a new orientation

My  first trip to Kenya, I never knew where I was. I guess this often happens when you visit a new city, when you haven't walked or driven those streets, haven't seen that tree or billboard or building before. But this disorientation felt particular. There was a way of getting from one place to another that felt unfamiliar in a whole new way. On my first day there, we drove from Nairobi to a small Maasai village near the border of Tanzania, and the second half of the trip wasn't guided by a road that showed us the way forward. Our drivers made their own way (or, remembered the one from before) over dusty ground and through thorny acacia trees. Then, there it was: a building, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

I thought of that feeling of disorientation, then sudden arrival, as I read The Bright Continent. A book about a new way of looking at Africa, its author opens by using maps and orientation as an illustration for how we would journey together through this book and its stories. Expect a Google map of the continent and you'll miss the important landmarks that are really the way to get from A to B. Be guided by those on the ground, and you'll find your way.

This book is well-written and well-researched. And, as someone who is Nigerian and has lived in the West as well, the author is able to straddle the continental culture divide and pull you along with her to explore stories of people and organizations in Africa and help you see them in a new light. Her main point is that, if we look from a formality-bias -- expecting Africa to conform to formal institutions and ways of doing things in the West -- we will miss the informal and customary traditions and innovations that are helping communities and individuals thrive.

I found this book at a used bookstore earlier this fall, and oh how I needed it. It started taking me apart, in the smallest ways, and readied me to be completely disoriented when I arrive in Kenya in a little over a month. I like maps, I like plans, I formality. But, now, I'm a little more ready to look in new ways.

Friends -- this is it. My last book completed this year, my last blog post on books I've read in 2016. Phew.

***
(photo: Nairobi streets)

half, whole, made one

I am having trouble finding a starting place. But here is one: last night, after dinner, my sisters and their husbands and me sitting around the table, empty dessert plates, surrendered forks, pie crumbs. Phone in hand, I look for a photo to show one of them. I see one of me at a fancy event wearing a dress that stopped well above my knees. I hold it up for my mom, who moved around us to clear the table of dessert, and who, when I was young, always lectured me for wearing dresses and skirts that were too short. Now, it's a joke I perpetuate. I can't believe you called me a hussy! I say, remembering our fights.

I'd have a hard time bending over in that dress, my sister says.

I tell her you don't bend over, you bend down. And anyway, men should do things for you when you where that kind of dress.

That starts it -- a short, heated exchange between my brother-in-law and me about what I meant by that comment. Double standard, we both accuse the other of holding. Way to advance the feminist agenda, he says to me. I never claimed to be trying, I shoot back.

We both let it go, both go back to our phones or the other conversations happening around the table. I try to understand why I feel so frustrated and why I had a hard time communicating what it was I actually did mean. I also wonder why he responded so strongly, and how he's felt hurt or deceived or let down by women in his life. (Or, it's completely possible I read too deeply into his reaction.)

Earlier in the day, I had tried to start writing this post, so I was thinking a lot about to my response the book I'd just read. From a writerly perspective, Half the Church was just ok. The author is clear enough, but not necessarily very skilled or artful as a writer. She draws largely on her emotional response to reading another book, Half the Sky, which leads me to think she didn't do extensive research on the themes she attempts to address. My hunch is that the book is mostly ideas recycled from her past books and studies, compiled as a response to some global issues she is just beginning to think about.

But that aside, I deeply appreciated this book. Much of it is an exposition of the creation stories in Genesis -- her starting point for much of what she has to say about women and their relationship to men and to our world. I love thinking about those original intentions God had for man and woman when he created us, and reading this book now -- during a season when I've had many new questions and doubts about how our relationships can be redeemed in a very practical way -- gave me a newly grounded desire and hope.

I'm also grateful for the author's ability to see in scripture the dignity, love and purpose God gives to His people, so that more than commands to obey, the Word is read as messages and stories that are meant to empower and expand. She draws largely on Jesus's command to love the Lord with all of our hearts, souls, minds and strengths, and suggests it's an invitation to live more expansively than we'd previously imagined. It's also a call to all of us to make it possible for women all over the world to respond to the invitation.

She doesn't stop in Genesis. She writes that throughout, the Bible stretches our imaginations and calls for a complete paradigm shift. New Testament teachings expose the fact that the way of relating as male and female that we lost back in Eden looks nothing like anything we see in our world today. To help us see this, Jesus resurrects a form of higher math that originated in Eden. In Jesus, she writes, we see a new kind of relational one-ness (in the trinity) in action. In him, we also see God's original intentions for us as image-bearers. This reminder of Jesus also felt incredibly hope-giving to me.

