Magdalen Dale

The Master Butchers Singing Club

2010-11-01T10:52:00.000-07:00

by Louise Erdrich

I've been a fan of Louise Erdrich's writing since college when I picked up Love Medicine. Mom and Dad gave me The Master Butchers Singing Club for Christmas when it came out in 2003, but for some reason I never got around to reading it. Even though in the time since I've read many of her other novels and all of her most recent ones. When Jen and I were in Minneapolis last September I saw that they were going to make a play of the novel and perform it at the Guthrie. I thought it would be fun to read it finally and then go and see the adaptation for stage. I've spent the last couple weeks reading it while sitting in the window seat our new place with the autumn light falling across the pages. So nice. Beautiful writing as always--the characters and descriptions... Some of my thoughts as I read: First, How could they possibly make a Louise Erdrich book into a play? How can you stage the beautiful small moments she captures in her descriptions? And secondly, I wish it was possible to have a butcher shop in town like the butcher shops of the past, where they slaughter out back, and there is an art and craft to the whole process, but current regulations prevent this. I understand why regulations have come into existance, a guarentee, a safety net, but I think something is lost. In response, we learn to raise and butcher our own meat, but even this isn't the same. I'm notaligic for the small community in which each person is so specifically trained and experienced in a single craft. We have aspects of it up here: master coffee roasters, master mead makers, master blueberry farmers :) ... but right now I'm missing my master butcher. I also missed seeing the play at the Guthrie as I wasn't able to make it back down to the cities during the run, but I'm glad it least it promted me to read... The books always better anyway, right?

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I just finished Erdrich's novel, Shadow Tag. Hard to read at times with a central relationship that is painfully complicated, but also just so well written. It was easy to imagine the characters expensive Minneapolis home on an unnamed lake after walking the perimeter of Lake of the Isles on our last trip down to the cities a few weeks ago (and even easier to imagine the vacation home on Madeline Island where the story ends). I couldn't help but wonder how much Erdrich drew on her marriage to Michael Dorris while writing this novel, but I also liked what this Washington Post reviewer had to say: "Erdrich has done what so many writers can't or won't do in this age of self-exposure: transform her own wrenching experience into a captivating work of fiction that says far more about the universal tragedy of spoiled love than it reveals about her private life."

Haroun and the Sea of Stories

2010-06-21T07:33:00.000-07:00

by Salman Rushdie

Since spring and sun I've been craving a good book and a place I can sit outside in the morning and drink my coffee, eat a bagel, and read. I've had my nose in and out of a couple different books and tried sitting on our shady steps, laying back in Jen's crazy creek, against a canoe, or in my car with the windows rolled down, but until this week I had yet to really feel comfortable or to be absorbed in what I'm reading, to feel I could sit and read all day. Then on Friday Jen and I drove up our driveway after a week away on the lake and see two beautiful red volkswagen bucket seats perched in the sun of our yard. And inside the cabin, a book on the table with a note inside: "Magdalen: Here is my copy of my favorite book. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. Love, Kate" A Demorest delivery!! The next morning I brew some Demorest coffee and move outside. Everything feels right again. Of course it only took me two days to finish her book (which i loved! so good. so kate.) but now I need another. Suggestions?

Coop: a Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting

2010-02-22T09:35:00.001-08:00

by Michael Perry (2009)

Michael meanders all over and often uses words that are beyond my vocabulary and yet he always manages to keep my attention. He has such respect for his parents and the rural life he grew up with and he struggles (as I and many others do) to retain their values and choices. His biggest struggle though out the book is that he is trying to do too much. He is always behind on his writing and often has others do the building or butchering that he imagined he would be doing. When he brings up the idea of getting sheep, his wife replies,"I have this vision of you in Des Moines, talking about writing and raising sheep--meanwhile, I'm running through the brush with a howling six-month-old under one arm and dragging a bawling seven-year-old behind me with the other arm while we try to get the sheep back inside a hole in the cobbled-up fence" (214). Reading about Michael Perry being stretched too thin was timely for me. I had been feeling the same and in the course of time it took me to finish this book, I made a decision to cut back on some of my obligations in order to spend more time writing and more time on the farm. I am also reminded how fortunate I am that my farming can be a source of income for me versus a distraction from money-making commitments as it is for Perry.

And my favorite quote, as he watches old farmers give their condolences to his brother at his nephew's funeral: "it strikes me again how much we miss if we rely wholly on poets to parse the tender center of the human heart" (273).

Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder

2010-02-22T08:35:00.000-08:00

by Kent Nerburn

This book arrived in the mail a month ago just as I had reached a break point in my writing and was looking to be consumed by a good read. Cory had received it as a gift and was almost finished reading it when she went online and bought me a copy as well. So many of my favorite books have come to me as recommendations from my friends and this book is another. The book starts with a request, from Dan, a 78 year old Lakota man to Kent, a 40 year old white writer: "I want you to help me write a book. I want to get this all down... What I have in my mind." As the book evolves, we do hear Dan's poignant philosophies on Indian history and relations between Indian and white people, but these philosophies are framed by another story, the present-tense story of the relationship between Dan and Kent and the story of how this book comes to be. The best advice to Kent comes early on in the book when Dan's friend Grover tells Kent to "write it all" not just the speeches and ultimately the book feels balanced and real and honest because he shows Dan as a complicated character and himself as a complicated character. It may be easier to leave the complexities out, but it is the complexities that drew me into the story and kept it real.

Behind You

2010-01-08T07:36:00.001-08:00

I've been on a Jacqueline Woodson marathon for the past couple months--ordering all her books through the libraries interloan. YA novels, they are the perfect length to spend a morning with or start before bed and then stay up late to read the whole way through. Last night I was up until two with Behind You. Fifteen year old Jeremiah is mistakenly shot by cops as he's running home from his girlfriend's house through central park. The chapters rotate narrators: Miah's girlfriend Ellie, his best friend Carlton, his teammate Kennedy, and his parents who haven't talked to each other since his dad Norman moved across the street and broke his mom Nelia's heart. Before Miah dies the characters are connected to each other through him, but now that he is gone, they seek each other out in order to feel connected again. My favorite was this passage written at the end of the book in the voice of Miah's mom. It is a year after Miah has passed.

Some days there is Ellie in my kitchen, the yellow-gold light spilling over us as we talk. Some evenings there is Norman on my stoop, telling me about his life, listening to me talk about mine--friends now, the past of us together not as painful as it once was. And on Saturdays there is Carlton, carrying my grocery bags--when I say, Sing, Carlton, he does, and his voice takes me back to another time, a lighter time, a freer time.

And each day there is at least one perfect moment--the way the sun moves around the living room, roasted potatoes with lots of rosemary and oil, a new baby wrapped up in blue, a child laughing.

The snow blows and blows. I turn a way from my window, make my way upstairs to my study. When I turn my lamp on, so much beautiful light fills the room.

A Gate At The Stairs

2009-10-23T10:50:00.000-07:00

by Lorrie Moore

I liked this quote on the back of the book (by Susan Salter Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times): "Lorrie Moore has something that many writers of her generation don't have: She is truly odd...[But] Moore's stories don't leave us in the solitary confinement that oddity can create.... They are the dance halls and constellations in which eccentricity becomes uniqueness."

I find myself liking Moore's characters and connecting to them because of their genuine quirkiness. In high school I read and reread Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? I liked the main character in it. I don't remember her name, but she was a teenage girl, and she was also weird. In A Gate at the Stairs, the main character (Tassie) and I are not only both girls and a little weird (although I think she is a lot odder than I am), but Tassie also grew up on a farm in Wisconsin (a lot different than my farm with her bumbling father and emo mother and close proximity to a big city) and like me, she graduates from her small town high school in 2001. The story starts during her freshman year of college, a few months after 9/11. I can't recall another book I've read in which the main character and I were the same age in the same year.

Who will run the frog hospital? was short (just over a 100 pages) and I had lived a lot less when I read it. It was easy to connect. In A Gate at the Stairs, Tassie and I have a lot more in common, but I also know 200 more pages about her life and I know ten years more about mine, which makes it easier to see that in fact we are quite different.

But it still doesn't make me like her any less.

After Tupac & D Foster

2009-07-21T17:39:00.000-07:00

by Jacqueline Woodson

So good. With real language and complicated emotions. The best YA novel I've read since Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Last summer, my friend Andrea was hired as the middle school language arts teacher at the Bayfield Public School, where we had both attended--kindergarten through graduation. She started the year by reading a chapter a day from 'Absolutely True Diary' to each of her classes. The eighth grade group was especially drawn in and when she neared the end of the novel, pleaded that she not stop at the chapter break and instead read to the end. When she told me this, I was excited to find more YA books that they could connect with. After picking 'After Tupac' up at the library yesterday and finishing it in just a morning of reading, Jacqueline Woodson is at the top of my list of recommended YA authors. While reading it I was already devising writing prompts (Is there anyone who was once in your life but isn't anymore? What do you remember about them? Is there a musician/singer/rapper whose lyrics you especially connect to? What lines? Why? Write a scene of dialog that sounds like how you might talk with your friends or family.) I was happy to read on the back flap that this wasn't Jacqueline's only book and excited to read more. But I was also a bit wistful. Despite Andrea's success working in the middle school, higher ups at the school decided to rearrange teaching assignments and the result has her teaching first grade next fall. After seeing how she was able to connect with her students over the past year, I have no doubt that Andrea will find her way back to middle school some day. In the meantime I will continue to read YA, to make lists of authors, and books, and writing prompts. And not all has to wait, as I learned upon visiting Jacqueline's website, that she writes picture books appropriate for first graders as well.

