Dear Park Ranger: Essays on Manhood, Restlessness, and the Geography of Hope by Jeff Darren Muse

In the interest of full disclosure—which, as an essayist, serial memoirist, and River Teeth editor, is always my interest—I need to tell you that I knew Jeff Muse and Dear Park Ranger when. Many years ago, when I was a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University, Jeff Muse was my student. (“Muse?” we all said, one after another. “What a great writer name!”) Along with the enduring impression that Jeff Muse is a terrifically nice guy—and can write the heck out of a sentence—is my memory that he served as a Hoosier ambassador, deepening this Oregon girl’s appreciation for both the people and the landscape of Indiana where I had landed—and, shockingly, that he wasn’t a fan of Annie Dillard.

During Jeff’s time in the program, we had many conversations about what he wanted to achieve in his own essays, and I remember with unusual specificity both because Jeff was so clear in his goals and because these goals were interesting to me. For example, since his expertise, love, and life as a park ranger, environmental educator, and husband of a park ranger was rooted so firmly in the natural world, he knew he would write essays that might be classified as “nature writing,” but he told me what he did not want those essays to be: he did not want his essays to be boring. He wanted to write page turners. Also? Jeff wanted his essays to be funny. He wanted to bring humor in to light up the foggiest landscapes—and he wanted these essays to make a difference. Jeff wanted his essays to get us outside for a nice long walk.

Fast forward a dozen years, I’ve just finished my journey through the intimate, beautiful, inspiring, funny essays in Dear Park Ranger, and I know I need to stay here in this chair and write this review, but what I really want to do is lace up my shoes, grab a water bottle, and hit the trail with Muse’s prose still humming in my mind. In other words: Jeff Muse did the thing. He set his compass for the peak he wanted to reach, as a writer and a man, and—with us along for both the flower-gathering wanderings and the steep stretches where the sweat dripped down our backs—he got us there. Together.

In “Ground Truthing,” the introductory essay, Muse makes good on the title’s promise and lays a foundation for this collection—which I do recommend reading in order because although we could wander down a side trail or sprint forward, choosing our own adventure within and across the nineteen essays of varying lengths and terrains that make up Dear Park Ranger, it’s clear Muse has done the hard work of mapping a thoughtful trail. It’s also clear from the trailhead that we can trust Muse not only as an expert of woods and stream, but also as a passionate reader and student of the essay—all tools he uses to make sense of himself as a son, husband, and man on this lifelong journey: 

I write, you’ll see, to self-interrogate, to ground truth inner terrain. Or to paraphrase Joan Didion, I write to figure out what I think. “What I want and what I fear,” she said.

Jeff Muse has lived all over the U.S. working as a park ranger, environmental educator, and historical interpreter. Muse knows things—and when he doesn’t know? He tries to find out. And the deepest, truest question of all, as the child of divorce, the son of an alcoholic who died too soon, a wounded kid who morphed into an insecure teen who grew into a “fatherless, childless Hoosier who wouldn’t and couldn’t stay put”—is Who am I and how do I want to live? 

Throughout my life, no matter where I’ve lived, manhood has been a kind of topographic map. Yet it’s peer pressure or social norms telling me which route to follow: Smile, Jeff, have a beer. Make babies. Make lots of money. Buy yourself a leaf blower. Hang out at parties. Lighten up. . . . The word [essai] is also a journey—to seek out, examine, prove. But prove what to whom, I wonder, and why does it matter anyway? 

Muse even questions the questions themselves. As patient and as serious-minded as these essays can be—taking on tough subjects like masculinity and aging, racism and white fragility—Muse’s meticulously written scenes can also be hilarious. In “Trail Blazers,” an essay that takes on a particularly intense period of searching for Muse, he joins a group of friends to participate in a ritual sweat, and the young Navajo man preparing the white men to enter the sweat lodge hands them a scrap of cloth from which they’re each to tear a thin strip and says, “Tie that around your foreskin to seal your penis. . . . You can’t drip any semen in the sweat lodge. It’s a sacred place.” Young Jeff is flummoxed, standing there naked and mortified, fiddling with his string, so his friend Kurt tries to help:

“Just wrap it like a present,” Kurt said, revealing the progress he’s made. The fabric dangled against his pubic hair and the pale skin of his gangly legs . . . His penis indeed looked like a gift, topped off with a bright white bow. 

I laughed out loud, but in a Muse essay there’s always a forward pull, and as the heat, the rhythm of the chanting, and his own panic continues to rise in the lodge, Jeff is nose down and crawling—hunting for air, driven by this singular need, stripped absolutely bare in a collection in which everyone is always searching for something—identity, purpose, air.

