We Think It Is One Thing but It Changes to Another

As I carried this book around with me, reading, I heard from multiple passersby, “Gross, is that someone throwing up?” to which I replied, “No, I think it is just a kid bobbing for apples.” Their responses then were usually calm, mostly understanding, with maybe even a restatement like we are all guilty of: “Oh. I thought it was someone puking.”

This to me is reading Jason Bredle’s Smiles of the Unstoppable — we think it is one thing but it changes to another, and then another, until we start to see that evolution is the thing that Bredle is chasing down with his use of words.

from “The Song Banana”:

“Sometimes I love the song banana and sometimes the song banana
makes me completely crazy
is what I wrote on a postcard, placed in my pocket
and walked to Happy Foods
wondering what might happen
on one of those days
I’d been feeling especially lost.”

Bredle uses both line breaks as well as word choice to negate what comes before, to change objects from one line to the next, to stay ahead of the reader by steps and steps. Smiles of the Unstoppable is a mountain of these, all well-crafted and burbling, so while this effect could be awful in the wrong hands, it is fantastically resonant here. Bredle, in his third collection of poems, has an understanding of how this evolution affects us as we read — knowledge that this practice of ever-changing keeps us forward, makes us want, keeps us stooping curiously close the page.

from “Kitchen Stadium at Twilight”:

“Man, that dude looks exactly like Scott.
I mean, freakishly tall yet also short with crazy non-crazy hair
falling all over his shoulders which aren’t shoulders
but instead comets.”

Add a soft mixture of culture and lit prowess and urban-dictionary slang to this always negating, always changing, always evolving style of poetry, and Bredle has me officially on his side. I am won over by his palette, by the color of his shapes, by the accumulation of his techniques and the words within them. And I’m not even sure if it was a battle, though there is some delicious fight in Smiles of the Unstoppable, a bite and phrases to chew.

from “Poem”:

“So far we’ve been focusing on here and now,
yet not focused on here and now but there and yesterday—
a red kitchen, ceramic roosters,
gravel driveway,
basketball hoop and fence separating us from the woods.
I remember these things fondly,
but how will I remember here and now
when they become there and yesterday?”

I feel like Jason Bredle is fucking with us, just a little bit, and I kind of like it.

More Than Anything, This Searing Collection Offers Us Hope: On Barb Johnson's More of This World or Maybe Another

Barb Johnson, author of More of This World or Maybe Another, worked as a carpenter for more than twenty years in New Orleans. I suspect Barb Johnson was a fine carpenter and built great things. She certainly created nine exceptional stories in this debut short story collection.

More of this World or Maybe Another traces the lives of several unlikely friends and loves living amidst the poverty, violence, and marginalization of New Orleans’s underclass. Through these excellent stories, Johnson offers us a welcome window into a place and people that are all too often overlooked and devalued.

Johnson has a great talent for titles, and the stories behind them consistently live up to their promises. Throughout this collection, Johnson displays an enormous gift for storytelling, characterization, and fresh, evocative language. More, the tenacity and individuality of the collection’s heroine, Delia Delahoussaye, jump out even in the opening lines:

“Delia has to walk past A.J. Higginbotham and his crowd to get to the gym, which is where the dance is. The boys are installed on the railing under the long breezeway like they’re at a livestock auction, cans of Skoal wearing their way through back pockets. Delia raises her right hand and shoots the bird at the line-up for the entire fifty-foot walk.”

By the end of this gripping title story, I was inside the page, urging Delia to “Do it. Now. Now.”

The collection’s second story “Keeping Her Difficult Balance” further reveals Delia’s torment: vacillating between how she is expected to behave (get married and settled) and what she knows to be true (her homosexuality and need for emancipation). Johnson draws her characters with enormous honesty and compassion, and even as I cheered for Delia and Maggie in this story, I also felt great sympathy for Delia’s fiancé, Calvin — further testimony to Johnson’s lavish skill.

