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Beginning a New Year as I Mean to Continue – with the Alchemy of the Word

January 5, 2019 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I wanted to write this review in December, but I was busy stealing moments to make writing from the inspiration I found in Alchemy of the Word.

I wanted to write this review over the Christmas holiday, but I was practicing balance.

I wanted to write this review on New Year’s and fill it with links to all the posts I’ve previously written about inspiration, but I had just found out that my grandmother died.

So here I am beginning the new year as I mean to end it, practicing balance, experiencing the fullness of life, and giving myself a little grace for the fact that I am trying my best. (If you need to give yourself a little grace, let Icess guide you).

Practice, Practice, Practice

I used the word “practice” very deliberately above, because I am not good at balance but it is a skill I’m trying to polish, just as writing is a skill that requires practice. The writers whose essays make up Alchemy of the Word are all very practiced writers and, as members of the faculty of Goddard College (my alma mater), are also tasked with helping new writers get into the habit (practice) of writing. The essays in this collection come from the speeches our teachers use to inspire us at residencies and to (lovingly) warn us about the writing life to come at commencements. They are about subjects as myriad as craft elements, literary activism, and failure. This last one is especially important (and frequent) because failure looms when you don’t practice. More so, failure plagues when you “fail” to see the success that is simply continuing to practice.

As I read this book, I found myself looking for essays I might have originally heard delivered aloud but ultimately found that didn’t matter. The know-how of practicing is something I’ve already absorbed. Instead each of the essays in Alchemy of the Word served as a much-needed reminder to practice.

Balance is Tricky, Balance is Necessary

As a working writer/mom/wife, the breadth of life in these essays reminded me that writing is part of my balance, not something I can add on after. Deborah Brevoort contextualized the anti-intellectualism that’s plaguing our politics (and chinking away at my soul), Elena Georgiou encouraged me to search for my own personhood and to fill myself, Keenan Norris reminded me that I actually love the humility that comes with writing, and Micheline Aharonian Marcom exhorted me (again) to “Do [my] work.”

But to do my work (well), first I must fill up again. And I must develop a plan to keep myself filled during all the things that are to come. Here’s the advice from Alchemy of the Word that I’ll be carrying close to my heart as I navigate finding my balance:

“As a writer, I think of my body as a well that is mostly filled through reading.” – Elena Georgiou

“Remember to be absent, Writer. Be in the habit of being absent more often.” – Kyle Bass

Life Happens. And Then You Write about It

The sympathy that might have jumped into your heart when you read “my grandmother died” is not really earned. I hadn’t spoken to my grandmother since 2012 when she called on my birthday to yell at me for not inviting her to my wedding. I didn’t invite her to my (tiny) wedding because I didn’t like her. I didn’t like her because she’d never taken the time to get to know me. Are there things to mourn in my history with my grandmother, yes, but they are probably not what you expected at the outset.

“Inherent in the creative process is a perpetual tension between love and loathing that gives art its life.” – Aimee Liu

I wish that my grandmother’s tension between love and loathing of the female line she created had tipped more toward love, but the tension is something that gives life to my own work. In Alchemy of the Word, I was reminded to write deeply:

“You have to go to the scariest places, the absence, where nothing has been said so there is no protection at all.” – Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

“It is our duty as artists to enter into those places that are kept most secret in ourselves, and bring them to light not so much that we may be healed, but so that others might.” – Paul Selig

Today is the first time I’m explicitly writing about my relationship with my
grandmother, so I don’t pretend my thoughts are profound. I do hope that at the very least I can offer someone the comfort of solidarity in the complexities that are family relationships.

For myself, I’m taking solace in the birthday call I received from my other grandmother (my Baba) in 2011—a call I took on the beach at Port Townsend— the very same beach I so often walked while at Goddard. It was the last time I talked with Baba and I was sad that day in knowing that was probably true. But I am filled with joy at the thought that Baba saw me and loved me enough for two grandmothers.

How I Plan to Move Forward

This year I will write. I will try new things and fail. I will try new things and succeed. I will practice. I will read and take time to be absent. I will be kind to myself. Most of all I will play, because these two quotes resonated with me more than any of the others in Alchemy of the Word and helped me find the joy and purpose in this writing life:

“Being a writer is to be a student without end, and it is to be at play without end. The two are tied, study and play. Both commit us to risk and remediation, that is to learning, always to learning.” – Keenan Norris

“The artists I know have the capacity for wonder and surprise coursing through their veins. And they are all riotously free—whether they have, the way my mentor had, summers off or not.” – Michael Klein

I’m off to play now—to read, to soak in a tub, to watch my son create Playmobil orchestras, to joke around with my husband and to think. All of this is practice. All of it is life. And I am lucky.

