How It Began Before It Ended: An Excerpt from WITHOUT SAINTS by Christopher Locke

It was two a.m. The Jetta was parked at the curb and I sat in passenger seat, top down. I felt vulnerable in the dark, uneasy with the city’s brick tenements and low sound. Directly overhead, a streetlight flickered like a dying brain. It was humid and I was dressed in shorts, a black t-shirt. I thought about my wife and daughter asleep back home and shifted my weight; my thighs stuck to the leather seats. 

I replayed the evening in my head: After dinner, I finished grading my students’ papers on Thoreau’s theory of needs vs. wants and reread five pages of Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude for another class. I changed Grace’s diaper and handed her off to Lisa, kissing them both and saying I’d be back by 11:00 at the latest. I went to my car, did four bumps of coke off the house key, and squeezed my eyes shut until the stinging passed.

When I arrived at a party in town, I had some whiskey, a little more coke, and then another whiskey. A white kid with dreadlocks got angry because all the tiki torches outside made the lawn resemble a landing strip, burning a symmetrical pattern that made him furious somehow. He pulled them out of the ground, one at a time, and threw them sputtering into the pool. A glass table followed.

That’s when Billy showed up. And what we wanted was only twelve minutes away. We would look for Psychs again. My heart raced. On the way, we drank beer from red plastic cups and talked about our students; we worked at the same school. The latest batch of kids seemed more docile, Billy said. I mentioned how much I liked the new boy from Jersey and all his mad energy, the love for Emerson he professed in my English class. A quarter of the students we worked with were at the school for drug abuse, the others had social/emotional issues, learning disabilities, or a combination of all three. We were viewed as one of the best therapeutic boarding schools in the country. We counseled kids in three-days-per-week groups. Just the day before, I sat across from a girl and spoke in a soft tone as she held her head in her hands and sobbed. Her long red hair fell around her wrists like spun fire. “I can’t believe I’m here,” she choked. I know, I said. I know.

At graduations, I was always a favorite to speak on behalf of a graduating student. For example, I discussed how hard it’d been for ___________, that he’d overcome massive trauma. Back home, he saw someone get tied to a tree and then set on fire for not paying a drug dealer. The sound of that boy screaming woke him up every night. This young man learned, I said, to love his family, and himself, again. At the end of the speech, as with all my speeches, I cried. The student cried. His family and the other well-dressed families cried. “You can do this,” I said. We embraced and then, bravely, he went back into the world.

We found Psychs where we did last time, hanging out in front of the small, withered park downtown. He wore a red Chicago Bulls jersey, cargo shorts and was sitting indifferently atop a cement ledge. I don’t think he remembered us. As we drove him to the place, Billy asked if I could front the money for the heroin. I said I didn’t have the money, thought he had it.     

“What,” Psychs said from the back. “You ain’t got the fuckin’ money?”

“No, no, we’ll get it,” I promised. “Where’s that ATM machine around here?”

The last time we did this, which was also the first night we ever met Psychs, we managed to do the exact same thing: try and score heroin without remembering the money. “It’d be a bad night to get knifed,” Psychs said then, and I pictured a cartoon Arabian sword being pushed through the seats and into our backs, Psychs rolling our stupid corpses out onto the curb. “Stay in the suburbs,” he’d say as he drove off in the Jetta.

This time, after collecting one hundred dollars from the ATM, we pulled up in front of the apartment and Billy turned to Psychs. “Don’t give us any of that white boy shit,” he said. “We want the normal dime bags, ten of them.”

 “Hey, don’t fucking talk to me,” Psychs said. “Just give me the money.” He took the five twenties, quickly exited the Jetta and crossed the dark street, disappearing like a spider down a flower’s throat. I was starting to feel hung over and the coke had worn off.

Silently, Billy and I waited ten minutes.

“That motherfucker better not screw us,” Billy said. A car moved softly down a cross street, left no evidence that it had ever been there.

“Fuck it. I’m going in.”

“In? In where,” I asked.

“Don’t worry, I’m just gonna see if he’s in the stairwell or something.”

Billy left and I sat in his Jetta alone.

I kept waiting for the police to roll up behind me with their spotlight blinding the mirror, their careful approach to my door as they asked to see my hands.

I could feel sweat prickling the back of my neck.

Someone came out of the building and walked with great purpose towards me.

Billy opened the door and hopped in. “Hold these,” he ordered. I looked at my hands and counted ten small plastic bags. He started the car and we drove off.

“I already had a taste,” he said, sliding the Jetta smoothly into third gear. “It’s fucking amazing.”

And I believed him because what other choice did I have?

Disparates: The Freewheelin’ Patrick Madden

free·wheel·ing /ˈfrēˌ(h)wēliNG/ adjective

1. characterized by a disregard for rules or conventions; unconstrained or uninhibited. (Google Dictionary)

Patrick Madden, the essayist, is freewheeling. To borrow the term from Bob Dylan and a technique from Madden’s book, I’ve defined what I mean. He’s unconventional, but his work is luminous:

lu·mi·nous /ˈlo͞omənəs/ adjective

1. full of or shedding light; bright or shining, especially in the dark. (also Google Dictionary)

In Disparates, his latest and third collection of essays, Madden introduces “disparate” both as a noun referring to diverse and incongruous things and as (a definition he embraces) having connotations from Spanish of “absurdity, inanity, frivolity; nonsense, claptrap, rubbish; balderdash, malarkey, drivel.” In other words, as he engages the reader, Madden is enjoying himself.

