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

Coping with a Personal Apocalypse in The End of the City

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Some events so change a generation, a society, that it’s difficult to imagine how you’d even write about them or their aftermath. In The End of the City, introduces us to one boy who’s rebuilding his life after losing his dad in events that may or may not be precipitated by the attack on the twin towers on September 11, 2001.

Alternate Realities

The narrative of this book actually takes place in two realities that alternate throughout the book. One is the land of teenaged Ben Moor living in Reston, VA and dealing with his dad’s death. He’s a pretty typical teenager–trying to mask the hurt while also trying to build a life of his own. Nevertheless, the world is carefully created and well imagined which makes it all very interesting, immediate, and personal. While Ben, Bobby Jihad (Ben’s brother) and their friends are living it up on spiked ginger ales and track meets, I worried about Ben’s sadness. I worried more about Bobby Jihad’s bravado. And sometimes I wanted to see Kitty kick Ben in the nuts.

The secondary world, that of an assassin in New York who has just been ordered to knock off one of his own crew. Although the action here takes place in 2011 New York, it’s so dark that I frequently wondered if it was an alternate history. I actually spent a lot of time wondering about its relationship to the first story. But even as the back of my brain puzzled over why both main characters drank ginger ale and had strangely similar ill-fitting suits, I was wrapped up in the cinematic pace of the action.

The Voice of a Generation

“I look down on you from the ridge, on you and what remains of you, and in your blood I see a map of your own making (and mine). I recognize it; I’m quite sure I at least half understand the language.” – David Bendernagel, The End of the City

Part what makes these two worlds so effective is the dense and evocative language Bendernagel uses. Although not as turgid as the dialogue in Rian Johnson’s Brick, The End of the City has a lingo all its own. The language–a kind of disaffected shorthand that feels very male and very much set in its generation–sets the mood immediately. It also forces the reader to slow down and inhabit what’s happening or be lost forever. For example, Ben’s reference to the events of September 11, 2001, “Jet fuel goes up. Two towers collapse.” is cryptic, but there’s a lot of story (and emotion) held just below that surface.

Cultural Referents

One distinctive aspect of that voice is the cultural referents Bendernagel uses. I beamed when reading how one character “pulled a McConaughey” and also wondered how many readers would miss the reference to Dazed and Confused. This decision between being specific (which sometimes means being oblique) is something I’ve struggled with in my own writing. Reading The End of the City, I realized how close the connection between writer and reader can feel when you’re on the inside of the jokes.

The other side of cultural referents is that they can easily be misunderstood. I struggled with this as I tried to reconcile the two story lines in this book. Bendernagel kept dropping references to Back to the Future and 12 Monkeys: two referents that signaled to me that time travel was imminent. When I finally understood the actual relationship between the narratives, I felt a little led astray.

Writing about Tragedy

In the end, it doesn’t matter if Ben’s dad’s death is suicide, a heart attack, or an accident. It doesn’t matter if it’s related to 9/11 or not. What matters is the personal tragedy to Ben of losing his dad at twelve. And that’s the perfect approach and what I love about novels–they take the whole big world and break it down into individual characters and experiences we can get inside and empathize with. I mostly avoid books about 9/11 (and, actually, the phrase “9/11”) either because I’m not sure I’m ready to deal with it or because I’m terrified of the sanctified air we apply to that day. I really appreciated how, by dealing not with the tidy euphemisms we’ve developed to talk about that day but instead with the loss experienced by one boy, Bendernagel let me feel the pure weight of the emotion. He let me get inside the feeling.

While the voice in The End of the City was so strongly male and so American that for a couple of weeks after finishing this book I found myself drawn to books about foreign lands written by women just to balance myself out, it was a treat to read something so different than what I’d been reading lately. When Bendernagel offered me this review copy, he said people had compared the book to the work of Jonathan Lethem. There’s some of that, but I’d say it’s even more grounded in the gritty and weird movies of the late 1990s like 12 Monkeys, Heat, and even Se7en. That may sound like a stretch for all the emotional impact I promised in the previous paragraph, but for a someone who fell in love with her husband while watching and discussing those very films so many years ago, it’s all a pretty good fit.

