Ear Candy for the Road: Recommended Books on Tapes

Over the last 10 days, our family jumped into a rented car and drove close to 2,700 miles to and fro New Jersey. The trip, decided upon on a whim, was catalyzed by my very dear step-father Henry's hospitalization, and the convergence of spring break, our schedule's being somewhat open, and the feeling that we should just go, right now. So we did, and it was very beautiful and essential to have been there with my mom and stepdad, and to have seen other family. Yet because we were there for the same amount of time we also spent driving, this was one of those trips where the destination really needed to be the journey too. Lucky for us, I loaded up on a heap of books on CD, and here are some mini-reviews for your driving pleasure.

Whitethorn Woods by Maeve Binchy -- This lovely Irish tale told in several compelling voices unfolds a landscape and community, both in the vacinity of a small Irish town and the nearby woods, which contain a shrine to St. Ann, believed to invoke miracles and healing. When the woods and shrine are threatened by a new highway, the community finds itself divided and also thrust into thinking long and deep about what that shrine means to them as individuals and collectively. What follows are splendid, interlocking stories of love against the odds, loss and its aftermath, and how to live together as community, particularly as community members age, change, leave and return. It was a marvelous book for the road although I did walk into gas stations in rural Indiana thinking in an Irish accent as I hunted down more ice tea.

Fear of the Dark by Walter Mosley -- While I don't tend toward mysteries, I was amazed and thrilled at this one, set in 1950s L.A. and narrated by an enticingly honest and learned bookstore owned named Paris Minton, who is drawn unwittingly into situations way beyond his coping skills or courage. Luckily, his good friend, Fearless Jones, a cool-as-iced-coffee protector, fighter and investigator of all things dark, comes to his aid to help balance the trouble set into motion in a Rube Goldberg kind of arrangement by Paris's cousin, Ulysesses "Useless" S. Grant, IV. Mosley is brilliant at setting scenes and conveying characters with charm, wit, music and vivid hues of description, and the language throughout borders on profound and hysterically funny simultaneously. Just listening to this made me feel far more cool than I am.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See -- This fascinating, disturbing and often very melancholy long-life narrative tells the story of a friendship between two women who find their fortunes shifting over their lives in extremely sexist and cruel 19th century China. Lily, a poor girl who, by virtue of having feet shaped perfectly for binding and breaking so that can turn into spectacular "golden lilies," lands a prestigious marriage, community standing and riches while her dear friend, Snow Flower, her "old same" (laotung) -- a girl to whom she commits to for life -- finds her high-ranking family origins sucked dry into poverty, abuse, addiction and great loss. They communicate with each other mostly through nu shu, a secret language only for women. While the sections on the details of foot binding were so upsetting that my whole family made me skip those tracts, the story itself was compelling in what it showed about the deepest friendships and loves of our lives, and about the need to tell our stories and be heard. The writing itself is a bit simplistic and clumsy in sections, but mostly, this is a marvel to listen to as you roar down I-70.

Housekeeping by Marilynn Robinson -- Few things I've ever read are infused with such meaning, depth, beauty, and loss as this novel by the author of Gilead about the coming of age of a misfit who, lucky or unlucky for her, is eventually raised by her misfit aunt. With an eye toward the nuances of the sky and nearby glacial lake, and an ear for the most poetic and flowing language this side of Toni Morrison and Ben Okri, Robinson unfurls the family story, shot through with great and uncontrollable losses against the backdrop of a remote and gorgeous landscape. The sense of longing and grief is balanced out by such imagination that hearing this has expanded how I listen to, look at, smell and taste the world around me. The characters are so pervasive that I would wander into truck stop restaurants thinking their thoughts.

Self-Portrait of a Woman Who Loves Her Body For a Moment: A Poem

My ankles, for instance, functional
as bicycle pedals, the elbows too,
elegant as the unfurling of an iris.
Then there are my thumbs, twin sons
of a mother who never forgets them,
marvelous their gymnastics.

My eyes that land on orange in a painting,
or my shoulders, heroic in their lifting.
The flat slate of blue crooked lines where
there used to be breasts, the curve of my belly,
the hips weary of insults when they surge
across the days like prize-winning horses.

