The mysterious Irene P., etc.

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Earlier this month, I was a panelist at a Delta Literary Arts Society (DLAS) event here in Tsawwassen, with writers Raoul Fernandez, Debra Purdy Kong, and S.J. Kootz. Along with an honorarium, each of us was gifted a book from “the abandoned library” of a woman known as Irene P.; mine was Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. “Do books long for a new owner?” asks a note pasted into the flyleaf. Assuming they do, “Just such a case has brought this book to you… once one of thousands in a collection owned by one Irene P.”

I asked the event organizer about her. She didn’t know much beyond the fact that when the woman’s house sold, there were thousands (6000, did she say?) books left behind, and hundreds about writing which somehow came to the DLAS and are used as unique thank yous. With all that advice on her shelves, did Irene P. write? I don’t know that either; hers is a story still to be told perhaps, but at any rate, I now have her 1995 edition of the Lamott classic, and it gives me pleasure. Since I already own the book, I’ll pass my copy on to someone else. And I think I’ll see if I can’t get more information about our mysterious donor.

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Speaking of writing advice, I recently read a small (80 pages) book by Stephen Marche called On Writing and Failure. Marche is no slouch, he’s written books and essays for all kinds of prestigious magazines, but he’s honest about the reality of the life: rejection. He kept track of them, he says, until they reached 2000, and hardly notices any more. He offers examples from other writers, and the point of it is not the promise of some inevitable arc to success, but his subtitle: On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer. The book is full of quotable quotes:

English has provided a precise term of art to describe the writerly condition: Submission. Writers live in a state of submission. Submission means rejection. Rejection is the condition of the practice of submission, which is the practice of writing.

In an environment where some 300,000 books are printed yearly in the U.S. alone, and only a few hundred of those are what could be called creative or financial successes, there’s certainly no urgency for anyone to join the ranks. But if one’s there already, nothing for it, he says,81l-0zGg3GL._SY522_ but to keep at it, to keep submitting the work. “No whining,” he insists repeatedly. “The desire to make meaning…is a valid desire despite the inevitability of defeat.”

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And, speaking of small but profound books, Sue Sorensen’s new poetry book, Acutely Life (At Bay Press), is an absolute delight. Whether she’s considering Freud or a musician or art or gardening/marriage or Mary the mother of Jesus, Sorensen registers on the page with both brilliant wit and deep emotional insight. Somewhere I read (though I can’t find the exact quote), one doesn’t interpret poetry as much as experience it. That’s how it’s been reading this book. I intend to read/experience it again.AcutleyLifeCover_(1)_800_1257_90

Did you turn into someone else?

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When my eldest granddaughter was 3-something, I showed her our wedding photo, which  happened to stand on the family mantel in her home. I said it was Grandpa and me. Obviously she’d never made the connection, for she looked back and forth from the photo to me, comparing the young woman with long dark hair inside the frame to the woman with short grey hair and glasses who was holding her.

“Grandma,” she finally said, earnestly, “did you turn into someone else?”

I can’t remember what I said in reply, though I chuckled. I still chuckle, thinking of it more than a a decade and a half later. What a great question.

I could have said Absolutely, yes, I’ve turned into someone else, in fact I’ve been a number of “elses” over my lifetime, at the cellular level for sure, but in other ways too, in awareness, knowledge, thinking, views on matters theological, political, and otherwise. Change is the stuff of life and I’ve tried to be open to changes and conversions of all kinds Here’s hoping it shows. 

But no surprise my granddaughter was confused. I get confused about myself too. I shopped for pants this week. Strolling the mall, seeing the window displays, I realized that when I look at the mannequins, in some weird way I still inhabit the sense of being a teen, assume myself slender and taut. Once inside the change room then, with my items to try on and it’s Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s that you’re looking at? and it’s someone with soft belly, soft thighs. With a sigh, recognition realigns with reality.

On the other hand, I could have said, No, no, no, same me, or better said, same old me. Surface is surface, and underneath is the me I’ve always been. It seems to me that there’s something basic in personality and sense of self that threads back as far as memory can take one and furthermore, that this thread, at least for a child with a reasonably happy childhood, doesn’t want to break. Shouldn’t.

I was struck by something I heard at an online funeral recently: the deceased person, on getting their terminal diagnosis, had said, “I’ve enjoyed being alive.”

Me too, I thought, I enjoy being alive.