***
(photo: just because i like it)

you almost forget to breathe

The day after my last day of work, I woke up too early and ran under a dull sky that hid the sun until I was done. I arrived back at my apartment by 8am, the sun shining now but not giving much warmth, with the entire day before me and few plans to fill it until the evening. I called my sister, cleaned my kitchen, showered.

Then, I picked up a book of short stories. I read slowly. I let my heart catch up.

The introduction spoke of stories as a form of art capable of putting a reader in touch with life's fleeting, inexorable rhythms. Good ones can move you somewhere beyond yourself. You almost forget to breathe. Even in these first few pages, I remembered why I love short stories (short forms of most writing, really) -- the intensity, the conciseness, the simple complexity -- and knew this would be a book full of characters and stories to disorient me from what life had been and turn me about. Ready, somehow, for the new one that's ahead.

This particular compilation, The Best American Short Stories of 2016, was edited by Junot Diaz, one of my favs. He curated a notably diverse group of authors to tell all kinds of stories. I liked nearly all of the stories, but I have to admit that the ones with female protagonists appealed to me the most. The women in these stories are vulnerable yet strong, recognizing that their fates are, in many ways, at the mercy of the men and societies around them, and yet not letting those seemingly predetermined stories be all that is said about them in the end. In one story, a young Bangladeshi woman with a history that is slowly revealed works in a garment factory and agrees to becoming one of three wives as a means of survival:

Jesmin sees marriage as a remedy. If you are a girl, you have many problems, but all of them can be fixed if you have a husband. In the factory, if Jamal puts you in ironing, which is the easiest job, or if he says, take a few extra minutes for lunch, you can finish after hours and get overtime, you can say, but my husband is waiting, and then you won't have to feel his breath like a spider on your shoulder later that night when the current goes out and you're still in the factory finishing up a sleeve. 

In another, a young Ojibwe girls is rescued by a white man (or, is is that she rescues herself?) from what is essentially slavery. She never speaks to the man, never tells him her name. He calls her Flower. To him, she is beautiful and sweet. But,

That he called her Flower made her uneasy. Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things--forms of light, forms of clouds, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon. 

And my favorite, I think, about a young woman dealing with the aftermath of a miscarriage of a baby about which she felt indifferent, who finds home in a strangers home, and the desire to mother in the grief of losing what she thought she never wanted:

All of my senses opened in recognition. The mixed scent of newsprint and butter, the muted ticking of the modern cuckoo clock on the wall, the enamel tea kettle gleaming atop the immense stove, the marmalade still sharp in my mouth: home. Here it was. Or something like it. Something homelike. Heimlich. How would the Germans say it? Gemutlich. Touchingly, where the soul or spirit belongs.

What happens to each of these women might seem like what you would expect, and yet each finds a kind of freedom: power over her body, her name, her vocation. It is only in the small entries into the women's narrations, the open window through which we hear whispers of what's really going on, that we understand this. Stories like this can ready you for a new season, ready you to look beyond what you think you know, ready you to know nothing at all.

books i didn't finish

Here's the deal: I've written, or at least posted, about each book I've read this year. Ok, that's a lie, because I can think of two that I didn't write about, not because I didn't like them but because I got busy and moved on to the next one before I really thought about these two. (The Turner House and We Should All Be Feminists, for the record.)

But, there are a few books I started and never finished. When Goodreads sent me an email and had tallied the number of books and pages I've read this year, I realized I wasn't totally truthful, with Goodreads or with you (though I'm not sure you care). I read more than I say I did. There's a reason, however, for putting each of those books aside, and some of those reasons my be worth writing about.

Pulphead by Jeremiah John Sullivan. A book of essays, one or two of which I'd read in other publications or for classes I've taken. Most reference pop culture in some fun and also thoughtful way. I really liked the first half of the book - the essays I've read before, plus one on the Real World, which consumed a nice part of my late high school and early college years. But then I got bored, and realized, yet again, how difficult it is to write and edit a book of essays that can keep one's attention, even when the reader isn't always interested in the topic.

Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor. I know a lot of other readers, especially liberal Christian women my age or a little older, really liked this book. I gave it at least 50 pages and couldn't get into it. She didn't say anything new about relating to God, and many of the anecdotes or illustrations she used felt untrue or not very meaningful to me.

Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton. Oh, I have strong feelings about this. First, I should say I listened to it on Audible (which is a whole other post, possibly). The opening took my breath away - such beautiful writing. But then it just got heavier and heavier, all the things she shared about her life, in present tense (so immediate!), with no pull back into present day for reflection or to guide the reader through all the crap that happened. This is the problem with the genre of confessional memoir that's so popular these days - the underlying ideology that's taking hold is it's ok to be messed up! Wear it proud! I'm all for vulnerability, but only in my close circles, and with people who are committed to seeing me through it. Not for the sake of wearing our bruised skin always on the outside. What is the point of that -- so we can all celebrate that it's ok to be bruised? What about healing?

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff. This was supposed to have been a good one, I think it even won some awards. The writing was nice but the two main characters, a married couple, were too self-involved and I could feel it all going south. I can't do a cynical book about marriage at this point in my life.

I've got 15 days of the year left and two books I'm partway through -- some short stories and a book about Africa that I put aside and intend to finish real soon.

***
(photo: taylor taught me this)

to catch words one day

I want to catch words one day. I want to hold them
then blow gently,
watch them float
right out of my hands.

from Brown Girl Dreaming by Jaqueline Woodson

***
(photo: sunset at Griffith Park)

reading bad feminist

I know nothing about cars. When I take my car to the mechanic, they are speaking a foreign language. A mechanic asks what wrong with my car, and I stutter things like, "Well, there's a sound I try to drown out with my radio."... I don't want to be good at cars. Good feminists, I assume, are independent enough to address vehicular crises on their own; they are independent enough to care.

-Roxanne Gay, Bad Feminist

This is one confession in a list at the end of Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay. It made me laugh, the part about turning up the radio to cover up the sound. It also made me nod in agreement, the part about not caring, and yet wondering if I should (to be an independent woman, i.e. a good feminist).

And that's probably a good way to sum up the book. There was some laughing, some nodding. In the middle there was some skimming because I got a little impatient with some of the essays. (And, I'd chalk that up to an editing choice. Some of these sections felt like a bunch of blog posts plopped there, instead of a more thoughtfully edited collection of essays - some previous writing that was expanded or combined or re-written.) In the middle of said essays, I also started to wonder if the author had anything positive to say. Where was the joy or the positivity? It was just critique of one bad movie after another (the section was on culture, gender and race). But then I felt caught - maybe it's because there's not much joy to be found, not much positive to say when it comes to how African Americans and other minorities are represented in film. Ok, keep reading...  

What I appreciated most in this book was the author's flavor of vulnerability. She wasn't confessional, but she did reveal a lot about what makes her human. That made her critique more credible. She's telling us that she's not a perfect feminist, that she's nuanced and complex and that she fails. So when she calls out others for ways they, too, have failed their art or their brothers and sisters, I can swallow it. We can be imperfect, yes. And, let's all try to be better. Yes.

***
(photo: coffee, reading, of course)

it always must be lost in some way

On a quick visit to my sister in Durham, I stopped at one of my favorite used bookstores. The day before, I'd finished a book and was ready for a new one - the perfect excuse to buy something there. This might sound silly, but I prayed as I entered that bookstore, hoping the Spirit would lead me to find what I needed to read next. I always end up finding books that mean a lot to me.

I bought three: a book of short stories, a book on Africa and a book called A Severe Mercy. This one had been ringing in my ears over the past few years - repeated in conversations or things I read online. So the title stuck out to me. What I knew about it was that the author tells the story of the death and his subsequent grieving of his wife, as well as of his friendship with C.S. Lewis during this time. Comparatively, I've read only a small spattering of Lewis, but I know that I love his letters and more contemplative writing, and hoped I'd love reading about this friendship.

The book starts with a strange prologue/chapter 1, then jumps into the story at the beginning of the story: boy meets girl. Neither follow any kind of religion. About a third of the way through, the author reminds the reader that, "this book, after all, is a spiritual autobiography of a love rather than of the lovers." He describes their early stages of love as a pagan love, since their orientation was inward. Their aim was to protect their love at all costs. He writes with a sense of superiority and great mission, which felt cumbersome at times (capital letters for the Shining Barrier they constructed for protection of their love,  the Appeal to Love which was their modus operandi in making decisions in their marriage). He also includes love poems he wrote -- for his love and about their love.

The writing wasn't exactly my taste, at least until he starts communicating with C.S. Lewis. Their friendship starts when the couple begins to consider Christianity. During their conversion and early days of following Jesus, as well as after the eventual death of the author's wife, Lewis writes with his characteristic clarity about themes of love, grief, joy and eternity.