One of the joys for writers and readers of personal essays is to go where no one has gone before—or to go where everyone has gone before but to get there by surprise. A current finalist for the Foreword Reviews INDIES Awards, Disparates takes the reader on a voyage to new places and to old places by new means. As, in his words, “a longtime committed nonfictionist, one who teaches his students not to lie, [but] to select and shape their real experiences into literature,” Madden has a gift for uncovering timeless and timely truths in a wide assortment of ways that one can newly savor and appreciate. This book is diverse (very), whimsical and wise.

Before I offer up concrete examples, note that this assessment presupposes that book reviews should be useful. It should help you decide: “Yes, I really am going to read that book” or “Don’t give me Patrick Madden’s Disparates because I really will never have the time for it, not ever!”

So I want to help. More likely my words will incline you, not convince you, but I hope to incline most readers in the direction towards. Granted some people may hate the cognitive dissonance posed by variety in tone, subject, style, and authorship in a single volume; these possibly should not read Disparates (though it might be good for them if they did). If a sudden mood shift from a chortle to sober reflection or to itchy perplexity elicits anxiety in you, maybe don’t read it. If a single author’s voice near imperceptibly morphing into a completely different, first person, original voice of a totally different author raises worry rather than delight, then take a deep breath before proceeding, because Madden’s essays are all these things. But if you relish changing it up now and then and you take satisfaction in thinking about life’s little mysteries, enjoying the stimulation of different, sometimes juxtaposed moods and thoughts, then you will take satisfaction, maybe even some joy, from Madden’s book.

So how do I incline you?  Let me count the adjectives, at least as a beginning. Disparates is, yes, diverse, also creative, funny, poignant, thoughtful, absurd, polyphonic, erudite, and surprising. The verbs: it evokes, entertains, bemuses, engages, moves, and mindfully meanders.

But all of this is too abstract! The nouns: it is, well, hmm, this could be useful. Let’s say that Madden’s book comprises:

1. Two tables of contents.

2. A romp, complete with photos, through the possible adventures of writer Michael Martone’s water bottle and its remaining contents following a Martone university lecture. (Auction, anyone?)

3. A chapter called “Nostalgia,” with gnomes as its nominal subject, that may make you long for the good old days when more such essays were written.

4. An essay by guest writer Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas brilliantly extracted (and presented), a word here or a letter there, from a Madden mind excursion into late 70’s pop rock music.

5. Computer-generated “predictive text” mimicry of Madden’s own writing, sometimes sensible and sound, sometimes silly. (Which is this, for example? “We have always felt that existence is a strange amorphous miracle that means everything.”)

6. A truly lovely account of poetic vengeance taken on an unruly airline passenger via a baby’s dirty diaper.

7. A paean to popular lyrics that got me to listen to music by Toad the Wet Sprocket. (Now why didn’t I think of that name for my band?)

8. Essays buried in word search puzzles, very clever though mercifully decoded for those lacking the persistence to work through them.

9. A hyperbolic apology for minor errors appearing in Madden’s previous books that evokes the suspicion that all books contain many mistakes of little consequence.

10. An illustrated comical and communal effort to rewrite cultural proverbs: “Take time to smell the grindstone” or “You made your bed, now let sleeping dogs lie in it.”

11. An essayistic nod to Montaigne. And a photograph of Madden looking like Montaigne.

12. Some elements of style on “comma-then” constructions, reductio ad absurdumed.

13. A thoughtful rejection of widely accepted punk rock glorifications of mayhem and violence.

14. Pangram Haiku, kind thoughts, with photos.

15. “Freewill,” my favorite, and to which I’ll return.

16. And much more.

Many of Madden’s cerebral sprees are enhanced by the cameo appearances of other essayists. Martone, Cabeza-Vanegas, Joni Tevis, Mary Cappello, Lawrence Sutin, Jericho Parms, Amy Leach, Desirae Matherly, Joe Oestreich, David Lazar, Elena Passarello, Wendy S. Walters, Stephen Haynie, and Matthew Gavin Frank all offer words, sentences, paragraphs, or entire sections to Madden’s chapters. One admires Madden’s ability and humble willingness to recruit other voices at the risk of eclipsing his own, but can’t help but appreciate the generosity of the guest contributors in making Madden’s good book better, knowing that Madden will win most of the accolades. Having said that, occasionally it is impossible to tell where Madden’s voice ends and his co-author’s begins. Italicized text may give it away but not always. We know only that credit is given at the beginning of the chapter and in the acknowledgements, and from there we get to play a little literary detective.

Sometimes these other voices support a direction Madden is going (e.g., Leach); sometimes they stand in contrast (Oestreich); sometimes they are just there, existing on their own merits. For instance Michael Martone, whose water bottle dregs feature in the book’s opening essay, lends his voice in a later chapter to a Madden reverie on musical coincidences (those moments when the “music angels” seem to conspire to play on the radio the old song you were just thinking of, for example). Martone’s appraisal isn’t about music, however, but about accident and irony and coincidence viewed through the vehicle of vehicular accidents. Martone’s part, linked to Madden’s neither by coincidence nor accident but by design, highlights the “delicious irony” pointed out by his son when Martone destroys their car in an accident the day after the son receives his driver’s permit. In telling the story Martone serves up the added irony of him writing about car accidents while admitting that he forbids his freshmen students to write about their car accidents because these accidents have “not altered the world of its narrator in any meaningful way.” Martone accentuates the irony through his meaningful pronouncement: “Perhaps things were set in motion in my life all those years ago by the coincidence of two cars inhabiting the same space and time. It would be a good story but I would need to imagine the true vectors of the collision, the physics of consequence not coincidence.”