By the end of the next three stories, “If the Holy Spirit Comes for You,” “Issue Is,” and “Titty Baby” I felt a growing tightness in my chest and heightened pain in my throat, similar to the sensations that come from swallowing a too large lump of ice-cream. My discomfort, alas, from far less innocuous causes. Rarely before have I felt such an overwhelming ache to reach inside the pages of a book and comfort characters. Yet that’s just how I felt for Dooley and Reet, Delia and Maggie, and Pudge and Belinda respectively.

As I read on, my emotions continued to take a beating as mastery and truth resonated from these pages (from “The Invitation”):

“I hand Luis the old valentine, proof of some bygone love. ‘Bring this to your Mama,’ I tell him. ‘Girls like to know they’re wanted. Even big girls. Especially big girls.’”

Even the one story that I found least powerful, “Killer Heart” (where Dooley leaves his baby daughter, Gracie, inside his car in searing temperatures), has stayed with me. Indeed, I found that I missed Delia when she was absent or played a small role in a story. Perhaps because I am so connected with her from the outset. It may well be a drawback in interconnected short story collections to unevenly represent recurring characters, particularly the hero or heroine. Regardless, this collection is stellar.

The collection closes with “St. Luis of Palmyra,” and ends as it began with a young protagonist, this time Luis, struggling to break free of shackles. However, this is a much darker, more violent and disturbing tale than the opening story. As this final story unfolds, we again witness great suffering and savage cruelties, and how even the oppressed will in turn oppress. Yet this story, like the rest of this collection, is also about transcendence, redemption, and ultimately a belief in the human spirit. More than anything, this searing collection offers us hope, however slim the crack of light.

She Moves, Oftentimes, As a Stranger In a Strange Land: A Review of Rose Hunter's To the River

I don’t get to travel as much as I’d like, which is one of the reasons Rose Hunter’s poetry collection To the River was a special treat for me: Essentially, it’s a passport that grants the reader access to places all over the globe, foreign places, or at least places foreign to me. And I didn’t even have to pack a bag or blush through airport security X-ray machines. Bonus.

This collection begins its journey in Sydney and finishes in Puerto Vallarta, touching down in places like Toronto, Hamburg, and Las Vegas in between. We follow the narrator as she rides buses, treks on foot, and sits on airplanes. She moves, oftentimes, as a stranger in a strange land:

“[. . .] I go to do laundry, and two girls
one on each side yell
something about me not being from here
and having odd hair [. . .]”

Sometimes I got the sense that she was traveling alone, being the quiet observer, sometimes interacting with locals, other times keeping a safe distance from them.

And sometimes I got the sense that she was traveling with someone else, a lover, or a would-be-lover, or a what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you-lover, partnerships to which, I’m sure, many readers can relate.

And it’s within these interactions, with her companion or with strangers, that another layer of access is granted, perhaps not to places foreign to the reader, but to the sometimes dusty promenades of the mind. And it’s on these paths that the gold of these journeys flickers just underfoot, wrapped in the rattling reality of planes, buses, hotels, or hostels.

“[. . .] Your

face is very expressive, he says.
‘I mean you can read everything
on it.’ No, I think, while aping
regretful admission; you can read
everything I plant on it. [. . .]”

With simple language, Hunter explores misconceived perceptions within personal relationships brought forth by the boundaries and guises we create for ourselves, our feelings. It’s a rehearsed honesty, a wall built of small moments to protect ourselves from the things we love and / or fear. It’s not a wall built out of meanness, necessarily, but personal necessity, what’s needed at a particular moment at a particular time to ensure safety, whatever that might entail.

Hunter also shines a light on the collective breakdown of human sympathy:

“while I despaired
how we zoom around
tossing out hurt like salad.”

