Family Business/Sharing Books

Winter's Hill Vineyard

UNO Press

Last week, visiting my family's winery, one of the wonderful women who often works special events there told me she'd bought a copy of Beyond the Islands for a friend of hers who would be diving in the Galápagos. What should she tell her friend about the book? Pirates, I said. Pirate treasure, and small-town boosters, and scientists amazed at the varied and impossible life of the islands. Poets and teachers and tourists. 

Book sharing is a family tradition, part of our daily lives, part of the family business. How many wineries sell literature in translation in their tasting rooms? Probably not too many. For me, it's been a wonderful way to get the books to people who might not otherwise find them, to make connections that might not otherwise be made.

I doubt I would have embarked on the same teaching/scholarly career or perhaps on translation had we not spent 15 months in northern Ecuador when I was in middle school. I would have been writing, but I might not have found my way to Latin America, to Ecuadorian narrative, to the Galápagos Islands and back. I might never have learned Spanish.

The classroom may be a more traditional space than a tasting room for literary connections but there, too, the specific links can be unexpected. A student recently approached me before class with a copy of Beyond the Islands. "This is my mother's favorite book," she told me. "Will you sign it for her?" Naturally, I was delighted--I only wish Alicia Yánez Cossío had been on hand to sign it, too. If I hadn't had a lecture to deliver, I'd have done a little happy dance, too.

What am I reading this week? Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card. It's one of those (too numerous) books I'd meant to read for years. I finally picked it up when my daughter, who read it for school, pronounced the novel, "Not my all-time favorite book, but close." I haven't yet reached the chapter that tipped the book from "really good" to "close to all-time favorite" status for her, but so far, so good.

Does your family share books? 

Some River Twice

Because it's not the same river, right? But it's a river all the same--another river, or the same pebbled bank on a different day, or the same water, further down stream.

I recently participated in a writing workshop with Gary Soto--even better, I went as my daughter's guest; a workshop spot was part of her winnings in a local writing contest. One prompt asked us to write about a river journey, point A to point B: what do you see?

Iguazú turtles (with bird)

I see the Red Cedar River, Mother's Day in Michigan and hot, our first big spring outing of the year. Just being outside, doing something outside: that's my mother's present. 

We're old enough to paddle two canoes--one kid, one parent each--up from the university rental dock. The turtles are out, the spring pollen is itchy, but here's the rub of memory: what I remember most are the turtles, baking their shells to summer hardness on logs or rocks, and the four of us in our hollow aluminum logs, burning rather than basking, because who remembers sunscreen, the second week in May? But were the turtles really out, so early in the year? I'm brought up short. 

We canoed later on in summer--maybe that's the source of my persistent memory of turtles. I can't think of the river without them. The scents I remember are the sweet sneezy haze of spring and the mildewed sigh of the orange lifejackets, also from the rental barn, last summer's damp that never dried out drawing a still underlayer to the spring heat smell, the drying mud.

Swimming near Wheatland Ferry

I haven't been on the Michigan State campus in years; I don't know if the canoe rental's still in place. But that was the first river that came to mind, like a slide flashing up on a wall of the library conference room. No need to elbow aside other, more recent rivers. They weren't even overlaid, one image crossing another. But now that I'm thinking about rivers, I'll list a few more: several times a week, I run beside the grandiosely-named Amazon Creek. That's not a river, I know. Once the rains really stop for summer, it will be scarcely be a creek. But the water's cloudy as milky tea after a storm, it sloshes against its banks, tempts nesting ducks. Point A to point B, I'm on the towpath, not navigating, but the watercourse suggests a route. Then there's swimming with my son near the ferry docks further north, or watching the fast, empty cereal ships cruising up the Paraná. Most recent basking turtles: just above Iguazú Falls in November. I was even there with my mother. 