On the subject of auto accidents, I now, as promised, freely return to “Freewill,” the essay through which Madden freewheels with abandon, engaging, entertaining, and all the while making sense. Although I very much enjoyed almost all of the essays in this book, I found in “Freewill” most everything that I admire in Madden’s writing.

“Freewill” starts with a cassette tape and an anecdote about a different minor accident to an automobile in which Madden was a teenage passenger. This first paragraph is partly about the accident, partly about his friend who caused the accident and partly about the Rush song “Freewill.” But then, as with the wrongly chosen gear that caused the collision, it shifts in tone and topic, with Madden’s direct invitation to the reader, breaking some kind of fourth genre fourth wall, to “take an associative jaunt together…understanding that there is no whole to be comprehended, no essential destination, and that what you read is only a shadow and approximation, a selection and translation of the memories I have here revived or the thoughts currently and recently swirling around my head, so that it is no detour to think linguistically instead of narratively. It is the inevitable path of the essay.”

At this point Madden takes up the meaning of “erstwhile,” questions whether he used it appropriately to describe his friend in his story of the car collision, explains his former confusion between “erstwhile” and “ersatz” which streams him to memories of his college English professor Erskine Peters and then to a jazz drummer named Peter Erskine whom he tangentially links to a feature in an old music magazine about Neil Peart, Rush’s drummer, which provides another touchstone and completed cycle to “Freewill,” lyrics by Peart, the song on the cassette tape that was playing during the opening fender bender and now lies moldering in a hypothetical landfill.

Somewhere in all that Madden also manages to debate guest essayist Joe Oestreich about the meaning of Peart’s “Freewill” lyric: “If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.” I’ll leave the direction and resolution of that debate to the future reader of the essay (which by now, I’m hoping is you). Regardless, Madden’s “Freewill” has a little of everything: a good story, elegant and witty language, straight lines and deviation, humor, music, and thoughtfulness.

Disparates. Also Sprach Patrick Madden: I’ve tried to offer a disparate, helpful review of his work. Perhaps my allusions to Bob Dylan and Star Trek and Ricard Strauss merely suggest my age. But in the end, I hope a lot of people will read this excellent little book. If you love the personal essay, or are open to learning to love it, the freewheeling, luminous, disparate Patrick Madden is well worth the time.

Oddities and Pleasures: An Interview with Rick Bailey

EF: One of the things I admire most about these essays is how you’re constantly making unexpected connections and leaps. For instance, in “Don’t Wait,” you bop between your faltering hearing, the “what it is” salutation from a former student, a problem with your foot, the article your wife sent you on fashionable hearing aids, and reading The New Yorker. Can you talk a bit about how you create an essay? Where do you start, and how do you know what paths to follow? How do you know when it’s “done”?

RB: Where does an essay start? With a tidbit in the news, with something my wife says, with a piece of music that triggers a memory or arouses a curiosity. Why is this important? Why is it funny? What does it remind me of? Where does it lead my thinking as I walk through the day?

“Make the subject of the sentence you’re writing different from the subject of the sentence you just wrote.” That’s what Richard Hugo recommends in Triggering Town. Introduce multiple subjects. I followed that advice when I wrote poetry and then began to apply it writing essays. “You get 3-4 balls in the air,” a teacher once said. The trick is to keep them from falling on your head. In the piece you mention, “Don’t Wait,” failing hearing, that curious “what it is is…” locution I hear so much lately (reminding me of an eighth grader I taught in 1980), the thing on my foot. . . . It’s all-at-once-ness. When you think about it, that’s consciousness, right? We walk around thinking 10-15 things at once. They’re related and unrelated, random and connected. 

I was driving my son to get his wisdom teeth removed the morning it was announced that Encyclopedia Brittanica would cease publication. That news triggered an essay in which I told the story of my son’s experience under the knife while also reflecting on those tomes I was so familiar with when I was a kid, which drove me to do some fact hunting about Brittanica, how long it was in publication, its shortest entry (woman: female of man), how it has been supplanted by information technology. What often happens when I’m managing multiply subjects is discovery in one thread triggers ideas and possibilities in the another thread I’m working on. I feel like I’m “done” when the two or three threads begin to converge, when I can weave them together in a satisfactory way.

EF: I love the idea of so many balls in the air, of so many different nodes of connection. Along with all these disparate ideas coming together, I see you’re writing a lot about finding balance too, for instance balancing purity and gluttony, health and desire. Having spent so much time in Italy, do you think this is a particularly American phenomenon?

RB: Yes, I think it is an American phenomenon. Especially if you’re from the Midwest. I grew up in a meatloaf family, in a farm town, where we went to the Methodist church and became very wary of sin. Very taciturn. Very modest. One mustn’t call attention to oneself. Then I married into an Italian family that was garrulous and noisy and very big-hearted. “We keep fast on Fridays during Lent,” my wife said of her home, where we sat down to a voluptuous feast that was a fast only in the sense that there was no meat. And after dinner, when we pushed back from the table, her mother and father told family stories and laughed until they cried. It was a different universe. I was (and am) so lucky. I’m still a child of the Midwest, somewhat modified.