And here, when our narrator comes across a discarded tire:

“[. . .] Like many of us
it was spun until it burst”

Hunter offers great observations on the ease of cruelty, how people have forgotten the importance of patience and kindness, of treating people like, well, people. And it’s observations such as these that strike me the hardest, probably because I feel them to be true.

Presenting insights that challenge without a heavy, preachy hand is what good poetry is supposed to do, and this collection does exactly that. It’s a kinetic observation of human ugliness and beauty, of being caught somewhere in the middle, kicking, longing, sometimes bleeding. To the River is a journey well worth the price of admission, and you don’t even need to leave the warmth and comfort of your blankets to begin.

The “Classic” Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby sat on my bookshelf for more than three years. I had bought it with other secondhand classics that I thought I really ought to read, most of which I placed proudly on my bookshelf and then promptly forgot about. Some, such as Wide Sargasso Sea and Wuthering Heights were prescribed to me by teachers back in high school and deserved a re-visit. Others like Huckleberry Finn, Animal Farm, and Sense and Sensibilitysimply struck a chord in this wannabe-literary mind of mine, and presented themselves as noble purchases.

However, about halfway through this modest collection, I realised that the term “classic” gave absolutely no indication of how I might react to each individual book. It seems obvious to me now, as all hindsight evaluations do, but I always thought that these books were supposed to be, oh I dunno . . . a special kind of special. I imagined a table (in a library) of old (and for some reason, British) people who (are drinking tea, and) had mystical powers of infallible good taste and intellectual insight, making their way through a list of every book ever published and deciding if they were “classic.” Their decisions were based on unobjectionable merits such as talent and originality, but in each chosen text there was also something more. There was a spirit, or a spark, or an essence or something possibly indefinable — whatever it was, each book had it, and that was how it earned its “classic” stamp. Nobody ever gave me an explanation why these books were in this class, so I think that justification could be as good as any.

Over the years I made my way through about two thirds of that bulk purchase, picking out books at random. A couple of weeks ago though, I was bumbling around the Internet and came across a shocking thing — a screenshot from a new movie featuring Toby Maguire, Carey Mulligan, and Leonardo DiCaprio strolling through a lavish garden, all laughing happily and looking ridiculously dapper. What was this!? I really like all those actors! Some minutes of Googling later, I was reading about this new adaption of The Great Gatsby, which was being directed by Baz Luhrman. Holy shit! I love Baz Luhrman! This movie is going to be so so so cool. It’s going to be beautiful and witty and it’s going to make me fall in love with it because it’s so awesome.

And then. Instantly. The panic set in. Holy crap. I haven’t actually read that book.

I sat up in my chair and straightened my pyjamas and re-plaited my hair. I was totally alone, and yet seriously embarrassed. I walked straight over to my bookshelf, found the title, pulled it out and began inspecting it. It was smaller than most “classics,” which was comforting because it meant I could read it quickly. And in that minute, I sat on my bed and began reading, and, after several intervals, was finished the following evening.

I really liked it. Really. It’s quite simple, and the themes and symbolic representations are easy to pick up on but nonetheless poignant, and for me this is one big reason that I’m now seriously fond of Fitzgerald’s writing. I got roped into the bright lights. I honestly did. The parties and houses and dresses drew me in so much, and I recognized similarities between the “roaring jazz twenties” and what I see in the “upper cut” of my generation now. Gatsby’s story is the epitome of the “rags-to-riches” mould, and the Nick’s humble humanity keeps the whole scene accessible and easy to reflect upon. The girls behave like absolute girls, and the boys behave like absolute boys, and it puts the reader in the comfortable position of being able to make conscientious judgments about everything. The judgment in the voice of the narrator himself is not the least bit pushy, and so when you find yourself (inevitably) agreeing with him, it gives you the feeling that you truly understand what it was all about. The Great Gatsby creates a relationship with you. You become friends with this book. There is a universality in it that goes beyond the specificities of location or time. It’s transcendent.

