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A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Help! I Read All My Christmas Books (And They Were Awesome)

January 20, 2024 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Every year I save a list of the books I most want and then give that list to my husband as my Christmas wish list. I try to pick the things that are going to be sure wins and he’s kind enough to buy me hardbacks of books I’d otherwise wait years to read (no, it doesn’t take years for a hardback to come out in paperback, but once a book is no longer top of mind it might take me years to get back to it). This year was a rousing success, which is fantastic! I’ve had weeks of reading a wide variety of the best books. It was so successful, I’m now out of new books. But at least I have a huge batch of new recommendations to share with you. And the list is diverse enough that there’s something for everyone here.

Liliana’s Invincible Summer

liliana's invincible summer by cristina rivera garzaWho wouldn’t want to counterbalance the sweetness of the Christmas season with a book about femicide in Mexico? Okay, so I get that isn’t a selling point for most people, but if you’re reading Bolaño, you’re probably reading about it anyway and Cristina Rivera Garza’s book is so tender and personal, I’d recommend this 1000 times more than 2666 (which I did not finish because 400 pages in I decided I’ve had enough literary vaginal and anal rape for a lifetime). While Liliana’s Invincible Summer is sometimes hard to read, it’s hard to read for the right reasons, because Liliana is so lovingly portrayed as a whole person whose victimhood is one thing that happened to her, not her entire purpose. Which makes sense because Liliana was Cristina’s sister and Rivera Garza is sharing with us the love of a sister’s gaze.

I’d previously read Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest and she was admiringly quoted at E.J. Koh’s book launch party for The Liberators with a perspective on trauma that deepened my thinking, so this book shot to the top of my list.

Liliana’s Invincible Summer is not at all what I expected. And I loved it. I hadn’t read the reviews too deeply because I wanted to encounter the book on my own, so I did not realize that Liliana had been murdered by someone who knew her, a type of femicide that’s so common that it too rarely makes the news. But what really floored me and made me fall in love with the book was the beginning where Rivera Garza is on a Kafkaesque trek through Mexico’s bureaucracy to even find the files related to her sister’s murder. It’s funny and it’s bleak, but most of all it’s exceedingly well rendered and sets up the rest of the book very well. Reading this book I got a sense of Liliana and also of the times she was growing up in. I learned more about intimate partner violence and I felt outrage. And I knew all the time that I was in the hands of a masterful storyteller.

It sounds like this book is heavy, and it is, but before you dismiss it consider all the heaviness we read about every day without thinking about the life that is present too. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is a book full of life.

Take What You Need

take what you need by idra noveyI’ve adored everything I’ve ever read that was written or translated by Idra Novey and we had some nice interactions on Twitter (when that was a thing) so I was excited to continue our “relationship” with Take What You Need, her latest book. The fact that she was dealing with mother/daughter relationships and the ways that our rural and urban selves have become so separated was a bonus.

The premise of Take What You Need is fresh: Leah was Jean’s stepdaughter for a time and once Jean dies, she hears from a man who was living with Jean about an inheritance that Jean’s left for Leah. As interesting as Leah’s relationship with Jean is (something we explore in alternating chapters as Leah travels to Jean’s after Jean’s death, while we see Jean in life), it was Jean I was most fascinated by. Perhaps because Leah felt more close to the author, she isn’t as fully explored. Jean, on the other hand, is a force that we get to know well in her contradictions and humanity as she watches the increasing poverty and isolation around her. It doesn’t hurt that Jean was a huge Louise Bourgeois fan (a sculptor I love with all my heart) or that my own first artistic forays were in sculpting metal.

I chose this as my first book to read in 2024 because I thought it would be healing. It was, and it was also cathartic. I don’t think it will spoil the ending to say that I wept at the care that can be taken with someone else’s work. Take the time to read this book and your brain will thank you.

Lone Women

lone women by victor lavalleWhat better way to follow up a book about a woman discovering her inner sculptor in a slowly rotting neighborhood than with a book about a Black woman trying to make her way on the Montana frontier with a terrible secret (horror-style)? I’m a huge fan of Victor LaValle, big enough to get me to read a western, and this book did not disappoint.