EF: Yes! I see that as another kind of balancing here: your Midwestern upbringing and your ties to Italy. Your time in Italy figures prominently in the book, and especially your interest in the language. You mention learning Italian through reading women’s fiction, and how there’s a humility to it. Can you speak to what learning other languages has taught you, and how it’s maybe changed (or not) your relationship with English?

RB: “You seem like a different person when you speak Italian.” One of my colleagues said that to me one night. We were in a restaurant in Florence. At the time I was doing 7-day excursions in Italy with small groups involving what I called “heroic eating.” His remark called to mind something I had been thinking about.

I was lucky to learn Italian in the home, from my wife and her parents. Over time I learned what my wife likes to call “the song,” the rhythm and intonation and phrasing of a language that’s not accessible on the page but alive in your ear. When I said to wait staff in a trattoria, “What do you have that’s good?” I said it the way my Italian family would say it, loading the question with enthusiasm and passion. There was a performance aspect to it, a kind of impersonation. If you have an immersion experience, for me 44 years of marriage, you gradually get the song right. But you have to be willing to get things wrong, to appear foolish. On a train over there years ago, I said something to a nun that made my wife and her cousin howl with laughter. Another time I announced I was going to become the Pope. In a bar I told someone I first came to Italy in the 15th century. 

EF: I haven’t yet hit double-digits in my marriage, but am continually learning that lesson about the willingness to be wrong. Forty-four years married, wow. Obviously you and your wife have grown and changed a lot over those years, and I see that aging comes up throughout the book. I love that you talk about it in so many different ways—sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, sometimes matter-of-factly. One of my favorite lines in the book is when you mishear your wife and write “a word can be Rorschach test . . . you make of it what you will.” There’s something so charming and positive about this. Aging has obviously entered as a subject you write about, but I’m wondering, has it also changed your writing process?

RB: On one hand, I sometimes feel a sense of urgency. In her 80’s my mother disappeared into dementia. I think about that. I think: I should write every day. I should capture memories and the fleeting oddities and pleasures of right now. On the other hand, that urgency, that decision to write, is just part of daily life. All the years I taught writing online, I wrote every day, with and for my students. Since then I’ve blogged for a number of years, which is part of the daily practice, the regular regimen.

EF: What a wonderful thing to have made a practice. Along with aging, I noticed technology and its advancements are a thread through the book. You say in “We’re Melting” that “humans are at war with the natural world.” You mention this in relation to the weather and the hardships of being outside when it’s less than pleasant, but I kept thinking of it in wider terms. Can you talk a bit more about your idea of humans in conflict with nature and how technology comes into play?

RB: Well we certainly have the sense of a ticking time bomb, right? We try to manage nature, all along with a sense of dread. Nature is going to come back and take a terrible vengeance. I read a story the other day about chicken in a test tube: lab-created chicken-ish meat that will be nutritious and environmentally friendly. Just think how excited those lab technicians and food engineers must be, how geeked by the tools they are using, for the betterment of human kind, to be sure, but also with deep engagement and satisfaction with the tools at their disposal. You just think, what about that oops moment. Will that come? We make mistakes, we flub, we cannot anticipate all the consequences of our actions. With tech we alter the world and we alter ourselves. My grandkids are born into a device-ified world. They will not learn to read the way I did. They will not read the way I did. I no longer read the way I did. What impact is tech having on deep cognitive structures and habits of mind? It has always been the case: the world we occupy is thick, complex, evolving, and we have always engaged with whatever tools we have available. My gosh, the sextant, the telescope, the microscope, enlarged understandings and greater human capabilities. I remember reading Rime of the Ancient Mariner, asking the question, Why does he shoot the albatross? Because he’s holding a crossbow. The tools make us do it.

EF: And yet I’m thinking back to your first answer, about how you make those connections between ideas to form an answer, and it gives me hope the computers and lab chickens won’t complete make us obsolete. I’m sure there’s no specific answer for this, but I’m wondering how long you go between living and experience something and then writing about it, or how you know when you’ve got the narrative distance to tackle a subject.

RB: My wife and I were taking one of our long Covid walks a few weeks ago. We were discussing—I should say arguing about—whether it’s safer to step off the sidewalk into the street when another walker is coming toward us or merely move a few feet off the edge of the walk and turn our heads to avoid the contagion. What are the chances of getting hit by a car vs. inhaling the virus? Over the next day or so I wrote on that what-are-the-chances theme, which caused me to remember crossing the Irish sea in 1974, from Hollyhead to Dublin, arriving the morning after a bomb went off. What were the chances? That experience in Ireland had been sitting there, in memory, for decades. It was a pleasure to examine it, to tell that story, and to frame it in the present moment.

I probably tend to lounge around a subject rather than tackle it. In The Enjoy Agenda, my second book, there are a couple essays in which “tackle” might apply, one essay going all the way back to high school (how’s that for distance?), another addressing “shortism,” the size-related bias humans seem hard-wired for, like racism or sexism. I needed distance on that subject. Still do.

