A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk A writer and reader, I review books from around the world & post related ephemera and literary geekdom. Friend me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter or visit my website for info about me and my writing & early access to new reviews.

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

Looking for Home

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

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

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

Worldbuilding as Art

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

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

Introducing My Son to Inequality

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children Are People

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

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

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

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

Mothering is Essential Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Reproductive Justice Framework

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

Challenging the Welfare Queen Myth

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

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

Scarcity vs. Abundance

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

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

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

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

Learning to Mother Myself

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Revolutionary Mothering and the Healing Power of Radical Love appeared first on A Geography of Reading.

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When I last wrote about my pandemic experience in December, I was ready for transition. I was thinking about the after, even though we were very much still in the middle. I needed the hope, then, to get through to a time when this might be over. Now that my husband and I are both fully vaccinated (and I believe our son could be before the end of the year), I’m ready to pause for a bit and evaluate where we came from and think critically about where we need to go next.

Who I Was Before

In the middle of a random conversation the other day, I blurted out “remember elevators?” Many things have disappeared from our individual lives this past year as we shrank them to survive. One of the things I set aside was my love of the paranormal. I had quite enough fear in my life as it was, thank you. I knew I was starting to regain bits of my former sense of life when I reached for Victor LaValle’s The Changeling, which both terrified and invigorated me. I took that liveliness and ran with it to read two more spooky books.

Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap

This collection of eerie short stories quickly became one of my most recommended books. I loved it so much I sent a copy to a friend (another way I’m trying to re-engage with life this year). Yap’s stories span parts of Asia and the U.S. and carry with them bits of lore from all over. They are surprising, smart, and delightfully creepy. Because I work in tech, I hardly ever read fiction about tech life, but the way Yap wove together magic with an insider’s view on this subculture in “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” was insightful and wicked and very much worth the read.

I Remember You by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

I have not finished this book yet, but it is one of the scariest things I’ve read in a long, long time. A true ghost story, I Remember You is also something that’s formed a new habit for my family: my husband reads a few pages some nights after I go to bed, I catch up in the mornings I wake too early, and our son questions us relentlessly about it over breakfast. I love the book. I love the sharing. I hope we get to do this forever.

How I Am Changing

Wake. Play. Eat. Work. Eat. Play. Work. Cook. Eat. Rest. Sleep.

This is my routine; the way the days blend together; the way time has stopped. I am often so tired during the “rest” portion of my day that I don’t fully comprehend what I’m reading until I’m far into a book—something I was definitely guilty of when reading Bird Summons.

Bird Summons by Leila Aboulela

I bought the book in the minutes following my second vaccination as part of a gleeful armload of treasure acquired during my first visit to a bookstore in over a year. It tells the story of three Muslim women in Scotland on a journey to visit the grave of the first western woman to take a pilgrimage to Mecca. Each of the women is beautifully drawn both in their individual struggles and in the ways they push and pull against one another.

I loved the book immensely even before I realized they had somehow become mired in an in-between place where supernatural elements are converging to help them work through the circular paths they are each trapped in. In ordinary times, this would make for an interesting story. In the now, it’s a poignant reminder that we make our lives and we have the chance to emerge from this bubble into a new, better future.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

Speaking of patterns and being doomed to repeat history we haven’t learned from, In the Dream House was not at all what I expected from a memoir of abuse, but it might be the book I need to help me work through some patterns I’d like to shed. Machado’s writing is gorgeous, always, and the book is a tender recounting of a relationship that felt like love, for a time.

The combination of her vulnerability on the page with her willingness to experiment with form allowed me to sink deep into her story. For example, what better way is there to immerse a reader in the trap of the cycle of abuse than a choose your own adventure that always ends in the same place?

Like pregnancy, this time of confinement has led me to look deeply at the relationships in my life and what I do and do not want to carry forward. Machado reminded me that what feels familiar is not always the same as what feels good. And I’m grateful.

What I Must Not Forget

It has been easy in this daily routine to forget what life was like before. And yet we have to make a life after. Two books are helping me remember what’s important to me to carry forward.

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper

My son entered a spooky place sometime during the pandemic where he latched on to Scooby-Doo and began asking for more. Although he’s only five, I thought he might be ready for The Dark is Rising series, one of my favorites from childhood. And I was right. I’ve loved every night we’ve cuddled late past bedtime reading just one more page. Over Sea, Under Stone taught me something important, too. As Jane, Barney and Simon crept up to the attic to explore the treasures of the Grey House, I found myself on an adventure with my son. And I remembered what that felt like. How essential adventure used to be to my sense of being, even when I was actively resisting it.

It will be a long time, yet, I think before we hop on a plane to discover another continent, but it will be longer still before I forget the shock of remembering that I almost abandoned something I once held so dear. Our stretches are small as we ease back into life—a Mother’s Day picnic in the park—but they are stretches still.

Dialogues with Rising Tides by Kelli Russell Agodon

I am a writer. This is a through line of my life that I have had to fight for. It is also what carries me forward in the hardest times (like the past year). I often look to Agodon as a model—a successful poet and publisher who lives on the side of the water I dream of. Dialogues with Rising Tides reminded me that her writing is also something I can learn from. I particularly enjoy the breadth of her voice, the way she embraces the quotidian “we’re replacing our cabinet knobs / because we can’t change the world,” casual wit “the apocalypse always shows up / uninvited with a half-eaten bag of chips,” deep insights “She tells me the reason I wake up / screaming is because / no one ever dealt with that pain,” and artful imagery “This is postpartum with suicide corsages.” I don’t always re-read poetry books (the way I should), but I will be re-reading this one.

“Now the only language I speak / is seascape” – Kelli Russell Agodon, Dialogues with Rising Tides

The Work Ahead

While it can feel like the world ended when the pandemic hit, COVID was merely one more travesty in a world where we are not living as we should. Or at least as I hope we can. When I’m actually past the “using all the energy I have for sheer survival,” I want to to more to make a brighter tomorrow for my son and his entire generation. These books are giving me ideas on how to start.

Nicotine by Nell Zink

Nell Zink is the best writer of my generation. She captures the essence of what makes us tick (for better or worse) as individuals and as a society and she’s not afraid to call bullshit when necessary. I was sucked into Nicotine by the descriptions of Penny trying to support her father through hospice and death while the rest of her family found anything else to do. What held me, though, was the nuanced descriptions of the squatters Penny encounters in her grandparents’ former home and the ways that Zink allows her characters to break past the labels we might want to place on them.

I did not fully appreciate what was happening in my city during the WTO riots while I was in college (I was mostly concerned with my hard-working partner being able to get home in the chaos) and I have derided some of the anarchist marches here since. But that does not mean that I believe in capitalism as the answer for our future. Zink made me look more deeply at myself and the values I hold. And she made me think about the future I want to build (all in the guise of a wildly entertaining story).

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Speaking of a post-capitalist life…this book is a gorgeous look at what life would look like if we embraced love and humanity as our underlying values, and it’s filled with reminders of the damage we do to ourselves and our planet every day we do not. The ideas lap like ocean tides against loving descriptions of sea life we don’t look at closely enough.

When I first encountered an essay from this book in Boston Review, I dared hope of a world where we could use nuanced discussion, intuition, love and science to make a better future for our planet and ourselves. The full book is a great place to start. Read it.

“We can trust cycles older than our species. We can do this between-work with grace and surrender. With patience and bravery. With all of who we are. And what made us will reclaim us as soon as the tide.” – Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned.

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

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

The Joys of Parenthood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Unthinkable

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

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

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

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

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

There’s So Much More to the Story

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

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

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

The post Real Talk about Parenting in The Changeling by Victor LaValle appeared first on A Geography of Reading.

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After my lowest weeks, days I spilled over into tears at the slightest provocation, I started to think I might have cabin fever. I may have researched winter-over syndrome, wondering if there was something clinical. I’ve definitely read this article about the pandemic wall more than once. Recently, though, I realized that I’m profoundly bored and that I’m using the fitty energy of that to gnaw at my leg and any other thing I can reach. This whatever feeling has also explained my reading tastes of late—I’m reading almost entirely nonfiction, a category I mostly avoid, except, perhaps, when I’m trying to experience something that feels more like life than this routine we’ve developed to get through the thing. I should say that we’re well, financially stable, and okay in general. But humans weren’t designed to live a full year mostly indoors and away from other humans. Screens aren’t helping. So I thought I’d share some of the lives I’ve been living lately in case you need your own escape.