The titular essay, “Dear Park Ranger,” a love letter to Muse’s wife, Paula, appears at the end of the book. In this essay, Muse makes a confession: after weighing backpacks and finding that Paula’s is heavier, he surreptitiously rebalanced the weight because he “wanted to be the man”—and even as he does this, knowing she’s fully capable of bearing more weight, he’s hyperaware of his own insecurity—and ashamed. Here we find the center of this collection—love. Muse remembers their first date, a hike through the snow, him following behind, admiring the view, when Paula shouts, “Look, glacier lilies!”

You plucked a petal gently, tore it in half, and handed me a piece. “Try it,” you said. “Tastes like sweet corn.”

I placed the creamy sliver on my tongue, chewing slowly, timidly at first. You were right: a taste from a summertime garden, something I’d known countless times back in Indiana.

“Reminds me of home,” I said, though in that moment, I wanted nothing of cornfields and flat farmland, and certainly nothing of football. I wanted the mountains. I wanted to hike. I wanted to find every wildflower. I wanted you.

There are so many great stories here. In Muse’s “An Ark of the Heart,” a twenty-something Jeff reads the book jacket that tells him that his literary and environmental hero Gary Snyder teaches “literature and wilderness thought” at UC Davis—and so Jeff gets in his car and drives. He shows up at Snyder’s office, gets in line with the other students, and I’m nervous for him: “He was my literary and environmental hero. Could I simply walk up and chat?” But—spoiler alert!—when Jeff’s the last one standing at the office door, Snyder invites him in, asks him first what plants are blooming in Western Washington where Muse began his drive. They talked about bioregionalism—“the notion of defining our lives by ecological zones”— and Muse tells us he’s been studying Snyder’s idea of “a sense of place” ever since. We shouldn’t always meet our heroes, but for Jeff, on that day, his days-long drive ended in a conversation that would guide the rest of his life.

“Subject: Advice for Tree Huggers” is one of the formally playful essays in this collection, a letter to the students in Muse’s ENV 303 to prepare them for a short field trip— “a mile-long ramble up a slushy trail”:  

You’ll never regret a hike. If there’s anything I would prioritize for a sustainable life, a life devoted to the environment, to caring for it, it’s time out of doors. Out of walls. Out of ceilings. It’s time to get muddy, slushy, sweaty. You will not care for what you do not know. Start now. Start knowing it.

And I am trying. I will try. Reading the extraordinary essays in Dear Park Ranger makes me happy. As we wander these geographies with Muse, he shows us the world with curiosity and attention buzzing. For me, this whole book is a lesson in leaning in—into the natural world, yes, but also into what looking outward can tell us about what’s going on in our own hearts as we figure out who we want to be in this world, how we want to love, and what we want to leave behind. 

[Travel tip: I hope you’ll visit Jeff Muse’s author site, learn more about the most recent chapter of his life that has brought him home to Indiana to battle cancer, and chart a course to one of his book events this summer. You’ll be so glad you did.]

Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate by Daniel Mendelsohn

1 / One thing we learn from the later-in-life memoir, or the personal essay writ long, is that it allows us to see the many digressive routes we’ve followed only after a good deal of life has resulted in our “ending up” on any one of these routes, a place much different than where we thought we’d be. Soren Kierkegaard spoke of living life forward, understanding it in retrospect, and Carl Jung said, “One finds one’s destiny on the path one takes to avoid it.” Fate never fails us; it’s got our welfare in mind, but bugger that it is, won’t reveal the plot until, well, it’s time. Because of our unexpected “off ramps,” we need to wait a while and then we may recognize a plan—perhaps the plan—that provides us with some sense of meaning. At times, a pattern to our directionlessness emerges, and anyone, even fools, can say it’s been predesigned. Think of Donald Trump assessing his 78 years (I know it’s a stretch) as a kind of Destiny: the TV brand, elected President on a fluke, convinced that he’s America’s Lord and Fricking Savior.

Is there a book in Western literature that best embodies our meaning-hidden meanders? For Daniel Mendelsohn, a professor of humanities and classical literature at Bard College and Editor-at-Large for The New York Review of Books, it’s Homer’s The Odyssey. His study of this epic Greek narrative, unique as an oral and written document, produced Three Rings. In it, the author juxtaposes a scholar’s memoir beside analyses of Homer’s tale-telling force in the work of several classic authors. The book’s contents were given by Mendelsohn as three talks in 2019 as the Page-Barbour Lectures at his alma mater, the University of Virginia.

