The Clever Title: Book Reviews and Other Cool Things

What Are You Reading, Sheila Squillante?

2011-12-12T15:50:00.001-05:00

Today is my friend C.S. Giscombe’s birthday, and since I can’t treathim to a pint of lager and a plate of rice & beans or gator sausage withhoney at the dive bar we used to lunch at before he moved to Berkeley, I willtreat you to some of his poetry. I’ve been re-reading his collection, Prairie Style (Dalkey Archive, 2008),and each time I return to it, I find more to admire, more to uncover anddelight in. It’s what I say to my students about how the best poems call you toreturn to them again and again, offering something new each time. It’s maybe acliché, but it’s also true. And it’s really true of this book.

These are packed (prose) poems thattake up/on much: music, race, geography, topography, histories, jokes, animals,love. It’s a downright reflective bookwith a voice I find intimately deliberate. What I mean is that as I read, I feel I’m the presence of a deliberatingmind, a whole energy, even, as it works stuff out. It bristles and rings. Itsurrounds.

Consider the first poem,“Downstate,”

To have the same sound, to be called by thesame name.

Location’s what you come to; it’s the lowpoint, it usually repeats.

To me, any value is a location to bereckoned with; I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge how an event could betalked about like it was you or me being talked about.

Or location’s the reply, the obviousstatement about origin; it goes without saying that pleasure’s formidable.

Lots of formidable pleasures dwellwithin, and not just of the cerebral sort. This is also a poetics of body, andone of my favorite moments appears in the poem, “Two Directions:”

To me love’s an animal, not the feeling ofwatching one but the animal itself—blunt, active, equipped…

Yes, yes, yes.

To me, (and this construction Iborrow from the book—there are a lot of qualifying “to me” moments. As in, Have your own experience. This is whatmatters to me. Oh, I like that.) there are enchanting if dizzying shiftshappening in subject , perspective and voice throughout the collection. In somepoems there is the vast horizon: “Nothing to the sky but its blank, endless chaos,” (“Day Song”); or amoment when “The prairie appeared suddenly like it was a miracle orfortification. (“Prairie Style”).” Thenstill others feel, to borrow another excellent phrase, “furiously local” –specificto the speaker’s desires, the smallness of a lived life, internal: “(I’d boughta room in Jeanette Life’s hostelry—the Stone Soup—on the north side and couldwalk to the archives.)” (“Camp Sites”). Even more so in “Ballad Values,” whichis, to me, a delicious list ofpersonal predilections, the sort of things you might want to know about a loverbefore your first kiss:

I like “short grass” and the way we sangonce—James Hamilton and I sang once—about liking meat that’s close to the bone.And I prefer going over the junctions to being part of the argument. I like twobuses rocking perilously and metaphor judging you. I’m partial to ugly. I varyabout the point where pleasure’s a train of waves. I see how voice is a joke onpassion and value the smooth as well as the sweet report. I like it once you get past the naturalboundary.

What I like most about thecollection as a made-thing is actually a formal aspect. It’s the quality oftangent & repetition that gives the book its satisfying shape: we’re in thecity, we’re in the city, we’re in the city, there’s a fox! Love, love, love, music,fox again. City. Music, music. Prairie. Love. Giscombe does this with subjectand image, but also—and this, really,is my favorite part—at the sentence, phrase, and word –level. It’s a thing that makes me squeal with delightwhen I come across it in a book or in music. Oh, how I love a braided motif! Ilove that moment of recognizing it—hey,I’ve seen this before!—and then the next moment of understanding it assomething “past the natural boundary.” Something new.

So happy birthday, dear friend.Thank you for the gift of this beautiful book in the world!

____________

Sheila Squillante rhymes with Chianti and she quite likes that you can take that two ways. She is the author of the chapbook, A Woman Traces the Shoreline, just released from Dancing Girl Press.

Gift by Donna Steiner

2011-09-18T15:56:00.000-04:00

I received a wonderful gift in the mail today: the first book written by my friend, Susan Fox Rogers. It’s called My Reach: A Hudson River Memoir and is being published by Cornell University Press.

I remember walking along a little stretch of the Hudson, listening to Susan describe her vision for the book. Over time, I read some of the essays that would become chapters and then, as the manuscript progressed, I read full drafts. As writing friends do, I marked the drafts, trying to make funny or encouraging or helpful comments in the margins. Later I read the galley proofs, and even got to weigh in on a few design elements. The book became a godchild, one I wanted to pay careful attention to and love and protect.

Susan and I met in graduate school at the University of Arizona. We had a couple of classes together and became friends; eventually we each left Arizona for New York. We stayed friends – writer friends – which means we periodically read each other’s work and cheer each other on, occasionally ponder a rejection, frequently laugh about the weird and wonderful facets of this chosen life. We’ve been close for a dozen years, we’ve had a lot of fun together, we’ve shared some heartbreak. A lot stands out, but there’s been nothing quite like seeing My Reach come to light.

As any writer knows, many good poems and stories and essays and novels never make it to print. I have friends who are intelligent, graceful, compelling writers but can’t find a publisher. I have manuscripts of my own collecting dust on a shelf. It can be a discouraging process, the years of effort that seem, at times, to come to nothing.

But this time, with Susan’s project, it was different. All the customary things happened that typically do when a manuscript is under way – the ideas, the slow progress, the revisions, the submissions, the rejections. Sometimes that’s as far as it goes… But after years of hard work, an editor became interested and the funding was found and the project was slated for publication. The ideas I’d heard while walking near the Hudson had been refined. The project had become more complex, more touching and more engaging. It would still be a book about the Hudson, but it was also about the quiet beauties of exploring a territory by kayak. And, perhaps most interesting of all, it was about grieving, and about joy.

It was, in short, a book – a beautiful, tangible, hard-cover book. And that book arrived in the mail today. When I read the Acknowledgments, I cried. I didn’t cry when my name was mentioned, although it makes me proud to see it there. I cried when Susan talked about her family. I won’t give anything away – you should read My Reach – but Susan’s family came to be part of the book in ways that she never anticipated.

That’s the thing about writing, and about families, and about friendship, and about rivers, and even, I think, about something as simple as opening your mailbox. You don’t really know what’s coming. Today came Susan’s book. Today came a reminder of why writing matters.

What a wonderful gift.

Donna Steiner’s writing has been published in literary journals including Fourth Genre, Shenandoah, The Bellingham Review, The Sun, and The Los Angeles Review. She’s a contributing writer for Hippocampus Magazine, teaches at the State University of New York in Oswego and is a 2011 fellow in Nonfiction Literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Not Simply Pro-Vegan or Anti-Meat Book

2011-06-15T13:49:00.000-04:00

“Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.”

I am not a raging anything. I am passionate about my own decisions yet I have never felt the need to inform others on how to live, behave or what to eat. Yet reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals has led me to examine my life as an eater, a food lover and a person with a heavy conscious.

I was raised in a Colombian household. To my family eating was a shared experience of delight, laughter and indulgence. To put it simply, in our home food was love. My mother cooked dishes that often times caused our upstairs tenants to come knocking on our door to linger in the doorway and get a better whiff of the spice filled aroma that ran through their air vent. Welcomed by my parents, they’d end up sitting at our dinner table eating my mother’s carne assada, ground beef stuffed bell peppers, fajitas, yellow salted potatoes, chicken and rice, meatballs, ceviche, breaded lemon pork chops. The Muñoz residence was a home of extreme foodies. This is why I’m sure my family was stunned when I, who loved all things wrapped in bacon, announced that I was going to become a vegetarian.

I have been a vegetarian for over ten years now. And although I’m still often faced with why in hell would you not eat meat expressions, hmm, interesting whimpers of pity, interrogating questions and pointblank confused glares, nowadays I rarely stop to acces, let alone defend my life choices. Reading Eating Animals caused me to examine my relationship with food. My reasoning like Foer’s and that of many vegetarians circled around the fact that I did not want to eat animals. It is the grappling of this truth that lies at the core of Eating Animals. Foer’s book is many things including, a self-study, a memoir, a book about food, an activist environmental book, but above all it’s a book that questions and challenges our habits, our comfort, our future and our humanity. Eating Animals is a call to action for people who may or may not want to know about what eating animals entails. Foer asks readers to put down their forks and ask: What am I eating? How did it get on my plate? Who and what do my eating choices affect? And ultimately, what does it mean to eat animals?

Foer’s clever modernist prose seen that appear in his works of fiction, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, seeps the pages of Eating Animals, his first nonfiction book. Fatherhood was the catalyst for Foer to research the food industry, visit farms and factories across the nation and write a book about eating animals. In 270 pages Eating Animals examines people’s relationship with animals, identifies Foer’s vegetarian conviction and traces both his hopeful and horrific encounters with American farming and food production.

What sets Foer’s poignant and informative book apart from other books and documentaries about this country’s food industry is his ability to sympathize with animal eaters. Foer’s sentimentality towards eating animals lies in the fact that neither he nor his vegetarian raised child will ever eat his grandmother’s famous chicken and carrots. I am often times asked if I miss the taste of meat and my answer is always yes. Eating animals is delicious. Yet my missing meat does not mean I long for it. I miss eating animals because it was once a part of who I was.

When describing his lack of lust for red meat Foer admits, “…the smell of summer barbeque still makes my mouth water.” Similarly, to this day the smell of fried bacon makes my eyelids flutter. I am able to placate myself with a deep blissful inhale. Stuffed turkey, glazed ham, baked chicken, pickled fish, most major holidays have a super star animal at the center of the table ready to be eaten. Herein lies the paradox, eating animals is a significant part of the American lifestyle yet, as Foer states, American factory farming is the key player in the deterioration of our ecosystem.

Eating Animals is not simply another pro-vegan and anti-meat book. What is at stake here is not only the animal welfare, health and environmental issues but our ability to stop think and choose to act upon our moral instinct. “Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.” Food production in this country has gone terribly awry. Yet as a population of people who love to eat animals we are writing our own downfall. “Scientists predict the total collapse of all fished species in less than fifty years.” The destruction of our everyday buying and eating choices are revealed in Eating Animals and although the truths Foer presents are neither pleasing nor easy to act upon they should be seriously considered. Foer teaches his reader that the staggering effects of factory farming impact both the environment and human morals. Reading Eating Animals has caused me to become a more active vegetarian mainly because I don’t want my children or grandchildren to look back on my generation with anger and disappointment. “More than anything, I want people to come away with the idea that meat matters," Foer says. "I am not asking other people to come to these conclusions. I am asking people to see something that they already know, which is that what we choose to eat when ordering at a restaurant, what we choose to buy at a supermarket, is frankly one of the most important decisions we'll make all day.”

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Gloria Munoz wrote this amazing essay. When you see her, ask her to sing that Lorca poem. She will swoon you with her voice.

There Is No Easy Answer, Claire

2011-06-03T13:30:00.006-04:00

I wanted Mary Roach to give me an excuse to stop having sex. I thought I would find myself in a list of symptoms and say – there I am. That incurable disease? That’s me. Got what I came for… and now I can quit. I ordered Bonk because I read an excerpt of her first book, Stiff, which explored the wondrous lives of the recently and very dead, and I liked her approach to the subject of bodies, that of a curious wide-eyed researcher. It followed that Bonk wouldn’t be an account of one woman’s sexual dysfunction (in which I knew I would recognize myself).

Stiff assured me that Bonk was about the science of sex, that Mary Roach would be the trustworthy guide I wanted her to be, that she would be funny and sympathetically human, and that she would provide me with the gentle handholding (dragging may be the better term) I needed to enter the Museum of Human Sexuality and by proxy and long-delayed result, my own psyche. Happily, Mary Roach gave me all of these things.

As foreign as some of the battery operated sex machines, rubber anuses, and sheep testicle transplants in this book are, Roach treats them with respect, and, as she already knew or finds out as she explores their history and the history of the people that surround these objects, they are testament to the ways we try to find out more about ourselves. To make ourselves happier. Or, as in the case of the penile pricking ring in chapter six, save our souls from the dangers of masturbation. Thank God times have changed, and thank God sex today can be about fun.

Roach also knows that the unbiased, unaffected scientist who denies her own involvement in a project she is unavoidably affected by, is outmoded. She knows that her humanness makes her a better guide, one that we can commiserate with to get through the cringe moments, those moments that strip sex of it’s mythology and it’s emotionality and put it in a petri dish. She reminds us that all of this science is about being happier and having more fun.

Which is why Roach’s sense of humor is important. Sex is so scary, uncomfortable, awkward, and silly that without the jokes, Roach’s exploration would seem more like work and less like fun. I can imagine Roach (the nightingale I take into the coal mine of sexuality) researching, or like in the footnote on page 212, spending half an hour on Merriam-Webster making the dictionary say “CLIT-oris” and “Vagina” and “Penis.”

Unlike science’s need to argue something in order to be successful, what makes Roach, and therefore Bonk, so successful and readable is the fact that she refrains from coming to any conclusions, preaching, or sliding into didacticism.

Roach could have argued that all women should tell their partners what feels good and where, exactly, they ought to be rubbing, and then provided the scientific evidence for said argument. That would have been good advice. Instead, she explains the myriad hilarious ways in which others (scientists) have made that argument and come to that conclusion. As well as a twenty other conflicting conclusions.

She doesn’t condemn science for its vagaries and lack of sensitivity, either, which would amount to preaching from the other side of the glass. Instead, she is the best kind of guide, one that would like to understand sex, but really just wants to know more about it. Importantly, Mary Roach does what I am afraid to do: find out for herself, through experiment, research, and good humor, what sex, is, does, and will be.

All thirteen chapters have titles that, like “The Upsuck Chronicles: Does Orgasm Boost Fertility, and What Do Pigs Know About It?” evince the extent to which Roach plumbs sex (ha ha). She explains medieval legislation against masturbation, but also explores contemporary laboratory studies of sex, one of which, having found that gay and lesbian couples have more intense and pleasurable sex than heterosexual couples, still wants to “help” homosexual couples into straight relationships.

While she is a trustworthy and fallible guide, Roach doesn’t talk about her own sex life, except when she convinces her husband to have sex in an MRI in order to better understand body parts during coitus. It is this emotional stake she puts into this project, and not her story, that make me want to call her Mary and not Roach, give her a hug, and laugh with her about the time when she was observing (through a small window) a woman with multiple sclerosis masturbate. Mary climbed up on a desk to see through the window and lost her balance, starting a Rube-Goldberg of loud crashing noises and undoubtedly distracting the poor woman on the other side of the glass.

It disappoints me that Mary Roach didn’t give me an easy out by lining up my symptoms with some rare but incurable sexual disorder from which I will never be rescued, so that I can just go ahead make plans for a life without sex, romance, and relationships. It disappoints me, because that would have been easy. But Mary Roach is not a stick-your-head-in-the-sand kind of woman. Instead, I feel like she sat me down and said, “There is no one answer, Claire. Your physiology is keeping you from achieving orgasm, but so is your brain, and so is everything else. But now that you know all of this, buck up. Be happy. Do what you can with what you have. And isn’t there a lot of stuff out there that you can do?”

Despite this feeling, reading Bonk was difficult. Writing about it has been much harder, because I keep trying to say that Bonk was good because it was frank and funny and interesting. But what I am feeling is anxious, and despite all of Roach’s unstoppable enthusiasm and the extent to which she puts her own emotions on the line, I still want to give up. I am trying to figure out why this is when my eyes fall on the LA Times blurb on Bonk’s cover.

I have finished the book, and am looking at the cover, which has an image of a couple embracing under a magnifying scope. Beside two couples embracing under a magnifying scope are fifteen words that suddenly make me uncomfortable. For your information, Stiff is the title of Roach’s first book, which explored the wondrous lives of the recently and very dead. I thought it was brilliant as well. “If Stiff made me glad I wasn’t dead,” Tara Ison says, “Bonk makes me happy to be alive.” Yes, Tara of the LA Times, I found this book lively and fun to read, but “happy to be alive?” I want to ask you what your sex life is like.

Are you one of the women, who like the woman on page thirty, can “bring herself to orgasm five times in quick succession” without any physical contact? If so, I envy you. Even if you could only do it once, I would envy you.

That is not the blurb I would have written for the cover of this book. I might have said, “Mary Roach makes good sex sound like more work than I want it to be,” but that is me on a pessimistic day, when I am not remembering how much fun I had when I read Bonk, and what I took away from it: Enjoy knowing more about yourself.

On a better day I might say, “Thank you, Mary Roach, for not making a decision about who I am, and for making sex funny.” But that would not go over well with the publishers, so instead, I might say, “Bonk is a great book,” and leave it at that.

____

Claire Stephens penned this fabulous essay. She's fast on her bike. I dare you to race her.

