UNDER COVER

The City of Big Readers

2010-12-04T10:37:00.000-08:00

I didn't know what to expect when I accepted an invitation to participate in a holiday gathering of the Mayor Daley High School Book Club. Karen Burke, the club coordinator, explained that the book club had been meeting with the mayor for thirteen years, and that this would be the last gathering. I've long been grateful to Mayor Daley for his extraordinary support of reading and public libraries, and I'd been told that he was a big reader, but I was unprepared for his warmth, candor, and caring in conversation with students from Orr Academy High School on Chicago's West Side. The students were also a revelation. So smart, so funny, so sweet in the best sense of the word. Gorgeous, it must be said, and giving. So, too, their radiant and, clearly, loved teacher and school librarian. It was a room full of passion for learning, for sharing, for stories, and for books (students named as their favorites Stephen King and Kurt Vonnegut). And for pizza.

Mayor Daley spoke frankly about how tough life is, how vulnerable we all are, how crucial education is, how essential books are to navigating the world. He sat forward and talked intently about how he struggled in school, how mortifying it was to fail the bar exam twice, with his father as mayor and his heart set on a state's attorney job. Mayor Daley told us about how his grandfather was killed by a drunk driver, a neighbor, just days before Christmas, and how difficult the holiday was forever after for his mother. He spoke with love and sorrow about his son who died before he turned three, and of how much life the young boy possessed. He spoke with pride and relief of his son who has just returned from serving in Afghanistan, and of how we need to bring all the troops home now.

The mayor showed us his office, or rather, his three offices, rooms in descending levels of formality. Rooms filled with the auras of conversations, arguments, thoughts, and emotions, as well as gifts, art, memorabilia, and, most of all, family photographs. And photographs of policemen killed in the line of duty, of teens shot down on the street for no good reason. Every day Mayor Daley studies photographs of these fallen Chicagoans with profound sorrow and concern, renewing his vow to do his best to do right by everyone who calls Chicago home.

But this was a day for celebration. The mayor, smiling and joking, yet always commanding, gamely posed for photographs with each of the Orr students, young women and young men full of desire for meaning and accomplishment, full of creativity and hope. This is what it is to be a mayor of a big complicated city. To feel grief and responsibility, and to mentor the young and promising, and feel joy in their beaming presence.

I cannot thank Karen, the mayor, his staff, and all the Orr Academy students and their teacher and librarian enough for an inspiring and uplifting meeting of the mind and spirit. To talk about books and how books enrich and guide us, to talk about what it means to live life fully and positively, to express gratitude and laugh together, I couldn't have received a greater gift.

A wild and beautiful book

2010-09-19T18:28:00.000-07:00

Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. By David Abram. Pantheon.

How is it that our curious, inventive species has gone from worshipping nature to destroying it? Why did human beings lose appreciation for the great mesh of earthly existence and our place within that intricate and spectacular dance of life-sustaining relationships? A creative and visionary ecologist and philosopher, David Abram offered provocative answers to these complex and urgent questions in his first book, the highly influential Spell of the Sensuous (1996). In his second recalibrating mix of stories, reflections, and discoveries, he offers original and profound insights into the causes of our disparagement of “sensuous reality,” of “bodied existence,” and the horrific consequences of our increasing detachment from the living world, a separation accelerated by the seductiveness of the cyber realm.

Abrams reawakens appreciation for our knowing bodies and minds––our animals selves which evolved to thrive on Earth, in one ravishing passage after another. From encounters with other animals (Abram’s tales of the wild are extraordinary) to an astonishing response to shadows to the many forms of sentience on the planet to an arresting discussion of the significance of oral culture. Not only does Abram write with poetic precision and ethical intent, he also draws on his unusual experiences as a sleight-of-hand magician and his apprenticeship to indigenous shamans as he writes about perception, awareness, and the endless complexity and surprises of the living world with breathtaking insight.

Wonder is an emotion we need more of, Abram believes, and this is a book in which close observation and sustained contemplation of natural wonders inspires an “earthly cosmology” meant to redirect our attention and compassion away from the human-made realm and back to the “enfolding earth.” We can’t “restore” nature, Abram writes, without “restorying” our breathing, spinning, sentient planet, and this enrapturing book is a start, as Becoming Animal reminds us that the sacred is in our every cell and everywhere around us.

Fiction books | The novel still makes an impact - KansasCity.com

2010-09-06T17:33:00.000-07:00

Click here to read about a great harvest of fall fiction:

Fiction books The novel still makes an impact - KansasCity.com

Eight Forty-Eight - Laurence Gonzales Explores Human-Ape Hybrid in New Novel

2010-07-14T14:09:00.000-07:00

I don't read many thrillers, but I couldn't resist this smart interspecies tale and its irresistible hero.

Click here to listen to my interview with the author of LUCY:
Eight Forty-Eight - Laurence Gonzales Explores Human-Ape Hybrid in New Novel

Cold Snap on a hot day

2010-07-03T13:05:00.000-07:00

A review:

BOOKLIST, June 2010

Cold Snap: Bulgaria Stories.By Cynthia Morrison Phoel.2010. 240p. Southern Methodist, $22.50 (9780870745614).

Phoel’s first collection of stories and a novella incisively dramatizes the interlocked lives of the beleaguered denizens of a Bulgarian town. Phoel spent time in Bulgaria as a Peace Corps volunteer, but one gets no sense of an outsider looking in. Instead, she fully inhabits the minds of her jittery characters as they grapple with various forms of family pressure, poverty, and the maddening cold. Young Dobrin’s brow is becoming permanently furrowed as he worries about his overworked mother and cavalier father, as a giant satellite dish funnels a nonstop stream of soccer and porn into their humble and frigid apartment. Galia has been utterly passive, but now that she’s pregnant, mutinous thoughts are brewing. Mathematician Plamen is plagued by self-loathing. In charge of central heating, Nasko is besieged. With the fierce cold serving as a metaphor for the deep social freeze of this long tyrannized land, Phoel is as confident as the great Russian writer Gogol in her acid humor and insightful portrayals of people who “could endure anything,” making for an unusually commanding and affecting debut. —Donna Seaman

A Chicago Public Radio interview:

Eight Forty-Eight - Author Cynthia Morrison Phoel's 'Cold Snap'

Review | ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’ by Jennifer Egan - KansasCity.com

2010-06-27T09:32:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Egan is one smart and electrifying novelist. Here's a review of her latest:
Review ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’ by Jennifer Egan - KansasCity.com

Eight Forty-Eight - Lit Scholar Writes Third Book of Short Stories

2010-06-09T21:58:00.000-07:00

A conversation with the versatile, smart, and funny writer Joseph Epstein:

Eight Forty-Eight - Lit Scholar Writes Third Book of Short Stories

'Discovering Margot Peet' is a portrait of an unsung KC artist - KansasCity.com

2010-05-30T15:25:00.000-07:00

A review in today's Kansas City Star:

'Discovering Margot Peet' is a portrait of an unsung KC artist - KansasCity.com

Eight Forty-Eight - Author's Collection Takes on New Meanings of "Slut"

2010-05-30T15:23:00.000-07:00

Radio!

My latest on Chicago Public Radio, a conversation with Gina Frangello about her story collection, Slut Lullabies:

Eight Forty-Eight - Author's Collection Takes on New Meanings of "Slut"

Living on Earth

2010-03-21T09:38:00.000-07:00

What a thrill to appear once again on this fantastic radio show.
http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=10-P13-00012&segmentID=5

Daily Beast debut

2010-03-06T11:04:00.000-08:00

A Daily Beast article sparked by a new novel about Emily Dickinson.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-01/emily-dickinsons-racy-side/full/

NBCC Awards

2010-01-24T10:26:00.000-08:00

The National Book Critics Circle Awards finalists were announced in New York yesterday. It's an exciting list--see below. Of particular resonance to me are fiction finalist Bonnie Jo Campbell for American Salvage, criticism finalist Eula Biss for Notes from No Man's Land, authobiography finalist Debra Gwartney for Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, biography finalist Benjamin Moser for Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, and nonfiction finalist William T. Vollmann for Imperial.

I'm also elated that the incomparable Joyce Carol Oates received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. And that New Yorker critic Joan Acocella received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, for which I'm thrilled to have been a finalist.

Here's all the information. Kudos and gratitude to the hard-working NBCC board:

Autobiography:
Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End (Norton)
Debra Gwartney, Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Mary Karr, Lit (Harper)
Kati Marton, Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America (Simon & Schuster)
Edmund White, City Boy, Bloomsbury

Biography:
Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (Knopf)
Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (Little, Brown)Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press)
Stanislao G. Pugliese, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin Press)

Criticism:
Eula Biss, Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays (Graywolf Press)Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf Press)
Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (Norton)
David Hajdu, Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (Da Capo Press)
Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (Faber)

Fiction:
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (Riverhead)
Michelle Huneven, Blame (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG)
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Holt)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Knopf)

Nonfiction:
Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin Press)
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books)
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon)
Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remain (Random House)
William T. Vollmann, Imperial (Viking)

Poetry:
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan)
Louise Glück, A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
D.A. Powell, Chronic (Graywolf Press)
Eleanor Ross Taylor, Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008 (Louisiana State University Press)
Rachel Zucker, Museum of Accidents (Wave Books)

Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing: Joan Acocella

Finalists:
Michael Antman
William Deresiewicz
Donna Seaman
Wendy Smith

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award: Joyce Carol Oates

The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974 at the Algonquin, is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization consisting of some 600 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns. It is managed by a 24-member all-volunteer board of directors. For more information, please contact National Book Critics Circle president Jane Ciabattari at janeciab@gmail.com or go to www.bookcritics.org.

Eight Forty-Eight - Exploring the Art of Edgar Miller

2010-01-11T19:27:00.000-08:00

Here's my latest Chicago Public Radio piece. Listen to the fabulously articulate and knowledgeable Richard Cahan and Michael Williams talk about their gorgeous new books, Edgar Miller and the Handmade Home. Here's a link:

Eight Forty-Eight - Exploring the Art of Edgar Miller

Copenhagen Reads

2009-12-06T19:30:00.000-08:00

As leaders and experts assemble in Copenhagen to talk about the overarching issue all earthlings face, our changing climate, I want to share with you two BOOKLIST reviews of two books that provide deep background for this gathering. Hard-hitting books that decry the politics of the crisis, explain the science, and provide plans for a smarter future. Be informed. Ignorance is dangerous.

*Starred Review* Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.By Al Gore. 2009. 415p. illus. Rodale, $26.99 (9781594867347).
First published November 23, 2009 (Booklist Online).

Nobel laureate Gore is dedicated to the most important mission on the planet: educating humankind about the causes and consequences of global warming, and offering solutions to the looming crises implicit in the changes to Earth’s climate and habitability that are already well underway. No one is more qualified than Gore to lead the collective movement beyond fossil fuels, given his command of the science and politics involved, his invaluable global connections and resources, and his sensitivity to our reluctance to face “the magnitude and gravity of the climate crisis.” As he did in An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Gore matches clear and ringing explanations and commentary with superb supporting diagrams and illustrations and striking photographs from around the world, documenting the dramatic impacts of human industry and climate change. He begins by providing the straight facts about the sources of the pollutants causing global warming and the disastrous energy inefficiency of our buildings, vehicles, appliances, and industrialized agriculture. Here, too, is the searing truth about the campaign of climate change denial via disinformation and ridicule orchestrated and paid for by oil and coal corporations. But after spending three years convening “Solution Summits” and assessing the fruits of those productive discussions, Gore’s trajectory is away from blame and despair and towards answers and encouragement. The result is a veritable catalog for a better world. A practical guide to solar, wind, and geothermal power and smart “super grids,” endeavors China is already pursuing. Gore also eloquently explains how the harnessing of renewable energy sources will solve an entire matrix of global traumas. Our Choice is an inviting and momentous compendium of environmental discovery (with 100 percent of its earnings going to the Alliance for Climate Protection) that addresses the greatest threat our species has yet encountered with intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, and faith in human empowerment. This is a book that should be displayed and talked about everywhere. —Donna Seaman

*Starred Review* Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.By James Hansen. 2009. 320p. illus. Bloomsbury, $25 (9781608192007).
First published BOOKLIST, December 1, 2009.

Climatologist Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and an internationally renowned global-warming expert, became even more famous when he was censored by the Bush administration. After decades of studying the role fossil fuels play in global warming and witnessing the federal government’s failure to take action to lower carbon emissions, he felt compelled to write his first book out of concern about the potentially catastrophic future facing his grandchildren. Hansen condemns governmental “greenwashing” and the undue influence of more than 2,300 energy lobbyists, and attempts to close the gap “between public perception and scientific reality” by lucidly explaining the dynamics of global warming, its acceleration, and how a slight rise in temperature can lead to disastrous consequences. He then boldly declares that the way to solve the climate crisis is to “rapidly phase out coal emissions.” How will we meet our energy needs without coal? Hansen tells the “secret story” of the jettisoned “fast” nuclear reactor, a safer and more efficient reactor than those currently in use, and advocates for its resurrection. Rich in invaluable insights into the geopolitics as well as the geophysics of climate change, Hansen’s guaranteed-to-be-controversial manifesto is the most comprehensible, realistic, and courageous call to prevent climate change yet. It belongs in every library. —Donna Seaman

Review news

2009-11-22T16:32:00.000-08:00

Click here: Kansas City Star to read my review of two new books by the versatile and sharp Kelly Cherry.

Heartland gal does good

2009-11-07T10:41:00.000-08:00

The houses are ramshackle, the trucks old, the weather extreme. The men, wearing shabby camouflage and stained feed company caps, are battered and scarred. They drink too much and work too hard with metal molten and stone-cold. They stand by their women no matter how ornery, destructive, or flat-out crazy they are. Or they think about killing them. And the women do the same for the men. Money is tight; jobs are disappearing, as is the wildlife; loneliness is a plague, and folks keep burning down houses while cooking meth. Welcome to rural Michigan, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s home ground, and welcome to American Salvage, a short story collection of rare impact. These are fine-tuned stories of metaphorical glory shaped by stealthy wit, stunning turns of event, and breath-taking insights. This is America, all right, and salvage is a concept Campbell illuminates in so many ways, readers will themselves feel saved, reborn, transformed.

I’ve been a raving Bonnie Jo Campbell fan for 10 years, even since I was knocked down in bliss and wonder by her first book, Women and Other Animals, and oh yes, what a title. Bonnie Jo’s novel is Q, The Road. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and the Southern Review’s Eudora Welty Prize. I had the great pleasure of including a story by Bonnie Jo, "Septmeber News from Susanna's Farm," in the issue of TriQuarterly I guest-edited. Campbell is a sizzling writer. American Salvage is a brilliant, brave, unforgettable book. And it is a finalist for the National Book Award, a tremendous feat for a book of short stories from a small university press.

Here's my starred BOOKLIST review (yes, I know, I've already looted it above):

*Starred BOOKLIST Review* American Salvage.
By Bonnie Jo Campbell.
2009. 184p. Wayne State Univ., paper, $18.95 (9780814334126)

The houses are ramshackle, the trucks hard-used, the weather extreme. The men, clad in shabby camouflage, are battered and scarred. They labor at dangerous, soul-killing jobs; hunt; drink too much; and stand by their loved ones no matter how flat-out crazy they are (or they think about killing them). Ditto for the women. Money is tight; the old ways and the precious wildlife are disappearing; loneliness is a plague; and the meth-cookers keep burning down the house. Welcome to rural Michigan, Campbell’s home ground, and a story collection of rare impact. These fine-tuned stories are shaped by stealthy wit, stunning turns of events, and breathtaking insights. Terrible injuries, accidental and otherwise, leave people and animals in misery, but they are salvaged, maybe even healed. Against all odds, salvation counterbalances loss and despair in unexpected ways in this small place of big feelings, where everyone is yoked together for better and worse, and where, as one persistent survivor observes, “what looked like junk to most people could be worth real money.” Campbell’s busted-broke, damaged, and discarded people are rich in longing, valor, forgiveness, and love, and readers themselves will feel salvaged and transformed by this gutsy book’s fierce compassion.

And watch for my interview with Bonnie Jo Campell on Chicago Public Radio.

On the cusp of autumn, Diane Ackerman looks to the cusp of day

2009-09-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

“The lamp of art allows one to shine light into dark corners.” ––Diane Ackerman

I love that Diane Ackerman’s new book is titled Dawn Light, because she’s been a guiding light in my life.

In Dawn Light, Ackerman contemplates many facets of “dawn” as both noun and verb. As in all her graceful, metaphor-lush, and, by turns, whimsical and deeply affecting books, from the genre-defining A Natural History of the Senses (1990) to the bestselling The Zookeeper’s Wife (2007), Ackerman deftly interleaves science with art, and the personal with the historical to created a verdant word garden rich in observations, stories, and musings.

She begins by noting that “dawn is always a rebirth, a fresh start,” then takes great pleasure in describing all that the first light of day delivers, stirs up, and transforms. In her naturalist mode, Ackerman witnesses the arrival and impact of dawn season by season from a balcony in Palm Beach, Florida, and in her home in Ithaca, New York. Birds get top-billing in tales of doves, cranes, wrens, and a very smart, funny, and grammatically precise starling, but, as always, Ackerman casts her net wide to embrace spiders, honeybees, and snails, as well as milkweed and lotuses. Natural phenomena of all kinds fascinate her, so we learn, too, about rust (“a very slow fire”), the dynamics of a “cloud glory,” and the shapes of rain.

No species is as urgently interesting to Ackerman then our own, and her roaming meditation on dawn includes reflections on diverse dawn rituals and goddesses, and on artists inspired by “dawn’s half-open doorway between dream and wakefulness,” especially the Japanese printmaker Hokusai and impressionist Monet.

Cascading detail, sensuous celebrations, hard-won insights into the human psyche, all is rendered in a glorious spectrum of dark and “dawn light,” as Ackerman, a gentle but resonant teacher, awakens us to the exquisite interconnectivity of life, and to the worlds within and without, to sorrow and joy.

A beautiful novel and homage to literature

2009-08-22T13:48:00.000-07:00

A month has gone by since my last post, I'm ashamed to note. My excuse, well, you know, I've been devoting keyboard time to other things. But today I want to rave about an August novel:

Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie. Tr. by Adriana Hunter.
Knopf, 288p. 24.95 (9780307271587).

The spell cast by Dai Sijie’s novels, beginning with his bestselling Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
(2001), is attributable, in part, to his work as a filmmaker—his fiction is strikingly visual, and most certainly to his bicultural and bilingual experiences. Born in China, where he underwent “re-education” as a boy, Dai came to France at age 30 in 1984. The unnamed narrator in his third bewitching and suspenseful novel about the power of literature makes the reverse trip.

A French college student inspired by the extraordinary work of Paul D’Ampere, a gifted Frenchman linguist who retraced the steps of Marco Polo and then disappeared, she is studying Chinese in Peking in 1978 when she hears the story of a missing ancient Buddhist scroll while riding a train—the first of many journeys of inquiry. She also falls in love with a Peking greengrocer, a young man named Tumchooq after “the language in which Buddha preached.” Through a finely embroidered series of flashbacks, Dai reveals Tumchooq’s connection to D’Ampere and the long lost Buddhist sutra, which begins with the phrase, “Once on a moonless night.”

Dai’s darkly beautiful, suspenseful, and cosmic novel, as richly historical as it is imaginative, is set in the Forbidden City, a Chinese prison camp, Paris, Mali, and Burma, and structured so exquisitely it illuminates “Hell, the earthly world, and Paradise.” Dai’s dazzling and poetic tale of epic quests, martyred scholars and artists, the courage of one’s convictions, and love put to the test tells us that language is transcendent; books are sacred; translation is a noble art; stories are the key to freedom, and truth will be found.

Writers on stage

2009-07-21T16:21:00.000-07:00

July is getting away from me. I spent last weekend at the American Library Association's Annual Conference here in Chicago, where I had a lot of fun introducing eight writers at a marathon "Live" reading. First up was poet Ed Lee Bok, who has a galvanizing stage presence to match his powerful poems. Check out his book, Real Karaoke People. published by New Rivers Press. Here's the opening stanza in his poem, "The Secret to Life in America":

My brother sits me down and tells me
the secret to life in America.
I'm twelve years old when this happens.
He grabs my shoulders and says:
No one likes an immigrant.
It reminds them of when they fell down
and no one was around to help them.
When they couldn't talk.
As children when they got lost in public.
Cold and wet, everyone hates an immigrant.

More "Live" authors to follow.

Lit Radio

2009-06-20T18:21:00.000-07:00

First of all, I'm going to appear on Rick Kogan's The Sunday Papers, a lively live radio show on WGN 720AM which has a huge reach both in the air on the Internet. We begin at what is for me an impossibly early hour, 6:30 am Central time. I'm going to be talking about the issue of TriQuarterly I guest-edited, and making some summer reading recommendations. Rick is a great guy. Knowledgeable and insightful, and intense yet relaxed. Warm, baby. Passionate and funny and caring.

