I wanted to write this review in December, but I was busy stealing moments to make writing from the inspiration I found in Alchemy of the Word.
I wanted to write this review over the Christmas holiday, but I was practicing balance.
I wanted to write this review on New Year’s and fill it with links to all the posts I’ve previously written about inspiration, but I had just found out that my grandmother died.
So here I am beginning the new year as I mean to end it, practicing balance, experiencing the fullness of life, and giving myself a little grace for the fact that I am trying my best. (If you need to give yourself a little grace, let Icess guide you).
Practice, Practice, Practice
I used the word “practice” very deliberately above, because I am not good at balance but it is a skill I’m trying to polish, just as writing is a skill that requires practice. The writers whose essays make up Alchemy of the Word are all very practiced writers and, as members of the faculty of Goddard College (my alma mater), are also tasked with helping new writers get into the habit (practice) of writing. The essays in this collection come from the speeches our teachers use to inspire us at residencies and to (lovingly) warn us about the writing life to come at commencements. They are about subjects as myriad as craft elements, literary activism, and failure. This last one is especially important (and frequent) because failure looms when you don’t practice. More so, failure plagues when you “fail” to see the success that is simply continuing to practice.
As I read this book, I found myself looking for essays I might have originally heard delivered aloud but ultimately found that didn’t matter. The know-how of practicing is something I’ve already absorbed. Instead each of the essays in Alchemy of the Word served as a much-needed reminder to practice.
Balance is Tricky, Balance is Necessary
As a working writer/mom/wife, the breadth of life in these essays reminded me that writing is part of my balance, not something I can add on after. Deborah Brevoort contextualized the anti-intellectualism that’s plaguing our politics (and chinking away at my soul), Elena Georgiou encouraged me to search for my own personhood and to fill myself, Keenan Norris reminded me that I actually love the humility that comes with writing, and Micheline Aharonian Marcom exhorted me (again) to “Do [my] work.”
But to do my work (well), first I must fill up again. And I must develop a plan to keep myself filled during all the things that are to come. Here’s the advice from Alchemy of the Word that I’ll be carrying close to my heart as I navigate finding my balance:
“As a writer, I think of my body as a well that is mostly filled through reading.” – Elena Georgiou
“Remember to be absent, Writer. Be in the habit of being absent more often.” – Kyle Bass
Life Happens. And Then You Write about It
The sympathy that might have jumped into your heart when you read “my grandmother died” is not really earned. I hadn’t spoken to my grandmother since 2012 when she called on my birthday to yell at me for not inviting her to my wedding. I didn’t invite her to my (tiny) wedding because I didn’t like her. I didn’t like her because she’d never taken the time to get to know me. Are there things to mourn in my history with my grandmother, yes, but they are probably not what you expected at the outset.
“Inherent in the creative process is a perpetual tension between love and loathing that gives art its life.” – Aimee Liu
I wish that my grandmother’s tension between love and loathing of the female line she created had tipped more toward love, but the tension is something that gives life to my own work. In Alchemy of the Word, I was reminded to write deeply:
“You have to go to the scariest places, the absence, where nothing has been said so there is no protection at all.” – Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
“It is our duty as artists to enter into those places that are kept most secret in ourselves, and bring them to light not so much that we may be healed, but so that others might.” – Paul Selig
Today is the first time I’m explicitly writing about my relationship with my
grandmother, so I don’t pretend my thoughts are profound. I do hope that at the very least I can offer someone the comfort of solidarity in the complexities that are family relationships.
For myself, I’m taking solace in the birthday call I received from my other grandmother (my Baba) in 2011—a call I took on the beach at Port Townsend— the very same beach I so often walked while at Goddard. It was the last time I talked with Baba and I was sad that day in knowing that was probably true. But I am filled with joy at the thought that Baba saw me and loved me enough for two grandmothers.
How I Plan to Move Forward
This year I will write. I will try new things and fail. I will try new things and succeed. I will practice. I will read and take time to be absent. I will be kind to myself. Most of all I will play, because these two quotes resonated with me more than any of the others in Alchemy of the Word and helped me find the joy and purpose in this writing life:
“Being a writer is to be a student without end, and it is to be at play without end. The two are tied, study and play. Both commit us to risk and remediation, that is to learning, always to learning.” – Keenan Norris
“The artists I know have the capacity for wonder and surprise coursing through their veins. And they are all riotously free—whether they have, the way my mentor had, summers off or not.” – Michael Klein
I’m off to play now—to read, to soak in a tub, to watch my son create Playmobil orchestras, to joke around with my husband and to think. All of this is practice. All of it is life. And I am lucky.
To freedom.
To reinvigorate your writing practice pick up a copy of Alchemy of the Word from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.