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich

This polyphonic history of post-Soviet Russia is fascinating. It’s fascinating as events unfold with Navalny in Russia. It’s fascinating as the U.S. seems intent on forgetting our own attempted coup. It’s fascinating in general to remember what it was like to live through the fall of the Soviet Union and the clashes and shifts in that country in the years following. It’s also fascinating for me as someone who’s always been interested in the Eastern European parts of my heritage.

Alexievich includes first-person narratives of everyone from dedicated sovoks to capitalist dreamers, from oppressed minorities to people who lived The Gulag Archipelago, and this book helped me realize how rich and complex the post-Soviet experience is. At times it made me feel better about the political situation in the U.S. At times it did not. Because of the failure of our Congress to hold Trump accountable for trying to kill them and their colleagues, I’ll leave you with this quote from someone who was part of massive anti-Lukashenko protests in Belarus in 2010:

“As long as it’s only us educated romatics out in the streets, it’s not a real revolution.” – Tanya Kuleshova as reported to Svetlana Alexievich

Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia by Suzanne Massie

My Russian deep-dive may have started with an attempt to finally get this tome off my to-read shelf before the opening the stack of books awaiting me for my birthday. It might also have started because I was remembering my Djiedo, who died about two years ago. Regardless, Land of the Firebird was fascinating. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like this cultural history. While it’s easy to be skeptical about any book about Russia published in America in the 1980’s, it’s clear that Massie loves the country of her ancestors and the book is filled with fascinating information.

Massie takes us through the history of early Russia where I learned that the Ukrainians and Russians used to be one people (which flipped some of my Reagan-era prejudices on their head). The early parts of the book are more history as she details Mongol invasions and other political transformations and I enjoyed reading about Catherine the Great after having watched The Great. In more recent history, though, Massie really goes beyond history and deep into the culture and arts of Russia (ending at the revolution). I took so much from this book as I forced my son to sit through Russian composers I’d never considered and started more than one poem tracing lines through the artistic side of my Ukrainian heritage. It’s a nice book, but one I’ve already found occasion to share with another writer online.

The Face Series: Tash Aw, Chris Abani and Ruth Ozeki

I was thrilled when I found this gem in a local Little Free Library one day this past fall, because Ozeki and Abani are two of my very favorite writers. I was also excited to delve into the very personal stories in the book as I work to learn more about individual experiences of race.

True to form, Ozeki’s meditation on her literal face is as inventive, intelligent and humorous as the rest of her books. Her Buddhist perspective is always fascinating and humbling, and I loved how she interspliced mini essays on her life with the minute-by-minute observations of staring at her face in the mirror.

“Making familiar things strange is the job of the artist.” – Ruth Ozeki, The Face

Abani’s book contains his characteristic humanity, gorgeous writing, and knowing humor. His look at identity weaves us through stories of his life, conversations with his brother, and greater lessons about Western African culture. This book is one step in the trail of love he leaves wherever he goes.

I did not previously know Aw’s work, but now I can’t wait to read more of it. He belongs among Pico Iyer’s global souls and this book takes us on a fascinating journey through what it is like for him as a Malaysian writer who both does and does not blend into a variety of cultures throughout Asia. Despite having traveled in several Asian countries, I learned so much about different experiences of the continent from the nuances of this book.

As much as I’d like to, I can’t really do any of these three (short but rich) books justice here, because so much of the beauty is in discovering the way these three writers structure their thoughts. What I can do is highly recommend each and every one.

The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller

This book is actually fiction based on stories from someone who experienced the same deportation to the gulag. I’ve lost the book somewhere (or given it away, it was oh so very depressing), so I cannot treat you to any of Müller’s sentences or the fantastic imagery she imbues into this bleak, bleak experience, but this book is one of the most beautifully written things I’ve read in a very long while and it will make almost any pandemic experience seem cheery.

New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

Now we’re snowed in for the long weekend, and after finally finishing the Alexievich book (so good, so long, such small print), I decided to treat myself to Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation. I’m not very far along, but already it’s a bit like reading Simone Weil (which I loved). Because I’m a reluctant agnostic (and most of the time Buddhist), I do not resonate deeply with Merton’s relationship with God, and still I connect deeply with the content of his writing. When he writes of Descartes as a being alienated from his feelings, “in exile from his own spiritual depths,” I recognize a struggle I’ve been working to overcome for the last decade as I integrate my thoughts and my feelings.

In January 2020, I had come to the conclusion that I needed to focus on being more mindful of my everyday experiences, their effects on me, and my relationship with the world at large. Which lasted until about February, when the only thing I was able to be mindful of was my need to stock up on basic supplies and the fear I was beginning to feel every time my son went to daycare. A year later, I feel stable enough (despite the pandemic wall) to breathe and think. And I’m excited to have Merton as my guide on the next step of whatever is to come.

Of course, this nonfiction fixation started before I realized it and most of my last pandemic reading list qualifies. May these (or any other) books bring you some comfort until we get to live our own lives again.

The post Living Life through Nonfiction appeared first on A Geography of Reading.

[islamcketta]

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

The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays by Elisa Gabbert

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

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

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

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

Becoming by Michelle Obama

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

The way she wove together the story of her childhood with the changing nature of her neighborhood reminded me how much I care about the structure of cities and communities and how they changed over time. Within a week my husband had me watch the Theaster Gates episode of Home and because of this book I had ideas and opinions and things I wanted to discuss.

Reading about the ways she fought to be seen for her achievements and how that conflicted with her people pleasing reminded me of how hard I’ve fought in the #metoo era to take myself seriously and to be taken seriously.

Her respectful yet honest insights into the sweetness and challenges of her marriage with Barack reminded me how much I cherish my own husband. Something I needed when we have all the time in the world together and what feels like no minutes at all to enjoy that.

Likewise on the friend front, Obama wrote about the strength her female friends have given her over the years and reminded me how much I’ve let fear separate me from the women I love (and that I need to reach out as I can).

She wastes no love on Trump, which was refreshing to read in this era of great enablement. Also refreshing was the detailed personal insight into what a normal presidential transition looks like. As a former Poli Sci wonk reading this book after the 2020 election, anything that felt like normal was helpful and gave me hope for other futures.

She generously writes about her experiences as a Black woman. In this year of reckoning, her personal stories about the Black community she grew up in, what it was like to be a Black woman at an ivy league school, how disconnected her neighborhood was from major local institutions (and what she did to fix this divide) provided gateways to better understand experiences beyond my own.

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

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

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

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

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

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

Habitat Threshold by Craig Santos Perez

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

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

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

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

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

Other Transition Thoughts

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

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

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

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

The post My Pandemic Reading List: Stage Three — Transitions appeared first on A Geography of Reading.

[islamcketta]

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

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

Seattle is a Destination

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

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

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

Reality is Always More Complicated (and Interesting)

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

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

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

What I’m Afraid We’re Losing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Change Comes from Within

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

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

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

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

The Work Ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your City of Literature

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

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

The post Seismic and the Courage to Make the City We Dream of appeared first on A Geography of Reading.

[islamcketta]

What a week it’s been. Seven days ago at this time, my husband was with our dog, Rocky, at the vet for what would be his second to last visit and I was trying to decide how to tell our four-year-old son that the dog wasn’t coming home. The dog did come home, and we spent a tense 48 hours watching for the inevitable before we could get the second, final visit. And somehow, on Monday I did find the words to tell my son that Rocky was not coming home. He covered his ears and did not want to talk about it. As heartbreaking as this conversation was (as well as subsequent ones where I tried to make sure he knew he could talk to me when he was ready), it’s nothing compared to trying to explain racism to a small child, even as I’m still learning about it myself.

But the time for change is now. That’s why I finally took Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race off the shelf in my bedroom where it had been waiting too long to be read.

When my son was born, a friend insisted I read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. An excellent book, and a hard read in that early parenting time when my empathy for all humans was almost shattering, I learned a lot from Coates. But my reading of that book did not fix our society and really, it did not fix me either. And I won’t say that I’m fixed now that I’ve read (most of, I’ll finish the rest this afternoon) Oluo’s book, either, but So You Want to Talk About Race engaged me in a conversation I needed to have with myself and Oluo gave me both the language and the understanding necessary to try harder.

A Lexicon of Racism

Too much of my experience of the world these days comes from Twitter-sized synopses in which I either smile or rankle before moving on and forgetting. And while I’ve had a superficial understanding of the concepts of white privilege, intersectionality, and microagressions, I haven’t really put the work in to know what I could do about any of it besides feel guilty and try to not say ignorant things. Oluo helped me take that next step by unpacking what the words mean and what they look like in everyday life. She opens up ideas of how white people can start to confront and dismantle them in their own lives and in the lives of the people around them. She also speaks directly to people of color.

