The title of the first poem in Sarah Sarai’s new collection Bright-Eyed is a complete sentence and a bold statement: “Things always work out.” It is an assurance and a promise reinforced toward the end of the poem when the speaker assures the reader that “With the East now behind you, / the lush of you spreads” and promises that you, your “lush,” will flip “the pages of religion” and thumb “through in search of / a promised earthly garden / of ethereal delight.” The speaker is offering comfort here, while the poet takes you on this journey in space (toward the West—“the East now behind you”) and time, as the poems in the following pages unfold revealing growth through adolescence to adulthood.
From “a girl, twelve and studying / the ambient inhalation of family” in “Souls in the Penalty of Flesh” to “This thirteen-year-old / Balancing on crabgrass” in “Two-Story Bldg, on Vernon,” the poems in the first half of Bright-Eyed give us insight into the child the speaker once was: “She is young: a fact which proves nothing” she tells us in “The Crooked Road Without Improvement,” before instructing us:
To offset appetites for urban nostalgia,
think: rats: scurrying: ivy’s sprinklered
banks before the house, before as in:
I trembled before the hanging judge, so
trembled ivy before the squatting house.
The poet does not want to indulge in nostalgia, nor does her speaker seek such a simplistic ploy at empathy. The flow of the verses here is from not simply how lines break from phrase to phrase; it flows from colon to colon, reinforced by the repetition of “before”—a word steeped in nostalgia but, as a preposition, functions as a means of positioning the reader, situating them in the present only to view the past. The rapid fire use of colons supports this position: a colon is used to introduce a list or expand on an idea, or both: “think: rats: scurrying: ivy’s sprinklered”—expand your nostalgic thoughts to include rats, and expand that to include scurrying, and then to the sprinklered ivy enjambed onto everything that came before. No, this isn’t mere nostalgia—it’s the establishment of how a life is lived.
Sarai’s command and control of the line is what gives these poems their flourish. Both in her use of enjambment, such as “a girl, twelve and studying / the ambient inhalation of family” and in powerful end-stopped lines, exemplified in “Not Me, It Cries”:
My past doesn’t haunt me.
I haunt my past.
In the middle of the night, it jerks ‘wake:
“Shit. Now what are you gonna blame me for?”
Unlike enjambed verses, the end-stopped line is a matter of fact statement: “My past doesn’t haunt me” has more power as a statement than the image of the girl studying because we don’t know what she’s studying until the next line when we learn she’s not studying at all; she’s lost in a contemplation of family. The speaker now haunts her past, she tells us in another end-stopped line, and she’s not going to be blamed now. She is no longer the girl, she is the woman who, in the second half of the book, looks back at all the girls now grown: “weirdo girl, prom girl, high-IQ girl, / neutral girl” as well as “nerdy girl, abused girl / abused girl, abused girl, pot-dealing / girl, acid-dropping girl” in “No One’s in High School These Days”—girls “who in / seventy years will be not-so-bitter / girl.” Nostalgia is for the weak, the poet reminds us; the “immovable past girl” is the “future girl”—she has come full circle, come into her own self, alluding back to rats and ivy in “Some Mysteries of Youth Unsolved (Where I lived When I was 13)”:
rats lay low in ivy,
a wet bank of it,
the leveling up of a slope
straining for your house
wrapped in scrim.
The girl is a woman now looking back, not nostalgically but understanding poetic “reenactment being / a distortion, a cry, and /even now, a question.”
Sarai’s control of poetic structures is not only demonstrated in enjambed and end-stops verses; it is present in the collection’s prose pieces as well. Prose poems remove the necessary distraction of verse’s line breaks and focuses readers on imagery and ideas. Sarai’s prose runs counter to the rhythms of her verse by creating a more flowing cascade of imagery, as exemplified in the title poem which begins with the reminder “The past is over” before immersing us in the images of the past: “The pain center was a tumor crazy for your right ovary”; “It’s malleable, not like ducklings, more like wet clay shivering in anticipation of thumbs”; “Zero in on the bright-eyed and hopping with more.” Each of these images is connected by ideas: “Memory is unreliable”; “Look to your future”; “Unreliable memory is understudy for sublimity.” All of this grounds the reader in a certain stability that is required when reenacting the past in poetry, and it takes a true practitioner of the art and master of the craft to pull together a collection this vibrant and stunning.
Moving without being sentimental, structured while feeling organic, Sarah Sarai’s Bright-Eyed skillfully displays her command of language to focus the experience of the past into a foundation for the present in order to connect the personal to the universal.
BIO
Ed Go is a Chinese-Filipino-Portuguese-English-Scottish-Irish American writer raised in Massachusetts, Virginia, Alaska, Hawaii and Connecticut. His writings have been published in various online and print journals and anthologies, and his chapbook Deleted Scenes from the Autobiography of Ed Go as told by Napoleon Id was published in 2014 by Other Rooms Press, and “new machines,” a sequence of twenty-one prose poems in the anthology Urgent Bards in 2016 by Urbantgarde Press.
One evening, after a dinner of whatever fast food chain was offering two sandwiches for three dollars, I retreated to my jail cell sized room for a time of forced self-reflection. I opened my Bible to the book of James, and read a verse that said religion is visiting orphans or widows. I didn’t know any widows. There was a dearth of orphans since the inventions of vaccines and organized agriculture. Seems if you give little kids shots and food, they tend to stay alive.
The next day my roommate said he was going to visit Grandma Ward.
“I didn’t know you had a grandma nearby?”
“Oh, everyone calls her that. She is an old widow I visit.”
Prayers answered. Time for some real religion. I shall minister to a widow.
We drove to where our town was called “old” and was once a separate village before being swallowed up by suburban sprawl. We pulled into the driveway of a ranch house with a huge picture window. It was across the from the library and a strip mall. The house predated all of them, as did its owner.
As we advanced up the walk, I could hear panting like a marathon runner nearing the end of the race, or his life. My roommate opened the front door to reveal an obese yellow lab. It was as though Winnie the Pooh were a dog.
We stepped into a living room with wall to wall faded light blue carpet. The fat yellow lab was trying to jump up on me, but unable to get her front paws more than an inch off the floor.
“Oh, am I happy to see you,” said an old woman sitting on a dark blue sofa. Lot of blue. Her hair was black and perfectly permed. She was wearing a dark brown skirt and a turquoise blouse. A sitting garage sale. At what point do people decide they are done updating their wardrobe? For my parents, it was forty-six. Hers was also forty-six. 1946.
“This is Jon,” Dan yelled, “He’s a teacher.”
Grandma Ward had perfect hearing. Much like a two-year-old being told to go to bed, if she didn’t like what you said, she just pretended not to hear it. This caused pretty much everyone to raise their voice around her. Like one does with a little kid.
Grandma Ward threw her head back and laughed. The exact laugh I had been missing in my life.
“I was a teacher for thirty years! You know, I had a fella that was sweet on me, back a hundred years ago. He asked me to marry him, but I knew he’d never let me teach, so I had to let him go.”
She patted the sofa next to her. And I went over and sat down on a blue sofa with a sheen of yellow lab hair. She leaned forward.
“Now, what grade do you teach?”
“Seventh.”
One eyebrow raised. There was a spark in her eyes. She reached to the coffee table to her left to snatch a glass bowl.
“You need a piece of chocolate,” she whispered.
And she was right, I did need a piece of chocolate.
She proceeded to ask me all about my job and boring life, hanging on every word.
A few days later, I was back at the corner of Main Street and Water Street, at the ranch of dark brown brick with the picture window. I grabbed her mail protruding out of the black metal box next to the door. It was addressed to Aida Ward. I didn’t need to knock, the dog having a seizure gave my presence away.
“Hello Mrs. Aida Ward,” I said while reading the name on her the mail.
“Oh, Aida is my given name, but I’ve always gone by Vareena.”
“You traded one civil war widow name for another?”
She laughed long and hard while extending her candy bowl toward me.
“So, Jon, are you sweet on some young lady?” she asked while I sat down next to her.
“I’m sweet on a lot of young ladies.”
She started laughing so hard she almost tumbled off the sofa. Her dog, Honey, got all excited and started panting, sending golden hair into the sunlight pouring through the picture window. I saw a leash hanging by the door.
“How about I take this dog for a walk?”
Grandma Ward clapped at the idea and Honey nearly went into an asthmatic fit with excitement while I grabbed the leash and clipped it to her collar. I stepped into her Brady Bunch kitchen. I pulled open drawers until I found a plastic bag to stuff into my back pocket. Honey and I took off down the sidewalk. Well, I took off. Honey waddled after me.
The neighborhood consisted of tiny ranch houses built on a cement block with single car garages. They were built in a totally different era. Just like grandma Ward. I knew this type of neighborhood. I grew up in one. In the 50’s and 60’s, these houses were the dream. Now they were homes for the permanently poor. Everyone owned three vehicles, two in the drive and one on the street, with the goal of keeping two cars running. People stood between houses and smoked. Everything had changed in this neighborhood. Everything but Grandma Ward.
Two blocks away, Honey drags me into a perfectly manicured yard. Her girth equal to that of a compact car. No sniffing around or pacing. She lets lose a steamy turd. I want to turn away, but I can’t. This must be what it’s like when a sumo wrestler drops a constitutional. I wrap the plastic bag around my hand, hoping against hope that this thin piece of plastic holds as I pick up a turd the size of adjoined softballs.
We walk a block back towards the house. The bag of steaming dog poop keeping time, swinging like a pendulum in my right hand. Honey lurches toward another yard.
“No! No! I don’t have another bag!” I yell as an epic tug of war begins. Honey strains forward like a plow horse. I dig in my heels, to no avail.
Honey arches her back and plops out another. Bigger than the first. She turns to me and smiles.
I look down at her business, glance right and left, not a soul in sight. I decide to use up any spiritual goodwill gained from walking Grandma Ward’s dog.
“We gotta run.”
Occasionally, in professional football, an overweight defensive lineman, a player who in the course of a season should never touch the football, ends up with the ball and has an opportunity to progress the ball with other large people chasing him. He will huff and puff and flail about in a comical manner. This player will finally collapse after running about ten yards and strain to stand again. This is Honey running back to Grandma Ward’s house.
Her exuberance over her once in a lifetime exertion extinguished, she lay in the center of the sidewalk half a block from home.
“Come on!” I chant while pulling. She responds with a raised eyebrow that says “Just choke me out with the leash.”
I drag the cement bag back home. As soon as I pull her over the threshold, she jumps up and starts panting all over the place. Grandma Ward gets up and disappears into her Brady Bunch kitchen. She emerges with a 1970 orange Tupperware full of leftover pot roast. She dumps it in the dog bowl and Honey goes to town like Winnie to Pooh on the honey pot. Then Honey pauses, lifts her head, looks at me, and winks.
“She worked up an appetite,” says Grandma Ward, not realizing I’m the work horse.
We both turn toward the picture window as a late model Honda Accord pulls up. A couple I have seen at church comes walking up the driveway. I hug Grandma Ward and prepare to excuse myself.
“Dale and Charlotte are taking me out to dinner. And you are coming,” she states, as though choosing dinner over the first drive though I see is a tough choice. Honey looks at me and smiles.
“We’re nothing alike,” I whisper to Honey.
Soon I am sitting at a local restaurant. Grandma Ward chooses where she eats based on the special for that day of the week. Tonight’s choice was based on potato soup. Grandma Ward made me sit close to her so she could whisper to me and wink. Charlotte was quite a bit older than Dale, which caused quite a stir in the church circles when they married. Charlotte was pretty, college educated, and smart, and I’m sure she had plenty of suiters in her day, but had turned them all away. Now she was forced to double back and scoop up Dale, a day laborer with square hands and an “aw shucks” grin.
Grandma Ward pats me on the back as I order saying I worked up quite an appetite walking Honey.
“I’ll have the pot roast,” I say to the waitress.
“Why don’t you have any kids yet?” asks Grandma Ward while staring at Charlotte, who is near forty, and near the end of fertility, “Something wrong with your pipes?”
Awkward silence. Grandma Ward turns toward me and whispers in an unusually loud voice that conceals nothing.
“Must be her pipes. My pipes are so old, I’m not even sure I could get a man interested in these pipes anymore.”
I sit perfectly still. Mortified. Charlotte giggles a little. Dale chuckles and soon everyone is laughing as Grandma Ward smiles, like a two-year-old who has a hang nail on her middle finger and goes around flicking everyone off, old ladies get to say whatever they want. I love Grandma Ward.
When the bill comes, Grandma Ward hoists a black leather purse that could easily encapsulate a bowling ball, up on the table. She pulls out a wad of cash that could choke a mule.
She walks out gripping my arm and I gently lower her into the backseat, hop around the car and sit in the backseat next to her. She winks at me and leans forward.
“Dale, I sure could use some ice cream.”
Dale and Charlotte turned to see the eyes of a little girl asking her daddy for a frozen treat. They’d have better luck kicking a kitten. Grandma Ward turned to me and smiled, her eyes sparkling. And I loved her even more.
The ice cream place was the type of establishment open only for the summer. A shack with a sliding window and four teenage girls in matching T-shirts, all sprinting around for minimum wage. I try to decide which of the 50 flavors to choose for my single scoop sugar cone. I order blackberry chip and step aside. Grandma Ward, black purse swinging, dressed like she just stepped out of a USO dance, fog of rose perfume, saunters up to the window.
At the bottom of the sign listing all the flavors, is the Atomic Bomb. A fifteen-dollar concoction of the ten most popular flavors, dumped into a waffle cone the size of a mixing bowl. Like the $100 bottle of wine at a pizza place, no one orders this.
“I’ll have that A-bomb,” states Grandma Ward.
The shocked teeny bopper starts stretching out the ligaments in her forearm. Grandma Ward pulls on my arm so I am forced to lean down to hear her whisper.
“Life is short. Always get the big cone.”
When the A-Bomb comes out, they have to turn it sideways to get it out of the window. Grandma Ward takes it with a grin. I grab a handful of napkins and she takes my arm as we walk to the car. She’s getting ice cream on everything. A glob lands in her hair, dribbles down her USO dress and onto my arm. She’s oblivious. She smiles and takes a big lick.
Back home, I help her into the house. She’s eaten a tenth of this monstrosity. She walks into her Brady Bunch kitchen, stands over Honey’s dog bowl, and drops it in.
“Done,” she deadpans.
Honey trots past me. Smiling. I have a feeling this is not the first Atomic Bomb for Honey.
It was getting late. I hug Grandma Ward, breathing in the rose perfume that has become comforting. It’s been a month since I’ve hugged anyone.
I’m back in the driveway. I can see Grandma Ward’s excitement through the picture window, I can almost hear Honey wheezing, and have rose perfume assault my nostrils. She is wearing a navy-blue pleated skirt with a matching top.
We decide, or rather she decides, to head to an Amish restaurant famous for fried chicken and peanut butter pie. She digs her keys out of the black leather purse that could easily fit a bowling ball, pinching the ignition key between her thumb and pointer finger.
“We’re taking my car,” she says.
“Fine, but I’m driving,” I answer.
“Don’t try to run away with me,” she says, teasing.
“With what? A 1989 Chrysler with eight hundred miles on it, and an untold fortune in your giant purse?”
“You’re lucky I’m not sixty years younger, or you’d think about it,” she answers, with one raised eyebrow.
At the restaurant, she struggles to get out of the car. I lift her and get her steady between the open door and frame of the car. Grandma Ward is slightly plump but weighs almost nothing. Whenever I help her up, she always takes that as an opportunity to hug me or give my arms a little squeeze. I turn and lean in to the car to get her purse.
It is autumn and the maple trees are a beautiful shade of orange. The seeds are aptly nicknamed helicopters. I turn around with her Brinks truck of a purse and she has a handful of helicopter seeds. The Cadillac next to us left their driver’s side window down a bit. She is dropping them in like letters in a mail slot.
“What are you doing? Where did you even get those?”
“This man will be glad in fifty years when he has a maple tree in his yard. He’ll thank me. You need to plant more seeds,” she says with a slight indignant tone.
“I’m sure he will thank you on your 130th birthday. Bring you firewood or something.”
She uncurls her fingers like a kid who has been caught with a hand in the cookie jar. She has two left. I glance around.
“Put ‘em in,” I sigh.
“You’re going to be a good dad one day,” she whispers as we walk across the restaurant parking lot.
The lobby is a sea of people. I have to breast stroke to get to the seating station. A taller Danny DeVito with a Secret Service earpiece is barking orders at a pair of teenage girls. He glances up at me.
“Wait is going to be over an hour,” he snaps.
Grandma Ward peeks around my arm.
“Tommy?”
He grins and barks “Table four” at one of the girls. She leads us to a circular table set for six people. Six people who are not us.
“You going to get married? Have some fun? Have some kids?” she asks without looking up from the menu, knowing we were both getting fried chicken and peanut butter pie.
“I’m already having fun,”
But I wasn’t. I was all alone in life. And so was she.
After dinner, we drive back to the ranch on the corner of Water and Main with the blue carpet, massive red brick fireplace, and fat yellow lab. We chat, count cars out the picture window, and eat all the chocolate out her crystal candy bowl.
“We’re a good team,” she says as I stand to leave.
“You get one of those handicapped parking passes and we’ll be unstoppable.”
“It was in the glove compartment.”
“You’re lucky you’re not sixty years younger.”
I drove home thinking about old Vereena, who goes by Aida, and why I liked being with her so much. Overpowering rose perfume? June Cleaver fashion sense? The fact that she probably slept in a formal dress? The ability to get a seat in a crowded restaurant? The ability to say whatever she wanted? Definite selling points.
I had mostly avoided the elderly. My own grandparents lived far away and I never saw them much. One grandma was cranky, the other was a hoarder. I didn’t think I was missing much on the old lady front. Mostly old people scared me. I was scared that I would end up just like them. Unable to stand without pulling a table over. Smelly. Wearing sweatpants and white New Balance shoes. I shuddered at the thought.
Grandma Ward was mostly the opposite of these things. She was witty, dressed nice, and literally smelled like roses. But that wasn’t why I loved her.
A few months later, I brought my new girlfriend, Julie, to the corner of Water and Main. I’m not sure if our relationship would have continued had Grandma Ward not extended her candy dish with her left hand and glanced at me and winked.
Soon we visited and Julie extended her left hand to Grandma Ward, palm down. We were engaged. Grandma Ward was so happy for me.
Julie had a wedding shower at the house we bought together. Neither of us lived in the house yet. We were going to do things “old fashioned” like Grandma Ward would want. I entered the living room with steel folding chairs and Julie’s college friends and ladies from church were sitting in a circle. Julie was wearing a black cocktail dress and she looked really beautiful. Grandma Ward gave me the most evil grin, like a four-year-old just waiting for dad to figure out she ate all the cake. My future wife pulls me out to the kitchen and cups her hand to tell me a secret. I lean down, looking at Grandma Ward.
“Everything was good. Everyone got me really nice gifts. But one person got me the skimpiest lingerie. It’s barely there.”
Grandma Ward just smiles and nods.
At our wedding, Julie had her grandma on her side, and I had Grandma Ward on mine. We got her this big flower to wear. We hugged on the way out of the church and some more at the reception. She was so happy for me.
Turns out, when you marry a corporate lawyer, they are responsible for this thing called “billable hours”. I’m still not sure what it is, but it meant I rarely saw the new wife. March came and I was staring down a wife working sixty hours and my own teacher spring break. Back to sad and lonely. That Sunday, at church, another old lady asked me if I knew that Grandma Ward had fallen at her home and was in a nearby nursing home. I did not know. And now I knew what I was going to do with my spring break.
I park in the side lot of Arlington Court Nursing and Rehabilitation Center next to the only other car. I haven’t seen her in six months. I walk into a lobby of overstuffed couches, brass lamps, and coffee tables. It looks like an abandoned furniture store.
There is an old lady staring out at the courtyard. She has perfectly permed hair, a green dress, and I can smell the rose perfume. I sneak up behind her and perch next to her on the couch. It takes a second, but she recognizes me. I get the biggest smile.
“I am so happy to see you! I was hoping you would come. But I would understand if you didn’t. You’re married now,” she says.
“Yeah, to a lawyer. it means I see her about as much as I see you. I am off all week. She is not,”
“What are you going to do with yourself?”
“Hang out with you. We make a good team. I like this place. I think I’ll move her too.”
“You can have my spot.”
We both laugh and then sit quiet for a good long while. I have missed her. Missed her a great deal.
“Did you drive here?” she asks as though I walked, “Sneak me out. Take me back home. They make me wake up too early. I miss my house. I miss Honey.
We talked for a long time. Neither of us had anywhere else to be. We both had empty houses waiting for us somewhere else. Mostly, she made sly innuendos about sex and me being newly married. She always threw in a smirk and a wink. I laughed until my side hurt.
It was nearing lunch time. I stood and helped her stand. I walked her back to her room, which was no easy process. I walked backwards with my arms extended. She had hold of my hands and I was talking her through every step of the way.
“Five more steps. You got this,” I said as she ambled down the hallway, “Don’t run home on us tonight, Mrs. Jackrabbit.”
“When does that wife of your get home? So you can have some fun,” she fired back.
“With your bridal shower gift?”
I have more faults than can be listed. One of my biggest is that generally don’t like other people. There’s seven billion people on the planet and if I met them all, I would like seven of them. This wears on a person.
On the couch, sneaking up beside her, Grandma Ward’s eyes focused and her smile was magical. She had recognized me as her person. She was my type. I thought I’d never see a smile as pure as that again in my life. Never.
“Do you think you could come back tomorrow?” she asked as I walked toward the door of her nursing home room.
“Let me check my calendar,” I said pretending to flip an invisible day planner. She thought this uproariously funny.
I went to that nursing home every day that week. When you find someone who really sees you, who smiles from deep in their soul at you, you return. Best spring break I ever had.
Soon enough, Grandma Ward’s shower gift returned dividends. Julie was pregnant with a little girl. I was excited. Nervous. All the feelings at once. Grandma Ward was thrilled for me.
“You will be the best daddy ever,” she would say. When I would ask her how she knew she would smile at me. As though it were one of our shared jokes.
Twenty weeks into the pregnancy, we starting having problems. They were serious enough that Julie had to go on bedrest at home, and then in the hospital. We had to have a baby shower in the hospital, and Grandma Ward came, despite her distaste for hospitals. Another sentiment we shared.
Weeks inched by. Then a month. Tough time. I went to work, and then straight to the hospital, every single day. It was depressing. One day, my wife was entertaining one of her many visitors while I sulked in the corner. I overheard them say “Grandma Ward fainted at home. She’s here now too.”
I walked out. Took the elevator to the welcome desk in the lobby. Some sixteen-year-old candy striper boy was manning the desk. He smiled at me with this “I’m going to be an Eagle scout someday” grin.
“I need to see Grandma Ward.”
Blank stare.
“Aida Ward.”
He pecks the name into his keyboard while I spell it. Blank stare again. Dang civil war widow names mixing me all up.
“Vareena Ward,” I say like we are trying to guess an email password.
“Bingo. Room 512,” he says while taking out an over photocopied hospital map and a highlighter.
Old Vareena would listen to him patiently. Smile at him and wink at me. Maybe in another fifty years I’ll be as saintly as her.
“I don’t need a map. I live here,” I snapped.
The hospital had two gleaming towers. My wife was in one, trying to keep a life from entering this world. Grandma Ward was in the other one, maybe leaving this world. I took the elevator to the fifth floor. The door to her room was ajar, and I could hear her and her daughter talking. I lightly rapped, slowly pushed the door open, and had to hold back tears.
Her hair was permed on one side, but mashed down on the other. No make-up. No rose perfume. Just the disgusting hospital disinfectant that permeated my life. This was the first time I had ever seen her not wearing a dress. They stuffed her in one of those white off green hospital gowns. It had blue polka dots, like the designer was thinking, “what this needs is some dots, that way when you’re dying with your naked rear end falling out, you’ll have that fashion going for you”.
She turned and her eyes focused. Her whole face brightened and she got a big smile.
“My boy! My boy is here!”
I saw the same smile as I did on the couch at the nursing home, as every time she saw me walking up the sidewalk through her big picture widow, and as she handed me a chocolate out of the glass candy dish while asking all about my hopeless life.
Her daughter graciously stood so I could have a seat next to her. She reached over to take my hand and the inside of her arm was all purple and green.
“What happened?”
“Young girl was trying to draw my blood. She was trying hard,” she said with a wink. I knew exactly what she meant. Learn on someone else.
“Your wife still here?”
“Yeah, I don’t think they’ll let us go home,” I said.
“I don’t think they’ll let me go home either.”
We talked. Laughed. Smiled. She reminded me of what a great dad I would be. I missed being with someone who really got me. One of my people.
Time flew. Unlike when I was in the other tower. One tower to bring you in this world and one tower to take you out. A life lived between the two. I heard two nurses whispering in the hallway. I knew they wanted in. I knew this hospital. Time for vitals. Then some water and ice chips. Lights out, until a midnight blood draw, or the janitorial staff strolls in to empty the trash at two in the morning. Time for me to get out or be chased out.
I stood and hugged Grandma Ward. Walked toward the door, but paused.
“Come see me again, come see me.”
“I will,” I promised.
But I didn’t. I never saw Grandma Ward alive again.
Because I was a self-centered jerk. Who learned nothing from her while she was alive.
I returned to my wife, thirty weeks pregnant. I was staring down ten more weeks of going to work all day, spending my evenings sitting in a 1979 pleather recliner in her room, and my nights in a big empty house. But that didn’t happen. We had a premature baby. Well, she had her. I just mostly stood around and freaked out at the whole process. Two and half months early. Due date was April Fools and we had her on MLK Day. Welcome to your tower, baby Hannah. Live a good life before you get to other gleaming glass monstrosity.
I went on paternity leave for six weeks. Which is exactly how long Hannah spent in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, or NICU. Her mother and I were there every day. This was largely because of her mother. Hannah wasn’t really my person. She was just a strange little creature who lived in a plastic aquarium. Then a plastic bin. Then my bed.
I was at church, when some unknown soul came and expressed regret to me that Grandma Ward had just passed. I felt nothing. “Well, can’t live forever. I hope to live as long.” I tried to put it out of my mind.
Julie made me go to the viewing. Funerals are out of the question. No one has to go to my funeral. I won’t be offended. They have no choice but to be a morbid affair. I expect the same gracious offer in return. There she was, laid out in a casket. She looked like a makeup covered mannequin. I leaned over the coffin and squeezed her hand. It was like a piece of wax. At least they doused her with rose perfume.
“Just so you know, I’d have put you in pants,” I whispered, half expecting her to open her eyes, smile, and wink at me.
I fell into a deep sadness. I did not want to be a dad. I was failing at the one thing Grandma Ward was sure I’d be good at. I didn’t care about baby Hannah. I cared about me. I wasn’t sleeping. I was having nightmares about rolling over on Hannah at night. Finally, my wife had mercy on me and took the little hand grenade to the guest bedroom.
I woke up, alone, at six in the morning. Drunk on depression. I wandered in to the guest bedroom to say good bye. Julie rolled over and baby Hannah, who formerly had the facial expressions of a Barbie doll, popped her head up. Then it happened. The thing that changed my life.
Hannah looked at me. Really looked at me. Her eyes registered me as her dad. She got the biggest smile on her face. It was exactly the smile that Grandma Ward made when she would see me through the picture window. The smile Grandma Ward had when I snuck up beside her at the nursing home. The smile I got in her hospital room when I saw her for the last time. My daughter was one of my people.
Everything changed. I would help her walk, encouraging every step. Go get too big ice cream cones. She’d go to school, and I would promise to be there when she was done. A promise I kept. I bought a glass candy dish. Because sometimes you just need a piece of chocolate. We’d feed the dog all kinds of people food. Hannah loved her dog. Mostly we just held hands and talked. Because in a world of seven billion people. I probably like seven. Grandma Ward was one. My daughter was another.
Sometimes I still think about that verse in the book of James. It said religion was simple. Find a widow. It was simple, just not in the way I thought. By keeping company with Grandma Ward, I didn’t help her.
She saved me.
BIO
Jon Woolley has been published in the literary journal Come on Georgia, and his humorous essay “Record Low” was published in The Columbus Dispatch. Jon is a public school teacher. He thought he knew all about children. Then he had two of his own. Jon Woolley lives in Dublin, Ohio with his lawyer wife. He is often the primary caregiver for his two daughters and they are the reason he writes. They are also why he has gotten into collecting bourbon. Jon is a former Division 1 basketball player. Now he is exactly 80 inches tall for no good reason.
My son would have turned 12 this month. The only evidence of his existence are a birth certificate and a death certificate with the same date on them. I remember I was alone. For hours I tried to get his father on the phone. I sent emails, I sent texts. There are just far too many ways for people to ignore us nowadays. Eventually I had to give up because I had to push.
Sam was born April 4th at exactly two minutes after two in the afternoon. The sun was bright outside, so he got to feel the warmth from the window for a few moments in his short life. Exactly 11 minutes later he was gone.
His heart was too weak. I’d known he would have trouble from previous appointments, but there was always a chance he might make it. I did everything I was told, from bed rest to eating disgusting food and vitamins. He was desperately wanted. I’d had three miscarriages before with the most recent only getting as far along as six months. But now, with Sam, I held out and even prayed sometimes despite my disdain for the practice. Watching his last cry sucked all the air out of my lungs. I’m pretty sure my blood stopped moving through my body at that moment, and I just froze, watching him, waiting for any movement or sound. I didn’t want to miss it.
There was nothing to miss. He was tiny and limp, still covered in afterbirth and attached to me through his umbilical cord. I couldn’t talk and I don’t think I uttered another word for the rest of the day. Still alone with the nurses and my dead son, they asked me if I wanted to hold him. I did. Then they asked if I wanted a picture of us. I couldn’t. I felt very defensive of his little body at this point, and the idea made me ill. Selfishly I also wanted to be one of only a few who got to see him. No one else deserved him. A line from a poem pushed into my mind, and all I could think of was the future we’d never have.
I could feel pity staring at me from every direction. Nurses had taken off their masks and were looking at me, their faces twisted in pain. My doctor just kept saying he was sorry. He asked if I wanted to be alone for a minute because they would have to take Sam away. My eyes burned, my jaw ached, and oddly nothing below my waist felt anything. I hadn’t even had an epidural. I was just in as much pain as I was numb. I asked if he would stay with me for a few minutes. He pulled up a chair.
The nurses walked out looking back at me or at Sam, I couldn’t really tell which as they disappeared behind the door. Then there was silence.
Suddenly, my doctor grabbed my hand and began his own venting session. He knew how hard I had worked and what I’d sacrificed to have Sam to try to give him a chance. He’d been in constant communication with my oncologist since the first day I came to him. Everyone did everything they could, and no one was to blame.
He was a specialist in an already specialized field. My oncologist referred me to him as soon as I found out I was pregnant. At the time, I was on chemotherapy and radiation for leukemia. Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, to be more exact. By the time I had an inkling I was pregnant, I was already three months along and had been putting poison and radiation into my body the entire time. My oncologist recommended I terminate the pregnancy not only because I’d been on chemo to that point, but I couldn’t continue if I held on to the pregnancy. I would have to stop immediately to give the baby any chance. But that would hurt me. I needed my treatment, as I’d fallen out of remission months earlier like a brick from a building top. From stage 0 to stage 4 in only a couple of months. I barely had to think about it: I wanted my child. Treatment stopped and I went to the OBGYN he recommended who has seen many women with cancer through their pregnancies.
It wasn’t going to be pretty, he said. The treatment had already wracked the baby’s body, which was undersized and not developing properly. I would have to make a lot of changes and assess the risks. Again, another man asking if I wanted to terminate. I realized they were looking out for me. But it left a bitter iron flavor in my mouth every time I’d tell another medical professional I wasn’t getting an abortion. Not because I didn’t “believe” in them, but I didn’t want one. Hence, choice. I made mine. And now I was living with it.
After sitting silently while my OB rattled on, I’m sure as a means of comfort, a nurse came in the room to take Sam. I let her. But I didn’t offer him up. She had to dig into my arms to take him, but I admired her gentle touch. She had even gotten a different, softer blanket than those blue and white stiff towel blankets every hospital has for babies. He was safe with her.
I asked the doctor if Sam had suffered at all. Was there pain? Fear? Panic?
He said he doubted all those things very much. But he said Sam would have felt my touch. Which makes me dubious about his previous response. If he felt my touch, he had to feel other stuff.
Everything went very fast after that moment. Once Sam was out of the room, nurses and administrators and other people who I have no idea what they did were bustling in and out. Nurses tended to my body while administrators asked me what his name would be on the birth certificate. They asked me to verify my information. Then they asked if I was putting dad on the form. I don’t think he knows to this day that I left him off Sam’s birth certificate. Sam was mine.
I was in a wheelchair before I knew it. I hadn’t suffered much physically from the birth, so I was safe to leave that same day. They asked if I had someone coming to pick me up, and I lied. As soon as they left me alone, I abandoned the wheelchair and walked to my car. When I opened the door and sat in the driver’s seat, I got this feeling of déjà vu. It was in reverse, though. Just hours before I’d been in that seat, driving myself to the hospital after my water broke. I had messaged him the second my water broke and kept trying to call Sam’s dad on the way there. Even now I don’t know where he was or what he was doing in all that time.
I drove home with no memory of doing it. I must have because I ended up at home on my couch staring at my ceiling. At this point I’d given up on getting a call back.
Sleep took me. I didn’t want to sleep, but I didn’t get a choice. It was after nine that night before I woke to a touch on my arm. It was him. I was too sad to be angry.
The next day came too fast. Sam’s dad was behind me, playing big spoon like he had a hundred times before. Occasionally, I would be big spoon. I’d struggle to put my arm over his wide shoulders, so instead I’d have to loop my arm between his chest and his arm as best I could. I welcomed his touch and was reviled by it all at once. My indecision left me frozen, staring at the wall, wondering if the events of the last 24 hours had actually transpired or been a cruel nightmare. Pain in my stomach and loins shot me out of the bed towards the bathroom, and the spots of blood and pain in my crotch brought me back to reality.
I stumbled back to the room after cleaning myself. My legs were weak and shaking, and I kept grabbing surfaces to steady myself until I reached the edge of my bed. He appeared in the doorway with a look of concern, asking if I needed something to eat. I didn’t answer: I just stared at him, holding his gaze as I fell towards my pillow and curled into a fetal position. My expression must have been grim. He retreated towards the kitchen, and I heard the fridge doors open and shut and the slight click of my stove turning on.
