A Review of Kim Chinquee's Snowdog

Kim Chinquee’s flash collection is a fantastic display of brevity and brilliance. The book is divided into three parts, each of them focusing on recurrent characters, including humans and dogs, and their relationships during a certain period. The dogs reflect the main character’s emotions, and bring into the book some playfulness and some heartbreak.

The complexity of the love relationships introduced in Part I is well expressed in the “Dogfight”. One phrase reveals a history, “We survived him buying an old house in the woods, me selling my new home, us moving in, each with our two dogs, into this new one.” In this flash, the last line opens a world of horror, saying “I see the blood in her ears.” In fact, last lines are among the highlights in the collection. Another startling last line ends the flash “Snowstorm”, saying, “Some days, I felt I was made of plastic…I watched the girls. They put the babies in the water, dunking them and then raising them up again.”

Double-entendres enrich the readers’ understanding as they create parallels between the physical world and the couple’s life together. For instance, in “Foxy,” a flash dealing with health-related and emotional problems after the woman’s hysterectomy and the man’s injury, reads, “He veers onto an exit. There’s a bump in the road.”

However, while most flashes tackle emotional difficulties, others, such as “The Dog Smells Like Peppermint” are sexy and/or humorous.

Part II introduces another couple, but the main character’s sense of discomfort continues. The couple enjoy a rediscovery of their old love, but soon run into problems. She cannot detach herself from her life in her city, when she spends time with him. In “Old Toast” she says, “I think about my home in New York, what I might do if I were there, on my own, whose shirts I would iron, whose lawn I would mow, whose dinners I’d be making. Things I’d do for myself.” Several flashes clarify, each from a different angle, that she likes her own company, and possibly prefers it to living with the man. The flash “Airfare” solidifies it toward the end of this part, saying, as her departure approaches, “He said, ‘Honey, but I love you.’” After her plane lands, she tells herself, “You’re home now.’”

Part III is somewhat different from the previous ones. The main character moves into a new neighborhood, where she tries to find her standing. Here, too, however, nothing is easy nor simple. “Lucky” shows her desperate attempt to find common ground with the new neighbors. She and her neighbors are “in many ways alike, though maybe different by our hair and skin. By our preferences and sizes. By probably our blood types and sleep patterns and the things we like to eat and with whom we choose to partner.” There is hope here, humor and worry. She cares for her garden, but she also says, “I used to kill every plant I owned.”

Dogs are mediators with the world, with other people. In the moving flash “Luck” the narrator holds her dog on her arms, like a trophy. Unfortunately, the dog cannot fulfill the expectation. “His paws curl and his body trembles.”

The main character’s identification with dogs, a thread that goes along the collection, becomes ever clearer.  In the second part the character’s name is Elle. In the third part she is Ellen. She says, in the flash “Rescue” that “Ellen’s Chihuahua’s name was Elle. Ellen has been with Elle for seven years.”

There is mourning for Elle in one flash, but there is a new dog and renewed hope as well in the flash that ends the book. “I wondered if he (the dog Spiff) smelled the death smells—my uncle died there…Years before, my grandma died in her sleep…But people were also born there…”

In the third part, the author writes about childhood, among other things. The readers can identify the source of the character’s sense of danger in her early days. In “Wear Your Seatbelt,” the narrator remembers her father’s mental illness and mentions the mother’s habit to tell the daughters repeatedly, “Wear your seatbelt. Wear your seatbelt. Wear your seatbelt. Wear your seatbelt.”

Back at the farm where she grew up, for the last farewell, the narrator’s sense of reality is shaken: “But on this night a storm came. It blew everything all over.”

Many types of yearnings fill these pages. Of the strongest ones is the longing for the faraway son, who’s serving in the army. He appears in the first and the third part, always described with affection and care.

Another recurring subject is the determination and solidarity of athletes. The character’s team, unsurprisingly, gets a name related to dogs and is compared to dogs. “We panted. We said woof. We brushed our teeth on the sidewalk.”

This is a small book that accomplishes a lot in its preciseness and insight.

An Interview with Katie Nolan, Author of Confessions of a Hobo's Daughter

Deborah Woodard: Congratulations on the publication of your memoir, Confessions of a Hobo’s Daughter, Katie. This is such a multilayered remembrance, and it’s a real page turner! It features family secrets, tales—some of them hair raising—of riding the rails during the Great Depression, an ongoing query into how to live one’s own love story, and even phone calls to your writing teacher. How did you come to write Hobo's Daughter?  Was there a moment when the book clicked into place for you?

