by rlhartleysmi | Apr 8, 2022 | Book Reviews
By Cyndie Zikmund
The Fact of Memory is an unusual prose experiment. Using Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29,” which begins with the famous line, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” the author Aaron Angello takes each word of the sonnet, 114 in total, and uses each word as a springboard for a short ruminative essay. He writes a single page of prose, 114 in total, which become the book’s chapters, the single words the chapter titles.
As a daily regimen, Angello savored, absorbed, and meditated on the impact the word had on him, then wrote his thoughts out in a sort of altered state of consciousness. The result is a meditation on life and memory that is sometimes directly related to the word being studied, the sonnet itself, or, at other times, the process the project inspired.
Angello chose Sonnet 29 for two reasons. It was the first Shakespearean sonnet he memorized, and he cherished its main message, “love is the way out of dark places.” The sonnet is about a wretched man who is sad in every way, but then remembers his loved one and is transformed into a happier, more joyous person.
Love conquering all appears as a theme in several chapters. Sometimes it’s the act of rejoicing about being alive, another time it’s the image of an infant’s fist, and still another it’s the random interconnectedness of strangers. In these moments of insight, the book comes to life. At other times, the chapters seem listless and without purpose, mirroring how memory vacillates between lucidity and ambiguity.
In a chapter titled, “Like”—there are four chapters using this word in all—Angello addresses the evocative and perhaps most primary question of the sonnet: whether we can know if our memory is an accurate fact or a fact created.
I read recently that remembering is a creative act. It isn’t a retrieval of stored information. It is a creative construction of past events that takes place in the present. And apparently, the more frequently one remembers a given event, the less likely it is that the memory accurately represents the event being remembered. Everything we know about ourselves and our worlds is fiction.
Similarly, following its own story arc, The Fact of Memory segues between philosophical topics such as in the chapter “Hope” where Angello contemplates the difference between faith and hope. He laments his younger years when he had a strong belief in his potential and the idea that there was some goal out there much greater for him to attain. At first, he thought he was guided by faith, but later realized it was hope and, according to Angello, “Hope is made of different stuff entirely.”
Later, the individual chapters become edgier such as “On.” Here he describes a crowd, waiting in line, is entertained by a homeless woman. The spectacle seems harmless at first but then, when the homeless woman lifts her clothes to expose herself, the situation takes a dark turn. What is the right reaction? To laugh? Look away? Or this: “One young woman in line says, ‘No, no,’ puts her arm around her and gently walks her away.”
A touching example of the love theme is “Yet.” A husband’s devotion and a father’s love were so primary that he waited until he was old and gray before getting the one object he pined for all his life, a Harley Davidson motorcycle. The joy of acquisition was tempered because the man now needed to reach down and manually raise his leg and mount the motorcycle.
Included within the pages of this slim yet bemusing essay collection are lessons on survival that hinge on neither love nor despair. In “Me,” a school age boy reinvents himself every year because he has moved to a new school where no one knows him. One year, he’s a kid hanging out with other boys, commenting on muscle cars. The next year he’s an introvert, teaching himself to write computer programs. The observation is that once the boy decided who his new persona would be, no one, including him, doubted it. A sure case of we are who we think we are.
Some chapters, such as “And,” two thirds of the way through the book, feel like a random stream of consciousness—mimicking how the human brain works. We are taken from a couple on the beach to a couple hiking, from a couple sitting on a roof to a couple standing on a bridge. At first, the stories seem disparate, capturing unrelated moments happening from coast to coast. But a pattern emerges. The male in the couple is fascinated by the female. In one case he can’t believe she’s spending time with him. In another, he is surprised his date takes pleasure in the simpler things of life, given her academic background. The key to this chapter, as is often the case, is in the last two sentences: “This is a game she loved as a child. It was new to him.”
Angello’s ruminations on poetry provide a craft lesson. “Break” describes the importance of a line break, “What makes a poem is the line—and only the line.” “Think” offers definitions of poetry: “A poem becomes a poem when a poet or reader decided to call it a poem.”