He was making fried eggs and rice. I knew somehow. It was my comfort meal even before my pregnancy. A couple over easy eggs, fried with avocado oil, put over a bowl of rice and sliced. The yolk would turn the rice a slight yellow. Imagining the color right then made my stomach turn.
I scootched up a bit towards my headboard so I could watch him. He always moved fluidly, quietly, as if he knew my kitchen better than his own. Which was likely true since he spent more time with me than at home. That thought sparked anger in me. He was usually with me, usually at my home. Where the hell was he when I needed him the most? I squirmed in my bed, trying to relax, as the sudden flare of fury brought about a boiling hot pain in my groin. I wasn’t allowed to be mad; I wasn’t allowed to be sad. I was trapped.
He finished in the kitchen, turned quickly, and walked towards me with a steaming bowl in his hand. I inspected him. I wondered if Sam would have looked like him or like me. Maybe he would have looked like one of his grandfathers or uncles. Would he have had that winning smile like his dad’s that engaged me the first time I met him? Who would he have been?
I named him Sam for many reasons. The leastimportant being it was a name his dad and I could settle on. The most important being how many wonderful Sam’s there are. When I was filling out his birth certificate, it was difficult for me to write Samuel instead of Samwise. It’s not as if his dad was there to stop me. I could have done it. Samwise Gamgee was one of my favorite literary characters. He still is. There was no one braver, more loyal, or more self-sacrificing. Would my son have been like that? Could he have lived up to his name?
He never got the chance and I will never know. I do dream on occasion of a boy. Brown hair, deep brown eyes, quick witted with a devilish grin. But also kind. So kind and good. No matter what happens in those dreams, as soon as Sam arrives, it’s never a nightmare.
The steaming bowl of rice and eggs was placed gently on the side table in front of me. The clank drove me out of my thoughts and back to where I was. Where I didn’t want to be.
Don’t ask me now what I was thinking. I have no idea, I only have regret. Despite my condition and knowing how bad it was, we made love just then. It hurt worse than when I lost my virginity. But I needed the connection. I was falling apart. Part of me tries to blame him for that moment, wondering why he would care more about sex than how delicate I was. Stupid as it was, it was my decision. Afterwards we laid there, and I’m reasonably sure he was talking to me. I wasn’t listening to him. I didn’t care what he had to say. I wanted to keep thinking about Sam.
I fell in and out of love in a 24-hour period. I’d never look at Sam’s dad the same, and I loved someone who I would never see again more than I could express. I was as full as I was empty. I barely spoke a word to his dad the entire time he was with me. I couldn’t even bring myself to ask where he’d been while I gave birth and watched our child die alone. Part of me didn’t want to know the answer. He was a love I always knew would go wrong one day. I hadn’t realized how horribly wrong.
It’s been 12 years, and I still dream of Sam. I like to fantasize about how wonderful and smart he would be, how adorable. Even how at 12, he would likely be giving me a hard time like any tween. Sam and I were robbed. I keep him to myself, rarely telling anyone about my ordeal. I can’t stand looks like the one the nurses in the hospital gave me. I didn’t want to give birth alone. I didn’t want to leave his dad. I don’t want pity. I just want my son. I have his ashes in a tiny ceramic urn, blue, with his name written in gold. Two small praying bears sit around him at all times. Fuzzy sentinels.
I’m not typically triggered by events. I can see a movie that discusses child loss without automatically equating it to my experience. For some reason, though, a poem makes me think of Sam. It’s titled, “When Tomorrow Starts Without Me”. Fortunately for me, this isn’t a particularly well known or repeated piece of poetry, so I can go months or years without the words making me fail. I feel like a failure still, like I should have and could have done more to save him. When I researched what more I could have done I found nothing, but I did find research that states he might have saved me. According to research I stumbled upon, the stem cells creating him might have healed my damaged organs and stopped the cancer from killing me. My baby, my love, likely saved my life even when I couldn’t save his.
BIO
Rachel Moncada was born in Portland, OR, and currently lives in Vancouver, WA. After 18 years working in the medical field, she is now a student at Washington State University pursuing a BA in English and Communications. She hopes to write grants for non-profit organizations along with her own personal work. Her writing is predominantly non-fiction pieces about her life and those around her. “Sam” is her first published work.
My dad, Frank Revheim, landed on Normandy Beach on the second day. I guess that is why he survived. I always wondered if his job was to pick up the bodies left behind from that first day of carnage. Or perhaps he hauled supplies to replenish those depleted by the survivors who scaled the cliffs.
I wonder how the troops were divided. Who was selected for the first day? The young? The unmarried? And who were the remaining souls that were thought to be worth saving for the long fight ahead?
I always pondered.
But I never asked.
Not even after we went to see the movie The Longest Day with his friend from work, who asked him at the end of the movie, “Was it really like that, Frank?”
“Yes,” Dad replied.
I guess his response was enough for me. Maybe I really didn’t want to know anything more than that.
But if he were alive today, watching the memorial services for the 80th anniversary of the epic battle that would liberate France, then Europe, I’d ask many questions so that he’d share some of his memories. The memories of his pounding heart as he raced forward over the beach and towards the escarpment with his equipment and weapons weighing him down. The sense of dread as he saw the fallen and wondered if he might be next. The reflection on meeting his brother Reidar in England. Reidar, who was serving in the Norwegian Navy, sought him out because he heard the 99th Battalion of Norwegian-Americans serving in the US Army were on the base awaiting orders. I imagine he would remember the hope he had in his heart because they went to a photographer’s studio to take a photo together. They marked the occasion they saw each other after 11 years apart; my dad left for America at 19 years old and his brother was only 10. I wondered if he remembered the song and lyrics to the Vera Lynn classic, “We’ll Meet Again”, not knowing where or when, but repeating those words over and over like a mantra to bolster his courage. I wonder if he thought about whether he’d see his 30th birthday in October 1944. Or whether he’d see his wife, Jenny, again in Brooklyn, his new home so far away from Haugesund, Norway. And I would ask how he prayed, not if he prayed. I would ask if he cried as he remembered what he saw in Normandy.
My father cried. I saw him cry when he listened to music. When he left for work because he’d be away for two weeks. When he wrote a letter to his family in Norway. When we sang along with Mitch Miller. When he played the accordion. Or the organ. He cried when the doctors told him he needed brain surgery. When the biopsy showed it was mesothelioma. When I told him it metastasized from the lungs. He cried when the ambulance got him home because he knew I had saved him from dying in the hospital.
“I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again,” he said, as I pulled the nasal-gastric tube from his nose. The hospital hadn’t removed it even though they knew he was entering home hospice.
He said it was okay when I got angry that he didn’t eat. When I had to remove thick mucus from his larynx because he was too weak to cough it out, I swiped and wiped in the back of his throat with a sponge on a stick.
“I’m glad you taught me how to fish in the fjords of Norway,” I said, remembering how we reeled in the red cod we caught. He laughed.
I remember how special it was to have my father home for the week he was off from working on the tugboat. I remember how he vacuumed and dusted to help my working mom. How he cooked his specialty, fried mackerel, first dredging it in flour tossed with salt and pepper, then placing it carefully into the melted butter until crisp.
I remember chopping down trees in the woods on the property in Pennsylvania before the country house was built and asking him if he was trying to turn me into the son he never had. The son that was stillborn six years before I was born. I remember how he told me he sang “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” to me. I remember the pink and floral alarm clock he gave me that played “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”
I remember his smile. How he always broke into a dance when he was feeling happy. Or sad. How we did the two-step and the polka. How he waltzed with me standing on top of his feet.
I will never forget his feet. His tender and soft soles that carried him through seventy-six years of life. Over the beach at Normandy and through western Europe. I remember the feet that he said hurt from time to time and that when they ached, everything else ached too.
“Take care of your feet and they’ll take care of you,” he said to me, many times.
My dad did not get to see the 50th anniversary reunion of veterans returning to Normandy in 1994. I watched the TV broadcast alone and cried as I thought about missing him since his death in 1991. I didn’t know that my Uncle Reidar was there with the other Norwegian sailors who survived the battle and were honored by the Norwegian government. I would like to imagine that they would have been together, once again, to take another photo to celebrate the lives they returned to after the war. They would tell their favorite story of how Reidar knocked on the door where my dad’s troops were located, and how he almost walked away after my father kept saying it couldn’t be his brother who was just a little boy. But they were both men facing the biggest challenge in their lives, two men who recognized the grace they had to survive.
Those feelings are present now and are even stronger since the American veterans present at the ceremony on June 6th, 2024 are in their late 90s and even 100s. My dad wouldn’t be there; he would have been 113 years old. But hopefully I will get to Normandy someday to visit the memorial that pays tribute to all who crossed the beach and have crossed to the other side. For my dad, and for the brave, with prayers and hope that our world will always remember the ‘war to end all wars’ so that tyranny will not have the final word, once again.
ACTIVITY DURING WWII
PRIVATE FIRST CLASS. SERVED OCTOBER 30, 1942 TO DECEMBER 21, 1945. ENTERED SERVICE WITH THE 99TH BATTALION, A SPECIAL UNIT OF NORWEGIAN NATIONALS AND TRAINED AT CAMP RIPLEY, MINNESOTA AND CAMP HALE IN COLORADO. SERVED IN CENTRAL EUROPE, NORTHERN FRANCE ON D-DAY PLUS 2, IN THE NORMANDY INVASION AND RHINELAND. PERFORMED VARIOUS DUTIES IN CONNECTION WITH THE STORAGE AND HANDLING OF ALL TYPES OF AMMUNITION FOR THE 95TH BOMB SQUAD, ARMY AIR FORCE. SAW ACTIVE DUTY AS A RIFLEMAN WITH THE 99TH INFANTRY BATTALION. AWARDED DISTINGUISHED UNIT BADGE, EUROPEAN-AMERICAN-MIDDLE EASTERN SERVICE MEDAL, GOOD CONDUCT MEDAL AND THE WWII VICTORY MEDAL.
BIO
Nadine Revheim, PhD, a licensed psychologist, occupational therapist, and author. Her forty-year career in mental health was primarily focused on research and clinical programs for individuals with schizophrenia with various professional publications. She is currently self-employed as a private practitioner in behavioral health for individuals and couples. Her memoir, Woven Together: Finding Me in Memories of You, is in press with Cape House Books. She has written an ad hoc blog, “Beacon Bits” – A Bite of the Hudson River Valley (beaconnybits.blogspot.com) for over ten years. Other recent published works have appeared in The Highlands Current and The Keepthings.
Deborah Holt Larkin grew up in the small coastal town of Ventura, CA. In the 1950s, her father, Bob Holt, was a newspaper journalist and columnist for the Ventura County Star-Free Press. Beginning in 1958, her father covered one of the most famous criminal cases in Ventura County history. When Deborah was only a child, her father attended the trial on a daily basis, following it through from opening statements to the verdict and punishment phases. As her father came home at night, Deborah would ask him for details about the case and the courtroom proceedings. Deborah recently wrote an exceptional and detailed account of the famous case of Elizabeth Duncan (A Lovely Girl, 2022), the woman who was convicted of murdering the pregnant wife of her son, Frank Duncan. Elizabeth Duncan was the last woman put to death by the state of California. Like the case itself, the memories of this period in her young, impressionable life haunted Deborah throughout her life—until it finally came out in book form.
*
I met Deborah recently at a local book festival in Carpinteria, just north of Ventura. As we sat down to talk, a train, the Surfliner, was passing by.
The Writing Disorder: Have you been to Carpinteria lately?
Deborah Holt Larkin: I haven’t been here since I was a little girl. A friend’s grandmother used to live here. We’d come up here and stay with her family. We would sometimes camp out in her backyard, and we would hear the trains pass by at night. My family lived on Alameda Avenue in Montalvo, and our house was right near the railroad tracks. So, we heard the trains going by all the time.
TWD: What about Ventura?
DHL: A local historian, Glenda Jackson, used to give tours of the Ventura courthouse (built in 1926). She would take groups up to the old court room and tell them all about the infamous trial of Elizabeth Duncan. It’s a beautiful old building. I actually spoke there last year about my book. My sister still lives in Ventura — in the same house where we grew up.
TWD: My friend, Susan, who grew up in Ventura and worked at the courthouse, said they used to display a large photo of Elizabeth (aka Ma) Duncan up in the window upstairs. So, when you looked up from the street below you would see her face in the window.
DHL: When I was in college, I got a summer job as a student intern at Camarillo State Hospital. I got it through my mother who worked there as a psychiatric social worker. I was an intern in the school there and I remember that they seemed to treat children with mental illness as if it were some kind of parenting error. And I remember sitting out front on the lawn and watching the parents who would come visit. It wasn’t because of bad parenting. My mother was a big influence on me too, as far as some of her experiences working there at the hospital. I put this in the book, and I remember my mother saying, “I just hope I live long enough for there to be a cure for mental illness.”
TWD: The things your parents exposed you to as a child were quite provocative.
DHL: It was a different family. It was very unusual at the time for my mother to be working. She was the only married mom I knew who held a job. For the most part, women didn’t work when they were married.
TWD: And there weren’t a lot of divorced parents back then either.
DHL: No. There were some that had lost their husbands during the war.
TWD: How did the book come about? Was it through your writing class?
DHL: First of all, the story of the trial shadowed me my whole life. And I wanted to be a writer. It was something I always had a dream of becoming. When I first went away to college, I didn’t have the confidence. Even though my teachers always commented on how good my writing was. I would get comments on my papers like, very well written. So, I went into education. When I graduated from college in the 1970s, a lot of women were going into education. That was something we all did. And then thirty years later I started taking writing classes at UC San Diego, because I wanted to be able to do it right. I wanted to write a fictionalized account of the Duncan case. That was my goal. I was going to write a novel and fictionalize the story.
TWD: You know your book feels like fiction. It reads like a story.
DHL: I’ll tell you a little more about that. But I started to fictionalize the story. But the more chapters I wrote—I would just end up tearing them up, because the case is stranger than fiction. It doesn’t sound believable. And for fiction, it does need to have a certain quality. Even if it really happened, it might be hard to believe as fiction. And people in my writing class used to say that, that it wasn’t believable. Even after I started writing the book as nonfiction, people would still say it to me that it was unbelievable. And I would say, I’m sorry, but that’s what actually happened. It’s actually right there in the trial transcripts.
So as soon as my youngest son went off to college, I started taking writing classes. That’s when I first had the idea to write it as a novel. And then I got into a writer’s group, with reading critiques. It was at that point that I realized fictionalizing the case wasn’t going to work. So, I would bring in ten pages every week to the group and the other writers in the group would comment and critique my pages. I didn’t actually have a book I was working on at the time. Sometimes I would bring in personal essays, and it would be about my family and about my dad. And other times I would bring in something that was more like a police procedural, writing about this true murder case. One night I brought in something about my dad and the murder, and his reporting about the trial. Mark, the teacher/leader of the group, said, you know, Deborah, I think you have a book here. He suggested I write both my memoir about my dad and family, and about investigation and trial, and also some of the actual court proceedings, and weave it all together as one book. I thought about it, and I decided that it was a really great idea. So that was Mark’s idea. I gave him credit at the end of the book.
TWD: The structure works really well. You get really involved with the case, but you also welcome the relief with your own personal story about family and life growing up.
DHL: And then a very fortunate thing happened. After I had written most of the book, I had met with an agent who was interested in it. I sent her the whole manuscript, and when she finally got back to me, she said she really loved it, but she thought there was a problem with the pace of the book. She thought the family chapters were slowing down the pace. She wanted me to work on it and then she would take another look. So, I did. And I realized that as the trial approaches, there needed to be more true crime chapters and less personal chapters about my family to rev up the tension of the crime story.
I wrote it as literary nonfiction. And in literary nonfiction, all the facts are true, but you can write scenes where they’re drinking a cup of coffee, or you can describe the weather, or how someone might sit or walk down the street. I actually looked up the weather at the time. But there are little details like brushing your hand through your hair or sitting in a chair. So, all that is part of literary nonfiction.And I wanted to write it like I was telling a story.
When I started the book, I got 5,000 pages of the trial transcripts from the courts. When I was reading that, it felt like I was there in the courtroom. When the people testified, they were very candid. And they tell what they did. And the fact that the two men had already confessed to the crime. I had Newspaper articles from four newspapers, my father’s files and all that testimony. I had the grand jury testimony of all the witnesses. I just couldn’t put all that in the book. So, what I did was to create scenes. When you’re reading the interview of the landlady by the detective, those words are exactly said told the grand jury. When I read those transcripts, I felt like I was really there. It all turned black and white in my mind. I felt that I was there in that public gallery when everyone was gasping at the outrageous testimony of the killers. So, I wanted readers to be able to experience it that way. There’s much more of an intimacy when you’re writing in the literary nonfiction style than a journalistic style. So that’s how I wrote it.
There aren’t any things about the case in the book that aren’t true. I can tell you where every fact came from, either the trial transcripts, or multiple newspapers interviews or my father’s files. I also was able to read the unpublished memoir of the DA who prosecuted the case. I got a lot of insight into his thinking and could be in his head in the court scenes.
TWD: Tell me more about that.
I was staying with this couple in Ojai, and she was getting married about halfway through writing the book. And she said one of her high school friends, Bob, was coming to the wedding and he had a lot of information about the Duncan case. He’s the one that found the transcripts that were said to be lost. That story is in the back of the book. So, when I met him, we talked about the case. I told him about my book. And he said he would send me the trial transcripts. I was missing of the original transcript, like Frank Duncan’s testimony, which was pretty important. And he said he had something else I might be interested in. He said, “I have Roy Gustafson’s (the prosecutor in the case) unpublished memoir.” Bob had worked in the same law firm that Roy worked in after he left the District Attorney’s office. Roy had already passed away when Bob started working there. So, in the early 2000s, the law firm was going out of business, and Bob was in the law library cleaning it out and up on the top shelf he discovered the lost transcripts of the Duncan case, and this unpublished memoir. The D.A.’s office wouldn’t have even had the transcripts at the time I came looking for them. So, Bob gave the transcripts back to the city, but he held onto to the memoir. And Roy didn’t have any children. So, he just left it there in the law firm.
I got the story from one of the lawyers that was still there at the time, and he said that Roy brought the transcripts over to the law office because he wanted to write the memoir. After he wrote it, he contacted one publisher and the publisher said no. It wasn’t written very well; it was more of a matter-of-fact style. But what I did get out of it when I read it were his thoughts on the proceedings, when he was prosecuting the case. His worries and concerns. So, when he thinks he’s ruined his own case, and what happened in that little room — I read all that in his memoir. So, I had all that information.
Elizabeth Duncan and her son, Frank
TWD: Everything just fell into place for you.
DHL: Yes, it did. And there were other things he wrote in his memoir. He gave his opinion on some of the witnesses, and their backgrounds. There were a couple of witnesses who were very credible. And those were his opinions. So, I got opinions of good and bad witnesses and why.
TWD: How did you get your book published?
DHL: While I was writing the book, I was hearing that publishers didn’t like books with mixed genres, and this was a dual genre book of memoir and true crime. And that publishers don’t necessarily like older authors. They like authors that write multiple books or series because the audience grows. And I had no platform, especially for a memoir. But I thought that this was what I wanted to write and I just kept writing and did the best I could. And in the end, it didn’t really matter. They say if you write a good enough book, none of the other stuff will matter. That’s what I was hoping for.
I had been working on it for nine years. And my youngest son said, mom you’re going to have to stop writing this. And I think I had eleven or twelve drafts. I. wanted to get it right. And I thought I could tell a good book; I read and write so much. I read true crime and everything else. So, I thought I could do this, since I read those kinds of book and I would know when it was right.
My son told me about the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. This was in 2019. He suggested I take it up there, since it was a Santa Barbara and Ventura County case. At this conference they have something called Advanced Readings. For an extra $50, you can pay to have an agent there read ten pages of your book. And they’ll come back to you with some feedback. I signed up for three agents. And I had done this before the book was even ready to be published, just to get some feedback. You can do it with editors or agents. So, I did that. And all I was expecting was to get a little more direction. And the agent I met with, we sat down and chatted. And she said she wanted to read the whole manuscript, that she loved it. And she’s only seen ten pages. She was the first agent I pitched. And she’s the one who suggested that I work on and improve the pace of the book. So, after that, it still took a while. We needed to make a book proposal. And she started pitching it to publishers. And she is a good agent. I looked her up and she has represented a lot of great books. She even represented one that was nominated for the National Book Award a few years ago. I could tell she would always send me the email that the editors would send her. And she knew these people personally. The first couple of rejections said that they didn’t know how to market the book. It’s true crime and it’s memoir. We don’t know how to market that type of book. So, we just kept going. It took about eight months. And towards the end — she was pitching this to good traditional publishers that I recognized — I told her to perhaps go with a lesser-known publisher. I don’t need a big advance and she said, oh no, you’re going to get an advance. We’re almost there. And sure enough, Pegasus Books offered me a contract a few weeks after we had that discussion. It didn’t take that long once I signed the publishing agreement. It only took about a year for the book to come out. It had already been well edited. They didn’t ask me to change hardly anything. The title, they chose that. My title was The Remarkable Duncan Case. That’s what my dad used to call it. That was my working title. I did have A Lovely Girl as one of my choices. But they added the subtitle. Everything went smoothly after that. The other thing that my agent said, is that publishers expect their authors to publicize the book. And they did have a publicist that they assigned me. But they still wanted me to do a lot of things to help promote the book. So my agent told them that I was a very experienced public speaker. And I thought, well, sure, at my school where I taught, and did training for teachers. I had been a school principal for a while. And then the book came out. And Pegasus Books was great. They set up a lot of speaking events for me at the beginning.
I’m going to be on a panel at the San Diego Book Festival. And I’ve done other book festivals in California.
TWD: Has there been any talk of turning this book into a movie or series?
DHL: I’ve already sold an option. My agent sold an option just before the Writers’ strike happened. And it’s a good company. They have a developmental production company. So, they want to develop it as a limited series on a streaming platform. They have something they did for Netflix. I’ve been told there are a lot of film options for authors and their books out there, but very few of them make it into production.
TWD: There are writers who make a living optioning the film rights to their books but are never made into anything.
DHL: It’s a two-year option. So, we’ll see what happens.
TWD: What are you working on now?
DHL: Not too much. I get overwhelmed by all the things that have happened since the book came out. It’s a lot of work. I would like to write some short stories. And I would also like to write a book for a younger audience, a mystery of some kind. I have a lot of experience with children, being a teacher. I have a good ear for children’s voices. So, I would like to write a young adult mystery of some kind. Based on my experiences as a child, children are interested in those kinds of things. Not necessarily the graphic, gruesome details, but they’re interested in learning about a lot of things. I’m not sure if they involve murder though. Maybe they have to be rescued.
TWD: You could be a character as a child. You can’t really go into the minds of your two main characters, the mother and son, but how do you read them. What is your take on their lives?
DHL: I tried to read them from their testimony. I think Elizabeth Duncan was probably what they call a malignant narcissist. One thing that I didn’t get into the book was when she plotted a jail escape, when she was in the county jail. It was so preposterous. I don’t think the woman ever thought one step ahead. She was in the moment, and she came up with all these plots, told lies, and moved on. I’m not even sure she even thought about what would happen to Olga, Frank’s wife. She just wanted to get rid of her, and she hired those guys to do it. I don’t think she ever thought it through. I think Frank Duncan was just trying to save his mother from the gas chamber. I think he knew, at some point, that she was guilty. A lot of people thought that he was in on the plot. But I don’t believe that was the case at all. It would have never been solved if he hadn’t dragged his mother down to the Santa Barbara Police Station to report this phony extortion case she’d made up to cover-up why she needed money to pay off the killers. Frank said something at the end, when he was testifying during the penalty phase of the trial. He said, when asked about his mother and about marrying all these different men, he said, “You know some people like to think about or dwell on their problems, but that’s not me.” He just didn’t want to think about it. What’s in the past is in the past.
The D.A., Roy Gustafson, talks about Frank Duncan in his memoir. He hated Frank Duncan. He despised him.
I remember I tried to get in touch with her son, Frank Duncan, and he hung up on me. He still had a law office in Los Angeles. He answered the phone. As soon as I started talking, he hung up. Bob, the man who found the trial transcripts, said he had seen Frank Duncan appear in his court room. He was representing an old client and was still practicing law. He said he was very cordial and polite, almost like a southern gentleman. He was in 80s at the time and seemed very sharp and knew the law. He was still practicing well into his 80s. His wife had passed away. I believe later that he lived in an assisted living facility. He had one child, a daughter. I think she still lives in Ventura County. But I decided not to contact her. I didn’t think it would be reliable information.
TWD: I found some old newspaper articles where they printed large sections of the transcripts from the trial right on the front page.
DHL: It was unusual that they would print the grand jury transcripts in the newspaper. Mrs. Duncan’s attorney complained about that. It was some like series from a true crime mystery. He felt it would poison the jury pool because everyone had read that.
There was a Lifetime movie made about the case several years ago. But they changed everyone’s name so they wouldn’t get sued by Frank Duncan.
You know how in the book I describe what everyone was wearing. I didn’t make that up. There was a Los Angeles newspaper, The Herald Examiner, they described everything about the witnesses—their clothes, their movements, and their emotions. It was all in the newspaper reports. They even covered—there was a lot of drama going on during the recesses at the court, and before the trial started. Mrs. Duncan would call people names during the recesses. It was all in the newspaper.
TWD: Some of the buildings—the school and churches—you visited as a child are still there in Ventura.
DHL: Yes, the elementary school I went to is still there, and some of the churches I went to with my friends. Judy and I liked to go to the vacation Bible schools.
TWD: Ventura has the oldest pier in the state of California, built in 1872. It’s being repaired now from recent storm damage. But it’s supposed to reopen this summer.
DHL: My parents have a bench on the pier. It’s just before the gates. So, whenever I go to Ventura, I like to sit on their bench. They liked to walk on the beach there. The newspaper offices where my dad worked are gone now. It must’ve been nice to work downtown. Ventura was such a small area at the time. Everything was walkable from his office. It was just a little town by the ocean.
TWD: Your dad was quite a character. He expressed himself freely.
DHL: Yes, he was very original. I don’t know where all that came from.
TWD: How did you end up in San Diego?
DHL: I went to graduate school there. That’s how I ended up living down there now.
TWD: From one beach community to another. I love all the history you put into the book about the city of Ventura.
DHL: I’ve been told that my book is a true crime book for readers who don’t usually read true crime books.
TWD: That’s true, because I usually don’t. Does anyone call you Deborah?
DHL: No, everyone calls me Debby. I just hope I live long enough to see the book made into a series. I get to be a Consultant Producer. Since this book is about me and my family, I was worried about how we would be portrayed. So, I told the producers that I would like to know their thoughts about my family. My agent thought Annette Bening would be good as Elizabeth Duncan. But we’ll see. No one ever wrote a definitive book about this notorious crime, until I wrote mine.
TWD: Thank you very much. It was great to meet you and talk about your amazing book.
There’s very little writing advice I’m willing to take as unarguable. Almost as long as I’ve been able to read, I’ve been trying to write, and as long as I’ve been trying to write, I’ve been trying to crack the code on what it means to be a writer. As it turns out, wanting to be a writer comes with an onslaught of suggestions and guidelines that are offered as helpful but more often seem to confuse and conflate the simple desire I started off with— I just want to write good stories. I struggle with common suggestions like “write what we know,”— if we all wrote what we knew, sci-fi would cease to exist as we know it. “Show don’t tell” is often useful, yet sometimes I find myself reading a book that is so overly descriptive, I want to throw it at a wall. “Write every day” is advice I should probably take to heart, yet I go days without opening a notebook or Word document, exchanging that writing time for binge watching reality TV. The only advice that I have always felt is most important, is that to write well, you have to read lots.
When 2020 came around and the world started to shut down, I was caught between an endless cycle of frequent doom-scrolling and scouring scholarly articles as I prepared myself to graduate university. In the midst of endless literary essays and widespread bleakness, I found myself in a predicament that I hadn’t expected given the state of the world— there was nothing I wanted to read anymore.
Finding myself in a situation where none of the books I had access to were appealing made the feeling of being locked down just that much more unnerving. I couldn’t stomach the dystopian novels I had grown to love in a post-Hunger Games world when I could barely handle the dystopia my own world seemed to be turning into. Gothic fiction had gone from something I was forced to read in an English class, to a favourite genre, to something I didn’t even bother to open. Books had gone from a comfort to another way to experience death, where characters’ lives were dependent on their circumstances, and the circumstances of the books I had loved previously all led the characters down dark paths I could no longer stomach. But still, I wanted to find ways to write and in order to do that I needed to find ways to read, or else I feared I would fade away into nothing more than a shell of the writer I one day hoped to become. At this overly dramatic point, romance books entered the scene.
My understanding of “romance” novels at the time involved front covers featuring men wearing ripped open billowing white blouses while swooning women in tight corsets draped themselves over them. I assumed there was always a pirate ship or grand manor involved and the only name I associated with the genre was “Fabio.” My idea of the romance genre was limited to the kind of romance books you saw at doctors’ offices or on spinning book racks at airports, ready to be picked up by bored travelers who needed something to pass the time. I’d eagerly signed up for a Jane Austen class during my undergrad, yet I would walk past the adult romance section in bookstores as if it didn’t exist. I had, at some point, allowed pre-conceived ideas of what romance novels were overshadow what the genre could bring me. It was as if I, an adult woman, could not read stories about adult women, lest I be caught admitting to wanting to read stories where women were safe and cared for, and loved most reverently by their significant other.
I bought my first romance book during those first long few weeks of the pandemic, when the news was overwhelmed by tragedy and unhappiness. The book was called The Unhoneymooners, written by author Christina Lauren, the combined name of writing duo Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings. The bright yellow front cover promised me “heartfelt and funny,” two things I desperately wanted more of during a global pandemic. The book arrived late one afternoon, and just a few hours later, I had completely devoured it. Not once did I stop to refresh the online counter that showed how many people had passed from Covid already or open the app formerly known as Twitter to see the vitriol that was being spewed between people who had differing opinions on how protocol around the pandemic should go. The book was a reprieve from all things tragic and by the end of the day, I’d ordered 4 more.
Drastically different from the preconceived ideas I’d had of what constituted a romance novel, the book didn’t advertise any distressed damsel who needed an overly muscular man to swoop in and save the day by offering to marry her. Instead, The Unhoneymooners told the story of the realistic frustration of a woman named Olive who had been let go from her job in the biomedical sciences. She struggled with the fact her twin sister was seemingly more successful, and hated a man who had a habit of making her feel bad about her weight. She was sometimes funny and sometimes sad, and always close to a realistic idea of what a woman was when I thought of the women in my own life. The book concluded with the expected Happily Ever After, but by the time the story was coming to a close, it felt only right that Olive had figured out her dream career and met her perfect match. The plot had been full of common tropes and what may be considered cliché but instead of feeling trite or repetitive, it was comforting and left me feeling hopeful. I may not have been able to go outside, but I could cheer on this other girl as her life moved forward.
As a genre commonly targeted specifically towards women, romance novels are often belittled, considered lacking in substance, or focusing too much on topics deemed “not literary enough” for the consumption of the general public. Yet romance novels currently make up the biggest category of fiction sold in stores as well as the highest earning genre, coming in at approximately $1.5 billion dollars’ worth of sales in 2022[1]. The number of romance novels sold per year has seen a steady incline since 2020, with sales almost doubling between 2020 and 2021. It seems, just as I had, many others had turned towards a genre that promised Happily Ever Afters when the real world seemed to be offering anything but.
Freelance journalist and YA romance writer Jennifer Chen had a similar experience. A popular romance book had been gifted to her from a friend, she wrote[2], but had sat on her shelf collecting dust until a few days into her lockdown experience. In the book she found the sense of comfort she was lacking in her own pandemic-affected life. She found that there “was safety in the routine of knowing that every story I read ended happily; I didn’t have to wonder if the people I read about were hurting.” This was a sentiment I found echoed many of my own reasons for finding comfort in books like this. During a time when it felt dangerous to go to even the grocery store, surrounding myself in stories where the main character’s suffering was only ever temporary was the perfect antidote, even if it only lasted between the covers of a book.
Chen cites a second reason for feeling connected to romance books, as these books provide characters in which she was able to find her own emotions and struggles validated. Self, the website Chen writes under, recommends an article titled “19 Books That Have Helped People Through Some Seriously Tough Times[3]” as the follow-up to Chen’s article. Instead of a slew of self-help books, the article instead recommends everything from YA series Percy Jackson to fantasy classic The Lord of the Rings. The key similarity between the books listed in that article and the ones Chen lists in her article is that all provide an escape for their readers. Chen cites specific memories alongside the romance books she mentions— one is the book that got her through her dog’s cancer diagnosis, the other got her through acting as caretaker for her family during hard times.
While the pandemic familiarized me with new phrases such as “endemic,” romance novels gave me new phrases like “fake dating” and “forced proximity.” These new terms were used to label romance novels to tell the readers what they could expect to find happening between the two protagonists. Instead of leaning away from “clichés,” a word I had been told to stay away from as a writer, the romance authors I was reading were leaning right into them. To be labeled under a certain cliché, or trope, was like waving a bright flag at romance readers. You want a story of forbidden love? Julieta and the Romeos by Maria E. Andreu was there waiting to tell you a modern-day Romeo and Juliet tale. Ali Hazelwood, author of The Love Hypothesis and holder of a PhD in neuroscience, became known as the master of one of my favourite categories, “enemies to lovers.” The best example of this trope? Literary classic Pride and Prejudice.
Written in 1813 by British icon Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice exists somewhere in the overlap between genre fiction and literary fiction. Years before phrases like “enemies to lovers” would have existed, Austen wrote a story that encapsulates so much of what people seem to love about the modern romance. Austen created the perfect female protagonist in Elizabeth Bennet. She’s tough but lovable, unwilling to settle down with someone she doesn’t love, nor with someone who is rude to her the way that Mr. Darcy, the wealthy handsome new neighbor, is. Elizabeth rejects a perfectly fine proposal from the dopey Mr. Collins in wait of something better. She makes the radical point that a woman might be more content to be alone than end up with someone who sees her first and foremost as a future mother, caregiver, and housewife. While Mr. Darcy blows his first chances with her, his grumpy demeanor provides the perfect setting for their “enemies to lovers” arc. Mr. Darcy’s icy behavior melts away to allow him to become the perfect match for Elizabeth; it is, without a doubt, a happily ever after.
