Remembering memoir

Of all the things that memoir can be: travelogue, coming-of-age story, humorous romp through time, etc., the genre's main focus as I now see it is to shape a life's story into events and perspectives that can help others learn. I suppose I've always known this, always being for as long as I've though actively about memoir, anyway.

After my stroke I spent lots of time hunting down books that told stories like mine. I wanted to know that despite the dung heap my life had become, things would get better. While none of the stories were like mine-- 'My Stroke of Luck" came out after I was over my misery-- I still found some comfort in what I read. At that time I never read for sensationalism, shock value or to make myself feel better because of someone's sorrows. The elements of memoirs that I read that spoke to me were just the ways in which the authors had assembled events to help me see their points of growth. Unfortunately, I think that many authors today use the adage that sex (or drugs, etc) sells, so these things are used in books to carry the whole story. It works, but frankly, I can't wait until we as a culture are bored with this tired old trick. In today's pop culture world, we can't help turning on the TV and seeing some sordid real-life TV show about how crappy someone's life is; there's Hoarders and Intervention and Wife Swap and all sorts of other shows like this; I can't wait till they are old news.

So what I've enjoyed the most about the class has to do with the ways in which I was asked to consider memoir as a literary form. It can certainly be that; however, I wonder if it's very nature imposes some limits on where it can go. If cultural trends are cyclical, as think we've all seen evidence of in some ways, then hopefully memoir can move into a place of substance, rather than just substance abuse/physical abuse, etc.

For example, I think back to our discussion on Langston Hughes, and the piece we read for that week. "Salvation" had some real depth to it, and although I'm not saying our other pieces didn't, it was so refreshing to read a piece that didn't involve the same story rehashed to another person's life/era. I know that all subject areas probably have memoir-writers in them, so maybe the onus is on me to find memoirs that fulfill me in a more "real" way.

So as I consider my own tale or stroke recovery, all of these considerations make me rethink the way I'd started that book; the inclusion of my own sordid stories and all the things I have come to dislike about the genre. How can I avoid them and write something that I'd like to see out there?

Again I turn to Hughes, who wrote, as the voice of an English teacher, in "Theme for English B,"

"go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page be out of you--
Then it will be true."

Wiesel's collective memory

I've been reading all of Patricia Hampl's "I Could Tell you Stories" for my final, and what I read today coincides with what Wiesel (and most of our authors, really) is trying to do with his stories in Night. She is talking about writers of the Eastern Europe persuasion, but I think it could be said that non-American writers fall into this category, as she later goes on to explain.Hampl is discussing the idea of memory and continuity in writers who have had to remember not only for themselves but for a whole era, a whole nation. That is definitely Wiesel.

"Remembrance in these writers is less strictly personal than it is in most American autobiography, through the uncanny and formative moments remain, as in any memoir, the basis of the work. But for these writers the past is the nation's finally, not the family's as it so typically is in American memoir. The brush strokes are of history, rather than autobiography" (83).

Hampl is calling attention here to the scope and intent of a memoir; she is saying that for American writers, whose lives and stories are shaped largely by and of their personal experiences and go on to reflect such things, scope and intent is not so all encompassing as it is for other non-American memoirists. Americans have always had a can-do, self-reliance sort of mentality, and even though other societies and individuals have this mentality too (Wiesel certainly does pull him self along), other people don't necessarily focus on the self quite to the point that American writers might. It is the difference between memoir and autobiography, she says.

For Wiesel, who must remember and write for whole countries, families and nation/states, the luxury of focusing on the self has disappeared with the past. Although Hampl is writing about the author Czeslaw Milosz and not Elie Wiesel, what she writes of the former could be said of the latter.


"[He] hinges the personal to the history of the nation. The fusion of these two narrations--one intimate, the other public--creates a powerful call and reply which achieves poetic form. It is a relationship--that bruised word of our own relentlessly psychological culture, reclaimed by the impersonal method [he] suggests" (86).


Wiesel's attempt at creating both personal and public narratives and histories in Night serves a purpose as a historical work, but it goes deeper than that in also capturing the stories of several "smaller" lives. The things he's chosen to include support his scope and intent to make this a literary work; each scene, each individual, each location works with this quality of memoir to highlight and foster discussion about "the greater truth" or the greater truths that must come of such a book.

At home with Thoreau

I'd like to think of Thoreau's writing as memoir because he does cover a specific time frame and series of events, but I'm not exactly sure his story fits into what I think of as modern memoir. To me, modern memoir is more of an examination of a certain time frame that is rife with problems that one has to overcome; problems that the individual has no control over. I usually think that there is some type of personal revelation that comes out of this, and although this exists here, I don't feel like the challenges Thoreau is facing are all that critical to self-development. No, that's not quite it-- the problems he faces are critical to his self-development, but what I'm trying to get at is that they are not do-or-die challenges he's facing.

For instance, in Karr's memoir, she's facing rape, alcoholism, family problems and disinterested parents. Same with Angelou McCourt faced poverty and alcoholism, etc. The problems Thoreau is facing deal with his need to disengage from society and find a simpler life, but this is not as necessary to his livelihood as overcome those other problems is for the other authors.
Now, I realize that Thoreau would argue that simplicity IS necessary to one's livelihood and self-preservation, but really.. in the face of the other memoirs we've read, his problems are pretty tame.

Another reason I question Thoreau's work as "memoir" is that I'm not exactly sure what he's learning about himself in the wild. It seems to me like he's already had some pretty well-formed opinions and ideas; his time at the pond is just testing them out and further reinforcing what he already knows about himself. To me, a literary memoir must have some sort of life-changing conflict that results in a growth process for the reader too. In our time it's almost impossible for anyone to do what he did, so it's unlikely that anyone will "learn" in the way Thoreau did.

However, for all of my inability to see his work as memoir, on of the elements of story that Thoreau utilizes is that of recalling memories. What is memoir, literally, it not that? his diligence to recording his observations in his journal no doubt helped with this, and the of detail he includes helps the reader see/feel the author's landscapes.

A staggering work

I see why Dave Egger's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" has been referred to as "manic-depressive." Bouncing from highs to lows, spun off in a story-telling style that is as intelligent, manipulative and melancholy as it is humorous, Egger's memoir drained me. His "unusual approach" to recounting a specific time period of his life works well because his life was as quirky and unusual as the story (ies) he tells in the book. Eggers' life as a publishing entrepreneur is particularly well-suited to the techniques he uses because these same techniques are used in McSweeney's, his magazine; they are also the same sorts of techniques Gen X grew up on-- sarcasm, self-deprecating humor, indifference, melancholia and depression.

This is not to say any other generation has lacked these traits, it's just to say that many times Gen-X is associated with popularizing these things and making them "cool." What Eggers has done is combined these personality devices and characterizations and figured out a way to put them on paper that remains true to the essence of his young adulthood.

In much the same way Gen X and the dot.com/publishing bubble of the 90s revolutionized those sectors, Eggers injected a particularly clever degree of snark and entertainment into the publishing industry and the memoir genre. Although I am not a fan of Eggers and felt that the ending of the story could have come much sooner, I do believe his ability to craft something from the resources around him and capture a whole time period (and life, in Topher's case) and societal mood speaks volumes to his ability to create and do so as an original. In setting up "Heartbreaking Work" as he did, he's subtly infusing the story with several elements of his life that made him him, elements that contribute(d) to his story.

Personally, I don't like to sustain humor in my writing. I like a turn of phrase, a witty bit of dialogue, a bit of snark, but I'm not the kind of person who writes to entertain in the same way Eggers has in this piece. I feel like self-deprecating/dark humor, while entertaining, is indicative of a deeper problem within the humorists life and a reliance upon passive/aggressiveness to get attention. I'm talking real-life people, not just authors-- so this kind of humor/voice is something I am wary and distrustful of when I encounter it in any form.