Perhaps the most intriguing craft technique Angello uses is the writing of the same paragraph forwards and then backwards, which bookend the work. The last chapter or paragraph of the book, #114, is the first chapter or paragraph of the book, in reverse order. The circle is complete because its subject—two tramps occupying the corner of Wilshire and La Brea in Los Angeles—has changed because their image has been revisited, a fact we remember.
In The Fact of Memory, we see what happens when a gifted writer challenges himself with a daily practice. With his “imposition of narrative,” Angello, the creative nonfictionist, thinks more freely and opens to random ideas that are more relatable than he originally thought possible. In the end, we are reminded that memory is what we make of it. Some memory is based on facts and other on reconstructed half-truths. Whether it be accurate or enhanced, memory’s impact on us is inarguably life-changing and everlasting.
The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications by Aaron Angello
Rose Metal Press
$14.95 Paperback | Buy Now
Cyndie Zikmund’s essays have appeared in Under the Gum Tree, Pink Panther Magazine, Magnolia Review, Literary Traveler, and forthcoming in Cutleaf. Her poetry has been published by A Woman’s Voice and is upcoming in North Dakota Quarterly. She has served as CNF Editor for Qu Literary Magazine. She’s earned an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, an MBA from Santa Clara University, and a BS EECS from UC Berkeley. www.cyndiezikmund.com
by rlhartleysmi | Mar 15, 2022 | Book Reviews
By Thomas Larson
Emerging in the midlife of the ongoing memoir explosion is what is variously called the bibliomemoir, the memoir/biography, or the writer-on-writer memoir. I like all three but the third type comes, I think, closest to a book that engages with a writer of central importance in one’s personal life and who deserves a paean of sorts to say and show how and why. It’s a book that ostensibly is about the other author, often borne out via the title—My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, referring, of course, to George Eliot’s masterpiece: note the my—but it really should cover one’s shared experience via the (usually) dead author’s work and a profound self-discovery that experience has hailed. “I could not have known myself fully without having read X.” I’m intrigued by these books, one, in particular, from 2020, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland.
Shapland sees in McCullers’s long reluctance to privately come out (and mostly stay hidden) as a lesbian aside her early literary success, a failed marriage to a gay man, and a series of unacted-upon love affairs. Shapland tells us she shares some of McCullers’s inner journey toward her own sexual expression; indeed, her coming out has been more welcomed, though still bumpy, and now quite public with this memoir. Her fragmentally-told book plows a two-women-made-for-each-other plot—my life lived already in yours. Writers “are the shards of others,” she writes, that is, we descend from and join into a sisterhood or brotherhood of shared initiations via the act of deep reading.
To prove she’s handled the shards, Shapland calls upon her recent years as an archivist at the vast Harry Ransom Archive in Austin. There, she studied a trove of McCullers’s belongings, artifacts seldom riffled by biographers—manuscripts, copyright guarded love letters, tapes and transcripts of psychiatric sessions, even items of her clothing, “a kind of hinge or portal to the author’s body.”
Reading McCullers’s biographers, Shapland decides they’ve failed to discuss the author’s confused lesbianism, instead, concentrating on the suggestively gay and tragic characters in the Southerner’s fiction of the 1940s and 1950s: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter appeared when McCullers was 23, Reflections in a Golden Eye at 24. Her emotional confusion is a blueprint for Shapland to examine hers as a thirtyish author and lesbian herself. This literary-ish link between fellow travelers allows Shapland to write a sexually attuned portrait of the beloved author who also wrote The Member of the Wedding, novella and play, and the dismal Clock Without Hands (according to Flannery O’Connor), and who died at 50.
Shapland insists on exploring the erasure of their sexuality, whether in the family or society, with particular emphasis on McCullers’s decentered homosexuality in previous appraisals. The unconsummated love affair with her psychiatrist sheds the brightest light on McCullers, a story which the letters and tapes do tell. By contrast, Shapland comes out at similar attractions to McCullers during her teens and twenties, dramatizing coequal scenes of love and anguish the older author seldom admitted to and Shapland is eager to share.
Like Geoff Dyer’s self-spadework in Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence (1997), Shapland succeeds at times because she’s decisive about her ambivalent role as memoirist and biographer. She cites Elizabeth McCracken who also fell under McCullers’s spell. Writing of the license such disinterment of another’s secrets brings up, both women agree that “feeling understood by someone does not equate with understanding them.”
