care about these events. I care about them in a place so deep inside me I can’t even talk about it. As a student of politics and humanity, I want and need to know how we function as a society and as individuals in times of great loss. I’ve read everything I could ever find about the Holocaust. Maybe it’s because those are all things that happened to other people in other times and fiction and literature are the only way that I can connect with them that I accept the imperfect facsimile.

Maybe I’ve seen the Zapruder film and watched the towers fall too many times. But when it comes to events that feel closer to me–my grandparents knew Lady Bird Johnson and Nellie Connally, even if only peripherally–I know that there is something in my heart that is not described by these social commentaries.

So I’ll disappoint you today and avoid talking about the craft of this book. But what I’d love to know from you is where you turn when you seek to understand the evils of the world. Do you look for and find solace in literature? Have you read pieces about these events that you care to share? Or do you want to share that most intimate gift, your own story about a day in history?

I’m off to ask my parents once again what they experienced on November 22, 1963. Maybe this time I’ll write it down.

The Lullaby of Polish Girls by Dagmara Dominczyk

November 13, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I can’t remember where I first heard of The Lullaby of Polish Girls by Dagmara Dominczyk a mere two days after it was released, but I know the very next thing I did was add the book to my Goodreads. Within a week I had purchased a hardback copy from Elliott Bay Books. I regret none of that. What I do regret is letting the book linger on my shelves for five months before reading it. I thought it would be an easy read, maybe a little pop-y and I was never quite in the mood. My mistake. The book was fantastic and I’m so glad I threw it in my suitcase for my anniversary getaway this past weekend.

First, a Little Background

I’m a sucker for all things Polish. I spent a year there on foreign exchange in this wondrous time (1994-5) when the country was emerging from Communism and hadn’t yet found its feet as part of Western Europe. I was so enthralled with the people, the culture, and the history that 10 years later I started drafting a novel about the place to try and grasp in fictional form some of the complexities of the place and people I loved.

As I’ve been querying agents for my novel, I’ve been seeking out books about Poland during that transitional period to 1) see if I got it right, 2) find out what agents and presses are interested in the period, and 3) recapture some of the magic. So I was predisposed to like The Lullaby of Polish Girls, even if it hadn’t been really well written.

A Book in Context

Minutes before I opened The Lullaby of Polish Girls and started reading it, I read the final pages of Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. It was a strangely apt transition, because I’d been really interested in Bathsheba Everdene’s unusual strength of character for a literary woman of her period. At least in the beginning. Then she got kind of wimpy and I started seeing so many of the gender limitations of the era. I was getting really depressed, actually, despite the fact that I was away on vacation and reading in a spot overlooking the sea.

About The Lullaby of Polish Girls

How wonderfully refreshing, then, to open Dominczyk’s book and find not one but three strong female leads. And they weren’t cardboard strong or representing some idealized female power. Instead, Anna, Kamila, and Justyna are beautifully round characters. All three are Polish by birth, although Anna has emigrated to America, and their mothers knew each other before the girls were born. Anna first meets Justyna when she returns to Poland for a few brief moments as a tween in 1989. Justyna tells Kamila (who had been away that weekend) about Anna and Kamila takes up a deeply personal correspondence with her.

Describing an Era

So what we get to see as readers is the lives of these women in 2002 and then fully-realized flashbacks of them as they are growing up in 1989, 1992, 1995, and 1998. It’s a simple setup. Each chapter has a section focused on Anna, then one on Kamila, and a third on Justyna. The chapters alternate between the present (2002) and an ordered sequence of years in the past. But what’s happening behind that simplicity is these girls are growing up and changing as rapidly as their country is. When Anna visits in 1989, Poland is still in the last stages of Communist rule. By the time the narrative ends, Poland is two short years away from joining the European Union. That’s a whirlwind of history and it all happens in 217 pages. But Dominczyk lets this exist as rich background rather than thrusting the history on the reader.

