It’s been nearly a year since my last post here. And dear ones, this here is my last post on Chalk the Sun. It’s time to let this blog go, a little more than twelve years after its inception.
But the conversation isn’t over, just a change in the the medium of delivery. I’ve migrated to Substack. Rather than maintain a separate blog here and a newsletter over on Mailchimp, and feeling so overwhelmed that I’ve can’t muster the energy to use either one, I’m combining platforms. Substack is free to you and me. Its layout is clean and simple requires much less formatting nonsense than either WordPress or Mailchimp. Happily, I was able to move every last post I’ve made here over to Substack, so all these years of content and celebration, words, worry and work, are captured in this new iteration. https://juliechristinejohnson.substack.com/
As it has been for so many, this past year has been replete with transitions and transformations. I resigned from my job at an arts non-profit in December and cobbled together part-time gigs as an independent contractor in development and finance for two other non-profits, all while working to finish a draft of The Deep Coil that I felt was worthy of sharing with my literary agent. In July, one of my part-time jobs went full-time and two weeks later, I hit SEND on the email that delivered that draft to my agent.
The Deep Coil is back in my hands now, with suggestions (okay, marching orders) and as I complete yet another round of revisions, I wonder if you, dear reader, would be interested in a beta read? I’m particularly keen on readers of the crime/mystery genre who can comment on tension, how the characters propel them deeper into the story, and if that story works! If you’d like to read and offer feedback on THE DEEP COIL, and could turn around feedback by early December, click here and let me know: Contact Me
I’ve missed you. Missed engaging with you, reading your comments, feeling your connection, support and receiving your feedback. My new thing on Substack will be a blend of blog-like conversations, interviews with authors, book reviews, updates on my author stuff, including workshops (in-person and virtual) and tap wood, publication news.
As I write, the good folks of Beijing, Auckland, New Delhi, Tokyo and Dubai have already bid 2020 adieu. There’s an extraordinary and epically bizarre laser light show happening from within a virtual Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris with music by the seemingly immortal Jean-Michel Jarre. Who knows what’s happening in Moscow or Montréal. Here in our quiet little corner, I’ve just remembered to put a bottle of bubbly in the fridge. Normally, I’d get in an afternoon nap in anticipation of making it to midnight and the evening’s festivities. Tonight. Hell. I just want to curl up with a good book and call it a year as soon as possible.
Reading came in fits and starts this year; there was a time in March and April when I found it so hard to concentrate. The brain settled down by late spring and I enjoyed rereading favorites from my own bookshelves as I waited for the library to reopen (to curbside pickup, natch. Haven’t actually set foot in a library since March… ) Summer ushered in a series of heavy non-fiction, but I was rested and ready. By fall I sought to escape again, binge-reading a bunch of mysteries that won’t make it to my top reads list, but they provided respite from the election-and-pandemic news cycle.
Here are the books — novels and non-fiction — I read this year that I’d press into your hands, if I could visit you. In order of when I read them, with snippets of my Goodreads review. Clicking on the cover will take you to the full review.
Before I let you go, know that you have my heart and hope for the year to come.
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice.”
Some Ann Patchett novels have taken my breath away (Bel Canto), others have left me less moved. The Dutch House succeeds for me because of the strength of its characters, who are allowed to grow and reach, creating a story in their wake. Tales of fortunes won and lost over decades, a panorama of post-war American culture, unhappy families, the ebbs and flows of marriage — these are all familiar themes that become fresh and urgent by the strength of Patchett’s Danny and Maeve and their voices. Told with reflective compassion, gentle irony, and vivid nostalgia for an America long-gone, The Dutch House is a deeply satisfying family drama.
In Russia’s Far East, the Kamchatka Peninsula knifes between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean. It is a 1250km-long blade serrated by volcanic mountains, honed razor-sharp by unrelenting cold, empty tundras, bears, wolves, and a history of violent encounters between Kamchatka’s indigenous people and mainland white Russians eager to plunder its vast natural resources. Julia Phillips chooses this perilous landscape as the setting for her mesmerizing, fierce debut, Disappearing Earth, easily one of the year’s top reads for me.
The perfect antidote for the rush and anxiety of modern life and the superficiality of our connectedness, This Is Happiness reminds us of what it means to live fully, deeply, in the present, to experience our environment on its terms, without distraction. Narrated by Noe (short for Noel) Crowe as an old man looking back nearly sixty year to the summer his grandparent’s village of Faha, in Co. Clare, was hooked up to the electrical grid, This Is Happiness is a sumptuous, sublime and softly rendered tale of love, memory, grief and family.
This is a work of historical fiction, a panoramic western in the great tradition of Cather, McCarthy and Portis, but author Téa Obreht is too skilled a writer to be confined by expectations and conventions of genre. She writes with such urgency and empathy, with wonder for her story and compassion for her characters, that this reader was simply swept away in the moment, carried on the current of a brilliant narrative through a parched land where drops of water are as precious as flakes of gold.
Long Bright River is stunning. Billed as a thriller, it transcends genres. It’s a rich, dark, deep drama, intense with secrets and emotional traumas, atmospheric in setting, crushingly apt in storyline, and damn if I haven’t just found a new author to love. Like one of my other favorite reads so far this year, Julia Phillips’ Disappearing Earth, Long Bright River holds in its fierce wordfist the story of women exploited by culture and politics. It is about the forgotten and those we turn away from: the addicts and sex workers, strung out by poverty and slamming doors. Standard crime noir plot, but this is far from standard storytelling, this is a multidimensional and heartbreaking examination of a national epidemic and an intimate portrait of a family in crisis.
Mink River shimmers in the moonlight glow of lore and possibility, in a place that seems to be on the very edge of the world, of reality, even, sometimes, of hope. Doyle presents a hardscrabble logging and fishing village slumping off Oregon’s Coastal Range into the Pacific Ocean. It is a wet and whispery place, settled thousands of years ago by indigenous tribes who knew Paradise when it filled their bellies and souls. Now, remnants of those tribes still live in the fictional town of Neawanaka, carving stories into wood, into their children, into the forests and creatures which stand watch over its myriad inhabitants.