And speaking of good guys, I reviewed Chicago writer Billy Lombardo's new book, How to Hold a Woman for Chicago Public Radio, on Eight-Forty-Eight. What joy. Here's the audio link:

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=34979

And here's the review for you readers. But I have to say, the audio is splendid.

How to Hold a Woman by Billy Lombardo.

Reviewed for Eight-Forty-Eight on Chicago Public Radio by Donna Seaman

Broadcast June 19, 2009

Give it to me slant, say some. While many readers prefer straight-ahead, point A to point B plots, other are bored by linear storylines and search for fiction that takes a more covert approach. It’s a curious thing that nearly everyone accepts all kinds of fractured timelines, abrupt relocations, and narrative gaps in movies, but when fiction is structured this way, objections are raised, and the dreaded word “experimental” is waved about like a cautionary flag. Personally, I love fiction that rides like a car on a winding road. One that passes through deep shadows into the crystal light, then back into the cool, mysterious dark, and out again into the warm sun, each emergence revealing a new vista. This is why I love the hybrid literary form known rather clumsily as a novel-in-stories.

Some examples of this form: Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge. Chicago writer Stuart Dybek is a seminal artist in the novel-in-stories mode. He is also a clear influence on Chicago writer Billy Lombardo. Like his first book, Lombardo’s second, How to Hold a Woman, delivers scenes that involve young characters: precocious 12-year-old Isabel and her symbiotically entwined brothers, Dex, 8, and Sammy, 4. But How to Hold a Woman is about a marriage under siege.

It begins with a charming, if loaded story, or chapter, titled “At Khyber Pass (August 2002).” Alan Taylor has just landed at O’Hare Airport, home from observing ring-tailed lemurs in Madagascar, and he’s looking for his wife, Audrey, and their three children. But only two kids are in the car, and the thing is, we never see the family whole. Sammy jabbers about baseball; sexual tension builds between the too-long-apart adults as they stop at a restaurant for dinner; they all tell Alan about how the kids got lost at a festival in Evanston, and Isabel reveals her utter enthrallment to The Great Gatsby. The curtain closes. The next story takes place two years later. Things have changed. Its breakfast time and Alan is trying to make light of Audrey’s silent rage.

The third story, set two years later, is told from Audrey’s point of view. She still teaches English, but Alan is no longer an animal behavior research scientist. He’s a lawyer working for the Chicago Police. Why did he change careers? Audrey takes measure of her body, as though neither she nor anyone else has appreciated it in a long time. This is when we learn that the family has suffered a tragedy. Audrey is grieving.

Lombardo’s novel-in-stories is breathtakingly concise. A book in which what isn’t said exerts a powerful pressure, like the dark matter of the universe. The dialogue is crisp, combative. The body language is almost ritualized in its gestures. One day, Audrey and Dex stop to peer through the window of a dance studio, where children spin like perfect little automatons, a perfect embodiment of the family’s mode of survival, while on the streets menace pervades. A backpack is stolen. A man falls from a building. Danger and death lurk around every corner.

But this is not a grim book, nor is it a soaper. There is humor here, especially in scenes featuring Sammy and Dex, who crack each other up and drive each other crazy over swearing and the misheard words of a Jethro Tull song. This is a sexy book about married love, about sex as an affirmation of life. Billy Lombardo’s How to Hold a Woman also conveys an exquisitely sensitive vision of unexpected beauty and connection, most remarkably in the story “The White Rose of Chicago,” in which an entire world of pain, sympathy, strength, and grace unfolds within the confines of a Clark Street bus. It’s amazing how many insights into the dynamics of marriage and family Lombardo fits into this supple novel-in-stories, this nuanced mosaic of shattered lives gently reassembled, and newly treasured.

Kudos to 'lit fest' panelists and a radio interview

2009-06-13T10:03:00.001-07:00

Terrific fiction panels last weekend at the Printers Row Lit Fest here in cold and rainy Chicago. Big thanks to three tremendous Chicago writers: Joe Meno, Billy Lombardo, and Peter Ferry. Read their books: Peter's marvelous puzzle-box novel, Travel Writing. Joe's latest and most profound and beautiful yet, The Great Perhaps, and Billy's exquisite second book, How to Hold a Woman. I also had the thrill of speaking with bestselling novelist Arthur Phillips and the literary provocateur turned novelist Ben Greenman. The theme? Music. Arthur's love story, The Song is You , is elegant and full of feeling and keen observations about image versus content. Ben Greenman's Please Step Back is an electrifying fictional riff on the life and music of Sly Stone, fun and incisive, and spiked with playful language.

And here's my latest Chicago Public Radio interview. I'm speaking wtih artist and novelist Brian D'Amato about his highly imaginative, time-traveling Maya novel, In the Courts of the Sun.

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=34622

Radio Review

2009-05-31T06:45:00.000-07:00

Steve Amick's novel, Nothing But a Smile, is unusual in subject, tone, and perspective. I had great fun reviewing it concisely for Booklist, and then at length for Chicago Public Radio, where music enhances the ambiance. Take a listen:

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=34322

And if you would like to read along:

Nothing But a Smile, a novel by Steve Amick (Pantheon Books). Review for Eight-Forty-Eight by Donna Seaman. Air date: May 20, 2009.

During hard times when jobs are scarce, the more creative and intrepid among us draw on their entrepreneurial instinct and willingness to gamble, and put to use what they’ve been given, be it brains or beauty. Or both if you’re Sal Chesterton, the guiding light in Steve Amick’s naughty-but-nice novel Nothing But a Smile. Nothing But a Smile is a tale of good-old American ingenuity and self-reliance, and a spicy and sly novel about sex, hypocrisy, extortion, censorship, and sleaze. Nothing But a Smile is nothing if not fun and tantalizing.

It’s 1944 and Wink Dutton, an artist who got lucky and landed a spot as an illustrator for Stars and Stripes while serving in the Pacific, badly mangles his drawing hand in an absurd and demoralizing accident. He doesn’t know what sort of work he can do now that he can’t hold a pencil or pen, but at least he can fulfill his promise to his photographer buddy, Bill Chesterton, and look up his wife Sal when he gets to Chicago. She’s been managing their family camera shop all by herself. A shop in the Loop that Chicagoans may well picture as Central Photo on Wabash Avenue between Adams and Jackson––the city’s oldest camera shop, and a Chicago landmark with its classic old sign facing the shadow-casting el tracks.

Sal is happy to meet Wink, maybe a little too happy, but she doesn’t let on that she is struggling to keep the shop in business. Folks are broke and not inclined to spend their few precious dollars on cameras or film, and her bills are piling up. Plucky and resourceful, she’s been moonlighting at the Chicago Tribune as a darkroom technician. Hoping to earn more money and make better use of her skills, she asks an editor about working as a photographer. He tells her, “We’re not quite there, yet,” and suggests a secretarial job instead. Infuriated by such blatant sexism, Sal decides to capitalize on her know-how and good looks and sets to work shooting her first roll of girlie pictures, using herself as the model. She also decides to rent Wink the empty apartment above the shop, across from her own. Why not? She can use some help, and, given the spate of break-ins in the neighborhood, some protection. Wink doesn’t have to know about her little sideline.

But of course he finds out. And while Wink’s hand is damaged, his artist’s eye couldn’t be keener, and soon he’s behind the camera while Sal and her friend Reenie, a living, breathing pinup with a cheerfully risqué imagination, vamp it up, “exposing parts of themselves in ridiculous predicaments,” as Sal puts it. After some experimentation, the three hit the jackpot with their cleverly staged, cute-pie sexy photos, described in, let us say, lingering, if not loving detail. Clearly, Steve Amick conducted exhaustive research into classic 1940s pinups, suffering mightily in pursuit of historic accuracy. And if their peek-a-boo slapstick seems familiar, it’s because Amick is paying homage to a real-life Chicago-based illustrator renowned for his antic portraits of leggy, disarrayed beauties, Glen Elvgren, called the “Norman Rockwell of cheesecake.” Elvgren appears in Nothing But a Smile (does the title make more sense now?) as does a “hatchet-faced young guy named Hef,” a nod to another bit of Chicago skin-trade history as the home of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy.

If it sounds like Amick makes girlie pictures seem wholesome and harmless, rest assured the novel does not fail to address the darker side of the industry. Sal, Reenie, and Wink are threatened by mobsters, insulted by outraged neighbors and family, and arrested during a shoot on a North Side beach. The trio also contends with a shocking tragedy, a military cover-up, and trouble with the feds at the onset of the McCarthy-era Red Scare. When the Tribune publishes one of Wink’s serious photographs, a powerful portrait of a wounded G.I. reading the want ads, he’s tagged as a communist.

Steve Amick’s novel, Nothing But A Smile, is an unusual mix of literary and pulp fiction, a bawdy romp and a true romance. A wily work satire that asks, What is actually obscene? Nudity or war? Sex or sexism? Titillation or poverty? Amick’s artful and affecting novel of pinups and put-downs is a zesty inquiry into fairness and decency, free speech and justice, and the value of work and creativity. Nothing But a Smile is fresh, witty, immensely entertaining, and provocative in every sense of the word.

A review

2009-05-27T18:48:00.000-07:00

My latest review for the Chicago Tribune:

Housewife finds her wings watching the world's birds

By Donna Seaman | Special to the Tribune

May 23, 2009

"Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds"

By Olivia Gentile

Bloomsbury, 345 pages, $26

Her mother said it best, "Phoebe is a bird, afraid of being caged." Crowned "the world's leading bird-watcher" by the Guinness Book of World Records in 1994, Phoebe Snetsinger described her devotion to birding as "emotional salvation." In her quest to see more bird species than anyone had ever imagined possible, she traveled the seven continents many times over, surpassed many ornithologists in expertise, published zesty birding articles and became a legend. She also skipped her mother's funeral, missed her eldest daughter's wedding and left her husband alone for months at a time.

The daughter of Naomi and Leo Burnett, founder of the renowned, Chicago-based advertising agency, Leo Burnett Co., tomboy Phoebe dreamed of becoming a scientist while growing up in Glencoe and Lake Zurich. But she graduated from college during the 1950s, and, as journalist and first-time biographer Olivia Gentile so astutely observes, not even a brainy and ambitious gal like Snetsinger was immune to society's husband-and-children-first directive for women. Accordingly, Snetsinger married, assumed the role of a suburban, stay-at-home mother of four and became so depressed "she felt like she was inside a tomb." Until the day a friend handed Snetsinger a pair of binoculars and pointed out a Blackburnian warbler.
An eagle-eyed stoic with a steely memory, Snetsinger was a natural in the field, and her "life list" of the bird species she saw and identified grew at a dizzying pace. As the first woman to tally 5,000 birds, she was exultant. Informed just before her 50th birthday that she had advanced melanoma and less than a year to live, she was devastated. Did she hang up her binoculars and cease circling the globe like a migrating bird? Certainly not. Time was short, so she planned even more arduous expeditions. Gentile wonders if perhaps Snetsinger hoped that perpetual motion and a fierce concentration on birds would enable her to outrun and outsmart the disease.
What astounding birds Snetsinger saw, the most exotic vividly described by Gentile, a bird convert under the influence of her compelling subject. Here are striking word sketches of the gray crowned-crane, lilac-breasted roller, harpy eagle, red bird-of-paradise, shoebill, Ceylon frogmouth and rufus-necked wood-rail. Snetsinger was blessed with enough time and money to be able to follow guides into swamps, jungles and deserts, up mountains and across rivers and oceans, often under the most grueling conditions. Over time, her journeys grew increasingly urgent. Not only because she was racing against death, but also because the planet's birds, "mostly as a result of habitat destruction and other human blunders," are facing extinction. Snetsinger experienced ecstasy in the presence of magnificent birds, but also faced despair, peril and terror.

Gentile chronicles Snetsinger's miraculous survival of treacherous trails, a lethal strain of malaria, a brush with tribal warfare, a potentially fatal boat accident, a sprained ankle and a broken wrist. She was taken hostage in Ethiopia, and, most horrifically, gang-raped in Papua New Guinea. But nothing stopped her. Each trauma toughened her resolve and intensified her sense of mission. Snetsinger's life list was her lifeline, and no one saw as many species as she did. She reached 8,398. Death claimed her in Madagascar at 68 in 1999. And no, it wasn't cancer (a vehicle accident on a birding tour).

Gentile tells Snetsinger's staggering story with clarity and verve. She reflects incisively on the shadow side of Snetsinger's quest¿¿the perverse metamorphosis that turned a liberating passion into a devouring addiction, and perceptively elucidates and celebrates her accomplishments. A remarkable woman of tenacity, courage and transcendence, Snetsinger leaves a profound legacy, which will now be more fully appreciated and treasured thanks to Gentile's enthralling, provocative and inspiring biography.

Donna Seaman is an associate editor for Booklist and a book critic for Chicago Public Radio. Her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air.

"Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds"

By Olivia Gentile

Bloomsbury, 345 pages, $26

Hot off the press

2009-05-11T18:12:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled to announce that the issue of TriQuarterly I had the great good amazing fortune to guest edit is now available.

#133 is a big, juicy issue full of poems, fiction, essays, and photographs by writers of phenomenal powers. Not to mention the beautiful and provoking drawing, "Snapdragon," on the cover by Chicago artist Jayne Hileman. The theme of the issue is "Strong Medicine," and here's a bit of my introduction:

My respect for the mystery implicit in creativity runs high, so I decided not to interfere with the process in my role as guest editor for this brimming issue of TriQuarterly. I did not name a theme, or assign a topic. Instead, I sought out writers who see life whole, who are curious about the interconnectivity and complexity of existence, and who care, deeply and unabashedly, about the world. When asked what I was looking for, I simply said, “strong medicine.”

Medicine, the dictionary tells us, is not only “a substance or preparation used in treating disease.” It is also “something that affects well-being,” and “magical power or a magical rite.” Reading and looking at art are not only intellectual and emotional pursuits. We read with our entire body; we take in a painting or sculpture with every cell. We feel the impact of stories, images, and music in our very bones. There are, after all, no divides between body, mind, and spirit, and many of us rely on literature and art to keep us alive and well, just as we need food, air, and water, sleep and touch. Good writing is a tonic. The work of inquisitive, imaginative, unfettered, and courageous observers, thinkers, and dreamers provides succor. Heat and light. Food for thought and balm for pain. Lucid and compassionate literature breaks the isolating fever of the self.

Clarion writing is strong medicine for what ails us, and the list of our disorders, our follies and crimes, is long and harrowing. The suffering we cause and endure is beyond diagnosis; our destruction of the living world is suicidal, malignant, terminal, evil. Yet we do try to make sense of our perversity, our brutality. We do learn; we do change. And it is the stories we tell that alert us to our maladies and suggest modes of healing. Without stories, chronicles, and poems, we would have no clue to what goes on in the minds of others, no insight into how other people live and define life. Right and wrong are embedded in stories; the great, glimmering web of life is best traced with words; the symbiotic relationships that make possible this planet’s mantle of green and intersecting family trees of creatures great and small, marine and legged, are best revealed by those who have a gift for precision and metaphor, for finding words for the beauty and wonder they discern everywhere they look and listen.

I treat my own afflictions of the spirit with art and writing that is revelatory, insurgent, and transforming. I imbibe images and language electric with that green force that through art’s alchemy reorients and recalibrates our perceptions, affirms our belonging. That essential radiance is present in each of the poems, essays, stories, and photographs that follow. Here is serenity and anger. Tragedy shocking and ordinary. Satire and suspense, lyricism and irony, desire and elegy. The brazen and the enigmatic. The absurd and the dire. Writers cross borders between the past and the present, the wild and the cultivated, the personal and the universal, the actual and the imagined, the rational and the incomprehensible, the horrific and the sublime. The creators take risks, and we the readers take chances as we accept each infusion, elixir, shock, or shot.

For a table of contents, look here: http://www.triquarterly.org/toc.cfm

Thank you to everyone who contributed to TriQuarterly#133. And thank you to the wonderful TriQuarterly staff, Susan Hahn and Ian Morris.

Let me know what you think.

Remembering a Chicago Writer

2009-04-25T11:16:00.000-07:00

In thinking about a forthcoming tribute to Studs Terkel here in Chicago at a great club called Metro, I returned to this piece about Nelson Algren. A shorter version appeared in BOOKLIST last month on the 100th anniversary of Algren's birth.

Another Look At: Nelson Algren

Nelson Algren, champion of the underdogs of the underworld, is a great underrated American writer. In spite of receiving the first National Book Award for fiction––presented to him by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1950 for The Man with The Golden Arm, a novel of poverty, drugs, and desperation––he was maligned as vulgar and sensational, dismissed by Leslie Fielder as “the bard of the stumblebum.” Briskly forgotten after his death in 1981, his unnerving books promptly went out-of-print. Yet readers the world over recognized the power of his gritty, unflinching tales, books akin to those of Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, and John Steinbeck. Thanks to the efforts of writers and critics, his books have been republished. And now, at the centennial of his birth, Nelson Algren is resurgent when we need him the most.

Of Swedish, German, and Jewish descent, he was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit on March 28, 1909, and grew up in Chicago, where his father worked as a machinist. Algren graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in journalism during the Great Depression, and hit the road in search of work in Louisiana and Texas. Inspired by Baudelaire, Tolstoy, and Dostovesky, Algren began writing short stories, later collected in The Neon Wilderness (1946) and The Last Carousel (1973). His first novel, Somebody in Boots, came out in 1935. Algren remained immersed in Chicago’s poor neighborhoods. The streets, bars, backrooms, and courts were his theater, the jails and police stations his libraries. And then his second novel, Never Come Morning (1942), hit like a bomb.

Set on the meanest streets of Chicago’s Polish American community, Never Come Morning is the brutally intense story of Bruno “Lefty” Bicek, a poor, bewildered bruiser trapped in a net of lies, violence, crime, and gangs. Grim and disturbing, the novel is nonetheless alight with radioactive lyricism and caustic humor. It also evinces a startling intimacy with thugs, con artists, and the cramped, filthy bars and jail cells they frequent. A self-described “up close” writer, Algren wrote from direct experience. He was a compulsive gambler, a regular at various dives, and had done time. For stealing a typewriter.

Never Come Morning infuriated that powers-that-be in Chicago, resulting in a call to ban the novel from public libraries. Algren eventually addressed Chis hometown’s rabid disapproval in Chicago: City on the Make (1951), a heady and lacerating prose-poem condemning his two-faced, hustlers’ town. But first, radical and irreverent Algren bucked the button-up mode of the McCarthy era and fed his fat FBI dossier as he persisted in revealing the truth about humankind’s inhumanity in his next unforgettable Chicago novel, The Man with the Golden Arm.

Everything goes wrong for Frankie Machine, a poker dealer, a junkie, and a slum Job. He lives wretchedly with wheelchair-bound Sophie, her plight his fault. Theirs is a “world of petty cheats, phony braggarts, double clockers, elbow sneaks, small-time chiselers, touts and stooges and glad-hand-shakers,” and all the down-and-outers suffer from the “great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. . .Their very lives gave off a certain jailhouse odor: it trailed down the streets of Skid Row behind them till the city itself seemed some sort of open-roofed jail.”

In the posthumously published Nonconformity: Writing on Writing, Algren states, “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.” Self-deprecating and ironic, an avid listener and a stalwart witness, Algren was of the underworld, yet separate from it. His balancing act is evocatively captured in Art Shay’s Chicago’s Nelson Algren (2007), a book of striking photographs and candid reminiscences. A buddy of Algren’s, Shay carried a concealed camera on their peregrinations and caught the writer, his brow speared by a widow’s peak, his eyes protected by glasses and bright with sadness, intently watching moments of mayhem, respectful and rueful. Algren stored it all up and wrote it all down in a feverish torrent of compassion and outrage, bemusement and sorrow.

A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), the novel he was most proud of, is set in Texas and New Orleans, in boxcars and brothels. A brilliantly crafted anti-bildungsroman, it stars Dove Linkhorn, first seen in Somebody in Boots. Here Dove is a rambling, illiterate country boy looking to earn a living among pimps and prostitutes. Expansive, poetic, ribald, and roguishly funny, Algren’s darkly picaresque tale grapples with issues of race, sex, and class.

A night owl, Algren loved cats, and kept in shape by pounding on a boxing bag. Ripped off when he sold the film rights, he despised the movie version of The Man with the Golden Arm, which won Frank Sinatra an Oscar. The women in his edgy fiction are as tough as the men, and usually smarter. Algren was married three times, twice to the same gal. He was deeply in love with trailblazing French philosopher, writer, and feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who broke his heart.

Increasingly embittered and destructive, Algren wrote poisonous satire about New York’s literary establishment and devilishly outlandish and critical travel pieces. He left Chicago for New Jersey to work on his last novel, The Devil’s Stocking (1983), based on the murder trial of the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, and made new enemies. He found sanctuary in Sag Harbor, and after he was finally elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, he planned a cocktail party to celebrate on May 9, 1981. Kurt Vonnegut hoped to bring Salmon Rushdie along, since Algren had reviewed Midnight’s Children. But when Vonnegut called Algren’s house, a police officer answered. Algren was dead, done in by a massive heart attack in a house full of unopened bottles of booze.