Two of the most impactful things Oluo helped me understand are the power dynamics of racism and the ways I’ve been failing to properly empathize with the experiences of people of color. They are not unrelated, but while I cannot dismantle the white supremacy inherent in our institutions (today anyway), I can breathe in her “basic rules” of determining if something is about race until they are a part of my body:

It is about race if a person of color thinks it is about race.

It is about race if it disproportionately or differently affects people of color.

It is about race if it fits a broader pattern of events that disproportionately or differently affect people of color.

Do any of those rankle? As a student of sociology, I had no trouble accepting the last two, but I really struggled with the first. Which meant I had to ask why. Where I’m at now (a few days into this process) is that I’ve been so gaslit about my own experiences (as a woman) that victim blaming is part of my body. My mechanism for feeling better about myself is trying to control every aspect of every situation so that I can never get hurt so if someone else gets hurt then clearly they failed to control something. Except that argument is as full of bullshit for people who are subjected to the abuses of a racist system as it is for women who are raped, assaulted, or harassed.

And the passing of a counterfeit $20 bill is never, ever a crime that should be paid for with a life.

The Beauty of Vulnerability

“Acknowledging us, believing us, means challenging everything you believe about race in this country. And I know that this is a very big ask, I know that this is a painful and scary process. I know that it’s hard to believe that the people you look to for safety and security are the same people who are causing us so much harm. But I’m not lying and I’m not delusional. I am scared and I am hurting and we are dying. And I really, really need you to believe me.” – Ijeoma Oluo So You Want to Talk About Race

I haven’t read White Fragility (yet), but I do know that when confronted with my own racism I more want to hide in a corner than confront my bad actions and I’m certain I’m not alone. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Oluo does the reader the kindness of opening up her own vulnerability. She both unpacks moments when she was not representing the values she espouses and experiences when she has been victimized by institutions and individuals. I’m deeply grateful for this approach, because by being so open and vulnerable with her readers, she made it much easier to be open and vulnerable back. Although she often says (correctly) that it is not the victim of racism’s job to educate the perpetrator, this choice is helping me examine both the problems with the system and also the ways in which I have perpetuated those problems.

The Structures of Power

As I mentioned, institutionalized racism was one of the hardest parts of this book to get my head around, I think because I was raised to believe in this American ideal of founding fathers who were looking out for all of us and who set up this great nation around some very laudable ideals. And now I have to interrogate all of that. We all do.

The police in my brain are here to “protect and to serve” and that’s a comfortable place to return to when I want to ignore one more abuse or death at their hands. But I remember the way the teenagers in my home town were hounded by the police—and we were white. When you entrust someone with a job, you have to be very careful how you frame that job. Even if you think about little things like quotas for traffic tickets. That’s not the police looking to stop people who are breaking laws, that’s a worker trying to check off a list of tasks and they’ll enforce traffic laws at whatever level they can until that list is complete. Now add a government and a legal system that was designed to protect the property of white men. I don’t know enough about what makes the police act as a military force against people of color (though I’m thinking about it); I do think they are acting to protect a status quo that should not be protected.

I don’t need to watch the video of George Floyd’s death to know that kneeling on the neck of a human being (ever, not to mention until they die) is not ever okay. But when John T. Williams was shot down in cold blood by a Seattle police officer, I used personal knowledge of his behavior to make excuses for the officer. When the pregnant Charleena Lyles was shot and killed three miles from where I lived with my almost two-year-old, I was sickened yet did nothing. In truth, those cases formed a pattern where the police failed to place the value of a human life above the value of their own inconvenience.

It’s beyond time that we confront what is wrong with policing in this city and this country, that we dismantle the current system, and that we instead build something that serves everyone. Something that treats human lives (of all colors) with value. I believe strongly that this starts early in life when we must give all children the same opportunities. I also believe that we have to stop treating 12-year-olds like Tamir Rice like it’s too late for them because their bodies are big. That no one should die for selling cigarettes, as Eric Garner did, or for being in a house where drugs were suspected of being sold, as was the case with Breonna Taylor. Black lives are human lives and black lives matter.

What I’m Telling My Son

The day my (then two-year-old) son asked for a Playmobil tactical van, my heart sank. But he thought it was a police car and he wanted it and I wanted him to have what he wanted. Now he asks me to turn off NPR when they use the word “dead.” Mostly I do, because there are a lot of details he does not need to know. But this week is different. As will be all the weeks going forward.

This week we talked about why people become police officers, that some people want to help others and that’s good, but that some people want power over others, and that’s bad. We talked about skin color and things that make people look different but that’s only how they look on the outside. We talked about how he needs to stand up for his friends because sometimes they won’t be able to stand up for themselves. Later, I’ll probably have him sit through the Sesame Street town hall on racism. Because while we try to surround him with diverse books and friends of all colors with a wide variety of life experiences, it’s not enough.

So I’m going to keep reading, Oluo’s book and others, and turning that knowledge into action. There are a myriad of good anti-racism reading lists out there and I also recommend this podcast and essay. As always, I’m open to your suggestions. Let’s take our hands off our ears and change the world with the power we have. We’re stronger than we know.

The post So You Want to Talk About Race (I Do) appeared first on A Geography of Reading.

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When I last wrote about what I was reading for the pandemic, it was all about preparation — what was essential to know as battened down the hatches. Now it’s been almost two months since my last dine-in meal and we’re as suspended in time as most. Finding a copy of The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima (which I have not yet read) at our Little Free Library made me realize that my reading had, necessarily, shifted of late, too. So today I’ll share with you the books that bring me comfort and a thought or two about why reading can feel so hard right now.

Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda

I confess that my reading of Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda was broken. I picked it up night after night and would read a few pages before falling asleep with it open and the lamp on. But it wasn’t the book’s fault and in some ways this was the perfect book to read in this way. (In my reading anyway) not a lot happens in the first half of the book.

The narrator is the gardener of a marvelous villa by the sea in 1920s Spain. He shares stories of what’s going on in the big house during the summers, but the story I connected with right now was his life of sitting in a cottage watching that life happen. His residence and employment continued as the property changed hands, as the seasons changed, and as lives were made and ruined nearby. This observer narrator feels less involved in the main drama than Nick Carraway was in The Great Gatsby and I very much connected with the feeling of daily maintenance that was reinforced by Rodoreda’s choice to describe the plants and the care thereof. As though this world will continue on, with minor changes, no matter what happens through the window. It doesn’t hurt that Rodoreda’s writing is gorgeous enough that I felt wrapped in a dream (even when I was still awake).

It helps that we’re investing a lot in our garden right now. Or maybe investing in our garden helps a lot right now. I’ve ripped all the grass out of our front yard and populated it with the few plants that I could order and my first careful reconfiguring of plants we already had. We also planted our veggies early and added a new bed for more. Not only is this all a place to put my angst, it’s also something for the future that I actually have control over.

Now by Antoinette Portis

Now is one of the books my son pulls from his shelves when he knows I’m upset and could use a calm down. Beautifully illustrated, this book walks through moments of a young girl’s life. I bought it so he could learn (gently) about mindfulness. Clearly I need it as much for myself. Still, this book is an excellent reminder (for readers of all ages) about appreciating the moments we’re in. At the end of the book, the narrator says “and this is my favorite now, because it’s the one I’m sharing with you” and shows the girl being read to by her mother (at which point my son always gets an extra big hug).

This week I started writing moments in our wall calendar. I needed some reminder that there was purpose to each day and that time is, indeed, passing. Some days are little (we planted seeds yesterday) and some are big (we finished building those new garden beds on Sunday), but these few daily words feel meaningful enough that I plan to go back through my Twitter and phone reel and fill in all the days since March 13.

Also, I’m trying to appreciate things more as they happen and to make magic in simple ways. It’s been a trying week for the whole family, emotionally, but slowing down and looking has helped. One day I lay face down on our grass and watched ants take food back to their hills (did you know they eat dandelion seeds?). Later that night I watched the dust settle in the beam of my son’s lamp as he picked out books. All of these gentle moments helped me reset a little and find the pleasures of now. Best of all, last night I finally traipsed out to get lilacs for my bedside (they’re great for wilding up your dreams). It was late, I was barefoot, and our back porch light was off. My husband came with me and there was definitely magic in realizing how much we could see in the dark and in spotting the big dipper overhead on a balmy night.

Why Reading Feels Impossible

I wish I could recommend to you old favorites like An Atlas of Impossible Longing about feeling angsty or out of place, but even pulling those books from my shelf feels exhausting right now. This came up on a family Zoom call recently—one of those discussions with people you love who are backgrounded by walls full of books you know they’ve actually read—except the conversation was about why we aren’t reading, or why reading feels so hard. For me it’s about empathy.