Fragments (From the F section of Kim’s Encyclopedia)

2011-05-14T12:08:00.000-04:00

Fragmented things I like:

1. Kaleidoscopes. The struggle to identify actual shapes is both frustrating and endearing.

2. Mosaics. Especially the Cinderella one in the castle at Disney World. When my legs are not being run over by strollers, I like to stand up close to the long stretch of wall and find where the peach-colored pieces start to form Cinderella’s cheek.

3. The back doorway of the House of Blues, Orlando. Surrounding the door is a halo of concrete and trinkets. There are old toys, coins, pieces of beer bottles and glitter all cemented into the wall. It reminds me of Junk City from Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Forgotten treasures packed together. I take a picture because my parent’s won’t let me stand there and ponder over it. I’m blocking the doorway, they say. People gotta eat.

Fragments things I hate:

1. Puzzles. I already know the story. It’s on the cover of the box. And I can never seem to finish one anyway.

2. Sentence fragments in student papers. Yep.

I like fragments. There’s something enchanting and mysterious about them. Maybe it’s because they function like the antithesis of a novel or perhaps they are just one way I find I can relate to postmodernism. But I’m talking about writing here. Storytelling.

So when I stumbled upon Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, the nonfiction equivalent of this kind of fragmented storytelling, I literally gasped loud enough in the bookstore to turn heads. In her forward, Rosenthal boasts of telling the story of her life, one completely absent of shocking clichés like abusive parents, addictions, and past life speculations. This is the story of one regular woman living in the twenty-first century, albeit in the structure of an encyclopedia. No joke.

There are charts, graphs, photos and illustrations. Even the front and back flaps of the books are used to stay in-sync with the quirky humor that is Rosenthal. For instance, the back flap has five sentences, each about what a certain person is doing at the exact moment I’m reading the flap. There’s a hilariously long reader’s agreement, in which, if you sign it, you agree not to reproduce the book and agree that “on any given weekend, there are way too many mattress sales” (v). Rosenthal does a great job grounding the reader in 21^st century living, from her Orientation Almanac, outlining anything an alien or time-traveler would need to know about this time period, to entries listed about kid’s meals on flights, parking spots, and compliments.

I got to savor each snapshot of life that Rosenthal offered. I remember being stuck on the road for an hour in the backseat and on the way to Disney World for our usual weekend trip. My parents talked quietly and I, being the diligent grad student with no traces left of motion sickness, decided to get some reading done. Be productive. About thirty pages into it, and with more than a half an hour to go before seeing the big ears, I bookmarked my page and put it away. I didn’t want to finish it too soon. I didn’t want to reach the last entry.

In the entry titled “Go,” Rosenthal writes:

“I get this weird sort of rush when an ambulance comes racing down the street, and I, along with all the other drivers, quickly pull over to let the more important vehicle pass. It’s as if us little cars on the side of the road are cheering, Go! Go! You can do it! Go, important ambulance, go! The experience invariably leaves me feeling proud and giddy”

When reading Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, I felt at times like I was riding in an ambulance. The roads were blurry and I could only focus on one tree or blue car or bike before something entirely different would catch me attention. And yet, as the gears in my head kept turning to put it all together, I watched the story of Rosenthal’s life unfold without confusion. I feel like I’ve seen glimpses of her life that are both intimate and not embarrassing; they are little things, ordinary things. The kinds of things that you’d talk to someone about if you sat down with him or her and had coffee. Reading this book has taught me that the high-octane drama of life does not always compare to a simple story about the weather or what you ate for lunch. Ordinary stories, like pieces of a mosaic or puzzle, can be told in extraordinary ways.

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As you're reading this, Kimberly Karalius is likely waiting in line at Disney World. There's probably a kid crying behind her, but she's too busy looking for Prince Philip to care. She writes about her magical and mostly mundane adventures in her blog, I Wear Milk Crowns. (http://kkaralius.blogspot.com/)

Lie to Me, Baby: The (very) Brief Adventures of Stalker Girl

2011-05-03T11:52:00.003-04:00

Not since Lauren Slater’s Lying has a memoir come along and deliberately lied to readers. And I don’t mean in the way of those infamous fake memoirs we all think about when we hear the words “memoir” and “lying” mentioned in the same breath. I’m talking in a straight-up literary and artful way. But before I get into the details of Karl Taro Greenfeld’s memoir Boy Alone I have to tell you how I came across his book. Why? Because I’m a narcissist, of course, so I can’t help talking about myself. But seriously, despite all my navel gazing, I’m also a huge believer in coincidence, or fate if you will.

It all began when I first encountered Karl Taro Greenfeld’s work in the pages of The Sun, a short story entitled “Death Or Glory.” I was smitten, in the midst of a very serious literary crush. Needless to say, I’ve had other literary crushes. There was Junot Díaz, Kathryn Harrison, Frank McCourt, all of them shamelessly seducing me with their words. By the time I picked up a used copy of The Best American Short Stories 2009, and found “NowTrends,” I was convinced we were meant to be: Karl Taro Greenfeld and me, Stalker Girl. Fate? You bet.

So, fast forward to January 2011. I’ve been celebrating the publication of my own short story in one of my favorite lit mags of all time—but I won’t elaborate on that since this is not at all about shameless self promotion—and tonight, I’m sitting in front of my computer when I open my email. It’s from someone who’s just read my story, congratulating and thanking me for writing it. And who is the email from? You guessed it. Karl Taro Greenfeld. I almost fall out of my desk, and by “my desk,” I mean the couch. But that’s not all. Tomorrow there will be a shiny new copy of The Missouri Review in my mailbox, and what will I find in its pages? Greenfeld’s “Even the Gargoyle Is Frightened.” I won’t read it right away. I’ll carry it in my messenger bag for weeks. Foreplay. Of the literary kind.

Back to the present. How should I respond to his email? I stop myself from replying with “Wow! I’ve been web-stalking you for months!” and I resist the urge to use various I-heart-you-and-you-complete-me clichés. I know how frightening such a statement might sound to a normal person. Instead, I opt for sanity. I thank him, because I’m grateful, and I tell him that it means a lot, because it does. Why? That’s the question, isn’t it?

It’s not that simple. Of course, every writer needs validation, to know that our essay or memoir or story has touched even one reader is part of the reason we all write. But let’s just say that lately, I’ve been having a crisis of faith— in the state of memoir as a whole, and in myself as a writer—which was triggered in part by the recent slew of celebrity “memoirs” crowding bookstore shelves. (Do we really live in a world where books written, and I use the term loosely, by Snooki and Justin Bieber are bestsellers? Are there no more Frank McCourts or Annie Dillards left in the world? And don’t even get me started on ghostwriters.) But I won’t mislead you. That wasn’t it. Not entirely.

The conversation that followed David Shields’ Reality Hunger also got me thinking about myself as a writer, about my own memoir, and about why I keep writing the thing if it feels like I’m banging my head against the wall. Then Taylor Antrim reviewed Nick Flynn’s The Ticking is the Bomb for The Daily Beast, insisting that the memoir would be a much better book if it were written as a novel. Antrim wrote, “So, what’s with all the memoirs? Are they somehow… easier? Is the storytelling bar set lower? Too often, memoir seems to me an excuse to be fragmentary, incomplete, narratively non-rigorous.” At the time, because I was without a doubt, one hundred percent, a defender of memoir, my answers to his questions were simple: No, writing a memoir is not easier. This reviewer is wrong. This is a failure on the reader's part. He doesn’t get it. The story arc here is secondary. He doesn’t understand what this memoir is doing because he’s a fiction writer. Only a fiction writer would say that the novel form is greater than the memoir, that fiction is better than nonfiction. (*Disclaimer: I’m also a fiction writer. I don’t have a preference over fiction and creative nonfiction.)

But later, as I struggled with my own writing, I wasn’t so sure. First I needed to find out why I was struggling. Maybe it was me who didn’t understand what memoir was supposed to do, or maybe I picked the wrong tense, or the wrong voice, or the wrong structure. Maybe I just wasn’t a good enough writer. I admit I found myself straying, scouring bookshelves like a mad Stalker Girl, looking through all my favorite memoirs for what exactly it was that made them my favorites.

And then I found it. I didn’t have a name for it then, but I knew what it was. And what did all these books have in common? Story arc? Whatever it was, it was not secondary. I found myself asking, Do I have a secret preference for fiction? Am I being unfaithful to my memoir? Am I sleeping with the enemy?

And so I picked up a copy of Karl Taro Greenfeld’s memoir, Boy Alone. Yes, I’m still in love. Not just because this is a book that sheds light on the effects of autism on children and their entire families, a book that while intentionally lying to readers—how? Sorry, I won’t spoil it for you, but I will tell you that everything is not as it seems—still manages to remain honest and unflinching, a book that at times straddles the line between memoir and lyric essay. Yes it is all those things, but it’s so much more—it’s a book that doesn’t shy away from the ugly truth even when it’s about the narrator’s own flaws or those of his family. Boy Alone will take the memoir conversation in a different direction, will make you question what a memoir is supposed to do, question how you read, and how memoirists write or should write, and what’s acceptable in nonfiction, and why. Maybe we will find ourselves discussing whether the story is determined by the structure or if the structure is determined by the story, instead of having yet another conversation about truth in memoir, or comparing memoir to fiction.

Reading Greenfeld’s memoir helped me make up my mind about Antrim’s review. I realize now that it isn’t just a failure on the reader’s part. But it isn’t a writer’s failure either. It’s simply a matter of preference. Some readers prefer poetry, others fiction. Some people like reality TV, others, like me, prefer to watch zombies get their heads blown off on AMC. Not that I’m comparing reality TV—or zombie gore for that matter—to memoir. But you get what I mean.

I bet you won’t be shocked to hear that after I finished Boy Alone, I just had to contact Greenfeld. Had to. Couldn’t contain myself. I also sent him a copy of my now finished memoir, and not only did he read it, but he thought it was “a brilliant coming of age story, especially the Aristotelian Organicism and Essentialism, the alien warfare, and the unique star-crossed lovers storyline.” Yup. His words exactly. And afterward, my agent called to give me the good news: seven figures. Oh, and did I forget to mention that President Obama called to ask if I would have dinner with him and Michelle? Oprah will also be there. I suspect they have a surprise for me. Suck on that, Snooki!

What really happens:

After I finish Boy Alone, I turn on my computer, find Greenfeld’s email address, start writing. You already know what I’m going to say, don’t you? When I’m about to hit send, I change my mind. I don’t send it. Why? That’s the question, isn’t it?

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This awesome essay was written by Jaquira Diaz. Don't mess with her. She knows 101 ways to take you down.

Life in the 12 x 12, or The Upside of the Downsize

2011-04-07T12:09:00.001-04:00

My apartment has granite countertops and cushy carpets. There’s a flat screen TV in the living room, and my two roommates also have TVs in their bedrooms. We have a fridge and a microwave, a washer and dryer. Paintings and posters line the walls, and we recently hung some art deco mirrors from Target. We’ve got two couches and two chairs and a dinner table for four. Vases and scented candles and a martini mix set speckle the coffee table. When it’s cold we turn on the heat and when it’s hot we crank the air conditioning.

Inside Dr. Jackie Benton’s home is a rocking chair, four-burner gas stove, a bed and a bookshelf. The photographs of her life are tacked to the cedar walls, along with Buddhist and Taoist sayings written on scraps of paper. That’s it.

My apartment’s 1235 square feet dwarfs her 144 square feet. Beyond Jackie’s 12 x 12 grow Virginia bluebells, persimmon for wine and preserves, cornelian cherry, mint everywhere, spicebush, elderberries, pecan trees and much more flora. Her dozens of gardens lead out to a lush forest and No Name Creek—literally, that’s its name.

It is here in rural North Carolina that a well educated physician in her sixties lives off the grid without plumbing or electricity—in North Carolina, any structure 12 x 12 feet isn’t considered a house and doesn’t require property taxes. The dirt road leading up to the farm isn’t on Google Maps. In the 12 x 12 she has “the carbon footprint of a Bangladeshi” and thrives off her permaculture farm, one that works in harmony with nature. In short, she makes Thoreau look about as materialistic as Kim Kardashian.

All this sounds wonderful to me, as I sink deeper into my recliner and shovel a handful of Oreo’s in my mouth. I gaze up from the book Twelve By Twelve, taking stock of all my stuff. I don’t really need most of it, if any of it. But I like my recliner, I like Oreo’s—if only because I’m used to them. Could I shed it all like Jackie?

William Powers went to find this out for himself. After spending a decade as a relief worker in Africa and South America, he returned to the US astonished by the consumption and total division from nature, and at many times the derision toward it. Jackie invited him to stay at her 12 x 12 while she marched in protests across the country (she took the Greyhound— “Grey-doggin’ it” as she called it —and stayed with friends to reduce her footprint).

And even though Powers had been accustomed to simplicity from his relief work, at first it wasn’t all rainbows and rapture. The first day he couldn’t stomach the idea of the composting toilet, though he didn’t mind the lack of electricity:

The only oddity was that I was in the heart of the world’s richest nation—but living a subsistence life. No humming refrigerator, no ringing phones, and none of the ubiquitous “stand-by” lights on appliances—those false promises of life inside the machines. Instead: the whippoorwill’s nocturnal call, branches scraping quiet rhythms in the breeze, and groggy No Name Creek. Looking east from the 12 x 12 toward the creek into the ink black night, without the slightest glimmer of industrial society, I thought, could I really be inside the borders of a high-tech superpower?

My air conditioner just kicked on. My Pandora music station sings, and I’m swathed in the laptop’s fluorescence. I take mental inventory of the computers, video game consoles, iPods and various iParaphernalia that fill the apartment. With entertainment streaming in our pores at the speed of light, surely we’d get bored at the 12 x 12. What would we do all day alone in the woods, without even Facebook to update, to show off to all our friends how rustic we are on our little nature retreat?

When Powers asked Jackie what he was supposed to do during his weeks there, his direction was “Not do, be…I was simply to sit…being was indeed the most difficult part in an era where clutter—in both stuff and activity—eclipses the sweetness of solitude, the aliveness of the present moment.”

And while reading Powers’ journey in Twelve By Twelve I too became steeped in the present moment. But the book does much more than try to get us to shut off the iPhone and stare at the daffodils. Twelve By Twelve smartly weaves nature writing with literary journalism, philosophy and indigenous wisdom. In a single chapter Powers juxtaposes statistics on carbon parts per million with Mary Oliver’s poem “Mindfulness”; another chapter threads the local history of the KKK with the dialogue of a Bolivian medicine man. This is how both the book and a permaculture farm work: part science, part spirituality, part sheer poetry.

Powers unpeels a world much larger, and much richer, than the American monoculture of strip malls and fast food joints. Twelve By Twelve takes us to Bolivia’s remote Aynmaran village, a New Mexican organic garlic farm, Brazilian rainforests and the Gold Kist chicken factory, yet always we come home to the 12 x 12. Of course, the 12 x 12 is not my home. My home is on the second floor of a neatly landscaped stucco complex, pretentiously called The Madison at SoHo.

Though I’ve highlighted and dog-eared nearly every page, I can’t just up and move to a cabin in the woods. Powers knows this, and his final chapters push beyond the walls of the 12 x 12 into practical ways I can let the sap of his experience run into my own life. And even with an appendix of resources for organic farms and nonprofit organizations, Powers still swirls his tender personal narrative with lessons from Thich Nhah Hanh and Nietzsche.

I close the book and look out my window to the cars rushing below, feeling all sorts of wasteful. But there’s inspiration mixed in there, too. Perhaps because there is my world of metal and glass, and another world of water and persimmons. But these worlds are not entirely separate, and perhaps it is their intermingling that is the most beautiful possibility.

_______

Melissa Carroll wrote this wonderful essay about space and what we cling too. (I shall not depart with my Iphone, ever.) She teaches yoga and writes phenomenal blog entries at: zenontherocks.blogspot.com/.

Fan Letter

2011-03-13T13:03:00.000-04:00

December 22, 2010

Dear Michael,

I’ve been reading your books—just finished Like Happiness—and trying to decide how to tell you how much I like them. Finally I tried to imagine how I’d like someone to respond to my book; thus this letter.

I’m writing this by the campfire in Collier Seminole State Park, listening (unfortunately) to the teen girls behind our campsite singing loudly and talking even more loudly. I’ve been thinking about how you camp away from people and wishing we were doing that now. It is a big step, though, from never camping to full-out-primitive-pack-it-in-pack-it-out, and this seemed like a necessary intermediate level.

Anyway I don’t imagine you reading this actual scribbled piece of paper—my handwriting is atrocious (the only subject I got a “C” in during my grade school years), and deciphering it would no doubt be more frustrating than any reward in content.

First off let me tell you that I really did fall for your poems just from hearing you read at the Other Words conference. I knew then that I wanted your books, but an odd shyness (hard to imagine, I’m sure) overcame me and I decided to order them when I got home. I knew I loved your most recent work best, so I ordered Flock and Shadow and pre-ordered Like Happiness, and looked up anything of yours I could find online while I was waiting for my packages to arrive.