To freedom.

To reinvigorate your writing practice pick up a copy of Alchemy of the Word from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Stories from the Portuguese: Reading Mia Couto Against António Lobo Antunes

December 22, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

After reading more of Bolaño’s 2666 than I ever should have, I cleaned my bookshelves of all the to-read have-tos that I’ve held on to for far too long. And found myself without anything to read. Failure to read good books generally puts me in a state of existential crisis, so I decided to return to an old favorite—Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes. Even after leafing through a few chapters in random order, I could feel myself restored. And I wanted more, so I turned to my shelf of books to review and found Mia Couto, a writer from Mozambique who also writes in Portuguese. I’ve spent a few wonderful days now with Rain and Other Stories and want to share with you the experience of reading this man’s work with Lobo Antunes in the background.

Writing and War

I’ve read many books by Lobo Antunes, a physician who fought in the Angolan war. His language is as lyrical as his thought and the books I’ve enjoyed most shift almost imperceptibly back and forth between African memories and European presents. On this read, I found myself immersed in sentences like “Lisbon, even at this hour, is a city as devoid of mystery as a nudist beach” and “I’m traveling the gentle geography of your body, the river of your voice, the cool shade of your hands, the pigeon-breast down of your pubis, but me and Xana and you, the Saturday rain, we are the only ones who truly exist…” Swoon. With a translation it’s always hard to tell whether to credit the author or translator (here, Margaret Jull Costa) but I suspect both contributed heavily to the magic of the flow of this book.

In Lobo Antunes, Africa is half of one whole. It’s either the immediate present of a man immersed in a memory of war or the tortured background against which the luscious European present unfolds. For Couto, though, Africa is everything—the tortured past and the luscious present, the luscious past and the tortured present. Rain and Other Stories was written after Mozambique’s war, and Couto writes in the introduction, “After the war, I thought all that was left was ashes, hollow ruins… Today I know that’s not true. Where man remains, a seed, too, survives, a dream to inseminate time.” Forgiving the decidedly visual metaphor, this is very much a book for our time, a time when we need to see the future beyond the [INSERT HYBERBOLIC ADJECTIVE HERE] headlines. Couto finds magic in those after-war ashes (literally and figuratively) and so shall we.

The Richness of Africa

Most of the books I’ve loved about Africa have been the books of the colonizers… partly because those were the books I was exposed to and partly because they reinforced the ideas of Africa that I grew up with during the “Feed the World” generation. Couto, too, is white. Born in Mozambique to Portuguese immigrants, he could be writing colonial books as well. And maybe the magic and use of folk images that I’m responding too is appropriated, but Rain and Other Stories feels written with the honest respect of someone who loves a country and a culture. Because Couto is Africa born and he lived through the war there, his experience, too is authentic and I wish I could have read this book without thinking so hard about race—because it’s good. I should (and will) read other narratives of different life experiences in Mozambique, but for now let me tell you about this gifted storyteller.

In “The Waters of Time,” the first story in this collection, a child rows down the river with his grandfather. It’s a simple set-up that quickly opens into another world as the narrator describes the lake they would row to:

“This was the realm of forbidden creatures. All that showed itself there, after all, invented its existence… Everything around us bathed in cool breezes, shadows made of light itself, as if the morning were eternally drowned in dreams.” – Mia Couto, Waters of Time

This fantastical world where they go to watch white cloths dance in the distance contrasts sharply with the quotidian rituals home. Through his use of tense, Couto manages to make both realms feel habitual and yet his images are rich enough to make both alive. I won’t tell you how the story unfurls because the pleasure of experiencing it for the first time was simply too great. But I want to… Suffice it to say that the river and water are recurring themes in this book in a way that feels very of the place and also ancient and of all of us.

“Water and time are twin brothers, born of the same womb. I had just discovered in myself a river that would never die. It’s to that river I now return, guiding my son…” – Mia Couto, Waters of Time

Aphorisms Abound

Like Portuguese writer Paulo Coelho, Couto makes liberal use of aphorisms, but unlike Coelho’s aphorisms (which can seem canned and cheap), Couto’s sound deeply across time and experience:

Fear is a river one must cross wet.
The illusion of being right is born when everyone is wrong at the very same time.
Work is like a river: even when it’s reaching an end, what comes behind is more and more river.
Snakes are bilingual to show that every animal contains a second creature.
Love is the world divided by zero.
He who tastes unripe fruit soon wants to try its flower.
Beauties subtract from one another: we see the butterfly and forget the flower.

