Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

The Next Big Thing Blog Series: Murmurs of the River

February 10, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 5 Comments

Elissa Washuta, author of the forthcoming My Body Is a Book of Rules, tagged me to respond to ten questions about what I’m working on. Elissa is a memoirist and member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe. Elissa is deeply involved with Seattle’s writing community including Richard Hugo House. She reminds me always of the importance of community and how very welcoming and generous other writers can be.

1. What is your working title of your book?

It was Murmurs of the River, and the final title is Polska, 1994

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

Ideas always come from obsessions, don’t they? Having spent time growing up in Pinochet’s Chile and post-Cold War Poland, I am obsessed with oppression on a personal and a national level. I am interested in the secrets we keep and those we ask others to keep for us.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Literary fiction.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Assuming a production in English, I’d love to see someone young and smartly vulnerable like Elle Fanning play Magda. It would be fun to see Ryan Gosling explore his meaner side as Paweł and Aidan Turner would make a beautiful Jacek. Because many of the main characters are young, it would also be great to see some new talent in the movie. Fionnula Flanagan would make a wonderful Babcia.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Thirteen years ago, Magda witnessed the arrest of her mother by the Polish secret police; now, as her country emerges from behind the Iron Curtain, a tip from a neighbor starts Magda on her quest to find out what would make a mother sacrifice her family.

See that semicolon? That’s where I cheated.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Ideally, the book will be represented by an agency. I’m still querying, so if you know someone… let me know.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

The real honest-to-God first draft took me a year and a half. I dinked around with the characters and story in various forms for about two years before that. Polishing the book into its final form only took another 17 or so drafts.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I carried The Lover by Marguerite Duras very close to my heart while writing this book, so there are many similarities between the two. Murmurs of the River is also comparable to Chris Abani’s Song for Night (which, not coincidentally, is also inspired by The Lover).

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I spent a year in Poland on high school foreign exchange during the 1990s. It was a crazy time after the fall of the Berlin Wall when Poland was trying to become part of the West but was facing some real questions about what that actually meant and if it was a good thing. I fell in love with the people of Poland and wanted to understand what it was like for them to grow up in a closed society. Although my explorations of the Polish experience are fictional, a lot of the peripheral events in the novel are based on conversations I had during the year I spent there.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The Poland I write about doesn’t exist any longer. I hope this book tells the story of how it was. I structured the narrative around lines from Czesław Miłosz’s poetry and mood in the three sections of the book recalls Chopin’s Murmures de la Seine.

Murmurs of the River is a coming of age novel about love, so although it’s set in a land and time that are unfamiliar to most, Magda’s struggle to define herself inside (and outside) the context of her family is universal.

Next Up on The Next Big Thing

Thanks for your curiosity about Murmurs of the River. Check in with the following writers next week to learn more about their upcoming projects.

Roxana Arama is a novelist, mother, and dedicated member of Louisa’s Writers. Originally from Romania, she earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Goddard College and writes in beautiful English. Roxana is one of my favorite people to talk with about editing and how to make the most of the little time we writers have. The spreadsheet she uses to organize her latest novel is legendary.

February 18, 2013 update: Roxana bravely decided her novel isn’t ready for public discussion, so she introduced me to Mindy Halleck, who also writes at Louisa’s. Mindy’s blog, Literary Liaisons, is a great resource for tips about writing and revising. I’m looking forward to getting to know Mindy better through her work and blog and maybe, just maybe, we’ll meet in person someday soon at Louisa’s.

Kim Brown has a Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing and a Master of Science in Written Communications. She has published with Chicago Tribune, Today’s Chicago Woman, and Contemporary Fashion, among others, and she co-founded Minerva Rising. Someday she will reveal her Jazz Age novel to the world. Kim is like your mom and your best friend all rolled into one and I don’t know what I’d do without her.

You may recognize Ann Hedreen as a contributor to A Geography of Reading. She also uses her Master of Fine Arts and writing talent for commentaries on KBCS radio, making documentary films, and teaching the craft to writers of all ages. Her memoir, Her Beautiful Brain, is a heartbreaking story of how a parent-child relationship changes when Alzheimer’s sets in. I am grateful to Ann for helping me learn that a creative life and a working life do not have to be separate things.