Katie Nolan: I carried my father's hobo stories, both written and in my memory, for years. So the idea that I ought to write them in a book form was there as well. Some of the stories were poignant, like the one where my parents, after retirement, were traveling with my nephew. My father gestured to the town jail as they traveled through and exclaimed, “I was jailed there once.”  My mother immediately said, “Don't say that in front of your grandson!”  There was always this tension in the family as to whether his story should be told, or not. I felt that telling his story completely would vindicate him, create empathy for his plight, and that of many others, of being forced into a life on the rails due to the Great Depression.

DW: You tell the parallel stories of Bud and Katie, father and daughter. Both of them ride the rails, but in different ways. Bud never buys a ticket, for instance. Did you ride the rails to prepare for writing the book?  If so, what stood out for you as illuminating moments?  Did this journey make you feel closer to Bud?

KN: I rode the rails along the same routes that I knew my father took; I was in search of my father, someone who had always seemed bigger than life and heroic to me, in the way that he sacrificed, first for his parents by helping them with his meager earnings, then for our family of five, as he worked full time as a logger along with his second job as a dairy farmer. All of this labor and he was still able to spend lots of time with us on camping trips. I think what dominated my thoughts during my thirty-day train trip was how amazing it was that my father was able to be the most optimistic person I'd ever known in spite of hardships that would turn another person despondent. By his hobo stories and his everyday joviality, he taught me perhaps the most valuable lesson of my life—how to be positive and optimistic in the face of darkness. His joviality took the form of singing silly songs on his way to the woodshed every morning, and of tickling the feet of his children to wake them up. My childhood friend, who often stayed with me, remembers the latter and the memory always makes us laugh. I have always felt very close to my father, but the journey and my writing of the book brought insights into him as an exploited human being. My admiration of him took on a new form, a new understanding, beyond those early memories of daughter and father.

DW: You write a lot about the Great Depression in your memoir. Were anecdotes of those years passed down to you by your parents and grandparents, or did you rely on research. Or both?

KN: My parents and grandparents did often speak of living through the Great Depression. To this day, I learn some new stories from cousins who had their father, and my father's brothers, tell them similar tales. Each of the brothers, except for the youngest, was told that they “better get on the road and find work, so that they could feed the girls.”  From my earliest memories, my grandparents lived in the schoolhouse that they had bought at auction when they arrived in the northwest. We visited there often, as they lived less than a mile down the road from where I grew up. My grandparents came as many others did after being blown out from the dust storm. They lost all they had in the dust bowl, except for the few things they could tie onto their old jalopy. I recall the wood cook-stove that they brought with them, which looked huge and imposing to me as a child, and the story was told that grandpa didn't want the burden of bringing the stove along, but grandma insisted. Walls and rooms were built into the schoolhouse over time, but they never changed the porch where students had hung their coats on their way into the schoolroom. In bold red paint it said “Play Ball!”  Because my grandparents spoke often about coming to the northwest, I definitely felt the history they described. I did some research, including verifying that Nebraska also suffered from the dust bowl, something that is not always mentioned in the history books. I also researched the resistance of workers to the injustices of that time, including the famous “hunger marches” of the unemployed. On March 6, 1930 there were hunger marches all across the country, including the one mentioned in my book at Union Square in New York City. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers marched in major cities throughout the United States, demanding relief from joblessness and hunger. Marchers were generally met with brutal repression; however, after the marches public sympathy for the plight of the workers increased. Unemployment insurance eventually followed.

DW: Despite the hard times that Bud endures, the book is full of moments of keenly-felt joy and companionship. I'm thinking in particular of some of the scenes in the hobo camps, for instance when Bud scores a chicken and they all make hobo stew. And also of Bud's friendship with Harry, his fellow former convict, which is every bit as satisfying as Thelma and Louise. Do you feel that extreme circumstances can give rise to joy?  If so, what characterizes this joy?

KN: There is joy and companionship in hard times. Perhaps there is a relationship between extreme circumstances and tight bonds between human beings. Relationships deepen when you see that you can trust someone with your life. This is revealed when you face life threatening circumstances together. But I'd like to believe that we can experience the same deeply trusting relationships without going through starvation or war.

DW: I understand that you are a former philosophy professor. Can you share a bit from a philosopher you find more relevant?

KN: One of my readers stated that I had “bared my soul” in the book and that was part of what she liked about it. Well, opening one's soul can leave one feeling both embarrassed and vulnerable. But my embarrassment is also related to a recent epiphany that I, as the daughter, perfectly exemplify the Buddhist philosophy of grasping, aversion, and delusion, otherwise known as the wheel of samsara (basic and universal human suffering). I see myself as this very confused, deluded person grasping for love in all the wrong ways, then expressing an aversion to the project of love. It should make me blush, and does, that I was so blind.