The ways Adelaide and the other settlers in the desolate landscape interacted with each other were carefully drawn, natural, and built a wonderful (and appropriate) sense of dread. I learned something new about the history of this vast nation and I was reminded, when reading this, of a visit we took to Bannack, Montana back when my husband and I were touring the west photographing ghost towns. I was also reminded that I cannot wait for the next season of The Changeling on AppleTV, feeling somewhat robbed about where the last season stopped and also hopeful that the next season will live up to my expectations. Narrated by Victor LaValle, the show made me realize how strong his authorial asides are in his books, the ways they shape the narrative with the power of his voice. This one is a classic:

“It would be nice to imagine Adelaide storming out of the store, climbing onto Obadiah, and galloping out of town, catching up with Bertie and Fiona and never looking back. But the human animal is a social animal; a lifetime of being treated like an outsider may make a person yearn to finally be let in.” – Victor LaValle, Lone Women

So wait on watching The Changeling if you haven’t already started it and read Lone Women in the interim. As with all LaValle books I’ve read, this one is a stark and important reminder that the monster is in all of us, a monster Jean tries to fight in Take What You Need and a monster Ariadne is slow to recognize when she meets him in Crete…

Ariadne

ariadne by jennifer saintIf the themes so far are in looking at people as people and trying to understand them across our differences, then Ariadne by Jennifer Saint is no exception. Technically this was a gift from my eight-year-old son (who loves Greek myths with his whole heart) but Imma guess he had a little help here from his dad. I’d read Elektra earlier in the year and was entranced by the deep exploration of this familiar material from a female viewpoint. I was less familiar with Ariadne’s story but that didn’t make me love this book any less. I got to see how little I knew about the Minotaur and then to catch glimpses of Daedalus and Icarus. Mostly, though, I really enjoyed learning more about Ariadne herself and her relationship with Dionysus. As this is my second of Saint’s books, I’m also realizing that what I like exploring is the archetypes we’ve been given and how they fit and don’t fit me and our modern world.

Ariadne is a very compelling book and I’m looking forward to reading Atalanta next.

Chilean Poet

chilean poet by alejandro zambraI don’t know how I got from Ariadne to Chilean Poet, but a non sequitur was the perfect leap into this book. I’ve read Alejandro Zambra’s work before and was excited to inhabit his worldview and to visit Chile again, a country I hold deep in my heart from the year I lived there as a kid.

Chilean Poet starts in 1991, a few important years after we left, but the world was still familiar in the best of ways. The world in this book is also universal in some wonderfully human ways. It starts with first love and some furtive fumblings between young lovers on a couch. Zambra so fully inhabits those uniquely teenage moments that I started taking notes for my own book (but in a “hurry and get back because the writing is really good” kind of way). Alas, young love rarely lasts and Carla and Gonzalo are separated.

Until they aren’t. In a crazy second coming, they find each other again and Gonzalo becomes a stepdad to Vicente (I’m not spoiling much here, this happens very early in the book). What Zambra masterfully does here is jump from one life stage to another without any regard for formality or time we might otherwise experience passing. It’s a little jarring but being put directly in the stages of life where the story action is makes the book read fast, despite a strong tendency for authorial asides (more on that in a second). And he completes these jumps more than once, all equally well.

As I mentioned, Zambra takes us on these windy and lovely detours through linguistics that are entertaining and educational and made me love the book all the more. I don’t actually know whether to credit Zambra or the translator, Megan McDowell, here, but I learned more about Spanish, about English, and about how language shapes my worldview just by following the tangents. About authorial asides (and tangents): one of the things I’ve criticized Bolaño for before (and Hemingway and anyone else who thinks they are due my attention because I showed up to read their book) is using voice as a means to captivate an audience. But voice only. Now you’ve read me praise LaValle’s voice above and I’m into Zambra’s and I’ll sing the praises of Jonathan Lethem here soon, so it isn’t voice alone that irks me, it’s when I don’t feel the voice is earned. As I’m getting older I’m realizing this is my reaction to a patriarchal experience I sometimes have where people look at me—not unattractive, still youngish woman—and think “AUDIENCE.” I say people but it mostly happens with men (except this one older woman in Dublin outside a WC, but I think she was a witch). My lack of defense to this type of attack has gotten me in trouble before (just ask my husband about the time I got our whole family locked in an otherwise empty bookstore in Bellingham for an hour because I didn’t know how to say “excuse me, we have to leave” while one of these men droned on), but I’m learning. So when I say that an authorial aside is worth it or that someone’s voice is powerful and strong (in a good way), I mean it.

Well that was long. Now I’ve held you captive with my voice, sorry, turnabout is fair play? One last thing about this book I loved was that it’s full of poets. Not just people who write poetry (though lots of those) but also people who care about language and experience and taking a few minutes to see clearly the world around them. Which made reading this book feel like hanging out with the best of friends.

