Advent 2022, Dec 9, Chelsea Biondolillo, Wrestling with Joni Mitchell's "River"

 

Wrestling with Joni Mitchell’s “River.”

Chelsea Biondolillo

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“Out of sheer rage I’ve begun my book on Thomas Hardy. It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy I am afraid.” D.H. Lawrence

You should begin by thinking, for days, about the sad music you like, and why. Think, specifically, about sad Christmas songs. “River” wasn’t a Christmas song exactly, when written, but it has been drafted into the role by holiday DJs. It’s a natural, after all. 

It’s coming on Christmas

They’re cutting down trees

They’re putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace

 

How does listening to “River” make you feel? Happy? Sad? Sad but in a good way, like the way pressing on a bruise can feel satisfying? Look up research on why sad music makes people happy. Create headers with the five or six likeliest suspects from neurochemistry and psychology. Think for two more weeks about writing fragments into those headers. Look up the saddest memoirs—decide that you like sad songs more than sad memoirs. A song is short, relative to a life, and it is nice to imagine a short sadness.

One study posits that people prone to depression tend to think sad music makes them happier, even though it often leads to unhealthy thought processes, chiefly rumination. Ruminate on that for a few days, until the idea of research about sad songs loses its shine. Luckily, a music theory study suggests ways to map emotions in music compositions. Look up what makes sad music sound sad. 

I wish I had a river I could skate away on

But first, get hung up on that dangling preposition, on, and how it seems like it shouldn’t work. It just bobs on the end of every verse, and even in the middle of the chorus, where it leads into the line “I made my baby cry” and an odd snatch of melody. Suspect that this line is the real heart of the song—even though it only occurs twice (the second time as “I made my baby say goodbye”) to the seven times “I wish I had a river I could skate away on” occurs. The crying is the thing she can’t stop thinking about. 

Look up the saddest chord progressions. Look up the song’s sheet music. It’s for piano, which you never learned to play. Decide to look for ukulele tabs so you can learn how to play it. Playing the ukulele is something you have picked up, set down, and picked back up during this longest pandemic season. Think about whether it is the melody or the lyrics that feel the most sad. 

Flip the piano sheet music and print it out on your laser printer so you can Xerox transfer it later. Picture something watery. Riverine.

I made my baby say goodbye

Download the Travis version of the song to your phone, because you hate to say it, but you like it (as a sad song) slightly more than Mitchell’s. Count the days you have left to write the essay and at the end of each day, count again. Start a draft about the river you think of as your river, but get self-conscious about opening with any version of “this one time, when I happened to be in New Zealand.” Scrap it. 

Isn’t ruminating what essayists do? Wonder aloud whether you have to rethink what you’ve been calling your writing process all this time. Out of sheer melancholy is how you make anything. Out of sheer obsession is how you learn. There is a lot of guilt at the heart of “River” – the urge to run away from the mess you’ve made, rather than face it. Out of sheer remorse. 

\When Geoff Dyer couldn’t write his book about DH Lawrence, he wrote Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with DH Lawrence, a book about many things besides Lawrence, including about not being able to write. It’s often funny, which helps. It has been suggested to you as a book worth checking out, on more than one occasion, since your inability to write a book on vultures is well documented. Not just vultures, you may feel tempted to scream. 

The last time you tried to write honestly about being unable to write, the editor kept sending back the drafts with “needs a more uplifting ending” until you gave up and made up an ending where you could, in fact, write just fine.

Call up one of your best friends, the one who can’t leave the house much lately because of a terrible illness that might be getting worse and that you can’t bear to talk to him too much about, which is selfish, you know. You can’t bear to even imagine a world where he might not be, is why. Instead, play him all the sad chord progressions and ask him to help you figure out whether it’s the chords that make “River” sad. 

One site lists the progressions by Roman numerals. Roman numeral one (I) is the root major in a major key, while (i) is the minor root in a minor key, and so on. This site calls vi-IV-I-V the “sensitive female progression.” Get bugged by that. Talk about that music theory class you both took way back in high school, the contents of which he remembers much better than you. That gets you nostalgic (something sad songs do especially well). Think of all the paths you never took. Say something dumb about how now that you are nearly 50, you will probably never move to New York City, and he will counter with how he will never run again, or dance, exactly. 

I wish I had a river I could skate away on

I wish I had a river so long

Spend some time learning two versions on the ukulele, one labeled Joni’s version and one, Travis’. The Travis version is harder to play, but just like the recording, you like it a little better. You always like the harder thing, you will think, involuntarily.

Now you can see it right there on the page, in the Travis version of the song, how the Bm and Dmaj7 chords make the chorus sound a little strange. You note not one, but two suspended 4th chords, each delaying the lyric resolution. That much you remember from music theory.

Spend another week thinking about how your mother will be upset if you write yet another sad essay. 

In your notebook write, Can’t this essay be happy? Like Mitchell holding “fly” for nine seconds at 2:20. It sounds like a brief imagining that the narrator, like Icarus in that Jack Gilbert poem, is at the end of a triumph, instead of the beginning of a heartbreak. 

Singing the song over and over as you learn to play it will make you think about notable heartbreaks in your life. There’s an unwritten rule that if you need to end a relationship in the second half of the year, you need to do it by Halloween at the latest. Otherwise the pressure of gatherings, feast days, and various and sundry celebrations will keep you lashed together til the end of February. And if you are superstitious about the Ides of March, because of an especially passionate high school English teacher, past even that.

Remember that once, in a December very far from the one presently breathing down your neck, you gave the first real love of your life an ultimatum you knew he wouldn’t accept as a way of breaking up with him. And then in the middle of another December, halfway between then and now, you screamed and shook your fists at a man you’d once said you loved, even though you knew you didn’t. How you wanted him gone—but after New Year’s, you said, because his parents were coming to town and there were so many parties. He was to act decent and not fuck anyone else for just the next two weeks, which it turns out, was too much to ask. 

I’m so hard to handle

I’m selfish and I’m sad
Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby I ever had

Find a podcast all about the song. Hear Joni Mitchell introduce “River” during a live recording, several months before it came out on Blue, an album that NPR has said is “the greatest album of all time made by a woman.” Get bugged by that preposition, too. 

“This is a very sad song. Get yourself into a kind of melancholy-before-Christmas spirit, and here we go.” —Joni Mitchell, BBC In Concert, 1970

The podcast features several unrelated people talking about moments in their lives when they connected to “River.” The moments are sad, not unsurprisingly. One man talks about a wild love affair that wrecked him when it ended. He talks about emotional resiliency that comes with age, but uses the term “Thames Barrier” to describe it. You develop a kind of Thames Barrier over time, he says, that keeps your emotions from spiraling out of control. Decide that is maybe something you need. Look up Thames Barrier and watch a few engineering videos about how the barrier works to keep the river open to ships but easily shut off from flooding. That sounds nice, emotionally. Consider, briefly, looking into whether anyone has thought of such a contraption for the Mississippi. But before you can follow that thought, become transfixed by the next video that comes up. It’s on the Falkirk Wheel in central Scotland, which you’ve never heard of. You know about all sorts of insects and animals and rock formations, but much less about great engineering feats.  

The Falkirk Wheel looks too fantastic to be real: a spinning boat lift that raises barges and passenger boats nearly 80 feet in the air from one canal to another. You watch its twin arms rotate slowly, as a floating bus of waving tourists bobs slightly in one arm’s gondola. The narrator speeds a fleet of data points by as the wheel spirals up. Only when he gets to the bit about how the two arms of the wheel are always perfectly balanced because they each weigh the same whether there is a boat in them or just water, because of Archimedes’ principle of buoyancy is your attention hooked. A floating object will displace water equal to its weight. You remember learning that a long time ago. Note the metaphor skittering at the water’s edge of your mind. 

Allow yourself to get melancholy in that before Christmas spirit, frustrated for the millionth time that you are no closer to a new draft about sad songs, that like the boats riding the Falkirk Wheel, each piece of information entering your brainpan weighs the same amount whether it matters to what you are supposed to be doing or not. Plan to spend some time here, grasping after the heart of the matter and, as if your mind were made of ice, falling through.