EF: Like above, I noticed these discussions or “arguments” with your wife set off a lot of your wonderful tangents in your essays. Your wife figures prominently in many essays, and I read her as somewhat of a long-suffering woman who both loves you and is annoyed by you. Is it difficult to portray someone you know so well when there’s no way to fully incapsulate them on the page? How do you go about turning a real person into a character in your work? 

RB: I’m a very annoying person. She is long-suffering. She is also extremely private, so I take a minimalist approach to presenting her in my writing. My capture mode is mainly dialogue. People who know us will say: In your books, that’s just what you two sound like. In my writing you will know her by her reading and our ordinary interactions that pack married life. She reads everything and she remembers everything she reads. And she is a great summarizer and explainer. Sometimes it’s hard for me to get a word in edgewise. So in many of the essays, she’s kind of a straight man for me. My three collections, I’m getting my edgewise words in. 

Rick Bailey grew up in Freeland, Michigan, on the banks of the Tittabawassee River. A small-town Midwestern guy, he married a woman from the Republic of San Marino and over the ensuing decades became Italianized–avid about travel in Italy, the language, food, and history. He taught writing for 38 years at Henry Ford College. Since retiring from teaching he has published three collections of essays, all with University of Nebraska Press: American English, Italian Chocolate (2017); The Enjoy Agenda (2019); and Get Thee to a Bakery (2021). He and his wife divide their time between Michigan and the Republic of San Marino.

Bringing a Collective Experience to Light: A Review of Melissa Febos's Girlhood

Melissa Febos opens her new essay collection, Girlhood, with a collage of visceral images of pain inflicted on the body—bloody knees, burned arms, skin rubbed raw. The opening essay is a lyric barrage of beautiful language and poetic image. In the essays that follow she looks back through a scrutinizing lens on her adolescence. Our very grown-up narrator takes us through the years she spent swimming in the ponds of Cape Cod, through most of her early sexual experiences, and into her late teens and twenties working as a Dominatrix in New York City. Using lyrical language and a meandering structure to move through her memories and experiences, the book also contains illustrations by Forsyth Harmon that highlight some of the most beautiful lines in the book.

Many of the places and scenes will be familiar for those who read her first book, Whip Smart, a memoir about being a dominatrix in New York City, and her essay collection, Abandon Me, about her father, her biological father, and a love affair gone wrong. But Ferbos’s voice and authority feel very different in this work. While the outside research and frequent metaphor were a large part of her second book Abandon Me—Girlhood moves from memoir to theory, and back again, with a new voice of authority. 

Febos sets up the problem that she investigates in this collection, the conditioning of a patriarchal society, and really defines it for the reader in her opening Author’s Note:

“This training of our minds can lead to the exile of many parts of the self, to hatred and the abuse of our own bodies, the policing of other girls, and a lifetime of allegiance to values that do not prioritize our safety, happiness, freedom, or pleasure.”

I read this quote with intrigue, but did not feel this until I was well into her second essay, “Kettle Holes,” where our early-to-develop narrator is expelled from female social circles and sexualized and bullied by young boys. A rush of middle school memories returned to me. Friends whose names appeared on the bathroom stall with “slut” written over it in black sharpie markers, lying about periods and tampons and getting to third base, either because we wanted to give people the impression that we had, or because we wanted to give people the impression that we hadn’t.

She builds on this girlhood narrative in the third essay in the book, “The Mirror Test,” taking the reader on a graceful weave of early sexual exploration—safely on her own—and the harrowing experience of her external sexual experiences. Is it painful to read? At times, yes, but in the sense that she is bringing a collective girlhood experience to light, it feels freeing to see that pain and discomfort that is so rarely addressed put down on the page. Febos takes her time to explain that her experiences were not particularly unusual, she was not raped nor did she experience a specific isolated incident of trauma, but instead, she portrays through her narrative a system of patriarchy that young woman endure which is normal, everyday, and troubling.

My best friend and I, both straight white Midwestern women, spent much of our twenties attempting to unpack our early relationships and sexual experiences as newly college educated grown-ups. Why were we so insecure? Why didn’t we trust men to treat us well? Why did we fear other women—who might see us as a threat, who might be jealous or callous toward us? Where had all of this come from? This questioning and investigation is just the work Febos is doing in Girlhood. Our thoughtful narrator is pulling apart the threads of these early experiences and giving us a context for understanding them. Much of the book is woven narrative, careful to never leave us too long in those dark moments. She regularly moves into a mode of what I can only really explain as autotheory.

Arianne Zwartjes explains in her essay, “Autotheory as Rebellion” (Michigan Quarterly Review) how mixing theory with personal narrative has power: “In one way, autotheory is the chimera of research and imagination. It brings together autobiography with theory and a focus on situating oneself inside a larger world, and it melds these different ways of thinking in creative, unexpected ways.” While Febos is working her way through her girlhood experiences, she is also reaching out to other woman, seeking their stories. She pulls these characters into her own story and brings their voices to the page. She tells us about psychological research and anecdotal research and in doing so paints a much more layered experience than her story alone could accomplish. She doesn’t stop there. She also examines literature and movies to highlight the experiences we see and read about in the media—arguably forming our ideas and beliefs as much as our own experiences. (Her critique of the movie Easy A, a teen comedy from 2010, was easily my favorite.) This analysis from our patient, if not urgent, adult narrator is leading slowly toward her goal—an understanding of what happened to her and what it means.