Two years prior, he published An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic. There, he tells the buddy story of his and his elderly father’s tour of the Mediterranean by ship, tracing Odysseus’s route home after the Trojan War. (His father died shortly after its publication.) Counterbalancing that and other personal losses, Three Rings is buffeted by a different wind. With complexity and grace, the author unfurls his sails to chart the narrative artistry of The Odyssey, a model for countless novels and nonfictions, written centuries apart and rooted in the Homeric vein.

In a short, 116-page book, he begins by distinguishing opposing literary structures, one, the Bible, the other, The Odyssey. The Bible framework is the brainchild of Erich Auerbach, a German Jew, whose Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature and the conditions in which he wrote the 1946 work comprise the first of the three rings or texts Mendelsohn dissects. In the spotlight is the story of Auerbach’s exile to Istanbul where, forbidden access to the local library, he wrote, perhaps, the seminal study of narrative art based solely on a few dozen canonic texts he’d stashed in his suitcase.

The Bible, Auerbach says, is written in the “Hebrew style.” Its form is chronological, events are reported as facts, unblemished anecdotes, devoid of drama; its procedural plots and faith-bred justifications are inscrutable, with nary an interpretive interruption and no sense of a controlling point-of-view. Abraham will do what God tells him—kill his son, Issac, without a reason from God and without His chosen slayer questioning the order. Once Abraham’s told to stand down, nothing of his relief or joy accompanies the scene. Readers ask, what does it mean? The answer for some goes beyond the obvious injunction of pure faith and, instead, codifies the insidious nature of religious evil.

The other primal narrative, in the “Greek style,” is the ring composition and, again, under Auerbach’s lens, Homer, the Greek culture’s collectivized author, is its herald. Here is free-form literary invention, all events hyper-dramatically “staged” with metaphoric additions, exaggerated and fantastic escapades, a participatory narrator whose survival skill is adaptation, a nitty-gritty concentration on lived experience, and, most important for Mendelsohn, the ring technique: “the insertion within one story of other stories, the flash backward or forward in time in order to give depth and complexity to the primary narrative.”

The form at work may follow the traditional path—rising action culminating in a climax, as in Freitag’s pyramid—but, more often, circles around that core event, obliquely, with devil-may-care disregard of the “rules.” In essence, the way many of us like to tell stories.

It’s not a wild claim to say that countering the Bible’s rigid obscurity launched literature on its winding course. Among its lasting methods is the ring, which Mendelsohn calls “a convoluted manner of composing.” While the Bible can stun with its knife-edged verse, elegant parallelism, metered music, and accentual stresses—the King James version, the seedbed of English poetry—its 66 books are invariant in style, a plodding tractor of flat chronicle, patriarchal tedium, moral commands, and coercive violence. Are we to trust that God is its reliable narrator?

Some of that can be said of The Odyssey. But it is, instead, composed. Its shape is like a river—gravity’s meandering whose current-swift variations are its path. That path delimits the idea (albeit, the male prerogative) of roving, postwar, over sea and land, heroes facing down villains. In fact, the Greek word for drift is polytropos—“of many turns”—one of the more finessable figures of speech. Such figures we know as schemes or tropes. To oppose or twist for literary effect, such devices “turn” a word or phrase from its normal syntax or its typical meaning. “How honorable is the man who never lies” shifts the usual syntax, a scheme, while “Brutus is an honorable man” shifts the phrase’s denotation, saying he is what he is not, a trope.

Writers’ tropes, used as commonly or greater than schemes, are what’s literary in oral and written narratives. An epic—from Homer to your mother’s memoir about her wild days in Greenwich Village in the 1960s—is, or is, potentially, polytropic—versatile, multi-themed, heterodox, wandering (purposefully mixing the written now with the lived then), and, if the writer can flair, laced with more than an occasional seam of guile, subtext, and surprise.

To underscore the Greek style, Mendelsohn’s trek cites the work of two authors (the other two rings) who “internalized” the Homeric scaffold of narration and renewed the ring idea for their eras. First is the French theologian Francois de Salignac de La Mother-Fénelon’s 1699 The Adventures of Telemachus, which dramatizes Odysseus’s son’s search for his father (as his father searched nine years for his home), including a trip to the Land of the Dead. Fénelon’s was the most famous novel of his time, eclipsed nearly a century later by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.