Hannah Coulter

2009-01-03T09:59:00.000-08:00

by Wendell Berry

I finished reading this book months ago now, but haven’t blogged about it yet—not because I can’t think of what to say, but because there is so much I could say that I don’t know where to begin.

Wendell Berry is my dad’s favorite author. His books fill a whole shelf in my parent’s house. Occasionally I have pulled a book down and read an essay or the first couple chapters of a novel, but I’ve never finished any of his books. Last Christmas, my dad told me I should read Hannah Coulter. He had just read it on his last trip back from (the Republic of) Georgia. During the long day of international flights and airports he had let the story consume him. He said parts of the book had made him cry and he wondered what the people next to him must have been thinking as he wiped tears from his cheeks.

So it’s been on my list for a long time, but I didn’t pick it up until this fall, and I’m glad I waited. I didn’t finish it in a day like my dad did, but I’m sure it didn’t take me more than a week. And I also cried, not on an airplane, but while sitting on the couch in my Grandma Dale’s house where I live now, and she lived for the last thirty years of her life. Hannah, the title character and narrator of the story was born in 1922; Grandma was born in 1915.

I think of my grandma often. Her presence in my life as I was growing up and she was living just a short walk up the driveway from my parents house, and now that she has passed and I have moved back home and into her little house and nestled my books and dishes in with what remains of hers, I think of what her life was like at my age. I know bits and pieces—that she loved to read, wanted to be a schoolteacher, but didn’t have the money for it, so instead moved to the city and talked her way in to nursing school. Eventually she met my grandpa and they married and had four children together, the third of which was my dad. I understand my grandma because we share books and escaping to the city and independence, but I don’t understand her because we share history. I don't know what it is to live through the depression, being a housewife in the 50s, and entering a new century with the wisdom of an old woman instead of the naivety of a teenager. Hannah Coulter is the (fictional) story of one woman’s life who does share this history with my grandma. Because they share a generation, Hannah's story is also a window into my grandma’s story, giving context and emotion to the facts of her life.

While Hannah shared a generation with my grandma, as a character, she shares values with everyone in my immediate family—a connection to the land you live on, hard work, family, community, common sense. I was actually inspired to make a venn diagram to compare the values expressed in Hannah Coulter with Atlas Shrugged. They overlap a lot, but at their root have the opposition of city versus country.

I am not the only one in my family who Dad has recommended this book too. It is relevant to all of us. Mom and Dad for choosing the life they have—to farm, to live simply, in a small community—and my brothers and I for choosing to come home and continue to farm and live simply. We all took different paths to come to this decision, but ultimately, we have all come back.

One night I am playing cribbage with my brother Jon (who moved home this fall and shares Grandma’s house with me) and we are discussing Hannah Coulter and rootless American culture. As he deals our cards, I say, “It’s like we leave for something better, and we make our lives more complicated, but we don’t actually get anywhere.”
“Right. We make our lives more complicated, and we don’t get anywhere. We get lost,” he replies. And I think how glad I am to not be so lost anymore, and can only guess he is thinking something similiar.

Hannah Coulter is just one novel in a collection of novels that Wendell Berry has written about the same fictional community of “Port William.” Like Louise Erdrich (and Toni Morrison), he returns to the same land and web of characters to tell his stories, and instead of running out of stories to tell, it seems with each book he opens more doors for more stories. In Hannah Coulter he writes (in Hannah’s voice): “Writing about Port William to Virgil in his absence and distance, I realized that the story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be finished. It is eternal, always here and now, and going on forever” (43). Being home and seeing home with a writer’s eye, I feel this way constantly—that everything is connected and complicated and “can never be completely told”—even writing this post, I have a hard time containing the tangents or fully explaining how one little novel affects me, other than to say it describes a life that I deeply connect with.

Atlas Shrugged

2008-11-05T16:22:00.001-08:00

Ayn Rand made it on the recommended book list I had requested from Breetel last winter, and when I made an off-hand comment to Davi about being surprised to see the infamous capitalist on her list, Davi defended her little sister by saying that everyone in her family has read Ayn Rand and that I would actually probably get a lot out of reading her. Then she disappeared into her bedroom and came back with the tattered paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged that she had pulled off of her mom's shelf and devoured while in high school.