Intercultural Identities

Dominczyk is also using her characters to describe the myriad stages of exile of the Polish people and the longing that produces. Anna’s father is a refugee from the Communist government. She was seven when her family came to the US to live the American Dream. Kamila’s parents came to the US after the Berlin Wall fell and are in the country illegally. When we first meet her in 2002, Kamila is visiting her parents as she flees from a bad marriage in Poland. Justyna and her family have always been in Poland. It’s remarkable that three families can showcase such a wide variety of experiences and it never comes off at all forced. There are some really gorgeous complexities that arise in the girls’ interactions because of their degrees of escape from Poland and it’s so well handled.

I’ve seen these experiences up close and Dominczyk gets them just right. When I was in Poland, I remember people telling me about an aunt or a cousin who had gone to the US as though I might have met them. They’d talk wistfully of America like it was the promised land. And a Polish friend I had in the US saved every year so she could go back and visit that part of her past and her family. She knew that people expected something from her because she was American–gifts or hope or a way out–and I think that always reminded her of what she had in the States. Meanwhile, as an American, I would have gladly stayed in Poland if I hadn’t been 17.

Strong Female Characters

But what I liked most about this book was the strength of those three women. Even as girls they are sharply aware (of each other when not of themselves) and they make mistakes and choices and life happens to them, but they are strong in their very core. The image I came away from Poland with was of an entire sex who was genetically blessed, good at all things home-related, and making their way in the workforce as scientists and economists. It’s a broad generalization, of course, but this book captures some of that “we’ll forge ahead no matter what” spirit that I so admired.

I haven’t been back to Poland. Maybe because it’s not in my blood I’m afraid that I won’t relate to the place after so many years. But I was grateful to Domiczyk for allowing me to revisit and broaden my memories. And I was grateful that she created this rich, tightly-written story. I’ll re-read this book with pleasure and not just as a vacation read.

If you want to visit a little piece of the Polish-American experience, pick up a copy of The Lullaby of Polish Girls from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

A Tale of Two Worldviews: Alice McDermott vs. Tim O’Brien

November 5, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

Sometimes what makes you love or hate a book isn’t the characterization. It’s not the plotting or the setting or the quality of the writing. Sometimes what you love or hate about a book just comes down to the message. That’s what I realized when I read July, July by Tim O’Brien back to back with Charming Billy by Alice McDermott this weekend.

Tim O’Brien

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know by now that I love Tim O’Brien. In fact, reviewing Going After Cacciato showed me that if I looked hard enough, literary language was all around me. So when I bought July, July, I knew it wouldn’t sit for long on my too-read shelf. I knew he was going to be playing with time and a myriad of characters and I couldn’t wait to see what he did.

I hated it.

Don’t get me wrong, the book is very well written. The characters are interesting, O’Brien plays with the edges of magical realism, and he does this thing with interspersion of space in the last few pages that blew my mind. But it was a miracle that I made it to the end of the book, because from the very beginning I just wanted out of the miserable lives of the characters as they sat at their college reunion rehashing all the horrible things that ever happened to them and all the horrible things they ever did to each other.

I realized that what the book jacket described as “a portrait of a generation launched into adulthood at the moment when their country, too, lost its innocence” was maybe too good of a portrait. And I wasn’t sure that most of them were adults. They were selfish, damaged, and childish. I recognized some of their behaviors as my own and it terrified me. The book made me want to hug my husband. Forever. And maybe not leave the house again.

I read the book in one night because I do adore O’Brien and I was looking for some redemption (for the characters, for me). But when I read that last period, I knew I was going to need to get out of bed and fetch myself a palate cleanser.

Alice McDermott

By contrast, Charming Billy by Alice McDermott has sat on my shelf for I don’t know how long. The sticker on the front says the used store bought this copy in 2000 and I could have been shifting it around since then. But it was just what I needed Saturday night after closing July, July. I know it was just what I needed because I fell asleep twelve pages in. My brain had finally found a place where it no longer felt assaulted and I could relax.

That does not mean the book was boring. Nor was it especially uplifting. The book actually starts in a bar following a funeral as neighbors pass around gossip about the deceased (Billy) and his widow sits almost entirely offstage. I did not know what to expect. What I found, though, was this tightly-knit world of several generations of Irish-Americans. Their lives are not idyllic and many of them are alcoholics. But they love each other and they act in each others’ best interest. The book shifts back and forth in time–covering more than half a century–and I fell so hard for these people.

