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

Micheline Aharonian Marcom on A Brief History of Yes

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a brief history of yes micheline aharonian marcomAs a writer, how do you critique the work of friends? In private you read drafts of their work and point out the parts you love and areas for improvement. You both know you can’t be objective but that red-penning a draft is in fact a loving act that will make the work stronger. With any luck you are different enough writers that you can learn from each other but also at similar stages so that it’s an equal exchange.

But how then do you review the work of your teacher, your advisor, the person who helped shape your voice? When reviewing a book, I always try to look at the best of what the book has to teach, so I wasn’t worried that I’d review A Brief History of Yes by Micheline Aharonian Marcom in a negative light. I did know, however, that Micheline will always be my mentor and that when I read her words on the page I hear her voice.

When I told her that I wanted to write about her book here but that I wasn’t sure that I could be objective, she graciously offered to answer a few questions. So what you see here, rather than a straight-up interview, is me asking both questions about the book and the questions that would help me continue to find my way as a writer.

A Brief History of Yes

“He still lies in the mind of the Portuguese girl, for as the lover of yes knows, the absence created by the end of a love affair is another form of presence.” – Micheline Aharonian Marcom, A Brief History of Yes

A Brief History of Yes by Micheline Aharonian Marcom is the portrait of a love affair from beginning to end between the Portuguese Maria and an unnamed American. The way the book is structured, we know always that the affair will end, but the writing is so gorgeously inhabited that I was deep inside the emotional thrall of the ups and downs from the thrall of new love to the deep loneliness of knowing something is about to end.

With echoes of Clarice Lispector, Fernando Pessoa, and William Faulkner, Marcom’s carefully crafted blend of lyricism and concision is inimitable. I know, I’ve tried. She plays gently with grammar, combining words and changing punctuation, so that I always feel the possibilities of language are opening before me. And the way she reveals the unsaid is something I’m still ruminating on, even months after reading the book.

Interviewer: You’ve led such an international life, how has that shaped you as a writer? Is that part of the reason you read trans-nationally?

Marcom: I think that literature, like painting or music, cannot be appreciated from the vantage point of only one culture or country or epoch—it would be as if I only looked at American painters, for example, and skipped Cézanne, Picasso, Klee, Velasquez, Goya, the ancient Mayan sculptures…. I seek the books that are “aesthetic achievements,” that make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Wherever and whenever they were written.

I: I loved the way you revealed the things that were “not said” between Maria and her lover. Is this something you started with or did it evolve as you wrote and rewrote?

M: I can’t any longer remember. But I don’t think that it happened in revision, and more or less emerged that way. Although, of course, I did revive the book extensively. But I am a writer who follows my intuition, who “listens to the voices,” as Faulkner said. So although I revise continuously, I also allow for the strange and unpredictable. And I am always interested in what people don’t say to one another, as much as what they say.

I: The events in A Brief History of Yes are not at all chronological and yet the book has an inherent logic. How do you think about time as you are writing?

M: When I’m writing first drafts, I don’t think, I follow my obsessions, my interests, my inklings—as I said: I tune in and listen. Later when I have material I shape and trim and work to cull a book’s final form. But I usually find the pattern had already been made and it then becomes my job to “lift” it to its final shape.

I: What are you reading?

M: Right now re-reading Faulkner’s The Bear for a literature class I’m teaching, and all the Lispector I can fit into my day for an essay I’m writing on her work. So, as you can see, I’m returning to the tried and true.

If you want to read A Brief History of Yes, pick up a copy from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Nance Van Winckel Gives Voice to the Dead in Pacific Walkers

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The world is full of strangers—people we’ll never know and those we once knew but will never see again. I come from a small town in northern Idaho and there I left behind so many former friends who are strangers to me now. Reading the poignant poems in Pacific Walkers by Nance Van Winckel, I began to wonder if I knew any of those Jane and John Does—if any of the friends who are lost to me have also been lost to the world.

