of reading and roaming :: February 12, 2024

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Halfway.

We are poised between winter and spring now. Around Brigid’s Day I joked a bit about it being my real New Year, but I discovered that my mind and body were in firm agreement with this. I didn’t fuss about the 1st of February or anything like that, I just sat with my journal that first week and dreamed some dreams. Suddenly all these little green shoots were wanting to emerge, things I might let grow and blossom in 2024. The first? I want to make friends with the sun and follow her around the year.  I’ve begun a 100 day project of greeting the dawn outdoors. Every morning, out for a walk in the dark while the sun slowly emerges over the horizon. On the days I can’t walk, I will take my tea to the porch and greet her there. Today was my fourth dawn and I can’t wait for tomorrow.

But there are still so many dark hours to enjoy as well. I am finding a lot of joy in reading this winter. Especially re-reading books I’ve loved before. I have a large selection of books on my To-Read shelves, but I don’t feel urgency about them. I will get to them eventually. Or maybe not. They aren’t passing fancies I’ve lost interest in, they are placeholders in a stream of thought, reminders to follow up on authors and ideas, fuel to stoke the writing fires. Every one of them means something to me and my intellectual journey.

part of the to-Read Shelves

What to read and how to know what to read are some of the things people contact me about the most. I absolutely love it when people want to talk about books, so I’m always glad to get your notes and happy to explore ideas with you. But I thought we might talk a little more generally about that subject in this space this month.

As many of you know, though I am currently working on a university English degree, most of my reading disciplines I developed entirely on my own. I say this because I am often surprised by the timidity people have in talking about the types of books they like or the books that feel accessible to them, etc. Reading is so common to most of us, I think we forget that it is a skill that evolves with use. The more you put yourself in contact with challenging texts, and the greater the variety of texts, the better you will be at understanding and retaining them. I have always read absolutely anything that interested me, from young adult genre novels to literary fiction, from nonfiction to academic commentary that was/is way over my head. I have consistently and intentionally attempted books that were too difficult for me. My early Goodreads reviews often went: “I mostly didn’t understand this book, but I liked what she had to say about ___.” It didn’t matter if I understood it all; I almost always came away with some new thread of understanding that I didn’t have before. I’ve done this all my adult life, but it is essentially how my classes work now too. I wade through an enormous amount of literature, talk about it, write about it, and occasionally retain something. The learning comes when this is repeated over many books or many classes. A poet shows up in a history class, a political theorist turns up in a novel, an essay about writing illustrates a technique in a short story. You dive into a deep pond and swim; slowly you become a fish.

But how do you find these books to swim in? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with just reading bestsellers or beach novels. My first rule for a reading life is that it should be pleasurable. But if you want to challenge yourself and develop your ability to find pleasure in new kinds of books there are many ways to go about it. You could use a formal approach, like following a university literature list (here’s one from New College Oxford) (and one from Berkeley) or a library list (The Library 100). I love a good list, but I often find that reading one selection after another from a list like that leads to a feeling of disjointedness. I prefer an interest-led approach that allows me to make connections and follow them, something I think of as roaming.

In a roaming approach, I might start with a list, but as soon as something starts catching my attention, I wander off the path and follow it. It might go like this: a character in a novel quotes Sylvia Plath: “I eat men like air.” I look up the poem, I look up the book, which I read and find vaguely disturbing, but also, who can ever forget “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air”? I read articles about Plath. I read a biography of Plath. I discover Plath is a lot different than I originally thought. The bio tells me she liked Auden. I buy a collection of Auden but I don’t read it. I think about Plath’s hunger to be both a mother and a serious writer. I read Rachel Cusk’s  A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. I read Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy. Cusk has a short story on “the self in visual art” in the New Yorker which takes my breath away. I think about art and artists. There’s an article in the Guardian about the painters Celia Paul and Lucian Freud. I look up Paul and am mesmerized by her portraits. I order her new book, Letters to Gwen John, even though I know almost nothing about either of the artists. The book goes on my To Read shelf with Auden. Celia Paul was 18 when she met Lucian Freud (54). I read Claire Dederer’s  Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma about what we are supposed to do with artists whose personal lives make us cringe (or worse). And on it goes.

