Sins of the Mothers: A Review of Laura Catherine Brown's Made by Mary

There is no happy ending to Laura Catherine Brown’s second and latest novel, Made By Mary, but rather an unsettling continuation after losses and distorted perceptions. This may not be readily apparent, as readers may sigh at the inevitable disappointments but assume triumphs in what remains and rises from the ashes of misplaced loyalties and intentions. We must decide if what is left augurs any hope or just a perpetuation of the misguided lineage of generations doomed to repeat mistakes and subsequent tragedies. Brown explores the classic dual desire to cling to the assumed support and security of our parents, particularly our mothers, and the need to separate and to become our own person in an ancient, perplexing conflict. Are there simply inherent flaws in the human condition that preclude us from escaping the entrapment of expectations and mutual, unhealthy dependencies? Or can we make conscious assessments and choices? Brown asks us to examine critical aspects of the mother/daughter relationship. The guilt and the responsibilities flow in both directions. She often treats serious situations, indeed life and death situations, with a subtle, perhaps even black humor. It stirs a hesitant smile within us, but there’s no hearty laughter in her astute observances of the foibles and problems that result from our inability to face truths and heal our wounds. These characters hold onto one another like pieces of a splintering life raft, and the consequences are frequently devastating.

Mary, a child of Woodstock and the sixties hippie generation, is mother to Annapurna Peace Moonlight, or Ann, as she prefers to call herself. Ann resists Mary’s values and influence every chance she gets. She responds to Mary’s open and often careless approach to life with strict, repressed attitudes and accusatory postures, much as Mary’s carefree life of avoidance responded to her own mother’s strict, repressive personality. Ann is struggling with her identity and sees motherhood as the answer to finding her value and her place in the world much as Mary once did. Born without a uterus, Ann already feels less of a woman and desperately wants a child. Right from the opening paragraph we see who she is, a pre-school teacher who merges with her little charges “…like crayons melting together in the sun.” The solace she assumes at the pre-school mirrors a desire to capture her own lost childhood. She’s out of touch with her deeper self and any accurate barometer of her own worth. Ann is a talented, gifted musician, but this is insufficient to satisfy her as she continues to measure her value against others and distorted, unrealistic standards. In one scene, Ann looks at her dog, McKenna, thinking to herself that his unconditional devotion is not enough, although “…his gaze is pure love.” It might be a subtler point, but it asks us to examine how we view love, what is “enough,” and if it matters where that love comes from. Is love only justified if we can wrest it from those who are unable to give it or are not even born yet?

Ann is married to Joel Solcombe, a musician and owner of his own construction company, who is struggling financially while building their dream house in upstate Sullivan County, New York. He and Ann are living in a trailer on the property until the house is completed. They both play in a band at local establishments, which is where they seem to derive most of their personal and creative satisfaction. Joel and Ann compose music together, which is symbolic of their true ability for mutual creation. Why wasn’t this inspired expression enough for them individually and in union with one another? Why was having children more of an affirmation of their creativity and existence?

Joel has issues with his own mother, Betty, a chain smoking, mean spirited woman, whose anger at her life and being abandoned by her husband is put upon her son, while she pins small remnants of hope on the prospect of having a grandchild. We learn that, “She would not permit Joel to live in ignorance of her unhappiness.” Joel vacillates between hatred and distain for his mother and trying to coddle up to any tidbit of emotion or concern she might offer. These feelings transfer to Ann in his desire to please her by doing anything and everything to help them achieve parenthood. Joel feels “duty-bound to Betty,” which causes him to suppress any negative feelings he has toward her and her behavior. We see how this translates into his relationship with his wife when he observes that Ann’s “contempt added to her beauty,” emphasizing how we are attracted to what we have not healed.

Joel is recognized as a talented musician and band leader but admits he hasn’t played in a while since their bass player had a child. We are shown early in the story that we sacrifice so much of our lives when we become parents. The questions Brown asks us to consider are deeply probative. How much are we meant to forfeit of our lives just to bring in another who will feel indebted to do the same? Are we simply fostering a lineage of obligation for others to fulfill us? What are our true motivations in becoming parents?

After a disastrous attempt at taking in a pregnant teenager, Jessica, with the anticipation of adopting her child, Joel and Ann find themselves embroiled in an in vitro surrogate mother situation with Mary. At age fifty and already overweight, Mary sees this as an opportunity to win Ann’s love and prove herself as a mother. She has no consideration for her own health and wellbeing in a desperate mission to prove her worth. Her litany of self-absorbed lovers, both male and female, illustrate her inability to take care of herself, and to accept her talents as a creative person in her own right. Mary feels it’s better to receive comfort from “someone who hurts you” rather than receive none at all.

It is not enough for Joel and Ann to express themselves as musicians and in their love for one another, and it is not enough for Mary to accept herself and her own gifts as a jewelry designer. In fact, she designs braided, intertwining wedding rings for Ann and Joel along with one for herself “…as if the three of them were married.” Here we see a prime example of misappropriation and intrusive interactions in co-dependent relationships. When Joel first meets Ann, he thinks he has finally found “…someone I can make happy.” He fails to realize that we are responsible for our own happiness. We can share that with someone else, but we can never make someone else happy. Huge resentments build among all the characters when they feel they are sacrificing themselves for others and are not fully appreciated for playing the role of victim in order to gain another’s love and attention. In their desperate struggles, they fail to see that this only leads to distain and anger from those whose approval they seek. It never ends well when we ingratiate ourselves to others by capitulating to their wants and desires at the expense of our own. We earn their respect and love when we honor ourselves as separate individuals with our own needs and aspirations. This may not coincide with accepted standards or a majority consensus, which is why we may need to leave those who do not accept us for who we are.