For me, this book really hit its stride after the author's wife's death, perhaps because I'd had enough of his verbose descriptions of their love and life together. That's also where the universal truth he's trying to convey in this autobiography of love crystalizes: that like every life, every love must also die and be reborn.

Suggesting that the wife's death may in fact be a mercy from God, though a severe one, C.S. Lewis writes to the author:

I sometimes wonder whether bereavement is not, at bottom, the easiest and least perilous of the ways in which men lose the happiness of youthful love. For I believe it must always be lost in some way; every merely natural love has to be crucified before it can achieve resurrection and the happy old couples have through difficult death and rebirth. But far more have missed the rebirth.

A mercy because the rebirth is less likely to be missed, because the letting go is a forced one.

The book held a few other precious Lewis-isms, but really this the piece that keeps turning around in my head. Though young love is so much fun, I've always been drawn to that long-established love that has gone through the fire and burned off what was never going to last long anyway. I also love the idea of a love that has a life of its own, a story to tell, something to share with others.

***
(I've been falling behind on writing - both book re-caps and everything else that has a chance to flit through my head or heart. This week I'm hoping to write and post at least a little every day. It may not be good, but there will be words.)

(photo: at a coffee shop with my niece and nephew. styling by my niece, photography by my nephew. they're already hipsters.)

friends, here are some books i read

Friends and books: two of my favorite things. I like to read with friends, about friends, talk about reading with friends. Today, as I play catch up on blogging books I've read, I see a theme and I'm going with it. These books reminded me of how good writing will sound to you like a friend's voice, how friendship will inspire our reading choices, how good friends will give good books, and how one of the most enduring stories we will tell is how we found our friends.

This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff

Well-known memoir by a widely-loved writer. I read it on the way to the writing conference I went to back in April because I knew he'd be speaking, and because I found it for five dollars at a used bookstore a few weeks before. The book was good. Here is my favorite quote: All my life I had recognized almost at a glance those who were meant to be my friends, and they have recognized me. Yes.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

About a week after my birthday, I came home to a mystery Amazon package on my doorstep. It looked like books. I got excited. In it was this book and another - both books I'd been wanting to read. They were sent by my sister. The woman gets me, even if she doesn't often understand me (which is probably the case a lot of the time because I can be crazy and text her a string of emojis that I expect her to interpret). That might be my new definition for friendship.

The book sat on my coffee table for two months until I decided I'd pack it for my trip to the east coast and Kenya. I started reading it in a Starbucks with my nephew. He wanted us to close our books and play cards, but I kept telling him to read another chapter so I could keep reading, too. It was good. Then I read it on the plane flying over the Atlantic, and in the van weaving in Nairobi traffic and struggling over the rocky, dusty roads that led to Maasai Mara. I read it while America was arguing with each other about why police were still killing black men and in between long looks out the window traveling around Kenya, trying to understand the country by what I could see.

I don't have the book with me (it is already lent out to a friend). If I did, I might give you a quote. Instead I will say that I loved her writing about Nigeria, and wondered what I could learn about writing about Kenya. I also loved her insights about Africans in America and how they relate to African Americans and to America in general, about what they love and what they find strange, about the ways that language and accent and hair and clothing and weight and food and love and the way air feels on skin all make moving to a different country so disorienting, and coming home, even after so many years, like encountering an old friend.

The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn Ward

One thing I love about books of compiled stories or essays is that, if they are well-edited, reading them can feel like sitting around a table with some really smart friends. That's how this book felt. The writers invite us readers around their table to learn from them, to start a dialogue, to acknowledge our shared humanity. Each essay highlights the specific voice and experience of the writer, which makes the books feel like a collective, a community - a gathered group that, together, is something more than just the sum of its parts. My favorite themes were writing to remember and the emphasis on the physical experience of being black in America (and, really, our world).

I can't choose just one quote to share with you. Not one thought or sentiment would sum up what the book made me feel or think about. But I am still thinking about it, which is good, and I hope I will be for a while to come. Mostly, I hope what I read will stay with me and help me be a better friend to some very dear people in my life, and to people I have yet to meet.

***
(photo: books! though not the ones i read)

an occasional strike of soul

And what is Bodily Flesh but a house so lightly mortised as to permit an occasional strike of soul to flash through like summer lightning? ... What is Soul or Spirit but Mystery, a Glory Ship, that Rumour founded by tales such as mine -- Mad Mary Roff -- tales bringing not confirmation but bare continuance of hope... instructing humanity in its keenest question: But if a man die, shall he live again?

