Sometimes it’s hard to know what exactly made you who you are today, but one of the joys of motherhood for me is rediscovering the books that shaped me as I share them with my son. I first noticed this on re-reading Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and finding the beginnings of my socialist tendencies there. The few times my son has been interested in The Story of Ferdinand, I’ve remembered where I first felt the peaceful pull of sitting in the grass beneath a tree, sniffing the flowers. But nothing has smacked me as hard in the “OMG is that where I got that?” as The Velvet Room by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. And while this is partially because the book speaks to some tendencies I probably already had as a fourth grader, it’s also a deeply artful book, which I think might have cemented forever my worldview.

Looking for Home

Not a lot of nineteen-year-olds dream of owning a house, but when I moved to Seattle so many years ago, I knew I wanted a big enough house with a fireplace and a yard and that was where I would live and eventually raise a family. I was lucky enough to have the family resources (a down payment and a co-signer) to get started on that dream and this summer we finally paid the house off. Was that why I picked up The Velvet Room when suggesting books for my son? It might be, but not consciously. He’s in a spooky place and I remembered there was a mystery and talk of a ghost and I thought this might be my chance to share this book with him during our early morning hammock reads in the grass beneath our cherry tree.

Robin Williams wants a home more than anything. Her large family has been traveling for the last three years, picking up whatever field work they can. They’d once had a home, but the Depression and her dad’s health robbed them of that security and now they live in whatever workers’ housing is available (sometimes resorting to sleeping in the family car). When their car breaks down in front of Las Palmeras, an abandoned mansion on an apricot farm in California, she is smitten. Already in this first chapter, the die are cast.

When I read of their itinerance and how deeply Robin longed for a home where they could stay, I felt a deep kinship. We didn’t move a lot when I was a kid, just an early move a few blocks from an apartment to a house, one year abroad in elementary school and another in high school. Still, I’ve always longed deeply for the feeling of being settled, preferably someplace quiet where I felt like I could be myself. Maybe Snyder felt the same way, maybe fourth-grade me drank the values of this book in, but it was jarring how much I still relate to this book.

Worldbuilding as Art

The second thing that struck me while reading this book was how well Snyder helped us see the world through Robin’s eyes as she sets up the hierarchy of the farm, starting with the second and third chapters. The family is buoyed when her dad gets a job at the ranch and to learn the job comes with a house! They climb in the back of the foreman’s truck for a quick ride to their new home. And Robin keeps watching for that home as they pass first the large, modern home of the owner, peeking out from behind a hedge. It’s the tease of a real house Robin could dream of, but it’s too big, too fancy to be theirs, she daren’t hope. Then they pass a lawn and an immaculate stable. After the horses comes a white picket fence and “a neat little house sat securely on a patch of green lawn.” She knows it isn’t theirs either, but hope lingers. The road turns from gravel to deep dirt ruts and they keep driving to Palmeras Village— “It had been right then that Robin found out about despair” as she realized they were about to unload into one of the worn two-room shacks where the workers lived.

Snyder continues to use distance, architecture, and landscape as mechanisms to tease out Robin’s desires (and ours). Everything has meaning and history, from the large stone and adobe (yes, the mix is intentionally weird) mansion of Palmeras house to the little Irish cottage behind. As Robin navigates the idiosyncrasies of the place, we learn about the history of the family who has lived there for hundreds of years. We are also constantly reminded about the differences between what Robin has and what Robin wants as she traverses the distances between. Eventually Robin is given secret access to the sanctum santorum, a fully stocked library inside the otherwise abandoned Palmeras House where she can linger and read. It is here that Robin is truly at home, to the extent that she’s content even dusting the tables. Writing these words in my small office with custom-built (by my husband) floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a lifetime of tiny objects and pictures around me, I feel deeply Robin’s peace at having found a place where her desires are satisfied, even for a few hours at a time.

Introducing My Son to Inequality

I am very aware of how lucky I am to have this home I can now call mine. I am also deeply aware that the city I once dreamed of is now wildly unaffordable to most working families, and it’s something I want to talk to my son about so he doesn’t grow up with a narrow vision of the world. The Velvet Room has helped us have those talks and more.

Snyder uses personal relationships to illustrate the divides between classes on the farm almost as well as she uses architecture. The best example of this is Robin’s relationship with Gwen, the owner’s daughter. Gwen is a winning girl, the kind of blithe, darling creature people are attracted to and don’t know why. Gwen is also completely unable to see her own privilege. This makes for a fascinating push-pull between her and Robin, who likes Gwen but who is unable to forget the differences between them. Gwen’s mother lingers in the background with a tight smile to remind us that Robin is not imagining the gap, she is a picker’s child who is accepted only to the extent that she nudges Gwen toward taking her schoolwork and music studies more seriously.

