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How The Immigrant’s Refrigerator by Elena Georgiou Could Save the World

February 17, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I had the privilege on Thursday night of moderating a discussion between three authors I deeply respect: Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Rebecca Brown, and Elena Georgiou. On the stage at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, I asked Elena about her recent collection of stories, The Immigrant’s Refrigerator, specifically about how she’d managed to fully explore the humanity of every character in the book. Turns out I lucked into something because she said that was the kernel of what made her write the book, that long ago in her London-centric life the experience she’d had of reading The Song of Solomon and getting so inside the life of an African American family in the faraway U.S. had shown her the power of words to inhabit the experience of another. We need that right now.

Here’s why you need to go read The Immigrant’s Refrigerator and then buy a copy for a friend who might not buy one for themselves.

Reading Builds Empathy

You’re a reader. You’ve probably seen the studies that say reading literary fiction builds empathy. If you’re like me, you read a summary of the study, felt good about yourself and went on your reading way. Trouble is that I didn’t really change what I read as a result of those studies. I just kept empathizing more and more with the people I’d already been reading about.

Reading=good. Now let’s take it one step further.

Exposing Ourselves to the Other

I’m proud of the fact that I usually read stories about people who live far away from me. What I’m too often missing in my reading list, though, is stories about people whose life experience is not that of a middle to upper class intellectual-type. I read about countries I’ve visited or lived in that I miss or countries that remind me of them. Occasionally I lament that I don’t read enough about Africa, but I haven’t mended my reading ways.

The Immigrant’s Refrigerator pushed me into reading about all kinds of lives I’d never considered exploring. And I loved every page of it. I picked up the book because I wanted to be prepared for the event at Elliott Bay. What I was not prepared for was entering—on the first page—the life of a man who makes soup for children who are riding atop trains to cross into the U.S. from Mexico and to those who’ve returned. “Gazpacho” is emblematic of the rest of the book in that it’s compact, revolves around food, and drops the reader deep inside the experience of another.

Georgiou does this again and again in the book. From the life of a Northern Irish rent boy in New York City to a Somali refugee who’s terrorized by an intended act of kindness by an employer, to a lonely baker who finds connection and companionship with a refugee from Niger, Georgiou fully realizes the widest range of experiences I think I’ve seen together in one book. But you almost don’t realize how disparate the events that got these characters to their moment on the page are, because rather than playing to any of the expectations we’ve already set about what the other is, the stories in The Immigrant’s Refrigerator focus so deeply on the characters’ human commonalities. This makes it easy to empathize with all of them and the result is as beautiful as the writing.

As easy and pleasurable as The Immigrant’s Refrigerator is to read, it’s not a facile book filled with happy glossy images of what people could be. Some of the stories I ended up loving most were the ones I initially resisted because the characters were too tetchy or far from my own experience (or too close to experiences I’ve tried to leave behind). One of these was “Pork is Love” where a rural Vermonter challenges his Nigerian pastor to preach a sermon about pork fat. Throw those three elements in a story and you could feel very much like you’re in a blender, but with Georgiou’s approach of reaching first for what is human, she finds unexpected light and darkness in both characters and ways of weaving them together that surprised, delighted, and challenged me.

Step Three: Changing the World

Easy peasy, right? Of course not. But if you need a refresh on looking beyond your bubble (and I think we all do right now) take a few hours to sit with The Immigrant’s Refrigerator and remember the things that could bring us together. It’s the only act that can truly put us back on the right path. The challenge I’ve set for myself right now is to look inside of people whose views I disagree vehemently with and try to understand what they most want. Usually it’s things like a better life for themselves and their family, freedom from fear, a genuine moment of feeling seen. I can relate to all of those, and we can build from that.

Acknowledging the humanity of the people around and across from us is a gift we can give them, and it’s a gift we can give to ourselves. It’s the smallest and biggest step toward rebuilding our society and it’s time we take it.

I’m going to go read The Song of Solomon now, you go pick up your copy of The Immigrant’s Refrigerator from Powell’s Books and then recommend this book at your next book club. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission. Bonus points if we change the world along the way.