       This roaming and enrichment can go on forever. The first thing I do when something begins to sparkle at the edges of my attention is start googling. What else has the author written? Is there a documentary? A well-written criticism of their work? A movie adaptation? A People magazine article where they reveal the music that inspires them? What other books get recommended to me if I plug this title into Goodreads?

        Do this over and over and you find that you are suddenly recognizing a current of connectedness that links artists, writers, and thinkers from every part of life. It’s a lovely pond to swim in. Of course none of this even touches the other riches available through re-reading, marking up books, keeping commonplace books, writing your own summaries or thoughts about what you read, doing a deep dive into a time period, or an author’s oeuvre, or exploring a niche genre (how about Afrofuturism or Native American Horror?) , reading author biographies, listening to book podcasts, joining literary book groups, taking classes, etc. The pond reveals its depths, widens into a sea, and you discover you will never reach the opposite shore.

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Phew! That was a lot! I don’t know if any of it was helpful or not, but often, it seems people just don’t know where to start. I say start where you are now. See what is sparkling at you, research your favorite author, find their influences, find early writers in their genre, or look for new writers that are experimenting and taking the genre in new directions. Most of all, you should feel excited by what you read and not worried about if anyone else likes it. I guarantee you someone somewhere does. Perhaps in your travels you will find that person, or a group of people, who feel the same. And then you can swim even deeper.

I hope February is being good to you. Let me know what you are reading and exploring, and let’s enjoy the last of the dark season while it is with us!

tonia

dawning new year :: January 14, 2024

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            I barely noticed crossing the 2023 finish line and entering the new year. The year of the owl was a tough one; it lasted twice as long as it should and death circled on all sides. I hardly had energy to notice that we are supposed to be starting again. I’ve thought it before, but I feel it more intensely now: January, coming in the heart of winter, deep on the heels of all that enforced merry-making, is a terrible, terrible time to have to find the motivation for new routines and habits. I want January to be a month to rest and reflect, to curl up with old journals and pots of tea. I want long, unembarrassed naps, already-watched movies, and thick books about naturalists or explorers enduring harsh conditions outside while I warm my toes under layers of blankets. There’s nothing stopping me from doing this, of course. I can begin a new year of habits on February 1st,  or March 23rd. It makes no difference.

            For now, I can feel the pull of winter on my animal body, drawing me into quieter spaces. This feels like wisdom I should attend; the earth and I are made of the same stardust, after all, but she is much, much older than me and has passed beyond the need to prove herself or produce for show. I find myself wanting to lean into her side and burrow into her skirts, let her decide when we start moving again.

            I don’t mean that I want to stop living though. When I was younger, I thought rest was just the absence of tasks. I thought it involved reclining my body and letting the laundry sit in the dryer and eating take-out or something. In this way, I managed to avoid all sorts of growth and personal development. I could keep myself spinning during working hours with a list of busy tasks and then be too tired to do anything meaningful with my remaining time (like my own art or creative work). And then, because I misunderstood the meaning of rest, I would refuse to create or journal or spend time alone with a notebook in the evenings or on the weekends because I had categorized that as “work” and I knew it was healthy to “rest.” To be fair, rest meant something different to me in the years I was raising and homeschooling four children than it does to me now. There are seasons. But there are also thousands of ways to procrastinate, aren’t there? 

            This winter season I am turning toward myself, going deep into places I have been avoiding. Some of this is the gift left by the owl, some of it is the lines on my face and the silver in my hair, the growing awareness that time does not stretch on indefinitely. If I would become someone, I must become that someone here, in this now. 

            So I set my alarm twenty minutes earlier, spend the time on writing morning pages, discovering that the pen has access to places in me that I have never uncovered. I do this out of desire, not demand. It doesn’t feel like habit or discipline I am building so much as a self I am quietly discovering, the emerging awareness I sometimes have in dreams or in the blurred spaces between waking and sleeping.