I pulled out my little workshop notebook (more treats, more prizes), looking to retrieve that first river version. Like any revisited, reopened manuscript, it's a little different than I remembered. Some images are clearer, others are vague. It's a river all right, but it's not the same one. Still, it's what I have to work with. I'll just dip in a toe--over here, where the murk starts to clear with the current.

Happy Mother's Day!

May memories, Mayhap, May help

When I was little--four or five--we used to hang May Baskets from the doorknobs of elderly neighbors. My mother instigated this, of course, but I enjoyed filling the construction paper cones with garden flowers, placing the surprise, ringing the bell and running away. It's not a tradition I ever tried to continue with my children. They're too old to appreciate it now, but it strikes me that, pleasant as those May Day memories have always been--and I can still see the stone porch back in central New York, across the street from my best friend's house, up the block from ours, pale green trim and maybe gables; I can see myself on that porch, arranging my offering, hurrying away--it never really occurred to me to "try this at home," so to speak. Granted, our elderly neighbors when my daughter was four frankly disliked us, disapproving of our lawn mowing skill, or lack thereof. Still, the elderly part isn't an absolute requirement, and we did have other neighbors, more forgiving. Double nostalgia then, my own childhood long gone and my children's littlehood, too.

I observed this spring morning on my own. Grayish sky, hint of sun--just a hope of that bright sun against gray velvet clouds  and sharp pink plum trees that I love at this time of year. When I set out to run, it was almost warm (not warm enough for shorts, but I realized that too late to turn back and change). Ducking under the neighbors' full-bloomed apple tree as I headed down the hill, I remembered I had dreamed last night that I was pulling snails off a fruit tree still in bloom. Anyone who has gardened in Oregon will understand this dream, this waking nightmare, this continual struggle. . . never mind. I dreamed a spring dream, and along with it, a cry for help. 

So mayday, not just May Day. My dictionary gives the definition of this international distress signal as the French (venez) m'aider, (come) help me! Who knew? (Not me, obviously). A not-quite translation, a homophonic or sound translation--historically, as David Bellos notes in Is that a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything, a rich source of vocabulary growth as languages come into contact and their speakers try to mimic foreign words using the closest sounds they can muster from their own experience. Turns out, again, translation is everywhere.

Including the eye of the beholder. Later, out the bus window on the way to work, I watched a woodpecker pecking away at one of the small, tasteful signs the city places to urge trail users to "leash pets" and "obey scoop laws." A kind of live underscoring, subtitling as highlighting. But I've also seen (and heard) the woodpecker--presumably a different woodpecker; it was a different spring--attacking the STOP sign down the road, the gong of its beak meeting metal louder than any distress call.

Message here? I'm not sure. But it's spring, hope springs eternal, memory and mayhem and possibility dancing 'round the May pole, one big happy family. Happy May Day, everyone!

Guest post tomorrow at The Blabbermouth

I'll be guest blogging tomorrow with agent extraordinaire Linda Epstein (Associate at The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency).  Linda always has something interesting to say about writing, publishing, reading, traveling. . .  and talking, naturally: her blog is The Blabbermouth.

I'm thinking about writing and saving, writing and frugality. A few days late, but still in time for Earth Day?

Do stop by!

Howling

Reading comfortably, cat on my lap, I was too lazy tonight to close the living room blinds, and so I looked out around 8:30 to see the moon just about full--or fully full? Clear sky after days of rain and slipped white clouds behind it, the kind that take on a shade close to brick just where the darkness resumes, and then a thin strip of gray cloud--steel gray, or darker--that seems to cross the moon itself.

Nothing happens, just a little movement, a little more, and still, it's fascinating. The moon is cupped in the frilly, still-bare branches of my neighbor's tree--willow? poplar? elm? I'll have to ask her. Something light, and this is the upper twigs (we're talking, after all, about the moon) and still, somehow, black lace against a deep blue sky, the spindly upper branches seem ready to take its weight if needed. The neighbor is a friend, a colleague, a person whose company I enjoy, one who has offered comfort in a time of terrible grief--she seems, in short, like the sort of person whose front yard tree would support the moon's weight, and more.