Oh, this beautiful, heartbreaking, astonishing book. There are not superlatives adequate in quality or quantity that do justice to a work of art that both opens the mind and fills the heart. Inspired by the real-life friendship between a Palestinian, Bassam Aramin, and an Israeli, Rami Elhanan, Apeirogon is a shimmering study of love and war. Each man lost a beloved daughter in the conflict that has torn apart this region since 1948. Smadar Elhanan was thirteen in 1997 when a suicide bomber carried out his mission as the teenager was out shopping with friends; ten years later, Abir Aramin was shot in the back of the head by a teenaged member of the Israeli army. Abir was ten years old.
“We move through this world so lightly,” remarks a character in The Glass Hotel after she and her husband lose their life savings in a Ponzi scheme and are forced to take to the road, working seasonal jobs and living in an RV. This novel is about that lightness, that unbearable lightness of being, how we are barely, if ever, rooted in place. We revolve around the suns of chance, choice and circumstance and a shift of any, at any given moment, alters our worlds like that proverbial flap of a butterfly’s wings.
My head and heart are so full. I wouldn’t know where to begin writing a review. This is an extraordinary, necessary, vital book that is not just the history of racist ideas in America, it is the history of America. I read a library copy, but have since ordered my own. The references alone are gold, but Kendi’s comprehensive, thoughtful, lucid narration of American history is breathtaking. Be prepared to be enraged and enraptured. Please read this.
Greenwood is an epic saga that touches down in 1908, 1934, 1974 and 2008, before circling back to 2038. Christie’s sprawling storylines are centered on a few key characters and because we come to know these characters so well, the cross-sections are easy to follow. Not just easy — exhilarating. Despite the book’s length and density, Greenwood maintains a thriller’s pace, while not sacrificing depth of character or beauty of language. This is first-rate fiction: immersive, relevant and inspired. Highly recommended.
Proof writ large that a novel does not need to zap with plot twists or zing with Big Moments to be unputdownable. No exotic locales or dazzling characters, just the comfort of broken-in-blue-jeans characters that made me hug this book to my chest and sigh in the rapture of delicious, delightful storytelling.
This is a novel about longing. About knowing what you what- in Casey’s case, to be a writer, to be content with love, to have her mother back – and trying to make peace with what is left to you. It is also about agony of writing, how very hard and solitary it is, and how very pointless it feels to writers in their darkest and loneliest hours. And yet Lily King makes it seem effortless. This novel flows like a river, gentle and full in places, rushing, gushing, breathtaking in others, a collection of precise details, rich characters and beautiful, true moments that coalesce into a sublime whole. Surrender to this generous, loving, wry, compassionate novel knowing you are in the hands of a master.
I haven’t had a chance to write reviews of the two novels below, both historical fiction, by two of my favorite authors. Jess Walter writes of Spokane in the early 20th century- a rollicking tale of brotherhood and the labor movement in an up-and-coming frontier city. Emma Donoghue takes us to Dublin in 1918- three days in a maternity ward in a city ravaged by the flu pandemic-timely and tender. These are tales based on historical fact but graced with damn good storytelling. Add them to your list!
Tonight, on this most sacred date of the year — the Winter Solstice — a most extraordinary event will occur. For the first time since March 5, 1226, the alignment of Jupiter and Saturn will be visible here on Earth (erm, if your day’s forecast is 100% chance of rain like ours, YMMV). This so-called Great Conjunction, also known as the Christmas Star, is an exceedingly rare astronomical event and that’s just straight-up groovy. But it’s the astrological potential I’m hanging my hat on.
I’ve written many a post here about the significance of the Winter Solstice to my creative and spiritual life. It is a moment to acknowledge the grace and beauty of the dark and the silence, to draw in and be still. Solstice is a listening time. It is a promise, for that which lies fallow and rests will be ready to burst forth as the earth tilts toward spring.
The celestial summit meeting tonight between Jupiter and Saturn heralds radical change, radical positive change, a literal Age of Aquarius, according to those who look to the heavens to interpret the world. I’m too much of an INTJ to throw my lot whole-in with the stargazers, but I’m also a creature of intuition, a spiritual being who is willing to listen, learn, and occasionally trust a Higher Power without being all that concerned about the HP’s derivation.
Jupiter is said to be the planet of optimism, expansion, healing, growth, and miracles; Saturn, conversely, is associated with restriction, responsibility, and long-term lessons. When these energies combine, we can expect a major ideological reset
Prepare Yourself: A ‘Great Conjunction’ Is Coming By Amanda Arnold New York Magazine, December 18, 2020
Here we are, at the end of this worst hard time, this absolute bowfing,blighted, bolloxed collection of 12 months, and yes, I am so very ready to embrace a major ideological reset.
On a personal level, it’s already underway. After daysweeks months of agonized decision-making, working through fear, self-doubt, anger and sadness, I have resigned from my day job. The deep fear of losing a steady paycheck and health insurance was finally subsumed by the even deeper fear of losing myself. I have accepted a part-time, contract position that will keep some income coming in. I will be able to accept more freelance editing work. The presidential election gave me hope that not only will Washington state’s robust health insurance program not be abolished, it may grow stronger (hashtag healthcareforall hashtag singlepayerhealthcare).
I can hang on with part-time work, my savings, and what freelance work I can cobble together for about six months- the time I’ve allowed to finish revisions of The Deep Coil and get a solid draft to my agent. I reclaim my time, creative energy, my belief in my ability to reinvent myself as I leap with a barely-strung together net below. I’m so scared. Here I go.
The past week, since I hit “Send” on that resignation letter, has been awful. Blow after blow of circumstances converging in a six-day hellspan that has left me weeping with overwhelm, doubting my decisions, exhausted by insomnia and bracing for the next catastrophe. It’s as though Saturn steamrolled right over me, with its restrictions, responsibilities, and painful long-term lessons.
But today begins a return to the light. A casting off of this year and a turning toward what is to come, in hope and vision. I have to believe that my personal tipping point is part of a larger convergence of determined, hopeful minds, with two planets of majesty and wonder pulling us in their powerful current.
I’m so scared. Here I go.
Each that we lose takes part of us; A crescent still abides, Which like the moon, some turbid night, Is summoned by the tides.