There is a great deal of depth to the concept of delusion that I am not addressing here. Nonetheless, the basic idea that delusion, as it is related to reality, ontologically and epistemologically, and as it drives our grasping and our aversions, seems to be something I totally missed when grappling with my failed romantic relationships. This perhaps adds substance to the opinion that we do have to deal with our emotional blind spots, use psychological tools such as counseling if needed, before we can successfully embark on a spiritual path that promises to remove suffering. I can only hope that my epiphany will help me install a bit more wisdom into my next book!

DW: That’s fascinating! More love stories should be written by philosophers. I just have a couple more questions for you. Katie reminisces about her past relationships while on the train. Without giving away the revelation at the end of the book, could you draw any parallels between what Bud and Katie experience and come to learn?

KN: Since I was raised poor, perhaps I have an inherent understanding of how economic injustice creates barriers to healthy intimate relationships. In this country, propaganda has convinced many that being poor means you are a flawed human being, perhaps lazy or stupid. I found that many potential partners I met were either true believers in this myth—this was always painful when I realized their view—or subconsciously, perhaps, judged me as inferior somehow. I couldn't help but take it personally.

DW: We may be facing another Great Recession. What lessons can we learn from Bud's story?

KN: Dad's life is an example of economic and social injustice. With minimal research it becomes evident that very few wealthy people go to prison. Or in street talk “We get the best justice we can buy.”  Bud was put on a chain gang because he had less than a dollar in his pocket—at that time this was the result of a vagrancy law. Massive imprisonment of the poor seems to me to coincide with economic instability and its creation of the poor, the majority of whom are women and children. It is still true that approximately 80% of the world's poor is composed of women and children, while women continue to do 80% of the world's work!  This creation of the poor, which increases with each recession, is also complicated by institutional racism.

Laws and policies are intimately connected to the specter of another recession. Laws favored the banks when my grandparents experienced the loss of the family homestead in Nebraska. During the Great Recession of 2007 onward, policies favored the banks and the 1% of the wealthiest. Or as a friend put it when I lost my house and life savings in the 2007 recession, “You didn't lose your house and savings. That money is in someone’s pocket.” 

Unless we strengthen democratic institutions, history will repeat itself.

Sense of the Strange: An Interview with Chloe N. Clark

Chloe N. Clark holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment. Her chapbook, The Science of Unvanishing Objects, was published by Finishing Line Press and her debut full length poetry collection, Your Strange Fortune, was published by Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. Her poetry chapbook, Under My Tongue, was published with Louisiana Literature Press in early 2020. She is founding co-editor-in-chief of Cotton Xenomorph. She teaches multimodal composition, communication, and creative writing. Her poetry and fiction have appeared such places as Apex, Bombay Gin, Drunken Boat, Gamut, Hobart, Uncanny, and more.

In Chloe Clark’s new short story collection, Collective Gravities, published with Word West, she takes us to the stars. She takes us to the zombie apocalypse and to mysterious research facilities. She frequently bends genre, putting horror side to side with sci-fi. It was a true joy to read Chloe Clark’s new collection, and I was privileged enough to have the opportunity to chat with her about the process of writing the book.

*

Dana Diehl: Please tell us a little bit about how this book came to be.

Chloe Clark: On one level, there’s the simple answer: I had a lot of stories and wanted to collect them up. On the truer level though, I kept finding that I’d circle back to similar themes and ideas, often seeing them in different ways, throughout the course of my writing and so I began to see a collection taking shape based on those qualities. 

This collection spans ten years of writing: the oldest story in the collection was originally drafted while I was still an undergrad. Which is weird to think about because I now teaching writing to undergrads. So the stories in this piece have gone through a big, important chunk of my life.

DD: I see images repeat themselves in several your stories. The image of the bruised woman. Space travel. Mysterious illnesses. The images have different significance in each story. It was fun for me as a reader, because I felt like I was seeing alternate realities play out. It was also fun looking for the ideas that strung your stories together. How intentional were the similarities between your stories? How do you think reoccurring images might strengthen a collection?

CC: Often the similarities were very intentional, in my mind a lot of my stories exist within the same universe (or slightly altered versions of it). I’ve always loved writers whose work invites conversation between pieces (it’s a bonus for people “in the know” who have read the other stories and see the connections, and it also feels like a reader can see the world of the stories more fully). Sometimes, they were less intentional when I was writing the stories, but then when editing I’d see that I’d done it and it was because I had felt that the stories shared some connection. 

I’m a huge proponent of novel-in-stories, so I think that continuity strengthens and redefines the way we read the pieces when we notice the connections or when we go back for a reread. They feel somehow “truer” when there are those connections that help us see the story beyond just the one frame.