For Eggers, however, I think his book reached people, precisely because so many people rely on these attitudes to get by in our society. For example, say a co-worker is having a bad day. Instead of saying he wants to talk about it, he might begin cracking jokes about how much of an idiot he is, or how much he wants to take the boss out and beat him up. On their face, these things may be funny in their presentation, but underneath the words, there's a desire to connect (in the first case) and a malicious need for attention (in the latter). Colleagues laugh and perhaps join in on the ribbing, not knowing what else to do, and everyone leaves the table bewildered about the social interaction that just went on. So, regarding Eggers... I read "Heartbreaking Work" in rapture about 1/3 of the way through, then gave up on because it began to alienate me, not help me see anything new and endearing about the human condition.

Getting a feel for Conroy's life

Frank Conroy's memoir is a departure from the other memoirs we've read in several ways. First, Conroy shows us his poverty but doesn't overtly mention it. Parental dysfunction is observed in young Frank but is less "recognized" by the character, who doesn't seem to know any better or realize that anyone else's parent behave as parent should. Even Tobey's parents, who are more caring, aren't exactly "put together," and Jean's brother's families seem to be a mess too. While these differences make the book more enjoyable for me-- I realized while checking it out how badly I wanted not to read another memoir, but having read it fully enjoyed it--they are not the main feature of the story that makes it stand out to me.

Writing as a musician, Conroy has happened upon, or created, a style of writing that is rhythmic and lyrical, what I'd call the cadence of his inner thoughts and emotions coming out harmoniously on the page. This is no small accomplishment, because what he has done is essentially take a musical, poetic form and stretch it out over 283 pages. In the other memoirs we've examined, the writers have done a good job of evoking a region or time period with their attention to language and sound of each character. While Conroy continues to do this, he also pulls the reader into an internal landscape that hum with a certain sort of sound and energy. What this suggests overall is a form of characterization that we don't necessarily get with the other authors. Conroy's salvation lies in music; he becomes a drifting note in several passages; we learn about this man not so much from the words and scenes and ideas he spells out for us, but in the way he uses dissonance, harmony staccato moments and weaves everything together to make us feel, in the way that music makes us feel. His life has become his art; he has taken an aspect of his art and applied it to his life's story in this writing.

When I think about how these musical techniques work in music, I think about how even when I think I understand a song I'm sometimes left with a vague question of whether or not I really got into its rhythms the way the musicians intended. Conroy manages this effect well in Stop/Time, even overtly relying on the associations readers have with music at certain times.

"I stood as if listening to music, and in something like the way we are told suns are born, that specks of matter nearly empty space begin to fall, rushing across vast distances...I sank down until my knees touched the ground, and sat on my heels, almost reverently, within to disturb nothing in the suddenly harmonious world," he writes on p 139, detailing the moment he watched a girl through shelves at the library. "It was at once frustrating, and for some reason extremely exciting to see only this small part of her... my brain raced... at moments like this, as all men know, one becomes oblivious to to everything else in the outside world..."( 140).

Conroy does an great job of building the scene slowly, moving books, hunkering down, peeking; he lets the pressure build in the reader as it has built in himself, and then, with just a hint, he ends the scene and escapes into the private release of his own action, mentioning, tongue-in-cheekily, "the business--and I choose my words carefully-- at hand" (140).

The sensuality of the moment is made even more intriguing and delightful by Conroy's stop! of time before the scene reaches its climax.

She's crafty: Hampl's imagination and importance in memoir

As an only child growing up in the middle of nowhere, I needed imagination to get through the stifling boredom of the farm life. I would make up playmates, landscapes and situations to keep myself company and leave the world I knew. Hampl says that our imagination is a vast, powerful thing; memory is not just a "warehouse of finished stories, not a gallery of framed pictures (24). Memory and imagination come together then, and because these elements of persona come together and allow for all sorts of possibilities, we can get lost in the expanse of our own creations.

"By writing about that first piano lesson I've come to know things I could not know otherwise," writes Hampl in her discussion of memory and imagination. When she says that we must all guard our own truths about what has happened to us (class notes), I believe that she's saying if we cannot figure out a way to tell our stories and comprehend the past so that it makes sense for us, no one will be able to. We tell ourselves stories to live (to borrow a line from Joan Didion), and if we have to tell ourselves some little white lies to get through things, that's what we do. Perhaps we begin to believe the truths we've been telling ourselves for so long that eventually we know no other way to tell the story. Then what? Has it become the truth, or is it still a fabrication? Is our cognizance of the untruth a factor in whether or not it's a lie?
"I realized I had told a number of lies," says Hampl on page 25 or our excerpt; when we realize that we're telling a fabricated story that must mean that we know the real story exists out there somewhere, so shouldn't we go after that? If she realized after her initial drafts that she'd been making things up, doesn't she have the responsibility to tell the reader the truth?

I argue that yes, she does, and so does any writer. But like Karr, who pointed out that her memory had fault lines and fissures, Hampl admits to having problems with her memory and the recreation of her childhood stories. In doing so she's being honest with us about the truth of her book, which is a collected organization of memories.

The word memoir comes from memoria, or memory in Latin. Memory means the "mental faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, etc., according to dictionary.com. So if memory is the act of "reviving" facts, then no, memoir doesn't have to imply a complete factual story. Definitions aside, I guess I feel like memoir needs to be "real life," since it's someone's life we're dealing with in the story. When I think about my contract with readers I guess I assume they're going to believe what I say is real to have been/be real, so I should just tell the truth. Again it goes back to my question of "why not just call it fiction if it's fiction?"

Both Karr and Hampl lead by example-- when they write a scene to say that time compressed and shifted or that they remembered something in a certain way, they're pointing out their memory problem, and for me, that example is better than any kind of "this is how you should do it" advice.

To safeguard my relationship with readers my intro will discuss the fact that I am writing about a time in my life when I was drugged up and recovering from brain surgery, and therefore my memory was compromised, to say the least. I note that the name changes of hospital staff were made to protect them in their careers; I will note that the time sequence I detail was the time sequence as I lived it, but perhaps it didn't occur that way to those not under the influence of morphine and other drugs. I think that's enough to let people know that yes, this is an accurate portrayal of what happened to me, but I'm not even sure if this is how it happened.

Ignorance as bliss in Hughes' "Salvation"

"My aunt came and knelt at my knees and cried, while prayers and song swirled all around me in the little church. The whole congregation prayed for me alone, in a mighty wail of moans and voices."

Langston Hughes' depiction of this scene toward the end of "Salvation" imparts the biblical idea of hell that many of us have heard since we were younger than the author is in his story.
"Mighty" wails of "moans and voices" are sounds we can hear when we think of "hell" and the atmosphere as it's been written; Hughes' patience and waiting conjures up the idea of purgatory, which is where he's kind of stuck throughout this story. The idea of purgatory, a place where sinners wait until they are prayed out of their limbo, threads through this whole piece, beginning with the happiness of those who have been saved (the adults) praying for others (the children) and ending with his salvation as the church "into a sea of shouting, as they saw me rise. Waves of rejoicing swept the place. Women leaped in the air."

How can one not see the illuminated images of Jesus rising from some glossy portrait into the flaxen beams of heaven?

In our class notes we see that "detail, sensory information and action" are the hallmarks of scene and movement. Hughes uses some dialogue throughout the piece, but what really moves the story, for me, is the imagined lull of prayers and voices that I hear in my head when I think of a congregation in prayer. That noise and reverence, although "holy," hums and buzzes in my skull, pushing me forward and adding to the urgency and tingling sensations the young Hughes must have felt. Added to the power of this feeling is the one recollection of times I've felt conflicted by self or society, much as Hughes is here.

Overall, although this piece moves through the shadows of peaks and valleys created by both Hughes' reactions and the desires of his church, what I find most compelling is that Hughes' salvation comes not so much in way of protecting his soul, but enlightening his mind.

For those who know of Hughes as a writer beyond this piece, it's not stretch to say that he wrote about the freedom and salvation that comes when the mind is loosed of ignorance. In depicting the actions of the little girls who cried and then ran to be saved--fearful for their souls-- and the rest of the "poor sinners," with their "work-gnarled hands"-- it's easy to see that Hughes' final savior is his mind itself, and his own understanding of truth. It's a painful truth for him to learn, that he can no longer believe in Jesus, or the adults who seem so wise, but in the end, his conflicts with the questions he had about Jesus prior to the revival (his aunt tells him all about the "feeling" but his scepticism persists) are answered and he comes to his own beliefs.