Desiderata (things desired): An monthly occasional review of books recently read.
My sweetheart and I have a running disagreement regarding autumn’s arrival: he’s holding to the Autumn Equinox, which falls on September 22 this year; I claim September 1, meteorological first day of fall. I know it when I feel it, in the certain cast of light, the dewy mornings, the urge to nest. We stacked cords of wood this weekend, long-burning madrone and alder, some snap-crackling cedar and fir.
Usually, I mourn the end of summer—they are enviably beautiful, warm, and bright in this land of no humidity or high temps—but this year I am craving the peace that comes with long nights of rain and cool, shadowy days.
My summer reading—since my last book review post on July 8—has been outstanding but darn intense. Luck of the draw: my library holds list came in heavy on historical non-fiction, social justice and investigative reporting and dark, dense novels. I’m ready for lighter fare! But what’s below is the best of the bunch of these past couple of months. Let me know if you cross paths with any of these books, and what you think.
Inspired by the real-life friendship between a Palestinian, Bassam Aramin, and an Israeli, Rami Elhanan, Apeirogon is a shimmering study of love and war. Each man lost a beloved daughter in the conflict that has torn apart this region since 1948. Smadar Elhanan was thirteen in 1997 when a suicide bomber carried out his mission as the teenager was out shopping with friends; ten years later, Abir Aramin was shot in the back of the head by a teenaged member of the Israeli army. Abir was ten years old. The fathers meet in a bereavement group that seeks peace through unity of opposing sides. Bassam, who had spent seven years in an Israeli prison, goes on to achieve a Masters degree in Holocaust Studies; Rami sets aside his apathy and comfortable life to become a leading Jewish voice advocating for the end of Israeli Occupation of the West Bank.
Written in reverent, hushed tones that echo like voices in an empty cathedral, The Bear is a tale of the last two humans on earth.
An unexplained catastrophe has ended the dominion of human, and the earth has reverted to the quiet brutality of weather and seasons and creatures. A father and daughter grow older in their stronghold beneath The Bear, the eponymous mountain of the title, the man teaching the girl survival skills and an appreciation of the poetry of Wendell Berry from the few books that remain in their cabin. The father and daughter leave their home one summer just as the girl enters adolescence, making for the sea where they can harvest salt. Disaster strikes and the girl must carry on alone.
What begins as a dystopian fairy tale carries on as magical realism, in a world where bears talk and mountain lions wrestle with moral dilemmas. The novella takes on a dream-like quality as the girl drifts from desperation and depression into quiet resolution. She derives comfort and wisdom from her carnivore companions, making her way home to bury her father beside her mother, growing old in the shadow of The Bear.
“We move through this world so lightly,” remarks a character in The Glass Hotel after she and her husband lose their life savings in a Ponzi scheme and are forced to take to the road, working seasonal jobs and living in an RV.
This novel is about that lightness, that unbearable lightness of being, how we are barely, if ever, rooted in place. We revolve around the suns of chance, choice and circumstance and a shift of any, at any given moment, alters our worlds like that proverbial flap of a butterfly’s wings. To write much more about the goings-on of this rich and rewarding narrative would be to spoil its plot, but be prepared to take a deep dive into the shady world of late 2000’s financial shenanigans, inspired by the most infamous Ponzi schemer of them all: Bernie Madoff; you will become acquainted with maximum security prison, the shipping industry, life as a line cook on a freighter, and what it’s like to have so much money at your disposal, you are bored. The Glass Hotel is a breathtaking adventure, thoughtful and immersive with gorgeously rendered prose and landscapes.
My head and heart are so full. I wouldn’t know where to begin writing a review. This is an extraordinary, necessary, vital book that is not just the history of racist ideas in America, it is the history of America. I read a library copy, but have since ordered my own. The references alone are gold, but Kendi’s comprehensive, thoughtful, lucid narration of American history is breathtaking. Be prepared to be enraged and enraptured. Please read this.
This outstanding biography of the most amazing Virginia Hall is more riveting than any well-crafted fictional thriller. Because history is written by men for their own glorification, Virginia’s story was largely buried in the annals of military legend and lore. Her extraordinary life and what she accomplished in France during World War II is pieced together in meticulous detail by Sonia Purnell, who balances cold fact with brilliant storytelling, bringing Virginia to three-dimensional, vibrant life.
The Highway of Tears is a 735 kilometer stretch of lonely road between the coastal town of Prince Rupert and Prince George, in British Columbia’s sparsely populated northeast, where countless numbers of women and girls have been found murdered or have simply vanished. The overwhelming majority of these victims is Indigenous.
Investigative journalist Jessica McDiarmid lays out the evidence to implicate Canadian settler history and contemporary Canadian political, legal and cultural structures in the deaths and disappearances of Indigenous women. Interspersing the stories of several of these young women and their families with the many, failed attempts over the years to investigate the disappearances and deaths — some half-hearted to the point of not even mattering, to serious, concerted multi-jurisdictional efforts — McDiarmid humanizes the statistics and makes the crisis immediate and infuriating.
Claudia’s husband has just left her for her younger, lusher, more exuberant sister. This profound betrayal sitting heavily on her thin shoulders, Claudia bolts from suburban Seattle to the edge of the contiguous United States: Neah Bay, on the Pacific Ocean side of the Olympic Peninsula, and the Makah tribal lands where she has been conducting anthropological research.
Peter, a native son, left the Makah reservation over twenty years earlier and travelled the world as an underwater welder. One recent day, while welding a bridge support, Peter — hungover, deeply depressed — shits the inside of his wetsuit when he is frightened by a giant wolf eel rising from the murky depths of the Puget Sound. He thinks the sea monster is the ghost of his father, who bled to death on the kitchen floor, his murder never solved. Peter abandons his job and returns to Neah Bay, where his now-elderly mother wanders the highway, in search of the memories she is losing to dementia.
These two troubled, searching souls collide like tectonic plates, all friction and desire, anger and appetite, upsetting the fragile balance of this community struggling to hold onto its stories and traditions that have been exploited, appropriated, and misunderstood.