At times, Shapland seems beholden to her subject’s privacy; other times, she writes avidly about McCullers’s clandestine, archaic love/worship of women. Then, as if she’s being ignored at a dinner party, Shapland gives full-throated longing for her partner, Chelsea, apart as they are while she writes this book.
In another sense, the writer-on-writer memoir is a way to make the past present—I know what you’re going through because as you did I’m going through it now. Sounds juvenile in that mere identification is somehow worthy of coverage. But maybe that’s the consequence of loving our literary heroes. Sometimes an anecdote about McCullers’s stunted amorousness makes Shapland think of her and Chelsea’s more expressive bond; other times, she forces herself onto the stage, burnishing her accountability, reminding us that she’s on the sidelines, waiting her turn as the understudy. It’s as if McCullers, the “intended,” can’t keep her stifled and sullen romantic feelings free from Shapland’s prying.
Obsessions, of the speculative kind, occupy the memoir: Did Carson and her therapist-pursuer, Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, actually “do it”? Hard to say. The evidence is highly suggestive, but inconclusive, a fallacy literary sleuthing is poorly equipped to answer. Not quite a genuine mystery, rather a TMZ video that doesn’t exist, no matter how much Shapland speculates it should. This search yields more than one dramatic in-the-midst-of-research moment:
I put the pages down with an audible, exasperated sigh and suddenly came back into the small Columbus [Georgia] reading room. For the first time in hours I looked up from my round table covered in stacks of folders at the other researchers—pairs of sisters or cousins all trying to find out their genealogical histories—and I began to question my research impulses. I’d found the love letters four years ago. I recognized what I read. What more proof did I think I needed? What was I trying to prove? Historians demand proof from queer love stories that they never require of straight relationships. Unless someone was in the room when the two women had sex (and just what “sex” means between women is, for many historians, up for debate), there’s just no reason to include in the historical record that they were lesbians. At least that’s what it seems like to me.
There is, with the putative chumminess the later writer projects on the earlier one, a sense of cabal: even in her confusion, McCullers chose not to swing the closet door open and left so much of her life unexamined. But via Shapland is here to examine its every cranny. Does she find a smoking gun? It’s not clear. (Strictures in McCullers’s estate forbid quoting directly from certain manuscripts.) But, note, this is also to say that the very hiddenness practiced by pre-millennial biographers of putative lesbianism is not only true in the writing of certain women but has to be sussed out from their behaviors: McCullers was so buried in her insecurities, Shapland concludes, that despite her desires for several women, she could neither act on them nor acknowledge her refusal to do so. That evaluation saddens a sorrowful life, wasted on marrying the same man twice, and despite her ongoing literary value.
There’s also a kind of a memoiristic #MeToo at work here: McCullers’s first affair parallels Shapland; so does their first times at Yaddo, their sexual feelings suspicioned and stifled by family, boyfriends, marriageable men, and their growing androgyny. (With Shapland, it seems everyone she names, historical or present-day, is gay or a little bit gay.) There are prerequisites for the pilgrimage to an iconic author, one of which is to emphasize one’s stickiness to another co-suffering writer, something our Age of Identity intensifies. Because we share this one Huge commonality, you the older artist must be a model for my art and, thus, the key to my categorical being. Note the adjective: not my quixotic self but the me I’m supposed to be.
Contrarily, I find value in this memoir subgenre not for its revelations but for its daring honesty, an aid to self-disclosure and the interior world. Moreover, the writer-on-writer memoir is a soft attack on the obsessively objective biography whose author possesses (is possessed by) an inordinate passion for his subject, that is, if he’s going to live with the person he’s exposing, for example, as Carl Sandburg did, barely making ends meet while writing his homespun paean to Lincoln over some seventeen years. Such devotion can neither be disguised nor tossed off; it must be self-sustaining because it’ll never be lucrative. Unlike the commercial novel or nonfiction narrative. Traditional biography is a peeping-Tom form whose rewards are vicarious eminence.
