by Ethan Rice | Oct 2, 2020 | Book Reviews
By Tarn Wilson
“I’ve always been a hungry reader,” Rebecca McClanahan writes in her newest collection In the Key of New York. Me too. And I often read as I eat: I gobble. But, as with certain transcendent meals, there are books that, from the first page, ask that I slow down and savor: hold the book carefully, turn the pages mindfully. McClanahan’s memoir-in-essays is just such a book. As I read, I found myself asking what qualities define writing that both enlivens and stills the reader.
Perhaps the sheer amount of time devoted to the work is part of the magic. McClanahan’s essays were written in the 2000s, most in and around 9/11, when she and her husband decided to have a short-lived adventure in New York City and ended up staying for eleven years. A respected essayist, she could have rested on her reputation and slapped together the previous pieces into a book. But she didn’t.
Instead, according to an interview in The Rumpus, the author took a different route:
My process was not just deciding what order to place the essays (almost all of which had been previously published in journals and anthologies) but also revising them so that together they would speak to one another in what I hope are interesting ways. Some of the revisions were substantive, even violent! (I believe in violent revisions when necessary.) In some cases, I sacrificed some of my favorite parts of favorite essays in order to serve the whole book.
In her author’s note, McClanahan also shares the spirit of inquiry she brings to her work: “More than twenty years have passed since my husband and I made our midlife move to New York City . . . This book is an attempt to hold, in this moment, a time and place that changed my life in ways I have yet to fully understand.”
The collection begins with McClanahan wrestling with the disorientation of moving from familiar and friendly North Carolina to the gritty, urban city and trying to find a sense of home and belonging. The essays carry us through the rubble and shock of the first days after 9/11; the more private shock to her marriage when her husband has a brief affair; and her diagnosis and treatment of colon cancer. McClanahan has ordered these essays so their themes and motifs echo and build. This is what I hunger for: Books in which I sense the writer has taken her time to show readers how language and meaning are carefully crafted—especially when language and meaning are refocused via revision.
Likewise, the leisureliness in McClanahan’s writing voice, her asides and trust in the movement of her own mind, help to slow me. Mainstream publishers are often on the lookout for the latest, popular essay voice—usually an amusing, clever, confessional, and self-deprecating persona. Although I often enjoy such collections, they seem to skim the surface of a self: they trace the buzz of a busy mind as it interacts with a busy world, interrupted by the occasional flash of real insight. In contrast, McClanahan accesses a deeper, slower self; a more personal and individual rhythm; a cadence as individual as a heartbeat.
Listen: In her opening essay “Signs and Wonders,” McClanahan, newly arrived, is both appalled and entranced by the city and wonders whether she should stay. One day, after she awakens to the “artillery sounds” of car alarms and jackhammers, she decides to “go to where I always go when I need a sign—to Central Park” where the beauty shifts her consciousness: “and, oh look, a day so beautiful you’d gladly pay if the universe were charging. The leaves on the ginkgoes are falling, gold coins upon gold coins.” She ends with the decision to stay:
Look, there’s a family now, spilling out of my gazebo, with their fishing poles, their buckets and bait, their beautiful, children—black eyes, black hair, dimpled hands—the kind of children you want to touch but you can’t, of course, especially in New York. The little boy is wrestling a bright red carp . . . Don’t they know it’s against the rules posted all over the park? Catch and release. Look but don’t touch. Enjoy for the moment, then let it go—the fiery carp, the brilliant day, the black-eyed children with the dimpled hands, the coins on the ginkgo trees swirling down. Our lives are sublets anyway, and too quickly gone at that. And what better place to live out our leases.
The passage reads as if McClanahan is writing in a reverie, surprising herself, unearthing rather than forcing metaphors, which gives her voice vitality. At the same time, McClanahan, a published poet (Deep Light, 2007), has a highly honed lyric craft, and the passage feels polished-like-a-poem, a compelling balance of control and letting go.
Essays, by definition, trace the wanderings of a mind and sometimes reinforce my tendency to intellectualize; McClanahan’s rich use of sense detail, though, welcomes me back into my body. In her sublet, we are washed with sounds: “the squeak of the faucet and the bump of the ancient water pipes” and “water, miraculously converting to steam from a huge boiler in the basement, then snaking up, up, through the five stories of hidden pipes, to emerge as heat that hisses through a radiator.” She lets me hear “the lascivious cooing of the pigeons that roost, and sometimes mate, on the air conditioner.” Her sensuous descriptions invite natives to see their city anew and those of us who know New York mostly through books and film to meet a city more specific, real, embodied than the one in our imaginations.
Her themes, likewise, are not merely intellectual, but vulnerable, human—our essential loneliness and longing for connection. Naturally, McClanahan, new to the city, is lonely, but we soon learn that she has touched loneliness before. She reflects on what drove her to a difficult affair in her youth: “my loneliness was mute, wordless, feral.” Reflecting on the causes of her husband’s brief betrayal, she recognizes, “Whole continents divided us. Hidden topographies.”
McClanahan is also exquisitely attuned to the loneliness of others, particularly strangers. She befriends the singing gas meter reader. She chats with a homeless man, the one with the frayed dinner jacket, a pigeon on his shoulder, and a baby bird tucked in the inside pocket. She does not turn these characters into charity or metaphors. Instead, she shares moments of genuine, often unlikely, connection. A drunk young man stumbles toward McClanahan, holding out a dying pigeon, and asks what’s wrong:
“Looks like he’s dying,” I say.
