We made it through the elections and the holidays and while it seems like there is a very long winter ahead, I’m ready to focus on the after. Because we’ll be late on the vaccination list (and there isn’t even a vaccine yet for our son), I don’t know when that after happens or what it looks like, but I’m ready to inhabit the liminal space beyond initial preparation and mere survival. Here are four books that are helping me get through this stage:

The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays by Elisa Gabbert

I started reading this collection of essays during the post-election drama when all sense dictated what should happen next and yet we all knew that sense was out the window. Reading about Gabbert’s obsession with disasters was relatable and timely and her thoughts about everything from survivor’s guilt to the way we glamorize disasters to “slow violence” feel important right now as we struggle to get through now, some of us while excitedly tweeting the worst headlines we can find.

“Often, when something bad happens, I have a strange, instinctual desire for things to get even worse—I think of a terrible outcome and then wish for it. I recognize the pattern, but I don’t understand it. It’s as though my mind is running simulations and can’t help but prefer the most dramatic option—as though, in that eventuality, I could enjoy it from the outside.” – The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert

Gabbert’s insightful essays hit me in just the right spot. I read her thoughts on Chernobyl within a month of finishing the miniseries of the same name. And though she’s writing about global warming with “You can’t prepare for the worst-case scenario when the scenario keeps getting worse,” the book gave me something to hold onto in the month when COVID was getting much worse and the news out of the White House was more unhinged every day. I found comfort in realizing that my own pull toward those dramas might be helping me cope, that I, too, might “feel this way all the time now. Nothing is safe. Everything is fine.”

There’s ever so much more to unpack in this book, from the battle for women to be taken seriously to the ways we return to the familiar even when the familiar is awful. Every essay helped me grapple with what it means to be human right now. With the idea of life after all this. I needed that. If you do too, read this book.

Becoming by Michelle Obama

One of the things I’ve been deeply lacking for the last ten months was hope. Enter Michelle Obama. I knew regrettably little about her before reading this book. The fact that she seemed kind was more than enough to pedestalize her in comparison to our current reality. I had no idea when I opened the book that she’d help me reengage with so many things that matter dearly to me:

• The way she wove together the story of her childhood with the changing nature of her neighborhood reminded me how much I care about the structure of cities and communities and how they changed over time. Within a week my husband had me watch the Theaster Gates episode of Home and because of this book I had ideas and opinions and things I wanted to discuss.
• Reading about the ways she fought to be seen for her achievements and how that conflicted with her people pleasing reminded me of how hard I’ve fought in the #metoo era to take myself seriously and to be taken seriously.
• Her respectful yet honest insights into the sweetness and challenges of her marriage with Barack reminded me how much I cherish my own husband. Something I needed when we have all the time in the world together and what feels like no minutes at all to enjoy that.
• Likewise on the friend front, Obama wrote about the strength her female friends have given her over the years and reminded me how much I’ve let fear separate me from the women I love (and that I need to reach out as I can).
• She wastes no love on Trump, which was refreshing to read in this era of great enablement. Also refreshing was the detailed personal insight into what a normal presidential transition looks like. As a former Poli Sci wonk reading this book after the 2020 election, anything that felt like normal was helpful and gave me hope for other futures.
• She generously writes about her experiences as a Black woman. In this year of reckoning, her personal stories about the Black community she grew up in, what it was like to be a Black woman at an ivy league school, how disconnected her neighborhood was from major local institutions (and what she did to fix this divide) provided gateways to better understand experiences beyond my own.

Becoming is a beautifully written book and very much worth the read.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

I’m not very far into this book yet as it was a much-longed-for Christmas gift, but already Kingsolver is helping me think about the kind of life I want to lead, particularly when it comes to food.

Thanks to the pandemic, we’re already buckled down with a storehouse of pulses and legumes. I’ve learned to cook dried chickpeas and we have four kinds of lentils in store (though we only like three of them). I felt justified in this as Kingsolver educated me on the massive consumption of fossil fuels caused by our eating habits as we buy our chickpeas and lentils direct from farmers who live not terribly far away. Reading this book last night, I pretended not to think of the mangoes, pomegranates, avocado, grapefruit, pineapple and coconut we’ve consumed to brighten our holiday and how far they traveled to get here.

