Card by Joanna Reiner Wilkinson
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The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper
This time of year, when the sun begins to return even though winter is just beginning (in the northern hemisphere), has been celebrated with rituals throughout the centuries. Prehistoric monuments such as Stonehenge, the building of which is believed to have begun around 3100 BCE, identify the precise moment of the winter and summer solstices. They probably had other uses as well; certainly Stonehenge was also a burial site and may be been used for religious ceremonies, a healing site, and/or as an astronomical observatory.
My favorite books about the solstice are The Dark Is Rising sequence, five fantasy novels by Susan Cooper for young adults. The author draws on Arthurian legends, Celtic and Norse mythology, and English folklore to tell the story of the struggle between good and evil.
In keeping with the season, these are identified as the Light and the Dark, which raised no cultural sensitivity concerns when the books were published in the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever we might think today of the persistent identification of dark colors with evil, these are still the best terms to describe the turmoil at the time of the winter solstice, when the sun tries to return and the darkness resists.
In these stories Will Stanton discovers that he is one of an ancient mystical people called “Old Ones” who are gifted with magical powers. He is the seventh son of a seventh son, and his eleventh birthday is the moment when he comes into his powers, including the ability to move through time. He is tasked to find the four Things of Power which the Old Ones need in order to vanquish the Dark.
Cooper’s five books are truly wonderful, especially for someone like me who grew up with these myths and legends. I can still picture that corner of my neighborhood library, just to one side of the front door, that held the books that captured my imagination as a child and put me on the path to become a writer.
The return of the sun inspires us with hope. Whether you are celebrating the winter solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Diwali, Hanukkah, St. Lucia’s Day, the Lunar New Year, Las Posados, or another festival, I wish you joy, health, love and peace, now and in the coming year.
What are your favorite books of the season, however you celebrate it?
The Music Shop, by Rachel Joyce
I’ve written before about Joyce’s novels The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and Miss Benson’s Beetle, so I looked forward to reading this, her fourth novel. It was even better than I expected.
In London of 1988, Frank owns a record shop—yes, vinyl only—on a street where the buildings are literally falling apart and the shops all struggling. His superpower is to find the perfect piece of music for whoever comes into his shop. They may know what they want, but he knows what they need.
Frank had helped them through illness, grief, loss of confidence and jobs, as well as the more daily things like football results and the weather. Not that he knew about all those things, but really it was a matter of listening, and he had endless patience.
The other shopkeepers are drawn with respect and compassion. Mr. Novak the baker, Maude the tatooist, Father Anthony selling religious bookmarks and other iconography, the Williams brothers who run a funeral home and are often seen holding hands: they are given to us in their fullness. This is an approach I noted in Joyce’s other books, the way she respects the voice of even the minor characters and her tone. She doesn’t make fun of the characters or look down on them.
The push by a development company to buy out tenants and shop owners alike, in order to tear down all the buildings to make way for luxury apartments, strains the communal bonds of the street whose inhabitants have previously been so supportive of each other.
Then a German woman in a green coat faints outside Frank’s shop. Ilse Brauchmann slowly becomes enmeshed in the community, with her mysterious background and amazing—to Frank at least—ability to fix anything mechanical. Eventually she asks Frank to give her music lessons.
The true joy of the book for me is listening to Frank talk about music. His sensitive descriptions, which have almost nothing to do with music theory and much to do with emotion and theme, have sent me back to pieces I thought I knew well and to others that were new to be. He says:
‘Music comes out of silence and at the end it goes back to it. It’s a journey . . . the silence at the beginning of a piece of music is always different from the silence at the end . . . Because if you listen, the world changes.’
As a writer, I was fascinated by Joyce’s interweaving of all these different strands to make an irresistable tapestry. I also noted the way she teased out the characters’ backgrounds with the same care as Frank layering in the context of a piece of music, and thus providing us with the same kind of insight.
At this time, when so much seems to be wrong with the world, this novel gave me comfort, reminding me of our common humanity and how we find it through our emotions in music, mutual concerns, and each other.
What novel by Rachel Joyce have you read? What did you think of it?
Book Launch for A Heart Afire
Last week I was delighted to attend the launch of Patricia Meisol’s A Heart Afire: Helen Brooke Taussig’s Battle Against Heart Defects, Unsafe Drugs, and Injustice in Medicine. Here is what Pat said about the evening:
“Thrilled to launch my biography about a woman doctor’s lifelong crusade to improve health care and end suffering. She changed medicine. Her work is not done.”
Some reviews:
“An enormous work—and, indeed, achievement—covering a life that explores most of the twentieth century. This impressive piece of research is not just about one woman, but also about the health of a nation and global developments in science and medicine.”