And what I found just whet my appetite, and confirmed that you share a peculiarity I had suspected was mine alone: the certainty that there are whole worlds inside us, landscapes both natural and fantastic, better and worse, lighter and darker than our outside selves, more mysterious, more real, truer.

Maybe other people feel this. Maybe a lot of other people. But they don’t seem to talk about it, to think about it the way I do—and you do. Well, of course not precisely—these are your poems we’re talking about, your particular wisdom gained (it seems to me) from the kind of mindfulness I’m just taking my first steps towards.

And so: Flock and Shadow. I read the new poems first. I mentioned to you already how I had to catch my breath after “Sky Full of White Birds.” Some parts I want to be the speaker: “In the middle of the night large creatures pulled themselves from the ocean and settled down near me.” And some parts I am, even if I’m not sure I want to be: “…would we stand still and inhale, or would we walk on, safe in our smaller selves, free of that feeling that takes us beyond and leaves us abandoned, out of breath and hungry.” And all this building on more ands, more images I know at the heart level (“the guts and groans of horses in glittering fields”) up to the final word, “sing.”

(I love the surprising ways singing comes up in your work, the mysteries and apt motif: “the world is always singing,/that’s just what the world must do to stay intact.”—but I digress.)

So after I read the new poems, I started section 2, your work from the 1980s. And it was instructive to see where you’d come from—I felt like I was peeking into a photo album. As I read through the whole middle of the book, though, I had to sometimes spell myself with a trip into the last section—the second-most-recent poems. Some of the older poems are starker; some of them hurt more to read; they feel not more lost but less content with being lost, more frantic about it, sometimes almost bitter about it. I know I presume too much, but some of them felt less far along the path to enlightenment than your recent work; and so they were closer to my own anxious musings, and therefore a bit unsettling.

And then I finally received Like Happiness. And yes, I felt happiness reading it, but really because it never gave in to easy definitions—after all, happiness can only be talked about in simile: might this be like it? Might that? What if these things we remember as weird or difficult were, really, more like happiness than like anything else? Counting, for example. Fraught, yes—but also a measure of happiness? A happiness the speaker wouldn’t experience as happiness, but that he wishes to try to understand, even honor.

Even in the speaker’s wisdom, though, in the closer-to-enlightenment feel of the book, there is still yearning. “…wondering how/they survive, such creatures, hidden in places//where nothing might venture for months, or a year,/and how they prepare themselves, when they hear us in the distance,/finally moving towards them.” How do we survive with all this yearning? How do we prepare ourselves, waiting for whatever will bring us the sustenance we need?

So I don’t know if it’s flattering or offensive to be compared to other poets—if that old critic’s phrasing of “a modern-day _________” is really just lazy and dismissive. I don’t mean it that way when I say your work makes me think of Mark Strand (who said at a conference I attended, “I’m a fantasist, not a surrealist”). And James Wright, whose collected poems would be my “take to a desert island” book, who claimed he was always just trying to be clear, and whose clarity was green and beautiful and grounded in the earth (“I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy/And disastrous place. I/Didn’t, I can’t bear it/Either…”). And a bit of someone wilder—Gary Snyder, perhaps—in the way you see things about the human animal and our less domesticated counterparts that require us to let go and love what we love.

So anyway—this was rambling and sometimes random, a thread with knots and beads at odd intervals, an attempt to explain how and why your beautifully crafted words mean so much to me. I am grateful your poems are in the world, and I feel lucky to know you.

Your friend,

Katie

The Love of Dogs

2011-02-27T12:51:00.001-05:00

I’ve been in Boise, Idaho, for the last couple of days in a kind of pensive state. Not that I abhor Boise. In fact, I’m charmed by the place, charmed by the surrounding Boise foothills and the snow that has coated everything in a layer of white. During my time here, I finished Mark Doty’s memoir Dog Years and feel enlightened. After snapping the book shut, I sat in quiet.

In the last year, I’ve been on the road, travelling from city to city, spending my days in cold hotel rooms. There is a loneliness that comes with travelling. Our minds travel the miles back to our comfort, back to the warmth of the familiar body, to the routines of our lives. Travelling is a disruption of routine. No longer do I hear the familiar click-clack of my dog’s paws, or the energetic bark for a treat, or the naughty scratching at the pantry door. At night, this is what I miss most: the beating hearts of my pack, their soft, velvety heads under my hand.

I grew up in a Thai household that was wary of any animal, especially dogs. In Thailand, dogs run rampant all over the country, dogs without homes, without love. It is a deep sadness I keep hidden when I visit, an adjustment in culture that tries me to the point of tears. Since meeting my wife, however, and during the ten years of our relationship, I don’t think I can ever be without a dog again. They are as much a part of me as I am a part of them. To describe how integral my dogs are in my life is impossible. When asked what I miss most when I’m away, most people tilt their heads when I say my dogs and not my wife. This is not to say that I do not miss my wife. I do. Immensely. But this yearning for my furry pack transcends language. Doty writes: “Love for a wordless creature, once it takes hold, is an enchantment, and the enchanted speak, famously, in private mutterings, cryptic riddles, or gibberish.”

My three dogs—Ginger, Charlie, Savvy—are getting old. One day they scurry across the pool deck for Florida geckos, the next they sleep a little longer in their beds oblivious to our comings and goings. With a dog you witness a whole life—from the exuberant, inquisitive puppy to the slow-paced steps of the old dog. And time, though it is years, descends quickly, and for some, unexpectedly. For the longest time, when asked how old our dogs were, my wife and I always said the wrong age, a younger age. Not because we were liars, but because we were trying to prolong the youth of our dogs as long as possible. We ignore the little things. Chalk it up as the quirkiness of character. But then, the realization hits: the reason our dog is not responding to her name is that she is deaf. The reason she does not hop up on our legs for a treat is because her hips are stiff. And then come the fatty lumps, the white around the muzzle, the crackling joints. Slowly, we begin to prepare ourselves. Slowly, time registers for the dog, too. “Knowledge of limit. A hesitation in the step, a look in the eyes, something tentative.”

This trip to Boise was a difficult one. I left with the knowledge that one of our dogs was ill. The day before I left, she wandered from room to room, her ears back, her blond fur without shine. She’s the oldest, but the naughtiest. My wife Katie and I nickname her, “Naughty.” Because she scrapes at the pantry door. Because she is endless with barks. Because she steals food off our plates. When none this happens, something is not right.

On this trip, Katie came too, and we texted our dog sitter, asking if Ginger was better, asking whether she was hopping around like her usual self. He responded promptly, sensing perhaps, the panic in our language, reassuring us that she was a hoppin’ bunny. Which, of course, made us breathe easier, which made us want to see her, which made us forget we have limited time.

The thing about love is its power to blind us with the impossible. But I’m OK with this—for now—because what is better than to watch your dog sleep and think she is dreaming of endless days with you. This is a dream I share.

Fever

2011-02-11T14:10:00.002-05:00

By the time I see the thin box on my way to the grocery store, the cardboard is sloppy with rainwater. I tear it apart while the engine warms and my daughter coos in the backseat. So new, the spine cracks. It smells a little bit like glue.

At home with Lit, I touch a match to the eye of the stove. In a moment, chicken will warm, liquid fat swelling out of the flesh. Standing over the stove, I bend open the book’s spine, and this time, it whines.

I keep reading while my toddler marches in circles around me. I read it while gravy thickens and corn muffins rise. The story lilts and booms through Mary Karr’s young adulthood and her first years as a mother as she recovers from addiction by recovering from her past.

In the middle of preparing dinner, I read, “In the next room, my son, stout but saggy-kneed, clings to the crib bars like a prisoner. Menthol steam from the vaporizer has made a ghost of him. His ringlets are plastered to his head, and coughs rack his small frame. The animal suffering that’s rattling him throws ice water on me, and I enjoy a surge of unalloyed love for him, followed by panic, followed by guilt.”

Exactly that is motherhood. Pots are boiling and spitting. The oven fan purrs; the burners warble under it. I sit on the floor and read the next few pages out loud, letting the vowels expand through the room like the herbed heat from the stove.

I bring Lit into my bed and read through one eye when the other is too tired to stay open. I wake up in the morning with the book in my hand. Day and night for this fraction of my life, I carry it with me.

At the end, I sit at my computer station – a swivel chair pulled up to a deep freezer. I close Lit. The glue smell dissolves into the kitchen air. My daughter is napping a few rooms away, and the kitchen is unusually quiet, a soft appliance hum. I flip through, reading “Without Warren’s hands cupping my own face, I’m almost faceless. I need his body in bed and his books on my shelves anchoring me to the planet.”

I know that feeling. I felt it when my daughter first nursed, that my identity had shifted, that I existed through the touch of her skin.

The first time my new daughter caught a cold, I spoke to an older, more experienced mom about home remedies to ease my baby’s cough and congestion. She told me to feed my daughter warming foods – chicken broth and garlic – rather than treat the symptoms. The symptoms, although uncomfortable, are the body’s way of expelling the offending organism, she said. Do not cure a cold, but let the cold cure you.

She told me that the body invites illness when it is overcome with toxicity. The virus pushes out the toxin, and the body and spirit are cleansed and refreshed.

But these days, she told me, We fight the cold as if to capture to the damage the virus wants to purge from us. We are addicted to damage, to our pasts. We have to let it go.

Mary Karr writes, “As I slow down inside, the world’s metronome seems to speed up, for without keen, self-centered focus on your own inward suffering, clock hands spin. Days get windstormed off the calendar. Rather than thinking about spiritual practices, arguing them out in my head, I almost automatically try them. That, I suppose, is surrender.”

Lit exposes the single device running through you and me and Mary Karr: that recovery is surrender.

As a virus wormed through my daughter’s body, as she survived, seeming to have grown up exponentially after the fever broke, I realized that the occasional purging of the body and spirit is necessary. By releasing the illusion of control, I allowed myself and my daughter to grow. In Lit, Mary Karr surrenders to her faith.

I’ve surrendered to the body, its incorruptible desire to thrive. I’ve surrendered to the fever: those things that run through us, taking something with them and leaving something new behind.

Lit is a recovery narrative. It contains lessons and truths and a pure, concise story. The story exists in the realm between life and death, poetry and prose. Open it, and in a few words, it’s inside of you. It swells, warming you from the inside out.

“Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody’s head off.”

_____________

Asha Baisden penned this wonderful essay. Read her wonderful blog at: http://meta-mom.com. She recently lost her cell phone. Her daughter Loki hid it.

On Scratching

2011-01-17T11:30:00.003-05:00

I love listening to other artists talk about their work. Comedians discussing how they structure their stand-up acts, origamists on the art of folding, painters on design, actors on preparation for a role, photographers on composition – all of it intrigues me. Shows like “Inside the Actors Studio” and “Iconoclasts” hold my attention, and I’m riveted by movies like The Beaches of Agnes, a documentary by and about the French filmmaker Agnes Varda that delightfully welds autobiography and the documentary form.

Consequently, I’ve read, over the years, a number of books that might rightfully fall into the category often called “writers on writing.” I read these for enjoyment, sometimes for inspiration, other times to glean ideas for my classes. I save those I expect to return to and pass others on to colleagues or students. I have a bedraggled copy of Anne Lamott’s beloved Bird by Bird, which I often excerpt for students, who are both reassured and entertained by chapters like “Shitty First Drafts.” Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer and Edward Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem (And Fall in Love with Poetry), likewise, have been great teaching resources.

Other books have had a direct influence on my own writing. Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story and Mark Doty’s The Art of Description, for example, have been underlined in places because they manage to say, concisely and/or beautifully, what I need to hear and rehear. Gornick: “Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.” Doty: “Description is fueled by HUNGER for the world, the need to taste, to name, to claim what’s seen, to bring it, as Rilke would put it (in the ninth of his great elegies, the subject of which is the resurrection of the world within the perceiver), ‘O endlessly into ourselves.’”

There’s a subcategory of writers on writing which isn’t quite that at all. These are generally narrative nonfiction books wherein the writer does something new or unexpected and so the book becomes, for me, a model of creativity. They aren’t intended as how-to books, in other words, but they become, by virtue of a unique quality, exactly that. Lauren Slater’s Lying is probably the best example. It’s billed as a memoir, and its first chapter reads, in its entirety, “I exaggerate.”

No nonfiction writer I know has quite recovered from the mind-blowing repercussions of that opening. It’s a brilliant move, one that guarantees the reader will question every word that comes after. Chapter 1 is both reinforced and complicated by periodic moments of clarification, denial, hesitancy, contradiction, and retraction. The reader is drawn forward by the elegance of the prose, but all the while we are forced to stop in our tracks over and over again and wonder whether we’re reading fact or fiction and, importantly, to question the legitimacy of that distinction. A stellar how-to model, albeit one I will never attempt to mimic.

While dramatically different in style and content, these books have all helped me in one way or another. Sometimes that help has been immediate and practical – providing an exercise I can adapt for a class, for instance. Other times they’ve been influential in a long-term sense. There’s not much crossover, however. A given book is either useful or influential… but rarely both.

Twyla Tharp’s book, The Creative Habit, may turn out to span that gap. It’s marketed as Self-Help and, although I’m sure I’ve read other self-help books in the past, I have to admit that the genre seems, to the book-snob in me, a bit slight. No doubt I could use all kinds of help, but I’m skeptical – perhaps naively so – that a self-help book could provide anything of substance.

Luckily, I didn’t discover the label until later, and so as I browsed on Amazon my snob meter didn’t reject the book. I was looking for ideas for my advanced writing classes and came upon Tharp, whom I know as a dancer and choreographer, but didn’t know she’d written about creativity.

My initial reaction to the book upon receipt was disappointment. The print is unusually large, which made me think the publisher was trying to make the book appear more substantial than it is – rather like a student who reduces his margins or increases font size to create the illusion of more pages. And Tharp’s book features rather unimaginative questionnaires; it highlights phrases like “Give Yourself a Little Challenge.” I sighed, figured I’d thrown away ten dollars. And then, partly because we were snowbound, partly because I was bored, and partly because it was right there– a nice new book – I started to read.

Here’s where I’m supposed to let you in on a great find, claim that the book was so much more than I imagined, announce that Tharp will join Gornick and Doty on my Shelf of Important Books. But here’s the thing about The Creative Habit: there’s not a single word in its 243 oversized pages that will feel new to anyone who is living as a writer or artist. I repeat: If you’ve been working for years on your own art, you’ve already discovered every single thing this book has to say.

And yet… I found The Creative Habit somehow comforting. It was like Tharp, (with help, I should mention, from Mark Reiter), was saying yes, you’re right. This is how you do it.

Here’s her thesis: “I will keep stressing the point about creativity being augmented by routine and habit. Get used to it. In these pages a philosophical tug of war will periodically rear its head. It is the perennial debate, born in the Romantic era, between the beliefs that all creative acts are born of (a) some transcendent, inexplicable Dionysian act of inspiration, a kiss from God on your brow that allows you to give the world The Magic Flute, or (b) hard work… If it isn’t obvious already, I come down on the side of hard work.”

This premise reflects my own experience. Inspiration exists, but is, for me, a result of pursuit and cultivation and openness and readiness… It’s mysterious, to be sure, and can be elusive – but I don’t see it as a bequest from the gods or some fickle, fetching muse. I look for it, I track it, I know its hiding spots. I’m willing to cajole it or court it or circle it or wait it out – whatever it takes. These are practices, one can learn and develop them. As far as I can tell, most writers and artists know this.

One of the reasons I liked the book, however, is not just because of the reinforcement value – I actually tend not to appreciate being told what I already know – but because Tharp has written in a concise and accessible manner about things that sometimes feel quite complex to me. Her writing contains no surprising leaps or lifts or spins – it is grounded and straightforward. If you return to a passage, it won’t be for its grace but for its economy. Well-said, you might find yourself thinking, but not wow.

Among Tharp’s topics: Failure as an inevitable and valuable part of the creative process. The need to negotiate between involvement and detachment. The difference between planning and over-planning. The benefits of limited resources. The importance of practicing fundamental skills.

Tharp also emphasizes the need to “scratch,” which may sound oddly diagnostic but is her euphemistic way of talking about seeking new material. “Scratching is what you do when you can’t wait for the thunderbolt to hit you. As Freud said, ‘When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.’” She follows up by suggesting that you never scratch the same place twice. “If you scratch the same way all the time, you’ll end up in the same place with the same old ideas.” I don’t entirely agree with this – there are certain writers I’ve reread for years, particular artists I return to repeatedly, looking for a spark to push me further into a new piece of writing – but it occurs to me that by returning to the same artists I may be returning, always, to my own methods and, by extension, always writing in the same way(s). Time, perhaps, to review my scratching technique.