“Why?”
“Things die. I’m sorry.”
“I love animals,” he says.
“I’m sorry.”
“I love you, too.”
Connection alone can’t halt death or suffering, her essays tell us, but we can offer, and receive—even in the most unlikely circumstances—tenderness and respect.
Her essays include some high-drama topics: bouts with cancer and infidelity as well as the experience of 9/11 and its aftermath; however, she doesn’t choose to introduce them until the middle of the book. As a result, we are not distracted by the sensational, but instead interpret the events through the lens of her loneliness and her connections. We sense that the small, ordinary moments of our lives—interactions with strangers, our searching for a sense of home, the smells and sounds and sights of our world—carry equal weight to our interior selves.
Here is the last element that makes me want to savor her work: her motives. In one of my favorite essays, “Bookmarks,” McClanahan becomes obsessed with the underlining and marginalia in a book of Denise Levertov poems she has checked out from the library, inscribed by someone who is obviously depressed, perhaps suicidal. “It appears that our hearts have worn down in the same places. Though my serviceable heart mended years ago, hers seems to be in the very act of breaking.” McClanahan wants to “reach through the pages and lead her out through some other door.” She wants to tell the woman what she can’t see: that she is not alone, that those very poems, read another way, offer comfort. “Reading,” McClanahan writes, “is all about sympathy.”
Books, for McClanahan, are not merely an amusing distraction or rigorous intellectual pursuit. They are nourishment. She writes: “When I am in pain I devour books, stripping the words of conceptual and metaphorical context and digging straight for the meat.” That’s what McClanahan offers us in In the Key of New York City: sustenance and companionship for my journey, seeing the world through a different lens than my own. In partnership with readers, the lesson she learns as she recovers from cancer and NYC is this: “We will not have to do this alone.”
In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays by Rebecca McClanahan
Red Hen Press
$14.95 Paperback | Buy Now
Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm (Ovenbird Books: Judith Kitchen Select, 2014) about her childhood with her hippy parents in the Canadian wilderness. Her essays appear in Brevity, Defunct, Gulf Stream, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, J Journal, River Teeth, Ruminate, and The Sun, among others. She is a graduate of the Rainier Writing Workshop and a high school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area.
by Ethan Rice | Sep 2, 2020 | Book Reviews
By Jill Christman
Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children has a sub-subtitle that appears only on the title page: Essays from 9600 feet, an ascension to yet another layer, so Winograd. I will begin at that altitude, in the Colorado cabin Winograd built with her husband Leonard—who features frequently in these pages as voice of reason, asker of crucial questions (“Where are the bees?”), cracker of jokes, watcher of sky, and bearer of arachnid mercy in the form of an oft-used spider jar. The Winograds live in the suburbs of Denver, but they built their mountain cabin in 2005 to—sometimes—escape:
I came to these 40 acres parceled out of an abandoned high meadow cattle ranch thinking it refuge from the worlds I had no control over, a sanctuary like the Ohio farm my mother and father bought almost unseen, climbing into it over a graveyard fence more than 40 years ago. Instead, I found this place to be the center of everything, found that one cannot migrate out of this world but must confront it and learn to decipher and accept the metaphors it gives.
This land and the cabin, in the shadow of Nipple Mountain, is more beautiful than I ever imagined. I know because I have been there. Kathryn Winograd and I met in the summer of 2008 when I joined the faculty of Ashland University’s low-residency M.F.A. and began spending many, many hours in her good and brilliant company not only in lectures, readings, and craft talks, but also, eventually, in the two-bedroom student apartment we shared. There, she would daily impress me with her discipline, passion, fleetness of foot, and appetite for popcorn. When I had a tough question—about teaching, writing, or mothering—I asked Winograd, and I can tell you: on the page and in person, she is wise and big-hearted, and she is always paying attention.
I was in the room on the Ashland campus when Winograd—who had published a book of poems, Air Into Breath (Ashland Poetry Press, 2002), and was teaching poetry in the program—read a draft of an essay that both took the air from my lungs and schooled me, a member of the creative nonfiction faculty, on the writing of an essay. When I think “lyric essay,” I think of sound, image, and language braiding together to reveal patterns and new meaning. The essay Winograd read that night, “Bathing,” appeared a few years later in her first collection of essays, Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation (Conundrum Press, 2014); “Bathing” is a regular feature in my essay-writing classroom, and if you’ve never read “Bathing,” I can give you a list of reasons why you should.
In the same year Phantom Canyon was released, Winograd asked me to a literary festival in Denver, and I realized what I had to do: Accept, and then angle an invitation to the cabin. My goal? To take a bath in the tub, the bathtub, in which the narrator of “Bathing” bathes. For me, this was a literary pilgrimage—like traveling to Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst to gaze upon her tiny square writing table or making the trip to Helen Keller’s childhood home in Tuscumbia to behold the water pump where she first understood that things have words. I bounced up those winding roads with Winograd and as I sat on the closed toilet watching the water rise in the clawfoot tub, I quoted passages from “Bathing,” tracing the filaments of the intricately woven prose to the belly button of that perfect essay: “What I will not tell you is that I did not love my body enough.”