Snyder’s use of Theresa, daughter of another worker, is less artful, and I’ll admit I cringed while sounding out the heavily accented Spanish. Snyder gets the sounds of the accent right, but the character is unfortunately never full enough to make her anything but a stereotype. We haven’t finished the book yet, but I think I recall the Caucasian/Hispanic divide being an issue in the resolution of the mystery, and while Theresa as an alternative to Gwen echoes some of that, she’s not a realized enough character to properly pull that weight.

I have been grateful for the way Snyder takes us into the apricot pitting shed. It’s been hard to explain to my son (who I probably over-indulge with every part of my heart) that Mommy has meetings he can’t always sit in on and that sometimes I need to work to pay for our home and his roomful of toys. Reading about the pitting shed and the fact that all the children who are able to help help, whether they are old enough for a work permit or not. And that the smallest children who cannot help are left to entertain themselves at their mothers’ feet for more than 12 hours a day. To be clear, I don’t want that for anyone, but I do know that it was like that for centuries and still is in many places. And while I do not expect him to take up my copy editing (and would, in fact, prefer he not read Slack over my shoulder), it is important that he see work and understand different ways of working and that what we have comes from something—even the apricots he picked out at the store this week.

When fourth-grade me set aside The Velvet Room for my someday kid to read, I had no idea the experience would be this rich. That I would learn so much from the book all over again and that it would give me tools for teaching my son. But I’m grateful. Are there childhood books that you’ve held onto (either physically or in your heart) that you’ve learned from as an adult? Please tell me everything.

I picked up Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines after reading an excerpt of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned (which made my stage 4 pandemic reading list) in the Boston Review (one of those “I love this so much I’ll love everything you ever do” book purchases). I started reading the book before visiting my mom for the first time in two years because I wanted to reconsider what mothering meant and maybe start to heal some of the rifts between us. What I didn’t anticipate is how much the book would start to heal my soul in general and open me up to better ways of thinking.

Children Are People

“Children are the ways that the world begins again and again. If you fasten upon that concept of their promise, you will have trouble finding anything more awesome, and anything more extraordinarily exhilarating, than the opportunity or/and the obligation to nurture a child into his or her own freedom.” – June Jordan, Revolutionary Mothering

We, as June Jordan puts it, “possess a degree of power over the lives of children that we would find inconceivable and unspeakably tyrannical in any other context.” I’m sure this is something every child feels at some point as they grow, it’s the basis of individuation, after all. As the mother of an almost-six-year-old, it’s something I wrestle with every day. There is so much beauty and determination in my small son. I am so grateful to be his mother and also I need him to eat some protein with his lunch (whichever of the four options he’s given). I’m sure my parents wrestled similarly with the little girl who wanted to wear her grandmothers gold glitter pumps to preschool.

Reading Jordan’s essay gave me a lot of fodder for thought about how I parent and how I was parented—about the conscious (and unconscious) choices we make every day and about the consequences of those choices.

“Children are not individual private property, but they are also not objects through which we seek to achieve our political goals or address our emotional needs. To do so would violate children’s human rights.” – Loretta J. Ross, Revolutionary Mothering

Mothering is Essential Work

“Women are socialized (not created) to care for others and to expect others to care for them. Mothering, radically defined, is the glad gifting of one’s talents, ideas, intellect, and creativity to the universe without recompense.” – Loretta J. Ross, Revolutionary Mothering

Depending on your race and socioeconomic status, you may be targeted with messages of mother as saint or mother as devil (or even both). There’s a lot packed up in the word, “mother” and in our expectations of the people who undertake this work. What there is not enough of, however, is support for parents from our communities, our government, and sometimes even our own families. The essays in this book reminded me that care work is essential work and that anything we do that fails to celebrate and support the raising of the next generation is a failure to invest in mothers and in children.

“How can a household, a community, or a nation be effectively governed when women are held disproportionately responsible for its future yet are disproportionately neglected, abused, excluded, isolated, and invisible? Two words: it can’t.” – Malkia A. Cyril, Revolutionary Mothering

As much as I love my son, mothering is the hardest thing I have ever done. I do it every waking moment of every day and most of the time I am glad for it, despite general exhaustion and overwhelm. And I write this as a financially secure white person with a deeply involved partner. A lot of ugly has been surfaced during my time as a mother (and I don’t just mean my own inadequacies). I birthed a child into a country that would soon elect a tyrannical, racist, misogynist president, and then #MeToo and George Floyd opened conversations we should have resolved generations ago.

I don’t know where I’m going with this except to say that if you don’t know where to start with making the world a better place for the next generation (or even your own), find a parent: offer them your attention and help, ask them how they’d change the world if they had any free time at all. Then read Cynthia Dewi Oka’s “Mothering as Revolutionary Praxis” and let it change your life and the lives of those around you.