And third—though not before he excurses through Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and its “fantastically elaborated series of narrations and digressions . . . exhaustively treated in the course of the novel’s four thousand pages”—Mendelsohn unpacks one of the most lauded contemporary nonfiction novels or, I’m tempted to write, autofictions: W. G. Sebald’s 1995 The Rings of Saturn: history, novel, travelogue, memoir, take your pick.

On a walking tour of Suffolk County in England, Sebald meditates on a host of subjects, which, Mendelsohn notes, are “nothing but digressions,” organized around the German exile’s gloomy meditation on fairly recent, historic “traces of destruction”: the mass death of Congolese by Belgian capitalists; a Dutch elm disease that pockmarked the English countryside in the 1970s; a caretaker’s reminiscence about British airfields from which planes took off and dropped “seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons” of bombs on Germany. For their effort, England lost 9,000 British aircraft and 50,000 men. Of all this wasting, of “the failure of narrative” to render it, and of “the irretrievability of the past,” Mendelsohn writes,

As you make your way through [Sebald’s] twisting narratives, it becomes ever more difficult to escape the impression that the circling merely exhausts us while never bringing us any closer to the subject.

2 / I noted that Three Rings is as erudite as it is memoiristic. Tributes to beloved authors observe Mendelsohn’s interests (and ours), but the emotional pitch is unmistakable. Such is his desire to quell or calm his own life’s rapture with the canon or, better, the canonical. He describes his several struggles while drafting the book about his and his father’s trip. One path out of that sinkhole was reading Auerbach’s Mimesis—a summons in which the art of narrative analysis is masterfully done—and there Mendelsohn discovered the ring form, in essence, saving him from endless indecision. He saw that if a writer gets lost in the writing, it’s not the subject’s fault but a bog of a different order. His muddle came from back-to-back, exhaustive books—the father-son adventure and his struggle, a decade earlier, to complete the 500-page grief memorial, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, in 2006.

As a summary, here’s the opening of my 2007 review of The Lost in Fourth Genre:

Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost is the story of his search for six relatives, his grandfather’s brother’s family, who were killed in the Holocaust. The search is ocean-going and slow to unfold, held back yet pushed on by its watery domain. The book presents a handful of memories from a handful of survivors and witnesses, many over eighty, from one Polish town. Yet even the mealiest of recollections carry a mystery—and it is this mystery about what might have happened to the six that has aggrieved others and consumes Mendelsohn. The book is a testament to, and an enactment of, the trappings of memory’s rituals: how we linger, defend, indulge, and exhaust what we hope to believe about the past and what we must relinquish as speculation.

In Three Rings, Mendelsohn returns to the emotional turmoil of writing The Lost. He dwells on years of research and interviews, the horror of imagining his family’s murder, which were not the product of a Nazi “labor camp, but a death camp.” Reconstructing likely scenarios took a toll on him, a pain he was slow to confront. In fact, he admits to a “kind of breakdown.” The only time he cried was in Tel Aviv at an exhibit of models of actual synagogues built around the world across centuries of the Jewish diaspora. Why did the tears flow there? As a child, he built models of Greek temples, which, beside (or like) literature, shaped his precocious interests in classical scholarship. Still, those synagogue models—and not the tales he heard from a few Polish and Ukrainian survivors of the camps—brought his heart to its knees and, at last, triggered a sorrow that he had not dealt with.

Each book seems to open up aspects of himself that Mendelsohn buried in order to finish each book. The buried child here is his lifelong fear: being trapped in a cave. He details his claustrophobia, his terror of enclosure as a child and an adult, then traces it to the Calypso chapter in The Odyssey where the hero and his men are kept, chained and enthralled, for seven years, Odysseus, Calypso’s “love-prisoner.” An act of self-liberation, writing a book about the literary efforts of others who in order to grow must battle their confinement may bring us to battle the same in ourselves.

The beauty of Three Rings is that Mendelsohn discovers his way by writing a polytropic book, one that demonstrates the form of its composition as the project develops and he follows. A practicing preacher, he offers new material and goes back to it, repeatedly, reassessing its quirks and questions in light of whatever fresh turns he’s compelled or game to take.

To apply “convolution” as a form for contemporary nonfiction (one bailiwick of River Teeth’s publishing mission) should not be missed. In the best critical essays and memoirs, nonfictionists mix our meandering uncertainties, our ghosts always on the guest list. These are spirits we include on the journey because they provoke our wisdom and our daring. It may be helpful to know that when we choose the Bible style—for its enigmatic detachment with reality—or the Greek—for its intimate dismemberment of reality—neither path alone will be free of tension because each path is shadowed by what its opposing path keeps for itself.