In her Author’s Note, Febos explains another hurdle for the content of these essays—“For years, I considered it impossible to undo much of this indoctrination.” This struggle becomes more evident as the book progresses. The narrator becomes a young adult, who struggles with addiction and works as a dominatrix. She engages in relationships with women and men, some of them pretty dysfunctional. She does not give us easy answers, because she doesn’t have any. Her process of investigation, much like her other two books, makes her writing compulsively readable—we want to find out what she finds out. And in so many ways, for me, the reading experience is personal. Her lived experience as a young woman in America was too familiar. I didn’t have a stalker in my early twenties, but I knew other women who did. I didn’t feel forced to give a boy a hand-job when I was twelve, but I did for many years after. Even where her experiences were outside my own, they were achingly close to the darkest parts of the stories that shaped my understanding of sex and relationships growing up.  

The adult Febos introduces us to her fiancé Donika, who acts as a bit of foil to our narrator. She questions the normalcy of the early experiences and pushes more investigation into her past. She offers an alternative way of looking at the “events” as Febos decides to call them, that live in her memories. The investigation seems to come to a head in the penultimate essay, “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself” when Febos and Donika, along with a friend, go to a “cuddle party.” The seventy-six page essay traverses many topics, but the cuddle party drags us into the uncomfortable experience (at least for some) of physically being close to strangers—proof that Febos didn’t just mentally push herself to understand the lasting effect of her girlhood experiences, but physically tried to find situations that would help her undo them as well. As I read through some of the cringe-worthy experiences, I could help but think, Oh wow, my therapist would be proud of her! And perhaps this is part of the gift of this collection, she is doing a lot of emotional work, that many of us haven’t had the time or energy to do. It is the cuddle party that leads to Febos’s brilliant exposition on “empty consent”—a term that says so much. Febos explains:

“I see two powerful imperatives that collaborate to encourage empty consent: the need to protect our bodies from the violent retaliation of men and the need to protect the same men from the consequences of their own behavior, usually by assuming personal responsibility. It is our shame, our embarrassment, our duty alone to bear it.”

Giving a name to the expression of “yes” when what you really mean is: “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” or “I want to say no but I don’t want to hurt your feelings or make you angry” was an especially powerful moment in her investigation.

Febos’s narratives continuously circle back to her youth. She raises the stories that dotted her girlhood over and over again. This continuous re-visiting mirrors our own memory, how they can pop up again and again, and allows her to reframe the narratives in new ways as she moves towards understanding. There are many moments that shine in Febos’s often lyric language and vivid imagery, but one that stuck out for me was in “The Mirror Test.” The narrator has gone to a liberal hippy summer camp, and she finds the camp director is a tattooed young woman, beautiful in overalls and a shaved head. She says of meeting her, “When she looked down at me, though I was terrified, I felt more seen than I’d ever felt under another person’s gaze.” Seeing an empowered woman through Febos’s eyes was a striking moment in her story. While Febos cannot literally go back in time to comfort her young self, she seems to have found a way to offer comfort, and a way forward, for her younger self, and for all the rest of us who lived through those troubling and isolating girlhood years. 

Moving and Mesmerizing: A Review of Robert Wrigley's Nemerov's Door

Nemerov’s Door is a collection of eleven autobiographical essays about poetry. It is both moving and mesmerizing. Themes that pop up throughout include family; mortality; politics, nature, man’s relationship to nature, and most essentially, poetry: what it is, how to read it, and why it matters. In form the book is a hybrid: part poetry/part prose; part academic essay/part autobiography; part bildungsroman/part ars poetica; part nature diary/part spiritual meditation.

On the day I received the book, I decided to wade in, reading just one chapter before bed. Instead, I didn’t put the book down until two hours later, having read ten of the eleven essays. You might say that this a book about rivers that pulls you in like a river.

There is an element of hodge-podge among the essays, as if Wrigley threw essays in to fill out the book. You’ll find essays here about My Fair Lady; Frank Sinatra; arrowheads; the Salmon River in Idaho; and the book concludes with a wonderful long poem to Wrigley’s children, largely about Idaho and the state of the nation. But the core of the book, and my favorite part of it, is a series of close readings of the poetry of a handful of modern American poets: Richard Hugo, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Etheridge Knight, James Dickey, and Sylvia Plath.

Early on Wrigley writes that none of these essays would exist if it weren’t for his being a teacher and it is easy to imagine him as an excellent one. About halfway through, I began to feel like Dante being led down the corridors of poetry by Virgil. As a teacher, Wrigley is plain spoken but enthusiastic, esoteric without ever being scholarly or dry. He’s madly in love with poetry and unafraid to say so. (He describes his entry into poetry at age 21 as walking into a cathedral he had passed many times with disinterest). He has an excellent ear and is keenly attuned to the music of poetry which he describes as the condition of poetry. He describes poets as working with the “fierce concentration” of a “ditch digger” or “mountain climber.”

Wrigley doesn’t suffer much hubris. He is aware of his status as a privileged white male, stating in his essay on Etheridge Knight that out of the 39 poets included in Donald Hall’s anthology Contemporary American Poetry, 0 are black women; 1 is a black man; 4 are white women; and and 34 are white males. “Based on the evidence I had at hand, [I deduced poets] were pretty much all white men.“ It is significant then that of the five essays dedicated to close readings of modern American poets, one is devoted to a black poet (Etheridge Knight) and one to a woman (Sylvia Plath).