Algren was angry at being misunderstood and angry at being unable to help the people he wrote about. He was burdened with his knowledge of lost innocence and endless guilt, unredeemed trust and secret fear, strangled hopes and cancelled joy, beauty twisted and tattered, life bought and sold. We mark the 100th anniversary of Algren’s birth while experiencing the worst loss of jobs and homes since the Great Depression, during an economic collapse driven by the very greed, lies, and corruption he condemned, a crisis delivering the same soul-killing suffering he railed against. Nelson Algren’s electrifying prose, steely-eyed vision, marksman humor, and tough compassion speak today with renewed vigor and resonance.

Upcoming appearance

2009-04-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

In Chicago. I'm honored to be speaking about a unique and wonderful book, Home Ground. See below for details.

Donna Seaman
Date: Wed. April 22, 2009

Time: 6:00 pm

Location:
Harold Washington Library Center
Authors Room
400 S. State Street
60605

About this event:

Celebrate Earth Day with Donna Seaman, Booklist associate editor, Open Books host and WBEZ 848 book contributor, as she discusses, reads from and signs the book, Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. This book brings together 45 poets and writers to create more than 850 original definitions for words that describe our lands and waters. The writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Luis Alberto Urrea, Jon Krakauer, Charles Frazier and Antonya Nelson, draw from careful research as well as on their own distinctive personal and regional diversity to portray in vivid prose the striking complexity of the landscapes we inhabit, from Missouri’s woody draws to Virginia’s runs, from California’s bajadas to Alaska’s pingos and Hawaii’s shield volcanoes. At the heart of Home Ground is a community of writers reviving a language that exemplifies the variety and vastness of the American landscape.

April books

2009-04-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

Charles Bowden is one of my go-to writers. Here's my BOOKLIST starred review of his new book:

Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future.Bowden, Charles (author).
Apr. 2009. 256p. Houghton, hardcover, $24 (9780151013951). 917.904.
REVIEW. First published March 15, 2009 (Booklist).

Bowden is a blood-and-guts journalist with a poet’s sensibility, a noirish naturalist, a ferociously inquisitive witness to life’s glory and horror torn between the desire to embrace the world and the need to hole up in a drapes-drawn motel room. Bowden covers the borderland drug culture in such high-voltage dispatches as Down by the River (2002), while also writing darkly rhapsodic works of memory and reflection. This ravishing chronicle follows Blood Orchid (1995) and Blues for Cannibals (2002) to complete an “accidental trilogy” of books that flow from a single question and a single hunger: how can a person live a moral life in a culture of death—the deaths of people and animals, forests and oceans, clean air and water. Writing with molten urgency, confessional magnetism, and piercing detail, Bowden chronicles his unlikely friendships with a rattlesnake and a desert tortoise, enigmatic encounters with women, the psychic repercussions of his murder investigations, and his part in a terrifying Greenpeace mission. Red wine, Moby-Dick, human brutality, the suffering of other species, the obdurateness of paradox, the ambush of love, beauty beyond comprehension, the immensity of loss implicit in our planetary crimes—Bowden, singing in chains, says yes to all of life.

— Donna Seaman

Green books in spring

2009-03-29T09:49:00.000-07:00

Not that spring is evident today. We're having a full-scale, impudent, and aggravating March snow storm here in Chicago. All right, it's pretty. The fluffy sort of snow, clinging creamily to tree branches and all the cables and wires that make things such as this blog possible. But we were so much happier to see crocuses and robins.

The stubborn hold of winter does not impede the blossoming of books. April, May, and June will bring many works of tremendous insight and beauty our way. And this month has delivered the third annual Orion Book Award.

I had an excellent time serving as judge along with Roger D. Hodge, editor for Harper's magazine; Scott Russell Sanders, the author, most recently, of A Conservationist Manifesto, Susan Straight, whose novel Highwire Moon is always playing somewhere in my mind, and H. Emerson Blake, Orion magazine editor-in-chief.

Here's the deal: The Orion Book Award was founded in 2007 to recognize books that deepen our connection to the natural world, present new ideas about our relationship with nature, and achieve excellence in writing. It is made possible in part by a grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

Here are the finalists:

• Trespass, Amy Irvine (North Point Press)
• The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane (Penguin Books)
• The Bridge at the End of the World, James Gustave Speth (Yale University Press)
• Inventing Niagara, Ginger Strand (Simon & Schuster)
• Finding Beauty in a Broken World, Terry Tempest Williams (Pantheon Books)

And the winner is Amy Irvine's Trespass. A book I raved about in the Chicago Tribune, nearly a year ago:

Memoir of sadness
A wilderness activist mourns the damage to Utah's desert landscape and her own personal tragedies

By Donna Seaman

February 23, 2008

Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

By Amy Irvine

North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 363 pages, $25

Amy Irvine's family tree reaches back to one of the original Mormon saints, but it also bears the sharp, sometimes bitter fruit of nonconformists. Her paternal grandmother, Ada, was an atheist and an artist enthralled by the dramatic beauty of southern Utah's red-rock desert. Irvine's father had the pedigree and demeanor of a good Mormon, but he could not abide the strictures of Salt Lake City life and took off hunting every chance he got. Add to that his alcoholism in an aggressively teetotaling world, and you get a sense of the misery that induced him to turn his gun on himself. As Irvine tries to come to terms with her father's death, she ponders her inherited apostate and "peripatetic ways."

A loner and wanderer who yearns for acceptance, Irvine explores the red-rock canyons, observing that "the mark of the ancients is everywhere," even though pueblo ruins have long been stripped of every artifact, with the exception of rock art visible only in certain slants of light. As she tries to imagine the lives of the hunter-gatherers who once lived in this arid, sculptured place, she braids together threads of Mormon history, her own family's stories and her quest for illumination, creating a singularly elegiac and astringent memoir of dissent.

Not long after her father's death, Irvine is working for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and madly in love with Herb McHarg, a longhaired, Catholic, wilderness-defending attorney. She tries to fit into her small, high-desert town near a Superfund site, even though her neighbors' pickup trucks sport "a window sticker displaying the cartoon character Calvin, pants down. He is urinating on the acronym" of the wilderness alliance.

Seeking a fuller immersion in the glorious place they are working so hard to protect, and more privacy, the couple buys 10 acres and a dilapidated, off-the-grid cabin in spectacular and xenophobic San Juan County. The four-state panorama is thrilling - - the vista embraces swathes of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado - - but the risks associated with their advocacy work remain high.

Irvine staves off her fears by hiking and pondering the past. And the conclusions she reaches are startling. Take her bold paralleling of the natural histories of coyotes and Mormons, sworn enemies. Both have been despised and hunted, yet both have thrived, even though the Mormon modes of survival are proving environmentally deleterious. Irvine acidly critiques the damage done by cattle ranching, the razing of foothills to build golf courses (guzzlers of precious water) and, widening her view to encompass the entire problematic development of the West, the damming of the Colorado River. Her environmental survey also covers a rarely examined consequence of 9/11: the federal government's loosening of restrictions on oil and gas leases on public lands, including Utah's most-scenic places.

Readers versed in the fiery eloquence of Irvine's kindred red-rock defenders Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams and Ellen Meloy will have a ready context for her probing critiques of the exploitation of this sacred yet much-sinned-against land, but her views on the demise of hunter-gatherer societies and the rise of agriculture are unique and provocative. Irvine suggests that men and women foragers were equals, and that their roaming way of life was active, varied and healthy. With the advent of farming came punishing labor and a sedentary existence. Women had too many children too close together, and a divide opened between the sexes. Inevitably, the impact on the overused land was equally depleting.

In her sorrow, anger and feelings of helplessness, Irvine seems to be channeling six generations of outraged and lonely Mormon women restricted to obedient lives as wives and mothers in polygamous marriages. Outsider Irvine preserves her freedom but still suffers wrenching losses. Her first child dies in utero, and during her second pregnancy she endures a harrowing health crisis, tragedies of the body she can't help but equate with the accelerating destruction of the living world all around her.

To trespass is to violate, to infringe, to unlawfully enter, to err or sin. Irvine composes a staggering litany of trespasses great and small that ultimately reveals the interconnectivity of life; the fact that everything matters: every cow, every blade of invasive cheat grass, every dam, every hole drilled into the desert, every life-crushing off-road vehicle, every betrayal. For Irvine - - passionate, imaginative, furious and visionary - - language is a ladder out of the silencing cave of despair. And what, after all, is a voice for if not to praise life? Of what use is a gift for metaphor and argument if not to provoke, entrance, persuade? After her steeling trials of body and soul, Irvine turns away from the rigors of advocacy to take up the more radiant and fluent defense of life that is art. Beauty and truth, she hopes, will speak to everyone.

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

Amy Irvine will receive a cash prize of $3,000, and the finalists will each receive $500 each. You'll welcome to honor them and celebrate green books at a public event on April 15, 2009 at the CYNTHIA-REEVES gallery in New York City. I'll be there.

For the love of books on Valentine's Day

2009-02-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

The AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) annual conference is here in Chicago: 8,000 writers, readers, teachers, publishers. It's quite a party. Today I'm speaking with Chicago writer Stuart Dybek in the Grand Ballroom at the grand old Chicago Hilton. I wanted to revisit my Chicago Tribune review of his magnificent book, I Sailed with Magellan:

A young man and a young woman squeeze into the conductor's compartment in the first car of an express El train and kiss passionately as they rock past crowded station platforms. This is a much loved scene from "Pet Milk," a short story in Stuart Dybek's The Coast of Chicago, and a moment exquisitely emblematic of Dybek's stereoscopic vision of the city's steely reality and penchant for risk-all romance. Published in 1990, The Coast of Chicago followed Dybek's first collection, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, by a decade. A book as essential to understanding life in the prairie metropolis as works by Algren, Brooks, Bellow, and Cisneros, The Coast of Chicago was resoundingly praised by critics, treasured by readers, yet woefully neglected by publishers. Meanwhile, Dybek, a true artist, continued to work slowly and intensely for another dozen years until his third cycle of interconnected short stories took shape, making publication of I Sailed with Magellan, an eleven-part saga about the evolution of a young man's sense and sensibility within the bricked grip of a big city on a great lake, a true literary event.

The meshed short stories in I Sailed with Magellan spotlight transformational moments in the lives of Perry Katzek and his family, friends, and neighbors over the course of his rough-and-ready boyhood on through and beyond high school. Perry, his younger brother Mick, their good-deal-loving, junk-collecting, Harvester plant-worker father, called Sir, and their nervous mother, called Moms, live in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood during the 1950s and 1960s. An amalgam of Polish and Mexican communities, it, like all of Chicago's ethnically defined neighborhoods, truly is a village in that everyone knows everyone else and considers everyone's business their own. Not only does Dybek masterfully evoke the intricate, singing web of urban life--the crossing paths and tangled destinies of intimates and strangers; the percussive energy generated by people at work and play; the contrapuntal mix of street action, classroom exchanges, bar talk, domestic banter and confrontation, the confessions of friends, and lovers' duets--he also aligns the longings and aspirations of his empathically rendered characters with Chicago's often forbidding, sometimes radiantly beautiful cityscape.

The ability to elucidate the complex symbiotic relationship between people and place is part of what makes the fiction of select writers so rich and resonant, so authentic and true. Dybek accomplishes this crucial feat by using music as the connecting tissue between the inner and outer lives of his characters. Music is built into the Katzek DNA and consequently plays a role in each story, whether the focus is on Perry's beloved Uncle Lefty, a derailed musician, or on Perry's brother when he falls in love with a Puerto Rican exotic dancer who performs to John Coltrane's masterpiece, "A Love Supreme."

Saxophonist Lefty, bedeviled by his combat experiences in Korea, is the book's touchstone and tragic hero. He loves to bet on the ponies at Sportsman's Park and take his young nephew around to the neighborhood taverns, of which there are way too many to get to in a day, where plucky Perry, a real ham, sings for their drinks (the boy gets root beer). Lefty also likes to play his sax on the roof of his Blue Island Avenue apartment building. When he takes his nephew up through the trap door to see the view and his neighbor's rooftop pigeon coop, he says, "Welcome to Dreamsville," and Dreamsville is, indeed, the perfect name for the city of unrequited desires Dybek so tenderly and knowingly conjures. Lefty, an artist and gambler who plays with all his heart even though he's been dealt a losing hand, initiates Perry into the holy realm of music, and, inadvertently, teaches him about the abyss into which sensitive souls can so easily fall.

In "Song," the opening story--a tale frank and edgy in its revelations of the grittiness of Chicago life, and funny and charming in its delight in our capacity for casting caution to the wind and giving in to sheer pleasure--a ragtag school marching band is so caught up in pounding out their kick-ass version of "Rock Around the Clock," they blissfully follow their unsavory, boozy, but well-connected band leader out of their Little Village enclave into forbidden territory, Douglas Park, a primarily African American neighborhood. "The El station was the kind of boundary that doesn't show up on street maps," (20) muses Perry, and sure enough he and his fellow band members are rudely awakened from their trance. Clutching his clarinet, Perry runs like crazy until he finds himself on a block where every hydrant has been opened. As great torrents of water pour into the street, a "prismatic mist of phantom rainbows" hovers in this "strange neighborhood that expressed its anarchy in water." (24) Suddenly, turf warfare and racial tension are washed away, and Perry is cleansed and redeemed. The city is full of surprises, and as Dybek summons up the wonder of the unexpected and the improbable, he achieves a low-key form of magical realism that places him in a constellation of writers that includes Joyce in The Dubliners, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Chicago's own Leon Forrest.

Water is one of the collection's reigning metaphors, along with music, birds, and flowers (especially morning glory-festooned alley fences). In the sweetly dreamy story "Undertow," immersion in Lake Michigan reveals a secret dimension of the cosmos we call Chicago, while in "We Didn't," the lake delivers a haunting icon. Early on in the book, young Perry and Mick are supposed to be sleeping, but instead they're listening to the gruff entreaties of their beefy neighbors across the gangway. Once coitus ensues, Perry thinks that the house is creaking "as if a galleon was anchored beside our window," (27) a curious image for a young boy to concoct, but it turns out the Katzek brothers are obsessed with the stories of explorers. Mick has even made up a rambling, dirgelike song about the trials and tribulations of those who first circumnavigated the globe, an epic poem that begins, "I sailed with Magellan, . . .) (38) The brothers themselves become intrepid explorers as they embark on the arduous journey into adulthood and roam the urban wilderness, encountering new and mysterious people and places wherever they land.

Sometimes Perry is at the center of a story, sometimes he's off to the side as a sympathetic observer, a narrative fluidity that grants Dybek the liberty to invent and orchestrate a compelling cast of intriguing characters. There's Zip, the one-armed World War II vet and proprietor of the Zip Inn, who, dismayed by the "crazy, private war" in which the neighborhood gangbangers are embroiled, and angered by the intrusion of "goombahs" demanding protection money, dreams of a Wisconsin refuge in the "land of the sky blue waters," (62) just as the slogan for Hamm's beer (then the official beer of the Chicago Cubs) promises. A regular at the Zip Inn, Teo, ruined his career as a professional wrestler in Mexico for love. Joey Ditto is the feckless hit man in "Breasts," a long, sardonic, surreal, and deeply unnerving tale in which eroticism and death are inexorably entwined, an endlessly compelling paradox that Dybek frequently improvises on to profound affect.

Mick turns out to be an enigmatic and compelling character. And no one will be able to forget young, doomed Ralphie Poskozim and brainy and budding Camille Estrada, who tries to make sense of Ralphie's life in a school composition, the stars of "Blue Boy," a stealthily powerful, many faceted story about faith, the vagaries of memory, and the need to transmute life into story. The misadventures and revelations of Dybek's get-under-your-skin characters yield bittersweet tales brilliantly attuned to the confluence of inevitability and chance, natural forces and human folly.

Anger, deprivation, and the unrelenting threat of violence drive Dybek's incandescent stories, as does a rogue eroticism. The women Dybek portrays are at once tough and vulnerable, lusty and pragmatic, witty and elusive. Given the chaos and bloodshed that punctuate the lives of the men in their world, these capricious, ambivalent, and evanescent women are wise to avoid entanglement. They call the shots whenever possible, and men wait helplessly for them to bestow their favors. Joey pines for Capri, a woman he adores for her unpredictability. And Perry, a hard-knocks romantic who has witnessed more fistfights than kisses, is repeatedly thwarted in his pursuit of smart, skeptical, and independent women.

Dybek's entrancing stories replicate with piquant accuracy the social, cultural, and ethnic dynamics of one quintessential Chicago neighborhood at one particular time, and this is a tremendous achievement. But Dybek is also looking beyond the specifics of the world he so vividly evokes in an attempt to illuminate the fundamental connection between people and place, and between humankind and the earth. The word ecotone comes to mind, a term used to denote a place of transition where opposites meet, such as land and water, grasslands and forest, city and country, the border between two ethnic neighborhoods, even the plexus of reality and dream. These are zones of intense activity, conflict, and synergy, and as Perry and company avidly explore their native terrain from the industrial South Side to the bucolic North Side, Dybek homes in on just this sort of fertile ground.

In "Orchids," for instance, a dazzling story of fantasy and resilience, Perry revels in "a strip of wilderness" (176) along railroad tracks where wildlife, including a blue heron, thrive in the midst of urban clamor. Perry's favorite place is the fire truck graveyard along the Sanitary (he calls it Insanitary) Canal, a forgotten outdoor museum of city history, a place of rusted grace that inspires "a kind of reverence--not a feeling frequently encountered in Chicago." (180) And not a feeling shared by all, as Perry finds out so comically on a prom night from hell. But Perry is on to something important in his peculiar regard for this oddly hallowed place.

Perry, his brother, and his friends all possess poetic temperaments and questing souls (as well as caustic senses of humor), and are, therefore, drawn to the arts as they struggle into manhood. This creative impulse is a significant one, a potential path to a life more fulfilling than their parents', but also a way of understanding and valuing what they're so eager to leave behind. Dybek fills his painterly stories with ravishing descriptions of the hodgepodge of Chicago's streets and their quirky neighborhood characters, the chimerical lake, the white-cap-raising and trash-spinning wind, drastic weather, and dramatically slanting light to celebrate our ability to discern and be transformed by beauty however unlikely its manifestations and harsh its settings.

This receptivity to beguilement--this transcending of everyday cares and sorrows while watching frolicking children through a painted-open window in a Rogers Park apartment, or raising one's face to the pearly full moon floating above a puddled alley, or succumbing to music's dizzying embrace while driving too fast in an unreliable old car on Lake Shore Drive¬--this openness to out-of-the-blue beauty rekindles hope, inspires us to cherish memories of the dead, and induces us to seek and nurture love in spite of all the terrors that shadow our lives. This is what it is to be a human being. And this is Dybek's subject as he extracts a grand spectrum of experiences, emotions, and epiphanies from the potholed, broken glass-strewn byways of a sprawling city on a vast heartland lake in spellbinding stories that are, by turns, hilarious, stunning, and tragic, but always deeply moving, genuine, and compassionate.

Radio Review

2009-01-29T18:45:00.000-08:00

Here's my Chicago Public Radio review of a powerful first novel, Miles from Nowhere, by Nami Mun:

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=31783

We Persist

2009-01-25T09:21:00.001-08:00

With rumors flying about the demise of the Washington Post Book World, one of the last of an endangered species, the stand-alone Sunday newspaper book review section, the National Book Critics Circle has recognized the good and fine work of a Book World editor, Ron Charles, with the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Congratulations to Ron and to the NBCC Board.

I'm also happy to report that I have a review in today's Los Angeles Times book section:

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-stacey-derasmo25-2009jan25,0,2128307.story

Radio review

2009-01-24T13:17:00.000-08:00

Chicago Public Radio broadcast my review of Tony Romano's ravishing story collection, If You Eat, You Never Die: Chicago Tales, on January 21, 2009 on Eight-Forty Eight. They have a great Web site: www.chicagopublicradio.org.

And here's a link for the archived review:

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=31618

Thank you, Arne Naess

2009-01-18T11:02:00.000-08:00

Arne Naess.

Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer who articulated the concept “deep ecology,” died on January 12, 2009 at the age of 96. Deep ecology is the essential perception that all living beings have intrinsic value, and, as Naess has said, “a right to live and blossom.” Naess also stated, “The earth does not belong to humans,” even though he understood that because we’re human, we look to our own first. Profoundly influenced by Spinoza and Gandhi (he wrote books about each), Naess was fascinated by the complexity of our relationship with the rest of life.

David Rothenberg, a philosopher, musician, and writer I greatly admire and learn from with great pleasure, studied with Arne Naess and worked on the translation of one of the prolific philosopher and ecologist’s major works, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle (1989). Rothenberg is the author of Why Birds Sing and Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound, and you can listen to Rothenberg talk about his music and writing right here on this site in Nonfiction interviews.