New York Review Books
$15.95 Paperback | Buy Here

Straitjackets and Lunch Money by Katya Cengel

At ten, Katya Cengel stopped eating lunch so she could give her money—a dollar a day—to her father to help salve his economic woes after her parents divorced. This act of sacrifice, first, a source of pride, brought on an eating disorder that threatened to end as well as change her life. At 56 pounds and shrinking, she was admitted to the Roth Psychosomatic Unit at Stanford’s Children’s Hospital. One of her early comments, already ironic, is: “Grownups are strange. They make me go to the cafeteria, but no one makes me eat. So, I don’t.” At Roth, when you don’t eat, you get fitted with a straitjacket.

Cengel’s first memoir, From Chernobyl with Love, recounts her experiences as a young journalist covering Latvia and the Ukraine after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1990s. Many of that book’s reviewers noted not just the quality of Cengel’s insights but her fearlessness. How did such a relatively new reporter write with such sangfroid about political upheaval? Her gripping, often disturbing new memoir, Straitjackets and Lunch Money, suggests an answer.

About her first day and night at the hospital, Cengel writes:

I was tied down, hooked up, connected to all sorts of machines. On my left side was some sort of heart machine and on my right was the hanger for my tube feedings. On top of me were heavy itchy blankets that flattened me to the bed. . .. For the first time in months, I felt safe. I drifted off, staring at the yellow curtains around me, listening to the voices, knowing there were people looking out for me.

At home—either Mom’s house or Dad’s—feeling safe was increasingly rare. Not eating became a way to be in charge of something.

It wasn’t that hard, really. Because I wasn’t much fun anymore, no one wanted to be around me. Not eating had become more than a way of saving money for Dad; it was a way out. The hunger I had felt earlier was gone, replaced by a bottomless pit that wouldn’t let food in. Even when I wanted to eat, I couldn’t. The less I ate, the less energy I had. I stopped doing things, even by myself.

I wore a baggy green sweatshirt with a whale on it. I could hide inside it. [The sweatshirt] covered my goose bumps and the long hairs that stood up on my arms. It seemed like everywhere except my head had more hair than it used to.

Though she comes to feel safe at Roth, this does not mean Cengel surrendered agency of her body or changed her eating behaviors easily or all at once. It does mean that competent, mostly caring adults were monitoring her condition and intervening when lack of nourishment pushed her close to the brink of unconsciousness.

As the child and the memoir settle in, Cengel serves readers the experience of her survival inside the institution whose effects on the bodies and minds of those incarcerated like her are frightening and fascinating. She treats us to canny assessments of her caretakers as well as candid descriptions of her not-always-successful efforts to make friends. Most of all, she puts us inside her own shrinking, shivering body and her own sharp, sometimes devious mind. For Cengel, as well as her fellow patients, finding ways to succeed at self-destructive behaviors—or to fantasize about succeeding—is an obsession that’s hard for her to shake. She narrates being there and being her with the immediacy and intensity of a novel.

I opened my eyes and mumbled something about not being cold, and why couldn’t they just put more blankets on me or turn that dumb heat machine up.

“Your temperature has gotten too low. It’s not safe. Come on, it won’t be that bad,” Sweet Nurse said.

She took me from my bed and wheeled me into the bathroom where I was lowered into a warm bath. The two nurses didn’t turn away. They sat by the side of the tub splashing water on my bare chest. Sweet Nurse splashed the water lightly, biting her red lips as she saw the unhealed sores and hollow areas on my body.

“It’s not going up,” Sweet Nurse said, once again pulling the thermometer from my mouth.

“I know. There isn’t anything else we can do but keep her in here, just hope it changes,” Boss Nurse replied, her rough hands patting my head for the first time.

Things did change. Cengel survived. After four months as a Roth patient, after making a largely unconscious commitment to continue living, Katya returned to her two homes and took care of herself despite her family’s dysfunction. Thirty years later, writing this book, the fearless journalist opened the door that closed behind her when she left Roth. In part, her quest was to better understand why she rewarded her abnegation with food, in part, to see how medical and psychiatric treatments for young anorexics and bulimics have evolved since then. 

She recalls that whenever anger overtook her, she was strapped in the straitjacket again, “almost suffocating me in the overpowering emotion.” Other recalcitrant patients locked up like her were force-fed using a tube inserted through the nose. The experience was so unpleasant that most “inmates” surrendered to their Ensure. One turning point in her story comes when Cengel admits to being secretly glad her caretakers resorted to extreme measures to save her life.