As we've looked at memoir from the perspective of the child thus far, we've seen that adults are often wise, confusing and so removed from the realities of childhood that their knowledge seems vastly superior and almost unattainable to the child(ren). But here we have an author who has bucked the conventions of his society and his aunt regardless of what he once thought or wanted to believe. Hughes doesn't tell us how all of this comes together for us; in introducing the characters he does, however briefly, and building the suspense of the moment with the quick snapshots of scenery and action, we come to feel the same flatness and acceptance that he feels.

What this acceptance becomes is not one of Jesus, but an acceptance of "oh, well, I wanted this because everyone told me I wanted it, but now I realize it's not really for me." This is a difficult kind of acceptance for anyone to bear because realizing we don't fit in, at any age, marks us as different, and therefore, potentially unsaved by common knowledge and ideals.

Membership in Karr's Club

Mary Karr's idea that "the alleged truth of a given voice makes it somehow more emotionally compelling" and "thus announces itself as real" is one that any writer of character-based nonfiction needs to understand. Voice and "precise, original language" are two of Karr's strongest allies in her work. She's got place as character, of course-- the way she describes the skies or the openness of her Texas childhood serves to further
set the reader in the state of wild abandon that her childhood seemed to have been.
But anyone can write about Texas in the 60s, or fractured families, or men getting together for construction jobs and beer drinking. What makes Karr's story her is the way her language defines her particular social circle, family, region and time frame. And even if the "truth" of an event is different from how it happened, the alleged truths of her characters voices are different truths than the stories those voices tell.

What I mean by that is that no matter whether or not Karr's grandpa really died by hanging or her sister really did act in a certain way or her mom really was Nervous and acted out to such extremes doesn't matter, in the way Karr has written it. The events don't necessarily need to be true, because we can understand the kind of person who might have done those things so well simply by "hearing" their voices on the page.

What this does for readers, then, is create a whole world and a whole way of life out of something that may or may not have happened. The use of voice and language as character gets inside the idea of a larger truth of humanity. We are all unique individuals, with our own ways of talking, acting, thinking and rationalizing things. For Karr, growing up the way she did, her ability to rationalize and understand the world around her had a lot to do with the stories her dad told. These stories gave her a place to be in the world, whether it was literally, as in in a corner of Fishers, or figuratively, as in how she came to know her father and family through stories.

What we, as readers, then take from seeing this is that we too can look at the stories around us and figure out how and where and why we fit into certain places in the world. We're all confused and lost and scared at times, and everyone has at least one memory they'd like to erase or forget or otherwise distance themselves from. There are also the great memories of events that have become even more epic as time passes and we begin to remember these events differently each time. In reading a literary memoir like The Liar's Club we all gain admission into our own story and way of telling it comfortably.

Speaking of Nabokov

language, syntax and figures of speech, appropriateness, age of voice
At the beginning of this excerpt from Speak, Memory, Nabokov sets the reader into the bedroom and emotion of his boyhood days. He tells us we're in the bedroom, but even beyond that, he lets his images speak for themselves.

"...if it disclosed a watery pallor one better not open them at all and so be spared the sight of a sullen day sitting for its picture in a puddle" he writes of his windows' shutters (423).

From the idea of nasty day as a nasty child he moves into the mental landscape of exuberance and dappled sunlight; the exuberance he felt while outdoors chasing butterflies.

Throughout this excerpt Nabokov meanders back and forth between his childhood memories and the recent present or the present. Although reading about Nabokov-the-child is interesting because I get to see a lifestyle quite different from my own, it is his adult intrigues and activities that hold me. His voice as an adult is a trustworthy one because he has built up a whole lifetime of entomology, and his stories show that. I feel like I can read this for information, come away from the piece and share my new knowledge with others and know its legit. It is literary nonfiction at its best for this reason.

This ability to entertain and inform is crucial for anyone writing a non-fiction memoir. I think of writers like Augusten Burroughs, whom I've loved, or David Eggers, whose work I hate, and whatever factual, informative stuff I might have taken from their books has been lost on me, since I didn't really think they were ever really telling a whole truth in any of their stories. Through his mentally stimulating crafting of his lifetime, Nabokov gives us fact along with emotion.

"'Natural selection', in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of 'the struggle for life' when a protective device was carried to the point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance and luxury far in excess of a predator's power of appreciation," he writes of the ways in which butterflies, moths and caterpillars disguised or changed themselves as needed. " I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art," he writes (425).

His love for art, nature and the craft of his own work shine in this passage, and it is his refined voice that allows for this. Were he to have written of his butterflies and knowledge from the child's viewpoint, we'd never get these insights, nor the detailed knowledge he's shared.

What is lost, of course, is the wonder and first-time innocence of a child out catching bugs for the first time. We don't get much of that sense of not-knowing here, but my guess is that even as a child Nabokov was a rather stoic, although quick and clever, boy. "Losing" this works for me, though, because I have my own sense of wonder and innocent understanding of what it was to chase bugs. What he's given me connects art with the natural world, and that wasn't something I had as a child, nor an adult really, until starting grad school. And even though my memoir doesn't take place in outdoor landscapes or focus much on place and environment, I've learned how to play with emotion in my word choice, sentence structure and composition enough so that I feel like I can relate my own "innocence" at the time of my stroke to the things going on in my voice when I write from the persona I write from.


In Eggers' and Burroghs, we get lots of emotion, lots of clever wit, but who knows how much "truth" we get.

McCourt's uncluttered life

The first time I read Angela's Ashes I was going through a severe case of Irelust (I wanted to go to Ireland real bad). My introduction to the brogue and the lifestyle and all of that seems to have come from something beyond this book, but I can't remember what now. A boyfriend, I think, whose family was Irish? Maybe. At any rate, despite the troubles or Troubles, I feel in love with the idea of Ireland, the harsh realness of place that McCourt conjured up for me. Today, I read the book as an adult and think that it wouldn't be at all fun to live that lifestyle-- not that I thought it would be fun when I was younger, but I was more charmed by the exoticism of the whole thing--but I feel so in line with what McCourt notes was an "uncluttered life" in the snipped in our class readings.

I've always been a traveler, restless and full of wanderlust. But I've also lived a real comfortable life, full of all the amenities McCourt never had. My troubles, and thus the stuff of a memoir (who wants to read a memoir about a happy, perfect life?) didn't start til I had brain surgery, but they've given me something to write about. When I could force myself away from the clutter of travel plans and an exciting social life and work to do so. left Chicago last year because I wanted to do just that, get away from the clutter (and excitement) of a life that pulled me from my writing, and when I look back at the stuff I've written (for my memoir) today, I can't believe how cluttered it is sometimes. I think that comes from not really being sure how to tell the story.

McCourt says that the child's voice is "innocent," it can also be messy. Think of a 4 year old and how he tells a story. There's lots of "and then.. and then's" because their train of thought sort of peters off and reroutes itself sometimes. McCourt has managed to stay away from that here, and I wonder if part of his ability to nail the voice and mood so crystal clearly also comes from his writing at 66, after retiring, and after a life-time of telling the stories. He'd had plenty of practice in adopting the persona of young Frank, so he could write with some clarity, and leaving his job gave him time to write without the clutter of work and other papers.

What this does--this perfectly clear telling of the story, from the viewpoint of a child-- for me, is tell the story in a way I can understand while creating two different characters. There's the Frank/teller, who sounds smart and contemplative, and then there's the Frank/kid, who I don't feel like I see quite as well as I see Malachy. I see him of course, but he somehow seems less than childlike to me. It's weird, and I've only just begun to think about what that does for me as a reader. Because present tense is used, I feel a sense of currency in the reading, which might also be what makes me see Frank as less-than child, since I can't separate him in my head as an adult now? I know.. that kind of contradicts the idea of two Franks, but it muddles me all up to think about it. So much for an uncluttered mind as I read!