You see, Van Winckel pulls her inspiration for many of the poems in this book from the records of the Spokane County Medical Examiner’s Office—a place not very far from where I grew up. She also gives life and stories to the people in old photographs. Van Winckel is humanizing what we have all left behind and some of the writing in this book is simply stunning.

Anonymity

“the question won’t pertain to tattoos

or unmatchable DNA, but to what
world, under what sun, in what situ

we go on finding each you, each you,
the not-missed, the never missing.”

– Nance Van Winckel, “Last Address”

I felt weird writing “left behind” above, but the word I really wanted to use was “detritus” and that felt worse. We’re talking about, and Van Winckel is writing about, human lives—a man found dead in a landfill, another in a railroad tunnel a premature baby girl found at a water treatment plant—and these are the lives of people we’ve left behind, who might never be claimed. People who are missed in some absent part of our brains that wonders only occasionally “What ever happened to…?”

And that’s part of the point, of course, of writing this book. That part of the experience of reading this book struck me so hard that I couldn’t even write about it for a week. Van Winckel touched on things I did not want to think about. I can barely leaf through old photo albums at the Salvation Army because I find the discarded memories so sad. Here she gives full stories to those people. The language is restrained, as it should be, and Van Winckel leaves me to sit in this uncomfortable place of wondering what’s happened to those I left behind.

The Detritus of my Life

“you were all the world I had to leave” – Nance Van Winckel, “Afraid of My Rays, No One Comes Near”

I remember a boy in junior high. I thought he was the cutest. I never dated him—I was dating other people and he never seemed to notice me—but I always knew when he was near. He didn’t have a lot of money and so he wore the same jacket for all the years from junior high through high school—not that I think he graduated—so it was easy to catch a glimpse of him on a street corner. I don’t know his first or last name—I only have his nickname and a hazy memory of where he lived. I know he got hard into drugs like a lot of his crowd did. And Spokane would have been a natural place for him to end up.

As I was reading this book, it was this boy I kept thinking of. When Van Winckel placed descriptions from the coroner’s office near the poems, I read them extra hard to see if any were him. I hoped they weren’t, but I wouldn’t have been surprised. There were others who were acting as lost as he was at the time, but they had bigger personalities and people to catch them. This boy, I don’t know… I hope he’s out there somewhere living a happy life surrounded by people who love him.

Poetry for Strangers

“Taped into the space
Where a window had been,
that newspaper: it must
be scanned… each day
another fact aglow
with sunlight,
each night the same war.” – Nance Van Winckel, “Compromised State”

So I want to tell you more about the language and form in Pacific Walkers, but I can’t. Maybe the level it affected me on says it all.

This weekend Rebecca Bridge and I are putting the finishing touches on our book of writing prompts and one of the things we suggest is taking a photograph and making it into a story. If our readers do have as well with that exercise as Van Winckel, they’ll be in great shape. My cousin Elisabeth finds inspiration in strangers every week and pulls it together into Poetry for Strangers.

Perhaps writing is a way we can catch people who might otherwise fall away.

“By May / I’m a dashed-off note with promises / of more where this one came from.” – Nance Van Winckel, “I Am My Own Assistant”

If you want to connect with the people in this book or to actually see what the writing is like, pick up a copy of Pacific Walkers from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Matt Betts Transcends Genre in Odd Men Out

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What do you call a novel that contains the Civil War, steampunk, zombies, and Godzilla? In most cases, I’d say “a hot mess” but in Odd Men Out Matt Betts pulls elements of all these genres and more together into a tight, engaging story. This review will contain spoilers.