As Brown extends these issues in a larger context, she asks us to consider societal assumptions and traditions. Throughout the story we get a sense of what is expected or even obligatory from women: to revere our maternal forebears and to relish becoming mothers. Women who are unable to have children are pitied, and others become stigmatized for not wanting children at all. In order to have a baby, Ann works against all her natural instincts. She feels that “So much of her life occurred beyond her control.” That is because she has willingly relinquished control without recognizing it. Interestingly, in a book all about motherhood, no one seems particularly “motherly.” Mary refers to the children of her friend, America’s daughter Cassidy, as “rug rats,” Jessica states, “I hate kids,” and Cassidy tells Jessica that at least she “…has the wisdom to give them up.” Then later on Cassidy cries about America never loving her, and we see the way she treats her own daughter, Sky, when she observes Sky’s attempts at affection by stating, “It’s not love, it’s a survival tactic,” and that her own mother never loved anyone, “not even herself.” But they remain tethered to hopes of connection, just as dying soldiers do on the battlefield, who can’t escape that instinctual need to cry out for their mothers, as we do so often in desperate and needy instances. Jessica cries out for her mother during labor, not for Ann who has taken care of her for nine months. Mary does the same while she is in labor. Jessica’s mother rejects her, yet she shows up at the hospital for the birth and claims her daughter and her grandchild.

Ann has an unrealistic, dreamlike vision of what motherhood will be, how she’ll be different from all the others, especially Mary. Her vision of a baby becomes her personal salvation and a barometer of her worth. Yet how can she expect to love another when she is constantly so critical of herself? This is where transference of such feelings becomes dangerous and distorted. These characters live in the illusion that their will can manifest their desires. Ann sees herself as being able to “bend reality to her will” and convinces herself she is not afraid. This is deep denial, as we see nothing but fear in all of these characters. What they lack is an acceptance that we do live in a fearful and precarious world. This creates an inability to see oneself clearly and to connect with reality. It is why Mary feels better about herself “in fragments.” Most often the characters reinforce their illusions through the use of alcohol, drugs, and elaborate demonstrations that are supposed to invoke the powers of the mystical in finding answers. In another misguided instance, Ann thinks she has “lost her vigilance against misfortune,” and this undermines and jinxes her happiness. She gives away her power once again to a perceived outside force. These modalities offer escape instead of a grounding in reality. In a moment of lucidity, Ann sees beauty in simple things around her and asks herself, “You’re alive…isn’t that enough?” Unfortunately, she loses the opportunity to go deeper into that realization.

There’s a lot of New Age rituals, symbolism, and artifacts that strive to give meaning and supernatural credence to decisions and actions taken by the characters. There are communal conjuring circles, ceremonial offerings, and a lot of smoke and mirrors. Instead of relying on their own intuition to guide their paths, they seek affirmation in external signs, interpreting circumstances through the prism of their hopes and desires rather than being grounded in truth. Instead of offering clarity, it clouds their vision, and offers misguided confirmation of their choices. There’s a menstrual party that comes across as something falsely celebratory, as opposed to the mutual comfort of this monthly ritual as detailed so beautifully in Anita Diamant’s “The Red Tent.” There is a forced imposition of frantic festivities without acknowledging the mixed emotions and discomfort that accompany so much of the human condition. The hippie, New Age dictums, and actions of Mary and her cohorts seem disingenuous and desperate rather than affirmative. But all the spiritual babble, tokens, and totems never offer true solace or hide the fears that they strive to assuage so ardently. The characters lie and deceive one another time and again, something a symbolic piece of jewelry or sacred chant can’t mitigate. They can’t replace lost dreams, wishful thinking, or revisionist history, all places where these characters reside. Their memories are revised and cloudy. Joel recalls loving parents leaning over his bed when he was a child, an example of the supposed halcyon days we spend lifetimes trying to recreate when they actually never existed. It becomes “a memory of a memory.” But he continues to ask himself why he can “access the past so easily but never the future?” Mary’s insistence that Ann was born at Woodstock during the famous festival of the sixties is an attempt to escalate her own importance and infuse the birth with meaning. But it’s a lie. She knows it and Ann knows it. But she would rather live in a lie than accept the truth, and it destroys her life.

The tragic losses of this story illustrate the very selfish and misguided reasons so many people seek parenthood. So much of it is the result of what they never received from their own parents and imagine that, somehow, they’ll be able to correct and recover this in a child of their own. But without the necessary introspection and examination of their actions and desires, it begs a critical question: how many lives must be sacrificed to prove that another one has value? Of course, we can see how this plays out on a macro scale in global conflicts, battlefields, and even the horrors of genocide, just as it does on a micro level in our own private interactions and our interior landscapes.

Perhaps the book’s title gives us some of the best insights into its message. Made by Mary suggests something manufactured and less than organic. Mary feels she has “made” Ann and shouts, “…I can make another you,” as if birthing another human being will give her a second chance to correct mistakes that she has made with Ann. As Brown observes of Mary, “Genetically unable to back away from perceived disapproval, she filled it with herself.” She is in a constant mode of compensation for what she sees as her own shortcomings. This is when she resorts to magical potions and incantations in desperate attempts to fix things. We learn early on that Mary’s motives for carrying Ann’s baby are less than altruistic when she sees it as an opportunity to promote her jewelry business and to get attention.

As Ann succumbs more steadily throughout the story into Mary’s world of external, spiritual validations, her actions simply mirror her desire to align with her mother’s illusionary world. Ann sees moving forward as choosing “love and life, as Mary had done.” But it is difficult to see how Mary accomplished this. She never chose to carry Ann’s baby out of love but rather to affirm her value to Ann. And she didn’t choose life but sacrificed it.

Brown names sections of the book for the four elements: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire that span the years 1999 to 2000 and concludes with the section Spirit 2000. The elements are meant to help us locate our strengths and weaknesses in order to address them. Air represents intellect and intentions, earth links us to family and roots and is a grounding force, fire represents transformation and inner strength, and water is emotional release and intuitive connection. We don’t see any of these characters as particularly grounded and their mental capacities are distorted and unclear. There are moments of emotional release, but they don’t actually lead to intuitive power. The fire they experience is ultimately less than transformative. But perhaps this is Brown’s point, to show us what we miss when we choose not to see.

