The Price of Living Your Beliefs: A Review of Her Sister's Tattoo by Ellen Meeropol

Failing to learn from history is an unspoken warning in the new novel, Her Sister’s Tattoo, by Ellen Meeropol. Spanning decades and told from multiple points-of-view, the repercussions and lessons gleaned from the protests of the Vietnam War are rendered viscerally through the story of two sisters raised to be activists. Social activism has been present in all of Ellen Meeropol’s fiction. She comes by it naturally. She is married to Robby Meeropol, one of the surviving sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed as spies in 1953. Robby and his brother were later adopted by the Meeropol family.

Rosa and Esther have twin red star tattoos on their left breasts but their temperaments are not alike. Rosa, red-haired and fiery, sees activism as vital and necessary. The atrocities of Vietnam weigh heavily on her and she acts accordingly, sometimes without considering the consequences. Esther, the mother of an infant, is more cautious, as is her husband, a pediatrician. When the two attend an anti-war protest and mounted police begin to attack the protestors, Rosa suggests throwing the hard green apples they are carrying in their bag. Like many stories, a seemingly innocuous incident explodes into a major life-altering event when one of the apples hits a horse, causing the animal to throw the mounted policeman. A paralyzing injury is the result and both sisters are charged with felony offenses that could result in lengthy jail terms. Esther, in consultation with her attorney, testifies against her sister to avoid prison. This act leads to the estrangement of the sisters and Rosa’s disappearance for a time. Once she resurfaces and is charged (and labeled Red Rosa), the relationship that was once an anchor for both seems over.

Our current perilous times make this novel all the more relevant. My Sister’s Tattoo shows that sometimes well-intentioned actions can have longstanding consequences. Vietnam War protests did accomplish the goal of ending the war but many were maimed and killed both fighting and protesting. The implicit question never asked is if the price of living your beliefs is worth it. The story picks up with the next generation, the now young teen daughters of Rosa and Esther who meet at an activist camp their parents attended. Esther’s daughter, Molly, has trouble hearing the story she wasn’t told about her mother and the aunt she never knew. Emma, Rosa’s daughter “repeated the whole story again, about cops beating people and throwing apples and the horse rearing up and the cop falling down. Except this time she told it with two sisters, Rosa and Esther. This time it was worse because I knew what was coming, and her sentences punched holes in my lungs, up one side and down the other.”

The book demonstrates the costs and responsibilities of standing up for one’s beliefs. Has the country learned from Vietnam? What is the price of freedom? Is protesting a catalyst for change? Ellen Meeropol doesn’t answer these questions, but her characters wrestle with the consequences of both inaction and activism. Can families bridge differences? In our current times, lines have been drawn politically and it’s often difficult to open a dialogue with people of opposing views, as it is in this story. Esther contemplates her choices as the novel moves toward its conclusion. The years that have been lost will not be recovered but forgiveness and empathy can manifest in future generations. Perhaps the lessons of history are imperfect and ongoing and by staying active and alert, her characters, like all of us, claim the right to a more optimistic future.

A Conversation with Bonnie Jo Campbell and Andrea Scarpino

One might make the argument that two of the strongest voices in contemporary Michigan are Andrea Scarpino, representing the Upper Peninsula poetry scene, and Bonnie Jo Campbell, representing the Lower Peninsula fiction scene. The strength of their voices comes from a combination of having unique, distinctive, and passionate style and subject matter on the page, furthered by both authors willingness to tour extensively, notably to rural communities in the state. Scarpino is the 2015-2017 U.P. Poet Laureate whose latest book is What the Willow Said as It Fell (Red Hen Press). Bonnie Jo Campbell is a previous National Book Award finalist whose current book is Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories (W.W. Norton & Company).

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RR: Both of you are brilliant with titles. I’m a big fan of the cryptic Once, Then and the best title of 2015 might be Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories with its lovely double-entendre of “Mothers, tell your daughters stories.” Can you talk about your book titles?

AS: Thank you, Ron! Your compliment means a lot to me because I really struggle with titles. When I was doing my MFA, one of the recurring criticisms of my workshop submissions was that I needed a different title, and I often go through dozens before I find one I really like. They just seem so final—like naming a child.