Originally titled First Impressions, the reputation of Pride and Prejudice as a romance novel offersitself as an excellent example of the gap between literary romance and genre romance, as well as the stereotypes surrounding both. While Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy walk the fine line between love and hate, Pride and Prejudice walks the fine line between “acceptable” romance novels and genre romance novels that have their literary worth called into question. Yet both fall into the same category of being written by women for women. First Impressions may not have stuck as the title for the novel, but I’ve always liked it for the book and for the way I seemed to interact with romance novels before I gave them a proper chance. The first impressions of romance novels seemed to be one that puts these stories down, that shamed the idea of a Happily Ever After.
My copy of Pride and Prejudice is shelved right above my copy of a book called Icebreaker, originally released in 2022 on Amazon by debut author Hannah Grace. Icebreaker is a college romcom that became so popular through Amazon’s self-publishing platform that it was picked up by a traditional publisher and rereleased in bookstores almost a year after its original release. The story follows college hockey player Nathan and college ice dancing star Anastasia. Similar to Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, Nathan and Anastasia fight back and forth through the book between love and hate. Similar to Jane Austen when she originally published Pride and Prejudice, Icebreaker author Hannah Grace was never expected her book to reach a such wide audience. It was one of the 1.4 million books that are self-published through Amazon’s Kindle platform every year[4]. With numbers like that, how could any self-publishing author expect to find themselves selling mass numbers of their book, let alone ending up with a book deal? Yet this enemies to lovers romance book has now ended up selling over one hundred thousand copies in the UKalone. Even in the vast world of self-publishing, romance novels hold the crown as the most successful genre. Everyone, it seems, is attracted to a happy ending.
Four years later and a multitude of romance novels lining my shelves, I proudly consider myself a lover of romantic fiction. Romance novels were what swept in to save the day when love and joy had seemed to take a backseat to tragedy and loss. The brightly coloured spines stand out against the stark white and neutral browns that are more likely to make up the covers of the literary fiction books I’ve stacked with them. While I don’t see either genre as better or more valuable than the other, the days of jumping to defend why I’ve taken up reading romance novels is gone. In the early days of my newfound love, when I explained the plot of a romance book I willingly stayed up all night to finish, I found myself needing to prove why it was worth my time or energy. I would claim it was nice to take a break from the heavy classics I was reading for school, that these books were quicker and easier to read, like candy for my brain. While some of these things were true— I finished romance novel Beach Read much quicker than I finished Paradise Lost— the most consistent truth of my new reading habits was that I simply enjoyed reading these books.
Beach Read, written by author Emily Henry, uses its own main character to address the questions of why romance novels are so quick to be written off as simple or unliterary. Main character January Andrews is a romance writer experiencing serious writer’s block for the first time in her career. She’s broke, forced to live in the house her now deceased father bought with his mistress, and finds herself living next to a literary fiction writer who gives off the impression that he doesn’t understand why she would write romance. January, frustrated by the difference in treatment she experiences compared to that of her neighbor, speaks to the validity of her own genre, stating that “if you swapped out all of [her] Jessicas for Johns, do you know what you’d get? Fiction. Just fiction. Ready and willing to be read by anyone, but somehow by being a woman who writes about women, I’ve eliminated half the Earth’s population from my potential readers.” Beach Read itself is shelved as romance but contains a story that reflects on memories of families of former cult members and discusses the grief of losing a parent who let you down, yet is still looked down upon for existing within a genre that is given less merit for every bubble- gum pink book cover it releases.
In the midst of all her writer’s block, there’s a moment where January looks out her kitchen window to find that she can see her neighbour, a fellow writer, pacing in front of his open laptop. She’s able to see the frustration lining in his face and is reminded that once genre is put to the side, “when it came down to it [he] was still pacing in the dark, making shit up like the rest of us.” It’s a statement that gets me through my own writing and one that seems to fit my readings habits too. When it all comes down to it, I’m still sitting with a book, looking to feel a little better, just like everyone else.
BIO
Hannah Ackerman is a writer from Calgary, Alberta. She has a degree in English literature and will graduate with an MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan this upcoming fall. She is currently working on her first book, a gothic novel about art, grief, and ghosts.
Works Cited
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Penguin Classics. 1996.
Ben Fox created a website for people who love to read books. It’s called Shepherd. Its primary goal is to help readers discover new books. It also helps authors find new readers. It’s the perfect setting for book lovers across the globe. I interviewed Ben recently to understand how Shepherd works and where it is heading.
For people who don’t know, tell us what Shepherd.com is all about?
Shepherd helps readers discover books in fun ways. I wanted to create something that captured the magical feeling of wandering my local bookstore but reimagined for the online world.
I’ve worked with over 10,000 authors to share five of their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood and why they love each book. Then, we connect the books and book lists in unique ways so that readers can follow their curiosity until something sparks. It creates an enjoyable browsing experience where you get to meet books through the eyes of someone who loves that book.
How is it beneficial to readers and writers?
We give readers fun ways to meet books while helping them meet a wider array of books.
They might search for a book they love, like Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, and from that page, they can browse book recommendation lists that include his book or browse books like his book that humans picked. Or they can jump to topics and genres in his book.
Or they might go to our science fiction bookshelf and filter to see only the most recommended sci-fi books with AI. These are just a few fun ways we help readers find books. We have a lot more planned!
We also help authors. Authors face a massive battle to get their books in front of interested readers. We want to make that easier. We do that by helping them get their passion, expertise, and book in front of the most likely readers.
Our primary format to do that is we work with authors to share five books they love around a central topic, theme, or mood. That central topic, theme, or mood should attract an audience that will also be interested in the author’s book. Then, we feature the author and their book at the top of the list.
Or, check out this list on the life and times of Theodore Roosevelt by author Clay Risen. Clay wrote the book The Crowded Hour and is an expert on Teddy Roosevelt. It is an excellent way for him to share other books he loves while getting in front of the best readers for his book.
I tell authors I am not Oprah. But we do provide slow and steady exposure from the most likely readers to be interested in your book. And we do that month after month and year after year. We just added a second format for authors and I am working on more as we grow.
Talk about where Shepherd is now and what your goals are for the future.
Shepherd launched in April 2021, and we turn 3 years old this year. We are bootstrapped and we are funded through affiliate revenue, display ads, and our Founding Member program. We are currently meeting about 50% of our costs and by the end of 2024 I will get that to 80%.
As you browse Shepherd, remember that we only have one part-time developer compared to Goodreads, who has 300+ people listed on LinkedIn and has done nothing new for readers or authors since Amazon bought it.
My tactical goal is to make enough money so that we can hire one full-time developer. That would allow us to continue building new features for readers and authors.
Strategically, I want to create a book discovery platform that helps readers find excellent books and widens the range of authors they bump into. The book market has shifted into a winner-takes-all market, and we need to work harder to flatten that trend. I want to help more up-and-coming authors get the exposure they deserve.
How do you attract authors to your site?
We get a lot of referrals from authors who have already taken part. And we email authors who we love or who readers ask us to reach out to.
I also work hard to improve specific categories. So, if I notice that we don’t have any recommendations around “Armenia,” I might find some authors who write about different aspects of that country and reach out to them to see if they want to recommend some books.
How do you attract readers to your site?
We had over 5 million visitors in 2023, and I am working hard to increase that number.
We attract readers through search engines, website mentions, and social media. If authors are curious, I have a big breakdown on our marketing plan here. We are working toward email as a channel now.
Who are some of your favorite authors today?
So many! I shared my favorite 3 reads of 2023 as part of the big event we launched last year, and that is probably a good place to start.
Christian Cameron is one of my favorite authors! I loved his book Killer of Men, and it hit me at a perfect time in my 30s when I needed a bit of a life reboot. His Tom Swan book series was my top read in 2023, and it was extra magical as I read it while biking through Italy on a pilgrimage route (the main character is a 15th-century Indiana Jones wandering the Mediterranean during a very interesting historical period).
Who else? Brian Klingborg for his debut crime series about a small-town Chinese police officer. And I also love Peter F. Hamilton, Michael Connelly, Richard Osman, David Baldacci, Andy Weir, John Connoly, and many more.
What were some of your favorite books growing up?
I remember the specific moment when I started reading. I was learning to read and going word by word through The Snow Baby by Margaret Hillert. There was this magical moment when the words came alive and everything just clicked. I could read.
I loved the Hardy Boys, Boxcar children, My Side Of The Mountain, King Arthur, and Greek myth when I was little. My dream is to one day buy an old box car to fix up if I ever have the space.
As I got older some of the most powerful books that shaped my youth were Native Son, The Jungle, the Dragonlance universe, Harry Potter, Wheel of Time, Breaking Open The Head, From The Holy Mountain, Down and Out in Paris and London, Snow Crash, Catch 22, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, the the Dirk Pitt series.
I am playing with a feature that lets readers share their “Book DNA” so I’ve been thinking a lot about the books that redirected my life or shaped large aspects of my worldview.
Talk about your background, family, education. Where did you grow up?
I was born in Texas but my family moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas when I was pretty little. I had a fantastic childhood full of friends, tree forts, hole digging, and wild independence. There were some tough spots as well but I managed to get through them with only small dings due to the support of my family. Plus, my family got a lot bigger as my parents divorced and remarried. So I get twice as much as love and support!
I went to school at the University of Arkansas. I ended up with a BA in history, political science, and international relations. Plus minors in anthropology and religoius studies. I probably enjoyed taking the interesting classes with amazing professors a bit too much. Luckily it wasn’t an expensive “mistake” back then.
Where are you living now? What is the book community like there?
I live in Northern Portugal along with my wife and 7-year-old son. I am pretty introverted and with my focus being almost 100% on building Shepherd and my family I haven’t built a community. My book community is mostly just a few friends who love sci-fi and trade book recommendations via Whatsapp (plus all the amazing authors at Shepherd who consistently destroy my book budget).
How many books do you read in a year?
I read over 100 books a year, my highest was 193. I’ve been able to read really fast ever since I was a kid.
Can bookstores participate in Shepherd?
They can! I haven’t emailed any, but if they wanted to take part I can adapt the format to feature their bookstore. I’ve done similar with a few non-profits, companies, podcasters, Youtubers, and others to create really fun unique lists.
Are you interested in writing yourself – fiction, poetry, nonfiction?
I’d love to write a book one day and I jot down ideas I get from time to time. I’d want to do a middle-grade chapter book that is a bit weird, heavy on adventure, and has a lot of laughs.
Were you parents, or anyone in your family, readers and/or writers?
My parents were both huge readers and I grew up with walls of books in our house. My mom would read us books every night. My dad made a lot of great book recommendations as I grew up that heavily influenced my reading.
My brother is an amazing writer and writes movie/tv scripts right now. He is working on a nonfiction book and I am looking forward to seeing that published.
Is there a way for readers to comment or interact with authors on the site?
No, to keep our costs low we don’t even have any type of user-account setup. It is something I am starting to look at and see what the first steps in that direction might be.
How many books are on the site now? How many authors?
We have 40,000 recommended books on the website. And so far 10,000 authors have taken part.
Is advertising space available on your site?
We just added a book launch program as a perk for our Founding Members. It allows them to advertise one of their books for 60 days on the website to the most likely readers for it.
It is one of our ways we give thanks to our financial supporters. 100% of what we raise from Founding Members goes directly to new features (and improving existing ones).
What books are you looking forward to reading this year?
Treason of Sparta by Christian Cameron. It is the 7th book in the Long War series which I love! The series is historical adventure and set in Ancient Greece.
Do you collect books? If so, what are some of your most prized acquisitions?
I don’t although I have a fascination with James Bruce of Kinnaird and have a very old set of his books on “Travels to discover the source of the Nile.” He was a really interesting character and when I got my first job I saved up enough to buy the set. And I have ended up with several old maps he made.
How do comic books and graphic novels, or small independent writers and publishers, fit in with Shepherd?
We welcome all authors to take part. I think authors make great readers and I think our recommendations shows that. We have sections for comic books and graphic novels.
We do work with a few small and large publishers. They send their authors to us if they are interested in taking part in Shepherd. I have talked to a number of small and large publishers about ideas on how we could help them in other ways. But most are not comfortable in the digital world and seem stuck with the old models.
What’s the best advice you can give to new writers?
Decide if you are writing because you want to get your story into the world or if you want to be a professional author. That might not sound different, but there is a world of nuance in those two approaches. Both are equally fantastic approaches.
OF ALL THE TIME that we spent in Alabama, very little was actually spent in Huntsville. It’s easy to forget this, considering the trip is almost exclusively called Huntsville among my family, when we think of the weekend that we spent just outside Decatur.
We drove all through the day, and arrived at a little hotel just after dark. Then began the show of unpacking the car, and repacking the bellman’s cart with our luggage, which we lugged into the elevator. The woman at the front desk was cordial and toothless, and she gave my father our keys without hassle. We thanked her quietly and shuffled up to our room, which was situated one floor up, and bordered on both sides by a dim stairwell, and the steadily chuffing elevator.
The room was not a thing of beauty or convenience; the curtains were shredded from the middle, as though someone had extended an arm straight outward and raked the strips to the floor, and the doors were beset with scratches at their bottom lips. I was to take the fold-out bed, which sprang from the graying blue couch along the room’s furthest-right wall, and my parents were to divide the two beds in the room’s set-away bedroom between themselves, their luggage, and the dog. That night, as I tucked into my fold-out bed, I discovered that the door to the bedroom would not close if the fold-out bed was extended. Keeping silent, I rolled over and offset their unending television with a pillow to the ear.
*
On the first day of our trip, my mother and I went to see the Space & Rocket Center, while my father left our room in Decatur for a Doubletree hotel in Huntsville proper, where he was to play in a dart tournament. This arrangement came as a result of the Huntsville hotel’s No-Dogs policy. Rather than leave our dog at home, we opted for the hotel in Decatur, although I could not yet decide, on that morning, whether the dog would really think our choice was worth it, as she was alone in the room for most of the day.
We took turns planting kisses on her black, clefted head, and took her outside the hotel, to the fields of dead winter-grass bordered by parking lots. I slipped off her lead and gave her a signal which meant, without question, go!, at the sight of which she took off in massive circles around the fields, kicking up fistfuls of strawlike grass and little hunks of dry Earth as she ran.
On that morning, the sky was radiantly blue, and the Tennessee river was full-up nearly to the shore. With the dog packed away in the hotel, and my father gone over to Huntsville for the day, my mother and I were driving out in search of rockets.
Just before we left for Alabama, I’d promised a friend, an English boy called Jack, who loved military history certainly more than I did, to get pictures of all the great rockets, tanks and aircraft for him. Our friendship had always been a strange one; lacking greatly in any real sense of certainty or stability, and so I was more than willing to impress — I could stand good graces.
*
The second-youngest president elected, John F. Kennedy, sometimes called Jack, was a Massachusetts Democrat. Compared to his predecessors, he was a handsome man, with a full head of hair and a presidential smile.
The other day, I stumbled across a picture of him on the campaign trail, standing outside a house in West Virginia and talking with who I take to be a young father and his daughters. Kennedy’s standing on the ground, jacketless, and looking up at the family, who stand relaxed on their patio. The father seems to have his hands in his pockets. The row of identical, small houses seems to stretch on forever, and the sky seems artificially gloomy and dark from the film decay.
Today, I found another picture. It was almost definitely taken minutes later; Kennedy is shaking hands with an older man, likely the first man’s father. The children, now joined by a boy, appear unphased. There’s something strange, looking at the pictures. Knowing that Kennedy won the presidency — and West Virginia itself, by a landslide — part of me wanted to exalt, to take a little joy in seeing such a tidy prelude. But there is another, far more sinister, part of me that cannot so easily examine the picture. I looked at the father, standing in his doorway, face caught by the shadow of the door, white tee-shirt dirty, presumably with coal, and I couldn’t be rid of the face of Lee Harvey Oswald; his dark hair, white shirt, unrepentant stare. I drew a sharp breath and closed the tab.
*
The Space & Rocket Center was ill-maintained, but, in its disrepair, it was charming. I took my mother’s picture under the Space Camp sign, and we made a quick entrance to the center itself; there were no lines. We made our way through the first dim rooms; a small minefield of shuttles, Mars-rock recreations, and displays joyfully announcing the advent of 3D-printed walls, inviting us to admire the black, wavy wall they’d fashioned from concentric plastic rings, after which, we filed into the high-ceilinged halls at the edge of the center.
The hall I remember best was a long one, fitted on all sides with large windows, and sectioned into the shape of a horseshoe by the rocket which lay lengthwise down the middle of the floor. Each wall was covered to eye-level with infographics, booths and children’s activity stations, and we wandered slowly down our aisle, taking in the place. In folding chairs, scattered throughout the hall at wide intervals, was a small gallery of white-haired, gray-suited men clutching clipboards, and fitted with lanyard IDs. I thought for a moment that they must be scientists, but we didn’t stop for long enough to ask. Secretly, I hoped that they weren’t bookending a life of scientific service providing simplified explanations of space travel to the slow procession of mothers and children passing them.
Eventually, when we’d followed the horseshoe back to the mouth of the hall, we took a turn down a cement staircase out to the Rocket Garden. Hearing the name, a small, near-imperceptible part of me had been expecting rows of flowerbeds, giving way to the noses of rockets, poking through the mulch and dirt as though they’d grown miraculously and immaculately from the Earth. Of course, the Rocket Garden was not a garden by any literal means, but a series of cement pathways and platforms, home to hundreds of retired government vehicles, laid bare and docile as animals in a petting-zoo. I cooed their names and peered inside them; leaned forward for better pictures — Little John, Cheyenne.
The rocket I remember best was a truly massive thing; I stood beside it, dwarfed, and looked up at a piece of long pneumatic piping, branded in tall red letters, UNITED STATES, in a hand that was unmistakably human. My mother called to me, for what must’ve been the second time, “Look over here!” I looked back and smiled. She snapped the picture on her phone, and, having had our fill, we left for Decatur.
*
When I think of the American presidents, perhaps more often than I ought to, there is always a defining event of each presidency; something that I can point to and say, “that’s what he did.” — Lincoln won the Civil War, Washington pioneered the position, Taft did/didn’t get stuck in his bathtub, and Kennedy put a man on the moon (So I’ve been told.)
I suppose I always did know that Kennedy himself couldn’t have been around for Apollo 11. Growing up, I was told, above all else about him, that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963. Still, his legacy of spaceflight was almost inescapable.
I spent a week in Florida very recently, almost a year after seeing Huntsville. My parents and I came to stay with my Aunt and Uncle in Sebastian, which is a town so flat that it seems to stretch forever. We spent a day at the Kennedy Space Center, dusted by spitting rain; grumpy and displeased. It seemed to me a sort of amusement park — Each building was a similar series of rooms; we’d wait in a line to get inside, before being led through a series of rooms, all of which played similar videos, covering Kennedy, the Apollo missions, and the invention, testing and success of rockets. Then, we were released into the galleries, — the part I liked best — where displays of all varieties peered back at us through glass cases. I took my mother’s picture next to portraits of Mark and Scott Kelly, and my father pointed out the patches of missing thermal tiles on the displayed rockets.
When I left the Kennedy Space Center, I was struck by a strange thought. Regardless of my longstanding fascination with John F. Kennedy and the minutiae of spaceflight, I had preferred the Huntsville Space & Rocket Center greatly. I wasn’t sure why.
*
The next day, my mother and I went back to Huntsville for the dart tournament. The tournament crowd was one I had been familiar with for most of a decade; a loose and extended network of kindly men and women with a habit of clapping me on the back and saying, “Your daddy’s on a real winning streak over there!”, or “You know, I’ve still got one of your stories in my office.”
Finding a place to sit was easy; my father was loosed on a winning streak, and the trading of seats was unquestionably in favor of his family. I made myself content with a can of coke and a bag of plain Lays — a preference my father has always mocked — and watched.
My mother and I had come to the Doubletree from a long hike on the edge of Huntsville. We had taken the dog, who, itching for adventure beyond our hotel room, had jumped eagerly into the hills. I had, ignorantly, expected that the hike would be flat and easy. Rather, it began to rain bitterly halfway through, and after a certain point, my mother suggested we cut across the remaining loop back to the parking lot. This measure only worsened things, as we climbed successive rows of wet rockface, stepping tenuously side-to-side in search of a clear footpath up, back to the parking lot. We arrived back to the car damp and unsteady on our feet, and so we climbed back into the car and sat in the lot, sipping from clinking metal water-bottles, and waiting for the dog to dry enough to return to the Decatur room, where we dropped her off on the way back to the Doubletree. It was strange, huffing back; we were seasoned hikers, competent and prepared for the hike we’d expected. And yet, somehow, we’d been bested. I didn’t want to think about it.
My hair was still drying as we watched my father in the Doubletree ballroom; he was jolly and light on his feet, and his winning streak did not let up. The evening was drawing to a close, and pointing towards a final match. Most were finishing up their games, and the room’s crowd was thinning at a steady pace. Those who stayed were largely in the same position as my mother and I; watching their friends, family members, spouses, who had not yet been eliminated.
My father was to finish the evening with the tournament’s penultimate event; a match against a friend. Then again, there are very few matches in a regional dart tournament that are not played between friends. The atmosphere was at once tense and slack; those of us still watching had grown hungry and restless, and the sun had gone down outside. The room’s good spirits still remained, but in smaller pockets, and in hushed tones. The movement had slowed, and then stilled near-entirely; there were no more bellowed greetings between friends, or five-man news crews wheeling cameras around to cover the event. Breath was drawn taught and shallow. My father took his place at the board beside his evening’s final opponent. They each shot for the cork, and then began.
*
A dart moves through the air so quickly that it is near-invisible until it reaches a target. It shoots forward, embeds its needlelike tip in the felt of a board, and twangs back and forth upon impact, creaking. When I watched the tournament in Huntsville, I hadn’t seen a rocket launch in person yet, but if I had, I might’ve drawn a parallel. I might’ve thought about the sound that they both make. Almost a year after I saw Huntsville, I stood in my uncle’s backyard in Florida, and watched a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral hours after we left the Kennedy Space Center. I never believed what people told me about feeling a rocket; I was wrong.
It was a few days after Christmas, and the sky had just fallen to full-dark. It was almost cold. I was barefoot, staring up through a sparse canopy at the little patch of sky beside the moon. My uncle pointed out the first signs of the rocket to us, and my mother oohed quietly from beside me. My father looked up silently, and my little cousin tugged at my hand, calling out in chorus with her father. The rocket cut a clear path through the sky and came to rest just beside the moon, framed between two branches of an old, leafless tree at the edge of their yard. It hung there for a moment, before the sound began — my aunt and uncle chuckled quietly, the dogs perked up their heads and cocked them, and the rest of us were silent, smiling despite our slack jaws. The sound buzzed all around us, bordered in by the tall backyard fence, and catching inside my chest. The air was alive and thrumming; I squeezed my cousin’s hand.
For a few moments longer the rocket remained, as the sound dissipated to a quiet hum. It was a little burning circle in the sky, stripping off its boosters and piercing into the darkness. It burned for a few seconds more, and then was gone.
*
My father won the last game. Of the three legs, he won the last two without ever seeming to lose his edge. He was calm and methodical; an unrelenting force. After the second game, he fired the chalker — a younger man entering scores on the iPad hanging beside the boards — with a fatherly pat on the shoulder and a muttered “I’ve got it, you go on and sit down.” The chalker had mistakenly marked his second leg as a loss, and took a seat to my immediate right, grumbling indistinctly, smelling of marijuana. My father’s opponent, a round man with a neat crew-cut, seemed to accept his loss well, and shook my father’s hand with a jolly smile. The game had been won quickly and decisively, and the room’s mood was that of joy and relief. My father made his rounds saying goodbye and patting the backs of his friends, and then we all loaded back into the car, and returned to Decatur.
The next morning, my father played in a final tournament event, while my mother and I sat reading books in the Doubletree lounge with our traveling bags by our feet. The dog slept fitfully in the car, ventilated by the half-opened windows and cool weather, curled up in her traveling crate. My father got done playing in the midafternoon, and we were all glad to pack ourselves into the car once again. I spent most of the drive with my head stuck out the window, swallowed by the falling dark, and blown about happily by the wind wicking down the river. It was a joyful drive; quiet, yet underpinned by a sense of triumph. There was something very strange about riding along, late into the night, on a Sunday evening, but I didn’t mind it. I was happy to be windblown, and to watch the shadows stretch themselves out over the long, pale highway; I was very, very happy.
*
I asked my father, just the other day, about the presidents he grew up under — ten years too young to have seen the Kennedy administration, he told me, “Jimmy Carter was a good man. They say he was just a one-term president, but…” He trailed off and tossed a dart at his practice board, “… No president has done so much after his presidency.”
John F. Kennedy was president for just under three years. In fact, he came in only forty-nine days short of the mark. He served less than a term in office, which continues to surprise me, although I’ve known that since elementary school. He was followed by Lyndon B. Johnson, a man I know very little about, who was followed by Richard Nixon, a man that I know mainly for his scandals and misgivings. Until only days ago, I didn’t know that Nixon had been in office during the Apollo 11 mission. That, technically speaking, he’d put a man on the moon.
Like most people, Kennedy’s goals were not as straightforward as they are represented. By 1963, he was suggesting a joint American-Soviet space mission to the United Nations; the Soviets weren’t nearly as eager. It’s strange to imagine, Ivanov and Sixpack on the moon. To me, the Space Race was an opportunity for blind, exalting Us-vs-Them patriotism; Hell yeah, those are our guys, and they’re kicking the Russians’ asses. I’m from the same country as the men on the moon; they brought all of us up with them, when they brought our flag. It’s strange to think how easily it might have, instead, been a gesture of national unity; friendship, my usual politic.
I think I understand, now, why it is that the Kennedy Space Center seemed so strange to me. I suppose it might have been anyone’s, but it was Kennedy’s. A living mausoleum, a testimony to the great things which came only after his death; a Pharaoh buried in wait of his riches. O, King of America, accept our offerings. O, King, O King Almighty…
*
Jack didn’t care for the pictures nearly as much as I’d hoped. His good graces were delicate. They wore thin before the summer began in earnest. Sometimes, when I look back on the last of our the good times; Huntsville, Easter Sunday, and the rest of our fun, I can’t resist looking back in anger; my current frustrations make me forget the point of remembering. I was happy then; times were good; I had a friend. For a short time, all that mattered was the joy of having a friend, of my father winning the game, of my mother and I making it back to the car, of the dog running free, kicking up clods of dirt and dead winter grass, of the handsome young president, of his black-and-white campaign trail, of his rockets launching, of his man on the moon. I tell myself that I cannot define all that comes before disaster by suffering. I tell myself that to do so would undermine all that there is to be said about living.
For that drive, on the way home from Huntsville, I was surrounded by whipping wind and darkness and music and a churning, frothing river and endless endless endless road. I had a friend, and I had no reason to believe that anything might ever change. There was joy in the infinite; the moving statically; the going nowhere and going quickly. There were thousands of tiny triumphs seeded in the river and mountains and cold night air; I wanted for nothing, and took as much.
*
The ending irony of John F. Kennedy is not lost on me. When he died, the Space Race became not a living man’s passion, but a dead one’s; the moon, the world’s greatest memorial. I live now in an age in which people from 21 separate countries have visited the International Space Station, an age in which a colonized moon is not a possibility, but an inevitability. Rockets launch so frequently that my Aunt and Uncle have become accustomed to watching launches from their backyard, and retired rockets are placed in centers like the Huntsville Space & Rocket Center and the Kennedy Space Center for the public’s viewing pleasure; made docile; domesticated.
In this age, I sometimes wonder about a world in which John F. Kennedy was never assassinated; in which Lee Harvey Oswald stayed in the USSR, and Jack Ruby never went to prison, perhaps in which the first men to walk the moon’s surface were a Soviet-American pair, forced into camaraderie by their proximity and shared goal. Would the moon be any less American, were it shared? Would I still feel as though I’d been brought with, on the backs of the toiling few, and placed upon the moon alongside the American flag? I don’t know. I don’t know whether John F. Kennedy put a man on the moon, or Lyndon B. Johnson, or Richard Nixon. I don’t know whether, had Kennedy survived his presidency, the moon would’ve been nearly as important to the American public. I don’t know whether the Soviets would’ve ever agreed to a joint space flight. No one does. I do know one thing, though. I know that, when John F. Kennedy died, his American people loved him. They still do.
On July 20th, 1969, an anonymous American left a bouquet of flowers on Kennedy’s grave with an attached note, reading ‘Mr. President, The Eagle has landed.’
BIO
D.S. Liggett is a student of creative writing at the Fine Arts Center in Greenville, South Carolina, with a vested interest in expressing the joys, hardships and little intimacies of the world through the written word. He plans to continue having great fun reading, writing and seeking publication.
Sleep lab and staged readings are two dates I cannot control and they end up falling on the same night. The reading goes great—strong turnout, good actors, positive responses, plus some useful critiques. I’m pretty high on it all as I drive around this dark office park area looking for the sleep lab place. My GPS is confused, or I am, and I circle the block a couple times before finding the right building.
I still feel dramatic buzzing on a call box, as instructed, looking in the window of an empty office lobby in shadows, as if on some clandestine mission. A technician in scrubs appears and leads me through an unmarked door to the sleep lab, passing a heavy-set guy in a sleep gown covered in wires flowing down from his head and face over his substantial belly walking to the bathroom. He looks like a high-tech Lord of the Rings dwarf with hair and beard replaced by wires.
The creepy simulated bedroom is like a stage set with a king bed, bedside lamps, and a TV mounted on the wall opposite, and a camera in one corner of the ceiling trained on me, and I suddenly feel as if I’m staying in one of those Moscow hotels the Russians use to trap VIPs. Like the kind that likely rendered Donald Trump an asset of Russian intelligence. Except this camera is in plain view.
Horror is not my genre, but walking that fluorescent lit hallway to this ersatz bedroom in this office park at night with high tech dwarves going to pee seems like a pretty good setup.
Still, I have to do something. My sleep has become a listing vessel, constantly tilting me overboard into unwanted wakefulness. I toss and turn, not just in the second part of the night, but an hour after turning out the light. I roll left, I roll right, waking up to pee, not once but three times, sometimes four, and in the morning I hardly feel rested, much less ready to write.
Our most difficult times with Bernie’s breast cancer have come in the night when her emotional defenses are down. Egoless in receiving encouragement, she often slips right back into sleep, leaving me awake, my mind racing with arguments for her life.
And I grew up a bad sleeper, waking in the night as a kid and staring out at streetlights, smelling the cold, dusty glass. The night’s emptiness spoke to something missing in me, and left me scanning its depths for some kind of solace, until I was exhausted enough to give up the search and sleep. Bernie had cured me of that nocturnal searching, and remedies like melatonin, gava, and theanine had helped me receive sleep’s arrival with less resistance.
But now sleep struggle is back like a malicious companion showed up uninvited out of the past. The internet readily serves up convincing evidence of whatever illness you suspect is creeping up on you, and sure enough, I have all the symptoms of sleep apnea. I also discovered that bruxism, which is teeth grinding, can be caused by sleep apnea. Well, I’ve been grinding my teeth and sleeping with a night guard in my mouth for years.
Apparently, no one is sleeping because I had to schedule an appointment with a sleep doctor three months out. When I finally spoke with him he prescribed a sleep lab. I thought he could just give me some gear to plug in at home in my own bed, but he said it wouldn’t be definitive, so here I am two months after that appointment, which was the next available opening. They say sleep apnea is a serious medical condition but make me wait months to find out if I have it.
The tech in scrubs is friendly enough as he wires me up. Electrodes are stuck to my scalp in several places and attached to wires that drape down my chest and back. I’m shaggy with wires, and the play reading is still thrumming through me, and I’ve forgotten my book. I read before sleep, I always read before going to sleep.
I try watching TV instead, but it’s not the same, and the commercials feel more than usually moronic, so I just turn it off and try to sleep, but a bright band of light blazes in under the door from the horror film hallway, and I’m bound up in wires. There is nothing restful about sleep lab.
I don’t feel like I’ve slept at all when the tech walks in a few hours later with a CPAP machine—a motor about the size of a shoe box, with an air hose and nose attachment. Chipper earlier, we’re both grumpy now. I protest that I’ve hardly slept, and he chuckles dismissively, saying they got plenty of data on me. I complain about the wires and the light and that I don’t have my book to help me fall asleep, but the problem is, when the CPAP starts pumping air into me, I immediately relax and fall into a much more satisfying sleep; if the cure for the condition cures you, you probably have the condition.
Apnea literally means a pause in breathing. Sleep apnea increases risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, and all the bad things that come with not enough sleep, which is probably every ailment in existence. Good sleep may be the single best thing you can do for your health and longevity, and I’m not getting it.
Obstructive sleep apnea is the more common variety, which happens when the muscles in the throat relax too much, narrowing the airway until breathing is momentarily cut off; your brain wakes you up to start breathing again. Central sleep apnea, the other kind, happens when the brain fails to signal the body to breath. This can be caused by heart failure and stroke, neurological disorders and opioids and other drugs.
But I don’t do those drugs or have those conditions. I’m not overweight and I and don’t even drink much alcohol, so why the do I have sleep apnea?
I realize this is what Bernie must feel about breast cancer a thousand times over. Why the hell do I have this? There is no definitive answer for either of us, just our own speculations. In my case, I read sleep apnea can affect people with big necks, and my neck is sort of big.
I don’t want to sleep attached to a CPAP machine every night forever, but some of the alternatives sound much worse, like a tracheostomy, which is surgically creating a wider opening in the throat to allow for breathing. I learn my former dentist, now retired, makes oral appliances for sleep apnea. I imagine some elaborate metallic gadgetry, like the old orthodontic headgear, to hold my airways open—don’t ask me how—but it sounds better than a CPAP or surgery.
The retired dentist, a talker, used to go on and on about adventurous fishing trips he’d taken and his enthusiasm for his Christian afterlife. Now he tells me how his best friend died of a sleep apnea event, and he wants to help make sure that doesn’t happen to others. How his will to save others from death jives with his blissful belief in meeting Jesus in heaven after death is a narrative I don’t have time to invite upon myself, so I try to keep it about the oral appliance.
But in reviewing the report from the sleep lab, he questions the data on some statistical grounds I don’t follow, and wants me to get a sleep evaluation from a different doc.
Another sleep lab?
The recommended sleep doctor is busy too, and schedules me for seven weeks out, and I feel myself starting to waver. I’m trying to do the responsible thing by getting myself diagnosed and treated for an apparent sleep disorder, but I may be losing interest.
I come from a long line of ailment ignorers and was raised on the assumption that discounting the problem is often the best way to make it go away, at least from your awareness. I’m trying to evolve to a more proactive posture—I have ambitious longevity goals my family doesn’t hold—but being reactive is looking better and better now.