- from the title story of Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

(a slim book of strange, somber short stories. I loved every one of them.)

***
(photo: sparklers lighting up friends at the end of a wedding)

i want to give you something

For all sorts of mistakes are possible when you are dealing with Him. Long ago, before we were married, H. was haunted all one morning as she went about her work with the obscure sense of God (so to speak) 'at her elbow,' demanding her attention. And of course not being a perfected saint, she had the feeling that it would be a question, as it usually is, of some unrepented sin or tedious duty. At last she gave in -- I know how one pulls it off -- and faced Him. But the message was, 'I want to give you something,' and instantly she entered into joy.

-C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I could tell you a few different stories about this book: how I started reading it after looking for a different book but finding this one instead, how the text on the cover intrigued me. How I found the receipt still stuck inside, telling me I bought it in 2012 but not telling me why. How, halfway through reading, I shoved it into a canvas bag to take it with me to read at the pool over Memorial Day Weekend and found the bag minutes later on the counter where I left it, swimming in the pool of water from my water bottle leaking everywhere. Now its pages are crumpled and stained.

But here's what I will tell you instead: you don't have to have experienced the loss of a wife (or a husband or a child or a parent or a friend) to find Lewis asking questions you have at some point wondered about. Lewis's nonfiction writing is decidedly philosophical, apologetic, heady. But this book, taken from a few moleskine journals he wrote in during the weeks or months following his wife's death, is much more reflective and raw.

I found myself reading the first half as a kind of observer. It's much more focused on the experience of losing his wife. At some point, Lewis notes a shift in his experience where the fog of grief lifts and he's able to experience his wife's presence in a much more clear way. It's at this point where he starts asking questions about his experience of God. His idea of God, shattered by the experience of his wife's death, has to be shattered again and again, he says. We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand the least. He writes of being utterly mistaken as to the situation he is really in, and always understands God as being more generous, more loving, more present than the person thinks. The mistake is to think Him absent, inattentive, unwilling.

[On a writerly side note: I have heard so many times how good prose writing is built on the foundation of good sentences. I would always nod my head. Yes, intuitively that made sense. But Lewis's sentences are good. Their length, their feel, their shape lends a kind of subdued intensity.]

***
(photo: book on table, before the water incident)

i read this book of poems

"Coda" by Danielle Chapman
     from Delinquent Palaces

Beyond the speeches we're given to when young--
the crystal moon, the harlot moon, the moon
big as the sun elongating scrolls
of banisters on the skin of someone
else so young--beyond the still moon cut
from a royal purple sky we stare into
as into the pupil of a beautiful
machine--beyond our grand stupidities--
the urgency won't perish: to be known
in one's own person as crocuses are known
by sun, conceiving green to breathe it,
for ravishment by light, to grow
into the moment in our cells when we open
ourselves as a plant uncoils pistils
and become refulgent whether looked at or not.



When I was in high school, my best friend started dating a guy who wrote poetry. So she started writing poetry, too, and sent some of her poems to me. Then, she bought me a small journal with blank pages and encouraged me to write poems, too. I wrote some really bad ones and stored the journal away for a very long time.

Since then, I've read books of poetry and books about poetry and even took a class on poetry. I found the journal and read my own early poetry. My conclusion: I'm no poet. And though I still read poetry, I'm sure that half the time I'm missing what's meant to be noticed. But poetry is forgiving. Just keep reading it over and over, and soon things emerge that you didn't see at first. I think that's why I love it so much. Surprise and discovery will keep you going after something.

So, I read a book of poems and here is my favorite one. I keep reading it over and over, each time finding something new.

***

(photo: blue sky over Michigan, at writing conference where I bought and read this book)

give this book the attention it deserves

Sometimes, it's hard for me to separate my experience of a book from the circumstances of my life while reading it. If you've read any of my read2016 posts this year, you might have gathered that much already.

So here's the thing with Tinkers: I was prepared to really like it, but I got distracted. I read it when I was tired, I read it on the train, I read it at a coffee shop when I got interrupted by a good looking stranger who asked if he could sit with me and talk (and I said yes), I read it on a Sunday afternoon when I was determined to finish it so I could start another book before travel a few days later. The conditions were not ideal, especially considering the kind of book Tinkers is -- not much plot, sprawling poetic sentences attempting to describe ineffable feelings, strange switches in point of view and time and generation that can disorient the reader if she's not paying enough attention.

