Winter Hours Working Life

“What is autobiography but a story rich and impossible of completion—an intense, careful, expressive, self-interested failure? What can I say to you, therefore, that will be true, and will cast its shadow or its light over the whole body of my telling, of my being here, or who I am?”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Essays and Poems:

Snow drifted like sand across the road in front of me. Our car felt lighter without the backseat weighed down by all the books my wife and I had culled from our shelves to prepare for our move. I wasn’t concerned that the rear tires would lose traction because I had driven in the Midwest for a half dozen winters.

Lauren had moved with me from our families in Florida to Iowa where I attended grad school and she got a job working at a nonprofit. After earning my MFA and marrying each other, we stayed. I struggled to find work beyond odd jobs. I feared the security of an office job that would cause me to not want to sit and write before or after work. I couldn’t live on my writing, or at least I couldn’t afford to write for an economic living. And I didn’t want to teach writing because I feared losing what I loved to do.

I had been frozen.

The car’s trunk was filled with a tarp, a ground pad, a sleeping bag, boots, and an external framed bright blue pack that I hadn’t used since crossing over from Cub to Boy Scouts by earning my Arrow of Light and then quitting in sixth grade. I was driving, alone, south to Missouri for a Wilderness First Responder course. I was about to begin a new path toward a non-seasonal job; it seemed like I was always getting a job that didn’t work out. The WFR course would complete my training for an environmental educator job out in Moab, Utah. The only thing I knew about the place was Edward Abbey’s cranky national park memoir Desert Solitaire where he wasn’t really alone; he just wrote his wife and child out of the book.

Underneath the road atlas on the empty passenger seat was a book I couldn’t help buying when I sold our books at a used store. It was a book that I read when I first started writing. A book by a living writer who was a poet but wrote prose in beautiful, quiet sentences that I would come to learn as lyrical. It was a book that began my writing life. A teal upper half of sky, between a navy sailboat cutting along the horizon on top of a turquoise half of sea.

*

The dust jacket was replaced by forest green vinyl. White Arial font stamped on the spine to read Oliver. The book sat on the poetry shelves back by the bathrooms in the University of Central Florida’s library. I probably picked the book because it was thin and our undergrad workshop class was reading Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook. We had to read several collections during the spring semester and then write a report after each one.

I still have a digital copy of my assignment on Oliver’s self analysis of her poem “The Swan.” I must have skipped Oliver’s first essay “Building a House”—a hard working piece about constructing a tiny shed from locally found scrap: a metaphor for writing a poem—and I doubt that I read the entire book, which is why I wanted to re-read my first encounter with Oliver, or rather, completely read Oliver and write back to that time in my life.

In my paper, I wrote that Oliver “held characteristics of a significant poem” with three musts—or as Oliver actually wrote, “rules”—for herself: 1.) genuine body, 2.) sincere energy, and 3.) spiritual purpose.

I didn’t consider that Oliver also wanted “the poem to ask something, and at its best moments, [she] want[s] the question to remain unanswered.” Oliver believes that a reader must answer the question.

I wrote that “The Swan” included concrete images (genuine body), its shape matched the motion of the animal (sincere energy), and that Oliver suggested heaven incarnate as imagination on earth (spiritual purpose). I don’t know if I knew what I was writing about.

When I read “The Swan” again in a basement apartment before my week-long WFR sessions I could see that Oliver had shaped her zigzagging enjambment like the floating little boat of a swan, or perhaps Shelley’s sailboat that Oliver laments capsizing in a final storm, drifting toward shore and the revelation of its hopeful landing as a joy of survival and the poem itself as an answer to what to do: live, and then write.

Rescue

What is forgiveness anyway but a terrifying and true opening—a dangerous, purposeful, affective, selfless vulnerability? What could Jakob say to us, right there, that would uncloak the shadow of death he had seen as he served in the oven of the continual Gulf war and took with him on the freezer of Antarctica, as we shared stories already dead and stories yet to live?

When the bloated body bobbed on the ocean, the face tight and white, and the helicopter’s rotors chopping the salty air, he knew the only thing he could do: plop down next to it, or hate. And he plopped, a gloop of a body made of water into a body of water, next to a body soggy with more water. He grasped that slick skin, so they both bobbed on the surface as a rope was flung out of the chopper. But the body did not know it was saved, or if it did its capacity to know was gone with whatever selfish will was gone, the body did not gasp like any living mammal hurled into water and only wanting air, that time was gone, and the body floundered in the ocean.

Years later, Jakob did not see the person in the water. In spite of the winch that hauled them both up where they had plunged in, the body wasn’t a person with a job, or hobbies, or family; it was a bag of meat and bones.

And I thought: I will need to remember that in the wilderness. The bobbing, the plopping, the grasping, and the hauling. Then the surrender of saving, of soul. Then the clear dryness of sanitizer. And the ocean: the depth and the apathy.

The Betrayer

From the beginning she had doubted. By from the beginning I mean as soon as we dated. It was terrible. At first I wondered, What is it? I would be driving, and she would be the passenger. As from the cold of space and unfathomable distance, not retuning but meteoring, the feeling rushed and entered and struck and embedded and settled and stayed.

Always, I wondered, How is she feeling about everything? What’s going on? She would write, I don’t know. I don’t want to hurt him. I gave my heart away before him. And line after line she wrote in her diary, betraying.