Greatness and Freedom- Dinesen's Africa

Although I've commented in my class post about Dinesen's language and the way her surroundings influence her style, I'm always stuck by the feelings of freedom that must have existed for her in Africa. I can imagine that as a woman at the turn of the century it was difficult for her to feel much freedom in her daily life. That she could "escape" to Africa and find it there is clear in her writing, not just in what she says about the place, but the very places and atmospheres she chooses to write about.

"Everything you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility. The chief feature of the landscape, and your life in it, was the air... In the middle of the day the air was alive over the land, like a flame, burning; it scintillated, waved and shone like running water, mirrored and doubled all objects.. in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart "(347).

Dinesen's passage about the way the air moved around her not only lifts me up to her level of appreciation for something so mundane as the air, but it undulates in pace and rhythm in much the same way a breeze blows a leaf down a dirt road. She may be talking about the atmosphere here, but as she shares these observations with the reader, she's also throwing out the contradictory nature of the place. Her air is a flaming candle at the same time it is running water, and the very juxtaposition of these things is as juxtaposed as her landscape and existence in it. Here she is, a landed woman, a member of society; White. But she's out on safari, she's engaging with her help and the natives. She's perhaps thought of as dainty and maybe even helpless at home, but here, in the "wilds" of Africa, she's got her own power, her own lifestyle.

Africa itself, as we see it through her eyes is as much a wild place as a calm one; as much a hot, dry land as a it is a sky full of vivid blues and violets.

I'm revising a piece about my childhood home for my thesis right now, and what I'm noticing is the contradictions and juxtapositions of the land and my perceptions of it. Many see a huge expanse of land as openness, possibility; growing up I felt hemmed in and confined by all that nothingness. One of Dinesen's brilliant moves is using these things to really put me there in her land, and this is something I'm trying to work with on my piece too. I want readers to feel the appreciation I have, now as an adult, for the openness, but I also want them to recognize just how limiting that can also feel. I don't get a sense of limits in Dinesen's writing, not the kind I struggled with, but the kind that came with being so different and removed from a "normal" society.

Enchanting myself away from the normal - Angelou post

Before I applied to grad school I spent the summer reading MFA reading lists for schools across the country. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was on several lists, so I read it. The book has stuck with me for its vivid imagery and uniquely light way of speaking to dark subjects. Angelou's ability to write with the innocence and wonder of a small child carries this book, and even though I sometimes wonder if she's really a trustable narrator- because her style of storytelling IS so vivid-- I feel satisfied that I am getting an accurate portrayal of Marguerite's life. So in reading our lecture notes, I wasn't surprised to learn that Angelou's magic carpet is sherry, a deck of cards and secluded room. As writers we have to do whatever it takes to get us out of the ordinary into a place where language sings and the common description/definition of things falls away. Because of this, I think Caged Bird is a timeless story, one that speaks to a certain period of Americana, but at its heart can show anyone how to live and move beyond one's world. Even if that world was a war-torn Parisian cafe and the writer was Hemingway, or a crummy, dumpy house and the writer was Augusten Burroughs, writers have the unique ability to take a moment and move beyond it to speak a larger truth.

So, in moving away from the 2010 Caribou cafe in which I sit now, let's go to Nebraska, circa 1989. This might be hard for some of you to read.. sorry. It's just what came to me.


The burlap bag is heavy in dad's hand-- I can tell becuase the muscles in his tanned forearm are shifted out a little, and with each wriggle and bulge of the bag I see that muscle tighten and pulse as he steps forward. I'm not sure where the bag came from, but he probably had it out in the dusty shop. When he came to the house with it an hour ago, I grabbed it from him and watched it puff the scent of dirt and tractor grease, surprised at its presence in his hand.

"Marcella, where did Touca have her kittens? Can you find them?"
Dad refered to me as his "right hand man," and becuase I had yet to start school and mom was gone all day, I spent my days with him in the shop. He was my best friend, and at five years old, I was all sugared compliance and quick eagerness.
"Yeah yeah, she had them in the old pig barn, over behind the saddles. You know, where you keep the old hay bales? Only one of them has been up and walking but--"
"They're sick, Marcella. All the cats around here always get distemper. It's not good to have sick kitties, it is?"

Was dad actually telling me he was going to take my kitties to the vet? This was unheard of. The feral cats mothered batches of babies the way I collected toads and slugs in the summer-- often and a fierce protectiveness, and dad had no use for the multitudes of wild cats that teemed around the farm propoerty. I couldn't believe he was going to make sure this group got the attention they needed to clean up the boogers that constantly plauged their eyes, and I didn't want him to stuff them in a bag, but if that was what it took to get them there safely, then so be it.

"No, it's not." I said, agreeing that sick kitties were bad. I couldn't play with them, what with their snotty faces, and most of the time, they lived for a while then died any way. If dad was going to get them some help, maybe I'd actually get to tame one, feel its soft down fur and nuzzle it in the way my friends with indoor cats got to. "I can help you get them if you want."

Dad had nodded me toward the pig barn, and we'd gone in to find the kitties. The old shed hadn't been used for hogs in years, but in the dust-mote shades of shadow and light that filtered in through the cracked and broken boards you could always smell some combination of amonia, straw, mash, pig shit and mold. I loved the old buildings on our farm, but I never played in this one becuase it was so old and fally-downy. The containment corrals had mostly fallen down, but next to the building and the one fence still standing, and old well and water tank still bobbed mossy water in and over its lipped surface.

"Ok, Marcella, I see them. You can go back to the house now."
I wasn't sure why dad was sending me to the house alone-- I figured we'd load up the kitties then take them to the vet together.
"You don't need my help here? But I can--"
"No, no, go in and.. get me some.. twine or something. To, uh, tie the bag? Please?"

The tall grass that had grown up around the pig barn knicked my legs as I ran through it, trying to get to the house and back in time to help dad. I don't know why I can still remember the way that grass and the weeds felt as they slapped against my bare legs, but I know that I'll never forget the scent of that pig barn, or the way dad's arms looked as he walked around the water tank, carrying that bag, arm muscles bulging. By the time I had found and hauled the spool of twine back to dad, he was outside again, moving around the water tan, dipping the bag in it. I stood and watched as he dipped the wriggling bag in the water, holding it under longer and longer each time, then letting it drop. I knew then, as a child knows a bad thing when she sees it, that something was wrong with this picture, that my kittens were sick and that dad was drowning them. I knew then that yes, maybe those kittens were beyond saving with the vet's medicines. I knew that even pulling them up was probably not going to save them. But what I witnessed was wrong in a particular way that only the executioners of bad men can probably know. My dad had drowned my kittens to put them out of their misery, and to end his own discomfort with their presence, but those things alone were not exactly what was so wrong with the scene. What was wrong was that he had lied to me, that my dad had lied to me, or at the least, misled me as to what he was doing with the kittens and why he needed my help. I eventually grew up and got hogs to show for 4-H and housed them in that pig shed. They drank water that came from that tank; I "got over" what I saw that dad and how bad I felt for the mewling bag of sopping kittens who had their eyes cleansed in the most unholy of baptisms, and I left the farm. That memory doesn't come to me often, but when my last cat died, it did. When my dog ate poison and died, it came to me then, too. There is something beautiful and innocent about a life lived among the cycles and organic moments of life and death on a farm, but I wonder if it only when we keep them masked and containted that we are able to accept them.

The language of being: Prompt Post 8

"As a preschooler, Lisa Yellow Horse knew only one language, Lakota. Now a grown woman on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, she embodies what many in her generation feel: a paralyzing fear to speak a language she is no longer fluent in and confusion about how to pass it down before it disappears.

The regret is hard to swallow."

A year-long series on the Lakota language and culture has been featured in the Rapid City (SD) Journal, and today's stories focused on the loss of language and the generational gaps that helped contribute to this loss as much as colonialism has (Yes, I do realize this disinterest was fostered by colonialism, as is pointed out in the series).