            And then because rest is regenerative, the morning pages extend to more words. I feel like seeing where a story might go. I feel like writing a letter, meandering around the soft corners of this winter hour. I feel like finishing, and so I do. Afterward I am more steady in myself than I was before. There is nothing strenuous about these meetings with myself, no intent to produce. And yet the words pile up, the creative spirit stirs.

            In a recent newsletter, L.M. Sacasas wrote about how slowly the sun arrives each day. Dawn is a gradual affair if you are attentive to it. I saw this recently when we were at the beach and I went out early to watch the ocean at sunrise which, according to my weather app, was supposed to arrive precisely at 7:42 am. I walked down about 20 minutes before that, when the sun was beginning to pink the clouds behind me, and headed home an hour later when the eastern sun was up enough to glint off a slant of western water. Maybe we can let the new year dawn on us like that too. Accept that January 1st is just the first pink signal that a new day is arriving instead of the starting gun for a race where we run fast now or fall behind. Maybe after the slow dawn of the new year, we’ll be better able to see what shape it wants to take, how we might live well in the light of it.

            How about you? Are you starting the year running? Or are you feeling the need for more time? Either way, I am holding out for a happy and deeply nourishing year for all of us.

Thinking of you all here, this quiet and encouraging community, with gratitude. Let’s share more words together this year if we can.

tonia

 This and that.

 *Reading: Claire Keegan’s novella Foster. Just exquisitely good storytelling. (Next I’ll watch the movie adaptation: The Quiet Girl.)

*Reading: the story of David Douglas, the Scottish botanist who collected and catalogued many of the indigenous NW plants for the British.

 *Reading: Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, about what we are supposed to do with problematic artists.

 *Making: this little blanket

*Making: an art journal with Suzi Banks Baum’s Dark Advent Workshop, learning to be imperfect and work with visual media. So hard for this perfectionist and yet so rewarding.

*Watching:  Ondine, Chinatown, and a selection of movies for a class I’m taking on Conspiracy Theories.

*Watching (soon): the new season of True Detective with Jodie Foster

 *Thinking about: Elizabeth Gilbert shaving her head and saying fuck it to beauty culture.  This whole interview is marvelous.

*Thinking about: Eliza Rathje’s gentle volumes of The Journal of Small Work and how we might envision a different future one small dream at a time.

           

we are stories :: November 2, 2023

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When at last my grandmother flew away this summer, she left a trail of feathers behind. I collected as many as I could, put them in the box with all the other things that get abandoned by death: books and letters, journal pages, old greeting cards and photos, scraps of notes scribbled during sleepless nights. I went through them all on my knees, laid them out on the carpet until they became a map of sorts, a survey of her last few decades. She was a woman who believed in resurrection and a someday/someplace where everything was eternally right, but she wanted all of it for the here and now. This longing turned her inward, kept her from moving forward. In the last years of her life, it consumed her. She threaded every conversation through her obsession with these yet-unfulfilled promises and the confidence that there was a secret key to prayer she was about to uncover that would bring them into being. In the box I found the remnants of her attempts to reach heaven, scribbled more and more incoherently onto the backs of envelopes, insurance statements, and clipped articles about the moral decline of the nation.

After she was gone, I found that I could navigate the sorrow of her loss, but I did not know what to do with the other, deeper sadness that emerged, this awareness that it is possible to burn with need and never become fire, to be a match that flares and yet extinguishes itself before it reaches the wick. It frightens me to think that an entire life could be spent yearning.

I don’t know what my grandmother would say to this depiction of her; I only have my memories and these feathers she left, already beginning to lose their vibrancy. This version of her, the one that I am wrestling with, is not her whole story, I know. It is tangled with my own stories, my longings and regrets. It is strange to think that in the years to come my mind will whittle her down even more, until she becomes some slim aggregate of the two of us, what I understood about myself inextricably linked to the life I watched her live.

We are stories within stories within stories and maybe all of them are true.

