Books Archives - A Geography of Reading

Gajarah and Writing Trauma with Somia Sadiq

October 1, 2026 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I love a dark story, I think because I’m always trying to understand the worst of what humans can do so I can think about what to do about it. The danger for me in a dark story, though, is that too few writers are writing from a place I can learn from. Some are putting forth unprocessed material (okay if you want to be there to process it with them) and some are titillated by the dark events (not my bag either). Enter Somia Sadiq and her novel Gajarah, which has become my textbook on how to write about the darkest parts of human behavior with humanity, respect, and foresight.

Honoring Our Stories

The novel centers on Emahn, a Punjabi girl being raised in the U.A.E. with her family who has deep roots in Lahore. Most of the book is in Emahn’s delightful and precocious first-person voice. Poems and myths are also woven in, and from all of this we get a full, rich, and loving picture of Emahn’s family’s life in both countries. This makes us care for her and for them. In life, I also hope that raising a child with this much love builds resilience.

Emahn needs resilience too young, as she is attacked by a stranger one evening very close to her home. We see the before and the after, but Sadiq does not force us to walk through the during. This artistic choice puts a very important focus on Emahn’s experience of the aftermath. Her family reacts in a variety of believable (and sometimes humanly imperfect) ways, but we never doubt their love for her. It’s a family I’d wish for everyone.

There is more to come in Emahn’s life, the trigger warning at the beginning of the book includes rape, sexual abuse, domestic violence, racism, and more. But the book is never about victimhood. It’s about life and love and survival.

“Pain is pain…The how and what is not important. It’s what we do with it that is more important.” – Emahn’s Naano jahn in Gajarah by Somia Sadiq

When not writing, Sadiq is a peace negotiator and conflict readiness strategist and I’m certain that’s where the holistic look at experience and healing in this book comes from. There are many characters who experience tragedy and pain, but each is presented as a whole human and their story is honored. They are also portrayed as more than the things that happened to them and we are reminded to keep our hearts open.

“The strongest way to fight back is to be.

To be in our languages, in our customs, our ways of being. To be comfortable in our own skin. To know inherently in every cell of our bodies that we deserve to be treated with kindness, compassion, fairness, equality.” – Gajarah by Somia Sadiq

Ceremonies of Life

One of the other things I loved about Gajarah was the focus on daily rituals and life in Lahore and in Canada among the Anishinaabeg community. Moments as simple as making burfi on a rooftop and brushing fingers over cedar become meaningful when the proper attention is paid, just as with the rest of life, and I found myself wanting to slow down and look while reading this book (and now, again, just thinking about it). Such is the attention to details that the advance copy of this book that I received came beautifully packaged in materials that recall some of the gorgeous text.

My only regret was that I spent a lot of time wondering whether the words presented in the text were Punjabi or Urdu (such is my imperfect understanding of the region) and I let this curiosity (read: obsession with linguistics) take me out of the sumptuous text sometimes.

Make no mistake, Gajarah deals with some heavy subjects, but I don’t know that I’ve ever read something that felt so alive. I’d tell you more, but I want you to experience it for yourself.

For a gorgeously written book that will make you think more deeply about the beauty of the world and how we survive it, pick up copy of Gajarah. If you use that link, I earn a commission.

Family Secrets in All the Things We Don’t Say and Buckeye

September 24, 2026 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Secrets. Every family’s got them, and no matter how garden variety the categories may be, each one can cause its own exquisite pain. Two books I read this week delve into those secrets, the costs of keeping them, and what happens when they come out in the open: All the Things We Don’t Say by Nuria López and Buckeye by Patrick Ryan.

All the Things We Don’t Say by Nuria López

This slim collection of short stories from Spain contains six sharp looks at different kinds of family secrets: abuse, sexual assault, pregnancy, sexual orientation, adultery, and the process of dying. As most successful short story writers do, López has centered these narratives around key moments so that we’re immediately in the mix.

The story I most connected to, for personal reasons, was “The Week of Goodbye,” where the narrator recounts the process of watching their father die in the hospital on a day-by-day basis. It sounds bleak, but what López captures is instead the incredible variety of what happens: relatives who need something, a visit from an old friend, an improvement, a decline, and always, the background of the hospital itself which continues long after any one patient’s stay. This story reminded me of what can be so glorious in a short story—that finding of all of life as represented in one small set of moments.