Still, I do like the savvy of this new form: what so interests one writer about another involves researching, mulling, and celebrating the other’s gift should lead to a personal discovery just as profound as the literary work that drew one in initially. At least, that’s the hope. If you reread this statement, you’ll see it’s not very different than the task all memoirists face: Find something of ourselves in relationship to this lone subject we’ve chosen to unravel from direct experience. Why shouldn’t our reading life be as fundamentally relational as, say, a mother-daughter memoir?
The memoir track—if the publisher demands it be “based on a true story”—typically calls for a lot more drama than a literary devotee’s enthrallment. This tell-all temerity occurs in Shapland’s book as more juicy chatter than memoiristic reflection, a flaw of the prurient marketplace. But still the biography of McCullers’s sexual repression, by her and by those of her confidantes, is the most gripping and original element here. For that I’m thankful. Well into the twenty-first century, some writers and most readers are exhausted by the bildungsroman of domestic violence, cancer death, an affair’s obsessive end, even spiritual trauma. Devotional love with or without sex sounds like a sweet offramp after ten thousand miles of memories of childhood sexual abuse.
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland
Tin House
$22.95 Hardcover | Buy Now
Journalist, book/music critic, and memoirist Thomas Larson‘s most recent book is Spirituality and the Writer: A Personal Inquiry (Swallow Press). He has also written The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease (Hudson Whitman), The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ (Pegasus Press), and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative (Swallow Press). He is a twenty-year staff writer for the San Diego Reader, a six-year book review editor for River Teeth, and a former music critic for the Santa Fe New Mexican.
by rlhartleysmi | Feb 4, 2022 | Book Reviews
By Emily Waples
CW: Rancher is an essay with rape. This is not to say that Selah Saterstrom’s Rancher is an essay in which rape happens, or that rape is a peripheral event. I use the phrase “with rape” rather than “about rape” to acknowledge Saterstrom’s own assertion of purpose: “This essay isn’t working towards anything,” she writes. “It is a being-with. It is trying to be with something.”
This enduring presence is no small feat, especially when—as Saterstrom intimates by way of, or rather in lieu of, closure—the dominant cultural narrative is that which comes after: the meaning-of, the healing-from, the accounting-for, the reckoning-with. An essay itself, Saterstrom notes, is conceptualized as motion: it turns, we say. But being-with substitutes suspension for motion: it abides, resides. And Saterstrom is preoccupied with one residence in particular, as she announces in the essay’s first line: “My rapist bought a house with a swimming pool in El Paso.”
This house, the rancher of the title, is emblematic of the undeserved spoils accumulated by the man who raped her at fourteen: “a respectable rancher with a pool, wife, and two kids active in sports programs at their Catholic school.”
A staple of midcentury American architecture, the ranch house soared in popularity post-World War II; in many ways, it is the quintessential Boomer milieu. A rash of these single-story, asymmetrical, wide-eaved, pitched-roofed, open layout constructions sprang up across the American southwest especially in the 1940s and 50s, attempting to accommodate an expanding population of the white middle class. In suburban tract housing developments, ranchers reigned.
In Saterstrom’s essay, the rancher functions as a realization of and container for the right kinds of desire—namely, capitalist, heteronormative consumption, and (re)production. The wife and two kids are trappings of status no less than the fact of homeownership. But it is the pool in particular that rankles Saterstrom: “It is true that my disdain for my rapist includes the fact that the rancher has a swimming pool,” she admits, “something I have wanted for myself my entire life.”
Rancher interrogates, in prose that probes its wound, what it means to want something for oneself after having been rendered the victim of someone else’s violent desire. For Saterstrom, a photograph of her rapist “standing in front of the rancher with its swimming pool” triggers a posttraumatic psychotic break; meanwhile, her rapist—or “Raper,” as she at one point deems him, cementing his identity in the act and action of rape—persists unpunished and unperturbed in “a remodeled open-floor concept suffering from gilded TJ Maxx elements.” To this, Saterstrom can only flatly protest: “I don’t think he should get to have a rancher with a swimming pool”—that he, of all people, should enjoy these tacky assets, this capital, this home equity. “But the fact is that he has these things,” she admits. “And more.”
*
I’m thinking about Christine Blasey Ford’s doors.