Still, I liked it. I dog-eared pages that I am now transcribing into a document of bright passages from books I read. Even as I do this, I find myself drawn in again by the beautiful language -- poetic, and also terribly precise and physical and surprising. I keep reading past the sentence I meant to transcribe, forgetting what's happening in that part of the story but just wanting to follow his trail of words.

One of my favorite passages comes early on:

There was also the ring in Howard Crosby’s ears, a ring that began at a distance and came closer, until it sat in his ears, then burrowed into them. His head thrummed as if it were a clapper in a bell. Cold hopped onto the tips of his toes and rode in the ripples of the ringing throughout his body until his teeth clattered and his knees faltered and he had to hug himself to keep from unraveling. This was his aura, a cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure. Howard had epilepsy. 

The sign of a good book (and perhaps the nerdiness of the person reading it) is that she will bring it up in a conversation with friends over drinks, which is what I did with this passage, with a doctor friend, because it was the most wonderful and felt description of disease in fiction that I think I've ever read. No technical jargon until the very end, when Harding names it: epilepsy. But before he gets there, he wants the reader to feel it as the character does.

I was tempted to make this post a long list of the passages I love, but I leave you with that one, and with the recommendation that if you read this book, give it the attention it deserves. Drink some coffee, take your time, and resist good looking strangers (but only for this book).

after reading ongoingness

What interested me was the kind of love to which the person dedicates herself for so long, she no longer remembers quite how it began.

          -Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness

***

(photo: selfie with niece)

the art of memoir

Here’s the thing: like a lot of people, I feel pretty ambivalent about memoirs, mostly because I’ve read some really mediocre ones. At their worst, it feels like the author is forcing me to sit through a therapy session with them, or as if I’m sitting across from an extroverted stranger with poor emotional boundaries at a coffee shop. He is just talking at me with no pause to insert myself into the conversation. Bordering on painful.

I’ve read a few good ones. I was surprised by Stephen King’s On Writing, which was fun and insightful and which I still remember parts of (telling, for me). More recently, Edwidge Danticant’s Oh Brother, I’m Dying placed her own current life as a writer and soon to be mother alongside the lives of her parents and uncle, who raised her in Haiti and then in America, giving readers a sense of what’s kept and passed along through blood and across oceans.

Let me get to it: I read The Art of Memoir (mostly on a friend’s recommendation) and really enjoyed it. Part critique (of memoirs the author has taught to aspiring writers for many years), part instruction, and part memoir (of course), the book felt like taking a master class with a good friend. I underlined a lot, but my biggest takeaway is this sense that writing about one’s own life is shaped by one's particular passions and way of moving through the world.

Here is a passage that brought it together for me:

… there begins to burble up onto the page what’s exclusively yours both as a writer and as a human being. If you trust the truth enough to keep unveiling yourself on the page – no matter how shameful those revelations may at first seem – the book will naturally structure itself to maximize what you’re best at. You’re best at it because it sits at the core of your passions.

Throughout the book, the author calls this "what's exclusively yours" talent, which is kind of her because implied is that we all have it. It just needs to be uncovered and refined – through hours spent writing, interrogating, remembering, revising. (I would add a few spiritual disciplines to this list, too, but that may be another post for another day.) 

Also implied is that, requiring a process that involves reexamining and “correcting the easy interpretation” in order to reach a version of truth worth sharing, writing may actually heal us. Which, in my opinion, makes the hard work of writing a good memoir a worthwhile pursuit.

***

(photo: magnetic poetry memoir with by my niece)

tenth of december: the swell and crash of a good short story

 From Tenth of December by George Saunders:

What a thing! To go from dying in your underwear in the snow to this! Warmth, colors, antlers on the walls, an old-time crank phone like you saw in silent movies. It was something. Every second was something. He hadn't died in his shorts by a pond in the snow. The kid wasn't dead. He'd killed no one. Ha! Somehow he'd got it all back. Everything was good now, everything was-- 

The woman reach down, touched his scar. 

Oh, wow, ouch, she said. You didn't do that out there, did you? 

At this he remembered that the brown spot was as much in his head as ever. 

Oh, Lord, there was still all that to go through. 

Did he still want it? Did he still want to live? 

Yes, yes, oh, God, yes, please.