A good example is my favourite mini-scene from the end of the book, when Nick awkwardly runs into Tom in New York, and cannot bring himself to be as rude to Tom as he deserves:

“I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child.”

There is just a really beautiful simplicity that that the narration brings to the story, and keeps it transcendent. That’s the word — the key word that forms the link between which “classics” engage me and which ones don’t. Transcendent. There is an underlying humanity in The Great Gatsby that lends itself just as easily to the 21st century, even though one of its greatest qualities is how well it captures that particular time in history. I know people like Daisy and Tom, and of course I don’t really like them. I know of people like Gatsby, who I wish I knew better, and I’m friends with people like Nick. It’s so easy to cut and paste this novel’s elements to my own situation to intensify my response as a reader.

It’s just really good and I want everybody to read it before they see the movie. Not because I think the movie won’t do it justice — but because I want people to enjoy the experience of entering Fitzgerald’s world for the first time, and respond to the narration for themselves. I want everybody to be friends with this little book and fall in love with it before they meet its glitzy Baz Luhrman cousin. I want them to put themselves in Nick’s shoes before those shoes are filled by Toby Maguire. I want them to think Daisy is pathetic before Carey Mulligan makes it impossible to hate her. And most of all, I want them to hunger for that slow trickle of information that we receive about Gatsby as the pages go on. Because it’s just too beautiful:

“As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moment even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.”

It’s poetry, it really is.

And as it turns out, I really do think some of these “classics” are masterpieces. The Great Gatsby is the perfect example of everything that can be great about a classic. It’s original and insightful and it came alive as I read it.

If you haven’t, you should read it too. If only because you bought it for a few dollars and always pretended you had. Or because you’re relieved by how short it is. Whatever your reason, once you finish you’ll wish it could have gone on forever. You’ll see the jazz of the twenties flashing before your eyes, and as you watch the American Dream come crashing down, you’ll see the Occupy Wall Street movement on TV and realise it’s always happening all over again.

Caution! Do not read Galerie de Difformité (or this recommendation) straight through from start to finish!

[1] I was selling books at the Chicago Book Expo for &Now Books, when a woman walked up to our modest booth and picked up Galerie de Difformité I gave her the usual spiel, “This is our newest book, and it’s actually my favorite. It’s pretty unusual, I guess postmodern.” Her eyes grew wide when she cracked the book open. “The author actually encourages you to not read the book straight through.” She proceeded to shudder, throw down the book, and exclaim, “I can’t do it! I can’t do it!” So, okay, Galerieis not for everyone, at least not for those who aren’t willing to tease the boundaries of traditional writing.

[2] You are here. Go back and read section [1] or stop reading this recommendation. Or, if you must, go to section [4].

[3] By the way, Galerie is dedicated to you. Yeah, you. Seriously. It’d be common courtesy to at least buy a copy. Now go to section [8].

[4] If you like pictures in your book, you’ll like Galerie. If you like destroying / deforming / improving the printed word, you’ll love Galerie.

[5] When I was little, I read choose-your-own-adventure stories. The first time, I would read it like the book dictated, out of order, following a pseudo-self-guided path. Then, when I was not satisfied with the path I chose, I read the whole book cover to cover. A slew of stories were hiding in that book somewhere, and I needed to find them. This is how I read Galerie de Difformité. I still feel like I haven’t found all its hidden treasures.

[6] Read Galerie if you don’t know who you are. Read Galerie if you’ve ever wondered what it means to be beautiful.

[7] Read section [3], even though I know you already did because tradition compels you to read a book (or recommendation) straight through. But really, didn’t you read the title?

[8] When I visited Florence, I decided not to visit Dante’s house. (1. I never really liked Dante. 2. They were charging 10 Euros to get in). I probably would have visited Beatrice’s house if Florence had assigned one to her like Verona had for Juliette. Beatrice is a mysterious woman. She existed, yes, but where do the lines blur between historical truth and literary hyperbole? Galerie is narrated by Beatrice. Well, a deformed version of this elusive Florentine. I’m thankful the book is not narrated by Dante.