The first one was waiting in the kitchen, pre-dawn. The cats ran down the hall ahead of me, their wriggly, wiry little bodies ever-joyful to start a new day. Little Kitty and Petey dropped to their bellies and began batting the thing back and forth, like some feline version of air hockey. Without my glasses, the creature was a blur, but I managed to scoop her up in an empty Bonne Maman jam jar and escort her to the safety of a patio lavender plant.
I’m afraid I wasn’t as benevolent a few days later when I came upon another lounging in relative ease behind a sofa throw pillow. The vacuum hose was already in hand, the motor drowning out the “Fuck Me” I let loose in startled horror. I emptied the canister, full of cat hair and sand, into the compost. I’m sure she’s fine.
And then the next day, I turned around in the shower to wait out the requisite one minute of conditioner soak-in and encountered one the size of a small island nation nestled in a fold of the shower curtain. Cue Psycho‘s mad violins. I couldn’t be bothered to rinse or even turn off the faucet. I stepped dripping into the hallway, saying in my most calm, stern, General-at-Battle voice, “Andrew. I need you to come here immediately.” I disavow all knowledge of what happened next. Really, I’m trying to put the entire horror show behind me.
Yes. It’s Spider Season. You may have noticed how the light has changed in recent days, deepening into its late summer denim blue and burnished gold. Summer delivered her hottest days over the weekend, but early mornings hold a freshness that has me reaching for my favorite, stretched-out-beyond-hope cardi-hoodie.
Another season is passing into the next. When I look back at my journal of two seasons ago, mid-March, I read with wistful melancholy my assumption that by late June, summer, this would be behind us. This is now nearly nine months old, if I count back to that January day when I was asked at the clinic’s reception if I’d traveled to China in the past two weeks.
I’m taking a precious few days off, the first day job PTO in over a year.
I’m not going anywhere. Oh, believe me. I’d love to. I haven’t been more than 50 miles from home since last fall. I dream of road trips, of numbing flights. I dream of Ireland, Iceland, Iberia. But now is not the time, not for me. I will remain close, tend to my garden. To my sweetheart.
Last June I rented an AirBnB and hid away, alone, to accrue some serious word mileage on my novel. I thought by the same time next year, I’d have a polished draft in to my agent.
Just like I thought all of this would be behind us by now.
Didn’t happen.
But I do have a novel in revision. And days of peace to do the work.
Why yes. That is a glass of rosé in a jam jar, on my desk.
Yesterday, after three 10-hour butt-in-chair days, I finished Draft 4, Revision 3 of The Deep Coil (as a point of reference, by the time my novels reach the bookstore shelf, they’ve been through upwards of 30 revisions. Not sure why I think any of this is anything other than complete madness.)
If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know I’m not much of an outliner or plotter — completely counter to my Virgo tendencies in most other aspects of life. I write from character and trust the plot will catch up. This current revision was to bring those two elements into alignment, a structural revision to weave the heart (the internal journey, my protagonist’s arc) and the head (the external conflicts, aka, the plot) together into the web of story.
Art is fire plus algebra – Jorge Luis Borges
Although I’m a pantser, I’m a big believer that we’re hard-wired for story, that, as Lisa Cron states in her fantastic 2012 book, Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence: “there is an implicit framework that must underlie a story in order for that passion, that fire, to ignite the reader’s brain. Stories without it go unread, stories with it are capable of knocking the socks off someone who’s barefoot.”
In the revision just completed, I searched for that implicit framework, the inevitability of my protagonist’s actions and reactions based on who she is, how her past has shaped her belief systems, and what she believes she wants at the point we meet her, and how that, and she, change through the course of the story.
Even though the revision revealed structural weaknesses, ankle-snapping plot holes, and myriad scenes to be written, the story’s foundation is there, solid and sound and ready to be built upon.
I woke to the sound of rain this morning, blessed, cool, healing rain. On this autumnal teaser of a day I set aside triumph at the completion of another revision and turn to Page One, Chapter One, to begin Draft 5, Revision 4.
Desiderata (things desired): An monthly occasional review of books recently read
On March 12, I collected a short stack of books — four novels and a memoir — from my holds queue at the library. The next morning, Friday the 13th, I heard the announcement: the library was shutting its doors due the pandemic. I felt my first real shiver of fear. The libraries are closing . . . all is lost.
Verdict still out on the all is lost possibility, but 104 days after that sinking feeling, I pulled into the parking lot of the library and a begloved, bemasked and beaming — I could see it in her eyes — librarian delivered another, much taller, stack of books to the backseat of my car. The library is still closed to browsing, but in late June, after checking in 26,000 volumes that had been out during the months that even returns weren’t accepted, it began offering curbside delivery. Those of us who cannot abide e-readers wept literal, literary tears.
A special shout-out of love and gratitude to librarians, here and everywhere. You do angels’ work. Thank you.
That stack of five lasted longer than I would have anticipated. By late March, I found it hard to focus on anything (the move had a lot to do with that) and early April pandemic anxiety snatched my attention span. But I eventually prised it back and settled down. Once I’d depleted the library books, I got by with a little help from my friends, who loaned out some treasures. I turned to my own shelves, reading a handful I’d just never made time for, and re-reading a few favorites that brought comfort (Jane Austen, JK Rowling) and a gasp of (re)discovery (Colm Tóibín, Kate Atkinson, poetry from Sam Green and Sharon Olds). All told, I read twenty books during the pandemic closure of the library.
Here are the best of the bunch, presented as snippets of my longer reviews:
Long Bright River is stunning. Billed as a thriller, it transcends genres. The author’s keen empathy for and understanding of her characters and their Philadelphia neighborhood elevate this novel to a multidimensional and heartbreaking examination of a national epidemic and an intimate portrait of a family in crisis. It’s a rich, dark, deep drama, intense with secrets and emotional traumas, atmospheric in setting, crushingly apt in storyline, and damn if I haven’t just found a new author to love.
The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín The Blackwater Lightship was my introduction to the work of Colm Tóibín, nearly twenty years ago. I’ve held onto this book since first reading it in 2002, through moves local and trans-Pacific when hundreds of other books were given away, knowing it was too special to me as a reader, and eventually a writer, to let go. After all these years, I was left with only vague memories of awe and sadness, poignancy and softness.