As I read this story, I was reminded my own small self, the only "brown" kid I knew, the only one who could speak another language. As I got older and my friends found plenty of things about my mom and her culture that were "wrong," I grew less and less curious in learning about that culture myself. Now, I feel ashamed only of the fact that I didn't take the time to appreciate my mom's culture more, as a child. Sure, today I take the time to visit relative in Colombia, and I'm genuinely interested in my heritage, but I don't feel like I'm "Colombian" anymore than I am "White." In action, manner and culture, I'm definitely White, north American. But this morning, as my mom rambled on and on and on about some story over breakfast (Colombian hot chocolate and a very America slice of cold, leftover pizza), I realized that in the way I tell stories, I am very much the Colombiana of my ancestry.

My aunts tell stories like my mom, loong, complicated rambling things that veer off in this direction for a while, then that one, then loop back around again and finally (or not) begin to make some sense. My grandma was the same way, and even my uncles tell stories full of stories, heaping one idea upon the next upon the next.

As I chewed and nodded, feigning in interest in her 7 a.m. nonsense, the work of Bruce Chatwin came to mind. A storyteller himself, Chatwin shared the work of the Australian Aborigines and their Songlines and Dreamtime stories, the stories by which all of Australia is mapped, plotted and held together by story. It seems like all cultures are held together by an intricate web of words, and for the Lakota people to lose that web is to lose their system of navigation.

Having spent a semester getting into the history of a place that I once knew intimately, I've found that my ideas of nature are as conflicted as I am. I'm a country girl who'd rather live in the city, but I have found that I want that city to have some of the pace and culture of my childhood landscapes. I still tell people that I left Chicago this semester because being in "nature" for a nature writing course made more sense than being in Chicago, so I guess I don't really think of Chicago as nature, although I know it does have it's own natural elements. This awareness is also conflicted, because I think of cities as places of learning, learned people,people who want more than a life toiling in the dirt. Cities are full of knowledge, and they have shaped the adult I am. They provided the education I received in college.

And yet there is a certain kind of knowledge to be found among the rural. The knowledge of cloud patterns and storms, the way plants grow, and animals; the simple understanding of the seasons and where food comes from.. all that is more a rural education than a concrete and book-learned one. Throughout the semester we've focused on the duality of this genre in the authors we've encountered, and even those who live in cities, or less rural places have a reverence for the natural land (land not paved or developed, in this case) that doesn't seem to have been bred of the city.

At the beginning of the course I felt that nature writing was the wild, lyric, expressive rambling and storytelling that a writer writes because he has to, is compelled from somewhere inside to create and honor with the gift of words and sentences. Environmental writing seemed to be the more scientific, book-learned stuff, and as the course ends, I feel mostly the same way. I know that there are cross-overs, as there should be in all good nonfiction writing; even in the fiction within the genre we see that the author hopes to inform as much as entertain. We see that as much care must be given to language as to the story itself, the story we tell in our existence on the land.


As I read the stories of the young women in this article, and then the story of a Philadelphian who came to the Rez to learn and then teach the Lakota language, I felt like I've spent a whole semester not just learning how to connect to nature and consider it, but how to speak to it, and about it, on its own terms, in its own language. What we need is a bridge over our failed communications, a means of spanning not just generations, but cultures and people and ideas. We need to close the gap between "nature" and "wild" as bad things, and develop a sense of understanding and fluency in our relationships toward all things. I'm just not sure how to go about getting at that fluency, other than writing. And exploring. And being.

Spring shed: Place Post No. 8

Wind is blowing in from the Southwest when I get to the lake. Not a cold wind, but strong, the force pours into my ear as I clear paint chips from a picnic table and view my surroundings.
Ducks on the water are invisible except for the slender, black tubes of neck and curves of head. I can hear them, however, fart-like noises and squeaks reach across the water's edge. A robin, clinging to the branch above me, yells at the wind and flaps its wings, remaining if not steady, attached to its wooden landing. even though the winter wheat is a green, shimmer carpet beyond the boundaries of the area, the bird's rusty orange breast is the only brightness I see in this drab surrounding, and I am thankful for it.

There is no sun today, so even though the day is in the low 60s and imaginatively warm, I want tome color to my surroundings. Yes, thin stabs of grass poke up through the dead leaves and grasses around me, and the wheat fields to the north and south beckon with luxurious industry, but what I am feeling is a lack of color—in mind and physical presence. I feel shadowed and dark, as if the melanin under my skin reflected only "bruise" as a color.

The ducks take off, and I watch the water "settle" after them. Its ripples flow and bounce like static on a television: jittery lines that move up and down, and up and down again, then across the gray surface in a haphazard pattern. I am mesmerized by the movement, much as I am when settled (reluctantly) in front of a noise box that must be plugged in. Television transports the viewer to other places; here at the lake, I too disappear, but only to the landscape within. My semester is almost over, and I feel that I've come to see the wildness of the lake in a way I never had before. The flora and fauna were just sticks and grasses and animals..and they still are, but I feel like I'm seeing them with an awareness that others who sit at these picnic tables might not notice. I don't really feel that way about those human others—I don't feel any more connected to the people I went to school with or sit with at the bar when I rarely go to town. I don't feel any more interested in the history of my home county than I did before. I feel settled here only in the temporary way I felt settled here when it was "home:" as if it were a place to be, for a moment. Like a sun-dappled bit of grass that invites an afternoon of reading in the summer.
I have just returned from Denver, from the annual AWP conference and bookfair, and even though I went to sessions on the Nebraska writer, or the importance of place and home and habitat, instead of the rosy color of promise, my heart is shadowed like the water before me. The conference connected me to authors and ideas, and hearing the words of authors I've read all semester float above a crowd in person was wonderful. The words of Leslie Mormon Silko, and David Gessner—words in favor of ancient rootedness or of seeking it until one is connected to a new place, respectively—stick with me, but the words of Debra Marquart have probably done more for me, because she took the stagnation of small town life and wrote about it, honestly, Compassionately. But as part of her past.

The air swills around me, traces whorls in my hair and marks my skin with invisible patterns, as I walk to the edge of the water and settle on a smooth, white stump. I run my hand along the arch of thick branches, marvel at the smoothness where the tree has shed its bark. Parts of this felled giant feel like the soft, curved back of a lover, the sturdiness of shoulder blade and bone and muscle, wrapped up and protected by a porous, peach cover that sometimes shivers with resistance. The smoothness of the tree is a second skin, and I think about the many times I've talked of "skin" when referring to the frozen water. That cover is gone now, the one before me is active, fluid. Moving water.
Moving.

As I stand up to leave, I look behind me an notice a dead fish, (a huge bass? wallye?), eye sunken in and horrid, a muddy scab of brown. Two ants crawl from its gill and march across their scaly, silver territory; I squat and look at its distended belly, the yellow opening of its mouth. Dad would have loved to catch a fish this big (maybe four pounds) at Walgren, so I wonder what happened to him, how he washed up to the shore, and if he drowned in the heavy absence of vital water. He's brittle and dry, so there's no stench of rotting fish—I probably would have smelled him before now, if there had been—and for this, too, I am thankful. The air today smells light and beautiful, like spring rains and cottonwood down. It's sweet, and sticks to me, but is not sweet and sticky like some smoke, clogging the air with a resinous, wet blanket. No, it's sweet and sticky in the way pine gum is when it covers pores on your hand and lingers in the air with a movement of fingers.

I walk back to my car, across foot-deep ruts of peeling mud that puncture the road's surface, and again, I think of the skins we are shedding, always, everyone of us. After this coursework, all of it, I will never come back to the lake and look at it the same way, nor will I be able to write of the natural world without a need for deeper connection and understanding. We might spend seven years shedding our skins—a time that seems like forever—or see new elements of the world with the dawning of new seasons, but in every moment, sun-dappled or crusted with snow and ice, our own landscapes are transforming.

"The inherent emotional risks of creativity"

a short video on creativity and staying sane as a creative person. I try to stay away from Gilbert (haven't read EPL yet) becuase she's soooo over-hyped, but she's super-funny in this clip. And her message is worthwhile. While creativity isn't necessarily birds and trees and bugs, I do believe there is a natural sort of pool from which creativity comes.