Fevered Star

Speaking of women ruling the world (even if it’s a fantasy world), I fell so hard for Black Sun (the first book in this series) that I gave it as a Christmas gift to at least one person who reads this blog. It felt great after reading Chilean Poet to dig back into Latin America in a more fantastic way. Fevered Star is just as strong as Black Sun, a book that pulled no punches as the worlds in it collided. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed all three of the main characters (Serapio, Xiala, and Nara) in their own ways and it was exciting to follow their further adventures in this book. I did not know what was coming and I’d been worried that this second book would not live up to the first. My worries were completely unfounded. Now I just have to worry about how long it will be until the next one comes out. That’s all I’m going to say because I don’t want to spoil either of these gorgeous books for you, dear reader, you know who you are.

Brooklyn Crime Novel

brooklyn crime novel by jonathan lethemI love Jonathan Lethem’s work so hard, especially his essays, and my first introduction to his work was Motherless Brooklyn, so I was excited to return to that place which is so clearly dear to his heart with Brooklyn Crime Novel. What I didn’t realize is how close this book would bring me to my own work as Lethem experiments with some things I’m working my way through, too: unnamed characters navigating a world that’s drawn heavily from the author’s childhood. It’s something I’ve been shy about at times as I’m writing my first draft and it’s been really good for me to see what does and does not engage an audience (at least the audience of me). For sheer reading pleasure, I think I’d choose Fortress of Solitude over this book, but Lethem’s voice remains strong, strong enough to carry what could be a very challenging novel if he wasn’t so engaging.

I love that Lethem’s embraced writing about place so specifically. I had been doing something similar with my book and it started to feel like I was writing introduction after introduction full of information that felt essential but also maybe too much and I didn’t know how to part with any of it. I don’t think I’ll ultimately make the same creative choices he has (I don’t have the voice to carry it or the career clout to get it past an editor), but I’m glad to read something that feels different (in a good way). I also think I’ll ground my characters with more details earlier than he has because I struggle between twenty minute bouts of reading to hold on to who is who. Was it Toni Morrison who said you write the books you need to read? In this case I’ll also be writing the book I can read at this stage of my distracted life.

I’m actually still reading this book at this writing, as the pattern of petty and not-so-petty crimes is a little too familiar at the moment and I can’t sit with the image of my kid getting a baseball mitt stolen, let alone stuffing his pockets with mugging money, so I can only read the book in spurts for that reason as well. Lethem the human turned out okay, though, and so will my son of a painter, I’m sure. Fingers crossed for life’s lessons not being too harsh along the way.

Don’t worry about me and my empty bookshelves yet. Not only do I have an extensive pile of things I was going to read someday (really, I will finish the complete poetry of Gabriela Mistral before I die, maybe?), but my birthday is this next week. I hope your year is full of great books and great friends! If you have any recommendations, please share them with me in the comments.

Filed Under: Books, Latin America

Ripe, Song of Solomon, and the Worlds We Build

December 16, 2023 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

On Thursday I asked our pizza delivery man his name. While we’ve had multiple delivery people and don’t order pizza that often, this particular fellow has been delivering goodness to our house two to five times a year for over two decades. We had a name for him (he looks like Penn Teller, so we’ve called him—always with love but never to his face—Penn) and are polite, but it was finally starting to bother me that I didn’t know his name. What on earth does this have to do with books, you wonder, and were there any leftovers (yes, but I can’t share them as they’ll be gone by this afternoon). I’ve been thinking a lot about community since my son was born (and especially since the beginning of the pandemic) and two books that I read recently really helped me deepen those thoughts: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter. Plus they’re both fantastic books, so let’s get into the book part of our chat…

The Worlds that Divide Us in Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon by Toni MorrisonLet’s be real, I was having a really hard time with this book for the first hundred pages or so. I was exhausted at night and only reading a few pages at a time, morning readings were slightly longer but always interrupted. I was not able to enter the very rich world of Milkman’s citified Michigan and I will definitely have to return to the beginning someday when I have the luxury of hours (and maybe a hot bath). One sentence, though, made me realize how deeply layered the whole book was and what I’d been missing by being a poor reader.

“I really do thank you,” Milkman opened the door. “What do I owe you? For the Coke and all?”