“We recognize that attacks on this mama work are grounded in anti-feminist, classist, racist, and sexist ideologies.” – tk karakashian tunchez, Revolutionary Mothering

The Reproductive Justice Framework

The introduction by Loretta J. Ross taught me about the Reproductive Justice Framework, the idea that “in addition to fighting for birth control and abortion, equal attention must be paid to the human right to become a mother, and the concomitant and enabling right to parent our children in safe and healthy environments.” There is so much wrapped up in this. First of all, the idea that choice runs both ways and that we should openly embrace all those choices. We spend so much time fighting each other (often impotently on social media) about choices people are making for their own bodies, what if we channeled that energy into fighting for each other’s human rights? What if we celebrated people who chose to have children and people who chose not to? What if we looked at each life that was consciously brought into this world as a gift? What if we invested in our communities and environment to the extent that everyone felt safe and healthy? Some of these ideas might seem radical, but they are not impossible.

Challenging the Welfare Queen Myth

“By discrediting the motherhood of women of color, poor white women, queer mothers, immigrant mothers, etc., this turns maternal virtue on its head, as these ‘bad’ mothers are held responsible for all the ills of society from the Wall Street mortgage crisis to environmental degradation caused by climate change. Because our children (however mothered) are the product of ‘morally impoverished’ mothers, our children become disposable cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism around the world or neo-slaves in the prison industrial complex.” – Loretta J. Ross, Revolutionary Mothering

As a child of the 80’s, the phrase “welfare queen” is as familiar to me as “trickle-down economics” and I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t really question the idea that people would have more children to get more government money until I had a child of my own and realized how difficult mothering is. I wasn’t running around assigning that name, but I wasn’t actively working against it, either. Reading Revolutionary Mothering I realized how much I’d bought into a racist, classist ideology that was built on heaping blame on our most vulnerable while the wealthy were celebrated for reaping whatever they wanted. Every essay in this book is a bold reminder of how much of the work toward making a better tomorrow is being done by people who get shit on daily by individuals and institutions. We have to do better.

Scarcity vs. Abundance

“Scarcity thinking says that there will never be enough of anything—love, food, energy, or power—so we must horde, or conditionally offer and withdraw, what we have… Abundance thinking says that together, we have enough of what we need, that there is enough for all of us if we recognize our essential interdependence.” – Autumn Brown, Revolutionary Mothering

The capitalist underpinnings of the last section lead naturally to Autumn Brown’s essay, “Scarcity and Abundance,” which sparked the most cogent conversation I was able to have with my husband about this book as we drove to visit my parents this past weekend. In Political Science classes in college, I was drawn to the idea of zero sum versus positive sum thinking. I identified as positive sum, but as I’ve grown older and more tired, I’ve felt pulled back into zero sum (at least at the worst of times). It’s been an ever-present topic during the pandemic on a global and personal level, and Brown contextualized this dichotomy for me in relation to mothering. I realized some of the struggles I have with my mother is that she, too, is drawn to zero sum thinking (or a scarcity model) when she’s at her worst because of how her mother treated her. She has her abundance moments, too, and I think she’s also wrestling with this dichotomy (though we haven’t talked about it).

The important takeaway for me here is that when I’m feeling grumpy or like there isn’t enough, I have to wake myself up to the fact that I don’t believe in a world where there isn’t enough—I, like Brown, believe that “if we develop relationships based on sharing our struggles AND our resources, we do in fact have enough of everything.”

“I experience abundance because I expect abundance, and because humans are social creatures, we live up to cultural expectations, whether they come from outside of us, or from within.” – Autumn Brown, Revolutionary Mothering

Learning to Mother Myself

“You will be beautiful when you are recognized as the person you really are, and that you will be beautiful when you do not try to be something you are not.” – June Jordan, Revolutionary Mothering

As the editors write, “We are accountable when we are specific.” For me, my greatest fault is the selfishness that comes from nurturing hurts long past. I realized in reading “m/other ourselves” by Gumbs that not only am I wasting energy in a cycle that will never change itself, I actually have the power to heal myself. As she writes, “love is possible in a world that teaches us to hate ourselves and the selves we see waiting in each other.” This small contextual shift loosed a feeling in me that I have more to offer the world, from beginning to forgive my mother to embracing the amount of love I have in my body for humanity as a whole. Gumbs writes of all kinds of groups where people come together to use the power of mothering to help each other and by God, I want to be part of that.

“To revolt, we must measure the depth not of our victimization but of our capacity and resilience.” – Cynthia Dewi Oka, Revolutionary Mothering

As Cynthia Dewi Oka writes, “The ethos of mothering involves valuing in and of itself a commitment to the survival and thriving of other bodies.” This is something I felt deeply after the birth of my son—the feeling that I was connected to every human on the planet and that each individual life had value. Lisa Factora-Borchers describes this beautifully throughout her essay, “Birthing a New Feminism.” My specific revolution, for now, is that I will learn to meet my own needs so I can share all the love that I feel with the other residents of this planet.