The thing - or, I should say, one of the many things - I love about short stories is how intense they can be. All crammed into something to be read in one sitting. So you, the reader, get it all in thirty minutes or so - all that build up and then the thing that breaks open. It's like an afternoon spent in the ocean, wave after wave crashing over you. The best are the ones you don't see building so high, the ones that take your over your body and toss you about and then return you to the sandy ground again, maybe a little scraped up by the shells but the joy of it all was worth it.

That might sound like melodrama (we're talking about reading, I know), but the best short fiction gives me this kind of thrill. And I was kinda expecting it from Tenth of December by George Saunders because I kept hearing so much about it... Halfway through the book, I'd say half of the stories lifted me off my feet, but overall it was a pretty average day at the beach. (To be honest, his voice was annoying me, it felt too affected to me. Like Rachel McAdams in half of the movies she's acted in. Just tone it down a little bit.)

Yesterday, I sat down on my couch with book in hand, intending to finish it. I was coming off a weird, emotional week, one in which I'd been able to push through some of the hard situations thrown my way. But there was one that felt like a last straw, that internally somewhere I was deciding to give up on. These little choices can be insidious because you don't realize that each one is really a choice to stop living. I was choosing to let my heart get a little bit harder, which feels like protection but is actually a living death.

This is how I found myself when I started the last story in the collection. The premise is two stories that intersect, that of a young boy playing make believe outside in ten degree weather, and a middle aged man who has decided to end his life my freezing to death because of a brain tumor. Their stories are filled out with wonderfully particular details - you understand why this man might end his life - but then he makes a decision to save the life of the boy when he is threatened, a decision which, in the end, leads him to choose to live himself.

I've excerpted that section above, the one where he realizes he wants to live after all. It came in a perfect swell, one that lifted me out of myself and made me realize that I, too, wanted more than little death.

That's the thing about a good story, it can make you want to choose the bigness of life.

reading about earth 39,000 feet above it

I bought The Sixth Extinction on a whim. That morning, I had finished reading the staggering Far From the Madding Crowd, and though I usually like to sit for a while with a book finished before I choose a new one to read, I faced a six-hour plane ride from my sister's back to California (and that's not including time sitting at the gate). I couldn't let that time be wasted.

So, an hour or two before I was due at the airport, my sister and I drove through the rain to the quaint local bookshop we'd already been to once that weekend so I could choose a new book and not have to take a risk on the selection in my terminal. I looked at memoir, then at the new books table, asked the cashier about a book I especially wanted to read (they didn't have it), then found myself in the Science section, and there it was. I'd heard of the book and had some interest in reading it, and then, a few weeks ago, had seen the book selected as No. 1 Nonfiction Book on the Guardian. (It's not clear to me if this means it's their top choice, or if it's simply the first one they chose to feature.) Because I'm a sucker for reading list selections and the shiny gold Pulitzer Prize emblems (and, yes, because I'm a nerd), I decided to go for it.

I read a good chunk of the book on that flight home a few weeks ago, and slowly finished it over the days since. What I liked about The Sixth Extinction - and, as a medical science writer, what I appreciated about it - is that the author presents a complicated subject that has lots of subjective and controversial arguments surrounding it in a simple, accessible and relatively unbiased way. There is a narrative to it, the main character being the earth itself, and centuries of species the supporting cast, their appearances and disappearances adding to the central conflict. That conflict is support and survival. Humans are just another of these species, thankfully not the villain. They are all fighting time, catastrophe, decay.

But the thing about the book is this: for me, it might not be that memorable. I enjoyed it while I read it - it was lively, and Kolbert's language was concise, resourceful, beautiful - but I didn't find myself thinking about it much after I put the book down for the night, or on my drive to work the next morning. It didn't move me emotionally. It didn't get me to think differently or to wonder. (Though it did make me want to travel to the Great Coral Reef or the Amazon, so there's that.) I know this wouldn't have fit with her as a writer or what she was trying to do with her book, but I think what would have made me more emotionally engaged is more reflection - like, what does all this mean? Or at least, what does it mean to her? After reading the book, finding myself not emotionally involved in her topic, I'm not sure it means all that much to me.*


*I also understand that this is because I don't "believe" in science. Like, I don't think it has the final say. I think there's lots of room for mystery. So, it might not be the way she wrote the book. It might just not be my cup of tea.

