Thanks-Giving

In our lives, we are all the keepers of stories.  These narratives tell us where we came from and who we are.  They also hint who we will become.

Yesterday, we gathered with family for Thanksgiving.  We told stories, some old and often repeated down through the years, and some new and tinged with sepia sadness at those no longer present, who live on only in our memories.  They are our recent losses, those of blessed memory.  Of course, we were also creating stories in present tense, right then and there:  my grand-niece’s first Thanksgiving.  Stories multiply and branch out from other stories to become trees reaching down to the past and up to the future.

As I watched people, I could read them as stories.  Or, at the very least, I could imagine them as characters in a larger fabric of our existence:  a crazy quilt of many colors, a host of fall-colored autumnal trees, strong and true.

Then, last night, I dreamed I told too many stories.  I had revealed too much, giving away secrets and the keys to the kingdom.  I awoke before the consequences of my storytelling were known.

But to reach maximum velocity, a story must put someone at risk:  the characters, the narrator, the storyteller.  Conflict and jeopardy rule the day in a good story.  They are the building blocks, the central core of any narrative, in truth or imagination.  Therefore, a storyteller must be brave.  We cannot tremble in darkness, nor should we shun the light.  Stand tall and simply tell it straight and true.  Relish the recitation; revel in its revealing detail.  The story is us.  And the keeper of stories is a trust sacred to this world.  For the storytellers and the stories, we give thanks.

Land of Childhood

Claudia Lars, author of Land of Childhood (iUniverse, 2003), has constructed a memoir that evokes all the nostalgia, poignancy, and sheer joy of being a child in her native El Salvador.  It is a warm and beautiful place, a sensual feast for the reader.  Lars is one of the greatest writers to come out of Central America, and this book, along with her fourteen books of poetry, has been enjoyed by generations.  For English language readers, this book, translated by her granddaughter, conveys all the richness and beauty of the land along with a plethora of memorable characters who enrich the story with their presence.  Each one teaches the young Lars (real name, Margarita del Carmen Brannon Vega) about life and its truths.  This edition also includes a helpful glossary.

The book is constructed in vignettes, scenes of daily life in the small villages in the Salvadoran countryside.  Lars is a child of an Irish father and a Salvadoran mother, and her history is steeped in story.  Each vignette expands the narrative until the cataclysmic finale and the end of her childhood.

She opens the book with a meditation on the old family house, the strength of its foundations, its “comfortable simplicity.”  Guests come and go in addition to family members who have various roles to play in governing the land.  Her first character is her grandfather, a “primitive being” in his simple life.  His Indian blood makes him sensitive to those who have less, and he often opens his doors to wandering tribes looking for shelter.  From these guests, Lars learns a lot about life.  It is a peaceful, bucolic existence, with time for beauty and observation.

In juxtaposition to the slower-paced life of the old house is the smoking volcano, the rumblings, the lava-spewing in the distance.  It is a reminder that at the horizon, something is always bubbling and oozing and threatening.  The world is always changing.  For children, though, this is the land of adventures, where every day is summer, and fruits and traditional dishes are plentiful.  Lars learns the medicinal properties of plants and herbs.  She watches her aunts cook and clean and keep the old house going.  She studies her grandparents, the Indian grandfather with the more refined Spanish grandmother, a sort of yin and yang.

Her father is Patrick, an Irishman born in America.  He is restless and was a rebellious child, growing into adulthood sailing around the world on cargo ships.  He fell in love with tropical America, first in Panama, where he was given the title of “bachelor of the street,” and then in El Salvador.

This is a book about how children used to occupy themselves without screens and devices.  Lars has ample time in her young life for wonder and investigation.  She and her playmates find ways to entertain themselves.  She loves books but she also loves nature and beauty.  There are mysteries in her life, questions that will not result in clear answers, but the magic of the moment is appreciated for its own value.  She recounts dozens of stories, like the one where her sister gets her head stuck in a metal, helmet-like soup tureen while they are playing soldiers.  It is a moment of panic, but the episode offers its own logic and lesson.  Since Lars had a hand in the mischief, she sustains a spanking by her grandfather (how would that go over today?), but her sister comes into her room late that night to offer a bouquet of flowers.  “I didn’t want Grandfather to punish you,” she says.  Lars struggles with her pride.  She puts on a brave front and says the punishment did not hurt her.  “Maruca placed her cheek against my lips, silencing my words and, after gently stroking my hair, quietly said good-night.”  No one spoke about the incident in the morning.

