In the Great Wide

In these months of pandemic, is it the time to petition a saint or two? Perhaps St. Roch, called upon during the plague? Or Ste. Thérèse of Lisieux, asked for in periods of illness? Thinking of all the cities in which so many have become ill, where doctors, nurses, and medical staff are overwhelmed and without desperately needed supplies, New Orleans among these cities.

“In the Great Wide,” a New Orleans story of floods and faith and finding one’s way, petitions a number of saints and recognizes a series of miracles. Published in Spring 2020 issue of The Massachusetts Review, the story is just a story, only fiction, somewhat on the speculative side, with a metaphor that is working overtime. In our world right now, it is only a distraction. Still, I’m taking the publication of this story at just this time as a sign that we all need a miracle.

And so the narrator Antoinette begins…

On a warm day in May, some years ago, Mary’s uncle set up a crawfish boil for his family of twenty-five and ended up feeding the five hundred members of St. John’s Cathedral. Hard red crawdad shells piled up on the newspaper-covered picnic tables and the altar boys swore the ice-cold beer never ran out. Across town that same spring, in the churchyard where my parents’ graves had already shifted in the soft soil, swarms of cream-colored roses grew, though no one had planted them. In late summer, a hurricane’s eye rested over the delta while the outer storm stalled and eventually gave up. The winds changed to light breezes, and the sideways rain became a calm sighing mist. That autumn a rumor floated through the neighborhood that the dying old woman one street over had woken up twenty years younger. By evening she was an infant in her daughter’s arms, and before the moon rose, she had disappeared.

            And then there was the Saturday afternoon I came home with my friend Mary from the winter sales down on Canal Street. We were breathless from walking all those blocks from the streetcar stop, the day’s gray cast and our thin-handled shopping bags weighing us down. As we neared the corner, a bloom caught in a crack in the sidewalk made us both pause. A fist of tiny white roses reached up, the same kind we had read of in Catechism class, the ones associated with Ste. Thérèse of France. Mary crossed herself and whispered, “Another miracle.” We didn’t even think of plucking them from the crevice and walked on. Miracles kept crowding in, taking up space. I preferred to think of my own miracle, baby Daphne, nearly a year old, growing in a new way. 

Here is a link to The Massachusetts Review, Volume 61, Issue 1, if you’d like to buy a copy and read more. Gratitude, stay well, and keep the faith!

First Light

"I surprised myself... by appearing at eight o'clock, outside the mosque... The beauty of the morning was another surprise: it reminded me of my earliest experiences of America. New York was my first introduction to the possibilities of light, crashing through gaps in curtains, transforming people and sidewalks and buildings into golden icons, or black shadows, depending on where they stood in relation to the sun. But the light in front of the mosque... this light was something else again. It buzzed and held you in its heat, it was thick, alive with pollen and insects and birds, and because nothing higher than one story interrupted its path, it gave all its gifts at once, blessing everything equally, an explosion of simultaneous illumination."

- from SWING TIME, by Zadie Smith

"Rock Salt and Rabbit"

Though celebration in a time of chaos seems an unlikely, untruthful action, I want to pause and breathe and acknowledge a moment in my life as a writer. This week my story, "Rock Salt and Rabbit," one of eight finalists for the 2016 Nelligan Prize, was published in Colorado Review. The experience of working with Editor in Chief, Stephanie G'Schwind, and all the CR staff was amazing. To add to this honor, the story was the featured fiction on the CR website for their 2016 Fall/Winter Issue and in their November podcast. CR editor Lauren Matheny's beautiful reading of the story and CR podcast editor Kylan Rice's introductions and following interview allowed me to listen and learn even more about the characters and their world than I realized in the all the months and years of writing.

"Rock Salt and Rabbit" stands alone as a story, but is also a chapter in the novel, SYBELIA DRIVE; hence, the years of writing. It is Royal's story, set when the war in Vietnam is still going on, and when soldiers like Royal were returning home. While I have never been to war, through research and time spent writing and rewriting, I came to understand this character - his stamina, his dilemma, his honesty and generosity.

Through writing, we learn empathy. And I'd say through reading, too. I'd like to imagine that if Royal was more than a character, that if he were alive and breathing, he would be one of the thousands of veterans deploying this weekend to Standing Rock in North Dakota to "assemble as a peaceful, unarmed militia" and "defend the water protectors from assault and intimidation at the hands of the militarized police force and DAPL security."

In a time when the world spins in mad and maddening directions, I'm grateful for this moment. I encourage everyone to disengage from the madness for an hour each day, to take in something positive, like a story. Read in order to understand, then go out and make the world a better place.

Leap Day 2016

I'm thinking about dance, music, and writing these days. A year has passed since last reading and thinking on the words of Zadie Smith, and in this leap year, on this leap day, Zadie reappears. And she is leaping and dancing toward a new novel.

From The Guardian:

Swing Time is “a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them”, said Hamish Hamilton [ZS's publisher]. Set in north-west London and west Africa, it will follow the lives of two girls who both want to become dancers, but only one of whom has talent.

“The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either,” said Hamish Hamilton, which described the novel as “dazzlingly energetic and deeply human”.

In the last moments of this gifted day that comes every four years, I'm grateful for Zadie Smith's take on the world, her leaps from here to there, resting in heightened realism, in multiple viewpoints and urban, racial, and social class differences, and in the rhythms and rituals that bring us together.

Zadie Smith on Imperfect Knowledge in Fiction

Recently, I've been flat out, seriously prone, lying on the day bed in my study with a mess of old lit journals and poetry collections and trashy mags. So, yes, I've been reading a lot, grabbing whatever I can reach, mostly the old New Yorkers and Oxford Americans strewn around the room. And that's how I came across a Winter 2013 New Yorker issue that was marked to Zadie Smith's story "The Embassy of Cambodia." The story involves Fatou, an Ivory Coast immigrant who works for a well-off Pakistani family in London's Willesden suburb and becomes curious about what - beyond the never-ending badminton game, shuttlecock continuously in motion - goes on behind the high brick walls of the Cambodian Embassy. Structured in 21 parts, the story, as Smith states in her "This Week in Fiction" interview with Cressida Treyshon, "is scored like a badminton game" and considers the idea of how "people win and lose in life."

The story reminds me of why I love Zadie Smith's writing: her aesthetic, her brilliantly honest characters, and her ability to paint the London world she loves to revisit with strokes that don't prettify and cover the truth, but uncover and examine it. In the interview she speaks of the origins of this particular piece and of how, when she's writing, "everything is basically spontaneous…  I have a vague idea one day… sometimes a tone, or a single image."  Within a smaller world, the curiosity about a wider one can open up the writing, creating something expansive for the characters involved. This question of how her characters reach beyond their own scope of understanding reveals how Smith strives for "imperfect knowledge" in her fictional worlds.

““The thing that can be challenging in fiction is allowing people to exist imperfectly. There is perhaps an added pressure if the author belongs to a group that feels itself burdened by what I want to call the responsibilities of representation. But if I believed that every time I wrote a Nigerian character that he carried the heavy burden of representing “The Nigerian People” in their entirety, well, I would find it hard to write a word. I’m sure there are readers who read in that way, but I can’t—won’t—write for them. I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely.””

— Zadie Smith

How incredible to read this, even in my seemingly endless horizontal state, to understand once more - this time through the words of an author from whom I continue to learn - the true responsibility of the writer. To get the words down; to create characters that ring true and have as many imperfections as, say, you or I; and to follow those characters into the unfolding story.

To write freely.

Indeed.