Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

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 Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Anderson Cooper Dispatches from the Edge

January 6, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about living abroad and why I don’t. I have plenty of international experience—from living in Chile and Poland to extensive travels on four continents. Despite my wanderlust, something keeps me on home soil, and a week spent with Magic, Science and Religion by Bronisław Malinowski, Travels with Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn, and Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper taught me something about the kind of writer I want to be and helped me understand why I choose to live in the US these days.

Magic, Science, and Religion

A random reference in another book led me to finally pull this tattered paperback from my to-read shelf. I have a cultural bias toward Poles and though I had no real idea what this book was about, I was in.

I wish I had known what the book was about. I have a degree in sociology, so observing cultures should be my thing, but Malinowski’s book made me profoundly uncomfortable. I appreciated how he started out by validating more primitive uses of science (even though I hated the use of the word “primitive”). I did not like anything thereafter. Magic, science, and religion should be fascinating topics, but when a culture’s most precious myths are told with complete scientific detachment, I’m out.

They tell how a malicious being of human shape, but not of human nature, went into a piece of bamboo somewhere on the northern shore of Normanby Island. The piece of bamboo drifted northwards till it was washed ashore near the promontory of Yayvau or Vakuta. A man from the neighboring village of Kwadagila heard a voice in the bamboo and opened it. The demon came out and taught him sorcery. This, according to the informants in the south, is the real starting point of black magic. – Bronisław Malinowski

It wasn’t Malinowski’s fault that I hated this book—he wrote a very classic anthropological study. He taught me that I am not interested in detached observers in life or in writing. I like narrative. I want my readers to engage with characters and details and story.

Travels with Myself and Another

Ann Hedreen turned me on to Martha Gellhorn in a recent post about curiosity and one of my favorite travel companions bought the book for me for Christmas. I really enjoyed Gellhorn’s independent spirit. She is famous for being one of Hemingway’s wives. She should be famous for picking up and doing whatever she wanted all over the world. The book covers trips she took to China (while it was under attack from Japan), the Caribbean (while it was under attack from Nazis), Africa (during regime change), and the Soviet Union (where she visited a literary dissident). Need I add that she took these trips mostly for fun?

My favorite chapter was about her time in China. She visited many of the same places I have and I enjoyed thinking about how in such a large country we all end up in the same places. She was there before the communists were in power and it was interesting to see how much has changed and how much has not.

Though I hate to admit it, I am not a resolute traveler, and this is something Gellhorn and I have in common. But whereas I blame myself for a miserable few days spent in the wrong part of Bangkok (there’s a reason western tourists stick to Khao San Road), Gellhorn seems to expect all of the world to live up to her standards. Perhaps Gellhorn and I are too much alike for me to love her. We have perfectionistic expectations and are disappointed when they are not met. Except that I would never have the balls to take off across Africa essentially by myself.

[Hemingway] considered me thoughtfully. “The trouble with you, M., is that you think everybody is exactly like you. – Martha Gellhorn

Reading Gellhorn’s interpretations of the world made me crave the chance to form my own opinions in the way that you get to when you are seeing a new way of life for the first time. I think if Gellhorn had described some of her cultural interactions (especially in Africa) for me instead of sharing her reactions to them, I might have spent less time questioning her opinion and more time focusing on her story. I realized that this engagement is essential for me as a reader though I am sometimes guilty of trying to shape a reader’s experience rather than trusting them to make their own.

Dispatches from the Edge

The highlight of this nonfiction binge was definitely Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge. Cooper found a way to marry a straightforward reportage of some pretty horrific war and devastation with a frank look at the trauma of his own life. For the majority of the book, he keeps his own emotion out of the narrative. He paints the scenes in enough detail that the reader can easily interpret and react to the facts on their own. This book hit exactly the right tone.

On the plane, a flight attendant asks a Sri Lankan passenger if she’s comfortable.

“I just lost three people in my family,” the passenger says.

“Oh, that’s terrible,” the flight attendant says, pausing for a moment. “No duty-free then?” – Anderson Cooper

This pulling back on reporting emotion during the most poignant and trying moments is something I learned in grad school, but it still strikes me how powerful omission can be. Cooper trusts his reader to experience regional events like the tsunami in the Indian Ocean and the genocide in Rwanda as well as personal events like his brother’s suicide. By not telling us how to feel, he allows for a much more complex array of emotions.

Even as Cooper seems to come into his own emotions during his outrage at the handling of Hurricane Katrina, he carefully balances journalistic distance with the story of his family’s relationship to the area. This is a deeply personal book and I found a deep respect for Cooper as a reporter, writer, and human being.

Why I Still Live in the US

I envy those living abroad, but I shouldn’t. Living in the US has been my choice. All the things I love about living abroad—the fresh way of seeing, the deepened cultural understanding, and the special feeling of otherness—are transitory. The heightened awareness that comes with living in a foreign country helped make me a writer, but when new countries become home, my observation curve plateaus until I pick up roots and move again. Settling in one place has helped me internalize those skills and turn them toward subtler contrasts.

