The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Author: Sherman Alexie

A good young adult novel is the best because 1) when I was a young young adult I was starved for good reads and usually resorted to sustaining myself with re-reads or checking out whitebread Sweet Valley High and 2) even though the language is simple, it doesn't mean the truths of the story don't run deep, if not the deepest because of it's accessibility/universality (think Hemmingway).

This was the sort of book that made me exclaim out loud--laughter, gasps, and the mmm sound you make when something tastes just right. Obviously, I'm a little biased--I'm a sucker for anything about Indians and sports and family and community and making the most of the cards you've been dealt and this book definitely has all that. Plus it has inserted little personal drawings/doodles/comics like the ones that Davi draws and I never get enough of.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

Director: Miranda July

I watched this movie when it first came out a couple years ago and besides remembering I liked it, I really only remembered the "back and forth, forever" scene because it is so funny and oddly touching.

I just checked it out from the Bayfield Library and watched it again with my mom and this time the scene that stood out to me was when Christine goes to the art museum to drop off her tape and the art lady gives her a business card and tells her to mail the tape to the address on the card, the address of where they are standing, and says it will be easier that way. Throughout the whole movie Christine is trying to break down this wall to be directly intimate and everytime she is cast as crazy for doing it, yet the rest of the characters are so closed off and can only let themselves be intimate through devices like internet chatting, posting signs on the window, code words, etc. And yeah, of course it is "easier" (as in less awkward, less scary) to only let your guard down when there is already a wall in place, but it is also so ulitmately sad and lonely and literarlly sense-less.

So yeah. Beautiful. And I promise the next blog will be about a book.

Speaking of, Miranda July has a pretty cool new book too.

Vivere

Director: Angelina Maccarone

Email I wrote to my foreign friends yesterday after seeing Vivere as part of Chicago's GLBT international film festival:

Hi friends!
I'm just writing to tell you that Angelina Maccarone is my new favorite director. (The only person I've ever called my favorite director actually.) She made the movie Fremde Haut (Unveiled in English) that I said both of you needed to watch because it is so good. And yesterday I just saw another movie (Vivere) by her that was perfect, especially for where I am in my life right now. Also, I just googled her name to find out more about her and she is half-german, half-italian, and lesbian!! She's us!! All smushed together! :)
Love, Magdalen

Genre: Film, Fiction

Sula

Author: Toni Morrison

This might be my favorite of her novels. It's short, like The Bluest Eye, but I think that is part of what I love about it. I am so impressed with how many characters and events she is able to give attention to in so few pages and how each detail she choses to include is weighted with emotion. Morrison's novels, like Louise Erdrich's, make me feel as if I am living in the community they are describing. On the first read through I am just a child--hearing the names of people in my parent's conversations and experiencing the events of a community but not necessarily understanding the full impact of these events. Each time I return to the book though, I grow up a little more--people and events are more familiar and I become better at perceiving and empathizing with the emotions behind the character's actions. I like the idea that I can reread Morrison and Erdrich for the rest of my life and always be getting something more from them, not because the books ever change, but because I do.

Genre: Novel(la)

Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and the Teaching of Writing

Editor: Robert E. Brooke

From the preface (p. ix): “In short, we believe energized writing is, at core, place-conscious. To write well—to want to write well—writers of any age must feel “located” in a particular community and must feel that their writing contributes.”

The book contains nine essays from English teachers involved with the Nebraska Writing Project’s “Rural Voices, Country Schools” team. Each essay is written by a single teacher and is focused on their attempt to include “place conscious-learning” within their curriculum. While the line-up of teachers does include one Elementary School teacher and one teacher at a Community College, the majority of the essays take place within high school classrooms. That is not to say that the students and teachers remain in their classrooms. The goal for all of these teachers is to find ways for their students to get out of the classroom and connect with the people and places that make up their communities.

It makes absolute sense that this book is so narrowly focused on one population—teachers and students participating in the RV, CT project in rural Nebraska. By doing so, the project and book in itself becomes evidence of it’s thesis that by paying closer attention to the people and places that directly affect us we will better be able to understand and interpret the larger world. While all of the teaching examples in this book are born out of and relevant to students in rural Nebraska, I think that all of them can be adapted to communities of students throughout the country and world.

Small Wonder

Author: Barbara Kingsolver

For class we were asked to bring in examples of words/sentences that we love/loathe. I just finished this book of essays and mostly really enjoyed it. For the assignment, I decided to quote from it in order to show that love and hate are often right next to each other.