DD: Another prevalent theme I see in your stories is isolation. One of your stories, “Bound,” explores a plague that sweeps the planet and forces the speaker into isolation. As we do this interview, we’re approaching the third month of quarantine in the US. When I read “Bound,” I found it to have chilling similarities to what we are experiencing today. Have recent events changed the way you view these stories? Has quarantine changed the creative work you’re doing now?

CC: This is a multilayered question to me. I’ve always been fascinated by isolation and how it affects people. Many of my favorite writing and movies, growing up, dealt with this. In some ways, I think isolation is one of the ultimate human fears.

I think recent events have, if anything, made me feel more strongly about the need to deal with isolation in writing. I think voicing the fears and anxieties of isolation, for people, is important. Writing and reading help us feel less alone.

DD: So many of these stories take us into the stars. What draws you to outer space as a setting for your stories? 

I’m not sure I have a great answer for this. For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved space. The unknown and the thought of all that exploration that has yet to be done is so compelling. Plus, what has been discovered through the reach for space has been so important and profound.

In my heart, I’m a wanderer and what better to go towards than the stars?

DD: Is there a movie or novel that has especially fueled or inspired your interest in space?

CC: Oof, that’s hard to narrow down. But I think the main media of my childhood were three distinct space pieces of art: Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, the BBC radio production of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the film Aliens. I think that mix actually kind of perfectly sums up my writing about space: A lot of hope and exploration, a distinct sense of delight, and a dose of fearing the unknown.

DD: In Collective Gravities, you explore a huge range of genres, from realistic fiction to science fiction, horror, and even zombie apocalypse. What do you like about playing with speculative fiction? What genres are your favorite to consume in your everyday life?  

CC: I think I think in multiple genres. It’s very hard for me to stick in one, even within the scope of a single piece. I’ve said before that I think speculative is how we live our lives—everyone has a sense of the strange about how they view the world and it makes sense to imbue our stories with that, too.

I read pretty widely. I’ve always had a love of sci-fi and horror, but I also read tons of domestic fiction and literary fiction. My favorite writers tend to be the ones who have feet in every genre like Colson Whitehead, Helen Oyeyemi, and China Mieville.

DD: In your bio, you mention that you have an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment, which is a degree I didn’t even know existed! What is your relationship with the environment and space as you’re working through a story?

CC: It’s a very cool and unique degree, from Iowa State University, that I wish more people knew about!

I think environment is extremely important to every piece I write—because environment encompasses so much: it might be a small town, but it also applies to the reaches of outer space or a haunted apartment building. Place influences character and story as much as any other element. 

We all have places that center us—be it our homes or a spot that makes us feel something. And I think that’s true of most good works of fiction too—there’s some distinct sense of place that makes the reader understand or feel the piece in a way. 

Because I’m a very visual writer, I usually know exactly what a story’s environment looks like. But I also hate describing that stuff in too much depth—because I want the reader to have input in the place they conjure up as they read. So one thing I always try to be cognizant of is finding the key detail that brings me into an environment and that’s what I’ll include. Sometimes I know that key detail right away, but it’s often one I eventually find in revision and pull into the forefront as I strip the other details away.

DD: One of my favorite lines in this collection can be found in “The Collective Gravity of Stars”:

“’Well, everything will be better now,’ her mother said. Callie wondered if anyone had ever said that and watched it come true.”

For me, this line captures the way your stories seem to pendulum-swing between pessimism and optimism. However, they tend to more often than not end in a moment of hopefulness, of light. Can you speak to this

CC:  I often describe myself as an optimistic pessimist. I think there’s a lot of importance to knowing and understanding how much is flawed and terrible about this world. But hope is equally as important, because that’s what helps us strive to actually make change.

And from a storytelling perspective, I think pessimism has its place, but it’s a lazy device. Hope is an active choice to be made and that’s far more exciting to me.

DD: If you could take off into outer space with your characters, where would you most like to go?

CC: Honestly, I’d be overjoyed just to go to space at all. But if I had the means to go anywhere, I think Mars would be a good start. There’s such a build up of Mars in my head from all of the sci-fi of my youth that imagining feeling the ground of Mars beneath my feet would be as close to living inside my dreams as I could get.

One Illuminated Letter of Being by Donald Platt

I knew of a woman who, in the course of a terminal illness, and without giving much thought to the matter, expressed a liking for sweet peas. Before long, every table, every shelf and windowsill, was filled with the scent and colour of this most youthful, this most joyful of flowers until she could bear to look at them no longer. Such are the pitfalls in the prelude to loss.