Gradually, most patients get well, but some get worse, or worse yet, leave Roth, backslide, and return. (Eighty percent returned to and stayed with their families. Cengel never went back, in part, because she adjusted to her mother and father using “a turkey baster to feed me the Ensure.”) Having tentatively committed to survival, Cengel accepts nourishment and thrives with its results—more flesh, fewer wrinkles, a bit more strength. 

Her parents may not have learned, may not have been able to afford the intermediate care facilities—rest homes and convalescent communities—where many Roth patients spent time between hospital and home. But without such programs, Cengel did eat healthily and gain weight. After college, she became a skilled writer and a war reporter. With this painful, honest, and enlightening book about her mental illness and self-starvation, she learned, in the end, that the treatment center no longer uses straitjackets to immobilize the children who refuse to eat. They, like her, have also grown up.

Woodhall Press
$18.95 Paperback | Buy Here

North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac by Carolyn Dekker

As North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac opens, author Carolyn Dekker with her dog Beckett,
a border collie, is driving north to Hancock, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula, which juts into
Lake Superior. Dekker has a new job teaching English literature at Finlandia University. She is
fresh out of a relationship and soon to begin another; she has traveled alone from New England
to embark on her a new life; though nervous and excited, she is mostly looking ahead. She sees
the Quincy Mine, structures that once housed a vibrant copper mine during mid-1800s, a stark
site that graces the cover. She writes, “Views that draw the eye upward have a way of lifting the
heart, too. This steep terrain told me at first glance that I could love this place.” This collection
of essays describes Dekker’s journey to fit in and love the people and the place, nestled in the
north country.

The subtitle, A Pedagogical Almanac, reveals the book’s central concern—teaching college
classes and the methods she uses. During one class discussing two pomegranate poems by
Andrea Scarpino, poet laureate of the Upper Peninsula, Dekker discusses the pomegranate,
describing a way “to normalize [the students’] unfamiliarity with exotic commodities.” She
states that if she were a “construction worker’s kid, what do I know about a pomegranate?” Aware of her students’ backgrounds, Dekker is adept at connecting with their intellectual,
financial, and emotional condition.

She realizes their hardship, buying textbooks for her students, gathering book donations from
students and faculty, and starting a project she calls the Textbook Justice Library from which
they can borrow any text they need. This helpfulness is also evident in her teaching style. During
a class discussion of Rebecca Solnit’s essay “The Mother of All Questions” and Virginia Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own, Dekker brings along her new puppy, who she has named Solnit. Dekker
writes, “Solnit roves happily from table to table as I take the plunge into the personal and ask my
students if there’s . . . some rigid model for life that they would rather slay than mold themselves
after.” Dekker understands that even with college kids to analyze the expectations of these kids
she can more easily accomplish that goal by having a puppy to hug.

Is North Country a memoir? A little bit. Is it literary criticism? Yes, because she cites and
responds to many books like hers. Is it nature writing, social commentary, a discourse on our
system of higher education? Yes, yes, yes, but also not clearly identifiable as such. No single
thread is fully developed across the whole book. Its hybridity touches on Dekker’s passions:
family, literature, teaching, outdoors, martial arts, parenting, horses; it often seems, however, that
she’s trying to do too much. Ultimately the book wanders and lacks cohesion.

In nineteen chapters, North Country ranges from one August to another August; several months
get two or three chapters. It seems that the book covers one year. But no. Each chapter is named
for a year, but the book actually spans five years: August 2015 to August 2020. On top of that, it is not strictly chronological. Though the chapters move from one month to the next, in order, the
reader is bounced back and forth across the five-year time span. If Dekker had rooted us solidly
in the town of Hancock or in detailed discussions of literary criticisms, for instance, she could
have taken those leaps in time between and within chapters without disorienting the reader.

For example, in Chapter Four about time-travel narratives, Dekker mentions a husband. Who is
he and when were they married? It’s not clear until a later chapter how this relationship fits into
Dekker’s life and the timeline of the other events in the book. Dekker writes about her expanding
family: her new husband, two teenage stepdaughters, the shock of an unexpected but beloved
grandbaby, a puppy, a horse. The characters are thinly drawn, and they appear and disappear
haphazardly. I’m a sucker for a puzzle, so I found myself flipping through pages trying to piece
together the who, the when, and the where. Ultimately, though, I was frustrated by the lack of
consistency and clarity.