The way my knees bend to make strong hills
of the legs. Then there’s the hummingbird synapses
of my brain, tired but as lovely in their blur
as the heart’s tap dance and dramatic bows.

Everywhere, there’s applause my white blood cells
drink each leg of their marathon, the efficiency
of my tongue, the wind my lungs translate into song,
and the fire at the center of each breath.

In the mirror, walking through foot-high snow,
or turning to sit in the chair, this body's imperfections
just the weather rolling through the landscape of the soul.
Why insult the thick heat, the broken branches that left
their lines, the dappled rocks up close?
I’m just a container for time like a river.
Tell, me, what’s not to love?

Kitty, Come Home!

We walk through the brush on the hill, mosey through the prairie, visit all the neighbors to hand them flyers, and whenever we open a door, we first call out, “Akio!!!” as loud as we can, hoping it will charm our beloved kitty back home. Akio, our 11-month-old male tabby, disappeared Thursday at dusk, around the same time a feral long-haired reddish beast of a cat showed up. We shooed the beast away, but from that time on, our kitten hasn’t come bounding like a dog (as he was apt to do) onto the porch whenever we call his name.

I know that life in the country can be like this for cats, especially ones less than sterling in their intelligence and speed. Unfortunately, Akio was such a cat. Within the last week, I saw him take a swipe at our other cat (who, in all fairness, has been attacking him since he was the size of a beanie baby), and then sit down beside her and stretch out on his back. So I have good reason to worry about him roaming this land where hungry hawks and owls patrol the skies, a packet of coyotes roams the woods, and occasionally, a cougar leaves her tracks. Although his name meant “Bright Boy,” he was bright mostly in his loud, clear purr and his dark eyes (and who knows how much of a boy he was after that fabled visit to the vet months ago). But he was a light of joy verging on ecstasy for my family.

My daughter’s cat, a gift for surviving junior high school with her humor intact (although a little darker), she would walk in the door after school, singing out “Baby!” as he speed-ran from wherever he was sleeping to leap into her arms. He leapt to poetic heights to catch and eat moths. He slept next to the dog, his best friend, and the two of them followed each other inside and out, room to room, sleeping couch to sleeping bed to sleeping floor.

What I loved best about Akio was how, in the middle of the night (when I’m prone to wake for no particular reason), he would suddenly make a sound like a cross between a meow and purr, which signaled me that he was about to leap on the bed, walk up to my chest, lie down, reach his paws out to hold my face between them, and tuck his purring head under my chin. During this longest-of-years winter when I’ve experienced the loss of a dear friend, and from a distance, my step-father’s serious illness, there was nothing I needed more than a sleeping, purring cat on me at 3 a.m.

So I steer the car up our long, muddy drive, hoping against hope that Akio will spring out of the cedars and run alongside me to the house like he used to do. Or I open the back door in the middle of a cold night just to see if there’s a meow that morphs into this kitten. Mostly, like my daughter, I ask impossible questions: Is he alive? Does he have a new home? Is he trapped somewhere or lost? Will we ever see him again, or know what happened?

The answers don’t come, just the sudden drop in temperature back down to the cold, pewter sky. Just the sun suddenly. Just the wind toppling over trash cans. Just the dog asleep, surprisingly not as depressed as I would think to lose her good friend. Just some of us who live here sad and still for a moment, then back to whatever we’re doing without Akio, the bright boy of a kitten we love. If, beyond reason, there are blog-reading angels with specialties in kitten whispering out there, you know what I’m asking. Please.

The Best Pie-Maker in the World: Remembering My Dear Friend Weedle

When Paul called my little cell phone that evening, I was immediately taken by the very still tone in his voice. “I’m afraid I have some bad news,” he said. I wondered if Weedle had a heart attack or a minor accident, but before I could spin out a scenario that ended with everyone intact, he said, “Weedle was killed in a car accident.”

Paul. Weedle. The friends we knew well before they found each other. Paul, who used to live in an upstairs apartment of a small alleyway home, the hermit of Old West Lawrence with his books, architectural drawings, sharp mind and beautiful heart. Weedle, who lived for years in an old farm house in Vinland, where she majored in meat loaf, child-rearing, a weary-but-knock-you-over humor, piles of books, insane genius in any word-focused board game, and the very best pies in the cosmos. Weedle was what you would get if you cross-pollinated Mary Englebreit with Rosanne Barr (the Rosanne before she just had one name) – and by the way, she loved both Mary and Rosanne.