What a book to read now. How prophetic, sublime, and sad. Set in the early 1990’s, The Blackwater Lightship takes place over a few days at a remote seaside home outside Wexford, Ireland. Helen Breen, her estranged mother, Lily, and her grandmother set aside their hurts and complications to welcome Helen’s beloved brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS. It is timeless in its examination of families, how they can hurt and heal, of an Ireland that exists today no matter how modern and fast it soared. Tóibín writes with such grace and tenderness. His quiets are all the more powerful and resonant for what he leaves out, and trusts the reader to intuit on her own.
Oh, this was glorious. Raw, vulnerable, sweet, tender. The simple facts of a sad and wonderful life presented in the most humble and matter-of-fact manner that is both heartbreaking and endearing. Janet Frame, born in rural New Zealand just before the Great Depression, was raised in a family that barely held poverty at bay; a working class Dad and a worked-to-bone Mum who wrote poetry in the spare seconds of her day. There were times of great joy and times of unimaginable grief. Janet, an unattractive kid with a bristle of red hair and a mouth full of rotten teeth, shy and preternaturally smart, made it through college and was in training to become a teacher when she attempted suicide. She was sent to a mental hospital, diagnosed as schizophrenic, and received – in eight years of incarceration – over 200 electroshock treatments.
An Angel at My Table, originally published as three separate volumes, travels through Janet’s childhood, young adulthood, and blossoming as a writer. I wrapped my arms around this book and cried when it ended. It will remain one of the defining points of my pandemic experience, that strange and beautiful time I read Janet Frame’s autobiography and felt closer to myself, and the world, as a result.
Mink River shimmers in the moonlight glow of lore and possibility, in a place that seems to be on the very edge of the world, of reality, even, sometimes, of hope. Doyle presents a hardscrabble logging and fishing village slumping off Oregon’s Coastal Range into the Pacific Ocean. It is a wet and whispery place, settled thousands of years ago by indigenous tribes who knew Paradise when it filled their bellies and souls. Now, remnants of those tribes still live in the fictional town of Neawanaka, carving stories into wood, into their children, into the forests and creatures which stand watch over its myriad inhabitants.
There. I’ll be back on the regular with more reviews. Several treasures to share from those I received a couple of weeks ago. At the moment, I’m reading The End of October by Lawrence Wright. Published in April of this year, it “imagines a global pandemic in which an unfamiliar virus works its way around the world, leaving economic meltdown, conspiracy theories, and mass death in its wake.” from Sophie Gilbert’s review in The Atlantic, May 13, 2020. It’s a clunky but addictive medical thriller that is creepily prescient. Wright is a staff writer at The New Yorker and better known for his creative non-fiction books. The facts about viruses and past pandemics he presents in rambling expository dialogue are oddly comforting at a time when facts are so hard to come by. We will get through this thing. I hope.
I’ve written a dozen blog posts in my mind since March. I’ve even started a few of them here, half-paragraphs, lists, an attempt to chronicle and catalogue this strange, and strangely beautiful, time.
Nothing stuck. I couldn’t hold onto a theme long enough to see it through before something else snapped my attention away. Fatigue, busyness, depression, procrastination, even just sitting in silence, letting the now wash over me in wonder and despair, have all occupied the spaces where words might have gone.
Suddenly, mid-June. Nearly three months ago Andrew and I moved into our home, the yard a patchwork of bedraggled weeds and barren sand, the side lot a bramble of blackberry and massive Doug fir stumps, left after a previous owner hacked down the regal beauties to sell for firewood.
A cool, wet, late spring = jungle greens, and so many flowers nigh on bursting open with color
We are nested in, now surrounded by lush greens and expanding bursts of color. Fiery orange nasturtium, indomitable yellow calendula, feverfew daisies, so white and small, petunia’s deep magentas and purples, the English garden romance of lavatera and penstemon pinks and burgundies — and these are just the early bloomers after a cool May and a soaking start to June. In a few week’s time, we will be tasked with a daily vegetable harvest. The field of vicious blackberry that covered our side lot has been plowed under, the stumps pushed to the side thanks to a one-day Bobcat rental. In their place are mounds of amended soil covered in 2-foot high clover and buckwheat to welcome back the bees and butterflies, a pile of biochar that smoldered for two weeks, and a pétanque court. Yes. We have our own pétanque court.
Inside we have feathered another sort of nest that is both full of light and cozy, with nooks to escape with a book, a guitar, a laptop, a yoga mat, a purring cat and a cup of tea. Speaking of cats, we added a third to our wee family: Agatha, lately of the streets of Cabo, Mexico. She made the trek north in a caravan with her rambunctious litter of six, just a week after hernia surgery. Her kittens have found other homes; we took Mama, who at 18 months is barely more than a kitten herself. She’s attached to me, and the affection goes a long way toward filling the hole that Camille’s death left two years ago.
Miss Agatha, at rest
Our move, the day before the Governor’s Stay Home, Stay Healthy orders went into effect late March, could not have come at a better moment. Andrew was able to pour all his anxiety and empty hours — after his March and April painting jobs cancelled — into creating our beautiful, and imminently sustaining, gardens; I have found solace and comfort in a sweet space full of love and joyful energy. Coming home is a becoming.
I hold these gifts in gratitude and reverence. This space that is nestled in green, looked over by the cedar and maple and Doug fir that tower just over the backyard fence, whispering their ancient magic. For there has also been so much anxiety and anger. Nights when I begin to weep as soon as I lay my head on a pillow. For no reason, other than for the whole world. For the fear, the masks, the violence, the knee-jerks and real jerks, the distancing, the confusion, all the voices silenced, whether for four hundred years or since yesterday; those who will never recover from the pandemic lockdown, and the generations of BIPOC men and women locked in systemic injustice.