This book was recommended to me by a dear friend (who’s always washed and reused her Ziplocs) as we picked the bounty of plums from my backyard and discussed how Kingsolver had to schedule family travel around an unexpected harvest. I’m looking forward to reminders about the importance and costs of eating better. I’ve already learned about how many calories a day our farmers produce and the ways our food is being changed to get those calories into my body. It’s an older book, so some of the information has (thankfully) permeated the zeitgeist (at least a little), but just seeing the numbers made me think hard about all the things I’d eaten in the last two days and about the massive amount of meat I’ve started eating again as plan-ahead cooking started to feel harder this fall.

The real test of this book will be if I actually eat all those (too-bitter) plums I dried before they’d completely ripened. Regardless, I’m looking forward to learning how my family’s food habits can make a lighter impact on the planet. Maybe I’ll even learn how to get more than one carrot harvest a year.

Habitat Threshold by Craig Santos Perez

It’s never too early to start working on the future, even when it’s too late (Gabbert quotes a statistic that the climate effects we’re experiencing now were actually instigated 40 years ago). Perez’s book of poetry hit me hard in the face with all the climate facts that I mostly want to ignore, and while we’re hunkered down seems like a good time to start changing some of our habits. Even the ones that have sustained us until now (like the almost daily boxes that help us mark time with goods we do not need).

Written after the birth of his daughter, Perez’s frank poetry puts us in that new-parent place of caring more deeply about the whole world than you ever imagined possible. He writes of everything from rising oceans to fossil fuels, our use of plastics to animal extinctions. And while I felt (deservedly) scolded by these poems, they were artful enough to hold me close.

… “In the oceans,
one tone of plastic exists for every three tons
of fish”… – “Age of Plastic” by Craig Santos Perez

The way Perez emphasized the word “plastic” in this first poem of the book (which is black in the text while the rest of the poem is gray) helped hammer the omnipresence of the material through one part of my brain while the rest was focused on the stories and statistics about plastic he divulges. I think of this poem every day as I pour more Playmobil into my son’s room and of the future I am making for him versus the one I need to.

With lines like “America, you were never great” the book is a timely reminder that we have to change how we view our place in the world and the impacts we make upon it.

Other Transition Thoughts

The weird thing for me about this list is it’s completely devoid of fiction, the genre that normally sustains me. Maybe this is related to the empathy drain I’ve felt during the pandemic where I’m putting everything I can into the people within (literal) arms’ reach, maybe it’s because I need concrete rungs on the ladder to whatever’s next. I don’t regret where my reading tastes have taken me, but one casualty has been my own writing. Fiction has always been the doorway for me to inhabit worlds beyond my own without having to caretake anyone else’s experience. This allows me to dream. To enter that headspace where my creativity comes from. Another casualty is that nonfiction does not lull me to sleep like fiction does, so I’m staying up late with big ideas and waking up not at all ready to do anything about them.

While I have been writing a lot during the pandemic, I’ve been almost entirely focused on poems and essays that help me unpack the experience of these strange moments as I live them. A favorite project is “The Tale of Benjamin Bunny,” a collection of poems about the bunny in our back yard who saved my life this spring. I love these pieces (especially the poems) and I’m grateful to have been able to do anything productive with this weird time, but I miss writing fiction. Maybe my next pandemic reading list will be all fiction focused on the future. I should be so lucky.

We’re currently planning for seven more months of this. I think February, March and April will be the hardest at our house because we’ll have hit the year mark. Depending on vaccine timelines (adult and kids), I’m currently crossing my fingers that May and June will be filled with hope and maybe we’ll get sprung from this hoosegow with some summer left.

I’d love to hear about the books that are sustaining you through whichever stage you’re at. Please share your recs and stories in the comments.

It’s the last day of National Book Month and I have a confession for you: I believe in the power of books to change the world. Not just to give us the chance to retreat to more palatable worlds in our heads, but to open our hearts to the greater world and help us find the courage to be better. Courage being the key word. Courage is what attracted me to join the board of Hugo House years ago because of the way they opened themselves up to ideas from the community during a difficult time (and really listened to the responses). And courage is what I’m excited about in the newest project from Seattle City of Literature (where I’m on the board now). Seismic is a collection of essays that looks deeply and frankly at Seattle as a City of Literature and I’m proud of the conversations it’s starting—for me personally, for the board, and in the community at large.