Rothenberg is currently working on a novel based on his experiences in Norway with Naess, an excerpt of which will appear in a forthcoming issue of TriQuarterly. In 1991, Rothenberg completed his Conversations with Arne Naess: Is it Painful to Think? (University of Minnesota Press). This is an excerpt from his introduction:

“Arne speaks of the small self and the “Self” with a capital s. The latter is the great Self, which is as near as he will come to the mention of God. It is the unity of the natural world, a singular thing with which we are meant to identify, as when we suddenly feel the suffering of the earth as a whole, under the vast weight of human transformation. And Self-realization is a way to link this intuition of the unity of life with our own individual lives and pursuits. . . .One approaches fulfillment through empathy with the world beyond the ego. This expansion of concern does not diminish humanity, but enriches us by pushing the meaning of humanity further and further away from any one person’s interest. As Spinoza says, we approach perfection with the more connections we apprehend of the innumerable links and branches that hold the world together as one.”

Arne Naess’ long list of books includes Life’s Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World (2002), and Harold Glasser has edited The Selected Works of Arne Naess (2005). When asked how he viewed the future in terms of humankind’s environmental impact, Arne Naess described himself as a “short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist.” What optimism we do feel is due in large part to Naess’ deep vision.

Meet Mary Austin

2009-01-14T14:17:00.001-08:00

One of the January books I read that fascinated me on many fronts is a biography of Mary Austin, author of The Land of Little Rain, a seminal book about the West, and about nature and humankind. I sink into biographies about writers and artists, hoping to learn about creativity, and morbidly intrigued by the inevitable suffering. Here's my response to this tale of a spirited woman and writer with a sharp sense of life's inclusiveness.

Mary Austin and the American West.
By Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson.
2009. 352p. illus. Univ. of California, $29.95 (9780520246355).

Goodman and Dawson paired up to write William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life (2005), and now continue their inquiry into the lives of seminal yet glossed-over American writers with a much needed reconsideration of the vagabond life and influential achievements of Mary Austin (1868–1934). Austin and her best-known book, The Land of Little Rain (1903) are often namedropped in books about the ecology of the West and the battles over water use, but Austin herself remains a cloaked figure. Goodman and Dawson convey all the trauma, originality, audacity, and courage of this against-type Illinois-raised woman’s adventures, from her college studies in psychology and botany, to her move to California with her widowed mother and siblings to her discovery of her great affinity for the “frightening beauty” of the desert and fascination with the culture of the Native Americans who truly called it home. Austin harbored an “anxiety to know,” and explored with world with a “double perspective of a poet and scientist.”

For all her brilliance, instinct for tolerance and justice, and mystical sensibility, she quarreled with her family, married a man she couldn’t live happily with, and had a mentally handicapped daughter she had no help caring for as she had to teach to earn a living. By sheer dint of her curiosity, empathy, and habit of chronicling her thoughts, Austin propelled herself out of the most isolating and depressing situations and wrote many works of nonfiction, nine novels, two hundred articles and essays, poems, plays, and short stories while traveling from coast to coast, sending herself to Rome when she believed at 39 that she was dying of breast cancer, effected a remarkable recovery, and befriended cowboys and shepherds as well as William James, Jack London, H. G. Wells, Lou and Herbert Hoover, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mabel Dodge, Robinson Jeffers, Ansel Adams, and many more.

We learn that Austin was an anthropologist by nature, a realistic advocate for Native Americans, women, and African Americans, a woman who excelled at friendship, worked under impossible conditions, supported herself with grueling lecture tours, speaking about an astonishing array of subjects, and became a member of the art scenes in Carmel, San Francisco, Greenwich Village, and Santa Fe. Unconventional, dynamic, prophetic in her environmental concerns and awareness of the dangers of big business infilitrating government, and an early practitioner of multicultural studies, Austin wrote “exalted,” outspoken, independence, and intrepid works. She was an “eclectic thinker and an intellectual magpie,” a phoenix, and, for all her posturing and infuriating assertiveness, she was fiercely private and deeply self-critical.

In their compelling biography, Goodman and Dawson achieve the perfect balance between fact and analysis, creating a deeply dimensional and genuinely illuminating portrait of a woman struggling to free herself to be an artist, while being pulled in different directions by money and health woes, good causes, and loneliness. Mary Austin is an important figure to bring forward in the pantheon of American writers and Western seers, and Goodman and Dawson have done so with empathy, drama, and clarity.

Lima Nights by Marie Arana

2009-01-10T09:21:00.000-08:00

It was my great pleasure and privilege to review this potent novel for the Los Angeles Times.

LOS ANGELES TIMES
Books

BOOK REVIEW

'Lima Nights' by Marie Arana

An affair ignites passion between two ill-matched people in Peruvian society, but it isn't enough to help them permanently cross barriers of cultural understanding in this harrowing, supple novel.

By Donna Seaman
January 4, 2009

Lima Nights
A Novel
Marie Arana

Dial Press: 248 pp., $25

She has the first line: "Give me your hand." He has had enough to drink to risk making a fool of himself. So, pale, blue-eyed Bluhm, egged on by his friends, lets Maria, a black-haired beauty, lead him onto the dance floor at a dive called Lima Nights. And so it begins.
Carlos Bluhm, we learn, hails from a prominent German Peruvian family with deep roots in Lima. His grandfather built the gated mansion at 300 Avenida Rivera that Carlos' banker father filled with servants and the clink and laughter of lavish parties, and which his mother cushioned with fragrant gardens. But times have changed. It's 1986, the Shining Path is terrorizing the land, and the family's affluence and influence have waned. Still, Carlos, a camera salesman of modest means, lives in style in the Bluhm stronghold with his energetic mother, Dorotea; elegant wife, Sophie; and excellent sons, Fritz and Rudy. It's a "familial paradise." Yet Bluhm carouses with the boys and conducts casual affairs. He tells himself that sex is "just sex, an indulgence that didn't have to unravel the family fabric or drain anybody's bank account." And he laughs when his friends assume that he prefers dark-skinned women because "an Indian woman was more disposable."

Born on the edge of the Amazon jungle, Maria Fernandez lives in the poorest, foulest and most dangerous part of the city on a rutted dirt road in a "cement box with a corrugated tin roof." Her father was stabbed to death; her mother, "feral as a cat," takes in laundry; her two brothers are usually out of work. Determined Maria juggles two jobs: She bags groceries at an upscale store and dances at Lima Nights, wearing a red collar to signal her availability as a tango partner. Bluhm is shocked to learn that she is only 15, but he can't keep away. He finds Maria wild and joyous, the opposite of his restrained, increasingly severe wife. Determined Maria sees her golden admirer as the key to a better life.

Maria's family is mockingly skeptical when she tells them of the affair. Bluhm's friends are incensed by her youth and his romanticism. And their prejudice is stabbing. Indians are "dirty and dumb," says Marcus, the most flagrant. Bluhm shrugs it off, knowing that Maria is "pristine, luminous." He revels in her "unalloyed delight" for aspects of his daily routine he has always taken for granted. While she gambles on his willingness and ability to white-knight her out of poverty, he is oblivious to the consequences of his ardor. Of different generations and different worlds, they take immense pleasure in each other's bodies and coo together, "agreeing on some things they both loved: the color yellow, the warmth of the sun, the smell of the ocean." But such moments of contentment quickly give way to dread, setting the reader on pins and needles, certain that things will go spectacularly wrong for this outlaw couple.

Marie Arana is well-versed in dualities. In her much-admired 2001 memoir, "American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood," she tells the story of her heritage as the daughter of a Peruvian father and a blond American mother and of growing up in both Peru and the U.S. A former book editor and editor of the Washington Post Book World, she is now a full-time writer. Her first novel, "Cellophane" (2006), is an encompassing Amazon saga in which one family suffers the fallout of a pipe-dream endeavor that pits technology against nature. "Lima Nights," her second novel, is a study in contrasts and a devastating cross-cultural and cross-racial urban love story as sinuous, precise and incendiary as a tango.

The first half of this tightly wound and lacerating book comes to a shattering close. Fast forward 20 years. The once-gleaming Bluhm mansion is "decaying." The glum outcasts occupy separate bedrooms. Bluhm, now in his 60s, is feeling weak and bewildered. Maria has cut and bleached her hair, and she relies on telenovelas for company. Suspicion and doom fill the air. Like a surgeon making an incision, Arana slowly but surely reveals why the Indian and the German live as strangers. How each persists in seeing the other as somehow slightly less than human, more of an icon, a figment, a fading dream. Page by page, scene by scene, Arana discloses the lack of common ground and "common language." Maria and Bluhm share too few favorite things. Passion seems not to have led to understanding or trust. As for love, well, the dance isn't over until it's over. And Arana's characters are in for far more complex turns, dips and reversals than they, or we, can imagine.

Arana's prose is lustrous, supple and mesmerizing. The collision of finely rendered worlds that she choreographs is spiked with racism, class divides, the malignancy of imperialism and the poison of sexism. But as sociologically astute and psychologically nuanced as this whiplash tale is, Arana doesn't stop there. Instead, she infuses this vivid novel of eroticism and exoticism, scandal and alienation, pragmatism and betrayal with magic and spirit. There is profound failure in empathy, kindness and humor here, as well as deep-seated fear and pain. But there is also strength, revelation and hope. The novel ends with a fall and ascension. So rich in feeling and perception, so wrenching and paradoxical is "Lima Nights," its beautifully sad, mysterious and soulful music plays on long after the book is closed.

Seaman is an associate editor for Booklist and a book reporter for Chicago Public Radio ( www.chicagopublicradio.org); her author interviews are collected in "Writers on the Air" and at www.openbooksradio.org.

A New Year

2009-01-04T10:35:00.000-08:00

I'm holiday-impaired, but did manage to steal an e-image of one of my artist mother's paintings for a holiday card. I used a snippet of a poem to accompany it, and here I'm happy to reprint the entire poem, The Apple Tree. I'm working on securing the image of Elayne Seaman's painting, Apple Tree. Apples are emblems of knowledge and health, forces we surely need as this new year gets off to a harrowing, hopeful start.

The Apple Tree
by Wendell Berry

for Ann and Dick O’Hanlon

In the essential prose
of things, the apple tree
stands up, emphatic
among the accidents
of the afternoon, solvent,
not to be denied.
The grass has been cut
down, carefully
to leave the orange
poppies still in bloom;
the tree stands up
in the odor of the grass
drying. The forked
trunk and branches are
also a kind of necessary
prose—shingled with leaves,
pigment and song
imposed on the blunt
lineaments of fact, a foliage
of small birds among them.
The tree lifts itself up
in the garden, the
clutter of its green
leaves halving the light,
stating the unalterable
congruity and form
of its casual growth;
the crimson finches appear
and disappear, singing
among the design.

Winter Solstice, a living light on Hanukkah

2008-12-21T08:07:00.000-08:00

A Necessary Writer: Terry Tempest Williams

2008-11-23T07:58:00.000-08:00

In Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, Terry Tempest Williams confronts the fearsome beauty and power of nature in her descriptions of the rise of the Great Salt Lake and the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, and tells the tragic yet life-affirming story of the cancer delivered by nuclear weapons testing that has ravaged her downwinder family.

In An Unspoken Hunger, Terry, as outspoken as she is gracefully and meticulously artistic, articulates the mystical bond between women and the wild. In Leap, Terry recounts her immersion not in a living landscape but rather in a painted world, Bosch’s wildly detailed triptyph, The Garden of Delights, a journey of the imagination that asks, among many other provocative questions, why we don’t value nature as highly as we do artistic masterpieces?

In Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, and in The Open Space of Democracy, Williams forthrightly and creatively extends her poetics of place into a politics of place, recognizing that one must defend what one loves.

A naturalist, writer, and activist hailed as a visionary, Williams has testified before Congress, gone to jail for acts of civil disobedience, and journeyed to Hiroshima and Rwanda to participate in acts of art and healing. Williams has contributed to numerous newspapers, magazines, and anthologies, and she advocates tirelessly in person for wilderness and justice. Williams has received the Robert Marshall Award from the Wilderness Society, the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award. She is the recipient of Lannan and Guggenheim fellowships. Terry Tempest Williams is the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, and the University of Wyoming's first Eminent Writer-in-Residence.

Terry has said, “Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.”

The truth of this observation is born out in her newest book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World. Here’s the Booklist review:

Ecologist and writer Williams composes gracefully structured inquiries lush with unexpected and revelatory correspondences. In her most far-reaching and profoundly clarifying work to date, Williams considers the complex beauty of brokenness and the redemptive art of creating wholeness from fragments in a triptych of explorations. She begins in a mosaics workshop in Ravenna, Italy, and then brings the understanding gleaned from working with tesserae to her day-by-day observations of a beleaguered Utah prairie dog town. Williams marvels over this tunnel-building, highly communicative species and dubs them “prayer dogs” for their habit of standing and watching the sunset. Prairie dogs are crucial to the biodiversity of the grassland ecosystem, a living mosaic, yet they have been brutally massacred and driven to the brink of extinction. The story of her brother’s death entwines with Williams’ riveting account of her trip to Rwanda with visionary artist Lily Yeh to help create a genocide memorial. Brokenhearted in this land of bones and sorrow, Williams gathers shattering stories of death and resilience with the help of an extraordinary survivor who becomes her son, bearing witness to the horror of neighbors slaughtering neighbors in an attempted annihilation. Scientific in her exactitude, compassionate in her receptivity, and rhapsodic in expression, Williams has constructed a beautiful mosaic of loss and renewal that affirms, with striking lucidity, the need for reverence for all of life.
— Donna Seaman

Listen to my Open Books interview with Terry Tempest Williams. You'll find it in the Nonfiction section.

Among the many things we have to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, in a time of cruel diminishment and fear, of catastrophic lies and high crimes, are writers of Terry Tempest Williams' eloquence, insight, compassion, passion, and courage. Let us be thankful, too, that we will have a new President who reads signifiant books, out of respect for the past and the knowledge and experience of others, and who has written books in pursuit of understanding and coherence, truth and inspiration.

Amitav Ghosh and Unity in Suffering

2008-11-09T20:14:00.000-08:00

The beautiful Fullerton Auditorium at the Art Institute of Chicago was nearly full on Saturday morning, although it was the sort of cold, windy, spitty day best suited for staying home. I've heard many an inspiring lecture there and was rather astonished to find myself on the stage instead of in the audience. I was there to speak with Amitav Ghosh, the imaginative and erudite author of profoundly entertaining, history-steeped, and humanist novels, among them The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and his newest, Sea of Poppies.

Ghosh seems to absorb history, including that discovered in such primary sources as court documents, as naturally and productively as a plant absorbs sunlight. His fiction is many-faceted, rich in tragedy and wit, romance and social concerns. He loves spending "long, dreamy days" at his desk writing, and his pleasure in language and story are palpable. Brilliant and fluent, Ghosh responded to each question with a beautifully formed story or thoughtfully expressed observation. When I asked him how he is able to write of dire things--slavery, torture, imprisonment, addiction, exile--without losing a sense of life's vibrancy and humor, he replied by talking about how, even in the darkest moments, the most oppressive places, people come together and find comfort in community, solace in making the best of the little they have--a patch of sun or shade, a hand to hold, food to share, however simple. We take heart; we distribute the sorrow, help carry the weight. We rekindle gratitude and hope, appreciation for beauty and laughter. That's just the way we are. We come together and find strength.

I couldn't help but think of the extraordinary community that coalesced around Barack Obama. We recognized the light of a true leader. Now we need to continue to support our new president, and each other. All of Ghosh's characters end up on a ship, the Ibis. It's no cliche to say that we truly are all in the same boat, that we all rise and fall together, and that we can make this new start a voyage into a more sane, responsible, just, and sustainable future.

I'm so grateful to Amitav Ghosh for all the compassion, art, and ardor he brings to his writing, for his generosity, and for the joy he finds in writing. In life.

RIP and Oh Happy Day!!

2008-11-07T17:26:00.000-08:00

Chicago has felt lately like the center of the universe. While many of us continue to pay tribute to the late great Studs Terkel, our city on the lake was the site of a spectacular celebration of democracy at its finest. We cried and cheered and danced and cried some more with astonishment, relief, and pride as Barack Obama came before us as the first African American president-elect, and the leader that will guide us out of the nightmare of the past eight years. I felt liberated, as though a hood had been lifted from my head and face. As though I'd been released from a cramped cell and could stand up straight and take a deep breath for the first time since 2000. We can once again try to live up to our ideals. This is transformation, with millions of new voters, with millions of voices raised to reclaim our beloved country, to reassert decency and justice. I'm so grateful to everyone who worked so hard on behalf of Barack Obama, family and friends included. Thank you, thank you.

And in the midst of jubilation, life, and death, go on. On the literary front, we mourn the loss of another great book advocate, another inspired reader and a supremely gifted critical writer, John Leonard. A man Studs much admired, and vice versa. John Leonard contributed mightily to our culture. He leaves an empty space, and one wonders if any one critic can command the attention he did in this time of pixels and pieces. Quick takes and endangered newspapers.

But then, I think of Obama and know that we'll figure things out. And that we'll keep writing and reading, learning and thinking.

More on Studs

2008-11-02T10:14:00.000-08:00

A Conversation with Studs Terkel

As an associate editor for Booklist, and as a book reviewer and critic, I had the profound good fortune to speak with Studs Terkel onstage and off. It was always a tremendous thrill and boost to converse with him in front of hundreds of his fans, I could feel the admiration, delight, and love rolling off the audience like a breeze over water. And the thunderous applause Studs received recalibrated one’s heartbeat. And no matter how prolonged the clapping, how enthusiastic the standing ovation, Studs would lean over to me and say, “How I’d do? Was it all right?” Half-teasing, but sincere. Studs was a giving and humble guy. He genuinely admired people, all kinds of people, and so for all his fame, he never put himself above anyone else.

I had the great honor and pleasure of celebrating Studs Terkel’s phenomenal contribution to American literature when nominated him for the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan
Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. Named after the first president of the NBCC, the award is given annually to a person––a writer, publisher, critic or editor––who has contributed significantly to book culture over time.

As the NBCC states, “Past winners have included Pauline Kael, Studs Terkel, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, Bill Henderson, John Leonard, Louis D. Rubin Jr., Jason
Epstein, William Maxwell, Leslie A. Marchand, Robert Giroux, Alfred
Kazin, Elizabeth Hardwick and the Library of America. As you can tell
from the list, the award is truly ecumenical, seeking to recognize
outstanding and long-standing work from any sector that affects a book
and contributes to American art and letters.”

Studs took immense pleasure in this award. He loved books passionately, and read books with penetrating insight and receptivity. When I was asked to write an interviewing the interviewers piece for Bookforum in 2007, I just had to start with Studs Terkel. Bookforum published a brief excerpt of our conversation, and I would like to share the transcript with other Studs fans here.

Seaman: You’ve spoken with so many great writers over the years. Who do you remember most vividly?

Terkel: Jimmy Baldwin, when he first came back from his long self-exile from America. He had just come back from Switzerland and Nobody Knows My Name was out. Well, he was great, just back after a long absence. He felt high. So I thought, hell, I’ll lead off with some Bessie Smith, some blues, and that did it. He loved it. He was terrific.

And it was very exciting to talk with Margaret Atwood. You know, these are improvised conversations to a great extent. I read the book, or, lots of times, all the writer’s books, thoroughly. I know them inside out. I mark them up, I’ve really gotten into it, you know.

And then, well, invariably, I start with the author’s voice. I like to have the author read, maybe from the beginning, or a favorite passage, something to set the tone. This is radio, so you want that. Then what I aim for, what I hope for, is that we’ll talk about the book, absolutely, but more than that, we’ll talk about their outlook on life. How do they see the world? What are they curious about? What’s on their mind?

The thing is to be flexible. You’ve got to be open to the conversation. You’ve got to know your stuff, and you’ve got to willing go where they go. Flexibility with substance. Style and substance are related after all. Form follows function. I’m a Louis Sullivan man. I like it solid and ornate. Stone and life, you see. You need both the solid and the fluid. That’s how it’s done.

Another great conversationalist is Gore Vidal. Oh yes, he is very clear. There’s nothing wasted in what he says. The clarity is, oh, amazing. It seems so easy, and he says so much, so naturally. That really stays with you. That’s impressive, that’s exciting. Gore Vidal has really got it.

Seaman: Writers tell me how amazed they are at how obviously well-read their books are. I just spoke to Patricia Hampl, who said that you “munched” her book. That it was “manhandled.”

Terkel: Oh, yes. Everyone says that. I’m famous for that. Patricia Hampl, she’s great. There are so many great women writers. Fabulous writers. They’re really doing great things in new ways. Now I’m thinking about Toni Morrison. How I love Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison is brilliant. Such insight. Such stories. Wow.

And I love the nonfiction writers, too. Harrison Salisbury. Remember him? At the New York Times. A historian, knew it all about the Soviet Union, China. He was someone who could speak spontaneously but deeply. That’s an art.

Tobias Wolff is like that, too. So much at the ready, you know. He writes beautifully, too, both fiction and nonfiction. Yes, that’s really something.

And way back, before he started writing novels, Tom Wolfe was something. I liked his early works. Very adventurous. Smart. He was a master of the short takes, and a great talker.

Different worlds, fiction and nonfiction. They’re both important.

