Laura Mullen on Daphne Marlatt

“Who’s There?” The book begins—as Hamlet begins—with a question, and the insistence on an unfolding that must follow upon a sudden awareness of presence. Who = character, There = setting and both together: plot. His story: “history, the story of dominance. mastery. the bold line of it.” A deep engagement with the archive, Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic is also an exquisitely and subtly crafted novel (this “book of interruptions” feels loose and fresh as a draft), its poetic prose both transparent and prismatic, providing a wise guide to the problems and opportunities exposed by second wave feminism while opening—gently, lovingly, lucidly—an inquiry into history as a discourse, and lineage as an issue. The territory the book explores includes the rough beginnings of a logging town or outpost in the Pacific Northwest and—as palimpsest—the civilized present incarnation of that geography; the narrator is a history student turned faculty wife who turns again, away, straying first with her mind and then with her heart and soul, becoming one of those who can never go home again, given what she comes to know. In questioning charged absences in the historical chronicles she finds traces of women whose almost erased lives fire her imagination, and she unfolds herself—going from research assistant to novelist and from a stale and stalled marriage into a relationship which is tender, warm, intimate, and vulnerable. She unfolds herself: it turns out that that opening “Who’s There?” was not necessarily a question for another after all. Or not only. Ask it of yourself: read this—more than once. “the real history of women…is unwritten because it runs through our bodies: we give birth to each other…it’s women imagining all that women could be that brings us into the world.”

Hear Laura read from this here.

(Learn more about Laura Mullen herself here.)

Daphne Gottlieb on Katherine Dunn

In 1989, I had a cat named Pooka and I didn't eat meat. I was baby steps queer. I shaved my head and dyed my hair pink and shaved my head and pierced my nose. I marched on Washington DC. There was no internet. Being a fierce outcast took work. All my clothes were black. 

In 1989, books were stars -- you wanted to know what the newest, the hottest, the edgiest were. Mary Gaitskill's Bad Behavior was like that. The RE/Search books were like that. 

I was 20. At 20 and before that, books change your life better and more profoundly than they can later. Siddhartha. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The Little Prince. Still Life with Woodpecker. Cat's Cradle. 

And Geek Love. The story of a "freak show" family-- what begins as a story about outcasts and quickly becomes a story about cults and betrayal, only to ultimately become a meditation on family, love, home and sacrifice. 

I was a freak show. I wanted to find my cult. I knew all about betrayal. The rest I continue to learn about. 

I have read that book at least four times now. I come back to it and come back to it, a favorite resort, a dry place in a storm, a party, a prayer meeting. It has never disappointed me. And I always find something new. I hope you do, too

(You can learn more about Daphne Gottlieb herself here.)

Brooke Champagne on Vivian Gornick

On Being (S)Mothered: Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments

If I used the word perambulatory to describe this book, I’d stop to imagine my mother’s response: why do I always have to look up half the words you write, which invariably leaves me to interpret her comment as either compliment or pejorative (there you go again! she’d surely say). My mother is my favorite passive-aggressive editor.

But Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments is a perambulatory book, one in which a mother and daughter stroll down their New York streets across the decades only to misunderstand each other more deeply—more fiercely—as they slowly gray. Both women rhetorically strike back and forth with aplomb; their words stomp down the pages. Gornick struggles with her involuntary reactions to her mother’s ideas, the rush of blood to the head, the irritation morphing into rage. Oftentimes on walks that start off simple—let’s go for a walk and talk—she endeavors not to “make a holocaust of the afternoon.”

These are struggles of anyone with a mother, even one like mine, who perhaps I’ve been unfair to. Rather than an editor, she can be quite a sycophant. Ah, you wrote a piece about Gornick, she’ll say, how wonderful. Now who is he? Infuriating.

Hear Brooke read from this here.

(Learn more about Brooke Champagne herself here.)

Khadijah Qeen on Helene Cixous

Explicating Process: Helene Cixous' Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

I hesitate to write about Cixous' work. She says it all so well herself. In Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (Columbia University Press, 1993), she begins with the letters I and H, H particularly for its ladder-like appearance, and when that letter (in French) is "out of breath" (4), she turns to English to give it sound (life). With that introduction, proclaiming "this H, this ladder is writing" (4), she proceeds to send us to the School of the Dead. 

It is important that these are not schools in the traditional sense, but levels of consciousness that intersect and repeat. Whether you take notes, read straight through, skip around, reread or re-reread, reading Cixous often mirrors the act of memory, much like reading Morrison (as outlined in her essay "The Site of Memory," from Inventing the Truth, edited by William Zinsser).