I started reading it in May, on the porch of the little one-bedroom Chicago apartment that I shared with Davi for two years. In June, I moved home to Wisconsin to be near my family and Davi moved to NYC to be closer to hers. At home I would read a chapter or so with my coffee in the morning and then mull it over as I pruned and weeded in the blueberry rows of my family's farm. I took it with me on a trip out west and read it on the train from Eugene to Seattle, marking my place with my ticket stub. I don't get cell phone service on the farm, so where I once shared daily conversation with Davi, I now was lucky to catch up with her a couple times a month. But reading Atlas, contemplating the themes of the novel, taking notice of the purple pen underlinings and hand-written notes in the margins, and imagining the conversations that will surface when we share space again, has helped me get used to not having my best friend within shouting distance anymore.

It was especially intersting to be absorbed in the final chapters of the book as the stock market fell and our country prepared to vote in a new leader. I often found myself asking, "Who would Ayn Rand vote for?" Although I can't imagine she would be in favor of his plans to tax the rich, I have to believe that Obama's message and the way he has run his campaign would strike a chord with her. I have to believe that while their politics may differ, she would be persuaded to vote for him based on the values they share.

From Obama's election night speech: "Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House – a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, 'We are not enemies, but friends…though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.'"

On Monday I caned raspberries. Dad joined me in the field for the last couple hours of daylight. We caught up on the events of our weeks. I told him I had finally finished reading Atlas and he said he noticed that Hannah Coulter had been sitting out and asked if that would be my next read (which it will be). He was excited for me to read it. He said he enjoys Wendell Berry's work, not because he shares the experience of the characters (farming blueberries in Wisconsin is a lot different than farming tobacco in Kentucky) but because he shares their values.

"Like me and Davi." I replied.

Skim

2008-04-11T22:55:00.000-07:00

words: Mariko Tamaki
drawings: Jillian Tamaki

I found this book at W&CF doing that thing I mentioned a couple posts ago where I wander around the store and leave with whatever book has found it's way into my hands and stayed there. I like especially that the book portrays a very real friendship with ups and downs and closeness and distance. I have found that my truest friends are not the people that are constantly in life, but the people that I always come back to. I also like that the book was created collaboratively with Mariko doing the writing and Jillian doing the drawing. I see myself and my friends in the characters, as well as in the authors way of intertwining their art.

Now Is Then: Snapshots from the Maresca Collection

2008-03-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

I think good found snapshots (like those collected in this book) are a lot like crushes--singled out of the plethora of others because of pleasing aesthetics and intriguing subject matters, but attractive also because of what you don't know, because you are able to take the pretty pieces contained in the small square frame and then just make up the rest.

The Florist's Daughter

2008-03-10T11:39:00.000-07:00

Author: Patricia Hampl

I started reading another of Patricia's memoirs (A Romantic Education) a couple years ago and I liked it but didn't have the time or patience then to be sucked in and therefore I never finished it. I've been wanting to return to her work for sometime now, especially as I am visiting the cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul, the setting of almost all her work) more often and am contemplating possibly living there myself or at least having it as my closest city when I move back to the farm. When I saw this memoir, her lastest, still in hardcover and costing more than I really should spend, displayed at W&CF, I couldn't help but pick it up and carry it around the store with me. My friend says she likes to grocery shop by walking into the produce section and seeing what vegetables she picks up. She believes her body will tell her what food she needs if she just surrounds herself with the options. I almost didn't buy it. I can wait until it comes out in paperback, I thought, or maybe get it from the library. I should read the one I started first and then come back to this one, I thought. But I wanted this one. The connection to her father's work in the title, but a summary that made it sound like it was actually more about her mother, and the Pat Conroy praise on the cover: "Patricia Hampl writes the best memoirs of any writer in the English language." I needed it.

For the next couple weeks, I would read a chapter or part of a chapter before bed, and like A Romantic Education I liked it, but whether it was me being busy and tired or her meandering, I didn't get sucked in. I brought it with me to Memphis last weekend but didn't open it up to read until Monday morning when I was waiting at the airport for my flight. I continued to read after I boarded the plane, as we waited longer than usual to take off, in the air, back on the ground in Chicago and waiting again for O'Hare to lend us a gate, on the blue line (I took a quick break to call work and tell them I would be late), and then on the red line. I laughed at the Belmont stop. I cried at the Lawrence stop. I finished the book at Berwyn, with just enough time to reread the last page before I got off at Thorndale. So good. I didn't mind paying for hardcover, and I definitely didn't mind showing up to work late because of a delayed flight.