Do I know her? I think. I thought. Bangs and pubes. Hangry and frisky. Sadness and giddiness. Disappointment, too. And the commitment. And for all that, does she know me? Who is this person I married less than a year ago?

This dense, opaque, scared betrayer.

“You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Four Poets:

The circle of desk-chairs all faced inward. Every class we workshopped a couple of poems. We said what we thought the poem was about. We said whether we liked the poem or not, and why. We said how the student could improve the poem by breaking lines, swapping out words, or creating rhyme. We said we didn’t know if it was poem. We said, “This image is cliché.” We said, “This image is killer.” We agreed with each other. We disagreed with our instructor. We considered whether or not the poem needed to be confessional, lyrical, narrative, etc.

I turned in sentimental writing. I wrote a sonnet about leaving love notes under the windshield of an ex-girlfriend’s car. I wrote an elegy to my dead grandparents. I wrote a prose-poem about the poor infrastructure and daily grind of a city. I wrote a found poem with lines about God holding the world in His hands.

I remember four undergrads who wrote stellar poems, people who were poets—who inspired me to work at my writing—because they could work their imagination into funny, loving, nostalgic, and urgent writing: Matt Harrison—this sly, lip-pierced, too tight T-shirted, and jeaned guy—who satirically wrote “The One That Got Away” from the point-of-view of an old Ash Ketchum reminiscing about the battle that he lost to capture a Pokèmon. Christina Johnson—this small, quiet gal with sepia blouses that matched her Polaroid photos she took, and corduroy pants like a couch’s slipcover that I wanted to lie my head on—with her “Floral Prints” about a husband who reupholsters a yard sale armchair for his wife who ends up dying before he does and leaving her shape in the cushions. Keri Smith—this strong, but shy gal with a canvas of tattoos, before everyone inked up, down on her skin including beta fish swimming in the fish bowl of her clavicle, a horse skull on her bicep, a pizza slice melting on her shin, and a percolator on the other leg that spilled out the word bubble, “Death before decaf!”—who wove Lorca’s verse Ni hay nadie que, al tocar un recien nacido, olvide las inmoviles calaveras de caballo into her poem “A Death Full of Light” where she walked through her parents’ barn while remembering her little girl self who loved to ride. Curtis Meyer—this functioning Asperger’s guy with slick button ups and slacks, whose voice boomed like an oracle that he raised as a slam poet—and his poem “Value” that tallied all the lives of cells in our bodies that we are responsible for, and that to live isn’t, but actually really is, “no pressure.”

Four poets’ obsessions captivated Oliver and she, too, was inspired to write by their work: Poe’s uncertainty caused by the continual deaths of dark-curled, high-foreheaded, large-eyed, ill women so much like his mother, including his surrogate mother Frances Allan and later his wife (and cousin!) Virginia Clemm who revisited him in “The Haunted Palace.” Frost’s bittersweet control with meter, and fame, as he was put on a pedestal as a Popular Poet (capital Ps!) for being a pastoral poet with a vulnerability written in “My November Guest.” Hopkins’ release from the rigorous Jesuit order with joyful language (rejoice!) on the page where he was constantly “Hurrahing in Harvest.” Whitman (oh, Whitman! her Whitman!) who after caring for the dying as a nurse in the Civil War replicated a miracle of resurrection with his life long rewriting of Leaves of Grass.

“Once I came upon two angels, they were standing quietly, keeping guard beside a car. Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready?”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Intermission:

Sand Dabs Seven*

Danger comes from above and around you.

*

Don’t do CPR if there is chest trauma, the person is dead, the person is speaking to you, if a body is rotting, if a heart is outside the body, if a head is not attached to the body, if the scene is unsafe.

*

You won’t know when your judgment fails you.

*

In the documentary “A Dozen More Turns,” a group of Alaskan grad school skiers gets caught in an avalanche on Mt. Nemesis. One of them snaps his leg and another dies.

“They should have known better,” an urban EMT in the WFR course says.

Would we have known any better?

*

The best container for water is your body.

*

Lightning spreads like a stream. The electrical charge flows along the ground gathering ions and then bolts up into the clouds. The safest place to be in a field, during a thunderstorm, is not down, but on a buoy of earth.

*

We have killed so many rattlesnakes that rattlesnakes now self-select to not grow rattles.

*

Six “Sand Dabs” are spread throughout three of Oliver’s books: Winter Hours, Blue Pastures, and West Wind. The sand dab is a small, bony, significant but well-put-together fish.

“I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _____. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope.”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Winter Hours:

What is failure except the lack of achieving a goal? A gulf, chasm, gulch, arroyo, valley—separation of place. You compete but you are defeated. You try but you don’t make it—somewhere. You don’t land. You drift. You carry the fault that didn’t enable you to succeed. You are the cause of your own let down.

What is mercy except underserved leniency, relief, and release?

*

Because the sessions began at 8:30AM I woke in darkness to journal my WFR training experience and to jot down the curious and inspiring bits of Winter Hours.

The ground-level studio was warm, almost damp since I ran a space heater all night long. The coils glowed as orange as coals and a fan spun, blowing beneath the bed and rising up to me tucked under a comforter. Double doors lead into the one room with a kitchenette and bathroom stall. The studio fit snug under the deck of a social worker’s house. She rented out the space cheaper than a hotel room.