These aphorisms were rich enough that I wondered if Couto was borrowing from Mozambican folklore, but while that may be true (I know woefully little about Mozambique), the way he (and translator Eric M.B. Becker) work around language to bring it to life, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the aphorisms were original. A few favorite examples are:

swallowed up into never
a walking beer-sponge
nestled in the night’s womb
the dictionary of her footsteps

Honestly I’ve struggled while writing this review, because every time I open the book to find more examples of things I want to share with you, I get so sucked back into the writing that I simply want to read it all over again. That is to say that I’m so enjoying being lost in Couto’s craft that I don’t really want to deconstruct it. Stories I keep returning to are: “Blind Estrelinho”, “The Delivery”, “The Flag in the Sunset”, “Beyond the River Bend” and “High-Heel Shoes”. Each story captures in its own way a very different life, a different experience and yet Couto manages in every single one to seduce me with language and then upend my expectations. The surprise is so much a part of the enjoyment that I don’t want to spoil these stories for you. I want you to read them for yourself. Immediately. (That means you, Dad… I’ll send you a copy.)

Luscious Characters

There’s one more story in Rain and Other Stories I can’t not tell you about. This part does contain spoilers. “The Perfume” is the story of Gloria, a woman “accustomed to living low” whose husband comes home with a present and announces they’re going dancing. In the first paragraph, Couto fully unravels the accumulated staleness of their marriage which contrasts beautifully with Justino’s gift to make us as surprised as Gloria. We’re with her as she warily dresses in the given dress and eventually throws a bottle of perfume Justino gave her when they were courting but that she’s never had occasion to wear out the window where it breaks on the sidewalk.

The strangeness between the pair continues as they leave the house and travel to the dance where habitually jealous Justino encourages her to dance with other men and then leaves her. It’s a confusing and somewhat devastating story as we’re locked inside what Gloria must be feeling at this humiliation, this parting. Except Gloria is a richer character than that. She arrives home, alone, to find her husband certainly gone, and in the morning she wakes in her bed to the smell of that perfume wafting though the window. She steps outside and cuts herself on the bottle and this is how the story concludes:

“To this day, one can find the indelible tracks on the living-room floor from when Gloria shed the first drops of her bloody glee.” – Mia Couto, The Perfume

I have noticed that both of these authors are male and I’m trying to read more broadly than I have in the past. Thankfully someone (@DeepVellum) approached me on Twitter and recommended Maria Gabriela Llansol and Noemi Jaffe. I’ve read neither yet, but they’re on my Goodreads list. And I’ll continue to seek out Mozambican and Angolan authors with different sets of life experiences. If you have recommendations, please leave them in the comments.

To immerse yourself in some of the magic of these books, pick up a copy of Rain and Other Stories or Land at the End of the Worldfrom Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reading in the Aftermath of the Kavanaugh Confirmation

October 15, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Depression robs me of feeling and enjoyment. It can also be a strong wake-up call to get back in touch with the things I value quick quick. Listening to the Kavanaugh hearings and all the blather afterwards I felt all the emotions—from the hope that a woman’s voice would be heard against the establishment to the devastation of having my worst expectations confirmed. I tried in those first few days to engage with my family and to touch the thing that always brings me back to myself—books—instead I found myself changed. I don’t know yet if for the better or the worse, or even if this change is permanent, but it’s big enough to explore, here, with you.

Silencing the Cacophony of Mansplaining

The first thing I noticed about how my reading was changing was that I suddenly wanted to throw A Feast in the Garden by George (Gyorgy) Konrád against the wall. I’ve had this reaction before when reading Roberto Bolaño—I loathed his narrator’s didacticism and the way it put me directly in touch with the (male) narrator’s thoughts about the story while distancing me completely from the (female) protagonist’s actual experience. Yes, this could have been done for effect, blah blah blah, but as a woman in this society I’ve had my fill of men explicating something I could or have experienced. I actually loathe the phrase “mansplaining,” but even more so I loathe the male voices that seem to find their only personal fulfillment in explaining—especially when they’re explaining my own experience (or something I know more about than they do) to me. This is not all men, but it’s too many. And I think it’s part of my on-again, off-again beef with Hemingway. Something I did not realize until this week.