This is the kind of book where you can read one story, close the book, and then think about the ramifications of those few pages all day long.

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

On the other side of the brevity spectrum is Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye which chronicles life in a small Ohio town over the period of an entire life. The story centers on the Jenkins and Salt families and the way their lives entwine over time. As with All the Things We Don’t Say, there are secrets here, including adultery, sexual orientation, and abandonment, and those secrets shape the destinies of everyone involved. Because it’s such a sweeping book, Ryan can linger on the social events that background (and shape) their lives as well, including wars and the Civil Rights movement.

I happened to be watching War Sailor, a show about Norwegian merchant marines who were effectively drafted into permanent, deadly service delivering supplies during World War II, on Netflix at the same time as reading this book, which made the descriptions of Felix Salt’s time in the Navy feel especially visceral and harrowing.

Buckeye also deals with death, both sudden and prolonged, and I think the thing I will carry longest out of this reading is the way one virtual stranger aids a couple in the depth of their grief. It is simple and pure and perfect.

Both books are reserved, though, and while characters’ actions make sense, there’s a level of pulling back from their emotions that made me long for them to explore what was happening underneath. Easier in a novel than a short story, of course, but if everyone had said what they were feeling in Buckeye the actions of the characters would have had to have been different and the overall feeling would have been very different, too. And sometimes, when the conversation is had, we see how very little it would have changed anyway. In that way, Buckeye simultaneously begs you to have the conversations you’ve never had and also reminds you that you probably already know what you’re going to learn.

If you’re interested in reading about other people’s secrets, pick up a copy of All the Things We Don’t Say or Buckeye from Bookshop.org. If you use either of those links, I earn a commission.

Watching Train Dreams and Longing for A River Runs Through It

September 19, 2026 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

“I am haunted by waters” is the perfect end to a perfect story, A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean. At times I’ve run across it and thought maybe it was a little melodramatic, which, out of context maybe it can be, but I’ve just finished reading the story again. And in context, it is perfect. I was drawn to this book again last night after watching Train Dreams, another beautiful movie from a slim novella, this one by Denis Johnson, that contends with the weight of a life in the Northwest. Hearing the last line of the movie, “But on that spring day, as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all,” and looking at images of the cabin reclaimed by wilderness, I felt the almost perfect completion of the story arc. But I craved Maclean because I could see that they were reaching for the same thing and because I wanted to know what about Train Dreams felt so familiar to A River Runs Through It.

Setting

Though Robert Grainier is said in Train Dreams not to have made it much farther into Montana than Libby, the setting of both stories is similar, both in place and time, though the main action of A River Runs Through It covers a shorter span. Part of what I will always love about these movies, then, is that they remind me of where I grew up. More on imagery below, but there are moments in Train Dreams where I saw the specific texture of bark and the particular splay of needles and thought, “I know that tree!” Both do an excellent job of capturing the expanse of the quiet landscape of the Inland Northwest.

Imagery

Whereas I can no longer separate the film and book of A River Runs Through It, because they mirror each other so closely and because I’ve read and watched them so many times, I cannot remember reading Train Dreams, though I imagine it was a quiet book and meditative because the movie is this way (and you don’t usually remove the splashy bits when going from page to screen). What I will carry forward from Train Dreams is the imagery, which is perhaps even stronger than the imagery in A River Runs Through It (as beautiful as that was).

From early on in Train Dreams, Director of Photography Adolpho Veloso interweaves flashes of imagery including fire and Grainier’s wife and child. These force a pause in our experience of the forward time of the movie and also feel akin to the way memories recur to us at times they might be useful. They’re also gorgeous to look at and from early on in the film they left me wondering if they were the future or the past (or both). They’re definitely dreamlike.

On the other hand, my memory of A River Runs Through It is much more straightforwardly beautiful. The locations and actors are often stunning and sun-kissed, but naturally so with no artifice. Of course there is art in this, in all of it, and my memory of several scenes wouldn’t be so visceral without the images, but in re-reading the book, the guide for what to shoot and who to highlight is right there in Maclean’s prose.

Regret and Loss

“Lone white men of the west” is not usually a genre you go to for deep emotional resonance, not because there aren’t emotions buried there, but because it can sometimes feel like the story is presented for you to dig in and pull out the emotions that the author couldn’t quite face themselves. This is not true of Train Dreams or A River Runs Through It at all. Not to say that either are histrionic (at all), but they carry the weight and perspective of creators who have put in the emotional energy themselves and they are prepared to share that journey with you.