Why Poetry? For Matthew Zapruder, for Me

February 10, 2018 by Isla McKetta, MFA 1 Comment

I’ve been going on and on for about six years about how I don’t know anything about poetry. This repeated admission has been a laying bare of my insecurities and a spur to jump into this abyss I feared so much but could not resist. And in truth, I’ve been writing poetry now, consistently and improvedly, for over three years, but I still hunger to know more and to work through this feeling that there is something I am missing.

So when I first heard Matthew Zapruder mention his (then forthcoming) book, Why Poetry? at a lecture, I knew I had to have it. Now that I’ve consumed the book, though I’m sure I’ll return to it again and again, I have a better understanding of what I was afraid of about reading poetry, the things I’m getting wrong about writing poetry, and the reasons I can’t stay away.

A Little Machine for Producing Discovery

“[I]n the course of writing, the poet eventually makes something, a little machine, one that for the reader produces discoveries, connections, glimmers of expression.” – Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry?

How irresistible is that quote for anyone who enjoys tinkering of any kind? Despite all my tinkering with words, I continue to wonder, “What is a poem, anyway?” I was once told (somewhat scarringly) that something I’d written wasn’t a poem but simply a list of words strung together. Reading Zapruder, I had to admit those words I’d hated to hear might have been right. Why Poetry? examines the core of what transforms words into poetry from so many angles that it’s impossible to summarize, but unlike the prescriptive poetry lessons so many of us were subjected to in high school English classes, Zapruder’s approach is so curiosity-based and full of love for the form that Why Poetry? is a delight to read.

Movement of Thought

What really flipped a switch for me in Why Poetry? was the idea that poetry is a movement of thought which allows the reader and writer to produce and explore new associations and ideas. It’s not something I’d really noticed about the poetry I’ve been reading all these years and, yet, as I’ve been reading poetry since finishing Zapruder’s book, it seems key.

Though I’ve accidentally followed a train of thought in the way Zapruder describes in a few poems, honestly the ones that have felt most successful, I’m excited to explore this concept more. I’m not wholly convinced that without this factor, a poem isn’t just words strung together, but I can’t wait to see what feels right in my writing.

Being Myriad

“A poem does not exist in order to get a single message across, or to privilege one idea above all others.” – Matthew Zapuder

Maybe one of the most freeing things about reading Why Poetry? was the idea that in a poem I could be conflicted, complicated, myriad. This is one of the things I struggle with most in everyday conversation—the inability to communicate the layers of truth in an idea and the places where I know I contradict myself and what that all means. The idea that I could inhabit and explore all of these layers at once is incredibly freeing. It’s like looking into my closet and realizing that there isn’t one character I have to be that day, that instead I can choose any combination of things that I love and just be in that outfit, that moment.

Seeing Connections Others Do Not

“The ear of the poet is not merely attuned to sonic music. It is attuned to the music of ideas in words, the latent resonances, the ones always waiting in etymology, the pasts of words, our individual pasts, and our collective memory.” – Matthew Zapruder

Though I come from a long line of successful punsters, nothing has made me more attuned to language than having a young child who’s learning to communicate with words. Just recently, he was telling my husband that his Batman-obsessed friends were all playing with the Batmowheel. A few years ago I would have simply thought that was cute, but now that I’ve been paying closer attention to words, I see the logic and beauty of the associations he’s making and I’m paying closer attention to my own. I used to be a lot better about this kind of seeing, but I steered away from it when I sensed the power it had to manipulate understanding. Which brings us to…

“Coming Back to Language, to Naming”

“The energy of poetry comes primarily from the reanimation and reactivation of the language that we recognize and know.” – Matthew Zapruder

When I first really started getting serious about poetry, I began by reading it in French and Spanish. I did it because I was scared of many of the things Zapruder identifies are wrong with the way we teach poetry (especially the insistence on symbolism). What I also achieved, though I was not aware of it at the time, was the defamiliarization of language. In Verlaine I heard mostly the sound of the words. In Lorca and Neruda I found words that I understood with my childish Spanish, which sometimes involved seeing most clearly the false cognates. I did not learn much about the strict structure of poetic forms in either language, but I was learning to look at words and to hear them.