So for one moment I feared I was off male narrators forever. Thankfully, Konrád is a brilliant artist and I came to see the effect of what he was doing in this book (which I am still reading, slowly, as his writing demands and deserves). I do, however, feel a lot more comfortable chucking narrators who don’t earn their keep right out my damned window…

Do I sound angry? I am. And embracing my actual feelings instead of trying to make them palatable was something that led me to this next book…

Getting Intimate with Women’s Darkness with Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories

I felt a little dumb when Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories arrived and I realized it was not by Yōko Ogawa (whose dark short stories in Revenge I adored) but instead by Kōno Taeko, a completely different female Japanese author who is also not afraid of taking readers to dark places. But Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories was fantastic, so much so that I wish I could give proper credit to whomever recommended it to me.

What made this the exactly right book for me exactly right now is that listening to Dr. Ford’s honest, gentle, people pleasing ways in that hearing I honestly believed someone might hear her. But that too-common female approach to power got bowled the fuck over and I needed to experience a completely different approach to female power. Do Kōno’s protagonists feel even a little bit guilty about how damned bad they are as they do things like stalk other women’s children? Maybe. They don’t feel at all bad about asking for whatever they want in bed, though, and I loved them for that (even though I wish at least one was the dominant rather than the submissive in the recurring BDSM scenes in this book). I loved being inside the experience of women who felt real to me in their myriadness.

By far my favorite story in this collection is “Snow,” a tale whose psychological underpinnings are so on point I gasped and felt physical pain when I figured out what was going on. It delved deep and unashamedly into the ugly that can be relationships between women—something I fear will prevent the kind of voting backlash I hope for in November. Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories is fantastic. Read it.

Embracing Allegory in Playthings

I’m not going to presume that Alex Pheby’s Playthings is a tightly scripted allegory of our present day (partially because it was originally published in 2015 and also because it’s actually about one of the most famous cases of paranoid schizophrenia in history), but let’s pretend for a moment it is. At first I was not sure that I could delve deeply into Schreber’s all-consuming self-centeredness (for example, he so completely can’t deal with the fact that his wife has a stroke that the action in that scene then has to completely center around him), but I went with it long enough to get immersed in this superb example of what it feels like to be gaslit by everyone around you. Pheby does a wonderful job of draining the life (at least from Schreber’s point of view) from all the characters around the protagonist and of portraying this man’s madness. I guess that’s the secret sauce of gaslighting, isn’t it? We all have some secret weakness that can be turned against us and drive us to madness. The fact that Schreber is in fact mad makes it just that much easier.

The old-timey feel of this book belies its modern effectiveness. I loved the way Pheby played with chapter introductions—using the length of 18th century-like chapter titles and the feeling of interludes—to transition us through this strange story. The historical setting also contributes to this effect. I was glad we never quite get Schreber’s diagnosis because experiencing the symptoms (and getting to wonder how much the people around him were exacerbating them) was much more powerful than having a concrete, rote, dead name applied to that experience (maybe because I don’t like things being explained to me). Telling myself that this book was an allegory made getting through the day a lot easier and I was enthralled enough by the middle of Playthings that I stopped taking notes. That’s a good sign. Check it out if you want a fictional look at what it feels like to feel completely insane.

I have not recovered from the depression or the related dashing of my hopeful illusions (over and over and over), but I’m no longer letting the current political crazytown keep me from my favorite coping mechanism, either. What are you reading to put light in these dark days?

If you need a good literary escape, pick up a copy of A Feast in the Garden, Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories, Revenge, or Playthings from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Nobody Told Me | After Birth | Like a Mother

September 15, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA 1 Comment

How often do three titles coalesce into a relatively coherent expression of the experience of reading them? I was going to call this review “Revisiting Pregnancy Narratives After Three Years of Motherhood” because something made me delve back into this topic almost exactly three years after the birth of my son, but somehow Nobody Told Me, After Birth, and Like a Mother was just perfect. Even (especially?) in its semi-coherence.

I feel blessed to live in an age where such a wealth of literature (fiction and non-) is being produced to counter some of the crap that our culture has converged around as our vision of motherhood. There are precursors, yes, and I’ve written about some of my favorite pregnancy books for writers previously, but Nobody Told Me, After Birth, and Like a Mother spoke hard to my mother self, writer or not, and I wanted to share why.