Odd Men Out

“The Civil war has ended but not because the South surrendered, instead it’s on hold while both sides face a new enemy—the chewers, dead men who’ve come back to life.” – book jacket description of Odd Men Out

Reading the above description of Odd Men Out, it seems like a pretty straightforward zombie book with a historical backdrop. But the book isn’t like that at all. The chapters alternate between stories of three sets of characters: a transport crew trying to make a buck, a zookeeper and his henchman (who is also a saboteur with the Sons of Grant), and the Odd Men Out–an international peacekeeping force. The transport crew falls victim to the Sons of Grant and is rescued by the Odd Men Out. The transport crew then joins up with the O.M.O.

If that sounds like a lot, it is. This book is packed with information and action (everything I outlined above takes place in the first 50 pages) and at times I was seriously lost–especially when it came to the Civil War and that the Sons of Grant were the bad guys. So although this book is filled with action and a lot of fun, don’t read it too quickly.

Instead, take some time to appreciate the relationships between the characters which are surprisingly well developed for a book this size with so many characters. Let the situations wash over you–in the first few pages of this book, I went from feeling like I was inside Serenity or Firefly to experiencing echoes of BioShock. It’s awesome and fun.

But What about the Zombies?

Although the description makes it seem like the zombies are a big deal in this book, the “chewers” are really more of a complication. And I loved that about them. Rather than the rushing World War Z hordes, there were just enough zombies to keep the characters on their toes. It felt like the zombie situation, though not yet under control, would soon be.

By the time the giant lizard shows up and starts destroying the harbor, it really should be too much. Except that it isn’t. I don’t know exactly how Betts gets away with this amount of excess, but it works. And there are dirigibles and “The Turtle” a machine that reminded me of an AT-AT walker. Perhaps it’s precisely the excess that makes it work. If Bowie had shown up dressed as Tesla, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised or perturbed.

Is this the Start of a New Trend in Genre Fiction?

Genre fiction isn’t new. Some of our greatest literature, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to The War of the Worlds, can be sidelined into the genre category. I say “sidelined” because there’s a tendency for literary types to look down their noses at genre fiction’s plot-driven texts and in response, genre writers often consider the literary folks snooty as they write about the innermost feelings of everyone and nothing really happens. But great writing and genre writing are not mutually exclusive and in the 1960s a host of writers like Ursula K. LeGuin showed us how to create gorgeous new worlds with equally stunning language and characters.

What does seem to be new, at least relatively so, is this wild blend of genres. To be fair, most zombie stories have an undercurrent of either dystopian fiction or comedy and many steampunk novels are based in either a dystopian or utopian world. But there’s a difference between pairing two genres with a similar feel and mashing together two disparate types of stories. The first time I saw it done was in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which married Jane Austen and the undead.

What about Movies?

This genre mashup is happening in film too. Last night I watched The World’s End without really watching the trailer. What I thought was going to be a buddy drinking movie turned out to be a midlife crisis movie. With robot aliens (who really don’t want to be called robots). It’s brilliant and it surprised me by how well these elements came together.

The same is true for Matt Betts. I don’t have any idea what he has planned next, but I look forward to finding out.

If you’re looking for a steampunk/zombie/sci-fi/dystopian mashup, pick up a copy of Odd Men Out from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Karen Rigby Explores the World in Chinoiserie

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karen rigby chinoiserie

When Karen Rigby asked me to review her book, Chinoiserie, I had no idea how much of the world would be contained in this slim volume. Winner of the 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize and published by Ahsahta Press in Boise, ID, I thought the book would be more, well, Idaho. Being from (and having fled) that beautiful but somewhat isolated state, I was delighted to find a rich, cosmopolitan collection of poems.

Why Book Cover Design Matters

We all judge books by their covers. There is only so much time in the world and there are a lot of books. A lot of time smaller presses don’t have the cash to get great designs or they don’t have someone on staff with a strong eye for design. I don’t know the story behind the cover design for Chinoiserie, but I do know that the organic white shapes against a lush red background is gorgeous. The book feels Asian and yet it’s reminiscent of European toiles and Islamic designs as well. It’s simple and yet it’s transnational. Much like the poetry itself.