The man was smiling, but his face changed now. “My name’s Garnett, Fred Garnett. I ain’t got much, but I can afford a Coke and a lift now and then.” – Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

I ain’t got much, but I can afford a Coke and a lift now and then. Said by a stranger who was helping Milkman out when he found himself in a jam, having left the city to trace his roots in search of (literal) treasure. Wearing a suit and city shoes he’d tromped through a stream and found himself muddied, torn, and in need of a lift. Garnett knows from the way Milkman carries himself and the way that he’s been talking that he holds himself above all the people there. But it’s the final insult of not being considered big enough to be generous himself that makes Garnett speak out in defense of his own dignity. Milkman can’t really hear Garnett in that moment but I sure did. That one sentence defined the world Milkman had entered but couldn’t see. A community rich with people who looked out for one another, friend or stranger. The kind of care Milkman needed so much in his life but could never see to let in.

I read this sentence the morning after I’d asked Craig his name and it hit me so acutely that this was part of the world I’ve been aching for all this time. A world where we see each other as humans who all want similar things: love and a life that isn’t harder than it needs to be for us and the people we care about. It’s the common humanity that we miss when we don’t make eye contact with people on the street, when we argue about red or blue without seeing who’s really winning when we fight each other, when we talk about wars without considering the civilians whose lives are destroyed in the process. It’s the common humanity I don’t contribute to when I don’t mention that I’m struggling while my mom’s been in the hospital these past weeks. She’s doing better now and I did actually reach out to a couple of people, which is progress to me, but we don’t have to be alone with all this stuff because we’re surrounded by other people who maybe would help us out for free if we gave them the chance—people we could help, too, by seeing their humanity.

Morrison goes deeper into this same divide later when Milkman reaches Virginia. I won’t quote the full passage here because the entire uncomfortable interaction spans several pages, but Milkman enters Solomon’s store and is trying to get information about where he’s going from Solomon and the men hanging out there. His car has broken down out front and he needs help either fixing it or buying another. He needs a woman and a place to stay. And while everyone’s really polite about it, “Milkman sensed that he’d struck a wrong note” and a coolness grows between Milkman and the men. Morrison lets us sit with that misunderstanding for a bit, feeling the exquisite discomfort that’s exacerbated by not understanding the why.

Milkman knew he had said something else wrong, although he didn’t know what. He only knew that they behaved as if they had been insulted.

In fact they had been. They looked with hatred at the city Negro who could buy a car as if it were a bottle of whiskey because the one he had was broken. And what’s more, who had said so in front of them. He hadn’t bothered to say his name, nor ask theirs, had called them “them,” and would certainly despise their days… – Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

The paragraph goes on to beautifully describe the lives of these men and the insult they took from Milkman’s ways, but it’s that crux of “He hadn’t bothered to say his name, nor ask theirs” that showed how little they mattered in his day except to fill his own needs. I grew up in the north but with Southern parents and while I sometimes felt a wash of teenaged embarrassment when my dad chatted up every sales clerk we ever encountered, it’s something I’m learning to appreciate. We talk sometimes now about dynamics of power and how no one owes you their story, but what we forgot along the way is the small (consensual) intimacies that can enrich all our days and make the world feel a lot smaller in the best of ways.

Read this book, but do it when you have time to really sit with it. If one sentence can open up my whole worldview, imagine what it can do for you. And Icess, if you’re reading this, know that I thought of you in the end when the body count was high 🙂

The Decay of a Tech-driven Society in Ripe

Ripe by Sara Rose EtterWhat scares me most these days is those who seem to have forgotten the similar things in whose quest we were once bound. Who have traveled so far toward some imagined future that they’ve left all the best things behind. Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter encapsulates all of this in such a visceral way that I’ve kept the book beside me in the month since I read it as I try to sort out my own complicity in the system and responsibility for changing it.

Cassie works at a Silicon Valley startup and is new enough to that world to see it for the ways it goes against the world she came from, but she’s also been there long enough to be perpetuating it. She’s at work at all hours in response to a capricious and abusive boss but she’s also passing along that culture as she seeks to hire someone in Pakistan, a worker so eager to be part of the system that he’s willing to give up his family to move across the country because of a misunderstanding Cassie had with her boss. And Cassie is the main inspiration for a series of insidious plans to take down their rival company. The way Etter places her at this exact moment in time increases the intensity of the story and drives the action hard. Because we feel badly for Cassie and also because we’re appalled by her, the story feels richer than it would have with a more passive protagonist.