Nobody Told Me

I’ll admit that when my husband gave Nobody Told Me by Hollie McNish for Mother’s Day “because it was on your to-read list” I had absolutely no memory of having ever heard of this book. While people did tell me I’d experience “pregnancy brain,” no one told me (that I remember anyway) my ability to retain information would be permanently altered (or at least that’s my experience so far).

There were so many thing no one told me (and which I cannot remember) that reading McNish’s contemporaneous journal of her pregnancy and first three years of motherhood made me feel wonderfully immersed in that world again. Her voice is gently honest, and whether she’s recounting the everyday indignities (like having no one offer you a seat on the bus when you’re ginormous) or sweetnesses (“When no one is watching, I feel amazing. Like that gigantic, ripe, juicy magic peach”) you’re endeared to her (and, if you’ve been pregnant, to your own memories both good and bad). She’s also deeply generous to the people around her—taking the necessary moments to look at why her grandmother tries to spare her the “embarrassment” of walking around her village pregnant and unwed or when McNish takes pity on her father who is helpless around her child and examines why his generation of men is that way and all the things they’re missing as a result.

I loved that she included her (basically unedited I think) poems in this text, even though I did not always love the poems, because they made me love even more this huge body of work I created while pregnant that I’ve been somewhat embarrassed by (both because I’ve been adding a derogatory “mommy poetry” label to it and because I was new to poetry so a lot of it really isn’t good).

Whether credit goes to me for finding this book (which will be issued in the US this November) or to my husband for having the memory to get it into my hands, I don’t care. I’m just glad I read it and that I read it right now.

Like a Mother

How strange and wonderful it felt to find Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy in a newsletter for a local bookstore because Angela Garbes is a local author and though our worlds have not overlapped, I feel like our experiences have. There was not as much revolutionary science as I hoped in this book (partially because I did get to read Penny Simkin and some others who are trying to give pregnant women actual information while I was pregnant), but I still loved the book and I learned a lot of things. Most importantly I learned to trust my own experience.

Garbes is witty and straightforward as she recounts the kinds of stories I have only ever shared with closely trusted family members (maybe I should be better about breaking the “nobody told me” cycle but I might let Garbes do it for me). From breastfeeding to sex to the importance of being cared for during pregnancy and birth, this book touched so many memories (and nerves) for me.

Through the gory (fascinating) details of the function of the placenta to the beauty of the ways that life and death coexist in a woman’s body as she carries with her forever the cells of motherhood, I felt grief while reading this book and I felt empowered. Most of all I felt normal, a sensation that is far too uncommon in these somewhat lonely days of parenting.

After Birth

Though it was Garbes who wrote about how parents “lean into the utter obliteration of their previous selves,” it’s Elisa Albert who dives all the way into exploring that experience in her novel, After Birth. The thing I love most about this book (among many) is how deeply angry new mother Ari is. It’s something I’ve seen lambasted in reviews, which I understand because it’s directly in opposition to the sweet, loving acceptance we all want to think our mothers immediately felt when we were born, but it’s fucking real. Especially in a world where too many of us are too alone in this event that changes our lives completely.

Ari grapples with a birth that did not go how she wanted it to (this is a euphemism because no one except other mothers really wants to even hear about shitty birth experiences), a body that’s irrevocably changed (torn apart), and a community that either does not or cannot meet her needs (in many cases because they aren’t even there). In short, it’s an all-too-familiar tale, but one that many women suffer in silence. I loved how angry Ari was because anger is the last thing we want moms to express and yet it’s a very real emotion (and one that doesn’t get better if we don’t feel entitled to even feel it).

After Birth can be as uncomfortable to read as the title is to imagine. It’s also funny and dark and real and I want all of my friends to read it and then I want us to say, collectively, all the taboo things about parenting REALLY FUCKING LOUD.

If you want to get real about pregnancy and early parenting, pick up a copy of Nobody Told Me, Like a Mother, and After Birth from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Treading Lightly While Traveling through Haiti in Maps Are Lines We Draw

September 8, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

What does it mean to leave no trace? This laudable goal of many a traveler can go awry when we get caught up in the “what does it mean” and forget that “leave no trace” is meant to apply to the outer environment and not to ourselves. In reading Maps Are Lines We Draw: A Road Trip through Haiti, I have no doubt that Haiti left traces on Allison Coffelt’s heart and soul, but the book gets caught up enough in the headiness of her experience that I too often missed what the journey felt like. Worse, I missed the opportunity to feel myself transformed by her journey.