While reading can be a wonderful escape into another world, reading well and fully also requires us to empathize with the characters, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t have empathy to spare right now. I’m spending all the love and care I can muster on those in my household (trying to reserve some for myself). I’m reaching out to friends I might not otherwise be on schedule to connect with. I’m weeping for strangers in newspapers or on Twitter. And at work I’m trying to think about what our audience needs so I can help them. None of this leaves much room for the fictional characters with whom I usually keep company. So much for the stacks of books that I keep ordering. I guess there will be time for those later.

Are you reading now? If so, what brings you comfort? I could use a few good recommendations before I move on to the “returning to outside life” stage of this pandemic.

Normally at this point I ask you to buy books from indies (yes, please, when you can), but right now the investment I’m making in the literary future involves donating (my money and time) to Seattle City of Literature to help keep our culture vibrant. Please join me in donating, if you can.

The post My Pandemic Reading List: Stage Two — Stasis appeared first on A Geography of Reading.

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Even though nothing much seems to change these days, radical shifts are happening in the undercurrent of my moods and most of the books on my original pandemic reading list are things I don’t even want to face right now. Yes, I still wonder about small details in The Great Influenza, but I know I’ll never re-read that book and have given it to our local Little Free Library (from whence it was quickly snatched up). Instead, the book I find myself recommending most right now (and most want to re-read) is Ways to Disappear by Idra Novey. Let me tell you all the reasons why…

Reading is Escape

I think we all intellectually understand that reading takes us out of the moment we’re in and immerses us in something else. For a while I needed to be immersed in the worst that could happen to remember that anything else is better. Right now I want to explore the world that exists beyond the one mile route I walk every morning with my family.

Ways to Disappear is set in a steamy Brazil where American translator Emma Neufeld goes in search of Beatriz Yagoda, a Brazilian author who had climbed a tree and then disappeared. Emma is (of course) also searching for herself as she tromps around Brazil and it’s easy to get wonderfully lost in the antics that ensue and in the locations. Even as I type this, I’m remembering how the book recalled for me a time when I ate a fresh papaya on Ipanema Beach (a sensation no papaya since has ever matched – à la Proust).

Before the virus, we’d been planning on maybe finally taking my son to Europe this year. He’s only four, but I haven’t traveled internationally with my husband for eight years and we were ready. We won’t make it this year, and my son would not be interested in this book, but the ways that reading this book felt like being abroad are making me misty right now.

It’s Really Funny

If you’re not yet at a place where you need/want a laugh, buy this book anyway for the day that you do. Emma is delightfully, poignantly messy and lovable. The well-constructed plot (including a very colorful loan shark) is worthy of a 1940s romantic comedy. And it’s wonderfully sexy. One taste of the humor is the moment in the book when a second-rate Brazilian author also climbs into a tree to see if their book sales will also skyrocket. I smiled throughout this book. That alone was worth the cover price.

Novey Writes Beautifully

There are a number of things I could have titled this section: Novey and I clearly love some of the same authors (Clarice Lispector to start), Novey does a wonderful job of inhabiting the worldview of a translator in her characterization, this book feels effortless and also smart. They’re all true. It’s rare for a book to hit both the “escapist” and the “damned well put together” buttons at the same time and Novey definitely accomplished both with this book. I look forward to reading it again and also to ordering more of her books from my local independent bookstore.

This is the place where I usually suggest that you order the book from Powell’s so I get a small commission and you support a great bookstore. But now is an especially important time to give extra support to the bookstores in your local community. Many of them will have shipping specials or other creative ways to get you the books you need. If you’re in Washington, here’s a list of bookstores that are still open in some way.

Life at Home

If you’re wondering what life is like where I’m at, I published a poem this past week. The moment it describes is about two weeks old and many things have subtly shifted, but it captures the then as well as I could.

Happy reading!

The post Disappearing into a Good Book with Idra Novey appeared first on A Geography of Reading.

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Station Eleven

When I asked my husband for Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven for Christmas, I don’t think I’d heard of the coronavirus yet. I like dark novels and have often found that reading about the worst of things makes me feel better about my everyday. Station Eleven did not disappoint, especially because the way the structure flips quickly enough back and forth between the panic of a rapidly-spreading pandemic and the life that continues (in its own way) in the way after meant I didn’t have to bear the “what if we all die” feeling that some books carry. So it was dangerous, but not too much so. It’s a very satisfying read overall with strong characters and a fresh take on life after the apocalypse. I loved the way the threads of the story eventually came together.

If you’re at all afraid, I would not suggest you read this book right now, but do put it on your list for later.

What Station Eleven Taught Me About Now

Be prepared. I do not feel the need to pack seven carts full of groceries into my home the way that Jeevan did, but we have set aside enough food and essentials that we’ll be okay if we have to self-quarantine for a couple of weeks. I’ve since read that having a little (not a crazy amount) of back-stock on hand can also help ease supply chain problems for others later.

Books matter. Not that I needed to be taught this, but the way that Kirsten clings to her copy of Dr. Eleven is an important reminder that we cling to things that make us feel civilized. And for good reason. I’ve read more prepper guides in the last month than I’ll admit, but the things that always come back to me are how humanizing small luxuries like a beloved chocolate bar or a great shower can be when we feel at our worst.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

By the time I finished Station Eleven, the news of a coronavirus in China felt distant enough that I picked up the copy of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History that my neighbor had given me as we were exchanging Thanksgiving dishes. I don’t normally read nonfiction, certainly not of the historical reportage type, but I figured if I was ever going to read that book, it would/should be after finishing Station Eleven. I’m glad I did, because I learned a lot about how viruses work and about what can go wrong in a society during a pandemic. There was far too much minutia about individual doctors for my taste, but I appreciate the work they did.

I do not believe that we are in for anything nearly as bad as the Spanish Flu, but I do think there are lessons from that time that can help us minimize the spread and mortality of COVID-19.

What The Great Influenza Taught Me About Now

Infections come in waves. There were actually two infection periods for the Spanish Flu, and those who were exposed to the first were mostly immune to (or at least suffered far less from) the second.

Viruses mutate over time. As they emerge in the human population, they are not necessarily at their most dangerous (the first spring wave of the Spanish Flu was not as lethal as the later wave), but they do mutate and over time “virulence stabilizes and even recedes”. You can read more about how this might be working with COVID-19 here.

Quarantine and self isolation helps. Not only are you limiting your potential avenues for transmission by self-isolating (before or after being infected), you are giving the disease time to mutate into something less lethal.

We are lucky to have already identified COVID-19. The Spanish Flu was not conclusively even identified as an influenza until much after the epidemic. Today researchers are working directly with an identified pathogen and trying to develop tests and a vaccine, rather than spending years trying to figure out what the disease even is.

Accurate information saves lives. During the Spanish Flu, the media in San Francisco likely saved lives by sharing accurate, unvarnished information with local citizens. This is a big worry for me at a country level because the president is more interested in his ego than in getting people the information they need to prepare. I’m looking directly to resources I trust, like King County Public Health and this map from Johns Hopkins, for my updates.

Large public gatherings are a bad idea during times of contagion. There were far too many stories in this book of public officials who were warned to cancel large events and did not. If you’re interested in specifics on how that affected mortality, this is interesting. We aren’t currently avoiding the grocery story (despite the general zombie vibe there) or daycare (the source of all contagion, really), but my workplace is closed and I’ll be skipping this spring’s slew of arts fundraising events.

The Ungrateful Refugee

This book by Dina Nayeri was an essential read for our time before the novel coronavirus. I’m still immersed in its pages, but the way she combines the memoir of her own experience as a refugee with the research she did as a new mother into the refugee waves of now is deeply artful and deeply humanizing. Her writing is as beautiful as her introspection.

What The Ungrateful Refugee Taught Me About Now

It is always easy to turn inwards and see only your own experience. It is especially important in times of crisis that we do not, to the extent that we are able.

The more we connect with others, the better we will see ourselves. When Nayeri sees a girl in a refugee camp who will not remove her pink backpack, she sees her own trauma and the need to cling to the one thing that feels like stability. And in reading about it I see ways I am paralyzing myself when I most need to find grace.

Every human deserves and wants dignity. The more we treat each other with dignity, the more we will all respond with it in kind. The way my husband described how people are treating our grocery store clerks is abhorrent. We’re all humans on this planet. If you can afford to give someone a smile or a kind word, please do.