This rather sad memory resurfaced after reading the collection of thirty-two poems in which Donald Platt lets us in on the uniquely personal, but ultimately universal trials of his mother’s illness, her death, and his subsequent mourning. Unflinching, but tenderly descriptive, they take us through the quiet courage, the moments of weakness, the little acts of unselfishness inherent in such an experience, in a gentle, but compelling series of unrhymed tercets. Along the way, autobiographical detail lends colour and perspective to a slowly developing picture of Platt and his family’s relationship with Martha, an artist and lover of classical music, who died in 2014 in her nineties. We meet, among others, Dana, his “million-piece jigsaw” wife with her own experience of recent  bereavement; his brother with Down syndrome whom his mother had not wanted to see in case her “skull-like head and jack-o’-lantern face…” might terrify him; and his two daughters making origami creatures — a peacock, frogs, ducks . . . for their grandmother sitting immobile in her yellow armchair. 

In the opening poem the author is looking at an old black-and-white photograph of himself at four years of age, lying in a bed alongside his baby brother. Their mother is smiling as she looks down on them both. Her eyelashes are long, he notes, and “her hair’s cut short. She’s dead.”  It’s a stark and arresting beginning to a tale which combines pathos, perception and occasionally humour, as when Platt finds himself in the meditation room at Albany airport after visiting his mother at the hospice earlier. He recalls her saying “I’m so ready to die” and prays that she will no longer have to endure her ninety-six-year-old body wrecked by sickness and pain. He remembers too the shared laughter at that colloquial “so” she had learned from watching TV. There’s something rather beautiful in that little exchange.

There’s a mingling of the factual and the lyrical, the day-to-day and the emotional that gives this collection such honesty; gives it integrity. I liked Martha’s attention to detail in planning her own funeral in “Fantaisie” (“. . . Bill Eakins to preach” — “give $100 to organist”); and in “Watercolor with Trees in Fog” the author remembers watching his mother paint: adding one last touch, a scrap of yellow, before appending the picture with a price tag of $65.00. He concludes, rather touchingly, that he will never be able to repay her. “Cloud Hands” is set in a hospice with various wards or units given Evelyn Waugh-esque names such as Harmony Lane and Hummingbird Hill. The place is described in detail, even down to its odours of urine, disinfectant and meatloaf. In Whispering Pines, his mother tells him it was good of him to come, and in a heart-breaking scene familiar to many, “the tears well up and burn my eyes so that I can no longer see her.”

Early one morning he receives a call to say his mother has passed on. Lung cancer, it says on the death certificate, and coronary artery disease. He had been with her only two hours earlier. Her ashes are buried — “a birthday present to the cold earth” — but she lives still: he talks to her; tells her what he has been doing. He sees and feels her presence everywhere. Sitting in a garden near Aubagne, east of Marseille, she is in “the silver green leaves of the twisted olive trees”; she is “the rooster that crows all night in expectation of the dawn” and “she’s the smell of thyme I crush between my fingers.”  There is a lovely moment when the author relates the story of how he came by the scar on his forehead. His mother had reminded him, one month before her death, how she had pushed him and a friend down the street on a sled, and they had crashed into a milk truck. And now the scar, the “signifier of my pain, of my mother’s self-blame” has become to him “love’s north star . . . still shining fifty-four light years away.” Such are the small compensations for the guilt and utter helplessness felt when witnessing the decline and passing of a loved one.

Plants, flowers, the natural world generally, feature a good deal in this fine narrative of love and loss: the “frail and foolish” crocuses that stand undismayed by desultory snow; the red-pink cloud of blossoms floating up from a crape myrtle; the lavender moth orchid he bought for his mother, and which he refers to as her “death orchid”. In “Wisteria” he’s planning to grow a variety called “Amethyst Falls”, building it a trellis anchored in concrete:

                                         and strung with horizontal
galvanized steel cable. I’ll train the wisteria’s wrought-iron vines
to climb and twine

through these staves, to become a sprawling G clef that will flower
into late spring’s
lavender notes, cross-pollinated by bees, its sound and scent carrying far

beyond our backyard.
On the harp strings of the trellis, it will blossom again and again into one
illuminated letter of being. 

It is a splendid poem, the last five words of which provide the title of this collection, describing practically but also quite beautifully the making of this living memorial to his dead mother. 

An old poet once told Platt that flowers were the only proper subject for poetry; it was an idea he dismissed out of hand at the time, but now he’s not so sure. His mother is dying when everything is coming into bloom, and there is a sadness, but also a sort of comforting inevitability in that fact; a parallel explored within these pages in an even, an almost subdued voice which, in its telling, is a quietly persuasive celebration of life.

A Review of The Nail in the Tree by Carol Ann Davis

Carol Ann Davis and her family had recently moved to Newtown, Connecticut when twenty first-graders and six educators were gunned down on December 4, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School. During the massacre, her youngest son was home with his father, and the older was in his fourth-grade classroom, but “through an accident of zoning,” neither was a student at Sandy Hook. 