Of course, thinking about my hometown, I loved Nelson Algren. Oh yes. We would talk. Nelson, well, he was great. He could speak on any subject, which was a good thing, because he would wander away every time. You’d be talking about one topic, and then off he’d go, on to something else. And you had to stay with it. And it was thrilling. I’ll never forget Nelson.

Seaman: Are there any writers you wish you’d spoken with?

Terkel: Writers I wish I spoke with? John Steinbeck. Now that’s a shame. I did write a good long introduction when they reissued The Grapes of Wrath, the great American novel. At least I was able to do that. And I regret never talking with Saul Bellow.

The thing is, much as I love talking to writers, it is regular folks who say the most surprising and unforgettable things. Yes, people, ordinary folks––a paralegal, an engineer, a bus drive, waitress. Now they can talk. They can tell you things. They have stories. Regular people, they stay with me.

Celebrate Studs

2008-10-31T19:01:00.000-07:00

Studs Terkel died today at his Chicago home. He was 96, and he did live long enough to see his new book, P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening, come into the world. I'm only sorry he wasn't able to stick around to see Barack Obama become president. Among many other roles in his long, empathic, creative, and positive life, Studs was a great champion of civil rights.

Studs of the red socks, cigar, martini, growl, and impish smile will be missed. He will be remembered. His books, works of great sensitivity, respect, integrity, and vitality, will live on. And you have to laugh, picturing Studs, always devilish, declaring that he wanted his epitaph to read: "Curiosity did not kill this cat."

Radio review

2008-10-13T17:42:00.000-07:00

I am loving my gig at Chicago Public Radio. Here's the latest, a review of Joe Meno's Demons in the Spring.

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=29485

Full story

2008-10-11T12:18:00.001-07:00

We are living in a time of diminishment. Everywhere we look, resources are shrinking, from common sense to financial liquidity to forests, ocean life, you name it. Part of the fall into extinction is the squeezing and dumbing down of newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, which, until a week ago, continued to publish a genuine book section, one of only 4 in the entire country, even though it exiled books to Saturday, the day with the lowest readership. I have had the privilege and the deep pleasure of writing for the Chicago Tribune for years and years, and I'm immensely grateful to everyone I've worked with there and continue to work with, especially books editor Elizabeth Taylor. But now, in spite of Taylor's valiant efforts--and Elizabeth Taylor is a true champion of literature, writers, and readers--the Tribune has not only combined book reviews with other cultural coverage, which certainly can create a positive synergy, it has reduced book reviews to a length far too brief for any real discussion of the book at hand.

Certainly short reviews have their place and their delights. But we need both concise and full reviews. Short takes to pique interest, sustained immersions to illuminate all that writers achieve. I've written a couple of the new, tight reviews, and seen them cut down even more. And so, in the interest of full disclosure, and out of the passion to share my joy in books and my full response to this particular book, a brilliant and beautiful creation, here is the original, more detailed version of the review that appears in today's paper.

Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World
By Jed Perl
Knopf, $25, 224 pages

Review by Donna Seaman

Writers are often seized by works of art, their imaginations ignited by communion with a sculpture, painting, or object. Think of Keats and his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” By responding in words to form, line, and color, a writer taps into the artist’s creative energy and transmits flashes of insight at once radiant and penetrating. Art critic Jed Perl takes a unique approach to this exalted literary tradition in an elegant tribute to an enigmatic, misunderstood painter.

Anyone familiar with Perl’s essays in the New Republic or his last book, New Art City (2005), a capacious history of the daring art movements that made twentieth-century New York the capital of the art world, knows that Perl writes with precision and a driving narrative force and takes as his mission the rescue of underappreciated artists. Even so, his new book is full of surprises, beginning with his declaration that Antoine Watteau is his favorite artist. Surely not this early eighteenth-century French painter so often dismissed as a frivolous aggrandizer of high-society frolics? Perl anticipates, relishes, and eradicates our skepticism, and not only by virtue of his knowledgeable and supple argument. The very fact that Watteau inspires Perl to write such sparkling, whiplash sentences is proof positive of the subtle power of the painter’s technically superb and brilliantly nuanced work.

In his decisive prologue, Perl characterizes Watteau’s masterpieces as embodying “a mingling of velvetiness and steeliness that constitute one of the miracles of art.” He goes on to explicate Watteau’s “delicious artifice” in which his “hiding or veiling or theatricalizing strong feelings becomes a way of revealing the complexities of those feelings,” as well as “the gathering contradictions of his world.” Perl then avers that Watteau’s paintings and drawings of fashionable young men and women of leisure are about nothing less than the evolution of the self. How do scenes set in nearly wild, certainly secretive gardens in which elaborately attired lovers flirt and dream illuminate the inner worlds of people living in a volatile time? Perl could easily articulate his striking interpretation of the true meaning of Watteau’s work in a straight-forward mix of biography and art history. Instead he invents his own artifice and makes extraordinary use of the simple, playful structure of an alphabet book.

Just as Watteau improvised on stylized tableau to create a clever visual lexicon based on the motifs of the commedia dell’arte, Perl anchors his lively essays to the homey letters of the alphabet, allowing for unexpected and marvelously revealing juxtapositions and jump cuts. This gathering of glimpses, this assemblage of impressions, reflections, and portraits of people influenced by Watteau, from Walter Pater to Samuel Beckett to Picasso, is perfectly suited to Watteau, a “mystery man” even to his friends; an artist who declined to talk about his work right up to his death from tuberculosis at 36 in 1721.

A is for actor, but Perl decides that while “the life of the theater” shapes Watteau’s paintings, his true subject is the elusiveness of identity and self-understanding. B is for backs, and how superb Perl is in his analysis of the “extraordinary psychological power” of this large part of our anatomy and Watteau’s passion for depicting it. D is for Deburau, as in Jean-Baptiste and Charles, the famous father-and-son mimes who launch Perl’s electrifying appreciation of the film Children of Paradise, first screened in Paris in 1945. And W is for women, and how Watteau adored them. Perl sees Katherine Hepburn as a modern “Watteau woman, a woman who is gorgeous and funny and sexy and independent.” Watteau’s charming and irreverent women, Perl riffs joyously, are “goddesses on the lam.”

What a perfect match between writer and subject. What panache, expertise, and sensitivity Perl displays. This refined yet ebullient book, this pearlescent ABC, offers an invaluable key to a great artist of profound pleasures and disclosures, and a scintillating primer in the fine art of seeing.

New radio gig

2008-10-09T16:57:00.000-07:00

I'm elated to announce that I am now reviewing books and interviewing authors for a terrific show on Chicago Public Radio, Eight-Forty-Eight. I've reviewed Porter Shreve's funny and smart new novel, When the White House Was Ours and I spoke with the always engaging, smart, and funny John McNally about his superb new book, the short story collection Ghosts of Chicago.

Here are the links:

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=29375

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=29428

Ruled by a two-faced deity

2008-10-05T11:18:00.000-07:00

I was thinking this morning about our two-sidedness, our confounding capacity to do right one moment and wrong the next. Who was it, I asked myself, who wrote recently about Janus, the Roman god of doors, gates, and beginnings who is portrayed with two opposite faces? Studs Terkel.

His new book is P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening.

Oral historian, writer of conscience, and raconteur-on-a-mission Studs Terkel follows his vivid and affecting memoir, Touch and Go, with an electrifying set of found treasures: essays and interviews that have never been published before, or which only appeared long ago in a Chicago venue. These excavated works—and everyone whose personal archives are experiments in chaos will find Terkel’s description of their exhumation from his messy workroom comforting and amusing––are startlingly fresh and stingingly relevant.

Terkel’s recovered 1961 conversation with James Baldwin is worth the price of admission, so sharply and devastatingly candid is Baldwin about the legacy of hate, fear, lies, brutality, and oppression we sanitize with the bland term race issues. This exchange couldn’t be more timely. Ditto Terkel’s conversation with lyricist E. Y. Harburg, who wrote the Great Depression classic, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

Terkel also looks back to Chicago election shenanigans and the abuses of clout. And yes, Terkel writes of his city on the lake and on the make as a “city of hands” ruled by the deity Janus of the two faces, a theme brilliantly realized in portraits of Chicagoans of diverse backgrounds and shared needs and dreams. Hilarious, wry, sorrowful, and prescient, this gathering asserts Terkel’s great gift for tapping into the lifeblood of America, and for discerning, always with heart and clarity, what people suffer and how they lift themselves up and keep on keeping on. Long live Studs.

And may we turn two-facedness into the ability to look both back and forward so that we learn from the past, perceive continuity and achieve perspective. To look to others as well as to ourselves, to see both sides of the question and make decisions with reason and fairness, to think twice and not two-time each other but give each other and ourselves second chances to do our best.

Unnecessary Loss

2008-10-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, my good dentist referred me to a periodontist. I’ve had gum problems since I was 15, and once again, some repair was in order. My dentist warned me that if I didn’t have a bone graft, I would suffer bone loss. Actually, I would suffer additional bone loss—damage had already been done. He told me that I might even lose a tooth or two. I was rattled; I did go to the periodontist. But I felt no pain; I disliked the place; I felt hustled, and the cost, even with insurance, was terribly high. I decided to wait. I forgot about it. I let life-as-usual hold me under its powerful spell.

A year went by. I was back at the dentist. He repeated his warnings. He scolded me. He sent me to another periodontist. I liked this place a bit more. I felt more determined. I had new insurance. I was ready. But they weren’t. I had to wait for an estimate, an approval, notification, an open time slot. More months went by. I ignored the bleeding, the sensitivity. My life is full and busy and deadline-driven, and I foolishly spent my bone and tissue capital like a binging gambler, like a homeowner who accepted a mortgage she could never manage, like a financial manager buying and selling millions of these sure-to-fail loans, speculating and gambling with “toxic assets.” I was as risk-inviting, irresponsible, oblivious, and hubristic as a Wall Street day trader. By the time I opened my mouth, ready for a bone graft, it was too late. The tooth had to come out.

Last night I dreamt that the ceiling in this room, the back bedroom in a small brick house that I use as an office, reading and writing room, favorite place to hang out, was separating from the walls. Its fall was inevitable. I dashed in and out, trying to decide what to rescue. My computer. My purse. Photographs. Paintings. Signed books. I did not want to get hurt, but I couldn’t bear the thought of losing what I think of as my life. We’d waited too long. We knew the house needed work; we procrastinated.

I’ve been indignant, outraged, and disgusted over the lack of foresight and regulation, the orgy of greed and folly that has led us to financial crisis. But as I sit here, icing my swollen face, tonguing the gap in my mouth, my deficit, my foreclosure, I know that we are all to blame. That we are all creatures of habit, that we are all stubbornly optimistic and childishly reluctant to face facts and take painful action. So now we will all suffer loss, regret, and fear. We will have to make sacrifices, and maybe we will learn from our mistakes. At least for a little while.

More Truth in Fiction: City of Refuge

2008-09-21T15:25:00.000-07:00

Here it is, the last sweet, sunny, slow weekend in summer, and we're still unnerved by last weekend's deluge. Although we are intimate with powerfully bad weather, Chicago is not a hurricane town. Yet last week, we were visited by extreme rain, and endured floods. Our suffering was minor compared to that of Galveston, Houston, and points south and east in the Caribbean, but it does make one stop and think about what we hold dear. Our homes as the holdfast of our identity, our sense of security, the fruits of hard work, and irreplacable artifacts. Every hurricane will remind us of Katrina, and I was reminded of a terrific new novel:

City of Refuge by Tom Piazza

Tom Piazza knows New Orleans, its flavors, aromas, and sounds. Its blues and jazz, pragmatism and magic, joi de vivre and defiance, amplitude and deprivation. And he understands the full tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. Determined to vanquish reader complacency and blast the clichés that sprout and spread, Piazza skillfully and astutely tells a harrowing two-track story.

SJ Williams is an African American carpenter and Vietnam vet who dearly loves his home in the Lower Ninth Ward, keeps his demons at bay through the discipline of hard work, and looks out for his sister and teenaged nephew. Craig Donaldson, an Anglo American magazine editor, is crazy about his adopted home in New Orleans, a passion no longer shared with his wife now that they have young children.

As the hurricane bears down on the city, everyone’s strengths and weaknesses are cruelly tested and exposed. SJ stays put and heroically helps others. Craig realizes that the needs of his family trump his own desires, and they join the exodus. In the pre-storm chapters, the conflicts and dreams of Piazza’s characters, men and women of bedrock goodness, essentially define home and reveal all the precious everyday wonders that Katrina disrupted and destroyed.

Then, in the scenes that make this such an extraordinary and unforgettable novel, Piazza dramatizes more devastatingly than any journalistic account the hurricane’s shocking aftermath, aligning the failure to protect, rescue, and respect the people of the Lower Ninth with the brutal indifference of war. By following his characters into the Katrina diaspora and back again, Piazza tells a towering epic tale of self, family, and place; terror and courage, criminality and altruism, a story as old and heartbreaking as humankind itself.

We are forever seeking higher ground.

Truth, beauty, and hard facts in fiction, part 2

2008-09-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

I've become a great admirer and beneficiary of contemporary Chinese literature. Anchee Min opened the door, and I've become a devoted reader of Ha Jin. This summer I was deeply moved by the beauty, daring, and sorrow of Ma Jian's Beijing Coma, in which a student shot in the head during the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square falls into a coma, but retains consciousness.

It's a mysterious, haunting, and meditative novel of the grim legacy of the surreally brutal Cultural Revolution. Courageous and creative, Ma Jian draws on Kafka and the Chinese epic The Book of Mountains and Seas in this powerfully allegorical masterwork, a compassionate and magnificent novel that exposes China’s catastrophic moral paralysis, and celebrates the inalienable freedom of the mind and spirit.

I'm also very high on Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xiaolu Guo.
Aug. 2008. 176p. illus. Doubleday, hardcover, $22.95 (9780385525923). REVIEW. First published July, 2008 (Booklist):

Fenfang has fled the dreariness of her impoverished village in a never-changing land of sweet-potato fields and made the long journey to Beijing. There she copes with wretched little apartments, a violently angry lover, and the viciousness of nosy old neighbors who, resentful of her loveliness and independence, sic the police on her. Cockroaches swarm the walls, while on the street she confronts the great press of humanity, dense smog, corruption, and repression. But things are changing in Beijing, and Fenfang is smart, tough, and funny. She works as a film extra and gets a little break in the role “Female Number Three Hundred.” Writer and filmmaker Guo, whose A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007) was a Orange Prize finalist, is a master of concision, filling each “fragment” of her alluring and admirable narrator’s life with irony, anguish, and insight. Once Fenfang recognizes that her loneliness and yearning for dignity and freedom are shared by all, she finds her voice and path to self-expression. A remarkably atmospheric, metaphoric, and piquant novel of personal and cultural metamorphosis. — Donna Seaman

Truth, beauty, and hard facts in fiction

2008-09-04T15:27:00.000-07:00

Time for a break, after last night's orgy of insults at the Republican convention. After that excessive display of the politics of greed and power. After that surreal scene in which the hatted and buttoned sign-bobbing audience chanted "Drill, baby, drill!" in some very weird trance of aggressive desire for a vanishing resource, a pep talk for raping the earth, a scene right out of Edward Abbey or Christopher Buckley of a world gone smacking mad, I find myself thinking of a beautiful, poetic, intelligent, earth-loving, compassionate, complex, and haunting novel by a writer of deep conscience and high imagination. Linda Hogan writes from a Native American perspective and with a fluent ecological understanding. She is also a mesmerizing storyteller. Leave the world of lies and camera-ready political theater in which a baby is used shamelessly as a prop--although I rather liked the youngest sister moistening her hand with spit to smooth down her baby brother's hair--and escape to Linda Hogan's seacoast world.

From Booklist, of course.

*Starred Review* People of the Whale.By Linda Hogan.2008. 320p. Norton, $24.95 (9780393064575).
REVIEW First published July, 2008 (Booklist).

“The ocean is a great being”; each whale is a planet, so much life does it sustain. These are truths Thomas and Ruth’s Northwest Pacific Coast tribe once held as self-evident. Sweethearts since childhood, they each inherited a working intimacy with the ocean, and their marriage is joyful until Thomas goes off to fight in Vietnam. Ruth is pregnant when he leaves, and when he doesn’t return, she devotes herself to their son, who possesses the old gift for communing with whales. Thomas reappears when his fellow Vietnam vets decide to break the ban on whale hunting, hoping to reclaim his legacy as the grandson of a legendary whale hunter. But the others are motivated by greed, and tribal traditions are grievously desecrated. Hogan, a poet, essayist, and quintessential econovelist (Power, 1998), dramatizes the interconnectivity of cultural extinction, environmental destruction, and war as she parallels Ruth’s courageous defense of the living world with Thomas’ suffering and secret life in Vietnam. She also links the near genocide of aboriginal peoples with the near extinction of marine life. Deeply ecological, original, and spellbinding, Hogan ascends to an even higher plane in this hauntingly beautiful novel of the hidden dimensions of life, and all that is now imperiled. —Donna Seaman

Personality cults versus serious issues

2008-08-30T09:25:00.000-07:00

I watched all the big speeches at the Democratic convention, and I wept. I'm sentimental, for sure, a bred-in-the-bone trait I often abhor not only because it makes my mascara run, but also because it clashes so violently with my righteous indignation and cynicism, making for stormy inner weather. But, tears are also a sign of deep feelings, of connection to others, of love of life. And so I wept in front of the television last week with joy and pride and relief. My heart lifted to see Senatator Ted Kennedy continuing to fight the good fight. I think the world of Michelle Obama, who exemplifies the best of womanhood, the best of Chicago (my home), and the best of America. I am thrilled by Barack Obama's dedication to helping others, his intelligent perceptions of what ails our country and of our country's role in the world; his willingness to listen to others, his strong sense of story, which makes for coherent and empathic thinking. His poise and eloquence. Obama is the finest presidential candidate I have ever seen and voted for. But one day after his historic speech, we were drowning in a muddy sea of mass trivia.

John McCain and his people mock Obama as a celebrity, and then turn around and set up their own instant cult of personality. Obama is a beautiful man, they found a beautiful woman. Obama is a family man with two daughter and a remarkably accomplished wife. Palin has five children; one a soldier on his way to Iraq, the youngest a Down's syndrome child. To many, Obama represents urban American. Sarah Palin is a country gal. She shoots guns, hunts, kills, and slaughters animals. She lives in a state with a small population and a vast and precious wilderness she apparently isn't concerned about preserving. Her husband is a commercial fisherman, an industry in great peril given our emptying of the oceans. Palin is anti-reproductive rights and an evangelical Christian. The calculations in choosing her are obvious and maddening, and distracting. Which is the point.

We are on the brink of environmental catastrophe as global temperatures rise, thanks to our burning of fossils fuels, and the human population increases. Thanks to rapidly accelerated globalization, our resource-consuming, waste-generating habits are spreading to China, India, and beyond. This is not sustainable. Back to our economic woes, they are directly connected to our dependence on foreign oil, which, in turn, is directly responsible for grave geopolitical conflicts. All is intertwined, and all is churning and whirling in a virtual hurricane for which we are utterly unprepared. We have fallen into a narcotized state of indifference and ineptness over the past eight years, years in which we have been at war for no legitimate reasons. This is doing us profound harm, not to mention the suffering we're causing in other lands. Our schools are failing as is our infrastructure. Science is censored; work is no longer respected or rewarded; health care is a Kafkaesque nightmare; the corporate imperative is gutting everything essential to our well-being, from agriculture to newspapers. All that has made our country great is threatened. The lifeblood is being sucked out; we are becoming a hollowed-out, weakened land. We need the four candidates to talk seriously, clearly, and productively about what they are going to do about the crises we face. And we have to put a stop to the crimes and destructive shenanigans of the Republicans.

The world is full of brilliant and caring people. Genuine information and valuable analysis is everywhere available. Take a break from political gossip and read The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank. We're in dire straits for fully comprehensible and carefully documented reasons. Here's my Booklist review:

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. By Thomas Frank.
2008. 368p. Holt/Metropolitan, hardcover, $25 (9780805079883). 973.92.

REVIEW. First published July, 2008 (Booklist).

Frank brings invaluable insider perceptions, ardor, and precision to his lancing inquiry into the erosion of democracy and the enshrinement of the mighty dollar. His One Market under God (2000) was followed by the best-selling What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), and now Lannan Award–winning Frank reaches a crescendo in this electrifying, well-researched analysis of “conservatism-as-profiteering.” With looks back at Ronald Reagan and Oliver North, and sharp scrutiny of Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff, Frank documents the hard-to-believe conservative strategy of deliberate misrule and the consequences of the conservative mantra, “Less government in business and more business in government.” Citing numerous, hair-raising examples, Frank explains how conservatism itself became a mega-big business and chronicles the grievous repercussions of the gutting of the federal government and the rise of high-rolling industry lobbyists and contractors, who are now feeding off the “ultralucrative homeland security industry.” In this “age of political vandalism,” Frank observes, we have jettisoned oversight and accountability, accrued “massive public debt,” committed crimes against humanity at home and in Iraq, and endangered the environment, the economy, the food supply, health care, and education. In short, Frank argues, the conservative agenda has defiled the American dream. This staggering history of systematic greed will inject new energy into public discourse as a historic election looms. — Donna Seaman

New Interviews!