“To live morally, to avoid self-delusion and even monstrosity, we have to think about what we are saying, and to avoid euphemism and cliché.” – Matthew Zapruder

Reading Zapruder, I was also reminded of that fear I’d encountered before of the power language has to obfuscate true meaning. I’m thinking of how difficult it becomes to fight against a wrong idea once a strong (but wrong) label like “Patriot Act” or “Pro Life” is applied. In essence, because of my own fear of the power of language, I’d stepped away and let others, who don’t have the same principles, make what they wanted of language and life. Zapruder (and poetry) are of course not arguing for the misconstruing of words, instead the idea is to bring us back to real meaning or even to understand the evolution of language. I can get behind that.

Slowing

“Reading poetry has the salutary effect on me of forcing me to read, and think, at a different pace than the rest of my life demands.” – Matthew Zapruder

I am as guilty as everyone of letting myself get wrapped up on a life full of work and social media, entertainment, and family. Unfortunately, in that order. And I’ve always been guilty of the sin of skimming, especially when reading poetry. I loved this emphasis on slowing and inhabiting, and reading Zapruder’s words here reminded me of the simple relief of focusing on the passage of a single breath. I’m looking forward to mending my ways a little and making more space in moments for words.

Shedding Airs

Something else I’m all too guilty of is applying a poetic mood to my work. A false one. Zapruder says he often sees his students “presenting their poetic qualifications” by being “deliberately obscure and esoteric, because it is a shortcut to being mysterious.” At least I’m not alone? I guess my poetry newbie insecurities show rather obviously in these moments. Which is okay. As long as I learn when this particular way of using language feels authentic to me and when to edit it the fuck out.

Dreams, Strangeness and Being Known

“[T]he true difficulty—and reward—of poetry is in reading what is actually on the page carefully, and allowing one’s imagination to adjust to the strangeness of what is there.” – Matthew Zapruder

The poetic airs, too, have been a shortcut to inhabiting my own strangeness. Not that I’m the enigma I sometimes believe myself to be, but that by frosting my ideas, I can simultaneously be “interesting” and not reveal my true self at all. One of my deepest struggles is this push/pull of being known, and although I’m aware of the hollowness of the game—as long as I don’t share the unvarnished me, I cannot be rejected, but I also cannot be loved for who I truly am—I don’t always stop myself from hiding. Despite how lonely it makes me feel.

“George Steiner defines every speech act between two people as a kind of translation, a negotiation between what he calls ‘the external vulgate and the private mass of language.'” – Matthew Zapruder

“The poem also reminds us of the dual nature of language, how each word means something particular to a person, and how we are also somehow not locked into those personal associations.” – Matthew Zapruder

Does this mean I should blarp all of me, unedited, onto a page and call it poetry? No, and there are some early submittals I’d rescind right now if I could. But it does mean that I can (and must, really) explore honestly my experience of being human. Sometimes that will be messy, sometimes clear. Sometimes it will be both. But I have to stop fighting it because it might be the best chance I have to become the fullest version of me. And I get to do it in the private dialect that until now I never had any reason to believe anyone but my husband would ever understand.

“What I thought was my principled resistance to meaninglessness was really a fear of, and attraction to, a new life.” – Matthew Zapruder

Am I a Poet?

“[T]hat choice to be ready to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility, is when the writer becomes a poet.” – Matthew Zapruder

Yes. I am a poet. Sometimes. Zapruder helped me see that as much as I’ve been fighting this thing, it really is something I cannot not do. I’m not sure I’d pass that final litmus test above just yet, but I’m willing to consider it as I tinker. And there was one last little tidbit in Why Poetry? that made me feel like I was on the right track:

“Poetry has always existed and always will exist, because there will always be the need to say that which cannot be said.” – Ralph Angel

“Saying that which cannot be said” are the words from an artist statement I wrote long ago that still feel truest to me. In both senses of the word.

To discover your own path with poetry, pick up a copy of Why Poetry? from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Revisiting My Roots with Energy by Elisabeth Sharp McKetta: On Finding My Center

December 9, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Not many people have the fortune to read a biography of their grandfather. I feel especially privileged to have just finished reading Energy: The Life of John J. McKetta Jr. while my beloved grandfather, a man I call Djiedo, is still alive at 102. Written by my cousin, Elisabeth Sharp McKetta, this loving portrait not only brought me closer to my roots, but in doing so helped me find comfort in a time gone awry. It is impossible to impartially review this book, but I do want to share some of the lessons I learned while reading it, because, while some are very personal, I think they can help more than just me.