Lars does not spare the darker nature of childhood, the bullying, the unfairness of things.  But these are the stumbling blocks on the path to wisdom.  Children must experience the dangers, the near-misses of childhood.  That is the only way to grow up and become an adult.  But this is an idyllic childhood, and the events as described lead to a resounding and frightening conclusion that takes her into adulthood.

Her final vignette is for her mother, a discussion with the dead.  “I want to tell you—my beloved dead mother—words I dared not speak before, but that vibrated in the depths of my secrets like little bubbles of love.  I regret not saying them sooner…Nonetheless, I know that silence, that guardian of dreams and songs, was never a cause for misunderstandings between us.”  Her mother was the tranquil, flexible sounding board for Lars’ more stormy, childish explosions.  She lauds her mother’s patience, and has come to believe that her mother embodied the “land of my first joys.”  Those joys are evident on every page of this memoir.  It is a gorgeous, heartfelt book by a great, underappreciated writer from a small country with big dreams.  It is time to share this book with the world and make it required reading everywhere.

Be Brave

 

Shores of Avalon

By Tina Malia

Be brave my love

The time has come

To cross the Tintagel Sea

The fragrant air, the apple blossoms

Have all been beckoning

And there we'll stand

Looking out upon the world that we've known

All fear will be gone

When we reach the shores of Avalon.

 

You'll be greeted there

By maidens fair

With eyes of the royal sea

In the garden they will braid your hair

With violets and rosemary

And there we'll stand

Looking out upon the world that we've known

All fear will be gone

When we reach the shores of Avalon

 

Feel the wind on your face

As we cross the stormy sea

Close your eyes, don't look back

There's nothing left to see

 

The other night you came to me

Like an angel you appeared

And we climbed the endless sky

And held each other near

And there we'll stand

Looking out upon the world that we've known

All fear will be gone

When we reach the shores of Avalon

 

Be brave my love...

 

There are wars and the utter silences after.  We know instinctively when things are at an end.  This is the moment, the reckoning.  These moments cleave the present and the future:  it is and then it becomes something more and life moves on.

 

So all fear goes.  We take comfort in how many moments there have been as Earth loops endlessly around the sun.

 

Keep looking on.  What's done is done and gone.  Let it go; it was never ours to hold anyway.  We are but travelers in this land, ghosts that pass through and beyond.

 

Mythology teaches us the mysteries of this life.  These are the fundamental stories.  What do we learn?  Violence is our nature, and we must resist it; wars are inevitable; they are costly, and they rob us of our sons and daughters, and in the end, our humanity.  Yet, without wars, we would have no heroes.  We would lose our shot at taking up the flag of decency, of humanitas, which in the end, is the only flag that reigns supreme.  To carry that flag out into the world is the only heroic act.

 

Somewhere in this world, people are being slaughtered.  People are oppressed, brutalized, destroyed.  For them, we stand.  For them, we must be brave and confront the darkness.

 

In our dreams, we rise.  We live our stories.  We must be brave to sing the journey through and give full throat to our valiant spirits.  We sing of the mystical island of Avalon and the Wise King as we wait for the return.  We stand, waiting, for the Kingdom of Humanitas to come.

 

 

We Are All The Catcher In The Rye Now

 

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.  Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around—nobody big, I mean—except me.  And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.  What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.  That's all I do all day.  I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.” 

 Holden Caufield from J.D. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye

 

Are we telling a story or are we careening downhill hellbent on sailing off a cliff?  Is the death march to destruction a kind of nihilistic event lacking coherence?

I really don’t know anymore.

Stories have plots and characters, heroes, and villains.  Our current story has one, incoherent sociopath who defies all logic.  He is the villain without conscience.  He is the priest who worships himself and chaos.

His chief acolyte bleeds from his eyes and has flies in his hair.  What a spectacle!  What a great, villainous sidekick to evil incarnate.

The plot, however, makes no sense.

These evil-doers don’t measure up.  They are not smart enough to be coherent.  The garage-sale Mussolini and his stuffed shirt fly-boy cannot even get on the same page.

Seduced by the dark side?  That denotes consideration and movement.  No, they are a discordant cacophony of emptiness.  They know no other dance except the single-dimension danse macabre.  They strut and preen and bluster through the hall to peals of laughter and pungent ridicule.  They have their impotent, flaccid henchmen, stiff-arming their allegiance to their own hollow-king.