2008-08-23T14:29:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Hillary Carlip, our web wizard, and, imagine!, Open Books guest, you will see lots of new interviews listed in both Fiction and Nonfiction. Chicago writers are present in an impressive array, from natural history writer Joel Greenberg to Sara Paretsky, crime writer, novelist, and essayist, to fiction writer Billy Lombardo to creatively investigative and scholarly journalist Miles Harvey to novelist Gioia Diliberto. And more. Each has a distinctive approach to writing, each is a uniquely compelling conversationalist. I hope that you'll listen to these discussions about reading and writing and seeking truth and understanding. I hope you'll read the books written by these articulate, caring, and immensely talented writers.

China on my mind

2008-08-09T11:55:00.001-07:00

By the time I arrived home Friday night, take-out Thai food in hand, we had already missed the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics. But we did tune in during the Parade of Nations, and I was instantly captivated. I love people-watching, and this was a rare array. I felt chagrined and amazed: how could I be unaware of the existence of so many countries? I felt wonder and love: how grand and glorious is the human palette. I felt catty as I sized up the costumes or outfits or uniforms. What a fashion show, and how full of energy and feeling everyone was, waving, holding up cameras, flags, looking up and up. What a stage. It looked like a space station, far, far from Earth. Nature reduced to icons. The utter triumph of the human will.

And what a species we are. It was stunning to see group after group, from the smallest delegations, a proud 2, a determined 4, a stern 7, to surging bands of rudely confident hundreds. People carrying so very many stories of families and lands battered, bruised, bloodied and bashed. That very day a new war had broken out in Georgia, and once again, we turned away from the old terrible news in Afghanistan, Burma, Zimbabwe, Tibet, right here in River City. During the commercials, a channel surfer could monitor the nasty, idiotic frenzy over John Edwards' affair. Back to the Olympics and the opening night's face-by-face survey of the state of the human family, which embraces the basketball giant Yao Ming and a tiny hero, the young boy who rescued classmates after the immense Sichuan earthquake, walking hand in hand.

Certain that I needed to see the full presentation, I stayed up and finally after 2:00 am Chicago time, it unfolded before me, a display so spectacular, overwhelming, martial, and imposing, I felt that I was witnessing a seismic shift in world power. The combination of the sheer wonder of thousands of synchronized performers and high-tech wizardry redefines our understanding of the place of the individual in the collective, the ability of technology to liberate and harness us, to realize ideas on an immense scale, to create propaganda of staggering dimensions and complexity and intimidating beauty. Such discipline, such grace, such power. Ancient arts writ large with new media. The director Zhang Yimou drew on centuries of art and philosophy and repression to project a utopian vision. An electric fairy tale. A high-definition dream in which hundreds of men and women became a vast machine among vast machines.

Chicago hopes to host the Olympics in eight years. What might our opening ceremony involve? All I could picture last night, in the blaze and burst and shimmer and military perfection of Beijing's resplendent and humbling and disturbing electronic vision of all for one and one for all was an old style old guys blues band hunkered down on a creaky stage in a small shabby club, playing their hearts out on simple instruments of wood and metal, feet keeping time, voices lifting and falling, notes bending and sliding, songs unfurling about loneliness and love, about yearning for home and needing to get away, of the joys and sorrows of the human predicament on the old whirling Earth. Of all that is lost and denied. Of beauty and hope and the certain knowledge that much as we try to do right, we so often do wrong. That as much damage as we do, we are but small creatures in a vast cosmos we can barely discern.

Let us all be athletes of compassion, peace, and truth.

New interviews on the way

2008-07-20T16:34:00.001-07:00

It's summer. That's my excuse. I have many new interviews to add to the site, and I'm working on putting all the elements together. Honest I am. In-between all the other urgent matters on my to-do list. For instance, I just recorded an interview with Miles Harvey about his fascinating and many-faceted work of history, biography, and scholarly sleuthing, Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America. I spoke with the editors and contributors to a rich and resonant anthology, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cultural Collision and Connection. Great stuff. Check back.

My Sister, My Love by Joyce Carol Oates

2008-07-12T09:25:00.000-07:00

I read Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, My Sister, My Love, months ago, and I had been waiting for it to come out to see what other reviewers and readers thought of it. But before responses to the novel surfaced, breaking news on the actual murder case on which My Sister, My Love is based flooded screens, air waves, and newspapers. This is so Oates. She is so attuned to the collective psyche. The collision of the release if this searing novel with the announcement that improved DNA identification technologies have exonerated JonBenet Ramsey’s family affirms Oates’ attunement to the gestalt. What a gift she has for turning the true stories that rivet our attention, mostly grim outbreaks of violence tinged with aberrant eroticism and certain madness, into fiction of tremendous dark power.

It’s obvious why JonBenet Ramsey’s murder fascinates Oates, a brilliant and daring writer fixated on the valor and vulnerability of girls in an aggressively sexualized and murderous world. She wrote a stinging essay about the 1996 murder of the six-year-old beauty princess during the media frenzy generated by the grossly mishandled case. In My Sister, My Love, she fictionalizes the family horror implicit in the Ramsey tragedy in a novel of ferocious intensity and nervy wit.

In Oates’ tale, the Rampikes live uneasily in wealthy, white Fair Hills, New Jersey. Bix is a big, shambling, sexy, and ruthless guy intent on getting mega-rich in the bio-tech industry. Bosomy, high-strung, and needy Betsey longs for acceptance among the town’s thin and snooty elite wives, and tries to use her jittery son, Skyler, as bait. But it’s her second child, anxious and brittle Edna Louise, who fulfills Betsey’s dream of fame and fortune. Her vehicle is figure-skating, a heady mix of athleticism and exhibitionism perfectly suited to Betsey’s mania for capitalizing on feminine charms to get maximum attention. Oates’ choice of ice-skating is inspired. It’s a cold, hard, and precarious realm fraught with prurience of the pedophile kind—her descriptions of Tots on Ice competitions are gloriously creepy. And her choice of narrator is equally brilliant: Skyler tells the story of his sister’s grotesque transformation into a gauchely make-up and provocatively costumed ice fairy a decade after her death. He himself has barely survived his toxic family, and his chronicle of two adults who never should have had children in an affluent and deeply neurotic society that reduces childhood to an alphabet stew of psychiatric and neurological syndromes and doses them with fistfuls of pharmaceuticals instead of love is a mordantly satirical indictment of upper-class child abuse during the pell-mell greed of the corporate grabfest of the 1990s. Both neglected Skyler and his poor little sister––renamed Bliss and kept out of school and subjected to extreme and painful practice sessions, beauty treatments, and drug regimes (“I’m not a little girl. I’m a thousand years old.”)––are victims of their monstrous mother’s misery over her husband’s incessant infidelities, a storm of hurt and fury young Skyler struggles to understand.

Oates’ insights into her narrator’s psyche when he is nine and nineteen and astonishing in their nuance and stinging humor, culminiating in his fascination and disgust with atrocities of the media coverage in “Tabloid Hell,” and the fiendish cultism in “cybercesspoolspace.” Oates reachers higher peaks with each work, and this is a stop-in-your-tracks novel of extraordinary dimension and power, sympathy and indignation.

For the love of country

2008-07-04T13:24:00.001-07:00

It's a surprisingly cool July 4th here in Chicago. The sky a weave of blue and white, the clouds pulled by the wind and sifting the sunlight. It's windows-open weather, which I love because I can hear all the leaves rustling in the breeze and listen to the birds talk and sing. Our milkweed is blooming and I watched a large monarch butterfly wing from one flower cluster to the next. I've spent the day, so far, reading a smart, eye-opening, and harrowing book about honeybees in decline. A book about interconnectivity and our species' inability to detect it. A book we'll be hearing about when it comes out in September.

But today I want to welcome another book into the world, a book officially released this week perhaps because its author, Rick Bass, is a great American. A valiant citizen of the world. An eloquent advocate for the living world, that is. His new book is Why I Came West.

Rick Bass writes out of a profound connection and commitment to wilderness, creating exalted and elegiac fiction—his last story collection, The Lives of Rocks, was absurdly overlooked, and molten nonfiction (no book more lucidly explained why drilling in the Arctic is a crime we must never commit than Caribou Rising). Clearly, his attunement to the great web of life is meshed with his love of language and story, but never before has he told the full tale of his apprenticeship to literature and the place that has defined his life for the past two decades, Montana’s Yaak Valley. In Why I Came West Bass looks back to his suburban Houston childhood and his work as an oil geologist in Mississippi, searching for clues to his love-at-first sight response to the Yaak. As he describes the rich diversity of life cradled in these northerly mountains and forests and his deep immersion in this bountiful land as a hunter, hiker, and meditative observer, he forges a majestic, sad, and clarion memoir of imagination and symbiosis, of “the spirit within us, and the spirit of a place, and then that third thing, that story-like thing––the ignition, or spark, that occurs between us and it.”

Bass shares his anguish over the clear-cutting of bear-sheltering woods, his turning away from writing fiction to do the hard work of environmental activism, and the virulent hatred aroused by his efforts to secure permanent protection for “fourteen little roadless areas.” Versed in duality and paradox, infused with fierce joy in the oneness of life, poetic, and philosophical, Bass is also “sensate and passionate,” qualities he holds in high esteem. In this ravishing and clarifying and important memoir of one life and the life of a place, Bass writes with incandescent frankness about how difficult it will be to change our ways, but how necessary, and about why we must cherish what little wilderness remains.

Rick Bass writes:

“Some landscapes these days have been reduced to nothing but dandelions and fire ants, knapweed and thistle, where the only remaining wildlife to be found are sparrows, squirrels, and starlings. In blessed Yaak, however, it is all still present: not a single species has gone extinct since the retreat of the Ice Age. I find this astonishing, and magical; I know of no other valley in the continental United States for which this can be said. The biota of the Yaak is the ecological equivalent of a Russian novel. It is a greatness, an ecological heritage, that we still have, barely, in the possession of public ownership. Unlike the Russian novels, however, which are preserved forever in libraries, the last roadless wildlands of the Yaak are not preserved: there is no guarantee of their continued survival, or of the survival of that wildness, that art, that exists between our imaginations and the landscape.”

If we be patriots, we will save this place.

Homesick

2008-06-22T09:51:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this at home, so why am I homesick? I'm longing for my home ground, the place that shaped me. Even though I'm happy in the summer breeze reaching through the large window at the end of my small and cluttered room looking out over a postage-stamp backyard in great need of a gardener's touch, the garage, and alley. Even though it's a blissfully quiet Sunday in my Northwest Chicago neighborhood, with only the pair of white running shoes dangling from the electric cable strung between houses to remind me of what goes on while I sleep, I yearn for the Hudson Valley. Not only for its curvaceous beauty and deep history, but for all that I was taught there about what it means to be human.

I grew up in Roosevelt Country, both literally in that Hyde Park was just up the Hudson from our Poughkeepsie home, and conceptually, because I grew up in a liberal household where our parents taught us that how one lived one's life in the here and now matters. And that we possess an imagination so that we can envision ourself in someone else's place. So that we can imagine what it feels like to live a life different from our own, and cultivate respect and compassion for others, and generosity of spirit.

I grew up learning about the leadership of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, a courageous and compassionate first lady who looked, listened, and advocated without fuss and preening. About an administration that put people to work, that valued the land and the arts. That recognized that the American dream was rooted in a society in which families or all configurations can thrive, a society in which people can work with dignity and afford food and a safe place to live; where people are educated, the air and water kept clean, bridges and roads maintained. A place of high ideals and practical solutions. A place where business, like religion, is kept separate from government.

In the ideal place I'm calling Roosevelt Country, government was a force for good. It was formed to protect and serve the people. The government, like other grassroot organizations, was created to ensure representation and justice. Among government's many functions was its role as counterbalance to the marketplace. The federal government would look beyond monetary profit. In this nurturing and democratic land, the government would serve as a corrective to greed and prejudice. It would understand that for business to flourish, the public has to be employed, cities have to work, the infrastructure must be maintained. For sellers to find buyers, people must be able to earn a living and foresee a better future. I'm homesick for a society that values people over profit, that believes in quality, learning, and the reality of the living world.

I know that this dreamy dreamland, this republic of the reasonable, has never existed, but at least it's a realm socially conscious and hopeful people used to talk about. Unlike the nightmare world we've allowed to coalesce behind our backs, the world of big business without restraint, of selfishness and looting, of corruption and lies and cynicism. This vampire empire has hollowed out our government, drained the life out of schools, sapped the strength out of the health care system and every agency designed to help people live free of exploitation, discrimination, and piracy. We are now imperiled, the cherished American way of life once admired the world over as endangered as many of the planet's precious animals and wilderness areas.

It does not have to be this way. The market is not holy; the market is not the matrix for a democracy. We do not want a country of the mega-rich and the oppressed poor, of poisonous produce, failed levees, gutted communities, disappearing jobs, lost homes, and corporate thuggery.

We look back to where we came from to try to understand where we find ourselves. I thought alot about my homegrown vision of a better world when I was invited to write a travel piece about Hyde Park, New York, for the Chicago Tribune. I was honored and thrilled by this opportunity, and an edited version ran in a spring issue of the Chicago Tribune Magazine as part of an intriguing series about presidential sites. Here's the original version:

Roosevelt Country
Hyde Park, New York
By Donna Seaman

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “All that is in me goes back to the Hudson.” A beautiful and bountiful river fed by the Atlantic Ocean and freshwater Adirondack streams, the wide, glinting, tidal Hudson River, technically a fjord, flows through a rolling landscape of secretive valleys, voluptuous hills, and dramatic cliffs and mountains. The site of critical battles in the Revolutionary War, the Hudson became the new nation’s most important waterway, while its mystic grandeur inspired the Hudson River School of exalted landscape painting.

The Hudson Valley’s prominent first families included the Livingstons, the Beekmans (established in 1766, the Beekman Arms is the country’s longest continuously operating inn), the Montgomerys, and the Roosevelts. In the nineteenth century, industrialists named Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Astor followed, building lavish river-view mansions along a lush length of the river that became known as Millionaires Row. But these grand country seats proved impractical and burdensome, and modern-day descendants generously turned their gracious, art-filled, magnificently landscaped family estates into historic sites open to the public, among them Boscobel, Vanderbilt, Mills, Wilderstein, and Montgomery Place. Thanks to the efforts of environmentally aware river gentry and not-for-profit groups, including Scenic Hudson and Clearwater, the Hudson Valley’s unique and majestic beauty is now protected under law as a Congressional National Heritage Area.

Head north from Manhattan, where the Statue of Liberty extends her regal welcome from the watery depths, and follow the broad and vital, glinting and mysterious Hudson River past Sleepy Hollow of writer Washington Irving fame, Sing Sing Prison (which gave new meaning to the phrase “going up the river”), the historic military academy West Point, Storm King Mountain, the alluring island ruin of Bannerman’s Castle, the small river town of Beacon, now home to the internationally renowned contemporary art museum, Dia: Beacon, and Poughkeepsie, one of the Hudson’s earliest colonial settlements and home to Vassar College. Keep on traveling north by train or on Route 9, past thriving Marist College, and the Culinary Institute of America (originally the John R. Stuyvesant estate), and at last you’ll find yourself in Hyde Park. Roosevelt Country.

As a sickly child, Theodore Roosevelt was sent upstate each summer to take the fresh-air cure, a Hudson River tradition that gave rise to many a resort, camp, and sanatorium. It worked for Teddy, who not only grew robust, but also became a nature lover, establishing more than 200 national parks, forests, and preserves as the United States’ 26th president. Franklin D. Roosevelt followed in the footsteps of his fifth cousin in both politics and conservation. He, too, spent much of his youth outdoors on the family estate, hiking, climbing trees, cutting firewood, and sailing ice boats. Franklin entered politics in 1910, and as a state senator promoted wildlife and forest protection laws. FDR also planted thousands of seedling trees each year on his vast family estate.

After contracting polio at age 39 in 1921, FDR found solace and spiritual renewal at Springwood, the Roosevelt estate. In spite of his disability, he became governor of New York in 1928, and president in 1932, ultimately serving four extraordinary terms as the 32nd president, guiding the nation through the Depression and World War II. Throughout this time of horror, courage, and compromise, FDR returned to Hyde Park, his cherished home ground, as often as he could, traveling on a specially outfitted train from Washington, D.C., nearly 200 times during his exhausting and heroic presidency.

Not only did FDR regain his strength and perspective in the peace and beauty of pastoral Hyde Park, he also took great pride in his ancestry and was fascinated by the region’s history. He counted among his forefathers one of the earliest Dutch colonists in the Hudson Valley, Claes Martenszen Van Rosenvelt, who arrived sometime around 1650, and Isaac Roosevelt, who participated in the Constitutional Convention of 1788 in Poughkeepsie, where New York ratified the U.S. Constitution.

Roosevelt was born in Springwood on January 30, 1882. Built around 1800 on high ground with a view of the river, the Big House is situated on Route 9 north of Locust Grove, home of the inventor of the telegraph Samuel F. B. Morse, and south of the 212-acre Vanderbilt estate. Enamored of Dutchess County’s Dutch colonial buildings, Franklin acquired a passion for architecture, adding two new wings to the Big House, and designing four area post offices and several schools. His simple, rustic aesthetic is evident in America’s most personal and intriguing presidential sites, Top Cottage and the cottages Franklin built for Eleanor at Val-Kill.

The cottages, built acres away from each other and the Big House, embody the dynamics of a complicated marriage. Franklin had an exceptionally close relationship with his formidable widowed mother, Sara, who lived in Springwood with her son, his wife and their five children (their sixth died in infancy). It was Sara who sat at the head of the table opposite her only child, Franklin, and it was wealthy and pragmatic Sara who financed and managed the Roosevelt household. She adored her son, was intensively proud of him, and meddled unabashedly in his life. As FDR readied himself for his second term as president, expecting it to be his last, he decided that he needed a quiet place of his own away from the formality and pressures of the Big House. So he built Top Cottage, designed to comfortably accommodate his wheelchair, on a hill on the eastern edge of the Roosevelt estate with a glorious view of the Hudson.

While Franklin was much indulged as a boy, Eleanor lost her mother, beloved father, and a brother. It wasn’t easy living with her exacting and accomplished mother-in-law, who had objected strenuously to her son’s decision to marry his distant cousin. Eleanor was bedeviled by insecurity and depression as a young wife and mother, and devastated by her discovery of Franklin’s affair with Lucy Mercer in 1918. Her own struggles and innate humility made Eleanor profoundly sensitive to the suffering of others who faced discrimination and other forms of injustice. As she came into her own as a world-traveling activist, tireless humanitarian, radio personality, and daily newspaper columnist (“My Day” was syndicated in 135 newspapers), Mrs. Roosevelt, as she was known, ardently supported civil rights, women’s suffrage, and humane labor laws. Recognizing that Eleanor was a keen and empathic observer and eloquent speaker, Franklin came to rely on her as an advisor and envoy. But Sara expressed dismay over Eleanor’s increasingly independent life and liberated women friends. Realizing that his wife needed, and deserved, a place of her own, in 1925 Franklin built Stone Cottage and Val-Kill Cottage for Eleanor and her friends.

The cottages at Val-Kill are set on a long cresting hill facing a pond that is home to swans and a notorious gaggle of geese, and ringed by broad lawns, gardens, and deep woods. Val-Kill was Eleanor’s first real home, a sanctuary where she walked with her beloved dogs, rode horses, and enjoyed gatherings of family and friends. With the intention of supporting the local economy and encouraging the creation of crafts by local artisans, Mrs. Roosevelt established Val-Kill Industries.

Hailed as the “first lady of the world,” and described by Winston Churchill as possessing “a spirit of steel and a heart of gold,” Mrs. Roosevelt continued her public life after her husband’s death in 1945. Appointed as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly by President Truman, she helped found UNICEF (the United Nation’s Children’s Fund), and was the leader in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Sought for advice by world leaders, Mrs. Roosevelt lived in her beloved Val-Kill Cottage until her death in 1962.

With an eye to prosperity, Franklin Roosevelt built the country’s first presidential library. Privately financed and gifted to the federal government, the FDR library opened its doors to the public in 1941. Today, the Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site encompasses the state-of-the-art Henry A. Wallace Visitor and Education Center, Springwood, the Rose Garden gravesite of Franklin and Eleanor, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum. As for Val-Kill, President Carter signed a bill creating the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historical Site, a national park open to visitors, and home to the Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Val-Kill, an organization that continues Mrs. Roosevelt’s work on behalf of racial equality, human rights, youth development, and women’s empowerment.*

Stroll these lovely grounds, tour historic Springwood, study the objects, photographs, and documents on display at the FDR library and museum, many testifying to the gratitude and reverence for the Roosevelts felt by people from all walks of life across America and abroad. Enter the serene environment where Eleanor and Franklin, homebodies and citizens of the world, reflected on their commitments to public service, family, and friends. You will find yourself surrounded by nature’s splendor and the aura of exemplary lives lived with great thought, effort, and conviction, sorrow and humor, valor and true generosity of spirit. Will we ever see their like again?