I really like titles that simultaneously shape the reader’s expectations and withhold a little bit of information from the reader. I want the reader to be interested in opening my book, but I also don’t want to be too explicit about the book’s content. In both my poetry collections, the titles developed from lines within the book itself which I hope readers will recognize when they’re reading. In my second book, the line, “what the willow said as it fell” is followed by, “Take this body, make it whole.” So I liked What the Willow Said as It Fell as a title in part because I’m hoping the idea of wholeness, and obviously the fact of the body, shines through the poetry.

BJC: Thank you, indeed, Ron! I’m with Andrea that titles are hard. And I might even go so far as to say that a work is not finished until it has the right title on it, and for me the title is often the last element of the story or collection to come to me. That said, after I get the right title, by settling into the final understanding of my work, then I have still more work to do, adjusting the whole work slightly to the title. The titles to all three of my collections have great stories behind them, and I’ll say that I spent months coming up with Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. I had this story collection, but didn’t quite know what it was about. After trying out hundreds of other titles, arguing with my editor and agent, and stressing endlessly, I finally came upon this one. It resonates especially for me because it’s a line from the song “House of the Rising Sun” when sung by certain female artists. Once alighting on that title, my editor and I made some adjustments to the collection, leaving out a few stories that no longer fit and requiring me to write two new stories, including the title story. American Salvage has a similar story behind it, in that the title story was the last one I wrote. My novel, Once Upon a River, has a different story behind it.  My agent came up with that title in the shower. We sold the book with that title, and I didn’t like it for a long while. Finally, when I saw the title allowed me to be fantastical, I embraced it, and I still like it.

RR: You both write about suffering frequently. What role does suffering play in your fiction and poetry? Do you handle it as redemptive or existential?

AS: I don’t think there is anything redemptive in suffering. It’s just suffering: it just hurts. I actually respond very negatively to suggestions that suffering makes us better people or enriches our lives in some deep way. I know some people derive meaning from their suffering and I’m glad for them when that’s the case, but the only meaning I’ve been able to derive from painful moments in my life is this sucks. I want this to end.

Suffering is an integral part of being alive and being human, which is why I so often write about it—I don’t think a single human being is spared suffering. And yet, we so often like to pretend we don’t suffer. We’re told to put on a brave face, and women especially are told we should smile no matter what is happening in our personal lives. So I think it’s incredibly important to acknowledge and sit with suffering, to understand it as a central human experience, and to appreciate the suffering of others around us. And writing and reading about suffering can help us with that.

BJC: I tend to write about what worries me, and the suffering of others worries me immensely. We fiction writers tend to write about suffering that comes about both because of circumstances and also because of the nature of one’s character—it is most interesting when a character has at least partially brought about his or her own suffering. I don’t write as a sociologist, and my main interest is in exploring the human character, but I am glad when my readers tell me that they have more sympathy for the sorts of folks they encounter in life because of my stories. Like Andrea, I see suffering as universal. Nobody’s life is easy when you come down to it—we want to pretend some people swim effortlessly through life’s waters, but life is hard for everybody a good portion of the time. And while I don’t see suffering as inherently redemptive, I do think it can sometimes spur a character into action.

RR: What religion do you identify with? What’s your religious/spiritual background?

AS: I don’t identify with any religion in all honesty. My father was Catholic so I have spent a fair amount of time in the Catholic Church, and my mother identified as Quaker for a while, so I spent time at Friends Meetings. I also grew up with dear friends who were Jewish and Muslim, and as an adult, I’ve read some about Buddhism. So I guess I have a bit of a smorgasbord religious background, which also means I don’t have a deep understanding of any one tradition.

BJC: Andrea, you and I need to have a beer! How have we never sat down together?

RR: The following is quoted from Mothers, Tell Your Daughters:

“I’m not going to hell,” he whispered.  “God is leading me home.  He has shone his light on the path to Him.  God has forgiven me.”

“For what, Carl?  What has God forgiven you for?”

“Forsaking Jesus.”  He sounded exhausted, his voice a hiss.

“What else?”

There was a long pause before he whispered, “Jesus is my Lord and Savior, my light in the darkness.”

“How about forgiveness for hitting your wife?  And your son?  Is God forgiving you for that?”

Could you talk about this passage?