And now? Winograd, weaver of threads and singer of syntax, has done it again. In Slow Arrow, we are invited to join Winograd up on those same forty acres. Much has changed: the aspens are ill and her new neighbors have built a dam to clog the creek for a fishing hole and Winograd’s eighty-five-year-old mother, who has moved from her own beloved Ohio to Colorado to die, sometimes pays a visit. During the time when these essays are set, the fading 2010s, Winograd’s mother has reached a point in her life when she wants not to exist. She is ready to die and reminds Winograd of this fact so often it ceases to be shocking, but even she is not without a playful side. At the wolf conservation center, she jokes darkly, “Well, why don’t we just shoot ’em?” and then requests that Winograd leave that part out of the essay. Winograd writes that part down, too.
The titular essay, “Slow Arrow,” is available online, published originally by Inverted Syntax. Near the beginning, there’s one of the most extraordinary descriptions of a mushroom I’ve read in literature:
I think I have always been half-afraid of mushrooms, their abruptness of “being” after days of dampness, their bloodless pallor—a kin of clay in a litter of leaves, molded out of the rot and dankness just beneath the hinged door of our earth.
Death, beauty, and the mushroom-like barrier that grows so quickly, pushing death and beauty apart and then glomming them together. Although Winograd has staked out new land, a new home, new people, and her own twin girls, her mother’s arrival in Colorado pulls Winograd back in time and memory to their native Ohio and pushes mother and daughter into the dying game together—no matter how much each woman wishes it weren’t true.
Savoring the twelve short essays (with the prelude and the coda) in Slow Arrow, I fall under Winograd’s lyric spell, the patterns of the images and concerns clicking together, the architecture of her writing inspiring freshly drawn blueprints in my mind. As a narrator, Winograd is simultaneously impossibly tender and scarily fierce. She looks and listens with the attention of a mountain lion up a tree—and with the same patience—distilling scene, setting, and character with the kind of carefully chosen words that create discovery and poetry.
“Unearthing the ‘Frail Children’” layers the story of Winograd’s father’s death with a journey she takes to a “broken volcano named Guffy along an ancient lakebed once rife with petrified sequoia stumps and post-dinosaur insects,” dragging her cranky mother along. In the quarry, she digs down with the blade she’s provided by the paleontologists, scraping through strata, not knowing what she’ll find, excavating with the same curiosity and precision she uses to write an essay. The penultimate paragraph of “Unearthing. . .” folds the end of the quarry visit with the memory of a fossil Winograd found as a child on their family farm in Ohio; she combines the death of her father and the coming death of her mother with the image of that fossilized snail: “a doe-eyed crater of infinite light and black hole I still yearn for.”
There are moments in these essays that aren’t for the squeamish or those who prefer to look away. Winograd holds us by the scruffs of our necks and turns our faces to look, and not just once, at the dead and the dying, over and over—trees, birds, calves, fathers—until we have some chance of seeing with her. Harder yet, the essays here that fold her mother’s approaching death in with the landscape of her beloved forty acres, remind us what we already know but usually prefer not to hold in our minds: there is no good way to grow old and die, not really anyway. The body goes first, or the mind, and neither is pretty or painless.
Throughout, Winograd challenges us to be better readers, better writers, and more open: our eyes, our brains, our hearts. She wants us to pay attention, before it’s too late. We can trust Winograd to allow an essay to keep flowing, undammed, in the direction it’s determined to move, as in “Breviaries of the Ghost”:
That [Sudden Aspen Decline, killing off of trees] was what this essay was “supposed to” to be about. And then there are my children’s shoes hanging from our suburban garage rack, four thousand three hundred and twenty-three feet below Phantom Canyon in a place called Columbine Knolls, one mile from the high school where two boys in trench coats slaughtered the children I read about on the stone markers of Rebel Hill, their parents still bumping against me in the local grocery store. Do you see how quickly words and meaning and place can change by their proximity?
Halfway in, “Breviaries of the Ghost” is tying the trees and the shoes and the shooting to the story of an addict, now dead from an overdose, who had planned to take Winograd’s poetry writing class. His mother enrolls in the class after his death and wants Winograd to judge whether his left-behind poems are any good. Look here, Winograd insists, and we lean in to listen, to really consider, the questions she lays before us:
. . . do you see how memory wills itself into the beautiful?
or
If we ask our daughter, our sons, will they remember time as we do?
or
Is it beauty then, or the idea of beauty now?
Winograd allows image to attach to image, language to beget language. Frequently, I think she’s gone as far as she’s going to go, and then she takes us deeper yet, as in another of my favorites, “Canyons”:
This fall, I will teach mythology at the community college: the world, and every god I think I know, turned metaphor for the uncontainable, for the essence of self, the mysteriousness that binds body to body.
Or a daughter to a mother.
I feel as if I’m not doing this collection justice, that I’m failing to portray the sheer scope of the essays in Slow Arrow—the depth of Winograd’s contagious curiosity and generous heart in her work to understand the bodies and the land we inhabit. In these pages, we encounter hummingbirds and Hawking, pronghorns and dead stars. We learn about migration corridors and Icarus, glory holes and ghosts, public policy and motherly instinct, fracking and the theory of relativity, weaving spiders and wandering daughters, scars and quarries, the “luckless” birds incinerated in the sky above the solar farms, and the existence of more than fifty Inuit words for snow.