*My parents, Elayne and Hal Seaman, are recipients of the Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal.

The Season of the Book Fest

2008-06-11T18:25:00.000-07:00

What's my excuse for not blogging for several weeks? Another big double issue of Booklist, some actual writing other than book reviews, a book review for the besieged Los Angeles Times--look for it this Sunday: How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, by Saša Stanišić, a Bosnian German writer, and translated by Anthea Bell. (See my reveiw of Honor Moore's The Bishop's Daughter in the new Bookforum.) And the Printers Row Book Fair in Chicago, where I was sorry not to speak with Richard Preston about his amazing book, Wild Trees, as planned, but where I had a fun time talking about nature, culture, and art with a superb watercolorist, Peggy Macnamara, who has a beautiful new book, Architecture by Birds and Insects: A Natural Art, and with Julia Bachrach, the historian for the Chicago Park District and author of a photo-rich book, Inspired by Nature: The Garfield Park Conservatory and Chicago's West Side.

I also watched Studs Terkel bring an audience to its feet as he riffed for 40 minutes without taking a breath. Studs is 96, and more vital than most folks half his age. And what a perspective.

Oh, right, there was also the Harold Washington Literary Award dinner, a benefit for Chicago's Authors in the Schools program. Columbia College's ardent fiction department chair and all around great guy Randy Albers spoke about Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor, and about Barack Obama, no explanation needed, and about this year's award winner, writer and activist Scott Turow. Who talked about growing up in Chicago's West Rogers Park neighborhood and his grandparents and finding his way to writing and the law. And who told a story about Harrison Ford. And it was all very moving and smart and caring and in such confounding contrast to the idiocy of what's going on in board rooms and back rooms and cells and bunkers elsewhere as to leave us all feeling bittersweet.

The new shows are stacking up. Soon we will expand the Open Books Radio web site with conversations with Sara Paretsky, Billy Lombardo, Gioia Diliberto, Hillary Carlip and lots more.

Read on.

Choosing a winner

2008-05-16T19:57:00.000-07:00

Chicago is a stalwart city. Still new and raw on the grand time scale of human civilization, it nonetheless holds fast to its traditions, when it isn't tearing down glorious old buildings. Called, in its early, hopeful days, Paris of the Prairies, Chicago has been proud of its artists and art institutions, including the The Society for Midland Authors. This heartland writers group was founded in 1915 by the likes of Clarence Darrow, Edna Ferber, Vachel Lindsay, and Harriet Monroe, and early members included Jane Addams, Ring Lardner, and Edgar Lee Masters.

The Society for Midlands authors continues to thrive as it nears its century mark, and each year it marks the vitality of Midwest literature with literary awards and a fancy awards banquet. I was pressed into service as one of this year's three fiction judges, along with the always mischievous and passionately literary Mark Eleveld and Billy Lombardo. We were deluged with novels and short story collections and quite dizzy over this bounty. But we thrashed our way through and came up with three finalists:

Benjamin Percy. Refresh, Refresh. Graywolf.
Tony Romano, When the World Was Young. HarperCollins.
Brock Clarke. An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. Algonquin.

And the winner, from Kansas City, a town that holds a special place in my heart:

Matthew Eck. The Farther Shore. Milkweed Editions.

Congratulations, Matthew! And thanks for coming to Chicago to celebrate with us.

Here's what Booklist had to say:

Booklist
September 1, 2007
**Starred Review**
The Farther Shore. By Matthew Eck. Oct. 2007. 192p. Milkweed, hardcover, $22 (1-57131-057-6).

Three American soldiers are stranded in a war-blasted desert city in Africa. The heat, the sand, the impenetrable darkness are all exacting a toll. The enemy is everyone and anyone, even your comrades. The mission is vague, preposterous. The people are starving, desperate, and violent, tyrannized by warlords and clan loyalty. Packs of emaciated dogs roam through smoking ruins. All is obscured by haze, dust, and fear. Josh, a good boy from Wichita, Kansas, struggles to stay rational, vigilant, honorable. Santiago, their lieutenant, tells him, “Stop thinking so much.” Their situation goes from bad to worse to all-out nightmare as they barely escape the city and set out for the sea. Every word in Eck’s first novel is as solid as a stone. Every moment of crisis feels authentic in its terror and tragedy; indeed, Eck served as a soldier in Somalia at age 18. Heir to Hemingway, and damn near as powerful as Cormac McCarthy in The Road (2006), Eck has created a contemporary version of The Red Badge of Courage in this tale of one young man’s trial by fire in the pandemonium of war in an age of high-tech weaponry and low-grade morality.— Donna Seaman

In Praise of Good Mothers

2008-05-10T09:25:00.000-07:00

Our Mother's Day broadcast on WLUW will feature an interview with Elizabeth Berg, a writer of great spirit and generosity. Elizabeth, a mother and a grandmother, writes with great insight and wit about women's lives, and about marriage and family, so we were thrilled to speak with her at this particular time. And I want to say Happy Mother's Day to my amazing and wonderful mother, my marvelous mother-in-law, and all the terrific mothers I count among my relatives and friends. No work is more important, difficult, and giving than nurturing the young, and standing by your children long after those delirious early years. Love, love, love.

Elizabeth's new book is a collection of short stories as perfectly crafted as they are emotionally and socially authentic: The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted: And Other Small Acts of Liberation. Berg exemplifies the writer as storyteller and artist, as close listener and keen observer, as empath and charmer. Berg seeks and finds connection with readers, writing clear and embracing prose about so-called ordinary lives with profound respect and joy. She's funny, frank, unafraid to be tender, and a natural and compelling conversationalist. Free of pretension, full of feeling, bemused and benevolent. Smart as can be. Beautiful.

Elizabeth Berg had wonderful things to say, but, alas, we were working without a studio and could do nothing to diminish the roar of the ceiling vents in our borrowed conference room. It was like being on a jet plane. Hopefully once we post the interview, you won't mind joining us as we fly to the land of reading and writing, of fiction and truth. All of us who love to read and write, who love quiet time to think and daydream, are always battling against a million distractions, a cacophony of machine noise, and endless interruptions. The space for stillness and thoughtfulness is always shrinking. But we persist.

Read this novel.

2008-05-03T12:29:00.000-07:00

The Sorrows of an American. By Siri Hustvedt.

Siri Hustvedt’s intricate and heightened novels cast a spell not only because Hustvedt is exceptionally observant and writes beautifully, or because her alluring characters are smart, sensitive, and accomplished, or because her stories are significantly complex, but rather because she perceives life’s hidden dimensions, the dark force of secrets, and the radioactivity of trauma. Preternaturally attuned to the vagaries of memory and the dangerous revelations embedded in dreams and delusions, she writes of psychological mysteries and maladies with emotional veracity and intellectual specificity. Her previous novel of family tragedy, the ravishing What I Loved (2003), featured New York artists and scholars. She returns to this milieu, even bringing along a character, art historian Leo Hertzberg, and deepens her inquiry into its spirit in this even more fluent and mesmerizing tale.

By narrating from the point of view of a psychiatrist, Erik Davidson, Hustvedt brings a professional perspective to besieged minds, although Erik’s knowledge isn’t helping all that much as he struggles for equilibrium in the wake of his divorce and his father’s death. Add to that his immersion in his father’s startlingly evocative memoir (based on a real-life source, as Hustvedt discloses in her Acknowledgements, evidence that Hustvedt’s writing skills are bred in the bone) about his poor, suffering immigrant family’s bruising hardscrabble life in unforgiving Minnesota and his scarring military service in World War II. Erik’s understanding of his past is greatly altered, and he is forced to recognize that a sensitive family mystery must be solved.

Erik’s sister, writer Inga, is even more reluctant to delve into the past. Not only is she mourning their father, she is also grieving for her late husband, a celebrity-famous novelist, a loss made all the more tortuous as a manipulative biographer and a vicious journalist root out painful truths.

Yet another unexpected set of concentric circles of pain and confusion ripple out from Erik’s involvement with his possibly endangered downstairs tenants: Miranda, a Jamaican-born artist he helplessly desires, and her young live-wire daughter, Eglantine. Like the great nineteenth-century novelists who combined riveting storytelling with incisive philosophical musings, Hustvedt has created intellectual and compassionate characters and a bewitchingly brilliant plot to explore the great chasms of human life. The Sorrows of an American illuminates with grace and insight the legacy of sorrows born of the struggles of immigrants, and the psychic wounds of war, betrayal, and unrequited love.

In Praise of Literary Heroism

2008-05-01T21:48:00.000-07:00

The Shadow Factory by Paul West.

“Can you think without words?” Paul West, a playful, prolific, and erudite master writer, was forced to contemplate this paradox in the wake of a massive stroke. The author of many remarkable and diverse novels, including The Immensity of the Here and Now, Cheops, and Terrestrials, and a string of vivid memoirs, West was already hospitalized for a drastic kidney infection when he was struck down and hurled into the void of global aphasia. His right arm was paralyzed. He could barely swallow. He could not speak. After months of heroic effort, he uttered his first complete sentence, “I speak good coffee.” His doctors were adamant: he would never write again. But over the years, West has overcome adversity in many forms. Persistent, ardent, witty, life-loving, deeply curious, and aided and abetted by his indefatigable, brilliant, and loving wife, the writer Diane Ackerman, he proved the good doctors wrong, regaining his great facility with language, and writing this astonishing work, the first aphasic memoir. A dispatch from the “shadow factory” of an abruptly silenced inner realm in which a radiant mind struggles to burn through dark matter.

West was determined “to be as sentient an observer as possible” even in this frightening, wordless state, and so he was. And in this philosophical, positive, and dream-like chronicle, a work that booms like Shakespeare and clicks like Beckett, West describes the lightning strike that changed everything, the voices he heard, and the slight alterations in sensation that gave him hope. As he ponders the nature of muteness, the solace of reason, and the maddening gap between thought and speech, he does not dwell on the fear, anger, and “silent frustration” engendered by his ordeal, but instead discerns an eerie beauty in his journey from the dim “languageless wasteland” into the full sun of life and the music of words, glorious words. “We live, most of us, in a world of dumb recalcitrance, saved occasionally by inspired seers.” West is just such a being. We all benefit from his valor and artistry. Watch for his next novel.

New shows in the wings

2008-04-24T19:43:00.000-07:00

My intention was to add five new shows to the web site, but, alas, more pressing, can't-wait matters required my attention. And now I'm about to return to my home ground, the beautiful Hudson Valley, for a visit with my parents. So Open Books Radio will receive its Spring infusion soon. In time for May, that month of promises.

In the meantime, this Sunday the Chicago Tribune Magazine will feature coverage of presidential sites, including my article on Roosevelt Country, a piece I very much enjoyed writing. And the Chicago Tribune Books section will contain my review of Louise Erdrich's new novel, A Plague of Doves.

On the Air

2008-04-19T07:33:00.000-07:00

Open Books will be on WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio, this Sunday night at 9:00 central time and it's a heartland Earth Day edition featuring Chicago naturalist, writer, birder, and activist Joel Greenberg. Joel wrote the magnum opus, A Natural History of the Chicago Region, and has now put together an inspired and revelatory anthology, Of Prairie, Woods, & Water: Two Centuries of Chicago Nature Writing.

Joel is a dream guest, ask a simple question, and receive a great fountain of information, observation, irony, enthusiasm, and insight. You can listen online, www.chicagopublicradio.org.

Bravo Junot!

2008-04-07T17:04:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite novels by one of my favorite writers and Open Books guests has won the Pulitzer Prize: Junot Diaz for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Wow.

If you haven't read it, do.

I'm also happy to see two other titles I gave starred reviews in Booklist: Robert Hass's Time and Materials in poetry, and the terrific Eden's Outcasts in biography by John Matteson. It's always good to have one's passions affirmed.

Pick these up.

Librarians listen

2008-04-05T11:03:00.000-07:00

Last week I attended the Public Library Association conference in clean and serene Minneapolis. The city, brisk and sunny, was a balm to stressed nerves and overheated brain; the company of thousands of thoughtful, book-loving, community-supporting librarians was affirming and inspiring. Public librarians from across the country gathered in meeting rooms by the hundreds to listen to their peers talk about books and readers. Even on a Saturday morning at 8:30 when three of us spoke about that most maligned and misunderstood form, the memoir. Thousands laughed uproariously at the closing session as Paula Poundstone, author and big reader, made good fun of them. You don't think, in that context, that the world of books is imperiled. No, you feel certain that literature is a pillar of civilization, that reading is a profoundly pleasurable practice cherished by many, that people are hungry for news of new books and writers, for precise and penetrating reviews, for reading recommendations and fresh perspectives on the river of books that flows from publishers to book review editors to bookstores and libraries. And then you find yourself stuck at the airport, your flight delayed, CNN blaring on TVs hanging above your head, and most of your fellow travelers spending their arrested time fiddling with gadgets--cell phones, laptops, and iPods. Now maybe they're talking about a novel they just read, or reading an essay online, or listening to an audiobook. It's possible. Me? Sure, I was reading one book, with another handy.

Story Week Afterglow

2008-03-23T12:43:00.000-07:00

Each March the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago puts on an electrifying writing festival. This year was radiant. I had the profound pleasure of sharing a stage with Chitra Divakaruni, a writer of fluent imaginative and spiritual intent. Chitra was exceptionally giving in her disclosures and in talking about the endless conundrums and efforts of writing, quite hilarious. I'm so grateful to Chitra for her spellbinding and compassionate books and generous nature. I heard Aimee Bender and Cristina Garcia read, exceptionally smart and inventive and funny writers. I met the uniquely talented and adventurous and inspiriting Hillary Carlip. Queen of the Oddballs and intrepid creator of A La Cart, Hillary is also the web design genius behind Open Books Radio, and it was an absolute joy to meet her. We did conduct an Open Books interview, coming to this web site soon!

Hillary was part of the culminating literary rock-and-roll event that brings Story Week to its grandly rambunctious crescendo. Hillary and ZZ Packer and Colin Channer and Junot Diaz and the empress of literary programs and pizazz, my dear friend Sheryl Johnston. And Randy Albers, big-hearted and brilliant director of this exuberant and inspiring and supportive fiction department, who presented me with the Story Week Achievement Award. I'm so proud of this, and so astonished by this, I'm quoting the plaque because, well, because I'm still trying to internalize it.

"For excellence in writing, for promoting 'the fine art of reading,' and for creative contributions to Story Week."

Long live Story Week. Hugs and kisses to all.

On the Air

2008-03-08T14:09:00.001-08:00

Open Books is still broadcast in Chicago on WLUW 88.7, but I have to say that I'm thrilled to report that a new show will air again on Chicago Public Radio, WBEZ 91.5, and www.chicagopublicradio.org, on Sunday night, March 9 at 9 Central Time. (Don't forget, we lose a precious hour this weekend.)

In this edition of Open Books I speak with Chicago writer Gioia Diliberto about women's history, her biographies of Nobel Peace Prize winner and reformer Jane Addams; Hadley Hemingway, Ernest's first wife, and Brenda Frazier, the Paris Hilton of her day. Diliberto also talks about art and fashion, fact and fiction as we discuss her novels, I Am Madame X and The Collection, which revolves around a character based on Coco Chanel.

More on Joyce Carol Oates

2008-03-08T14:04:00.000-08:00

Our sympathy and concern for Joyce Carol Oates remain high, and none of us involved with Story Week here in Chicago were surprised when Oates cancelled her March 17 appearance. It's too soon after losing her husband. I hope to have another chance to speak with Oates in the future. For now, I'm looking forward to reading her next book, a very intriguing novel due out in June titled, My Sister, My Love.

Immersion and sympathy

2008-02-24T11:19:00.000-08:00

I live book by book, deadline by deadine, immersed in worlds imagined and reported. Certain writers are always present in my mind: boon companions, scouts, guides, goads. Enigmas and friends. Joyce Carol Oates is a constant presence. Her books stay with me, deep-swimming sea creatures, luminous and pressing in the dark. The power of her fiction, its risks, and insights; the complexity of her work, the many masks she wears and the consistency and courage of her vision: all inspire and incite me. My fascination is fed by her essays and The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973 - 1982. And ever since Joyce Carol Oates was invited to participate in Columbia College Chicago's Story Week this March, and ever since I was invited to speak with her onstage on March 17, I've been thinking about how to approach her work. What questions to ask, what subjects to raise. And now I'm thinking of Ms. Oates with great sympathy, having learned of the death of her husband, Raymond Smith. Her anchor.

A new venue

2008-02-14T11:52:00.000-08:00

Open Books will air on the Chicago's NPR station, WBEZ 91.5 and www.chicagopublicradio.org Sunday, February 17, at 9:00 pm central time.

We are thrilled to join WBEZ's Sunday night rotation. This edition of Open Books focuses on African American cartoonists. I had the great pleasure of speaking with Nancy Goldstein, the author of a fantastic, groundbreaking new book, Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist, and cartoonist and cartoon historian Tim Jackson.

New interview: "Invisible No More"

2008-02-03T11:27:00.000-08:00

The show I wrote about in my last post is now up: "Invisible No More: Voices of Literacy Chicago," the 'new' show in Nonfiction. Please listen. This is a very special edition of Open Books.

Denied Access

2008-01-20T09:37:00.000-08:00

We're alone with our thoughts, and alone in our habit of silently telling ourselves the story of our life day by day. When we read, we tune into stories created by another mind turning over the stones of thought. The written word is an extended hand, an invitation to connect, to share. The written word only comes back to life when someone else turns her or his attention to it. The act of reading is a powerful bond between strangers, and this common experience underlies my conversations with writers. We feel a ready rapport because we have both traveled the same trail of words, the same path through the labyrinth. The writer has laid the stones, the reader has set them more firmly in place by her tread. We are able to speak the same language even as we see the books under discussion from different perspectives. These are exciting and affirming conversations.

But often when I leave the studio feeling uplifted and grateful for communion with an artist and thinker I admire and reenter the larger world and look into the faces of strangers hurrying in the cold, I wonder, are books part of their lives? I've been speaking with writers for a decade and I will continue to do so. But now I'm going to extend my Open Books inquiry and speak with readers.

I feel that I'm part of a resplendent realm of knowledge, effort, beauty, wit, tragedy, and discovery simply by virtue of my reading. What if I was walled off from that paradise of language and empathy? What if I couldn't read? How would I navigate the wilderness of human emotion and endeavor?

I've always been aware of the shameful fact that in our great land many people not only go hungry, but are also starved intellectually and aesthetically. Boys and girls attend public schools, moving up grade by grade, and yet they do not learn to read. Smart, determined, and creative, they adapt, they conceal, they improvise. They drop out of school and get on with life. But far too many adults live diminished lives because their reading skills are rudimentary at best. For all that they accomplish, they are isolated and silenced. And many refuse to accept this fate. Men and women of all ages make the tough decision to try again to learn to read. I decided to speak with people who are striving to become literate, word by word, and thanks to friends, spent the best part of two days at a true haven, a true place of learning and love, a school called Literacy Chicago.

Nine stories above State Street is a community of dedicated teachers, tutors, and students. We three--Craig Kois, Neese Aguilar, and me--sat at a long table in an overheated, windowless room and listened to stories of neglect, struggle, reclamation, and triumph. Of love and hope. We felt humbled, privileged, and deeply moved. We are putting together a show based on these tales from the reading front, and recalibrating, once again, our understanding of what it takes to be a human being.

A new year and interviews new and new to the site

2008-01-14T22:49:00.000-08:00

Thanks to my Open Books comrades, my husband David, my producer Craig Kois, and our web genie Hillary Carlip, lots of new conversations are now available for your listening pleasure. We've loaded the most recent shows, among them conversations with Yannick Murphy and Jonathan Messinger, two dynamically creative fiction writers. And I've gone to the archives to reclaim shows from the past that merit listening now. I just tuned in to Diana di Prima and was captivated all over again. How extraordinary to listen to the Queen of the Beats talk about going to the library as a girl in Brooklyn decades ago and finding excitement and solace in books. I'm reading Sara Paretsky's memoir, Writing in an Age of Silence (a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle awards), and she describes the same experience of finding sanctuary in reading in eastern Kansas. I could tell a very similar story about my childhood in Poughkeepsie. Tomorrow, or, technically, later today, I'll be speaking with Sara Paretsky for the next edition of Open Books. So you know, more conversations with gifted and caring writers will be coming your way.

Read, and vote!

Just past the solstice

2007-12-24T18:06:00.000-08:00

Winter arrived in Chicago well before the solstice, and now we're relieved that the hasty days of paltry sunlight squeezed between the great smothering arms of darkness are pushing back. In the meantime, I've been rereading a favorite poet, Edward Hirsch. This is from a treasured collection, Earthly Measures.