I woke alone in the navy room. The walls were painted light blue and the trim and floorboard and doors were painted a darker blue, but it all looked nearly black like a bruise until I turned on a light.

I worked at a table quadranted off with four stools that tucked underneath, by the legs. Rarely did I experience being alone in the quiet. I did, and didn’t, like it. I liked turning over my thoughts without distraction, except for the distraction that there wasn’t any distraction—that there wasn’t my cat or Lauren or anybody I really knew in the entire state.

I have known loneliness even with being with someone. Or perhaps not loneliness, but despair.

After my journaling and a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal, I suited up in wool socks, long underwear, a turtleneck, synthetic T-shirt, Carhartt pants, a fleece pull-over, an insulated canvas jacket, a scarf, hat with ear flaps, mittens, and waterproof ankle boots. I felt in uniform—that I had a purpose, a duty, to save lives; myself included.

The winter morning air crackled and I steamed, walking up the frosty hill to my car parked at a lesser angle. I turned over the ignition, warming up the oil and the engine. Exhaust plumed from the tailpipe, escaping into the brightening sky.

*

I had pulled up and shut our garage door. I didn’t like the work I did even though it more than paid the bills. I drove a bus at odd hours of the day, on-calls, and Saturday nights since I was ranked 101 out of 120 drivers. I would sit all day and pay close attention to the road around town and the mall and the university and downtown and everywhere else in between. It wasn’t mindless, it was mindful; exhausting.

Ironically, I had to drive the direct 5 minutes to and from work because I couldn’t regularly catch the bus in time before my shifts. I would have had to ride for 20 minutes and then wait at least another 10 minutes adding an unpaid extra hour to each day.

I felt strapped into my position. I couldn’t just quit. What would I do in Ames that would pay as much? How would I afford to live? How could I go on riding the wheel and feeling unchallenged, but also depleted?

My vision clouded. I switched the fog lights on. Their orange beams cast caution in the filling garage.

I thought about staying. Lauren and I had had a confrontation. I don’t know what to call it. A non-physical fight? An empty debate? An emotional conversation?

We had been married for less than one year. Winter’s coldness still froze the nights of early spring and the tulip bulbs hadn’t sprouted. She didn’t know. I didn’t know. The commitment felt like too much, something we weren’t prepared for. Would this—the unrest, the doubt, the nausea—ever end?

The intoxicating exhaust settled in. It was a thicker smell than the sweetness at the gas pump. Should I get out? I thought about driving off, to not even consider the next thing with work, with Lauren, with my life. It would be even easier to just let the engine run motionless in the garage and floor the pedal so the carburetor would open for gas to flow and burn and take me away.

I turned the key and took it out. I huffed out a toxic breath and opened the car door and waded through the gray haze. I exited all that.

*

I have never planned to live in the west. I’d been to Colorado as a youth. Once, Lauren and I had visited friends in New Mexico for Albuquerque’s hot air balloon festival. Then, we had honeymooned in Portland, Oregon for a food festival, but spent most of our time at Powell’s Books. We came to know the upper Midwest almost as well as the East Coast and the South where we thought we would return.

I have not forgotten how it feels to be a stranger in a strange land. I still felt strange even after living five years in Iowa. I came to enjoy the corn and casseroles as much as the sand and sweet tea of Florida. I could spot a bur oak better than a magnolia, but I never saw prairie rose while my parents’ neighborhood had multiple orange trees, their blossoms zesting with the acidic hint of future citrus. I loved spotting an Eastern goldfinch darting in a flash above hostas while I detested the hidden repeating and annoying mockingbird mimicking a car alarm from a scrub pine.

I love to figure out the layout of a town, where the roads, trails, stores, houses, and restaurants unfortunately cut down the trees and plants and land. I like the sense of structure, or order, while also wanting those green spaces to wildly push up through the concrete and plywood and rebar. I go to all of the same places a few times to find out what they have and at what cost and how they serve or neglect people. I decide between one or two places and then continue going there. I settle.

*

From one of the three needs—dwelling—came work in Iowa, occasionally by willingness, or skill. One morning I shoveled dirt from a truck bed into a wheelbarrow and rolled the loads to the backyard of a retired special ed teacher. When I dumped the load, my forearms strained and flexed and released with the tip of dense soil.

I worked with a guy I knew. Work always came from some guy, some project, for some person’s home. Where they already lived. I had cut out windows and sealed flashing under new ones; scraped off paint from Craftsman roofs’ peaks and shellacked on fresh coats; and yanked out pink insulation from rim joists in basements—that would be replaced with sawed foam board, its blue staticky minuscule debris clinging to my jeans—the fiberglass speckled my skin but only cleared in a cold shower so my heated skin’s pores wouldn’t relax and open and accept the shards.

I raked the loads of dirt along a rectangle of 2x4s that would become a cement patio. The rectangle that contained the slurry of concrete was called “the form.” Not a frame, because a frame held a wall before sheets of plywood and then drywall were hammered and hung in place. I loved the language of construction, how the words worked.

Inside the form we crosshatched rebar to support the slurry so the soon-to-seal cement wouldn’t crack. Cement traps water. In basements cement will moisten, feel damp, and then sweat.

We walk on water every day. This is no blind path of faith. This is the road of work.