Spending NaPoWriMo Writing with Stephen Dunn and Kim Addonizio

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I have the incredibly good fortune to be spending a few days in the San Juan Islands for a writing residency. When I arrived, I didn’t know which of three projects I’d be working on: 1. getting a solid draft together for my second novel, 2. writing and revising a book of poetry I’ve been playing with, or 3. whatever random thing struck my fancy along the way. So I packed a large box of books and all of the scraps of paper that comprise those various projects and headed off to devote some time to writing. What I should have realized is that the presence of Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio and Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs by Stephen Dunn in that box, together with the fact that it’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) would prove to be an irresistible shove in the direction of the poetry book.

NaPoWriMo

I’d actually been making really good progress on writing a poem a day for NaPoWriMo before I got on the ferry to come here. I think I’d created first drafts of seven or eight poems in eight days. Some of those days I’d written two poems. But throughout the process I’ve become even more keenly aware of my limitations as a poet. Talking with Nicole Hardy and Karen Finneyfrock (both poets who also write prose) last night, I kept saying things like “I haven’t written poetry since high school” and hearing how that sounded. I know that the time I’ve spent improving my fiction has definitely helped my poetry, I can feel that, but it’s far from good yet. I knew I needed help. Admitting that is the first step, right?

Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs

I’d actually placed Stephen Dunn’s Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs on my Christmas list this year and then forgotten about the book. I think I heard about it through ModPo but I can’t even remember the context. My husband scoured the internet for a copy for me and I’m so glad because it’s exactly what I needed right now. Dunn’s essays are about life and poetry in this way that makes them completely wonderful for an aspiring poet. I fell in love with the book on the first page of the introduction when Dunn describes as essayist as “a person who believes there’s value in being overheard clarifying things for himself.” That line was humorous and self-deprecating and true in all the ways that told me I could trust this man to teach me about writing and the world.

The essays in this book are accessible in the best of ways whether he’s discussing the “ambiguities that poets must honor” or how poems “must make available the strangeness that is our lives.” This is not a how-to book, but he does delve into some poems that work and some that don’t, and he writes frankly about both. And the book is filled with useful insights like, “The poem is not written in natural speech. Few successful poems are. But it does give the illusion of natural speech.” I don’t always agree with Dunn’s assessments, but the mere fact that he’s brought me to a level where I feel like I have an educated opinion about poetry is a triumph for me.

“There’s hope for someone who can be embarrassed by poor word choice.” – Stephen Dunn

His essays about life are equally good. I particularly loved “A History of My Silence” which is an essay about Dunn’s shyness. I’ve only recently realized how deeply shy I am and have always been, although I’ve covered it up pretty well at times, and reading lines like, “What a pleasure reading was: the world received in silence, at my own pace” made me feel that my shyness is a trait not a deficit, and I was so glad to know that I’m not the only one with a “history of letting you know only what is useful for me to let you know.” That’s something I fight to get past in my writing, but it feels functional in my day to day life.

Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

Whereas Dunn’s book is so rich that I could only read a few pages at a time before passing out (seriously, I couldn’t even finish an essay), Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio is so delightful and quick that I couldn’t put it down. This is much more of a how-to book, but it’s written so conversationally and intelligently that she can impart three lessons where you thought you were learning one. I’m savoring both books a bit, but Addonizio has already taught me about the traffic signals of punctuation in a poem and answered a question about word spacing that had bothered me so much I’d actually been running around asking people about it. I’m learning about music and detail and how rhyme is related to echo. She’s opening my work up already.

As I’ve worked my way through the book, I’ve written so many first drafts of poems I didn’t even know I had inside me. I’ll take her advice about revision seriously and take heart that some poems “are supposed to fail, to teach you that you have to keep going and try out new strategies.” I’ll even try plodding through meter, a bit.

“Dare to feel like a beginner–unsure and clumsy at first, but having a good time and doing your best to learn.” – Kim Addonizio

Ordinary Genius is also more than a how-to book–it’s a book where an established artist talks openly with an aspiring one. Addonizio’s advice on publishing is priceless to writers of all genres. And insights like, “While there is a real distinction between art and therapy, the truth is that art is therapeutic. It helps you to take something that is within you and make a place for it outside of yourself” make me want to keep writing forever and ever and ever.