[9] Go here and deform an exhibit in the Galerie.

[10] Galerie is an adventure, so if you’re looking for an easy read to kick back with after a long day’s work, don’t read Galerie. Save it for when you’re ready to think.

Say Goodnight, George: A Review of Matthew Salesses's The Last Repatriate

When I arrived in Orlando and turned on my phone, there was a text waiting from my mom. Call me as soon as possible. I had flown to Florida to see my grandfather in hospice, and that text couldn’t be good. But she had inexplicably attached a picture of her tiny, pig-snouted dog with the massive underbite and he was staring at me like he was Gary Coleman in Different Strokes, and I was Willis. Tonally, something was off.

Turns out, my grandfather might only have a few hours to live, and I was still two-and-a-half hours away from Palatka by rental car. The picture was there because my mom had no idea how to use her new phone. In fact, even if I paid her, I don’t think she could send that picture to me again. So as I got onto the toll road, my mom and I laughed. And it was important.

I disregarded every speed limit, even in construction zones, and made a promise into the perfect blue sky that I would drive the speed limit on the way back. The farther I got from Orlando the trees pushed in like eager onlookers, many of them adorned with beards of sagging moss. My driving was robotic, a reflex. I began observing the proceedings as if I weren’t an active participant. Like I was watching a movie. With that thought, Matthew Salesses’s novella The Last Repatriate came to mind.  The first line is: Imagine the thick forest of Korea, late autumn, 1950, sunset, the sentimental angle of light through the pines. More like the establishing shot of a film.

I’d been carrying around The Last Repatriate, a slim book about the size of my hand, for about two weeks and had written quite a lot of nice things about it in my notebook. But nothing had any traction. I couldn’t say what I wanted to say. In thinking about Salesses’s novella where every word is painstakingly chosen, I managed to write a soup of words that were being sucked into the center of the page with a moist pop. Like quicksand.

Ted is a POW in the Korean War. He spends time in a small hole in the ground as punishment, and never truly emerges. Even when he returns to Virginia a war hero. Even when he sees his ex-girlfriend with his best friend.Even when he marries Kate and attempts to start anew. He learned how to be detached in that hole. He may never feel as wholly, as achingly, as he did in that moment before he was captured — clutching the note from Beth where she had written that she wasn’t waiting for him to return from Korea, his pistol pressed against his temple. Ted remains an aloof observer of his life throughout the novella. The cinematic tone is perfect.

I had a hard time writing about this small, but dense, book because as much as I loved it, it thrummed on a different wavelength than my own life. So there I was, racing to see my grandfather whom I love immensely, and I couldn’t stop myself from disassociating. I thought about how many times this scenario had played out for countless numbers of people before me. How the other drivers around me had no idea where I was going or why. Or how important it was. I wasn’t special. Had my grandfather slipped away the exact moment I turned on the radio? Or when I passed a minivan in the left lane? Or when I tapped on the brakes because 100 mph was just a little too fast?

But my grandfather was still alive.

I discovered as soon as I entered the room that he was unable to talk. The conversation I had with him on the phone two days previous would be our last.

Me:  Grandpa, I’ll be there on Saturday.
Grandpa: You’re going to come all the way to Florida to see this old man?

My grandfather was a pilot for over thirty years. Like many pilots of his generation, he fought tumors and skin cancer on his neck and cheeks and face. And boy did he fight. When I arrived, I realized how much of him had been cut away. His neck had been operated on so many times, his left ear no longer seemed attached; it hovered in the correct spot like a bad 3D film.

Whenever we had talked though, he never once complained. It didn’t matter if he had just gone through hours of chemotherapy or was told another tumor had appeared overnight. Instead, he cracked jokes. He got on the phone with all the grandchildren and offered his support of their endeavors. He cared about what everyone had to say. When the UPS guy said he was interested in flying, my grandfather took him up in his small plane. That guy has his pilots’ license now and visited my grandfather in hospice. The last thing my grandfather said to me in our phone call from his hospice bed was to inquire how my mother-in-law was doing after a kidney transplant.