The Simply Evocative Imagery of Ralph Salisbury

February 3, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

In Like the Sun in Storm, a poetry collection, Ralph Salisbury uses relatively simple language to conjure images that are anything but. The title poem was one of my favorite in the collection. I’m still so wrapped up in the clean description of a child’s hiding place and the safety and hope embodied therein that I can’t translate the extraordinary feeling to the page. Instead, I’ll share two other favorite excerpts.

Enmity in “End of a War”

“The widows, who’d prayed we’d be shapes
burned into brick by a weapon broken into myth
saw us as skeletons
garbed in their husbands’ flesh” – Ralph Salisbury

This poem takes place in Nagasaki at the end of World War II. It recalls people who were vaporized by the atom bombs we dropped on Japan—leaving only shadows of their existence “burned into brick.” There are so many ways Salisbury could have talked about the horror of war. He could have described the effects of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or he could have written about the confusion in Pearl Harbor as the Japanese bombed us.

Instead, this first-person, boots on the ground account of how the survivors reacted to his band of soldiers conveys both individual torment and a sense of mutual responsibility. I felt revulsion at the damage done by a weapon we created, but Salisbury also raised my guard with the enmity in those widows’ eyes. They were out to destroy us too.

The concrete imagery of the body in this passage evokes the human cost of war. It also allows the more ephemeral phrase, “weapon broken into myth” to stand apart. Well after I first read this poem, I was still thinking about the aura of myth around the atom bomb—how it creates almost Biblical destruction and how we talk about it so casually.

The poem as a whole creates a very personal and a very complex view of war—one I will be thinking about for a long time to come.

Family Meets Technology in “Awakened by Cell Phone”

“I hear the lovely and loving chatter
my daughter’s year old daughter sends
through silicon crystals
transmitted into eons of green
metamorphosed into petroleum
reborn as plastic, and, yes, into the centuries
of families which formed my ear.” – Ralph Salisbury

Here again Salisbury plays two sentiments against one another. He begins with the warm intimacy of family—the uncomplicated love of a grandparent for a grandchild. Then he makes a surprising segue to a thoughtful deconstruction of this wondrous technology that binds us. Though the language here is a bit more flowery than in the previous poem, the images are equally straightforward. My favorite part about this passage is how he returns to the human connection at the end.

I am not a poet, but even I could appreciate Salisbury’s carefully constructed language. The book overall spans World War II and familial love as you’ve seen here. It also speaks to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, being Cherokee in Amish country, and the more complex sides of family relationships. It’s worth reading this book to understand how these diverse topics coalesce under the mastery of one voice.

I’m planning to re-read Like the Sun in Storm to learn about line breaks from Salisbury as I consider writing some poetry of my own. I’ll also enjoy (and learn from) the layers of nuanced emotion he creates on the page.

What poets do you read and what have you learned from them?

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

Grace Paley: Choked with Meaning

January 27, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 8 Comments

Grace Paley has a way of packing a lifetime into a sentence. In Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, her visceral metaphors drive home enough meaning to describe her characters fully using very few words.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

Two of the most powerful sentences Paley wrote in the title story of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute follow one another back to back: “He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear and down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment.”

If Paley had not used the plumber’s snake analogy, the path of words “through the ear and down the throat, halfway to my heart” could be sweet or seductive or slippery, but the image of the plumber’s snake gives at once a wheedling and an invasive implication. I can see a man casually unrolling the long metal snake, maybe he’s smoking a cigarette. The snake goes farther and farther in, working toward her heart against her wishes and scraping the sides of the canal, and if it is one of the snakes with a claw at the end, doing further damage along the way.

If the next image were him reeling it back in, then I would think of all the filth along the length of the snake, but no, he leaves it in, clogging the canal and leaving his job memorably half-finished. Then there is the sexual connotation of the words “snake” and “equipment,” where the narrator is figuratively left full of the unwanted genitalia he unraveled inside her. Paley is showing how he got to the narrator, past her better judgment and then left her “choking” on the fact that he let him get to her again.

Faith in the Afternoon

In “Faith in the Afternoon,” Paley presents another sentence packed with meaning: “Faith really is an American and she was raised up like everyone else to the true assumption of happiness.” The “assumption of happiness” explains the uniquely American viewpoint Faith holds that we are entitled to a good life and that good things happen to good people. But assumption also has the connotation of rising to heaven in living form.