A Room of Her Own: my writing studio, and lately, my office away from the office
I write in fits and starts. I taught a weekly writing workshop via ZOOM for five Thursdays in April, and was smart enough to include myself in the participant roster. We wrote 300-max-word stories each week. I submitted one of my stories for publication, another I am working into a larger narrative for submission to an anthology of women writing about climate change. The Deep Coil is still with me: I edit a few pages a week. I crave time away, just a week, to do the deep dive it needs, but that is at least two months off. It is not the time to take a vacation, even though I am desperate for a break. I am one of the fortunate who is still clocking in and I am in the thick of writing my first federal grant proposal. Until I hit “Submit” in mid-August, I am chained to 9-5, or whatever it is these days with the blurred boundaries of working from home, Zooming with colleagues, workingworkingworking, all of us, for fear that if we stop, we will lose everything.
I miss my friends. I miss my family, though half of us aren’t speaking anymore because right left, backwards sideways. I no longer really know why. I deactivated my Facebook account in fury over my community’s obsessive fears of tourists invading our sheltered space, bringing their disease with them, when it seemed that more important issues were at hand, i.e. one in four Washingtonians now going hungry, a man lynched, his murder finally coming to light. Hours after I resigned from Facebook in disgust, George Floyd became another Black man whose life was ended by law enforcement.
After days and days of rain, suddenly the sun. Little Kitty- we can’t seem to remember to call her Agatha – is clapping her paws at bees in the lavender, the others are sun-drunk on the back patio. It feels good to be here with you. How are you? Share your world with me. Let’s be fully present in this, The Only Time We Have.
*Inspiration from poet Samuel Green, whose collection The Grace of Necessity I reread during this time of shelter-at-home
Desiderata (things desired): A monthly review of books recently read
My reading life took a hit in February. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I have teetered between the joy of buying a house and the anxiety of strange and still-unexplained health issues. My attention span is in tatters. And now we are all facing massive anxiety. The world seems have turned upside-down. I believe we will get to the other side of this worst hard time, but right now, in the face of school and restaurant closures, of store shortages and hospital overloads, it feels dire. Let’s all breathe and move more gently in the coming weeks. May you find comfort and refuge with family, loved ones, nesting in your home. Go for a long walk in this hemisphere awakening to spring. Cook some soul and body nourishing food. And allow a good book take you away for just a little while.
The worst hard time had befallen South Carolina long before the Depression sank the rest of the nation. In the years following a boll weevil infestation which decimated the cotton industry, the town of Branchville is barely hanging on, even as its secrets rise like the eyes of an alligator surfacing from the depths of a murky swamp.
Deb Spera paints a vivid picture of the rural South in the early 1920’s – the bleak existence, Jim Crow segregation and racism, the plight of women controlled by amoral men. Call Your Daughter Home alternates its first-person perspective between Gert, a young mother of four daughters who frees herself from the tyranny of an abusive husband but is still prisoner to grinding poverty; Retta, a Black housekeeper who mourns the death of a beloved only child; and Annie, the wife of a plantation owner and mother to four children, two of whom are estranged- her daughters- for a crime that she did not commit, but for which the girls still hold her responsible.
The novel is both a mesmerizing work of historical fiction, deeply rooted in time and place, and of literary suspense. Tension and dread flow thick and dark through the story as the reader wonders if Gert will be called to reckoning for her crime and if Annie will seek justice for the wrongs committed to her, and others’, children. Gothic melodrama overlays much of the book’s final third, as acts of God, epidemics, and shocking revelations merge into a breathless denouement, but the strength of the characters and their intertwined relationships hold the reader’s emotional attention.
To know me is to know that I am fascinated by the history of Europe in the Middle Ages, I love long-distance walking, I have written a novel about the Catholic Church’s crusade to rid France of the Cathars, and my bucket list is full of pilgrimages, even though I’m not, nor will ever be, Catholic.
So I couldn’t wait to curl up with Timothy Egan’s A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith, not only because of its setting and subject matter, but the author himself. A personal hero, one my Pacific Northwest compatriots, whose narrative nonfiction ranks among my favorites.
The author takes on the 1,200 mile Via Francigena, a medieval route between Canterbury and Rome, to contemplate the Catholic faith, search for meaning in its history, and come to terms with his own ambivalence. Egan was raised in a large Irish Catholic family in Spokane, home to the Jesuit university, Gonzaga. His mother was a vibrant, selfless, would-be artist who traded her own ambitions to raise a family and be a wife-mother to a taciturn salesman. He is a self-professed skeptic and abandoned his faith in the face of the Catholic church’s and God’s many failings, “You can see why people shun a supposedly benevolent creator who presided over the slaughter of the Wars of Religion, the African slave trade, the butchery of the Great War, Stalin’s mass executions, genocide in Germany and Uganda and Cambodia.” But Egan is hoping to reconnect with some manner of spirituality. His sister-in-law is dying of cancer, and he’s getting to the age when one’s mortality begs the question of an afterlife.
A Pilgrimage to Eternity is a humane, funny, gentle and engaging travelogue, a glimpse into the fraught and fascinating history of Catholicism and Christianity which is in many ways the history of Western Europe. Egan pulls no punches when detailing the broken promises and travesties of the Church, either historical or contemporary, including a harrowing episode of a predatory priest in Spokane, but he remains unabashedly admiring of Pope Francis and eagerly hopes for an audience with the pontiff at the end of his journey, using his connections as a journalist to reach out to the Vatican.
It’s not clear what inner demons he calmed during his long walk to the seat of the Catholic Church; this books is less about Egan’s spiritual journey than his physical and cultural one. It made me long to lace up my boots and strap on my pack, recalling the mind-emptying meditative bliss of my own long foot journeys through Ireland, and the peace I found in walking. I now add the Via Francigena to the long list of pilgrimages throughout Europe I will take in the years to come. Glad to learn the trick about taping heels (and toes- oh, that was so painful to read!).
A lovely travel narrative by one of my favorite non-fiction writers and journalists.
I feel sorry for the next book I pick up. When I love a read as much as Inland, the subsequent story or two usually pales unfairly in the afterglow.
This is a work of historical fiction, a panoramic western in the great tradition of Cather, McCarthy and Portis, but author Téa Obreht is too skilled a writer to be confined by expectations and conventions of genre. She writes with such urgency and empathy, with wonder for her story and compassion for her characters, that this reader was simply swept away in the moment, carried on the current of a brilliant narrative through a parched land where drops of water are as precious as flakes of gold. I think of recent historical fiction by the outstanding William Kent Kruger and Mary Doria Russell, and those novels now seem plodding and clunky compared to the ethereal grace of Obrecht’s Inland.