In one strong chapter, Dekker grapples with what to do about teaching Sherman Alexie’s work
the week after a sexual harassment scandal involving him breaks. She wonders whether or not to
teach the Native American’s work, asking questions of her class and herself. About Alexie’s
collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, she applies the Bechdel-Wallace Test
about how women appear in literature: Do any of Alexie’s stories have two female characters
who have a conversation about something other than a man? “Not one story passes,” she writes.
In addition, she asks, “Who needs another Sherman Alexie when there are so many other voices,
writers who remake language, worlds, and genres with a brilliance and courage that makes more
room for all of us to live inside?” She lists other writers who do: Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Margaret Noodin, Stephen Graham Jones, Rebecca Roanhorse, all more worthy to teach
than Alexie.

Dekker writes vividly about winter in Hancock: “Outside my office, the wind blows fine
snowflakes in white swirls across a landscape of waist-high drifts.” She acknowledges the
sounds, the cold, the light: “The snow on the front walk squeaks underfoot as we walk to the
car.” “In February, every day is startling, hurt-your-face cold.” “Our mornings on the ski trail are
drenched in gold light that slants through the trees from the rising sun.” While writing about the
CopperDog 150, a dogsled race in the Upper Peninsula, she shares, “My heart took flight with
the teams. The curves of their backs under the harnesses were saying yes to life, and the reach of
their claws and their wide-mouthed dog smiles were stretching out to grab and enjoy every mile
and moment.”

After the deep cold of the winter months, what is summer like in Hancock? The reader doesn’t
get to know because Dekker takes us to France with her stepdaughter in two long chapters after
which we get a chapter another off-ramp on horse pedigree. In that seventeen-page chapter, only about ten paragraphs made sense in this book. The chapter opens with her horse, Ruby, having a medical emergency. As Ruby recovers, Dekker dives into the Arabian pedigree and her own history with horses. Finally, Dekker writes, “Since becoming a horse owner in the north country, I have come to know the calculus of horses and land on a more intimate level.” The chapter wraps up with Dekker using Ruby to connect to the community: “We give riding lessons to a young family friend who experienced a paralyzing illness, and it’s a joy to be close to her in her first months of recovery, to watch her progress from using a wheelchair to crutches to a cane.”

Dekker’s writing shines when she’s evoking her experience as “an intensely physical person,”
especially when she’s moving in or interacting with nature. Gardening: “I pry at the ground until
I bend and then break my trowel.” “This gardening is a rare and necessary pleasure, a physical
enacting of the decisions with immediate results when so much of my life in the intellectual work
of course design, lesson planning, and grading leaves little physical manifestation.” A hike in the
woods: “I’m going to the woods to be with the spring flowers, but also because I believe it’s
good for a woman to sometimes go where only a good dog can follow. I want to walk alone a
while, to examine the shape of the connections I feel to this place and to my partner and family.”
Such writing leaps off the page and draws the reader in.

In the last chapter, Dekker writes, “The pandemic will be the end.” It’s August 2020 and she
means the end of in-person university classes. Staff continues planning for the fall semester, but
the future is far from certain. “We could shutter up and blow away overnight,” Dekker writes.
Indeed, as of fall 2023, Finlandia University has stopped enrolling students; the institution may
be dissolving. Alongside teaching preparations, Dekker collects wood for winter and spends time
gardening: “Attending to the garden helps quiet the roil of my mind. I carry buckets of rainwater,
cut dahlias, harvest tomatoes, basil, beans, and peas.” In these and other interactions with the
land, Dekker prepares for “whatever the next season brings.”

North Country is an ambitious work of creative nonfiction in the now-common hybrid form. The
book would have benefitted from a tighter focus and greater clarity, but her care and concern for her students, family, and the wonders of her new home “on the northern edge of beyond” is
admirable and instructive.

Black Lawrence Press
$21.95 Paperback | Buy Here

Secrets of the Sun: A Memoir by Mako Yoshikawa

Mako Yoshikawa is on a mission. In her memoir, Secrets of the Sun, she sets out to resolve the enigma of her father, Shoichi, a physicist and man plagued by bipolar illness. Through vivid snapshots, Yoshikawa obsesses over the mystery of her father, a brilliant scientist in the field of nuclear fusion who failed to achieve greatness.

That Shoichi also happens to be dead both simplifies and complicates his daughter’s task. Simplifies it because she can ask questions of her father’s “women,” those he was in relationship with as well as his daughters, the author’s sisters and Yoshikawa, who he claims to have loved the most, that is, if he truly loved any of them. She can also talk to his colleagues about whether he regretted his choice to devote himself to research that in the end proved futile. The complication is, had her father been alive none of the subjects she speaks to would have disclosed much of anything. After his death, some open up, but not a lot is revealed. For instance, when Yoshikawa asks her mother if her father regretted working on fusion, the conversation circles back to the same unsatisfactory conclusion her mother often hides behind. “He was a good man, inside.” Had he been available while writing the book, Yoshikawa could have asked her father to clarify his “goodness.” But that option is gone.