“The creative spirit is nothing less than love made manifest.” – June Jordan, Revolutionary Mothering

Next up, I’m waiting for a collection of June Jordan’s work to arrive from my local independent bookstore. The Twitterati were celebrating her birthday as I read this book and I realized that not only did I love her essay in this book but that many of the people in Revolutionary Mothering were inspired by her ideas. I can’t wait to read more of her work for myself and see what sparks. Meanwhile, whether you are a mother or simply were born of one, I highly recommend reading Revolutionary Mothering to see what it opens up for you.

Five and a half years into this parenting thing, I see around me the beginnings of a new generation of dads—men who are in touch with their own feelings and who understand their role in a family is not just to provide, but also to nurture. But I don’t see a lot of that in popular culture, yet. Even the empathetic fathers on TV and in books are too often hapless doofs, when they even exist. Victor LaValle’s portrayal of Apollo Kagwa as a deeply believable New Dad in The Changeling was the first reason I fell in love with this book. There’s a lot more to love about this book—from the writing to the incorporation of classic myths to the explorations of friendship and what it’s like to start a family with not enough support—but Apollo helped me appreciate even more deeply my husband as a partner and a father.

There will be spoilers in this review, and it breaks my heart to mess with your experience of the book unfolding, so go read it now. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Be careful, though, because I got so into the book that I woke up at 4am today to read the last half of this book—it’s that engrossing.

The Joys of Parenthood

“Parenthood is a story two people start telling together” – Victor LaValle, The Changeling

With sections entitled “First Comes Love,” “Then Comes Marriage,” etc., The Changeling lulls us right into the space of our brains where we first encountered nursery rhymes. If you’re lucky, that’s a happy memory. Even for Apollo, whose dad abandoned him but who was raised by a loving mother, there is magic to the realm of childhood, and it’s delightfully refreshing to read when the “biological clock” of our male protagonist goes off. We then get to watch Apollo fall in love with Emma (a complex and interesting few pages) and then they get married and pregnant. The memorable delivery was honest enough to give me flashbacks, and yet it’s all very artfully written.

In the beginning there are some visitors and there is joy in the new arrival. Emma sings to her little boy, Brian, and even though they are very tired and Brian struggles to latch, the family seems happy. Apollo dotes on his little boy, taking a million pictures and posting them online.

“Apollo stopped moving, even breathing, and watched his baby boy labor to lift his head. This small act, working to develop the muscles of his neck, would someday lead to sitting up, crawling, stumbling, sprinting.” – Victor LaValle, The Changeling

As a self-employed bookseller, Apollo’s the one who stays home with Brian when Emma has to go to work six weeks after delivery. I had five months at home, but the wrench of leaving was familiar. I had so many memories as Emma pumps milk for the baby and this little family watches home improvement shows. Apollo wakes with Brian in the night and wears him in the Björn to meet other dads in the park.

“Apollo had become one of those men. The New Dads…. New Dads do the dishes and the laundry. New Dads cook the meals. New Dads read the infant development books and do more research online…. New Dads are emotionally available…. New Dads fix all the mistakes the Old Dads made.” – Victor LaValle, The Changeling

And then Emma starts to receive pictures of Apollo and Brian together. Pictures that Apollo did not take. Pictures that soon disappear from her phone.

The Unthinkable

One quarter of the way through the book something awful happens. It’s the kind of thing we talk about in whispers or broadcast on the news in pure horror, pretending not to understand.

First, Emma’s sister, Kim, arrives at the apartment for Brian’s six-month checkup and notices that things are not going well. The house is a mess, the parents are exhausted. Emma, in general, is not alright enough that Kim feels compelled to tell Emma the real story of their parents’ death.

This part of the book, too, felt very real as you begin to suspect that Emma has post-partum depression. A simple word for a complex experience. One that was all too familiar to me, except no one checked in on us long enough or frequently enough to realize how badly I was doing. How even the wonderful New Dad I married couldn’t buffer me from what was happening in my body. Though he did help me get help, and we eventually we were making do again as best as we could. Until the pandemic. With increased stress and decreased access to any reprieve or help, I had some very bad days this winter.

When Emma locks Apollo to a steam pipe in their apartment and kills their baby, I felt the natural horror and revulsion. I was also scared that I did understand what could make her do something so awful.

I put the book down and walked around for a few days trying to express the inexpressible. And then I picked it back up to see how on earth Apollo could move forward from the unthinkable.

