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.

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)

what love longs to be

In the end, this is what love longs to be: capable of meaningful action in the life of the beloved, so committed to the beloved that everything is at risk. If we want flourishing, this is what we will have to learn.

-Andy Crouch, Strong and Weak

***
(photo: late afternoon light in pittsburgh)

literary, lately: travel edition

I have a love/hate relationship with professional conferences. Love: travel to new places, eating out on someone else's dime, staying in hotels (I love a clean bathroom, especially when I'm not the one cleaning it). Hate: spending all day in over-chilled rooms with no windows, uninspiring keynote speakers, networking (i.e. an introvert's hell).

I'm thinking about this because it's happening next week, I'm going to a new city, getting up in front of a lot of people to talk about writing (simultaneously my most exhilarating dream and worst nightmare), and hopefully getting lots of reading done on the flights there and back -- among other things. Here are a few links that are getting me excited about traveling, writing, reading and everything in between.

Listen to what makes your hair stand on end, your heart melt, and your eyes go wide, what stops you in your tracks and makes you want to live, wherever it comes from, and hope that your writing can do all those things for other people. A writing manifesto, in the form of ten tips. Maybe I'll scrap my presentation and just read this to the audience?

Airports are mini-civilizations, governed by their own rules and rituals. On bookstores in airports. My airport rules: a magazine from those ubiquitous bookstores, peanut m&m's and stretchy pants.

The National Book Award long list selections are being announced this week. I haven't even heard of most of the nonfiction books just announced. Looks like I have some reading to do. Maybe worth an airport book purchase?  Follow along if you're interested...

I go in phases with writing music. Right now, it's this song and every other one from the album. He's, like, the male T.S. I'll probably also be listening to this on my flights. (Don't judge.)

Can't wait to find myself here. (Quick stop over to see my sister!)

***
(photo: NYC skyline, before flight to Kenya)

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).

favorite essays: it will look like a sunset

One afternoon, a hummingbird flew through the open door of the apartment to the window in the corner and beat at the glass. It was panicked, trying to turn glass into sky. I wrapped my hands around it, the hummingbird heart pulsing against my palms, then released it on the stoop.

From It Will Look Like a Sunset by Kelly Sundberg

:   :   :   :   :   

On a Saturday early in December, I went alone to a bookstore. All day I had been with friends doing fun things, and yet I'd been carrying around a sadness I couldn't shake, and which source I didn't entirely understand. It was the rare kind of sadness that sharpens senses instead of dulling them. That kind that feels like a fire in the heart.

I wandered around, admired book covers and titles. I opened a book of essays by various authors and my eyes settled on the title of the last one in the collection: "It Will Look Like a Sunset." I bought the book and took it home with me and skipped to the end to read it.

Before I started reading, I didn't even guess what the essay would be about, though the title made me think of summer nights, when sunsets come late and bring warm colors. Or, at this time of year, when the sun is setting over the freeway ahead of me as I drive home from work, and the clouds and sky seem to be showing off.

But sunsets are endings, slow ones that bring with them hours of night. In this particular essay, the ending comes to a relationship. There is love and commitment, and also abuse and apologies and false hope. Near the end, a doctor tells the author that her fresh injury will change color and heal over time. "It will look like a sunset," he says. Which you, as the reader, come to understand is also how leaving looks: bruised and final.

There are many things I love about this essay: the structure, the way she handles time, her images. I especially admire her ability to make the reader understand her love for her husband. Why she stayed. Domestic violence stories can be told with so little empathy for the abuser, and even for the abused. As if leaving should be an obvious, easy choice. You forget about the love. At close of the essay - after we know that she has indeed left - the author recounts simple memories of family-hood with her husband, and her mother's advice to try hard because living without him will be hard. You get it, why she tried like she did. Why she put up with all that hurt and fear.

It will look like a sunset, but then it will heal. During the night, as the earth makes its turn, the sun still burns. Eventually, you see it again.

(Oh, and that's what happened with that sadness I was carrying around, too...)

literary, lately

A few links, if you're interested...

I love awards season. Though this year, the Golden Globes were underwhelming - the acceptance speeches too self satisfied, the nominees mostly ones I care little about. I'm afraid the Oscars won't be much better. BUT! We always have literary awards. Today, the Pen literary awards short list was announced.

Unofficial goal this year: read more fiction by African authors. Just added a few of these to my list.

And another reading list, this one from authors presenting at a writing conference I'll attend. Love this list of authors, some favorite and some new ones to explore.