I first connected with Weedle in a large car with her then-husband Walt, friends Dan and Kat, and my not-yet-husband Ken. We drove around Kansas City, laughing uproariously, switching lanes fast on our way home from a Joni Mitchell concert at the Starlight Theater. The night smelled like roses, honeysuckle, car fumes, popcorn, and darkness. Weedle demanded we stop at a quick shop so she could get her mandatory diet Pepsi.

At the time, most of us subscribed to walking the carob road, eating little or no white sugar, chocolate, dairy, meat, and generally consuming a whole lot of tofu, granola, and those awful carob brownies. But Weedle never followed convention in such ways.

Weedle had an intellect of immense sharpness and wit, a heart as big as all the pies (and we’re talking thousands here) she ever baked lined up across Kansas, and God help you if you ever crossed her. Weedle loved her friends, family, and especially Paul and her children like nobody’s business, with a fierceness that rivaled a pack of Grizzlies. She collected quirky and moving tales from the lives of her children that showed just how much she loved watching them grow up, try new things and new places. The thrill of her day was when the cell phone rang with a call from Laurel, Will, Kevin or Kelly. She also adored all their spouses and sweethearts, she was over the moon about her grandchildren – Katie, Allison and Joshua.

She was also the funniest person I ever met.

At a party at our house last year, people were hanging close to the kitchen table, covered with beads of all kinds for making jewelry. Food overflowed the kitchen counters nearby, and there were about 30 of us reaching over each other for a piece of turquoise or another slice of Weedle’s cherry pie. Weedle herself was on the phone, trying to reach Paul to find out when he would be here, but the phone was continuously busy.

“I can’t reach him. He must be downloading porn,” she announced before taking another sip of her diet Pepsi. Now for anyone who knew Paul, imagining him downloading porn was analogous to George W. Bush revealing that he was a gay, vegan, meditating Pacifist with the IQ of Einstein. The next hour, she kept juggling the joke about Paul downloading porn, to the point that when he arrived, a bunch of bead-bearing women immediately called out, “You done downloading porn?”

Weedle cooked up more than jokes. She was the diva of the kitchen in the grand tradition of comfort foods. Nobody made spaghetti and meatballs, meatloaf, fried chicken, chocolate chip cookies, mashed potatoes, gravy and especially bread like her. When I was walking gingerly from the car to my bed after my hysterectomy, Weedle was already on her way with an industrial-sized tray of her chicken pot pie.

Of course it was her pie-making ability that trumped all. She could not only make the best-tasting pie (winner of grand prizes in the very competitive pie division of the Vinland Fair, and deemed by my mother-in-law, a fellow pie competitor, to be the best ever), but she did it at the speed of light. I once timed her making a cherry pie from scratch (although the cherries came from a can) to oven: 6 minutes. Really, I’m not making this up. Her hands knew dough.

Her heart knew love. When Weedle met Paul over 15 years ago (at my backroom prompts of, “Weedle, Paul likes you,” and “Paul, Weedle likes you”), she met her match in mind and heart. While Paul is relatively quiet and internal, he fit around her like an exquisite home-made quilt. “You were the love of her life,” I reminded Paul the night she died as we sat in the kitchen, dishes Weedle washed in the drying rack behind us, and to our left, the open oven to warm the room. “She was the love of my life,” he answered.

She found in Paul someone who also brought home piles of library books to read on everything from the Black Sea to Harry Potter. They went to farmer’s market together. They walked their pony-sized Great Pyranees down country roads. They took trips to Chicago, New York, and other outposts. They played with their granddaughters. And they sat with us and our friends Courtney and Denise playing board games, mostly “Taboo,” a game where you have to make your partner guess the word on a card without saying the obvious thing. “It’s like a….” Weedle began. “Dishwasher,” I yelled, and we were right, again in a kind of telepathic word-game connection neither of us understood. Together, we prided ourselves on wiping our opponents into the ground, and we never lost when we played as a team.