The city around Cassie is also exceedingly well rendered. From the man living below her window to increasingly unaffordable rents, to the luxuries Cassie and her friends allow themselves to salve their feelings about the lives they are living, it was all too familiar and also architected to make the reader feel uncomfortable enough about these tech Meccas we’re making to actually think about the worlds we’re building for a moment. Enough that when my husband mentioned Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run” when catching the sunrise glinting off the Seattle skyline the other morning I shuddered at thinking of what we’re worshipping in our new Jerusalem. It isn’t our shared humanity, but it isn’t too late, I hope, to find that again.

I strongly recommend you read Ripe as well. It’s the most insightful book I’ve read about where our cities (and the tech workers in them) are now, and it’s extraordinarily well crafted at the sentence level, too.

Begin Again by Oliver JeffersWell I’m off to re-watch Working Girl (did that to myself) and spend the next couple of weeks looking deeply into the eyes of the people I love most (and anyone else who will make eye contact). If you need a slightly more reassuring nudge towards pulling back to make the kind of world you want to live in, Begin Again by Oliver Jeffers brought me a lot of comfort in a hellish week at work. It’s a book for kids and anyone who wants to play a part, no matter how small, in making this planet a better place to be. My pledge to myself over the holiday break is to learn the name of at least one counter person at our new bakery, no matter how many pastries I have to eat to get up the courage to do that. If you have a similar pledge, leave it in the comments (along with your name) and I will happily be your accountability partner. I wish you, your loved ones, and your perfect strangers peace and much love for now, for always.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada

Cora’s Kitchen, The Equivalents, Lessons in Chemistry and Carving Out a Life Less Ordinary

August 12, 2023 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

If I knew the journey I’d be on once I opened the copy of Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry that my mom sent to me, I would have started reading it sooner. What I didn’t foresee is how Elizabeth Zott’s forceful way of being herself would lead me to the creative community of Maggie Doherty’s The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, which evolved naturally into reading Kimberly Garrett Brown’s Cora’s Kitchen, a book by someone I love. I didn’t know how much I’d learn about the feminist struggle or the reminders I’d find about what it takes to create and protect a creative life. It’s been an excellent journey and I’d love to share with you the highlights.

Elizabeth Zott and the Force of Will

lessons in chemistry - bonnie garmusThe hero of Lessons in Chemistry, Elizabeth Zott, is brilliant, accomplished, and under-recognized chemist in early 1960s America. While she has a deep understanding of chemistry, she is seemingly blind to a society that is trying to limit her from all angles—even though she brutally experiences those limitations over and over. I loved her hardheadedness (maybe my mom was trying to tell me something?) and the book was an all-too-familiar reminder of how many of the feminist (pronounced “women are people too, equally”) struggles of then still occur now. The story is engaging but this was not my favorite of these three books, I think in a lot of ways because while Zott stumbled her way to a better life by speaking to women’s intellect, marrying chemistry and cooking, and there were some happy triumphs, Garmus couldn’t rewrite the realities of society as a whole—sexist realities I’m still impatient to see resolved.

Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, Tillie Olsen and the Creative Life

the equivalents - maggie dohertyThe Equivalents was the perfect followup to Lessons in Chemistry because it’s a nonfictional account of women’s experiences during the same era. For example, I learned by reading this book that (the fictional) Zott filled much the same role as Betty Friedan when she published The Feminine Mystique, prompting women to see that the oppression they felt was part of a larger pattern. But I also read this book for the creative community—something that grew here from something called the Radcliffe Institute, an entity that was created for extraordinary women to take time away from their household duties and get back to the intellectual and artistic pursuits they may have abandoned. The spine of this narrative is the (pre-existing) friendship between Sexton and Kumin, two poets, mothers, and wives and how they navigated their complicated friendship while building a sustaining creative community with each other and others at Radcliffe.

Of particular interest to me about this book was the role of Tillie Olsen, a working class writer who tested the limits of what the Radcliffe Institute could do. Because she was a main source of income for her family (which had no generational wealth) and lived on another coast, she wasn’t really what the Institute was set up to support. But her friends helped her find her way in and she advocated for writers like her from the inside. I’m thinking a lot right now about the ways class can be a barrier to a creative career and it was helpful to me to see the ways Olsen challenged that (and the ways she couldn’t). Along with reinvigorating her own career (that had fallen prey to the need to feed herself and her family), she was especially interested in championing the work of women of color, another group that was not necessarily at the top of mind for the Institute. I also loved reading about how Olsen’s own marriage was more equal, with two creatives trying to support each other while getting by (an experience that mirrors my own).