Meanwhile, Bernie begins using this ultrasound at night that’s supposed to support her overall wellness and maybe it’s helping me sleep better too. I mean I’m asleep, so I’m not sure, but I don’t think I’m tossing and turning as much. This is how ailment ignoring works—you start to downplay the condition, not all at once, but incrementally, step by step, so that it can dwindle in your consciousness over time, as you either get used to it, and the discomfort feels less acute, or in fact, it goes away.
But I’m not entirely committed to complacency either. I start this thing called myofunctional therapy, which works on your face, mouth and tongue, that is supposed to help with sleep apnea by keeping your airways clear. I meet with the myo therapist online, and she gives me truly strange exercises to do with my tongue and mouth, difficult to coordinate but easy to practice, if you don’t mind looking idiotic to yourself in the mirror.
I’m supposed to do like two reps of each exercise, but that hardly seems enough to me, so I repeat them over and over throughout the day, until my jaw starts popping, and I can’t bite down on food without feeling like I’m cracking something essential inside my mouth. So I have another condition to downplay or ignore, which in a weird way confirms my inclination to downplay or ignore the alleged sleep apnea, because if I engaged fully with that problem, and this jaw thing now, whatever it is, that would be a lot.
Sure enough the myo therapist helps me correct the clicking, and almost another month into not doing another sleep lab, I seem to be sleeping better. The good news is that they scheduled me so far out I’ve got plenty of time to keep downplaying what I may or may not have. But unlike my ailment ignoring forebearers, I’m living in the era of data, so I stop researching sleep apnea and start researching biometric devices to tell me how well I am sleeping.
The Apple Watch is supposedly really good, but I have enough Apple in my life, and really don’t want to get emails on my arm. So I buy this device called a Whoop. You wear it on your wrist and it collects biometric data. It knows if you’re awake or asleep, and calculates how much REM sleep you get, and deep sleep and light sleep, and your respiratory rate, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, etc.
You can’t fake sleep and you can’t force it. Begging for it like Macbeth after murdering Duncan won’t do any good either. The sleep drugs apparently add very little actual sleep per night and leave people drowsy in the morning. Michael Jackson died trying to manipulate himself to sleep with stronger stuff, a drug used for anesthesia procured from a crooked doctor,— so you can’t buy sleep either.
Truth is you don’t conquer sleep, sleep conquers you and you let it. Sleep is surrender, but consciousness won’t let go, or can’t, without the nervous system’s say so. The brain may be the interpreter of life, but however much it might seek to rationalize and reign it in, the nervous system mediates life itself washing over and through us. I suppose that’s the real sleep lab every single night.
I start tracking my sleep. I don’t always get a perfect night’s sleep, but it hardly amounts to a sleep disorder—more like sometimes disordered sleep. But most nights my sleep stats are good. Good numbers of hours asleep. Good amount of REM and deep sleep. Good oxygen levels.
My reactive self feels more justified than ever. What should you do to address what looks like sleep apnea? Nothing, as always, may be your best bet. I realize this is not very responsible advice to share with others, but the data speaks for itself.
BIO
Joe Bardin is an essayist and playwright based in Arizona by way of Trenton, NJ, Washington DC, and Tel Aviv. He is the author of the essay collection Outlier Heart, (IFERS Press). His essays have appeared in numerous publications including Interim, Louisville Review, Superstition Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Rock & Sling, and been anthologized in the Transhumanism Handbook (Springer). His plays have been performed both domestically and abroad. A scholarship alumni of the Valley Community of Writers, he is a member of the Dramatists Guild. (http://www.josephbardin.com) / (www.josephbardin.com). @joebardin.
I’m a longtime fan of Maila Nurmi’s, the woman who created and played the legendary Vampira on TV and in movies. Although I don’t remember, my mom once told me that she took me to see Vampira in person when I was a little kid. I guess Maila did public appearances—in costume? Maila Nurmi was the host of The Vampira Show on ABC-TV back in 1954 in Los Angeles. Countless imitators followed her, borrowing and stealing from her unique look and style.
After reading the excellent book, Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira, Maila Nurmi, that examines the extraordinary life of Maila Nurmi (1922-2008), the legendary TV host, actress and artist, I was curious to know more about the author. Sandra Niemi is Maila’s niece. When Maila Nurmi passed away in 2008, Sandra took control of Maila Nurmi’s writings and possessions. Ten years later, she penned a loving tribute to her famous fabulous Finnish aunt.
I was able to contact Sandra recently and she agreed to be interviewed for The Writing Disorder.
Tell us about yourself.Where are you living now?
Where the weather is mostly gray and cloudy. November is my least favorite month of the year. It’s dark and rainy and cold and the days are short. I live in Salem, Oregon, which is the capital. It’s a fairly good-sized town. I don’t know the population, but it’s a lot bigger than my hometown of Astoria that I lived in for sixty years. I sure do miss it, but the rain keeps me away.
How far is it from Salem?
Astoria is about two and a half hours north. I was up there recently for a Vampira celebration. It was a big success. They screened Plan 9 from Outer Space and they’re celebrating Maila because she graduated from Astoria high school in 1940. So the town is claiming her as an Astorian.
You grew up in Astoria, as well as your father, who was Maila’s brother?
Yes, my dad was Maila’s brother. He was 17 months older.
Did you know Maila growing up?
Not really. I met her when I was too young to remember. But I remember this, I must have been five or six at the time. My family went down to Los Angeles, and I saw her for the first time—and I was sure she was my own private Cinderella, because she was so beautiful. I had never seen such a beautiful human being in my life. It was in the daytime, I can still see her, she had blonde hair and she had blue eye shadow from her lashes to her brows, and bright red lipstick, a gold lame dress, and transparent shoes—which reminded me of Cinderella’s glass slippers. Then I didn’t see her again until her mother, my grandma, died when I was ten. And we went down to L.A. where they lived. Maila lived with her mother on Carlton Way. We were there for the funeral and Maila scared me. She reenacted how she found her mother dead in the chair that I was sitting in. But I didn’t know that, and she gave out this blood curdling scream that she was known for as Vampira and scared me to death. I ran out of the house. So, I thought that this was kind of a weird place to be, you know, it wasn’t like my little house in Astoria. And the strange thing is how Maila wore a black shift dress and dirty white slacks for two days. And then on the day of the funeral, or the day before the funeral, she asked my mother what she was going to wear to the funeral and my mother told her. And she thought, oh good, Maila’s going to change her clothes. But she didn’t, she just wore the same clothes again, and an old raggedy men’s navy-blue cardigan sweater inside out. Very odd.
She was a very independent and unique person—in her taste, her style, and with everything she did.
She was never afraid to display her different outlook on life, or to talk about it. She was very brave. And she just went about her life as she chose.
I read your book and it’s a really great story. It’s very well written. I kept asking myself, who wrote this book? I wanted to know more about you because I assumed you had written many other books, because it’s so good.
When I was younger in my 20s, I went to and graduated from Oregon State University, in 1969 when I was 22, and I majored in English. I always kind of fantasized about writing because I really enjoyed it. I received a lot of compliments from my professors, and good grades. And then life got in the way, and I worked my entire life as a minimum wage waitress, cannery worker, bartender, or house cleaner. I started out at 99 cents an hour and I think I ended at 8 or 10 dollars an hour. Oh, I worked 18 years at this job, the best job I ever had at the end. I worked 18 years as a medical lab courier. I went to clinics and hospitals and picked up specimens and delivered them to the laboratory. I never did anything with my love of writing until I got Maila’s writings. She didn’t have a typewriter, and this was before computers. She was a prolific writer, and it was all done in long hand. She wrote and wrote, and I gathered all of her papers together. And I thought, well, here is Maila’s story. I’m the only one who can write it. Maila and I had talked about it, when we were writing back and forth for three or four years, before we lost contact again. She said that she and I should do a coffee table book. Since she had been a house cleaner and I had been a house cleaner, she said, we’ll talk about the famous toilets that I cleaned, and you can talk about the rich timber barons and fishermen that you worked for. We never got around to it, but wherever she is, she is not mad at me.
It’s a great book. I would read it again because I enjoyed it so much.
It always shocks me, because we always put our own work down, you know, and have great doubts. Thank you.
Did she ever plan to write an autobiography?
Three times that I know of. I picked up in her apartment, after she passed, an old reel to reel tape and my friend got a player so we could hear what she said. She had spoken the words as a biography, and she had a friend there who was taping it. That was in 1966, so she was planning it then. And then she was planning it with another author, his name is Warren Beath, and he wrote a book about James Dean. He thought he was in contact with Maila, and then as Maila would sometimes do, she would erase the person from her life forever. She would not trust them, and she thought he was trying to steal her story and write her story himself. And then at the end I met this man, Stuart Timmons, he was the man who was with Maila day in and day out during the Elvira trial. He did everything for her, Maila never drove, of course, so Stuart drove her around wherever she needed to be, and he did a lot of the legal work that she needed done, because anything, like the clerical stuff, she had to do and he was also an author. She was telling him stories about what had happened in her life and he was taking notes and typing them up. And then she got to where she didn’t trust him, so she erased him from her life.
Now Stuart and I got together right after Maila passed away. We had lunch together, and we also were together every day. He helped me clean out Maila’s apartment. And, in fact, I found a box that Maila had written: To Stuart Timmons. And I said, Stewart, here is a box just for you. And he said, oh my gosh, and he got teary eyed. Inside was some jewelry that she had made for him. He was so thrilled to get it. And then we went to Maila’s storage unit with Dana Gould, another friend of Maila’s. Dana is the one who paid for her storage unit. And it was a big storage unit — it was packed to the rafters. You couldn’t put a hair pin in there it was perfectly packed to the door, to the ceiling, to the wall. And Dana said, oh my God, this is going to be a chore to go through, and I said, yes. He had a key and I had a key, and because I had to go back to Astoria to work, I gave my key to Stuart, because I totally trusted him. He was a wonderful man. In fact, I called him Uncle Stuart, because he told me he was my aunt Maila’s last gay husband. So, I called him Uncle Stuart.
Dana gave his key to a woman named Gabrielle Geiselman, who at the time had a boyfriend who was a bass player for Rob Zombie’s rock band. And he is still famous, he’s Matt Montgomery or Piggy D, is his professional name. Anyway, they broke up and Gabrielle moved to New Orleans. Stewart called me one day, and I have documentation of this. Stuart called me on the 26th of January 2008. I was in Astoria. And he told me, I think I found THE dress, Maila’s, and I found some hip pads and a waist cincher, and he says I’ll put them aside for you. I thought, oh, that’s wonderful because I’m coming back to L.A. for Maila’s memorial in February. So as luck would have it, five days later, Stewart suffered a massive stroke. He couldn’t speak. They didn’t expect him to live. He was hospitalized for over two years before he was able to come out. He has since passed away, but his brain was fine, but he could no longer walk. He had to be in a wheelchair, and you couldn’t understand what he said. But he was still writing books when he passed away. But when I went back to the storage unit in February, it had been ransacked and everything was gone all the way to one stack of boxes at the very back. So, I called Dana right away and said what happened to the storage unit? He said, Gabriel was there but you know she saved everything for you. There’s a box there for you and I rented another storage unit there that you put all the garbage in that you didn’t want. I said, Stuart, there’s one box here with a hat in it and that’s all. I was furious. And I couldn’t make Dana understand. I blame Dana for ransacking it, and there was a rift with Dana and me. And we didn’t speak for 10-12 years. We’ve made-up now. We’re friendly now, but now he realizes that Gabrielle was a thief. She took all Maila’s stuff, oh gosh—her bat sunglasses, her waist cincher, the dress, black wigs, her makeup, and all kinds of writings. Her marriage proposal from Marlon Brando — all the pictures, and she sold them to Jonny coffin. Jonny Coffin now owns them and the trademark. I get no money; the family gets no money from anything that Maila sells. Not a penny.
You know anything with Maila Nurmi on it that sells, Jonny Coffin gets it all because he owns the trademark. But he went and got it behind my back while I was still grieving my aunt and so yeah, he’s the owner of the trademark. Maila’s family gets nothing. In fact, he tried to stop the publishing of my book. He sent his lawyer to me. His lawyer threatened me and so I turned it into my publisher’s lawyer, and they got rid of him. But then Johnny turns around and says that he helped me write the book. Oh no, which is obviously a big lie. He contributed nothing except a letter from his lawyer saying that they were going to stop the publishing of Glamour Ghoul and that you owe him $30,000. For what, I don’t know.
His real name is John Edwards, and he’s married to a woman named Linda Kay who is an actress and singer. Jonny is a big goth fan, and he hosts parties where he wears a Cape and a weird top hat. He has hair down to his waist and he has some kind of shop where he sells coffin-shaped guitar cases. He has girls dressed in bikinis and things advertising his guitar cases. And he sells a bunch of other stuff — plus all the Vampira stuff, of course, he sells now, and he makes pretty good money.
I think I saw him on YouTube. He was talking at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
That’s where Maila is buried. Maila had her 100th birthday celebration last December in L.A. And I was there, and Jonny coffin, of course, wasn’t. He was terrified of me, so he didn’t even make an appearance.
I’m so sorry that all this happened to you.
We were very close for a while, Jonny, and me. He would call me a couple times a week, always professing to be my friend and asking me advice—what color should I put in this advertisement, and what do you think about this? I guess he was just trying to get information from me. I don’t know. And then when I told him one day, after many years we had talked, in fact. I’ve met Jonny several times. I’ve had lunch with him and his wife in L.A. And we were friendly, but one night he called me in Salem, and I said to him, you know Jonny I have in my possession from when Maila was alive, a cease and desist letter from her attorney to you, because you were proposing to introduce a new Vampira doll and Maila wasn’t going to have anything to do with that. And she told him in the letter, she said she never wanted Jonny coffin to have anything to do with Vampira, and he hung up on me. He never talked to me again because he knew the jig was up. Maila hated him in life.
I think that book The Vampire Diaries was put out by him.
Yes. It’s mostly newspaper clippings, I think. When I went back to his shop in 2009, he showed me a three-ring binder with all these newspaper clippings of Maila’s career that he had bought from a man named Chad, and he had paid $300 for it. A lot of those articles were in that book. I haven’t bought the book, but a friend of mine in California did buy the book, and I leafed through it. I wasn’t going to read it. I don’t know how many of Maila’s writings were in there, but they were all stolen property that Gabrielle stole. If Maila knew this was going she’d be so mad. I know she’d be on my side. So, I don’t know where it’s all going to end but that’s where it is now. And Jonny has no family. He has his wife, but his mother, father and sister have all passed away. And he and his wife have no children, whereas I have a daughter and two grandchildren that I have to live for. And then I have also met Maila’s son, David Putter.
Yes! Are you still you still in touch with him?
Oh, yes! I just called him. He left me a text message last week. He’s learning how to message. He’s going to be 80 in March, and I’m 76. I’m going to be 77 in May, and he’ll be 80 in March. So, we’re all Oldtimers. Yes, I’ve met him, and he’s got his mother’s eyes, exactly the same color and everything—that brilliant blue. We got along really well. He was an esteemed attorney for 50 years. It was celebrated with a lifetime achievement at the ACLU. He was at one time the assistant attorney general of Vermont. He has some things that he changed in the courtroom that are still law today in Vermont. He’s a very esteemed attorney. Maila would be very, very proud to know that.
Has he ever tried to reach out to the other side of the family?
Well, he’s looking to see who his dad is. He asked Orson Welles’ daughter for DNA, but he hasn’t heard back yet. But he’s trying to find out for sure. We don’t know for sure. We just know what Maila said. We weren’t there so we don’t know for sure. But I put it in the book because that’s what Maila said. Everything she said was put in italics in the book. You know she was a brilliant writer herself.
I remember her writings in your book. I liked the way she always used an ampersand.
Yes. I was really impressed by how she expressed herself, and I thought this is too good to paraphrase, I need to put her words down word for word so she can tell her story right. So that’s how it all happened.
You spent a lot of time researching this book.
Oh, I forgot to tell you that in 1989 I spent a week with her in Los Angeles and that’s the last time I saw her. We had a great time, we got along together. We dined out every single day and we got drunk together.
Those were the good old days — 1989 in Los Angeles.
It was August, the last week of August of 1989.
She was living in East Hollywood.
She was living at a place on Hudson Ave. and it’s no longer there. They raised the house and the garage that she lived in. There’s an apartment house there now. She was evicted but she got $5,000 to move, so that helped her.
And she had a store on Melrose Ave.?
Yes, she had a store. She went to garage sales and bought things and brought them back to her store and resold them. And also when she was on Melrose—she was a great seamstress—she made clothes for rock stars, during the hippie age, when they liked pantaloons and feathers and sequins and things like that. She would make costumes and people bought them. And she made jewelry. I still have many pieces of her jewelry, many pins that are signed Vampira on the back.
She also did some painting and artwork?
Yes, she did, and they were stolen—every single one. I know for a fact that when I looked at the storage unit before it had been ransacked, there were many paintings and they were covered with paper and they were propped on either side of the door. And when I came back, they were all gone. A year later I picked up a copy of Spin magazine. I don’t think it’s in print anymore, and there was a two-page color layout of Rob Zombie displaying his favorite things, and two of them were Maila’s, two of her paintings. He said he bought them from Maila’s estate. And I thought, no, you bought them from Gabrielle Geiselman, who’s the girlfriend of your guitarist Matt Montgomery aka Piggy D. So, she sold at least two paintings that I know of to Rob, and he has money, so she probably sold them for $1,000 each. They’re probably worth more now.
I’m assuming they’re worth a lot more.
I own one of her paintings that’s small. I got it is from a friend of Maila’s. They were very good friend towards the end of her life. His named is Greg and he connected with me, and I connected with him, and we talked. He sent me one of his paintings of Maila’s for free. It’s on my wall. It’s very nice. I love it. I had it professionally framed.
Beyond her personal diaries and her own writings, what other research did you do?
I interviewed Hilda, she was the woman who found Maila when she passed away. And I, of course, interviewed Dana, and the man who wrote Vampira and Me, R.H. Greene. And also, her second husband. His name was Farbrizio Mioni, he lived in Calabasas. When I was in Los Angeles, I just dropped in on him on a Sunday morning. He came to the door in a bathrobe, and he graciously invited me in the house. So, I got to visit with him. His last name was Mioni, and he and Maila were married in 1961 and divorced in 1964. He was 79 years old at the time and he has since passed away. I got the impression that it was just a marriage of convenience. He was gay. Maila wanted so much money a month to stay married to him and he could afford it and so it worked out. They stayed married for three years. And there were other people that knew her. I can’t think of anyone now right off the top of my head, but people that knew her. I would contact them about Maila and take notes. That’s after I had decided to write the book. I didn’t think that at the beginning, you know, and then I thought I have to, I have to. I can’t let Maila be a sad footnote in horror history, right? She deserved so much more.
How long did it take you to write the book?
12 years. I was plagued by self-doubt. Who am I? You know I’m 70 years old and trying to write a book, my first one, and then I would write a couple more chapters and put it away for six months and think, well I’ve come this far. And I’d write a little more, and it just went like that. In fact, I didn’t write the entire book, I was on the last chapter, when I came home from the grocery store and my daughter said to me, who lives with me. She said, I know who Maila’s son is. I know his name. I know where he lives. and I know his phone number. And I said, you do not—come on, that’s not even funny. She said, it’s true, here it is here. His name is David Putter, he lives in Vermont. What happened was, a couple years before for a Christmas present, I had sent my daughter, you know that ancestry.com? I sent her that and she had sent it in, and so had David. And they matched them as first cousins once removed. Oh my God, give me his phone number right this minute, I said. And I called right then and there. I didn’t even have my coat off and David answered the phone. I never dared to dream I could find my cousin; Let alone talk to him. Because I have a very, very small family, and every family member is extremely precious to me. David has no children, and he was adopted, so he has a very, very small family too. So, the first question he asked me is, do you do I know who my mother is? And I said, do I know who your mother is? I’m writing her biography right now, and I’m on the last chapter. You couldn’t be talking to anybody else on earth who knows her better than I do. It’s Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira. And he goes, Oh my God! I waited 75 years to find out who my mother is, and she’s a vampire? He didn’t know who she was, so he immediately went on the internet and looked her up. I said, you can see your mother, you can go on YouTube, and you hear her talk. You can find out everything you want to know just by going on Google. And he was excited about that. He said, I never dreamed of this. And you know those Vampira statues that Maila had commissioned back in the 1980s? They are very, very rare now. I had one for me and I had an extra one. And I said to myself, all these years that I have been packing it around original in the box, never opened, I always said to myself, someday I’m going to find the perfect person to give this to. And I’ll be darned if I didn’t. I sent it to David, and he has it proudly displayed in his living room. Whoever comes over to visit him, he always says that’s my mom out there, and they go, no? and he goes oh yes, that’s my mother! I saw her statue when I was at his house. I went there a year ago in August and I saw Aunt Maila there in David’s living room. He says he feels her around him all the time. And I say well if Maila could be anywhere, it would be with David. And then I said, I thought I was almost done with this book, and I had one more chapter because I had just met David. So that was the final chapter of the book.
Yes. He is the last chapter in the book.
I mean, I was there, I had just gotten to the end. Well now it’s over, just a few more paragraphs. And then I met David. And so, it was just my Maila. I keep saying, you know 12 years it took me to write this book, and I’m saying well Maila said you’re not going to finish this book until you meet my friend. And the minute, the minute I met him, the book was finished. It’s just bizarre, isn’t it, how things work out?
How did you find a publisher? Did you have one from the beginning or did you find one at the end?
When I first started writing the book, I learned that Feral House published the book on Ed Wood, A Nightmare of Ecstasy, that the movie was based on. So, I thought, well Maila was in Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Ed Wood—she knew him. I wondered if they’d be interested. So, in 2009 I called up Feral House and I talked to a man Adam Parfrey, he was the owner. And I simply asked him, I told him I was Maila’s niece, she had passed away, and I was going to write a book. Would he be interested in a biography of Vampira? And he said, oh absolutely. I said, okay, thank you. And so fast forward 10-11 years. I called him up again and Adam had passed away, but his sister Jessica was running the business, so I talked to her. And she said, yes, send me the manuscript. So that’s where it went, that’s how that worked out. They took it right away.
Were you involved with the cover design and or any other aspect of the book?
No. I’m not thrilled with the cover, it was not my choice. That was all the publishers. The Passion and Pain of Vampira or whatever the cover says, that was the publisher too. I just wanted to say Glamour Ghoul. So, I didn’t have much input on any of that. No input, I should say. And now these Finnish filmmakers, ICS Nordic, that are in Finland, they’re just in love with the whole concept. They’ve had a contract for going on two years now. They’ve been working on a six-part documentary of the book, and they’re looking for money. They’ve been looking for money for a while, and apparently, they don’t have the money yet, but that’s where that is.
Did they get the rights to your book?
They have a contract. The first time it was for 18 months and that expired. Now they have another six-month contract and Jessica Parfrey has been through this situation with her books many times. She said this is normal for the course, when people try to find money. She’s giving them a lot of leeway.
They’re a company from Finland?
Yes. They’re from there, and because Maila’s from Finland—we’re 100% Finnish all of us. Her parents spoke Finnish at home, and my mother’s parents spoke Finnish at home, so we’re Finnish. I think there are a lot of blondes in Finland, but there are brunettes too. You can usually tell by their faces. They have small eyes and round faces and blonde hair. But Maila and I are similar, we don’t have a round face. We have the cheekbones. I can usually tell Finnish people by looking at their faces. Yeah, they’re Finnish.
Do you have any family in Finland?
I have lots of family in Finland, but I’ve never met them on my mother’s side. My mother was in contact with them briefly. And they sent pictures of our cousins and lots and lots of cemetery pictures. Fins are big on cemeteries. They visit the graves 12 months out of the year—they’re decorated. I laughed when I got the photos, I said, oh there’s the cemetery, grandma said, yes, we’re big on cemeteries. My grandmother on my mother’s side was the oldest of nine children. She came to America on one ship after the Titanic. She missed the boat. She had a ticket for the Titanic, but she was late, and missed the boat. So she had to take the next boat over in 1912. My grandfather was already here from Finland. They got married and my grandmother never got to go back home. On the other side, on Maila’s side, her father was born here but she had one sibling who was 20 years older, and he was born in Finland. When he was a child his parents moved to America. And Sofie was born here in Boston. She was born in Boston. She was a Fin with a Boston accent. She talked like the Kennedys. My grandfather came over here when he was 21. Maila’s dad.
Who were some of your favorite writers?
To tell the truth, in college I had to read so many books as an English major. I even took French. I had to read books written in French, which I couldn’t do now to save my soul. But when I got out of college, I said I never wanted to see another book as long as I live. Never. And I did not read a book for many years. I was sick of reading, and now I can’t live without having a book to read. I like biographies. So, I read a lot of biographies, but I also like true crime like John Grisham, John Sandford, and Lee Child. I’m reading Grisham now. I’m reading something about an island in Florida.
When you were a kid or a teenager, who were some of your favorite writers?
When I was a kid, I read all the Nancy Drew books. Carolyn Keene, I think she’s the one who wrote those books. I can remember sitting in the car when my mom and dad were working during the summer, and just avidly reading those books one after another. I had a collection of Nancy Drew books. All of them were a dollar a piece in those days. And I went to the library quite often and just randomly picked out books to read. I was always a good reader, you know, right from the get-go. I could read very well. I didn’t read much in high school because I had schoolwork to do, and I had to read schoolbooks. The only thing that comes to mind now is Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys (Franklin Dixon) books. I might have read some of The Bobbsey Twins. I read a lot when I was a kid.
What about television — what did you watch when you were growing up?
We lived way out in the sticks, so we had to get an antenna. We didn’t get a television until 1958. But I can remember watching a Miss America pageant, and Bourbon Street Beat. I remember watching Bourbon Street Beat and the writer was Dean Riesner. And I said, oh mom look—we called him Dink—Dink wrote this episode of Bourbon Street Beep. (He was Maila’s husband at the time.) And my mom just said, Oh well, good. But I remember Chet Huntley and David Brinkley news, and I remember the original Mickey Mouse Club.
Dan Riesner was her husband?
Yes, we all called him Dink. I met him when I was a little kid. I remember sitting on his lap. I remember men in those days would flick the ashes from their cigarettes into the cuff of their pants. At the time that I met Dink he had on tan pants and a pink shirt. I remember he took us to a movie set where they were filming. We sat in the back, and they were filming a western. I think it was Amanda Blake or someone like that. There was a girl in a saloon. Then a production guy came around, I was standing by my mother, and the guy said, come on you’re on next, to me, and he grabbed my hand and took off. And my mother said, no, no, wrong kid, wrong kid. I told my mother years later that she had ruined my chance to be a star. We all went and played miniature golf after that, and I got to wear my Aunt Maila’s Cinderella shoes.
Dean was a successful TV writer?
A very, very successful writer. He wrote Play Misty for Me for Clint Eastwood. He wrote the movie for him and he was very involved with Clint Eastwood’s, The Enforcer. Remember all those movies he made in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. He even wrote the words, “Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do you? Why don’t you make my day?” That’s Dean Riesner. He was very well known, and he was a script doctor. If somebody didn’t like a script, they called him to come in and fix it. Rich Man, Poor Man, the mini-series, he wrote that. He was very famous. He had no children, and he married a woman named Marie, and she passed away before he did. He didn’t have a family either.
How long was he married to Maila?
It was a common law marriage. They were together from 1949 until the first part of 1955. Dean was a hopeless alcoholic when Maila met him. And his career was down the drain, but Maila got him to quit—and his career took off again.
How many times was Maila married?
Twice. I never put the third husband in because I was never sure that they were actually married. She was married sort of married to Dean, I mean common law. And then she was married to Mioni. That’s the name that she went by legally. That’s how she got her Social Security checks, Maila Mioni. Supposedly she was married to John somebody. And I’ve heard there was a marriage license somewhere. But I never saw it, so I didn’t include it in the book. I think Maila and this John guy were just very good friends. So I didn’t include him. I think she was only married twice. And I’ve never been married, so I always say Maila was never really married, and neither was I. And we both have one child. I see a lot of parallels with my life and Maila’s.
Does your daughter or grandchildren have any resemblance to Maila?
No. My daughter is half Hispanic. As she found out with her genealogy. She always says, I’m 61% Finnish. I’m more Finnish than Hispanic. And it came back that her father was 10% Finnish. We never would have guessed. So, she’s 55% Finnish today, and her half-brother is 5% Finnish from his dad, from their mutual father. She’s 47 years old now. And I have two grandchildrenboth living in the Hawaii on differentislands. My granddaughter, she kind of resembles Maila. She would make a perfect new Vampira. She’s five feet, six inches, long dark hair, light colored eyes—very pretty girl. She would make a beautiful Vampira. She’s a bartender in Maui. She’s 27, my grandson is 24, and he works on the Big Island, Hawaii. I don’t ever get to see them because I can’t afford a ticket to get to Hawaii. That makes me sad. If I had the trademark for Vampira, I could afford to go see them. But I don’t.
So, you can’t use the name Vampira for anything because he got the trademark?
I guess I’m not supposed to. It’s okay to write a story about her because you know biographies happen all the time without trademarks. But I can’t sell any anything. I can’t go and have coffee mugs made with Vampira’s name or picture on it, something like that. I can’t do any manufacturing. I can sell things that I found in her house, because that’s like a gift you know. I can sell those, but I can’t manufacture anything and sell it like T-shirts. I can’t even do that.
That’s not right.
No, it isn’t. There’s nothing I can do about it, it would cost lots of money for an attorney, which I do not have the money for. Jonny was counting on that, I’m sure.
Maybe the publisher or someone like that could help.
We’ve had talks. Maybe in the future. I told them, well, you better hurry, because I’m 76, and you know I’d like to see it in my lifetime. But there isn’t anything yet. They have an attorney. The one who wrote the letter in the first place, when they threatened to not get the book published. I’ve met him, he’s very nice. I met him in Astoria this last weekend. He’s a very nice man. So, you don’t know. He kept telling me how important it was for me to attend the Maila celebration in Astoria. He said it was important and I don’t know why. I signed books. There was a Q&A. I have participated in that. I also participated in the signing of books and a Q&A in Los Angeles for Maila’s 100th birthday. So, I’ve done this twice.
When was that?
It was December 11th last year in Los Angeles (2022). I can’t remember the name of theater. It was at a perfect theater. It was supposed to rain like crazy that day, but it was beautiful sunshine on her day. It was in Hollywood. The American Cinematheque—that’s where it was, in Hollywood. It’s the old Egyptian Theater. That’s where we were.
I wish I would’ve known. I would have attended.
They declared it Vampira Day. It was officially named Vampira Day in Los Angeles. And now my biggest wish, my biggest wish, is for Maila to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
I can’t believe she doesn’t have one.
I know. I want to start a crowdfunding effort to raise the money. It’s around $55,000 to have a star. And then they have to vote on who gets to have a star that year, because not everyone does. But I think, for Maila, because it was officially called Vampira Day, that it really boosts her chances.
That would be great!
I keep saying that Maila walked the streets of Hollywood for 60 years, because she never drove a car. And for 38 years of those she walked with a cane because she had pernicious anemia. She had walked with a cane. And she walked a lot.
Later in her career, Maila was still appearing in movies.
Yes, she was doing movies, but was still being billed as Vampira. She was never billed as Maila Nurmi. Even though she wasn’t in a Vampira costume, she was still Vampira. As she got older, Maila liked being remembered as Vampira. For a while she tried to get rid of that image, you know like, I’m Maila Nurmi. And then she sort of became like a hermit, a recluse, and moved to the very, very east part of Melrose Ave. She moved from the west part, clear over to the east part. And she never told anyone that she was Vampira. In fact, in the book it says that Hilda knew her as Helen Heaven. And even when I was having lunch with Hilda, she always referred to Maila as Helen. And she knows that her name was Maila, but she always referred to her as Helen. That’s who Maila introduced herself as, Helen.
She lived on Melrose when it was like becoming trendy and popular with punks and new wave music in the 1970s?
She was there when the hippies came out. That’s when she lived there. I’ve gone past the house that she lived in. It’s still there. It looks like a two-story duplex. It might be four apartment units. That’s where she had her shop, in her living room. She didn’t rent a separate place. It had a big window in front. And it was her living room, so she just had that part as her shop. I just saw it in December again. I had some friends from Sacramento that drove down, so they were my wheels while I was there. And they’re interested in Maila too. They have a goth rock band called Ashes Fallen, and they have a song called Vampira that has over 10,000 hits. They’re big Vampira fans. They wanted to go to all the places where Maila lived, and we took pictures. It’s still there, and the little crappy apartment she lived in on east Melrose is also there. When we were there, it was a beauty shop. And, of course, the one where my grandma died, where Maila and grandma lived, It’s still there. It looks almost the exactly the same one. There’s a little fence built around it. A short little fence, and the apartment house next door has been torn down and a new apartment house has been built. And the fence that separated the properties is gone. That’s the same. I recognize that street so well. And then she lived on Gateway. I went up there and looked at that place. And then she died on Serrano and of course, they’ve completely torn down that and rebuilt it so it’s nice and new now. I remember Gabrielle had the key to Maila’s last house, and she did not want me to go back in there. And I couldn’t find her. I called her on the phone she wouldn’t answer. So, I called the managers, and they knew who I was by then. And I said I don’t have a key to Maila’s apartment, and I want to go in, and they said go ahead and break in. And I said really? They said how they were going to tear the place down anyway, so it’s okay—just break in the door. And I said, okay. Kind of funny. So, I was at the front door, and I was shouldering the door, and shouldering the door, and the guy next door opened his window and said, hey, do you need a hammer? Yes. I said, what kind of neighborhood is this where I’m breaking in and they’re offering me help? But Gabrielle had been there, and she had set aside a bunch of stuff on the floor that she wanted to take from Maila’s apartment. And I know she was there because she had left a satchel, an umbrella, and a hat of hers there, which I took. And the couch that Mila had died on, she had ripped open the back of it looking for money. That’s how she thought of Maila. It’s just sickening. And I have pictures of that.
Since you’ve written the book, have you learned anything more about Maila that wasn’t in the book? Are there any stories about her that didn’t get in the book?
There’s probably a couple. When I finished the book, the publisher wanted me to remove about 5,000 words. They wanted it to be shorter. So, I had to take some material out. And somebody said, now you have enough to write a second book. I don’t think I have enough for a second book. I have enough for a fiction book, but it wouldn’t be Maila. It would be some other name. I’ve messed around with the thought of me and Maila being in a book, but fictionalized. It would have Jonny and Elvira. I’ve pictured it. They would be the enemies of the book. Jonny would be running around Los Angeles, but instead of that costume that he wears now, he would be wearing one of those bird heads that doctors wore back in the day, when it looked like a crows head, when they had the plague, and they had to take care of people with the plague. They were those things that looked like a bird heads. That’s what Jonny would wear around Los Angeles, you know, and we get them in the end. I don’t know if it would sell. That’s the whole thing it’s just kind of a comedy, and not really, but I could put my personality in it.