Here is one: krikaya—which Winograd tells us means “snow mixed with breath”—and which feels like something she is pulling off with her prose. In “Gravitational Waves and Canis Lupus,” Winograd reminds us of “our need for awe, for the mysterious, no matter how fleeting or frail.” Reaching the end of this essay, my mind full of stars and coyotes, shining and in shadow, I think how extraordinary that Winograd can show us this synthesis between scientific observation and her most intimate human relationships in words that enlarge the scope of our vision like Leonard’s homemade telescope—pointing at the sky.
It’s really something.
Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children by Kathryn Winograd
Saddle Road Press
$20.00 Paperback | Buy Now
Jill Christman is the author of two memoirs, Darkroom: A Family Exposure & Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood, as well as essays in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Longreads, River Teeth, & True Story. A senior editor for River Teeth and executive producer of Indelible, she teaches at Ball State University. Find her on Twitter @jill_christman.
by rlhartleysmi | Aug 3, 2020 | Book Reviews
By Renée E. D’Aoust
In Sonja Livingston’s The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion, the author is drawn to explore her youth in the Catholic Church. She longs to return to the intertwined experience of childhood and faith when the two were inseparable. Drawn by this longing, which she heeds because it feels both sacred and mysterious rather than sentimental and maudlin, Livingston returns to her first church, Corpus Christi in Rochester, New York. She discovers that the Madonna statue she adored as a child has disappeared; this Madonna statue’s beauty epitomized Livingston’s devotional identity. Her search for this statue becomes intertwined with her adult return to Catholicism. The need to discover where the Madonna statue has gone—and what has taken its place, actual and symbolic—becomes the central quest of this memoir.
The return to Catholicism is part of a process. Livingston moves from past to present and back in fifteen chapters; she uses the essay form to enter and explore the Catholic faith, attend masses, meet old friends, and make new ones. On visits home to family in Rochester, she normally attends her husband’s family church, but their denomination neither provides enough mystery nor moves her soul. Throughout these essayistic explorations, she is also haunted by the history of the very institution to which she is drawn.
Although raised Catholic, as an adult, she begins sneaking into a rear pew during Catholic Mass, at Christmas and Easter, staying seated during Communion. Vexed, she refuses to be drawn back to an institution that is still beset by lies, misogyny, and violence. Livingston does not overlook the Church’s power imbalances between the curia and the laity; nevertheless, her halting return to organized religion gives her space to wrestle honestly with a shameful yet spiritual tradition that still draws her to its mystical rituals.
Livingston wrestles with belief, faith, and God alike. The word “God,” if not the idea, makes her uncomfortable, prickly: “For as far back as I can remember, whenever anyone said God I simply added an o in my head, converting it to the word good.” Livingston further reflects: “The word God is broken shorthand, a one-syllable exchange that tricks us into thinking we understand something of each other and how we see the world.”
God, Livingston comes to feel, is more than good. She writes: “What an impossible and lovely proposition—to attempt to build bridges with words to the mysterious expanse where language cannot join us.”
These enthralling essays are interspersed with interludes specifically focused on the search for the missing Madonna statue. Livingston invites readers to join her quest, a journey that befuddles her. The statue, which a parishioner tells her has been sold, symbolizes the less complicated faith of her youth; if she could find her Madonna, the symbol of her youth, she might reconnect with her faith, second-guessing herself less.
Livingston describes the way “the tangled mess of [her] heart” longs for the devotional receptacle a statue provides, especially a Madonna and “the perfect blue of her cloak” that she loved as a child. She feels the devotional pull physically in her body. She doesn’t want to be a child again, but she wants, I think, to experience faith in a childlike way, perhaps often as a physical, real manifestation of mystical, imagined experience. The body moves during a Catholic mass, and Livingston finds her body rising and kneeling as if she never forgot the choreography of prayer. Her body remembers the pre-conscious experience of childhood faith while her mind turns in knots from the force of her desire. Her body wants to walk forward to take communion; her mind holds her back.
Although many congregations have changed demographically and churches have closed or consolidated, her home church is still open, though attendance is much reduced. Empty pews mean Livingston’s search cannot be hidden because her need is exposed and shines brightly. She wonders:
Wasn’t waking early on Sunday mornings to attend the church on East Main and Prince Streets a giant step backward? Perhaps. But what appears to be a backward step is sometimes the only way forward, and the act of returning to anything was new to me.
Although an altar girl as a child—her folksy post-Vatican II Corpus Christi Catholic church allowed girls to serve—her devotion since then has been sporadic and unharnessed or left fallow. The adult Livingston recalls herself as a child: “while I came eagerly to Mass, served proudly at the altar, and noticed the way that people from the neighborhood perked up at church like wilted plants given doses of water and light, I was not—by even the most generous interpretation of the word—devout.”
