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

Lisa Robertson Finds Poetry in Architecture

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Lisa Robertson Occasional WorkWhen I requested a review copy of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture by Lisa Robertson, I was working as the managing editor of an architecture magazine while earning my MFA. The irony of my experience was how many architects used convoluted and turgid language to describe designs that were pared down to their purely minimal essences. The days I spent sorting through jargon like “fenestration” and “tectonics” were great training for nights spent finding the clearest way to communicate an idea in my own writing.

Essays on Art and Architecture

“We believe that the objective of architecture is to give happiness.”

A poet, Robertson uses her command of words to blend the architectural vernacular with everyday language. She writes in the persona of the Office for Soft Architecture which speaks in the first person plural about a wide range of issues that affect the urban environment from architectural style and color to invasive species.

One of the ways Robertson displays her skill with language is by pairing a simple sentence with a truly dense one:

“The Himalayan blackberry escaped. The plant’s swift rhetorical trajectory from aestheticized exotic, to naturalized species, to invasive alien, all the while concealing a spurious origin myth, displays a typically hackneyed horticultural anthropomorphism.”

At times, I found myself lost in the richness of her vocabulary, but the writing was so well crafted that I felt I still understood her meaning on some subliminal level. Just when I thought I might truly be done for, Robertson reeled me in by tying the lascivious undertones of strawberries in Jane Austen’s Emma to the Arts and Crafts Movement in British Columbia.

Some of my favorite essays in this book were commissioned to accompany art shows. I enjoyed leafing through the full-color illustrations of those shows and guessing what Robertson might have to say about them.

Seven Walks through a Changing City

“Imagine a very beautiful photograph whose emulsion is lifting and peeling from the paper. There is no longer a negative. To preserve it you must absorb this artifact through your skin, as if it were an antique cosmetic comprised of colloidal silver. You must absorb its insecurity.

The seven walks in this book are poetic journeys through a rapidly changing Vancouver. They are not meant as guidebooks. In fact, it would be impossible for an outsider to replicate the paths Robertson is describing. Instead, they impart the feeling of a city as it evolves around you. Sometimes she references architecture directly:

“Ruined factories rising into fog; their lapsed symmetries nearly gothic. The abandoned undulations of the vast mercantile storage facilities…”

Other times the walks become more emotional journeys.

“There was no window in the city that was not overtly moralistic – the roadways were illuminated and my decadence seemed to soak the asphalt so it shone.”

But the language is always evocative and it feels as though the setting is pregnant with potential stories even when Robertson is merely conveying a mood.

In Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, Robertson finds poetry in the language of architecture and finds a new way to convey the experience of urban geography. It is a book architects will appreciate for the careful consideration of form and context and writers will appreciate for the plasticity of Robertson’s language.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Heidi Julavits and The Uses of Enchantment

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Was Mary Veal abducted from a high school field hockey practice or was she playing a sick joke on her family? Even after she resurfaces more than a month later, the answer is not clear. The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits explores what exactly happened to Mary using three interwoven stories that capture the angst of being a teenaged girl better than anything I’ve read in a long time.

Interwoven Narrative

These expertly linked tales give three very different views of Mary’s life. One tells what might have happened to Mary. It’s a story of a girl so desperate to be noticed or have something happen in her life that she runs away with a stranger. It could also be the story of a girl parroting another girl who made up a similar abduction years before.

“Let’s say that I tried to tell the truth and nobody heard me. Let’s say, then, that I’ve decided telling the truth got me nowhere. If I want anyone to listen to me, I have to construct a scenario that appears true, but isn’t.”

A second story is composed of Mary’s therapist’s notes from his sessions with her as he begins to develop a theory of “hyper radiance” based on Mary. It is a theory of how some girls take the negative energy of sexual repression and instead of allowing it to crush them, they turn it outward as a destructive force—“A work of art.”