I entered the Plath chapter with some skepticism, with a feminist feeling of “ok, show me what you’ve got,” but Wrigley did well with the subject, calling the poems of Ariel a kind of “hyper-lucid and incendiary suicide note” whose emotional content is “sheer force” written by an “agonized consciousness” (90) living in a state of “terrified introspection.” Such, he writes, was her “electrified suffering” and the “strange ecstatic horrors” of her situation that she exhibits a “monstrous sensitivity” like Van Gogh’s. In a line that’s flat out funny he writes that if Sylvia Plath were a character in one of his son’s NBA video games, “her every drive on the basketball court would be trailed by flames.” In the last days before her suicide, he writes, “She was on fire. She was in another place. She had left the rest of us behind. She felt more than most of us ever will for any reason....She [was] seeing into the heart of things.”

With the possible exception of the beautifully conducted close reading of Richard Hugo’s “Trout” (“The Music of Sense”), “Nemerov’s Door” is the book’s most powerful essay and is itself more poem than essay. That eponymous essay is a meditation on Wrigley’s relationship with his father, a car salesman with little aptitude for poetry. In the essay father and son blur, passing in and out of each other like ghosts. The “door” of the title is the door of poetry the poet’s father almost supernaturally leads his son to. It’s a mystical essay brimming with love, the strangeness of life, and the fluidity of generations. “Somehow,” he writes, “in all of this you are yourself and you are your father and you are the small boy in Nemerov’s ‘The View from an Attic Window’ coming into the knowledge of time and mortality.”

But what makes the book most mystical is Wrigley’s John McPhee-like appreciation for nature. One of the book’s most striking moments is Wrigley’s description of waking up on a beach with his son and seeing the sky bent down low over them “all eyes and personality,” as if the cosmos were a curious and gentle creature intimately staring at this sleeping man and his son. Another is his description of waking up on a rock in the wilderness to find a group of coyotes staring from a distance, wondering whether he was dead or alive. Another a description of coming upon a bear in the wilderness rearing on hind legs transfixed by a host of yellow butterflies in front of its nose. These glittering images and many more are scattered across the forest floor of this book.

You will get the most out of this book if you are a poet or at least seriously interested in poetry, but in truth, any sensitive person—especially any person in love with the idea of disappearing negatively capable into nature—can be pulled into these essays as easily as into a river you won’t mind floating—or drowning—in.

A Review of The Nail in the Tree by Carol Ann Davis

Carol Ann Davis and her family had recently moved to Newtown, Connecticut when twenty first-graders and six educators were gunned down on December 4, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School. During the massacre, her youngest son was home with his father, and the older was in his fourth-grade classroom, but “through an accident of zoning,” neither was a student at Sandy Hook. 

The Nail in the Tree begins with an explanation of the title: Davis tells the story of her older son, Willem, now in high school and an activist, explaining how he does his best to make sense of the shooting:

Willem explained that the way he felt about the tragedy was similar to a tree with a nail driven into its skin. As the tree grows, the nail becomes a part of it, a gnarled knot in a trunk that nonetheless grows tall and strong. You would not take out the nail, would you, Mom? he asked me. At some point you have to love the nail.

Davis’s collection, part of Tupelo Press’s Life in Art series, is a thorough examination of that nail and that tree. Chapters are labeled by both title and time — "the day of the shooting,” “in the year that comes after,” “two years before,” “three years after”— revolving around this one incident and attempting to make sense not so much of the violence itself, but of its repercussions vibrating through her family's life. What does it say that the “not-suffering, happy-ending story” means being the child not shot, the family not destroyed?

Davis’s cyclical way of writing and processing works well as she deals with these vibrations, tying them to other lived experiences, her writing, and other art media. As Davis says, “Art is experience’s contingency,” and much of the book is spent interacting with numerous artists and their work — Rumi, Hélène Cixous, Georgia O’Keefe, and Tomas Tranströmer, to name a few — attempting to deconstruct how they have used their art to understand the world. She writes of Eva Hesse, “It’s clear she expects only to get closer to what she envisioned, never to arrive at it,” and that’s what these essays feel like: a constant circling nearer to what Davis is looking at, but never quite arriving. This is not so much a criticism of Davis's book as a way of understanding it: this book is not about the arrival but about the circling — the attempts to make meaning rather than the meaning itself. 

For instance in “On Brotherhood and Crucifixion: two years before,” Davis recalls incidents from her childhood, writing how difficult it must have been to be an older brother to her and her siblings, “to shield us from the unaccountable as it assuaged us in various forms throughout our childhoods.” Later she realizes, “nothing I can do takes back that I was not only witness but cause of his suffering. . . . This brings me close — close — to what the feeling of being a brother must be.” Circling, not arriving. 

Davis writes a lot about the unknowable things we cannot express, looking at essential paradoxes: how a thing can be both wild and tame, inside and outside of ourselves, taken and not taken, pursuing and leading, and general chaos structured as order. At times her writing captures that inexpressible expression, but at others it feels like an evasion, the words purposefully hiding their meaning, although maybe this too is another paradox she’s exploring, another yin and yang. 

For example, In “Loose Thread: four years after” Davis writes of her children in conflict with some of their friends:

The way they argue over a narrative they all frame differently has me thinking about the ethics of the image, how a narrative sometimes detaches the image from its surroundings; in the case of argument, images can be produced to substitute for reason, to provide a tidy narrative, or to illustrate a wrong deeply felt, among many possibilities. The image’s symbolism detaches it from the realities of the experience and from its original ethical framework.