*

For years, in the afternoons, I walked down Clark Avenue. Down as in south. Down as in the slope of Ames toward downtown. Down as in whatever to call the spiral and drain and loss of purpose.

On the east sidewalk I treaded hundreds of times. For several seasons I walked to get the sun, even though my home office had a south-facing reading chair. I would follow the shine before the rays filtered through the tree line and then dipped behind the tree line and well before the sun slipped off the edge of the Midwest. Walking out the door was the most difficult step; to go without a need to get anywhere else, but away. I was getting away from loneliness, from a distancing muteness close to neglect. Sometimes in winters between odd jobs and indoor work I wouldn’t talk to anyone except for Lauren the whole gray day.

I didn’t know I would encounter people on my walks, but I did. These were neighbors without names. I guessed they had come to town for the university, or perhaps the railroad. Most likely to get away from farming. They retired and got old and then they were there in their front windows or lawns or gardens. The sweatpantsed man standing on his couch who I wondered if he was tantruming over the cable news or screwing in an overhead light bulb. The lady who shuffled down her driveway to shout, “Stop!” at the rampant Solomon’s seal. The deaf woman who smiled when I gestured at her lilies. The stay-at-home dad raking leaves into piles or shoveling snow or mowing the lawn or seeding the lawn and then giving me the manly nod and, depending on the season, the brim-of-hat tap.

*

The seasons change. Now an ice storm threatens the end of the WFR weeklong course since the University of Missouri will close the next day. So, tonight, this Thursday, we test out. Answering a multiple-choice test and then splint a leg with a book, pad, jacket, and p-chord. I use Southwestern Homelands, my North Face, a classroom pad, and borrowed rope. I’m in the odd group, the only pair with a plus one. The geography master’s student researching digital terrorism and the undergrad athletic trainer. I forget to include a trucker’s knot in my simple loop and so my half-hitches come loose from femur to shin and the instructor doesn’t like that we’re last. At last, I re-do the entire splint and then we lose the personal trainer to another pair for the final assessment of clearing a spine after a positive mechanism of injury (read: someone fell from a height).

Of course, I support the geography student’s neck and I know where to look for any bruising behind his ears and how to dab his earlobe to check for any cranial fluid leaking and palpate his back and test the feeling in his palm and pinch his fingerpads for capillary refill and take his pulse and cover his eyes to see if the pupils equally and reactively respond to light and create a c-brace with his fleece jacket and ask him his name, where he is, and what month it is. Pain is the answer I don’t want to receive from any question; I ask as he moves his head on his neck left then right and then up and finally down like the cardinal directions, east and west, and north and south. Finally, Dan, at Mizzou, during January, is cleared.

There is a place on the road home where my eyes droop while listening to the Black-Eyed Blonde on CD. I roll the windows down when the exhumed Philip Marlowe isn’t enough to keep me awake. How the chill snaps my eyes fully open! I stagger the stops I make for coffee so I don’t crash with the lack of caffeine or the jittery blur of happiness, returning to Lauren.

During the WFR course, Lauren and I texted and talked to continue to dwell together even as we were apart and were readying to leave. Overnight, I drive to our garage, to our place, to our door that we continue to open for each other.

*

Darkness is the best time to write. I mean my emotional and woken and environmental state. Perhaps something wrong or just rising or shadowed, the thing that needs lightening, lightning, light, is what I like to work with.

In the act of writing an essay, I am loyal, and wandering. As much as I can I neglect the rest of the day—hunger, work, communication—and attempt to submerge in my mind both memory and how I recall. I think, What do I know? What I consider is a tangle to undo and then weave into something useable. Oliver writes of hearing a song, a whisper, a voice. I am no Oliver yet, but I know of that language inside myself. Every essayist attempts to listen to it. You can learn the rules for the dance, but not the feel. You can hope for talent, but not style. Hope for ability. It is real and spiritual. It is a possession, and ephemeral. Perhaps it’s why I jot on scrapes of paper and then scribble them together on lined notebooks. My laptop only helps me get the supplies in order, ready to construct.

*

I could not be an essayist without work. Someone else could. But not me. For me, the experiences pile up. During a driving shift, in a garden plot, or on a ladder I work toward a physical exhaustion that fills a mental reserve—a tap to pour out with writing. I learn, and then write, how doing something affects me.

Perhaps I’m a working writer. But there’s always a tension between needing to work and wanting to write but not wanting to write for work. I also don’t want to be a communist or union organizer or whatever would be a writer writing for workers. I document my own labor: pay, hours, and skill and treatment and interpersonal relationships and lack of lunch breaks. What I write begins with the shifts and doesn’t end after work. Maybe I would become an activist if I got comfortable. But I haven’t. I don’t consider the gross domestic product, international trade agreements, or inflation rates. I am just going to work and riding the wheel, digging with a trowel, slinging a brush and then coming home with an experience. This is an unfortunately usual way to live—non-mystical, scraping by.