Paley is equating living in America with living in heaven which offers a stark contrast to Faith’s grandparents’ lives in Eastern Europe and the hell of the holocaust from which they fled. In a few simple words, Paley embodies the ideological differences that separate the generations.

Again in “Faith in the Afternoon,” we meet Bugsy. About her dereliction after meeting Ricardo and becoming a whore, Paley writes: “[s]he soon gave up spreading for the usual rewards, which are an evening’s companionship and a weekend of late breakfasts.” Bugsy would simply be a tragic figure if it weren’t for her place in the relationship as the former lover of Faith’s first husband.

Because of what happened to Bugsy, we see the potential ruin of Faith by her relationship with Ricardo. But in Faith’s attitude toward sex, we also see that she is getting paid though not with money and we start to wonder whether Faith escaped from her relationship with Ricardo as unscathed as we would like to think.

I love that Paley can say so much with so few words. The language she uses is always appropriate to the characters, but the words’ rich connotations imply worldliness. I love to use a good image when I can find one, and I hope I can imbue one with as many luscious possibilities as Paley does.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reinventing Language with The God of Small Things

January 20, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy - Cover

Of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, John Updike wrote, “A novel of real ambition must invent its own language, and this one does.” This quote alone is neither complimentary nor derogatory, but after reading this gorgeous book, I am awestruck at how Roy’s small tweaks to spelling, capitalization, and compound words captured both my attention and the essence of the characters and setting. The language she invents for this book is only the beginning of her ambition and every word on every page is worth the read.

Discovering the True Grammar of a Story

Roy shows from the very beginning of this book that she is doing something different with her language and that to get the most out of the story, the reader will have to trust her. Her wordplay begins subtly as she joins adjectives and nouns into unfamiliar compound words like “dustgreen” and “mossgreen.” It’s a hint of what’s to come, but it’s so gentle that it’s not at all off-putting.

Then Roy begins to emphasize words with unexpected capitalization, as when she writes, “[W]hen life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever.” Because much of the story centers around children, these capitalized words bear the weight of a mother’s emphasis—they become words and lessons even when we don’t yet have the context for them. These capital letters also show us how characters see each other. For example, Sophie Mol is often described as “Sophie Mol, hatted bell-bottomed and Loved from the Beginning” in contrast to Rahel whose birth forever marred her mother’s life.

Roy also creates weight around words by intentionally misspelling them. For example, Estha is given “pocket money” at a movie theater to fetch a soda. The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, who will go on to molest Estha in a few moments, calls this “porketmunny” instead, which denotes both that he comes from a lower caste than Estha and also that he is teasing him. The scene that ensues between them is an important one and this linguistic variation (denoted through the varied spellings) adds a nuance to the moment that could have easily been overwritten if the differences between the two characters had to be described instead.

I’m glad I surrendered my copy editor’s eye to the way Roy was using language. I’m certain this book was a nightmare during the galley correction stage, but the end product is wonderful.

Piecing Together a Fractured Narrative

Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. – Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

True to the above quote, Roy reveals early that the young Sophie Mol will die and that her death changes everything for the family. The author shifts easily backward and forward in time as she describes the aftermath of Sophie’s death (spanning decades) and the events leading up to it. Clues are nestled throughout the novel, and yet when we come to the actual death it is both satisfying to finally know and unsatisfying that one event could have such a devastating effect for generations of a family. In this way, the art of the story imitates the justifications we seek in life for terrible events that occur, even though the answers offer no solace.

Some Books Deserve a Quiet Weekend Alone

A book this carefully constructed demands your full attention. I recommend holing up somewhere without distractions so you can fully surrender to Roy’s language and follow the emotional logic of her narrative.

Are there other books you’ve encountered that use subtle wordplay as artfully as The God of Small Things? Please tell me about them in the comments below.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The God of Small Things from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reading Locally with Lidia Yuknavitch and Jamie Ford

January 13, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Jessica Prentice created the word “locavore” to mean one who eats locally, but I propose a broader meaning—one who consumes locally. The Latin roots support this (“loca” is related to “locus” or “place” and “vore” means “eat” but also “devour”). Because I devour mostly books, I wanted to look at the benefits of reading locally using Dora: A Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford as examples. Both books are set in Seattle where I make my home.