Weedle was a whiz at any game that had to do with speed, words, imagination, and no wonder: As a long-time librarian after being an excellent elementary school teacher, and a writer, she was always a storyteller. When the kids were little, when the kids were grown, when the grandkids were born, when she took a road trip, when she stayed home.

The first Weedle story I fell in love with concerned her taking Will, who was just a little kid at the time, to see Bambi. When Bambi’s mother died, little kids throughout the theatre raised an intense collective crying chorus. After they were finally soothed quiet by their mothers, the movie’s final scene revealed a pastoral twilight expanse, with smoke from a campfire in the distance. “Is that where they’re cooking Bambi’s mother?” Will yelled out, tilting all the kids in the theatre into hysteria again.

Weedle loved that story for its irreverence and freshness, for its perspective, too, all three of which were ample in Weedle’s surprisingly-tender, full-voiced, fierce and imaginative writing. From her short essays for an old Lawrence publication, Well, Well, Well, to the brilliant memoir she was writing of late, Weedle’s writing brought to the page all you saw of her and so many more layers. The writing was gorgeously funny and poignant, just like the writer. It was one of Weedle’s great dreams to have more of her writing published.

As the news lands, I remember the long after-dinner walks we took from her house to the road alongside the elementary school, watching the sunset through fields of coming twilight. I see her turning to my children – from the time they were babies through their teen years – to hand them cookies, videos to watch, and roll her eyes at wry asides. I think about the last time we were together, New Year’s Eve, with Paul, Ken Denise, Courtney, Marek, Daniel, Natalie and Forest to eat vast quantities of miniature eggrolls and toast the New Year with sparkling grape juice at 8:30 p.m.. We played a game we had come to love because it often made all of us laugh ourselves into falling-over crying.

It’s called, “Moods,” and for this game, there are 8 moods, each on a card, displayed at any given time. When it’s your turn, you draw a card with a statement like “It’s getting bigger” or “Would you like fries with that?” and shake the dice in a little cup, look inside, and see which number mood you have to bring into how you say this statement. Everyone else has to guess which mood you’re conveying in your voice.

Life is giving us all a new card to draw here, and the moods on the table, for me this week, are numbness, irritability, fear, grief, despair, spacey-ness, love, and sadness. I know Weedle is on the other side of the table even though I can no longer see her, and my heart is breaking at how far away she is. Yet at home, on the shelf in our refrigerator door, are a few cans of diet Pepsi she brought for herself for New Year’s Eve. I think I’ll keep them there as a fitting and well-placed memorial of someone, even without the diet Pepsis, I never could forget.

Please see http://www.LovingWeedle.blogspot.com for a community scrapbook on Weedle and lots of her good writing.

Failing

It happened again. Yesterday, the long-awaited email arrived from the agent reading my revised (as per her suggestions) novel. In short, she said one word: No.

Finding an agent is akin to being a teenager desperately seeking a sweetheart: “Yes, I’ll be whatever you want me to be, just say, yes!” After dating this agent for over a year (all those encouraging emails and lingering conversations), I was once again dumped, mimicking my previous dating-game-gone-bad love story with the agent before her. If there were such a thing as Literary-agent-eharmony, I would post an ad that read, “Sincere and hard-working writer, willing to listen to you deeply and edit until the cows come home yearns with all her being for long-term relationship with literary agent who tells it straight, loves my characters, and knows her way around a publishing house.”

Instead, I find myself once again matchless (not that I should complain – I feel like I was surprisingly lucky in love beyond the manuscript), and feeling like I’m failing. It’s not so much “failed,” as in the past tense, but more an ongoing process punctuated by doubt, fear, longing, anger at the publishing industry, jealousy when I stroll the fiction sections of bookstores, and an underlying sadness. The sadness is what catches me most and, in slow-motion, lowers me to the ground. There’s something about failing that feels like falling, and then lying quietly on the ground for a long time.

It reminds me of when I failed my Ph.D. comps – 12 hours of written exams over a three-day period on my four chosen specialty areas: American literary of the 20^th genre, Emily Dickinson, poetry as a genre, and child birth imagery in contemporary women writers. After reading over 300 books, memorizing dozens of poems, and readying myself to speak at length on 50 poets from Chaucer to Leslie Marmo Silko, I thought I would leap and twirl through the exams like the Baryshnikov of the English department. Instead, I picked up the phone a week after the exam, holding my toddler son, and heard one of my most beloved professors on the other end, gently explaining how the committee unanimously failed me on each section of the exam. I put my son down, and although I was standing, I felt like I was sinking into the floor, laying face-down, seemingly unable to stand again for many months.