Now, she realizes she desires less to find meaning than to understand her yearning for faith. Sometimes what is unexplainable is full of love. Her husband encourages the search, but initially she is drawn to the church of her impoverished youth for reasons that elude her. Still, her search for the Madonna statue makes sense; it’s real, tangible. But returning to the institution stained by abuse and scandal hardly makes sense. In this regard, the essay “Litany for a Dying Church” explores the “click of rosaries and creak of kneelers”:
If everyone on earth spit at the same time, we’d all drown, my friend Angie once announced on the way to Mass. My head went so soggy with the prospect and sheer calculations it’s taken four decades and a return to our old sanctuary to formulate a response: If everyone who ever set foot in this church sang a psalm at the same time, our hearts would become birds and fly straight into each other’s hands.
Livingston’s The Virgin of Prince Street is also a travelogue about devotion, necessarily visiting places along the way, but the journey always circles back to her congregation of origin and her quest to find the Madonna statue. While Livingston watches sacred parades and sits in new pews, she uses her research and trips to travel further into the farther reaches of her heart. Like any journey we take, we often find that what we thought was missing was with us all along. Indeed, it turns out, that her locus of faith was alive, inside Sonja Livingston, a candle demanding to be relit.
The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion by Sonja Livingston
University of Nebraska Press
$17.95 Paperback | Buy Now
Renée E. D’Aoust is the author of Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press). Recent book reviews and essays have appeared in Big Other, Fourth Genre, The Rupture, and elsewhere. She teaches online at Casper College and lives in Switzerland. Please visit: www.reneedaoust.com.
by rlhartleysmi | Jul 9, 2020 | Book Reviews
By Deborah L. Hall
I was so immersed in Judith Sara Gelt’s memoir Reckless Steps Toward Sanity about her life growing up in a Denver neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s that I kept entering a time warp. It’s not fair to Gelt’s story that my own memories of living during the same era kept flashing through. Gelt sent my senses hurdling back in time with the mention of TV shows or magazines, filling my head with jingles and laugh tracks and the sound of Stevie Wonder’s voice. I heard the drumming of horses’ hooves from Bonanza and the vibraphone’s nose twitching from Bewitched.
In this way, not only does Gelt use surprising details from cultural signposts of an era a half-century ago, immersing readers in her tale of adolescent survival, but she also paints an excruciating journey of a young woman living under a patriarchal thumb with a mentally broken and absent matriarch.
One of the most original features of Gelt’s memoir is that her journey is organized in a taxonomy measured in steps that function like chapters. Each step acts as a survival guide, an instruction manual toward achieving a sane adulthood, beginning with “Step #1. Act Out” and ending with “Step #9. Face Facts.” If lives can be gifts and the recounting of one life a connection for the rest of us, Gelt’s gift is that she takes you back to the past so soft-handedly that when she describes a scene in which the phone rings and the caller is silent, anyone who has listened to the deep abyss of a wire line connected to a quiet breath will remember the feeling: Someone is there. With it will flash the memory of wrapping your fingers around the cord or slamming the phone onto the cradle, so that you’ll need to pause again and again to marinate in all the lost sensations and beauty of a more connected and visceral era.
Craft-wise, Gelt slips seamlessly in and out of scenes, balanced by specific summaries. The result is that we move along quickly, indulging in the movie of her life, voyeurs, an audience in a coming-of-age Survivor show. Critic Kelly Barbagos, writing in the Mom Egg Review, agrees: Gelt “has pulled back the curtains and left the lights on, allowing readers a clear unobscured view of her family.” I found myself copping a seat next to Gelt, watching Laugh-In and Mission Impossible, riding busses, borrowing cars and getting high at concerts. Throughout the memoir, I was remembering the era while living her life as she told it.
Like Mary Karr’s Liar’s Club, Reckless Steps Toward Sanity wrestles with a father’s cruelty, and like Jeannette Walls’s Glass Castle, with a mother’s mental illness. But unlike those classics, Gelt’s story expands to the wider world more often than narrowly focusing entirely on her family. For example, the Denver-based narrator runs away from home and is saved by a single mother in Lubbock, Texas; she is institutionalized, living for a while in a psych ward. From home, she sneaks out to attend Buddhist prayer meetings in Aurora (outside of Denver), and when she is thrown out on her own, she shares a first apartment in downtown Denver with a friend from work. There are many shifting contexts: concerts; time in Kansas City, Kansas; Greyhound bus stations; college; and the mountainous landscape and weather of Colorado peppering this memoir’s world.
At sixteen, a series of events leads Gelt to attempt suicide by swallowing her mother’s pills. What begins as a queen-sized betrayal by her mother who, apologizing for being a lousy parent, says, “If I had to do it all over again, I’d never have children,” ends with Gelt, seeking help from a friendly teacher who forcibly French-kisses her and puts his hand in the distraught teen’s bra. After she fends him off, he accuses her of being a tease. Broken adults who misuse their power are everywhere in this memoir.
After the suicide attempt, Gelt lands in a psychiatric ward; she’s lost her will to live. While I have not experienced such a grave trauma, Gelt reproduces the mind-frame of a severely depressed teen sufficient to make me feel like I was crawling out of the same hole. Here, she describes the weeks that passed with her therapist as she convalesced from her mental break. The description captures the smeared and blurry passage of time:
The idea of a tolerable existence drifted, and I couldn’t hold on, couldn’t pull it close enough to trace its contours, detect safe terrain. And how to explain the pills, my past, my feelings? Where would I unearth the words? Regardless, I must have listened while he talked, and I must have talked while he listened. Over time, possibility plowed through hopelessness.