The writing is good and sometimes quite pretty, but it was McDermott’s spirit that captured me.

The Quest for Happiness

“Billy didn’t need someone to pour him his drinks, he needed someone to tell him that living isn’t poetry. It isn’t prayer. To tell him and convince him. And none of us could do it, Danny, because every one of us thought that as long as Billy believed it was, as long as he kept himself believing it, then maybe it could still be true.” – Alice McDermott

My generation is really busy right now trying to figure out what’s going to make our lives happy. We’ve been told we can be anything, except there aren’t really all that many jobs. We’ve been told we are special, except that few people want to pay us to be special. In contrast, when Billy’s cousin and best friend, Dennis, comes of working age in 1937, his father gets him a job at Con Edison because “The greatest city in the world will always need electricity.” This is a man who knows that having enough money to feed your family is happiness. There aren’t a lot of strivers in this book and I found that refreshing, especially after reading July, July where the strivers were the unhappiest of the lot. As I think back on it, maybe both books were telling me the same thing, but the positive example was a lot easier to listen to.

Maybe it’s a generational thing–the Greatest Generation vs. the Baby Boomers. All I know is some of the brightest minds of my generation are either setting up jobs completely on their own terms or they are walking away entirely. They are working part time or using their Ivy League educations to set up farms and grow enough food to feed their families.

Ain’t Capitalism Grand?

The other thing I watch in my everyday life is how we all talk about the economy, waiting for it to get better. And we’re told the best thing we can do to make it better–the best thing we can do to create jobs for those who don’t have them–is to buy more and save less. We have to put our money to use. We have to want more things.

I don’t know about you, but my house is full. I have so many things I can’t even give them all away. And not a one of them makes me happy. I understand that capitalism is built on growth and that growth is built on consumption, but it feels like all of that rests on a bubble of rapidly-cooling air. I can’t buy a better coat that will last longer because it might put someone out of a job. I can’t buy coffee in bulk bags because those horrible, single-use plastic cups require more manufacturing and cost more money so they equal prosperity (and then even the man at the landfill has a guaranteed income). Oh, and I have to do it all on credit because my income won’t go up until I stimulate the economy.

In Charming Billy, when Dennis asks his step father (Mr. Holtzman) for a loan so that Billy can send for his bride from the old company, he says, “You boys will never have any money if you spend everything you make before it’s earned.” Imagine if the government worked that way. Imagine if we were talking about paying down the deficit instead of raising the debt ceiling. On a good day the best we can muster is balancing a budget so we don’t add to the debt.

A Life Less Ordinary

I thought of Mr. Holtzman today when the repair bill for my car started to approach the car’s actual Blue Book value. As my husband and I discussed the worth of the vehicle, the life still left in it, and whether we should replace it, I was proud that we sounded more like Holtzman than John Boehner. I was glad that my husband agreed the car is worth repairing. I was grateful that it is, unlike so many of our electronics these days, still somewhat cost-effective to repair.

I know that if we all walk away from the malls and refuse to buy the latest iPhone our way of life will change. Our GDP will shrink. The stock market will lose value. People might well lose jobs. But that last one is the only one I worry about because none of these objects I’m supposed to want make me happy.

What does make me happy is to come home every night and snuggle with my husband. Our jeans might be a little ratty. We make coffee in a cheap French press that only gets replaced when I shatter the carafe. And we’re repairing our nine-year-old car like a couple of old fogeys. And maybe that means I’m not ambitious enough, but I don’t care. I don’t care because it makes me feel like an adult to take care of the things I have instead of throwing out something that isn’t perfect. I don’t care because I share my life with friends new and old and not a one of us gives a rip about what material goods the others possess.

I could go into how the impulse to toss out things that aren’t working relates to divorce rates, but you can make that inference on your own. I just know that if I treated my writing like we are taught to treat our material objects and each other, I’d have a waste basket full of shitty first drafts and very little personal development (and very few final products) to show for it all.

So the gift I received this weekend from two very talented authors is the inspiration to dig deep and think about my values. What books challenge you? Do you feel the tide changing like I do or do you think I’m full of it? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

If this review made you want to read either book, pick up a copy of Charming Billy or July, July from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.