The Nail in the Tree begins with an explanation of the title: Davis tells the story of her older son, Willem, now in high school and an activist, explaining how he does his best to make sense of the shooting:

Willem explained that the way he felt about the tragedy was similar to a tree with a nail driven into its skin. As the tree grows, the nail becomes a part of it, a gnarled knot in a trunk that nonetheless grows tall and strong. You would not take out the nail, would you, Mom? he asked me. At some point you have to love the nail.

Davis’s collection, part of Tupelo Press’s Life in Art series, is a thorough examination of that nail and that tree. Chapters are labeled by both title and time — "the day of the shooting,” “in the year that comes after,” “two years before,” “three years after”— revolving around this one incident and attempting to make sense not so much of the violence itself, but of its repercussions vibrating through her family's life. What does it say that the “not-suffering, happy-ending story” means being the child not shot, the family not destroyed?

Davis’s cyclical way of writing and processing works well as she deals with these vibrations, tying them to other lived experiences, her writing, and other art media. As Davis says, “Art is experience’s contingency,” and much of the book is spent interacting with numerous artists and their work — Rumi, Hélène Cixous, Georgia O’Keefe, and Tomas Tranströmer, to name a few — attempting to deconstruct how they have used their art to understand the world. She writes of Eva Hesse, “It’s clear she expects only to get closer to what she envisioned, never to arrive at it,” and that’s what these essays feel like: a constant circling nearer to what Davis is looking at, but never quite arriving. This is not so much a criticism of Davis's book as a way of understanding it: this book is not about the arrival but about the circling — the attempts to make meaning rather than the meaning itself. 

For instance in “On Brotherhood and Crucifixion: two years before,” Davis recalls incidents from her childhood, writing how difficult it must have been to be an older brother to her and her siblings, “to shield us from the unaccountable as it assuaged us in various forms throughout our childhoods.” Later she realizes, “nothing I can do takes back that I was not only witness but cause of his suffering. . . . This brings me close — close — to what the feeling of being a brother must be.” Circling, not arriving. 

Davis writes a lot about the unknowable things we cannot express, looking at essential paradoxes: how a thing can be both wild and tame, inside and outside of ourselves, taken and not taken, pursuing and leading, and general chaos structured as order. At times her writing captures that inexpressible expression, but at others it feels like an evasion, the words purposefully hiding their meaning, although maybe this too is another paradox she’s exploring, another yin and yang. 

For example, In “Loose Thread: four years after” Davis writes of her children in conflict with some of their friends:

The way they argue over a narrative they all frame differently has me thinking about the ethics of the image, how a narrative sometimes detaches the image from its surroundings; in the case of argument, images can be produced to substitute for reason, to provide a tidy narrative, or to illustrate a wrong deeply felt, among many possibilities. The image’s symbolism detaches it from the realities of the experience and from its original ethical framework.

Phrases like “ethics of the image” and “the image’s symbolism” and “original ethical framework” feel more like strings of words than intelligible concepts, like a hiding place for Davis, as she explores the issues while trying to make sense, unable to circle too close. Her work shines brightest when she does deal with the concrete: the nail in the tree, the act of putting a child on a bus, minding a radio tower at the beach as a young woman handling calls about drownings. Two pages after the above quote, she admits to her fear in more tangible terms:

These days I live in fear of the catalog in poems, once a friend for its precision and the accretion of depth, even for its potential surprise: I am fond of apples, tomatoes, and elocution exercises. But now, familiar with a catalog that lists names of children lost one after the other, I’m leery of the harm cataloging can do, grammar seeming to make inevitable their senseless murders, reducing their deaths into nothing more than a list.

Here Davis circles so closely and so specifically. We know her emotion — fear — and we see real things — lists, apples — and what she likes about these lists — precision and depth. This is followed by the gut punch of the list of the kids and “the harm cataloging can do.” 

In the end, Davis doesn’t necessarily answer her questions about art and life, chaos and order, but she’s smart to realize, “What I want of my art is not at all what will come out of it,” which is where the reader comes in. At the end of the book I asked myself, What did come of it? What has this art taught me?, which demonstrates that Tupelo’s Art in Life series, and Davis’s work in particular, extends well beyond words on a page. 

Asking the Right Questions: The Overstory by Richard Powers

The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

The Overstory by Richard Powers, whether it changes your mind or not, is a damn good story. It is also more than just a story.

I picked up The Overstory months ago in a moment of inspiration. It is a 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner, but more importantly, Keanu Reeves had recommended it in an interview. Since I would trust John Wick with my life, I figured I could trust him with recommendations. And yet, committing to a tome of 625 pages seemed as ambitious an attempt as the book itself.

