Art Is the Daughter of Freedom
Read books, be kind, stay weird (Band Parking Only!)
Hello dear ones
I took a trip (which I wrote about here in more depth for paid subscribers) but as one does, I had an overflow of pictures and needed to share them with SOMEONE. I went away for a writing retreat with some really lovely people and am still basking in the now distant glow of their intellects and souls. After this, I met my little family in northern Michigan for what has become a small tradition: yank our poor children out of public school and teach them by the ghostly glow of Lake Michigan’s lighthouses.
I mean, I’m kidding about the teaching part, unless you are solving the math problem, How Long Does It Take to Cook a Hotel Waffle? And/but the real reason I’m here is to ask if anyone else is being haunted by Stanley Tucci. I don’t know if the universe is trying to tell me something about buying a cookbook but in every bookstore I’ve been into recently Mr. Tucci’s bald pate peeks out from some stack mischievously. (That word is an actual nightmare to spell, ps. I just checked it four times and am still worried about it.)
I’m putting Jim Harrison’s Dalva here because on this writing retreat, one night by the fire one of the organizers (Sarah McColl who writes the newsletter Lost Art) asked me and the other retreat organizer, novelist Amy Shearn, what book changed our lives or what book changed how we think about writing on the page. For me, that book was Dalva. (Sidebar: I’m so impressed by the questions people ask. My questions are: What did you eat for breakfast today? Also: What color tile would make you SO HAPPY to have as a backsplash in your kitchen? And, like, I actually want to know the answers, lol.)
There are lots of things to say about Jim Harrison and not all of them are great. On the retreat I spoke to another woman who happened to grow up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula who said she’s never read a novel about that region that isn’t written in the style of Jim Harrison - a larger than life romp amoungst wilderness and (what I would call) a free-ranging masculinity. She said she doesn’t know anyone like that where she grew up. There are no actual characters there like that, so where are the novels about teen girls going to the mall? Which I thought was a GREAT thing to say and I’d read that novel in a heartbeat. It also reminded me of my friend who grew up in Colorado who doesn’t ski or camp, who says “THIS is what it means to be a Colorado girl,” referring to the fact that she’s not clad head-to-toe in REI every second of her life.
I once heard (or read) Louise Erdrich say she felt that she’d been overlooked as an American author and had been instead shelved, perhaps even fetishized, as a Native writer. (This is where Kara should go find that interview. Sorry and you’re welcome, I’m not doing it.) I completely agree and also admit I have never gotten through Love Medicine! I think it’s because it starts with a murder, right? I have read several of her novels, and loved The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (which is the best freaking title you’ve heard in your life) and really loved The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood, which I later found out was a condensing of several pregnancies and the mothering of different children, which is just one more thing to admire about Erdrich’s craft and intelligence.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that Dalva helped me unlock some of the sloppiness of my own prose because I read it at the end of graduate school while struggling to write a novel for my thesis project. We had been studying sweetly twee, tight little short stories, and I was quite intimidated, nay constipated, in the face of them. Then, on a trip to Alaska of all places (though also not of all places - of course in a locale focused on mythical ranging, I’d find a spotlight on old Jim) I picked up a tattered copy of Dalva and something unlocked inside my skull (felt, in fact, like my head was a blender and Harrison blew the top right off).
I haven’t read it in years. I don’t know how it holds up. I don’t know how Harrison’s potential co-opting of native passions and narrative tricks stands against the tests of time and culture. But I might always feel grateful to that book for helping me understand that it’s okay to let your structure be kind of a mess, it’s okay to let your narrators go on tangents, and that a woman with secrets is one of the most delicious things - in literature, certainly, or maybe just in life?
As one does on vacation, we went to a lot of bookstores. We even got properly kicked out of one? By a surly young person manning the register who would rather have been in the stock room playing video games. It was the sweetest store, too, decorated like my ideal living room: a little fussy, a little cozy, with Stanley Tucci in the corner, obvs.
This was in Sutton’s Bay, which we’d had to target for a toy store because we were being held hostage by a grumpy seven year old. But it was fun and we all played together, and the cash registers in this store were helmed by adults who felt like they could have fallen out of Harrison’s pages. They were wizened and wrinkled and sun-tanned and had smoker’s coughs. I don’t know, I liked them all.
Some other things collected on this trip (with a nod to Allen Ginsberg?): I saw sheriff going into a Starbucks. I heard the GPS tell me to stay in the any of the right five lanes. That’s a lot of lanes! I saw something billow, white and fluffy, falling from the shelf of a billboard where three humans stood. Was it a man in a jumpsuit, that thing that just fell? A piece of old signage? I was past the billboard and couldn’t see if the others were concerned about it. I hoped someone hadn’t broken their neck. I saw a woman put down her cigarette to take a bite of a fudge bar she was sharing with her travel partner at a highway rest stop. And, this isn’t on the trip but I need you to know that upon returning home, I saw two police officers shopping together in uniform at Meijer in the pasta aisle, with ingredients for what looked like a killer salad or a fresh spaghetti sauce. Their radios squawked. They were on duty, shopping together for food, possibly to feed others which is perhaps all I want from my police officers?
At one of my favorite stores I saw this book and thought it looked good and am kicking myself that I didn’t get it. But I had to pass because it had the kind of poetry you study in college English courses, which feels like dried flowers are going to actually fall out of the book and crumble onto your lap while you read.
Because I met up with my family on vacation, I drove home by myself while absolutely blasting an audio book, a novel I don’t quite care about which is frankly the perfect thing to listen to while driving. It is slightly entertaining but not so engrossing you have to study the language. The characters are like birdsong chittering in the breeze.
On the way home I saw an enormous pumpkin parked outside a City Hall with a permanent leprechaun statue in front. Wonders never cease. Like a dog with crooked teeth, a horse with one working eye, Michigan, I am proud to call you home.
Later that night, Tim sent me this photo from the soccer complex. Nevermind that this person used the wrong spelling of “Your.” Who doesn’t love an enterprising mind and a someone with a Sharpie? If you’ve spent more than three seconds with this newsletter, you know that I deeply appreciate that combo. **insert all the dragon pictures my child scrawls in twenty seconds at the kitchen counter**
I’m outta here but sending you all the good luck and all the good Sharpies (not the ones that kind of suck that my mom swears will be revived if you just store them upside down, lol), books that haunt, the whisperings of freedom, the wilderness of changing seasons, and some mad midnight scrawlings for those of you inclined.
XOXO
Kara
I need to know what you got kicked out of the bookstore for
Love these traventure postcards (except perhaps the Stanley Tucci images, which will also be haunting me for nights to come). It sounds like it was a rich time <hooray> - good luck with the re-entry to post-retreat days/daze <3