Tribute Essay in High Country News

This week I have an essay in High Country News titled "The Sign Maker" honoring Phil Garfoot, who died almost exactly a year ago. I was lucky enough to have a couple of fine Barnhart photos of Phil's signs accommany the essay, but I thought it'd be fun to include several more. Unfortunately the snow still hangs in the high country so these shots don't include many fine trail junction signs, but they give a sense of how ubiquitous and fitting they are here in Stehekin.

http://www.hcn.org/issues/43.6/the-sign-maker

Teaching, Writing, Publishing

So the three are supposed to be in eternal conflict, I realize. How much time do I spending writing (duh - as much as I can), trying to publish (crucial, right?), and teaching (my passion/my paycheck)? Last semester the three dovetailed nicely and I have my nonfiction workshop at Whidbey Writers Workshop to thank. Sort of. I was afraid, as all writing teachers are secretly afraid, that teaching would sap all my energy. I was simultaneously afraid that I had demanded too much of the students - a complete draft or revision every week of the semester. So I decided I had to keep up. I had to submit a complete draft or revision of an essay to myself and/or to an editor every single week. The rule worked well because it kept me writing, and also because it kept me from fretting over creating a masterpiece every time I sat down to write. The results: 8 essays in 16 weeks. Seven of which have been published or accepted for publication. Here's one from the current issue of Mountain Gazette:

http://www.mountaingazette.com/mountain-notebook/re-entry/

Test Ride on the PNBA 2011 Book Awards Short List

Just before Laurie and I left on a sprawling Thanksgiving trek that has temporarily landed us at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in Northern California for Laurie to prune a few fine old trees, I heard via the grapevine that Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus was shortlisted for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association 2011 Book Awards. I didn't quite believe it, but it was true. Big news in my little world. In part because some of the other authors on the list were literary heroes of mine when I first started writing - Rick Bass, Ivan Doig - and all of them are authors I admire.

http://www.pnba.org/awardsshortlist2011.html


Additional kudos - and thanks - to Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA student Janet Buttenwieser. The PNBA folks chose to link to the interview she did with me outside Elliott Bay Books in May as introduction to the book.

http://whidbeystudents.com/nonfiction/

Mink River

I’ve long admired Brian Doyle’s essays: succinct, precise, unexpected, and gorgeous. They’re chockfull of playful language, unabashed spirituality, and plain elation. It’s not as though Doyle’s unwilling to confront harsh realities. His very short essay “Leap” is the most moving response to 9/11 I’ve ever read. But more often he confronts us with joy. The last sentence of “Joyas Voladoras,” which moves from a hummingbird’s heart to a blue whale’s to a human’s, makes me weep every single time I read it:

“You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.”

Still Brian Doyle’s essays did not prepare me for Mink River, his first novel. I mean, I thought I’d like it, but I didn’t think I’d like it so much that as soon as I stopped reading I’d start all over again. But that’s exactly what happened. Part of the attraction is geographic. Mink River takes place in the fictional Northwest coast town of Neawanaka and the descriptions of the rain and forest rival those in Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. But Doyle’s novel is bigger-hearted than Kesey’s. The prose sings with echoes of Blake and Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Louise Erdrich. The story itself shimmers. Mink River isn’t just about one stubborn family; it’s about one generous, pained, magic community.

And there’s the rub. I’ve been writing essays about community for ten years at least. (The collection Potluck: Community at the Edge of Wilderness comes out in spring) I’ve tried to capture the complicated nuances, loyalties, surprises, and sorrows. Hopefully, I’ve done it in my own little way. Doyle does it in a big way. Between braided storylines, short sections from a omniscient narrator describe what every character is doing at one moment, and the parallels between them captures connectedness, over and over, better than I ever could.

I adore these sections. I adore the characters: Worried Man and Cedar who collect stories for the Department of Public Works, the strong women – Nora the wood carver, Grace the fisherman turned barkeep, Stella the barkeep turned farmer. I love Moses the talking crow, Daniel the bicycling boy, Owen the Irishman, Michael the cop, the doctor who smokes 13 cigarettes a day, one for each apostle including Matthias, and young Nicholas who moves away to attend college at Oregon State. Which brings me to my only criticism of the book: Nicholas should’ve been a Duck. Really, it’s a terrific book. Better than terrific. Read it.