In her 2018 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ford noted that the catalyzing event that led her to reveal the details of her sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh at the age of fifteen had been a home remodel. She’d needed, she noted, to explain to her husband why she’d insisted on the installation of a “second front door.” She had to rationalize, psychologize, for his sake—for he demanded explanation—how badly she needed to create a means of escape, to knock down her own walls and flee being fifteen, trapped in a room on a bed with a boy’s hand held over her mouth. She’d needed to engineer exits in a world where men like Kavanaugh still exist.
The story of the second door was promptly seized upon by right-wing pundits as supposed evidence of Ford’s duplicity: real estate records were dredged up, and a slew of gotcha posts crowed that the second door had been put in years before Ford exposed her motivations to her husband in couples’ therapy. On the matter of the door: why hadn’t she said anything sooner? And on the matter of the rape: why hadn’t she said anything sooner? Men on the Internet demanded explanation.
As if the time-loop of trauma is not precisely the point: “The sense that you don’t know how to end anything or that things don’t end,” Saterstrom writes. “The terrible, smooth underbelly of ongoingness. Which brings up another aspect of life after rape: the unforgiving public.”
*
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that domestic architecture should act as impetus for narratives of sexual violence; the private spaces we inhabit are always at risk of inching into view: a photograph, an illuminated window, an open door. Rancher exploits this aura of lurid interiority in companion illustrations by H.C. Dunaway Smith from a series titled Imaginary Anatomy. These are an arresting collection of vividly-colored botanical-anatomical images, symmetrically-splayed across the page like overdetermined Rorschach blots. In lieu of the requisite ink stains resembling bifurcated animal hides, bats, moths, butterflies, our eyes track teeth, arteries, nerve endings, hands, a thyroid gland, an open mouth.
Rorschach tests have been used as an instrument to investigate childhood sexual abuse. Trauma is validated by what you say you see. Interpretation is a testament.
But of course, testimony is up for interpretation.
Rancher is an essay with rape, and an essay with rage. Invoking Maria Goretti, Italian-Catholic patron saint of sexual assault and rape victims—“You might say that she is the patron saint of the #MeToo movement,” Saterstrom muses—the text invites indignation at the narrative of a murdered eleven-year-old turned virgin-martyr by a culture bent on redemption rather than revenge. Saterstrom invites vicarious delight in the retaliatory tale of the band of students at St. Maria Goretti High School for Girls in South Philadelphia, who in 2004 chased down a man who’d been exposing himself on school grounds and collectively wrestled him to the ground, punishing him with kicks. Yet as to her own rage—it simmers with understatement: “I don’t think he should get to have a rancher with a swimming pool.”
For what it’s worth (which is, as we or sexual assault survivors know, nothing), I don’t think Brett Kavanaugh should get to have a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court of the United States.
But the fact is, as Saterstrom shows, some men have these things. And more.
Rancher by Selah Saterstrom
Burrow Press
$25.00 Limited Edition Hardcover | Buy Now
Emily Waples teaches in the Biomedical Humanities program at Hiram College. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere.
by rlhartleysmi | Jan 7, 2022 | Book Reviews
By Sebastian Matthews
I must admit, before reading Supremely Tiny Acts, I hadn’t read Sonya Huber’s work. When the book arrived on my doorstep recently, I wasn’t sure about its context. Did I order it? Had someone sent it to me as a gift? Was it an advanced reader’s copy? I read the first few pages with mild curiosity; and, enjoying what I read, I put the slim, key-lime green book on my things-to-read pile and promptly forgot about it.
A few days later, I heard from the book editor at River Teeth, asking if the Huber had arrived. Turns out that it was months late due to supply-chain problems. And then I remembered. Yes, I had agreed to review it. I picked the book up again and reread those first few pages. Somehow, I had managed to come to this work without preconception as if I were opening it at random at a bookstore—because I liked the title or the cover or found the subtitle “a memoir of a day” intriguing—reading to see if I was transported by what I was reading. And I was. For a second time. I liked the syntax and the images and the voice. Which is how a book I was supposed to review became a strange sort of impulse buy before transforming itself back into a book I was assigned to review.