There’s So Much More to the Story

Keep in mind, all of this occurs about one quarter of the way through the book. Apollo’s rich journey is far from over at this point and the things that arise speak beautifully to friendship and to living the life you have. There are fantastical twists, mythical allusions (from multiple cultures), and smart cultural commentaries—and I loved every single page. Apollo is true to his New Dad nature throughout the book and I very much hope future generations of dads look to Apollo as an example.

As for me, I’m moving forward as best as I can. I have a stable income, health, a wonderfully supportive partner and a beautiful boy who woke up today in the best of moods. And the bulbs I planted in the fall are starting to poke up. I have the week off of work and I plan to read many, many more books while following whatever erratic sleep schedule my body chooses, all while drinking very good tea. I don’t know if anything I read will touch me as deeply as The Changeling, but I can hope.

If you are hurting right now, please know that you are not alone. And if there is anything I can do to help, please speak up. It is wonderfully important to see ourselves reflected in literature. It is even more wonderful and important that we’re there for each other in real life.

We made it through the elections and the holidays and while it seems like there is a very long winter ahead, I’m ready to focus on the after. Because we’ll be late on the vaccination list (and there isn’t even a vaccine yet for our son), I don’t know when that after happens or what it looks like, but I’m ready to inhabit the liminal space beyond initial preparation and mere survival. Here are four books that are helping me get through this stage:

The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays by Elisa Gabbert

I started reading this collection of essays during the post-election drama when all sense dictated what should happen next and yet we all knew that sense was out the window. Reading about Gabbert’s obsession with disasters was relatable and timely and her thoughts about everything from survivor’s guilt to the way we glamorize disasters to “slow violence” feel important right now as we struggle to get through now, some of us while excitedly tweeting the worst headlines we can find.

“Often, when something bad happens, I have a strange, instinctual desire for things to get even worse—I think of a terrible outcome and then wish for it. I recognize the pattern, but I don’t understand it. It’s as though my mind is running simulations and can’t help but prefer the most dramatic option—as though, in that eventuality, I could enjoy it from the outside.” – The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert

Gabbert’s insightful essays hit me in just the right spot. I read her thoughts on Chernobyl within a month of finishing the miniseries of the same name. And though she’s writing about global warming with “You can’t prepare for the worst-case scenario when the scenario keeps getting worse,” the book gave me something to hold onto in the month when COVID was getting much worse and the news out of the White House was more unhinged every day. I found comfort in realizing that my own pull toward those dramas might be helping me cope, that I, too, might “feel this way all the time now. Nothing is safe. Everything is fine.”

There’s ever so much more to unpack in this book, from the battle for women to be taken seriously to the ways we return to the familiar even when the familiar is awful. Every essay helped me grapple with what it means to be human right now. With the idea of life after all this. I needed that. If you do too, read this book.

Becoming by Michelle Obama

One of the things I’ve been deeply lacking for the last ten months was hope. Enter Michelle Obama. I knew regrettably little about her before reading this book. The fact that she seemed kind was more than enough to pedestalize her in comparison to our current reality. I had no idea when I opened the book that she’d help me reengage with so many things that matter dearly to me:

• The way she wove together the story of her childhood with the changing nature of her neighborhood reminded me how much I care about the structure of cities and communities and how they changed over time. Within a week my husband had me watch the Theaster Gates episode of Home and because of this book I had ideas and opinions and things I wanted to discuss.
• Reading about the ways she fought to be seen for her achievements and how that conflicted with her people pleasing reminded me of how hard I’ve fought in the #metoo era to take myself seriously and to be taken seriously.
• Her respectful yet honest insights into the sweetness and challenges of her marriage with Barack reminded me how much I cherish my own husband. Something I needed when we have all the time in the world together and what feels like no minutes at all to enjoy that.
• Likewise on the friend front, Obama wrote about the strength her female friends have given her over the years and reminded me how much I’ve let fear separate me from the women I love (and that I need to reach out as I can).
• She wastes no love on Trump, which was refreshing to read in this era of great enablement. Also refreshing was the detailed personal insight into what a normal presidential transition looks like. As a former Poli Sci wonk reading this book after the 2020 election, anything that felt like normal was helpful and gave me hope for other futures.
• She generously writes about her experiences as a Black woman. In this year of reckoning, her personal stories about the Black community she grew up in, what it was like to be a Black woman at an ivy league school, how disconnected her neighborhood was from major local institutions (and what she did to fix this divide) provided gateways to better understand experiences beyond my own.

Becoming is a beautifully written book and very much worth the read.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

I’m not very far into this book yet as it was a much-longed-for Christmas gift, but already Kingsolver is helping me think about the kind of life I want to lead, particularly when it comes to food.

Thanks to the pandemic, we’re already buckled down with a storehouse of pulses and legumes. I’ve learned to cook dried chickpeas and we have four kinds of lentils in store (though we only like three of them). I felt justified in this as Kingsolver educated me on the massive consumption of fossil fuels caused by our eating habits as we buy our chickpeas and lentils direct from farmers who live not terribly far away. Reading this book last night, I pretended not to think of the mangoes, pomegranates, avocado, grapefruit, pineapple and coconut we’ve consumed to brighten our holiday and how far they traveled to get here.