A sentence I love:
On p. 197 Kingsolver quotes a line from Robert Frost’s poem, “Death of a Hired Man”: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” I like the ‘universal truth’ of this sentence. Kingsolver comments, “Frost captured in just a few words the most perfect definition of home I’ve ever read” and I agree. There is something really inclusive about the simplicity of words used and the complexity of the term “have to.” He doesn’t say that home is good or bad, he just says it’s there, and I think it’s kind of profound.

A word I love:
“Home.” The only synonyms for ‘home’ are words for a physical place, and each of these words sounds like an object (house, residence, domicile) whereas home sounds more like a feeling.

A sentence I loathe:
On p. 126 Kingsolver writes: “If there’s anyone who still thinks eating organically is a bland, granola-crunching affair, he or she must have missed the boat back around midmorning in the Age of Aquarius.” Kingsolver really pulled me along with her throughout this essay on the importance of being more conscious about what we eat and where it comes from, until I got to this line. Mostly I hate her use of the word organic here because I don’t think it supports her main argument (that we should eat locally), and secondly I think she really distances any reader here that doesn’t believe in eating organically, but does believe in eating locally, (as I do). In other words, I was totally on the boat, until she told me I missed it, “around midmorning in the Age of Aquarius”… whatever that means.

A word I loathe:
"Organic." It’s overused, simplified, misunderstood, and romanticized. And I probably need to just buckle-down and write the essay on why I believe so.

Genre: Nonfiction, Essays

Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain

Author: Michele Morano

I came across one of the essay from this book in a lit magazine. I started reading it because I knew Michele was a Chicago author and sometimes taught in my program and then just got sucked in. I think that essay ("In the Subjunctive Mood") is really the best one in the book, but all her writing is smart and clever and just really put together. I bought the book and read the rest of it while I was in Italy. Even though she was writing about her time in Spain, there was a lot just about travel and the idea of "translating" that umm.... translated to my own experiences abroad. Like, The Horizontal World, this book is another example of a collection of essays that can each stand alone, but have deepened meanings/effects when all read together.

The book's website is also very put together.

Genre: Nonfiction, Essays

Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball and Honor on the Little Big Horn

Author: Larry Colton

I was excited when I found this book in a thrift store (and surprised that I hadn't come across the title sooner) but I was also skeptical about the idea of an old white guy, an ex minor league baseball player at that, writing about an American Indian girl playing basketball. I read the introduction and first chapter ready to underline ignorant lines and write angry responses in the margin. As I continued to read, I found that Colton was indeed ignorant about a lot--he hadn't spent much, if any, time on Indian reservations before beginning the book and his original intention of course was to write about the boy's high school team, not the girl's--but he was also honest about what he didn't know and that made all the difference. In fact, I began to kind of like this old white guy. I felt like he gave a very honest and respectful portrait of the team and the girls on the team and he did so by also including his own story of how and why he was first attracted to this team and the relationship he forms with them throughout the writing of the book.

Genre: Nonfiction, Journalism
Subject: Women's Sports, American Indians

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Who will run the frog hospital?

Author: Lorrie Moore

Book Details: I found this book at the Bayfield Public Library the first time I ventured out of the kids/young adult section when I was about ten. Over the next eight years, I probably checked it out twenty times, but I haven't read it again since I graduated from high school. As I read A Complicated Kindness, I was reminded of this book and I was curious to return to it and figure out why. Both authors write with an affecting humor. Both novels take place in a small town near the US-Canadian border (one on the Canadian side, one on the American side) that has a small amusement park frequented by French Canadian tourists in the summer. Both have female narrators: one a sixteen year old writing in present tense, the other a middle-aged woman on vacation with her husband in France and reflecting on being sixteen. Both are about how the place we have grown up (and the people in this place) have simultaneously pushed us away and pulled us back.

"I never knew what to do with all those years of one's life: trot around in them forever like old boots--or sever them, let them fly free? Of course, one couldn't really do either. But there was always the trying, and pretending. And then there was finally someplace in between, where one lived."

Genre: Novel

a complicated kindness

Author: Miriam Toews

Author details: I just read an interview with her and I think I understand so much more why I like her. She grew up Mennonite in a small town (like the narrator of her book) and then she moved to Montreal. The interviewer asked her about her transition and Miriam responded, "It was exciting and it was stimulating. I loved the cosmopolitan culture and its physical beauty, but at the same time I was stuck in between worlds and wondering where I was going to best fit in. I felt like an outsider in my own town as a teenager, and I certainly felt that way in Montreal. I'm not a part of this community, clearly, but I can't go home." Ummm... yeah. I feel ya, Miriam.