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Chelsea Biondolillo is a collage artist and the author of The Skinned Bird and two prose chapbooks, Ologies and #Lovesong. She is still not the author of a book about vultures and is currently at work not writing a book about reclaiming the house her grandparents built on land in rural Oregon. Her essay “Weeds” won the inaugural Craft Literary Hybrid Writing prize. Currently, she teaches science writing workshops for Creative Nonfiction magazine. 

Advent 2022, Dec 8, Andrew Maynard on Rabih Alameddine

 

Reading “How to Bartend” as a Map for Avoiding Our (My) Worst Tendencies, While Thinking About Misguided Viral Videos and the Middle School Essay

Andrew Maynard

Set the occasion, tell them why we’re here 

Because I read an essay that made me pause, and I’m not sure why. 

Because as swaths of America push to abolish the police, there seems to be an uptick in civilian policing, often by the same people. 

Because it seems as if we’ve transitioned to being on constant jury duty. All the time. Everywhere. In the classroom: student to student, student to teacher, and most excessively (by far, not even close) teacher to teacher. In bars, probably (it’s been a while). People on stoops. On cable news. On non-cable news. Twitter (well before Musk bought it) has become a curated series of attempted citizens' arrests. 

And it’s bleeding into art. There’s been a lot of noise lately about what writers can’t do. 

So I’m saying that if a white person writes from the perspective of a historically marginalized group to interpret (read: mansplain) and capitalize on the struggle, that’s bad, for sure, and we should throw stones (preferably heavy and jagged) at him. And (in all caps) if a writer who went to public school writes a story about a kid who was homeschooled—that’s probably fine. 

I’m saying I think Dave Chappelle took trans jokes to a place I didn’t find funny or enjoyable, but this monologue didn’t bother me. But it’s OK if it bothers you.

I’m just saying let’s avoid absolutes unless we absolutely can’t.

But I need you to know I believe it’s important to call out harm. And I mostly hate the idea of hard and fast rules, especially the kind meant to limit art. 

Yet I teach 8th-grade English, which means I’m expected to talk about writing in ways that kept me from discovering joy in craft until my 20s. I’m expected to talk about thesis statements. About evidence in a singular, sometimes reductive, always dull way. I’m supposed to give bad advice like: tell them what you’re going to tell them and then tell them and then tell them that you told them. 

But, like, fuck a thesis statement, right? Can we hard-pass on knowing exactly what we want to say before we say it? 

If I could teach using a single sentence (run-ons and semicolons excluded), it would be: read this, tell me what you notice, and then write the thing it compels you to write. 

Anyway, last summer, on my in-laws' porch in Virginia, I read The Best American Essays 2020. I think about the opening essay, “How to Bartend,” often.   

Mentor text: Steal from the pros until you’re one of them 

In the essay “How to Bartend,” we learn quickly that Rabih Alameddine is a serial academic from Lebanon, H.I.V. positive, and, living with the assumption that he will soon die, has developed an affinity for impulsively purchasing cashmere sweaters. Oh, and he loves soccer. “I used to joke when I first moved to San Francisco that I had an easier time coming out as gay to my straight friends than telling my gay friends I loved soccer.” Alameddine is funny and sharp and doesn’t know the first thing about bartending. But he does get excited when he finds out the English bar that hires him has four TVs with access to all the soccer games. 

Alameddine does a lot that I admire, and we’ll look closely at some of those moments, but it’s getting late in this essay not to have explicitly said exactly what I am here to say. 

Your claim must be clear and arguable 

Grace is a dish best served to others; avoid cooking it for yourself. Teacher note: too vague.  

Revision: It’s easier to call people out than call them in. Who are these people? Why are we calling them? 

Revision: In the essay “How to Bartend,” Alameddine uses his art to unexpectedly deliver grace and empathy to a group of Irishmen who he could just as easily have dismissed for using insensitive language. 

Counter argument: What do the haters say? Give them a voice and dismantle them with it

There’s a video on Youtube of a woman walking around New York being catcalled. The men in the video are problematic; they’re mostly Black and Latino, except for the filmmaker, Rob Bliss, a white guy that remains off screen. It has 52 million views. 

I believe documentary at its best is a close cousin of the essay. 

I have some questions/concerns about the catcalling project. What did the filmmaker set out to prove? (Is it ever a good idea for an artist to set out to prove anything?) Was it simply that women are verbally harassed on the street? How did he choose which neighborhoods to visit and which ones to avoid?

The catcalling video was wildly popular for spotlighting a problem too often ignored. And it did. Definitely. 

So isn’t that a good thing?  

Maybe. But it’s a short compilation of a white actress being catcalled after she was filmed for 10 hours. So the fact that it is almost all Black and Latino men is an editorial choice, possibly a pre production choice, and one that seems to say two things.

1. Women can’t move in public without being harassed.

2. The problematic men making the streets unsafe are Black and Latino.

I think the filmmaker found exactly what he expected to find. What would the project look like if he made room for discovery?  

Don’t summarize your mentor text, use it to build something new 

In the 1980s, Alameddine assembled an amateur soccer team called the San Francisco Spikes that played in gay tournaments around the Bay Area. When the Spikes began registering in regular leagues—“and by regular I mean that many of the guys on the other teams were homophobic bastards, or to use the Linnaean classification, assholes”—they encountered regular bigotry in the form of cheap shots and celebratory “hand signs for fucking” most notably from a dude name Chavo. 

Chavo is an asshole, for sure, and Alameddine doesn’t have to work too hard to paint him as such. At the height of Chavo’s bullying, he digs his cleats into Alameddine’s leg, drawing blood, and ends the assault with a homophobic slur and a shitty comment about not wanting to get AIDS. 

Usually, I would not have allowed an insult without some sort of witty comeback. I was a faggot, after all. Even something like “You’re not my type, bitch!” would have made me feel better. But I was writhing on the dry grass, in such pain that what I really wanted to scream was “I want my mommy!”

And then Chavo disappears, and we meet a couple blunt, disheveled, Guinness-loving Irishmen who come into the English bar, much to Alameddine’s distaste, and force him to do something he finds horribly irritating: his job. Alameddine didn’t become a bartender because he possessed a knowledge of mixology or a customer-service disposition. He got it because he had a pulse and knew a guy. So he’s even more pissed when five Irishmen show up the next day to watch soccer. 

Only digress if you must

Sorry to dwell, but I really don’t like that viral catcalling video. And I’m not alone. If you Google search “the problem with catcalling video,” there’s no shortage of criticism about the racist editorializing. So maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that Bliss’s follow up viral video made a concerted effort to reveal some real cutting edge insights that can be boiled down to: white people can be the problem too; racism does indeed still exist; and Bliss sacrificed his right to white apathy to show us our sins. The video is called “Holding a Black Lives Matter Sign in America’s Most Racist Town.” And to know the title is to know the rest. It makes the same mistake as the catcalling stunt in that it opts to prove instead of wander, instead of wonder. So I won’t share the link. I won’t contribute any further to spreading a video that centers a white guy proving his courage by provoking other white guys to say the N word, before circulating the hate without nuance or thought or anything in mind but ego.

And I should probably stop thinking about this guy, but I can’t, because he’s everywhere and everything around me. He’s the bikers I hear outside my window yelling at cars for blocking the bike lane. He’s the cars I hear honking at bikers for burning through stop signs. He’s everyone being incredible at yelling the rules when someone else is breaking them. He’s me being incredible at yelling the rules when someone else is breaking them. He’s my judgment. He’s the disillusioned omniscient nonfiction narrator. He’s the middle school essay I avoid teaching. He’s the version of me I detest but can see if I squint hard enough in the mirror.  

But he is nowhere to be found in “How to Bartend.” Alameddine refuses to give him air, because he knows that to snuff a fire you cut its oxygen. 