In the case of A River Runs Through It, you can feel in every word the lifetime that Maclean spent mulling over his brother’s story and his regret at not being able to save him. If you read carefully (as I tried to this morning), you find lines like, “He did not want any big brother advice or money or help, and, in the end, I could not help him” everywhere in the story. But rather than being repetitive, they reinforce the perspective that Maclean is writing from.

There’s also a retrospective voice in Train Dreams, and lines like “Money was tighter for them then than it ever had been. And though he didn’t know it then, he would always look back on this time in his life as his happiest” frame what you can expect from an emotional perspective while holding back the details of the plot.

Both stories deal extensively with loss and regret, something that could easily be over dramatized, but to my mind, both hit all the right notes to create resounding stories that it’s easy to connect with and to think about for a long time after.

Performances

I won’t name names, but both films contain actors I sometimes roll my eyes at because I’ve seen too many roles they’ve overplayed, but I can’t think of a single performance in either movie (except Stephen Shellen’s Neal in A River Runs Through It, but he’s supposed to be that way) that feels over the top. In fact, they are perfect, from the side characters to the mains, and they make it a genuine pleasure to sink into both movies. Particular favorites include Nathaniel Arcand as Ignatius Jack (TD), William H. Macy as Arn Peeples (TD), and Craig Sheffer as Norman Maclean (ARRTI).

It’s time for me to dry my eyes and go back to working on my own books, but what a relief it was to linger in something really good for a change. If you have read or watched something that felt perfect, please share it with me. I’d like to get used to this feeling.

Another Kind of Symmetry by Angela Jane Fountas and the Road Less Traveled

September 7, 2026 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

“What if, what if, what?” is the refrain I often hear in my head as I ponder the limitless possibilities that could result from life’s choices. What if we moved to a small town? What if I went back to corporate? What if this relationship (or that) was different? And then I return to some sage advice Angela Jane Fountas gave me once, “You only get seven out of ten of what you want. You can change which seven, but you’ll never get ten.” Fitting, then, that what struck me recently about her gorgeous new book Another Kind of Symmetry is that she’d found the perfect way to explore and inhabit life’s myriad what ifs.

The book centers on twin sisters, Agni and Effie who live with their Greek-born parents in Astoria, Queens while going to college. Effie is wilder and Agni quieter, and the fact that they are twins already gives us a chance to explore two ways of blooming from the same circumstance. But because of their heritage and close family ties, we get two other what ifs: living the diaspora or returning home and whether to embrace the city or the country.

Another Kind of Symmetry begins with Agni and Effie at their grandmother’s grave in Greece, five years after she died and six years after Agni decided to stay in their ancestral village after coming for her grandfather’s funeral. They are there to dig up their grandmother’s bones after her soul has finally transitioned to the afterlife—this being just one of many chances we the readers get to see touches of Greek life that we may never have encountered before. This scene provides an early sense of the divergence of the sisters’ paths, but just enough to provide a framework for the treat of a story Fountas is about to unfold for us.

This is not a book I want to unfold for you, because one of the beauties of the way the book is constructed is in how it consistently presents us with the two sides of something and leaves us to plumb our feelings (all while enjoying a great story). The richly-drawn characters experience love and loss as they are trying to figure out their own lives and all the while the world changes around them in locations are as carefully detailed as the characters. Themes of personal identity mix with gentrification and how to love someone you don’t understand.

This is also not a book to read quickly, as much as you may find yourself wanting to. Regardless of whether you are a country mouse or a city mouse, I strongly urge you to take the time to sit with Agni and Effie and what they teach you about who you may want to be.

As for me, I may never have the fireplace I so wanted when we were looking for a house all those years ago, but I spent the last couple of weeks harvesting and processing plums, apples, and tomatoes from the garden of the place we have made our home. And I have the memories of watching Stinky and Dirty with my son when he was tiny, listening to those trucks sing a refrain whose wisdom he was probably too young to understand at the time but one that reminds me every day that everything is a choice.

If you pick up your copy of Another Kind of Symmetry from Bookshop.org, I get a commission.