It sounds like it would be make a good graphic novel. You’re not into the Goth scene, are you?
No, I’m not Goth. But I have friends who are Goth. They never wear anything but black. And my friend is the best Gothic baker you ever saw. She can bake anything. She can make a cake look like anything. I like the Goth scene. A lot of the people who came out for the Astoria Maila Nurmi show and the Los Angeles Vampira show were Goths. Very, very interesting outfits that they wear. And I like it. Maila is the original Goth creator—the mother of Goth. When she got older, she would say I’m the grandmama of Goth. She was the pioneer. And I had no idea when Maila passed away that she had so many fans. They’re all over the place. And I had no clue because to me whenever I saw Vampira, I would just say, oh there’s Aunt Maila in a black dress with a wig on. It was just my Aunt Maila in costume. I couldn’t separate them. It was all just one person. When I was with her in 1989, I didn’t ask her one question about Vampira. I just wanted to know her as a person. What’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite food? What do you like to do? What do you do with your days? How do you take care of your dog? What are you interested? Do you like to read? What’s your favorite TV show—things like that. Who is this person, my aunt? I didn’t ask about James Dean. I was here to find out who Aunt Maila was.
What was her favorite food?
Her favorite food was banana cream pie. Her favorite color was jewel tones. I assume she liked Ruby, sapphire, emerald—that kind of thing.
Who are her favorite performers?
I know that she hated Madonna and loved Cher. And I said, there we agree. I can’t stand Madonna, and I love Cher. And she hated in those days, at the newsstands, The Inquirer and The Star. She said all the photographs were terrible. They all had shiny faces. I remember that. She liked the TV shows, Three’s Company and Remington Steele. And if she could get an old movie on her TV, she’d like to watch that. She had a tiny little TV up on top of an armoire. That was her entertainment. I had sent her a little boom box that was my daughter’s. It was light blue, and I sent her some tapes. My father had been dead for 12 years, and I had a tape recording of his voice taken at a Christmas celebration. I sent her that and she really enjoyed that she got to hear her brother’s voice again. He sang the Finnish national anthem. He whistled and he talked, so I know Maila enjoyed that. And I still had a couple of letters that her dad had sent to my dad. They were written in Finnish and Maila could understand it. She could read it. So, I sent her copies of those letters. And I sent her a case of salmon, tuna and sturgeon, and a can opener. And a bottle of wine and a bottle opener one year for Christmas. So, I hope she liked that. I know she couldn’t cook. I think she had a heating plate to make coffee on. So, I sent her something that didn’t have to be cooked, and I know she liked fish. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience visiting with her. If I could live my life over again, I wouldn’t have come back in a week. I would’ve stayed and asked a lot more questions. Anyway, that was my time with Maila.
The photographs in the book, those were your photographs — or the did the publisher have to secure the rights to them?
I don’t know much about that. Some of them were my pictures, but I didn’t have much input on that aspect of the book either. I have a friend in Tennessee, who is a young man. He’s a huge Vampira fan that I befriended. In 2009, when I was in Los Angeles and met Jonny coffin at his place, Clint, and his mother, from Tennessee, flew out. So, I got to spend some time with them too. And Clint is a huge collector of Vampira memorabilia. He has lots of pictures. So he gave the pictures he had to the publisher. That worked out really well. I’m not that organized, and I have some pictures, but I don’t know where they are. The one that makes me the maddest of all, the one that I can’t find, is an 8×10 photo of Marlon Brando and Maila. It’s just the two of them. Maila is all decked out like she’s going to a party, in black dress, and Marlon is dressed like the movie, Desiree. He was a sea captain, or a military guy, and he’s dressed in costume and they’re together. I had looked for that picture for years, but I can’t find it. I think it still might be in the garage, and I’m hoping so. But I’m afraid to look anymore for fear I won’t find it. And so, there’s a lot of pictures in there—my most important pictures, and the letter from my grandmother is in there, too. The last letter she ever wrote before she died that I wrote about in the book. It’s in a three-ring black binder with a lot of Maila’s writings. I have not been able to find it. In fact, all the letters that she wrote to me, I had them when I wrote the book because I quoted from them, right, but I can’t find them now. Like I said, I’m not organized, I see something, and I just put it aside. And I’m not going to change at this age.
Who were the photographers who photographed Maila Nurmi?
Well, we know some of the photographers who took pictures of Maila in the 1950s. But we have no way of knowing who all the photographers were. I have no clue. There are family pictures of Maila, and her mom and dad, that I don’t have—and Jonny’s hanging on to it. That makes me mad. That’s my grandma and grandpa and my aunt. He has nothing to do with them.
Perhaps you could use some help organizing.
That’s why I have that friend in Sacramento. She is the most organized person I’ve ever met. She is really my archivist. I gave her all the stuff I had. She came up to Salem and I gave her everything I had. And she has cataloged and filed and put everything together and filed everything on the computer. She said this is all important Hollywood history, we have to preserve this. And she has. I’m really happy about that. Now everything is organized. Before everything was just in boxes. Everything works out. Maila found me, the archivist, and Maila made sure that I met her son. Maila is still working her Vampira magic. We don’t know for sure, but it seems that way.
She still has a presence in your life.
Yes. I still feel her around me. Once in a great while, not a lot, but once in a while, it feels like Maila is here with me. I think she spends a lot of time in Vermont now with her son. But she’s still working weird things. I mean, when my friend was here in Salem, and we were going through part of the garage looking for Maila’s stuff. It was September, I think. The garage door was open, and we were talking about Maila, and all sudden there was a huge cacophony of crows across the way. You couldn’t hear yourself talk. There had to be fifty of them in one tree. I’ve lived here for eight years, and it’s never happened before. And we both stopped talking, like what?! And we looked out and there’s all these crows. And my friend said, that’s a murder of crows. And I said yes. And then her husband showed up and we told him about the murder of crows. About a week later, I told you they have a Goth band. So a week later they were called up and asked to perform in New York City at a festival called Murder of Crows. See stuff like that is happening all the time. They went and performed this year in September, and now they have lots of new fans. They were number two on the Goth music list for their new album. They’re called Ashes Fallen. Michelle, my friend, plays keyboards, and her husband, James, is lead singer. The other guy in the band is named Jason. James and Jason have been friends for 30 years. They’ve played in the same band.
Thank you very much for your time. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. I wish you good health and happiness—and the rights to Vampira someday. I hope you get the rights back.
Sometimes it Takes Fifty Years to Repair a Friendship
by KelseyBerryman
I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, Babcia, growing up. We would swim in her pool, she’d make delicious food, and I’d dress up in her old clothing- she even let me wear her high heels. But what I loved most was when she told me stories.
Sometimes she would tell me about being a little girl in Poland. Usually, she would gloss over her teenaged years. Sometimes she would talk about her time in Chicago as a single woman in the fifties. But then other times she would talk about the time that she was happiest; as a married woman and later young mother in Erie, Pennsylvania, where she lived in a little apartment building with a bunch of other parents with young kids.
My grandparents had only dated for a few months before they got married and left Chicago for Cincinnati and then Erie. Babcia hated Ohio. It was too dirty for her. But she loved Pennsylvania.
She told me about the one neighbor with the bum husband and told me about the one with too many kids, but her favorite neighbor was her best friend Cathy and her husband Fred. They had two kids: Cathie Lu and Mary. Cathie Lu had arthritis. Everyday Mary would knock of her door saying that it was Halloween and ask for some candy.
When Babcia went into labor with my mother, Cathy and Fred took her to the hospital. It was a different hospital than my grandparents had planned on going to and my grandfather, Grandpere, didn’t know where to find Babcia until he talked to Fred. It turned out that Cathy and Fred had taken Babcia to the Catholic hospital.
When my mother was born Cathy told my grandparents to name her Deirdre. My grandparents liked that it was a name that you could yell. But they wanted to change it slightly and named her Daedre.
Cathy wanted to be godmother to my mother and sent over to my grandparents a Catholic priest to facilitate matters. Though both my grandparents were raised Catholic, they had become disillusioned with the church. Grandpere was called the son of the devil and expelled from Catholic school because he kept asking “how do we know” when ever religion was brought up. Babcia lost her faith during childhood her family was poor and the priest kept telling them to give more to the Church. They didn’t even marry in the Catholic church because the priest demanded that they promise to have as many children as they could. Anyway, a new Catholic priest came over to the apartment to discuss a baptism and when he found out that my grandparents were married in the Episcopal church, he screamed that they were living in sin and had to get remarried. My grandmother sent him packing.
Babcia said Cathy was a large woman with dark, Italian skin. Once when my infant mother wouldn’t stop crying and Cathy put her on her breasts and rocked her. She knew how to help with a baby because she had so many kids. She would buy her kids clothes rather than wash the dirty ones. But as soon as her husband came home she made him watch the kids and she’d go out to see the same movie twice just to be away from them.
Eventually, my grandparents moved to California because my grandmother wanted to grow oranges. Since Babcia was a girl in Poland she had hated the cold climate and dreamed of living somewhere warm. Florida had too much mildew so they chose California.
Cathy and her husband moved to Texas. But both couples all still kept in touch. My grandparents even drove to see them in Houston when my mother was in elementary school. My grandparents saw that Cathy and Fred had a big house with a swimming pool and had had three more kids: Deirdre, Ralph, and Florence.
Cathy decided to come to California and visit my grandparents. They took her all around Los Angeles, especially Beverly Hills. Cathy wanted to be discovered. She was mad about Rock Hudson and thought that if he would just see her he’d fall in love with her. My grandmother bought her some diet cookies. As soon as Cathy heard that they were diet she ate the whole box.
My mom said that she had been waiting to meet “Auntie” Cathy. She had heard so many good things about her but didn’t end up liking her. Everything that Cathy said was a patronizing, “Honey” this or “Sweetie” that.
Cathy talked about to my grandparent about moving out to California. Babcia told her that it was so expensive. Cathy could have a much nicer house in Texas.
Finally, one night Cathy told my grandparents the real reason she came. She was going to divorce Fred and needed their help. She wanted to punish her husband and wanted my grandparents to hide their children from him. My grandfather immediately said no. Fred loved those kids. It was also illegal to take them over state line.s Cathy was insulted and kept saying that if they were divorcing she would hide my mother for one of them.
Babcia and Grandpere didn’t hear from her again. I always wondered what it would have been like if my grandparents had taken her five kids.
To me Cathy was just a character from my childhood. She was as safe and real as Peter Rabbit. Part of me never thought of her as a real person but a figure of stories that I was told.
During spring break of my junior year of college, I went to visit Babcia. She was sitting in her maroon recliner and sipping coffee. Babcia had already grilled me about school (“Are you getting A’s?”, “I hope that you will go to grad school” and “Kelsey, education is something that no one can ever take away from you.”) I had given my pat answers. Then we got to an interesting part of the conversation. I lying about my friendships (“Oh, I have really great friends, we hang out all the time.”)
When Babcia said, “It’s so important to have friends. You know like I had Cathy Xxxyz….” She took a sip of her coffee before adding, “I wonder what she is doing now.”
Back in college and lonely, I decided to find out what happened to Cathy. I knew that she had lived in Texas and googled her daughter’s name and found a workplace that advocated for the disabled. Given that Cathie Lu had had arthritis that seemed to make sense that she would in a capacity for the disabled.
From: Kelsey Berryman Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 9:08 PM To: Cathie Lu Subject: old friendship
Hello,
I know that this might seem kind of random but I might as well ask. My grandmother is named Anna Cottrell and she used to live in Erie, Pennsylvania, and was great friends with Cathy Xxxyz and her husband, Fred. She was wondering what ever happened to them and I told her that I that would look on the internet for them. I assume that you are their daughter Cathie Lu. I hope that this is not too much of an intrusion but if you are so inclined please email me back. My grandmother would be really happy to know what happened to her old friends.
Thanks so much, Kelsey Berryman
Ten days later I got
From: Cathie Lu Subject:RE: old friendship Date: March 26, 2012 12:34:40 PM EDT To: Kelsey Berryman
Hello Kelsey,
Yes, I am the oldest daughter of Fred and Cathie Lu and we did live for a short time in Erie, PA when I was a child. My mother lives in a Dallas suburb and my dad and his second wife live in Houston. If your grandmother is interested, we can exchange phone numbers so she can call and speak with my mom and dad.
Cathy A. XXXYZ
We exchanged a few more emails and on my normal Sunday call I said, “Babcia, I’ve found Cathy XXXYZ for you.”
“What?”
“In Texas, I’ve got her phone number for you.”
“Why on earth would you do that? What if she is still angry at me for not taking her kids.”
I rolled my eyes because that was so typical Babcia.
A few weeks later, when I called Babcia she said, “Cathy called me.” She found out that Christine had two kids and Florence worked in design and that Deirdre had a dog that was like her kid and that Cathie Lu had never gotten married. She had forgotten to ask about Ralph. She also talked about Mom. Cathy wasn’t still angry.
From: Cathie Lu Subject:Sad News Date: June 20, 2012 8:40:04 PM EDT To: Kelsey Berryman
Good Evening Kelsey,
I wanted to let you and your grandmother know that my mom died unexpectedly on May 26. My brother will be spreading her ashes in New York City (her hometown) next month.
Cathie Lu XXXXYZ
Your Mom, my grandmother and my Mom in front of their house in Pacific Palisades before Mom’s ballet recital.
BIO
Kelsey Berryman grew up in California and has been writing since she was twelve years old. She attended the University of Iowa to study writing. She currently works as a teacher and is working on her latest book.
When they hit the mist net, they seem to be floating. Tangled, their fleshy wings crumpled and held tight against their bodies—flightless. Bats are the only mammals capable of flight. Not the hopping, drifting, falling from tree to tree of a sugar glider or flying squirrel, but true flight. Batman would carefully untangle one from the net as it thrashed and squeaked in his hands. Holding it up to the light, it would flash its fangs and tear at his leather glove as he bared his teeth in a smile of his own.
I first started working with Batman, as all the interns affectionately called him, in my junior year of college. My philosophy professor was the one who introduced us. We happened to be talking about our summer plans when she mentioned her unusual pastime of walking through the cemetery-turned-wildlife-sanctuary a few blocks from her house at night carrying around a bat detector and doing citizen science work with a professor from a nearby university.
It was the perfect coincidence. I had been looking for some sort of field work experience at the time. Anyone who had any career plans at all was, and I was swept along in this same wave of ambition. On the first night that I arrived at the cemetery, it was nearly dusk, the perfect time to walk transects around the ponds, mosquito repellent liberally applied and headlamp strapped to my forehead making a funny indentation.
This is where I first met Batman. Among the imposing, stone crypts as big as traditional style housing on a college campus, holding the stately remains of renowned writers, governmental officials, and historical figures from the Revolutionary War.
Batman was known for being constantly on the move. I remember him walking up and down the paths crisscrossing the cemetery grounds, a cup of convenience store coffee in hand, without a flashlight, without a map. Not because he never got lost, he got lost plenty of times as he would reluctantly admit, but because this was how he worked best, on the fly and constantly adapting the plan.
I have never met anyone as enamored by bats as he was. His excitement was infectious, a quiet hum in the air that traveled through the group of high schoolers, college students, and citizen scientists as one by one our heads were drawn up to tree-level where the first bats of the night were zipping by. I thought they would look like birds when they flew, elegantly soaring, but they’re much more like moths fluttering and staggering in the dark.
That’s what I was. A bat hopelessly tangled in a net I couldn’t even see, strung up from tree to tree with thousands of gossamer threads, that I would spend the next year struggling to untangle myself from.
I realize I’m searching for the perfect metaphor to find meaning in this story.
***
Take four years of a college science curriculum, and you will learn how to take yourself out of your writing. The author will be impersonal, unbiased, and keep their opinions from marring the scientific integrity of their work. All claims will be backed up by evidence, corroborated with the literature, and thoroughly reviewed. You will learn that the highest authority that exists is a panel of old, white men in academia.
I was twenty years old, female, and an ambiguous shade of not-white. He was a professor, published in scientific journals, respected by his peers, an expert in his field. I had no evidence.
Let me tell you my story anyway.
***
It was late summer. We were sitting outside the barn, huddled in our coats and scarves after the relentless heat of the day. The grass was wet with dew forming in the few hours left before dawn, and the cuffs of my jeans were damp from pacing back and forth.
In that long moment of silence, a bat flew into our net with a resounding thud. I got up to put it in a brown paper lunch bag and carry it back to the processing table. He held it up to the light spilling out from the barn door. That’s when I saw its wings. The metal band clipped onto the bat’s forearm was digging into its skin, slicing an angry, red gash into its flesh.
I remember the sharp focus he had when he handled the bat. It may have been past two in the morning, my legs stiff from sitting in a lawn chair bent over a clipboard the whole night, but my mind was suddenly clear. In the circle of light cast by his headlamp, I could see him cradle the bat in his two cupped hands. He didn’t take his eyes off of it as he directed me in a low and even voice to his toolbox, to find the pliers, to wedge the blade between the bone of the wing and the metal band and pry. Then slowly, millimeter by millimeter, the band loosened until I could pull it off with two fingers. It was rusted and caked with blood. We had gotten it off in one piece. Without breaking the wing.
I like to pretend I know what I’m doing. I like to play the part of the scientist. But that night, I was completely out of my depth. No one had said it out loud, but we could all see the truth. The bat would either get an infection from the open wound gouged in its wing and die, or we’d try to remove the band and break the fragile, toothpick bone of its forearm and it would die anyway. I could see it in the hesitance and bated breath of the other field tech. In the quiet tension that had replaced the sleepy-mind-wandering downtime only moments before.
The three of us looked at the bloody band, at the bat in his hands, still beating both wings, and let out a collective sigh of relief. There would be no death tonight.
In my mind, I can see this moment take a different turn. I can see the different pathways branching and the probability of each outcome and all these probabilities at the tip of each branch being multiplied together to get the result of this night. In other words, I can picture him walking to the back of the barn, turning off his headlamp, grasping the head in one hand and the body in the other, and pulling back until the sides of both closed fists meet.
But I must constantly remind myself of which path was taken, of what really was the truth, and that no matter how unlikely it seemed, I saw that bat cling to his open palm as he raised his arm to the black sky, then suddenly the bat was gone too, melted back into the night.
Whenever I find myself thinking that I must hate him, I come back to this night. The focus, the intention, the care, the exhilaration of holding another life in my hands. The waver between uncertainty and assurance in my own capabilities. The beauty of the bat leaping from an open palm. And yet he was there too.
***
My dad called me yesterday to tell me he saw a mouse run out of my closet. Whatever it was my mom sent him upstairs to find was completely forgotten with the quick scurry of a four-legged thing, a flash of pink tail and whiskers.
It’s comforting to know that while I’ve been gone, something living has moved back in. Reclaimed the dusty corners and moldy cardboard boxes, the cluttered drawers with a lifetime of old schoolwork, the empty spaces I’ve made with my leaving. But the real surprise wasn’t the mouse. I can’t remember the last time my dad picked up the phone to ask how was my day, what classes am I taking this semester, what are my plans for Thanksgiving?
So what does he do when he hears the news—when he’s so desperately worried about his only child? What does he do but call to say there was a mouse in my closet?
***
I watch for him. Every time I walk past the tables outside the dining hall, some part of me expects him to be there, waiting for me. I watch for his car—dark blue and speckled with dents and scrapes along the sides. When I see a car that looks familiar, I have to peek into the window to make sure it’s not him. Every time my phone buzzes, it’s him, asking about my day, when we’re going to meet next, and can I call him to talk now? He took every minute of my free time to the point where I would drop a class and not tell him at first, just so I could have that hour to myself. He’d tell me to drop classes because they seemed too hard for me. He chipped away at every ounce of my resolve until I’d just say yes to avoid an argument, to avoid the questions, is everything okay? what’s going on with you? you know you can talk to me, right?
You can talk to me right?
You can talk to me. Talk to me. Talk.
Are you fascinated by a good story?
Am I telling you a story?
Am I a story?
Bats are the only mammals that can fly.
Bats are the only mammals that can fly.
Bats are the only mammals that can fly, can fly, can fly away.
We were alone together in his car, driving back to the city at two in the morning. I was barely awake but he wouldn’t stop talking, telling me how special I was, how we had this connection, unlike any of his other students, we had so much in common. Teachers were supposed to be good and kind and trustworthy. Teachers were not supposed to put their hand on your thigh and lean over in a dark car while driving you home.
It was tangled in the net, wings held tight against its body.
Flightless.
***
After I told someone for the first time, it felt like time had stopped moving. Or maybe during the past year was when it had stopped, and now the clocks were finally ticking again. I walked across campus with my head down, staring at my shoes as they carried me further from the biology department. My eyes were red and bloodshot. I hate how easy it is to tell when I’ve been crying.
The mallards sound like they’re laughing
from behind the trees.
I left campus and kept on walking through the residential areas, past off-campus housing, the ancient looking seminary with its pristine brick walls and spires. I didn’t know exactly where I was going until I got there.
Laughing at me for my somber mood
on this day that was freely given to us.
I looked around at the empty park benches, the murky pond with freshly painted three-story homes surrounding it, the cormorants basking in the low-hanging sun, and I thought to myself, of course, I’ve been here before.
On this day, where catbirds
fight to be heardover car alarms.
Two years ago now, in early fall. I’ll always remember this place. This is where I go when I don’t want to be anywhere anymore.
Where the rumbleof someone rolling out
their trash bintries to imitate the thunder.
My roommate asked if I wanted to go grocery shopping this weekend. I didn’t understand the question, it didn’t feel like I would still be here this weekend, or the next, or even tomorrow. I was suspended in this one moment. I didn’t even have the energy to get up from this park bench.
Can’t they see the time for beautiful things
is over?
I’m telling you this not so you’ll pity me or hate him. I would rather tell you any other story, yet this one seems to keep repeating itself. In fact, I can’t seem to tell you any other story until I get this one down. Until I’ve given it some semblance of order by writing it and given myself some fragment of peace by claiming it as my own.
The trees agree with me,their trunks almost black,
still wetfrom rain and appropriately gloomy.
How do I understand my memory of him? How can we hold so many memories within us? Some of them contradict each other. Some of them overlap and blend and transform.
It is time for the bleak mid-winter.
It is time for icy sidewalks that catch youat your worst.
How do I understand that people are not always good? That I am not always good? That I am a victim and everything that entails but not only that.
It is time for bare branches,gnarled and knobby
like the arthritic jointsof an old man’s hands.
Surely I can’t be both. Surely the old gray-beard-poets contained multitudes, but who am I to try to be everything I am all at once? Do I even dare?
It is time for the mallards to fly away
to wherever it is they gowhen the pond freezes over.
My performance is over. I’ve retold my story too many times. I could rattle it off like a script, complete with exposition, rising action, a dramatic climax. I’m tired. I’m done talking. Haven’t I done enough.
Yet here they remain,
laughing at me and my foolishness.
I want this to be the last time. Let me sit alone in the woods and listen to birdsong.
They have always known how to tell me
the truth when my mind will not.
***
I am afraid that all this summer was, everything that happened, was meaningless. What’s the moral of this story? I’ve been searching this whole time and I can’t seem to find it. What have I lost? What was gained? Maybe I’ve misplaced it. Maybe it’s time to go looking elsewhere.
I go to the woods to be alone. Not even here is it completely silent. I can hear the muffled white noise of cars behind the trees and the distinct groaning of the Green Line shuffling along its track. There’s the crunch of dead leaves as people walk by chatting about their innermost lives or else nothing important at all. There are the dogs, off-leash at last, with noses glued to the ground as their owners call to them. I go to the woods to be alone and find that I am surrounded by so much life. I wander until the skin over my knuckles is red and cracked from staying out too long in the cold.
I am constantly surprised at the impossible kindness in people. I wonder how life can be horrible in one moment and wonderful in the next. I’m learning how to notice the good things when they come around. I have a lot to learn.
I study the world to find meaning in it. I’m beginning to think this is also why I write. To find meaning in what would otherwise be nothing more than sleepless nights, skipped meals, and resentment. I question myself if some things are better left unsaid. I question myself all the time. But I know there are also things that can’t be contained within the body. Maybe some stories are like pain leaving the body. I have told my story many times. That’s why I feel so much lighter when I put down my pen, stand from my desk, and open the door. The telling makes room for something else. (I’m beginning to find out what that is.)
BIO
Rachel Paz Ruggera is a research technician in a developmental biology lab and holds a BS in Biology from Boston College. Her work is forthcoming in Atticus Review and Outrageous Fortune.
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. – Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
I had written almost every day for more than a decade before someone paid me for it. A European magazine, desperate for content, spotted two of my travel essays on a website and offered me 300 British pounds for them. I eagerly jumped at this offer, feeling ecstatic and somehow justified in my ambitions. Isn’t this how it happened? After all, I had spent my youth filled with a deep and abiding ambition to create words that reached people, to be a respected author like my bookish heroes, to create literature. And it was not a frivolous ambition. I had bent all my energy towards this goal, spending far more than ten thousand hours of preparation, reading ten thousand books and writing over a million words, including two hundred poems, a hundred stories, and four full-length manuscripts. I had earned this payday, and more besides.
However, getting foreign money in the early years of the 21st century was not so easy. I had to set up a special account, talk to my bank several times, and continually badger the magazine editor to pay up. Meanwhile, two copies of the magazine arrived at my door, with my original articles altered completely. Finally, nearly a year later, the money was deposited, but it felt tainted now, flawed and impure. It was as if some forbidden fruit had finally come within reach, but when I took a bite, tasted bitter. Moreover, it was another four years before anyone paid me for my work again.
That feeling of triumph mixed with a rising sense of disquiet was one I would get to know well during the following decade. In those years, my friends and I operated on what we called the Bull Durham theory of authorhood. In the film, written by former baseball player Ron Shelton and considered to be one of the best sports movies of all time, catcher Crash Davis is close to breaking the home run record in the minor leagues. When superfan and adjunct English professor Annie Savoy congratulates him, he scoffs, telling her that it is a “dubious honor” to have a record in the minor leagues. At an author event in 2009, someone said one of my books was a “home run” and I said, “Yes, a home run in the minor leagues.” So, I often felt like the Crash Davis of Connecticut authors, able to keep getting hits with small publishers, mid-range websites, and local magazines.
Even major league authors struggle to earn enough money to survive, and only a few hundred make enough to be called rich. Still, a major league writer might afford to just be a writer, and not to teach, or live on a spouse’s income, or work as a postal carrier. They might be published by large media conglomerates, but more importantly than that, they are popular, they sell lots of copies, they get lots of grants and awards, they travel in higher circles: New York, Hollywood, London. As far as royalties and advances, we minor leaguers make almost nothing, and never have. My wife Amy and I supported our author habits by teaching at the University of Bridgeport, at first part-time, then full-time, then tenure track, then tenured, a process that took us both two decades. That was trivial compared to the process of becoming a writer, which lasted a lifetime.
Many major leaguers may not in fact write “better” than some of their minor league compatriots, but the percentage of competent and even beautiful writers in the major leagues is certainly much higher. A few singles made a big difference in your batting average – enough to send you up to the show. Art doesn’t work in quite the same way as sports, though. Just being in the major leagues is no guarantee that the writing will last; many minor leaguers have gone on to be rediscovered, and as many major leaguers have been quickly forgotten.
It took me a while to adjust to this way of thinking. Growing up, my favorite baseball movie had been The Natural, and I had thought I might be Roy Hobbs, the best writer to ever play the game. I believed that some innate talent would carry me to the league championship. Sometime in my late 20s or early 30s I realized that it rarely worked like that. The Bull Durham theory not only made more sense, but it also resonated more deeply, since even as a child I had always had a feeling of being on the periphery, never at the center, never in the thick of art or of life.
That is not unusual. It comes at first from being out of our depth, and later from swimming well without finding the shore. Writing is hard work, much harder than non-writers realize, and most of it is on the front end, learning how to do it properly. “I want to be an artist,” a woman told one of our publishers. “But writing a book seems like a lot of work.” This person asked them how to hire a ghost writer, so she could live the literary life without the decades of struggle to learn how to write. That was one way to solve the problem.
Money or influential connections were others. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on the point of view, my wife Amy and I were both solidly middle class. We did not have patrons; we did not study with any elder writers who could lend us an agent or publisher. We had to build a career from home plate to home plate, step by step. But we did have one advantage many writers do not: we had each other. And slowly but surely, we found other minor league authors, editors, and booksellers to befriend, many flowers born to bloom unseen, or at least seen by fewer eyes, than the ones that made the bestseller lists.
And the truth was that almost every author was a minor league author, even those we thought of as major leaguers. At one of our “author parties” at our house, former Connecticut Poet Laureate Dick Allen told us that, finally, in his seventies he had reached the point where journals solicited poems from him. “It’s taken me fifty years,” he said, his flyaway gray eyebrows raised in a sort of half-amused, half-frustrated expression. I got to know that look well during those years, from a hundred writers across the state and beyond.
Most of my friends embraced the ideals and the lives of minor league authors. “I’ll be the third base coach,” singer and author Jim Lampos told me once, happily. For him, maybe, it was about building a team. But the person who taught me the most about being a minor leaguer was environmentalist, historian, and poet David K. Leff. When he was younger, he had actually toured many of America’s small-time baseball stadiums and had even sketched out a book on the subject. So, like me, he often talked about going to “the show,” the majors, and about the joys and sorrows of minor league life.
We had met when I invited him to give a presentation for the Hamden Historical Society and had discovered that he knew Dick Allen and other mutual friends. He had also attended a recent presentation Allen and I had participated in for U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall’s birthday, energetically moving around the room, taking photos. I thought I could remember him, but couldn’t be sure, and he certainly remembered me. “Your speech was the best,” he told me. It was one of those coincidences of intersection that made for a good story, but later I found out that in his case it was not so surprising. We would meet for liver and onions at a rural diner and inevitably someone would walk in, spot David, shake hands, and exchange news. He seemed to know all the other Connecticut writers, and mentioned them, major or minor league, casual acquaintances or close friends, as if they were all worthy of Nobel Prizes.
“After all, the Prize Committee makes some dynamite choices,” he said, cracking one of his many trademark puns.
At the Hamden event, I had bought The Last Undiscovered Place, and for the first time, I found a “local author” whose book I was astounded by. It was Walden, but “inside out,” about community, culture, nature, and public life combined. The reader could see one small place through a multi-lensed panopticon, from every angle, making the book impossible to classify, mixing reportage, memoir, history, and a dozen other disciplines.
“How many drafts?” I asked, thinking that no one could possibly write more versions than I did.
“Eight or nine.” His beard cracked with a smile. “I read it out loud to catch the repetitions, you know, the things you don’t catch with your eyes.”
Well, I thought, this guy is serious about his work. Soon I found out how serious, learning about his regimented, precise method, with time parceled out into the days and weeks. His research always included multiple interviews, visits to every site he talked about, and notecards for every reference. I couldn’t decide whether I was intimidated or inspired.
“I’ve always worked here, in isolation,” he said when I asked him about his process. “I can edit or do other work at the coffee shop. But the first draft, the bloodletting, takes place right in my office.”
When I visited his home, I found out why. David lived in an 1847 Greek Revival house on the Collinsville Green, writing every day in a former drawing room with views of a sugar maple and the white clapboard Congregational Church. It was a luminous space, surrounded by books and artifacts collected from a lifetime of hiking and canoeing. The daily journal he had kept since May 29, 1978, stacked impressively along one wall. He sat rigidly at a three-board pine table in a flannel shirt and jeans, glasses squared on his nose, hair and beard shot through with silver, sipping a hot mug of coffee. Then the nerve in his neck would begin to pinch, and he would stand up and walk around, wincing with the pain, but somehow cracking a joke instead of a curse.
Along with his daily struggle with pain, I found out that he wrote The Last Undiscovered Place while grappling with divorce and single fatherhood, sometimes waking up at 2:30 a.m. to find time to write. It took him six years to write this first complete book, and in my opinion the result had been well worth it, the best “local history” –if that label could even be applied– that I have ever read. It was a home run, even if a small crowd watched it sail over the wall.
By time I met David he had been forced into retirement by the nerve damage, but he had worked as a handyman, janitor, and pot washer to put himself through the University of Massachusetts before becoming a lawyer and finding work in the Connecticut General Assembly. “Some of us were in the vault in the cellar of the State Capitol with one hanging light bulb,” he said. “No kidding. But I loved it.” Then he became the Deputy Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, writing most of our first “green plan” and saving hectares of open space when he negotiated the largest land conservation deal in the history of the state. In retirement, he continued to work for the public as best he could, serving as the historian for the town of Canton, acting as moderator for town meetings, and continuing to serve in an administrative capacity for the local fire department.
“I think volunteerism is at the very axis of what it is to be an American from the Minutemen at Concord and Lexington to the guy who coaches Little League,” he told me, without a hint of shoulder-shrugging irony.
“Well,” I said. “Writing is kind of like volunteer work.”
“You have to write for the love of it,” he agreed. “Because it is certainly not for the money.”
I don’t know if I was more ambitious than David, but I always believed that someday that would change. I was excited by the attention my books were getting and thought that this would inevitably lead to more money and fame. In those years, every radio program I spoke on, every local access cable television show that hosted me, every newspaper article mentioning my appearances or work…I loved it all. When a network television affiliate showcased me, or when a regional magazine ran a feature story, I admit I felt a thrill. Weren’t these the fruits of authorhood? A photographer traveling to our house to take shots for the front page of a newspaper, a reporter meeting me in a bookstore for an interview, a television personality giving us an hour of time, a mayor shaking my hand for a publicity photo. It was all happening.
One of those early books was Becoming Tom Thumb, the first thorough biography of diminutive 19th century performer Charles Stratton. Shortly after it was released, an English producer contacted me and told me that he and his production company had read it and were using it to plan a documentary on Charles and his manager P.T. Barnum. Would I like to participate? You bet I would. So, I met the producer when he came scouting the locations, and a few months later on a cold winter day, they returned to film in Bridgeport and several other American towns. The host of the documentary was the former chair of the BBC, Michael Grade, a man who had done nearly everything in British television. He had recently been made a life peer and sat in the House of Lords, though I didn’t know that until later. He had jumped at the chance to host this because his own family came from “circus people.” The director set up in the wood-paneled parlor of one of the old houses owned by the university, and Michael…Lord Grade…interviewed me for three hours, while Amy watched proudly from a chair nearby.