Books, books, books

For the past few weeks, as I've been planning ahead for the courses I get to teach in the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA program next Spring, I've felt the same anxiety I've felt since I was a kid whenever someone gave me a gift certificate to a book or record store, my favorite gift bar none. I obsess over the options and worry that I will make a poor choice. I wring my hands. I wander the aisles or keep updating my cart online. Finally I click to buy and hope for the best.


So now I get to choose not one or two books, but several. Not just for myself but for my students. Two courses: Craft of Nonfiction and Directed Readings in Contemporary Memoir. It's like the ultimate gift certificate. Should I choose forty books or eighty? The lists beside my desk on scrap paper kept accumulating. I emailed friends for advice, and then promptly ignored it. I honed the list over and over until it occurred to me, yesterday, that I had other work that probably needed doing, most notably firewood splitting and putting the garden to bed, but also teaching my current classes.

Anyway here's the final list for The Contemporary Memoir. Now that it's finalized, please let me know what you think so that I can start the inevitable regretting.

Two craft books for reference:

The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again by Sven Birkerts
Fearless Confessions by Sue William Silverman

Ten fine books:

Brother I’m Dying Edwidge Danticat
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Nick Flynn
Lit Mary Karr
Autobiography of a Face Lucy Grealy
Somehow Form a Family Tony Earley
Boyhood J.M Coetzee
The Tender Land Kathleen Finneran
I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing Lucia Perillo
Jarhead Anthony Swofford
Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood Melissa Hart

With apologies to the many also-rans: Mark Doty, Alexandra Fuller, Judith Barrington, Michael Ondaatje, Danielle Trussoni, Frank McCourt, Maxine Hong Kingston, Thomas Merton. I don't suspect it bothers them to have missed the cut. But good lord does it bother me. Next time. Next time.

PS - For my most recent CD purchase, in spring, I was stuck between Clem Snide and Fruit Bats, nearly paralyzed for weeks. Finally, I bought both. Big splurge. No regrets. I'll take this as an omen.

Barrie Jean Borich

Here in blog-land, I return this month to my project of featuring writers I admire.

Barrie Jean Borich is the author of My Lesbian Husband, winner of the American Library Association GLBT Book Award. In preparation for a visit to her class at Hamline University this spring, I picked up the book, thinking that despite the obvious similarity - we’re both lesbian nonfiction writers - our lives and work would be wildly different.

And that’s true. I’m out the boonies; she’s in the city. I’m a former trails worker; she’s an established – and gifted – college professor. I have very few gay friends; she’s part of a large community.

Turns out none of that matters. Her book struck home with me. It’s a book about lesbianism – about identity and discovery and the joys and struggles of a long-term relationship – themes to which I can certainly relate; it’s also about family, neighbors, pets, and jobs. The language is rich and inventive and honest. The narrative structure, too, takes an original course, meandering through time while staying, well, wed, to her younger brother’s wedding and the feelings it inspires. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

My Lesbian Husband is largely about Minneapolis and various neighborhoods therein, her chosen home(s). Like the best nature writing, her descriptions brought the city, a place I’d never been when I read it, to life for me. Moreover, the way she grapples with the idea of home (especially in the fine chapter “Leaving Bohemia”) helped me understand that my own feelings aren’t as tied - or limited - to wilderness as I sometimes worry.

In a more recent essay, “Geographical Solutions” in the Fall 2009 issue of Ecotone, Borich boards the Amtrak “Empire Builder” and sets up her theme:

“… all Americans, even the most put-upon among us, might have a little bit of empire building in our makeup, some desire to refind the lost parts of ourselves through locating and owning, landing somewhere and inscribing our names.”

As she travels back to Chicago, where she grew up, she discovers that “There is a retaking that comes of reseeing.” Her work has helped me “re-see” some of my own ideas. For that, I’m grateful.

You can read “Geographical Solutions” at the Ecotone website:
http://www.ecotonejournal.com/index.php/articles/details/geographical_solutions1

For more about Barrie Jean Borich and her work, visit her website:
http://www.barriejeanborich.net/

KUOW interview

About a month ago, I traveled over the mountains to Seattle to tape an interview with Dave Beck on the Seattle NPR affiliate KUOW. It was a great experience - despite the late June snowfall on Snoqualmie Pass - and wildly different than the live radio interviews I've done in the past. You can hear our chat about Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus live tomorrow July 24 at noon on 94.9 in Seattle or at http://www.kuow.org/. (It will also replay a couple of times mid-week.)

Or you can listen at the link below:

http://www.kuow.org/program.php?id=20888