Humans Are the Best of What We Have

One of the lessons drilled into me as a child by my father who learned it from Djiedo was how a person’s worth was not tied to what they did for a living. This is something that’s been top of mind lately as the Republican Party seeks to reward donors and reinforce the growing divide between rich and poor in the US. And it wasn’t until I read “wealth can never be a measure of worth” in Dan Rather’s poignant Facebook note that I could pinpoint exactly what my discomfort with recent events was. I assumed we all thought that wealth wasn’t a measure of worth. Naive, perhaps, but also a worldview that forms who I am.

The value of humans rather than wealth seems natural for a man who rose from coal miner to university chancellor and presidential advisor, but it’s one that’s all too easily forgotten. It’s one we mask by talking about “a man being the sum of his actions and not his inheritance,” but judging by how much of Djiedo’s admittedly fantastic rise was influenced not just by his drive but by the support of others, human connections are the only real wealth in the world.

Material Wealth is Impermanent

Something I’ve feared desperately since I got laid off last year and Trump was elected is how I would take care of my family in an economic downturn, or worse, a war. Reading Energy, I realized that worry itself was a luxury. When the Great Depression hit the McKetta family, they were poor enough to not have much to lose. It was the Smith family, my grandmother and her parents, whose fortunes fell because they did. I have a home, bank accounts and a cushy corporate job, but this book reminded me that it’s my loved ones who matter. Tragedies can happen there, too, and did to my Djiedo, but I can’t live in fear of those, either, because life goes on and we carry our people with us.

Connections Can Last a Lifetime—Or More

Speaking of people I love, this book reminded me that family is what you make it. I did know that, but in the past three years of pregnancy, birth and raising an infant without any close family nearby, I’ve let myself get pretty isolated. What a wonderful feeling this week to pair the addressing of my Christmas cards with reading in Energy about how Djiedo kept in touch with so many people who touched his life for so long.

That actually brings up a funny story. Dr. Eugene P. Schoch started the Chemical Engineering department at the University of Texas that’s now named for Djiedo, and when Dr. Schoch recruited Djiedo, he, Baba and my infant father lived in a building behind Dr. Schoch’s house. On my Christmas card list is a Stephanie Schoch—the great-granddaughter of Eugene. I met Stephanie two years ago when I used AirBNB to book the building behind her house so that my husband, my infant son, and I could attend Djiedo’s 100th birthday party. Point being that the world is small and we can let it feel large and unmanageable or lonely but it doesn’t have to be. Those connections are there if we preserve them—as Djiedo has and as I’m relearning to.

Honestly Learning from Anyone You Can

Some of the people Djiedo kept in touch with were his mentors. One of the most beautiful things Elisabeth did in Energy, and I’m sure this was blessed by Djiedo’s stellar recall and generous willingness to share attribution, was to trace some of the most important and memorable parts of Djiedo’s character to his mentors.

This is an excellent reminder that not only are our lives touched every day by people we can learn from, but we touch lives too. In a time when so many “mentors” and men in power are being called out for sexual harassment, abuse, and assault, perhaps one of the most important things we can all do is to look at our own behavior and see where we have failed those who looked up to us and how we can not fail next time. There’s an anecdote in Energy about Djiedo being confronted with his own sexism. While I think he came by his beliefs honestly (from his culture, his family, his time), what is very much to his credit is how open he was to learning a new way to be. I hope I have the courage to learn as well from my own mistakes.

The Advantages of Staying Busy

Busyness is what makes Djiedo the man he is. On days when you’re not prepared for this energy, you might call it frenetic, but it’s also a key to his success and to who he is. Instead of going off to college to find himself like so many of us do, Djiedo launched a personal campaign to get himself admitted to a university and then worked three jobs to ensure he had food and shelter while he obtained that degree. As a professor he was an editor (something I did not know), a lecturer, a board member, and also a presidential advisor. This is a pace I believe he sustains even now. Though at 102 he sleeps many more hours than he used to, I know from personal experience that there is not a minute wasted in his day as he keeps up with old acquaintances and feeds his busy brain.

As an inheritor of this type of energy, it certainly feels frenetic in my chest, especially as I woke at 4am all week to read about Djiedo during hours I usually describe as “McKetta early” because so many of Djiedo’s descendants greet the dawn way before the sun is ready to get up. But I know this energy is also what allows me to find time in the week to have a corporate career while spending time with my son and also writing books.