The world makes a distinction between work: digging ditches or going to meetings. There is a false divide between the same sort of taxing menial, repetitive tasks. You strain your back or you widen your ass. What’s the difference between physical and mental jobs? Education, opportunity, nepotism? There are carpenters torquing nails out of siding who spend nights reading Cormac McCarthy. There are English professors writing mysteries who cut cedars with a chainsaw. There are research scientists advocating for rye as cover crop who fill their freezers with hunted waterfowl. There are bakers punching down swollen sourdough who practice transcendental meditation. There are vegetable farmers spot weeding brussel sprouts who attend racial equality town halls. The world is made up of fiber optic cables, ballpoint pens, and screws. A diesel is alive. The screen of the phone and the screen inset on a hinged door that lets in the flow, but not the bugs, is circulatory. There is breath in all work.

What I want to emanate in my essays is the feeling—both physical and emotional—of knowing the job, the trajectory toward mastery that occurs on a no set-up turn, the pluck of a taproot, or the slide of a primer coat.

There is something special in this, I believe. It creates something. Writing work is a way of clocking-in with a subject. You become what it is. With your muscle—brain or brawn—you live as you work. The muse is the planned, the effortful, the constructed—not the flighty, the sporadic. You work, and you notice. You are purposeful in order to be fulfilled. You consider how to do a job by doing it, and then telling it. Each evening, you come home and your beloved says—always—How was work? The answer comes as a narrative reconstructed.

*

Lauren and I met when we were in our early twenties. For myself it was so adult—a shared bed and split bills. Coupling. We have lived together for a half-dozen years, without an end. I have told lots about it. Confession, the over-share in our selfish world, has been a catharsis of youth. We are forgiven, and we try again. We are both yoked, and maturing, together. Repeat: we are forgiven, and we try again. We work with sincerity, goofiness, kindness, and forgiveness. Whenever I write something angry it lacks my life with Lauren. Whenever I write something hopeful it is my heart yearning to live it with Lauren. This is my life’s work.

Funny and Heart-wrenching All At Once: Sarah Bruni's The Night Gwen Stacy Died

There is so much material to be plumbed from the Spider-Man canon, so much mythologizing and fantasizing and romanticizing to be had, and it’s not so much that Sarah Bruni wields an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Spider-Man in her debut novel, The Night Gwen Stacy Died, but she is skilled in exploiting this material, understanding the weight it carries in the minds of both her readers and characters. Wrapped in a sleek, hardboiled-ish sheen, the narrative skulks behind high schooler Sheila Gower, gas station attendant in insipid Iowa with dreams of the bright lights of Paris. When in walks Peter Parker—or a boy calling himself Peter Parker—brandishing a gun he’s never used and a backstory he doesn’t understand. Sheila is swept away in a stolen cab, the willing victim of a staged abduction, and the pair sets its sights on Chicago—it’s not Paris, but it’s not Iowa. Sheila buys into Peter’s story, adopting the name of the tragic Gwen Stacy, Spider-Man’s first love (well “first” for all intents and purposes, although that’s up for debate within the Marvel Universe), allowing the Spider-Man myth to assume its role in her life:

“There are moments when such slippage occurs, between the regular, everyday world and the interior worlds created, and these are the moments that fortify and support the worst delusions.”

Much to her credit, Bruni uses the Spider-Man lore not to ignite her story, but to fuel it: these are real issues for her runaway characters, speaking to larger themes of first love, of responsibility, of identity. Sound familiar? At no point does the conceit feel authorial; Bruni’s prose is the webbing to support this. With literary agility that is playful in its storytelling and plot-handling, Bruni weaves in and out of the heads of her characters, the sorcerer of a teenaged world that is as authentic as any in literary fiction. In this respect, Bruni’s treatment is reminiscent of the work of Brian Michael Bendis, longtime Marvel Comics writer and pioneer in the new age of Spider-Man storytelling, expert at rendering the complicated lives of teenagers, super-powered or not. Bruni, like Bendis, is funny and heart-wrenching all at once.

But The Night Gwen Stacy Died is not lacking in its superpowers either, or at least the supernatural. The Chicago of the novel is mysteriously overrun by a Greek chorus of displaced coyotes. Peter Parker is a boy overwhelmed by prophesizing dreams that can only be described as Spider-Sensical. Bruni litters the narrative with ghastly images both real and imagined. Hitchcock’s Vertigo readily comes to mind, and to a lesser extent the detective novels of the 1920s and ’30s, as Bruni employs a narrative pacing that makes for a genuine page-turner. Bruni’s world is dark in the ways the world can be for a seventeen-year-old and her ennui-addled heart, a world so close to our own and yet so distant. To great effect does Bruni invoke the Spider-Man lore for her reinvented Gwen and Peter and with a deft hand infuses her runaway tale with the weight of fifty years of comic book storytelling. Not as a crutch, but as a complement not often seen in literary fiction. This is what separates Bruni’s debut novel from mere fan boy fantasy. It’s a fine line Bruni walks, and she walks it well, as she knows she must. After all, with great power there must also come . . . well, you know.

Imagination and Language Combine to Make Spirits in the Head: On Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried

The First Gulf War began in 1990, and I was worried about being drafted. Thinking about such a thing in reference to this war seems ridiculous now but, at the time, with the ghosts of Vietnam swirling around us, I was worried. I watched the news and wondered if Iraq would be Generation X’s war. I wondered if I would experience waves of heat or if I would feel sand beneath my boots. Would the government push an M16 into my hands?