And so it’s the Irishmen who get the bulk of the word count, not Chavo. And forgive me for breaking the form I’ve already established but I’m going to skip the bolded instructions, the white-space pauses, the separation of threads. I want to see what happens when they interact with one another. I want to change my mind mid-essay. 

I love this story because I see myself in the story in ways I find difficult and productive. And I’m realizing that I was never actually interested in looking at “How to Bartend” because it reveals something new about the essay, but rather that it’s a nice alternative to what feels like a static public discourse that prefers reactive finger-pointing to the deep breath. “How to Bartend” masks itself as instructive in its title, but chooses to model complexity rather than project moral authority. It takes its time. It’s patient. It has really really good sentences. Here are a few highlights. 

Memory is the mother’s womb we float in as we age, what sustains us in our final days.

It never occurred to me to plan against regret.

So many of my friends died while the world remained aggressively apathetic. 

Why did assholes always drink Heineken?

I did not die and I did not recover.

Alameddine eventually makes friends with the Irishmen. Not immediately. There’s some character building first. The Irishmen give him shit for being a terrible bartender and not knowing how to pour a Guinness. When they find out he’s gay, they could’ve been better. Their language could’ve been better, just as most things said multiple decades ago regarding inclusion will fall into the category of could have been better as long as words are spoken. But they gradually come to an understanding. Like all successful relationships, Alameddine and Irishmen improve through compromise, which in this case is simple: the Irishmen pour their own beer. And their relationship simplifies and gains depth. But it’s still limited. They banter and talk about soccer. They take shots at each other and themselves. And though they never talk in any serious way about gayness or H.I.V., we’re told it isn’t due to fear but rather they just don’t quite know how to broach the subject. Not yet.  

The truth was that I was rude to them because I felt safe from the beginning. I felt at home with them. I had gone to high school in England, and my closest friend at the time was Irish. These men were older than me, but we actually had a lot in common, which was obvious from the first soccer game we watched together. They had a sense of humor that matched mine. They could, and would, make fun of everything. Nothing was sacred, and I couldn’t tell you what a relief that was, living in the ever-earnest state of California, which had more sacred cows than all of the Indian subcontinent. They made fun of Americans, the French, the English, you name it. Boy, did they make fun of the English. They mocked Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims. No joke was out of bounds. They were ever self-deprecating. They tore into each other ruthlessly. And most of all, they made sure to insult me. I dished it right back, of course. I felt as if I were back with my family.

And I appreciate this progression because it feels refreshingly honest and optimistic. It feels like being able to look back at the movies from my childhood not simply to point out what didn’t age well but also to remember the value. Alameddine isn’t going to ignore the Irishmen’s flaws or his own, but he’d rather exhaust his energy seeking connection as opposed to recounting division. And Chavo doesn’t come back until later when he unexpectedly shows up at the English bar and says some cruel, idiotic shit to Alameddine about how he doesn’t belong and the possibility of getting AIDS from a beer on tap, but it’s not done because we need to know people like Chavo exist. Because we don’t. Of course we know Chavos exist. Chavos are abundant. And if we’re being honest, we might see more of ourselves (past or current versions) in Chavo than we’d like to admit. I think about my best friend who eventually told me he was gay in a bar in San Francisco in our 20s, and how we used to play “smear the queer” in middle school in Arizona with teacher supervision. We loved each other then and we love each other now. And I feel ashamed. But we absolutely need to know that the Irish guys do in fact love Alameddine despite their flaws and are waiting in the wings of the English bar, ready to fuck up Chavo’s world and body beyond repair if he so much as a lays a finger on their friend. We need to know they exist, so Alameddine breathes oxygen into their stories almost twenty-five years later, centers them instead of himself, even though he hasn’t seen them in decades and can no longer remember their names. But he doesn’t need their names to show that goodness is not simply measured in the things we’ve said but is rather a container we fill and spill and stain and consume as we go. I think about my first years in San Francisco and all the Irish bars on Clement Street I used to frequent. I made friends with the bartenders who would later ask me to bounce from time to time when they were in a pinch. And they’d give me 50 dollars and as many draft beers as I could drink and I’d check IDs and collect the cover charge and, on occasion, have to tell a drunk guy to leave. And the drunk guy never wanted to go quietly, so I’d have to remind him the thing he did wrong as if it defined him, sometimes stand him up and shove him away from the one place he wanted to be. And I never wanted to kick someone out but I always felt a gross type of power when it was over. But this was before I taught middle school and learned that if a kid is being shitty and you want to chip away at the shitty behavior you wait for them to do something good and then give them the love they seek. You pull them closer. It was before I read “How to Bartend” and learned that I was pushing a man who might’ve been the hero in my story had I let him. 

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Andrew Maynard is a writer and teacher based in San Francisco. His essays have appeared in Bending Genres, DIAGRAM, True Story, Mud Season Review, and other venues. His essay "Take Your Son to Work Day" has been optioned for film. He's strongly considering ditching social media in the near future, but here's a half-baked website that might grow into something more. 

Advent 2022, Dec 7: Amy Barnes, Bah, Numb Bug

Bah, Numb Bug, Dec 7, 2022

After Sabrina Orah Mark's "Bah, Humbug," The Paris Review, January 16, 2020

It is December in Tennessee and warm. There are three Lego minifigurines on the mantel. I’m trying to decide which one is going to be a baby Jesus stand-in because one of the dogs has eaten the Christ child. 

     I’m running a Twitter poll and Yoda is winning, probably because of Baby Yoda. 

     “Can I have a Christmas tree?” My son asks. 

     “No,” I tell him. 

     I’m resistant because I know why he wants one; he might not be home for the holidays and that numbs my heart like Novocaine.

     Not-holiday music is playing and our neighbors’ holiday lights are up and abrasive in the daylight. There are lights lining the eaves and sidewalks and they feel vintage but aren’t; they match the neighbors’ xenon headlights speeding through the neighborhood; a perpetual train of too-big SUVs and too-big houses and too-big blow-up holiday figurines that scare the dogs. The light lines are Rockette-soldier-perfect, too straight to be parents and kids wonkily hanging them. I imagine their nativity scenes are Willow Tree or from Italy or at least matching and not filled with two broken-handed Joseph’s tending to multiple Mary’s and a variety of wise men clutching whatever gift is the MLM essential oil one, because—suburbs. CHRISTMAS feels like bigger letters with bigger screen televisions and cars with obscenely-large red bows on them. 

     It isn’t all garishness; there’s one special night where our entire small city sets out lumanarias with candles and sand weighing them down. Every cul-de-sac and every neighborhood is lit up. The next day there are only glowing and flaming white bags at curbs. The night time glow is all sand and soggy paper as the Boy Scouts come by and pick up remnants. 

When I was a kid, my grandmother’s tree went up on Christmas Eve while we were sleeping. It was part of the gifts with a strand of bubbling lights in primary colors encircling the table tree and soft packages that meant socks and underwear and warm gloves because those were practical, needed gifts that I hated because I was a kid, because I didn’t know that there was no money for other things. I think of her bass voice O Holy Nighting the night in a way that still makes me cry when I hear the song. 

     At my other grandmother’s house, I naughtily watched The Love Boat and Fantasy Island with my older cousins and cracked nuts with my grandfather’s silver nutcracker until the shells made a neat pile in the basement and my mother yanked me away from the television and pecan halves. 

In the not-quite holiday music days and daze, I’ve heard two “numb” songs in a row, both Tik Tok sensations first, and radio hits second. I hum the numb songs, numbly because they’re what’s on. I think of the music that played at Montgomery Ward during 90s holidays when I was a manager; two polar opposite songs competing every hour with each other to overtake the numb shoppers and number employees: Madonna breathily and sexily singing Santa Baby and Burl Ives crying about a baby laying in the holiday snow for a not-Yoda Jesus to find.. Who thought those were the right holiday songs? The numb songs are actually a better fit. Scrooge would have liked them and I imagine Mary might have used them as white postpartum noise to get Jesus to go to sleep. 