Make this part of my writing mission statement - from Sarah Manguso in her piece on envy and what drives our writing

The purpose of being a serious writer is not to express oneself, and it is not to make something beautiful, though one might do these things anyway. Those things are beside the point. The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair. If you keep that in mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison. If people read your work and, as a result, choose life, then you are doing your job.

Lastly, I give you my favorite new instagram account: Hot Dudes Reading, Female readers, you're welcome. Male readers, take note.

they will inherit the land (or, some rambling thoughts)

Speaking of black bodies: Fighting Environmental Racism in North Carolina

I clicked on this article because I was curious about the term environmental racism, and also because my sister lives in North Carolina. In my few short visits there (to only one part of the state - close to the area spoken about in this piece), what I've seen has made me curious about race, segregation, and how history has shaped what is now. This story provides a glimpse of a kind of modern-day racism that is more systemic and perhaps for that reason, more silent. It is yet another way we sacrifice black bodies for the comfort of the Dream. (See Between the World and Me for more...)

What I loved most is how the story ends. A local activist and son of the area's first black police chief, who was involved in the beginnings of this particular fight for justice, says, "I don't feel anybody should fight as long as we've been fighting for something that's God-given." He's speaking of the promises made to residents more than 40 years ago that are only now being fulfilled by local authorities, after years of trying to prove discrimination. Never mind that people had made promises - he recognizes that justice is of God's own heart and is given at his hand, even while it can be blocked by people with other (evil?) intentions. And he's right, it shouldn't take that long. But, as he says, "you fight until it's done."

The story brings new light to a psalm I've been meditating on, especially with the imagery of land:

Do not fret because of evildoers, 
    do not be envious of wrongdoers,
For they will soon fade like the grass 
    and wither like the green herb.
Trust in the Lord, and do good, 
    dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness.
...
For those blessed by the Lord 
    will inherit the land.
...
For the Lord loves justice; 
    he will not forsake his saints.
                                                                               - (Psalm 37)

Amen.

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.

dreaming of books, and the time to read them

This fall, I nearly applied to a grad school program that would have me writing and reading all the time. My dream was to quit my job and hole up somewhere (really dreaming, I thought maybe the woods of North Carolina or along a river in Pittsburgh or in a small village in Kenya) with just books and my computer. I didn't want to be a hermit, per se, but I just wanted to have more time to read, think, write, explore.

That is not happening, and for good reasons. Life is about other things, for now at least. But there is a little violin playing soft, sad songs in my heart during this season when all the 'best of" book lists are being released. I want all of them.

Dreams are still fun, even when the firm edges of reality don't line up with them. This best book list from NPR not only gives you titles of great books, it also helps you pick out the rights ones for you. And this list from Buzzfeed shows the best book covers (and some of the best titles, too, I think). I would also direct you to the bookstore - my photo is taken here - where you can get even more crazy with your book dreaming. Just give someone your credit card before you go in.

PS A trusted friend's list and more recs in the comments. Love it.

the echo that did not die away

Loving this:

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. ... All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it - tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeads, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all. 

...Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you... Your place in heaven will seem made for you and you alone, because you were made for it - made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

-C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain

books as friends, and a city that gives you space

If books were my friends (which, um, they are), I'd probably categorize them the same way I do my friends. I hope that doesn't sound overly utilitarian, but let's face it: hopefully we love our friends as wholly as we're able, but we often appreciate them for those one or two unique and complex qualities that sets them apart from others we know. It's what appeals to us in them, what draws us in. For example, I have this friend at work who is endlessly bubbly and enthusiastic and loves frappuccinos (with lots of whipped cream, of course), and she also has this incredibly smart, analytic take on things. I especially love to be around her when I want dessert, need a pep talk, or feel like my brain is failing me. And because of her, I just bought a girlie dress that I wouldn't say is "me," but that I love.

The same with books. I'm not looking to each book I read to bring the same kind of experience. I guess this is pretty obvious, especially when it comes to choosing different genres. But even when I read, say, two different books of narrative nonfiction, the author's voice and spin and language and images all work together to create a unique feel. What I'm getting at is that, reading Meghan Daum's newest book of essays, The Unspeakable, made me feel like I was with a friend (and actually reminded me of one of my closest friends). Daum's book is interesting, and heartfelt but not overly emotional. She said a lot of things that question the way I usually think about the world around me, which got me thinking. And I didn't always agree with her, but I trusted her enough to keep going along with her.