There was something about the way the women’s struggles were positioned in The Equivalents that was easier for me to exist with. I think part of this is that I could see particular progress in each of their real lives and think about how that might be applied to now. Halfway through this book I remembered that I’d once dreamed of setting up a creative colony or residency of sorts and it’s all I can think of since. I don’t have the funds but I have the passion and I know what even a week away at a residency like Centrum (deadline for application on Tuesday!) can do for a creative person, particularly one with family and work responsibilities.

Cora James and the Complexities of Patronage

coras kitchen - kimberly garrett brownBecause women of color were really the ones with the least access to something like the Radcliffe Institute, I reached for Cora’s Kitchen next. I own this book because I went to school with the author and because we’ve kept up a friendship (although often too distant) ever since. I remember Kim describing the general idea of this book to me at a bar in D.C. during AWP in 2011 as I wept over my grandmother’s death that morning and Kim continued to pour me amazing wine. Although I saw her again at AWP in Seattle this year, I’ve had her book on my shelf for much longer than that and it was a joy to finally have the right occasion to open it.

Cora James is a Black mother and wife in Harlem in 1928. She works at a library and has an epistolary relationship with Langston Hughes, but she doesn’t really have time to fulfill her own creative dreams. Then she takes over her cousin’s job for a bit of time (because her cousin was beaten terribly by her husband) so her cousin won’t lose her job. What Cora finds during this time as a cook in a white household changes her life. The work is more menial but less constant and she is suddenly free to write for part of the day. The racial politics of the household are complicated and Cora makes an unexpected friend. Eventually Cora even finds a patron, someone who has the power to lift the burdens of running a family and a household (a burden her musician husband is not interested in sharing). The Awakening plays an important role in this book as Cora is also reflecting on literary models of women freeing themselves.

I won’t tell you more about what happens in the book because it’s beautifully complex and I’d spoil it by trying to reduce it. What I will say is there are moments I was afraid some of Cora’s relationships would be a crutch or that she’d fall into clichés, but Brown deftly navigates all of this, giving Cora the power and intelligence to create a life less ordinary for herself, despite the limitations of racism, sexism, and class.

Three Good Books, One Big Message

I guess I’m trying to work something out for myself. While I’m able to sign my own mortgage or get a credit card that’s not in my husband’s name, I still encounter sexism every day. While I have a very supportive partner with whom I can balance a family and the idea of creative lives for both of us, there’s never enough time or money to really dig into what we could be. While I’ve been grateful for the conversations about race that were pushed to the forefront during the pandemic, I’m devastated about how far we haven’t come there either. Wheel of progress long, etc. I am impatient for better. For women, for creatives, for people of color, and most of all for those of us who fall into more than one of those categories. I’m grateful to Brown, Doherty, and Garmus for reminding me I am not alone in my impatience and that I need to find ways to do more for myself and for others, when I can.

What are you doing to sustain a creative life? How do you keep your friends close? How do you pay for it? How are you helping others? Please inspire me in the comments.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada

Jami Nakamura Lin Re-imagines Memoir in The Night Parade

July 15, 2023 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Confession time. I am so indoctrinated into the Western way of storytelling with its Aristotelian plot arc that I forget I’m always looking for the next conflict and how that will get resolved. So when a book comes up that makes me fundamentally rethink that form AND it’s superbly written… well, let’s just say that reading The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir by Jami Nakamura Lin was a deeply pleasurable education. To say that the memoir envelops stories about bipolar disorder, childbearing, and losing a parent to cancer feels reductive, because the book is so much more expansive than any other memoir I’ve read on any of these subjects. It’s a beautiful book that’s been upending my thinking ever since I first opened it last weekend.

Subverting the Expectations of Form

“I choose kishōtenketsu, the Japanese version of the four-part narrative structure that flows from Chinese poetry. I need something. I have too much story and not enough shape. I overflow my banks.” – Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade

Throwing a literary form on a writing project can be a good way for a writer to organize themself and to kick-start their thinking. To see what is and is not working. It can also turn into a gimmick where they’re shaping the work to fit the form rather than finding the right form for the work. Instead, Lin wields form in The Night Parade as a tool to both unlock the narrative and to rethink assumptions.

I can’t speak to the kishōtenketsu form Lin uses (which I have no experience with), but I can tell you that the way she applies this structure feels natural and compelling. Which is to say the form definitely supports the work rather than the other way around. Lin explains each of the four parts as we encounter them in the book (in a similar gentle way to the quote above) which gives entry to those of us with little experience with Japanese literature. What worked best about this for me (among many things) was that she immediately subverted my expectations—I didn’t realize the weight that expecting the next conflict (as in the Aristotelian model) carries. Because I knew from the outset that this book is different, I was free to float along on the journey Lin is taking us on.