Enough of me. Here’s the premise of the book: The author chooses one very specific day in her recent past—November 19, 2019—to write a “memoir” about. The day “sticks in my head,” Huber writes, “because of the chemistry of adrenaline, downtime, and notes made in a journal.” Specifically, it’s a day that requires her to go to court for an act of civil disobedience (she had strapped herself to a boat in the center of a busy Manhattan intersection) and to take her son, Ivan, to the DMV to get his driver’s permit. Both activist and mom—as well as professor and writer—Huber chooses to write about her life through the lens of a set of intersections, literal and emblematic.
Pretty cool, huh? Also: pretty damn risky. Like watching someone tightrope walk without a net. You watch partly to see if she can pull it off and partly to see if she’ll fall. Of course, Huber knows this. She writes early, and ironically, in the book: “I’m taking your time with my real-life bullshit, and there’s no excuse for it.” But, instead of assuming her own brilliance, she makes a jujitsu-like move: “So, I am going to assume I am among friends.” And then, in another brilliant move, Huber references an experiment she and other writers did with the essayist Ander Monson in which he asked everyone to pick a day and write about it. By page 6, we know who the narrator is, what she’s going to write about, why she’s doing so, who her influences are, and how the book’s idea came to fruition. All this before she’s even gotten out of bed.
Huber’s setting out to write about a day isn’t without precedence. Ulysses comes to mind, as does Mrs. Dalloway. More recently, as Huber refers to early in the book, there’s Nicholas Baker’s The Mezzanine and the six-novel epic by Karl Ove Knausgard. But those books are fiction. In nonfiction, I think of Thoreau’s and Nin’s journals as well as Joseph Pla’s The Gray Notebook, an example of early “autofiction.” (The New Yorker recently did a feature, “The Most Ambitious Diary in History,” on a Bennington professor who wrote obsessively about his life, day by day, millions of pages, never published.) It seems this microscopic tendency to cover daily life has picked up traction of late, perhaps as part of the memoir craze. Or, as Huber herself puts it: “I think we have to get to the real, to catch the facts we have, to hold on to what we see . . ..”
A quick tally. By page 4, Huber’s gotten out of bed. On page 6, she’s making a to-do list. By page 20, she’s drinking coffee. It’s fun keeping track of the day’s mundanities inside all the narrative fireworks that flare up in this epic monologue. Between the to-do list and the coffee, for instance, we learn about her activism from her engagement with Extinction Rebellion (the strategic bit of street theater that gets a group of activists arrested on purpose) to its beginnings in her childhood. Along the way we are treated to all manner of narrative devices: digressions, casual asides, jumps in time (big and small), use of space breaks with backstory jumps, run-on free associations, etc. It’s virtuosic.
About halfway in, when Huber has arrived in court with all her co-conspirators, hoping to get out in time to take her son to the DMV, I started asking myself Is this a memoir or a long essay? Does it matter? What it feels like now, on the other side, is like is a strange combination of a comic’s monologue and a friend’s epic phone call rant that you sit in the dark and listen to, allowing the flow of images and ideas and moments wash over you. Of course, what Huber risks in doing this, and doing it in this way, is being that boring drunk at the bar that Annie Dillard warns writers avoid being—forcing the reader to sit there and listen to her sad tale.
Huber couldn’t pull any of this off if she didn’t display 1) the perfect combination of seriousness and humor, 2) a gift for language, and 3) a storytelling sense. Just in those first 20 pages alone, for instance, Huber confesses to wearing an adult diaper just in case she has to pee during the protest, describes a moment in the event as “like ring around the rosy in reverse,” and wonders if something like cop imposter syndrome exists. As I read, I’m following the character through her journey and the writer’s free-associating her monkey mind with a chaotic subject.
Such writers as Geoff Dyer and Matthew Specktor come to mind who allow themselves to ramble in an around a subject, not afraid to put themselves and their thoughts front and center. Dyer does it brilliantly in his book on D.H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, as does Specktor in his recent Always Crashing in the Same Car Twice, a book in which he conflates his own depression and failure with famous examples from Hollywood and contemporary literature.