What’s painful to admit is that I’ve let my own busy life become an excuse for avoiding visiting Djiedo. I wondered often while reading Energy how the type of career that allows one to become a presidential advisor affects the family back home. Although Djiedo lived the ideal male role of his time, I’m not sure the time away from family is something I want for myself and I see that my choices aren’t reflecting my values. I’m afraid of losing him the way we lost my grandmother, Baba, but we will lose him eventually and staying away only squanders an opportunity.

Baba, the Heart of it All

The hardest part of this book for me to read was the section about Baba’s decline and death. Not because she wasn’t ready to die, she had been for a long time, but because she was the heart of us all. I witnessed Baba’s moderating effect on Djiedo that Elisabeth describes in Energy and I know that from my love of reading to the deep patience and quiet I am capable of, a good share of who I am comes from her as well. Being in Baba’s very presence was a grounding, healing experience for us all, and while she was more than ready to go, I think we all will miss her always. I’m grateful to Elisabeth for the ways she wove Baba’s story in with Djiedo’s because I think I, and my son, have lessons to learn from incorporating both types of energy into our lives.

We Are the Legends We Leave Behind

As I was reading this book, my son slept down the hall, and I kept thinking what a privilege it is that he’ll have a book about his great-grandfather to pore over when he’s ready. He’s even in one of the pictures. Though the audience for Energy might be limited to the people whose lives John J. McKetta has touched, that touch is profound and the audience engaged.

If you are a parent or a grandparent, please write your stories down. Not in ones and zeroes but on paper where a curious child or grandchild can find them later and begin to understand where they come from and how that has made them. This is not the first book I’ve read about Djiedo—two decades ago he gave our family individual copies of an autobiography entitled My First 80 Years—but Energy gave me a rounder portrait of my family in a time I most needed it and I will read it again.

Although I remember some of the legends differently, so goes family lore. I am grateful to have a canonical reference for my son that’s more trustworthy than my faulty memory. And I’ve annotated my copy with extra details where I appear so that he can come to know me better someday.

One of my favorite movies has always been Big Fish, especially the ending when all of the characters from the father’s mythic past converge to bid him farewell. It’s a gorgeous celebration of a full life well lived and also a reminder that the way we choose to remember our history makes us who we are now. I hope we have a long time before Djiedo’s final celebration (and not just because I need to book a plane ticket), but if his 95th birthday party (attended by 650 people) and his 100th (rich with family in an event kept intentionally small) are any indication, it will be sprawling people whose lives Djiedo has touched. I am lucky to be among them.

To read this portrait of a man I love very much, pick up a copy of Energy: The Life of John J. McKetta, Jr. from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Breaking Free from a Writing Rut with Daughters of the Air by Anca Szilágyi

November 25, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

A good book opens you—to worlds you would never know, to the experience of being human, to yourself. Daughters of the Air by Anca Szilágyi did just that. This story that touches Argentina’s Dirty War, the gritty days of Brooklyn, and what it’s like to be alone in the world before your time shows, through one family’s experience, how tragedy and political upheaval can upend lives and alter forever the future we once thought we had.

Writing About Argentina’s Dirty War

Daughters of the Air is not the same kind of blow-by-blow story of Argentina’s Dirty war that Liliana Heker’s The End of the Story is. Though Szilágyi gives us glimpses inside the politics and even the arrests, the story is for the most part one or two steps removed from that main action, and I was glad for the freedom to explore that this separation allowed Szilágyi. Instead of detailed accounts of rallies and resistance, we encounter the fear that surrounds a family and how that affects them for years to come. Rather than a peek inside the torture chambers, we see the moment of flight and what comes next for the exiles. Daughters of the Air is stronger for this separation which also allows Szilágyi’s story to migrate to Brooklyn.

A Teenaged Girl Alone in 1980’s Brooklyn

Basically abandoned at a boarding school in Connecticut after her father disappears from his Argentine university and her mother shuts down emotionally, Pluta takes flight one evening by jumping into a car with a strange young man and heading off to Brooklyn. If the previous sentence reminds you enough of your hot-headed experiences as a young person to bring up some terror-related bile, you’ll know how I entered this book. I will not tell you what happens next, but I will say that Szilágyi pulls no punches with Pluta’s experience as a teen on the streets of a pre-hipster Brooklyn.