As a teacher, I’m glad I read this book. I sometimes worry that students see their creative writing classes simply as classes and don’t take advantage of the apprenticeship college offers. It’s as though they think “I’ll start really writing when I graduate,” and defer the work of developing strong skills, for instance, or learning to research, until then. I’m concerned that they also believe that some magic will happen at that point, whereupon not only will they be able to master aspects of grammar and spelling and punctuation that they’ve put off as too tedious to dwell upon, but will miraculously also discover troves of inspiration which will allow them to sit in front of a screen and effortlessly channel their bestsellers. Then a roving literary agent will knock on their parents’ front door and ask if the writer in the basement has any new work; they’ll turn over their manuscripts and wait for that first big contract to set them on their way.

I’m exaggerating, but only a little. At 18 or 22, my own vision of the future wasn’t much less fanciful, but what I had in my favor was the willingness to work and, eventually, the habit of self-discipline. I’m hoping that Tharp’s ability to, in effect, break down the process of a creative life into manageable steps might be meaningful to at least some of these young writers. I’m hoping that their understanding of the artistic process will be refined by Tharp’s explorations of what it means to desire and seek inspiration. It means that you create inspiration. She’s not taking the magic and mystery away. She’s saying that the artistic process relies on the active engagement of the artist; you don’t sit and wait for art to find you... You discover and practice ways of finding it.

I respect Tharp for putting this project together. The self-help label is, in the end, accurate. The Creative Habit is a clear and readable source of what is essentially basic training. When my own processes feel stagnant, or when I have worked myself into a rut, there is appeal in reading what another artist has done to counter such occasions. Not every piece of writing is meant to dazzle with grand leaps and spins. Sometimes it all comes down to walking slowly across a bare stage. Sometimes it comes down to scratching.

__________________________

Donna Steiner penned this marvelous essay. She has an amazing blog: Life in a Northern Town and is mostly drowning in Lake Effect snow as we speak. If you happen to find her, pull her out of the snow drift.

Crush

2010-12-27T22:07:00.001-05:00

In the 7th grade, I played flute in the school band. I was slightly above average, certainly not first chair. That’s how our band director organized us; first chair meant you were expected to help out your section-mates, pick up the music fastest (practice more, in other words) and perform solos when your instrument was called for.

I had a crush on the boy who was first chair trumpet.

He wasn’t particularly cute, certainly not carrying any more drama or depth than any other 13-year-old boy. He had a bowl-cut head of hair streaked with white blond, silver-rimmed glasses, and an obnoxious laugh.

But he could play the trumpet.

When he raised that instrument to his lips, he shone. The light reflected off that polished brass and the sound that came out promised secret rooms inside him, hints of the complex self he himself might never even know about.

He wasn’t Louis Armstrong, of course. He was just a 13-year-old boy who played trumpet better than anyone else in his class, and knew it. He wasn’t awkward when he played, or conscious of his body or, really, of anyone or anything else. And though I’d never noticed him much before he stood up to play his solo in October of that 7th grade year, I was, suddenly, smitten.

I crush easily. I sense some hidden angle in a person and I’m gone. But it’s not about appearance—a parade of Brad Pitt and George Clooney look-alikes would entertain me, but produce no crushes. My easily-won, temporary love—for that’s what it is—blossoms under the conditions of performance.

So imagine you love poetry as I do, that it is the closest to spirituality or transcendence you ever feel, that it drops into your center like a stone into a pond and the ripples trace the most vital patterns you will ever know. And imagine you’ve read someone’s poetry and it makes the patterns you didn’t know you needed. And this, of course, is art, is a performance of words. Wouldn’t you fall in love?

Then add—oh such a delicate equation—a person whose conversation and body language and expressions remind you of that art you love, like the little whiffs of cologne a body gives off when it moves to put on a coat or wave to a friend. Imagine a poetry reading, and the person responsible for that art performing it even more directly, making it even better than it was when you first met it, solitary, on the page.

That, for me, is the ultimate crush: the poetry crush. Mark Strand, sexy and witty in person, definitely still the man I can imagine “romp[ing] with joy in the bookish dark.” James Galvin, who wooed me with lines like, “The slender lodgepole pines/Stand so close together/You couldn’t walk through them/In your body,” before I ever met him and became his student. And Jean Valentine, for “Under our radiant sleep they were bearing us all night long,” and the quiet but real magic of her voice when she read her poems in a crowded room in Washington, D.C.

My poetry crushes are true loves—I really do love them, these poets. And I don’t know how else to feel my love but in my body, too, wanting to both kiss the maker and taste the words, the bells ringing under my sternum and the loosened rubber bands of my leg muscles.

This is who I am: I get crushes. I fall in love with poets, including those I will never meet (James Wright, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale…). Sometimes those poets’ books watch me while I sleep. That I am happily and faithfully married to the funniest, kindest, most talented writer in the world doesn’t mean I’m lying when I say, “I love this poet.”

I love you, my poetry crushes. Yes, you.

________

This essay was written by Katherine Riegel. Not only is she the best poet I know--I have a wicked crush on her--but she is the author of Castaway.

My Dog Ginger Reviews Stitches

2010-09-24T00:16:00.001-04:00

Ginger hugging Stitches

First off, I'd like to say when your two masters are writers, you get to be a bit of a literary snob. Nope, no rhyming poems for me and bad metaphors are like flees; sometimes no matter how hard you scratch, there's always more of them. Every day, I listen to my masters type away on their computers. My mom master is quiet and intense and stares hard into the screen, and sometimes, I have to roll onto my back and show her my tummy, so she returns from whatever poetry world she entered. My dad master, he insists on reading his work out loud to me and sometimes what he reads is good, and sometimes I howl and bark like I do when I see a squirrel on the pool cage.

One day, my dad master couldn't sleep so he went into his office and read this book with lots of pictures in it. I think it's called a graphic novel. He read the entire book in one night till it was four in the morning, a few hours before my breakfast. After he read the book, he made this breathy noise with his nose. I do the same after dinner. It means he's satisfied. I'm usually satisfied after dinner, too.

He left the book on the floor, and there it stayed for three months.

I couldn't help myself. While both my masters were away at work, I read the book. I mean, it was at my level and all, and I kept stepping on it, so I thought, why not? The title of the book was Stitches and it was drawn and written by David Smalls. There were lots of pictures in it, and some of the pictures were scary, like the crazy lawnmower people that come once a week with the crazy blowing machine. Still, I couldn't stop. I needed to know what happened to the main character; I needed to understand this family that seemed to hold so many secrets.

What I found disconcerting, especially for me because I'm a dog and my favorite thing in the world is to bark, were the silences in the book. There would be pages of drawings and no words at all. But those drawings were screaming. Those drawings illustrated devastation. Those silences were what made Stitches unforgettable, which was a pretty good feat because us dogs have short memories. At the core of this graphic novel was the way Small's family lived in silence and percolating anger and resentment and disquieting rage. At the core of this graphic novel was also a past that continually haunted Smalls.

In short--Four Paws Up for this book. I enjoyed it as much as I enjoy eating Milkbones and barking at the turtle outside the fence. I won't hurt it. I just want to play.

__________

Ginger is an eleven-year old cocker spaniel and is responsible for writing this bark-tastic review. Her work often appears in the backyard, and she likes to play hockey with her dog dish.

Bye-Bye, Summer

2010-09-21T09:21:00.000-04:00

The Love Sponge here.

I've had a fantastic reading summer. Not only did I travel the country, but I read all over it. I read in hotel rooms, in parks, in Midwest cornfields, in the Pacific Northwest mountains. I read in my car (not while I was driving), in independent bookstores, in coffee shops, in our nation's capital, and on Florida beaches. I read in doctor offices, in a hammock, in a pool, in a loft, in a cabin. I read while hiking, while playing disc golf, while waiting for the wife at the airport. It seemed every free moment I had this summer--no matter where I was--I read.

I read fantastic books. Books that have stuck with me for days and weeks and months, even now, when the semester's trucking along.

I read without a pen. I read without judgment. I read for enjoyment, which has been the Clever Title's mission for the last three years. Read because we want to, because it makes us feel good, because it awakens something within us.

I'd like to share three books I enjoyed and where I read them.

1) Cheryl Strayed, Torch

How does a family keep it together after the loss of a mother? How does this loss effect everything they do? I was swept way by the lushness of Cheryl's prose and how she gets into the brains of her characters' and their vulnerabilities. A fantastic read.

Where was I when I read this? In Sparta, WI, in a log cabin, where outside, two llamas slept.

2) Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Always a big fan of Alexie's work, I picked this YA novel expecting more of the same brilliance. All I can say is this book exceeded my expectations. The balance of humor and seriousness is what makes this book special. A quick read that will keep you on your toes from page to page.

Where was I when I read this? In Los Angeles, sitting in the Westin Bonaventure lounge, completely absorbed in the book, while everyone else was watching the Chile versus Spain World Cup soccer match.

3) Craig Thompson, Blankets

Don't let the size of this graphic memoir fool you. Once you start, you don't ever want to stop reading this story about a boy who is trying to find himself in love, family, and religion. Though expertly drawn, what is compelling is the writing of this book, the minimalistic style that still hits hard on the heart.

Where was I when I read this book? Most of Blankets was read in the car with the a/c on, waiting for the wife to get her allergy shot in Brandon, FL. This little excursion took much longer than anticipated, which I was thankful for because I didn't want to stop reading this book.

Other books read:

Joe Meno, The Great Perhaps, Memphis and Atlanta
Paul Guest, One More Theory About Happiness, Carbondale, IL (getting a tattoo)
Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index, Bellingham and Spokane, WA
Haruki Murakami, After Dark, Fort DeSoto Beach in Florida
Kevin Sampsell, A Common Pornography, In a plane from Seattle to Tampa

What I find intriguing about reading a good book is not that it takes us somewhere else--which of course it does--but it makes us remember where we read it. This is a reminder that reading can be an experience, just like the big events in our lives. We remember our first kiss, our tragic moments. We recall what we were doing and where we were physically and mentally in our lives. Reading has become like that for me. It cements me to the world. It marks the road I have taken.

We, at the Clever Title, want to know your best summer read and where you read it. Please share!

What Are You Reading, Wendy Rawlings?

2010-09-03T23:08:00.000-04:00

David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (Vintage, 1999) is a monster of a book, and even more of one when you realize that this is the guy’s first novel (he has since written four more, including the hugely popular Cloud Atlas), and that Mitchell has just barely turned the corner on forty (he was born in 1969). I’ll admit up front that I have a strong (almost malodorously strong) preference for small, lyric novels: my favorites include Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, James Salter’s Light Years, and Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place. By “small,” I mean that I tend to like novels that are light on action and plot, with closely observed details that often focus on domestic and psychological interiors. I’m really not a big book sort of person, but one of my students gave me Ghostwritten as a thank-you gift after he defended his MFA thesis, so I sort of felt obliged to read it. “Uh-oh,” I thought as I scanned the table of contents, which contained ten chapters with titles like “”Okinawa,” “Petersburg,” “London,” and “Mongolia,” “I’m about to be sent all over the freaking world.” Worse, when I perused the novel to see what I was in for, I counted nine first-person narrators, one of whom appeared to be a “noncorpum” entity that transmigrates into a series of human hosts. I remembered how pissed off I’d been years earlier when I’d read Mona Simpson’s terrific novel, Anywhere But Here and discovered that the point of view switched all of three times. How would I manage to keep engaged through nine narrators, one of whom wasn’t even human?

I’m happy to report that Mitchell’s risky narrative experiment passed this cranky reader’s test with flying colors. The separate first-person narrative strands in this novel are so utterly distinct and detailed that I found myself immediately immersed in each one, so much so that I often had the strange feeling at the end of a chapter of having myself transmigrated into a kind of fictional host, a narrator whose story inhabited me so completely that I temporarily forgot my own identity as well as all the novel’s preceding narrators. When Mitchell takes me into the mind of a terrorist who belongs to a cult in Okinawa, I fully enter that terrorist’s mind. And when he takes me into the mind of a female Irish physicist on the run from Pentagon officials, I somehow become part of that physicist’s mind. I won’t spoil the ending, which is as intellectually challenging as it is aesthetically pleasing, but I will say I haven’t had such an exhilarating experience reading a novel since my parents gave me a Wizard of Oz series book each time I managed not to cry during a visit to the orthodontist. Maybe I am a “big book” person after all, when it’s a magic carpet ride of a book.

__________

Wendy Rawlings is the author of a collection of short stories, Come Back Irish, and a novel, The Agnostics. She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama and is the hippest person I know. Period. (And she loves dogs and that's super cool.)

The Same Book

2010-08-18T18:14:00.002-04:00

We all go there eventually,

taken by the dark god from the green

meadow life must seem as one is departing

toward another meadow…

--Alison Townsend, from “The Meadow”

In February, my father died. He had Parkinson’s and was battling dementia. He fell down on the stairs, hit his head, and never recovered consciousness.

We had talked on the phone less than two weeks before his death. He had called to tell me that the book of poetry I’d sent him for Christmas, the book he’d saved to read for his vacation, was “magnificent.” He told me how it fed his soul, how wise the speaker was and how vulnerable, how vivid the author’s images. He told me he loved it, and he thanked me for sending it to him.

The book was Alison Townsend’s Persephone in America, which I’d finally bought after teaching her poem “What I Never Told You About the Abortion” in a coursepack for two semesters. I don’t know why it took me so long to seek out more of her work—perhaps a fear that the other poems wouldn’t stand up to the one I knew?—or why I chose to search for it when I did. But I had read it in the fall, and I loved it.

It is sometimes difficult to share the books we really love, books that aren’t just well-written and beautiful but that fit into some space in us we didn’t even know was there. I don’t think I could teach the whole book, because I might actually cry in class if a student were to criticize it, flipping through the pages and saying, “Honestly, I don’t see what the big deal is about.” Or maybe I would lash out, saying, “The big deal? The big deal is about how these poems show a girl’s life spinning out after a rape, a woman’s sudden hollow despair, a curving desire for familiar landscape and a stranger’s startling affirmation in the crosswalk. The big deal is about how we are the speaker in these poems, and the girl, and the stranger. The big deal is about poetry that matters, that goddamn means something instead of just playing around with its own cleverness and blasé.”

But when I sent the book to my father, I did so because I needed to send him a Christmas present, and because he was a poet and a reader of poetry, and because I wanted the gift to help keep alive our connection to each other, tenuous and strained as that connection sometimes was. I sent it to him because he knew about the labyrinths of despair, as I did, as Alison Townsend did, and because when a book can help you take in just one big lungful of air—scented, perhaps, with hay and sunset—you look around for someone to share it with.

And so I mean this small essay as a thank you, to Alison Townsend, to writers and writing that challenge and define and question and shape us. Because of this book, I had something real to talk about with my father when he called. I had the joy and satisfaction of having chosen just the right gift. And when he died, suddenly, I knew he had been happy, he had been feeling, if not whole, then at least less hollow than he sometimes did; and though never of us were ready for him to leave this green meadow, we had walked together in it for a while, holding the same book in our hands.

This essay was written by Katherine Riegel. Her debut collection of poetry, Castaway, is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press.

Go Independent!

2010-08-07T23:29:00.000-04:00

This summer I've been touring the country, doing readings from my new book Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy. What I find deathly for a bookaholic like myself are events at independent bookstores. Yesterday, I read at Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis with my friend, Kao Kalia Yang, author of the marvelous memoir The Latehomecomer. I left Magers & Quinn with a large dent in my wallet. This happened at A Room of One's Own in Madison, WI, a lovely store in a lovely city, where I walked out with a hefty bag of books that nearly tipped me over. And I can't forget Bookends on Main in Menomonie, home of Neil Gaiman. The truth is I won't get to many of these books for another decade because I have other books I've purchased at independent bookstores, like the ones sitting in my car from my reading at The Book Cellar in Chicago, or the ones I bought at Village Books in Bellingham, WA, and the ones chilling on the ping-pong table at home in Florida from Aunties Bookstore in Spokane, and the ones gathering dust from the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, and oh, the ones from Busboys and Poets in DC and the ones from Book Soup in West Hollywood.

Reading at Busboys and Poets.

Books and books and books. Do I feel guilty about my purchases?

Answer: Not one damn bit.

In fact, I make it a point to buy at least one book at any independent bookstore I go to. Independent bookstore exists for the love of books and the love of reading. True love. But more importantly, independent bookstores love people. Bill Reilly, owner of one of my favorite bookstores, The River's End, in Oswego, NY, said that indies are as much about the books as they are about the community. The River's End bookstore hosts a number of events and book clubs, and many of my students--students who adore reading and the reading life--have worked there.

This past Wednesday, my niece Jenny and her partner Michael wanted to take my wife and I to an independent bookstore in Minneapolis, Arise! When we got there, we found it closed.

"Oh no," Jenny said.