Made by Mary gives us tremendous insights not only into the feminine and maternal journeys but into human nature as a whole. It asks us to examine what we sacrifice for others and why; how we derail our own train by trying to hitch it to another. She asks us to examine the impetus behind our desire to create another human being when we feel our own humanity is insufficient. What does it mean to give life? To have life inside of you? Do we have no life if we do not bring another one into this world? What does it mean to live one’s own life? These are the critical questions she asks us to consider in a story that sometimes appears deceptively lighthearted on the surface. There’s a fine, delicate equivalence between outrageous humor and very serious subject matter. For the most part, Brown is successful in achieving that balance. Language is sometimes raw but is evocative and appropriately representative of certain situations. Her astute observations give depth and clarity about the misguided ways in which we interpret our own lives and sacrifice them at the altar of external acceptance and norms.

Brown shows us clearly that our fears of being forgotten and misunderstood, and our denial of the realities of death, are intense motivations behind our desire to procreate, and to live on through something we believe we have created. In truth, each soul has its own journey, and we are merely vessels in bringing them forth into the world. Creativity is not passed on through another but is an expression of the passion in each individual spirit. The consequences for characters in this story shows us that the burden of our own worth should never be put upon another. Whether we adapt or rebel, it’s only two sides of the same coin. We are still not individuals living in our own bodies and owning our own truth. We go back and forth between rejection and craving attachment. We become children again, the child inside of us who was raised deficiently and still seeks connection and approval. At times we might find it difficult to feel compassion for these characters. We become exasperated with their lack of self-reflection and their ability to deflect truth and honesty. If this angers us, it’s because we see these flaws in ourselves, which means Brown has been successful in prompting us to identify them in a very personal way.

If the reader isn’t mindful, the desire to find redemption in the losses suffered by the characters will overshadow the more crucial messages of the story. Brown has done a fine job in elucidating very pivotal issues if the reader mines the gold within. What happens when we choose family, or any other option, over truth? As Ann faces the future with her own daughter, we are left to decide what lessons she will take with her, or if she is doomed to repeat legacies of dysfunction. Rather than wrapping up her story in a neat package, Brown wisely leaves us with that question. Perhaps, the epigraph by W.B. Yeats at the beginning of the book sums it up most aptly: A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.

I Know I’m Somewhere New: An Interview with Chelsea Biondolillo

Dana Diehl: In this book, you use birds to reflect on your life. Why do you think birds have such power over you? Why do you think they illuminate your life more effectively than other animals might?

Chelsea Biondolillo: Birds live on every continent. They have incredible diversity of size, shape, color, and behaviors. When I travel, birds are one way I know I’m somewhere new (mockingbirds in Arizona, scrub jays in Oregon, rheas in Chile, tuis in New Zealand, and European cuckoos in Austria). And while they are unlike people in nearly every way, they feature frequently in our metaphors and clichés across cultures and throughout history. This means they can always be found somewhere in the periphery of any story I want to tell.

Practically, I live with a lot of anxiety and attendant depression, and birds are one way for my brain to get some perspective. They remind me about all I can’t know and can’t control, about all the things I can’t see (like geomagnetic navigational lines) and will probably never understand (like why Oregon has a hummingbird that doesn’t migrate). It doesn’t always work, but sometimes looking for a bird can help me to break out of panic states.

DD: As long as I’ve known your writing—about five years now—you’ve been writing about and researching birds. It makes me wonder, which came first? The birds or the writing? Did these passions develop independently of each other, or have they always been intertwined? Or has one fed the other?

CC: I started actively writing after I lost my corporate job in 2008, and my first publications came the following year—short travel essays on a couple of blogs, some sidebar pieces for glossy mags, and a handful of book reviews. One of my first essays published in a real literary magazine, though, was about starlings. It was the runner up in Diagram’s hybrid essay contest in 2011. That same year, according to my Submittable rejection history, I was sending out a piece on red-winged blackbirds (which eventually appeared in Birding in 2014) and one on hummingbirds (landed in Phoebe, 2012). I remember printing a bunch of peer-reviewed papers on big cats when I got to grad school in 2011, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to be the bird lady, but nothing has so far come of those. My thesis was full of birds and I still like writing about them.

My grandmother was an avid birder, and much of my reading and creative pursuits were encouraged by her—so I think there’s some creative-muscle memory there, but also there’s a lot of science available about birds, and so when I had a bird question (like, why do starlings mimic, or are hummingbirds really headed toward extinction), there was easy information to find and mostly approachable experts to interrogate. In that sense, birds helped me become a more interesting writer.

DD: The essays in this book vary widely in form. What do you enjoy, or what is useful, about shifting forms?

CB: My undergraduate degree is in photography, but that’s only because my alma mater hadn’t yet created a mixed media studio major. In art school, I sewed books and glued tiny tarot cards on the pages. I built boxes and filled them with broken ceramics. I took photos and transferred them to watercolor paper. I was always looking for my form—and it turns out it was in a different discipline! Playing with text and form in my essays is one way I am continuing that collage/mixed media process. Experimenting with line breaks or balancing small text blocks with images (or obscuring text with photos) allows me to view an essay as a visual composition or even as an object—which means I can consider how I hope to reach a reader and a viewer, both.

DD: In “The Story You Never Tell,” fifteen lovely, stark, black-and-white photographs of seashells block out fifteen pages of text. The words that creep around the edges of the photographs are ominous and evocative. What was it like to write this piece? Did you know you’d cover it up as you wrote it? If so, how did that affect the experience of writing it?

CB: That essay was originally written as a “regular” essay, but after a few rounds of revision, it still didn’t feel done. I wanted a way to redact the textual specificity without turning it into a MadLib that readers would want to solve like a puzzle. As an art student, I often incorporated words, phrases, or even pages of text in my work, and as a result, had many conversations with my instructors about how readability can negatively impact a composition. (Reading the text was not supposed to be the point in painting class.) I wanted to play with that idea—how much text would it take to make clear that what the viewer was seeing was an essay, without the content of the essay taking over? I was inspired by works from painter Titus Kaphar and texts like Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, which feature elements of concealment / or otherwise hiding one or more parts of a composition to highlight another. I tried out several methods of obscuring the text, including other imagery, before settling on portraits of seashells from both my and my grandmother’s shell collections.

And while the resulting piece can’t be “solved” through reading (so it’s not like I can spoil it), I am worried that too much talk about the hows/whys of writing it could dictate a new reader’s experience of it in ways that I want to avoid. In that regard, it could be sort of a spoiler to say too much more about it.