At any rate, I hope this clip entertains and spurs some thought.

The science of forgiving

I left Sioux Falls four years ago not so much with my tail between my legs, but with my teeth bared and snapping at everyone. A friend and a boyfriend had made social life difficult for me, and the editor I'd been working under at the newspaper left for a better position. Life felt stagnant and black, like the water in the Big Sioux when it hadn't rained all summer. Chicago sounded like a good idea while I was taking a break from life, in Seattle, so Chicago became home. In the four years I lived in the Big Windy, I never got over my love for South Dakota and Sioux Falls, or the real friends I had made there; birthdays, weddings and a simple magnetism drew me back time and again.

Since I've been home in Nebraska, that longing and pull has gotten stronger, so last week I up and road tripped across the plains and made it back in town in time for two birthdays. Although the airwaves are about as lonesome as the country music that chokes them, NPR never fails to entertain and educate me; on Saturday, while passing the Wall Drug signs and deteriorating carcasses of animal after animal after animal, I listened to this amazing American Public Media story on the evolution of forgiveness. This is a story of revenge and forgiveness, a story that tells us how revenge and human emotion has evolved over the centuries, a story that tells us that we humans are "more instinctively equipped for forgiveness than we've perhaps given ourselves credit for."

I could write about how the components of this story-- an interview with the father of an Oklahoma City bombing victim, a scientific breakdown of revenge, a bit of thoughtful music-- made me feel, but I think listening to it yourself will be more meaningful for your own story.

I never sought revenge on my friend and my ex, because I wanted nothing to do with either of them any more, but instead of confronting the issue, it festered deep enough to force me away from a city and a landscape I loved.

I just got back to Nebraska from Sioux Falls, and even though I don't see either of those people any more, listening to this segment set me up for an afternoon of reflection on what was truly important to me as I went about my days in eastern South Dakota. I don't know how we ever muster up the courage to forgive and move on ( Michael McCullough, author of the book and papers this segment is based on) says that he'd like a new discourse on forgiveness to happen; a discourse that removes the softhearted wimpy connotations of forgiving to take place. Forgiveness is a strong, difficult, powerful thing to do, he says. We should respect it as such.

Seagull: Prompt Post No. 7

The small white "boats" bob in the distance, like scoops of vanilla ice cream atop a dark, bluish float. I can't see the small black eyes of the gull, nor the vivid, sharp hooks of their beaks. Their cute little webbed toes are hidden beneath the surface of the water, but I know they're either tucked up into warm feathers, or paddling languidly. The seagulls pay no attention to me, but I am watching them. The tables have been turned. "The circle, as Joseph Bruchac writes, "is the way to see." In these warm feathered bodies, bobbing and drifing in the current, I see the natural world. I see a reflection and an interconnectedness. I see me.

I have always been fascinated with the seagull. As a little girl, liked the birds because I could throw my icky bread crusts overboard, and the loud birds would swoop in a for a meal, entertaining me and breaking the monotony of a day on the lake. I learned as a child that gulls are not picky; watching them scavenge on the shorelines for bits of fish skin, human refuse or even the living insects and water bugs showed me that these birds know how to make do with what they have.

Walk along the edge of any dump, landfill or polluted place, and there's the gull, loudly proclaiming himself king of all the things in the world that no one else wants. I've often wondered what, if anything, I can learn from these birds.

Once, while reading a book in a park in downtown Chicago, I'd set down the lemon bar I was eating, only to watch it slide away out of the corner of my eye, pages later. A craft gull had snuck in close behind me, nabbed the cellophane wrapper, and was slowly backing away from me with one eye trained on my face. It was the first time I'd even been so close to a bird like this, and I held my breath, not wanting to freak him out. I don't think he cared at all.. he scooted about two feet away, and looked up, then took his time pecking at my lemon bar. By that time, I realized I could no more offend him than he'd offended me, so I pulled out my cellphone and snapped a picture of him, in case no one believed me. Thankfully, my friends in Chicago "get" this kind of thing; one saw it as a message.

"You know, Mars, maybe the seagull is your totem animal."

Totem animal, huh? I'd heard of this concept, but hadn't felt like I'd even had an encounter with any animal to experience the coolness of this.

A totem animal, is, according to the Manataka American Indian Council, a spirit guide that may "teach us their powers and give as lessons of life (and these things don't necessarily have to be animals)."

Well, from that day on, I kept noticing gulls, all the time. Sure, they're all over Navy Pier in downtown Chicago, and I lived next to the lake on the North side, but even when I wasn't near water or trash or spilled food.. I'd see a gull.

There would be a magnet in a bookstore, a lighthouse with a bird atop it.

And one day, at home in Nebraska, I was feeding ducks at a small lake in the town where my mom works, and these gulls flew above me, and hovered there, caught on the wind current. Most of the flock moved on, but there was one gull in particular that kept riding the wind; he'd go higher, and move forward, then drop down and be pushed backward again, until he was above me yet again. It felt like this went on for hours, but it was probably no more than 60 seconds. There was this old dead tree behind him, and the way the sun was coming through the tree, dappled and reflected, broken into small squares of glittering, opalescent light, then landing on the bird's feathers, made me feel like there was more than woman and bird and wind involved in the moment. It made me feel like I was connected to something larger than the bird, or the sun or even that moment. It made me feel like all moments were the same and my entire life was as shot through with amber and gold and warmth as any life had ever been.

So what did the seagull mean? That a carefree, scavenging, wild attitude was always going to be part of my makeup? I guess I knew that already, but it was fun to see a similarity between me and the animal.

Since that time Raccoon has added himself to my cache of totem animals. Before I left Chicago for good, I'd been praying for a sign, and the night I first talked to my boss about possibly putting in my two weeks, a raccoon walked out of a dark street in front of me, and walked about 1/4 of a block home with me. Raccoon can often help people let go of things that no longer serve them.

I feel stronger ties and loyalty to Seagull, but it was really amazing to feel like I'd gotten the sign I was hoping for.

I know I am not alone in my kinship with animals in this manner; many indigenous peoples believe that there is power and connection and meaning in special animal encounters. For example, ancient cultures, such as the Mapuche, know that Puma and Jaguar are animals of power. Condor and Snake represent life and death and the great mystery surrounding us, and it is not uncommon for spiritual practice to invoke the names and strengths of these animals as needed. Even author Peter Coyote, who pays homage to his namesake in "Muddy Prints on the Mohair," calls upon the trickster spirit of the furred animal in both humor and contemplation.

"Coyote is the miss in your engine He steals your concentration in the Zendo… He is total effort. Any good afternoon nap. Best dancer in the house . The dealer and the sucker in a sidewalk Monte game. An acquaintance who hunts your power. The hooker whose boyfriend comes out of the closet while your pants are down. He's also the boyfriend…"

Seagull, too, is all of these things and more. He is the bird who flies with others but is not afraid to go alone. Seagull is like Gluskabe, or Ikitomi, depending on the tradition of story. He makes his home in any place, mates with anyone, finds what he needs to survive and knows how to go on. He is hated, cursed, studied, poisoned, diseased, make into cartoons and stuffed animals is stuffed and studied in museums and labs. Seagull is loud and annoying and always has something to say, like it or not or understand it. Seagull is also comfort.

I can't watch the birds bob on the water or pick through trash to this day without thinking of that day in Chicago or the moment in Nebraska at the lake. No matter where I am, what or who I encounter, I find a strength in these memories because I find a strength in seagull. I know I'm crass and loud and irritating and even animal in my actions at times. I don't so as far as theft of others' food, from behind their half-turned backs, but I know how to get what I need in order to function and survive. I am okay with going though the cheap-o bins at good will or the curbside junk left on the edge of my street corner. I am drawn to those who live likewise, the curious, the messy, the adaptable. We might be a stone's throw away from the edges of humanity and being pesky, pesty animals, but we are true to our animal nature. And for providing the example and reminding me to by myself, at all costs, I remain indebted to the seagull and the other guides who walk this planet.