I’ve been thinking a lot about narrative frameworks lately, the ways in which what we believe about the world and our belonging to it are partly inherited and partly developed. Every day we see the collision of these frameworks happening around us, politically, culturally, personally. That space of impact feels so untenable and violent to those experiencing it. How do you come to consensus when the very root of your perception of events is different than your neighbor’s?

One thing I am convinced of, those spaces where beliefs collide can’t be traversed with accusation and negativity. They are navigable only by connection and empathy, on both sides. We need the conviction that all walls are breachable somewhere, even if only to share some small talk or the same neighborhood.

There were so many things to find inspiring about my grandmother. Before the world got so confusing for her, we connected over food, art, love for our family. I wanted to be understood as I was, to be known inside my own story instead of hers, but this is what she wanted as well. Those points of connection were what we could manage to offer each other and that is enough. What I will learn from my relationship with her is that my children and grandchildren will have their own stories about the world, that they will know and understand it as a different place from the one I know. I will be reminded to keep letting my walls down, to believe that they are wise and good and I can enjoy them on their terms. But for myself, I hope I will have the courage to set myself on fire, to let myself burn and burn, all the way to the end of the wick, nothing held back. That’s the least I can do for her.   

 It's been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve missed everyone. <3

Here’s a little list of things that I’m enjoying or thinking about right now:

~Elemental // Kortney Garrison

My dear friend has gifted the world with her first chapbook of poetry. All her work is so precise and gentle. I’m a big fan.  Find it here.

~Just finished my annual read of The Haunting of Hill House // Shirley Jackson, this time with the lovely APS folks.

~Finally getting around to Ali Smith’s quartet, starting with Autumn.

~ Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath// Heather Clark

I finally finished this meticulous and eye-opening biography of Plath and it affected me deeply. She was so much more relatable in ways I didn’t expect, all the while being astoundingly talented and driven. Her confidence in her right to speak and her willingness to be misunderstood artistically taught me so much.

~Transforming Narrative Waters // Accidental Gods podcast with Ruth Taylor

A lovely synchronicity that found me this week. Ruth Taylor talking about how to frame stories to reach across divides.

Which led me to this discussion of using fiction to make real change:

~ No More Fairy Stories: Writing the Way Through One Tale at a Time// Accidental Gods podcast with Denise Baden

~ Watching the absolutely stunning In the Mood For Love.  

~ Making this to get my daily calcium and celebrate the cozy part of the year.

~ Also eyeing these high protein gluten free rolls:

~ The lovely Amanda is back, sharing her generous and smart weekly meal plans.

 Do let me know how you are doing and what you are loving right now if you have the time.

Thanks for being here!

xoxo

tonia

not done yet :: July 20, 2023

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              I’ve been born again many times: in a crowd, at an altar, in my seat, on my knees, on my feet. Those were jarring rebirths, laboring under the strain of my supposed corruption and persistent doubt, brutal attempts to bring a roving mind to heel. Always, the newly born me would flourish for a time and then falter, would need another altar, another crucifixion. It was years and years before the realization that all this monitoring, repenting, dying, rebirthing was someone else’s idea of living, a system I inherited but didn’t want. Slowly, finally, I killed off my attachment to it. (Don’t bother looking, the grave is in the woods; I burned the bones and buried the ashes deep.)

You must know that no matter what they tell you, nothing can really destroy the original self, the core person. She sleeps, she waits, and when the time is right, she rises.

“Practice resurrection,” Wendell Berry wrote, as earnestly as if he had just pilfered the power from the coffers of the divine. The idea lay in my spirit for years simmering like some stolen jewel, until one summer afternoon when I was alone outside, journaling and watching the bees in the honey locust. The old life was done, had been ending for so many years, but I had not been able to admit it yet. Words began to form themselves under my pen, words I didn’t even know existed in my mind. The moment they became visible on the page, I began to shake. A door behind me clicked shut, the sleeping girl opened her eyes, I was through to the other side.  