The first thing I noticed about how my reading was changing was that I suddenly wanted to throw A Feast in the Garden by George (Gyorgy) Konrád against the wall. I’ve had this reaction before when 
I felt a little dumb when Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories arrived and I realized it was not by Yōko Ogawa (whose dark short stories in Revenge I adored) but instead by Kōno Taeko, a completely different female Japanese author who is also not afraid of taking readers to dark places. But Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories was fantastic, so much so that I wish I could give proper credit to whomever recommended it to me. 
I’m not going to presume that Alex Pheby’s Playthings is a tightly scripted allegory of our present day (partially because it was originally published in 2015 and also because it’s actually about one of the most famous cases of paranoid schizophrenia in history), but let’s pretend for a moment it is. At first I was not sure that I could delve deeply into Schreber’s all-consuming self-centeredness (for example, he so completely can’t deal with the fact that his wife has a stroke that the action in that scene then has to completely center around him), but I went with it long enough to get immersed in this superb example of what it feels like to be gaslit by everyone around you. Pheby does a wonderful job of draining the life (at least from Schreber’s point of view) from all the characters around the protagonist and of portraying this man’s madness. I guess that’s the secret sauce of gaslighting, isn’t it? We all have some secret weakness that can be turned against us and drive us to madness. The fact that Schreber is in fact mad makes it just that much easier.
I’ll admit that when my husband gave Nobody Told Me by Hollie McNish for Mother’s Day “because it was on your to-read list” I had absolutely no memory of having ever heard of this book. While people did tell me I’d experience “pregnancy brain,” no one told me (that I remember anyway) my ability to retain information would be permanently altered (or at least that’s my experience so far). 
How strange and wonderful it felt to find Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy in a newsletter for a local bookstore because Angela Garbes is a local author and though our worlds have not overlapped, I feel like our experiences have. There was not as much revolutionary science as I hoped in this book (partially because I did get to read Penny Simkin and some others who are trying to give pregnant women actual information while I was pregnant), but I still loved the book and I learned a lot of things. Most importantly I learned to trust my own experience.
Though it was Garbes who wrote about how parents “lean into the utter obliteration of their previous selves,” it’s Elisa Albert who dives all the way into exploring that experience in her novel, After Birth. The thing I love most about this book (among many) is how deeply angry new mother Ari is. It’s something I’ve seen lambasted in reviews, which I understand because it’s directly in opposition to the sweet, loving acceptance we all want to think our mothers immediately felt when we were born, but it’s fucking real. Especially in a world where too many of us are too alone in this event that changes our lives completely.
Every night my son gets to choose a bedtime book from his vast library—a library I’ve very carefully built to represent a world larger than he’s been exposed to so far. He’s a beautiful, bright, curious little white boy who spends a significant amount of his time in a class that’s 95% other white boys and I want him to know there’s more to the world. I can’t change the makeup of his class, but I can bring a wide variety of colors and cultures into our home and introduce him to some awesome female figures along the way. And I thought I was doing a pretty good job, but the other night he confused Love Is for Come on Rain (the only two stories on his shelves that star African American girls) and I realized I might have fallen into the trap of tokenism. 
I looked at the gender and race of main characters and also the gender and race of each book’s author and illustrator. It wasn’t an exact science—I found myself making some assumptions about both race and gender (some of which I was later able to clarify) and the counts are a little iffy (you try wresting a little boy’s books from his grasp) but the patterns are clear and I’m so glad I went through this exercise, because I learned a lot. 
My favorite thing about this table is the “Many” category which I had to scrawl into a margin because of three books: Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess (where the main character shifts race and appearance throughout the book), Love by Matt de la Peña and Loren Long (where technically “love” could be the main character but the rest of the book is so representative of so many lived experiences, it deserves massive credit) and Peace Begins with You by Katherine Scholes that follows a similar pattern. 
I was surprised to discover just how many books we read that feature non-human characters. Unfortunately, the default gender for animal and vehicle characters seems to be male. Some of this is due to the English reversion to “he” as a generic pronoun (read: patriarchy) but some of it is just laziness.
So the fact that almost all of the authors my son has been exposed to are white is a fail on my part. I can name the one Black author—Lucille Clifton—and the excellence of The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring is argument enough for actively seeking out more diverse voices. It’s a gorgeous book that gets to the heart of male friendship better than anything else I’ve read.
Can I admit yet that I’m starting to feel a little demoralized? How can I not have one single book in my son’s collection that’s illustrated by an African American? And that this category is looking very white overall. The same note from above about Suzy Lee, Dan Santat and Shaun Tan still applies—fantastic illustrators that I might have overemphasized in my son’s collection.