Then we progress to the School of Dreams, still accompanied by the dead writers discussed in the previous School – Kafka, Lispector, Poe, Tsvetaeva. We learn that "One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One's own night. Walking through the self toward the dark" (65). Forget what you know. Look for what you don't understand, don't see – write through it.

The point of such a process, according to Cixous, is to unravel the self's mysteries, to know more than before about yourself and the world. Armed with that knowledge, "let the dream ladder grow. It grows down – toward the depths" (108) to the School of Roots. Reminiscent of Jenny Boully's recent work, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them (Tarpaulin Sky, 2011) with its "Home Under Ground" throughout, we enter "a world under the world" (126), a place of metamorphosis, restoration, recovery of self and language anew (129). Then we come to a finishing place. We write something else. Do it again.

(Learn more about Khadijah Queen herself here.)

Arielle Greenberg Bywater on Maira Kalman

Hey, Willy, See the Pyramids by Maira Kalman

I was working as a nanny in college in the early 90s, and my three-year-old charge Gracie had this book, which is how I discovered it; and how I discovered that surrealist and absurdist humor is alive and well and continues to thrive in children’s lit, as does Chagall- and Florine Stettheimer-inspired art; and how I discovered how much I eventually wanted to have children of my own, partly to have the excuse to read more children’s books; and how I discovered Maira Kalman, the contemporary author I most want to have over for dinner, because she is funny and Jewish and cares about food politics and democracy and vintage hats just like me; and how I discovered how much joy I get from things like the “tiny story” in Hey, Willy, which goes, in its entirety, “Four very tiny people / walked right by me / on the way to school. / No one knew / where they were going, / but they were / walking very fast / and carrying / little instruments”; and how much I myself wanted to write spare, funny, weird little things, which is not what I was writing then, but is sometimes what I try to write now.


Hear Arielle read this aloud here.
(Learn more about Arielle Greenberg Bywater herself here.)

Jennifer Bartlett on Mary Rising Higgins

“One must grow used to happiness.”

Mary Rising Higgins, who passed away in 2007, was a public school teacher for 25 years who dedicated herself to poetry the last years of her life. Higgins describes her introduction to the so-called language poets (by Lee Bartlett) as one of the major turning points in her vocation. This passion became translated in the work of a poet who should be considered a major innovator. 

red table(s combines the experimental with lyricism and disjointed language to make a collection of poems that is, at turns, beautiful, difficult, and always surprising. At first, Higgins retains traditional form – flush left margin, in stanzas. Around the middle of the book, the reader can see her form expand and open into the “poetic field” that would become crucial in her later work.   

Higgins was a master of the constraint, visual poetics, and “word collecting.” 


As: 

            dinner music            space altar             ladder

she, the range in each bright   spinning   song
how he could not look back

She speaks of writing through dreams, dictionary meditations, and scored poems based on letters of the alphabet. Her later work became reflective of Olson’s field and what Higgins describes “about sound and movement in the poem. Linescape, really.”

As:

            Evening beads            pattern for swallow

she reflects   herself 

             stand            kindle            splitting

And a bit of geometry   in   both language   and punctuation:

a way to carve out the in)visible

            A required curve looks graceful enough

Although Higgins and her work are deeply loved by folks in the Southwest and those whom she was influenced by and who influenced her, her work remains "quiet." I think this relates to Higgins’s geographiphical location, but also to her non-assuming personality; this is the work of a poet who simply loved poetics for its own sake. 

(You can find more on Jennifer Barlett herself here.)

Dara Wier on Gillian Conoley

Gillian Conoley's TALL STRANGER was published in 1991 by Carnegie Mellon University Press.  Now,  almost any title with the word stranger attached to it will get my attention.  I like how the word stranger  functions in many areas:  uncanny thinking, science, and often in poetry, as in James Tate's you are the stranger who gets stranger by the minute.  Even Tina Fey's production company entices for it is called Little Stranger.  Stranger  invites so many sensations: a little dangerous because to us humans what is strange may be as yet misunderstood, a little fetching, as sometimes a stranger is in need of being cared for,  a little unfamiliar, and sometimes very distant, as in alien.  Sometimes a little homespun, as in Howdy, Stranger.  Conoley's book revolves in the orbits of all these.  Here she is:

in the spoiled ash,
in the stirred dust

                                            *


a shy, secretive being who loves 
how these new homegirls sing


                                            *

Black horse, red moon,
I want no government,


                                            *

One day I looked 
at the face in my shoes
and walked off the land


                                            *
and from the title poem:


I have a different fix on the stars,
and the frontier opens up again,
far into the interior



Download and listen to Gillian Conoley read from Tall Stranger here.
(You can find more on Dara Wier herself here.)