"This sucks," said Michael. He kept peering into the store, as if to see, by some miracle, that the bookstore was open, that this had been a cruel joke on us. We grumbled away. Yet another indie had sadly bitten the dust.

Like the one in Savoy, IL, Pages for All Ages. When my mother-in-law was alive, before cancer took her away, it was this bookstore she loved most, three blocks from her home. She was a voracious reader, finishing 1 or 2 books a day. The workers knew her by name, Dinny, and she had accrued so many points it seemed she got a perpetual discount. The service, the attention, the care, the community, that's what made Pages for All Ages special, what makes all independent bookstores special.

What does the closing of independent bookstores say about our culture? If the indie bookstore is about community, as Bill Reilly said, have we begun to isolate ourselves? Have the Kindle, Nook, E-readers, made the indie bookstore obsolete? Have amazon.com, the large chain stores like Borders and Barnes & Nobles, taken away an essential intimacy that buying a book entails?

Seriously, we, at the Clever Title, don't have an answer. We want to save the independent bookstore. We want to save all of them, cradle them in our arms, because the world needs books, lots and lots of books, books to hold, books to hug and kiss and cuddle like a binky.

Please tell us what your favorite independent bookstore is, and your last purchase. We urge you to go and spend your hard earned cash on books, books in independent bookstores. Keep them alive. They are an essential part of our reading culture.

Please.

Pretty please.

Step Over the Blood

2010-07-15T03:28:00.001-04:00

The first time I walked up the hill from the Manshiyet Nasr garbage village to the cave churches carved into Cairo's Muqattam mountains, I had to step over widening streams of blood rushing down the middle of the steep street. When I reached a curve in the road I found the source: a pig, recently poked in the heart with a knife, was draining before being skinned. The knife-wielder, a boy of fifteen or sixteen, smiled at me as I walked by. His smile was so intense that it seemed like he killed pigs in the street every day. Which, of course, he did.

My friends and I stayed in the visitors' housing at the monastery at the top of the hill for five weeks, learning about the complex cycles of poverty, religion, and health in the lives of the zabaleen, the garbage collectors who traveled through Cairo's metropolis to collect the trash and bring it back to be sorted in the streets and lower levels of their homes for recycling and as food for the pigs. Every day, my group and I hiked the road to the monastery, always turning the tight corner where the pig butcher's family lived. They worked their trade in the wide space of the street corner, always eager to talk but careful not to shake hands when theirs were covered in blood. I was surprised at how quickly this felt unsurprising, a daily occurrence as unnoteworthy as the sweet, rotten smells of garbage.

Usually we only caught pieces of the show, stepping by quickly, grasping the whole process in a disjointed, out-of-order fashion, like watching a movie out of order throughshort clips caught on late-night cable. Only once did I watch the entire process from beginning to end. T he pig was guided out of its chamber by its ears. It quickly escaped, hiding underneath a car. It was pulled out by its legs, screaming as if there were a person living in its belly. Its heart was stopped by a knife plunging into it. It laid down, as if sleeping, and died. Hooked up to hang and drain, right there in the street. Skinned--the moment when, to me at least, it changed from "animal" to "food." Cut apart swiftly.

I later learned that roasted, these pigs tasted very, very good.

When reading Joan Fry's How to Cook a Tapir: A Memoir of Belize, I kept thinking of my weeks in Cairo, of what it was like to see animals transition to food more directly than I had ever experienced growing up in the U.S. Fry uses her slowly emboldened adventures with food in a 1960s Mayan village as the symbol of her slow acceptance and love for the people she knew during her year-long stay as a twenty-year-old who taught English to the village children while her husband did whatever grad students in anthropology do. Throughout the book, his heart drifts in the opposite direction from hers, dreaming of his U.S. world of prepackaged meals-in-boxes and a life where he can control his meals, his schedule, and his wife. But Fry's story is one of embracing the unexpected, of accepting the chickens, gibnuts, iguanas, and tapir that her neighbors lovingly deposit at her door, and figuring out whether to fry or boil the suckers, and with chayote, beans, or what.

Food draws you in like that. Our first meal with the pig-slaughter family in Cairo was simple: lots of ful (a thick hummus made of fava beans) and pita bread, and huge bowls of green molokhiyya soup, its slimy snottiness dripping from the spoons so that we had to hold the bowls close to our faces. But even better, to eat the foodwe had been invited in; we had sat on their rug and seen the dark concrete walls inside their house. When we would later see the blood in the street we thought not, "Death is streaming toward my feet," but, "My friends are home!"

For Fry (and for me in Cairo), food was a link to the present, lived experience of neighbors--and without embracing it, Fry's anthropologist husband Aaron was unable to really grasp the life of those he was studying. Toward the end of the memoir, she gives an illustrative example of the kinds of discussions they have throughout the book:

By the time Aaron and I got home, it was two in the morning. "Did you like that bush green?" I asked. "I'll ask Lucia to show me where it grows. What did Evaristo call it again?"

"We still haven't seen anybody die here," Aaron said, as though replying to my question.

Aaron's world is a ghost world, where he manages to see everyone and everything in Belize through a distant haze, indistinct as if seen through grocery-store milk. He relied on abstractions: the categories of behavior he learned about in anthropology texts. But Joan's attention to the details, to the bush greens, keeps her grounded in the reality of the village.

In Cairo, my team's goal was always to avoid "studying" the Zabaleen like Aaron would have--we purposefully only had one camera between the seven adults on the team--and instead to learn from them, to eke out an understanding of what role garbage and policy and relationships and God had in their lives, so that we could join in the flows of the work already being done there, both secular and spiritual. But I can imagine how our memories of the garbage village would be different, abstracted, if we had insisted on keeping our eating habits separate, dining only on the chicken and hard-boiled-eggs served in the monastery dining room or buying dried soup to reconstitute in the separate privacy of our rooms.

**

On the main street of the garbage village, Osama had a bread shop. Twice he took me inside to watch the magic: employees tore beanbag-sized clumps of dough from a huge bowl and rapidly dropped them on a conveyor belt through an oven large enough to cook a camel. On the other end, the dough had expanded into canteens, puffer fish, Whoopie cusions--pita bread ready to be swept into baskets with paddles that were big enough to push boats through the Nile. Osama and his family would then manage the arms reaching through the sales windows from the street, fingers and voices calling out the number of loaves needed. "Telehta!" "Arbah!"

Osama loved it, the wild warmth of the making and the selling. A musician, he was eager to learn any songs I could teach him in English, and he taught me a song by writing it out for me three times: in English and in Arabic script and transliteration. Maybe I'm forcing a coherence that wasn't there, but it seems to me that Osama's music and bread were part of the same impulse, a part of him that wanted to create and share and praise together.

In Belize, Fry ate tortillas, not pita bread. And instead of being invited to rooms where they were mass-produced, she and Aaron at first had to simply smell them: "Ever since Aaron and I had arrived here," she writes, "I'd been inhaling the fragrant, corn-chip aroma of freshly made tortillas wafting from the women's houses and salivating." Aaron brokered a deal with a neighbor, paying her to make tortillas for them daily. But going back to that early scene in the book is telling: the woman who agrees to make the tortillas seemed early in the book simply to be a random Maya woman who knew how to cook. But after reading the rest of the book, readers get to know Dolores, and she begins feeling real, as concrete as a chewy tortilla between the teeth or a living mass of people eager to buy pita bread.

That early scene is also a reminder that Fry's transition into village life was difficult, much less smoothed out than I'm describing it here. She often felt stupid,barely knowing how to do basic chores in the U.S. and feeling completely uncertain about what it looked like in a Maya village to wash clothes in a creek, cook over a fire, maintain a dirt floor, and manage a group of students. Her change after a year there, when she doesn't want to return to the U.S., is both expected--we expect books to show a character's development, after all--and, as much as I hate the word, inspirational. It means that the times when I've felt distant, analytical, afraid of the places I've been, there was always hope that I could end up more like Joan than Aaron. That is, as long as I remember to step over the blood in the street, smile, and accept some food.

Kyle Stedman is responsible for writing this wonderful essay. Don't let his calm and cool exterior fool you. He is mad with the mic on karaoke night.

Wallflowers, Freaks, Us

2010-07-04T03:13:00.003-04:00

Back in 2006, a friend from college called me up and said, “I just finished watching one of the weirdest, most fucked-up, disturbing movies ever. You’d probably like it.” The movie was Me and You and Everyone We Know, written and directed by a young performance artist named Miranda July. I knew that the film had generated considerable buzz at Cannes but apart from that, I knew nothing else about it or July.

As it happened, a few weeks passed before I got around to renting Me and You and Everyone We Know from my local library. When I finally watched it, I was simultaneously moved and repelled by the extraordinary lengths the characters went to in order to forge meaningful relationships with one another. Miranda July’s intelligent handling of the generally oddball situations in which these sad characters found themselves left a good impression on me—which is to say, I looked forward to future Miranda July films. But that’s all I looked forward to. Just films.

Let me explain. Typically, I’m wary of books written by actors, athletes, politicians, filmmakers, etc. I think, “Hold it right there! Stay on your side of the street! As it is, there are too many books written by real writers. We don’t need your books clogging our literary arteries.” For that reason, when I learned that July had published a collection of stories (never mind that many of the stories were originally published in leading literary journals), I didn’t run out and buy the book.

In fact, I completely forgot about No One Belongs Here More Than You until coming across a story of July’s called “Roy Spivey” in The New Yorker. In this story, a young woman is seated on an airplane next to a famous actor. After striking up a conversation, the actor gives the woman a piece of paper with his phone number written on it. Throughout the remainder of the story, the woman debates whether or not she should call the actor and considers the ways her life could change as a result of making contact with him. Reading this story, I was taken by July’s eye for detail and her uncanny ability to express her protagonist’s dreams and apprehensions so convincingly. Putting my reservations aside, I decided I wanted to read more stories by this talented young writer.

Like “Roy Spivey,” many of the stories in No One Belongs Here More Than You begin with an odd premise in which an opportunity for human connection presents itself. For example, in “The Shared Patio,” when a man has an epileptic seizure on his apartment patio, instead of seeking medical attention, his lonely neighbor cozies up next to him and falls asleep. Meditating on this “dangerous and inappropriate thing,” she invents a conversation between her and her neighbor and says, “He loved me. He was a complex person with layers of percolating emotions, some of them spiritual, some tortured in a more secular way, and he burned for me. This complicated flame of being was mine.” Regardless that the man has a wife and that the feelings the narrator ascribes to him are imaginary, she is pleased to have experienced these brief moments of intimacy.

Her characters’ loneliness is palpable and heartbreaking, but the decisions they make to alleviate the loneliness are comical—sometimes plain bizarre—but always profound. In “The Swim Team,” a woman “shocked to remember” she lives alone invites elderly women and men to her apartment for improvised swimming lessons. In “The Man on the Stairs,” a woman’s decision to confront a possible burglar prompts her to consider all the ways she’s disappointed by the direction her life has taken. In particular, she is disappointed that she hasn’t experienced idealized love and friendship. She says glumly, “Sometimes I lie in bed trying to decide which of my friends I truly care about, and I always come to the same conclusion: none of them. I thought these were just my starter friends and the real ones would come along later. But no. These are my real friends.”

Perhaps July’s greatest gift is her ability to communicate these characters’ yearnings without being overly sentimental. The narrator of “Ten True Things”—my favorite story in the book—is a lonely secretary who reaches out to her boss’s wife for friendship. Although the two women communicate on a daily basis—via phone—they have never met in person. The narrator tells us she’s drawn to the wife because she doesn’t seem to “recoil” from the narrator: “Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can’t see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.” When the narrator learns that the wife has enrolled in sewing classes, she decides to do the same. Although the friendship doesn’t pan out quite as the narrator imagined, she seems grateful to have learned a bitter lesson about love’s fleeting nature, as do the other characters in the book. No One Belongs Here More Than You is a startling, funny and heartbreaking testament that Miranda July is a true Renaissance Woman.

_____

Bryan Rice wrote this wonderful review. Please feed him. He's a poet.

The Aquarium

2010-06-23T03:07:00.001-04:00

I. A girl, twelve, walks up a narrow, carpeted staircase to the second floor of a dark house. The girl has long, blond hair, combed straight down her back. Her hair is wet. She is wearing an over-sized t-shirt, her father’s, and pale yellow underwear dotted with tiny, green frogs. Ahead of her, the floor above is a dead end, a hallway lit only by daylight from an open door down the hall on the left. She reaches the top of the stairs and turns toward the light, entering a bedroom. The bed is laced and covered with throw pillows, like a wedding cake. On the wall beside a tall window, two shelves are filled with a pastel rainbow of TY Beany Babies. The girl stands in front of the window, her body barely feminine, silhouetted against sunrise over the bald, Maryland spring.

She stands close to the glass, her breath on the window. From downstairs, her mother’s voice is muted, calling, asking if she is ready.

II. Dolphin tank of an aquarium: the girl sits on a short bench facing the tank, her hair a plait down her back. She is wearing a lavender dress, white stockings, and shiny black shoes. Her legs are crossed at the ankles. A young man in a tux sits beside her, their faces lit by a flood of blue from the cerulean water in front of them. A dolphin streams by.

Girl: It’s like if we had to live in a glass submarine at the bottom of the ocean for, like, the rest of our lives, and jellyfish and eels would come by and watch us.

Young Man: Nods.

Girl: Even while we poop. And there would be fake trees and AstroTurf. And fish babies pressing their faces to the glass. Pauses to watch air bubbles rise to the top of the tank. I wonder if they hate us. Or want to be one of us. Or don’t notice us, anymore, at all.

III. Living room, painted warm colors. Taxidermied ducks in flight and deer antlers decorate the walls. The girl, wearing her t-shirt and underwear, sits cross-legged on the carpeted floor, and her mother sits on an overstuffed couch behind her braiding her hair. In front of them, a fat, grainy TV runs the news on mute. Her mother’s face is dotted with green concealer, and her red hair is short, blown dry but not yet curled. Across the room, the girl’s aunt sits in a wide recliner. She is older, her red hair longer. A single curler rests on her forehead, twisted in her thin bangs. The dishwasher in the kitchen makes a loud gurgling noise, and the girl turns her head toward the sound. Her mother yanks the braid. “Bitch,” she says under her breath. The girl’s eyes widen, and she straightens, staring hard at the soundless screen. Her aunt glances at her mother and then focuses on the news: photos of a cabinet floating in a flash flood, some people huddled in ponchos on their roof, in the rain.

III. The girl and her mother face each other. They stand alone in the large kitchen of a church. Beyond their faces, a door is cracked revealing gray, morning light. The girl’s hair is tight in a braid, and she wears her lavender dress and stockings. The mother wears a blue dress. Her hair is a mess of curls. They wear the same color lipstick.

Mother: I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean it.

Girl: It’s okay.

Mother: It’s just visiting them, their lifestyle is so different from ours. And me and my sister, it’s always been hard. I want us all to be close.

Girl: I know

A man enters carrying a five pound bag of carrots from the door behind them. He is heavyset with a thick, gray mustache and salt-and-pepper hair. He dumps the carrots onto a wooden cutting board, unsheathes a curved hunting knife, and chops the carrots.

Mother: I’m going to sit down with your dad. I'm tired. Watches the girls face, smiles a little and exits.

Girl watches the pile of chopped carrots shift and scatter across the table as the man adds more.

Man: Want one?

He hands her a carrot chunk and she pops it in her mouth.

Man: Know what I use this knife for? Chopping worms.

Girl spits the chewed carrot into her hand. She walks, fast, searching for a bathroom. She hears voices behind a door, and pushes it open. Inside, her aunt is sitting on a plastic chair, and her cousin stands, smoothing her puffed, white, beaded gown in front of a square mirror atop a vanity. The women turn to the girl as she enters.

Aunt: What’s wrong?

The girl touches her face, realizing she’s been crying. She looks down at the smashed carrot in her fist.

Girl: I need a napkin. This guy used his worm knife to chop the carrots. Tries to laugh, but it emerges imitation-soft.

Aunt: Oh honey, he was probably joking. Hands girl a delicate, blue napkin from the vanity.

The napkin is spotted with concealer, mascara, eyeshadow. Girl folds the chewed carrot into the napkin.

IV. The young man is lit from behind by a row of fish tanks embedded in the wall. They are filled with colorful coral and a dark blue light. He is walking along the hallway of fish tanks with the girl.

Young Man: I just think family, you know, that’s it.

Girl: But we don’t have anything in common. We don’t even eat the same food. But my friends- they do the same things as me. We like the same things, love them. We love things together. I don’t love things with my family.

Young Man: Puberty is lonely.

Girl: Looks away. I don’t like Maryland. I want to go home to Florida, where it’s hot.

Young Man: I love this time of year. Soon there will be flowers. If you lived here, you'd get used to it.

Girl: Looks back at the man. You know, my cousin she’s, like, ten years older than me or something. She has so many Beany Babies. We gave our Beany Babies to our doberman a couple years ago.