In my life, and not always by my choice, the idea of moving to another continent was often tied to the idea of running away. As a result, my enduring feeling of living abroad is restless homelessness and transience—you cannot stop lest the adrenaline fade and all the feelings you are fleeing catch up with you. I don’t want to live on that expat edge anymore.

I wanted emotion but couldn’t find it here, so I settled for motion. – Anderson Cooper

Of course, escape is far from the only reason to live abroad. Opportunity and adventure have shaped migration patterns since the beginning of time. I am lucky to have had the chance to learn that home can be anywhere you make it, and I have friends who are happily making homes on other continents on a more permanent basis who I can live vicariously through. But for me right now, the greatest challenge is learning to stand in place and face myself where I am. That happens to be in the US. I may move again someday (my husband and I still cherish that artistic dream of Paris), but when I do, it will not be because I am running away. It will be because I am on steady footing with myself—because I have learned all I can from home and am ready for the next adventure.

If this review made you want to read one of these books, pick up a copy of Magic, Science and Religion,Travels with Myself and Another, or Dispatches from the Edge from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Waves of Intimacy with Virginia Woolf

January 2, 2013 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Micheline Aharonian Marcom once said to me that books teach you how to read them, and though I was lost when I opened The Waves by Virginia Woolf, I fumbled onward until, as Miłosz would have said, “I surrendered and it carried me and I swam.” As the best books will do, this book challenged me as a reader and writer and made me think hard about my own life.

The Structure of Interspersion

The book is starts with a short poetic passage in italics which describes the dawning of the day at the edge of the sea.

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it.

Additional italicized sections serve as markers of the passing day (and lifetime) throughout the book. It’s perhaps an obvious analogy and one I’ve used myself, but Woolf handles it beautifully. Without the passing time denoted in these passages, I would have had a more difficult time understanding what was happening with the rest of the text.

The space between those italic sections, the bulk of the book, initially looks like a dialogue:

“I see a ring,” said Bernard, “hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.”

“I see a slab of pale yellow,” said Susan, “spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.”

“I hear a sound,” said Rhoda, “cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down.”

But it quickly becomes evident this is something different than ordinary dialogue. Though there is often more than one speaker and their words build on each other, they are not interacting with each other. At first I wasn’t sure if the characters were even speaking aloud, but once I was entranced by them it ceased to matter.

This creates an effect similar to a classical Greek chorus because it conveys a unity of experience, but the characters do not speak in unison. Instead, each contributes a slightly individual perspective which allows us to see the other characters through their eyes. This variance is important because there is no other exposition. The entire story is told in these weirdly interwoven monologues.

The Closeness of Interior Monologues

Though it took me awhile to get into the spirit of this book, it knocked me on my writing ass. In my new book, I’ve challenged myself to work in third person. Reading Woolf’s dialogues (which often come off as interior monologues) I am reminded how very much exposition can come from the self-exploration of first person. Whether to include sections in first person is something I’ll be carefully considering as I revise for structure. The other thing I will be looking at, again influenced by Woolf, is the way two completely separate narratives feed off of one another to tell one story.

Creating a Sense of Belonging

Woolf has found a way of conveying the depth of friendship. As I followed Bernard, Susan, and friends through the moments from a childhood classroom to a restaurant in young adulthood and beyond as their progressing lives intersect, the enormity of their shared experience became intoxicating. The choral speaking felt as though they were only truly whole when they were together in body or spirit.

Friends like these are the people who who know and accept you for all that you are. In my life, I have been lucky enough to be part of more than one group like this. Though my introversion requires long spaces of solitude, those moments of true kinship and understanding are unequalable. I’m thinking back to a recent night with writer friends when we said what we really thought and finished each other’s sentences. I knew how important this is one-on-one (as in a marriage), but I don’t think I realized how deeply important and satisfying this kind of friend group is until I experienced it through Woolf’s strange and bewitching narrative.

What have you read lately that challenged you as a reader, writer, and person?

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Waves from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Will Augmented Reality and E-Readers Kill Paper Books?

December 31, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 6 Comments

As 2012 closes and 2013 dawns, it seemed a good time to enter the fray on a popular discussion: will e-books be the death of paper books? I’m a confirmed Luddite (no dedicated e-reader yet, though I do finally have a smart phone) and I love my paper books, but even I have to admit e-books present exciting new opportunities. In the right hands, e-books have come a long way from the poorly-formatted and typo-ridden uploads we came to expect in the early Kindle and Nook days.

One of the most exciting things I see writers exploring on paper these days (it’s not actually new, but I’m just now discovering it) is hybrid forms. Writers like Michael Ondaatje and W.G. Sebald blend poetry, prose, news clippings, images and more. These narratives come alive in new and interesting ways as the writers and readers fill in gaps between these forms to create a different kind of story.