It’s easy to imagine that a collection commissioned by a City of Literature would be filled with fluffy, soft words about how wonderful our city is. There is some of that in Seismic, we do live in one of the most beautiful places in the world and have a vibrant literary culture, but this book is also filled with deep introspection about the ways we’re failing. This is where the courage comes in, because speaking truth about our failures is the first step toward addressing them. In this way Seismic is an act of love as much as courage. Let me tell you about what Seismic made me think about…

Seattle is a Destination

As the nearest big city, Seattle was the next best step for me and many of my high school classmates. For my part, I wrote some (really crappy) poetry about my dreams of this emerald city during a visit in my senior year (which I promise to spare you). Like Rena Priest, I sought “the creative sanctuary of Seattle.” I craved the natural beauty Timothy Egan praises in his Seismic essay. And when I arrived, the city felt fresh, because as Jourdan Imani Keith writes, “No one is from here. No one knows where things are.” Which is kind of a big deal coming from a town where your eighth grade science teacher fondly remembers (out loud, for the class) your running down the street in nothing but a diaper. The idea of Seattle gave me comfort as someplace I could recapture the cosmopolitan feeling I experienced living abroad without giving up the Northwest that I love.

“If I had to tell you why Seattle is a literary city, I would say it is because I was able to become myself here. I learned how to inhabit my mind in this place. To hold space for your own story can be a revolutionary act.” – Kristen Millares Young, Seismic

Wei-Wei Lee writes, “Seattle has given me freedom. It has afforded me the luxury of writing for the sake of feeling, without expectation or the pressures of succeeding, with my friends, classmates, school writers’ club and the Youth Poet Laureate Cohort.”

Reality is Always More Complicated (and Interesting)

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore writes of the end of Seattle, a city she has returned to again and again because it is “the city where I first found calm.” I, too, moved to Seattle because it was a place I felt I could be myself. On the best days, when I could stomp around Capitol Hill in my green patent-leather Docs and vintage dress, that still feels true. But even before the pandemic, I started to see that my best days in this city were the days I was projecting beyond what I actually felt.

The longer I lived in Seattle, the less of a dream it became and the more of a reality as I got to know the underpinnings of the place, the Seattle process, the people behind the Seattle freeze. As with any home, some of this was endearing, some frustrating. What I barely ever got to know, however, was anything tangible about the indigenous cultures here. Seismic started me on a better path, from Priest’s insight into the indigenous mythology of our region to Ken Workman’s reminder that the Duwamish are all around us (literally).

“Writing about anywhere in the Salish Sea bioregion is a challenge because in order to keep from alienating people, I have been taught by polite society never to publicly acknowledge the true story of the people who belong to this place. We don’t say “genocide.” We don’t say “murdered, cheated, displaced and starved.” We don’t say those things. Tell a different story, sing the people a song. So I tell you how nice the people are in Seattle’s literary community, which is certainly true, but it omits this other story. Please don’t be alienated. “ – Rena Priest, Seismic

What I’m Afraid We’re Losing

“I walk around Seattle looking at houses I’ll never own.” – Dujie Tahat, Seismic

“If literature and art are an effective antidote, we must attend to how so many artists have been pushed out of Seattle as the city’s economy “soars.” My family still might be. When our art spaces refuse to acknowledge or address this ever-growing loss, they become complicit in the marginalization of the very culture these spaces claim to cultivate.” – Dujie Tahat, Seismic

Part of my dream of Seattle has always been of being in a place where I could be myself and be surrounded by likeminded people. As I grew, it became more apparent that that dream included being a writer. Married to a visual artist, we are nourished by being around other creative people. And while Seattle is full of creative people of various types, I ache for how many of my friends have left because the city is no longer affordable. The city is also less livable as increased traffic divides us from the friends who have stayed. Maybe a city kid would know what to do with this, but my small-town heart still craves having the people I love no more than 20 minutes away.