In “Step #2. Run Away from Home,” the triggering incident that launches a fraught decision to march out of school, past the parking lot, onto the interstate highway, and, in her school uniform, throw out her thumb hoping to hitch a ride to anywhere but here—brought on by a shameful attack by her father. Within earshot of her ailing mother—she suffers from bipolar disorder—Gelt’s father accuses his daughter of pretending to love her mother in order to borrow her car. He uses his wife in order to guilt his daughter. Gelt is overwhelmed by his emotional manipulation. It’s a blow to an already fragile kid.
Luckily, Gelt catches a ride with an affable college-age man on his way home to Texas and settles in for a ride without any money of her own, a toothbrush, or a change of clothes. The ride is excruciatingly uncomfortable as Gelt does not want to reveal her situation, fearing he’ll dump her or she’ll make the unwitting driver an accessory to her escape. As he and she hasten away from Denver, Gelt paints a vivid picture as the landscape changes and flattens out the blue two-door’s window:
Soon, we passed nothing but dusty, level fields crowded with bundles of tall blue grama grass, now bleached brown, and clumps of silver-leafed rabbit brush drying into tumbleweeds that would bounce like beach balls in gusty winds until getting stuck behind fences. The bloated sun climbed. A row of mountains in shades of gray was propped against a background of vivid blue sky—a flat stage set at the horizon.
It’s a painterly description written with a poetic sensibility. Reckless Steps Toward Sanity is full of this kind of rich language that breathes so much life into the narrative that some readers may favorably mistake Gelt’s experiences for their own.
In contrast to the wide-open, blue-skied possibilities that seem to lie ahead for Gelt during the ride from Denver, the uniform-clad sixteen-year-old, once dropped off alone in downtown Lubbock, Texas, is met with the dirty, gray reality of hotel clerks telling her, “We’re not hiring.” Finally, one clerk gives her a $5 bill. The small kindness has the effect of bursting her fantasy of independence—the romance of finding a job and living without her parents. Defeated, she resolves to call the emergency number her rescue-driver had given her.
This second fetching by the driver allows Gelt a night with his family, the Conovers. For a short time, she relaxes and enjoys a meal with him and his mother who converse easily. I wanted the pair to invite Gelt to stay and give her an option; instead, arrangements are made to send her home. Kind people, the Conovers of Lubbock are only a brief, one-night reprieve from her life in Denver.
The next day, Gelt spends a morning and afternoon waiting at the Greyhound station. When she finally boards and settles in, Gelt’s description of leaving the terminal beautifully transfers her plight into her body. I feel the weight of her attempted flight, her willingness to work, the dashed hope of extricating herself from her own family and the disappointment she has returning home. Gelt writes: “Scrunched on my side as the bus pulled out, I braced for the turn.” Readers may also brace not just for the physical turn but a return to dysfunction.
Along the way, Reckless Steps Toward Sanity boldly wrestles with matters of the female body, recounting early humiliations of Gelt’s first period, breast growth, and first bra, which all come too soon. Later, she describes losing her virginity quite mechanically, after hanging out and getting high with a boy named Jim while Steppenwolf crows “Born to Be Wild” in the background. Continuing the adventure in “Step #3. Change Religions,” Gelt experiments with Buddhism, hiding her shrine in her closet from her Jewish parents. Many of these scenes are as refreshing to read—reminders of certain American-based trials of teenage desire and the search for meaning during adolescence—as they are uncomfortable.
Arriving home late at night after a concert, Gelt is surprised by a stranger who lunges out of the bushes and attacks her. It is a harrowing and traumatic event as he pulls her away from her house at gunpoint and rapes her. After it is over and he stands over her, Gelt braces for a bullet. Instead of shooting her, he commands she count to 1000. She does. The most amazing thing is that she has the strength to go straight to her parents, then to the hospital and the police, where the male officer’s interrogation is textbook 101 on how not to talk to a rape victim. So much of the rest of the memoir deals with her healing from this ordeal, yet her rapist is never caught; however, the purse he stole shows up, weeks later, missing only her Buddhist prayer book.
With a slap across the face by her father, Gelt’s final break from her family is assured. What ensues is a period of low-wage work, sharing an apartment with a woman who has a worse story of violence and abandonment than Gelt’s—which seems to save Gelt from falling into victimhood or self-pity. During this time, Gelt makes money from sex, enough to build her savings. Sex is a means to end: to move on. There is a stint at a typing job, a return home, college courses, and meeting Jack, her first husband, first divorce, and more demeaning behavior from her father who cannot speak to his daughter without insulting her. Although attempts are made, they never reconcile.
Gelt’s mastery in choosing when to summarize and when to be specific helps moves the narrative across large swathes of time. Reckless Steps is a memoir, but autobiography, a life in total, seems a better categorization. Steps #7, #8, and #9 cover her second marriage, her daughter’s birth, an abortion due to her husband not wanting a second child, as well as the deaths of her father, sister, and, eventually, her mother. Gelt reconciles with her brother as friendship and respect grow over time. Gelt’s father dies without her saying goodbye, but we understand why.
