After Tupac & D Foster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.