More than a hundred people came to see him in hospice. It got to the point that the nurses asked if people could stop coming in droves. I talked with family I hadn’t seen in years. We huddled around the bed and shared stories. Sometimes we addressed my grandfather directly. Sometimes we didn’t. If he could hear us, and I think he could, it probably felt like a movie to him, too. He couldn’t talk or add anything to the scene. He could only listen and enjoy.

At the end of the day, my great uncle said to my grandmother that she looked too skinny. This is a woman who got up every day in hospice and took a shower and fixed her hair and wore a snappy outfit. She even flossed. “Don’t worry,” she said. “After this I’m going to get really fat. I won’t have anyone to look good for anymore.”

I want to say I was closer to my grandfather. There was a lot of love there. A mutual respect. But no grandchild can know everything about his or her grandfather. He lived a life and had numerous friends I didn’t know much about. He retired and traveled all over the country with my grandmother in an RV. Seeing Alaska. Visiting his children. Always making friends.

He understood me. I was the first of the grandchildren to go to college, and I know he was proud of me. He didn’t care that it was film school. There wasn’t a time when we talked where he didn’t tell me that he was the president of my fan club. When I told him that I could still see myself there in that magical place I envisioned as a child, the perfect life, he knew what I meant. I was going to keep working. Just like he did. Just like he wanted for all of us. Grandpa had three points on which he was very clear:  You can do anything you set your mind to. You can be happy anywhere. Wherever you go, people are the same.

My grandfather is a genius. He made it sound easy. And he made it look easy, too. He made you want to be a better person. If you only listened.

Before the trip to Palatka, I hadn’t seen my grandfather in years. I felt much like Ted in Salesses’s book. When he begins courting Kate, someone he only noticed when he was younger to poke fun at, he tells her that he thought about her in the war. He knew that wasn’t true. She knew that wasn’t true. But in his new life, he wanted it to be true. Just as I wished that I had somehow been more involved in the stories taking place around me. There were a lot of things I heard for the first time, and I was infinitely sad. Ted should have been thinking about Kate. And I should have been around more.

My family loves to talk. Just ask my wife. But no one more than my grandfather. It was surely driving him crazy that he couldn’t chime in as he lay gasping for air between us. My grandmother told us that as a family, we all say goodbye in stages. Grandpa would announce that he was going to bed, and then he’d walk ten steps and start talking again. Then another ten steps. This would go on for hours until my grandmother finally approached him and said: “Say goodnight, George.” At which point my grandfather would say his final goodbye and turn in for the night. Hospice continued to tell us that each day was his last, but he stayed there, his breath hoarse and raspy, because he didn’t want to miss anything that was said.

In The Last Repatriate, one of the most moving images comes toward the end when Ted has been arrested and Kate visits him in jail:

“My daddy don’t want me coming here no more,” she says lightly, as they part.  Her eyes leave two wet spots on his shirt, as if she is looking out from his insides.

When it was time for me to go, my grandfather still hadn’t said goodnight yet. I hugged my grandmother and my tears soaked into her sweater. It was exactly as Salesses had said. Each of us that visited, or were carrying him in our thoughts, had those tear marks on our shoulders. It wasn’t just one person he was looking out of. It was all of us.

A Voice In My Head: A Review of Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones

I found Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones in a small-town library four years ago. It was an accident — I was looking for a book of poems. I read it that night in a dim attic bedroom with the sloped ceiling crushing my neck. I also read it on a summer beach in Wellfleet, in a coffee shop in Boston, on a sleepless bus ride to Manhattan, during a blizzard in Minneapolis, in a hostel in Dublin, at the airport in Milwaukee. I read it a year ago. I read it last week. It is a book about writing, it is a book about life, it is a book about the inner workings of my own mind.