E-books have infinite potential to take hybrid forms to a new level.

Enhanced E-Books as Illuminations

Melville House has been experimenting with HybridBooks. These e-books contain additional materials from maps to curated text that are meant to illuminate the stories they accompany. This series has been well-received and I’m intrigued by the ability to immediately follow intertextual linkages (without the trudge to the bookstore). And I’ve always loved the maps inside the covers of books, so I suppose this is an extension of that and I can definitely see applications.

Reinventing Publishing with New Media: Augmented Reality Books

My husband received The Art of Journey for Christmas. Using an app, his smartphone turns this illustrated companion to the PlayStation game from a paper book (art by Matthew Nava) to a four-dimensional world as characters literally fly off the page accompanied by a haunting soundtrack.

Though this “augmented reality” only works for a few pages in the book (I imagine the animation is insanely expensive), daqri, the company behind the technology has already been using it to take scientists inside the protein shell of a virus. The possibilities for turning a book into a high-tech immersive entertainment experience are endless.

Will Paper Books Still Exist?

Paper books will always exist in my house as long as I can get them. Sure, there are times when it’s great to be able to click through to understand a reference I hadn’t quite gotten or to see an illustration of what someone else envisioned a creature to look like (this would have been very helpful to me with Lovecraft). But the beauty of black ink on white paper is that I get to participate in the experience of creating the stories and images. If I had a clickable Les Misérables, I would never have spent hours in a British Consulate library looking up new words in the full-length OED and discovering how much I love language and etymology.

I have to admit, though, that for the right project, HybridBooks and augmented reality are very intriguing. Would either of these options enhance the manuscript you’re working on? I’d love to know more. And if you know about other new ways people are re-imagining the book, please share.

Dinaw Mengestu Builds Beautiful Things with a Sense of Place

December 23, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 3 Comments

One of the things I like most about a book is the possibility of completely inhabiting a new culture or rediscovering a familiar one. Dinaw Mengestu gave me that gift this morning in the novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by allowing me to explore DC and Addis Ababa through the eyes of his narrator, Sepha.

Changing Landscape

Stories are supposed to take place during times of change, and Mengestu takes that adage all the way to his setting. Sepha has lived and run a small store in the Logan Circle area of Washington, DC for nearly two decades. It was cheap when he moved in and it’s cheap now, but signs of gentrification are appearing and the longtime residents are not pleased.

It would be far too simple to call this a novel about a poor neighborhood being fixed up by newer, whiter residents. Instead, Mengestu has beautifully woven the social and economic changes of gentrification into the storyline so that the pulse of change in the neighborhood becomes an important element of the setting.

Juxtaposing Cultures

Sepha immigrated to the US from Ethiopia after his father was brutally killed by rebel forces nearly twenty years before, and Sepha’s closest friends are two other African immigrants of a similar vintage from the Congo and Kenya. This setup allows Mengestu to create a world where Sepha is living the American experience (whatever that is) at the same time as he reflects on an almost shared history with his friends. Though they each come from different countries, the game the friends play of naming a coup leader and then coming up with the details speaks to the commonalities of their background, even as they experience the US in very different ways—shop owner, businessman, and waiter. The genius of having the friends not quite share an experience is that each notes and reflects on the differences between them, e.g. the Ethiopian way of kissing as a greeting.

“This country is like a little bastard child. You can’t be angry when it doesn’t give you what you want… But you have to praise it when it comes close, otherwise it’ll turn around and bite you in the ass.” – Dinaw Mengestu

Both the US and Africa are ever-present in the novel as they are in Sepha’s life. My favorite example of this is when he wanders into a park in DC and remembers a park in Addis Ababa that he visited with his father a few days before his father was killed. Sepha’s memory of seeing “traitors’” bodies that day shapes and colors how he sees his current neighborhood and it gives the reader an amazing wealth of depth to read into.

Writer as Observer

It is often said that writers are observers. I am so pleased that Mengestu devotes so much of his observation to how culture makes place. The novel is often quiet, but there is much happening beneath the surface and his characters are setting in place the events that will create the change in their lives (as should be). What is special about The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is how Mengestu observes the relationship between macro-scale events like gentrification and the micro-scale of people who are both causing the events and experiencing their aftermath.

I wondered at times if Mengestu’s experience as an immigrant helped him see so clearly the cultures of these places. Though his story is very different than Sepha’s—Mengestu came to the US as a very small child—I wondered to what degree his family integrated into their new community and how that shaped his powers of observation or whether he was a born observer. I know my experiences living in Chile as a child and Poland as a teenager enhanced the observation skills I developed as a shy child. Recreating that jarring and unmoored memory of seeing a new culture so quickly for what it is and yet never quite understanding it is why I seek a strong sense of place in a book. It is also a sensation I aspire to create in my own writing.

What experiences shaped you as a writer and how do they show up in your work?

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

This post was amended on July 2, 2013 to correct a factual error.