Hardiness: Place Post No. 7

The lake has shed it skin for another winter. Sunlight shines on the ridged surface this afternoon, and I think that the gulls bobbing on the water look like small, white boats or dutch shoes floating in the distance. In just a matter of weeks it feels like winter has come and gone, and yet there's still a feeling of harsh cold in the air. I wonder if the wildlife below notices something similar? I know that fish like rough water, still, beautiful days above the surface do nothing for for the fisherman or woman.
I still see only dead plants, and a few birds, but no abundance of animals (or people). We've made it through the winter, but where is everyone?

The trees are beginning to send out small knobs of brown buds, and I can't wait to see the green life that sprouts from them. Their barren branches are now familiar, but they're not as inviting as the fullness of color is. Is the algae and other underwater greenery undergoing a similar process? Do these things live and die and move in cycles like the same things above water? I know the water grows its own furry covering sometimes in the late summer, but that's just what I can see. The filamentous algae covers the wooden legs of the dock with a mustardy yellow throughout the summer but is absent now; but what's it like underwater? Is the curly-leaf pondweed flourishing (I scout it out online and learn that it is, but will die back in the summer)? We don't have to worry about the invasive Eurasian watermilfoil in Walgren, but I know it exists in rivers throughout the south-central region of Nebraska.

I don't think we have Zebra mussels here, like Yankton county, South Dakota, so that's one less lifeform to worry about. But for all of those that should be here that didn't make it or don't, how many of the bad guys do? How many survive our winters (the zebra mussel comes from the Caspian so it should love the cold)?

I don't think about the wildlife that I know as invasive--he plants I see, the animals.. pheasants are not native to our country either--in much the same way I don't think about how hard it is for other life forms to make it through the winter. But as spring creeps around the corner and curiosity blossoms, how much will I begin to think about the existence of these things, and mine, relative to them?

A word on "Salebarn" (the following prompt post)

I went to a bull sale with my dad a few weeks ago and have been wanting to write about it since then. I've also been thinking about the "Old Indian Tales" books and characters, and the characters around my county, and The Salebarn is the result of all these things coming together. Yes, this story is fiction, but it's based on a lot of real stuff. The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is just up the road and over the state line from Rushville, NE where I worked during high school. I worked at the newspaper, not the salebarn, but I was in 4-H, with the auctioneer's son, who never showed me around the salebarn at night.

I've only posted the first part of the story here, hoping to capture and evoke the feelings of confusion, fear and familiarity I found when entering the sale barn and falling backward into my old memories of 4-H and cattle sales and time spent at the salebarn with my dad as a little, little girl. I'll post more, but I didn't want it to be a waay long post.

Thaw: Place Post No. 6

Friday. March 19

Finally, I can sit outside without freezing. It'll be cold again in a bit, when the storm moves through, but for now, we're having some nice weather. The ground is damp underneath the grass and the leaves, but it is so nice to sit under the cottonwoods that for once, I don't mind the soggy coldness of winter.
The ice on Walgren is rotting today, beginning its spring thaw. A little more will go out everyday, but if we get cold weather again on Monday, that will slow it once again (It's Tuesday as I type this, and we got more snow today), but not allow it to freeze over. That's pretty much it for the winter on the lake. As the ice continues to melt for the next three weeks (or longer, depending on the weather) the hazy patches will separate, looking like oil on water.

In my light hoodie, I'm getting hot, it's almost 65 today and nothing but a mild breeze. I can hear the Canadian Geese overhead, so I know summer is coming, but today's temps aren't going to stay, not yet. That hasn't stopped dad, who's getting the boat ready and putting away the ice gear. He hopes to be on Minatare (another lake , about an hour from home) by next week. I think that's pushing it, but that's what makes him happy.

I rise from the damp spot on the ground, uncrossing my legs and shaking them. Heading down to the bridge sounds like a good idea, so I scramble down the gentle hillside and hook a hand over the wooden slat of the bridge. The little creek/crick in front of me has been running for at least two weeks; we've had more snow this winter than I have seen since my childhood memories of snow tunnels behind the house. Those snowdrifts were up to the gutters, and I suppose that was more than 20 years ago.. a lifetime, at least.

Seeing the water run clear in quick in front of me makes me smile. When I leave work in the evenings, I curse this same water, because it has pooled in the ditches along the highway that joins home and town. For fifteen miles I have to squint as I drive south; the sun, as it sets across the dried, yellow grasses, burns brightly in this melted snow runoff, and blinds me.

But here, today, looking at the results of warming temps and the coming of spring, I'm not blinded by the sun, only a little dizzy. The small ripples of water absorb some of the bright beams, which filter through the pale cabbage-colored water, but the other bit of sunshine that hits the water gets caught on the crest and moves along with it, a soft ripple of molten gold.

I want to see a fish, a minnow, maybe a turtle, but there's no activity like this yet. Maybe in a week. I lean over, squeeze and empty juice bottle in the water, suck in a great gulp of it, and return it to the Rav. It's too late in the day to go over to my old elementary school and use a microscope, but I'm tempted to pull a Dillard and see what I can see.

I have been awed and amazed all year by the readings I have had in my MFA courses. Some I've read before, others I've not, but in this light, the light of context and contemplation, I'm seeing things I've never seen before. This week we're reading about the urban landscape, how we find and create nature in the city. This nature doesn't necessarily even have to be of-the-earth type stuff, but seems to be adaptable to whatever is always around us. It is all our perspective, as Dillard wrote, it's all about how we take the time to look and see.

After leaving my bottle in the Rav, I walk over to the edge of the lake, where it's too reedy and marshy to still be frozen, and squat down, sniffing, looking to see what I can see. The edge of the ice that is close and observable for detail, is smushy looking, like wet cotton, and there are sticks and dried leaves and fine sediments stuck in it, a little further out. The mud here smells dank, like the holes left behind in week-long mud when you pull up a rock and air rushes in, trying to seal it over. It's smelly, the breakdown and decay of all the dead things that got stuck, but it's spring mud, and this thought moves me.

Cabin fever hasn't hit me as hard this year as it has in the past. I thought winter on the Plains was bad, here where everything is so wide open, so susceptible to snowing one in and blowing things closed, but it sure beats winter in the city. I feel like beyond the comfort of the winter--the bounty of snow, which means fuller lakes and rivers and better harvests, the ability to drive from place to place and not walk, and the warmth of my home (the heat is not my responsibility!)--I've come to find a general comfort in my placement at the moment. I'm certain I'm not here forever; in fact I'd like to leave next month, but instead of feeling quite so vicious about "home" I'm beginning to feel a bit of warmth.

Something splashes out beyond the silent reeds, something that has broken a spot in the ice and jumped up. It's got to be a fish, or maybe an otter? A beaver? A muskrat? A cheese rat? Who knows what it is. I eye the general area but see nothing, then walk to my car. It's inevitable: the next time I come back there will be less ice and more water; more mud too. More animals. In a month, kids will be out on the dock fishing, and the sheen of bruised, rotten ice will be gone. In a month the semester will be almost over, and it's just as inevitable that I'll be thinking strongly about what's next for me. It's human nature, nature that things come and go, change and progress. Even in it's solid, stagnant flatness, the ice too, is moving slowly. Yes, this is the thaw.

The Salebarn (part I): Prompt Post No. 6

wind blew across the parking lot as Tomi stepped from her car, crunching shit-stained snow with her black heels. Her small car, its shiny green body sure to get lost in between the staggered rows of tail-gated vehicles, was nosed in forward-- no need to parallel park, here, she thought, shaking her head slowly. Life in Boston had been a shock to her system, coming from the sweeping grasses of her Plains prairie, but grandfather, he had prepared her for that one.
"In the cities, there are so many cars people park in long rows down the street. It is different in many ways, and if you park funny, your difference will show."
Tomi had always hated it when her differences showed off the reservation, but on it, she was proud of her distinctions.
"There goes Tomi 'Too-Good'," joked the boys she had no time for, when they were feeling particularly mean and nasty, but Tomi would smile and nod her head into her books, trying hard to feign indifference. She knew she would get off the rez, leave behind the sadness and misery that had so long been suffered by her people. Grandfather told her he saw that in her future, and since he knew everything, she had always believed him. His comments about her differences being beautiful were something she had never believed growing up on the edge of the reservation, but in the city, well, people had loved them.
And now, she could remember his words like it was yesterday...had six years really passed already? Was her beloved Grandfather really dying? What had he said, crackling and wheezing from her cell phone?
"No more moons for grandfather?"
Tomi knew he'd said it in an attempt at humor, poking fun at his old ways, the things lost to her people that he'd held dear, those things she's once dreaded. Things like the dances, the way the drums spoke deep in her heart and her stomach, the way the rocks sang at the lodges and whispered the secrets of her people. She’d hated being known in school for those things, the Indian girl who was bused in to town on government funds, but now, her heritage was something almost magical.