The Plague

I actually haven’t started re-reading The Plague, so I’m not certain it’s the best thing to turn to at this exact moment, but I do recall that I read it during a particularly dark time of my life and I was very much reassured by the way Camus highlighted what Mr. Rogers would call “the helpers,” the people who went out of their way to make sure that society survived.

What The Plague Taught Me About Now

There is good in and around us. Look for it.

Do what you can to help others.

Anything that Gives You Pleasure

The one thing I very much have stockpiled in anticipation of being at home for the duration is books. I started with an indulgently large order from Powell’s and then let myself go hog wild at the AWP virtual book fair where hundreds of small presses are selling their wares, often at a wonderful discount. Read or watch anything that reminds you that COVID is only part of life.

Other Things I’m Thinking About

Kids are generally less vulnerable. According to this piece on NPR, kids go through so very many COVIDs early in life that they are not at risk now. This has to be a relief for any parent.

The digital age has added some layers of protection and stripped away others. It’s nice that many people can work from home. I wish that everyone could (or could get paid in absentia). I did wake up in a cold panic the other morning with the realization that if my husband and I both died (highly unlikely, but tell my anxiety that), my son would have no way of contacting the people who can take care of him because he doesn’t have a relationship with our phones.

Panic is paralyzing; avoid it at all costs. There are hashtags on Twitter that I won’t click anymore because the fear has already taken people way beyond a functional place. If you’re scared about something concrete, like not having a list of emergency numbers on paper somewhere handy, fix it and try to move on. Turning off the voices of panic from outside the house is not the worst idea, either (she tells herself).

Supplies are available in places other than grocery stores. We’ve been ordering nonperishables (again, only a week or two ahead) from Target. It saves us from going out and also lets people who need to get things more immediately have some hope of finding them on a nearby shelf. Free shipping over $35, but you want a week’s lead time.

Also avoiding full isolation. I don’t mean in a physical sense. If your fear/worry/general busyness has kept you from contacting your loved ones, try a text or a call. I’d planned to write some “COVID missives” to pen-pals I’ve neglected before I started writing this post (and I still will, here eventually).

Finding joy, even if in alternate universes. My husband and I have immersed ourselves in as many comedies as we can in the evenings, but the most effective panacea has been streaming a favorite design show from the UK in the 2000s. It feels good to immerse myself in something that isn’t about disease at all. And as part of our prepping, we have a new set of soccer nets arriving soon, JIC daycare finally closes.

I wish you health and peace of mind. If I read anything particularly interesting while shut in, I’ll share it with you here.

The post My COVID Reading List (And What I’ve Learned) appeared first on A Geography of Reading.

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Elizabeth Liang reached out to me about her solo show, “Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey,” in the week I finished reading Humiliation by Paulina Flores, a book I’d sought out because I wanted to reach into the psyche of a country I once lived in and can never quite let go. Like me, Liang is a TCK, a “Third Culture Kid,” someone who grew up in more than one culture and doesn’t really feel like they have ownership in any culture. In Liang’s case, she is a global nomad who was born in Guatemala to a Chinese-Guatemalan father and an American mother and lived in six countries before going to college. I was born in the U.S. and only lived in two other countries but I felt a deep connection to Liang and was glad to journey with her through her childhood to try and understand mine.

The Intimacy of Personal Address

The majority of “Alien Citizen” is a direct address from Liang to the audience as though she was telling us her life story at a cocktail party. There’s a minimal black set and what look like family photos projected on a screen behind her to ground us in whatever country she’s currently been transplanted to. Liang uses accent, gesture, and language to characterize other people in her life, most evocatively her mother’s waved cigarette and her father’s pointed finger.

The difference between a cocktail party and a show, however, is that the latter requires the performer to keep the audience engaged for the entirety of the performance. Liang delivers on this exceedingly well. She is nakedly honest and sincere about her story and I was riveted as she took me through the highs and (many) lows of her life abroad as Xerox moved her family back and forth between Central America, North America and North Africa. Liang’s emotions are at times raw in all the ways they must have been when she was wrenched from a beloved home or friend or when she found herself becoming in a woman in two cultures that are not friendly to women.

Living an Unreal Life

I don’t talk about my own upbringing much at cocktail parties. When I consider telling people I grew up on three continents, I assume they’ll think I am lying or that the privilege of living abroad will be so unfathomable that I’ll seem like an awful little princess if I discount about any aspect of it. This is the same reaction I had while watching Liang. Even though I should know better, I found myself rankling she seemed to be complaining about her extraordinary life.

It was only by watching through to the end that I realized I was perpetuating (for both of us) the “trying to be the good guest like my parents taught me” that many TCKs feel. That we’re supposed to be cheery and positive and nice because we’re experiencing something beyond most people’s dreams—even as we’re being forcefully pulled away from most of the things we know at a time in our lives when we barely know ourselves. We become so “good at blending” that we “feel like [our] life never happened” and it’s our “fault because [we’re] so good at adjusting” and the result is a feeling of “playing make-believe without knowing I’m playing.”

I wasn’t letting her be myriad in the ways that I don’t let myself be myriad.

Once you give yourself “permission to feel the pain, you can be so much more grateful” – Elizabeth Liang, Alien Citizen

I do feel many wonderful things about having had the privilege to travel and live abroad, so much so that I’ve wondered how I can incorporate this into my son’s life. But Liang helped me remember, too, that I don’t spend my spare time seeking out books that will help me understand the cultures I feel like run through my blood (even though I’m certain anyone from those places would consider me a mere Dolezal) because I feel complete and happy and understood.

Liang for allows us inside her struggles and triumphs brings them full circle in a way that helped me more fully understand mine. By being real about the pains, she freed me to experience the joys in the rich, nuanced way that is real life (and to think more holistically about the life I want for my son).

Multilingual Communication

Now that I feel more free to enjoy the fullness of the extraordinary childhood I was treated to, I will say also that I loved how Liang took the freedom to break into Spanish or Arabic during her story. When I was writing Polska, 1994, this is one of the big questions I had to answer—if I break into the language the way I feel it in my body, will I lose people? And the obvious answer is yes, you can, but if you’ve already built trust and momentum with an audience, as Liang did, the audience can and will follow

Geovani Martins addressed something similar in a recent interview in BOMB in reference to his use of Portuguese slang:

Every time a writer explained some slang, I felt like he was telling me: I’m writing this for a specific reader, someone who doesn’t speak like this. I told myself, “Man, I’m going to do the opposite, and use every word I want to use.” Because that’s what literature does. I love Shakespeare, right, but he didn’t make an effort to explain anything to me. If I don’t try to understand it myself, I won’t like him or read him. No great writer in the history of literature has explained things to people in that way. They just wrote their stories in their chosen language and people who liked reading them did so because they were willing to step into the story on those terms. I didn’t understand why it had to be different with me.

By using all her languages in “Alien Citizen,” Liang brings closer the people who can follow her and also envelops the stragglers, carrying them over the hump into something more—a world where we are not just different but also the same, one where tone and gesture speak as loudly as vocabulary.

I could go on for pages about the things I related to in Liang’s show (her relationship with her maids, an irrational fear of conflict, self-silencing and shyness, and more) and some of the things I did not (being racially “other” in the U.S. and transition fatigue). But I don’t want to rob you of the experience of watching it and seeing what you, global nomad or not, might relate to, too. Because we’re all a little alien sometimes, no matter where we come from or where we’re living right now. I learned a lot from Flores’ gorgeous book about the Chile I’ll never really know. From Liang I learned about who I was, am, and want to be. And I’m grateful.

The post Alien Citizen: An Earth Odyssey and Life After Growing up Abroad appeared first on A Geography of Reading.

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2019 has been a busy year. Between raising a 4 year-old, investing in my adult relationships, making Head of Content at my day job, and trying (always) to keep writing, I have not blogged here as much as I’ve wanted to. I have been reading, though, and I thought I’d take one quick pass at sharing all the things I loved most with you in one fell swoop. I’ve linked to longer reviews that I did manage to write, and at the end of the post I’ve included links to where my own (recent-ish) work can be found.

On Being an Artist

Witches’ Dance by Erin Eileen Almond

Classical music, madness and a tale of genius that doesn’t go quite the way you think it will? Mix that all up with some great writing and you have Witches’ Dance. This book helped me get past some of the fears I have about committing to the artist’s life (and I’m so grateful).

What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World by Robert Hass

This book sits in the precarious pile of “books I can’t live without” to my right as I type right now. Bob Hass is always thoughtful and intelligent and this collection of essays covers so many topics I love—from poetry to fiction to art—and reading it was like spending an evening in deep conversation with the dearest of friends. In one essay where he’s writing of Judith Lee Stronach, Hass says, “the practice of poetry was for her, a centering, a way of being clear-eyed, of discovering feeling in verbal rhythm” which helped me see why I’ve returned to this essential practice in recent years.

Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work by Edwidge Danticat

There are many things to admire about this collection of essays by Danticat, but what I connected to most was the connection she made between being an immigrant and being an artist. “Self-doubt is probably one of the stages of acclimation in a new culture. It’s a staple for most artists” perfectly captured for me the combination of humility and striving for better that drives my own artistic practice. Danticat’s insightful reflects on her own experiences and those of other artists living between cultures is a worthwhile read, whether you’re interested in art or simply the human condition.

Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet by Christian Wiman

Somewhere in the middle of musings on the loneliness of poetry, the need for technique in writing, and the importance of the negative space that silence imparts in poetry, Wiman accomplished the very rare achievement of making me laugh aloud while reading. He also reminded me that part of the beauty of America (which can be hard to see these past years) is how much change is part of our very essence. This is a good book to read to osmotically improve your work while growing your own artistic survival suit.

On Womanhood Today

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

Red Clocks is the dystopia we all fear is right around the corner. It’s brilliantly constructed to portray a myriad of women’s individual experiences while also reflecting the many sides of what could happen if we don’t protect the rights of women. It scared me right into action and I’d highly recommend it if you need a kick in the pants.

Landscape with Sex and Violence by Lynn Melnick

I read this book in a hospital in Spokane while someone I love was being ravaged by a surgeon’s knife. It was strangely appropriate and adequately devastating given that the book is about the life of a sex worker. It’s a painful book to read and also an important one as it humanizes the women we so often fail to see. It’s helped me look more deeply at the lives of those forgotten women in my own community, like learning about the number of serial rapists victimizing them within a few miles of my home.

What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence

Mothers and daughters… it’s a fraught landscape that’s ripe for literary mining. The essays in this book do just that. From abuse to deep love, it’s a worthy read that’s helping me heal.

blud by Rachel McKibbens

I saw McKibbens perform one of the poems from this collection at AWP this year… about the rape of her grandmother and how the man helped her make sandwiches for her boys after. The mundanity of the violence against women in this book is devastating, because it’s everywhere and it’s accepted and because McKibbens is brave enough to look it right in the face and name it.

The Guineveres by Sarah Domet

Being a teenaged girl is hard. Being a woman trying to love the teenaged girl you once were is not easy either, but this book put me sweetly in the mindset of that time in my own life in ways that helped me heal a bit (all while telling a compelling story). I loved the myriad portraits of the different Guineveres—they were a good reminder to look deep into any group to see beyond the stereotypes you think define them.

Educated by Tara Westover

If you haven’t yet read this memoir of growing up in a fundamentalist LDS household in Idaho, you might be alone. I read it while flying over Idaho and Montana and it brought back so many memories of what it was like to live in a place where individual rights are paramount to everything. Westover’s writing is really, really good and her portraits of a very flawed family are as loving as they are terrifying.

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This little book speaks big, even just from its title. I was gifted this book during a semi-annual Ladies and Literature event that I live for because it’s an evening filled with intelligent, worldly women talking about the books they’ve loved. The premise seems so obvious and yet I know how necessary it is. The woman who gifted it to me said she was glad I was getting it because someday my son should read it, too. It’s based on Adichie’s TED talk, but goes deeper, so start with this video and then commit to the full 52 pages some afternoon when you have a moment to become a better human:

For the Craft

The Story of My Face by Kathy Page

If you struggle at all writing compelling suspense, this book is deeply educational (and it’s a great read to boot). We learn very early that this strange story begins with the protagonist’s face being horribly disfigured as a teenaged girl. As the book weaves between the now of her adulthood investigating the odd religious sect she once encountered and the then which led to her injury we are constantly reminded that there is a story to her face. But Page knows that all the details leading up to that story (both in the then and in the now) are compelling enough that she can dangle the mere mention as we follow her like salivating dogs through the full narrative. It’s a fascinating read for a non-writer. For a writer, it’s essential.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction

I could have put this book, deservedly, under any number of categories, but I chose this one because the essay by Stephen Graham Jones shook me to my artistic core. It’s a gorgeous collection of writing by Native authors and I learned many names I should have known long ago. This anthology is filled with artful essays about everything from literary craft to the deep pains inflicted on Native peoples as the US was colonized. I am grateful to the editors (one of whom I call a friend) for expanding my reading horizons and allowing me to read much more deeply about the country I call home.

The Paris Review, Issue 228

I’ve been reading The Paris Review for ages, because it made me feel smart, cultured, and literary long before I had the guts to just write already. But I haven’t always connected with the work in the magazine, especially the poems. This is the best issue of the magazine I’ve read to date. The interviews introduced me to new and exciting ideas, the stories were fascinating, and I think I loved every single poem.

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk

Is there any fame in saying I loved Tokarczuk before the Nobel? This book is layered and complex and exceedingly well written. I wanted to read it because it reminded me of the Poland I once knew, but what I got was a much better understanding of how telling a story from a wide variety of perspectives yields nuance and beauty.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

I already wrote in depth about how very much I enjoyed the braided narrative of this book. It’s accessible and yet complex and I was recommending it to a friend just this week. I love Ozeki’s work. This might be her best book yet.

Field Notes on Science & Nature

I learned about this book in a session on poets who cheat on poetry with prose during AWP. Or maybe it was about prose writers cheating on prose (with poetry) but the upshot is that there are so many ways to see the world that we ignore if we’re just looking at literature. This book included a wide variety of scientific perspectives that were fascinating and also very enriching. I loved it so much I bought if for my sister-in-law. I also shoved my copy into my husband’s to-read pile. When asked recently what was the thing I loved most about my son I said, “He’s curious about the world.” This book is for the curious. Enjoy!

To Love Widely the World

McSweeney’s #52

This particular issue of McSweeney’s focused on stories of movement and displacement and I adored it. I met authors I’d never read before (particularly a couple from Africa that blew my mind) and felt that glorious thrill of seeing how very similar and how very different we are at the same time. I learned new techniques of storytelling and dug into histories I’d never really understood before. It’s a fantastic read that only lacked for not including anything by Elena Georgiou.

Night of the Golden Butterfly by Tariq Ali

When I started this post I’d only read this last book of Ali’s Islam Quintet and I wanted to recommend it here because I loved the ways the diverse array of characters helped me look at modern-day Pakistan anew (and also because it reminded me of travel tales my dad would tell me about the Khyber Pass when I was a kid). But the holidays wore on and I continued to be obsessed with this series and I’m now almost done with three more books in it. I’ve learned about Muslim Spain, Saladin, and turn of the (last) century Turkey and I can’t get enough. The best books are the ones where Ali really flexes the dialogues between the characters, but I’m loving them all and how they’re adding layers and layers to my understanding of the world.

Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers by Frank X. Walker

A poet friend recommended this book to me at AWP this year and I was very glad I read it. Not only did it help me expand my own understanding of the Civil Rights era in the US (something we could all use a refresh on, it seems), but I learned specifically about Medgar Evers. The switching of voices between Evers’ wife and that of his killer and his killer’s wife was devastating and rich. Read this to break through “our great tradition / of not knowing and not wanting to know.”

Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East by Pico Iyer

I love Pico Iyer’s way of looking at the world as a sort of permanent exile. The experience of being in-between cultures is something I always relate to and it’s in his work that I feel most at home. I don’t know if this book is better than The Global Soul, but it’s the book of his that I’ve most recently read and I very much enjoyed the throwback feeling of reading about a completely inaccessible China (among many other things) and thinking about how far we have (and have not) come.

BOMB Magazine, Number 146

BOMB has to be my A-1 magazine for inspiration. Although it’s only published quarterly, I carry it with me for weeks on the bus as I read interviews between artists of all types to learn about the synchronicities in artistic practice and what parts of the zeitgeist different disciplines are feasting off of now. This particular issue is one of the best so far. I don’t know if it’s because the throughline of water helped me look deep into the very many ways that one subject can be approached or if it’s because it raised my environmental and social awareness or maybe because it exposed me to more Native artists than I’ve ever encountered. But it was fantastic and I hope to carry it on the bus for many weeks to come.

If you’re interested in reading any of these books for yourself, please visit Powell’s and I’ll earn a small commission.

My Own Publications

Touting your own work is always a little weird, but I am proud of my writing and this has been a good year for getting poems published with 34 submittals (most of which contain multiple poems) and four acceptances. Two aren’t yet published, but here’s where you can find the two that have been, plus some other work I may have forgotten to ever mention.