They reach a balcony and stop, resting against a railing, looking down over the wedding reception below. The bride and groom are dancing, and people stand around with small plates of hors d'œuvrs.

The bodies of the girl and the young man are silhouetted against the reception scene below; the reception is a mess of colors and lights in front of them.

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I recently talked to my mother about my memory of my aunt’s living room.

“I said that?” she asked.

“You were really stressed out.”

“I don’t remember that. And your aunt never uses hair curlers.” But I remember it. I can see it, clear as morning. Maybe it never happened.

Memories are lonely things: hardly ever ratified by the other people involved. As people cannot share their consciousness, they cannot ever, really, share a moment after it has passed.

Lauren Slater opens her memoir Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir with, “I exaggerate.” She could have written, “I remember.” Exaggeration draws meaning from memory.

Exaggerating an image: the bloom of my daughter’s toes right after she was born: she is my flower, she is human, alive; she begins. Exaggerating an illness, a state of the body: Lauren Slater writes, “I have epilepsy. Or I feel I have epilepsy. Or I wish I had epilepsy, so I could find a way of explaining the dirty, spastic glittering place I had in my mother’s heart.”

In Lying, through the rush of her body, Slater maneuvers through her coming-of-age and my coming-of-age and every girl’s coming-of-age. For Slater, the song of puberty is filled with epilepsy and flowers, “I watched the other girls in their bathing suits in the water; I watched them stand in the water up to their waists, and then topple backward, and then the lovely squelching sound when they hit. With their eyes closed, they drifted on their backs, and if they were twelve or older, their nipples pushed out from beneath their suits, lilies those girls, every one. I was a lily too.”

Mine was a song of politics and fish. My daughter’s will be something different, maybe birds or dancing or pine needles.

For every mother, the burst of a daughter’s puberty is foreign and familiar. For every daughter, the climb toward the buxom enterprise of womanhood both forms a collective between mother and daughter and alienates them from each other.

Slater combs the wild, the gorgeous, the grotesque from her formative years and lines them up so that her story is as inescapable as my own life. As inescapable as the questionable nature of truth:

“I suggest you pitch [this book, Lying] to the public as...a book that takes up residence in the murky gap between genres and, by its stubborn self-position there, forces us to consider important things.”

Epilepsy or existentialism. Disease or state-of-mind. Stranger, narrator, story-maker, friend.

“Together we will journey. We are disoriented, and all we ever really want is a hand to hold.
...I am so happy you are holding me in your hands. I am sitting far away from you, but when you turn the pages, I feel a flutter in me, and wings rise up.”

Asha Baisden penned this wonderful essay/review. Read her incredible essay "Touch" at Sweetlit.com.

On the Table

2010-06-05T20:49:00.003-04:00

Every winter my aunt whips up a pot of “ugly cider,” a warm drink that tastes like sugary pumpkins but looks like the cat got sick over the stove. At holiday meals my grandmother tells the same anecdotes with a cast of characters spanning four generations—we always pretend we’re hearing her stories for the first time. We also tease my cousin Kim about her runt of a pet turtle, Ted, who serendipitously appeared on her welcome mat one morning, compared to my cousin Marco’s personal-pizza-size turtle, the robust Squirtle. (We’re planning a turtle race next Thanksgiving; I’m betting on the underdog Ted. Or is it underturtle?)

Families are constructed from these momentary bits and pieces that line up like dominoes. These are the seemingly mundane nuances that forge our connections and ultimately shape our memories. Some families only gather for the milestones—the graduations, the weddings—and some families never gather. Yet no matter how far we may stray from these people, we are inextricably fused together at the root. And when a family is confronted with devastating loss, they must rediscover who they really are to one another.

Roger Rosenblatt’s family had to do just that after his daughter Amy, a 38-year-old pediatrician, suddenly collapsed on her treadmill. When her heart stopped, she left her three children, her husband Harrison, and constellations of friends and relatives behind to grieve. While Rosenblatt’s memoir Making Toast is a stirring account of one family’s unthinkable tragedy, it is also an exercise in connection and resilience.

The day after Amy died, Rosenblatt and his wife Ginny drove from their home in New York to Maryland, where Amy and her family lived: “With Harris’s encouragement, we have been there ever since. ‘How long are you staying?’ Jessie asked the next morning. ‘Forever,’ I said.”

With the family structure upturned, the grandparents must assume parental roles of three young children, suddenly immersed in the day-to-day routines: “I become a short-order cook, on the receiving end of commands fired at me all at once: cereal, no cereal; cereal with milk and without; orders for skim milk added to Silk and ‘cow milk’; minipancakes and miniwaffles, with and without sugar, with and without butter, with and without syrup. Bubbies remains consistent in his preference for toast.”

Rosenblatt is frank about his good fortune in life up until losing Amy. However, he dispels any perceptions of self pity, as Ligaya, the nanny, coolly yet wisely tells him, “You are not the first to go through such a thing, and you are better able to handle it than most.”

With lucidity and honesty, Making Toast spun me into this family’s idiosyncrasies, inside jokes and intimate relationships. On page one I was a stranger merely invited to gaze upon Rosenblatt’s story with some brand of sympathy. By the end I felt as though I’d been living in Maryland with them all, eating at their table, sharing their everyday joys as well as the heft of their crushing loss. This, of course, is a testament to Rosenblatt’s skill at navigating the reader across his family landscape. He does not dwell on sentimental notions of death or faith, but rather reveals how people cope in the pale light and force of heartbreak. Every morning the toast must be made.

Rosenblatt sews many lives together and examines how even his closest of relationships are reformed after his daughter’s death; in many cases with unraveling complexity and ardor. “I had always thought of selflessness as a characteristic one learns and adopts, but in Ginny it seems like part of her genetic information. And now, in sorrow, she is in her element. ‘I am leading Amy’s life,’ she says in despair yet comfort, too. After forty-six years of marriage, I am getting to know my wife.”

Like Kathleen Finneran’s The Tender Land: A Family Love Story, which honors her late brother’s life and her family as a whole, Making Toast swims through time, blending memories of Amy with present moments. Throughout the vignettes, Rosenblatt gradually shapes the difficult process of recovery; though, with the help of a therapist, he realizes that complete recovery is impossible in such a situation. Even so, the children portrayed in the memoir breathe optimism and innocence into their days. Naturally they experience penetrating confusion, anger and pain, but they also remind Rosenblatt, and the reader, that there is still room for laughter. One particularly smile-worthy moment occurs when the youngest child, nicknamed Bubbies, has taken to having The Letters of James Joyce by Stuart Gilbert read to him before bedtime by Rosenblatt. It’s clearly “an ambitious choice for a twenty-three-month-old boy,” and so Rosenblatt creates letters from Joyce to Bubbies, cataloguing Joyce’s days playing in the sand at the beach or trying the scary playground slide. “Bubbies turns the pages. Occasionally I amuse myself with an invented letter closer to the truth of Joyce’s life and personality: Dear Bubbies, I hate the Catholic Chucrch, and am leaving Ireland forever. Love, James Joyce. It tickles me that Bubbies has chosen to latch onto a writer who gladly would have stepped on a baby to get a rave review.”

Making Toast is not a self-indulgent pity party. Instead, it’s a celebration of how we connect to one another in even the most commonplace ways. This book will make you want to call your mother just to say hi (do it—she’ll be so happy), buy your best friend lunch, or simply give your dog a hug. Read, and be grateful.

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Melissa Carroll wrote this review. She conducts weekly dance parties in her living room, often to 90s jams. Please inquire about the next running man competition.

Snow White by Bryan Rice

2010-05-24T20:15:00.002-04:00

This is a our second installment of collage stories. Bryan Rice is an incredible poker player. Don't let him fool you. He knows what he's doing.

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Nobody could touch the body until the coroner came. You could smell it through the rank sweetness of the dumpster. She wore a black dress and very red lipstick. One temple was dented. All messed up and no place to go.

People are often unable to take in the sufferings of those close to them. “I prithee, daughter, do not make me mad: I will not trouble thee, my child; farewell: we’ll no more meet, no more see one another.” Weeping, the Count got off his horse, unfastened his breeches and thrust his virile member into the dead girl. Sausages in between a glass. He said, “I bet nobody has ever done this!” He thought of his wife, making breakfast with her delicate, methodical movements, or in the bathroom, painstakingly applying kohl under her huge eyes, flicking away the excess with pretty, birdlike gestures, her thin eyebrows raised, her eyes blank with concentration.

The crowd was quiet. “We got us a situation here. Got a figure out what to do.”

A policeman asked him if he wanted to go to the hospital.

The Count wanted isolation. He took off his hat and nodded solemnly, slapped the hat against his coat as if that were it, everything had been settled, the drive finished, the railroad reached. He began to feel slightly happier.

The officer laughed loudly. “Oh, I was only joking,” he said and drew his head back.

The weapons came out.

It was Go Time.

- Willa Cather, My Antonia

- Eugene Marten, Waste

- Paul Auster, City of Glass

- Lydia Davis, from the story “Mr. Knockley”

- Jay McInerny, Bright Lights, Big City

- Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

- William Shakespeare, King Lear

- Angel Carter, from the story “The Snow Child”

- Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

- Diane Williams, The Stupefaction

- Mary Gaitskill, from the story “Romantic Weekend”

- Shirley Jackson, from the story “The Lottery”

- Annie Proulx, from the story “Brokeback Mountain”

- Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locusts

- Bram Stoker, Dracula

- Raymond Carver, from the story “Collectors”

- Anne Tyler, Morgan’s Passing

- Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

- Franz Kafka, from the story “Unhappiness”

- Denis Johnson, Angels

- George Saunders, Pastoralia

The People We Meet in Waiting Rooms

2010-05-08T01:16:00.001-04:00

Michael Greenberg’s Hurry Down Sunshine is a story that begins when his fifteen-year-old daughter, Sally, suffers a mental breakdown and is hospitalized in New York City. After she is diagnosed with manic depression, Greenberg’s family life is turned upside down. Although mental illness runs in Greenberg’s family—his brother Steve is a lifelong paranoid schizophrenic—when he is confronted with the idea that Sally’s manic depression may be hereditary, he struggles to accept it. Greenberg’s mother, Helen, dismisses the idea altogether, telling Greenberg, “Sally is nothing like Steve. […] Steve is the way he is because of me.” Helen prefers to take the blame for Steve’s illness, citing her emotional withdrawal from Steve when he was a baby, rather than admitting that Sally may suffer a fate similar to her uncle’s. When his father dies, Greenberg is forced to take responsibility for his brother. Although Greenberg’s brother has his own apartment in New York, he lives in a state of disrepair, letting drug-addicted squatters take control of his home, and eventually having his own breakdown near the end of the book. When Sally is released from the hospital, the family must learn to live with her illness, and to come to terms with the possibility that she may never again lead a normal life. One can’t help but fear that Sally is doomed to live in the same chaotic fashion as Steve.

Hurry Down Sunshine resonated with me personally, evoking feelings similar to those I experienced in the years since my own mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. My mother is not only a schizophrenic, but also an addict, and after so many years of her methamphetamine abuse, I have difficulty separating the two. Sometimes, I can no longer tell whether the person I’m speaking to is simply displaying symptoms of her mental illness, if she’s hallucinating, if she’s suffering from withdrawal, or if I’m talking to the tweaker. In his memoir, Greenberg struggles with similar feelings when dealing with his brother, and fears having to encounter the same situation with Sally.

But as much as Hurry Down Sunshine is about Sally’s “crack-up,” the story is also about Greenberg himself, about his complicated familial relationships—with his daughter, his wife, his ex-wife, his mother, and finally, his brother. The book also poses questions other than those raised by the personal story: What happens when the mentally ill reach adulthood? Who is responsible for them?

I haven’t seen my mother in more than five years. Our conversations over the years have dwindled to limited, short instances when I call family members in order to reach her, or the rare occasion when she calls to ask for money. The last time she called, it was to tell me that she’d had most of her teeth removed, and to ask for money to fix the few she had left. My brother called the next day, described the extent of the damage.

“She didn’t have them removed,” he said. “They fell out.”

I considered if it was true, but still, I was unable to discern if my mother’s poor oral hygiene came about because of her schizophrenia, or if what she had was a case of what is commonly referred to as “meth mouth.”

“It’s bad,” my brother said after a long silence. “You don’t know how bad.”

My brother had been taking care of my mother, on and off, for the last five years—as much as you can take care of someone like my mother—and I assumed that he’d also struggled with those moments, when he could not separate my mother’s mental illness from her addiction. My brother assumed the responsibility of caring for my mother because he lived close to her, that much I knew. But there was so much about their relationship I didn’t understand, like how he could live with her. Or why, after he moved out, she still visited him daily, yet she never remembered me or my sister, never even called on birthdays or holidays.

On the phone, my brother mentioned the state of her apartment, how she’d been evicted and he needed help clearing out all her valuables, roomfuls of stuff she’d hoarded over the years.

“Why don’t you come down?” my brother asked. “See for yourself.”

“I don’t need to see her,” I said. The truth was I didn’t want to see her. I thought my brother was somehow trying to force some interaction between my mother and I, or trying to make me assume some responsibility for her. Seeing my mother would mean that I’d have to revisit those feelings, to ask some of the same questions Greenberg had been forced to ask of his relationship with Steve. Even though she was an adult, who was responsible for my mother?

Hurry Down Sunshine promises Greenberg’s acceptance of his daughter’s illness, a deeper understanding of his brother, perhaps a mending of their relationship. But what I found in Greenberg’s pages was a larger truth—that there are no definitive answers. Only more questions.

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Jaquira Diaz wrote this essay. She loves food as much as I do. That's saying something.

Running Barefoot

2010-04-27T01:13:00.002-04:00

I’m a cultural anthropologist. I study cultures and read books. That’s what I do. I’m not an athlete, let alone a runner. I couldn’t care less about proper stride or the magnificent shock absorption capabilities of our body. And if I ever harbored any secret dreams of becoming anything athletic, the knee surgery I had twenty years ago (which incidentally, exacerbated the injury) sealed the deal. Needless to say, I have never been interested in sports and have never , ever, wanted to run a marathon. Until I read Born to Run.

Journalist, contributing editor at Men's Health magazine, writer for Runner's World, and former war correspondent, Christopher McDougall, combines the necessary elements, in just about the right doses, to hook me in. He uses every trick of creative nonfiction to recreate past events and artfully interweaves humor, anthropology, history, physiology, profiles of renowned ultra marathoners and sports scientists, with the reverence and awe that only one who sees running as a religion could transmit. The Tarahumara being the gods of this creed.

Born to Run is a tribute to this Mexican tribe of Stone-Age superathletes who live a parsimonious existence in one of the most inhospitable places on earth: the Copper Canyons of the state of Chihuahua. It is an extreme place, with blistering heat during the day and frozen nights, deadly cliffs, rocky patches of nothing but snakes, thorny shrubs, and unscaleable escarpments. Yet, despite the ruggedness of the environment or because of it, the Tarahumara are a small group of superrunning savants, celebrated for their ability to run extreme distances (think twelve non-stop Boston Marathons back to back) without injury. Without training. Without stretching before racing. Without power bars. Without specialized diet (their diet is based on pinole, chia seeds, grain alcohol). All of this without shoes.

Whether or not running has a direct effect on their health, McDougall noted that “In Tarahumara Land, there was no crime, war, or theft. There was no corruption, obesity, drug addiction, wife-beating, child abuse, heart disease, high blood pressure, or carbon emissions. They didn’t get diabetes, or depressed… Their cancer rates were barely detectable.”

This book is not only about the Tarahumara. It is also about the greatest race the world has ever seen orchestrated by an eccentric gringo who had long adopted the Tarahumara ways and is the key to the author’s communication with the tribe. It is a fifty mile race in the Copper Canyons, between a handful of rubber-sandaled Tarahumara and a pocket of crazy non-Tarahumara ultrarunners:

Jen and Bill, a pair of wild twenty-one-year old party animals who had already won the toughest 50k on the East Coast and clocked one of the fastest 100-mile times in the USA.

Eric Orton, a Wyoming adventures-sport coach who trained the author for the race.

Scott Jurek, a seven-time winner of the Western States 100-mile ultramarathon who also broke the record of the 100-mile Badwater ultramarathon after running the course in 24 hours 36 minutes.

Luis Escobar, another ultrastud winner of the sweltering H.U.R.T 100-mile in Hawaii.

Barefoot Ted, an amateur runner who had discovered the health and spiritual benefits of running barefoot and had already run The Los Angeles, as well as the Santa Clarita marathons. Barefoot, of course.

The book is not only about a brutal race in an unforgiving environment, but also a communion of philosophies of living, a cross-cultural war of athleticism the reward of which is nothing but a better and richer understanding of our bodies and collective psyches. We are natural runners. We run because it is therapeutic, and because it is a legacy of our ancestors, who ran, not to keep fit, but because their survival—either running away from predators or running the prey to exhaustion—depended on their ability to run steady for hours.