            When I try to write about this, I often end up splitting myself in two, the way you do in dreams when you both experience an event and observe yourself experiencing it. I am the girl who was silenced and the girl who held a hand over my mouth. I don’t know how to reconcile this, but the original girl does. “Forget that,” she says. “We’re going to live.” She signs up for school, makes friends, gets a tattoo, plans solo trips, buys a pair of walking shoes, piles of books, a tarot deck for the hell of it, ditches a life’s worth of anger because it’s not worth our time.  The woman who has done my hair for the last 18 years tells me, “You get younger every time I see you.” She is not talking about my appearance. Though I can only seem to write about it in a fractured way, what she recognizes in me is a wholeness, a completion, a freedom. I am the girl who lives.

            As I write this, I am sitting in a café in the little beach town I sometimes dream I have moved to. I’m eating coffee cake and drinking my third pot of tea. I am a little footsore from a walk and frizzled by the mist that comes off the ocean here, and I’m happy. I am halfway through my life and I am happy in a way I didn’t know I could be happy. Now I face the task of nurturing and growing up the original girl. How to do it?

  Find joy, I think. Joy is the path.

            My oldest granddaughter taught me something about this recently. She is 7 now, and most of those years have been spent with a pencil in her hand, drawing. She’s been calling herself an artist since she was around 3. Last time I visited her, she told me she was writing a book. It’s about a rabbit named Thorna and she has written 14 pages of it so far. She has plans for “about 30” but no one can see it until she’s done. Every couple of hours or so she would go to her spot at the dining table, take out a basket of paper, ignore the chaos around her and work on that book a little. Then she’d put it away and go play or read or eat or whatever life had brought her at the moment. She’s been working on this project for several months. No anxiety, no pressure, no deadline, no self-loathing, no avoidance, just claiming her truth, doing her work, day after day. I can’t quit thinking about it. When I look at her, I see what could have been, what still can be.

            My life is not quite so simple and straightforward as a 7-year old’s, but the path is still the same.  Play a little, work a little, follow the quiet strings of joy’s pull day by day, that is the way to grow a self.  Maybe especially, a self that has been forced to sleep for so very long. I have spent a good amount of time grieving those misspent years, but something inside me keeps promising: it’s never too late. As long as I am here and breathing, I am becoming who I am, who I always have been.

            A couple of years ago I put this framed encouragement from Lucille Clifton in my office. I’ll leave it here where it might encourage you too:

 i am not done yet


as possible as yeast

as imminent as bread

a collection of safe habits

a collection of cares

less certain than i seem

more certain than i was

a changed changer

i continue to continue

where i have been

most of my lives

is where i’m going

            

(I know before I publish this that friends who read here have their own experiences, different than mine; that some of you have found peace where I found pain. I honor your story and your choices and want only for you to find joy and wholeness, wherever that is for you.)

 Reading and thinking:

funeral rites :: April 30, 2023

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The people at the funeral don’t believe in ghosts, though they nod gently when I tell my story about the dream the night before, how the dead woman had come to sit so sweetly beside me, how she laughed when I told her about the funeral.

“I think she was happy,” I say, and they smile with relief and Christian politeness. A bridge has appeared for them to bring my ghost over.

“Of course! She’s dancing with Jesus!” one woman says excitedly and raises her arms. She jigs her hips a little. She has lost two sons and a husband. Her eyes, when she leans in to say this again, are both kind and a little manic.

The people all look like memories I have forgotten. Faces emerge somberly out of the crowd, claim to be old babysitters or Sunday school teachers or friends of my mother. I am mistaken for my sister several times. Everyone wears the same clothes they wore thirty years before. Everywhere the sound of polyester, the squeak of stiff shoes.

The dead woman liked purple. I appear with her in a slideshow: 12 years old, 14, 18, 45. We wear no makeup, then too much makeup, then we are middle-aged. The slideshow ends; she will always be middle-aged. The preacher tells us we don’t need to be sad, she is happy now. I rub the back of my heel with the toe of my other shoe, wonder if eternal happiness is as exhausting as it sounds. The dead woman liked butterflies. On the screen behind the preacher now there is a purple sky; it fills and unfills with butterflies.