With Shoichi’s death is where this fast-paced memoir begins, days before Yoshikawa’s wedding. Yoshikawa is getting ready for her rehearsal dinner in Boston in 2010 when she receives a call from a police officer in New Jersey. A 44-year-old novelist and creative writing instructor, Yoshikawa thinks the call will be about another breakdown her father has had, a familiar tale. She expects to hear he’s been found roaming the streets half naked, not that he died the night before of natural causes.

As Yoshikawa embarks on a new stage in her life as a wife, her father’s passing pulls her back into an old one as a daughter. Since Shoichi had been physically abusive and never admitted it, Yoshikawa distanced herself from him. Vanished from her life, she questions why she kept him at a distance; she wants to confirm that she made the right decision to seek, at least, in writing, some kind of resolution.

Thus begins her quest to understand her father, hoping it will help her understand her childhood and her relationship with her mother and sisters. Yoshikawa examines her father’s early years in Japan, which coincide with World War II. She searches for clues to his character in his wealthy upbringing, overthrown by hunger and loss that came during and after the war. Later she interviews the many women with whom he was intimate, including her mother. Did he at least love her? She writes,

Because if my father had never loved the wives and girlfriends who loved him and nursed him and stayed by his side, what hope was there for me, the daughter who’d fled his home and returned as seldom as she could?

Because Shoichi was a physics genius, many whom Yoshikawa turns to trying to decipher him seem to overlook his other faults. Early in the book there is a telling exchange between Yoshikawa and her stepfather Jimmy. They are trying to craft a statement about Shoichi’s passing. Jimmy suggests they say something about Shoichi being “groundbreaking” for his research in nuclear fusion. Yoshikawa thinks up another possibility: “Groundbreaker who broke.”

The broken part is the part Yoshikawa knew best as his daughter. He may have been a renowned physicist, but he was a failure as a father, a heavy drinker whose anger was unleashed on his family in shouts and blows. Nevertheless, Yoshikawa realizes that despite her efforts to distance herself from him, he was, and will always be, a part of her life. This revelation makes her redouble her efforts to comprehend this man who showed so much promise before he began to suffer from mental illness in midlife. Why he became ill, what brought it on, and whether it was the mental illness that made him abusive are all questions she wants answered.

Yoshikawa pushes to learn the truth while fearing it at the same time. As her youngest sister cries about their father’s death during the rehearsal dinner, Yoshikawa brushes it off, telling her soon-to-be husband that her sister was not close to their father. Competing for his attention still bewitches her. Along the way Yoshikawa tackles other equally charged issues, including the prejudice and racism her Japanese-American family experienced and, surprisingly, her father’s penchant for cross dressing.

She first saw her father at home wearing a woman’s nightgown when she was a child. Later she learns from one of his female partners that he wore dresses and women’s underpants as well. It’s another thing the family does not talk about. When Yoshikawa asks her father’s female partner why he did it, all she remembers him saying is “they better,” a sort of arrogant threat. Trying to come to terms with this comment, Yoshikawa explores the issue of clothing and how it camouflages us as we try to fit in. She compares our use of clothes to how cuttlefish change colors. “Clothes can also serve as an adaptive strategy: a means of self-protection, of intimidation.”

When family and friends disregard his violent behavior, which included hitting his wife and children, Yoshikawa is left empty. If his mental illness is to blame, Yoshikawa has nowhere to direct the anger that has built up in her after years of his abuse. This leads to several beautiful truths about the complexity of communicating with the mentally ill, one of which is: “Talking sense into a schizophrenic: an endeavor so futile it could be an idiom, like tilting at windmills or squeezing blood from a stone.”

Insights like these into human nature manifesting in familial relationships make this slim volume about more than just one woman and her relatives, focused on an enigmatic father. Indeed, by exploring his past Yoshikawa understands more about Shoichi the man, which helps her forgive—a tall order—Shoichi the father. By the end, it’s less her father’s mental illness that makes him a mystery, but rather how his difference and strangeness are all too human, a finding the author struggles to accept. “He was elusive and capacious, as all of us are, every memory I had of him refracting, shifting over time and with the light.”

Mad Creek Books
$19.95 Paperback | Buy Here