I drifted in and out of it for many weeks, eventually picking up pace with my reading once I decided it would be my April read for my monthly reading challenge. It took me another six weeks to plod through it, but once I had finished, I flipped back the volume — now extensively dog-eared and interspersed with pressed flowers — to its beginning, and I inscribed under the title the two sentences that open this review.

As I write this now, I realize how challenging it is to comment on The Overstory without resorting to blatant exhortations at people to “give a f*ck about trees”. But we’ll come back to this.

The Overstory is divided into four parts. Roots, Trunk, Crown, Seeds. Each chapter in Roots is a mini bildungsroman of one of the main characters of the novel, of which there are as many as eight/nine. They are as diverse as could be; a farmer’s son who becomes an artist, a reclusive child fascinated with ants, an IP lawyer and an amateur theatre enthusiast, a loadmaster in the Vietnam War, the engineer daughter of a Chinese immigrant, a computer nerd in a wheelchair, a hearing and speech impaired young scientist, and a carefree student living a risqué lifestyle who dies for seventy seconds and then comes back to life, serving as a bridge between the Roots and Trunk of the novel.

As I read Roots, it felt like I was reading a collection of short stories, each story coming across as objectively detached. These chapters seem as unconnected as they are different, like trees and men. But as pointed out more than once, “you and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor”. And so it is that the nine protagonists share a common thread. For one of them, it is stated outright, “he owes his life to a tree”. The rest, in their own strange ways, do the same. Even the one broken by a fall from an oak. Even the one to whom trees mean nothing but the stage prop forests of Birnam Wood in Macbeth.

It is only about one-third into the book — we’re barely through the understory — that Olivia, the resurrected, finds Nicholas, the tree artist. Soon, more roots come together to form the trunk. Five of them unite to form the heartwood. Much of the story hereon is focused on the battle for the Californian redwoods, waged against timber companies working their way at a suicidal pace through the country’s green cover, but a battle is a mere milepost in the trajectory of the greater war — the endless struggle of planet versus profit.

One of the key tenets of The Overstory is the delineation of this struggle and its stakes — the tree of life is on the brink of collapse. Mankind’s hunger for ‘just a little bit more’ is endless, and endless exploitation of resources within a finite system can only lead to one outcome. Climate crisis is already upon us, a pressing life-threatening reality, and deforestation alone has been a bigger factor than the carbon footprint of the world’s transportation taken together. A key character proposes damage control, “What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

The other is simply this — trees are the most wondrous products of four billion years, they’re sentient, they’re social, and they need our help.

Yes, The Overstory tells you why you should give a f*ck about trees, but it also narrates the story of men and women, those who are brought alive in its 600 odd pages. From failing to remember their names in the first part, to witnessing their journeys of self-discovery, to being moved to tears in the end pages by their acts of love, sacrifice, betrayal and redemption, the "best novel ever written about trees" (Ann Patchett) takes you on a tumultuous ride through the experiences and emotions of its bipedal heroes.

More than anything, The Overstory amazed me with its details. The sheer volume of minutiae — of plants and their species and their behaviours and habitats — had me constantly wondering how long and hard the research for the book must have been. It took Powers five years to write The Overstory. But Powers is known as the ‘the last generalist’ and known well for writing masterpieces in the realist tradition. The Overstory is one triumph among many.

And yet, there is such a thing as too many details. The Overstory could have been part botany text if not for the seamless way in which tree talk is interwoven into the story, but reading it can be exhausting at times. There were pages when the descriptions wore me down to the point where baobabs and their buttresses and bald cypresses and cedars all seemed to merge into one another.

The scope of the story is grandiose, even overreaching, spanning the entire lives of many of its characters. The sheer chronological scale makes it necessary for chunks of the story to be summarized, which Powers does with skill. This, however, renders some parts too simplistic, as if the writer couldn’t afford to have his readers stray in contemplation. Dilemmas are dissected, motives and actions explained, evidences clearly signposted.

Nonetheless, The Overstory has more than one trick up its sleeve. Structurally, the book is a conceit. The story unfolds like the whorls on a tree. A bunch of roots unite to feed its trunk, extending into the crown, which reaches out towards the sky and in a final act of bountiful giving, disperses its seeds into the cerulean expanse.