As the Allies mobilized against Saddam Hussein, my friends and I drank cases of beer and asked each other if we’d go. This wasn’t an academic exercise, you understand. We thought about the 5,000 Kurds that had been murdered by chemical attacks in Halabja. And didn’t Hussein say this would be the “Mother of All Wars”? Let’s not forget that Iran and Iraq had just finished a very bloody war with each other, a war that had snuffed out the lives of over 500,000 men.

So, yeah, I was worried.

Amid this jumble of fear and unstoppable world events I picked up a copy of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. He was from Minnesota like me and his latest book was getting rave reviews all across the nation. I’d read a lot of war literature before (All Quiet on the Western Front, Slaughterhouse Five, Catch-22) but nothing prepared me for how inviting, how visceral, and how immediate O’Brien was. Here was a writer from my neck of the woods and he said things I’d always felt deep in my ribcage, but I just didn’t know how to articulate them. I read The Things They Carried in one sitting. It mesmerized me. It captivated me. And when I closed the book, I sat back and looked out the window for a long time. A very long time.

This book shifts between war and peace so effortlessly, so brutally, that we quickly learn what it might be like to go to war and, perhaps more importantly, what it means to come home from war. I was especially hooked when I read a chapter called “On the Rainy River”. In these pages, a fictional Tim O’Brien is drafted by the government and he spends his remaining days over the summer working in an abattoir. That metaphor is perfect enough, but as the date for his induction into the US Army draws closer and closer, he drives north to the Canadian border. In beautiful prose, this fictional O’Brien sits in a boat and decides if he will flee his country (Canada is so close, just twenty yards away) or if he will turn back and go to Vietnam.

Rarely does a book speak so directly to your life. I mean, here I’m reading about a fellow Minnesotan sitting in a boat and he’s trying to decide if he will fight for his country. All of these societal expectations are swirling around him and, as I read about a fictional Tim O’Brien making up his mind, suddenly Vietnam and Iraq and American manhood and growing up in a small town all get collapsed together. As I continued to read, that was me sitting in that boat. That was me looking out at Canada. Would I go? Should I go?

O’Brien finally decides to go to Vietnam but not for any heroic or noble reason. He allows himself to be drafted because he couldn’t stand the idea of disappointing anyone in his small farming town. As he says towards the end of this chapter, “I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to.”

I’d never thought of it this way before. I’d never considered how embarrassment and shame can factor into what appears to be a selfless act.

“Hey Hicks,” one of my friends asked after I finished the novel. “If our asses get drafted, what’re you going to do?”

A good question. I had visions of driving an ambulance like in M*A*S*H or maybe becoming a medic that ran from one wounded soldier to another. Carrying a gun though? I just couldn’t see myself doing that.

Flash forward a bit. The First Gulf War ended quickly and with limited loss of life, at least as far as America was concerned. My friends and I laughed at how frothed up we got about the whole thing.

“To think we were worried! Jesus, what a bunch of wimps. What on earth were we thinking?”

It’s true The Things They Carried made me re-examine my understanding of individualism, community, patriotism, and the nature of truth, but let me tell you something I’ve never told anyone else before: To my growing astonishment, I began to resent that my government could draft me into a war that I might find morally reprehensible. The more I thought about this, the more I wanted an escape clause, so I became an Irish citizen. When my purple passport arrived in the mail it felt like a magic door to elsewhere had opened up. It allowed me to live in Europe for six years and it allowed me to meet people I’d never meet otherwise.

Looking back on it now, becoming an Irish citizen fundamentally knocked me on a different road. Would I have become a dual-citizen without the hard questions that Tim O’Brien raised in his slender book? Who knows, but his book did spark my imagination to think of myself beyond the shores of America. Since my mother was born in Northern Ireland, I also started to care more about her national history around this time of my life. Some people might have a problem with my decision to become a dual-citizen but, as I’ve said elsewhere in my writing, I hold the treasonous belief that we can love more than one country. Just because I was born in the U.S. is no reason to set up a border patrol around my heart. As a rule though, countries don’t like such split allegiances. I can call myself Irish-American but it’s the American part that matters most…at least as far as Uncle Sam is concerned.

But, back to the book. Although The Things They Carried raised thorny questions of patriotism and community for me, it is, at its heart, a novel about writing. It’s very easy to miss this on your first reading. Yet O’Brien reminds us that words connect us across time, words can raise the dead, and words can help explain the incomprehensible. Sometimes it feels as if Tim O’Brien is deliberately frustrating us. In a chapter called “Good Form” he forces us to grapple with the differences between “story truth” and “happening truth”. In one of the more famous sentences in the book, O’Brien says, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story truth is truer sometimes than happening truth.” Telling a war story or, for that matter, any story, means bumping up against the problems of perception and memory.

We may get annoyed with The Things They Carried because we don’t know what the truth is but we also get carried away by his prose. Even today, it’s hard for me to read just one sentence and put this book down. Forget about “story truth” and “happening truth” for a minute. I’m going to tell you the god’s truth: writing this review took much longer than it really should have because whenever I stopped to consult the book, whenever I flipped through my battered beloved copy, I got lost in his prose and read pages beyond what I needed to.

So here’s another truth for you: To read Tim O’Brien is to realize that you’re in the hands of a master. Don’t believe me? Okay, let’s read a few passages from “How to Tell a True War Story”:

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”

Or this:

“In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.”