McDougall makes himself a character in the book and it is through his passion for running and his determination to discover the secrets behind the Tarahumara’s strength, that he documents the conspiracy of the multi-billion dollar running shoe industry and makes a strong case for our return to basics, which is, running either barefoot or with the cheapest, flattest sole possible; and running for fun (like children, kicking our behinds with the soles of our feet, knees slightly bent, straight back, toes digging down into the earth) on the spirit of camaraderie and for the sheer joy of using our bodies for a basic, essential purpose: to remind ourselves that we are meant to run, physiologically designed for running and mentally engineered for incredible feats of endurance.

While some skeptics might accuse McDougall of adrenalizing the story for maximum effect, the book is nevertheless a great adventure, a comedy of misfits, a scientific discovery, and a celebration of life in its purest form.

And although I understand that at this point in history, life is no longer about the survival of the fittest, I’m seriously contemplating the thought of running. I’m not too old. One of the many scientists who McDougall interviewed said that a human being reaches his running peak at sixty-two. I qualify. Checkü.

I also followed his advice about fixing injuries by running barefoot. Well, not quite. I attend frantic high-energy Zumba sessions a few times a week and the twenty-something year old knee pain that almost made me quit went away a few weeks after ditching my fancy gel-cushioned Adidas shoes. I am now dancing in flat, old Converse shoes and haven’t felt better in years. Check.

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Adriana Paramo penned this running review. Watch out for her. She's vicious with a pen.

This Dog Knows a Good Book

2010-04-21T10:55:00.003-04:00

Here is another Katrina Koski photo!

Hospitals

2010-04-07T01:39:00.002-04:00

I’ve always been ambivalent towards hospitals. As a kid, I accompanied my parents to St. Francis to visit sick relatives. Occasionally, I looked forward to these excursions. I remember going into the gift shop and rummaging excitedly through bins filled to the brim with stuffed animals—I was convinced these stuffed animals were available nowhere else. I remember walking past the cafeteria, my eyes drawn to a colorful display of chocolate pies and lemon cookies and cakes. And I remember walking past semi-private rooms in which patients would be laying in bed watching television. They looked so relaxed, so content!

For a long time, hospitals meant stuffed animals, dessert and relaxation. When we were at St. Francis, I asked my parents to buy me a stuffed animal. I asked my parents if we could eat dinner in the cafeteria. I asked my parents if I could hang out in the waiting room and watch television. They told me that stuffed animals were for sick children, cafeteria food was too expensive and that we didn’t drive all this way to watch television since we had a television at home.

So why had we driven all this way to St. Francis? To be supportive and provide comfort? To bring flowers? To ensure whoever was sick that she or he would soon be well? To be reminded that we, too, regardless of our good health, could wind up sick and miserable and, after visiting hours, would end up totally alone?

The isolation and confusion wrought by illness and institutionalized medicine have been explored in all literary genres. For poetry, think of Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” and Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips.” For fiction, think of Raymond Carver’s story “A Small, Good Thing” and Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here.” For nonfiction, think of Susan Sontag’s book-length essay Illness as Metaphor. And so the list goes.

Recently, in the memoir The Two Kinds of Decay, poet Sarah Manguso combines her narrative and lyric gifts to reflect upon the loneliness and anxiety she experienced as a college student diagnosed with chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP). According to Manguso, CIDP is a very unusual autoimmune disease that causes, among other things, recurrent bouts of paralysis. While she describes her condition in laymens’ terms, Manguso’s purpose isn’t solely to bring awareness to CIDP. Nor is her memoir a self-exploitive “tell-all” in which she casts herself as a hapless victim unable to realize her true potential in life because she’s spent weeks (sometimes months) bedridden and unable to move. Rather, it is a poetic investigation in which Manguso is trying to remember and catalogue various aspects of the experience in order to make of it a “widely applicable model.”

Without an ounce of self-pity, Manguso chronicles the ordeal through a series of brief vignettes (prose poems, really) that hone in on a particular person, moment, place or aspect of CIDP that carries some metaphorical significance. One of the primary thrusts of her memoir is the unpredictability of the disease: one moment, her neurologist pronounces her “well;” the next moment, she is once again sick. In a section called “The First Time,” Manguso explains: “Unused to being frail, I returned to college and stayed up very late that first night reading mail and writing papers and cleaning out the refrigerator, and in the morning I lay in bed vomiting into the wastepaper basket from fatigue, and less than two weeks later I was back in the hospital.” Manguso’s attempts to maintain balance and normalcy are relayed to the reader in this single sentence in which she spends the first half of the sentence performing everyday activities (in a kind of remission) and the last half being sick.

Another emotional truth about illness that Manguso develops in the memoir is one we recognize but rarely articulate: the loneliness and isolation that accompany illness itself. In Illness as Metaphor, Sontag describes illness as a state of exile—it’s as though the sick are banished. In The Two Kinds of Decay, Manguso describes her encounters with strangers—the doctors and nurses, namely—but rarely describes her encounters with people familiar to her. We learn, too, that her parents experienced a similar loneliness. Her mother stated in a letter that she herself felt “very isolated. Friends and family stayed away, perhaps in fear of catching the disease.” Her mother went on to say she “resented this but could understand.”

At the end of her memoir, Manguso states, “There are two kinds of decay: mine and everyone else’s.” We must learn to “pay attention” to this decay, for to pay attention “is to love everything.” That is the poet’s primary aim, to absorb everything—the beautiful, the ugly—and discover the metaphors that illustrate our vulnerabilities, our humanity. Manguso succeeds in unearthing these metaphors out of memory and making them “widely applicable models” from which we can learn to see life in new ways.

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Bryan Rice wrote this wonderful essay. He is a poet, runner, and road rager. When you see him in his clown car, RUN!

Readers reading!

2010-04-05T14:54:00.004-04:00

Contributing editor and gifted photographer, Katrina Koski, has taken some wonderful shots of the reading life. I will be posting more of her pictures in the coming weeks.

Here's the first one.

Go check out more of Katrina's work at : http://koski365.tumblr.com/

Stories from Other People's Lines

2010-03-28T13:58:00.002-04:00

We, at the Clever Title, will be doing something new. We will be creating short, short stories by using lines from writers we admire. This is our first installment. You will find where these line come from below the story.

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We know what Saturdays are in the lane. Next to one of our side yards ran a short, dirty dead-end ally. The fall of the snow thickened. I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.

“I think we cool our heels, don’t get all panicked up.” His voice trembled, surprising him.

I stepped out of my underwear and was instantly embarrassed by my erection. And it seemed to be a part of myself—a sickly part?—that was now going into the discard.

“What the hell is the matter with you, Conroy?”

It’s a beautiful thing: a wild descent into the purifying intra-intestinal fires.

He pulled away down the street.

And standing there outside the gala I learn something vital about myself: when push comes to shove, I can care less about lofty ideals. For the first and only time in my life, I forgot I was there.

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Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes
Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
Tobias Wolff, from the short story “Hunters in the Snow”
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods
Erin McGraw, from the short story “Ax of the Apostles”
Tom Perrotta, from the short story “You Start to Live”
Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman
Frank Conroy, Stop-Time
Stephen Kuusisto, Planet of the Blind
Wally Lamb, She’s Come Undone
George Saunders, from the short story “The 400-lb CEO”
Lawrence Sutin, A Postcard Memoir

Letter

2010-03-26T22:36:00.000-04:00

Dear Ira,

When you suggested that I write an essay, a review of pregnancy and reading for your blog, I thought, How perfect. I read almost every day of those ten months.

After writing, like, fourteen drafts, I realized that it is irresponsible for me to review the books I chose prenatally. My pregnancy was over saturated with emotion, and every time I try to remember the books, they are sensationalized by the experiences that went with them. I can't tell you honestly about the truths I found in any narrative, what they did for me, or how they can service other people.

It is strange that I am incapable of this now because before pregnancy, analytical writing was my therapy.

Making decisions during an emotional upheaval is the impossibility of a sniper assassination through a stained glass window, and occasionally, during emotionally inappropriate times, big decisions have to be made. Several years ago, I formed a personal technique to clear my brain of emotional blur. I called it brain yoga.

Imagine a standardized composition test in high school: a pencil, lined paper, a block of text to dissect. I focus only on the task. I relax into a routine of themes, plot-lines, moods, and symbols, rounding them toward my thesis. Afterward, I am separated from myself. My mind: stretched and exercised. My emotions: safely stratified by the analysis of unrelated information.

I must have forty or fifty of these hand written pages stashed in various drawers, shelves, and in between the pages of other notebooks. They are useless mementos of my brain as a manufacturer of coherency: sorting and classifying emotion and thought.

This technique lost its effect a couple years ago when my first pregnancy ended after five months from a "missed miscarriage." Missed, as if I didn't feel a sharp twinge like a twig breaking in my uterus, as if the sentence, she is dead, did not roll through my mind before I could banish it. As if two days after my diagnosis, I did not go through the actual miscarriage, numbed from morphine, watching, horrified, as an ER doctor deposited the tiny body into a bin of medical waste. As if while someone else's blood transfused through me, I did not stare for hours at the piercing black symbol and the bold word "BIOHAZARD" thinking, I've never seen a symbol look so threatening ( a circle surrounded by the heads of six, rounded scythes ) on a container holding something so small and harmless.

Major decisions domino following the end of a pregnancy: I could suddenly go back to work, to school. I could party like a maniac or get serious with college. I could change my career plan. I could leave my husband. I could move out. Many of these decisions were immediately necessary, and none of them seemed at all approachable.

The day after my miscarriage, the seventh Harry Potter book was released (I have a guilty affection for Harry Potter). I drowned myself in the book. I did not even notice the array of run on sentences and whacked out grammar that distracted me through the first six books. I couldn't notice the flaws; I could only embrace and exist within the story, and between reads, I found myself rationally considering the next phase of my life.

I don't know the psychology, but Harry Potter replaced my composition therapy. In regards to the failure of my pregnancy, outside analysis could not organize my emotions. In order to confront my world, I needed escape, and Harry's chaotic and entertaining life dwarfed the unfeasible aspects in my own.

My second pregnancy marked the onset of an affliction my father called "existential dread," which he defined as "sucking at life because of the fear of death."

Because of my previous miscarriage, I knew that life reaches a threshold and blows out like a broken power line. Sudden and electric. With someone alive inside of me, my awareness of death ballooned. Death seemed to crouch in every shadowed corner, cloaked in every alarming noise.

Terror is the most debilitating emotion, and stricken by it, I could not prepare for my daughter's birth, her life. I could not pick out baby clothes or books on childhood development. I could not decide what to eat for dinner. I was frozen in anxiety.

I remembered my previous pregnancy and Harry Potter. Books became my therapy.

I have never read with such thorough investment in the characters. I have never so energetically despised the despicable or adored the tender. I channeled my life through whatever was at stake in the story. I read without editing, without analyzing. I attached myself to the story, and the story dehydrated the emotion my perspective of my own life.

The end of each book became a temporal landmark: I'd plan something like, I'll read Borges' Ficciones by the end of the week. Then I'll finish Kafka's complete works in two weeks and spend the next week on old literary magazines. That will mark the end of my second trimester. Then I'll start on my collection of Sylvia Plath and Alan Moore comics..., on and on until I finished every book I had, and then I branched out to other people's books: my dad's old Stephen King and Hermann Hesse collections. My mom's cliquey romantic dramas. Books my friends recommended and books my friends hated.

I read anything that could be fill the space of an afternoon. Minutes were enemies, fatal events ready to pounce on my fragile conception of family. Stories were my soldiers, annihilating time.

I can't give a fair review because those little shiny nuggets, the parts that make the story worth something, for once, didn't matter to me. I didn't care about language or rhythm or oomph, and, in a way, I still don't. Stories became tribal and fascinating and a way to make sense of my life. Trying to write the review showed me that, during my pregnancy, I returned to the kind of reader I was as a child: a reader who is captured by the story, a reader who feels the story. A reader who knows that stories can sing.

And now, I listen.

Sincerely,

Asha

Tennis, Fat Man-Style

2010-03-16T18:51:00.008-04:00

I can't stop. My legs pound the concrete. Breathy grunts escape my nose and mouth. I accelerate. I will my legs to push harder, move faster. I tell myself this is it. I tell myself I will not have this chance again as long as I live. I tell myself, Move, fatty. Move. But I don't feel fat here. I don't feel the usual weight that keeps me grounded. On this court, I am transformed. I am my shadow on the ground, and that shadow is not fat, that shadow does not exist in a world of gravity. It is only shape and blur. On this court, I am without weight, without doubt. And at this precise moment, there is nothing as important as the now. Not the girlfriend at home on the couch reading some fantasy novel. Not the golden retrievers who love to lick my ears and glasses. Not even my Thai mother who will call from Chicago to see if I'm eating right.

I focus only on the ball. The ball. The ball. The ball.

I have to get to the the ball at all cost. This small, green, fuzzy ball. This small, green, fuzzy ball that just hit the top of the net and is trickling over to my side, and if I get to this ball, this small, green, fuzzy ball, I can possibly defeat my opponent across the net, this opponent that is so unlike me, this opponent who in my three years of playing twice a week, I have never managed to beat.

Don't stop. Go! GO! GOOOOO!

*

Tennis. This is my game. My obsession. I've played tennis since I was six because my mother wanted me to socialize with others my age. Tennis, however, is not a socializing sport. Tennis isolates you from reality. Reality are the lines on the court. You find yourself alone. You find yourself figuring things out on your own. A tennis player talks more to himself. A tennis player talks more to his crooked strings on his racket. A tennis player sees his opponent as an obstacle. A hurdle to victory. Something to be destroyed.

I'm not your average tennis player. I'm not lithe. I'm not fit. I'm your fat tennis player. FAT. ALL CAPS. I'm your fat tennis player with diabetes. Six one. Over three hundred pounds. I belong more in a wrestling ring than a tennis court. But this is what I love about the game; it defies even my expectations.

When I was young, playing the junior circuit, I used this to my advantage. At tournaments, I pretended to be a fat slob, my racket a useless fly swatter. During the five minute warm-ups with my opponents, I hit balls over the fence. I said things likes, "Oops," or "I just started," or "My weakness is my forehand." When the match started, my weakness was not my forehand. It was my strength. And I didn't hit over the fence, but blistered serves up the middle and creamed groundstrokes down the line. I demolished opponents in less than half an hour. I loved that feeling, the feeling of defying expectations. You expected a fatty, and you got served. I relished the moment even more if my opponents were in shape, were concerned with body image. With image in general. Superstar athletes.

Superstar athletes like, like, like.... Andre Agassi?

No.

He didn't exactly fit the superstar build, did he? He was short. At times overweight. Loved Burger King. A headcase. Which was why I think I admired him growing up. I liked the seemingly perfect players, too: Pete Sampras, Jim Courier, Stephen Edberg, Boris Becker, Pat Rafter. But Andre was a wild card, a rebel, a loose cannon. His memoir Open let me into a world that so fascinated me when I was growing up. I wanted to have Andre's long hair. I wore his trend-setting lycra shorts. I bought his uber expensive Nike tennis shoes. I hung up his calendar in my bedroom. He made me love tennis. Made me believe if this long-haired punk kid could play tennis, surely this fat kid could play too. Hit harder was Andre's father's mantra. Hit harder was mine when I faced svelte opponents. Put all my weight into the ball. Blast it. Bam.

But Andre's book was more than just a tennis player talking about tennis. More than a tennis player gloating about his victories. Open is exactly what the title suggests. Andre is open. He is open to his imperfections, his insecurities, his flaws. He is open about the bad choices he made in his life. Andre's memoir illustrated that life--on and off the court--is not always pretty. Image, to contradict those famous Agassi Cannon commercials-- was not always everything. Not even anything. Andre opened up and allowed me into the athlete's mind. The doubt that could creep into your head during a match. The doubt that could creep into your life. The drive to achieve perfection. The drive to survive. The drive to get to a small, green, fuzzy ball. A fuzzy ball, that for Andre, haunted him.

*

The small, fuzzy, green ball. It's getting lower and lower and lower. I don't think I can make it. No, I can make it.

Yes. No. No. Yes.

I reach out. I get my racket on it. It bounces softly off my strings. It barely creeps over the net. I watch it bounce and bounce again. Point. Match. Done.

My opponent just stands on the court in disbelief.

My opponent: Missy, the tennis pro at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Missy, five two. Missy, a twig compared to me. Missy, who can hit a ton despite her size. Missy, who has been whooping my ass for three straight years. Missy, gracious in victory and defeat.

For a moment, I let the win wash over me. This will be my only win against her. She will beat me again and again. I will enjoy every moment. I will keep coming back. Me and my fat and my racket.