This attention to detail continues on the inside of the book with a leaf of vellum before the title page. The title page itself is one of the most attractive I’ve ever seen. It boldly and cleanly declares the title across two facing pages with two lines of Rigby’s poetry, “Dear Reader, what I started to tell you / had something to do with hunger” spanning the bottom of the title. No illustration, just that inviting text.

I don’t usually spend a lot of time talking about the design of books, and I don’t want you to get the idea that the outside is more important or interesting than the inside, but aesthetics do matter. I recently went through this design process with a book of writing prompts I co-authored that’s forthcoming from Write Bloody, another small press. We hated the first design. Actually, it was pretty cool, but it said all the wrong things about our book. I’m glad we spoke openly and honestly with the press. I know the budget is tight, but in just one turnaround, we got a cover that’s inviting instead of scary and I’m really happy with the results.

What’s important is that the book design of Chinoiserie made me want to linger over Rigby’s poetry, so let’s do that now…

A World of Poetry

I knew this was the right book for me when I saw that it was divided in three sections each introduced by an epigraph from a Spanish-speaking poet. Rigby quotes from Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, and Octavio Paz. Epigraphs are amazingly important to a book and I sometimes forget that, skimming over them. But here, Rigby reminds me that it’s not just the words in the epigraph that are important, but the other details as well. Because she chose poets rather than essayists or definitions, I stayed in the poetic sphere of my brain as I was reading. By embedding the epigraphs in the text of the book rather than placing them somewhere before the table of contents, she brought them in closer relation to her own work. And because of who she chose, poets that I personally love, I felt closer to the text–more invested in it.

But this isn’t the only way that Rigby brings the world into her poems. Her subject matter spans the globe. As you might imagine, I love that. She wraps her words around subjects as diverse as Pittsburgh and borscht, as international as the film of The Lover and women harvesting lavender. What could be disjointed instead weaves together into a gorgeous portrait of what it means to observe the world carefully.

Unexpected Imagery

“her body as shorthand / for what his body mistook for love” – Karen Rigby, “The Lover”

One of the things I loved most about this book is the way Rigby uses words to make me look closer at the everyday. It’s something we’re all supposed to do as writers, but it sometimes feels damned hard. But Rigby’s use of phrases like “lizard-dark” make creating that perfect image look easy and I want to know more about that creepy night. When she writes about “a matchbook / missing half its lashes” I know exactly what she means and I wish I could have put those words to the image. And there’s an undercurrent of flirtation there that makes me think of all the phone numbers ever written into matchbooks.

Sometimes these images turn into full-on scenes when Rigby creates phrases like “Places you meet turn semaphore” and I picture both the signalling flags and the metaphor behind it and a story starts to form from those few words. When when she writes about The Lover, “hunger traced the Mekong” I can feel the sensuality in that line and also the geopolitical import. Because Duras is one of my favorites and I’ve watched the film over and over, I remember images of the older Chinese man tracing his fingers over the young, bony, French girl and think of the many forms of hunger.

Rigby makes me want to spend more time digging into my own images and making them this evocative and concise.

The Power of Repetition

I love repetition in its many forms from anaphora to epistrophe. I’ve written about it before and will continue to because of its incantatory magic. What Rigby shows me in “Orange/Pittsburgh” is the power of implied repetition. Let me explain, but first, let me show you. In the third stanza of this poem, Rigby writes, “Orange is girder / & rusted flange, citrine” and then in the middle of the sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas that “Orange is” returns like this…

“Orange is Japanese carp
beneath the tattoo needle,

habaneros sweating
in their grocery bins.
French horns warming

on the south cathedral lawn.”
– Karen Rigby “Orange/Pittsburgh

See how your mind fills in “Orange is” before “habaneros sweating” and again before “French horns warming”? I don’t know if this spell works because I’m so conditioned to rules of three or if including “Orange” in the title is what makes the magic, but I loved the tension between the words I was hearing as I read this poem and the words on the page. It opened a whole new space of reading for me.