Or lastly:

“You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it. And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”

Even though I’ve read this chapter many times, I want to re-read it again. And again. And again. But that’s not the half of it because there are also chapters like “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, “The Man I Killed”, “Speaking of Courage”, “The Ghost Soldiers” and the final chapter, “The Lives of the Dead.” This ending gently reminds us that stories can save us. Stories allow us to commune with the dead. Stories give us a place to be with our loved ones even when they are no longer among the living. As O’Brien so beautifully states, “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.”

Spirits in the head. That of course is the essence of good writing.

This book is almost 25 years old but it hangs in my imagination and haunts my understanding of war, returning from war, and the passage of time. When I first read this book as a young man it made me question my relationship to my country and my own sense of bravery. Now, as I creep into middle-age, this book challenges me to become a better writer and it asks some hard questions about the nature of storytelling. More and more, I realize this is an excellent book on the craft of writing. I’m confident it will be read one hundred years from now. Why? Because it’s not just about war. It’s about how we tell stories to each other. It’s about reaching out. It’s about understanding the vital power of words.

The Tension Between Domesticity and Artistry: On Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's Madeleine Is Sleeping

When I submitted the unsure beginnings of a novel to my writers’ group, the wonderful Idra Novey recommended Madeleine Is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum. I was, am, interested in novels in prose poems. Madeleine Is Sleeping is written as a series of lyrical, impressionistic observations on events or characters that range from a single sentence to a page or page-and-a-half in length. It’s a bildungsroman of sorts: Madeleine has fallen mysteriously into a deep, impenetrable sleep. Without being able to separate dream action from waking reality, the reader follows her as she leaves her provincial French village, joins a gypsy circus, and stumbles into an unexpected triangle of desire.

But in its fractured telling, the story only becomes clear on second read. The novel is more about the savoring of tangential reveries, odd corners and flyaway moments than the propulsion of plot. The inciting incident occurs when Madeleine is caught fondling the village idiot. Her mother dips her hands into a pot of boiling lye and sends her away to a convent. One short paragraph titled “bureaucracy” is given to the revelation and aftermath of Madeleine’s transgression, a single sentence on the same page to the lye. I missed it on first read. Still, the bildungsroman progression was clear, the emotions attending adolescence aptly muddied: The initial pleasure Madeleine, with her bandaged hands, takes in being cared for at the convent; her subsequent escape and discovery that when her bandages are removed, her hands have grown into mitten-like paddles; her determination to use her disfigurement as an acrobat in the circus; her unwitting conversion from victim to victimizer when she is made to paddle another performer, M. Pujol; and her ultimate longing — when this confusion becomes love — for fingers “to touch the soft hair growing there on the back of [M. Pujol’s] neck.”

There are other Freudian metaphors for desire and transformation. Among the circus freaks is Charlotte, who, longing to be touched by her asexual husband in the way that he touches his viol, morphs into a viol, growing black, horse-like hairs down the length of her body. As she unbuttons her bodice and draws a bow across the strings, she tells Madeleine, “Music, more than any other thing in the world, teaches us emotion.” There is the metamorphosis of Matilde, a luxuriously fat woman who inexplicably sprouts two sets of wings and flies up to housetops. An alter-ego for the author, Matilde travels freely between dream and reality, keeping a scientific journal, maintaining that if she meticulously records the details of life, the overall picture will emerge.

Madeleine is Sleeping is a novel that resides in the details. Charlotte’s story is complicated toward the end of the book, its heartbreaking particulars assiduously relayed by Madeleine’s sister, Beatrice, over the course of four sections. Claude, the younger brother, blurts out the ending at the conclusion of the first section, but the reader is rewarded for persisting, even as three interrupting sections cut away from Charlotte’s story. Alas, Beatrice never gets to the end of the story. “The story is too long, Mother interrupts. All those . . . corridors . . . I already know what is going to happen. Claude told us in the beginning.”  Mother is concerned only with the tidy marriage plot she has arranged for Madeleine, which Charlotte’s macabre marriage story quite literally upsets. I won’t be a spoiler like Claude, but ending or no, the rich middle of Charlotte’s story plumbs the tension between domesticity and artistry, speech and silence, and deserves not merely patience, but several re-readings, as it offers a multiplicity of interpretations.

Madeleine’s corridors are wondrous strange. When it’s discovered that not merely Madeleine, but all the girls, have played sex games with the village idiot, he is sent to an insane asylum. There, he mails Madeleine sketches of his brainpan that look like the “moon on its back.” “Conversion” describes how Madeleine’s brothers and sisters make kites from the accumulating drawings, how Mother decorates her preserves with their delicate cranial swirls. When the shared object of their love leaves them, Madeleine and the circus photographer pour over photographs of him. “This image, [the photographer] tells Madeleine, is literally an emanation of M. Pujol: from his body radiates light, which then inscribes itself on the very surface which in turn your gaze now touches.”

M. Pujol’s body emits not merely light, but “the most melancholy sounds [Madeleine has] ever heard: that of the nightingale, the grasshopper, the cuckoo . . . the strange and unearthly emissions reminded her of her home, and she wept.” Lest the novel’s enchantment become too precious, the ethereal is tempered by the body’s humiliations and grotesqueries, the surreal grounded in the sensual. Or rather, Madeleine is Sleeping transcends these divisions. M. Pujol’s musical flatulence is at once farcical and heartrending.