I’m not going to say much about the book’s plot, if that’s what you call it, because I would be doing what those horribly long trailers for new movies or television shows do when they cover the entire narrative arc in a minute and a half, rendering moot the need to actually see the thing. But I will say that there are seriously important themes that come up and run through this book. Supremely Tiny Acts is not an act of whimsy. Indeed, it can be a deadly serious book when it tackles issues of white privilege, disability, activism, mothering, artmaking, and the need to do something—tiny acts—in the face of such, such, I am not even sure what to call it. Just look out your window.
It turns out Supremely Tiny Acts is not really a memoir of Huber’s experience of one day but a memoir, as the subtitle states, of that day. The day itself is the platform off which the writer jumps—back in time, forward in time—then keeps returning to. She does this at an unspecified remove, recalling things from years prior. The experience of reading the book is somewhat like looking over the writer’s shoulder as she constructs a set of scenes from her notes. a cohesive tale gets told, as if by magic, from all the little bits and pieces.
My favorite aspect of Supremely Tiny Acts might be the way Huber’s encounters with people—on that day, and on the day of the protest, as well as in her memories—accumulate and cohere in such a way that a wider and more inclusive sense of humanity emerges. She reminds me over and over to pay attention to the little moments, to those seemingly innocuous exchanges we have in everyday life; they may contain deep truths that could sustain us through difficult experiences.
Indeed, when Huber and Ivan arrive at the DMV, I’m bristling with alertness. (And, as we all know, “alertness” and “DMV” are not usually witnessed in the same sentence without “bomb threat” thrown in.) Her need to be there at that important turning point in his life is as important, maybe more important, than her need to be tied, with jailtime or a fine, to that boat in that intersection in downtown Manhattan. Huber’s book works like many of our great contemporary memoirs do, but on a miniature scale. And Huber manages somehow to be a miniaturist with a maximalist’s heart. It’s really something.
Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day by Sonya Huber
Mad Creek Books / The Ohio University State Press
$19.95 | Buy Now
by rlhartleysmi | Dec 10, 2021 | Book Reviews
By Robert Root
The back cover of Robert Miltner’s Ohio Apertures asserts that the book’s “brief pieces of creative nonfiction” include “flash memoir, lyric essays, narrative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, travel writing, and historical excavations of place.” In the text no selections are identified with those labels, leaving readers free to apply some themselves as they read. Having skipped that back cover, I read the book first and enjoyed the range of writing it displayed but had to decide for myself about its organization.
Robert Miltner is best known as a prose poet and most of the pieces here reflect in their brevity the concentrated lyricism of his poetry even as their perspectives are expanded and enhanced. They are presented in a series of segments—sometimes in prose stanzas—in which each succeeding segment is triggered by the one before it; the concluding part, rather than wrapping up the process, may allude to where the series began. The six pieces in the first section of the book guide our expectations for how the individual pieces will work.
“Double Exposure,” the first one, a page and a half long, contains three segments that trace the progression of a plane flight to an amusement park through alterations in a child’s observations of the flight in terms of his expectations of the park experience. Other pieces focus episodically on childhood moments such as sorting out the six-year-old’s feelings about his grandmother’s death or resolving his dunking in a shallow stream. The longest one takes him, again via episodes, from childhood appreciation of Pillsbury Crescent Rolls to mature enjoyment of fresh baked croissants in Paris and, most erotically, in Quebec.
The second section of the book, except for an account of being robbed in Colorado, consists of adult moments in Ohio. “Ohio Ode” is a series of reflections on the state, a combination of musings and celebrations. “Quiet” considers sound and silence in and around the library of his neighborhood home. The longest piece recounts a visit to a local used bookstore and deciding whether to buy a book of Raymond Carver’s poetry.
I’d characterize the pieces in the third section as narrative meditations, not a category the back cover mentioned but one that identifies elements in so many pieces the collection offers. Most are short but, Miltner might argue, still too long to be considered prose poems. Yet they offer concentrated moments in the author’s existence that trigger reflections and evolving realizations. One of the longer pieces traces the passage of a cufflink through six generations of Miltner men, pondering “what small fragment of a life once lived might become a token, a talisman, a touchstone for the telling of a tale about a family’s history, its potential outcomes, or unforeseeable futures.”