I dare you to hit to my forehand. Try me.

_____

This essay was written in the voice of the 22-year old kid. The girlfriend is now a wife. She, too, has a wicked forehand. I still play and my serve is as lethal as it was back then.

For Paul S Riegel

2010-03-15T01:22:00.004-04:00

Dear Clever Title Followers:

I'm sorry for not posing in a while. But I wanted to dedicate this blog post to Readers, especially my father-in-law who passed away on February 27, 2010.

We often mourn the loss of legendary writers. And during the last few months we have lost a great many writers like J.D. Salinger, Barry Hannah, and Frank McCourt, one of my heroes. Yes, these writers were great, and yes, they will be missed. But I want to also remember readers. Readers are the reason writers exist. Readers are the reason writers keep writing.

Paul S. Riegel was a reader and writer. He was a lover of the arts. He was a lover of the written word, especially in verse form. Paul worked for years as the Associate Chancellor at the University of Illinois, a job he despised. A job as he described it as, "Soul sucking." Throughout that time and afterward, Paul read. Everything. He devoured poetry, finishing collection after collection. He was proud of his family, his children, his grandchildren, a family of readers. He was proud that one of his daughters was a poet. "A damn good one," he often said. In his late sixties, Paul decided pursue a life long dream. He went back to school for an MFA degree in poetry and got it.

One of my last memories of Paul was at our house in Florida a year ago. He had just gotten out of the hot tub, and Katie and I were speaking so highly of a new poet we had recently found and fell in love with. Melanie Braverman. Paul sat in the Lazy-boy, in his robe, and read Red in one sitting. He sighed. He cried. It moved me to see someone so affected by words.

I miss my father-in-law. His words. His wisdom. On Christmases and birthdays, he always sent books. Before he passed away, he sent The Anthologist by Nicolas Baker. I can't wait to read it.

Here is a poem from Paul's MFA thesis.

ORB

by Paul S. Riegel

Here is a hollow orb, chosen
by my daughter, a gifted poet sometimes frozen
mid-poem by a chronic syndrome.
I lift off the orb's top in my silent home.
The marble's earthen red, and white, veins
bloodied by its wound and pain
dropped by my daughter, broken,
glued back together, given as a token
of love for a father --a father broken too
as his pain and anger grew,
driving him away from those
who loved him. He chose
a life apart. Ah, daughter, tell me can
this shattered, hollow man
be mended?
Can he be worth the love that you intended?

Understanding Mom

2009-12-28T07:02:00.002-05:00

As always, my parent’s house is freezing. Whatever they’re living in, whether it is a trailer, apartment, or house, they keep it as cold as the air conditioner can possibly make it. As a child it was not uncommon for me to be directed outside, spray bottle filled with hot water in hand, to unfreeze whatever freezes up on an overworked AC unit. Not that I ever minded. Even now, sitting on the couch with Mom, the cold wraps me like a familiar blanket. Mom is looking at me. It’s two in the morning, and Dad is asleep in his recliner, the light from the TV flashing gray-blue on his face. He is snoring.

So what about this interview? Mom asks.

It’s not really an interview, I say.

But it’s for your nonfiction class?

We’re supposed to ask people how they feel about being written about, I say.

She smiles and looks away.

We talk a lot about seeing characters in different lights, I say. You know, the differences between fiction and nonfiction. You got a character, do you judge them harsher, or easier, if they’re real or not.

But it would just be your version of me, she says.

Yes ma’am.

What would you write? she asks.

I don’t know anything specifically. It’s just a general question.

Her hair is short. I remember when she got it cut; she did it for her thirtieth birthday. That was twenty-one years ago. She was crying when she revealed herself to Dad. I was five. Twenty-one years ago. I’m almost as old as she was when I was five, when she got her hair cut. I think about this while she thinks about being a character in my writing.

When you write, I just wish you could see me for who I am now, she says.

See how much you’ve changed? I ask.

You and Miki, I don’t think—you don’t understand me.

And like that she is crying. I’m not mad, but I’m not surprised either. I put this conversation off because of this. I could have asked someone else, but really, there is no one else that deserves to be asked this question. When it comes to my nonfiction writing, she is the only blip on the radar, because there is no one more complex in my life than my mother.

You just don’t understand me, she says.

She twists her body away from me. She’s looking at Dad, shaking her head.

Well, Mom, you say that a lot. You tell me that often. But, you know, I know what you like and don’t like, I know your voice on the phone—if you’re upset or angry—

That’s just it. You and Miki always ask me if I’m mad, and I tell you...I told you, I don’t get mad anymore.

You’ve told me that, I say. And last time you said that, I just said yes and okay and went along. But what if Miki or me came to you and said Mom...I no longer feel sadness...what would you say?

She laughs a bit. I know what you’re going to say, she says.

Mom, I mean, anger is like our most basic emotion. And you’re telling me it no longer exists inside you at all?

I get mad at certain things. Just not you and Miki.

Why not? I ask.

Because I don’t want to argue. After that last time, when we fought, and those things you said...I don’t ever want to go through that again.

So you really don’t get angry or you don’t let yourself get angry?

I just don’t even go there.

Well, if we got angry we’d get through it.

I can’t do it again, she says.

What does that say about our relationship? I ask.

She shrugs. There is genuine fear in her eyes and I think of the last fight we had, of the hurtful things we said to each other.

We talked for another two hours. It was a nice talk. It started out as an interview for an assignment for class and turned into me convincing my Mom that I actually have forgiven her and Dad for certain things from my childhood. I don’t know if she’ll ever be convinced that I have moved on. Maybe it’s that she hasn’t moved on. Maybe when I told her how I felt she got so angry it scared her so something inside her shut down. I don’t know.

Around four, as our conversation winds down, with our eyes drooping, she says, Can’t you just write about the dogs you had as a kid, or all the baseball you played?

I could, I say.

But you won’t.

Come on, now. I will. I can. It’s just that—

And I don’t know what to say to her. Why don’t I write about those things? There are plenty of happy memories from my childhood. Winning the local World Series. Shrimping with Dad in Boca Grande. Catching tadpoles and trying to raise them into frogs. The eighth grade dance when I held Katie’s hand. Losing my first tooth. My first kiss. Why don’t those memories step into the foreground?

I kiss Mom goodnight. I don’t mention the fact that we never really discussed much about nonfiction. In bed, I decide that if I ever do write about her I’ll just convey exactly how it is that I see her: as a woman with inner struggles, contradictions, regrets, bad habits, anger, hurt, guilt, love, forgiveness, grace, tenderness, creativity, and heart. I think she’ll be okay with the final product.

___________

This essay was written by the great Chase Holland. You can often find him breathless on the University of South Florida Campus.

Just In Time For the Holidays

2009-12-01T18:01:00.003-05:00

One Christmas Eve several years ago, I was rushing around town to get some last minute items: a hostess gift, champagne for my friend Annette, a last minute toy from Walgreens. A friend was watching my kids and my husband was finishing up at work. The traffic was heavy on Westshore Boulevard with everyone else probably doing the same thing, and there was a particular backup where a driver was waiting to take a left onto a street. I looked up ahead to the right and saw a heavy woman with dirty clothes layered on top of each other, no teeth, and wild, filthy looking hair. She had a shopping cart overflowing with items and was trying to cross the busy street, but the cars were not stopping for her. I watched her inch her cart closer to the street only to back up again, and I burst into tears. Later that day at Annette’s house, I told her my reaction, knowing she was one of the few people who would understand my emotion. We cried together, wondering aloud how we could make a difference with only two hours left before Christmas Eve dinner.

Holiday commercialism in the United States can be a sad subject as we observe the waste and loss of meaning that occurs in many American households, especially when we see others in need. There is the often self-imposed stress of the holidays with the decorating, the shopping, the crowds, and the cooking. The colder, shorter days can also be a source of stress and depression. We have our traditions of Santa Claus, holiday carols and the nods to the birth of Jesus with our nativity scenes, all of which leave us feeling empty.

Why lament this state of the union, though, when we can laugh about it. Leave it to David Sedaris to help us do this when he pokes fun at himself and the readers in Holidays on Ice. This is a collection of essays written by David Sedaris and a running social commentary about holiday commercialism in the United States. Some of the funniest essays are the ones touching upon David Sedaris’ family life. He’s not afraid to make fun of himself and his honesty is the driving force behind the humor. His painfully candid account of his mother, such as in “Let it Snow” when she becomes fed up with several “snow days” and locks her children outside in the snow, has mothers across the country cheering and feeling as though they’ve made a friend for life.

In “Dinah, The Christmas Whore,” ‘twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring . . . except a whore named Dinah, David Sedaris, his mother, brother, and sisters. The family is gathered in the kitchen with Dinah, while David’s father dozes in his underwear watching t.v. in the basement. His mother, unfazed by her daughter bringing a drunk prostitute to her home does what any gracious hostess should, offers a her a drink. David Sedaris is a teenager whose enthusiasm for Christmas is waning and now feels “cheap and common” after observing shoppers while working as a dishwasher at the Picadilly cafeteria. The presence of a prostitute in his kitchen, while perhaps not enlightening him as to the true meaning of Christmas, has made him feel special in a neighborhood decorated with tacky lights and identical trees.

Equally funny are the essays on his experiences as an adult in various jobs and travels to other countries. In “Six to Eight Black Men” Sedaris describes interesting, yet subtle differences between cultures. He also makes some not so subtle comparisons in the way in which the different cultures celebrate Christmas, making fun at his materialistic American traditions at the same time. In “Six to Eight Black Men” Sedaris is offended by the Dutch cab driver scoffing at the idea of “silly” elves helping Santa when the Netherlands had approximately six to eight black men coming to St. Nicholas, the former Bishop of Turkey’s aid. “For starters, Santa didn’t used to do anything,” Sedaris argues. As far as Santa hailing from Turkey, Sedaris says “[i]t’s too dangerous there, and the people wouldn’t appreciate him.” He is personally insulted, however, by the elves being described as unrealistic and “silly.” This brings the readers full circle back to the first and longest essay, “SantaLand Diaries,” where Sedaris describes his experience as an elf in Macy’s of Manhattan during the holiday season. He was hoping to make it in show business in New York City but, as Sedaris explains “. . . instead I am applying for a job as an elf. Even worse than applying is the very real possibility that I will not be hired, that I couldn’t even find work as an elf. That’s when you know you’re a failure.”

There are also several satires where David Sedaris pushes the boundaries of decency; a little too far in my opinion. He pokes fun of the Holiday letter that so many families write to keep others updated on their families’ accomplishments in “Season’s Greetings to Our Friends and Families.” In Sedaris letter, the mother and author of the holiday letter finds herself explaining the illegitimate child now appearing in their holiday photo. In “Christmas Means Giving” Sedaris is successful in portraying American greed and commercialism, taking it to a ridiculous level. This family’s Christmas card shows them surrounded by all their Christmas presents from last year with a caption reading “Christmas Means Giving.” A competition between this family and their neighbor leads to one adding an indoor skating rink and a “three-thousand-square-foot pavilion” and the other “an indoor soccer field and a five-thousand-square-foot rotunda” to their homes. This is one the milder examples of their competition. In the last essay, “The Cow and The Turkey,” Sedaris illustrates the selfish side of human nature with a hilarious Orwellian essay complete with talking farm animals partaking in a “secret santa” holiday game.

Although the satires are obvious in their statements, the nonfiction essays also manage to get across a message. In the midst of a ridiculous situation dressed as an elf in Macy’s, entertaining a prostitute in his family’s kitchen, or stuck outside with his siblings in the snow for hours, Sedaris provides the reader with a sobering moment. In the middle of laughing, the reader will find a pause towards the end of these essays to catch a glimpse of a true holiday spirit, the genuine love of a mother, or the fragility of life. And if you’re like me, you may even choke up a little.

________

This essay review was written by Teresa Parrino. She's a writer, a mother, and a professional weed killer.

Poetry Phobe

2009-10-30T00:45:00.000-04:00

POP QUIZ: If you asked Ira, when he was 22, which would he prefer to read--

a) a Shakespearean sonnet
b) War and Peace and Crime and Punishment at the same time while singing Belinda Carlisle tunes
c) a Wordsworth poem about clouds

--the answer: B.

For the longest time, if I saw words that were arranged in weird shapes or if sentences failed to go all the way to the right side of the page, I ran screaming. I didn’t have to read it to know it was a dreaded poem. I couldn’t even say the word. The mere mention of a poem made me want to plunge sharp objects into my brain, made me want walk on crushed glass.

Am I being melodramatic? Probably.

I was never the type of teenager who scrawled deep thoughts into a notebook or wrote angsty poems about how girls didn’t like me or how life sucked or how I would never be prom king because the system was rigged. (IT TOTALLY WAS!) I never understood poems, no matter how long we covered them in class, no matter how many English papers I had to write about them. There was a mental barrier between my brain and the poem.

In high school, I used to date a girl who would read me her poems. Every time she started, I pretended to look into the sky, put my hand to my chin and nodded thoughtfully. Really, my mind went flat line and I was thinking about dinner or how the Bulls would fare without the great Michael Jordan. She read her poems in the way that after every line there was a question mark. I’m falling into a deep, deep hole of despair? When she asked me for my opinion, I appeared as if she had recited the most profound piece of art in the world, and told her it was like watching a painting come to life. She caught on to my bullshit and we quickly disintegrated as a couple.

I’m not going to blame bad English teachers for my misgivings. They’ve been blamed enough. In fact, I’ve been quite fortunate to have wonderful English teachers. (Here’s a shout out to Ms. Savaggio, Mr. Scarpelli, Mr. Monnier, and Mr. Winch) The best of the best. Teachers who were passionate about poetry.

There was, for a while, a disconnect in language for me. English was already a secondary language, and often times when younger, I would have to go through a series of obstacles to understand what I was reading. The eye would recognize the English word, would then have to process the word to a Thai equivalent, and finally the brain would come up with meaning. This made me into an extremely slow reader, and even now, an extremely slow writer. Poems, it seemed, operated with a different set of rules. Some poets, like the great W.S. Merwin, use no punctuation, so my brain doesn’t know how to make sense of sentence syntax. And then there was the dreaded line break which disrupted my brain momentum. And don’t forget grand metaphors that took me to the edge of understanding and often times misunderstanding.
Ironically, I fell in love with a poet. When we first dated, she asked what poets I liked to read. I felt that this question would determine our future together. If I admitted I hated poetry, if I admitted I wasn’t smart enough to understand it, this long-haired poet of Illinois, this green-eyed smarty pants, would leave me.

I thought quickly. “I love that Arlington poem. ‘Richard Cory.’”

Truth: I thought it was OK, but I didn’t know what else to say. The bullet in the brain part was cool.

She shuddered and said, “Don’t you think that poem’s a little overdone?”

“Totally,” I said. “You’re right.”

“What else?” she asked.

“You know Keats, Wordsworth. Ginsberg is pretty deep, too.”

“Anyone not dead?”

My brain went blank. I’ve never read any living poet. I didn’t realize there were living poets out there in the world. I assumed they all died after The Beats. I imagined some strange poet plague that wiped out every rhyme, every enjambment, every trochee; everything Lewis Turco wrote in his Book of Forms.

I shook my head. I felt ashamed. I really, really liked this smarty pants poet.

The next day, I went poetry hunting. I took out three books: Picnic, Lightning by Billy Collins; Rose by Li-Young Lee; Burnt Offerings by Timothy Liu.

I read them. I understood them. I felt like I was in a public service commercial where some celebrity extolled the virtues of poetry. I imagined that celebrity was Tom Hanks—I was obsessed with Forest Gump—and Tom was telling me how poetry opened the mind to other planes of the imagination. At the end of my imagined commercial there were rainbows going in every direction. Tom was right. I wanted more. I wanted Billy Collins’ meandering musings, Li-Young Lee’s quietly sustained power from stanza to stanza. The very first line of Timothy Liu’s poem, “Echoes,” captured how I felt. The world exists again. It did. Reading these three poets made me want to read more poetry. I went on a poetry rampage. I read a book a day, sometimes two, going through shelves and shelves of verse at the library. Tony Hoagland. Dean Young. Sharon Olds. Mary Oliver. Marie Howe. Lola Haskins. Charles Harper Webb.

A stranger thing happened: I revisited those poems I hated. Something had magically shifted. The language and rhythm of the contemporary poets I read made me understand the poets of long ago. Give me T.S. Eliot. Give me e.e. cummings. Give me Byron and Yeats. Give me all of those poets I struggled with. A door had been opened, angels were singing, and indeed the world exists again.

Am I being melodramatic? Absolutely. When it comes to understanding, you can’t be dramatic enough.

(As a side note: I married the smarty pants poet. She didn’t think I was too stupid.)

____________________

The Clever Title would love to hear about your favorite poets and poems. If they are online, link us to them.