I’m off to make some space outside of myself for these projects. I’d love to hear about how you’re experiencing NaNoWriMo or how you’re challenging yourself in the comments.

If this review made you want to read Walking Light or Ordinary Genius pick up a copy from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

How Denise Levertov’s Poems 1972-1982 Made Me Stop Judging Myself

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denise levertov poems 1972-1982There are many ways I will fall in love with a book. Mysteries like Fletch wrap me up in their comforting blanket of action. Mind-bending fiction like The Trial make me question the world around me and help me learn to see. And then some books unlock the tumblers in my brain and make me want to write. Poems 1972-1982 by Denise Levertovis one of the latter. This book hit me at just the right time and it’s the first thing in a long while that made me put pen to paper on my own behalf.

The Wrong Poetry at the Wrong Time

The book of poetry I read just before Poems 1972-1982, Transfer by Naomi Shihab-Nye did not make me write. Recommended by a friend, I enjoyed some of Shihab-Nye’s language. I even related to the way she looked at the world, but her work was almost too close to me. As I read her poems, I kept wanting to edit them, to give them that last gloss that would make them mine. And as I read about her grief, I wanted it to be more resolved. That’s not to say that I’m a better poet than she–I’m a complete amateur in comparison–but I couldn’t distance myself enough from her work to let it exist on its own. It was almost like that unhealthy relationship you get into with a friend or loved one–the one where you know they could be perfect if they were just a little more like you.

It’s possible that Shihab-Nye’s work would be perfect for me at a later date when I’m more secure in my own writing, but I was not able to enjoy the work the way I hoped I would.

The Rules of Poetry

Levertov, on the other hand, grabbed me immediately. I’ve recently finished reading The Body Electric: 25 Years of America’s Best Poetry from the American Poetry Review to gain a better understanding of poetry, especially what I like, what I don’t, and what I might like to imitate. I annotated the book heavily with little rules about what makes a poem “good” in my eyes. I don’t like poems composed mostly of full sentences. I like language that isn’t too highfaluting. I like poems that are aware of themselves as poems.

In Denise Levertov: Poems 1972-1982, Levertov breaks every single one of those rules and shows me just how silly I was being. In the first poem of the collection, “From a Plane,” she uses the phrase “alluvial silvers” and I wanted to react and say that there’s a simpler word, but it was perfect. It was the perfect word for me. I had created some system for an imagined poetry I would someday write that negated all the things I like about me, and here is Levertov just doing what she’s doing and blowing my mind along the way.

Fanaticism for Beginners

Of course rules are something that many beginners cling to and proselytize–alcoholics, religious converts, and writers alike–but I’m excited to get beyond that “judging myself and others” phase and into the “judging my work for its own effect” phase. I’ll be a little patient for now because poetry is in many ways new for me. I haven’t devoted real time to writing poetry since high school and am still trying to shake some of those teacher-imparted rules (start your line with an active word and be sure to capitalize it) out of my head.

Imitation as Flattery

Levertov gave me a good start to writing my own poems in “Metamorphic Journal.” She writes:

Let me say
it is I who am a river.
Someone is walking along
the shore of me.

And that phrase, “I who am a river” struck me and stuck with me in my twilight sleep. The metaphor and how she develops it in the following lines wouldn’t let me go. Although it was far too late at night, I found a pen and wrote the words, “I who am an ocean” and several lines to follow. My poem–even in its raw state–is and is not like hers, but we are separate enough and close enough that I can see parts of who I might be in her without trying to make her me.

For some lovely synchronicity on this, read Levertov’s “Writing in the Dark” halfway down the page here.

Retreating to Write

I’m going on my first writing retreat in a couple of weeks. I swore to myself that I’d use that time to finally piece together the first draft of my next novel. But poetry is calling me and I have a project that I might be feeling brave enough to finally make some progress on. In this moment, in my writing chair where I’ve spent most of the morning looking for answers in my phone, the idea of delving into any kind of writing for myself seems pretty delicious. Maybe I’ll curl up with the rest of Poems 1972-1982 to get a head start.