“Seattle is now a city of displacement and desperation, where rent has basically doubled in seven years and we have no meaningful protections, where even people against gentrification say of course they support increasing the density. But what kind of density are they supporting? A density of overpriced crap; a density of bland homogenization; a density of corporate exploitation masquerading as necessary growth.” – Claudia Castro Luna, Seismic

And I often wonder, if we’d left too, if my husband and I could live the artistic lives we dreamed of instead of cobbling it all together between a series of service jobs until being driven into tech to afford day care. As a white woman, I say this from an incredibly privileged place that includes having a home, a livable income, a family, health. But I’ve never wanted a circle of friends that was solely white and upper middle class. I had that bland uniformity in my hometown and I think I unconsciously recreated it by choosing to live in northeast Seattle. But I came here because Seattle offered more than that. And as a city and as humans we can be better about racial equity and inclusion, affordability, and livability, but we have to start trying now—on all levels.

“Everyone talks about the need for affordable housing, while the city shuts down the largest public housing project, displacing hundreds of families and destroying the country’s first mixed-race housing project to make way for a billionaire to build luxury apartments. How did they do this? By changing the zoning to increase the density. When developers control the language, everyone else loses.” – Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Seismic

In Seismic, Claudia Castro Luna notes the delicate balance between the image we want, “a world-class literary city” and the reality that we are failing at engaging people of color as artists and even as audience members, where the key question is “literary programs for whom and by whom?” She bears witness to the extraordinary diversity this city does possess and that we could build on, if we try.

“When I hear the phrase that Seattle is a great literary city, I want to scream. Because when people praise what Seattle is now, it feels like they’re praising displacement, homogenization, the streamlining of the imagination to become a tool of social, cultural and political obliteration. I don’t believe that literature is automatically a force for good, especially if it participates in the self-congratulatory boosterism that celebrates Seattle as it is now. If we cannot critique what we love, then we don’t really love it.” – Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Seismic

Change Comes from Within

“Seattle is experiencing unprecedented transformation with profound implications for the future. Yet in the strict confines of high art and cultural discourse, many institutions remain unwilling to reckon with the ways culture is displaced from the city. It cannot be because cultural institutions are apolitical—not only because there’s no such thing but because many of these organizations willingly come together to fund electoral campaigns when what is on the ballot are public subsidies. What becomes clear is that it is not the city’s culture being curated but rather institutional balance sheets.” – Dujie Tahat, Seismic

I was so heartened when, during a Seattle City of Literature board meeting at the beginning of the latest peak of #BlackLivesMatter protests, we were presented with Tahat’s essay and asked to imagine how this organization we’re shepherding should work to help create the kind of city we want to live in. I won’t name names, but I was so heartened to be in a (virtual) roomful of people who also saw where we were failing. People who wanted as badly as I do to change it.

“Philanthropy, which is the predominant model of literary and cultural organizations in our city, is failing us. If one builds an organization centering wealthy white landowners, then that is the culture being curated.” – Dujie Tahat, Seismic

We have a lot to build on. Charles Johnson recalls Seattle’s “distinguished history of supporting progressive causes” and our civility even as he cautionarily compares Seattle to San Francisco and Rome. We also have a lot of work to do. At Seattle City of Literature, one first step was to this statement on racial equity and the literary arts. I’m very excited to see how we’ll take this energy forward to help build the city I still dream of.

The Work Ahead

I’ve over-quoted from Seismic already, but some of the best, most inspiring words I can think of about what’s next come from the contributors, so I’ll leave them to speak for themselves:

“It is praiseworthy for Seattle to be recognized as a UNESCO City of Literature—an important and vital achievement that recognizes the hard work of countless artists that made this city what it is….It represents an opportunity for Seattle to partner and learn from our sister cities how best to employ literature and this designation to improve the material lives of those at the margins. As far as I understand literature to have a purpose, it is meant to reflect back to us our fullest selves, to speak truth to power, and to be a site for greater individual and communal reimagining. If we don’t take this task seriously, the honor serves simply as a laurel hung from the drawing room walls of those of us living in safe, material comfort.” – Dujie Tahat, Seismic

“If this is a great literary city, how do we expose all the layers of violence so we can imagine something else? How do we write what we really feel, so we can feel what we really need? How do we use language to expose hypocrisy rather than camouflaging harm? I want to live in a city that doesn’t destroy the lives of the people who are already the most marginalized by systemic and systematic injustice. This may be too much to ask of literature, but it’s not too much to ask.” – Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Seismic

