In the Garden of Stone/Susan Tekulve

You know how it is when you steal that time to read the book you desperately want to read? I have been stealing that time.

Among the many wonderful people I met at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference (a conference I attended so that I could spend more time with the great Jayne Anne Phillips)—Brooks Hansen, Anne Lamott, Jane Satterfield, Leslie Pietrzyk, Jay Kirk, Olena Kalytiak Davis, my first editor, Alane Salierno Mason (W.W. Norton), my second editor in chief, Janet Silver, Grace Paley, even—there was a young scholarship winner named Susan Tekulve, who hailed from the south and told intriguing tales. Through the years Susan and I remained in touch as she published short stories and built a reputation as a fine teacher at Converse College in Spartanburg, SC. She traveled to and taught in Italy. She spent time among the Appalachian hills, where my great grandfather had left a mark. She brokered fascinating details. She was always humble and she, like me, loved chocolate, cats, and gardens.

Not long ago, Susan won the South Carolina First Novel Prize for In the Garden of Stone, which will be released in a beautifully designed package by Hub City Press in late April. Kirkus gave it a huge star. Library Journal named it as a Spring Break. None other than Robert Olmstead, Thomas E. Kennedy, and Josephine Humphreys have sung its praises, and I asked for an early copy.

This is the book I've been desperate to read, and my joy for Susan, my enthusiasm, my deep respect, I'll use the word "awe"—it overflows. I'm 100 pages in and now must leave it for a spell to do some corporate work. I'll write a full response in a few days. But for now let me say that this generational book about the south and southern Italy (yes, they combine to perfection here) is so brilliantly built and quietly affecting that I could choose any single paragraph and it would impress you.

Here's just one. It's 1924, the first evening of a southern honeymoon.

Around the mountain pool, the butterflies flattened themselves against long, polished stones, drinking the water held in their dimpled surfaces. Emma took off her shoes and walked across the slippery rocks. Water sprayed her face and arms as she dodged the drinking butterflies and stood at the pool's edge, watching the giant trout swim around the pool. Dark blue and mottled, they skulled just below the surface, gulping up butterflies and water, their stomachs filling like empty buckets. She saw now why her husband had released them. She, too, was satisfied just to know that they were there.

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Central Park: An Anthology, A Poem, A Hot Day's Celebration

At the close of a warm day I discover this news in The New York Times—Andrew Blauner has edited an anthology on Central Park (called Central Park: An Anthology) featuring reflections and celebrations from Colson Whitehead, Paul Auster, Jonathan Safran Foer, Susan Cheever, Mark Helprin...and my friends Brooks Hansen and Buzz Bissinger, among others.  You can read the whole Michiko Kakutani review here, but if you have time for just three paragraphs, I share these, about and from the Bissinger essay: 

In Buzz Bissinger’s case, the view from his childhood apartment on Central Park West provided a window on a changing New York City. Just as he loved the boyhood ritual of going to the park with his parents on Sundays, so he later loved the ritual of sitting with his dad in front of the living room window overlooking the park. 

Mr. Bissinger’s father died in 2001, his mother four months later, and when the rent zoomed from $2,700 a month to $7,000 to $10,000, he and his sister were forced to let go of their treasured home. Looking back now, he says he realized he never felt closer to his family than when they were sitting in the living room, looking out the picture window at the panorama of those 843 acres below.

“I thought we would last forever,” he writes. “In a way I cannot quite explain, I felt a sense of immortality because Central Park was immortal, that everything would always stay the same.”

Reading all this takes me back to a Central Park day I shared with my friend Rahna Reiko Rizzuto.  In celebration of the book, then, in celebration of Andrew, Buzz, Brooks, and Reiko, and in celebration of warm summer days, I share (again) that poem here.

Unassailable

From where we stood, on the castle rock

Of Central Park, Harlem was as near as

Twenty years ago.  Everything

Between then and us was green.

The pond turtles were stacked up like stones

On stones.  The trees were a day away

From shucking their own shells.

The red wing of a black bird was like a hand

That had been dealt, and we were the splendor

Sight we had given ourselves.