My husband tells me about a news story where people at Dollywood have had their Apple watches call 9-1-1 because the watches think they’ve all careened to their deaths. This is funny because he has a Tesla and we have a Roomba and they are both equally-confused about near death. Both semi-robots—one car and one vacuum—often think they’ve plummeted off the road. They are numb. There are bugs in their systems—the Apple watches, the self-driving/self-loathing cars and the vacuums that hate vacuuming so much they get stuck under couches and spin until death or my husband comes to take them back to home base. I remember I need to plan when to bring my son back from college to his home base too.

It’s time to put up our Christmas tree. I try to have it up after Thanksgiving but I’m late as usual. The nativity, with its Yoda slash baby Jesus has stayed on the mantle all year as I was late putting it up too and later thinking about taking it down, but it has come full circle so maybe I’m now early? 

I honestly hate our tree. 

     We can’t have a real one because of ME. I’m allergic to all things pine. Ironically, I worked at a Christmas tree farm as a teenager and lived with perpetual hives. An MLM woman I know who definitely doesn’t put up her own lights, rubbed “stress oils” on my arms until I swelled up like a Kardashian after fillers and smelled like a Christmas tree and looked like a round Christmas tree ball ornament. I kind of hate her. Almost as much as the scratchy tree but I know she’s numb too with her essential oil gifts. 

     Our Christmas tree is as old as our marriage, 75% off at Kmart two decades ago. It has tiny colored tags that used to have numbers on them, but in twenty-two years, the numbers and the holes in the dark green metal base are worn and disconnected. Those tags are supposed to lead the way to installation like the Christmas star, but they don’t anymore. I drag the tree parts out of the battered box. It looks more like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree than the one or three or six that are set up in my neighbors’ front rooms and front windows and back porches and upstairs stair niches. The only miracle is I finally get it together but there’s always one stray branch that never quite fits.

     My husband reminds me it doesn’t matter because the Christmas tree is a pagan symbol like the Easter Bunny but I can’t imagine anyone worshiping our tree. They might burn our Christmas tree at the HOA stake because it isn’t pre-lit or pre-put-together. The nativity is the same age as the tree, Mary is missing a hand and Joseph may or may not be the shepherd boy and there are five Wise Men from different nativities we’ve bought over the years, none matching but all vaguely in the same realm, ready to welcome the arrival of baby Yoda

My son is a Christmas baby, not home from the hospital until the 23rd of December. I was numb that year with a sick baby and staples in my gut, swaddling him like the baby Jesus in a jaundice blanket so we could go home. 

     Both kids are really too old for Christmas now. There will be a few presents under the tree that will cost more than a few dollars—electronics and cash. There won’t be visits to see The Nutcracker because there are college apps to fill out and exams and holiday parties with friends. I hate our city’s new version of The Nutcracker anyway. They’ve reimagined it, turned into some kind of rock opera with Russian nesting dolls in hip hop costumes and Mother Ginger singing raps and Clara in some kind of Victoria’s Secret babydoll nightgown with her pointe shoes. I long for the old school version. I long for an old school Christmas where kids glue glitter on paper and there’s a nutcracker that cracks nuts and doesn’t just look pretty.

I’m numb this holiday and the last and maybe the ones before that. Putting up the tree is a tangible way I use to force myself into the festive spirit. This year, the numbness looms like The Nothing crawling into The Neverending Story. I think about both kids not coming down the staircase on Christmas morning for the first time next year. I can’t replace them with Lego figurines. I don’t know how to match the my-kids-have-flown-the-nest-tags with what next year will look like. I thought I didn’t know what was bothering me this year but I know it’s because I’m going to hand both kids cash and headphones and dorm towels and things that are grown up gifts and that next year they’ll both be away, with their own small trees.

     “Do you want to visit Dollywood over break?” My husband asks. 

     I think about getting on the rides and having my Apple watch call 9-1-1 because I’m going loop-de-loop on a rollercoaster and have the heart rate of a numb person. 

We haven’t been to a holiday church service in two years because of the pandemic and I miss toddlers with construction paper and cotton ball sheep and drummer boys and choir boys and the Hallelujah Chorus. 

     I think back to other holidays and settle on one when we were invited to a Muslim friend’s home. There was a bookshelf style-tree in their living room. Religious figurines and other small items lined the shelves. At the very bottom (kid-level) was a row of toys and action figures, Lego minifigures, elephants and G.I. Joes. They were worshiping with the family, with us. I know the lower shelves were designated for the kids but I wonder if some of those toys were fillers added by an exhausted mom.

     I don’t know why I’m holding onto our Peanuts tree. I salivate over expensive pre-lit trees but never buy even when they go on sale. The tree is from when we were newly married and newly pregnant and newly parents and too numb and too poor, and never-too-joyous, when Christmas was a struggle and when it was a triumph and when it was not a $2500 team of light engineers in the cul-de-sac. I wonder if my Apple watch would call 9-1-1 if I suddenly ditched the scraggly tree and its scratchy branches. Would it pick up on my fancy tree heart rate and bring in an ambulance? 

     I decide I can't face the crowds in a holiday church service but I need to do something. Yoda is sleeping in his ceramic straw bed and with him overseeing, I drag out ornaments and kids to help decorate. When we’re done, I look at the scraggly tree and it has perked up somehow. It’s suddenly not as lopsided with its sentimental hodgepodge of homemade ornaments. I am less numb too when I see tiny hands and snowmen and macaroni and construction paper and walnut shells glued on cardboard, glued on glitter. 

On Christmas Eve, the ceramic Baby Jesus is still missing. The dogs look suspicious while Yoda looks even more at home. Both kids are home. Madonna is crooning and Mariah Carey is belting over Alexa. There’s a strange light glowing on baby Yoda’s face as we gather by the mantel and stare at the rag-tag nativity. 

     I’m not sure I’m going to take it down. 

     I want to help both kids find their own tradition, their own fill-in-the-manger-with-what-they-find holidays. I don’t know what that looks like either. They don’t know either. Will there be spouses and children and Christmas mornings down staircases and Chinese food on New Year’s Eve? Will there be rows of white flickering bags when they come back home? Why haven’t I bought a full Lego nativity? 

We leave the house for mall shopping and the grocery store to buy pre-shelled and chopped pecans for pies. I take Lego Yoda in my pocket to remind me of what’s on the mantel and to find joy. We play Settlers of Catan in the basement and frost a wonky gingerbread house in the kitchen and pop crackers filled with paper crowns and jokes and corkscrews. There are lights on the house and in the house— holiday lights to lighten my heart, not as bright as the Christmas star but still leading us home. 

     I mutter Bah, Numb Bug at the dogs and ask if they’ve seen the Baby Jesus. 

*

When I sat down to write this “cover” essay, I didn’t know exactly what that was, so I started by thinking about television talent competitions. The judges admonish the performers to keep the original song at heart but to also make it their own—with tones, styling, lyrics or pacing. The goal being to keep the original song recognizable but also with the voice of the competitor, with emotion and resonance. I immediately thought of a holiday-themed essay by Sabrina Orah Mark. I’ve always thought it is risky to write “after” poetry or prose that is inspired by an admired writer because it can cross a line. My goal was to give the feeling of the essay, focused on the holiday season, without straying into dangerous “after” territory. 

     In the case of this Mark essay, I tried to take the approach of covering a song but with all new words, instead of a new singing style or pacing. I decided to focus on nine main parts of the essay to “cover” that I found in the original: objects, religious aspects, a sense of place, memories, family, food, holidays, pacing, and a search for meaning. My religious background is different. My kids are older and leaving the nest soon. I tried to “cover” the original by integrating mentions of things like nuts and a holiday tree—but with my own memories as the impetus. 
     But first, I started at the beginning. To keep with a musical cover theme, I also included mentions of music and played with Mark’s original title to reference currently-trending songs. Her "Bah, Hum Bug" became my "Bah, Numb Bug" in the cover essay. I opened my essay with a line similar to her opening but grounded in my own place. The pacing of the essay felt important and I tried to maintain my own version of Mark’s rhythm as well in the writing tone. 
     I explored my approach to the holidays related to each of the main elements in “covering” the related topics. Just like a song chorus or refrain, I also inserted repetitive elements through objects and intangible things. Christmas tree. Searching for a replacement Baby Jesus. My dogs. Light. The holiday season. My hope is that in the end, I created a good enough writing homage to not get voted out by the reading public slash judges. 