The apertures Miltner presents are openings into memory and associative reflection. In a sense we follow processes of incremental connection that happen to the author as he composes, almost as if the essay is being written while we read it. “Into the Bargain” explores his ambivalence about buying Raymond Carver’s Where Water Comes Together with Other Water and the expanding sense of a writerly need that makes him decide. He tells us:
something Carver writes in one of his poems comes to mind: ‘If this sounds like the story of a life, okay.’ It’s as if he’s telling me not to define or dissect or deconstruct everything. As if he’s telling me that sometimes it’s best just to trust the way the story sounds, which is sometimes enough, even if I can’t find the word to say it aloud.
Miltner realizes the book “is going to connect with my life each time I read it again, finding in successive readings not what is new in the book, but what I keep discovering about myself in each subsequent rereading.” Given the nature of the personal memories Miltner’s poetic prose kept triggering in me as I read through the book, I suspect Ohio Apertures will provoke intimate moments of linkage in other readers as well. What can’t we help remembering? What ought we try to record?
*
If Robert Miltner gives us intimate reflections on interrelations in place, Barbara Hurd offers a most expansive perspective on existence. In The Epilogues: Afterwords on the Planet, her reflections are separated by brief comments about the extinctions the planet has witnessed since its creation, including the sixth extinction that we’re living through now. Hurd’s lyrical approach to living in the epilogues of each extinction makes the book a powerful companion to Elizabeth Kolbert’s more scientifically journalistic The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, a Pulitzer-Prize winner in 2015. The Epilogues also complements Miltner’s close up musings of more limited time and limited place.
I’ve been reading Hurd’s rich explorations of natural places since the beginning of this century, admiring her penchant for on-site examination of complicated locales. She combines observant natural history with shrewd links to the human condition, expressed in her titles and subtitles: Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination; Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark; Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains. Her concentration on elements of the natural scene and the revelations they provoke in her struck me as original and rewarding, sound nature writing combined with insightful literary memoir. She’s lost none of those gifts in the narrative segments of The Epilogues. Now her response to the times in which we’re living has deepened and complicated the power of her prose.
The principal strands in The Epilogues can almost be read separately but their power arises sequentially in alternation with one another. A preamble indicates what the planet was like when it began without life and only randomly, haphazardly, initiated it. In two-page reports on continuous climate change and species proliferation and disappearance, subsequent accounts of five previous extinctions progress to the one in process now. A second developing strand is a series of lamentations, fifteen one-page cumulative meditations on change and loss. Yet another strand is a collection of nineteen narrative essays set in landscapes ranging from Hawaiian reefs with their corals, sea urchins, sea stars, and volcanic-formed sea floor to the northwest coast of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, its shrinking ice floes and isolated mammals. These three strands are deftly interwoven as they shift between personal narrative, encapsulated ecological history, and lyric expression, exploring how earthly existence has consisted of a series of epilogues to long, successive chapters of time.
She tells us in her introduction,
“Hovering in the background, the five mass extinctions recorded in the fossil records of deep time remind us that loss is universal and timeless.
“So are our bungling attempts to cope with it.”
Hurd goes on to mention the earliest life forms on earth a billion years ago—trilobites, sponges, brachiopods, gastropods—and how “some 500 million years ago, most of them vanished.” She has a lot of ground to cover to get us through the subsequent new beginnings and the sequential five extinctions that eradicated life-form after life-form: 443, 364, 250, 206, and 65.5 million years ago. The sixth extinction begins roughly 11,700 years ago and covers the Holocene and Anthropocene Period, the latter winding down now. Loss is universal and timeless.
Miltner and Hurd present place and time in ways opposed to each other—his focused on personal memories across a single lifetime in familiar terrain, hers narrating investigative moments across widely different landscapes that suggest the widest possible time spans. He relates the individual and the familiar, she examines the evidence of universal recurring change. Ohio Apertures is a well-crafted book of celebrations and The Epilogues is a lyrical book of lamentations. They make a profound pairing for any reader willing to balance ways into understanding personal life with comprehension of what is both personal and global about the losses likely looming ahead.
Ohio Apertures by Robert Miltner
Cornerstone Press
$18.95 | Buy Now
Epilogues: Afterwords on the Planet by Barbara Hurd
Standing Stone Press
$16.95 Paperback | Buy Now
.