Will you be celebrating National Poetry Month in April? Please share your plans–reading, writing, or avoiding–in the comments.

If you want to see if Levertov is the right poet for you, pick up a copy of Poems 1972-1982 from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Capturing Anomie in City Water Light & Power

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city water power and light - matt pine

Matt Pine’s first novel City Water Light & Power so clearly captures the experience of living in a modern day city that at times I wasn’t sure I could go on reading it. The basic gist is that friends Jake and Michelle navigate the city of Chicago as it changes and they do. Touching on everything from urban renewal to mental illness, the book provides insight into what creates a lost generation.

Capturing a City (and a Life) in Transition

The central metaphor that pairs the changes in Jake’s and Michelle’s lives to the changes in Jake’s neighborhood is strong. It’s fascinating to read as Jake’s neighborhood bar and everything he loves about the place he is living starts to give way to gentrification while he faces a personal struggle with how he fits in the shiny corporate world. You hope that his chances are better than that of his favorite bar, but it doesn’t seem likely.

Meanwhile, Michelle seems as wrapped up in the opportunities of urban renewal as she is in her developer boyfriend. Wrapped up in, but also succumbing, albeit in a more socially acceptable way.

If you’ve lived in a city and worked too many hours just to pay too much money for the roof over your head and a bunch of trappings you’re not sure you even want, this book will feel familiar.

Reading for Escape

At times, the book felt altogether too familiar. I don’t normally consider myself an escapist reader. Sure, I spend the odd afternoon with Fletch, but usually I’m chasing big ideas from far away. Reading City Water Light & Power made me realize how much emphasis I put on the “far away” in my reading.

I started this book on the bus the morning after the time change. I was running late and feeling frustrated about rushing in to a day that I felt I had no control over. I wanted to meet expectations and be on time, but I wasn’t sure what those expectations were and I wondered where I left mine along the way (or whether 20 minutes really mattered to anyone). As Jake works his soul-crushing job doing QA for a call center, Pine does an excellent job of showing just how hard we’ve all worked to take the meaning straight out of life.

At the same time, Michelle spends much of her time drunk or stoned enough to tolerate her job as a paralegal with a jerk of a boyfriend. There is a glimmer of hope as she gets accepted to law school, but given how much she hates the people she works with, you have to wonder what she’s rushing toward.

Reading about the suffering of others gives me a way to think about the way the world works and how we can all work to improve it. It affords me a macro-level view because I can sympathize while maintaining my own experience. Reading about Jake and Michelle hit too close to home. The book is well written, but I found myself wanting to get away from it before I became mired in self pity.

This might be an excellent read if you have better boundaries with books than I do. It might also be good for a reader of a different generation or from a rural area or even another country who wants to understand why people who seem to have it all are so freaking miserable. But if you’re in the rat race, it will likely hit too close to home.

A book has to be well written to elicit this kind of visceral response in me, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to read it again soon. Maybe I’ll pick it up when I’m old and retired to see what ever I was whining about.

Passive Characters

Passive characters are a huge no-no in fiction workshops, but it often feels like they abound in modern stories and novels. At a panel I attended at AWP, a professor confronted the idea that passive characters can serve as a political statement–to show how oppressive a situation is. City Water Light & Power definitely wants to fall into this category.

And while this sense of oppression is well portrayed, the passivity (especially of Michelle) was absolutely maddening to me. That must have been the point. But the book did not incite me to revolt against my corporate life or the world around me. And for this passive character as political statement thing to have worked for me, I would have had to come out of the book feeling that rush to change rather than the urge to drink myself into oblivion.

What do you think about passivity as political statement? Did Pine succeed when he made me feel stuck or should the book have done something else? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Reading Outside My Comfort Zone with Marston Bates

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the forest and the sea marston batesI don’t usually read nonfiction. In fact, it’s the one genre I get snobby about (especially those self-help-type business books that regurgitate info rather than creating anything). I really do have strong feelings about those books. But the rest of nonfiction, for me, simply falls victim to my desire to lose myself in the dream worlds of poetry and fiction. So I have no idea what inspired me to pluck The Forest and the Sea by Marston Bates, but I’m glad I did because it opened me up to a whole world of ideas and helped me see the world from a variety of fresh perspectives.