—Claire Brock, Associate Professor, University of Leicester; author of British Women Surgeons and Their Patients, 1860–1918
“Exquisitely told with a penetrating eye for detail and the telling anecdote, Patricia Meisol’s biography of Helen Taussig is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of medicine and the twentieth-century struggles of women to break through the profession’s glass ceiling. What emerges from these pages is nothing less than the birth of modern heart surgery.”
—Jonathan Bor, The Baltimore Sun
Working in a critique group with Pat and others, I witnessed the sheer volume of work that goes into creating a biography. Even before you start writing there are the years of research, chasing down clues and people and documents. Then there is the writing itself and all the rewriting that goes into creating any piece of writing much less a book-length manuscript.
I’ll write more about the book itself later—hint: it’s brilliant! Though I admit I’m biased—but for now I want to celebrate the huge accomplishment of a having a book launched out into the world.
Terrace Story, by Hilary Leichter
Imagine that you are young and living in a tiny apartment with your spouse. Then there’s a new baby, and it feels like you don’t have room to turn around. The windows look out on other walls, and it’s all so cramped and impossible. Then your friend Stephanie comes to visit, and when she opens a closet door, instead of broom and dustmop, there is a terrace: a large terrace, with a table and chairs and green plants and a gorgeous view.
Whoa, I thought, as dazzled by the idea as the characters are by the sudden sunlight. Impatiently turning the pages, I was terrified that the rest of the story wouldn’t hold up. Reader, it did. It knocked my socks off.
By story I mean the first of the four interlocking stories that make up this book. I don’t want to go into too much detail, and urge you not to read more about the book. Just jump in and let yourself be surprised and saddened and swept away.
Leichter finds imaginative yet concrete ways to get us to think about love and time and space and memory—those ineffable concepts. The book is funny and unsettling, sweet and compelling.
Enough with the adjectives. This may be the shortest review I’ve written, because I don’t know how to write about it or analyse it without giving too much away. I’ll just say that magic happens when the author unleashes her imagination and invites us into the story.
What book have you read recently that knocked your socks off?
A Dog in the Fight, by William Davies
Instead of a book, this week I want to talk about an essay-length book review that has helped me understand some of the cultural trends that have mystified me. William Davies’s review of A Fan’s Life: The Agony of Victory and the Thrill of Defeat, by Paul Campos, was published in the 18 May 2023 issue of the London Review of Books.
Using football, American for the author and British for the reviewer, both dig into what it means to be a fan. While referees and judges in and out of the sports world are expected to be fair and objective, not favoring one side over another, Davies says fans “make no pretence of balance or reason. They are drunk on irrationality and obstinacy, hurling themselves after the fortunes of their chosen team, band, TV show or celebrity.”
Where it gets interesting for me is this quote from Campos: “While sports allegiances can be seen as a sublimated form of politics, political allegiances can also be understood as a form of sublimated fandom.” Some politicians have supporters who weigh a candidate’s positions on issues, proposed solutions, and their character in order to choose the person most appropriate to represent them, while other politicians have fans who don’t care how illogical or offensive the politician’s statements are.
Davies also discusses how the internet has emphasised fandom:
Once there is sufficient space for every opinion and claim to be published, what need is there for anyone to be looking down on them from a position of assumed disinterest? Fandom can become the norm instead. The internet is less a ‘marketplace of ideas’ (as conservatives and libertarians would have it) and more a ‘marketplace of passions’.
This has significant knock-on effects for the rest of the media, especially the liberal media that once sought to distinguish themselves in terms of their commitment to facts, neutrality and critical distance – values which, in a public sphere awash with fandom, can appear both technically unnecessary and culturally haughty.
As quoted in the review, Campos offers the surprising insight that “‘Sports are a form of entertainment, but deep engagement, which makes the entire sports branch of the entertainment industrial complex viable, is not about entertainment at all: it is about suffering.’” True fans stick by their team no matter how rarely they win; the nostalgia for its few successes is “integral to fan identity.”
Davies discusses “the growing difficulty Americans – especially American men – have in distinguishing ‘life’ from ‘sport’.” The concentration on men and masculinity in both the review and the book is interesting. Certainly, sports are an arena where even the most repressed men feel free to express emotion, but I think there’s plenty here that is applicable to women as well.