DD: You mention several animals that have occupied your life: the cats, the geese, the insects, the dogs, the mockingbirds. Who are the important animals if your life right now, both wild and domestic?

CB: I’m living in the home my grandparents built, and one of the artifacts my grandmother left behind was a stack of birding journals. Over several years she tracked every bird she saw every day—most from her own picture window. It’s been weird and amazing to read her journal and see which birds are still regularly appearing at the feeders my partner puts out, and which seem rare now. We delight in seeing downy woodpeckers and varied thrushes, and often see bald eagles in the neighborhood—something I do not remember from my childhood.

As far as non-bird obsessions go, the other inhabitants of this place, the rabbits, snakes, deer, and hordes of ravenous insects (they got about half of my kitchen garden last year and would love back into our house’s fir posts and beams) and their boom-bust seasonal cycles are one of my areas of focus right now, for both practical and creative reasons. But also, I’ve also become much more aware of plants, as I’m currently surrounded by two acres of formerly neglected landscape. What thrives on neglect, and what literally withers and dies without care is of considerable interest to my gardening decisions.

DD: If you could disappear off the grid for a year and immerse yourself in the study of a single species that you haven’t already devoted a lot of time to, where would you go? What would you study?

CB: Being back on the West Coast has reminded me how much I love the Pacific. Rather than any single species, I’m often interested in systems, and the relationship between sea lions, salmon, and fishermen out here (and its current lack of balance) intrigues me. Sea lions have been seen on local rivers, over a hundred miles from the ocean, and are posing major risks to steelhead numbers, which impacts recreation and ecology. I’m drawn to stories that seem to have easy answers—over fishing or oceanic pollution in this case—but upon review, have complicating factors, like, are the sea lions starving at sea, or are they exploiting ready food sources inland? I’d have to see a lot of the Northwest and North coasts to be able to draw any reasonable conclusions—and that would be a wonderful way to spend a year.

DD: If you could be reborn as a bird, which bird would you like to be?

CB: Probably a crow. They seem to watch out for one another and have a good time when they can.

DD: What is something you are obsessed with right now? It could be a hobby, a TV show, a dish, anything.

CB: I am deep into sweater knitting, having finally settled down somewhere that is at least chilly for much of the year. Since moving back to Oregon, I’ve finished nearly half a dozen, and I have a dark green wool pullover on the needles right now.

Los Ángeles at Ground Level: Letters To My City by Mike Sonksen

The poet Mike Sonksen knows more about Los Ángeles than almost anyone. It began when he was a kid, his father and both grandfathers introducing him to the sprawling city by taking him on destination drives. Due to his father’s love of architecture, having, “taught me about…Frank Lloyd Write from an early age,” Sonksen “had a natural interest in maps and geography.” Those drives fostered that interest, dipping in and out of distinctly planned and inhabited neighborhoods that made up the patchwork quilt of, not only the city, but Los Ángeles County.

In Sonksen’s new book Letters To My City (The Accomplices/Writ Large Press, 2019), he explores the city’s geography and architecture from the ground up, from his perspective as a third-generation Angeleño. The book is a collection of his poems and articles that span his 20+ years of exploring, not only the landscapes of Los Ángeles, but the people and cultures and histories of communities like Little Tokyo, The Eastside, Leimert Park and even Cambodia Town in Long Beach.

Early in Letters, Sonksen includes his remembrance of local human interest reporter Huell Howser in, “Huell Howser and the Gospel of Beauty.” Howser hosted “California’s Gold,” on local PBS, highlighting landmarks, small towns, places of interest or events in California that were not well known, including countless in L.A. and Southern California. In each episode Howser conducted impromptu and informal interviews with locals involved with the sites he visited. When the show debuted in 1991, Los Ángeles and California were beginning to take a serious interest in and find significance in its own history. Howser, according to Sonksen, “provided the common ground for people to relate and meet on,” especially in Southern California, where Howser lived, “like he did for my dad, grandmother and me.” Plus, “‘California’s Gold’ reinforced my own burgeoning interest in this history; I saw Huell as a messenger to stick to my own California dream.”

Along with the article, “Community, not a Commodity: The Ethics of Giving a City Tour,” the opening 35 pages or so of Letters To My City act as explanation of Sonksen’s aesthetics and why he tells the stories he does: Get the History Right, Sharing Authority and Debunking Stereotypes and the unofficial, The Right to the City.

The concepts of Mike Sonksen’s aesthetics are apparent throughout Letters To My City. He shares his authority by quoting long time Cambodian residents of Long Beach’s Cambodia Town in “Driving Down the 105,” as a way for them to tell their neighborhood’s history. When he profiles a person, such as the late dynamic Chicana writer from Oxnard, California, Michele Serros, he lets those who knew her personally, speak to who she really was.

When Sonksen entered UCLA in 1992, when native Angeleños like Lynell George, Ruben Martinez and Luis J. Rodriguez were publishing their journalism and narratives about L.A., and he was being taught by urban theorist and native Mike Davis, they helped reinforce his “interest in all things Los Angeles.” He learned about letting a place speak for itself.

However, Sonksen’s articles can leave readers of Letters’ wanting more specific, from-the-ground-up, portrayals of L.A. Too many lack depth in the content he’s exploring, where he ends up repeating himself instead of expanding on his idea(s). A good example is “The Cascades.” Here, language is used more as a summary, and where he needs to expand his ideas, Sonksen repeats information. “We notice on our left side a park with a well-lit hillside waterfall fountain. Quickly I turn left heading towards what looks to be a park.” As the centerpiece of the article, in sentence two, I want to know how this waterfall fountain ads to the neighborhood’s atmosphere.

Another example is when Sonksen says at various times throughout his articles, “as noted/said earlier,” and proceeds to only restate that same sentence as above, before immediately moving on to a new paragraph or point.