The following day, I drove to Middleborough, Massachusetts to the house Charles Stratton and his wife, Lavinia Warren, had shared in the 1870s. No film crew had peeked inside for decades, and I was excited to see the house itself, beyond the fact that I would be appearing in a film-length BBC documentary. I waited in my car nearby as snowflakes began to swirl. About an hour later the film crew showed up, just as the snow began to really fall. As a precaution, I booked a room at a nearby hotel, and later the crew joined me there – no one was getting out of town that night. But we had a documentary to film! So, even as the snow began piling up on our cars and the front lawn, we started filming. I did some unscripted exterior shots with Michael and then, as so often happens in the “industry,” I waited for an hour while they did more scripted exterior work. Finally, the director scoped the interior, and Michael and I talked to the family who owned the place at the time. The owner’s sister, who was a theater major, took us on a lively tour of the house. Of course, we did several takes for each bit. The director had made sure that as the “Tom Thumb expert,” I had not seen any of the wonderful details before so that my “surprise” and enthusiasm would show up on tape. Built into the house was the miniature stove, miniature tub, and a staircase built at a sort of compromise height for the Strattons and their servants. The family had also found a pair of Lavinia’s shoes in the back of a cabinet and had re-purchased a Tom Thumb miniature piano and a pair of lawn bowling balls given to him by an Australian club. I reacted appropriately to each revelation, and then off camera, I spent a moment in the room Charles died in. I talked a little to his ghost, then, telling him that I hoped my book had done him justice.
Filming had taken a long time, and a foot of snow had gathered along the country lanes. We drove through the darkening evening to the hotel, taking a half hour to go four miles. But since the hotel had no restaurant, we had to venture out again, slipping and sliding another three miles to a nearly empty bistro. It was not a palace, but we were hungry, and sat down to a hearty dinner as snow drifted and piled outside. Michael regaled us with stories, at one point telling us that in the 1970s, a friend had called him to consult about a bad situation facing his client, who had agreed to act in a film with a largely unknown American director. The production had run out of money and the director offered a percentage of the take rather than a flat fee. “I told him it was a bad idea,” Michael said. “But the actor stuck with it, because he liked the script.”
As Michael slyly revealed, the actor was Alec Guinness, the movie was Star Wars, and he made a mint. The first check alone was five million pounds, an amount equal to the rest of all the money held by his small bank in Sussex.
“I was always glad Alec didn’t take my advice on that occasion…,” Michael finished dryly.
The crew was already gone when I woke up the next morning, on their way to New York to film more scenes. Driving home across the long leagues of Interstate 90, blustery wind sweeping snow around my car, I thought for sure I had made it to the major leagues. At the very least, I told myself, I could parlay this into a deal with a larger publisher. But despite several awards, the book never sold out its first printing, and my subsequent proposals to major presses were rejected. That early excitement would return –briefly– every time I was consulted in the years following by major league venues like the Atlantic Monthly, the Wall Street Journal, or the History Channel. The next one was the one that would send me up to the show. I just knew it.
Unlike me, David often seemed to revel in being a minor league author. It’s not that he didn’t want to sell copies – he worked constantly at that, giving dozens of presentations and readings every year. But he had no real interest in fame, probably because he had already seen the dark side of it. Shortly before I met him, a certain state agency found David Leff practicing law, and sued him for his disability retirement money. It was the wrong David Leff, actually a lawyer of the same name in New Haven. Apparently unwilling to admit the mistake, they sued him anyway, charging that his writing constituted work and that his nerve damage was faked. His own book, Deep Travel, was used against him in the hearings, as they tried to demonstrate that his brief canoe trips on the Concord River meant he wasn’t really injured. He came out of his house one morning to find the workmen he had hired to restore it sitting on the front step reading an article about the ongoing lawsuit on the front page of the newspaper. It was humiliating, to say the least. He received hate mail and threats, becoming “a poster child for the excesses of the system,” as he put it. Worse, he didn’t have the money to fight the deep pockets of the state and had to sign a compromise document. Years later, when his primary tormentor retired, representatives of the state agency that plagued him apologized privately. But no newspaper covered that.
He did not let the bad experience with the media and the state make him bitter or turn him into a misanthrope. “Make the most of where you are most of the time,” he said. “There’s so much joy in life.” When you met David, it was obvious he lived that maxim fully. I didn’t trust the world as much as he did, but I did trust him. Someone who has seen both sides of fame was someone I needed to hear from, to balance out the ambitions of my own grasping soul.
Authors, even minor league authors, have a weird sort of celebrity. Most of it is second-hand, through the work of art, through words. The exception, of course, is during author readings and presentations, which had been part of the lifestyle I had witnessed and envied. And at first, despite performance anxiety, it was fun. Amy and I gave an average of thirty presentations or readings a year, some unpaid, some paid, some to five people, some to a hundred. We gave presentations at libraries, bookstores, schools, museums, casinos, town halls, town greens, senior centers, and conference centers. We gave presentations to business groups and women’s groups, to historical societies and secret societies.
Amy often recited her poetry, and I gave occasional readings of fiction or creative nonfiction, but most of the events were presentations for history books, either those I wrote myself or ones we wrote together. We gave over a hundred presentations just on the history of Connecticut food. We would arrive early, shake hands with the organizer, and set up the projector and laptop. Our books were stacked on a small table with printed sheets denoting prices and special sales. We would test the podium and crackling microphone, perhaps framed by an emergency exit, and greet the guests one by one as they arrived, making small talk and trying to charm them into buying our work. Once, we drove an hour through driving snow to lecture five people, one of whom fell asleep and snored.
In general, bookstores were supportive of minor league authors and their struggles to get on the shelf. But a few were not. At a store on the gold coast of Fairfield County, the owner sitting at the front desk openly insulted us when we offered our “sell sheets” from regional publisher Homebound Publications. “We don’t carry self-published authors.” I tried to explain that it was a real press, but she wouldn’t listen, despite the fact that the store carried two of my history books, and I had just signed them. “We have a certain clientele here,” she said. Rich people? Families? I wasn’t sure, but I got the message. This was not a place for minor leaguers like us. Of course, turning away local authors is probably not the best business strategy. Who buys more books than writers?
Bookstores sometimes invited you for signings that were unaccompanied by readings or presentations. These were usually not productive events, and many times I spent two hours chatting with curious patrons to sell one or two books. Often, these events were not advertised on social media or local papers the way presentations were. In most big chain stores, there is little connection to the community, and little concern about the store or the local culture on the part of the workers. Perhaps that is why they kept dying during those years, one bookstore failing after another. That also happened to quite a few “local” shops who didn’t carry local authors or make their inventory unique and specific to the place. Bookstores always worked best as linchpins for a particular neighborhood, town, or region.
At one disheartening session I signed zero books, sitting helplessly behind a table at the entrance to the chain store while guests ignored me, or worse, talked to me. One woman asked me for a chiropractor recommendation, as if I was a search engine. “I had a dream about the Beast,” one man told me, as if I was a confessor. A family stopped by, looked at my pile of books, and realized they had made a mistake. “Have a good day, buddy. Hope you sell a lot,” the father said. An old, old man sat down nearby, talking loudly on his phone, and to me. “I’m 96 years old,” he said, and then, loudly enough for everyone to hear, told me a disgusting joke. Shortly afterwards a woman trapped me at the table to tell me about underground cities built by the trillionaires who were tapping our phones. She was also terribly angry that her husband who fought in World War II was not mentioned in a recent book.
I nodded. “That can be frustrating.”
Afterwards, Amy quoted Bull Durham, as she often did in these situations: “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.”
However, after a few years of being published writers with minor league reputations, we began to get a few actual fans. “I have all your books,” one woman said to us while we were signing after a presentation, pointing to the dozen on the table. “Except this one.” She promptly bought it. “I know who you are,” one librarian told me, blushing, when I introduced myself. “Your work is lovely,” another told Amy. One dark winter day, feeling drained by my classes, I pressed the answering machine button in my Bridgeport office and a phone message from an anonymous woman told me that she had finished Becoming Tom Thumb and that it was the best book she ever read. That was enough to keep me going for a little while.
We were literary encounters for these folks, and that was a strange thought. We also began to meet more and more writers simply through the virtue of being authors ourselves. Once, walking across the vaulted neon hall at Mohegan Sun during the Big Book Club Getaway, Amy and I spotted a black-haired woman with a copy of A History of Connecticut Food.
“Would you like us to sign that?” we asked, having just signed several after a panel discussion.
She let us do it, and as we asked her name, she seemed surprised that we didn’t know it. “Debbie,” she said, smiling broadly.
“Are you an author, too?” we asked.
“Oh, I’ve written a few,” she said, laughing a little and heading to the cashier to pay for her armload of books. We looked at the main author table for a “Debbie.” Turned out that she was the headliner for the event, a number-one New York Times bestselling author with over 200 million copies of her books in print. Embarrassed, we slunk across the thick carpets toward the cling-clang of slot machines to try our luck there instead.
These frequent but brief encounters often ended ambiguously, and sometimes the most we could hope for was not to annoy the major league author. I succeeded with one best-selling novelist and did not with two well-known historians. Amy was somewhat more successful, and usually charmed the poets she read alongside. After a presentation in Stratford, we ate lunch with Robert Frost’s granddaughter, elderly but lucid and sharp; she bought one of Amy’s poetry collections.
“Ernest Hemingway used to think of other writers as competitors,” I mentioned to David once, as we walked along the Farmington River in Collinsville. “He sized up everyone he met, dead or alive, and tried to outbox them.”
“Really?” David seemed surprised. “To motivate himself?”
“Yes. But Amy thinks that this is a crazy attitude.”
“She is a wise woman. You would do well to stick with her.”
“That’s the plan,” I said. “That’s the plan.”
“Do you think that way?” He pointed to a large oak. “I mean, would you want to wrestle Ernest Hemingway?”
“I used to.” I followed the line of his arm to see a red-tailed hawk perched on a branch. “But not anymore.”
Minor league careers can live or die by book reviews, and I was shocked to find that reviewers and critics did always not read your work. If they had a grudge to settle or an ego trip that had nothing to do with you, you could sometimes dismiss it. “You’ve hit the big time now,” Jim Lampos told me when I asked what to do about a supposedly professional reviewer who slammed my book without reading beyond the introduction. “That’s the price of fame.” However, in this internet age even anonymous individuals could give you bad reviews, though often it was quite clear who they were, and even clearer that the book was not their real target. Bad reviews only really hurt if they were accurate, which seemed almost never. Instead, they annoyed you and awoke a sense of injustice, which was nearly as bad. You always had to be careful not to become a righteous victim. What you wished for as an author was a fair review, good or bad. Maybe the book was actually awful.
Another problem arose from the opposite situation – occasionally people liked your work so much that they passed it off as their own. An article by a major critic for the New York Times materialized two months after one of our books, detailing the exact argument Amy and I had made, but without any reference to our work. A popular television show on a major network did the same. Our friend, Chef Bun Lai, told us this was absurdly common in the food industry. “I’ve seen my recipes on a dozen New York restaurant menus,” he said with a good-natured laugh. “You just have to let it go.”
One year Amy and I found out that one of our history books had been pirated by an unknown company that used artificial intelligence to rework certain areas and republish it under various fake names and fake titles. When I asked around, I found out that others had also suffered this fate. Minor league authors were apparently the easiest to steal from. One friend had his magazine articles republished under someone else’s name willy-nilly on the internet. Worse, there was almost no legal recourse against this piracy of our words and ideas. Was this the future of authorhood? As anonymous content providers? Or would robots put us out of our jobs entirely?
Major leaguers have all these struggles to deal with, and more. But at least for them there is actual money at stake. Celebrity may suck, but it pays the bills. Or so I thought in those days, anyway. What good was my picture on the front page of Connecticut newspapers if only a couple dozen people bought my books each time? Why was I adding to my trouble for the little bit of pleasure and cash it gave?
Hate mail occasionally arrived, and I always respected if not liked those who at least signed their names. But other messages were unsigned, anonymous, cowardly. One postcard even arrived with typed paper pasted to it, like a ransom note. We weren’t popular enough to get death threats, I guess, so that was a plus. However, we knew plenty of others who did. Once, we were enjoying a nice Italian dinner with a major league author and scholar who we had invited to speak at the university. She appeared on cable television and talk radio frequently and spoke on divisive political topics.
“You must get a lot of hate mail,” I said.
“Oh yes,” she said after finishing a bite. “A lot of racist stuff, in particular, and other terrible threats. I try not to look at it.”
“I don’t know how you deal with it,” I said. “I get very anxious with far less hate than you probably get.”
“Oh, I think the anxiety of being in the public eye is unavoidable,” she said. “I try to focus on the final good, the cause.”
I thought about this. What was my cause? Literature? History? What was I doing that was so important? Did I have a purpose? I thought that perhaps it would become clearer as I sold more books, got more media attention, and found my audience. Likewise, as my minor league fame grew, I thought that the author events would gradually get bigger, with more and more fans showing up and more books being sold. That was not the case. One summer Amy and I stood on the stage at the Mohegan Sun Cabaret, presenting to a crowd of a hundred, complete with popstar headset microphones, a mixing board, and giant video screen. A month later we gave a presentation in the cramped cellar of a tiny library to four people, two of whom were my parents.
You could always count on an old man sleeping in a corner, a student taking notes for extra credit, a couple who thanks you profusely but does not buy a book. It could be demoralizing if you weren’t careful. There are days when you just want to give up, stop trying, sit back with a martini and let oblivion come. Seven years into our book tours, we gave what would be our last presentation on Literary Connecticut. We talked about the significance of stories, the connection of writing to place, and finally, the importance of supporting our own local writers. The twenty people attending seemed to love the lecture, asking numerous questions and applauding at the end. But no one supported the writers in front of them by buying a book. In a sandwich shop afterwards, eating a desultory lunch, we listened to Frank Sinatra’s voice filter through the sound system: “Here’s to the losers, bless ‘em all.”
That evening we drove to Collinsville and were greeted by David’s wide smile splitting his salty beard. Standing in his small, comfortable kitchen, I immediately began to complain about the fact that no one bought the books.
“That’s why I charge them up front.” He popped open a bottle of beer. “I may lose some opportunities that way, but our time is valuable. You are giving them knowledge. Did you get paid by the library?”
“Yes, a little.” I thought about it. “And I guess there was an article in the newspaper about it, so word about the book got out to people, even if those people didn’t come.”
“Well, there you go.”
“I know, but it is still depressing. Every time we fail like this…”
“Is it you that is failing?”
“It makes me feel like a hack.”
“Focus on the craft,” he told me. “The rewards will come, or they won’t. It is the work itself that matters.”
David’s wife Mary returned home from her work at the library, and the four of us shared a wonderful dinner, glasses of wine, and a vibrant conversation. That made for a good day, and Amy and I decided that, rather than freighting each presentation with expectation and ambition, we would simply make each an opportunity for exploration and for meeting friends. We might try a just-opened Korean restaurant or order fried oysters at an old favorite. We might buy tickets for a museum or a play, or we might call around to find friends who could meet us for drinks. Once, we arranged a reading to coincide with our publisher’s 34th birthday party.
Another way to cope was to have a few loyal fans. The antidote to fifty enemies is one friend, as Aristotle says. One librarian invited us for presentations at multiple libraries as her career bounced her around the state. A local pharmacy owner kept our books on a shelf for years, adding each new one as it came out, the only books in the store. One fan drove an hour to see us a second time, another followed us from venue to venue for different presentations and readings. These were the fans that made the work worth it, and gratitude fills my heart every time I think of them. For a minor league author, every loyal fan is important, in a way that they can never be for an international bestseller. We tried to spend time with each person who bought a book, to value their time in return for the value they placed on our words.
And of course, many of those fans were our fellow authors. One day near the end of the pandemic, we sat in David’s garden, red poppies and water iris in bloom, drinking together, eating from the same plates. It was a hot day but comfortable there in the shade of the trees with a north wind blowing. I asked about the strange green fire hydrant in his front yard, and he told us an intricate story about its origins and endurance. He talked about the long journey the water made from the reservoir and about winter days shoveling out the hydrant in case of possible fires. He talked about how unique it was, its long years of service, and its unheralded importance in the life of the small town.
Eventually the talk turned to literature, as it always did, and I mentioned that few had bought or reviewed my latest novel.
“The writing goes on. It matters to the writers and the people who read it,” said David. “I’m happy being a minor league author.”
He was right, as usual. Everything I had gained – the small shelf of books, the friends I had made – these were privileges, and I felt lucky to have any of it at all. Success is a privilege, and so is quitting. Who cared about joining the major leagues? After a couple years of isolation and video events, I just wanted to visit a library again, to sell a few hundred or a few thousand books, to sit across from my friends at a local brewery and discuss our latest projects. I no longer wanted to go to the show; I just wanted to keep playing for a few more seasons. Two-hundred-forty-seven home runs in the minor leagues might be a dubious honor. But it would be an honor nevertheless.
A few months later, Bethel’s tiny Byrd’s Books held one of its first post-pandemic live events, a Sunday poetry reading that included David and Amy, among many others. Amy was recovering from a bout of Covid, and David was suffering from terrible pain caused by his ever-present nerve injury, unable to stay in one position or sleep for more than thirty minutes at a time. His fifth spinal surgery was scheduled for that Friday.
From the podium in the little bookstore, owner Alice Hutchinson welcomed everyone and introduced each poet. Amy chose one poem from each of her six collections, her chestnut hair luminous in the afternoon light. David read from his forthcoming Homebound Publications collection, Blue Marble Gazetteer. His second poem included “salty” dialogue, and I worried for him and for all the poets and risk-takers of language in these times. And I worried about his surgery, though I tried to maintain a brave face whenever we locked eyes across the room.
After the reading, Mary, Amy, David, and I sat at outdoor tavern tables across the street from statues of Abraham Lincoln and P.T. Barnum, enjoying the cool spring air together. We sipped drinks and ordered food while David regaled us with tales of their recent adventures, including a funny story about a visit to the emergency room the previous Saturday night. When he disappeared into the restroom, Mary thanked us and told us that this was the most cheerful he had been in weeks. “He is in terrible pain.”
“Well, hopefully the surgery will work.”
When he returned, we talked about our plans for the future. “Thanks for your help with the chapters of the Great Mountain Forest book,” he told me, referring to his work-in-progress about this small area of Connecticut from ancient times to the present. “I made the changes you suggested.”
“It’s going to be good.”
He waved my compliment away. “I’m excited about the project. But now I’m getting into modern times, where the actual people I’m talking about, or their children, are still alive. It’s tough to know how to handle that.”
“You always want to be respectful of people.”
“But be honest.”
“I also have to be mindful of what I put my efforts into. If I choose this, I can’t do something else. It might take me two more years.” He shifted in his seat uncomfortably and stood up to lessen the pain. “But if I become the state poet laureate, then this will go on the back burner, and I will put my efforts into that.” He laughed. “That’s a big if.”
“I think you really have a good chance at that,” Amy told him.
“If not at the Nobel Prize,” I joked.
“Well, I’m not that interested in accolades, but you never know,” he chuckled. “They make some dynamite choices.”
Two weeks later at his memorial service on the Collinsville Green, hundreds of people gathered on the lawns of the 19th century houses and milled about the closed-off street: uniformed volunteer firefighters and black-clad beat poets, environmentalists and politicians, rabbis and librarians. I sat on the corner of his lawn by the fire hydrant with Amy and a few other minor league authors. Everyone faced a podium set up in front of a huge red fire truck and the white peak of the Congregational Church. The murmur of the crowd blended with the distant melody of the Farmington River, rushing through the valley below.
Swallows caught insects above the chimneys and a cat meowed somewhere in the gardens on the hill. Bright green trees and white puffy clouds seemed to refute the somber occasion as David’s family emerged from the house and a rabbi began the ceremony. Two Connecticut poet laureates stood up to read his work, and I realized that he would never reach that position now, his application sitting fallow in some bare office room. Speaker after speaker read eulogies, with descriptions like “Man of Letters” and “Renaissance Man” echoing again and again. Indeed, the echo of the man himself was in every word and in every face. I felt like I could turn around and see him puttering around in his beloved garden, but when I did glance over the fence, I saw only flowers.
The sun began to set through the maple trees, the hot day cooled, and the seemingly inevitable rain held off. Mary stood up to read a poem, somehow managing to repeat her husband’s pun about visiting ancient cemeteries during the pandemic lockdown, “where everyone was safely six feet distanced.” The bells of the Congregational Church pealed, and we walked away from the Green, heading to a tavern for a late dinner, to a night of conversation and laughter that resembled David’s own rough vision of paradise.
Well, Eric, I could hear him saying, it is the work itself that matters. Literature goes on, and our little streams flow into it. What is literature after all, but the work of thousands of ordinary writers reaching for extraordinary words? We are all minor league authors – I was going to say, “even the best of us.” But perhaps I should say, especially the best of us. Not because there is quality hidden in the bullrushes, but because literature –true literature, good literature– springs from hope.
BIO
Eric D. Lehman is the author of 22 books of fiction, travel, and history, including 9 Lupine Road, New England Nature, Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London, and Becoming Tom Thumb: Charles Stratton, P.T. Barnum, and the Dawn of American Celebrity, which won the Henry Russell Hitchcock Award from the Victorian Society of America and was chosen as one of the American Library Association’s outstanding university press books of the year. His novel 9 Lupine Road was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award, and my novella, Shadows of Paris, was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award, a silver medalist in the Foreword Review’s Independent Book Awards, and won the novella of the year from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
The poems in Lola Haskins’ newest collection, Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press 2023), are equally elegant and eloquent in their graceful blend of theme, imagery, and language. Elegant in their refined, fluent use of words and eloquent in their visions and messages, these are luminous poems. While some poems are nearly haiku-short, others contain many stanzas, yet all resonate with beguiling, stirring words from a poet with a close connection to the natural world and an intense perceptiveness. There’s a spiritual quality to many of the poems, even a metaphysical element to some as in “The Discovery” where “time is as / random as the patterns the sun makes on / any given day…” As Haskins travels between accessible and elusive, the personal and the observational, Homelight offers a stunning collection of well-crafted, evocative poems which flow with a natural rhythm.
Organized into seven named sections, these 63 poems are diverse in their topics. In part one, titled “On the Shoulders of Giants,” Haskins writes in the style of such renowned poets as William Blake, W. S. Merwin and Mary Oliver. In part two, “Wings,” she celebrates wild birds, often a topic of hers in prior collections. Other named sections include: “And They Are Gone,” “(In)humanity,” “Corona,” “The Slapped Girl,” and “Rehearsing.”
Haskins’ talent for the poetry of nature is well established with her prior books and her poems of the natural world stands out superbly in Homelights too. As a long-time environmentalist and outdoors enthusiast, she occasionally tilts these poems toward a world-weary awareness of what we are damaging and seeing slipping away. In “Dominion,” she questions when we will understand how “the tips of our fingers / are like yellow butterflies? Reach for them and they are gone.” In “Those Who Look Alike but Are Not,” she ends the poem with “They are not the ones destroying the world.” Yet, the poems usually lend themselves to hopefulness and celebration of what we still have as she finds a yin and yang equilibrium. For example, in “The Hundred and One Names of the Wind,” Haskins rejoices in the wind for “its voices / have taught us song, / and its swaying dance.” Yet, she also recognizes “for any day / of the world it may crush us under / our houses.” In the end, she wonders “be we wise or foolish do we / understand what we have done.”
Haskins’ vivid use of metaphors, simile, and precise, unique descriptions is so powerful that images lifted from the natural world become so much more—which of course is the alchemy in truly good poems. In “The Salt Marsh,” for example, “At dusk the water turns melted pearl” and in, “Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love,” readers find “The earth is a kind chair. When I have stopped breathing she will not tell me / I must get up.” In “At the Park,” robins “drab as dead leaves” nonetheless rise “like children swinging / lanterns, stars among the darkened trees.” And the bird in “The Woodpecker” will “hammer at the tree / like a resolute / toddler / pounding pegs.”
Among the nature and personal poems, a few are also topical. The pandemic appears in the section titled “Corona, 2019-2021” where in a poem entitled “Woods,” Haskins observes sharply that “Home and here are / the only places / I’m allowed / now the world is sick.” Yet, even in that narrowed space, she finds beauty—“A tiny violet moth / has fallen in love / with my socks.”
Other topical poems include “Aleppo,” where a Syria father “speaks of his six month old boy, born here / who has never seen the sky.” In “Bear,” referencing Ukraine, she writes:
If a group of bears attacks your village, lie still. If they are not fooled, fight back with everything they are trying to rip out. If this means you have to set fire to your country, do it.
The most deeply personal poems are those in “The Slapped Girl” and in “Rehearsing.” One of the poems in those sections is a bittersweet, haunting love poem entitled “Though We Can Never Be Together.” In only twelve sublime lines, the poem captures both a story and a feeling, beginning with this line: “I live with you / in the interstice between breath and breath / in the cool damp hollows tides leave in the sand” and ending with these words:
And I wear you the way a Sikh wears his cord under his clothes in token of the ineffable beauty of the world.
All in all, these are rich, layered poems of beauty and transcendence which once more establishes Lola Haskins as a poet worthy of her many accolades and worthy of reading, re-reading, and cherishing.
Lola Haskins’ poems have been broadcast over the BBC and her work has appeared in such prestigious publications as The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The New York Quarterly, Georgia Review, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and others. Her body of work also includes thirteen previous collections of poetry, a beginner’s guide to the poetry life, and a non-fiction book about Florida cemeteries. Twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, she has been honored with three book prizes, two NEA fellowships, four Florida Cultural Affairs fellowships, the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine award from Poetry Society of America, and many others.
Dominion
By Lola Haskins, from Homelights and used with permission
We name the birds and think those are their names but our throats are helpless when calling flights pass over and we can’t taste the earth that comes up with the worm in a robin’s beak nor in the worst moments of our lives can we approach the way an owl sobs.
We analyze the sky using charts one phenomenon at a time yet when light pierces the clouds like our visions of God we turn into open mouths and when that light enters us no matter how much we want to keep it because we do not have the tools we can never.
We wade through undergrowth whose leaves and sticks are our words for them but the nodules and stitchings on our ankles will always know more about plants than we do and we have no idea what to call the way trees dwarf us nor when we hold them how to interpret the patterns their barks leave on our cheeks.
We have stories but we cannot parse them so when we step on a seedling struggling through a crack we never think of Cain and Abel nor does the way water cascades towards us from high and ancient rock bring Rapunzel to mind nor when we look at the stars do we remember As it was in the beginning.
When will we understand that all our classifications are only attempted dust? That nothing pinned to a card is true? That sight and hearing and taste and our hearts and our brains and the tips of our fingers are like yellow butterflies? Reach for them and they are gone.
BIO
Claire Hamner Matturro has been a journalist, lawyer, organic blueberry farmer, and college instructor. She is the author of eight novels, including a series published by HarperCollins. Her poetry appears in Slant,Kissing Dynamite, New Verse News, One Art, MuddyRiver Poetry Review, Tiger Moth Review, Lascaux Review, and Glassworks. Her reviews of poetry appear in Southern Literary Review, where she’s an associate editor, and in Slant,Compulsive Reader, and Verse-Virtual.
Reading one hundred books in a year is probably not that unusual. And yet, when I mention it to friends or colleagues, they look surprised.
Why?
I could never do that.
Now you’re just showing off.
Well, contemporary wisdom (i.e. Instagram) states that your 30s are the time for unlearning all the conformity you learnt in your 20s and returning to the feral weirdo you were as a child.
If you asked me where I could be found between the ages of 4 and 10, the answer would probably be reading a book. Under my bed. Under a chair. Upside-down on the monkeybars – now there was a trick that required discipline.
As an only (lonely) child with a Montessori school background, I was used to entertaining myself. And what better adventures could I possibly experience than the ones flickering in my mind? Ghosts, dragons, elves, mysteries, children living off the land or surviving in the woods. Books were easier to operate than a VCR.
Then, I transitioned into an ordinary, American-style Elementary school with schedules and designated snack-time, and books in a completely separate wing of the building.
I discovered quickly that reading carried no social capital. No one cared that I could read. In fact, two teachers told me to slow down – and not make the other kids feel bad. My fifth grade teacher took Hatchet by Gary Paulsen out of my hands on the playground and demanded that I go engage with the other kids.
One year, I decided to read all the books nominated for a YA award. I was terrible at sports, but having a little reading goal set a thrill inside me. I was competing against myself. It was the ultimate game of solitaire. I wasn’t looking for praise or validation, but when I finished all thirty nominated books, I genuinely felt alone in accomplishment. I’m sure that people who collect belly button lint must feel the same way.
So my hobby, along with so many other childhood hobbies, dwindled. I only read books assigned by school or university courses. I would still buy books, ones I thought would look intellectual and interesting on my shelves, and never crack the spines. During one particularly stressful exam period, I just opened fiction books at random – the middle of the fucking book – and read until I fell asleep. I couldn’t commit.
In January 2020, I decided to cauterise my festering reading habits and engage in some serious exposure therapy: 20 books in 2020. Incredibly, I achieved this goal and it was due to two factors: a pandemic and moving to a country with free libraries. Like for most people, lockdown was confrontational about how I spend my time. What do you do with the hours you should be commuting, socialising – doing literally anything outside your apartment?
But the greatest gift I received was access to a public library. ‘You know these books are free, right?’ I want to shout as I grab library patrons by the lapels.
I have actually only bought one book this entire year.
It would be impossible for me to afford to purchase 100 books per year. Let alone house them, or reconcile the environmental impact. (Would I recycle them? Pass them on? Self-entomb using them as bricks?)
I have never been more aware that access to books is a privilege. Literacy itself is a privilege.
If you don’t have a library card, I strongly urge you to get one (even if you don’t think you’ll use it) just to bump up the recorded number of users. Local authorities are so quick to close libraries thinking it’s an easy way to save money. But we have a duty to keep them funded. Libraries provide free information for those who may not be able to afford access to books, audiobooks, or the internet.
Does borrowing from libraries still support authors? Absolutely. Publishers like to allege that library sales impede their profitability (which is convenient when publishers set prices and royalties). But libraries often pay two or three times the retail cost of a book, and have a demand to buy multiple copies if it’s popular. Some libraries even have a pay-per-use system where authors get royalties for every check-out. And who says you might not go and buy the book later if you really like it? Bookshops and libraries are not mutually exclusive ideas.
But enough about that.
After I managed to read 20 books in a year, of course I needed to up the ante. 40 books. Then 60 books. And then, here we are, 100 books.
The truth is that I could not have read so many books without the work of some truly extraordinary authors. Their words inspired me, delighted me, comforted me, and made me feel grateful to be alive.
My tastes may not be for everyone, but looking back over my 15 favourite reads (or re-reads) of 2023, I realise how haunted this list is.
Firstly, haunted locations – chilling places full of mysterious atmosphere, poignant memories, or inexplicable tragedies.
The Field by Robert Seethaler showed me the entire history of a small Austrian town, told by the residents of their local cemetery, with tender poetry akin to Spoon River Anthology. Then there are the desolate, apocalyptic landscapes. I starved and despaired with a man and his son in The Road by Cormac McCarthy and then I starved and despaired again with a group of forgotten women in I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. Books like these make us wonder: How could this happen? And then, worse, Could this happen to me? What would I do?
When I’m in a reading slump, I reread Shirely Jackson, inarguably one of the greatest writers in history (excuse me while I blow a kiss to her framed portrait on my desk). Dark Talesis a masterclass in horror short story writing. I re-read The Haunting of Hill House, which happens to be one of my favourite books ever. And then I had the privilege of reading this book’s modern reincarnation in Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt. A love letter to Jackson with all the horrifying fears that queer and trans people face on a daily basis.
Then there were the haunted spaces of transformation. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield brought me to tears with her superb writing, beautiful metaphors, and a love threatened by a supernatural transformation. Perfect for fans of The Southern Reach Trilogy or Love and Other Thought Experiments. Not all haunted spaces are inherently malevolent though, as can be seen in Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which is a truly joyful exploration of a surreal environment. Sister Maiden Monster by Lucy A Snyder made me mutter out loud, “fucking genius” several times. Zombies, octopodes, pandemics, cosmic beings, and queerness. What more could I want?
Secondly, there are haunted characters – people stalked by their past and difficult choices, unable to cope with their present surroundings. I adore these psychology-driven works, perhaps because they make the mess inside of my own head seem just as comprehensible.
You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian was un-put-downable. Wonderfully grotesque character examinations in a stellar collection of short stories. You would think she couldn’t outdo Cat Person, but she can. On a train journey, I listened to the audiobook version of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and heard the author himself narrate vignettes of intergenerational trauma, immigrant identities, and queer first love, as tears ran down my face under my N95 mask.
Mrs March by Virginia Feito has already received so much praise this year, there’s little I can add to it, except saying that it is worth the hype – like The Driver’s Seat meets Mrs. Dalloway. There’s nothing I love more than a messy, female protagonist. And I got her in spades with Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. A feral scream of female rage that I encourage all women to read – whether you have children or are childfree. I enjoyed seeing women blossoming in callous wildernesses. Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy gave me a haunted protagonist trying to save a dying species. The New Wilderness by Diane Cook is another favourite re-read, telling the complicated, resentful story of a mother and daughter surviving in a national park as part of a climate change experiment.
You may think that 15 treasured books out of 100 (15%) are low odds, and make the process hardly worth the outcome. But you would be wrong.
I wish everyone in the world were as privileged as me to be able to read 100 books. And experience 100 different lives in a year.
So if you want to twist my arm and ask me for some digestible pearls of wisdom – CL, how can I also read 100 books in a year? Here we go:
Get a library card.
If you want to buy a book, try to prioritise buying from independent shops or sellers that keep high streets alive and ensure that authors are paid fairly. Fun tip: treat it as a date location. Trust me on this. It’s better than a movie or a drink in a loud bar. Take your paramour or your spouse. Walk around the stacks and discuss the book-jackets. Then buy them a book.
Stop reading the books you think you should be reading. I will never read Jane Austen. I have never read Dickens. The phrase “but it’s won so many awards” will never entice me. Read what actually grabs you. What punches you in the gut. There are no guilty pleasures. If you only want to read vampire smut or nonfiction botanical encyclopaedias – that is fine. Anyone that judges your reading tastes clearly has to work on themselves, and learn how to say, ‘hmm, that’s not for me, but I’m glad you enjoy it.’
If you don’t know what you like: read widely. Try a new genre. You might find a new author that speaks to you. Experiment until you find “your thing”. I know so many people that thought they didn’t like reading until they found the right genre.
Join a bookgroup. Even a small one. Even a virtual one. It will give you the monthly consistency of reading at least one book.