Uncertainty

We couldn't tell if it was a fire in the hills
Or the hills themselves on fire, smoky yet
Incandescent, too far away to comprehend.
And all this time we were traveling toward
Something vaguely burning in the distance--
A shadow on the horizon, a fault line--
A blue and cloudy peak which never seemed
To recede or get closer as we approached.
And that was all we knew about it
As we stood by the window in a waning light
Or touched and moved away from each other
And turned back to our books. But it remained
Even so, like the thought of a coal fading
On the upper left-hand side of our chests,
A destination that we bore within ourselves.
And there were those--were they the lucky ones?--
Who were unaware of rushing toward it.
And the blaze awaited them, too.

"Best of"

2007-12-09T20:33:00.000-08:00

I want to praise good books book by book, and consequently I resist the reduction of end-of-year “best of” lists. The quantifying of quality. With winter comes the call for book critics’ favorites, a short list of top picks, an impossibly small number of books deemed better than all the others. I find this process painful and, in spite of solid critical criteria, arbitrary. It’s a game, a gamble, a shuffling of priorities and compromises. And so begins the reluctant dealing of the cards from a stacked deck, the required discards, the arranging and rearranging of the fanned hand in search of a winning combination, a feeling of being strong-armed, of bluffing, of hedging one’s bets.

I played this high-stakes game for six consecutive years as a National Book Critics Circle board member, seated at a long table with a large cast of passionate players. Now it’s a game of solitaire, but somehow I still seem to be facing a group, my various reading selves. The me that loves a poetry collection one day and finds it cryptic the next. The self that swoons over the pages of a novel, then, months later, realizes that somehow it is the response that is memorable, instead of the book. Or, conversely, my insatiable reading self who can’t bear to give up any of the year’s beloved titles. And the overworked editor who inevitably overlooks a deserving book. Winnowing down my true wish list of outstanding books to conform to a prescribed number is a form of editing, much like my daily sacrifice of prose to meet requisite word counts. Another surgical procedure, another steep climb in painfully tight shoes, another interrupted dream. But selecting the best is also an act of sharpening, of rigorous questioning, honing, pressing, testing. A study in necessity and essence. A test of time and resonance. A duel between the rapturous self and the critical mind. A letting go. A leap.

Here’s a poem from a collection I’ve chosen as one the “best” of 2007, Captivity by Laurie Sheck.

As when an otherwise opens

Now December strikes in with its own brittleness, as when an otherwise

Opens in the body, wrenching further into slant and hazard.

Past the covert operations of the state, past checkpoints and official access.

A crystal splits along the lines of its own cleavage.

Questions unshelter themselves harshly. Each war-zone of them flaring,

and radical with damage.

Reading is living.

2007-12-01T14:25:00.000-08:00

Readers and writers are by definition thoughtful people, reflective, questioning, analytical, sometimes anxious, often self-deprecating. One can’t help but question the entire enterprise of the life of the mind, especially when you realize that you’re happiest alone in a small room with a window, a book, and a sleeping cat. You don’t want to go anywhere in person, since you can go everywhere in your imagination. So one asks one’s self, is this healthy?

But some of us are lucky enough to share our passion with others, eye to eye. I had many such opportunities this autumn, and all were affirming and revelatory. Of course, some encounters were also nerve-wracking. It never fails to amaze me, what strangers will say. But you, know, if you accept invitations to moderate panels and speak, you are opening yourself to scrutiny and commentary.

And so it was one fine and chilly night when I spoke to a group of sharp-minded women in a beautifully restored old mansion on a college campus along Lake Michigan. The subject was one I was perhaps too ardent about: women, justice, and the environment. As always, I worked hard preparing for the talk, and brought along all kinds of notes and quotes and never once looked at them, which in this case, may have been a mistake. At any rate, I stumbled to a halt, and ask for questions. I enjoy this exchange, and on this night, my good listeners came up marvelously discerning queries. Pleased and relieved, I sat down, and signed books (such a many-faceted pleasure), and then found myself entangled in a rather thorny conversation with a skeptic. Frowning thoughtfully, she said that she couldn’t imagine spending so much time reading. Surely no woman with children (How did she know I have none, and how many does she have?) could do what I do day after day. And really, who would want to. Didn’t I feel cut off from real life? Wasn’t I even more distant from true experience than real writers because I was writing about writing, two levels away from breath and flesh and blood? Wasn’t it isolating? Artificial? Even, she seemed to imply, cowardly.

Who was this stranger who sensed the exact content of my own dark worries and fears? My own self-criticism, my own litany of failures. But because I’ve ruminated on this so much, I know that she is wrong. I know that reading opens you to life. Stories, poems, essays, history, science writing, and biography deepen your understanding of the living world, of humankind, of the cosmos. Reading engenders empathy, reveals hidden connections, gives words to inchoate feelings, breaks down the cell of the self, infuses daily chaos and tedium with meaning. You discover that many suffer the same doubt, fear, desire, anger, and hope that you do. You realize how fortunate you are when you read about the brutal lives and deaths of other. Reading extends your perception, stokes a sense of social responsibility, awakens compassion and appreciation for beauty, and provides a vessel for sorrow. Reading makes you a citizen of the world, a fuller, more conscious human being. I never feel completely alone, or at a loss, with books at hand. I know that I’m part of a great bright web of consciousness. The past is illuminated, as are countless ways of being and knowing, every conceivable sort of landscape, the wondrous world of animals, plants, stones, water, and sky. A reader contains multitudes.

My interlocutor was generous after all (and how knows the shade and shape of her regrets and unfulfilled yearning), and bought a copy of my anthology, In Our Nature. I signed it with a little frisson of mischievous pleasure: “Reading is living!”

Not many days later I heard the literary critic and writer Alan Cheuse speak to Scott Simon on NPR’s “Weekend Edition.” I admire Cheuse for his intelligent and passionate response to books, and very much like his edgy fiction. Here’s my Booklist review of his new book, The Fires:

Book critic Cheuse, whose resonant commentaries are heard on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, returns to fiction after the essay collection Listening to the Page (2001). Cheuse ignites fire in the mind and in the heart in a pair of tightly written novellas (the dialogue volleys as smoothly as that of a play) that form a yin-yang of grief and healing. In the title story, a woman suffering the debilitating hot flashes of menopause journeys to Uzbekistan to collect the body of her husband, who died in a fiery accident, and finds herself participating in a Hindu cremation. In "The Exorcism," a man struggles with his own conflagration of sorrow after his ex-wife, a brilliant jazz musician, dies of a heroin overdose. He then offers sanctuary to their college-student daughter, whose mourning turns dangerously incendiary. Startlingly beautiful in their searing radiance and molten heat, Cheuse's poetic tales of pain and forgiveness, loss and remembrance stoke our age-old fascination with fire as a force of destruction and renewal.

But my high regard went up several notches after this exchange:

Scott Simon asked Cheuse how much he reads, and Cheuse answers, four or five books a week. (If someone asked me that, I would say six or more, depending on the books.) Simon continued:

“How does all that reading affect your writing; do you have to be careful?”

And booklover Cheuse answers without missing a beat:

“I think being careful is the worst thing you can possibly do to yourself as a writer. You need to read as much as you possibly can, and live as much as you possibly can, and write as much as you possibly can. Reading is as much a part of life as any part. It’s life itself and it allows us to live other lives that we might not have lived if we hadn’t picked up those books. So, it seems to me to be a good human being you must read as much as you can. And certainly if you want to be a good writer you should read as much of the good stuff as you can get your hands on.”

My hero.

Studs Terkel tells his story

2007-10-28T07:51:00.000-07:00

Studs Terkel's Touch and Go.

Looking back over ninety-five years of life with an eye to writing a memoir is a daunting task, even for veteran storyteller Studs Terkel. The bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a dozen books of oral history, among them Hard Times, Race, The Great War, and Hope Dies Last, Terkel summons up memories redolent with sensuous detail and shaped by his irreverent humor, concern with justice, antennae for drama, and unfailing sense of how the small things unlock the large. Here he is, a boy of eight in a New York café, sensing that “something illicit is going on” between his father and Natacha Rambova, Rudolph Valentino’s wife. But he is a “child pragmatist” attuned to his father’s “burdens,” and willing to enjoy his father’s trust and the sweet drink unperturbed. And there it is, Terkel’s madeline, and a clue to his future success in bearing witness to people’s lives with curiosity, understanding, and respect. Writing with a gruff lyricism rooted in the literature he loved by his friend Nelson Algren, whom he describes bluntly as “nutty as a fruitcake,” Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor, Terkel recounts his formative years at the front desk in the working-class Wells-Grand Hotel in Chicago run by his father, his graduation from University of Chicago’s law school, and his serendipitous entrée into radio and early television success. Roguishly funny and candidly self-deprecating, Terkel recounts one atmospheric, keenly detailed, and rousing tale after another of adventures in a life of conversing. His musings on music and theater reveal the secrets of his success in shaping conversations with people from all walks of life, and his recollections of the great movements for workers’ rights and racial equality, as well as his own blacklisting and the FBI’s long surveillance, lead to bracing observations about current predicaments. “Remember,” is Terkel’s refrain, and his dazzling memoir reminds us that in memories personal and collective reside wisdom.

You can order Touch and Go here:
http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-97815955804360

New interviews, inspiring conversations

2007-10-27T17:54:00.000-07:00

We've posted new interviews in fiction and poetry. Some are freshly recorded conversations with three significant and very different writers: Junot Diaz, George Saunders, and Ann Patchett. The others are interviews from our archives with no less remarkable writers. All are worth listening to.

I've had the great pleasure and privilege of speaking with readers and writers this week at two distinctive and, each in their own way, historic venues. The Nineteenth Century Club in Oak Park, Illinois, and the Guild Complex in Chicago. One a venerable, Corinthian-columned philanthropic institution founded in 1891 and dedicated to lifelong learning and community building; the other a vibrant and arty neighborhood literary center established in 1989.

You can learn a lot about a place by visiting its rest room. The ladies' lounge at the Nineteenth Century Club, which was founded by women for women, is a gracious parlor with wall fixtures, Victorian furniture, old photographs and intricate lace under glass made by the founders. And a recently created plaque listing some of the famous women who have used this ladies' room in the past, among them Amelia Earhart, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Indira Gandhi, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ruth Page, and Jane Addams. After reading this illustrious roll call, I corrected my posture, felt like an impostor, and went in to the lovely dining room to partake of a luncheon well-served on good china. The room was filled with a symphony of bright conversation. Then the talkers and diners were transformed into an attentive, receptive, and smart audience of book lovers concerned about the shrinking space accorded books in newspapers, and desirous of an ongoingly vital "culture of the sentence," to use Cynthia Ozick's phrase. How would we know who we are without literature?

The Guild Complex is on busy Division Street in the Chopin Theater. The Chicago/International Writers Exchange was held downstairs in an art-filled, low-light room furnished with vintage couches and chairs. The short description of the exchange is: "A discussion of literary cultures and literary practices between writers from Australia, Bulgaria, Egypt, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Russia, and Chicago." First, we served box luncheons which we balanced on our laps. Twelve incisive writers, one in-awe moderator. More on the amazing conversation anon, but for now a big big thank you to our international guests: Linsday Simpson, Aziz Nazmi Shakir-Tash, Hamdy El Gazzar, Lawrence Pun, Nirwan Dewanto, Ksenia Golubovich, our international guests. And to Chicago's Francisco Aragon, Rosellen Brown, Tom Montgomery-Fate, Tyehimba Jess, Alex Kotlowitz, and Bich Minh Nguyen.

In praise of reading: Orhan Pamuk

2007-10-21T09:38:00.000-07:00

Other Colors: Essays and a Story by Orhan Pamuk

Leave it to Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk––author of the novels Snow and My Name is Red, and the nonfiction work, Istanbul: Memories and the City––to turn what could have been simply a solid essay collection into a beautifully spiraling, meditative sequence of memories, dreams, ideas, and reflections. By gathering some of the brief, quickly written lyrical essays he published in a weekly magazine in the late 1990s, portraits of his family, various speeches, literary essays, interviews, and responses to politics and events, including the terrible earthquake that struck Istanbul in 1999, Pamuk allows readers to get closer to his inner world than the authors of most memoirs. What comes across most hauntingly is the tension between Pamuk’s utter devotion to writing, and his recognition of how very few people share this passion, and of how very few books will stand the test of time. Pamuk is, accordingly, humble about what he calls the “clerkish” aspect of writing, the patience required, the long hours of solitude. But he is also exalted, believing that it is only through novels that we can truly understand what life is like for others.

Put on trial for having “publicly denigrated Turkish identity” by writing and speaking out about the Armenian genocide––a century-old denied crime currently stoking the worsening situation in Iraq and contributing to the controversy over Turkey’s role as an ally to the U.S. and potential member of the European Union––Pamuk is keenly sensitive to the full significance of freedom of expression, and writes with candor and valor about political matters. But, clearly, he is happiest recreating the atmosphere of his beloved Istanbul, reporting on his travels, and musing over the work of his favorite writers, among them Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Borges, and Camus. There is at wistfulness and grandeur in Pamuk’s essays, a mix of pain and joy that is at the heart of the human experience.

Pamuk writes so unaffectedly about the “pleasures of reading,” listing among them the way a book allows the reader to “escape the sadness of everyday life and spend some time in another world.” Pamuk also writes that reading, especially when he was young, “was central to my efforts to make something of myself, elevate my consciousness, and thereby give shape to my soul.” In comparing words to images and reading to watching a film, Pamuk, who initially dreamt of being a painter, admits that if he could find the same pleasures reading brings in film or television, he would “read fewer books.” But, “words (and the works of literature they make) are like water or like ants. Nothing can penetrate into the cracks, holes, and invisible gaps or life as fast or as thoroughly as words can. It is in these cracks that the essence of things—the things that make us curious about life, about the world—can first be ascertained, and it is good literature that first reveals them. Good literature is a piece of wise counsel that has yet to be give, and as such it has the same aura of needfulness as the latest news; that is mainly why I still depend on it.”

Just Out: The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973 - 1982

2007-10-02T19:17:00.000-07:00

It’s impossible to write about Oates’ diverse, almost bewilderingly large, and steadily growing oeuvre without expressing astonishment at her productivity. But more significant are her intensity and artistry, spirit and intelligence, deep commitment to truth, and receptivity to discovery and mystery. Since she turned 34 thirty-four years ago, Oates has not only written myriad published works, she has also kept a journal that is now surpassing 4000 single-spaced typewritten pages in length. Greg Johnson, Oates’ biographer (Invisible Writer, 1998), has edited the entries from the first decade with great sensitivity, sustaining a narrative arc and focusing on passages in which Oates chronicles how she works and reveal the forces that compel her.

Oates was already famous as a provocative, category-defying writer and a National Book Award winner for them (1969) when she began her journal. But what inspired what she describes at the outset as “an experiment in consciousness,” was a “peculiar experience,” a “mystical experience” that occurred in 1970 and continued to haunt her in 1973. Much of this volume, in fact, consists of Oates’ musings on the power of the unconscious, the inexplicable, and the intrusion of forces beyond the self. Again and again, stories and novels intrude upon her, push at the gates and prowl the edge of her mind. Here are explanations of her phenomenal creativity.

Oates is so lucid, so intent on explaining her writing process to herself, so fluent in her observations of the world at-large, both human and natural, the reader feels privileged to have access to such a thoughtful chronicle, such revealing disclosures. Oates also writes of her close and loving marriage to Raymond Smith, her heart condition, her love of teaching, and how she protects her privacy and establishes a “pattern of living” that enables her to write. She observes that you can’t force fiction. She analyzes all the elements that go in to a novel, and declares that “the novelist must be on the side of life.”

And how poignant this is: in 1975, Oates writes that she wouldn’t want to be known as prolific; she has already sensed the negative response to her stream of books. And yet, soon after she writes, “I don’t care: I want to write what I want to write.” She records a “burning eagerness to work.” She exclaims, "At times I feel that I could write endlessly, scarcely rising to the surface to eat, or even breathe.” Writing is “voluptuous.” But Oates is driven. As this volume draws to a close, Oates writes of her long-submerged feelings about her family’s hidden past, and her discomfort with the great divide between her lovely, successful life, which she often expresses gratitude for, and the dire deprivation her family endured. Here are the stirrings of the desire to understand, to inhabit, to bring back to life her family’s lost world. And she did so, 25 years later in The Gravedigger’s Daughter, which is based on her grandmother’s story, and a stunning and very recent revelation: her grandmother was Jewish.

Oates' journal begins with a transformation and a new way of
writing, and it ends with another opening, another deepening of her artistic calling. Oates is not merely prolific. She is ravenous for words, stories, truth. Her work will stand as a monumental exploration of the American psyche, the collective unconscious, the parameters of literature, and one woman’s complex inheritance.

The one line among many powerful statements that illuminates Oates the most: “I feel so much.”

Open Books Radio in Full

2007-09-04T16:20:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the new and improved Open Books Radio Web site. Have a look around, and sample our "Interview" page. We have organized the interviews into three categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. Often this sorting has been a bit arbitrary, since many writers write in all forms. I've based their placement here on the book under discussion. So, for instance, A. M. Homes, an extraordinary fiction writer, appears in Nonfiction because much of our conversation revolves around her memoir, The Mistress's Daughter.

Thanks to our wonderful Web designer, Hillary Carlip, you can scroll through the interviews in each category, and listen to each interview as it streams (you can fast forward and pause), or you can download interviews for later.

We would love to hear your comments. You'll find email addresses on the contact page.

Happy listening, happy reading.

2007-08-13T12:10:00.000-07:00

SUMMERTIME BLUES

2007-08-04T13:06:00.000-07:00

Summer is a time of amplitude. Life feels large and spacious, and yet even though we want to laze about, soaking up warmth and light, we also feel compelled to make the most of this time of flowers and embracing greenery, birds and great big moons. And for most of us, work does not let up. Nor does change take a holiday.

WLUW, home of Open Books, will no longer be a sister station to WBEZ, Chicago’s National Public Radio station. Their connection will be severed by next summer. In the meantime, the show must go on. We will keep producing the show, and broadasting it on WLUW (wluw.org) while we look for a new station. The good news is the state of the Open Books Radio Web site. A full-force edition is nearing completion. Watch for a fabulous new look, thanks to our terrific designer, as well as uthor bios, new interviews, interview transcripts, reading lists, reviews, and more.

Reading is a blues chaser, and one of summer’s finest and simplest pleasures is reading outside. Let the sun illuminate the page.

RIVER OF READING

2007-07-08T19:08:00.000-07:00

Rivers from time out of mind have been conduits for human culture, whether they are navigated in pursuit of new places and better lives, or to transport beliefs or products. Rivers inspire art, poetry, declarations of love, the daredevil impulse, and contemplation for contemplation’s sake. Just as all rivers lead to the sea, one book leads to another, and all lead to the collective stories of humankind. Rivers are the subject of many a book, from novels to photo-essays to Akiko Busch’s just published Nine Ways to Cross a River.

Busch has the gift of seeing the world new. In previous works she has offered fresh perspectives on our relationship with our belongings and the design of our homes. Now turns her discerning attention to nature, reveals herself as a passionate swimmer, and chronicles her intimate involvement with rivers. Busch inadvertently launched a riverine quest when she swam the river she loves best, the Hudson, in August 2001. Somehow the tragic events that followed made it seem “essential to mark each summer after that with a river crossing.” Not that Busch is interested in athletic feats. No, her river adventures are immersions both literally and imaginatively as she lingers to speak with people who live along the shores of the Delaware, Connecticut, Susquehanna, the Monongahela, the Mississippi, and other rivers, and ponders the lore, spirit, and history of each waterway, including such crucial aspects as the river’s “industrial archaeology” and “timeline of toxicity.” Busch profiles various river keepers, including the Hudson River’s guardian “trickster” Pete Seeger, whose success in guiding the reclamation and restoration of the mighty Hudson proves that “the damage arrives collectively, so too does recovery.”

Writing with a swimmer’s economy, propulsion, and buoyancy as she describes the exhilaration of swimming, and the distinct energy and moods of each river, Busch muses over the profound metaphors associated with rivers, and all the life lessons rivers embody, creating a beautiful, quietly enlightening book of reflections.

As someone who grew up along the Hudson River, I especially enjoyed Akiko Busch’s response to the river and its valley. Here’s an excerpt from her description of one swim across the ever-changing Hudson River:

“The river was choppy that afternoon. Visibility was low. The natural turbidity of the river, a product of its aquatic life, made it difficult to see anything underwater, and when I lifted my head out of the water, the waves and whitecaps obscured the view of the shoreline as well. If this river were a book, it was dense, obscure, difficult to read. Some rivers have a brilliant clarity; they are translucent, quick, clear about themselves and where they are going and where they are taking you. Others, like the Hudson, have a thickness and opacity, as though there is too much type on the page to take it all in. The pages are long and packed with intricate information, and even at the end of the page, you may not be quite sure of what you’ve read. Its narrative begins as a pond on the side of Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks, and the clear mountain stream running from it ends up as a tidal channel in the Atlantic Ocean. Its character, never fixed, is transformed during its passage from freshwater to saline, from a thin, winding stream to a broad straight channel. It has a tide and a current, and it flows both ways; sometimes it flows both ways at once.” Akiko Busch. Nine Ways to Cross a River.
Gorgeous in concept and realization. And don’t I relate to this mutable river.