The review goes deeper into the connection between sports, politics and fandom, and how in politics and sports, the participation of the middle class in this kind of obsessive fandom can be traced back to a shift from snobby dismissal of the working class to wanting to join it and the subsequent flood of money into sports. Davies calls it an
embourgeoisement of the game. While middle-class men began dressing like working-class football fans, top-tier football was flooded with Rupert Murdoch’s money and the glamorous Italian players it was used to recruit – this was the beginning of the long investment wave that led to today’s multi-billion-pound industry. ‘To have been sports fans over the past few decades,’ Campos writes, ‘is to have witnessed how our passions have been identified, catalogued and then exploited by the relentless engines of hypercapitalism, in its insatiable pursuit of ever-greater profits.’
Lots here to consider in the mix of sports, politics, journalism, and capitalism.
What are you a fan of?
Displaced Dolls and Oviducts, by Marigo J. Stathis
These are some meaty poems from my friend Marigo Stathis! The cover might give you a clue as to what you are in for, but when you dive in you’ll see these are not so much protest poems as heartfelt support for all women on “the female warrior’s path to self-worth and discovery.”
Homeless angels, naked shepherds, broken Barbies will find a welcome here. So will feisty women who defy fortune tellers and speed limits to sport their tattoos and midnight dance moves. They will find acceptance in these poems and, even more important, proof that their voices have been heard.
Many of these poems are packed with details, a feast for the senses. Your mind scrambles to grasp them even as each one lays bare your memories. Here’s the first stanza of “Clarity:”
This night smells of poetry,
amidst cricket cacophony,
with a climate that quavers
of exhaustion, lust,
and crouched cats with
cutting claws to pounce,
in promise:
prey on the way.
Or this description that begins “Mimi:”
On Sunday mornings,
we woke to light clinks of the prayer string;
as your spotted, once smooth skin
touched each bead,
with every psalm,
I wondered how long
the cross would remain warm in your palm,
that felt like crumpled velvet
caressing our small faces.
Stathis also uses rhythm to enhance the mood, whether it’s the nostalgic pebbles of memory in “shrewd games of Scrabble. // Pink bubbles, bursting;” the ominous opening “An eclipse was promised that night;” or the “thrashing thoughts, ionic tumble, / altered orbit—stutter, stumble—“ of an “ardent love-storm.”
These poems are full of love, the kind that links arms with you and walks beside you in a world where often justice is missing and others are constantly trying to shape you. Be yourself, these poems urge. I’m with you.
What poetry collection have you read that felt like a feast?
The Book of Goose, by Yiyun Li
I’ve been a fan of Yiyun Li’s writing ever since I picked up a copy of her first book A Thousand Years of Good Prayers in Toronto shortly after it was released in 2006. In her latest novel we meet Agnès and Fabienne in 1950s rural France. Only 13, they have already seen a lot of death, not just the war but the death of Agnès’s brother after his return from a German prisoner of war camp and of Fabienne’s older sister in childbirth.
The two are inseparable, linked in one of those intense adolescent friendships—do boys have them too?—that ignore the rest of the world. Fabienne, the leader, boils over with mischievous, sometimes violent games that Agnès eagerly joins. She says, “I gave Fabienne what she wanted: her Agnès. I did not give this Agnès to others, but what they asked of me I did my best to accommodate.”
Agnès says of her friend, “Some people are born with a special kind of crystal instead of a heart . . . That crystal in place of a heart—it makes things happen. To others.” Fabienne yearns for the excitement of the world outside their village while Agnès yearns merely to be with her friend, to live in the world Fabienne creates.
Then Fabienne comes up with a scheme for the two of them to write a book. She dictates her dark stories—an American GI is executed; a young woman suffocates her newborn and leaves it in a pig trough—for Agnès to record in her excellent handwriting. Fabienne decides to drag in the local postmaster, reasoning that as a widower with no friends, he must be lonely and bored.
What happens with the book and how it affects the girls’ friendship follow. As shown in the quote above, the book is narrated by Agnès, but an adult Agnès, married and living in Pennsylvania where she raises geese.
In my writing community, we have been talking some about how to sustain momentum in a story when you have a passive protagonist. One way is to have a mesmerizing voice, which this story certainly has. I kept trying to put it down in order to tackle more of my to-do list, but was unable to stay away.
It’s an unusual voice and an odd story. What I saw in it, and treasured, were the kinds of friendships I remember from my youth, and also the shifting of power within those friendships over the years. I saw the yearning for freedom, and the question of how much freedom is enough.
As I was reading, it seemed a meandering story, but in retrospect it comes together as an astute psychological portrait, a fairy tale, a story of secrets and social pressures. It will not leave me alone.
Have you read anything by Yiyun Li?