More notably, The Overstory asks the important questions. How much is enough? How long do we have? Do trees have rights? Does the end justify the means? It is remarkable and scary how pertinent these questions seem to be in the current times; a time of bushfires and cyclones and earthquakes and pandemics and rising temperatures and weakening magnetic fields. Even when the ideological tussle of environmentalism vs capitalism veers off into the territory of ecoterrorism, absolute censure of the acts of vandalism and arson is difficult in view of what is at stake. Violence, by all accounts, cannot be justified, but what when it’s state-sponsored? When the city’s finest are the ones pouring pepper spray into the eyes of peaceful protesters? Who do you call when the police murders?

One of my favourite modern artworks is the photographic self-portrait of Adel Abdessemed, French-Algerian contemporary artist, where he set fire to himself and struck a defiant pose in response to contemporary events like Arab Spring and Syrian Civil War. A dominant interpretation is that it represents the incitement of violence in response to the injustice existing in the world. Similar sentiments echo through The Overstory, and whether it changes your mind or not about the merit of desperate measures in desperate times, it will at the least have you acknowledge it as more than just a good story.

Some may even call it radical. Radical, a word that comes from Radix. Root.

An Interview with John Reed, author of A Drama in Time: The New School Century

Kristina Marie Darling: Your newest book, A Drama in TIme: The New School Century, just launched from Profile Books Ltd. What are three things you’d like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?

John Reed: Well, I'd like people to know about The New School and its history, and coming to the book with a very basic outline of The New School is something I'd hope for. There's nothing like writing a book about a submarine and having someone ask you, "but what's a submarine?"

I'd also love for people to know that it's a reference book, with many pictures, and that it was designed to read through or to just peck at, reading now and then and going back to for information. That would make me really happy, knowing the book lived that kind of life on people's shelves.

The last thing, hmm. I'd love for people to know that there are many mysteries to solve here. 

KMD: In addition to your achievements in nonfiction, you are an accomplished poet and novelist. Why is it important for writers to allow themselves to move fluidly between genres? What can nonfiction writers learn from poets? And from their colleagues working in fiction? 

JR: When I was in graduate school in the 90s, this idea of writing across genres was actively discouraged. It may still be discouraged at some schools. I was often challenged: what are you? Would I be writing cultural criticism, non-fiction, poetry, fiction? My first novel was historical fiction, which seemed at the time the only way to marry a fictive sensibility with an historical one. Now, many of those distinctions have gone away, which is as it should be. This is partly, I expect, a result of the use of fiction techniques in non-fiction, and vice versa. And this isn't only in the literary space, but in the media space. Reality television, the internet, etc etc, all this is old hat now. We understand that narrative design is a skill apart from the writing itself. It seems to me, and I'm sure people would disagree with me here, that there are really only two forms of text, prose and poetry, and that even those two aren't that different. If you can write a line of poetry, and you understand to limit your metaphorical values and employ extended metaphors rather than multiple metaphors, you can write a line in any form: film, television, advertising, essay, journalism, anything. And the great lessons of prose—narrative structure, tense, interiority and POV—will take you into any textual terrain, line to line, scene to scene, paragraph to paragraph.

KMD:  Relatedly, How did your cross-genre sensibility equip you for the rewards and challenges of writing A Drama in Time: The New School Century?

JR: The problem of a centennial book about The New School was a sophisticated one: how could I make it a single compelling story? The fear was that it would be: a giant block of prose that was dry as dust; a nearly as boring timeline; a seemingly random series of callouts. The solution was to layer an epic structure onto a journey structure: there are many individuals and points of the story, but the story as a whole is a characterization of The New School. That's what justifies the non-chronological telling. I wanted to put the internal experience of the school before the external experience of the school. I was quite pleased with the solution; it came to me as an aha revelation.

KMD: In addition to documenting the New School’s history, you also teach in the MFA in writing program there. What has teaching opened up for you as you embarked on this project?

JR: The project has been extraordinarily humbling. I've had the chance to research—not nearly enough but still I'm grateful—the lives and visions of an amazing cohort of artists, writers, creatives and thinkers. There's so much more to do; I can only hope I'll keep finding ways to go back to this history. As faculty, I'm humbled and honored to work with the New School artists, writers, creatives and thinkers of today—all of the community that upholds the New School tradition. The people at The New School impress me every day. Everyone. 

KMD: As you promote A Drama in Time, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?

JR: I'd love to work on some narrative design seminars: look at narrative structure as it's utilized across media and throughout culture. I do things like that in my teaching at The New School but I enjoy the more open forums sometimes.  

KMD: What’s next? What are you currently working on? 

JR: I'm finishing up a long term historical novel project: very much in keeping with my first novel. Civil War, a bit of romance, history and sadness. I've also been working on a quick novel project, through this COVID moment: another romantic project, an apocalyptic love story. I have these sonnet videos I'm playing with. I don't know. I'd be curious to know what people think about those. Not really officially anything yet but I was thinking of doing a "season" of them.