(Readers - you may or may not have caught on that I've been writing posts about the books I read, a tiny effort of mine this year. Not a book review. More a response in words.)

of love in far from the madding crowd

(Excerpts from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy)


Of love, as a spectacle Bathsheba had a fair knowledge; but of love subjectively she knew nothing.  (Chapter XIII)

:   :   :

What a way [Gabriel] Oak had she thought, of enduring things. Boldwood, who seemed so much deeper and higher, and stronger in feeling than Gabriel, had not yet learnt any more than she herself the simple lesson which Oak showed a mastery of by every turn and look he gave -- that among the multitude of interests by which he was surrounded, those which affected his personal well-being were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes. Oak meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst. That was how she would wish to be.  (Chapter XLII)

:   :   :

[Bathsheba and Gabriel's] was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship -- camaraderie, usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because they associate not in their labours but in their pleasures merely. Where however happy circumstance permits its development the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death -- that love which many waters cannot quench, not the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.  (Chapter LV)

open letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates after reading between the world and me

Dear Mr. Coates,

I read Between the World and Me in just a few sittings, over the course of a few days. Most of it I read last Saturday evening, alone in my apartment, my body stretched out on my couch, back supported by pillows and legs warmed by a heavy blanket my mother knit. My stomach was full, my pulse was resting, the only strain that of holding the book, turning its pages. I read fast, wanting more of your words and images. They made me want to text my sister, who is also reading your book, to say something to someone about what I was learning. But I knew her body would be lying in her soft bed under the peaceful blanket of night dreams.

Two days later, at work, I approached the subject of your book with my coworker. My black coworker, the one who has published books and spoken in front of audiences about her writing, the one is often the only black woman - the only black person - in the room, the one who was told that she is too pretty to be a writer, the one whose body has survived the violence of cancer and the chemical weapons used to fight it, which continue to tear apart her insides, the one who grew up in the L.A. Jungle and now drives a Benz, the one who tells us stories about her one daughter and paints herself as a fierce mama bear, the one who has worked here longer than me and bled on my papers to teach me much of what I know and who remained when I was promoted to supervise her, the one with whom I have talked about the complexities of this new arrangement but not the part about being black and white. When I brought up your book, she confirmed that yes, she's reading it too. "Slowly," she said. "It hurts." And I wondered how it hurt, what the pain feels like for her, where it touches her, how she carries it in her body. And I felt the slightest bit of shame in telling her I was nearly finished. I was reading fast. I have far less pain to deal with.

On some level, though, I do understand why she would need to read it slowly. Your language about the body is physical. One page I earmarked talks of "fruits secured through bashing children with stovewood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn." When I read this, I feel some of the discomfort and violence conjured by these images. But my mind quickly takes over and observes with what skill you write, deconstructs the specificity of image, the choice of words. As a writer, I am changed, but what about as a human? I can't say.

But there is this: during college and for a number of years after, I spent time with kids living in cities. To some people I called them "at risk urban youth." To others, I called them my neighbors, because they were. They all had skin that was some shade of brown or black. The contexts in which I knew them were connected to my belief in Jesus and his exhortation that to truly love God, we must love those whom the world calls "poor." With these kids I led bible studies, formed mentoring groups, met in clubs in which we had fun and talked about God. I remember becoming acquainted with street culture through the stories they told me. I also remember my very noble-feeling ideas about how to change their ways of responding to the people around them. I thought about scriptures in which Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, pray for our enemies, wait for God to contend with those who contend with us. I still believe that these are not just sentiments or good life principles, but that they hold great power. And yet I knew I was missing something. There was something I didn't get.

You unapolagetically assert that "spirit and soul are body and brain." You don't believe in God, and you acknowledge this shapes how you understand the body to be destructable, the violence done against it to be destroying what is most holy about us. I appreciate that you admire others who do even while admitting your inability to make this faith your own. While my faith and the stories we tell gives me a different way of looking at these things, I needed to understand how brown and black bodies endure violence, have for generations, and the kind of fear this instills. Though I still believe scripture speaks into these wordless places, knowing what I understand just a measure more deeply now, after reading your book, I might respond to the kids I hung out with differently. Or maybe I wouldn't. I don't know. I wonder if anything I ever said to them stuck. I hope that something did. The gift of seeing something now that I was blinded to years ago - this is grace, and I wanted you to know that your book helped to bring this, to me and, I hope, to those kids who are adults now, some of them parents raising their own black or brown kids. I hope they knew, or know now, that I was still figuring things out alongside them. Even when my best intentions failed, I hope they felt loved, body and soul.

There is so much more I wanted to say, about bodies and Dreams and your writing. Part of me also wants to say "thank you," but those words feel trite. I don't think you are wanting thanks or praise, but a willingness to be uncomfortable, to struggle alongside you, to try to understand. I'd like to say I am trying.

-B.