Genre: Memoir

The Church of the River

2008-03-09T15:41:00.000-07:00

I went to Memphis last weekend to meet up with Leslie, my roommate from college who was there on a grad school interview, and stay with my friends Sara and Lauren who I've been promising to visit since they moved there. Before coming, Sara and Lauren asked what I wanted to do when I came. "Graceland? Beale Street?" they offered almost fearfully, but I told them I was coming to see them and that I wanted to see their Memphis, not the the tourist packaged Memphis.

It was great. We drank Budlights at a (the) trashy dyke bar, BBQ'd salmon and chicken on their backporch, drank coffee and ate whole wheat bagels at the "hippie" hangout, chilled in the park by the art school where all the "different" people of Memphis hang out, watched tevo'd reality MTV, played guitar hero and a little bit of real guitar. On Saturday Sara and Lauren mentioned that they had been attending services at a Unitarian church. I had learned about the Unitarian Church from living with Leslie in college, but I had never been to a service, so on Sunday morning the four of us went and I have to say it was one of the nicest church experiences I've had. The music was pretty and the sermon was thought-provoking (although I think it could have gone deeper), but what really got me was the windows. The pews are tiered and face a front wall of all window that overlooks the river. (This is the best picture I could find of the church, but it doesn't really do it justice. And we also didn't stand up at the front like that.) It was so nice to sit there and watch the trees and the river and feel the music and contemplate the sermon. And to be with a whole room of people that are sitting with you watching the same river and feeling the same music and contemplating the same sermon. Afterwards the four of us got brunch together and talked about what we had been thinking about and that was pretty damn great too.

The Translation of Dr. Apelles

2008-01-29T10:29:00.000-08:00

Author: David Treuer

This is the novel Krystle gave me for Christmas this year. I started reading it a couple weeks ago when it was below zero temperatures in Chicago. The book begins with two villages of Indians dying off in northern Minnesota because of a cold spell. Only two children survive the "bloodless massacre" as Treuer vividly describes it. So as the rest of Chicago complained of the cold, I couldn't help but feel lucky to have a house and a furnace and lots of blankets. It was an appropriate book for me to read right now. I could be feeling cold, but the setting of this novel is colder. I could be feeling lonely, but the characters of the novel, the only who remain of the community they were born in to, are lonelier. I'm beginning to think I'll always be able to count on Krystle to pick my winter reading. This was last year's pick.

Dreams from My Father

2008-01-14T11:56:00.000-08:00

Author: Barack Obama

Part of why I love Obama is because his activism so obviously grows out of his life experiences. He does what he does (like run for president) not just because he feels like that is a good thing to do, but because he couldn't NOT do it. This book reminded me in a way of Michael's The After-Death Room: Journeys into Spiritual Activism. In both books the authors' journeys are simultaneously inward and outward. Ultimately they are able to make peace with their pasts and use it as fuel for their future work, yet the complexities of this journey, this peace, and this future are all present as well and I feel that is what makes the book, and the person, so affecting.

So yeah. Go Obama.
https://donate.barackobama.com/momentum

Six Feet Under

2008-01-11T12:27:00.000-08:00

Where do I even begin? I have never been so affected by TV. Davi and I have been watching this show via DVD over the last few months and last night we watched the final episode. Not only was the last episode wonderfully crafted, bringing together beautiful writing, cinematography, acting, and music, it also had four seasons of rich material and characters to draw from. As we had been warned we would, Davi and I wiped tears and blew our noses constantly through the last twenty minutes. And then rewound and did it a second time. Even today, I will recall an image from this final scene and it will make me teary--partly because I have become attached to the characters, feeling as if they are my own family and friends, but mostly because I see myself in them. It has been interesting to note which scenes over the past couple months of viewing have really a struck a chord for one of us as the relationships between family members, friends, and significant others in the show echo our own current or past relationships.

The timing for watching this final episode couldn't have been better. It has been so good to watch and learn, to see myself reflected in the show, and to think to myself, "I want to be able to do this in my own work." And as Claire drives across the blank slate of desert, cheesy as it sounds, I feel as if I am in the car with her, as if I am her--affected by the lives of everyone around me and finally ready to create my own life.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

2007-12-29T13:39:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-19T11:31:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-12T11:51:00.000-08:00

Director: Angelina Maccarone

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

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

2007-11-09T09:05:00.000-08:00

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

2007-10-22T15:35:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-01T13:15:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-25T11:57:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-25T11:02:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-08-08T11:04:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-02T11:50:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-22T16:38:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-22T14:54:00.001-07:00

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

2007-06-13T11:57:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-22T17:53:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

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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