*

Amy Barnes has words at The Citron Review, JMWW Journal, Janus Lit, Flash Frog, No Contact Mag, Leon Review, Complete Sentence, Cease, Cows, Gone Lawn, The Bureau Dispatch, Nurture Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s, SmokeLong Quarterly, and many other sites. She’s been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, long-listed for Wigleaf50 in 2021 and 2022, and included in Best Small Fictions 2022. She’s a Fractured Lit Associate Editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Ruby Lit assistant editor and reads for NFFD, CRAFT, Taco Bell Quarterly, Retreat West, The MacGuffin, and Narratively. Find her at @amygcb on Twitter. Amy is the author of three collections: Mother Figures (ELJ Editions), Ambrotypes (word west press), and Child Craft, forthcoming from Belle Point Press in 2023. 

Advent 2022, Dec 6: Jamie Etheridge, Oysterless Bay

 

Oysterless Bay

After Blair Braverman’s "Useless Bay"

Eleven miles across, averaging 10 feet deep, the bay looks nothing like the blue mirror my mom grew up admiring. Muddy, silt-thick water from the five rivers delta converges at its mouth, America’s own Amazon. On the western shore, Mobile office buildings compete with the reflection of lights from fishing boats floating across the broad expanse of water. My mother remembers neither its flow nor flood, but seafood banquets cooked by her father. Her favorite: oysters raw or stewed or fried. Oysters tonged from the bay’s shallows just for her. I wonder, would she love oysters so much if she hadn’t grown up on a bay teeming with them?

The bay is a story sad and brackish: Native civilizations dating back thousands of years erased by first Spanish, then French explorers. Their oyster middens dismantled, their cultures destroyed. The last slave ship, the Clotilde, scuttled to the slimy bottom to avoid prosecution just before the Civil War. Mobile Bay drowns its bloody history in the murk. But eventually, all stories return to the light, divers retrieve what can never be forgotten. My grandfather – young and wild – would cook Momma shrimp and crawfish, grouper and redfin but it was the oysters she loved. Raw, on the half shell, pearly meat glistening, doused with lemon juice and served with saltine crackers and spicy cocktail sauce. 

In the 1950s, when my mom was a girl, Mobile Bay’s oyster harvest averaged a million pounds of meat a year. That’s just the meat: thick, juicy flesh. Not the bivalve shells. Not the millions of pounds of calcium carbonate, magnesium, sodium and bits of copper iron. These were abandoned on the edges of canneries where children as young as nine shucked oysters for pennies all day or later dredged for highway construction. 

My mom grew up, married and moved away, coming home every few years, another new baby in tow. By the early 2000s, the oyster harvest had plummeted to a few thousand pounds a year; the reefs destroyed by the dredging schemes, disastrous oil spills and decades of overharvesting. The canneries shuttered and disappeared and fishing fleets shifted to shrimping in the Gulf. Pretty soon Mobile Bay oysters were a bedtime story no one remembered, only a handful of restaurants even sold oysters on the half shell anymore. 

When she had seven children and then her husband died, my mom packed up and came home. By then, oysters in the bay, now foul and poisoned, were mostly gone. Oysters are natural filtration systems, you see, and with millions removed, the beds destroyed, there remained no natural defense against upriver agricultural runoff, sewage, pollution and bacteria growth. No one understood what they had lost until it was long gone. 

My mother never speaks of bereavement: Dead husband and seven pairs of eyes turned to her—a woman who hadn’t worked in 18 years and didn’t know how she would feed her children. I imagine her, down by the bay where she eventually found a low-wage secretarial job, watching a film of oil rainbow across its surface. Did she contemplate the barren bottom devoid of the wild oysters she once loved? Did she wonder what life she might build now for herself and her children?

In recent years, environmentalists, scientists and residents of the bay’s littoral have come together to restore the oysters. In Bayou La Batre, Dauphin Island and Murder Point, farmers hang wire cages packed with seedling oysters from docks. Washed by the briny water, these babes in arms are the region’s best chance at reviving the once-flourishing commercial oyster aquaculture. But farmed oysters are sterile. They will never rewild the bay. 

Rewilding requires a different kind of courage. A belief in a future we agree to safeguard. I am no scientist nor fisherwoman but if I could, I would gather hundreds of oyster seedlings in my arms, fill the basket of my shirtfront to overflowing. Then I’d wade out into the shallows of the bay and plant the future, oyster a reef of possibility, and restore my mother’s sullied hope. 

*

I am drawn to Blair Braverman’s essay "Useless Bay" by the sparse yet lush prose juxtaposed against the precise imagery of the bay and the people and marine life that once populated it. 

Mobile Bay served as an important backdrop in my mom’s childhood and a place that I’ve always loved so the Braverman essay spoke to me on myriad levels. 

Climate change and the environmental changes that have impacted Useless Bay are global in scope and though not, perhaps, the exact same litany of issues that have destroyed the oyster reefs in Mobile Bay, there are parallels that resonate with me both because of climate change and human behavior. 

I wanted to cover this essay but also layer in this issue of Mobile Bay’s decimated oyster reefs - and the human behavior that caused their destruction. Bringing this into focus in as many ways as possible feels to me urgently important. 

I also appreciate the deeper metaphor at work, the life we give to the world around us, to the sea and to the earth, is given back to us. 

*

Jamie Etheridge is CNF editorial assistant for CRAFT. She won the 2022 Fractured Lit Anthology II Prize, judged by Deesha Philyaw, for her flash fiction, "Ways of Karst." She was also a finalist for the Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellowship 2021 for CNF. Her writing can be found in Anti-Heroin Chic, Bending Genres, Essay Daily, Identity Theory, JMWW Journal, Reckon Review, X-R-A-Y Lit, and other publications. She tweets at LeScribbler. 

Advent 2022, Dec 5: Patrick Madden, f-Words: An Attempt at an Essay on Style (feat. Brian Doyle)

f-Words: An Attempt at an Essay on Style (feat. Brian Doyle)

Patrick Madden

 

Years ago, when he was visiting BYU, Brian Doyle offered me what I think was meant as a compliment, saying that one potential downside of my teaching could be that scores of younger writers might notice and emulate only the superficial qualities of my essays, the easily identifiable traits (such as jump cuts from one topic to another seemingly unrelated one) without perceiving or achieving the deeper connectedness or the surprise of the buildup to a kind of epiphanic wholeness, the shock that what seemed like rambling has instead been a tightly controlled weaving, which readers apprehend viscerally if not explicitly. The comment landed well, felt good coming, as it did, from a writer I deeply admired and hoped to emulate, but I think it also began for me (or at least coincided with) a period of self doubt, or perhaps a dissatisfaction with my self, or my style. I began to grow tired of what I often did, not without effort, but naturally and habitually. I wanted to learn something new, as a challenge or an adventure.

Here might be a good place to pause and mention that this essay could strike some readers as self-indulgent, even self-congratulatory. I would fain reveal that I do not feel these ways about myself, and while I have a vague grasp of rhetoric that might otherwise lead me to dampen these qualities in my writing, I have, in this moment, as the kids say nowadays, no f---s left to give.