Part of surviving for Gelt lies in her own self-determination that which her mother was unable to do. Gelt is a psychological model of how to survive the tumultuous manipulations of a father whose power is neither confronted nor checked by his wife. Her mother’s sweet fealty for her husband is an act of self-abandonment, causing her to exist like a shadow in her daughter’s life.
In the final scene of Reckless, Gelt is snug and warm in a house of her own in Denver, watching a snowstorm blow across the landscape—a loyal yellow lab at her side. It’s the end of the third day of sitting Shiva for her mother. The scene shows a woman who has survived the wreck of her childhood and the emotional dysfunction of her parents and other authority figures. She watches a storm while also basking in the calm that her brother’s connection and respect has given her. It’s a hard-won peace and the feeling seems as satisfying for readers as it does for the author.
Reckless Steps toward Sanity: A Memoir by Judith Sara Gelt
University of New Mexico Press
$19.95 Paperback | Buy Now
Deborah L. Hall has had her work published in River Teeth, The Literary Review, The Arkansas Review, The Sun, Apalachee Review, and other journals. She edited a textbook on craft, The Anatomy of Narrative: Analyzing Fiction and Creative Nonfiction. Her writing has been anthologized in On Becoming (U of Nebraska Press, 2012) and Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems (Negative Capability Press, 2015). From the Glades area of South Florida, Deborah L. Hall teaches creative writing and contemporary literature at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia.
by rlhartleysmi | Jun 3, 2020 | Book Reviews
By Joy Gaines-Friedler
Carol Ann Davis’s collection of nine essays is a memoir, a treatise on aesthetic expression, and a philosophical journey through the aftermath of what was, in 2012, the deadliest school shooting in American history. Her son Willem, seven at the time, was at Hawley Elementary, one mile away from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. That morning Davis, a professor of English at Fairfield University (a half-hour away), was summoned by a shaken department secretary and told that all schools in Newtown were on lockdown. Soon, the world would learn that some of the Sandy Hook children tried to escape the shooter as he reloaded, and several teachers tried to guard the kids with their bodies. Twenty six-year-olds and six teachers were massacred.
Davis’s essays weave together the trauma the shooting caused with the subjectivity of art works, which often deal with the sacred, mystery, wonder, and survival. She communes with philosophers, examines the language of poets, quotes from interviews with artists—all to help to bring order to disorder. To represent trauma, there is always a before & after, and Davis emphasizes this in the titles of her essays, each spelled without the use of capital letters: two years after, in the year that comes after, five years after, two years before, and so forth.
The book begins on the day of the shooting then moves nonlinearly through the aftermath. In the third essay, The Practice of School Buses and Hummingbirds – in the year that comes after, Davis writes: “I am being led. [Italics added.] At many moments in the year that comes after it has been helpful to repeat these four words, mantra-style, so as to call a path into being. . . . The practice of writing has taught me to let the answer travel to me. To be led you must surrender.”
But surrender is nearly impossible. Just as she can’t escape hearing the sound of the helicopters hovering that day, so, too, she can’t shake with the massacre and its aftermath. What Davis calls the “after-aftermath” threatens to swallow every sound, every attempt to surrender. “And this is what it is to not suffer. This is the not-suffering, happy ending story, the one I get.” Unlike, of course, the parents of the first-graders lost that day.
In the year that comes after, Davis seeks the wisdom of the Sufi poet Rumi, the American poet Larry Levis, and the Russian literary figure Ivan Bunin. They will offer her another eye. They will be her “temporary balm on the lost feeling one has while being led.” She will also be led by her own writing:
By now I have learned just how much of my writing life I have spent learning to trust being led, how difficult it is sometimes to obey the physics of the unknown. . . . I cannot say what exactly it leads to (or even towards), except that the subject of how children read their immediate surroundings is newly important to me.
Now, more than ever, it will be through writing where she will learn, as she says, “an important lesson backwards: lose and you shall seek.”
We speak of survival as that way in which we continue to live or exist despite trauma. But along with this idea comes the implication of not surviving, or, as having become altered by circumstances. “In our town,” Davis tells us, “we are careful—we have been trained—not to suggest images children may not have seen, images they may have missed.” Speak not of what you have not seen, she invokes Rumi.
Feeling far from whole, and only four days after the massacre, parents in neighboring districts, herself included, walked outside their homes that Tuesday and put their children back on the school bus. It is hard to imagine what this would be like for her and other parents. Davis will later write, “there were those who put their child on school busses and never saw those children alive again.”
Processing her worry, Davis seeks a spiritual connection with artists, poets, and philosophers, hoping to find relief. She cultivates what she calls the “abstract emptiness inside tumult,” by studying the works of Georgia O’Keeffe, Apollinaire, Picasso, Helene Cixous, Paul Celan, and others.
In her essay on Surrealism, Loose Thread – four years after, she addresses “the disconnect between the real and what is beyond real.” This plays into her fractured “sense of certainty.” Even if the result is only further ambiguity.
For the Surrealists, to make art without accounting for the violent disconnect between the real and what was beyond real (“sur”) was to live in a fundamentally dishonest way. Their acceptance of the violent un-twinning of the present moment from its natural environment, their acknowledgment that an axe might flower, makes me grateful. This articulation mirrors my own dissatisfaction with the real. It helps me at the bus stop and the grocery store to know that others have questioned exactly how to represent the discord one feels between the quotidian and extraordinarily untenable, both somehow housed in the now of one’s experience.