Although some of the poems in this collection were too spare for me to get inside, I will return to this book over and over to learn from Rigby’s use of language and to see if they open to me. And I hereby vow not to prejudge literary products from my home state nearly as harshly in the future.

On Lyn Hejinian and Reading Out of Your Depth

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my life and my life in the nineties - lyn hejinianA couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a friend about our mutual interest in Buddhism. She recommended I read Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha and I asked if she’d read the works of Thích Nhất Hạnh. We agreed that neither of us really understood him, but I said what I like most about his work is precisely that I don’t understand it and that every time I re-read one of his books, I take from it what I need that day, regardless of what’s on the page. That’s how I felt reading My Life and My Life in the Nineties by Lyn Hejinian.

Drowning in a Book

“I imagine a foreign language to be like a thin stick over a creek, one must run on it with great speed so it won’t have time to break and without stopping for a second so one won’t lose one’s balance.” – Lyn Hejinian

I’d been told that My Life and My Life in the Nineties was a difficult book. I don’t think that’s strictly accurate. What the book is is fragmentary. Each of the poems or sections or essays, whatever you want to call them seems at first to be a series of disconnected sentences. But I ran head first into the book, determined to achieve that perfect balance of comprehension and enjoyment. I found myself immersed in a collection of reminiscences, and even though I could not put together the narrative, I could feel Hejinian’s life moving forward in time as I progressed through the sections.

Finding Inspiration Anywhere

“I can type faster when I don’t hear my hands.” – Lyn Hejinian

As I was reading into this book, looking for that narrative I’m so accustomed to, I found myself grasping onto individual sentences but not in the way you’d think. Instead of clutching a gnarled sentence for meaning as I would with a writer like Faulkner, I was holding onto some of Hejinian’s clear sentences as they pulled me up out of the ocean of her book and into the surface of my own writing.

Let me explain that. Normally, when the style of a book pulls you out of the narrative, that’s a bad thing for flow and surrendering to the fictional dream, and all so on. But because I was happily wandering through this book without really knowing where I was, I was glad to stop when I encountered a sentence that reminded me of something from my own life.

If I’d been in a writing frame of mind, My Life would have been the single greatest set of writing prompts I’d ever encountered. Lines like, “Because children will spill food, one needs a dog” sparked memories from my childhood and I had a visceral feeling of having food licked off of my face. Different sentences will speak to different people, but over and over as I read the book, I could feel long-lost memories igniting.

What’s the Difference Between Prose and a Prose Poem?

“Consciousness is durable in poetry.” – Lyn Hejinian

I’m not a student of poetics, but what Hejinian showed me in My Life and My Life in the Nineties is that one big difference between prose poems and prose is whether narrative is a main thrust of the writing or not. The passages in the second part of the book, My Life in the Nineties, contained more contiguous sentences in the same narrative stream and the section read faster for me, but this book is still for me much more about the language than the narrative.

Another thing I came to appreciate in this book is the way Hejinian uses particular sentences as refrains. I was well into the book before I realized that some of her sentences felt familiar. I started reading closer and marking the ones I recognized. I couldn’t discern an intentional pattern, but they did feel like a key to another way to read this book. It was as though those sentences were the triangles on a sewing pattern and when I pulled the writing into three dimensions I would connect those triangles and appreciate a completely other creation.

“Please note that in my attempt to increase the accuracy of these sentences and the persistence and velocity with which they proceed, I’m pursuing change while trying to outrun the change that’s pursuing me.” – Lyn Hejinian

Reading out of your depth can be frustrating or it can be the most wonderful thing ever. I highly recommend that you pick a day where you have nothing pressing and the world will leave you alone, and then pick up a book you always thought was beyond your ken. Read the book for whatever strikes you. There is no wrong answer and there will be no test at the end. Let me know what you discover.

If you need some fresh inspiration, pick up a copy of My Life and My Life in the Nineties from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.