Yet, there are many engaging and rich articles that portray L.A. from the lived-in, ground-up perspective Sonksen’s acquired from a lifetime of personally engaging in L.A. Enough for Letters to join the narrative of correction written by native Angeleños, illustrating that Angeleños actually do care about their city, that there is a deep, rich history and [literary] culture there, that there are beautiful neighborhoods—in all definitions of the term—most having nothing to do with Hollywood, some with predominately “humble working-class people.” Sonken quotes Lynell George at one point in Letters, saying, “we know much more, it seems, about ancient cities and dead civilizations…than we do about day-to-day life in ‘South Central Los Angeles’…beyond the trope.”

Sonksen too, goes beyond the tropes, to portray the suburbs in “Something in the Water: Hip-Hop History in Cerrritos.” He quotes DJ Rhettmatic, remembering his childhood in Cerritos in the ‘80s, saying , “…their [his father’s employment’s] old building is actually on Valley…right next to the old Don Juan Mexican restaurant that used to be there on the corner…” His DJ crew, “…used to DJ parties at Don Juan during the early stages before the crew even manifested.” These are details about how culture was created in Cerritos and what kind of culture it was, that is now preserved.

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Letters To My City is most powerful when Sonksen explores what Los Ángeles is and reminds the reader what L.A. has. That’s where he’s at his best, inhabiting the same boundless enthusiasm for his subjects that he saw Huell Howser inhabit for his.

Sonksen writes many list and ode poems, full of local history and culture. In the poem “Ode to L.A. Women Writers,” he reminds readers “L.A. women writers are the masters of this ecology.” He then lists as many as he can, from Wanda Coleman to Octavia E. Butler, to Irene Soriano and Helena Maria Viramontes. In “Homage to Little Tokyo” Sonksen repeats throughout, “Little Tokyo is…” That device creates the sense of community pride that builds throughout the poem as he proceeds to describe the heartbeat of one of L.A.’s most iconic neighborhoods. “Little Tokyo is legacy businesses/Nisei witnesses.” he writes, tightly weaving in the community’s history as context for his sustained focus on the individuals who’ve shaped Little Tokyo.

Although his poems celebrate L.A., Sonksen casts a critical eye on the city’s faults and issues. “I Am Still Alive in Los Angeles!” an update to his most iconic poem “I Am Alive in Los Angeles!” opens Letters and sets the context for how the rest of the book is understood. The poem steeps the city in three of its pressing issues: affordability, traffic and environment. The opening dives right in: “I am alive in Los Angeles/even as the price of rent rises/and gridlock strangles central arteries…” But through it all, Sonksen says, “The community is a poem/in progress called Los Angeles.”

Los Ángeles, and cities in general, are by their very nature imperfect, always in transition to becoming something else, especially at the community level. It’s a city’s communities, Sonksen reminds us, that shape what a city is. And those communities are shaped by the people that live there. Those, he says in the title poem, who “pound the pavement, fight the good fight,” are civically engaged.

Though a fuller portrayal of L.A. would have included more communities in other parts of L.A. (e.g. the Persian community on the Westside or any specific community in the San Fernando Valley), as Letters primarily explores downtown to the east (the Eastside, SGV) and South Central to South L.A. County (Cerritos, Long Beach), it’s the ground-up perspective from which Sonksen portrays each community and tells their history, that creates the mostly intimate portrayal(s) of this often written about and vastly misunderstood city. By the end of Letters To My City it becomes apparent that this perspective is the only authentic way to truly understand Los Ángeles—or any city.

The Gain of a Deaf Republic

Much of the recent responses to Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic have rightly focused on its metaphors of silence and their tense relationship to political resistance. While such metaphors are crucial to the way Kaminsky imagines political resistance, the reduction of deafness to metaphor undercuts what I contend is a much larger project of “deaf-gain” that he explores in his volume. Deaf activists have long worked to undo reductive stereotypes of deafness as lack or loss by insisting upon it “as a means to understand the plenitude of human being.”[1] As opposed to a medical model of disability in which an individual is entirely reduced to their deafness, Deaf identity embraces deafness as a valuable part of biocultural diversity. Members of the Deaf community share rich cultures, histories, and languages grounded in deafness as a particular embodied orientation to the world. Such orientation enables a unique form of knowledge-making unique to Deaf people. But within the traumatic conditions of wartime, what does deafness afford? What is at stake in claiming “to be of deaf people” in the face of violence?

Deaf Republic reads like a two-act political drama in which lyric poems trace the experiences of citizens living under martial law. Armed militants come to occupy the fictional Eastern European town of Vasenka and ultimately murder a deaf boy, Petya, who spits at a sergeant during a local puppet show. As public gatherings become banned all together, Petya’s childish yet brazen act of resistance becomes one of martyrdom. One of the puppeteers, Galya Armolinskaya, rallies the townspeople around his death as the bloody symbol of the soldiers’ cruelty visited upon one of Vasenka’s most vulnerable. Here, Kaminsky considers how resistance can take unexpected, subtle forms. Some of the townspeople choose to be deaf as a strategy of silent protest. Deafness becomes a means of refusal: to speak, to hear, to comply, to resign, to forget. “In the name of Petya, we refuse,” the chorus of townspeople proclaim. Such an act feels deeply fraught, for able-bodied citizens seem to be performing deafness as “their only barricade” against tyrannical authority. Yet assuming deafness here is not tokenism nor the petty exploitation of disability for political gain. Rather, it is a communal act of mourning for and solidarity with the fallen Petya that animates their rebellion, that makes his deafness insurgency. Kaminsky frames deafness in explicitly crip terms: a politicized, community identity—mobile and adaptive— whose practices resist dehumanization and subvert authority.

Out of such meaningless violence is born a deaf community whose experiences shape not only their identities but their language. “The townspeople invented their own sign language. Some of the signs derived from various traditions (Russian, Ukranian, Belarusian, American Sign language, etc.). Other signs might have been made up by citizens, as they tried to create a language not known to authorities,” notes Kaminsky at the end of his book. Vasenkan deafness is thus characterized not by quietism but by prolixity—a ingenious talking back in the face of oppression that enables the townspeople to “testify” to the atrocities happening daily, poem after poem while the rest of the world “lived happily during the war.” In the form of printed representations of these signs, Kaminsky invites his reader to navigate a deaf poetics that deftly eludes the censorship of the soldiers. Scholars of Deaf Studies have argued that sign language’s rhetorical power lies precisely in its unique capacity to express complex ideas through visual-spatial metaphors.[2] We see this linguistic ingenuity both in the hybrid origins of the Vasenkan sign language, produced collectively by the townspeople living in precarity, and the hybrid forms of the poems in both verse and sign. Seemingly singular, localized signs come together in an embodied essay that expresses what might otherwise be silently witnessed during the occupation. When the traumas of war become nearly unspeakable, the hands unbound in turn speak volumes. The same hands that manipulated the puppets when Petya died. The same hands that, in retaliation, dragged the bodies of the dead soldiers to the back of the theater.