Everyone says it’s a shame we only see each other at funerals and weddings; I think that’s the whole point of having them, but I don’t say this out loud. There are many things I don’t say out loud. I see an old teacher from the church school. He asks about my husband, a man he has met once. He thinks my husband is a pastor. This accidentally makes me laugh. He wants to know then about my husband’s job, his health. He reminisces about the Olive Garden where they were introduced. I am fine, I don’t say. I write. I am finally in university. He has to go, there is a lot to do at funerals, but he tells me to assure my husband that he enjoyed having me in class.

After he leaves, I stand still, waiting to see if I am actually visible. I feel as insubstantial as a ghost, as if you can see through my body to the rows of chairs, the red-flecked carpet. I look around for the dead woman, maybe I can see her now. People circulate. Someone plays softly on a keyboard. I resist remembering this life. I resist the unresisting me that lived before.

In the back room there is a reception. I consider a row of water bottles and a plate of cookies, but I have read my fairy tales: food offered in a transitory space is always a trap. One cookie and I will be haunting the halls of this church forever. I move on to the display of the dead woman’s life. Here are the books she liked as a child, here the photos she had on her wall, here a wooden cat, purple. When I die, what color will I be?

I find my husband just before he takes a cookie and we make our way through the goodbyes and out the door.

“That wasn’t so bad,” he says.

“No,” I say. The sun is shining, and I am suddenly sure of myself once more. I look back at the church, imagine the butterflies escaped from their screen, circling, fluttering over empty chairs, taking refuge in the plastic greenery. I want to run back and open the doors, let them all out. I don’t. There are no butterflies in the sanctuary, just as there are no ghosts. We get in our car and roll through the parking lot. I watch the church recede in the side mirror and catch a flash of purple. The dead woman waves from the steps.

She looks happy. 

 Hello friends,

How are you? I don’t know how many of you are still out there, but I’m sending a wave from my corner of the world. It’s been several months, but I’m getting used to these new routines of interaction, study, commute, work. For a while, I couldn’t do much but go to school and recover from going to school (my HSP friends, you understand) but these last weeks I’ve found things coming easier. There’s more space for taking care of myself, more space to enjoy, less exhaustion. I’m finding I want to put my experiences into words again, so I’ve come back to this space today to tell you about a personal loss, and the twist to the heart that sometimes comes when we are asked to revisit our old lives. I’m just telling it in my own way – a little slant, a little storybook.

This piece came to me very clearly one morning. Joy Harjo says we all use the second sight – in dreams, in intuitions, in our art.* I’ve been leaning into this idea that I am already in touch with whatever I need to articulate in this world, trusting myself to write words the way they come to me, instead of rounding their edges so they don’t cut, or delineating too clearly their meaning. Mostly when I write, I don’t know the meaning anyway. Words rise like shoots out of the ground of what I’m living, feeling, experiencing, and consuming. It makes me conscious of how I nurture myself, how I fill the time. I want the ground of my being to be rich and complex and full of possibility so the words can grow straight and true. Maybe we feel these things most clearly when death’s skirts have so recently brushed past.

Wherever you are, I hope you are safe and well. I’ve missed our conversations and our sharing. Thanks as always for reading these words here.

peace keep you,

tonia

…

Some of what I’ve been reading, watching, enjoying these days:

 Listening to:

*Commonplace podcast, episode 109 with Joy Harjo

Watching:

Perry Mason

Reading:

~ Fingersmith // Sarah Waters – a twisty, unpredictable, dark Dickens of a tale.

~A Ghost in the Throat // Doireann Ni Griofa – absolutely gorgeous writing about mothering, poetry, and passion. Unlike anything I’ve read before.

 ~The Outermost House // Henry Beston – Beston’s account of a year living alone in a house he built on Cape Cod in the 1930’s is beautifully written. I can’t quit thinking about his hours alone there and wishing for my own quiet cabin somewhere.

 ~Standing in the Forest of Being Alive // Katie Farris - Farris’ battle with early breast cancer told through poetry. Incredibly intimate, funny, and strong.