Sound and fury, signifying nothing.  These are men without a country; these are rebels without a cause trapped in their own befouled gene pool.  Separate them.  Challenge them.  They fall down.  They cannot hold up.  They are afraid of their own shadows.  They think strength in numbers will save them.  A white hood will keep their identities safe.  Their masculinity needs a prop:  a long gun or a big knife.  Like their leader, size is everything.

History has seen these self-serving crybabies before.  It never ends well for them.  They are the waste kings on the dump of a larger, better, and more worthy story, a tale of hope and human achievement.  They are the hollow-king’s hollow men.

Take your shiny boots and unearned military medals and go home.  Practice your salute and your cowardice from the safety of your secret gardens.  Your time has come to get off the stage.  Your day, so short and murderous, is done.

We have lost so much—hundreds of thousands of dead; millions infected; millions, going back through history, enslaved, maltreated, brutalized, and killed.  American innocence is dead.

But it is not too late to seek a better world, Tennyson reminds us.  “We are not now that strength which in old days / Mov’d earth and heaven, that which we are, we are: / One equal temper of heroic hearts, / Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Let us gather in a field of rye at the edge of a cliff, a silent army of the righteous, to profess our faith in the future, to dream our dreams of love and redemption, and to save ourselves from the fall.  We hold in our hands a flock of white birds.  Release them to the promise of the sky to consort with the angels.  Believe. 

 

Nicotine

 

Vroman’s Books in Pasadena, the oldest and largest independent bookstore in Los Angeles, hosted a discussion last Thursday night of The Nicotine Chronicles (Akashic Books, 2020), edited by Lee Child and featuring new work by David L. Ulin and Joyce Carol Oates.  All three writers were on hand for the discussion.  The book is part of a five-book set from Akashic Books on addictions.  Titles include The Cocaine Chronicles (2011), The Speed Chronicles (2011), The Heroin Chronicles (2013), and The Marijuana Chronicles (2013).

In his introduction to the book, Child writes that nicotine can be found in potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, but one would need to eat an enormous amount of produce to reap the benefits of the drug.  The only delivery system that guarantees maximum bang for the buck is to inhale the smoke from burning tobacco leaves.  Do it that way, and the drug is flowing through the highways and byways of the body in ten seconds.  Nicotine improves fine motor skills, attention span, cognitive abilities, long and short-term memory, lessens depression, delays, or even prevents Alzheimer’s, and decreases the risk of developing Parkinson’s.

Child said he moves through his day in a cloud of marijuana and tobacco smoke and said Thursday night that he could not function without them.  For that reason, he wanted to edit this anthology.  The project excited him because he could draft an all-star team of writers to contribute.  David L. Ulin, who has edited several anthologies, said he liked editing anthologies because one did not have to come up with an entire book of original material.  It is a true group project.  Joyce Carol Oates talked about researching vaping and chose to write about the subculture of that controversial activity.  She has never inhaled a cigarette and is a confirmed running and fast-walking addict.  But she was fascinated by the subject nonetheless.

This series of five books is all about addictions.  Alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, shopping, behaving recklessly—all are part of the human condition.  Child made that clear Thursday evening—“Marijuana is one of my necessary food groups,” he joked, and he was seconded by Ulin, who said Child was a “man after my own heart.”  For emphasis, Child stated that nicotine is ferociously addictive, and for him, to get the benefits, he had to accept the delivery system as part of the bargain.

Oates addressed her addiction to running and fast-walking.  Her day would not be complete without this exercise in her schedule.  Ulin is also a confirmed walker, usually in the mornings.  He bemoaned the recent fires around Los Angeles and the poor air quality, which prevented him from taking his morning stroll.  He has felt grumpy and out-of-sorts over the last few weeks as the fires raged out of control and the air was filled with chunks of ash.

Ulin told a story of going to a party when he and his wife first moved to Los Angeles.  Almost immediately, they realized they were not in the same “pay grade” as their fellow partiers.  His wife, a so-called “social smoker,” went to bum a cigarette from two women standing off by the pool smoking.  When she came back, Ulin noticed a look on her face.  When he asked what was up, she said the two women were Faye Dunaway and Jacqueline Bisset.  Child added that he has met many famous people when smoking, and he counts that as one of the perks.  Ulin went on to say that as a small child, he thought four things made a boy into a man, as he observed from his father:  shaving, driving, smoking, and reading.  He is no longer a smoker, but his life involves all of the other activities.