This book was recommended to me by a dear friend (who’s always washed and reused her Ziplocs) as we picked the bounty of plums from my backyard and discussed how Kingsolver had to schedule family travel around an unexpected harvest. I’m looking forward to reminders about the importance and costs of eating better. I’ve already learned about how many calories a day our farmers produce and the ways our food is being changed to get those calories into my body. It’s an older book, so some of the information has (thankfully) permeated the zeitgeist (at least a little), but just seeing the numbers made me think hard about all the things I’d eaten in the last two days and about the massive amount of meat I’ve started eating again as plan-ahead cooking started to feel harder this fall.

The real test of this book will be if I actually eat all those (too-bitter) plums I dried before they’d completely ripened. Regardless, I’m looking forward to learning how my family’s food habits can make a lighter impact on the planet. Maybe I’ll even learn how to get more than one carrot harvest a year.

Habitat Threshold by Craig Santos Perez

It’s never too early to start working on the future, even when it’s too late (Gabbert quotes a statistic that the climate effects we’re experiencing now were actually instigated 40 years ago). Perez’s book of poetry hit me hard in the face with all the climate facts that I mostly want to ignore, and while we’re hunkered down seems like a good time to start changing some of our habits. Even the ones that have sustained us until now (like the almost daily boxes that help us mark time with goods we do not need).

Written after the birth of his daughter, Perez’s frank poetry puts us in that new-parent place of caring more deeply about the whole world than you ever imagined possible. He writes of everything from rising oceans to fossil fuels, our use of plastics to animal extinctions. And while I felt (deservedly) scolded by these poems, they were artful enough to hold me close.

… “In the oceans,
one tone of plastic exists for every three tons
of fish”… – “Age of Plastic” by Craig Santos Perez

The way Perez emphasized the word “plastic” in this first poem of the book (which is black in the text while the rest of the poem is gray) helped hammer the omnipresence of the material through one part of my brain while the rest was focused on the stories and statistics about plastic he divulges. I think of this poem every day as I pour more Playmobil into my son’s room and of the future I am making for him versus the one I need to.

With lines like “America, you were never great” the book is a timely reminder that we have to change how we view our place in the world and the impacts we make upon it.

Other Transition Thoughts

The weird thing for me about this list is it’s completely devoid of fiction, the genre that normally sustains me. Maybe this is related to the empathy drain I’ve felt during the pandemic where I’m putting everything I can into the people within (literal) arms’ reach, maybe it’s because I need concrete rungs on the ladder to whatever’s next. I don’t regret where my reading tastes have taken me, but one casualty has been my own writing. Fiction has always been the doorway for me to inhabit worlds beyond my own without having to caretake anyone else’s experience. This allows me to dream. To enter that headspace where my creativity comes from. Another casualty is that nonfiction does not lull me to sleep like fiction does, so I’m staying up late with big ideas and waking up not at all ready to do anything about them.

While I have been writing a lot during the pandemic, I’ve been almost entirely focused on poems and essays that help me unpack the experience of these strange moments as I live them. A favorite project is “The Tale of Benjamin Bunny,” a collection of poems about the bunny in our back yard who saved my life this spring. I love these pieces (especially the poems) and I’m grateful to have been able to do anything productive with this weird time, but I miss writing fiction. Maybe my next pandemic reading list will be all fiction focused on the future. I should be so lucky.

We’re currently planning for seven more months of this. I think February, March and April will be the hardest at our house because we’ll have hit the year mark. Depending on vaccine timelines (adult and kids), I’m currently crossing my fingers that May and June will be filled with hope and maybe we’ll get sprung from this hoosegow with some summer left.

I’d love to hear about the books that are sustaining you through whichever stage you’re at. Please share your recs and stories in the comments.

It’s the last day of National Book Month and I have a confession for you: I believe in the power of books to change the world. Not just to give us the chance to retreat to more palatable worlds in our heads, but to open our hearts to the greater world and help us find the courage to be better. Courage being the key word. Courage is what attracted me to join the board of Hugo House years ago because of the way they opened themselves up to ideas from the community during a difficult time (and really listened to the responses). And courage is what I’m excited about in the newest project from Seattle City of Literature (where I’m on the board now). Seismic is a collection of essays that looks deeply and frankly at Seattle as a City of Literature and I’m proud of the conversations it’s starting—for me personally, for the board, and in the community at large.