What I respect greatly about this narrative, though, is that while Pluta is victimized, it’s never quite what I feared—Pluta is no Law & Order: SVU-style victim who gets smacked down by life and exists only as the object of rescue. Instead, she makes active choices that have actual consequences. As a mother and a former wild teen, this story line was heart-rending to read but I had to admire the strength of the character inhabiting the decisions she made. No matter what happened the page before, Pluta was always trying to make the best choice she could to make a life for herself in a world where all of those who should have been protecting her were gone.

I found myself wanting to shake Pluta’s mother from her stupor. A reaction whose violence I can only credit to the tension Szilágyi builds in this book. Equally so, I wanted to wrap Pluta in blankets and save her from herself and the world, but I don’t think this steely character would have allowed it. She has her own path to walk and she will not stop until she’s reached the end on her own terms.

Enter Magical Realism

And then something completely unexpected happens. I won’t detail it here (because I think knowing in advance would spoil something for you), but I will say that the element of magical realism surprised me and I wish I understood it as more than a metaphor. Part of this is my own expectation as a North American reader because I had a similar reaction when Dylan in Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude began flying (literally) around Gowanus.

I think Szilágyi was experimenting here and trying to stretch me as a reader, which I appreciate, but I wasn’t fully on board. Perhaps I read too quickly to fully grasp the nuance of this element, but I was left wanting the implications of this element to be explored a bit more than it was.

Stasis in Perfection Lies

I wasn’t sure after finishing Daughters of the Air that I liked the feeling of reading the book, so for my very next read I pulled Emily Ruskovich’s Idaho off the shelf. From the first sentence this story of the world after a mother has killed her daughter is textbook perfect. The structure is well-architected, the prose cleanly constructed and Ruskovich doesn’t shy away from fully imagining and confronting a difficult topic. And yet Idaho completely failed to move me as a mother and as a writer.

Putting these two books side by side made me realize I want to read a book that pushes me so far beyond my own experience as a human and a writer that I’m already off the cliff and halfway to a crushing death before I realize what’s happening. Daughters of the Air took me there. Idaho did not.

Daughters of the Air is not a perfect book, but that’s where its beauty lies. Instead of telling a pat story, Szilágyi reaches into her treasure trove of fiction-telling tools and weaves a story different than any I’d ever read before. The narrative surprised me, the gravitas shocked me, and the fantastical elements challenged me—all of which made for a worthwhile read and will make me a better writer. Daughters of the Air showed me that I’ve become much too safe with my own writing and that I must push myself into new depths and new experiences to create work that is meaningful to me. I must shove off the idea of perfection and instead begin, again, to explore.

If you want to read a book that will surprise and challenge you, pick up a copy of Daughters of the Air from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Dreaming of The Brick House by Micheline Aharonian Marcom

October 28, 2017 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Years ago, when I was still waiting for someone to tell me what it meant to be a writer, I read a panel discussion in Poets & Writers with a group of agents who said you only get one dream per book because dreams are too easy a way to spell out what a character is feeling. The Brick House by Micheline Aharonian Marcom showed me what was really too easy was that quote. By dedicating an entire book to that most revealing condition, she’s shown how complex our dreams, and our lives, really are. My mentor in grad school, I’ve learned a lot from Micheline about how to find my own way as a writer and reading this book showed me not only how far I’ve come but how much farther, still, I can go.

The Brick House, Real and Imagined

There is a magical place I go to fill up, to find myself when I’ve strayed too far from who I want to be. It is the place I was conceived and the place I learned to accept and celebrate myself as a writer. This place sometimes calls me so hard I consider dropping everything and rushing there to teach (or just to be). Now Micheline has written a book set in this place, and when I touched the book, when I read it all late the night it came in the mail, I was nearly home again. Though The Brick House is strange and unsettling, this beautiful book helped return me to me.

The brick house I know is at the end of a lane on officer’s row. A strange building known for the visions and nightmares it imparts to women. A house I once missed exploring because I did not have the courage to enter the front door, let alone climb aside the staircase to pass the barrier that hides what is in the attic. The house was so renowned for its haunted nights, that my school eventually stopped housing women there altogether. But not before Micheline got to sleep there.