As for Child, his lesser vice includes coffee—in fact, he has two machines on his kitchen counter.  Without coffee, nicotine, and pot, he would not be able to function.  This has always been the case for him.  He started writing when he was out-of-work and needed to put food on the table.  He took matters into his own hands, sat down, and created the Jack Reacher series of novels, and from there, his career took off.  He attributes his success, in part, to his vices, and to paraphrase those philosophers, the Doobie Brothers, what were vices are now habits, deeply ingrained in how he works and moves through the day.

The trio discussed writing the stories in the collection, and the art of writing in general.  Ulin says he often focuses on a single scene.  He feels that is his métier, although he mainly writes nonfiction.  Oates sees the short story as a single moment in time.  They both hold up Hemingway as the model short story writer.  Sometimes an entire world can be illustrated in three pages; that is what Hemingway was good at, and what all other short fiction writers aspire to.  Oates said she recently taught Hemingway’s short story, “Indian Camp,” and thought it was the best of his short works.

It was an interesting and lively discussion, convenient because there was no traffic to fight to get there on time.  The event was recorded and can be accessed in replay.  Ultimately, this series of books centers on the fact that we all have addictions that get us through the day.  Rather than taking up smoking, one audience member suggested in the chat that maybe nicotine would go well in brownies.  Child responded that he would weigh 400 pounds if that were possible.

Nicotine’s delivery system is an unfortunate problem.  Until there is a quicker way to get it—an injection?—we will have to make do with eating more vegetables instead of burning tobacco leaves, unless we throw caution to the wind and give in to our addictions.

 

How To Write A Personal Statement

 

It is never too early to think about writing a personal statement.  You may be asked to submit such an essay for graduate school, an internship, or to be part of a research lab or project.

Students often face writer’s block when crafting these essays.  “My story is not interesting,” they say, or “nothing has ever happened to me?”  Often students compare their situation to others and find their own essay lacks excitement and life-changing epiphanies.  Do not fall into this trap!

There is an old writing cliché:  a story is only as good as the person telling it.  You may think you do not have a story, but you do.  And events that seem mundane will take on importance when you tell that story.  Most of life is composed of little moments, not big, earth-shattering thunderstorms, and these little moments often carry the weight and heft of a life-changing experience.  It is, truly, all in the telling.

Begin by thinking of the events in your life and how you came to be where you are.  When we look back on the past, we often see how, even in the most confusing times, there is a pattern.  If you had not met this person, you would never have had that experience.  If you had never taken that class, you would not have discovered this about yourself.  Look for those transcendent moments.  Again, to be significant, the moment does not have to be “the day I had brain surgery,” or “the time I traveled through Europe.”  If you have had moments like that, certainly use them, but just as easily, you may have had a favorite moment when you last gathered with your family or the time when you had an encounter with someone who made you see the world differently.

Next, begin writing.  No outlines or pre-planning; just write and let your mind go.  No judgment, no saying, “This is horrible.”  Just write.  This may take several sessions over a few days.  You might write thousands of words before you find the story you wish to tell.  Literally, throw words onto the page and see what sticks.  Once you have material written, begin highlighting blocks you might want to elaborate on and develop into something more full and complete.  Remember, the audience for this writing is a scholarship or admissions committee; they want something more from you in the personal statement than what they will know from your grade point averages and letter grades.  Who are you?  If there are times in your history where you did not do as well as you’d hoped, or when you faced a setback, a personal statement is the place to explain what happened and, more importantly, what you learned from the experience.  Committees are not interested only in the good things that have happened to you.  They want to know how you faced adversity, how you struggled with change, how you made mistakes but learned from them.

It is important while you are doing this prewriting to research the program to which you are applying.  Know the research being done in the department and the professors who are coordinating the work.  Your statement should incorporate your research.  Ask yourself what is my goal in applying to this program?  Then work that into your statement as well.  Committees like students with strong goals and objectives.  Go to the library and read the latest research in that particular area so you have knowledge to back up your goals.

Passion is imperative.  What do you find exciting about this program or research?  Make sure to include the experiences you have had that led you to this next step.  You might have discovered this area in a required course, but describe what makes you want to pursue this area in more depth.  Don’t just say, “I want to help people,” or “I want to give back to the world.”  Those are noble sentiments, but it tells the committee nothing but the most common clichés.

This is only the beginning.  Be prepared to write and rewrite.  Take each word, each sentence, and work it to perfection.  Every line must convey meaning and insight into your character and abilities.  That comes with time and revision.  The first draft will never be the only draft if you expect to succeed.  Get input from trusted friends who know you and your passions.  Seek help from your advisors and professors.  The professors might be called upon to write letters of recommendation, so letting them know your career and research plans will help them understand what you want from your future educational pursuits.

