Precise Diction and Vivid Imagery: A Review of Joan Fiset’s Memoir, Namesake

Joan Fiset’s collection, Namesake (2015, Blue Begonia Press), has been described as a book of “memoir vignettes.” Indeed, the passages that comprise the book offer us brief glimpses into Fiset’s childhood and adolescence, ultimately giving us a fuller picture of the author’s life. More precisely, each vignette might be read as a kind of prose poem, as Fiset’s precise diction and vivid imagery allows each passage to stand alone, a tiny slice of life from a time long gone. Passages like “Ballast,” “Wonder Bread,” and “Standardized Testing” give a sense of 1950s American culture and the experiences of a young woman in that time. Nonetheless, each passage, or poem, draws upon or hints at the collection’s larger focus—Fiset’s mother—expanding our understanding of what it means for Fiset to be her mother’s namesake.

For example, in “Mirrored,” the speaker describes her childhood past time of sliding down the banister and a single instance of glimpsing herself in a mirror at the bottom of the stairs: “This face surprised me, a child rounding the bed on her way to some destination. The fleeting image lasted because the mirror was there.” These closing lines simultaneously propel us through the book with the idea of a “destination,” even as the words ask us to linger with this particular passage, to think about the layers of meaning in the idea of reflection. As readers, we understand that Fiset’s mother is the reason the mirror is there. In this way, this vignette of Fiset’s childhood experience speaks more largely to the purpose of the memoir as a whole—a reflection on Fiset’s identity through a reflection on her mother.

Thus, even in the passages that do not mention Fiset’s mother, we have the sense of her presence, of the ways she shaped Fiset’s world. Indeed, as the memoir goes on, Fiset’s mother becomes more and more of a figure in the passages, sometimes blocking out Fiset all together. In “Heartsick,” for example, we actually see a moment from Joan Stone’s point of view: “My mother comes out of the kitchen to comfort me. Years later she can still see me through the window in black-watch plaid. My cotton skirt filled with wind as I ran.” It is as if Fiset, the speaker, has filled her mother’s place, watching her child-self through her mother’s eyes.

As the memoir unfolds, then, the passages move away from innocent moments tinged by the shadow of some family strife until we begin to see a real conflict between Fiset’s parents, and between Fiset’s mother and the world’s expectations. Joan Stone, while present for her daughters, is different from the other mothers and wives around her. She teaches her Girl Scout troupe weird songs and arrives to Fiset’s fashion show in a poorly made dress. In “Entrée,” we learn that “There are sixteen bottles of ketchup in the refrigerator. They stand next to each other, some with an inch of ketchup or less.” This fact is odd, though perhaps not alarming. But the next passage, “S.O.S,” hints more strongly at the mundane paranoia of domesticity: “Turn off the stove; check then check and check it again.” Slowly, these moments reveal something deeply amiss with the mother and the family. In a late passage, young Fiset tells her father not to hit her mother, and eventually we learn of the breakdown that puts Fiset’s mother in the hospital, with shock treatments and medication.

Thus, Fiset’s true talent in this collection seems to be in her ability to slowly and deftly create a fuller picture through these tiny vignettes. While her language is honest and plain, she is never condemning of the figures she depicts. What is more, in revealing her mother’s struggle, Fiset also hints at the struggle of women to find and live out their own identities, perhaps especially in the 1950s and 60s, but also in today’s cultural climate. Before we learn of Joan Stone’s eventual breakdown, we learn of her remarkable early career as an actress on Broadway; she gave up that career to devote herself entirely to her family, to a husband whose love eventually fell short. In the end, we learn that Joan Stone finds true healing only through artwork: “She will talk of how her art grew out of her suffering, how it is the child within.” Thus, Namesake is itself an example of Fiset following in her mother’s footsteps, making art through the sufferings of the past.

While some of the passages do not resonate as powerfully as others, Fiset’s 2015 collection is filled with abiding, poignant concerns. In the selection of moments and images, one can tell that a master is at play. I look forward to reading her newest work.