When I went into the graduate advisor’s office to sign the form that basically said, “I quit,” the advisor cagily suggested I sign another form that said I was taking a leave. “Who knows? You might wake up in a year and realize you can do this,” he said. I told him he was dreaming, but wouldn’t you know it? A year or so later, that’s just what happened. I realized that, although I knew the literature inside and out, I had been resisting putting my analysis of it into any kind of theoretical framework based on the irrational fear that to do so would compromise my poet’s soul.

After reading the likes of Rachel Blau DuPlessis and other feminist writers who presented theory with the poetry intact, I saw that passing the exams was a challenge of translation for me. I enrolled in an American studies course on literary theory, revisited the likes of post-structuralism, Marxism, reader-response theory, and assertions from the professor that everything – from the earth to love or spirituality – was simply a social construct. I disagreed mightily, but found the strength to stay put and listen to the language people used to discuss theory, in great part through a connection with a fellow student who felt, like me, that the living earth wasn’t a social construct. At the end of the semester, I re-took my Ph.D. comps, passing them this time, and polished off the dissertation I had almost finished before I took the comps the first time.

Had it not been for finishing my Ph.D., I would never have gotten into the door at Goddard College, where I’ve now been teaching for 12-plus years, and where I’ve found my people academically and artistically. Had I not failed my exams, and learned that I could engage with theory without selling myself down the post-modernist black hole of pure nothingness, I would not know how to engage so deeply with students facing similar challenges. Failing broke open my heart as a teacher in ways that continue to teach me how to help others forge critical writing that’s honest, meaningful, and liberating for the writer.

But beyond the actual lessons learned, there’s also that sense of lying quietly on the ground, the same thing I feel each time a manuscript is rejected despite my jumbo-sized effort and earnestness. I carry that sadness and close connection with the ground in my pockets and computer bag, finding it when I look for loose change for the parking meter. It’s not so much the sadness of plans not panning out, but something underneath the intentions and words, a kind of common ground that hurts a little to walk, and yet it’s also completely okay. It just happens to be where all of live in addition to the fields glimmering with light wind, sunlight and horizons that look like tourist outposts. Knowing that all over again feels sad, but also honest, meaningful and strangely liberating for the writer.

Photos of the ground: Top is floor in the HueHuecoyolt (Spanish for old, old coyote) ecovillage community center, middle is prairie in winter, bottom is prairie in late spring.

Braving Brave Voice

Several years ago rhythm and blues singer-songwriter Kelley Hunt and I started talking about how singing can open up our writing voice, and visa-versa, all of which couldn’t help but to enliven the rest of our lives. That was the impetus behind Brave Voice, the week-long retreat we developed that brings men and women together in the wilds of the weather and their own experience to recover, discover and express more of their voice and life.

As a writer, I’m long-acquainted with the value of entering a new piece of writing through the backdoor, which means being committed enough to write without making such a big deal about doing it perfectly that the words get too scared to show up. Instead, I show up, put myself out there on the page, and bring enough curiosity and respect for the art, for the poem, story, or song to unfurl and show itself. In bringing singing and writing together with Kelley, I realize we’re walking into all kinds of new places through back doors, opening up the physical voice through singing and then watching what happens with that voice on the page, or speaking from the heart and then leaning into a song to see what it has to show us.

This kind of engagement allows us to access far more of our lives, experiences, perceptions, magic, music and words than putting only our brain’s frontal lobe in the driver’s seat. Yet such engagements benefit from enough patience, time, safe enough space to take creative risks, and good enough witnesses to help us see what we’re creating. It’s a date with the mysterious to witness what wants to be said, written, sung or performed, and both Kelley and I believe in having outrageous fun and making sure to get up and dance on such dates.

At Brave Voice, we come together to listen deeply to ourselves, to each other, to the land and lake and sky around us, to the calling of our own voice, and the sightings along our own path. We witness each other, and in doing so, we learn how to listen more deeply to our own creative process. We are witnessed, which helps us feel and know the full weight of our music, writing, and art.