The photographs of M. Pujol were taken for the widow, a rich old libertine who hires the circus to pose in lecherous tableaus for her pleasure. Except the photographs offer her no pleasure. She teases a scientist who interviews her for his study of libertines, “so strenuous were his attempts to manage her perversions, to render them immobile. What you must . . . understand about my predilections (the scientist leans forward: at long last, the secret!) is that my desire does not take; it turns, as milk does.”

Throughout, there are the motifs of desire’s slipperiness, aberrance’s resistance to immobility. The beauty of Shun-Lien Bynum’s vision makes us embrace the strange — what does not fit and is not clear — which seems to me the province of the prose poem. The successful novel in prose poems manages to resist immobility, to open a space for ambiguity. I recently read We the Animals, a novel that similarly refuses the traditional bildungsroman trajectory, that uses the liminal form of the prose poem to get at the fierce space between a family’s power to sustain and destroy.

Through the meticulousness of her language, Shun-Lien Bynum manages to simultaneously inhabit and contain desire, aberrance and transformation. The tension between form and the sublime, the combination of a voice at once extravagant and matter-of-fact, indulgent and constrained, made me think of Anne Carson, whom Shun-Lien Bynum lists among her favorite writers. The artist bildungsroman themes in Madeleine is Sleeping are closest to Autobiography of Red, but I think of Decreation, which searches for, and ultimately explodes, various forms to contain the Sublime — opera librettos, screenplays, poems, oratorios, essays. “Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep),” an essay in which Carson writes about how authors use the space between waking and sleep, seems particularly relevant. Here Carson writes about how To the Lighthouse falls asleep for 25 pages in the middle section, “Time Passes”: “Changes flow over the house of the story and penetrate the lives of the characters while they sleep. These changes are glimpsed as if from underneath; Virginia Woolf’s main narrative is a catalogue of silent bedrooms. . . Down across these phenomena come facts from the waking world, like swimmers stroking by on a night lake. . . . [Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay, having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]” In Madeleine is Sleeping, the major plot points similarly “float past the narrative like the muffled shock of a sound heard while sleeping.” The novel’s emotional and poetic density is both allayed and heightened by sleep pauses, recurring pages containing a single sentence: Madeleine stirs in her sleep.   

Carson goes on to discuss The Voyage Out, in which Woolf writes of six people traveling to South America on a boat, afloat between waking and sleep. “The dreams were not confined to her indeed, but went from one brain to another. They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid ocean.” The characters in Madeleine is Sleeping meld in the same porous way, all of them manifestations of adolescent fears and scars and becoming. Madeleine is Sleeping uses the space between sleep and waking to traverse the liminal territory of adolescence, the space between disfigurement and beauty, the bawdy and the holy, abjection and attraction, asceticism and ecstasy, impotence and power.

In Shun-Lien Bynum’s second novel, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, this sepia­-tinted dream of pseudo-Victorians and fairytale grotesques gives way to a linked collection of stories about a seventh grade English teacher that resemble personal essays in their retrospective composure and resignation. Ms. Hempel puzzles over her reverse metamorphosis, from parti-­colored butterfly to monochromic caterpillar:

“Mr. Dunne, her college counselor, was the one who first noticed the discrepancy. Impressive scores, mediocre grades. A specialist was consulted, a series of tests administered, and a medication prescribed. The bitter pills, her father used to call them. The prescription made her hands shake a little, but that wore off after awhile. And then: a shy, newfound composure. Her mother entrusted her with the holiday newsletter; she wrote film reviews for the university newspaper. She had a nice way with words, a neat way of telling a story.

To her ears, though, her stories sounded smushed. As if they had been sat upon by accident. None of the interesting parts survived.” She remembers the story she told at her father’s funeral: “Beautiful was not what she intended.  Her story was not about safety and concern and anxious attentions.  It was a tale of danger, intrigue; a story from the days before her medicine. . . . This was the story she wanted to tell. Then how did something altogether different emerge?  Something she didn’t even recognize as her own.”

My first book was my Monster in a Box. I finished the first version at 27 in LA, where I’d moved for love and where love and I didn’t seem to make sense. I wrote in my underwear in a roach-ridden hotbox of an apartment; I wrote from inside the wound, unspeakably sad and angry and alone, Baldwin, Woolf, and Carole Maso my closest friends. A large part of this book was about my father’s entrenchment in an authoritarian cult that talked in circles about Rules and Tools, so I had a vested interest in breaking formal rules. I returned to New York alone and dropped this unruly 600-page beast on the desk of an agent who called it an “epic quest full of moral force and luminosity,” who feared that if I cut it down it would “shrink from a big, tawny lion to a skinny cat” and believed we only had to find someone who let it speak to them. I didn’t find that someone and in the years that followed, this first book went through countless visions and revisions. I worked on it for too long, long after its rawness had dissipated. I whittled it down to a skinny cat I hardly recognized as my own.

I don’t devalue the understanding of craft and editing I gained, but I am trying, in the gestation of this second book, to unlearn some of the rules, to locate the intersection between the dream and the analyst. Since it’s the dream that must first be protected, I’m grateful for the unruly extravagance of Madeleine is Sleeping, its courageous insistence upon the strange, misshapen magic of claiming one’s own cracked voice.