Two stories unfold, one expanding over four decades, the other in a span of hours, until they come together in the novel’s final, gutting pages that left me sobbing the smallest hours of the morning. Lurie, an immigrant and wanted man, hustles west from an Eastern seaport where he landed from Bosnia as a boy. He attaches himself to bands of itinerants and outlaws, trying to outrun his own WANTED poster. He finds himself astride a camel, imported as pack animals by the Army which supposed the beasts well suited to the desert west of the Arizona Territory. His compatriots hail from Greece, Turkey, and the ancient cultures of the Levant, places we don’t typically associate with the settlement of the American West. Lurie spins out his long tale to his beloved companion, the stalwart camel, Burke.
Her throat aching with thirst, Nora Lark homesteads with her husband, Emmett, and three sons in “a little mining district between Phoenix and Flagstaff.” Emmett is three days late returning with their water supply and the morning after a heated argument with Nora, the two older Lark sons disappear in search of their father. Nora is left on the forlorn property with fragile seven-year-old Toby, stroke-addled Grandma, and her husband’s scatterbrained young cousin, Josie, who claims to commune with the spirit world. Nora maintains a heartrending patter with her daughter, Evelyn, who died of heatstroke as an infant, but in conversation is a sophisticated and articulate foil to the cruel, unforgiving land that her family survives in. Nora carries a slow-burning torch for Sheriff Harlan Bell, with whom she has a shadowy unrequited love that is full of longing and empathy. Their few scenes together are full of aching desire, their loneliness epitomizing the beautiful, terrible landscape that shifts between silence and violence in a heartbeat.
Obreht creates a breathless tension as Lurie’s and Nora’s stories track toward collision. The desiccated land is haunted with ghosts, menaced by drought and starvation, riders appearing on the horizon are unknown as friend or foe until they reach shotgun distance. And yet the cast of characters retains an enchanting humanity with Nora, tough, broken, resolute and loving, the greatest among them.
It’s been eight years since Téa Obreht’s celebrated debut The Tiger’s Wife, which I lauded for its beautiful prose, but lamented the lack of connection to character and the overwrought fabulism. Inland is the work of an author deeply in touch with her rich cast, allowing them agency in this exquisitely rendered story. I didn’t expect to love Inland as much as I did, given the low rating here. I’m so very glad I ignored the naysayers to discover this unusual, luminous novel.
“Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the stories of deepest horror are perhaps those for which there are no numbers, no maps, no possible accountability, no words ever written or spoken, And perhaps the only way to grant any justice—were that even possible— is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again, so that they come back, always to haunt and shame us. Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.”
In the spring of 2015, Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli, while her own immigration status was under review, began working as a Spanish-language interpreter for the New York immigration court. Her task was to conduct a forty question interview of children who had arrived in the United States illegally, crossing the US-Mexico border. Nearly all of these children had fled their home countries of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico to escape crime, poverty, abuse, making the perilous crossing with paid coyotes, risking rape, enslavement, and the desert elements. Once in the United States, they are at the mercy of ICE and the civil court system.
This slim books recounts the ways in which children responded to the questions posed by Luiselli during the court intake interview and the contemporary history of the immigration crisis in America, which has become a veritable shitstorm under the Trump Administration, aided and abetted by all previous administrations, and of course, the United States’s decades-long meddling in every aspect of Central America’s affairs, leaving a bloody and intractable mess in their wake.
This book came to my attention in the long list of What to Read Instead of American Dirt, and as a study guide/precursor to Luiselli’s recent novel Lost Children Archive which Forty Questions inspired. Please read.
The Jan/Feb 2020 issue of Poets & Writers contains an excellent essay by playwright and poet Sarah Ruhl on many of the reasons why writers aren’t writing when they could or should be. In Writer’s Block: Variations on a Superstition, Ruhl describes sixteen categories of writer’s avoidance.Instances from the basic general sloth and distracted by the modern world to the searing abandoning a piece of writing that is not meant to be written. I saw myself in nearly every one of Ruhl’s categories, taking comfort in the universality of my reasons excuses.
After finishing the first complete draft in THE DEEP COIL just before Thanksgiving, I’d intended to let it sit for a few weeks before digging into revisions. I almost couldn’t wait. In early December I had two brainpicking sessions that made my fingers twitch with excitement to return to the page. Over beers at the Pourhouse, I talked big league crime in small town America with a writing buddy and a former county sheriff. Then came a long phone conversation with a former Seattle homicide detective. This retired detective volunteers to solve local cold cases along with a few other former law enforcement officials who just can’t let the job go. I shared my premise with these good men, and they shared many of their experiences with me, steered me toward some agencies I needed to research, suggested awesome plot points, and generally made me feel my crime story, protagonist, and sub-plots were not only plausible, they were authentic and full of potential. Writer’s Gold.
And then stuff happened.
My sweetie’s back-of-envelope landscaping plans.
Of course, stuff is always happening to distract us from our work. Some writers fear the blank page; others, like me, stand at the bottom of the Mountain of Revision, dreading the Sisyphean task ahead. At the end of my walking away from the canvas — as Sarah Ruhl terms the period when we break from a work that we are too close to — I made an offer on a house. This is a joyful thing, as I was certain that being a single woman in her 50s, broke in that postmodern feminist way of being broke after an amicable divorce, working at an arts non-profit in a community where the median home price is well north of $400k, home ownership was right up there with new car smell: things I would never experience again. Joyful, but terribly distracting, as it suddenly introduced concepts of permanence and commitment to community, job, relationship. It meant stability but also responsibility.
Just as that process entered the phase where nothing can be done but wait (for the holidays to be over so everyone is available to sign endless documents, for agreed-upon repairs to be completed, for the appraisal, for the lender to put urgency behind the oars as it navigates the shipping lanes of bureaucracy), the pain started.
January saw me in Urgent Care twice, visits with specialists and twice to my PCP. Multiple prescriptions and lab tests, an ultrasound, and painful examinations, but very few answers. One of the specialists sat across from me, after mansplaining my reproductive system, and asked, “What is it you want me to do for you?” To which I can reply in all certainty, “Absolutely nothing” as I will not be darkening his door again.