I wrote to a friend this weekend that, for a reality TV aficionado, The Night Parade is to the Great British Bake-off what most books are to Making the Cut. That itself is reductive, but it starts to hint at the gentle layers one can enjoy in a story when unnecessary drama is stripped away.

When the Art of Storytelling is the Story

“Each time you tell a story, you can manage the tale to fit your needs. You can gauge the audience’s reactions, alter the form or the tense or the point of view. With a little maneuvering, a little emphasis here and a little de-emphasis there, you can make an ending seem happier.” – Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade

Lin is not only a master storyteller, the fact that she’s telling a story also becomes an important part of the writing. Throughout the book she inserts small breaks with the fourth wall, pulling back from the narrative enough to remind us that she is structuring this story and how. In lesser hands this could feel jarring. In The Night Parade it feels honest, like Lin is acknowledging how artificial our constructs are and bringing us in on the making so that we can see the nuances in the choices she’s making.

For a writer, this book is pure heaven because those moments are like the best conversations you’ve ever had with a really great editor. If you are a reader who doesn’t write, I think you will also enjoy these opportunities to learn more about the art of storytelling.

“She: a distancing. She: a way to get close. I’ve tried to tell this story so many times, but when I use I—when the girl is me—the story sputters in my mouth. Becomes too big or to small or too askew. It is wrong. I promise I am not telling this story like this to keep you away. I want to invite you in, the only way I know how.” – Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade

The Mythologies We Inhabit

Lin bases each chapter of The Night Parade around a character from Japanese, Okinawan, or Taiwanese (the three strands of her geneology) folklore and then gently weaves the story around these tropes, forming juxtapositions it could take many re-readings to fully unpack.

“You are drawn to these myths because they change. Unlike static texts, folklore, legends, and oral histories are living tales that transmogrify with each subsequent retelling. We understand and understand again based on contemporary lenses and frameworks.” – Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade

I loved that these mythologies existed fully enough in each section to function as their own stories. I imagine this is because Lin was learning them as she was writing and researching this book, but it also helped this reader more fully see the parallels between the mythologies and the family stories. I loved learning more about each of these characters and there were times I felt glimmers of understanding bits of what I had missed in reading about characters like these in the works of Sayaka Murata and Isabel Yap.

Humility is Underrated

Maybe it’s the gentleness of the form, the way that it made conflict feel secondary to experience, but The Night Parade felt like a deeply humble book. Don’t get me wrong, it takes a certain amount of ego for any writer to sit down and decide that their work belongs on the page, let alone that their life story is a story worthy of sharing. But “ego” doesn’t have to be pejorative. While this is Lin’s story and she fully embodies the narrative with her experiences an her analysis, she has also very carefully worked beyond herself to tell a larger story.

For example, Lin recounts the night of a teenage suicide attempt that got her hospitalized (one of the few times she goes deep into the more dramatic side of being bipolar) but she also includes nods to what the night may have done to her younger sisters. Rather than a blood-on-the-page recounting of individual trauma, Lin’s stories always exist in context—in the context of the reader, the context of her family, and the context of a world that is, in general, larger than each of us individuals.

I want to spend thousands of words describing the threads of this book to you—the strands of miscarriage, pregnancy, parenthood, childhood, a dying parent, exploring your roots in a culture that wants us all to blend—but I wouldn’t do as good of a job as Lin does and if you thought I was, you’d be robbed of the true beauty of reading this book for yourself. Trust me. When I tried to explain to my husband how much I loved this book I just cried all over our couch.

The Night Parade isn’t released until October, but you can pre-order it now. Meanwhile, I’ll be looking around for other things Lin has written, because I want more of her voice in my life.

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada

Girl, Interrupted or Mother, Interruptible? Reading My Body and The Poetics of Wrongness

May 20, 2023 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In the days leading up to Mother’s Day I treated myself to extra reading time, time I spent with two books that helped me think more deeply about the female experience: My Body by Emily Ratajkowski and The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker. While I picked them up in an effort to shorten my (usually less beloved) non-fiction to-read pile, reading these two books in sequence enriched my experience of both and my experience of Mother’s Day, my manuscript, and the ways I want to move in the world going forward.