Afterward, it was Amsterdam to Broadway,

Columbus Circle down to the sweet

Remembered squalor of Times Square,

And on every corner:  Song.

The high hollows of the Peruvians,

The mesquite of a jazz trombone,

The Mennonites in hairnets and black sneakers.

I wondered later whether we had become

The engine of concatenation,

Two women made radical
With unappeasable want,

The unassailable desire to remember.

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This is Me (and the books I should be reading)

The books are stacking taller and taller about my tiny house—beckoning, desired, and unread. No One You Know (Michelle Richmond), which I won from Presenting Lenore, who lists it as a favorite book. Halfway House (Katharine Noel) and Home Schooling (Carol Windley)—gifts from a certain editor at Grove. John the Baptizer, by Brooks Hansen, a long-time friend and an Alane Mason author, Alane being my first editor. The Language of Things (Deyan Sudjic), also an Alane book, and The Little Strangers (Sarah Waters), because I adored Waters' The Night Watch and because I trust the independent film producer who suggested that I add Strangers to my list. The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery), because everyone is talking about it. Brooklyn (Colm Toibin) and Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann), because they are books by two of my favorite living writers.

I have been out, I have been dancing, I have been taking photographs, I have been Body Pumping and Zumba-ing and walking the streets of Philadelphia and running this business of mine. I have not been reading, and I have barely been writing, and I've gotten that ache in my bones.

It is 6:40 AM, a Sunday.

Today I read.

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Second Chances

I posted earlier this week about the gifts of friendship yielded by the mostly private writing life; I wrote, particularly, about Jayne Anne Phillips.

My story was about the time I'd spent with Jayne Anne in Prague; Jay Kirk, that enormously gifted writer whom I've praised in other blog entries (most recently that gorgeous Rwanda piece in GQ) and whom I've benefited so hugely from knowing since 2005, wrote to tell me about the quality of a critique Jayne Anne had given him at Bread Loaf. The email dialogue went (paraphrasically) thusly:

Me: Wait. What year were you at Bread Loaf?

Jay: I was there in '96.

Me: As was I. Grace Paley. Anne Lamott. The gorgeous Olena Kaltyiak Davis. Jane Satterfield. Brooks Hansen.

Jay: Wait. You were in our class? Or were you teaching...

Well, indeed. You get that point. Apparently, I've known Jay since 1996. Apparently, we sat in the same small classroom. Surely, I read pages from his then novel-in-progress; I remember the beating pulse of the guy's talent. And beyond this being one of those ain't-life-strange conjunctions, it raises for me this question:

How do I keep managing to trip up against blazing talents who are also (don't ever take this for granted) hugely good souls? The sort of people I need to know, because without them I wouldn't think nearly as hard. I had the chance to know Jay a long time ago, it seems. I was given (fluke that it was) a second chance. Thank goodness I was finally paying attention in '05. It would have been lousy if I hadn't.

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The Brotherhood of Joseph

Last night a fever woke me in the dark—the trembled physical brand of fever, yes, but also the soul-er variety, the stir within that whispers: Get up.

I got up.

I'd left the galleys for Brooks Hansen's upcoming memoir, The Brotherhood of Joseph: A Father's Memoir of Infertility and Adoption in the 21st Century, on the downstairs couch. It had arrived via Fed Ex the day before, and in between what I was supposed to be doing on Friday, I was stealing time with it—caught up in the story's spiral, in Brooks' searing, daring prose, in the shout and the song of the life Brooks has been living since I saw him last, perhaps 11 years ago, when he was a much-touted young novelist at Bread Loaf and I was a yearning wannabe. If I could have read Brooks' memoir cover to cover Friday, I would have, but real life intervened, and so this morning, a little hot, a little cold at the same time, I crawled downstairs to finish the story.

BROTHERHOOD is a book, a real book. So knuckled into, so honest, so entirely cinematic and yet, I'm sure of this, because I know a little something about Brooks, so true. It is the story of his search for family. It is the story of all the rock-faced moutains two people choose to tunnel through to find a boy named Theo.

I guess I'm celebrating that today—the achievement of the book itself, which is due out in June, and the triumph of the Hansen family. I'm celebrating the discovery of a book I loved, this reawakening in the height of a fever.

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