The first act of Deaf Republic traces the intimacies between Alfonso Barabinski and his wife, Sonya, who is pregnant when the military occupation occurs. After giving birth, Sonya is shot and Anushka, the baby girl, is immediately taken as Alfonso is hanged. The traumatic violence of civil war, this tragic family story suggests, is often intergenerational. Yet, as Kaminsky reminds us, cultural memory and forms of resistance also passes from one generation to another: “And yet, on some nights, townspeople dim the lights and teach their children to sign.” The Barabinskis are survived by Vasenka’s children, by the very language they helped to invent and share. Deafness remains a means of survival, the means of radically imagining “a peaceful country.” A deaf republic.

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[1] H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray. “Deaf Studies in the 21st Century: ‘Deaf-gain’ and the Future of Human Diversity.” The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education. Eds. Marc Marschark and Patricia Elizabeth Spencer. 2 (2010): 11.

[2] Bauman and Murray, 14.

Water and Life and Death: Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda

“He gave us life,” the people of a western settlement earnestly say about the man—Dutch Joe—who digs wells or maybe divines water in the Great American Desert they have chosen to try to settle. He gave them water, and so who is a kind of spiritual leader or variety of folk hero in a story—neatly called “Dutch Joe”—in Terse Svoboda’s new collection Great American Desert which holds inside of it all of the work and boredom and ambition and helplessness and the fear and the monotony of settler life. “I have it on good authority that you can tell the future by looking up from those holes,” Dutch Joe tells them and us. “It has to do with those stars you see that way. But you don’t want to look up too often. If the sky comes down, we’ll all be wearing a blue cap.”

The whole collection occupies a wild but familiar American West then and now and maybe someday. It is connected by the space—the Clovis in what we know now as New Mexico (“Camp Clovis”), explorers chart the “great American desert” (“Major Long Talks to His Horse”), the settlers break ground on the land with their water guru Dutch Joe, desperate dut bowl farmers try to eke out a kind of existence and live a kind of life on the disappearing land (“Dirty Thirties”), citizens in a cold war atomic town live and lose their lives in the shadow of The Bomb (“Bomb Jockey”), and so on, and so on.

Water and life and death soak the pages. I come from a place full of ice and rivers and many lakes; I have spent very little time in deserts. It is only after I am several stories in to the collection that it occurs to me how large a space water must occupy—metaphorically, spiritually, mortally—in a place as dry as a desert. Having it, polluting it, searching for it, its lack, the desire: these energies pulse under every parched story.

The collection is eerie, touching, speculative, reflective, funny, tragic, and bittersweet. “Ah civilization” one of her characters reflects, and this may be the second thread in the braid: living and dying and doing it all with other people in human society. The stories unearth what is good and what is ugly and what is futile in us. For me there are several other stories which particularly stand out, but each is individually strong and worth the reading.

The very first story—“Camp Clovis”—is a dreamy, shadowed, bittersweet story told in “we”s which starts as if a familiar summer camp story and flows silently into an extinction tale about the Clovis people. Even without obvious magic, it has a hard-to-place flavor of something mystical.

Her story “Hot Rain” has worked its way in to my brain and my heart and seems likely to stay there. It has a fractured, disorienting story about an elderly man, his suspicious caregivers, his adult children, and the lack and decay of parental love. Everyone is a little awful and a lot human and certainly hurt and vulnerable. Tenderness and anger and generosity and selfishness and grief permeate each paragraph. It is such a clear sketch of a family, of desperate and damaged people, of being angry with someone who is dying. At one point the group goes to a restaurant for a meal together and it goes achingly awry: ” “We are ungrateful and unworthy, Dad is telling us, beaming as if he’s just discovered the true meaning of being a parent. At our age he figures we don’t need to be coddled, protected from the truth the way we were in our upbringing, not acknowledging all his years of upbringing-neglect, the true truth.” And yet it still pulls a few laughs from me.

“The Mountain” is a strange and disturbing fairy tale. It unfolds in a city-village that exists then-now-always in which all the children have been lured into the mountain by a pied piper—or perhaps sacrificed to the mountain—except for but one girl. She has a limp and fell behind and so was saved; subsequently the parents beat for being free. She suggests that the town may pay to get their children back, but this suggestion instead of calming the distraught parents enrages them as they descend into absurd, banal infighting about who should pay more and why. They decide to sacrifice the kind and queen to the mountain, who do not like hits idea at all and suggest that the people simply have more children, and who thwart the plan by murdering the girl at the doorstep of the mountain and either chaining, deporting, or promoting the parents into acquiescence.

Finally, the collection closes with what is for me the strangest and most evocative story: “Pink Pyramid.” In a dark, bizarre, and isolated dystopian past/present/future a man and a woman live in a travel home in the glow of a huge pink pyramid. What has happened, and what is happening, and what will happen outside of the immediate events of their interactions is shadowed; what matters is the emotional energy between the two, and it is heartbreaking and beautiful. With no explanation of the pyramid, the gas, the work, the shadowy threatening “they” who had sensors supposedly everywhere, the cataclysmic war, or anything else, the reader is forced to read only the immediate reactions of the two. But is he a ghost? A figment of her imagination? Is she? We are suspended in curiosity.

This is a wonderful, and fiercely original collection for anyone who enjoys fiction in any genre—literary, speculative, horror, romance. It ticks all of the emotional boxes. Even still disoriented by and under the spell of what I read, I can confidently recommend it.