Phrases like “ethics of the image” and “the image’s symbolism” and “original ethical framework” feel more like strings of words than intelligible concepts, like a hiding place for Davis, as she explores the issues while trying to make sense, unable to circle too close. Her work shines brightest when she does deal with the concrete: the nail in the tree, the act of putting a child on a bus, minding a radio tower at the beach as a young woman handling calls about drownings. Two pages after the above quote, she admits to her fear in more tangible terms:

These days I live in fear of the catalog in poems, once a friend for its precision and the accretion of depth, even for its potential surprise: I am fond of apples, tomatoes, and elocution exercises. But now, familiar with a catalog that lists names of children lost one after the other, I’m leery of the harm cataloging can do, grammar seeming to make inevitable their senseless murders, reducing their deaths into nothing more than a list.

Here Davis circles so closely and so specifically. We know her emotion — fear — and we see real things — lists, apples — and what she likes about these lists — precision and depth. This is followed by the gut punch of the list of the kids and “the harm cataloging can do.” 

In the end, Davis doesn’t necessarily answer her questions about art and life, chaos and order, but she’s smart to realize, “What I want of my art is not at all what will come out of it,” which is where the reader comes in. At the end of the book I asked myself, What did come of it? What has this art taught me?, which demonstrates that Tupelo’s Art in Life series, and Davis’s work in particular, extends well beyond words on a page. 

Sunlight on Grief: A Review of Mystery and Mortality by Paula Bomer

Grief is unwelcome and, like an unwelcome guest, has a way of sticking around long after the party’s over, chairs are stacked, and the light’s turned out. Working around grief’s hidden edges, that’s what we struggle with, like breathing through glass. Paula Bomer’s exceptional new book of essays, Mystery and Mortality: Essays on the Sad, Short Gift of Life, is breathing through those shards in any way it can.

Much of Mystery and Mortality is personal: about Bomer’s mother, her children, her father, somatic pain. But interspersed are meta-musings on literature, on Tolstoy, Gaitskill, Flannery O’Connor (lots of O’Connor), DFW. At first, the sequencing bothered me. What in the world does Tolstoy have to do with dementia?

We work through grief in our own ways. Some eat our feelings to the tune of Haagen Daz, others exercise until exhaustion. Bomer chose to exorcise her demons by seeking an explication of suffering through works of literature—how pain and grief in fictional and non-fictional worlds runs in rivers beneath sight. By uncovering these truths, Bomer came to understand herself, “To what extent that suffering is or is not a result of our free will seems almost irrelevant…How to—to quote Wallace again—say to yourself, ‘this is water, this is water.’”

Bomer doesn’t conceal the grief in her life, she exposes it, hoping that sunlight will wither it. In the aptly titled introductory essay “My Mother’s Dementia,” Bomer writes, “It unnerves me, the possibility that we never stop wanting our mothers.” She is forced into a caregiver role but also craves her mother’s protection and benediction, succor from a once-strong, once-capable woman whom Bomer might not have liked, but admired. “She was insanely beautiful and righteously smart …. Later, I understood that those two things, when combined, are the things the world hates most in women.”

While Mystery and Mortality’s content is upsetting, there are moments of levity. Bomer’s blunt honesty transforms simple prose amusingly, curmudgeonly. “I looked out at all the beauty and thought, ‘All this beauty, too bad it is full of Austrians,’” she writes, feeling melancholy in the midst of bucolic nature. Bomer understands that without the relief of comedy, pain is unendurable. Even when discussing her mother’s failing mind, she’s funny: “When my mother first became demented, I thought she was just being really annoying.”

Besides the pain and humor, Bomer allows her exploration of sorrowful moments of beauty. In the essay “Under the Jaguar Son,” in which she deconstructs cannibalism, her love of her children, and Calvino, there are lovely, strange lines that play jump rope with prose poetry, “We eat pussy or cock, we eat each other…Perhaps also, we are always consuming and wasting as we go about our living, birthing, begetting, and dying.” The will to beautify tragedy is redemptive.

Perhaps my favorite essay focuses on the villain in Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men. Unlike McCarthy’s legions of male fans, who perhaps glorify the darkness in his prose, Bomer takes a counter point, seeing the implacable villain as an avenging angel, meting our dark vengeance as, “…an angel, sent by God to destroy all of those who suffer from greed.” This interpretation, while seemingly odd, makes a certain amount of sense when taken in the context of the whole collection. It’s relatable to the age-old question of why God allows evil and suffering. The answer reminds me of the film Jacob’s Ladder, “If you’re frightened of dying and holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.” I see comfort in that.

The redemptive powers we possess, and the enemies of our own nature are what Bomer’s book revolves around: “What strikes me most is the idea that smugness—not violence or vitriolic hate (although yes, that as well)—is the opposite of compassion.” While she feels grief as deeply as we all do—“After my father’s suicide, after I’d alienated my friends, I felt I lived in a bubble…Often I would crawl the walls, screaming out for my father…,”—the book is her redevelopment of connections sundered by loss. She heals through text, through communion with other writers, likeminded souls. For readers, there’s a lot to learn, “Because once you acknowledge you have a soul at stake, you have a lot to lose.”