BJC:  The passage is from the story, “A Multitude of Sins,” a man who has abused his wife and son finds Jesus right at the end and so figures he’s saved. When the husband is dying of cancer, the wife begins to discover the seeds of her empowerment. She finds herself furious at the notion of her husband receiving forgiveness. I enjoy seeing this woman become angry after a life of submissiveness.

RR: Andrea, in your poem “Homily,” you repeat the phrase, “She didn’t believe in God.” Why that repetition?

AS: My poem “Homily” was based on an experience I had while visiting Paris and walking into Notre Dame on Christmas Day: the priest was saying the mass in Latin, and the air was filled with incense and evergreen, and I was completely in love with being there and being present in the moment even though I don’t identify as Catholic. So I guess I tried to capture the feeling of wanting so badly to believe in something because the present moment is so special, but also knowing, deep down, that belief is just not there.

RR: Do you find you struggle with your religious beliefs through your characters?

AS: I don’t know if I struggle with my own religious belief through my poetry, but I definitely am a person who questions almost everything, including religious belief, in my life and in my poetry. I like feeling open to the world, and I like questioning, and I like hearing about other people’s beliefs, and I like learning how other people experience the world around them. And I find religious belief endlessly curious and interesting and rich with possibility.

BJC:  I’m not interested in my own religiosity, but I am interested in the religious beliefs of others, and as a writer, I’m interested in seeing how those beliefs inform character.

RR: Bonnie Jo, Halloween appears in Once Upon a River and Q Road, notably in the passage on “Halloween [where], he’d soaped windows, strung toilet paper across people’s front yards, and once he’d found a veined, milky afterbirth from his sister’s horse foaling, and in the middle of the night dragged it onto a neighbor’s front porch.”

Are you attracted to what an old Religion professor of mine, Dr. Hough, called the Jungian shadow aspects of humanity?

BJC: Katherine Dunn’s novel Geek Love has an epigraph from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a line Prospero says of the monster Caliban: “This thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine.”  I, too, acknowledge mine!

RR: Earlier, we spoke of suffering.  Both of you are connected to metaphorical center points in Michigan—Marquette and Grand Rapids. Grand Rapids/Kalamazoo is emerging as an economic and spiritual powerhouse of the state, as well as important for Michigan publishing with Zondervan and New Issues Press. There is also the complication of poverty in the far southwest regions that grinds up against Grand Rapids’ wealth. Hate groups are in that area and the recent Uber driver murders. Bonnie Jo, where you live is a very complicated place. Can you talk about good and evil in your writing, how it fits with the complexities of southwest Michigan?

BJC:  I was just reading Plainsong by Kent Haruf, and I was noticing how he makes very clear who is good and who is evil in his stories. I am more interested in gray areas of human nature, in people who try to be good, but fail, and in people who make trouble sometimes. The person who has a decent job and a good family situation might go his or her whole life as a productive law-abiding citizen, while the same person, after losing a job and a spouse and children might become a meth-addicted criminal. What amazed me about the Uber shooter is just how ordinary and normal he was; that showed me that crimes are not committed by devils or evil people necessarily. Crimes are committed by people who make bad choices, and they make them for a variety of reasons, some of which we will never understand.

All we can do, it seems to me, is pay attention, keep our minds open to all the possibilities good and bad, and work to care for one another at all times. We can strive to never be cruel or judgmental.

RR: Who are the great spiritual writers in fiction and poetry?

AS: I love Marilynn Robinson’s writing, particularly Gilead. I first listened to that book as an audiobook on a road trip many years ago, and I remember just weeping while I was driving because I was so moved by the quiet spirituality throughout her writing. And that quietness is really the kind of spiritual or religious writing that I most appreciate: a quiet attention to those around us, a quiet attention to the world, a quiet attention to the connections that make us human.

RR: What issues of religion do writers need to talk about now?

AS: Acceptance and appreciation of different opinions, viewpoints, and religious traditions. Our country’s hate speech deeply troubles me, particularly as it is directed toward Muslims. But we’ve never been particularly good at accepting differing viewpoints and that’s something that writers and religious leaders and teachers and parents and politicians all need to address.

BJC: As a writer I spend a lot of time imagining how it feels to be in someone else’s shoes, and that helps me be more humble and generous toward my fellow human beings, even the difficult ones.