Red on White: Motherhood in Lynn Lurie’s Museum of Stones

The literature of motherhood, like motherhood itself, is full of different pathways. A reader or mother can venture down any number of routes through the experience, and the choices any person has in this regard are determined by luck as much as will. When I was pregnant the first time, a friend sent me Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, a popular memoir that frankly acknowledges Lamott’s demons: addiction, grief for her father, the mundane travails of single parenting.

Warm and wry, it was the right thing for me to read at the time; it patterned a kind of gallows humor that buoyed me through the tender hell of newborn care. I passed it around to other new mothers. Later, deeper into motherhood, I read and loved Rachel Zucker’s MOTHERs, which travels a darker (and more formally experimental) path, largely shaped by Zucker’s deep disappointment in her own mother. Here was a gravel-voiced account that provided companionship by daring to admit, as Zucker puts it, “how often I feel, when with my children, ‘I don’t want to be here.’”

Lynn Lurie’s new novel, Museum of Stones, locates its own route, one whose primary signpost is ominous tension born of trauma and pathology. From the book’s opening lines, its narrator describes her son, just born, as “a crumpled form” and his face “suctioned beneath transparent wrap, like meat.” Things only go downhill from there. “I do not know how to pray but I can weep,” the narrator says later, and indeed she finds little cause for joy, many reasons for tears. Life’s shared milestones become, for this character, occasions of pain.

In a steely, vivid style, through an unconventional formal project of modular paragraphs containing very little dialogue—each unit partially asunder from the others in narrative time—Lurie builds a picture of a woman’s life as it weaves and doubles back on itself via memory and expectation.

The image of blood on white paper, for example—the result of a minor mishap—links to a much more horrifying event, the accidental death of a childhood classmate when blood “continued to dribble onto his white shoes.” It connects also with the narrator’s experience of recovery from childbirth in the neonatal ward where her premature baby lies in an incubator: “As I shift across [the stool’s] hard surface, my skin, at the place of the sutures, throbs. I imagine the edges pulling apart, a crooked path of blood etched into my underwear.” Even her memory of courtship with her husband—“A bouquet of deep-colored roses, red wine, a bath in an antique tub…” coincides visually with this group of images, and thus emotionally too: Times of pleasure are, in this world, marked by the possibility of disaster.

The death of one’s child is the wraith that haunts every parent, of course: Though we call it “unimaginable,” in secret truth we conjure it frequently. Lurie has drawn a character whose fear and grief around loss operate on overdrive. Who knows how she would have fared with a healthy child; as it is, she and her son both suffer through a relentless series of problems whose explanations repeatedly shift along with their symptoms. The son’s early insomnia, as it develops into a phobia of water and obsessive-compulsive behavior, fuels and perhaps is fueled by the mother’s anxiety and addiction. Nurturance, for her, is neurosis—a kind of helplessness, in which every moment of care for another being piles another ounce of guilt and vulnerability onto an already groaning scale. “The attic-ceiling fan shakes with such force I imagine it breaking free and moving through the hallway, catching up to him as he runs toward his room, shredding his flesh and the fabric of his fire truck pajamas.”

Recurring throughout Museum of Stones are images from extended travel in South America, in which the narrator’s witness to suffering in Peru prefigures her experience of her child: an unruly other, a constellation of sorrows that is much too big for one person to fix or contain. Global inequality manifests here in specific scenes of personal heartbreak, like the mother in a rural village with no way to transport her seriously ill daughter to medical care.

An acquaintance in Peru calls the narrator “the one who is stained,” because of a birthmark on her face—again, red on white—and the moniker is apt. She is constantly attuned to darkness and disaster, her own and others’, and it makes her unwell; she may not be wrong, we tend to think uncharitably, when she laments, “Anyone…can care for him better than I.” This is motherhood as mental illness and mother as inexplicable Cassandra.

Lurie’s sometimes overwhelming narrator, and the events she endures, come to the fore, while Lurie herself stays in the background, composing quietly elegant sentences. (“I weave myself a crown using the ivy that grows between the rocks, unaware it is poison.”) In the background, too, is the narrator’s resilience and strength: though she gives herself very little credit for it, the reader slowly begins to admire this mother’s devotion to simply being present through the manifold discomforts of her particular motherhood, to doing better than her own mother did, and to supporting the strange gifts and intelligences that come along with her son’s struggles.

“How many times have I said my son’s name?” she reflects near the end of the book, as mother and son return to Peru together, and the place becomes an unexpected backdrop for the son’s remarkable adult competencies. “I walk beside him, occasionally falling a few steps behind.”

If motherhood takes every mother to the brink, then perhaps Lurie’s portrait of a woman perpetually on the edge is only an exaggeration of what is normal. Motherhood is not a “role” but a pervasive life condition, like a permanent amendment to one’s basic character. And, miraculously, childrearing tends toward growth and survival more often than not.

Lurie’s character had been attracted, as a young woman, to an antique Peruvian postcard captioned La Tejadora (“The Weaver”), and she has woven a certain pattern of understanding from her life’s disparate events. It may be a crown of poison or something more hopeful. In the same way, partly because of her choice to downplay most traditional techniques of fiction—dialogue and plot—Lurie has subtly constructed a picture of tenacious wholeness, if not health. “Stones erode, chip and cleave, yet remain essentially the same,” she writes.

The dreamlike quality of her narrative is, in the end, perhaps more true to life than a tidy narrative could be, and makes Museum of Stones a shimmering, poetic contribution to the world of mothers’ pathways.

An Interview with Julie Zuckerman, author of The Book of Jeremiah

In 2011, shortly after I settled in Raanana, Israel, I reached out to American-immigrant-writer, Evan Fallenberg, about writing groups. Evan connected me to Julie Zuckerman, who invited me to join hers. The handful of writers met in my town, a 45-minute drive for Julie. Despite other commitments—four children, a full-time job, mountain biking and running time—she showed up. But never alone. Every meeting, she brought Jeremiah: as a no-goodnik preteen, as a cantankerous retiree, as a contented professor. When anyone questioned Jeremiah, whether his character, behavior, action, intention, or decision, Julie never wavered. She knew him through and through. When anyone asked about the book’s structure, she answered clearly. Julie’s dedication to, curiosity about, and bafflement with Jeremiah shines through each page.