There is nothing wrong with listening to audiobooksinstead of reading with your eyes.
Normalise talking about books. Ask your family and friends and colleagues what they’re reading. Ask them what they like about it.
Stuck in a reading rut? Re-read a book that you liked in the past. It will remind you what you’re looking for, and you might even read it with new eyes. To quote T.S. Eliot, we might “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
I am grateful that I have reignited my bibliophila and rediscovered an activity that I adored as a child. I know that I will continue devouring books for the rest of my life.
And what about 2024? Will I read 100 books again?
Maybe. We’ll see how it goes.
BIO
CL Glanzing is an international nomad, currently living in the UK. Her work has been published in Luna Station Quarterly, The Writing Disorder, The Quarterl(ly) Journal, Jet Fuel Review, Uncharted Magazine, Meniscus Literary Journal, Minds Shine Bright Anthology, and received nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She is currently pursuing her dream of living in a haunted lighthouse.
Most of my life, I’ve been unable to speak the language of Boys Like You.
Even now, I am limited to “I am lost,” “Where is the bathroom?” and “Please take me to the hospital.” Generally speaking, that’s enough to get around town.
I once crashed into walls so reliably, I was a hazard to my health. My mother was forced to institute an emergency alert system. Meandering the mall or chit-chatting with tenors after a choir concert, she had sonar for shining eyes. If I was actively being appreciated, she would exhale what I can only describe as a Scandinavian drawl: “yahh.”
I never believed her, not even when her hypotheses grew sinews and spoke. A week after a science-fair “yahh,” Jake the sophomore told me I was prettier than all three girls on Friends.
“See?” My mother was exultant.
But he never asked me out. He never asked me to dance. In fact, he said I looked like a “lunatic linguini bean” when I leapt and whirled to Mariah Carey in the strobe light. He ended up going out with Jenna, who was blonde.
I was too much for them, my mother said. “Wait until college.”
My English teacher took this further. “Do you see all the hangdogs around you?”
“No.”
“The kennel is open. But you have a forcefield.”
She was a fool. All my gates were open.
“You are wiser than you realize,” she insisted. “They are not ready for you. I don’t even foresee a boy rising above the buffoonery in college. Wait until grad school.”
I cursed her prophecy through college, where my only irrefutable admirer was a grizzly with a beard to his belly button. Isaac was my square-dance partner at orientation, and he circled me for four unsatisfying years.
“Why don’t you give him a chance?” my stepfather demanded.
“Because there are woodland creatures living in his facial hair.” I was, at least, honest. “Because he is semi-feral.”
“Because he’s too interested?”
My mother interjected. “She calls him ‘the hairy, scary guy.’”
“Because he’s too interested,” my stepfather confirmed. “I’m gonna start calling you Fox on the Run.”
“I’m no fox.”
Isaac drew me cartoons of men with hot dogs and hamburgers for hats, his mysterious specialty. He threw them under my dorm room door: “Salutations, my pixie! Library, 11am?” I piled them under my Post-its. Isaac found a film major named Hannah but still bowed at the waist every time he saw me.
Senior year, I waited for the train with a boy who always let me cut in line at the salad bar. He looked like the host of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and had the courage to wear Dick Tracy hats.
“I don’t think I’ve ever caught your name.” With NJ Transit only three minutes away, I could be brave.
He was pleased to answer. “I’m Michael.”
“Angela.”
He shook my hand. He told me he was born on Michaelmas. He described the asters in his mother’s garden, planted to celebrate his birth. He asked about my birthday.
“St. Patrick’s Day.”
“How fitting!” He clapped his long hands.
“How so?” Did he not know that I was the girl of no beers? I hid in the chapel on the campus the Princeton Review voted “most likely to ignore God on a regular basis.” I was the unofficial psychologist to the anthropology department. Did he have any idea how depressed those professors were after field work in Yemen and the Trobriand Islands? Did he not know that I could tell the difference between the scents of marijuana and Cinnabons? Did he not know that I had Type 1 diabetes? Also, I was a virgin.
Should he not be wearing a hazmat suit, or at least the lead vest from the dentist’s office?
He threw an asteroid. “It’s one of those holidays that exists to add color to our lives. You radiate joy.”
“What makes you say that?” I was not about to accept such a thesis without teeth.
“I don’t know. I mean, I do know.” He adjusted his fedora. “You are just this little orb of light everywhere I see you.”
“Radioactive.”
“If so, nuke it up, my lady.”
I felt lightheaded. “I think I want that on a bumper sticker.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
NJ Transit arrived. Michael sent me emails on Candlemas and Michaelmas. I never saw him on campus again.
“You should have been more responsive,” my stepfather chided.
“But I did respond.” I did. “I want them to pursue me.”
“I don’t think you know what you want, foxie.”
I wanted to go to seminary, where pastors-to-be would pursue me in the Presbyterian way, “decently and in order.” The first month into a Master of Divinity, liturgical hooligans proved we had not come far since high school.
The gentlest boy in Koine Greek cornered me in the mailroom to sing that numinous Top 40 hymn, “Hot in Hrrr.” He had sacralized the lyrics: “I am getting so hot/that I wanna take my robes off!”
I laughed, and I ran.
I chose to concentrate in Pastoral Counseling. The first day of The Minister and Mental Illness, Dr. Dykstra informed us, “conservatively, one third of you have some form of pathology at the diagnostic level. Statistically, at least one of you in this classroom is a predator.”
We would learn our Myers-Briggs types and the wrong reasons people skulk pulpits. We evaluated television preachers as charitably as possible, although we were unanimous that a man named Prophet Angelo Prosper was placed upon this earth exclusively for educational purposes. A boy named Mark rolled his eyes at me every Tuesday and Thursday at 10:40am.
One day he manifested behind me in the dining hall. “So, you think it’s me?”
“What?” I laughed for no reason.
“The predator. You think it’s gotta be me, don’t you?”
He had hair like overcooked ramen and something very John the Baptist behind his eyes. He wore T-shirts that said things like Save Darfur and Love is Love.
“Definitely,” I answered.
“What kind of music do you like?” This seemed an appropriate follow-up.
I answered without thinking. “Johnny Cash.”
“Aw yeah!”
“Willie Nelson. Emmylou. You know, country when it was still folk.”
“AW! YEAH!” Mark slammed down his tray. “That’s right!” He nodded for several seconds. “Wanna know which one you are?”
“What?”
“You’re not the predator. But I know what you are.”
“Please tell me.” This could be helpful information.
“You’re the one with the best posture in the whole wide world.” He nodded in rhythm with some inner music.
“I am?”
“You are.” He took a stance that I could only assume would merit my mother’s “yahh.” “Were you a ballerina?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You sit perfectly, so properly.” He extended his neck and crossed his eyes. “You learned that somewhere.”
I had wanted to be a ballerina so badly, I had put magazine pictures of pointe shoes in my parents’ lunch bags until they relented to lessons. I had lasted three months before the instructor, my body, and my ego agreed this was not meant to be.
“I took piano lessons.”
“That ain’t it.” Mark shook his head. John the Baptist kindled his eyes. “It must be the Hoooooooly Ghost.”
He went to his lunch table and never talked to me again. Maybe he was the predator.
“He wanted you to follow him,” my mother insisted.
“He put his entire heart on the tray,” my stepfather groaned.
“He didn’t ask me out!” I shouted so loud, a man in a fedora heard it all the way across the asteroid belt. A boy at a science fair dropped his “linguini beans.” All the woodland creatures crawled out of a distant beard and said “yahh!”
And I walked into the wall and knocked my glasses off. And I staggered into the bathroom. And I saw a tall girl in the mirror, blurry but alive. And I took my robe off.
And I decided to sign up for salsa lessons on the far side of town. I would not stop at the mall. I did not need anything there.
I packed my translation guide.
BIO
Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, The Penn Review, The Razor, and Still Point Arts Quarterly, among others. She is a Best Spiritual Literature nominee. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.
Two old ladies now, I met my brother’s future wife in the ’50s—let’s rock and roll!
And we did; within a year we both were married. Other life events jibed as well: becoming pregnant with our firsts, buying our homes, hers far more lavish in size and zip code than mine (my brother was a rousing success early on).
Though I did want nice things, I couldn’t see myself in her house, or the country club they’d joined—the lifestyle too la-de-da for my more earthbound tastes. Was I jealous? I didn’t want what she had, but I didn’t want her to have them either? Trying now to get a pulse on what I felt back then is taking some doing. But I’m working on it.
She had a standing Friday at a salon for a wash, set and blowout, mid-week for a recomb. Except for a cut every six weeks, I washed and rolled up my hair, slipped on my Lady Sunbeam bonnet (hose attached), hitched the portable motor around my waist, and vacuumed while my hair dried. With three children under five years, my main interest was getting out of my nightgown before my husband got home from work.
Her hobby was shopping; she had a stylish eye. I learned from her to be more selective in my choices and upped my wardrobe. I asked her once where she bought a certain dress, scurried over, and snapped it up in a different color. The sour look she gave my new frock said she was not flattered.
Years later, my children grown, I started an interior design business. After that, I decided I wanted a college education and got undergraduate and graduate degrees in English. She had a brief stint selling real estate, also enrolled in college but dropped out because my brother wanted to travel. Our goals and aspirations were very different. Instead of creating a yin/yang, a complementary balance between our personalities—me, outspoken and opinionated, she, thin-skinned, easily took offense—our different makeups widened our gap. To be blunt: we rubbed each other the wrong way.
If matters were tenuous between us, the shit hit the proverbial fan when my mother died.
Writing in earnest then, eager to capture the family dynamic, I put to paper my impressions of her shiva, the Jewish seven-day mourning period. I fictionalized my brother as a landscaper and his wife as an Israeli who couldn’t cook, when she was actually a pretty good cook. The piece was published. The description offended her. My family sensed the slap; our strained relations, a secret no longer.
Defending myself to myself, and to others: That’s what writers do; we make up things! But did I have to make up that thing? Was it the writer in me cracking wise, or was I taking a swipe at her? She swiped me but good. Dropped me like an e before ing. I was relation non grata for years.
During that time, I would meet my brother occasionally for lunch. I need to say here that we were not ever close.
Growing up I had never felt his big-brotherness, that under-his-wing mentoring often felt by younger siblings. The most we had in common was to eye-witness my father’s hot, unpredictable temper, most often aimed at him. Belittled and criticized at every turn—You’ll never amount to anything! shrieked my father—it’s amazing he turned out so well. I hurt for my brother then, but don’t think I ever told him. Would that have made us closer if I had?
At those infrequent lunches we did find things to talk about: our children, upcoming vacations—surface talk, information talk. The few times I brought up our father—real talk—I noticed he was overcome by an urge to visit the men’s room. I sensed his distress and went back to safer ground. At least we had contact; I was grateful for that.
Eventually, his wife thawed and, as with warring nations, we arrived at a detente. Still, keeping conversations between us light and agreeable was an effort; so much of her talk annoyed me that if I managed to keep my mouth shut—shooting from the lip was my default—I gave myself an A+ in self-control.
By then, I had more pressing things on my mind—a son stricken with ALS;a daughter with advanced breast cancer—than chasing someone who, at best, wanted nothing to do with me. Week by week, their conditions worsened. The realization that I would likely survive them was unbearable. I needed support, the listening ears and open hearts of those I loved. I needed my brother.
He would be there for me, he said. I could count on him, he said. “Anything, sis.”
Anything turned out to be a once-in-a-blue-moon call asking how my children were. For the most part, I took the initiative. I told myself, let it go. It’s not in him. He can’t do more. Accept it!
A stroke took my brother a few years ago.
At his grave, the rabbi told of his many contributions to yeshivas and other Jewish causes. My brother was a generous man, devoted to his faith. But what struck me were the beautiful tributes from his children and grandchildren. You could hear it in what they said—they had pet names for him—feel the emotion with which they spoke, how they clung to each other in their grief. Adored is the word I came away with. And he must have adored them, and cared and given fully to them. Apparently, he did “have it in him.” Perhaps when he packed up and left home—and our father’s constant put-downs—he made a clean break, and somehow broke with me as well.
Last year my daughter died of breast cancer. His wife came to the funeral, the shiva, but after that… months passed. How much time does it take to shoot a text or send an email—Thinking of you. How’re you doing? — if you can’t drag yourself to the phone for a proper call? And because I so much wanted her to reach out to me, I, like a schmo, texted her.
Ever hear the joke about the lady and the gorilla?
She’s on a trip to Africa and she gets lost in the jungle. No food, no shelter. A gorilla finds her and takes her into his lair. Ravages her for weeks on end. Finally, she’s rescued. Home, she tells her friends all about her ordeal.
“What about the gorilla?” they say.
“He doesn’t call … he doesn’t write…”
That’s her! Not a word, not a peep since my text a year ago and counting. Her husband’s gone; she wants me gone. So … why did I pursue her? Why am I still expecting/hoping for her call? Why, when I’m looking to keep stress and aggravation out of my life, do I want this woman back in? Maybe, I’m thinking now, it’s not her I want or ever wanted. Maybe it’s my brother I’m still looking for. My distant elusive brother. To be close to his presence, through her. The way I feel close to my son and my daughter now—their energy, the essence of who they were—when I’m with their spouses. As of a precious metal over a duller alloy, they give my life a little shine; a luster, otherwise lacking.
I will get no gold from her, but I’ll do without. I’ll believe that my brother did care for me; he just wasn’t able to show it. When I think of it that way, it gives me some peace.
BIO
Author of the novels Lily Steps Out and Feminine Products, and the short story collection Alterations, Rita Plush is the book reviewer for Fire Island News and teaches memoir at Queensborough Community College. Her stories and essays have been published in The Alaska Quarterly Review, MacGuffin, The Iconoclast, Art Times, The Sun, The Jewish Writing Project, The Jewish Literary Journal, Kveller, Jewish Week, Newtown Literary Review, Down in the Dirt, and Down in the Dirt Collected Stories, 2021, Potato Soup and The Best of Potato Soup, 2021. Flash Fiction Magazine, Broadkill Review, Backchannels, Persimmon Tree, LochRaven, Avalon Literary Review, Chicken Soup For The Soul, Sanctuary Magazine, Write City Magazine, Hadassah Magazine and Delmarva Review.
Power. Silencing. Child abuse. Tragically, these themes co-exist. When perpetrators steal their victims’ voices, they rob them of a precious gift—the ability to express and protect themselves. Yet not all victims remain silent. And when the one who speaks is a poet, adept at massaging words to circle difficult experiences, the effect can be profound.
In Tangled by Blood, Rebecca Evans exposes the reverberating nightmare of childhood sexual abuse that was etched into her body as a child—by parents who were supposed to protect her but violated her, instead. Silent no more, Evans uses her lyrical voice to reclaim her power by shouting, whispering, and singing her story. The arc of this memoir-in-verse progresses from childhood recollections to adolescent struggles to adult reckonings. Throughout, echoes of the narrator’s dysfunctional upbringing remain—in the form of disordered eating, suicidal ideations, domestic violence, and the shame, secrets, and lies that abuse often engenders. Yet through verse, Evans guides the reader through this difficult subject matter, building understanding and empathy by presenting poems and prose from different points of view and by using a variety of styles and forms to create a multi-faceted story of her experience living with this trauma.
A chorus of female voices (sister Tina, a young “Beckala”, the mother, and a wiser adult Rebecca) offers a glimpse into the narrator’s youth. The preface poem, “I wanted to be your womb,” written in the voice of Tina, introduces the theme of innocence poisoned by “Daddy’s” uninvited intrusions. The rest of the book is broken into three parts, which works well to separate childhood experiences from adult reflections and lingering pain.
Part I creates a mosaic of abuse—a stepfather sexually assaulting his young daughters as well as a biological mother who knows yet doesn’t intervene. In powerful lines that build between descriptive stanzas, the narrator condemns the complicit mother: “Mother…Mother was…Mother was worse…Mother was worse than…Mother was worse than Father.” In “Cremation” she reiterates this blame, yet also hints at the complexity of their relationship in a stanza containing the apt title for the memoir-in-verse:
…. If she asks my forgiveness, I’ll fail her, though we remain tangled by blood….
Poems written in the mother’s overbearing and dismissive voice further cement this image of a child alone and undefended against the force of an abusive stepfather.
The entirety of Part II is a six-part poem in Tina’s voice. In “I wanted to be your wall” Tina weaves the story of two sisters facing a cruel reality at the hands of a monster. Yet Tina also imparts a sweet song of sisterhood —a picture of what mothering should have looked like.
…. In our after time, I’d wrap you, Sweet Baby Sister, curve you in my arms, wait ‘til your heart slowed and your eyes slid low….
This loving voice provides a stark contrast to the mother’s condescension as well as a more appropriate role model for young Beckala that offers a glimmer of hope.
In part III we find the adult narrator grappling with life in the shadow of abuse. Having survived her traumatic childhood, Evans explores the persistent memories that she carries in her mind, soul, and body, even as she moves forward—tales of her own sons, spousal abuse, and finally an un-silencing.
In “Tombstone Roses,” the narrator uses the model of Norma Jean transforming into Marilyn to morph from child, Beckala, to adult Rebecca—renaming herself, owning herself.
…After I entered the military, I unnamed my- self, introduced Rebecca, no longer Becky—no
longer victim. Not as drastic as Norma Jean spinning into Marilyn, though I thought I could alchemy
into gold, story selected memories…
Yet the desired transition proves elusive, and Evans goes on to write of her own adult struggles in poems that are increasingly complex and metaphoric. In “Not the Land of Milk and Honey” Evans uses images from nature to reflect on her pain:
…And I wonder
if there’s ever a right time—for war or tears or feeding a hunger that’s selfish and red. Wonder if the tubular
felt raped and left for dead after her nectar-draining, like blood-drawn from empty veins…
In this and other poems, we see that the trauma is never truly left behind. Instead, it contorts in form from daily threat to haunting memory.
Despite the lingering anguish, Evans allows us to witness her extraordinary love—in the exquisite joy she feels in becoming a mother herself. We see her humility, strength, and humor in the checklist-formatted “The Non-Standard Parenting Plan for Turning Boys into Men,” including advice that is humble, “Say I’m sorry. Say it often,” profoundly true, “Tell them to value their own body and the bodies of others” and humorous, “Sing aloud in public when they misbehave. Get the lyrics wrong.” We journey alongside our narrator as she transitions into a conscientious caregiver (with a self-deprecating sense of humor) even as she continues to face adult struggles. And we cheer as she reclaims her power in “Yellow Declaration”:
…. Some say detasseling corn is like rape, savaging female stalk centers. But I, Rebecca, declare, don’t compare rape to anything but rape or yellow
to anything but yellow.
This truth-telling feels well-earned after so many years of silencing.
Throughout the memoir-in-verse, Rebecca Evans bravely condemns the abuse for what it was and attempts to break the cycle through her own fierce style of mothering. Although ripple effects linger, there is an increasing sense of, if not “healed,” at least healing. Overall, this lyrical memoir presents a personal journey through breathtaking imagery, word choice, and rhythm. It confronts pain, struggle, resentment, and ultimately, resilience with vulnerability and honesty. Its poetic styles immerse us into the mind and body of a survivor, a woman who has taken her trauma and turned it into art, so that her story is no longer shrouded in silence.
BIO
Lisa C. Peterson holds an MFA from UNR at Lake Tahoe as well as a BA and an MA from Stanford University. Her work has appeared in Hypertext Magazine, HeartWood Literary Magazine, Writer’s Foundry Review, Sport Literate, The Closed Eye Open, Sierra Nevada Review Blog, and elsewhere.
My fake ID said I was eighteen years old, and my name was Micaela. It was technically not a fake ID but a document I had found, and instead of returning it, I decided to use it as if it was my own. Micaela and I were similar, but it was pretty clear we were not the same person. For starters, I was fourteen at the time.
Not like the guards in the clubs cared. If the club was for 18+, you could expect to see only minors inside. Those who were eighteen or older went to clubs that were for 25+. The same happened with quinceañeras—you only went if you were under fifteen. Getting into places with a fake ID was especially easy for girls because girls attract boys, and boys usually pay, making it a win-win situation: we get in, and the clubs earn more money.
We liked to pretend we were older than we actually were. We wore high-waisted mini skirts way too tight with ugly crop tops that were barely enough to cover our developing bodies. We didn’t know that blending our foundation was a thing, so we walked proudly with our necks two skin tones lighter than our faces. We were lucky if we managed to do eyeliner properly without getting it in our eyes. After hours of preparation that concluded in liters of perfume and the smell of burnt hair, we were ready to go. Nothing could stop us; we were invincible. I felt invincible.
Until someone in the club touched me under my skirt.
More and more strange hands. Their skin against mine. Male bodies “dancing,” pressed against my own, offered me a couple of drinks to “let loose” and, just like that, to forget that even more hands were touching me under my clothes in that dirty, dark club.
The first time it happened, I was confused—maybe it was an accident? Yet another hand touched me, and another, and another. I tried to stop it, to call my friends, to find some help … yet when I saw my friends were also being touched and liked it, I felt ashamed. Not scared or angry—just ashamed.
Was this normal? Seeing everyone around me going through the same thing and not reacting at all made me hesitate as to whether to tell someone or do something. But it felt so wrong, and I was so uncomfortable. More and more drinks. More and more hands. Was I overreacting? I used to answer myself that yes, indeed, I was. I had to understand; that’s how it works––that’s the Latino culture. In fact, if you were lucky enough to be the target of teenage hands grabbing and caressing you, it meant you were attractive. So come on, be happy, smile, stop complaining! Enjoy the compliment and embrace your culture. Let them touch you; let them press their bodies against yours!
I saw my friends not only enjoying the harassment (as I call it now, but most definitely not how I called it then) but intentionally trying to get more of it. Noticing that only I felt uncomfortable with the situation, I thought, You are definitely the one in the wrong, Liz. I just trusted it was normal—because everyone acted as if it was.
When I look back, I always try to find a culprit, yet I always fail. It would have been easier if my parents had blamed my outfit or if my friends had explicitly said that getting touched was a compliment. I could then look back and say, “See? Look what they tell us when we are young. That’s why we acted as we did.” But the truth is, no one told us anything. That’s just not how it works—in Argentina, you learn on your own. You walk outside, and you follow the clear expectations that society places on you. You copy what others do, overhear conversations and take them personally, get punished or rewarded for your actions, and learn to survive in that savage jungle we call home.
When I was a child, during lunchtime, boys would be taught how to hammer while we were taught how to make pompoms out of wool. No one said it, but we learned that girls were weaker than boys. Boys wore pants and were allowed to wear shorts during Physical Education. We were absolutely banned from wearing shorts during P.E. but were expected to wear mandatory skirts every other day. No one said this explicitly, but we learned that girls should look attractive to look formal but never to be comfortable. In the clubs, girls don’t pay an entrance fee but are expected to express their sexuality and let strangers touch them. No one said so, but we learned that if no one touched us or pressed their bodies against us, it meant we were ugly and undesired. And all we wanted at fourteen was for someone to desire us.
***
“Liza, prendé el bajón,” my mom asked. Bajón, in English “anticlimax,” is how my mom referred to the evening news—a channel where journalists exploit the suffering of others and turn horrific news into morbid entertainment. That night was no different.
A woman is murdered every 30 hours in Argentina due to sexist violence. There have been 286 femicides so far this year, and today we…
My mom turned the TV off. She knew what had happened that afternoon and couldn’t bear to hear it again. Chiara Paez, who was only fourteen, had been brutally murdered by her boyfriend after finding out she was pregnant. Fourteen. Just like me at the time, which is why my mom didn’t want to keep on listening.
But Chiara’s death was impossible to ignore. Everywhere, public demonstrations and marches arose like flowers in the spring. Women were tired—fed up with the killings and the raping, and the terrible violence that came with the curse of being a woman in Latin America.
The TV stayed off for the remainder of the week in my house.
For the first time ever, Argentina experienced a social outbreak focused specifically on sexist violence. The use of the word “femicide,” a mix of female and homicide, grew stronger as a way of explaining the murders of women at the hands of a man solely due to misogyny. A whole concept that stressed the gravity of sexism in our cultural context where gender violence and discrimination were common currency. Chiara was the final straw—Argentina couldn’t remain silent. That little girl’s assassination gave life to the Ni Una Menos movement, a feminist group that shook the country, spread to the Latin continent, and later reached North America as Me Too.
Meanwhile, all I cared about was which club I would go to on the weekend. About to turn fifteen, I was oblivious to the reality outside my bubble. I still craved the attention of those men in the clubs. I wanted to oversexualize my body and pretend to be older. I wanted to walk alone at night and dreamed about running away. And it wasn’t just me. My friends, most people my age, condoned all of those actions. While marches and demonstrations fought for a feminist future in the streets, the internal speech had not changed as quickly.
Feminists said that women were getting raped, and that mustn’t happen. At the same time, teenagers learned that being touched without consent was a compliment. Feminists said that men were killing women, but meanwhile, we were expected to seek male validation at all costs. Feminists protested and fought against Chiara’s and every other girl’s assassination. Meanwhile, the media, run by men, portrayed feminists as exaggerated and aggressive individuals. No wonder I soon started saying that feminists were crazy and that I didn’t like their modus operandi.
“Mamá, look what they’ve done!” I would say, looking at whatever thing those crazy stupid women had done that time. Like a parrot, I repeated the media’s message that feminists wanted to combat violence with more violence, which was useless and inconvenient. “I would never be part of that.”
My poor mother—she never argued about it with me. Instead, she kept silently attending those marches, patiently waiting for me to grow and join her in the fight. She knew how hard it was to wake up to the fact that feminism was not the enemy but the ally while being fed misogynistic speech and growing up in a sexist environment.
Why would I even support a movement that failed to help me? I would have loved to have had such support that first night out when I was fourteen, on my first encounter with the Latino nightlife. And yet, I had learned to accept my culture and its ways. Or worse—I had learned to like it. Why wouldn’t they do the same? Why wouldn’t they just remain silent and accept the world as it was? Why did they have to go out and destroy the streets during pointless demonstrations to change something that would never change?
My father, just like me, believed what the media portrayed. Violent women destroy public squares, wreck national monuments, vandalize governmental buildings … If we dared to talk about it during dinner, my mom would stand strong with her arguments, and a peaceful meal would turn into a heated fight. The voice of the media was louder than my mom’s during those nights. Until one day, when we opened our eyes.
The femicides had risen from one woman every thirty hours to one woman every twenty-three. During a Ni Una Menos demonstration, a group of women covered their faces with bandanas and scarves and vandalized the Cabildo of Buenos Aires, a historic building once used as the seat of the town council during the colonial period. The graffiti filled the entire wall with the names of hundreds of women who had been murdered that year, among other common feminist phrases.
“Graffitis ruin the cabildo’s facade,” “Insurgent protesters vandalize historic buildings,” “Violent demonstrators cost the city 270k pesos…” The media went wild. The Cabildo, located in the main square of the country’s capital city, had been destroyed. A building with historical value was completely ruined by inconsiderate women who were not satisfied with being allowed to protest peacefully but had the need to use violence––thus harming the innocent Argentine people.
“270,000 pesos! And this is a public building, so we will be paying that with our taxes. Outrageous!” My dad, worried about our income, had completely missed the fact that an entire wall was covered with names of girls my age who had been brutally murdered. Still young and oblivious, I had also missed the point.
“Don’t you guys see?” my mom asked. “Neither money nor the cabildo is the problem here. You can repaint the wall. You cannot bring those girls back to life.”
Suddenly, it all made sense. I felt as if someone had cleaned my pair of glasses, and the world I once saw blurry was now well-defined and clear. It felt like when one increases the brightness on a computer screen.
Feminists were not the enemy—the media was.
***
All around me, women dressed in green and purple chanted feminist songs that made my skin instantly flare with goosebumps. Thousands of banners and signs plagued the street. My mom, next to me, joined the women in their scream, “Never again, ni una menos!” My heart was pumping, and I felt quite overwhelmed. It was 2016, and as I attended my first march, I felt a paradigm shift in my mind.
Another girl had been killed. It had been over a year, and the femicides were still rising. I used to think feminists were unnecessarily violent. But why wouldn’t they? (Why wouldn’t we?) More than a year of peaceful protests, and what was the result? Even more femicides. How were murders, rape, and discrimination accepted but protests frowned upon?
I looked at my mom, and she smiled. Her smile delivered a clear message: among all the chaos, right there and then, we were safe. Surrounded by signs with the faces of the deceased girls, marching next to the victims’ families, and protesting against the never-ending violence, we still felt safe. There was a feeling of empowerment and belonging that was hard to put into words. We were not just individuals fighting for a cause; we were a collective—a family.
That mix of empowerment and despair remains with me to this day. I have not stopped going to demonstrations, simply because the gender-based murders and discrimination haven’t stopped either. And while it will take time to eradicate the sexist dynamics that plague my country, I can proudly say that Argentinean women were the pioneers in a movement that spread quickly through The Americas, and that, hopefully, changed the paradigm of many others who, like me, didn’t even have the word feminism in their language.
BIO
Born and raised in Mendoza, Argentina, Liza Martin left home when she turned eighteen to study for an International Baccalaureate in Thailand through the United World College program. Completely alone on a foreign continent, writing became her refuge—her therapy. Once she graduated, Liza was accepted into The University of Oklahoma on a full scholarship, where she is currently studying English Literature with a minor in Professional Writing. Being the first in her family to complete her studies abroad and the first to speak a second language, Liza aspires to represent her roots in her field of work. She writes in Spanish and English to make her art and culture accessible to both languages.
While in denial about my bipolar disorder, I decided, maniacally, to drive from Los Angeles to San Antonio with three baby chickens in the back of my blue Chevy Cruze. I had agreed to adopt them before my then-girlfriend put me in the hospital, and my conviction was, when I emerged a week later no less manic and much more fearful, that I could not abandon my babies, no matter what happened.
At every gas station, every motel, everywhere I could, I would crack the back windows open so that I could show off my babies to passersby, ideally children whose mothers’ eyes would widen as they pointed out one, two, three of my darlings. Once, in the parking lot of a gas station, I fully opened the door to replace their water jug, and they escaped, running under a neighboring car. I enlisted a small family, apparently familiar with chickens, in wrangling them back to my passenger side, but the adolescent chicks refused to return to the blanketed backseat, their nest, where I had poured hemp bedding in the footwells. Eventually, I developed a technique with my walking stick, using a sweeping motion to scare them back into the familiar.
The most beautiful effect of mania, I found, is the certainty, how everything makes sense. Destiny is the day’s return each and every day, until you find yourself penniless on the side of the road. It took six weeks, my mind and the wheels of a rented Tesla running fatally fast–so fast I couldn’t remember all of it. I had abandoned the Chevy in Alhambra before taking the road north to Seattle, but I did not abandon the chickens. They lasted until the end of those weeks, in the middle of the desert in Apple Valley, probably eaten and enjoyed by coyotes.
I wailed, pleading with the gods I had espoused concurrently with the chickens. These gods were neutral clowns armed with cruel jokes, ever ready to bestow lessons harshly. I had allowed my babies their freedom from the car for just one day as I attempted to purvey my clairvoyance at a cannabis convention. They had never before roamed far from their assigned bush where I set their food and water jug. But the bush proved insufficient defense against the desert’s will.
Throughout my mania, I invested my faith into a single coin–heads yes, tails no–and braced myself for the truth: were they dead? Heads–yes. Still I pleaded. I could not have guessed that just a month into the future I would be pleading for my own life, at the mercy of my own hands, as I fought suicidal instincts. But I spent that day hiking over sandy hills blooming with tiny desert flowers, searching for signs of my chicken babies and not finding even one feather.
I called the woman from La Quinta who had babysat my chickens one afternoon as I stewed in the hot tub. She had gushed about my chickens as much as I did, once a chicken mother herself. They were adorable. She assured me that coyotes would have left a mess. “Someone must have taken them,” she reassured me. “There’s no need to cry. Someone must have picked them up.”
Now when I hear the word “desert,” my heart shrinks. I think of the road, the strangers I grew attached to in my loneliness, the wild bravery desiccated and replaced by shame. A world without destiny, without a holy mandate to keep my babies alive and well, leaves me shaken with confusion over those cruel gods, now fully abandoned. How can chemicals in the brain so thoroughly change the material of your soul? I marvel at the life I led before the mania, before the chickens, when our shared reality held enough weight, enough purpose, to keep me moving through my days without hitting 106 miles per hour.
BIO
Maza Guzmán is a non-binary, multi-genre artist and writer currently living in the Chicago area while aspiring to return to Los Angeles. In 2020, they were featured in the documentary film The Art of Protest. In 2021, one of their needle-felted originals played a role in an award-winning stop-motion short. They’re currently working on a surrealist memoir, finding inspiration in space, science, queerness, and the bittersweet. They studied creative nonfiction writing at Northwestern University. This is their first publication.
I was coming out of my near-death experience in the Cardia Intensive Care Unit at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Atlanta, and was feeling thirsty. Slowly, I opened my eyes completely and saw a nurse. I signaled to her to get me some water.
I looked around and saw my wife, Lakshmi.
“Hi, I am back,” I said.
She smiled and held my hand.
The nurse came back with a cup full of ice and gave me one ice cube. “This ice needs to last for an hour. You cannot drink water yet. Savor this.” I held it in my tongue and relished the feel of the ice. I twisted the ice with my tongue and savored it.
In another fifteen minutes, I wanted another cube of ice, but the nurse refused to give me one. She said, “wait an hour.”
I had taken the availability of water for granted and this incident made me reminisce about the role of water in my life from childhood to my senior years. When I performed research, I was surprised to find that currently one third of the world’s population doesn’t have access to potable water. What can we do to alleviate the suffering of these people?
Childhood
Where I grew up in rural South India, I lived in an arid climate: water was scarce, the rivers near homes were barren, and the riverbeds were filled with sand rather than water. There were no town-wide water supply or sewage removal operations. We lived in towns that were at least a hundred miles away from a nearby beach. I rarely saw any large bodies of water.
I remember a house where my mom had to keep all the food items in a cabinet that rested on four stone furniture cups. The cups were circular where the edges and the middle portions were at a height and a depression was formed between them. Water could be poured into the cup so that ants cannot get into the cabinet. At that time, milk was procured from local herdsman who will deliver fresh milk to home. My mom used to keep it in a dish and cover it with a lid. If we forgot to put the water into the cups, we will see ants floating on top of the milk in the dish. Frequently, my mom would curse since ants would have creeped in when the water dried up; she had to take out the floating ants and use the milk.
In the house, we drew water from a well using pulleys, rope, and a bucket. We used that water for both drinking and bathing. We used to drink water drawn from the wells assuming that it was drinkable. Little did we know that it might have been the reason for many of the diseases in our household.