There, in that most recent paragraph, we have three f-words that might illuminate the inner battle I mentioned in the first paragraph. The first is fain, an archaic word that I know primarily or perhaps solely from Charles Lamb’s essay “New Year’s Eve,” wherein the author states that he would “fain lay [his] ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel” [of time, it’s understood]. Except I’d been understanding fain to mean something like “like to” or even “pretend to,” but in the older sense, which I feel in the Spanish pretender, which gives off a vibe that whatever you’re trying to do, it’s doomed to fail. Maybe I was equating fain with fail, in fact, though shifting its part of speech. But (I’m continuing my “except”) that’s not what fain means. Instead, it’s “gladly,” derived from an Old Germanic root meaning “rejoice.” What do you know. (Let the pretentious adverb, which I misunderstood when I wrote it, stand there, under my hand, to all posterity, as Louise Imogen Guiney might say.)

Following closely after fain we find feel, which I do, often, though I filter this or strain it so that what lands in my writing can sometimes seem devoid of it, of feeling, that is. I’m sorry about this. Lo siento.

The last f-word is the f-word, a word I’ve never committed to print, as far as I can recall. I am, I fear, too restrained by the culture’s taboos, but I quite like the sense imparted by the phrase I’ve invoked here, and I feel that it accurately describes my current mood. And anyway, it’s just the latest of several vague words stripped of any correspondence to things in favor of a kind of all-purposey emphatic functionality (see “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” etc.). What, exactly, one gives or doesn’t give or refuses to give is beside the point.

But back to Lamb a moment: I admit to feeling a little disappointed that my context-gathered definition is “wrong,” because I feel that it works quite a bit better than “gladly.” “I would try but fail to lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel” aligns with the fatalism elsewhere apparent (resplendent, even) in the essay. Or, better still: “I would lay my finger upon the spoke of the great wheel of time, but I’d fail to make any difference.” Maybe I’m commuting “ineffectual” over the whole event. Maybe Lamb intended something like this from the adjective but couldn’t find a place for it except on “finger.” Maybe everything I feel here is contained in the subjunctive “would” coupled with the metaphorical philosophical wheel.

Maybe you’re wondering where I’m going with all this.

I have titled my essay “f-words” in feeble homage to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who begins her own essay of this title wishing she might call her work “The Essay as Form” (a well-known treatise by Theodor Adorno) or A Room of One’s Own (which likely needs no tag, but, for the sake of some, Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking lecture/ essayella). Her piece is subtitled “An essay on the essay,” and this is where we diverge slightly, except that all essays are essays on the essay, including this one. There is no more self-referential form. And I do understand that “An attempt at an essay” is redundant, or self-distancing like one of those infinite parallel mirrors images or Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma album cover.

I’ve been spinning my wheels, catching my interest on small accidental (or at least subconscious) details in my own sentences, and I’ve gotten so tangled in the weeds that I feel like the best next move is simply to stop and declare that my occasion for writing this brief and personally limited essay on style was a recent exchange I had with Dinty Moore, editor of Brevity, about the title of an old Brian Doyle essay published there.

A student essay I was reading had reminded me of it, so I went to reread and then recommend it, but found that instead of “A Child Is Not a Furniture,” the title I remembered confidently, the essay was now (perhaps always?) titled, more “correctly,” “A Child Is Not Furniture.”

I felt faint at that missing determiner. Could I have misremembered? Could the journal be wrong? Why had I never noticed this before?

Upon rereading the essay, which recounts and recreates a conversation with a woman on the bus in Chicago at three AM, I discovered the phrase I’d remembered, intact, in Doyle’s interlocutor’s words. She is talking about discussions with her husband over whether or not to have children. She says (of him), “He measures and calculates. He arranges things just so. But you cannot arrange a child just so. A child is not a furniture.” While the saying is cast in the voice of the woman on the bus, it is exactly the kind of phrase Doyle would notice and highlight, and thus it feels like his style. After all, writing is only arrangement of preexisting words, and in general, when Brian Doyle quotes other people, he tends to inflect their voices with a little bit of his own. Or his own voice is the result of absorbing so many other interesting voices. Either way, this is one instance of that.

Given that Brian died five years back, I took it upon myself to write an email to Dinty, asking whether the title might have been accidentally changed. Then, while waiting for his reply, I found the essay in Doyle’s book Grace Notes, where its title includes the “a.” Then, inspired, I searched out an archived version of the webpage from back when and confirmed that it had indeed originally been titled “A Child Is Not a Furniture.” Meanwhile, Dinty responded, agreeing with my revision/reversion, and assured me that he’d fix the error.

This is a small thing, perhaps as small as it gets (while other single-letter words night occupy less space or use less ink than the humble lowercase a, I would argue that given its function in a sentence, its position in the alphabet, and even its variable pronunciations (long vowel or schwa), the indefinite article is the least noticeable of words and the most takenforgranted). But see how sharply its presence inflects the essay’s title and, by extension, the essay. When I hear it, I both understand the phrase’s meaning and wonder about its everslight variation from expected usage. Perhaps, I wonder extratextually, the speaker was translating from Spanish or another language where “furniture” is not an abstraction but is cast as a quantifiable noun. Un niño no es un mueble, indeed.

This would be example enough, but a very similar thing has happened once before, so I’ll tell you about that, too. I was reading Doyle’s “From the Editor” in the journal Phoebe when I noticed this sentence (amidst the sprawling hypothetical responses that an editor wishes he could send in response to an unsolicited submission):

A piece like yours, we are sometimes tempted to write, is not elevating or edifying to the reader, but merely performance, or comment, or confession, or rant, or the product of insomnia or inebriation or incoherence, or lecture, or sermon, or humility, or browbeating, or elusive goop, and is the very reason why so much of what is sold culturally as art is nothing at all like art.

Did you catch the misplaced word in the list? I did. There’s no way Brian would have written “humility” in the context surrounding it. I was certain that he’d meant, or a copyeditor had changed, “homily” in that position. I wrote to the editors (this happened at a time when Brian had just undergone brain surgery and was incapacitated, so we could not ask him directly) to argue my case. I had, I explained, read many of, perhaps most of, Brian’s published essays, and I’d absorbed his cadences and phrasings, and thus knew that he’d often rail against sermon and homily (a simple Google search confirmed this), but he’d never rail against humility.

Within a week I got an email back from editor Robbie Maakestad, who agreed with my logic and forthwith made the change.

I mean, great. Congratulations, Pat. You did it! Twice! You noticed something no one else had noticed or could possibly care about. Here’s your Pedant Certificate.

But maybe there’s something to be said for knowing someone by his voice. (After my first public reading, a friend commented, pleasingly, “You sounded like you.” After my first [anonymous] external tenure review, when I ran into her at a conference, the new associate professor commented, “I recognized your voice in the letter.”) Maybe noticing the smallest things corresponds with the kind of prayerful attentiveness that Brian was always encouraging.

There are the generalities of style: the long, sinuous sentences that challenge and surprise with their ordering and nesting of information. The short, clipped ones. The fragments. The preponderance of elemental or ornamental words. There’s also the understanding that whatever your style, it is not a thing you’ve invented; it’s a thing you’ve inherited, largely, overwhelmingly, without knowing it, or at least without knowing its intricacies. What’s important, it seems to me, is to strive for humility and to challenge yourself beyond your current defaults. When you get tired of yourself, experiment with something new. Take in influences consciously and voraciously, make new attempts, play, see what feels natural, what sticks, what becomes your own.

[Look. As far as I remember, Rachel Blau DuPlessis didn’t stick with the f-words thing religiously either. There was no structuring element built from it. So forgive me if I seem to have left it behind (some word of it may still be found off in a corner). I mean, I have. But also I haven’t.]

One more story: On the day I learned that Brian Doyle had begun hospice care—perhaps this was also the day he began hospice, I no longer remember if I ever knew—on that day, I went to see my daughter’s middle school dance recital. For the sentence you just read, I have channeled, at first subconsciously and then consciously, a sentence from a poem by Mark Halliday in which I feature as a character, the antagonist even, having conked Halliday on the head during a game of basketball. Halliday delays/resets several times where I’ve done so only once:

On the day that my lifespan matched my mother’s lifespan,
on the day when I had come to live as long as my mother had lived—
she died in 1975, of cancer, three days after her 52nd birthday—
on the day when I had lived as many days as she got to live
(though for her there were hundreds and hundreds of days of
miserable pain, which has not at all been my fate)—
on that day
I went to the gym to play basketball with some friends.