“I view the Creative City designation not as an arrival but a portal to discover new ways to engage many more residents in the literary life of the city. What is at stake for Seattle is not guarding a literary legacy but envisioning one. The UNESCO designation is an invitation to redefine what a literary city looks like. Seattle could have the makings of a literary renaissance that inspires cities around the globe to reframe what constitutes literature and who has a right to create it.” – Claudia Castro Luna

“If I could make a wish upon a book or ask “the Lorde” Audre for a blessing for this city, it would be to add more platforms, avenues, megaphones and bridges for voices who live between the lines, in white spaces and in the margins. I feel hope for the direction that Seattle is moving. We are remembering that without community there is no liberation.” – Anastacia-Renée, Seismic

“We each have a little magic, and the city brings it out in us. We are capable of creating such things as no one has ever done. We are more than what people want to see, sometimes more than even we ourselves expect to see. We are not bound to the lots we draw.” – Wei-Wei Lee, Seismic

Your City of Literature

I’d love to know what your City of Literature looks like. Seismic is free for download or you can ask for a free copy at your local bookstore (while they last). Please read it and share your dreams for our city with me, with your community at large, with your legislators.

I’m hugely grateful to editor Kristen Millares Young and to Stesha Brandon for their vision and collective work to bring this important book to life. They, together with the contributors, have definitely inspired me to be more courageous in building my City of Literature. May this be the book that changes our small corner of the world for the better.

What a week it’s been. Seven days ago at this time, my husband was with our dog, Rocky, at the vet for what would be his second to last visit and I was trying to decide how to tell our four-year-old son that the dog wasn’t coming home. The dog did come home, and we spent a tense 48 hours watching for the inevitable before we could get the second, final visit. And somehow, on Monday I did find the words to tell my son that Rocky was not coming home. He covered his ears and did not want to talk about it. As heartbreaking as this conversation was (as well as subsequent ones where I tried to make sure he knew he could talk to me when he was ready), it’s nothing compared to trying to explain racism to a small child, even as I’m still learning about it myself.

But the time for change is now. That’s why I finally took Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race off the shelf in my bedroom where it had been waiting too long to be read.

When my son was born, a friend insisted I read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. An excellent book, and a hard read in that early parenting time when my empathy for all humans was almost shattering, I learned a lot from Coates. But my reading of that book did not fix our society and really, it did not fix me either. And I won’t say that I’m fixed now that I’ve read (most of, I’ll finish the rest this afternoon) Oluo’s book, either, but So You Want to Talk About Race engaged me in a conversation I needed to have with myself and Oluo gave me both the language and the understanding necessary to try harder.

A Lexicon of Racism

Too much of my experience of the world these days comes from Twitter-sized synopses in which I either smile or rankle before moving on and forgetting. And while I’ve had a superficial understanding of the concepts of white privilege, intersectionality, and microagressions, I haven’t really put the work in to know what I could do about any of it besides feel guilty and try to not say ignorant things. Oluo helped me take that next step by unpacking what the words mean and what they look like in everyday life. She opens up ideas of how white people can start to confront and dismantle them in their own lives and in the lives of the people around them. She also speaks directly to people of color.

Two of the most impactful things Oluo helped me understand are the power dynamics of racism and the ways I’ve been failing to properly empathize with the experiences of people of color. They are not unrelated, but while I cannot dismantle the white supremacy inherent in our institutions (today anyway), I can breathe in her “basic rules” of determining if something is about race until they are a part of my body:

1. It is about race if a person of color thinks it is about race.
2. It is about race if it disproportionately or differently affects people of color.
3. It is about race if it fits a broader pattern of events that disproportionately or differently affect people of color.

Do any of those rankle? As a student of sociology, I had no trouble accepting the last two, but I really struggled with the first. Which meant I had to ask why. Where I’m at now (a few days into this process) is that I’ve been so gaslit about my own experiences (as a woman) that victim blaming is part of my body. My mechanism for feeling better about myself is trying to control every aspect of every situation so that I can never get hurt so if someone else gets hurt then clearly they failed to control something. Except that argument is as full of bullshit for people who are subjected to the abuses of a racist system as it is for women who are raped, assaulted, or harassed.