“Bhanu Kapil in the Night.” Minerva Rising: Issue 17. In print only. “Kenneth Patchen on a Bookshelf.” {isacoustic*}. Online. “Re: Emergence.” Riddled with Arrows. Online. “The Needle.” antiBODY. Online “Swans.” Towers & Dungeons: Lilac City Fairy Tales Volume 4. In print only. “Marco Polo.” Poetry on Buses, 4Culture, King County. Online.

I also published “Yet All Memory Bends to Fit” at Cascadia Rising Review. Their site is currently under construction, so I’m including the text here:

“Yet All Memory Bends to Fit”

Reading Harjo I see the end of my memory— her ancestors, my severed line not at the ocean, but even after. Though we paint pysanki, our frozen pierogi are served with a side of poppy seed cake, courtesy of Moosewood. And the branches more established? Daughter of the American Revolution, I once ran a welcome wagon (kind of) until my wealth ran out, or I was given up, my siblings too many. I Rosied rivets and spoke Welsh with the old nostalgic for an accent I’d never heard. What can I claim? How can I know where I start if I can only love the memory of coal dust that darkens upper leaves. And maybe that’s what’s with this city wrong, where so many of us came to start anew— severed, floating while all around us Natives hunkered down, frozen shadows, street corners and basements— a tripline of roots we’d rather not see.

Cheers to a new year of reading adventures in 2020. Please always feel free to share your favorite books with me. It’s a wonderful way to connect to what makes us human.

The post The Best Things I Read in 2019 appeared first on A Geography of Reading.

[islamcketta]

Far too often the narratives of genius and madness are entwined to the extent that they appear inseparable. The story of artistic becoming and success then becomes a drama where the highest achievements happen only when the artist sacrifices their entire self to this daemon. It’s a dangerous narrative and a seductive one and I was grateful with my entire being when I realized that Erin Eileen Almond was writing against this trope in Witches’ Dance. Don’t get me wrong, Witches’ Dance is as deeply seductive as it is intelligent, but what makes this book extra, and very much worth reading, is the way Almond twists and unweaves our expectations of greatness.

The Maestro

Fortissimo the prelude to Witches’ Dance as brilliant violinist Phillip Manns steps onstage for a performance at the peak of his career. The audience, filled with other characters who will become important to the plot, sits rapt as he performs Paganini’s “Witches Dance.” Almond’s language is so deft in this opening that I was as rapt as the audience as the scene of his triumph built to a crescendo… and then Phillip took one step too far, declaring himself to be Paganini and running offstage and down the street. Almond uses the confusion in the audience to tease out how Hilda, the other most important character in this novel, succumbs to Phillip’s magnetic performance in ways that will alter her life forever.

The Student

Cut forward a decade and we meet Hilda again at 16, a strong violinist who hasn’t had the chance to fully immerse herself in the art… yet. I hope it’s not revealing too much to say that the forces of fate (and a skilled author) bring Hilda and Phillip together to play off of one another as she becomes his student and muse. But this is not really a Pygmalion story and as much as Phillip shapes Hilda, she shapes him (and that’s where things get really interesting).

The Music, the Magic

Almond does a beautiful job of working music into this book, both in the pieces and instruments the characters play and also in the lexicon she uses. Almond also incorporates subtle fairy tale touches that emerge wonderfully toward the end of the story. The blend of the music and the magic is in the wolf tone that can be heard on stringed instruments. I’d never heard of this before, but it forms the perfect bridge between Hilda and Phillip’s playing and the monster Phillip is battling inside.

The Madness

Not surprisingly given his unorthodox behavior at that initial performance, Phillip tries to kill himself later the first night. This happens offscreen and is introduced later to give us a flavor of his struggles. Another aspect of his struggles is his mother, Domenica, now deceased but apparently manic depressive, alcoholic, and still visiting Phillip on occasion.

My summary sounds flip, but the experience of reading about the madness in this story is anything but. Almond brings many human frailties together in her characters, each one a creative in their own field, in ways that feel very familiar to anyone who’s spent significant time around artists of any type. Hilda’s mother is a ballerina who quit young to have a child. Hilda’s father is a failed musician who still believes his own hype. There’s an artistic rival as well as some people who end up working close to the artists because they did not themselves commit to the grind. We watch all of these characters struggle against and embrace their human and artistic frailties. Then we watch the consequences.

The story was all too relatable for me, a writer who struggles with depression. Sometimes I feel like my sensitivity to the world around me is the only reason I can be a writer. Sometimes it keeps me from writing. Sometimes my depression makes it impossible to pick up a pen. Sometimes I think the self-critique that comes with it is the only reason my writing has gotten any good. And when I take that anxiety/depression questionnaire at the doctor’s office that asks if I ever suffer from delusions of grandeur, I lie, because of course I do, I have to in order to believe that the words I put on paper have value beyond my own writing of them. It’s a little lie, though, because I know I’m not Paganini and I have no intentions of rushing offstage anytime soon.

I could tell you more about The Witches’ Dance, but if you’ve ever wondered in the least about whether artistic genius and madness really have to be coterminous, I think you should read the book. The depths Almond explores are ones I’d like to read over and over again as I consider my own narrative.

Pick up a copy of Witches’ Dance from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

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[islamcketta]

The cliché about MFA programs (and arts degrees in general) is that the percentage of graduates who are still practicing a decade later is pretty poor. I’m delighted that my classmates appear to be the exception as the (then tiny) writing program at Goddard College in Port Townsend is where I first met the authors of four of the five books listed below. It’s a big year for these writers, especially since most of these are first books, and it’s a big year for me because I get to help celebrate them. Please join me in showing them ever so much reading love…

Natasha Oliver’s The Evolved Ones (Awakening #1)

In a world where humans are evolving, people are more curious than afraid. They look for answers from a handful of scientists who try to uncover why some develop abilities yet the vast majority to do. For most humans, it’s an exciting time, but for EOs— the evolved ones—it’s a game of hide and seek that ends with far too many of their kind disappearing, permanently.

Natasha is the writer I envision when I explain to people why I can’t (and won’t) write fantasy, because her creativity and world-building are so wonderfully alive that all I could hope to do is kneel at her altar. She’s been working for a long time on this book, the first of what promises to be an amazing series full of excitement, deep human insight, and a great story, and I’m very much looking forward to reading it the second it’s released in the U.S. in 2020. I suggest pre-ordering it now as a little present to your future self or flying over to Singapore where it’s available right now.

Cody T. Luff’s Ration

Cynthia and Imeld have always lived in the Apartments. A world where every calorie is rationed and the girls who live there are forced to weigh their own hunger against the lives of the others living in the building. It’s a world where the threat of the Wet Room and Ms. Lion always lingers, and punishments are doled out heavily both by the Women who oversee them and the other girls.

The two things I want to tell you about Cody are that he writes some of the deepest, darkest work I’ve ever read and also that he very tenderly officiated at my wedding. In that contradiction lies the heart of a man who is full of kindness and generosity and also is not afraid to be very real on the page and in person. Because Cody lives a little closer to me than Natasha these days, I was lucky enough to attend one of Cody’s readings and am pleased to report that this book will be dark, gory, and feminist. I’ve been saving my copy to read on a very bad day because I know it will be very good. Get your copy of Ration from Powell’s.

Nita Sweeny’s Depression Hates a Moving Target: How Running With My Dog Brought Me Back From the Brink

It’s never too late to chase your dreams: Before she discovered running, Nita Sweeney was 49-years-old, chronically depressed, occasionally manic, and unable to jog for more than 60 seconds at a time. Using exercise, Nita discovered an inner strength she didn’t know she possessed, and with the help of her canine companion, she found herself on the way to completing her first marathon. In her memoir, Sweeney shares how she overcame emotional and physical challenges to finish the race and come back from the brink.

Nita was a year or maybe just a semester ahead of me at Goddard but her kindness stuck with me and I’ve held tight to the friendship over the last decade. Though I haven’t read this book yet (parenting ate my reading time), I am certain that it’s as warm, sincere, and thoughtful as Nita is. She’s the one who told me years ago that the word “husband” never gets old… and she’s right. Let’s both pop on over to Powell’s this second and order copies of Depression Hates a Moving Target. Nita also offers a wealth of inspiration and opportunities on Twitter.

Karen Hugg’s The Forgetting Flower

Secrets and half-truths. These litter Renia Baranczka’s past, but the city of Paris has offered an escape and the refuge of a dream job. The specialty plant shop buzzes with activity and has brought her to a new friend, Alain. His presence buffers the guilt that keeps her up at night, dwelling on the endless replays of what happened to her sister. All too suddenly, the City of Light seems more sinister when Alain turns up dead. His demise threatens every secret Renia holds dear, including the rare plant hidden in the shop’s tiny nook. It emits a special fragrance that can erase a person’s memory—and perhaps much more than that.