I came to this book and author through an essay published in The New Yorker a few months back, which is also part of this collection. It's called Difference Maker, and in it, she writes about her desire to remain childless. As she digs through her experiences and relationships to help the reader understand her path to this decision, she remains balanced (not sentimental at all, a leaning that the subject could lend itself to pretty easily) and yet uncovers what she called the Central Sadness (what a universal name!) in her marriage during one season of recognizing what remaining childless might mean for her and her husband. When I first read this essay back in the fall, I sat on my couch for a while afterward, thinking about it - about her process and how I could relate to that Central Sadness she described, and also about how she was able to achieve what she did with her writing.

One of my favorite essays in Daum's new collection is about Los Angeles, called Invisible City. If you're a reader of this blog, you probably know that I have my issues with LA (the traffic! the incessant sun! the fake green! and the metaphor that is!). Daum doesn't so much rant about LA* as see it with clear eyes and describe what she sees. Her premise is that, even though LA is a place where people come to be seen (or known - like, become famous), it's also a place where you can be invisible. She writes:

Now I just think that LA is a place that's hard to see close up. You can't capture it from the street. It's an aerial-view kind of city, best photographed from a helicopter or hillside. There are people everywhere, but they are hidden in their cars or houses, or they are tiny specks hiking on canyon trails, their dogs even tinier specks beside them, the wildlife crouched in the sagebrush unnoticed. LA is a place that will leave you alone if you need it to. It will let you cry in your car. It will give you your space. (emphasis mine, because exactly.)

It might be weird of me to say, but Daum's essay made me a little more sympathetic toward LA. As if I never thought that some of its flaws weren't its intentional doing, but rather just a result of how people have people the place. That is one of the best qualities that a friend can have, isn't it - to help others see more clearly, and as a result, find it in themselves to forgive. To act with grace toward the world around them.

*Ok but she does rant just a little bit, with such fresh imagery: "The surreal effects of watching these [obvious LA] cliches play out before you in real life and in real time can make your head spin. They can make you feel like the one live person in an animated children's show."

reading strengthens the soul

Because they can be consumed in a sitting, we tend to think of short stories as the equivalent of literary bonbons, small bites to satisfy a small craving or to fill a little space in the day. Short they may be, and yet the work of digesting a good story is anything but quick... The best short stories I've read over these years have seemed to require nearly as much of me, the reader, as of the writer, a kind of passionate engagement that challenges not only my intellect but my humanity. Reading, reading actively, strengthens the soul.

-Katrina Kenison, Introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2006

preparing for Kenya: buying scrubs and fostering fresh eyes, an open heart

My trip to Kenya is just a little over a month away. I'm starting to get more intentional about my preparations - including asking a few experienced friends for input or advice about travel to Africa, writing about Africa, etc.

One friend, who traveled as a photographer with Alabaster Mobile Clinic on this same trip two years ago, responded with this email:

Tips? 

Stay away from elephants

Embrace being smelly

Just love the kids, kids all over the world need love hugs and laughter. It transcends language

Pray

There is a new scrub store on walnut, cross street Catalina. I just bought scrubs there! They all fit funny so don't stress about it :) 

(Yes, I'd confided in her my hesitations about wearing scrubs - required attire as part of the clinics we'll be running. How will I know if my butt looks big without being able to try them on? Glad she recommended a store to check out.)

Another friend, Amber, lives in east Africa (Uganda - a wholly different country than Kenya, but in the same region). She's also in the middle of an MFA program in creative nonfiction and is writing about her transition to life in Uganda as an expat, and about conflicts and issues she and her young family face. Her blog is great, and hopefully soon she'll have more published pieces to read. She passed along this an important essay written by a Kenyan man about writing about Africa. His use of satire is effective. As in, it has made me afraid to write about Africa. Here's an excerpt:

Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

I talked to Amber about this briefly when I got to see her a few weeks ago, and she told me to just write what I see and hear and feel, and worry about the politics of what I've written in the revisions. I'm hoping that I'll be able to see Kenya, and the people we meet, with fresh eyes and an open heart and mind, enough to write about them with due generosity and thoughtfulness.

the God of small things

I was getting a snack from the vending machine at work and happened to glance at the table of books. It is usually stacked with those small thick mass market paperbacks with the author's name in huge block, books that I imagine someone bought for the beach and cleared out of their house when they moved a few summers later. And I usually ignore these. But sitting there like it knew I'd be looking for it was a book with a title that I needed to understand. I picked it up and turned it around to read the back cover. And here is a confession: I stole it. I bargained that I had a few books I'd drop off in exchange for this one (which, another confession, I haven't done yet).