Joy and wonder. That’s the part that feels unchanged, or when lost, can be recovered. It’s the entering the kingdom like a child. Being four or maybe five or six, the wonder of hearing exquisite music come out of a huge tape player above my head on the table. The wonder of fields and hills we played in, the wonder of “swimming” in a foot of creek water, the wonder of those letters on a page that make up words and can be read, the wonder of God is love.

Oh you sweet, bright grandchild of mine, did I turn into someone else? Yes and no. No and yes.

And you, what about you? Did you turn into someone else?

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A February day.

Konstantin Paustovsky & Hildi Froese Tiessen: there, then

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I’ve been working my way through Konstantin Paustovsky’s 6-book Story of a Life this month. I heard about Paustovsky on The Mookse and the Gripes podcast and was drawn to his work when I discovered he was an almost-exact contemporary of my grandfather, about whom I’ve been thinking on account of last fall’s trip to the Caucasus. My grandfather was born in Molotschna Colony, Ukraine (then Russia) in 1890 and Paustovsky was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1892.

I was also pleased to discover that the entire series is held at the Vancouver Public Library. I took them all out.

Since I may — someday — do a personal essay about my grandfather in the Caucasus during WWI, reading Paustovsky is a kind of research, though of the most pleasurable variety, for he writes vividly, not at a distance but from within each experience as it occurred. During the war he worked on a medical train, as did my grandfather. He was in Moscow during the early revolutionary period, when the city was “one solid, seething, endless public meeting.” He was in Kiev during part of the 3-year period when Ukraine underwent civil war and 17 political upheavals.

The first three books were especially compelling, but I will persist to the end because after a year in Odessa during the blockade (Vol. 4), Paustovsky spends time in the Caucasus in Vol. 5, which I’ve reached too. I look forward to his descriptions of that region.

Mennonite/s writing

I’ve also worked my way this month through On Mennonite/s Writing, selected essays by Hildi Froese Tiessen — “a scholar widely recognized as the primary critical figure in contemporary Mennonite literary studies” — recently published by CMU Press. The selecting of 18 essays, from her more than 80 contributions in the form of essays, book chapters, special journal issues, and so on–was done by Robert Zacharias. He also provides a fine introduction to Froese Tiessen’s overall work and this collection.

This is an important book, both in terms of honouring Froese Tiessen and of encapsulating a history of critical engagement with Mennonite literature. It was also fun to read.

I think I may have read some of the essays before, and certainly had some sense of the emergence of a so-called Mennonite literature, but I enjoyed starting at the beginning with her first essay in 1973 about Rudy Wiebe’s work, and seeing, in real time as it were, her continuing and developing insights into what was going on, especially in the relationship of Mennonite writers and their Mennonite community.

I read this book as a reader of Mennonite literature — and do recommend it to other readers and to students of literature — but I also enjoyed it as one of those “writers who happens to be Mennonite,” whose work came along rather later, in the wake of the period she especially observes. Reader or writer, we will all likely share the question of what comes next, and may have our opinions about what should or could, for as Froese Tiessen makes clear, the field has changed and continues to change. Her last essay describes the shift as one of “Mennonites as a community written about” to “Mennonites as a community writing.”

Two asides, or additional points of interest for me. The essay on the “forever summer, forever Sunday” trope of the Mennonite past in Russia, which entered the work of Rudy Wiebe, Sarah Klassen, David Waltner-Toews, and Sandra Birdsell (“Between Memory and Longing”) struck me as almost ironical as Froese Tiessen discerns/articulates an effect she herself could be said to have created. (She and her husband published a book of Peter Gerhard Rempel’s photographs of Mennonites in Russia with that title.) Perhaps an element of such circularity also characterizes her wider contribution to the field.

And then, in the middle of the book, in the essay “The Case of Dallas Wiebe,” three poems! His voice “distinctive enough to unsettle or inspire,” she says quite rightly. From the poem “God Speaks to the Geriatric Convention,” lines that sprung out to me:

You should imagine
that when you walk
through the valley of the shadow of death
that I am the one
who casts the shadow.

Reflecting on her life’s work, Froese Tiessen says, “[D]uring that irruption of Mennonite writing concentrated in the last two decades of the last century I had found myself, so often, right there, right then.” We can be grateful she was there, then, for her thinking is astute, her writing is clear and accessible, and her impact was enormous.