trusting your past to a book of life (and wisteria)

I'm not all that adept at social media. I notice things, but it takes me time. So that when Modern Heirloom Books began tweeting from and about my memoir book, Handling the Truth, I didn't quite understand, at first, from whence this kindness was coming.

I have since learned. Modern Heirloom Books, founded by a woman with a long (senior) history in magazines—Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Parenting—is an organization, an idea, that stands up to time.

Here's what they do:

Forget about stuffy family histories. No old-fashioned photo albums, either. We expertly curate your “stuff”—from boxes, phones, and hard drives; hone your memories; elicit stories that surprise and delight; and design a book that is graphically and narratively evocative.

We’ll take a journey of discovery together, and present you with a modern book of life that will resonate for generations to come—and that you will revisit again and again.

The more I've come to know Dawn M. Roode, the founder of this lovely organization, the more I see just how deeply she has come to think about this process, and just how perfectly right she is—a woman to whom you can trust your past.

Last week, on a blog that is genuinely and reliably thoughtful, Dawn wrote about how to use photographs as prompts for writing life stories. She may be quoting again from Handling the Truth, but she does far more than that.

She takes you somewhere.

Go with her.

The wisteria above, by the way—the gift of last evening's dinner party with friends. The earth is tangled, politics are cruel, there is far too much inequity.

But look at the wisteria and breathe.

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Leave Your Sleep/Natalie Merchant: Poetry Made True

Back on December 27th, I wrote of Natalie Merchant on this blog, wondering out loud where she had gone.  In the intervening weeks and months, I began to hear rumors.  Ed Goldberg, a librarian, had spotted her, he said at a convention; she'd set poems to music, he reported, and they were lovely.  On April 18th, The New York Times confirmed Ed's promise; Leave Your Sleep, a project that took Ms. Merchant five years, was now available in stores.  My Friend Amy further confirmed the fact; on April 19th, she blogged of her long love for Merchant, as well as of her enthusiasm for Leave Your Sleep, which she'd already procured.  By then my copy was already on the way to me.  Yesterday it arrived.

Earlier today, my husband and I drove to a town called Skippack, where I sat beneath this wisteria tree.  When we arrived home, my husband went out to his studio to make the art he masterfully makes, and I stayed inside to listen to every single one of Natalie Merchant's 26 new songs.  There's never been a voice like hers, I'm sure, nor, perhaps, a musician's heart.  I cannot count the times that I have danced alone to her songs through the years or yearned after the quality of her lyrics—the stunning coherence and wisdom of them.  I have always loved Natalie Merchant; I didn't think I could love her more.

With Leave Your Sleep, Ms. Merchant didn't merely select and arrange often nonsensical poems into songs, yielding them new and delving meaning.  She also set out on an adventure to discover the lives of the poets who'd penned the songs that inspired her.  She fell in love, in the process, with the "doomed and luminous eyes" of Robert Louis Stevenson, restored the child prodigy Nathalia Crane to a place of honor, imagined seeing Ogden Nash at "a cocktail hour in a paneled den with cut-glass bowls of salted nuts on the bar and the air blue with cigar smoke," and refused to imagine the day that Arthur Macy learned that both of his sons had died.

In the preface to the book of poems and poet biographies (all researched and written by Ms. Merchant) that accompanies her two CDs, Ms. Merchant writes this:

This collection of songs represents parts of a long conversation I've had with my daughter during the first six years of her life.  It documents our word-of-mouth tradition in the poems, stories, and songs that I found to delight and teach her.  I pulled these obscure and eccentric poems off their flat, yellowed pages and brought them to life for her. I willed into being this parade of witches and fearless girls, blind men and elephants, giants and sailors and gypsies, floating churches, dancing bears, circus ponies, a Chinese princess and a jaintor's boy, and so many others.

Art born of a mother's love.  I like that.  I like that a whole lot.

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