First of all, let me say that I’m unusually blessed living in Seattle. Other cities star more frequently in novels (New York and Paris come to mind), but something about Seattle—maybe because it’s smaller or because I feel like part of the amazingly rich and diverse literary community here—is more intimate. Or maybe it’s because you have to go out of your way to get here, so (unless you’re writing Twilight) authors usually visit the area to get to know the place before writing about it.

I could have written this post about any number of Seattle authors like Sherman Alexie or GM Ford (both of whom I’ve loved), but these two novels by Northwest authors crossed my path this week and they speak to such different geographies that I want to look at each of them here. So we’re on the same page, when I say geography, I mean the location and also the people who affect (and are affected by) the place.

Dora: A Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch

Nearly every review you read about Dora: A Headcase begins with some version of the following phrase, “contemporary coming-of-age story based on Freud’s famous case study.” If I had known this, my reading of the book might have been more nuanced. But I didn’t. I went to the store in search of Yuknavitch’s memoir, The Chronology of Water, which I was unable to find. What they did have were several copies of Dora. I like the serendipity of discovering a book, so I bought and read this one without considering the back cover or the introduction. I may have missed a dimension of the book in doing so, but it didn’t dampen my enjoyment.

Yuknavitch’s characters capture the spirit of Seattle. Smart and angsty teen Dora showed me just how active a protagonist can be as she teams up with the wild gang of Obsidian, Ave Maria, and Little Teena to rage against convention and authority. I’ve seen people just like each of them on Capitol Hill. Dora has that well-to-do hipster with an angry edge vibe that is uniquely Seattle and the others are equally authentic. Dora’s uptight parents and more-rigid-than-he-ever-thought-he’d-be Dr. Siggy were also familiar and well-drawn, and it was easy to imagine them pushing carts through Trader Joe’s on Queen Anne.

Although the specifics of some locations in the city were treated with creative license, the essence of the neighborhoods is well portrayed. And when the action of the book moves to suburban Renton, the characters stand in even starker contrast to the landscape. I won’t spoil the story, but the shift in setting adds a whole new, very important, dimension to the book—a peek at what all us crazy city folk look like mere miles beyond our border.

The book is a very wild ride and I’d recommend it for those occasions when you are looking for a (legal) way to indulge in revenge.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet showcases a very different but equally real Seattle. Set primarily in the International District during World War II, the book tells the story of Chinese-American Henry and Japanese-American Keiko and a love that could not be.

The layered complexities of racial relations that Ford presents rival Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer, though this is a very different book. The detailed scenes revealed an aspect of Seattle history I’ve managed to mostly ignore until now. I’ve known about the Japanese internment for a long time, but only in an abstract way. Ford made the events and their impact real for me, even if the love story was a bit pat.

I have always been interested in World War II, but I usually read about the Holocaust and the European campaign. This book helped me put names and faces with experiences—wondering about the Moriguchi family (owners of Uwajimaya, which was in Tacoma until after the war) and what their life must have been like during the war.

I came away from this book with a deeper appreciation of Pioneer Square where I work and the International District where I sometimes shop. In any city, we are surrounded by more strangers than friends and books can help us understand a place even if we can never meet all of its characters. This is a great book to pick up if you want to find out more about events that rocked Seattle during an era that many people are still not talking about. It will make your next visit to the Wing Luke Museum (or even through the bus tunnel) all the richer.

My Writing

Geography was very important to me in writing my first book, Polska, 1994, as I tried to understand the people of Poland. My characters are shaped by their location in the smaller city of Toruń just as Dora would have been a very different book if it was set in Ballard rather than Capitol Hill, and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet needed to be set in the International District.

Perhaps that’s why my next book (a work in progress) feels unmoored at the moment—it currently has no setting and is instead entirely about the characters in relation to each other. I like the amorphous nature this gives the characters, but it is also far outside my comfort zone for them to not have a place that shapes them and which they play against.

I am grateful to both Lidia Yuknavitch and Jamie Ford for reminding me that good stories happen at home, too, and that by devouring local books, I might get that extra layer of enjoyment of learning about my city. Do you read locally? What books would you recommend about your city?

If this review made you want to read either book, pick up a copy of Dora: A Headcase or Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.