Book Details: Funny and sad and with an underlying feeling that people are innately good and well-intentioned, but also complex. Mariam comments on the characters in the novel in her interview: "The people of the community, the individuals, are like individuals everywhere: there are good ones and bad ones, but most of them are in between, like all of us. It's the culture of control that complicates their decency."

I thought this sentence (well, two actually) captured the essence of the novel well: "I miss kids. The way they react to everything like they're alive."

Genre: Novel
Subject: Family

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she also wrote a memoir.

The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere

Author: Debra Marquart

Book Details: I bought this book at a used bookstore a couple months ago based solely on the cover and the description on the book flap. I had read a few pages of it here and there put never really got into it. And then I picked it up again recently, started reading from the beginning, and became thoroughly consumed with her writing. I finished over half of the book in that first day, and the rest of it by the end of the week. She touches on a number of ideas around growing up in the Midwest that I am just beginning to dig up in my own writing, and she weaves it all together beautifully. I hope I am eventually able to do the same.

Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Subject: Home, Rural Midwest

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Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary

Author: Nelson Peery

Author Details: Michael had Nelson come talk to our class last quarter and read an excerpt from his forthcoming book. They met while Michael was teaching a writing workshop at The Guild, but it is clear that the relationship between the two is one of collaboration, of mutual respect in each others lives and work. It made me value the relationships I have that emulate this (Davi) and look forward to discovery of other such relationships.

Book Details: I've always had a hard time learning about history and politics because so much of what I've been taught has been dates, names, and events--the facts. And facts are never really that interesting to me unless they are grounded in a story, in a person. Reading Jane Addams biography earlier this year, I felt like I finally was able to begin to understand the time period that inspired her to create Hull House. Similarly, with Nelson memoir, I have a whole new understanding of American before and after WWII, especially from the perspective of the black men that served.

Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Subject: Standing Up

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Also, his new book comes out next month.

The After-Death Room: Journey Into Spiritual Activism

Author: Michael McColly

Author Details: Before I had gotten into my grad program at Northwestern, I had tried to get into one of Michael's undergrad classes. Even though I didn't have the prerequisites for the class, I had already visited his website and knew I needed to work with him, mostly because of this statement of one of his goals for his work:
"To highlight the many effective programs I have witnessed around the world and the creative and courageous people behind them who are defying the popular image of the AIDS pandemic by showing that it need not be a devastating plague but rather an empowering agency of change for individuals and communities."

Book Details: The After-Death Room also won the 2007 Lamba Literary Award for Spiritual Writing.

Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir, Travel
Subject: Spiritual Activism

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Author: Kim Edwards

Author details: She graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and currently teaches writing at the University of Kentucky. In an interview about writing The Memory Keeper's Daughter she references a Paris Review interview, in which Katherine Anne Porter "talks about the event of a story being like a stone thrown in water—she says it’s not the event itself that’s interesting, but rather the ripples the event creates in the lives of characters." Kim adds, "I found this to be true. Once I’d written the first chapter, I wanted to find out more about who these people were and what happened to them as a consequence of David’s decision; I couldn’t stop until I knew. "

Book details: Krystle gave me this book for Christmas. Reading it made me want to write fiction--just to be able to get in the heads of so many different characters and show all the sides of a given situation. It was beautiful.

a long way gone: memoirs of a boy soldier

Author: Ishmael Beah

Author details: I went to college with Ish. His dorm room was just a couple doors down from mine. I didn't know his story then. I just knew what you know of most people that you interact with daily but never deeply: walk, smile, habits, mutual friends. I'm glad that he could write this book and that I could read it and add some depth and understanding to what I already knew.

Book details: I think it's pretty much summed up in the title.

Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir
Subject: Overcoming

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Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy

Author: Louise W. Knight

Author details: Lucy was my professor this quarter. When she was in her thirties she asked her herself what was the thing she most wanted to do with her life. If she figured out what it was, she would do it. She realized it was to write a biography of Jane Addams, so she did. She believes the best advice she can give someone is that regardless of how unqualified you feel you are to do what you dream of doing, you should just do it. She started writing on her own, and eventually received an NEH Fellowship (after applying for one numerous times) that allowed her to just write for one whole year. The publication of this biography has opened many doors for Knight that she never imagined when she started writing it.

Book details: I'm kind of in love with Jane, in the same way I'm kind of in love with myself. Err... I think she is a great, and I hope I am and can be great too. I like her religion. I like her politics. I like how her friends remember her:
"She was so utterly real and first-hand, full of compassion without weakness or sentimentality...loving merriment while carrying the world's woes in her heart. A great statesman, a great writer, one of the world's rarest spirits."
--Emily Green Balch

Genre: Nonfiction, Biography
Subject: Great Women

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