The Brick House Marcom imagines is an isolated place beside the sea where those in need come for one night to dream the portentous dreams they need to change their lives. Not a well-known or fancy retreat center, but rather the kind of place that strangers seek you out in your worst moments to whisper an invitation. We meet first the house and then a traveler who was invited here to dream.

As in Marcom’s other two more recent books, this traveler, the mysterious caretaker and the place itself are not named. This anonymity opens the book to a reader’s own willingness to add the final details that make the book our own. For me, the eponymous brick house could not be separated from the one in my memory, but I enjoy imagining the myriad brick houses other readers will bring to this book. I wonder now if the not-naming comes from Marcom’s multicultural background, if it was a realization that once an author adds a name like Peter or Issa to a character, a reader layers on assumptions. Instead, Marcom pulls back and allows us to enter and assign the cues that pull us deeper into the book than any prescribed identifiers could.

The traveler finds the brick house unnerving, from the jumble of room numbers to the art on the walls everything makes him feel “as if he might lose himself inside of this building, as if he will not return or resume after he crosses the threshold to the room because the man that he is (that he thinks he is) might come apart or will not hold inside its walls”.

Pushing My Writing, Still

Writing into the Heat

One of the things Micheline taught me that I always return to in times of fitfulness and bad writing is to write into the heat. That means both to write into what feels worthy at the moment but also to continue exploring your long-term obsessions. I’m good at remembering to write about what’s burning at the moment, but I’ve been neglecting my long-term obsessions. The Brick House reminded me that the magic of the words we put together on the page is that personal brew of ideas and triggers and explorations that are unique to each of us. The words are full of life if we write into our excitements (negative and positive) and the words build into an opus if we follow our obsessions.

Marcom’s obsessions include labyrinths and love affairs, houses invaded and the toxicity of capitalism. By reading how her obsessions have evolved and endured in this new work, I saw that the tiny chunks of projects I’ve been breaking off for myself are selling short the greater ideas I’m grappling with. Marcom helped me see that my explorations of what it means to see oneself as and be seen as a woman are related to my “mommy poetry” which is related to my struggle with algorithms as actors in shaping who we are, how we are seen, and how we see others. In the days since reading this book, I’ve already had one breakthrough in my writing (and, more importantly, my thinking) that could not have happened without bringing all of myself to the page at once.

Bending Genre

Speaking of bringing all of yourself to the page, The Brick House is the first work in which I’ve ever seen Marcom explore genre and it’s wonderful to behold. One of the things I liked most about our grad program was the agnostic approach to genre, but there were not many advisors who wrote in genres themselves. Perhaps it’s because of the freeing aspect of writing about dreams, but The Brick House contains some exquisite examples of horror, sci-fi, folklore, and erotica.

Rethinking the Cadence of Language

One of the tricks I’ve cribbed from Marcom along the way is the pushing together of words that we generally see separated. It’s something she explores still in The Brick House, pairing it with a repetition that turns the words into music with lines like:

“Paying notpaying paying the bills and collectors and more bills”

The touch here is subtle enough not to distract from our understanding of the sentence, but the effect of removing the commas, smashing the words together, and repeating “paying” with only slight alteration throws us deep into the gnawing rhythm of everyday life that this character is either trying to escape from or drown himself in.

My Dreams

“The strangest dream was the one you dreamed before you arrived: of lonely, unnatural men.”

I dreamed last night that a friend won a major literary award. While I got to spend time with her before the event, I spent the duration of her reading worrying that I should not have brought my toddler. This quotidian dream is not worthy of the brick house. But it is relatively revealing about my current fears as I prepare for the privilege of flying down to San Francisco for the release of The Brick House, leaving my family at home for a night to embrace the writer life. Despite the incredible generosity and support of my husband, this time to be just me feels like an emotional extravagance. Although I’m thinking more and more a necessary one, because life is short and it’s very easy to get caught up in “paying notpaying paying the bills” and forget the person I could be.

With two books under my belt since I first visited the isolated peninsula where I began and began again, I do know now what it means to be a writer, but sometimes it helps to have a reminder. The Brick House was that reminder for me, in more than one way, and now that I know who built that house, I’ll return to it again and again.

To dream your own most important dreams, pick up a copy of The Brick House from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.