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Jennifer Lang: How long have you been writing about Jeremiah? Did you know from the get-go that you were trying to write about Jeremiah’s entire life or did you craft your first story as a standalone?

Julie Zuckerman: I wrote the first story in 2010. At the time, I was taking a fiction class with Evan Fallenberg, and he gave a prompt to write about someone who is “definitely not you” but who does something in which you’re interested. I wrote about an African-American woman who has her own business as a landscape architect; I like gardening, but don’t know much about it. I enjoyed writing that one so much, I used the same prompt for my next story. This time, it was a bit closer to home: an older Jewish man who takes up baking, which I do know something about. As soon as I wrote “MixMaster,” ultimately the final story in the collection, I knew I wanted to go back and unravel Jeremiah’s life.

JL: Who is Jeremiah? Is he based on anyone in your life? Who inspired his character?

JZ: Jeremiah’s voice was inspired by my father-in-law. My father-in-law is a lovable man, a true mensch, but at times he has a gruff exterior, and I was trying to figure him out. His parents had fled Germany in 1933 for France, where he was born in 1937. Thanks to wealthy friends in New York, the family was able to flee Europe in 1941. Three months after arriving, his father died of a heart attack, leaving his mother with four young boys. I often wondered how this early loss has affected his personality. I figured Jeremiah had experienced a similar trauma.

JL: How did you decide on the chronology?

JZ: I played with the order many, many times; I had at least six different possibilities. When I attended a writers’ conference at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2015, my instructor, Ellen Lesser, helped me strategize, telling me to think of the collection in thirds—younger, older, midlife. I had to balance the stories told from Jeremiah’s POV and from the POVs of others. I made flashcards and rearranged things and wanted to make sure there was a thread that carried through from story to story.

There’s an excellent essay “Stacking Stones” in David Jauss’s book Alone With All That Could Happen, in which he discusses the various ways one can structure a collection. “…we need to find a way to order [stories] so that they ‘expand and elaborate’ each other, and ultimately, become one unified work… Essentially, a successful short story collection is an elaborate system of parallels, contrasts, repetitions and variations that creates unity out of diversity.” Long before I read two of David’s story collections (also published by Press 53) and before he wrote a blurb for my book, I aligned with his advice.

JL: Is the book modeled after anything you’ve read?

JZ: Absolutely. I had recently read Olive Kittredge and loved how every story revealed new layers of Olive’s personality, even those in which she plays a minor role. My hope is that readers will find similar delight in getting to know Jeremiah.

JL: Did any part of this book involve research? If so, what?

JZ: For the stories that take place before the 1980s, I did a tremendous amount of research. There’s a story set in post-war Paris, another one during the tail end of the Vietnam War, another one during Freedom Summer. I read the archives of The New York Times, transcripts of press conferences, academic journal articles, eulogies of historical figures, accounts of what combat nurses and Signal Corps soldiers did during the war, and so on. I Googled things like “Depression-era Bridgeport” to picture what Jeremiah’s hometown (and my own) looked like in the 1930s.

Some of my research was on a lighter note, too: Jeremiah’s older brother Lenny is one of these kids who is obsessed with baseball, just as my own son was at the time. Ask me anything you want to know about Game 4 of the 1932 World Series, and I can probably answer.

JL: How long did it take you before you knew you were done telling his story?

JZ: I thought I was done in 2013/14 but ended up rewriting one of the stories completely. The only thing that remains the same from that earlier version is the year and location. I Googled to see happened in America in the summer of ‘64. Immediately, I found news items about three missing Civil Rights workers – Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney – whose bodies were later discovered in a Mississippi dam. We’d just had a horrific summer here in Israel, in 2014, which began with the abduction and murder of three teenage boys, Gil-ad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach and Naftali Fraenkel. I was struck by the parallels of the missing persons posters and knew I had my subject matter.

At some point in early 2015, I rewrote the last third of a different story. Between writing the first story and finishing the last significant revision, it took about five years to write the entire collection.

JL: What was it like writing about a character of the opposite sex?

JZ: I didn’t find it that difficult, to be honest. That’s one of the things I love about fiction writing, getting into the mindset of someone else and striving to find the connective tissue that bind us together, without regard to gender, race, religion, sexual orientation and so on. That being said, there’s one sex scene told from Jeremiah’s perspective which I was pretty nervous about. What a relief when the male instructor of a class I took through Catapult told me I’d aced the scene!

JL: What was the hardest chapter to write? Why?

JZ: Ironically, the hardest story to write was “The Dutiful Daughter,” which takes place in Israel. It’s told from the perspective of Hannah, Jeremiah and Molly’s daughter, on her first trip to the country, as an adult. The details about the setting in Israel were relatively easy, but it was a challenge to find the right balance between Hannah’s story and Jeremiah’s.

JL: How did you decide when to write a chapter in present/past tense?

JZ: I didn’t think about tense much when I first started writing the stories. Most were written in past tense, but during the revision process it felt more natural for certain stories to be told in present tense. I know some people look down on stories told present tense, but I went with my gut.

JL: Point of view shifts too. How did you decide who was best narrator for each chapter?

JZ: It evolved organically, just as with the varying tense shifts. From the outset, I knew I wanted to explore Jeremiah’s life from different perspectives. There are chapters told from the POVs of his mother, brother, wife, daughter and son, and originally there were more of those. But I found that my favorite stories were the ones told from Jeremiah’s POV; for reasons I’m not sure I can explain, I enjoyed being in Jeremiah’s head more than the others.

JL: What was one of the most surprising things you learned—about yourself, your characters, the craft—in writing this book?

JZ: I remember hearing craft advice about continuing to nurture your characters because if you don’t, they’ll wither and die. The first story in the collection, “A Strong Hand and an Outstretched Arm,” was one of my favorites, but it faced a lot of rejections. I didn’t want to give up on the story, so I kept revising and revising, ad nauseam. Finally, after four years of working on the story, the right ending clicked into place. Writing is an exercise in patience; often, you need to sit with a story for some time. It was a wonderful, gratifying surprise when I cracked that one open.