Don’t be discouraged.  Good writing takes time and effort.  This may be one of the most important essays you write in your education.  That is no reason to be blocked; it means you must revise and rewrite obsessively to make the statement sing.

So make the commitment today to get started.  No procrastination!  You cannot see the shine until you have started polishing.  Pick up the pen, open the laptop, and begin.

 

"Memorial Drive" by Natasha Trethewey

In childhood, begin our stories, and those stories influence all the chapters to come in the great epic novel of our lives.  Natasha Trethewey, in her book, Memorial Drive:  A Daughter’s Memoir (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2020) dares to grapple with the murder of her mother and the way that horrific event propels her into adulthood.  Trethewey, a Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry in 2007, offers us a spare and elegiac tracing through the shards of memory.  In the end, we are left with the potent realization that what is missing always remains with us, including the dead.

Trethewey brackets her story the question:  “Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?”  Born in Gulfport, Mississippi, she spends her childhood moving from her birthplace to Atlanta, Georgia, and back again as her parents’ marriage falls apart and her mother remarries a Vietnam vet named Joel.  After the second marriage, Natasha welcomes the birth of a half-brother, but there is an ominous shadow over their lives.  Joel suffers from PTSD and the after-effects of his time in the military.  His behavior is strange, violent, and belligerent; he picks on Natasha and harasses her when her mother is at work.  This malevolent darkness awakens her to the power of story and lays the foundation for her future as a writer even as it spells tragedy for her mother and this new cobbled-together family.  Trethewey writes, “I need now to make sense of our history, to understand the tragic course upon which my mother’s life was set and the way my own life has been shaped by that legacy.”

Language offers redemption.  She immerses herself in symbol and metaphor, the poetics of living in extremis.  She rages in her diary, knowing Joel is reading it.  She loses herself in story, checking out books from the library, as many as she can, to lose herself in reading.  One metaphor that she uses to convey the losses she suffers is the phantom pain an amputee experiences.  It is the figurative language of compartmentalization—escaping into story from the force that threatens to overwhelm her.

She focuses on a belt made of bullets that her mother wears, a strange accessory, ironic in light of her eventual death.  The bullet belt sticks in Trethewey’s mind, a harbinger of things to come where she will have a front row seat at her family’s apocalyptic moment when bullets shatter their lives.  It is again a powerful symbol.  She describes the belt as “cold metal brushing my hand,” and that her mother’s body was literally “ringed in the objects of her undoing.”

Trethewey analyzes what she sees as her own culpability in her mother’s fate.  Joel shows up at a high school football game where she is a cheerleader.  He sits in the stands directly in front of where she is cheering on the track.  She attempts to make nice with him, smiling and waving.  She would not find out until later that he had a gun in his pocket and had decided to kill her in front of the crowd to get back at her mother, but he lost his nerve.  In retrospect, in that moment of smiling and waving to him, she feels she escaped her own murder but sealed her mother’s fate.  Upon reflection, Trethewey comes to see her desperate attempts to placate the abuser, Joel, as a “kind of magical thinking,” believing that she can somehow mitigate the anger and irrational violence of her stepfather and prevent tragedy from happening.  In the transcriptions of Joel and her mother’s final phone calls, it is clear he plans to follow through on his threats.  He uses the textbook language.  Even the art he creates in the final days is prescient.  Trethewey describes it as “black negative space surrounding a misshapen bird that may as well have been the symbol of his soul.”

Natasha, the child, hears the unbearable sounds of her mother being beaten at night.  She wants to protect her, to jump in front of her when the bullet arrives.  Trethewey, the adult, realizes the futility of this:  “Look at you.  Even now you think you can write yourself away from that girl you were, distance yourself in the second person, as if you weren’t the one to whom any of this happened.”  Writing is the only way through the maelstrom of her past.  She longs to find peace with her unique “geography of fate.”  That wound, again, cannot be healed.  In the end, she realizes the story is the only “arc and meaning of our lives.”  She says, “To survive trauma, one must be able to tell a story about it.”  Story redeems; it converts experience into understanding and acceptance.

This is a searing, painful examination of life and love and murder played out in the shadowlands of the American south.  Natasha Trethewey spares us nothing.  She brings us in close to probe that wound that never heals, the one that continues to burn through the years, leaving only phantom pain and memory to carry us forward.