During summer months, the water in the well would recede and we had to toil to get a bucket of water. In the monsoon months, the water would be near the top and we could easily draw the water. There were some years when monsoon failed leading to scarcity of water. Then, the well-diggers were in full demand, whose job was to deepen the wells further and find new sources of water.
The toilets were outhouses, which had cement platforms on all three sides about a foot from the floor. Typically, they were about 10 feet away at the back of the house. They didn’t have roofs but had a wooden door. Family members squatted on the platform and used a mug full of water to clean themselves. The waste stayed exposed to nature for a day or two until the restroom cleaner, typically someone from a lower caste, came with a basket to collect the waste and wash the outhouse, though they were never truly clean. The sun would dry the waste and it was difficult to clean it given that the cleaner only used a bucket or two of water. Given the stink, we would hurriedly perform our ablutions and come out from there.
When we traveled, roadside toilets were hard to find, and my mom had to hide behind bushes to urinate. Men urinated openly in India anywhere they wished. Feces from children and adults were left in the open, drawing mosquitoes and flies who pecked at them and spreading diseases among the people. It was a disgusting sight; we had to be careful in walking so that we did not accidently step on one.
We typically took a bath next to the well. We stripped to our undergarments and then drew water from the well and poured it on ourselves. Depending on the season and the depth at which the water was at the well, our baths might be very short. We used very thin towels to dry ourselves since the sun would do an excellent job of drying us quickly. Given the lack of water, very few people in the town knew swimming.
During the summer months, it would be so hot (possibly in the 100 degrees F) range, that we had to take a bath twice a day. The water level in the wells would be at a low point and we had to exert to pull the water out. As a young boy, I did not mind getting drenched in the rain as it was easier than drawing water from the well. My parents used to fuss about it, but it was a lot of fun for us youngsters.
When ladies or girls took baths near the well, they tied their pavadai (an undergarment like a skirt) to cover their breasts and took baths from the wells. Boys and men generally did not go to the back of the house when the ladies were taking a bath.
The clothes were washed next to the well. There was a washing stone that was kept nearby. This was just a large block of stone with a small slope so that we could squeeze and clean the clothes. We would draw a bucket of water, drop our clothes in the bucket, put some soap, squeeze, and clean the clothes using the stone, and then rinse them in the bucket of water. After that, we would hang the clothes on a clothesline that was a constant presence in our backyard. The clothes would dry in a couple of hours given the intensity of the sun. We had trouble cleaning our clothes only during the monsoon months when we had to dry them inside the house on clotheslines.
When I was about twelve, I visited our relatives in Chennai, I was fascinated to see the indoor plumbing. The the toilets were enclosed rooms where water came out of a pipe. These were Indian-style toilets where there was cement structure, and the toilet was integrated into the ground. We had to squat down on the toilet and then use water to flush the waste away inside the hole. The waste was collected in a tank that was at the front of the house. Sewage trucks would come once a month and pumps to remove the waste away from these tanks.
There were bathrooms where water would come out of taps and buckets would be placed under them. The buckets would have mugs that would hang on the side. People would have to strip to my undergarments and then use the mug to pour water on oneself. Typically, one stops a bath after using a bucket or two of water. There were no showerheads in these bathrooms.
Chennai is situated on the shores of the Bay of Bengal, a large body of water. In the evenings, I used to walk from my relative’s house to the Marina beach (about three miles away) and sit there for a period gazing at the unlimited expanse of water before my eyes. I wasn’t’ able to believe such a large expanse of water could be adjoining a large city. It was fun watching the waves and I used to wade into the water in my shorts. People wore modest clothes and you may see ladies standing in knee deep water with their saris pulled up.
The Bay of Bengal was ferocious, and it was not possible to wade much further than a few feet. But the beach was long and well kept. There would be many vendors that would sell their products and the crowd was intense. The noise from the vendors hawking the products would compete with the sound from the waves; the smell of deep fried pakodas and bondas would mix with the smell of fish; ships would be anchored a few miles away from the beach leading me to imagine the life of the sailors. I would walk barefoot on the sand enjoying the feeling of sand getting into my toes.
Adulthood
I joined my undergraduate college, Regional Engineering College, Trichy, when I was fifteen years old. Trichy was a large town that was served by the rivers Cauvery and Kollidam. The Kollidam river splits from the main branch of Cauvery River at the island of Srirangam and flows eastward into the Bay of Bengal. Even though the bridge to cross the river to get to Srirangam from Trichy would be long, the riverbed was mostly dry, and we could see sand everywhere. Only during monsoon season, the river will be flowing fully. People would dig the sand to get to the water. The municipality pumped water out of the river and supplied water to households in the city.
My college was located about ten miles away from the city in a rural area. It was a large campus. When I joined, it was three years old, and had an administrative building, a few departmental buildings, and a few hostels (dorms) to accommodate the students. The mess (cafeteria) for food was a separate structure. The staff and faculty members lived in residential units that were constructed inside the campus.
There was a large water tank where water from the underground (borewells) was pumped into and supplied the water to everybody on the campus. We had indoor plumbing and water was available in plenty. There was no filtration plant, and we drank water from the taps. There was no facility for obtaining hot water in the bathrooms. Since the temperature was mild even during winters, this did not pose any serious problems for us.
Some of my friends from North India who were used to getting hot water used to buy and hang a portable water coil to the side of the bucket and heat the water by plugging it in into a wall outlet. Even though this was a quick means to obtain hot water, frequently, we would get electric shocks if we touched the water or the coil without unplugging it.
I saw large bodies of water when I traveled to Kolkata to pursue my MBA from the Indian Institute of Management during 1971. This was the first time I had traveled out of my state to another state that was about 1,000 miles away. When I got on the train that would take me to Kolkata in two days, I bought a mud pot and filled it with water from the train station at Chennai. This kept the water cool during the hard and dusty two-day journey by train. The compartments were not air conditioned and the windows were kept open to facilitate air flow. We would feel the hot air coursing through the compartment during the daytime; it would cool down during the nighttime when we slept on the berths that were allotted to us. The water from the mud pot would condense and create a puddle on the floor of the compartment. Most people did not mind it since it cooled their feet in the hot weather.
Water was available in plenty at the dorms at my Institute. Unfortunately, the pipes had rusted, and we used to get red colored water spewing out of the showerheads. The concept of filtering water to drink was not common knowledge at that time. Therefore, frequently, we used to get stomach upsets from drinking the polluted water.
I saw the Hooghly River frequently since I crossed it either using a bridge or a boat from 1973 to 1977. I lived in South Kolkata and worked in a factory at Howrah on the other side of the Hooghly River. I had to take a bus from South Kolkata to the Howrah train station and then a local bus to the factory. Given the large population, all these buses were crowded, and one had to stand all the way. In the evenings, I took a bus from the factory to the riverfront, took a ferry, crossed the river, and took another bus from the Kolkata side to my home. Due to the humid and hot weather, most of the passengers would be smelling of sweat in the overcrowded buses.
I enrolled in a swim club in the Dhakuria lake, near where I lived in South Kolkata. It was a crowded pool and the instructor discouraged me from swimming since he felt I could not swim. That ended my swimming lessons in India.
Many parts of South Kolkata were below sea level and would get flooded during rainy seasons. The water would accumulate up to one’s knee level; I had to take my shoes in hand, roll up the pants, and cross this to get to my home. At other times, I used to hire hand rickshaws (small carts pulled by humans) who took me to the doorsteps. The rickshwallah (the person who pulled the cart) wore a dhoti folded up, ran bare feet, and were willing to cross the flooded streets for a few Rupees (local currency).
The Executive Director of the municipality visited our institute and talked to us about the difficulties in pumping water out of low-lying zones to the river. He also mentioned about the issues that arise when drinking water and sewage combine creating difficulties for the residents.
Hooghly river was a large body of water and the Howrah bridge to cross it was famous for its length and architecture. Ships used to sail under the bridge, and I used to wonder at this technological marvel. The water was used for all sort of purposes; drinking, cleaning, factories, etc., and was very polluted. When I walked near a ghat (and Kolkata had many of them where people could access the river using a series of steps), I saw people bathing in the river, cleaning their clothes, priests performing rituals, ladies putting flower garlands to worship the river, people fishing, and children loitering around the steps. The steps were not clean, and I had to be careful not to slip and fall into the river. The river itself was quite deep as Kolkata was a natural harbor. The rotting fish and floating flowers would combine to create a unique smell.
Lakshmi, my fiancé, was born and brought up in Kolkata. She used to have severe stomach pains due to drinking untreated water during her youth. But she did not realize the problem until much later in life. We married in March 1977, and I prepared for my travel to the USA in August to attend the University of Pennsylvania to obtain a Ph.D.
Studies and Career in the USA
Life at Philadelphia during the first five years was difficult since we lived on a student stipend and had no ability to bring any of the funds in India to the USA due to Indian government regulations. Our difficulties did not seem arduous due to the friendliness exhibited by my host family, relationships formed with other Indian friends, amazing mentorship by my advisor McDonough, and love from our family.
The Delaware and Schuylkill rivers encircled the city, and the fact that they never went dry fascinated me. This contrasted with many rivers in South India that were dry and became full only during monsoon season. We used to go on walks on the shores of the Delaware river and used to cross Schuylkill River to get into the downtown area.
Our old studio apartment had hot and cold water and the heating system was run using radiators that circulated hot water. The sewage system was connected to the city’s network. When we had an opportunity to travel to Manhattan, New York, I wondered at the ingenuity that led to constructing tunnels (such as Holland and Lincoln tunnels) under the rivers to access the island city.
The University of Pennsylvania had excellent gyms and they had two pools. I learned swimming in those pools by myself. Later, I took swimming classes in local pools when we lived in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
We moved to Matawan and Ocean Township in New Jersey from 1985 to 1989 when I worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories and Lakshmi worked for a private school. Lakshmi’s school was right on the boardwalk of the Atlantic Ocean. There were many rivers and lakes in the state, and it led to dense forests and green landscapes. There were many beaches near us, and we used to go for walks on the boardwalks occasionally. The Island Beach state park was about 30 minutes from our home, and we visited it during the summer months.
My friends from Philadelphia would visit us and we would end up going to this state park. I had to drive through many towns in New Jersey to access this beach and then cross a bridge across the bay to reach the island. As I drove through the towns, I saw houses that were built on the backwaters. Boats were docked on these narrow waterways, and I saw people navigate their boats through the rivers into the Atlantic Ocean.
The water would remain cold most of the year and we would waddle in and get out quickly to avoid the cold. Most of the people would be sunbathing and few would get into the water. It would be very hot for a few weeks and we all would rush to the beach. I have some amazing photos of our children waddling on the beach holding onto our and our friend’s hands. My love for water grew out of these activities.
We also visited the Sandy Hook beach that was north of us. Unfortunately, the water was not that clean in that beach. Once, we stopped in a beach in that area and saw rotten fish and animals washed ashore due to the pollution and environmental damage from the heavily populated North New Jersey and New York city. As we drove near Staten Island, the stink from the accumulated garbage dumps in that area would assail us and we had to close the windows of the cars. It was alleviated by the beautiful scenery that greeted me as we went through the tall Verrazano- Narrows bridge and saw the vast expanse of water on both sides.
We moved to Auburn, Alabama, during 1989 to start my academic job at Auburn University. During meetings with some of the senior faculty members, they mentioned that they had properties at Lake Martin, a lake about 30 miles away. They talked about the 750 miles of shoreline and the beauty of the land.
That piqued my curiosity and I eagerly accepted when one of them invited me to their lake home. I appreciated the serenity of that lake and the blue waters.
My two children and we explored that area further and camped at the Wind Creek State Park situated on this lake one summer and enjoyed the views. The campsites provided water and electricity. I had bought a tent, a dining tent, and sleeping bags for my family. It took some effort, but we were able to pitch the tent for all of us. The bathrooms and toilets were in a common area near the campsite. We enjoyed our stay there and Lakshmi cooked meals on a propane stove top. We played in the water, went for strolls in the trails, and befriended people who were nearby. After a few days’ stay, we packed our tents and returned home.
We felt comfortable with the people who lived near Lake Martin and started to look for properties to buy on the lakefront. Eventually, we bought a 3 bedroom, 2 bath cabin that needed repairs. The neighbors were retired people who were living full-time on the water. My son, Shiv, and I rented pontoon boats and jet skis from a nearby marina and explored the lake. We had a physical map of the lake and had no cell phones with GPS functionality. We had to navigate the different inlets, remember where we were, figure out how to come back if we were lost, and identify where our cabin was in the lake. There were many occasions when we would think we were approaching our house to find out that we were on the wrong inlet and had to retrace our way back to the main channel.
It provided a great bonding time for our family. My brothers and their families from the Northeast visited us occasionally and we took them around the lake. Many rich people who lived in Birmingham, AL, had estates at the lake and we used to gawk at them from the water. There were a few houses which were built on islands and that aroused our curiosity as to how those people lived there.
This was an artificial lake, in fact a reservoir, when Southern Company built a dam to produce electricity during the early 1900s. The level of the lake dropped by about 10 feet during winters and the lagoon where our cabin was had no water access during those months. Some of my colleagues had their homes in the deeper parts of the lake and we used to enjoy our visits with them.
Auburn University had an excellent swim team and had an Olympic size pool. I further refined my swimming in these pools and received training from outstanding coaches. Our children also learned swimming in these pools during the summer breaks.
Exploring Lakes in Georgia
During 2003, Lakshmi changed her to job to work in LaGrange, Georgia, adjoining the State of Alabama. We bought a house there so that she would be able to commute to her work and I can continue to work at Auburn, a 45-minute drive.
I wanted to learn more about operating boats and noticed that there was an organization called Coast Guard Auxiliary that offered training and camaraderie. I joined a local unit that operated out of West Point Lake, Georgia, and worked with experienced boaters. When I attended the first meeting, the other members were receptive and encouraged me to stay in the organization, even though I was the only brown person amidst the whites. Being a small group, it was easier for me to fit in and be accepted by others.
Being an auxiliarist meant that the Coast Guard might ask us to serve in case of emergencies in Coast Guard cutters; they also had the authority to deploy the boats belonging to the members for Coast Guard activities if need be. The Coast Guard was generally deployed in the coastal regions and there were no units other than local law enforcement officers responsible for keeping the lakes safe and navigable. The auxiliarists played an important role in helping the law enforcement and the Coast Guard in protecting the lakes and waterways in the country.
The flotilla commander invited me to join in a patrol in West Point Lake. I found that four of them had already launched the 26-foot Sea Ray Sun Dancer boat in the water. Gingerly, I walked on the deck and got into the boat. We spent about four hours in the water going from the dam to the Highland Marina. I understood the basics of the red and green buoys (“red, right, returning”) that mark the waterway. That lake with 525 miles of shoreline was managed by the US Corps of Engineers, and I did not see any houses next to the waterway. On enquiry, I found that it was to protect the houses from getting flooded and to preserve the natural beauty of the lake. We helped the park rangers by assisting any stranded boaters and teaching boating safety classes. I enjoyed the companionship of the members and joined them in many other patrols of the lake and taught boating safety classes.
In due course of time, after mastering the basics of boating, I qualified as a crew. That meant that I could assist the boat’s coxswain (a sailor who has charge of a boat and its crew and who usually steers) during patrols.
Steering a boat was relatively easy since it was like driving a car and there was a lot more leeway available in water compared to road when navigating the boat. The difficulty was in docking the boat; there was no brake on the boat, and one must gently ease the boat to the dock and angle it so that the crew could tie the boat to the cleats on the dock. We went on patrol for several nights to check whether the lights on the buoys were working or not and report it to the Corps. The Coast Guard reimbursed the coxswain for using his/her boat for official patrols and we had to learn to use the complex computer systems to request patrol orders and report completion of the patrols.
The flotilla conducted regular training on teamwork, navigation concepts, and reading maps (charts). We were also trained in how to perform search patterns and conduct rescue missions.
I became enthusiastic about buying a boat and requested Lakshmi to accompany me to the 2005 Birmingham Boat Show. We saw a beautiful yellow pontoon boat and bought it on the spot. I did not have a truck or a trailer and requested the dealer to deliver the boat to my lake cabin. He obliged me and sent a person to deliver the boat and train me in the basics of driving that boat. Wow, now we had a large 22-foot boat docked in our cabin with a trailer sitting in our yard.
It took several months for me to operate and use the pontoon boat effectively. In the meanwhile, winter approached and the water level in the lake receded. I was able to get a local marina to put my boat on the trailer, service it, and leave it at my cabin. I needed to learn how to tow the boat and therefore, I bought a Toyota Tacoma, a mid-size pickup truck.
I had to latch the trailer to the truck and drive in empty parking lots and learn the backing maneuver. I did not have a rearview camera in the truck and had to figure out how to back up the trailer in a straight line down a boat ramp. This is more of an art than science and my colleagues at the flotilla taught me some of the finer points in backing the trailer. The major issue is that one must rotate the steering wheel in the opposite direction of the backing maneuver; the angle of rotation determines how the trailer moves.
I went to the marinas to launch the boat at times where there were not many other boats so that I could take my time to do so. Even then, it was difficult to figure out exactly how much distance one must go in the water before you release the boat. Even now I admire those truck drivers who back up their vehicles up to loading ramps without breaking a sweat.
As I gathered confidence and experience in handling the boat, I trained to become a coxswain in my flotilla. A major task for this qualification was to perform stern tow and side tow. A stern tow meant that you tie the other boat to your stern using a line and tow it. The crew must listen to the appropriate instructions and ensure that the line does not get entangled in the propeller. A side tow required both the boats to be tied together on the side using four different lines. There was a sequence as to how to tie these lines and any error made it difficult to tow the other boat. We had to train together many times to master these techniques. When two boats are of uneven heights, this becomes a tricky maneuver. It is also possible to damage the side of the boats during the tow; one had to be careful to deploy the bumpers so that the damage is minimized.
Having mastered these techniques, I applied to be a coxswain. An experienced member of the auxiliary tested me, and I passed the requirements and was qualified as a coxswain. That provided me an opportunity to use my boat for patrols.
We were now living in LaGrange, GA, and having a boat at Lake Martin, about 70 miles away in a cabin, did not make much sense. Therefore, we sold our Lake Martin home and brought the boat back to LaGrange. Our homeowner’s association objected to us parking the boat in our driveway as it went against the covenants. I parked it at a local campsite and started looking for alternatives.
Lakshmi had a colleague living in Lake Harding, Alabama, about 30 miles away from LaGrange. We visited this area and found that this lake was managed by Georgia Power Company and most of the homes were leased from the power company for 15 years extendable to 30 years. After a six-month search, we bought a 4,200 sq ft house on the lakefront and obtained the lease from Georgia Power in 2007. It had a boat house, and I was able to dock the boat there. The Lake Martin cabin was no longer needed, and we sold it in 2008.
We decided to remodel our master bathroom on the second floor since the current one was small. We chose a closet and requested a contractor to create a bathroom there. He inspected the house and told us that the house was on a downward sloping hill and the current bathroom was at the highest point. Therefore, sewage easily flowed into the septic tank. If we wanted to move the bathroom to the larger closet further away from the front, sewage must move upstream and would need a pump. We agreed to the idea, and he put in a sewage pump next to the closet. Unfortunately, the pump leaked and failed often leading to water leaks and damage to the ceiling downstairs. The stink was unbearable whenever it broke. The water would leak through the floor and the drywall in the room below would collapse. We had to repair the pumping unit and ceiling multiple times.
After repeated repairs, we got frustrated and complained to the plumber. He said the only option is to move the pump outside the house, bury it, and run pipes to it so that the sewage would flow into the septic tank. We agreed and after an expensive repair and three days of work, the bathroom was usable. I learned a valuable lesson; it is difficult to fight nature and pump water upstream. Any failure of the pump leads to flooding.
This is a common problem in many cities around the world who are located at or below sea level. Any tornado, hurricane, or heavy rain floods the streets and causes considerable damage to property. Although pumps are deployed, they frequently don’t cope with torrential rains leading to severe flooding of homes and businesses.
As a coxswain, I used my boat to patrol both West Point Lake and Lake Harding along with my fellow auxiliarists. There were only a few boaters on these lakes most of the time; it got crowded during the holiday weekends, particularly during summer. I had an opportunity to witness and help with the July 4th fireworks on both lakes on multiple occasions. The major issue during these joyous weekends was boaters leaving their deck lights on during the nighttime thereby blinding the other boaters. We had to warn them to turn off these lights and use the navigation lights. In addition, the use of PFDs (personal flotation device, life preservers) was lax, and we had to ensure that those who rode the Jet Skis used them all the time.
I discovered that PFDs save lives; once you have it and are in the water, you stay afloat whatever happens. It is not possible to sink; therefore, there is no need to panic until help comes. Once, some of my relatives were visiting and we went on a ride around the lake in our pontoon boat. We had a jet ski and one of my brothers donned the PFD and tried to climb into the jet ski from the boat but fell in the water. He was scared and started shouting. Some of my relatives were ready to jump into the water to save him; I had to restrain them and tell them to desist.
We attached a rope to a float and threw it to him and asked him to hold it so that we could pull him into the boat. He was scared and started to put the rope around his neck. I had to tell him that nothing would happen to him as far as he had worn the PFD; he could not sink and therefore, there was no need for panic. In a few minutes, he calmed down, and we pulled him into the boat. Subsequently, he went on the jet ski and enjoyed that experience.
The best way to save a person stranded in water is to throw a float at them, ask them to hold it, and pull them in using the line. Jumping into the lake to save them might not be an appropriate strategy. People who assume they are drowning might use their adrenalin rush to pull any rescuer who jumps in down under the water; that is why it was recommended that we throw a float to them, they grab it, realize that they are not drowning, become normal, and then pull them into the boat.
Since these were artificial lakes that were created by releasing water and drowning the then existing buildings and roads, it was difficult to know where the water would be shallow or deep. It was important to have a good depth gauge and ensure that we stayed afloat and did not run aground.
Occasionally, we ran aground. Then, I had to lift the propeller up, push the boat away from the shallow portion using a paddle, and then get the boat away from that area. The boating community was friendly and respectful towards us even though we were one of the few minorities on the lake. I gained a lot of confidence in handling boats by belonging to the auxiliary.
During our patrols, my fellow auxiliarists and I noticed sewage from plants occasionally fed into lakes, leading to major pollution problems. This is a major problem in many states if it is not regulated by the local government. In 1990, I visited a steel plant to learn how to purify polluted water in Birmingham, Alabama. A lot of water was used to cool the hot metal during the forging process, and the polluted water had to be treated before being released into a river. I saw how the company worked valiantly to remove the pollutants and created a free-flowing, drinkable water stream using modern technologies. This showed me that although some of the water in the world is polluted, it is possible to clean and make it drinkable with the right resources.
My family spent several summers on beaches in Florida and in the Caribbean. I really enjoyed snorkeling. This required us to get in a boat, drive to a place where there are lots of coral reefs, then wear the snorkeling gear, jump into the water, float above the coral reefs, gawk at the variety of fish, sharks, turtles, tortoise, and other sea animals below us. It was an amazing moment where you see that there are so many creations in the world about which we pay scant attention.
I was in Hawaii one time and decided to try surfing. I went to a beach where they were offering surfing lessons. The young person gave me a board and taught me how to ride the waves. After thirty-minutes of trying and falling into the water, I asked him, “was there any simpler way?” He suggested lying on the board flat and surfing; I tried it and at least was able to surf a few times before I gave up.
In a beach, it is a lot of fun to get into the water and let the waves sweep past us. The undulating motion of the waves reminds me of how our lives have ebbs and valleys constantly. As we are relishing success, a defeat in another matter comes sweeping in and takes us to the bottom. Before we completely despair, a new positive wave lifts us up and we enjoy that moment.
Senior Years
The Near-Death Experience (NDE) during January 2019 shook my confidence and intention to continue with the rigorous boating activities. I retired from the auxiliary and sold our Lake Harding house. A person known to the realtor offered to purchase our boat and I sold it to them. My boating activities came to an end, but not my interest in the importance of water for everybody. Even though there is no large body of water next to Atlanta, I continue to enjoy water by participating in water aerobics at the local gym. We get into the pool and perform exercises, such as rigorous walking and moving various parts of the body. A trained instructor helps us perform these activities.
Having realized the importance of water, I have stopped drinking coffee, tea, or alcoholic drinks, since they are either stimulants or depressants. I keep a water bottle on my desk, on my bedroom nightstand, and in my car. When I travel, I ensure that I carry a water bottle with me. These steps ensure that I am hydrated constantly.
Water from the tap is drinkable in most towns and cities in the US. When I was at the hospital, once I was past the critical stage, the nurses insisted that I keep drinking water and urinate. In the hospital, they measured how much I urinated to ensure that there were no problems with my kidneys. Thankfully, drinkable water was available in plenty.
Water is an essential element of human living, and the nurses got me fresh water each time I needed it. Similarly, when I used the toilet, the wastewater and solids were sent to a central facility in the city where it was processed, and the water was purified and then mixed with regular water. Countless plumbers and engineers maintain the water’s purification and wastewater plants and ensure that the citizens in the city got potable water to drink and the waste in homes was taken away. They perform a heroic task without any complaints or fuss.
Did humans struggle to get water from their home generations back? I was astonished to see that using gravity, Romans built aqueducts in Spain, Italy, and other countries where they ruled (about 500 years, from 312 B.C.E. to C.E. 226), to bring water to homes using gravity[i]. I had seen aqua duct systems in palaces in Rajasthan, India, so that the royalty had access to water. I assumed that with all the modern technologies that are available to us, clean water is accessible to all.
Availability of Potable Water for Everybody
When I performed research, I found that potable water is not that widely available. About 71 percent of the earth’s surface is covered in water, but its availability for drinking is limited to where we live and the technologies that are adopted by the community to purify and bring it to people’s homes.
According to an 2022 UN report[ii], one in three people does not have access to safe drinking water, two out of five people do not have a basic hand-washing facility with soap and water, and more than 673 million people still practice open defecation. Women and girls are responsible for water collection in 80 percent of households without access to water on the premises. More than 80 percent of wastewater resulting from human activities is discharged into rivers or the sea without any pollution removal. Floods and other water-related disasters account for 70 percent of all deaths related to natural disasters.
What can we do to change some of these conditions? I identified several organizations that are leading efforts to change conditions and I have joined and/or donated to them to help alleviate some of the misery that one third of the world population suffers from.
Water for People[iii] has provided 4.7 million people with reliable water supply around the world. They focus on things like protecting water supplies, training mechanics, and establishing supply chains for parts in addition to drilling wells and installing pumps. It means they think about long-term projects like advocating for national water policies and creating local water and sanitation utilities. It accepts donations and has the ability for us to volunteer on fund raising and providing technical assistance.
Charity: Water[iv] works with local organizations to build sustainable, community-owned water projects around the world. It accepts donations to fund the projects.
World Water Relief[v] installs water filtration systems, local training on maintaining the system, ongoing maintenance, and hygiene education. This education is critical to help prevent the spread of waterborne disease. An estimated 1/3 of school-aged children in the developing world are infested with intestinal worms. Not only do these illnesses rob children of school attendance and achievement, but they are also underlying causes of malnutrition and stunting.
UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 6 calls to ensure universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene for all by 2030. “Access to clean water changes everything; it is a stepping-stone to development. When people gain access to clean water, they are better able to practice good hygiene and sanitation. Children enjoy good health and are more likely to attend school. Lives of women and children improve. Parents put aside their worries about water-related diseases and lack of access to clean water. Instead, they can water crops and livestock and diversify their incomes. Communities develop and thrive.”
Water.org is a global nonprofit organization working to bring water and sanitation to the world[vi]. They help people get access to safe water and sanitation through affordable financing, such as small loans. They give our everything every day to empower people in need with these life-changing resources – giving women hope, children health and families a bright future. They work with local agencies/ municipalities to implement solutions.
Water gets into our system, water gets out of our system, and the water we drink must be processed so that it is safe for consumption. In any part of the world, there is a need to obtain clean drinkable water and efficient processing of waste. The water we drink comes from water our ancestors drank, their waste was processed by earth, and water was regenerated to keep us alive. Similarly, the water we drink and the water in our waste will subsequently be used by our succeeding generation. It is critical to recirculate the wastewater so that it is free of toxins for those who need it next.
I am saddened to note that the lack of potable water which I experienced as a young adult is common to 33% of the world population today. I hope and pray that in the next few decades people around the world will have their need for potable water and sewage treatment met adequately.
[ii] UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “Ensure Availability and Sustainable Management of Water and Sanitation for All,” https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal6
Chetan S Sankar holds a doctorate in the information systems area and was a professor and researcher in this field for thirty-five years. He is a member of the Atlanta Writer’s Conference and coordinates the memoir critique group. Attending the Creative Writing Program at Emory University and receiving critiques from the memoir group have helped him write this article. He lives in Avondale Estates, Georgia with his wife. He spends his time playing with and learning from his four grandchildren. His website is at www.chetansankar.com.
I watch as Micah walks through the gray doors of his high school and crosses the parking lot. He is smiling, and in his usual slow gait, crosses the street in front of a long row of school buses. It’s a frigid winter day. I quickly unlock the passenger door so he can enter without hesitation.
“Hey kiddo.” I take his backpack, help him remove his puffy black parka.
“Hi mom.” He looks at me, then stares at my phone. I know he wants to watch movie clips on YouTube. It’s his way of unwinding on the thirty-minute drive home.
But he knows the drill.
“Tell me about your day.”
He mutters something about gym or performing arts, his two favorite classes, then falls silent.
“What was the kindest thing you did for someone today?” I’ve had luck with this one before.
“Mom, no more questions!” I sigh and hand him my phone. Perhaps he’ll tell me more on another day.
This familiar scene in my life reminds me of the book, Plums for Months, by Zaji Cox, a beautifully written collection of short essays in which Cox shares snapshots of her life growing up on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. The author is keenly aware of her surroundings, her feelings, and emotions, describing it all in wonderful sensory and visual detail. I found her memoir to be intelligent, heartwarming, and often bittersweet.
My son is as Cox describes herself to be—neurodivergent. Micah is on the autism spectrum, and although Cox does not use that diagnosis in her writing, she does divulge about her struggles with non-verbal cues and social interaction, skills most individuals with autism have difficulty with as well. It is the foremost reason I loved this book so much—she articulates so well what it’s like to process the world around her differently and to face such challenges.
In one essay entitled, “The Intricacies of Social Interaction,” Cox explains this struggle and how she uses the tool of observation hoping to learn social skills that come so naturally to others. She draws the reader into a restaurant scene where she is with her sister and a few of her sister’s friends:
…between bites I’m observing and taking mental notes like usual: the lilt of their voices in casual speak; the rise of an eyebrow when making a joke; the blank look during a moment of sarcasm; how they sit, how they stand, how they gesture.
Reading this story brought me back to my son being mainstreamed into classes and extracurricular activities with those who are neurotypical so that he has the chance to learn, as Cox does, through watchfulness and interaction. Micah’s interest in performing arts has led to his participation in school plays and summer theater programs during which he’s absorbed a variety of social cues from his neurotypical peers. I can’t be certain that he is intentional in his observation as Cox is, but it is possible to learn social skills through osmosis—absorbing behaviors while participating in a group. The improv and sketch comedy classes Micah is taking this summer have given him the opportunity to learn how to think on his feet and jump into a scene like the other kids do. Being included with neurotypical peers gives him the chance to watch, to learn, and then try. He is improving in interjecting lines that are original and appropriate instead of phrases said by favorite Marvel characters like Spiderman or Black Panther or perhaps Scar from The Lion King, a movie he has watched dozens of times.
In this essay and others, Cox illuminates how being around neurotypical peers can help one learn to live in this world more effectively. It’s how most of us learn social skills, and why it’s vitally important for a child or teenager with autism to have ample time in community with others both on and off the spectrum. When my son was much younger, I enrolled him in a mostly neurotypical gymnastics camp. Jumping on the blue spongy floor trampolines, climbing rock walls, and being able to play games and run around amidst these peers also gave him the opportunity to learn turn taking, sharing, and how to encourage others.
Cox writes about living with her mother and sister in her grandfather’s time-worn 100-year-old house. Her close relationship with both her sister and her mother is reflected in much of her writing as is her fascination and connection with nature — especially the feral cats that often visit them on this property. Her essays about the cats were thoroughly delightful and, for me, so relatable because of Micah’s similar connection with animals, his being dogs (although he would love for me to give him a cat or two). Like Cox’s fascination with the wild felines that loiter on their property, Micah has always been enthralled with a larger variety of feral cat–the mountain lions at our local zoo. He could spend hours watching them prowl around in their not-nearly-large-enough cage.
Cox also shares about her domestic cat, Jerry, who is a warm companion. “I soon find in Jerry a listener,” she writes, “He is there when I can’t communicate right with the human world to which I supposedly belong.” I love that she has touched on the importance of animals in her life; I see this same relationship with Micah and our black lab mix who is always there for him to sit and snuggle with after long days at school, who helps him decompress and be comforted after being in a largely neurotypical world.
This book is so well written, and not surprisingly, as Cox is an avid reader, writer, and lover of books as she demonstrates in her essay, “The Scholastic Book Fair.” In this brief, yet beautiful and bittersweet piece, she takes the reader with her to her school’s book fair where she peruses the shelves knowing she has money for just one or two. She watches as her peers, able to have all they desire, load their arms with merchandise. She imagines her bedroom filled with towers of books separated into genres and categorized by ones read, not yet read, and those worthy of being read again. She soothes herself by inventing a way she can have as many as she wants: “I will simply pay for them with need.”
There are so many other topics Cox covers–gymnastics and dance, dealings with boys, friends, frustrations (and triumphs) with her hair, and shopping at Goodwill. Her essays are a sensory feast bursting with vividness, so much so that I felt I had been in her mind seeing her view of the world. Plums for Months is a book for all ages and for all walks of life. Through Cox’s essays, we learn so much about being human, about wanting to fit in, to achieve, and to feel the warmth, friendship, and love of others.
Oh, how I wish I could plumb the depths of my son’s inner world as Cox has done with hers. For now, I remain inspired by Plums for Months to see beyond the outer layer not only of those who fall outside the neurotypical category, but of everyone I meet—to look more deeply, with more patience, with more love.
BIO
Deb DeBates is a writer and parent of a son with autism and type 1 diabetes. Her experience inspired her to start a blog, micahandme.com, to help raise awareness about all aspects of raising a child with these diagnoses and to encourage others who are on a similar journey. She lives in Southeastern North Dakota with her husband and two children.