The third narrative thread encounters Mary 14 years after the abduction as she returns to her family after her mother’s funeral. Here Julavits creates a compelling portrait of family dysfunction and denial dating back to the Salem witch trials. Because each character is richly drawn and plays a key role in the family’s enduring misery, the sections about them are fascinating rather than a trial of endurance à la The Corrections.

“Helen was a shadowy pro at expressing her own feelings by attributing them to others.”

Each story is so fully inhabited that I was guessing to the very end what really happened to Mary. And while I was focused on whether Mary told the truth, Julavits was feeding me all kinds of information about Mary’s experience that created this incredibly believable world of a young girl who feels lost, alone, and ignored.

Capturing the Essence of the Teen Mind

Like Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase and Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (I really have been on a teen angst reading binge lately), The Uses of Enchantment explores how truly wicked it is to be a teenaged girl and how that makes girls behave.

One of the things I love about this book is that Mary is ordinary. She’s smart but not necessarily brilliant and pretty but not remarkably so. Most of all she is in the middle of the torment of being a teen. All of the factors are there: the drama with siblings and peers, the complicated definition of self in relationship to parental expectations, and the pure work of trying to distinguish oneself just as you are learning who you are.

Mary uses the tools she has, manipulation and a budding sexuality (a real threat in a family where her mother cares more about whether she was raped than the actual abduction), to get noticed by her family. And the futility of being a teen comes through in Mary’s experience. She wields the power she thinks she has, but the people around her often fail to notice her efforts.

I highly recommend this book. While it isn’t exactly a mystery, it held me in suspense until the end and the world that Julavits creates is so well imagined in so many ways (dialogue, characterization, setting), that I think any writer will find something that relates back to your project and that you can learn from (all while you’re enchanted by a really good book).

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Uses of Enchantment from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Simply Evocative Imagery of Ralph Salisbury

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In Like the Sun in Storm, a poetry collection, Ralph Salisbury uses relatively simple language to conjure images that are anything but. The title poem was one of my favorite in the collection. I’m still so wrapped up in the clean description of a child’s hiding place and the safety and hope embodied therein that I can’t translate the extraordinary feeling to the page. Instead, I’ll share two other favorite excerpts.

Enmity in “End of a War”

“The widows, who’d prayed we’d be shapes
burned into brick by a weapon broken into myth
saw us as skeletons
garbed in their husbands’ flesh” – Ralph Salisbury

This poem takes place in Nagasaki at the end of World War II. It recalls people who were vaporized by the atom bombs we dropped on Japan—leaving only shadows of their existence “burned into brick.” There are so many ways Salisbury could have talked about the horror of war. He could have described the effects of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or he could have written about the confusion in Pearl Harbor as the Japanese bombed us.

Instead, this first-person, boots on the ground account of how the survivors reacted to his band of soldiers conveys both individual torment and a sense of mutual responsibility. I felt revulsion at the damage done by a weapon we created, but Salisbury also raised my guard with the enmity in those widows’ eyes. They were out to destroy us too.

The concrete imagery of the body in this passage evokes the human cost of war. It also allows the more ephemeral phrase, “weapon broken into myth” to stand apart. Well after I first read this poem, I was still thinking about the aura of myth around the atom bomb—how it creates almost Biblical destruction and how we talk about it so casually.

The poem as a whole creates a very personal and a very complex view of war—one I will be thinking about for a long time to come.

Family Meets Technology in “Awakened by Cell Phone”

“I hear the lovely and loving chatter
my daughter’s year old daughter sends
through silicon crystals
transmitted into eons of green
metamorphosed into petroleum
reborn as plastic, and, yes, into the centuries
of families which formed my ear.” – Ralph Salisbury

Here again Salisbury plays two sentiments against one another. He begins with the warm intimacy of family—the uncomplicated love of a grandparent for a grandchild. Then he makes a surprising segue to a thoughtful deconstruction of this wondrous technology that binds us. Though the language here is a bit more flowery than in the previous poem, the images are equally straightforward. My favorite part about this passage is how he returns to the human connection at the end.