Then a few days later I was at a bookstore, in line to buy some used books (I can't be helped), and I saw a coffee table book that featured authors' bookshelves. The name of one of my favorites caught my eye, and what else was on his bookshelf but the book I had recently stolen from the work breakroom. I took it as a sign (the God of small things indeed) and started reading it a few days later.

Reading this book required a change of pace from the previous few books I'd read, which were nonfiction narrative and moved fairly quickly. This novel is full of imagery and poetic language, and its structure is complicated, jumping from the present to the past to the further past as memories are evoked. The beginning was slow for me as I adjusted to the depth of concentration I needed to grasp this book. The action picks up at the end, and so did my focus, so I read the second half within a few days.

Something I really loved about this book is that it took trips into the past to tell the beginnings of each character's story and how they fit into the Story this book tells. The author is particular about when she gives you these bits of information, inviting you to deeper feeling and opinion about characters at specific, strategic points in the Story. She also spends a lot of time with scene-setting, making some of the places in the Story (a house, a river) into characters, too.

There are so many beautiful passages that, if given time, I could sit and read over and over. Here is one that I earmarked:

Being with Chacko made Margaret Kochamma feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them -- as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.   

In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from her lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.

the home of the word

Silence is the home of the word. Silence give strength and fruitfulness to the word. We can even say that words are meant to disclose the mystery of the silence from which they come.

- Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart

in the desert: on the need for solitude

But soon [St. Anthony] realized that more was required of him. He had to... let himself be totally transformed into a new being. His old, false self had to die and a new self had to be born. For this Anthony withdrew into the complete solitude of the desert.

-Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart

Last week tailspin came unexpectedly, like it always does. My friend cancelled dinner out and my internal balance got thrown. She hates spending time with me, I am a loser, I will be alone forever. The emptiness of that night loomed like a dark oblivion ready to swallow me up. I thought about making plans S. or N. or SOMEONE so that my night would be filled again. So that I wouldn't have to spend the rest of my life alone.

But the thing is, I sometimes really enjoy time alone. And - the next day I'd be going away for the long weekend, so the extra time was actually sorta needed to pack and prepare. I know something isn't right when I respond so dramatically. I resisted those sneaky solutions to just make new plans and forced myself to face me Empty Thursday Night.

It was then, in the middle of this past week, that I was absolutely convinced that this weekend away was necessary, and that I had some inner work to do while here. Not coincidentally we are in the desert, the same terrain where Jesus himself was tested and emerged prepared for ministry. I will admit, this desert is probably quite different from the one where Jesus went, or the one where the Desert Fathers fled. Here there are manicured landscapes (and greenery!) and golf courses and swimming pools. Tonight we are headed to a Purple Rain tribute concert and I'm hoping to get a cocktail.

But here I am with Nouwen and my journal and some coffee, wondering about how to create some internal solitude. How not to despise time alone in my apartment. How to not fill up every night of my week with new and old friends to somehow guarantee that I'll never have to live alone.

Here are a few ideas from The Way of the Heart that I'm trying to allow to sink in:

Changing my thinking about my apartment and my time living alone
We say to each other that we need some solitude in our lives. What we really are thinking of, however, is a time and a place for ourselves in which we are not bothered by other people, can think our own thoughts, express our own complaints, and do our own thing, whatever that may be... We have come to the dubious conviction that we all have a right to privacy... solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion... the place where the emergence of the new woman occurs.

On solitude as a discipline
We have, indeed, to fashion our own desert where we can withdraw every day, shake off our compulsions and dwell in the gentle healing presence of our Lord.

What we can expect in the desert of solitude
It is the struggle to die to the false self... The wisdom of the desert is that the confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unconditionally to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Why solitude is important to cultivating compassion for people in my life
Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it... It is in solitude that this compassionate solidarity grows... In solitude our heart of stone can be turned into a heart of flesh.

listen, watch, read

It seems like every other conversation this week is about the government shutdown. When I logged into the New York Times website on Tuesday morning, the main scrolling photos featured services outside of the capitol that were impacted by the event. One showed a man standing outside the Liberty Bell, another of signs posted at Valley Forge state park turning visitors away. I heard one man on the radio talk about a trip to the Grand Canyon that had been 18 years in the making. He was waiting outside to see if he'd still get part of his vacation.