To be fair, much of Coffelt’s most obvious travel transformations probably happened before she even left home when she read Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, the book that inspired Coffelt’s trip and in the international journeys she undertook before this one. And I deeply appreciate that she was trying to give us a more complex experience than the standard “I went abroad, I saw a lifestyle unlike my own, I was transformed” trope, but the fact that she’s visibly still processing this complex experience makes it harder to follow along with her, as does the fact that we are exposed as much to her thoughts about events (or even her thoughts on thinking about events) as we are to events themselves.

Scene vs. Summary

One of the lessons drilled into me in an early writing class is that readers need scene (the depiction of events) in order to engage with events rather than summary (the narration of outcomes) which can keep a reader on the outside of a story. It’s a lesson I rebelled against (like most lessons) and we can all cite examples of long, in-depth narrations that made a book for us. In truth, though, those examples are rarer and in our modern life of direct access to video and other first-person accounts, not to mention the unreliability of many “truths” spouted at us from innumerable political mouths, scenes connect readers with events in ways that allow us to both feel what’s happening and to trust the experience (even though all books, like all photographs, are in some way framed). Or maybe I’m just one of those “need to see the foreign brilliance before it’s spoiled by visitors” kind of people.

So in the moments when Coffelt is sharing glimpses of the scenes she experienced while in Haiti, I’m right there with her as she and Dr. Gardy pull to the side of the road to sample douce macoss or as she uses a headlamp to illuminate a man’s medical treatment. These scenes allowed me to feel like I myself was the traveler (without even a single visit to the travel clinic).

Contrast that with the moments where she’s reflecting on the tropes of the mission-trip story or the self-interrupting nature of travel writing (something she’s consciously doing). This latter brings me as a reader back to the level of watching the book being constructed—separating me from experiencing what I think Coffelt wants me to experience of Haiti.

Other Comments on Craft

Because I was often engaged with this book more at the craft level than the experience level, I was very interested in what Coffelt was doing with tense. In the moments when she does use scene, especially as she’s traveling with her guide, Dr. Gardy, the action that makes up the spine of this book, she uses present tense narration, which is a wonderful way to squeeze the most immersion possible from those scenes and a strong way to counteract the distancing effect of the rumination that intercedes. It’s a trick a lesser writer would not have thought to use.

Coffelt also knows her way around a metaphor. Whether it’s turning a moment of crushing garlic into a commentary on the messy history of Haiti or the staging of a photograph that encapsulates what it means to even write a book like this. These comparisons can allow us to fathom some of the complexity she’s grappling with without having it narrated for us.

Travel is Complex

Was it Pico Iyer who called out the difference between a tourist and a traveler? Maybe not, but it’s an important distinction in this type of literature. While many will feel that a book like Eat, Pray, Love delves into the realm of traveler, I’m actually looking for narratives that go even deeper than looking at how experiencing other cultures changes us as humans. I want the Anthony Bourdain effect of literature—to see those cultures as much as possible as they are and to learn from them what I’m missing about the world at large. This is something Lindsay Clark does brilliantly on No Madder Where and it’s something Coffelt clearly values as well.

I loved the way she included quotes like “The poor don’t want you to dress like them. They want you to dress in a suit and go get them food and water.” reminded me of the Mormon missionaries we came to know in Chile. There was something so interesting and complex about these young, white, tie-wearing boys’ success in converting the poor that continues to inform my own (evolving) thoughts about religious fervence. I also appreciated her reminder about the roots of travel: travail (to work), and I was interested to learn about Haitian’s relationship with the American culture of disposal and the dependence of relief organizations on having a population that needs relief.

Before reading Maps Are Lines We Draw I knew about Haiti only from one chapter in Ann Hedreen’s Her Beautiful Brain and from decades of news accounts of disasters there. I’m glad to now have a fuller picture of the place. Do I love how honest Coffelt was about the inability to form a pat narrative about her Haitian experience? Yes. I actually do. Do I also wish that I’d been able to engage deeply enough with the book to come away with my own picture of Haiti? Yes. That too. But I did learn a lot about Haitian history, watch a fellow traveler grapple with some larger questions about travel, and get to pay some careful attention to craft, so there’s a lot to recommend in this book.

If you want to learn more about Haiti or just the intricacies of structuring a travel memoir, pick up a copy of Maps Are Lines We Draw from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.