Riding the Earthboy 40, by James Welch
Reading and rereading this sole collection of poetry by Native American novelist and poet James Welch has been an adventure. Welch is considered to be a founding author of the Native American Renaissance in literature. The book’s title refers to the land he grew up on: forty acres leased by his parents from a family named Earthboy on the Gros Ventre Reservation in Montana. It’s a prosaic explanation for a phrase that conjures so many associations.
Steeped in the Blackfeet and A’aninin cultures of his parents, he attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap Reservations before attending high school in Minneapolis. The tension between the Indigenous world and the White world can be found in these poems, but there is so much more.
I don’t pretend to understand all of them. Many of the poems seem like, as James Tate says in his introduction, a kaleidoscope of images. What comes through most clearly to me is the connection to the land, whether we’re talking about the stark power of a butte or the iron cold of winter in the far north. “Thanksgiving at Snake Butte” begins:
In time we rode that trail
up the butte as far as time
would let us. The answer to our time
lay hidden in the long grasses
on the top . . .
Welch moves around in time with the ease of a storyteller, conjuring a memory of three boys who barricaded themselves inside a grocery or finding the truth behind a photo in a hotel lobby. There is much about death and hardship and betrayal, much about violence done to and done by.
But there’s far more about the strength of tradition and community, even if sometimes that legacy must be questioned. He tells stories of individuals like Doris Horseman, Deafy, Eulynda, Bear Child, Lester Lame Bull. In “Blackfeet, Blood and Piegan Hunters” he says “Comfortable we drink and string together stories” of the past, but insists
Let glory go the way of all sad things.
Children need a myth that tells them to be alive . . .
He writes of small moments that take on grandeur of “Such a moment, a life.” And there’s also much about the lonely road to yourself. From “Blue Like Death”
. . . Now you understand:
the way is not your going
but an end. That road awaits
the moon that falls between
the snow and you, your stalking home.
Moons slip through these poems and “stars/that fell into their dreams.” There are single phrases that haunt me, even when I cannot grasp the poem as a whole, such as “Man is afraid of his dark” and “No dreamer knows the rain.” “To stay alive this way, it’s hard . . .” and “goodbyes creaking in the pines” both conjure strong memories.
I will keep reading and rereading these poems, letting them sit within my consciousness, within my dreams.
Have you read the work of James Welch or of another poet of the Native American Renaissance?
Purgatory Road, by Charles Coe
One autumn day when I lived in Massachusetts, we took the children to Purgatory Chasm, a park in Sutton with a playground, nature trails, and the chasm itself. Only some of the adults and older children attempted the difficult path between looming rock walls. There were strange and unworldly formations: deep clefts, overhanging boulders. I found it unsettling.
I remember that feeling whenever I drive past the exit for the chasm, and again when I heard Charles Coe read from his new collection of poems. In the title poem he explores his early understanding of purgatory, summoning with characteristic vibrancy “the dust-covered relics” of his Catholic schooling. As in the best meditative essay, we engage with him as he sorts through these memories and carries them forward into a new understanding of what it means to be us, today, in this damaged world.
Coe’s superpower in these poems is his generous heart. Small things that strike his attention, such as a truck that won’t start in a grocery store parking lot or a woman talking to herself on a traffic island, lead us to understand what it is like to inhabit someone else’s life. Channeling Forster’s call to “only connect,” Coe’s poems from 2020’s lockdown trace what we’ve lost and our attempts to communicate across the void.
In other poems, he invites us to recognise how it feels to be a person of color is our society. He writes feelingly of his father being belittled by a young white drugstore clerk in the 1960s, and what he understands now of the difficult terrain his father had to traverse.
He writes too of his own experiences. He shares with us the everyday things that, unlike the great glacial gush that created Purgatory Chasm, wear away at one. It might be a stink eye from a doorman or an uncurtained window at night. The six-line poem “Things White People Have Said to Me” begins:
You’re so well-spoken.
You don’t seem like you were raised in a ghetto.
In “Blocked” he writes about an encounter in the parking lot. The tone of this poem, as in others, is one I struggle to achieve. Because it is calm, aware, restrained, we reading it are free to feel our own outrage, our own concern about possible consequences, and our own recognition that we are all imperfect beings.
Coe’s sense of humor inflects many of these poems, sometimes wry and subtle, sometimes flat out hilarious, as in “Butt Dialing Jesus” which begins:
There was a time when voices emanating from my pants
would have caused concerns. But now I simply shrugged
and pulled out my phone . . .
It is a joy and a comfort for me to read such poems. Their effect on me is similar to that of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, which reminded me of the goodness in this world and its people. While Coe notes the rocks that litter our path and the walls that rise around us, his generous warmth and humor become welcome companions on this journey.
What poems have you read that were both a comfort and a joy?