The weeks passed, the pain eased, the fog of worry lifted, and I decided to change THE DEEP COIL from past to present tense. This became my way into revisions, as every single sentence needs to be touched, examined, possibly changed. And yet the humming anxiety remained. I managed only coffee-fueled bursts of editing here and there in the wee hours.
A CT-scan the day before Valentine’s brought only more questions. Wide awake at 3 a.m. questions. I picked out paint colors for my new writing studio. Tried to steer my racing brain from thoughts of “unspecified masses” on my liver and spleen and kidneys to the flower beds I would plant and the pantry I would organize.
Last Monday, I signed a ream of papers and picked up the key. I walked through the empty bowels of a house, my house, my and my sweet man’s home, feeling the same sense of possibility and impossibility as I do when I open a blank page to begin a new story.
The next morning I took a deep breath and squeezed my eyes shut as the technician tucked a blanket around me and slid my prone body into tube of an MRI. I inhaled and exhaled when the disembodied voice told me to and tried to compose a symphony from the mechanical beeps and clangs, whirrs and groans. I tried to love my body even as it seemed to be failing me.
Two days later the test results landed in my in-box with a message from my physician, “Hi Julie, I’m happy to report…”
This morning I am sore and exhausted. My lower back feels like hardened, cracked rubber. My fingers are stiff, my hamstrings ping, even my toes feel used. A weekend of scrubbing, wiping, wringing, bending, stretching, my nose stuffed with odors of fresh paint and Lysol, white vinegar and black coffee. And we haven’t even started packing.
Yesterday I stood in the empty shell of what will be the Room of My Own, arranging in my mind’s eye my desk, sofa, bookshelves, imagining how the view out the window will change as trees are planted and flowers bloom, and I knew that even as my writing sits in Category Seventeen- (i.e. too much life happening- did I mention the promotion/new job?), it won’t stay there forever. It’s okay to let hope and joy blossom of their own accord, and trust the words will follow.
If we are not sometimes baffled and amazed and undone by the world around us, rendered speechless and stunned, perhaps we are not paying close enough attention. – Ben Marcus
Desiderata (things desired): A monthly review of books recently read
January brought me a handful of critically-acclaimed and/or commercially successful 2019 books. This is what happens when you wait not just weeks, but months, for hot titles to wend their way through the library queue to land on the holds shelf, your name printed in bold font on a scrap of paper tucked inside.
January’s biggest news in publishing was the controversy surrounding the debut of American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. I have not read the book (see: library request list), but I weighed in on the controversy all the same. The notion who has permission to tell which stories, the flinging around of the word censorship, the state of the publishing, and a myriad other issues moved me, as a writer and reader, deeply. My post on Goodreads led to some interesting discussion.
As always, clicking on the book cover will take you to my full Goodreads review…
Danny Conroy and his older sister, Maeve, sit in Maeve’s car across the street from their childhood home, watching, waiting, reviving the ghosts of their memories. They catch an occasional glimpse of their stepmother, Andrea, who turned them out of the house soon after their father died, when Danny was in high school and Maeve was in college, but they leave her be. There are deeper wounds than an evil stepmother to contend with, and even though the mansion they spy upon has enormous windows that provide views from front to back, the source of their pain — and their healing — is not visible.
In Russia’s Far East, the Kamchatka Peninsula knifes between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean. It is a 1250km-long blade serrated by volcanic mountains, honed razor-sharp by unrelenting cold, empty tundras, bears, wolves, and a history of violent encounters between Kamchatka’s indigenous people and mainland white Russians eager to plunder its vast natural resources.
Julia Phillips chooses this perilous landscape as the setting for her mesmerizing, fierce debut, Disappearing Earth. The story opens benignly enough, on a warm summer day at the edge of a bay in the territory’s only metropolis, Petropavlovsk. Sisters Alyona and Sophia Golosovskaya, eleven and eight, are left alone to play while their mother writes feel-good propaganda for a post-Soviet state newspaper.
Then a man arrives in an improbably polished black sedan and the little girls are vanished.
What follows is a kaleidoscopic literary thriller that tracks the year following the Golosovskaya sisters’ disappearance, each chapter a shift of perspective of a Kamchatkan woman, reflecting the cultural complexities in this strange and treacherous place.
This is as harrowing and haunting a book I have read since 2009 and Uwem Akpan’s short story collection Say You’re One of Them, set throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Edna O’Brien’s Girl is the nominally fictional horror story of young girls enslaved by Boko Haram, the Islamic terrorist group that still holds sway in northeastern Nigeria.
Vivid and heartbreaking, Between Shades of Gray tells the story of a Lithuanian family disappeared into Siberia in 1941, as Stalin demolished the independent states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Although slotted into the YA genre, this is engrossing reading for adults. Ruth Sepetys combines meticulous research with excellent storytelling to bring history’s forgotten episodes to life. Outstanding historical fiction and a must-read for those with a particular interest in WWII. Highly recommended.
The perfect antidote for the rush and anxiety of modern life and the superficiality of our connectedness, This Is Happiness reminds us of what it means to live fully, deeply, in the present, to experience our environment on its terms, without distraction. Narrated by Noe (short for Noel) Crowe as an old man looking back nearly sixty year to the summer his grandparent’s village of Faha, in Co. Clare, was hooked up to the electrical grid, This Is Happiness is a sumptuous, sublime and softly rendered tale of love, memory, grief and family.
I wrote this in response to another reader’s statement that the criticism of American Dirt amounts to censorship. I find this notion so appalling that I responded with the following, but realized I didn’t need to bomb her feed with my opinion. I could bomb my own 🙂
Oh, as an author, it makes me so sad to see anyone conflate accountability with censorship. This author received a seven-figure advance, a massive marketing campaign, (bolstered ironically by the controversy); this book will be, is, widely read; it’s currently topping a number of best-selling lists, including The New York Times’s. No publishing runs were cancelled, this book is featured prominently in bookstores across the country. Please, please reconsider your take on “censorship”…. Read more….
CHALK the SUN 