The Forest and the Sea is a tiny book about just that, the creatures, vegetation, and environment of the forest and the sea. He explains and investigates, in a very accessible way, the parallels and differences between these environs. He also looks into man’s relationship with our environment. I am not certain that this book is a precursor to the environmental movement, but I do see how it could be a rallying cry to create one, even for someone as disengaged with that on a daily basis as me.

The Family Perspective

I actually didn’t even know why I had The Forest and the Sea until I opened the front cover. It’s a tiny little paperback with snails on the cover and it just doesn’t look like something I’d buy or read. So I knew it had either come from my grandmother’s library or my mother’s. In the upper-right corner of the first page was the name “McKetta” in a handwriting that wasn’t quite my grandmother’s but it was definitely not my mom’s. Then I read the dedication and title pages. The book, written in 1960, is dedicated to Bates’ Zoology students at the University of Michigan.

I was holding my father’s textbook. He would have been at Michigan a few years after that, actually, but the coincidence was too great. As I read this book, I felt closer to my dad (who I’m proud to say reads this blog) and found myself considering each bit of knowledge from his point of view. He’s a forest economist by trade and that experience really enriched my reading. It was the next best thing to talking with him about what I was learning

If you have family textbooks available to you, go read one now. It’ll change the way you view all the facts.

The Science Perspective

I was hardly a dumb blonde in school, but somewhere along the line, I started to treat science as this weird other thing that I could never understand. It’s a shame, really, because when my husband turns on Nova, I usually wait for the next day’s summary. I do care. I am interested. But my specialization of knowledge has focused so deeply (especially lately) on the literary that I think I’m limiting myself. The Forest and the Sea opened, in really intelligible language, a whole new world to me and I’m so glad I read it. Because science isn’t jargon or formulas anymore than literature is jargon or sentence diagrams. I just forgot that for a little while.

The Pre-Global Warming Perspective

I do worry about our effect as humans on the environment (as does Bates, especially toward the end of the book) but I sometimes get lost in the political rhetoric around global warming. The whole thing makes me want to disengage. So when Bates writes “We are still living in an ice age,” it is so easy for me to cut through all that noise and pay attention to the science in front of me. He does have an agenda, but he’s relatively transparent about it, and I was so grateful for the chance to engage with what he was saying instead of having to understand then fight a hidden agenda just to understand the truth behind the words.

The Creative Perspective

If you’re like me, you are sick to death of biped aliens in movies with two eyes and maybe, if the creature designer was feeling really creative, four fingers on each hand instead of five. It’s as easy to get stuck in a creative rut as it is in a reading one, but there is so much out there.

When I started reading Bates’ descriptions of how and why undersea creatures and vegetation had developed the way it did (how the wavelengths of light fish have access to changes their coloration and that their eyes are very sensitive or even blind because light isn’t a primary part of their environment) There were about five minutes where I thought I might try to be the next Ursula K. LeGuin. I wanted to go out and design a new world with different constraints and see what creatures developed as a result.

I know there are amazing science fiction writers out there who are way into this stuff (including LeGuin) and I probably won’t be poaching on their territory anytime soon. But it was a relief to start to think of something like creature design in a totally new way for me.

The Perspective of Balance

One of the most exciting parts of this book for me was when Bates started talking about seawater as an equilibrium and how complex that equilibrium is. I loved the idea of the environment balancing itself out and the way he described it, “Materials are constantly being added, but materials are also constantly removed” was so simple and clean that it allowed my brain to take off in all kinds of crazy directions and think about how much I value balance, how I can achieve it, and what that might mean for my work. It reminded me of an amniotic fluid that I could run off and let my work and my life gestate in.

There’s so much else in this book, inter-connectivity, the gorgeous metaphor of the forest being like the sea but on land, and wonderful stories about Bates’ own research. And it’s all completely intelligible to a non-scientist like me. It was a delightful book to read to broaden my knowledge of the world at large.

What I’d love to know about, though, is books you’ve read that have been outside of your comfort zone and how they’ve influenced or changed you as a writer.