And then the moon rises further, the clouds slip south, and the sky behind the moon is like the deep blue velvet of my mother's first formal dress, one I could never really fit into properly, but loved.

And then I turn away from the window to help my daughter with her Spanish homework. When I look back, the moon is entirely gone, the sky is black: we live on a planet with neither moon nor stars. Perhaps the eternal darkness has begun.

But the cat is still stretched out on my lap, one leg extended languidly across my shin, a hind paw desultorily raised, tail lost under my book. He must weigh twelve pounds by now, maybe more. My legs, resting on a hassock, are starting to go numb.

Cheating? This is the moon from my apartment
in Rosario. But it is the moon, and I did take the picture.

The moon might return. There's a near glow to the puff of cloud just beyond the neighbor's tree. We had hail today (heavy, like someone in the sky pouring out a spent beanbag chair, shaking the white pellets down with a vengeance) and sunshine (enough for a good run) and more hail, a little wind. There's no reason to think, after dark, the weather will hold still until morning. So the moon might be back; later, it might be bright enough, outside, to read.

This isn't a story. But it might be where a story begins.

Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Contest

The official notice is up on the Burnside Review website, so I can spread the word far and wide myself: my sequence of linked prose poems/flash fictions, "Detours," was chosen by Blake Butler as winner of the 2011 Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Contest. I've been detouring with these words for a good while; winning the contest is immensely gratifying. I'm grateful to the literary journals that published portions of the manuscript in the past (Southern Poetry Review, Permafrost), and to friends who listened to or read all or part. And I'm looking forward to thinking about cover art, and planning a reading and release party for later in the year--with, I hope, some good wine and lots of friends. Cheers!

Conversation Starter

Waiting through one of my children's lessons this week, I had my ear talked off by a not-quite-acquaintance who was also waiting on a child. It was one of those small increments of time I had planned to spend reading, or maybe refining my to-do list, as if arranging my set of not-yet-accomplished tasks in the perfect order would somehow move them closer to done. But this woman started talking, and she asked me a question, and then I asked her a question--help, I'm politing and I can't get up--and pretty soon we were having a whole conversation and then I was getting the evil eye from an impatient pre-teen who really understands the value of time, unlike us older folks. 

Driving home, my first thought was, damn, I wanted to finish reading that story. But then I started thinking about how I'd describe the conversation--the odd (to me) topics she raised, the worries I simply don't share, though maybe I should. And then, eureka! I thought, might she fit (hand in glove) in the new story (or maybe it's a novel?) that's starting to take shape? I've been kneading at the idea like dough, throwing in a new ingredient now and then, letting it rise, punching it down, putting it back in the fridge to ferment (it's a sourdough, obviously). Maybe her worries--foreign to me, a little bizarre--are just the dough conditioner I need. Or maybe more like sprinkles, to keep the baking analogy but change the hoped-for dish. A little sugar confetti of newly understood anxiety, a mace and nutmeg dusting of aspiration.

The buses are full of people with problems, worries about money, about work, about whether and when they'll be able to retire, if their kids will get jobs, if they'll get a job, will it rain before they get home, this one day when the umbrella lies abandoned at the foot of the stairs. Most of the other drivers at the traffic light are fretting about something; if they're not bopping along to whatever's pounding out of the car stereo or hollering into their phone mics, they have the look of people who might be running late, might have left the stove on, might not have heard all the directions to the interview, might have misunderstood a crucial bit of grandpa's dying wish.

But my head is full to bursting with my own worries. Just my worries, the ones ragged and familiar as old flannel--and just as muffling, when it comes to sound from the outside. So that sometimes, in the interests of empathy but also of fiction, it is a real gift to be dragged into someone else's forest. Even if the trees of my own preoccupations loom almost immediately out of the fog to remind me that the to-do list is still a jumble and the plot starter is still mostly water and yeast.