Karen was one of a very select group of beta readers for Polska, 1994 because she knows her shit about writing. She even honored A Geography of Reading with a few reviews many years ago. Karen is not only an artist with words but also a devoted gardener (talents she merges in this book), and I have every confidence that her worldliness and creativity make The Forgetting Flower a fantastic read.

Elissa Washuta’s Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers

Just as a basket’s purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, the editors have curated an exciting collection of imaginative, world-making lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island into a well-crafted basket.

Elissa is the only writer on this list I did not go to school with. Instead I met her through Hugo House and the Artist Trust Edge program and have been glad to follow her career ever since. The most established writer on this list, Elissa is not only one of the editors of this collection but also a contributor. This is the one book I have already read and I can tell you that it’s very much worth a read. Not only did it stretch my worldview, the essay by Stephen Graham Jones knocked me on my creative ass and got me writing deep in a time when I was lost, lost, lost. I’m certain that every reader of this book will have their very own favorite essay. Please read Shapes of Native Nonfiction and tell me all about yours.

As ever, most of the links above are affiliate links. If you purchase something using them, I receive a tiny commission that then funds my reading habit. Thank you.

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[islamcketta]

The idea that a book is brought to life by its reader is not new. A writer pours all of the details and plot that they can into a work and then the reader comes along and makes it their own by keying into the things that matter to them and ignoring the things that don’t. This conversation and co-creation between writer and reader feels like magic when we allow ourselves to surrender to it. Yesterday, though, Ruth Ozeki took me beyond that magic to make me feel as though A Tale for the Time Being was not only written for me, but was being written for me as I read it. I wanted to go back and re-read it immediately to see if it changed. I also wanted to have you read it immediately to see if it was a completely different book for you. It probably isn’t (not really) but it’s very much worth a read either way. I’m going to delve into where the magic came from for me. Just go buy the book if you want to avoid my spoilers.

Metafiction Toys with Reality

A Tale for the Time Being is two books in one. The first is the diary of a teenage girl living in Tokyo in the nearish past. The second is the story of a writer, Ruth, living on an island on the west coast of Canada actively avoiding writing her next book, a memoir about her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s. Now if you look up metafiction, you’ll see that the form of authorial insertion is often used as parody. Yes, if you’re talking about Kundera. It’s also used as a tool to “explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art.” This is more what you see with writers like Paul Auster and it often feels like a stilted lecture. Weird, but stilted.

Ozeki, on the other hand, brings a rich humanity to metafiction that allowed me to bring my whole being to the book and not just my intellect. I’ve loved two other books by Ozeki before and I can’t recall her ever using herself as a character before, but she did it brilliantly here and it was just the right effect for this book. Part of the reason it worked so well is that she engaged my emotions first. Granted, it was the emotion of annoyance as I met an angsty Japanese teenager, Nao, who I though was being glib about metaphors as she called herself a “time being.” I pushed past that (thank God) and kept reading. Ruth’s story drew me in more easily because it is, at this point in my life, easier to engage emotionally with a writer who should be writing her masterworks but isn’t always. Ruth finds Nao’s diary and some other papers washed up on a beach in Canada and begins reading.

Through the relationship of these two stories, A Tale for the Time Being effortlessly whisked me through major events like the Fukushima meltdown, 9/11, suicide, and what it was like to be a kamikaze pilot in World War II, hitting each from a deeply human angle. Because Nao is a Japanese girl who was living in America but then moved back to Japan we also get a Japanese perspective on these events and more which was incredibly interesting and humanizing. There’s also lots of Buddhism. In gentle, washing waves that stretched my thinking and made me feel at home. The metaphor that had initially seemed pat expanded gloriously and this book wrapped around me and made me think deeply.

How This Book Wrote Itself for Me

At first it was easy to gloss over the details that were personal to me. Nao’s great-grandmother, Jiko, is 104, wise and dying. This year I lost my Djiedo at 104. Like Ruth, I’m a writer living in the Pacific Northwest (and most days I’d rather be on an island). She’s married to an artist (as am I). They’re both trying to find their place in the world—worried about being too isolated, too in the mix of things, not making enough work or the right work. Ruth had some complicated health stuff with her mom, something I’m navigating this past month (and for the last 30 years). Nao is a complicated, unhappy teen-aged girl (as I once was). And Jiku, a pacifist Buddhist nun, has to navigate her son going off to become a kamikaze pilot in World War II while I’ve worried about sending my son to war ever since I first heard myself sing “Taps” after “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” in a night of misguided lullabies (that I couldn’t seem to stop repeating for as many years as he still let me sing to him).

This is the spoiler part. There is a moment when Ruth opens Nao’s diary and finds that what was once written is now blank. That was the switch that flipped for my tired, busy brain and made me think that maybe it was no coincidence that I picked up this book, the copy of A Tale for the Time Being that I was holding, this week, a terribly busy week near the end of a terribly busy eight months in which I find myself writing book reviews at 5am and all that Buddhist balance I’ve been craving isn’t something I’ve even been able to look for. As Nao sat with Jiko practicing zazen meditation, I felt myself breathe. And it was everything.

I don’t know that this book will write itself for you the way that it did for me, but I hope you do have that experience of magic someday. Either way, Ozeki’s writing is fantastic, always.

Pick up a copy of A Tale for the Time Being from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

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[islamcketta]

Phillip Lopate once said, “The reason I read nonfiction is to follow an interesting mind.” The best nonfiction example I’ve ever seen of this travel is Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” in which she goes out in search of a pencil and we learn everything there is to know about everything she sees along the way (along with all the associations those things bring up). This meander through an interesting mind is less common, though, in fiction, especially in book-length fiction. This is likely because it’s very hard to sustain over a long period and also because most fictional characters don’t have the breadth of knowledge that makes a mind truly interesting. The Pope’s Left Hand by Friedrich Christian Delius is a wonderful exception.

A Back-Alley Tour of the Corruption of Rome

An 88-page novella about the five to eight minutes that a German tour guide in Rome watches the Pope during a visit to a Protestant church, this book races rather than meanders through topics as varied as “the complete fabrication of the life of St. Francis of Assisi,” the Numidian stallions, and why a Roman police car might park empty in front of a fashionable store. While many of these tangents have corruption at their core, each digression is diverse and detailed enough to be fascinating in its own right (and would have led me on countless Wikipedia dives if I had been anywhere near a computer).

Reading The Pope’s Left Hand is like having a drunken dinner with a disgruntled and wildly intelligent tour guide as he goes off on a city that he’s grown weary of but can’t get off of his mind. It is both fascinating and entertaining. I learned countless things about the personalities attached to the Catholic Church, the Roman Empire, and the Nazi invasion of Rome. None are subjects I would have considered myself ignorant of, but Delius took me deeper and tied the stories together in waves that enhanced my understanding. There are remarks on tourists, a history of the relic of Jesus’s foreskin, and more than a few pokes at Augustine.

Grounding the Reader in a Non-traditional Narrative

One of the things I have hated about Roberto Bolaño is the feeling that I’m trapped next to him at a bar and he just won’t shut up. Which is to say that I’m not always down for a chatty narrator who thinks I should be interested in what he has to say. In The Pope’s Left Hand, though, Delius draws me in with his careful observation, applying an archaeologist’s eye to every detail of the few minutes the narrator is in the Pope’s presence. This gives the reader something concrete to hold as the diversions start. Most importantly, Delius returns us again and again to our close observation of that hand. It’s these loops that give the book a strong enough structure to hold the digressions together.

“There are sights more exciting than the pope in profile, and I felt little inclined to stare at one side of a milky, careworn face. I just peered over at the partially shaded hands, hanging, resting, supporting, on their fingers no sign of the ring that his subordinates and the devout are wont to kiss. Turn on your brain camera, I commanded, point the zoom at the hands.” – Friedrich Christian Delius

In the beginning it’s necessary for Delius to intersperse these observations more closely to build the groundwork for us to return to. As the book continues, though, he’s free to wander farther and farther because the moment is built and we know already what we’ll be coming back to.

My only advice when reading this book is to find a place where you can sit with it uninterrupted for a couple of hours. That’s the closest you’re likely to get to the full feeling of spending the evening with Delius’s fascinating narrator.

To tour millennia of Rome’s corruptions with Friedrich Christian Delius, pick up a copy of The Pope’s Left Hand from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

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