Remembering her high school days Tomi slammed her door shut, and walking purposefully, moved toward the screened-in entrance.
it had been years since she'd driven past this lot, and now, back from college, the memories of her timeworking at the salebarn haunted her. The white paint was chipped and ugly along the north side of the building, and the scattered straw, manure and yelllowed snow puddles washed the ground leading to the chutes with an equal squalor. The men and women who worked here said that life on the Rez was putrid and ugly, but did they ever take a second look at their surroundings? The kids she'd guarded in basketball or ran against in track, the ones who'd been so hard on her for the way she'd ridden her horses in 4-H, did they ever think twice about the way they treated their own animals? Had she, when she slapped rumps and prodded ankles?
As Tomi reached the screen door-- still hanging at an uncomfortable angle after McClintock lost out on a heifer bid--she craned her head around to the east of the building, so that she could just see beyond the first pens and around the chute. The pens, once red and black, “in honor of the Herefords and Black Angus that come through,” Ellis had told her, were now rust colored and bronzed, or a flaky, dirty gray.
To the south of the pens, the loading chute was exactly as she’d remembered it: weathered wood, gone gray and warped in the harsh winters, covered with shit spatters of all colors, like brown,honey,gold,yellow,tan,chocolate,raisin polka dots. This was where the animals met their new enclosures: slatted semi-trailers, horse trailers or maybe just porta-pens in the back of a truck.
Tomi was hoping for a familiar face or two, but she couldn't see anything but cinnamon hide and loopy, bubble-gum udders. The cows were still in progress-- it would be a while until the bull sale started, so steadied by the determination in her mind, Tomi pushed open the screen door and was pulled forward.

The grounds had been kept up over the years, obviously, because the parking lot was full of trailers and pickup trucks and semis—hers was the only car—and that meant that today’s was going to be a big sale, but she had wasted enough time outside already. She knew how she felt about the commerce of animals. Boston had changed that, too. What she wanted to know…would Ellis be working here today?


The first time she stepped foot in the salebarn it had been dark out, but the sky was full of stars and the Moon was shining.
The 4-H sale had ended, and Tomi's steer had brought top dollar. Ellis Drum, who's dad Gene owned Drum's auction and officiated at the 4-H sale proceedings, spoke to her back in the pens when she'd returned her steer to his holdings.
"You know, Tomi.." he'd said, slow and calculated, with the mind of a man who is used to sizing up female animals for their heft, durability and reproductive capabilities "I could take you inside the salebarn sometime, show you around.. get you a drink."
Tomi's hand had stopped brushing whorl in the middle of her steer’s hindquarters. She knew Ellis in the way everyone knew him-- good looking, funny, Gene Drum's son. Golden. They'd talked at the 4-H dances each year, shared a few, shared more than that many beers, but they'd never been friends. Not really. Why did he want to do this for her now?

"Oh, really? What for?"
Tomi knew that there would be a cost of some sort involved in this; the Drum family hadn't wrangled the largest salebarn and auction reputation in the tri-county area with nothing but their good looks and silver tongues.
"I dunno, just thought you might like to see the place we kill the animals."
Tomi snorted, whipping around and bending upright to face Ellis.
“Cut the shit, Ellis. You know as well as I do that I’ve seen death before, and I’m not scared of it. You’ll talk to me here, ask me to see your salebarn while no one’s around, but you really want something. What.”
No nonsense, matter-of-fact. Tomi still talked that way, always had; it was this sensibility that had interested Mr. Brookings when he encouraged her to go into law.
Ellis’ dark eyes had almost glowed that night, like the firebugs she’d chased up from the grasses as a child, and when he answered her, she knew he meant it.

“Business, is all. You’re a good looking girl, gonna be a woman before school starts again.. I know you want offa that wasteland up north. Come down and work for us rest tha’ summer. Help out during the year.Put up some money for college. Dad’s on the Golden Clovers scholarship board… maybe he could work something even better.”
Tomi had pulled at the steer’s halter when Ellis offered her the job, a little harsher than necessary, and the young animal had bawled. And bawled and bawled, she though, shaking the old sounds from her head, then realizing that the lulling she heard was taking place now, in the present.


Without stopping by the small cafeteria to see if Cookie still worked here, Tomi had made it from the front door to the orchestra-pit style auctioneer pen, and there, teeming and gnashing and bawling, was an old Holstein and two little calves. The cow’s black splotches were haphazardly inked into her white hid, and if Tomi squinted, they looked mildly circular. The caked-on mud and shit that had spread across her back was dried and chunky, covering up her natural color. She was a mess, and her swollen udders, looking like pulled-taffy that had been stretched waaay too far, had cracked from a winter spent being milked hard.
It was not a scene Tomi had hoped for, when she’d parked her car, or at least not the first thing she saw upon entering. Why couldn't it be the little Brayden twins, in their matching Wranglers, chasing each other over the seats and playing "bangbang" with pistol fingers? Of course it wouldn't be them.. they had to be grown up now.. junior high school at least. Or Sally, the other Native who swept out the pens and sometimes snuck inside to watch the sale? Something nice, something warm and comforting.
Right. Comforting, at the saleabarn, where lives are bought and sold and deals are made among the human animals.


That fall, after the fair was over and Tomi skipped out on the carnival and dances to go drinking, Ellis had taken her inside the salebarn. No livestock, no humans, just the two of them, and that smell. That wet, earthy smell that comes from and is a range animal. It had been her first time inside the salebarn, and even though all they did was sit up in the crow’s nest and drink bourbon, Tomi thought it felt familiar. Like maybe she belonged. She made up her mind that night to work at Drum Auction and Packing, because she knew that working in the white man’s town, trading his commodities and understanding them, was crucial to her success when she left her own broken land.


“Iminabid iminabid, iminabid, five, five five, no, six, no, seven, no, ten, do I have ten? Up ten, up ten, up ten on the dollar, to the man in the white hat, the white hat, the Stetson, yessir, number 45, is that you Bob? You are number 45, if I am not mistaken?”
Tomi was jerked again from the past into the present, hearing Gene’s undulating voice drop down and run up octaves as he raised the bidding price on the cow in the pen. It surprised her how easily the language of the auction came back to her. The “man in the white hat white hat white hat,” Gene knew him, he was a regular at the auctions, and it wasn’t uncommon for Gene to sneak in greetings and observances in the middle of a sale, then carry on with the bidding without even taking a breath. The cow and her calves, looking to be about two weeks old, sold for just over $800 dollars.
Eight hundred dollars for her life, and the lives of her children. Surely worth more? But how would Tomi know? Hadn't her own life, her hopes for something better, been commodified in a similar way, in this very place, just a few years ago?


Tomi sniffled at the cold air and watched the next items lope inside: two small, red heifers. The thing about watching an auction that always bothered Tomi was not that the animals would be killed and eaten—dinner—but that they had served as entertainment first. Mick was still working here, brandishing the prod that kept the animals in line, and as he shocked one of the heifers from behind, she jumped forward, slipped on the wet, shitty dirt, and skidded across the pen floor. The men around Tomi, intent on the sale in progress, didn’t seem to notice the animal’s fear, or frantic energy. iOr perhaps they did, and they just didn’t care? She was never quite sure which it was, but either way, it didn’t matter. What was clear was that the animal had suffered, then rushed into this pen, thinking only of something different, yet not knowing quite what.