Where we meet has much to do with what we find. The retreat is held at a camp on an arrowhead-shaped peninsula surrounded by Council Grove reservoir. The location, in the center of the Flint Hills (endless hills of tallgrass prairie that look like voluptuous women lying on their sides), was key meeting ground for Plains-area tribes, which came together in council to share news, celebrate, meet and make and keep community. The location of the camp is the precise place where thousands of tribal people met for hundreds of years.

Coming to this sacred ground, we experience both resonance and reverence that’s inherently healing, grounding and renewing. We come to a particular place, and in doing so, we also find our ways into our own particular songs, stories, poems, plays, rhythms and motions. Such a place, combined with such a process, uncovers the utter bravery of our voices, and what we have to say, sing or write to the world.

Check out Kelley's new site: http://www.myspace.com/kelleyhuntmusic.

One Good Note & The Larger Song: Learning the Cello

I unzip the case, and carefully, trying not to bump against a wall or cabinet, lift out my cello. Made in China, put together by one luthier in the south part of town, and recently adjusted by another luthier in the north part of town, my cello has been with me for close to four years now. A cross between an antique rocking chair, a favorite dress, and a particularly loveable family pet, this cello has been déjà vu all over again when it comes to beginner’s mind and the sweetness of both one good note and the larger song.

I came to the cello and the cello came to me all at once after many years of yearning to learn it. One day I was in the Merc, our local natural foods co-op, talking to a friend who had recently begun cello lessons when I blurted out, “I always wanted to do that, too.” The next day I was renting to own a cello, and setting up lessons with a gentle-voiced celloist named Julianne Boren. Getting whatever I needed to get started – inspiration, a teacher, and of course, a cello – came so easy that I knew I had to follow. Learning the cello, however, didn’t, but I still followed.

I was, shall we say, a remedial cello student, taking months just to learn to hold the bow, and weeks of weeks to master (e.g. play badly but close enough that people could tell the tune) “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Now, after close to four years of lessons, I’m just starting to be able to do vibrato (that way celloists make that fast, mellow siren sound). Lucky for me, the cello, my first, and now my new teacher -- fabulous celloist Matt Herren -- have all had a good sense of humor.

Practicing the cello is all about practice for me. There’s nothing to learn well enough to parlay it into some kind of income or something flashy enough to impress anyone. There’s no train stop where I’ll finally arrive; it’s more like riding the train, seeing the scenery and especially, feeling that sway up and down my spine as the wheel turn, and that because the cello, as much as it’s about sound, is also about vibration.

I love holding the cello between my legs and arms, letting its neck rest on my shoulder, and when I bow a good note, feeling the sound echo through my body, like ripples in a lake. It's like standing in the woods on an overcast day when the sun breaks through and lights the edges of everything just as a south wind sweeps through.

When the vibrations add up to a song, I’m encompassed in movement and sound at once. Sometimes the song is slightly injured and unsure of its footing; other times, it surprises me with its deep color. In any case, I’m just leaning into the sound and letting it show me its underside. If I fall off, I climb back on. When I let go and make contact at once, I fly.

When I started learning, I was barely out of treatment and surgeries for breast cancer, and just taking baby steps back to some kind of new normalcy. I sensed that wrapping myself around this instrument and letting sounds vibrate through my newly reconfigured and somewhat-fragmented body would help. I was right, but what I didn’t realize was that making this music, one pull of the bow at a time, wasn’t just about healing: It was and continues to be about everything else in the day to day practice of being alive.

That’s because practice is what we mostly get: We practice at love, work, parenting, friendship, spirituality, citizenship and all else on our path. Vacuuming isn’t a destination, and neither is apologizing to someone when it hurts, speaking up a public hearing, trying to figure out what to tell our son about his heartbreak or parent about her diagnosis. It’s all a constant music we practice at, hoping to make the note sweet enough.

But then sometimes, often when we’re not expecting it or certainly not forcing it, we enter the larger song. As the poet Tess Gallagher writes in a found poem, called “What Cathal Said,”

You can sing sweet
and get the song sung
but to get to the third
dimension you have to sing it
rough, hurt the tune a little. Put
enough strength to it
that the notes slip. Then
something else happens. The song
gets large.