I am not a poet, but even I could appreciate Salisbury’s carefully constructed language. The book overall spans World War II and familial love as you’ve seen here. It also speaks to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, being Cherokee in Amish country, and the more complex sides of family relationships. It’s worth reading this book to understand how these diverse topics coalesce under the mastery of one voice.

I’m planning to re-read Like the Sun in Storm to learn about line breaks from Salisbury as I consider writing some poetry of my own. I’ll also enjoy (and learn from) the layers of nuanced emotion he creates on the page.

What poets do you read and what have you learned from them?

Grace Paley: Choked with Meaning

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Grace Paley Enormous Changes at the Last Minute Cover

Grace Paley has a way of packing a lifetime into a sentence. In Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, her visceral metaphors drive home enough meaning to describe her characters fully using very few words.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

Two of the most powerful sentences Paley wrote in the title story of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute follow one another back to back: “He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear and down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment.”

If Paley had not used the plumber’s snake analogy, the path of words “through the ear and down the throat, halfway to my heart” could be sweet or seductive or slippery, but the image of the plumber’s snake gives at once a wheedling and an invasive implication. I can see a man casually unrolling the long metal snake, maybe he’s smoking a cigarette. The snake goes farther and farther in, working toward her heart against her wishes and scraping the sides of the canal, and if it is one of the snakes with a claw at the end, doing further damage along the way.

If the next image were him reeling it back in, then I would think of all the filth along the length of the snake, but no, he leaves it in, clogging the canal and leaving his job memorably half-finished. Then there is the sexual connotation of the words “snake” and “equipment,” where the narrator is figuratively left full of the unwanted genitalia he unraveled inside her. Paley is showing how he got to the narrator, past her better judgment and then left her “choking” on the fact that he let him get to her again.

Faith in the Afternoon

In “Faith in the Afternoon,” Paley presents another sentence packed with meaning: “Faith really is an American and she was raised up like everyone else to the true assumption of happiness.” The “assumption of happiness” explains the uniquely American viewpoint Faith holds that we are entitled to a good life and that good things happen to good people. But assumption also has the connotation of rising to heaven in living form.

Paley is equating living in America with living in heaven which offers a stark contrast to Faith’s grandparents’ lives in Eastern Europe and the hell of the holocaust from which they fled. In a few simple words, Paley embodies the ideological differences that separate the generations.

Again in “Faith in the Afternoon,” we meet Bugsy. About her dereliction after meeting Ricardo and becoming a whore, Paley writes: “[s]he soon gave up spreading for the usual rewards, which are an evening’s companionship and a weekend of late breakfasts.” Bugsy would simply be a tragic figure if it weren’t for her place in the relationship as the former lover of Faith’s first husband.

Because of what happened to Bugsy, we see the potential ruin of Faith by her relationship with Ricardo. But in Faith’s attitude toward sex, we also see that she is getting paid though not with money and we start to wonder whether Faith escaped from her relationship with Ricardo as unscathed as we would like to think.

I love that Paley can say so much with so few words. The language she uses is always appropriate to the characters, but the words’ rich connotations imply worldliness. I love to use a good image when I can find one, and I hope I can imbue one with as many luscious possibilities as Paley does.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Reading Locally with Lidia Yuknavitch and Jamie Ford

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Jessica Prentice created the word “locavore” to mean one who eats locally, but I propose a broader meaning—one who consumes locally. The Latin roots support this (“loca” is related to “locus” or “place” and “vore” means “eat” but also “devour”). Because I devour mostly books, I wanted to look at the benefits of reading locally using Dora: A Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford as examples. Both books are set in Seattle where I make my home.

First of all, let me say that I’m unusually blessed living in Seattle. Other cities star more frequently in novels (New York and Paris come to mind), but something about Seattle—maybe because it’s smaller or because I feel like part of the amazingly rich and diverse literary community here—is more intimate. Or maybe it’s because you have to go out of your way to get here, so (unless you’re writing Twilight) authors usually visit the area to get to know the place before writing about it.