The Tension of Truths in Raised by Ferns by Maya Jewell Zeller

August 29, 2026 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

The morning of Maya Jewell Zeller’s book event at Seattle Central Library, I packed a box of photo albums to send to my mother. There are two stories of how I came to have these albums and to whom they belonged, just as there are two stories of Zeller’s birth (one based on the moon, the other a calendar). The tension is in the difference between these two things, how they are both true and also how they cannot be fully reconciled. This tension is what’s exciting about the book (a memoir in essays) and about life, and I deeply enjoyed exploring the nuance of the thinking in Raised by Ferns as Zeller chronicled growing up poor but far from impoverished. Below are a few things that helped me think deeper about topics that interest me.

“The Privilege Button”

It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the title of this essay refers to a garage door opener. At the event, Zeller told us how she laughed every time she used it to open her large garage in a subdivision of Spokane. One of the many places she lived as a child was in a garage and this essay blends clips from her HOA’s bylaws with details of her childhood as well as things she learned about class in the process of becoming an educator. She also writes about the complex feelings around making a more permanent home, first in the city and then in the suburbs.

This summary is reductive because I can’t adequately convey in a few words how beautifully all these threads are woven together to form a larger narrative about class and socioeconomic mobility that is richer than anything I’ve read on the subject in a long time (maybe since Dorothy Allison). I think it’s richer because Zeller chooses not to conform to tropes (in her life or her writing). Lines like “Suburbs were those places…where Santa always brought gifts, and where people believed it was Santa” carefully capture the differences between her experience growing up and the life she’s making with her family. When Zeller writes, “could a person sustain a working-class sensibility of the world and—more importantly—instill it not as theory but as practice in her children if they lived in a social bubble” I saw some of the same questions I’ve asked about my own parenting in a city where it’s normal to drop more than a thousand dollars on the newest phone (for kids even) just because it’s new.

“I want my children to inherit more than whatever impermanence exists in money. I want them to scavenge their own minds and the world around them and waste nothing except time, wandering about in their own hunger to be animals, to find and to wonder and to remember what shapes them.” – Maya Jewell Zeller, “Scavenger Panorama” in Raised by Ferns

This is the essay I read aloud to my husband to start a conversation about the differences between our backgrounds (mine being the more privileged) and to get ready to read him some of the essays I’ve been working on about social class as I think about our trajectory in the wake of me leaving my high-paying tech job to try and make a life I actually enjoy. Zeller’s essays are better, though, more embodied and layered. They give me something to aspire to.

“Ruin Porn”

“We never called it foraging. Those who eat, by necessity, what’s wild and/or found—collage eating—just call it food.” – Maya Jewell Zeller, “Sestina for Foragers” in Raised by Ferns

Zeller actively calls out ruin porn in an essay by that title and echoes similar ideas more subtly throughout the book. She doesn’t want to be your poor kid who redeemed herself. She doesn’t want you to look at her childhood as a tragedy of circumstance. If “[t]houghtful, textured portrayals—of a range of differences, large and small, across lives” is the antidote to ruin porn, to the fetishization of poverty (or any other experience), then Raised by Ferns is a helluva dose (and beautifully written, too).

I don’t actually know Zeller, but we both travel in the small circle of Pacific Northwest writers. She’s close friends with a poet I adored in grad school (and after but she moved) and it was at Zeller’s event that I learned Nance van Winckel (who I did not read but whose work I love) had died earlier in the summer. I felt further kinship with Zeller as she explored what it means to be stable, the creative wonders of scavenging, and what it means to have time to think after having children, and I look forward to reading this book again as I absorb the layers of her thinking.

Before boxing up the albums, I leafed through the pages of my parents’ lives before I was born to see what I might like to photograph or scan in case this was my last chance. I saw two kids, they were in their twenties but that seems so young to me now, posed with their respective VWs and with their parents. I saw my dad playing guitar while my mom sat adoringly at his feet. I sent my cousin a picture of her mother and she said, “I don’t know that lady, and it’s before she knew me. I have strong feelings of ‘that’s not my mom.'” But I knew these were my parents. What I didn’t know was how to reconcile the stories I’d grown up with and my own childhood memories against these pictures. With Raised by Ferns at hand, I have a guide to writing into the richness of that gap, and I’m grateful.

If you also want to read beyond poverty porn and stretch your own thinking, pick up a copy of Raised by Ferns from Bookshop.org. It helps keep indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.