Experimental Fictions

For those of you who have never gone to a Rahna Reiko Rizzuto reading or enrolled in one of her classes, she's a knock-out green-eyed Italian/Irish-Japanese astrophysics-trained novelist/memoirist who was born in Honolulu and has made the world her home (and left the world with, among other things, Why She Left Us, the novel that won an American Book Award). She's also one of my dearest friends, and every now and then a package will arrive with Reiko's writing scrawled across the front. Saturday that happened. Inside was a book by Christian Peet, a story told through postcards titled Big American Trip. Yes. A story told through postcards. Angry, odd, fantastic comminiques that all add up to a singular voice that may be male, may be female, may be fiction, may be not.

Addressed to the Sweet Grass County Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Center in Big Timber, MT, for example, these words: "I do not wish that the world would go by. I do not wish to watch the world leave."

Reading through Trip yesterday afternoon, I thought of all the other deliberately odd books that have won my heart—the out-of-the-boxers that made me want to write a book like Flow, a river's autobiography, and that inspire the work I'm doing now. Carole Maso's Ava, for example—the final words of a dying woman, the unpieced fragments of a life. Michael Ondaatje's pseudo-biography of Buddy Bolden, Coming through Slaughter. John Berger's novel in unchronological letters, From A to X. Markus Zusak's Death-narrated The Book Thief. Richard Flanagan's Death of a River Guide. Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds. Alexansdar Hemon's The Lazarus Project. Forest Gander's As a Friend.

These books don't hew to the sound bite. These books dare. I've got an entire shelf of them here. I like sitting among them, breaking rules.

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Gifted

Once, when writing the preface to a book of poems written by young writers I'd been teaching, I wrote: "You measure good writing by any number of criteria—by the accretion of telling details, by the ingenuity of the narrator's voice, by the pizzazz of dialogue, by the you-know-them-when-you-see-them signs of originality. We come to value, in good writers, so much more. Exuberance and compassion. Reliability and audacity...."

I was thinking about this yesterday after I discovered a fat package in my mailbox, return address naming Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. Reiko is the author of the extraordinary, American Book Award winning WHY SHE LEFT US. She is also one of my dearest friends—has been since our essays appeared together in MOTHERS WHO THINK—and when I saw the package, I had this mind-trip moment of remembering all the gifts she's ever sent me. A paper vase from Japan. A piece of jade from Hong Kong. A pair of earrings. It goes on. She's the sort of person who fills an afternoon in New York City with detours into niches I'd never know existed. Also the sort who listens brilliantly, and calms you with her words. She's a fantastic writer, ask anyone. But she is also so much more, and it is the more of Reiko that I think of first—the who she is trumping the what she writes, but also, of course, creating the frame in which she writes.

There were bookmarks from Japan in Reiko's package—they sit here now, on my shelf. And then there was DIVISADERO, Michael Ondaatje's newest book. I'd read it, of course (I've read every last Ondaatje word), but I didn't, as her note said, have a copy inscribed to me, which this one was. Jetlagged, just a few hours off the plane from Japan, she'd gone to see this great author read. She'd waited in line. She'd bought me his book.

Writing is impossibly hard; we all know that. There are those who make the journey sound. Reiko is one of those.

(Photo above: Reiko to the right, and our families, at Hawk Mountain.)

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