All of that makes me kinda sad and angry and like I want to scold those politicians for bickering with each other like children. I'm sure there are factors at play that I'm totally unaware of and probably unable to grasp, but still.

So, the bad news is that some of the beauty of our country is off limits for a little while and there are grown men (and women, I suppose?) acting like children. The good news is that there are still plenty of people doing wonderful and surprising things. So in case you got turned away from a museum or monument or park and are twiddling your thumbs or writing death notes to congress, here are a few alternatives for you.

1. listen
My favorite host on NPR's Morning Edition (a Lancaster, PA native!) interviewed a 12-year-old girl with some extraordinary musical talent. At the end of the interview, he gives her a scenario and she makes up a song for it. The tune comes to her so quickly, so naturally it's like a second language. She speaks in key strokes. It had me thinking about what second languages some others of us have - unique abilities that maybe aren't quite so lauded but are extraordinary nonetheless. Apparently it also had my nephew practicing extra hard for his first solo piano performance (he's in second grade).

2. watch
You may not consider comedians high culture, but watch this appearance by Louise C.K. He's onto something and I admire his honesty, and the way he can help us to listen to an uncomfortable truth through his humor. (I've also picked up my phone a lot less.)



3. read
And lastly, this quote from Isabel Wilkerson talking about her process of finding people with the stories that would eventually make up her book The Warmth of Other Suns. (What a great title, right?) I guess the reason it struck me as so beautiful is because I still try to outrun my mistakes, thinking I can somehow reverse them or make up for them. That's a lot of running. If any of you readers are distance runners, you know that the best part of the run is almost always that moment at the end when you can stop. That's what I imagine she's talking about here.

I wanted people who were beautifully imperfect. Perfection is not real, and readers cannot identify with people presented as perfect. I wanted to find people who were at peace with their mistakes and with the things they had done not particularly well. I wanted people who were willing to be who they really, truly were. Via here.

a story is a promise

Last week, I started a new writing course. I've noticed a pattern when I take writing classes: I start out incredibly excited and eager to soak up everything. Then after a few days, usually spent comparing myself to my new classmates, I get shy and unsure about my writing ability and realize that everything I'm writing sounds boring / unimaginative / unthoughtful / etc. I hit the delete button a lot in those few days. I rarely pick up a pen.

I'm doing my best to push through this ugly self-doubt phase because this weekend I have a goal of finishing a first draft of my 3,5000 word assignment due next Sunday night. The class is narrative journalism, and since I'm not a journalist and I work full time, I've felt my limitations in collecting material for my story. And honestly, some days I think about the topic I've chosen for my first story, trying to formulate in my head where I'll start and what the story is really about, and it sounds just plain dumb. Especially when I compare it to what my classmates are working on. (Theirs will discuss issues of immigration, living as an artist in a restrictive society, etc. Mine is about a cat.). Still, I'm convinced there's a story in there somewhere, and though I may not get the interviews and face to face contacts that will make the story really come alive, I'm reminding myself that it's all a learning process. Is my story going to be award-winning material? Definitely not. Am I learning something? Yes, a ton. So there you go.

While we're talking about award-winning narrative journalism, I just finished reading this three-part series about a mother and her micropreemie (is anyone else tired of the prefix micro? but it may actually be applicable here, since the baby is the size of a barbie doll, if you can imagine). So many ideas and themes are explored in this story - the cost and worth of a life, motherhood, miracles, what is it that gives us the fight to live, and so much more. I cried at the end and at one other part, but if I tell you more it might give the ending away, and you need to read to the end. As the author's husband (also an award-winning writer) explains, "A story is a promise... It's a promise that the end is worth waiting for."

The author shares some of her process here, which is incredibly helpful as I try to understand what kind and breadth of research and reporting goes into telling stories like these. She worked for months and scoured hospital records as well as her husband's notes and her own journals. That was all before she started writing it. I love when she talks about the excel spreadsheets. I couldn't have thought up a better combination for a job for me - spreadsheets and writing. How can I also fit paid travel to destination locations in there?

I promise to let you know if I have any revelations about the cat story this weekend. In the meantime, if you can tell me anything about what makes somebody a "cat person," leave it in the comments. To me, this is like trying to understand French. (Huh?)

you know you're a nerd when

 You want your room wallpapered to look like a used bookstore.