This is the sort of thing I do quite a bit: crib consciously from writers I admire, whose voice has imprinted itself upon my subconscious. Once, when writing about my infant son’s skull operation, I took from Brian’s phrasing about his son’s heart operation:

When have I been filled with grace? One time above all others, when my son was under ether.

One time above all others I felt the great divide between theory and practice, was closest and the situation heaviest: when my son was under knife and morphine and screaming ceaselessly.

I admitted the theft, still in time for a possible revision, but Brian gave his blessing, so I kept it. And I’ve borrowed knowingly other times as well, with things like skimping on punctuation to establish exigency, or shifting suddenly into the present tense to cast a moment into relief against the background. And then there was that one odd time when Brian attempted to write like me (at my invitation, for an essay subverting the simplistic view we sometimes default to about “originality”) but, in my view, couldn’t quite pull it off, or maybe didn’t care to. Readers familiar with his style will recognize him by his voice in this uncredited passage in the middle of my essay:

But to return, sidelong, diligently, like a small child who was going to check out that cool bird’s nest in the backyard but got distracted by how hard it is to hop on one foot for more than, say, eight hops, to plagiarism and the essay. One might well say, as certainly someone has, perhaps in another language, that the essay is by nature a magpie, a confluence of all the influences on its author; even Montaigne, for example, was soaked in Plutarch and the Bible and other literary glories of antiquity, and no force on earth can utterly erase the music and cadence of writers from the sponge-like crania of subsequent writers; the most honest essayists among us admit with admirable honesty that we all have, as Robert Louis Stevenson says, “played the sedulous ape” to writers we admired or admire. All that we can hope for as essayists, it seems to me, is to have learned something of rhythm and pace and sentence-carpentry from our predecessors, while gently leaving their particular styles behind like a teenager tiptoes away from the college of his or her parents; although I will here confess, in public, right on the page, right here at the end of this sentence, that there are some writers I cannot read while writing, because their music is so alluring it begins to dilute my own.

And readers who’ve been paying attention to this attempt at an essay will note that Doyle’s topic fits neatly with our considerations here. Not only have I played the sedulous ape to him, but he has to others, and they to their forebears, so that we realize the folly in claiming any kind of ownership, in the traditional, uncomplicated sense, of a style. And it’s worth noting that sedulous does not mean “copycatty” as I’d assumed from context, but “dedicated and diligent,” as in consciously attending to the writing styles of others in order to own our influences, beyond the inevitable osmotic assimilations.

So. What happened at that dance recital? As I waited impatiently for my daughter’s troupe to take the stage, I recalled, at first subconsciously and then consciously, Brian’s similar experience of seeing a “forgettable” amateur play, not wanting to be there, noting one particularly “execrable song” and its singer’s “groaning tractor” voice, and yet, by force of will perhaps, finding beauty and even joy in the imperfect attempts of the performers. From what I knew of Brian, this reversal would have been expected. That he’d “roar with delight” at the young man who sang so gratingly but also with “deep humming joy.” That he’d perceive the dreck made art, be willing and able to appreciate it. Of that singer he said,

He had made something wonderful of nothing but dreaming and labor and passion, something that probably not even he knew he could make with such eerie skill—and that is where I wish to begin talking about creativity, for dreaming and labor and passion are its ingredients, and wonder is both its engine and its product.

So in the midst of my silent caviling and kvetching, my wishing myself away as I watched others' children while awaiting my own, I thought What Would Brian Do?, and I knew, and so I did that. I shifted my perspective in such a way that I was enabled to sit calmly in my seat and gladly enjoy, truly enjoy, the hard-thumping electronica, the asynchronous jerky movements, the mistakes and the moments of harmony. And not in an ironic way. I became present for the dances. With the back of my mind trying to reckon with the inevitable and imminent loss of my dear friend, I borrowed his strength and found beauty where I’d been unable to perceive it before.

*

Patrick Madden, author of Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010), teaches at Brigham Young University and curates the online anthology of classical essays www.quotidiana.org.

Advent 2022, Dec 4, Paul Crenshaw covering Steve Edwards

 

The Last

Paul Crenshaw

*

Sometime in early October we lose the last caterpillar. Lose isn’t the right word, but we can’t find any more, which is a different kind of loss, so we keep looking, as if we’re always oscillating between have and had, always wanting the first and wishing for the second. 
     Outside, it’s a time of cool mornings. Mist smoking from the surface of the river I drive across on my way to work. Deer moving in the late woods. Afternoons like exhalations, when the wind is constant in the branches of the trees and dead leaves go scuttling along the sidewalks in the same wind. The swallows gather in the live oaks; they take short flights, measuring the distance they have to travel, or warming their wings for the trip.
     All summer Jenn and I have been raising butterflies. We find the caterpillars among the milkweed and put them in cages to protect them. We watch them form chrysalis. We watch them eclose into butterflies, and on warm summer afternoons we release them and watch them spiral skyward. All summer Jenn has been keeping records. All summer she has spent bent over her butterfly cage, making notes about males and females, about days found and days released.
     What she doesn’t record is the last. She can’t mark which is the last caterpillar because we won’t know which will be the last until long after they’re all gone. If we’ll find one more hanging around like the last leaf on some December tree. One more to gather and protect until it’s time to release.   
     It’s fine weather this fall, but fall brings about a change in me. I suspect it does in you, too, else so many poets are wrong about what the seasons represent. In the afternoons I’ve been walking our small garden. For months our milkweed has been thick with caterpillars, and now there are none. The leaves are mostly gone from the trees. The flowers in the garden are dying, and we are left looking for what is no longer there.
     In the bare garden, waiting for the first hint of coming winter in the wind while I look for one last caterpillar, I am reminded of Steve Edwards’s essay “The Last Cricket.” It’s a short, beautiful essay about loss: how easily it is to lose track of things we love. But in the loss is a gaining—Edwards remembers being a boy. Baseball games, an oiled leather glove. He writes:

It’s easy to think so fancifully when the crickets are going gangbusters. A time of abundance props up the fiction that you’ll always have enough. In September the sun shines on trees full of apples. The first stars of frost on the lawn feel as far off as real stars, wintergreen and blinking. In September, the crickets deliver to me every lost dream of childhood. From the depths of my love and loneliness, the boy I once was emerges again to lie awake all night listening. His insomniac mind conjures impressions from a late ballgame: the smell of cut grass in the outfield around him, the oil darkening the mitt he absently jabs a fist into while waiting for a pitch, the coolness oozing from the deep woods beyond the parking lot. That boy’s parents are young and strong, and time hasn’t grayed their hair and carved lines into their faces. That boy’s grandparents smile and blink and breathe. To have him back, if only for a moment, is a restoration of innocence, the melancholy of which sings to me. I want to rise to the last cricket’s call and inhabit a quiet empty enough to contain my every contradiction.