The sculptor Eva Hesse earns an essay all her own. Perhaps Davis identifies with Hesse because she and most of her Jewish family escaped Germany as the Holocaust began. Hesse grows up to be an artist who refuses definition, who allows her work to lead her. Davis tells us, “It’s clear she [Hesse] expects only to get closer to what she envisioned, never to arrive at it.” (Memoir of Sleep and Waking – two years after.)
Davis guides us deeper into the challenge of survival by using rhetorical devices that she repeats throughout the essays: Images like helicopters and school busses, sounds like sirens, and the phrase wild animal, among them. Hummingbirds, too, which she describes in one essay as part of “the beautiful world . . . that intervenes and insists on being described. . . . [I]t’s as if she has hovered in my inner ear, tiny motor of my ongoing survival.”
She repeats pieces of dialogue she heard in the shock of that terrifying day, and she threads these throughout the essays. One such is the reassuring voicemail of the principal from Hawley, her son’s school: I have opened every door and seen your children. I have seen your children is repeated so as to let the relief of that sink in.
Although she mentions the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in reference to her son, Willem—that shooting occurred when he was 14—I felt Davis glossed over a few things. For one, the trauma of her husband and the role he played in this memoir. For another, gun violence in general. But it is clear that these sharply observed essays, told in poetically rendered prose, make a kind of declaration: I am here as an observer of, and for, my children.
The memoir deftly moves back and forth between now and her early childhood. She was the youngest of seven children and raised in Florida, where her father, a NASA rocket scientist, was part of the team that safely returned the stricken Apollo 13 mission. Growing up, she felt unobserved, largely invisible, unwatched. “I stayed blindly hungry for twenty years,” she writes in The Practice of School Busses and Hummingbirds – in the year that comes after. Hers is a hunger both metaphorical and literal. “Though I only noticed it when I got to be about twelve and then starved intentionally for another eight years.”
It is clear from these essays that Davis will not allow her children to be starved of familial regard.
Life is a journey of uncertainty and paradox. Davis never tries to quell that reality. The sensation of instability and vulnerability is deepened by the use of binary oppositions that occur throughout her writing: Grief/happiness, finished/unfinished, outside/inside, sheltered/exposed, comforting/terrifying. In A covering snow – three years after, Davis quotes from James Wright’s poem about horses, “The Blessing”: “They love each other. / There is no loneliness like theirs.” In the same essay Davis further unpacks this sense of vulnerability after reading a quote by Helene Cixous, which includes the phrase There is an outside of me. Davis says this about love:
There is an outside of me. . . . In the moment of knowing that one’s own happiness is tied to another, that one’s own well-being is no longer the most important thing, a door should open to an inside. Instead, one realizes that there is an outside of me, something I can’t protect. Something likely to suffer . . . we are stuck inside, watching parts that are outside-of-us walk around, jump too high, cross the street without looking, enter their classroom.
Her use of strange juxtapositions works to deepen the awareness, the instability, and the vulnerability of life and love. The relatively defenseless hummingbird is juxtaposed with the murderous wild animal. Insomnia is a “pleasing wound.” These poetic devices infuse the essays with a lyrical quality: a greater meaning beyond knowing.
Davis relates mystical and traumatic experience. In A Covering of Snow: three years later, Davis discusses philosopher Helene Cixous’s “door,” which is guarded and unguarded, and where childhood resides and can be reentered, a door from which or through which we perceive the world. She cites the surrealist paintings of Pablo Picasso as a kind of uncovering of the self, and how she discovered that artist’s door: “And so it was that I learned the wonder of the foreign and its innateness in me could be a function of language. Any time two words are put together for what might be the first time a door inside language snaps open.”
In the final essay, Of Morning Glass: Becoming a Swimmer, the only one written in the second person, she has the You and an implied Me become one. Davis contemplates the limits to what a vessel, including the vessel of the self, can contain:
While you swim you are a vessel for what you hold, and also part of what is held. This is the key to the oceanic feeling. In the months after the shooting all you want is to feel again this floating oceanic certainty you felt as a child, but the vessels have been breached everywhere. All over town vessels are spilling. You pull and breathe and flip-turn in pools that are too small for what your body now knows, what is has been asked to take in.
I end by quoting from the preface:
Not for nothing do we write, paint, love, live, raise our voices in song as well as protest. These essays are my exercise in practicing what my children have taught me: loving and continuing to love the tree and the nail, the ruin of the current moment and its beauty.
The Nail in the Tree: Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood by Carol Ann Davis
Tupelo Press
$17.95 Paperback | Buy Now
Joy Gaines-Friedler lives in Michigan and is the author of three books of poetry including the award-winning Capture Theory. She works at Freedom House Detroit where she teaches poetry to asylum seekers from western and northern Africa. She’s also taught for the University of Michigan Prison Creative Arts Project where she worked with male lifers. In addition, Gaines-Friedler teaches ongoing workshops in memoir, fiction, and poetry. She has multiple Pushcart Prize nominations, and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Ashland University in Ohio.