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Interviewer Ron Riekki’s latest book is the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Award-winning Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (Michigan State University Press), which includes writing from Bonnie Jo Campbell and Andrea Scarpino.

It's Madness, but There Is Method: A Review of Bill James's Parnucklian for Chocolate

By way of background, I do know Bill James. It isn’t like we hang out and get hammered on the weekends, but we both attended the University of Nebraska MFA program. We hung out and chatted there from time to time and do still talk over Facebook and email once in a while. Bottom line: I know the guy.

My impression of Bill has always been one of a quiet and intelligent guy. Almost laconic, he talks well when he speaks up but doesn’t necessarily speak up that often. At least, that was my impression.

The only reason I mention all of that is how utterly bizarre it seems when I hear Bill read or get a chance to read his work myself. For such a calm and soft-spoken guy (at least around me), the craziness of what he tends to write is flabbergasting. Quite seriously, it surprises me every time.

However, though I know this about Bill’s writing, I was unprepared yet again when I picked up Parnucklian for Chocolate. Let’s just take a quick peek at the very first paragraph:

Three weeks before his sixteenth birthday, Josiah was allowed to move back in with his mother, who had been impregnated with him during an alien abduction her freshman year of college. Josiah did not move back into the home he had grown up in — the home he had lived in with his mother — but rather Josiah moved into the home of Johnson Davis, his mother’s new fiancé. Johnson Davis, with whom Josiah’s mother had been living for the past four and a half months, also had a child: a girl, seventeen, fully-human, named Bree, who also lived in the home of Johnson Davis, but only on weekends.

Keep in mind; this is a relatively sane paragraph for this book. You will notice how the alien thing is just slipped into a fairly mundane seeming paragraph, almost as an offhand note. If it weren’t such an odd thing to have as an offhand remark, the fact that Josiah hadn’t been living with his mother and the fact he was moving into a stepfamily home would suggest menace and take precedence. However, put together the way James does it, we just can’t be sure how to react.

The book only picks up from there. You see, Josiah’s mother has told him all his life that he is special. He is special because he is the son of a ranking government official of a planet called Parnuckle, a place where the only food is chocolate. Obviously, there were some home environment problems and Josiah was removed. Now he is moving in with his delusional mother, her overly controlling though well-meaning fiancé, and her fiancé’s wild-running daughter. A complex situation becomes even more complicated.

In short, the book is insane. It is wild, imaginative, and original . . . but also completely and utterly mad. Even the language of the prose has a certain amount of madness; it’s own rhythm that sucks the reader in:

Josiah, who was twelve years old at the time, had his own room at the psychiatric facility — unlike his room in the group home he would be sent to in less than a year, which he would have to share — and each day a tall woman who smelled weird came to Josiah’s room and led him down a long hall and a flight of stairs and another long hall to a room where Josiah met with a man who would ask Josiah a lot of questions. The room where Josiah met with the man was much different from Josiah’s room at the psychiatric facility. Josiah’s room at the psychiatric facility had been only a bed, a dresser, a table, a lamp, and a chair, but the room where the man asked the questions was filled with photographs of people hugging and photographs of people smiling — all in different settings, such as sandy settings and grassy settings and snowy settings — and some of the people in the photographs were the man who asked the questions and some of the people were not, and on one wall was a picture of an old house in a rainstorm and on another wall was a picture of a pink tree, and there were also several different types of chairs in the room, and two different couches, one long and one shorter, and both couches were the color of the walls, which were the color of wet wood.

Many more things in the room seemed to be made of wood, or to be the color of wood, unlike Josiah’s room, where more things seemed to be made of metal and plastic, and the room where the man asked the questions was not as bright and not as cold as Josiah’s room.

Strange choice and timing of detail, sentences that seem to go on forever or cut off abruptly, almost musical repetition–the above paragraph has it all. All that should be a mess, but it isn’t. Just reading through it, you can feel how perfect the rhythm is. It’s madness, but there is method.

Looking at the book as a whole, Parnucklian for Chocolate has to be one of the most surprising reads I’ve come across in a very long time. It is wild and crazy, but it is well crafted and touching as well. I think any writer would be justifiably proud to have created this work and it is interesting to think that this is coming from an author who is really just getting started. I’m sure there will be more, but you’ll definitely want to check Parnucklian for Chocolate out.

People are going to be talking about this one.