     Like Edwards, I grew up listening to crickets. Catching fireflies on summer nights that now seem so far away they might have happened to another person. Lying in my bedroom with moonlight pooled on the floor thinking of the kind of man I might turn out to be, not knowing then that all life is looking back, trying to remember the last fireflies on a timeless summer night or lying awake in a room wondering what the future might be like.   
     But the boy I once was is long gone, replaced by a man who, more and more, sees endings everywhere. Fall seems more final than it ever did before. I’m at that age. When my father calls we talk of his friends—men I’ve known all my life—and their health: Floyd goes into surgery Monday. Phil had a heart attack last month. David’s cancer came back but he won’t go to the doctor—he’s not doing another round of chemo, he says. My father is diabetic and walks 3 miles each morning. We talk more and more of death in these Covid days, and though neither of us ever acknowledge each phone call might be the last time we talk, we do linger a bit near the end, prolonging the conversation. “Oh, I meant to ask you. . .” he might say, just for a few more minutes. 
     Which brings me back to caterpillars, and crickets. In his essay Edwards can’t remember when he heard the last one. It is an essay not so much about endings as about missing them. Realizing a thing is over only after it is over. It’s an essay about all the ways we fail to pay attention. Or maybe just that there are so many things clamoring for our attention we lose track of time.
     Now I can’t find any caterpillars, and as I look I am lamenting not holding onto the last one. Or, rather, not realizing it was the last one. We mark so much in our lives: birthdays, anniversaries, the days friends and family members died. We step outside after a hot summer and realize the weather has changed, another season has ended, the earth keeps on turning as it swings its way around the sun. We look in the mirror and notice the gray hair, the lines etching themselves into our faces.
     But it’s hard to mark the last time you did something. One day you put your child down and never picked them up again. Chances are you’ve already seen some friend for the last time and just aren’t aware of it yet. We all know some stars are still giving off light long after they’ve died, but their light takes so long to reach us we might never notice when it finally winks out. My younger daughter just came home from college, and I can’t help but wonder, as she drives away, if I’ll ever get to pick her up again.
     I wonder if I’ll ever talk to David again. If I should call Floyd after his surgery. If Phil, whose son I went to high school with, will ever breathe again without hearing the wonder of his own failed heart. 
     I wonder if I’ll know the last time Jenn and I make love. The last time I’ll hear my father’s voice. The time my daughter will drive off and I’ll never see her car come swinging around the corner again. She makes fun of me because I am always standing at the door waiting when she arrives, and I haven’t yet figured out how to explain to her what would happen to me if she never did. 
     What I do know is that yesterday Jenn released the last butterfly. I can’t find any more caterpillars, but we stand in the backyard while the last leaves fall around us. The backyard looks like a coin pool, the fallen leaves all red and yellow and gold. The wind feels like the last warm breath of summer. Jenn takes the last butterfly out of its cage. She holds it perhaps a bit longer than she needs to, but I know she is saying goodbye. When she lets it go we watch it wind its way upward, tiny wings beating against a giant backdrop of blue sky. In a moment one of us will say “That was the last one,” but for now we watch it go, until finally it is so small I’m not sure if I can still see it, or if I can only remember what it looked like.  

*

When I first read Steve Edwards’s essay “The Last Cricket,” it struck me in the way the best essay always do—I wish I would have written that, I thought to myself. It’s a (seemingly) simple premise that’s beautifully rendered, the kind of essay that through language and image and idea, moves me. I wanted to write this essay because I identified with young Edwards, lying awake in his room. I identified with older Edwards, realizing that, once again, he had missed the last cricket. That once again the wintergreen stars had been moved toward winter by the turning of the earth.  

But every essay of Steve’s I’ve read has hope in it. He captures so well the melancholy that sets in us all at times, but ends with the idea that we can, if we’re lucky, look for whatever it is we’ve lost. “October,” Edwards writes, “comes along with its dazzling, razor-edged contrasts—warmth and cold, light and dark, color and gray— and other stories start singing. By the time I remember my intention to listen for the last cricket, the silence is already everywhere. Come the spring, I think, I’ll listen for the first.”  Reading Steve's essay made my own start singing. I hope you'll listen. 

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Paul Crenshaw is the author of the essay collections This One Will Hurt You, published by The Ohio State University Press, and This We’ll Defend, from the University of North Carolina Press. His third collection, on the Cold War culture of the 1980s, is forthcoming from The Ohio State Press. Other work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize, Oxford American, Glimmer Train, Tin House, and Brevity.  

Advent 2022, Dec 3, Rajpreet Heir, Reading Censorship

Reading Censorship

An Essay Inspired by Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris

Rajpreet Heir

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My mom grew up in a house in England without books. Her parents, Indian immigrants with little schooling, cared more about her watching her four younger siblings than doing homework. Once after school, while at gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, a religious leader claimed women who receive higher education become lethargic, and my mom disagreed, arguing women should get the same opportunities as men. Her parents heard about her comments and later scolded her, worried about appearances within Coventry’s active Indian community.

When she had an arranged marriage to my dad and then moved to Indianapolis in the eighties, her British credits didn't equal out to a degree, so she finished one when my brothers and I were toddlers. In many of my early memories of her, she has large textbook book on her lap and a highlighter in her hand. She'd always wanted to write a book and English was her favorite subject, but a career counselor had pushed her into technology.

We had books in almost every room. When she read to me, I’d laugh when Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin taunted Old Brown Owl, I rooted for Sister Bear when she was excluded by Brother Bear, and hoped Penny would find a home in The Little Cottage at the End of the Lane. Birthdays and Christmas always meant books as presents: Mrs. Pepperpot, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Anne of Green Gables, and The Wizard of Oz. Under my mom's care, the librarians at Marion County Public Library knew my brothers and me by name. This also could have been because we were the only Indians in the area, or because we pulled down the dividers at the library checkout line for fun.

Slowly, I went from The Little Engine That Could to Ramona Quimby to the Babysitter's Club series to Nancy Drew. My brothers and I continued to participate in the summer reading program long after our friends turned from books to video games. In fourth grade, my backpack zipper broke from straining to hold my fourteen school library books and I put grocery bags in my new backpack in case the same thing happened again. In our home set of encyclopedias, I began looking up words like “sex” and studied paintings of ancient naked people. When I was in fifth grade, I’d secretly look at her Vanity Fair magazines, fascinated by all the beautiful celebrities and their revealing outfits. One day, my mom called me into her room and asked if I’d been looking at her magazines, noting the pile was slightly askew. After receiving my confession, which required just a few steady stares, she told me not to look at them anymore, and I turned back to the reality of hitting puberty at the age of ten.

That reality meant my mustache came in before my twin brother’s, I was the tallest in my whole elementary school, girls teased me for my hairy legs, I bled through my jeans a few times at school, and worst of all, my parents and I began fighting regularly. My dad would yell at me to help my mom in the kitchen and when I would run away to my room, he would bang on my door until I emerged, shoulders hunched. My mom became distant, even when I shouted from two feet away.

In middle school, when I began reading from the young adult section, she would occasionally read the back of my books before allowing me to check them out of the library. Ones she didn’t like—about prom, books by Judy Bloom, books about steady boyfriends, books about women who worked behind makeup counters—she made me return to the bookshelves. Sometimes I got wholesome biographies of politicians so I could put them on top of my pile, and I kept the romantic novels at the bottom or hid them under my bed. Once, I picked a book by Alice Sebold just because I recognized her name. At home, in front of my brothers, my mom went through my books and confiscated some, then gave me a startled expression when she read the inside flap of Sebold’s book. She handed it back to me and safe in my room, I read the description. The first sentence read, “Artist’s model and divorcee, Helen Knightly spontaneously murders her mother, an agoraphobic now suffering from severe dementia, by suffocating her with a towel.”

In high school, with more freedom with my transportation, and with a more rebellious attitude, I found ways to read about white girls losing their virginity to their white college sweethearts, white women warriors falling for white warrior men, and white women slow dancing with white lawyers while listening to country music. (The caucasity of these books was lost on me at the time.) Unable to talk to boys without my brothers snitching, unable to wear fitted clothing, and unable to attend dances with boys, I could only live vicariously through the fictional characters.

One rainy Saturday afternoon, standing on one side of table in the library while I stood on the other, my mom went though my pile of books and actually skimmed the pages of the books—something new. Only one in the group was romantic and it was at the bottom. It seemed as if my mom was done checking, but perhaps after seeing my relief, she picked up the last book. In the prequel, Elizabeth Wakefield, who had dropped out of college and moved to England, had kissed the wealthy son of the parents for whom she worked as a maid. From my mother’s expression, I could tell Elizabeth had gone further. Slowly, my mom put the paper book on the table, and looking me hard in my eyes, she said, “You can check out this book, but you need to know that women can do more with their life than this.”

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Rajpreet Heir is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at Ithaca College with publications in The Rumpus, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Best of Brevity, and others. She is working on a memoir entitled Indian in Indiana.