It’s easy to imagine that a collection commissioned by a City of Literature would be filled with fluffy, soft words about how wonderful our city is. There is some of that in Seismic, we do live in one of the most beautiful places in the world and have a vibrant literary culture, but this book is also filled with deep introspection about the ways we’re failing. This is where the courage comes in, because speaking truth about our failures is the first step toward addressing them. In this way Seismic is an act of love as much as courage. Let me tell you about what Seismic made me think about…

Seattle is a Destination

As the nearest big city, Seattle was the next best step for me and many of my high school classmates. For my part, I wrote some (really crappy) poetry about my dreams of this emerald city during a visit in my senior year (which I promise to spare you). Like Rena Priest, I sought “the creative sanctuary of Seattle.” I craved the natural beauty Timothy Egan praises in his Seismic essay. And when I arrived, the city felt fresh, because as Jourdan Imani Keith writes, “No one is from here. No one knows where things are.” Which is kind of a big deal coming from a town where your eighth grade science teacher fondly remembers (out loud, for the class) your running down the street in nothing but a diaper. The idea of Seattle gave me comfort as someplace I could recapture the cosmopolitan feeling I experienced living abroad without giving up the Northwest that I love.

“If I had to tell you why Seattle is a literary city, I would say it is because I was able to become myself here. I learned how to inhabit my mind in this place. To hold space for your own story can be a revolutionary act.” – Kristen Millares Young, Seismic

Wei-Wei Lee writes, “Seattle has given me freedom. It has afforded me the luxury of writing for the sake of feeling, without expectation or the pressures of succeeding, with my friends, classmates, school writers’ club and the Youth Poet Laureate Cohort.”

Reality is Always More Complicated (and Interesting)

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore writes of the end of Seattle, a city she has returned to again and again because it is “the city where I first found calm.” I, too, moved to Seattle because it was a place I felt I could be myself. On the best days, when I could stomp around Capitol Hill in my green patent-leather Docs and vintage dress, that still feels true. But even before the pandemic, I started to see that my best days in this city were the days I was projecting beyond what I actually felt.

The longer I lived in Seattle, the less of a dream it became and the more of a reality as I got to know the underpinnings of the place, the Seattle process, the people behind the Seattle freeze. As with any home, some of this was endearing, some frustrating. What I barely ever got to know, however, was anything tangible about the indigenous cultures here. Seismic started me on a better path, from Priest’s insight into the indigenous mythology of our region to Ken Workman’s reminder that the Duwamish are all around us (literally).

“Writing about anywhere in the Salish Sea bioregion is a challenge because in order to keep from alienating people, I have been taught by polite society never to publicly acknowledge the true story of the people who belong to this place. We don’t say “genocide.” We don’t say “murdered, cheated, displaced and starved.” We don’t say those things. Tell a different story, sing the people a song. So I tell you how nice the people are in Seattle’s literary community, which is certainly true, but it omits this other story. Please don’t be alienated. “ – Rena Priest, Seismic

What I’m Afraid We’re Losing

“I walk around Seattle looking at houses I’ll never own.” – Dujie Tahat, Seismic

“If literature and art are an effective antidote, we must attend to how so many artists have been pushed out of Seattle as the city’s economy “soars.” My family still might be. When our art spaces refuse to acknowledge or address this ever-growing loss, they become complicit in the marginalization of the very culture these spaces claim to cultivate.” – Dujie Tahat, Seismic

Part of my dream of Seattle has always been of being in a place where I could be myself and be surrounded by likeminded people. As I grew, it became more apparent that that dream included being a writer. Married to a visual artist, we are nourished by being around other creative people. And while Seattle is full of creative people of various types, I ache for how many of my friends have left because the city is no longer affordable. The city is also less livable as increased traffic divides us from the friends who have stayed. Maybe a city kid would know what to do with this, but my small-town heart still craves having the people I love no more than 20 minutes away.

“Seattle is now a city of displacement and desperation, where rent has basically doubled in seven years and we have no meaningful protections, where even people against gentrification say of course they support increasing the density. But what kind of density are they supporting? A density of overpriced crap; a density of bland homogenization; a density of corporate exploitation masquerading as necessary growth.” – Claudia Castro Luna, Seismic

And I often wonder, if we’d left too, if my husband and I could live the artistic lives we dreamed of instead of cobbling it all together between a series of service jobs until being driven into tech to afford day care. As a white woman, I say this from an incredibly privileged place that includes having a home, a livable income, a family, health. But I’ve never wanted a circle of friends that was solely white and upper middle class. I had that bland uniformity in my hometown and I think I unconsciously recreated it by choosing to live in northeast Seattle. But I came here because Seattle offered more than that. And as a city and as humans we can be better about racial equity and inclusion, affordability, and livability, but we have to start trying now—on all levels.