Considered Slantwise: A Review of Joan Fiset's How It Was in Scotland

If you want to see the Pleiades in the night sky, you must not look at it directly or all you will see is a faint smudge. But shift your gaze a little one way or the other, and all seven stars become clear. Much the same approach works when reading the poems of Joan Fiset in How It Was in Scotland. If you try to meet them head on, you won’t see clearly. But look to the left or to the right… 

Paintings by Noah Saterstrom, which accompany Fiset’s poems and to which she responds—more often than not obliquely—in this hybrid collection are also best viewed from an angle. The paintings are renderings of photographs from Saterstrom’s family albums and, like Fiset’s poetry, seem somehow incomplete, not quite finished. Often the people’s faces are smeared, and the settings softened so that they feel familiar, but not entirely so. Together, the text and the visual work in a way that does not reveal the connection unless they are considered slantwise.

Take, for example, a two-line poem that appears about halfway through the book:

a man kept calling Lucinda
up and down the stairs

The painting that accompanies this couplet shows a young girl in a blue dress and a white apron standing outside near the corner of a red building. Behind her, the scene is a bleary landscape reminiscent, perhaps, of Kansas with what could be a grain elevator in the distance. Her face is featureless except for the suggestion of a mouth and eyes. She has a deep shadow behind her and is wearing red shoes. Is this Lucinda?

That sort of question, that sort of correspondence between image and language is central to our reading. Even if, as in the case above, there is not an evident relationship, the fact that each poem—save the last, which is a variation of the first—has been paired with a painting, that they present themselves in the same way each time—poem on the left, painting on the right—suggests we are meant to take them in together, in union, halves of a whole.

There is also a thread of a narrative in the volume, an interconnectedness, as if we are turning the pages of a family album and seeing scenes changed by time, recalling them barely. Fiset’s poems capture those relationships and, in their spare way reveal the meaning of the memory. Two poems in particular stand out as exemplars.

In one, a young man poses in the unnatural way high school graduates are twisted for their important portrait. He wears a jacket and tie and looks away from the camera. Fiset captures both this moment and the uncertainty of the boy’s future:

voices croon from across the river
he gathers stray language
inside his hands

should words approach
blue eyes close

to silence
like the room

In the other poem, she expresses the grief of a man in a gray suit, head bent and hands folded, looking at a grave:

later
hands held
below the minute
seconds
understand

Other images of grave sites and mourners prompt Fiset to additional musings on death and loss, while photos of families dressed in bright spring colors invoke thoughts of life, rebirth, joy. Next to a picture of a mother and three children, all dressed in red, she happily declares:

this is summer
this is years and years

over the lake
returns so blue

look together into it
dreaming the hummingbirds home

Two of the children in that painting appear again in other guises and, perhaps, at different ages, helping to stitch together the collection as a continuous but not necessarily linear history. In some instances, though, the history, the lineage, is mysterious, as if there were secrets the poet has discovered. A man standing next to his car outside of a motel looking at a boy who may be about to climb into the back seat or has just emerged is depicted in two lines

faint sketch of a man
rarely mentioned

leaving us to wonder if this is the man we’re looking at, and, if so, just who is he and why is he rarely mentioned?

The only named character in the book, Lucinda, makes a second appearance several pages after we initially meet her. She is dressed in the same outfit, but her hair is braided in this one, and she’s carrying a book. The dark shadow of her photographer can be seen on the wall next to her. As is the case in the first poem, this one raises more questions about the girl than provides answers and seems to hint at her being ill-suited for this place:

Lucinda’s thirst
lengthened out to a ruler
to measure the kitchen inch by inch
no one moved to wipe up the mess
no one said a single word

In an interview published in Tarpaulin Sky magazine, Fiset explains that her writing is oftentimes an unconscious process, one that “is capable of calling forth, translating, and transforming ‘news’ from the unconscious in relation to lived experience—what one witnesses externally as well as internally. When form and content become one a synthesis and integration have occurred that can shock us into a deeply satisfying crucial kind of knowing, a fierce recognition that, for me, often cannot be explained.”

By focusing her attention on the Saterstrom paintings, Fiset is forced to translate very specific lives and experiences which may seem somewhat counter to the unconscious approach she describes, and yet the poems that make up this collection reflect the synthesis of form and content that shock us into a fierce recognition. Just as we might see ourselves in the blurry images of a family photo, so, too, might we find something vaguely familiar in Fiset’s poems which, like whispers or snatches of overheard conversation, trigger our curiosity and memory. The strength of How It Was with Scotland is that the poet and the painter take us to places we think we remember but which are ultimately unknowable.

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