My Body by Emily Ratajkowski

Before I get into this excellent book, I want to share with you why the title makes me giggle happily. When my son was in preschool, he came home with the words “my body” to express his personhood. If he didn’t want to be touched or touched in a certain way, “my body” implied his ownership of himself. If he wanted to show off, he could say “my body” and smile and I’d smile right back at this most beautiful creature. My husband and I have carried the phrase forward as a loving goof about that second use case but it also serves as a reminder to us that he does own that little body. And we own ours, even if we never had the same language to express it. We’re in awe of that kid and in awe of this age of talking more clearly about our bodies in the world.

Ratajkowski thoughtfully expresses the same duality of self containment and observed self in the essays in My Body. A model and actor who spent significant parts of her early career as an Instagram influencer, Ratajkowski is very aware of beauty—what it means to be beautiful as well as what it means to use that beauty as currency. The essays explore everything from parental expectations to sexual assault to living an Instagrammable life on someone else’s dime.

What I liked most about this book, though, is how layered and nuanced Ratajkowski’s writing is. She’s beautiful and aware of (and honest about) the best and worst of that. She’s empowered in her body and also (unfortunately) experiences the limits of that power in a patriarchal society. She’s doing her best to be strong in the world and also one (at times very young) girl with no one looking out for her.

I’m trying to pick a favorite essay, but I can’t. I just know that I’ll be returning to this book again and again as I write about girls who are trying to find their ways in the world even when society feels like it’s working against them.

The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker

the poetics of wrongness-rachel zuckerThe Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker was referenced over and over at AWP this year, so I ordered it and added to the to-read pile in the middle of my office floor. But something called to me about this book so I lifted it from that messy stack of somedays just after finishing My Body. The title essay is incredibly good—another instance of layered, nuanced thought that is worth reading and reading and reading. But what I loved most about this book was reading”Why She Could Not Write a Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood,” especially since I read it in the wee hours of Mother’s Day as I was hoping my son would not wake up quite yet.

“It was thirteen days before she was supposed to deliver a lecture called ‘The Poetics of Motherhood’ at the Portland Literary Arts Center, and she had not written it. She had written parts of it in her head and she had written notes on small pieces of paper that she had misplaced somewhere in the apartment. She was even teaching a class in which she had delivered four mini-lectures in the first four weeks of the semester in preparation to write this lecture, but she had not written the lecture.” – The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker

The essay goes on to detail the millions of things Zucker is doing instead of writing the intended lecture, all while trying to write the lecture. She invites a former student over to help her write the lecture and instead they write a list of all the things she needs to do before writing the lecture. She realizes she needs to triage but her son needs her because he’s trying to do too much so she takes the time to teach him about triage and helps him get through part of his list. She consults writers she would like to lecture about and she tries to get away to think but a myriad of life experiences keep intervening. What never manages to prioritize in the triage is writing the lecture. Which is to say that reading this essay is like being a mother. Progress is being made all the time, but not always toward what you wanted to finish. Needs arise all the time, and you have to figure out how to keep everyone alive. Help is available but the pile is still too big. And everything is interruptible. ALL THE TIME.

looking up through chestnut leavesThis interrupted, all-over-the-place essay is of course very artfully structured to achieve this feeling, and there are nuggets of information in it about specific poets and their experiences as mothers. But most of all this piece is incredibly effective. At the end I felt seen and also wondered how mothers (or involved parents of any gender) manage to create anything at all for about two decades in the middle of their “most productive” years. I read whole sections of it to my husband that morning because he’s also an artist serving as a caregiver (and felt myself growing increasingly manic as the work piled up). The essay made me think about the choices we’re making and the choices that are being made for us. It made me remember that part of the reason I felt like I could write at all during my cherished Saturday morning writing time this weekend was because I had spent many hours during the week reading and lying in the grass staring up at the chestnut leaves expanding over my head.

I don’t have a point except that I want to thrust this essay into the hands of all the creative caregivers I know and say “you’re doing great. If you had time to write it all down you might realize just how much you really are accomplishing. Even if none of it is what you set out to do.”

Filed Under: Books, USA & Canada

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Polska, 1994

Polska 1994

Clear Out the Static in Your Attic

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Recent Posts

  • Small Things Like These, Getting to Yes, and Seeing “Now” Clearly
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What I’m Reading

Isla's bookshelf: currently-reading

Birds of America
Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
by Jonathan Lethem
The Souls of Black Folk
The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois
Bomb: The Author Interviews
Bomb: The Author Interviews
by BOMB Magazine
On Writing
On Writing
by Jorge Luis Borges

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