I’m what you might call a secret writer. I have things I want to say but I’m not sure I want anyone to hear them. So I go to work every day. I look at spreadsheets and databases. In my secret life, I write things. Most people who know me have no idea.

I have some doubt and insecurity. I avoid writing about the hard things. I throw my writing away. I throw away entire notebooks (lots of notebooks). I write in isolation. I refuse to share it with anyone. In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg confronts the doubt that whips around inside of me and cripples me again and again. The brief chapters are about details, practice, deep loneliness and fear. She understands the critic, the editor, the censor — all battling for attention in my own head:

“If those characters in you want to fight, let them fight. Meanwhile, the sane part of you should quietly get up, go over to your notebook, and begin to write from a deeper, more peaceful place.”

Writing Down the Bones is full of ideas — triggers to writing. Sometimes I’m avoiding myself and I need to get over it; I read a few pages just to get the itch back. Sometimes I need to feel the tremor in my fingers, the frantic heart-racing desperation to get the words out of me. Sometimes I need to be reminded that I’m not finished, even when I think I’ve quit. Every now and then I read the whole thing, front to back, very late at night.

At the core of Writing Down the Bones is Natalie Goldberg’s method, her writing practice. It is based on this one simple rule: keep your hand moving. When you keep your hand moving, you begin to uncover first thoughts — the ones that flash across your mind before you have a chance to mold them or censor them. I finally understood the practice when I was stranded in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport during a raging blizzard hell storm last year.

I often carry Writing Down the Bones with me when I fly — just in case my other books turn out to be bad. I had it with me that winter in Minnesota when my flight was cancelled. I couldn’t get on another flight to Boston for three days. It was impossible to get anywhere in the storm. So I pulled out the book, read a few pages and chained my elbows to a table at Starbucks. At Natalie’s prompting, I wrote for those three days, almost without pause. I pushed past what I had thought was my limit. I wrote until my hands were cramped and the cheap airport notebook was full. I wrote with my jaw on the table in shock. My feet were cold. I was drinking mint tea. I could hear it in my head: “Just ten more minutes. Keep your hand moving. Go.”

“. . . the aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel. It’s a great opportunity to capture the oddities of your mind. Explore the rugged edge of your thought. Like grating a carrot, give the paper the colorful coleslaw of your consciousness.”

When I found this book four years ago, I had just left my Minnesota home for the East Coast. My upbringing and culture had been instantly reduced to stereotypes. I was a stereotype. Throughout Writing Down the Bones, Natalie is describing her own experiences living in Minnesota. It’s nothing special. She studied at the Minnesota Zen Center in Minneapolis. She wrote at the diner with orange booths in Owatonna. But that night in the attic bedroom, it felt like a secret language she was speaking solely for my benefit. She was teaching in schools, writing poems, practicing zazen, getting a divorce — all in Minnesota. It wasn’t even that I loved Minnesota — I just felt alone. On that night, in those pages, I was less alone.

Life happens in no particular order and each moment is just each moment. There’s the drunk man on the street and the stray cat on the back porch and the coffee you spilled on your shoes. There’s the thought in your head and the pen in your hand. There’s the notebook on the table. There’s the word you have written that someone else will read. It just happens. Each moment.

I am learning how to be vulnerable these days. How to open up wide and say This is it, this is really it. This is who I am. Sometimes it hurts and I don’t mean in a good way. It just hurts. Stretching becomes cracking, splitting, breaking.

I am also learning how to share.

I am also learning how to speak.

“Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese, and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow and all winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived.”

Ask Natalie Goldberg into your heart. I’m serious. Hers is the generous voice that forgives me for my doubt and tells me to keep going. She asks me what I’m afraid of and shows me the path that’s already in front of me, that my feet are already walking. She hands me the pen again and says, “Here. Just write. Go.”