“Everyone talks about the need for affordable housing, while the city shuts down the largest public housing project, displacing hundreds of families and destroying the country’s first mixed-race housing project to make way for a billionaire to build luxury apartments. How did they do this? By changing the zoning to increase the density. When developers control the language, everyone else loses.” – Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Seismic

In Seismic, Claudia Castro Luna notes the delicate balance between the image we want, “a world-class literary city” and the reality that we are failing at engaging people of color as artists and even as audience members, where the key question is “literary programs for whom and by whom?” She bears witness to the extraordinary diversity this city does possess and that we could build on, if we try.

“When I hear the phrase that Seattle is a great literary city, I want to scream. Because when people praise what Seattle is now, it feels like they’re praising displacement, homogenization, the streamlining of the imagination to become a tool of social, cultural and political obliteration. I don’t believe that literature is automatically a force for good, especially if it participates in the self-congratulatory boosterism that celebrates Seattle as it is now. If we cannot critique what we love, then we don’t really love it.” – Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Seismic

Change Comes from Within

“Seattle is experiencing unprecedented transformation with profound implications for the future. Yet in the strict confines of high art and cultural discourse, many institutions remain unwilling to reckon with the ways culture is displaced from the city. It cannot be because cultural institutions are apolitical—not only because there’s no such thing but because many of these organizations willingly come together to fund electoral campaigns when what is on the ballot are public subsidies. What becomes clear is that it is not the city’s culture being curated but rather institutional balance sheets.” – Dujie Tahat, Seismic

I was so heartened when, during a Seattle City of Literature board meeting at the beginning of the latest peak of #BlackLivesMatter protests, we were presented with Tahat’s essay and asked to imagine how this organization we’re shepherding should work to help create the kind of city we want to live in. I won’t name names, but I was so heartened to be in a (virtual) roomful of people who also saw where we were failing. People who wanted as badly as I do to change it.

“Philanthropy, which is the predominant model of literary and cultural organizations in our city, is failing us. If one builds an organization centering wealthy white landowners, then that is the culture being curated.” – Dujie Tahat, Seismic

We have a lot to build on. Charles Johnson recalls Seattle’s “distinguished history of supporting progressive causes” and our civility even as he cautionarily compares Seattle to San Francisco and Rome. We also have a lot of work to do. At Seattle City of Literature, one first step was to this statement on racial equity and the literary arts. I’m very excited to see how we’ll take this energy forward to help build the city I still dream of.

The Work Ahead

I’ve over-quoted from Seismic already, but some of the best, most inspiring words I can think of about what’s next come from the contributors, so I’ll leave them to speak for themselves:

“It is praiseworthy for Seattle to be recognized as a UNESCO City of Literature—an important and vital achievement that recognizes the hard work of countless artists that made this city what it is….It represents an opportunity for Seattle to partner and learn from our sister cities how best to employ literature and this designation to improve the material lives of those at the margins. As far as I understand literature to have a purpose, it is meant to reflect back to us our fullest selves, to speak truth to power, and to be a site for greater individual and communal reimagining. If we don’t take this task seriously, the honor serves simply as a laurel hung from the drawing room walls of those of us living in safe, material comfort.” – Dujie Tahat, Seismic

“If this is a great literary city, how do we expose all the layers of violence so we can imagine something else? How do we write what we really feel, so we can feel what we really need? How do we use language to expose hypocrisy rather than camouflaging harm? I want to live in a city that doesn’t destroy the lives of the people who are already the most marginalized by systemic and systematic injustice. This may be too much to ask of literature, but it’s not too much to ask.” – Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Seismic

“I view the Creative City designation not as an arrival but a portal to discover new ways to engage many more residents in the literary life of the city. What is at stake for Seattle is not guarding a literary legacy but envisioning one. The UNESCO designation is an invitation to redefine what a literary city looks like. Seattle could have the makings of a literary renaissance that inspires cities around the globe to reframe what constitutes literature and who has a right to create it.” – Claudia Castro Luna

“If I could make a wish upon a book or ask “the Lorde” Audre for a blessing for this city, it would be to add more platforms, avenues, megaphones and bridges for voices who live between the lines, in white spaces and in the margins. I feel hope for the direction that Seattle is moving. We are remembering that without community there is no liberation.” – Anastacia-Renée, Seismic

“We each have a little magic, and the city brings it out in us. We are capable of creating such things as no one has ever done. We are more than what people want to see, sometimes more than even we ourselves expect to see. We are not bound to the lots we draw.” – Wei-Wei Lee, Seismic

Your City of Literature

I’d love to know what your City of Literature looks like. Seismic is free for download or you can ask for a free copy at your local bookstore (while they last). Please read it and share your dreams for our city with me, with your community at large, with your legislators.

I’m hugely grateful to editor Kristen Millares Young and to Stesha Brandon for their vision and collective work to bring this important book to life. They, together with the contributors, have definitely inspired me to be more courageous in building my City of Literature. May this be the book that changes our small corner of the world for the better.