And the passing of a counterfeit $20 bill is never, ever a crime that should be paid for with a life.

The Beauty of Vulnerability

“Acknowledging us, believing us, means challenging everything you believe about race in this country. And I know that this is a very big ask, I know that this is a painful and scary process. I know that it’s hard to believe that the people you look to for safety and security are the same people who are causing us so much harm. But I’m not lying and I’m not delusional. I am scared and I am hurting and we are dying. And I really, really need you to believe me.” – Ijeoma Oluo So You Want to Talk About Race

I haven’t read White Fragility (yet), but I do know that when confronted with my own racism I more want to hide in a corner than confront my bad actions and I’m certain I’m not alone. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Oluo does the reader the kindness of opening up her own vulnerability. She both unpacks moments when she was not representing the values she espouses and experiences when she has been victimized by institutions and individuals. I’m deeply grateful for this approach, because by being so open and vulnerable with her readers, she made it much easier to be open and vulnerable back. Although she often says (correctly) that it is not the victim of racism’s job to educate the perpetrator, this choice is helping me examine both the problems with the system and also the ways in which I have perpetuated those problems.

The Structures of Power

As I mentioned, institutionalized racism was one of the hardest parts of this book to get my head around, I think because I was raised to believe in this American ideal of founding fathers who were looking out for all of us and who set up this great nation around some very laudable ideals. And now I have to interrogate all of that. We all do.

The police in my brain are here to “protect and to serve” and that’s a comfortable place to return to when I want to ignore one more abuse or death at their hands. But I remember the way the teenagers in my home town were hounded by the police—and we were white. When you entrust someone with a job, you have to be very careful how you frame that job. Even if you think about little things like quotas for traffic tickets. That’s not the police looking to stop people who are breaking laws, that’s a worker trying to check off a list of tasks and they’ll enforce traffic laws at whatever level they can until that list is complete. Now add a government and a legal system that was designed to protect the property of white men. I don’t know enough about what makes the police act as a military force against people of color (though I’m thinking about it); I do think they are acting to protect a status quo that should not be protected.

I don’t need to watch the video of George Floyd’s death to know that kneeling on the neck of a human being (ever, not to mention until they die) is not ever okay. But when John T. Williams was shot down in cold blood by a Seattle police officer, I used personal knowledge of his behavior to make excuses for the officer. When the pregnant Charleena Lyles was shot and killed three miles from where I lived with my almost two-year-old, I was sickened yet did nothing. In truth, those cases formed a pattern where the police failed to place the value of a human life above the value of their own inconvenience.

It’s beyond time that we confront what is wrong with policing in this city and this country, that we dismantle the current system, and that we instead build something that serves everyone. Something that treats human lives (of all colors) with value. I believe strongly that this starts early in life when we must give all children the same opportunities. I also believe that we have to stop treating 12-year-olds like Tamir Rice like it’s too late for them because their bodies are big. That no one should die for selling cigarettes, as Eric Garner did, or for being in a house where drugs were suspected of being sold, as was the case with Breonna Taylor. Black lives are human lives and black lives matter.

What I’m Telling My Son

The day my (then two-year-old) son asked for a Playmobil tactical van, my heart sank. But he thought it was a police car and he wanted it and I wanted him to have what he wanted. Now he asks me to turn off NPR when they use the word “dead.” Mostly I do, because there are a lot of details he does not need to know. But this week is different. As will be all the weeks going forward.

This week we talked about why people become police officers, that some people want to help others and that’s good, but that some people want power over others, and that’s bad. We talked about skin color and things that make people look different but that’s only how they look on the outside. We talked about how he needs to stand up for his friends because sometimes they won’t be able to stand up for themselves. Later, I’ll probably have him sit through the Sesame Street town hall on racism. Because while we try to surround him with diverse books and friends of all colors with a wide variety of life experiences, it’s not enough.

So I’m going to keep reading, Oluo’s book and others, and turning that knowledge into action. There are a myriad of good anti-racism reading lists out there and I also recommend this podcast and essay. As always, I’m open to your suggestions. Let’s take our hands off our ears and change the world with the power we have. We’re stronger than we know.