I could have written this post about any number of Seattle authors like Sherman Alexie or GM Ford (both of whom I’ve loved), but these two novels by Northwest authors crossed my path this week and they speak to such different geographies that I want to look at each of them here. So we’re on the same page, when I say geography, I mean the location and also the people who affect (and are affected by) the place.

Dora: A Headcase by Lidia Yuknavitch

dora a headcase - lidia yuknavitchNearly every review you read about Dora: A Headcase begins with some version of the following phrase, “contemporary coming-of-age story based on Freud’s famous case study.” If I had known this, my reading of the book might have been more nuanced. But I didn’t. I went to the store in search of Yuknavitch’s memoir, The Chronology of Water, which I was unable to find. What they did have were several copies of Dora. I like the serendipity of discovering a book, so I bought and read this one without considering the back cover or the introduction. I may have missed a dimension of the book in doing so, but it didn’t dampen my enjoyment.

Yuknavitch’s characters capture the spirit of Seattle. Smart and angsty teen Dora showed me just how active a protagonist can be as she teams up with the wild gang of Obsidian, Ave Maria, and Little Teena to rage against convention and authority. I’ve seen people just like each of them on Capitol Hill. Dora has that well-to-do hipster with an angry edge vibe that is uniquely Seattle and the others are equally authentic. Dora’s uptight parents and more-rigid-than-he-ever-thought-he’d-be Dr. Siggy were also familiar and well-drawn, and it was easy to imagine them pushing carts through Trader Joe’s on Queen Anne.

Although the specifics of some locations in the city were treated with creative license, the essence of the neighborhoods is well portrayed. And when the action of the book moves to suburban Renton, the characters stand in even starker contrast to the landscape. I won’t spoil the story, but the shift in setting adds a whole new, very important, dimension to the book—a peek at what all us crazy city folk look like mere miles beyond our border.

The book is a very wild ride and I’d recommend it for those occasions when you are looking for a (legal) way to indulge in revenge.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

hotel at the corner of bitter and sweet - jamie fordJamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet showcases a very different but equally real Seattle. Set primarily in the International District during World War II, the book tells the story of Chinese-American Henry and Japanese-American Keiko and a love that could not be.

The layered complexities of racial relations that Ford presents rival Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer, though this is a very different book. The detailed scenes revealed an aspect of Seattle history I’ve managed to mostly ignore until now. I’ve known about the Japanese internment for a long time, but only in an abstract way. Ford made the events and their impact real for me, even if the love story was a bit pat.

I have always been interested in World War II, but I usually read about the Holocaust and the European campaign. This book helped me put names and faces with experiences—wondering about the Moriguchi family (owners of Uwajimaya, which was in Tacoma until after the war) and what their life must have been like during the war.

I came away from this book with a deeper appreciation of Pioneer Square where I work and the International District where I sometimes shop. In any city, we are surrounded by more strangers than friends and books can help us understand a place even if we can never meet all of its characters. This is a great book to pick up if you want to find out more about events that rocked Seattle during an era that many people are still not talking about. It will make your next visit to the Wing Luke Museum (or even through the bus tunnel) all the richer.

My Writing

Geography was very important to me in writing my first book, Polska, 1994, as I tried to understand the people of Poland. My characters are shaped by their location in the smaller city of Toruń just as Dora would have been a very different book if it was set in Ballard rather than Capitol Hill, and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet needed to be set in the International District.

Perhaps that’s why my next book (a work in progress) feels unmoored at the moment—it currently has no setting and is instead entirely about the characters in relation to each other. I like the amorphous nature this gives the characters, but it is also far outside my comfort zone for them to not have a place that shapes them and which they play against.

I am grateful to both Lidia Yuknavitch and Jamie Ford for reminding me that good stories happen at home, too, and that by devouring local books, I might get that extra layer of enjoyment of learning about my city. Do you read locally? What books would you recommend about your city?

If this review made you want to read either book, pick up a copy of Dora: A Headcase or Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.