Enchanted Prose

What’s lost and what can be saved after severe psychological trauma (China, northeast/southeast cities, and Toronto, Canada; 1968 – 2006): “In 1976, the sky over China collapsed.” So begins the newest, English-translated, searing novel by acclaimed Chinese-Canadian author Zhang Ling. Poignantly asking, “What can you hold onto forever?”

In 2010, Ling’s Aftershock novella was adapted into a movie that skyrocketed her to literary fame. By then, she’d immigrated to Toronto and was working as a clinical audiologist treating patients who were victims of wars and disasters. Her Chinese and Canadian experiences gave her first-hand insight into trauma. The movie became the “highest-grossing domestic film in China’s history.” Available in subtitles on some streaming platforms, be forewarned that even this short video clip is intense and disturbing:

Aftershock, turned-into-a-novel, is dedicated “To 1976, the most eventful year in my memory.” Psychologically focused on the aftermath of the worst 20^th century “natural disaster in the entire record of earthquakes,” Ling writes, killing an estimated half-a-million people and leaving survivors “numb and heartless.”

The emotionality of Aftershock may be the closest a non-psychologist/psychiatrist reader gets to understanding the mental anguish of a deeply-rooted, complex psychological illness: post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD.

Penetrating storytelling centers on one family living in a “simple, residential” community in China’s northeastern, coastal city Tangshan, in the Hebei province. You’ll see how some survivors cope, dramatically contrasted by one whose heart and soul are so broken she becomes an emotional shell of her former self. Xiaodeng is that mentally, dispirited main female character who essentially died in that epic earthquake too.

Ling’s piercing prose and storytelling deeply moves us, displaying why she’s been awarded multiple, prestigious Chinese literature prizes. A mere two-and-a-half opening pages, following an even briefer Foreword about that fateful 1976 day, may be one of the most compelling literary hooks you’ve read.

The story of a family of four primarily revolves around the mother, Li Yuanni, and her two twin children: daughter Xiaodeng and son Xiaoda. Twin psychology is also at play. Their father, a former soldier, drives a truck on “long-haul” journeys. Long-haul well-describes the novel’s journey from Before and After the earth exploded onto them. Mother-and-son are the more resilient ones, yet still dealing with their survivor guilt; Xiaodeng is the one who cannot move forward because of her mother’s in-the-moment, life-or-death decision when she realizes she can only rescue one child. A fleeting, excruciating decision with monumental, life-altering consequences. Why she chose her son over her daughter will haunt you.

There’s so many BIG themes packed into this slim historical, soulful novel (208 pages). The soul that’s left is what happens after unbearable sacrifice and abandonment. The depiction of Li digging through the “rubble with her our own fingers after the earthquake” leaves a mother and son with emotional and/or physical scars, yet overpowered by the left-to-die daughter.

Xiaodeng’s mental suffering is witnessed over thirty years. How do survivors of extreme emotional trauma get on with their lives? How tormented are their psyches? How well do they sleep? Have nightmares? Paralyzing anxiety? Unrelenting headaches? What are their relationships – familial, marriage, children, occupational – like? At one point, optimistic Xiaoda says, “Good days are coming,” and you can’t help but wonder when, if ever, that outlook will apply to his long-lost sister, who could be dead as far as mother and son know.

In a recent interview, Ling discusses how important the “mother-daughter relationship is,” which she’s explored in other novels. Aftershock delves into three mother-daughter relationships: Li’s and Xiaodeng’s; Xiaodeng with her adoptive mother (her adoptive father also influences feelings of betrayal); and when Xiaodeng marries and has a daughter of her own. An exceedingly strict, overprotective mother.

“Xiaodeng,” her husband Yang Yang says, in tears. “I can’t get inside your heart. I’ve been trying to for eighteen years, but it’s no use. You’re wrapped up too tightly.”

“What if I told you my heart was wrapped too tightly even for me to get in, would you feel better?” Xiaodeng replies. 

Yang Yang’s tears replace Xiaodeng’s who hasn’t cried since the earthquake. “Her eyes like ice caves.” Tears, a treatment goal. Her mother Li’s tears are of “only despair.”

Ling helps us understand why Xiaodeng is helpless at modifying her behavior for the sake of her daughter’s and husband’s happiness. Even love and tenderness cannot fix this family’s oppressive tension. “How could she give what she didn’t have?”

We don’t meet Xiaodeng in the Before. Instead, when she’s thirty-seven, when the damage has become ingrained, arriving by ambulance at a real Toronto hospital, whispering into the ear of a psychiatrist, “Save Me,” having tried to commit suicide. Can she be saved?

To fully absorb Ling’s heartrending words, Chinese history (ancient and revolutionary swiftly blended in), culture, and intentions calls for pacing yourself, despite riveting you. Otherwise, you may need to pause to get your bearings, as I discovered. Owing to the novel’s creative structure told in one fell swoop: one long chapter broken up by subparts or scenes that do not move chronologically over the decades and vary from place to place in China and Toronto. If you don’t pay attention to the dates you might get confused as Xiaodeng’s name changes from Chinese to North American and the storylines are multi-leveled depending on the time period. Time and place melt, creating the sense there’s no exit, no reprieve. The foreverness of mental illness, especially when you suffer inside and don’t let others know how badly you’re hurting should jolt even those who stigmatize mental disorders rather than appreciate how the mind influences people’s behaviors.

Like A Single Swallow, one of Ling’s earlier novels, Aftershock was also translated by Shelly Bryant. Released in 2020, its forceful prose conveys the same science and art of translation found in Aftershock that’s sure to remain vivid long after you finish it.

Earthquake survivors today are nearing their forties, Ling points out. How many others are quietly suffering to the degree Xiaodeng has? To Ling’s credit, she brings their debilitating psychological duress out in the open.

Atmospherically, the “force of the wind” blasts throughout, adding to the “crisp pain”and fantasy of being swept away escaping the pain.

It’s impossible not to reflect on how much of Zhang Ling’s personal experiences are blended into the novel. Like Xiaodeng, she came to Toronto, staying in China ten years after the earthquake. After the Cultural Revolution she depicts, launched and ended by Mao Zedong, the Communist founder of the People’s Republic of China, who also, strikingly, died in 1976. Another similarity we learn on page one is that Xiaodeng, like the author, is a famous writer. When she’s wheeled into the hospital, the staff know she’s just been honored with a Canadian literary award. The dichotomy between triumph and devastation is enlightening, like when we get shocked that a celebrity has taken his/her own life. Outward success conceals inner demons.

Freedom is another BIG theme. Freedom from mental agony, tyranny, and feeling free to express oneself. In another interview, Ling discusses what it was like to grow up during the Cultural Revolution, “when a wrong opinion could lead to unimaginable consequences.” Her literary recognition happened after she left China.

Healing Fiction is both a literary subgenre and the name of a groundbreaking book by American psychologist, James Hillman. His therapeutic work was referred to in the above linked-to fascinating article about Aftershock, the movie.

If Xiaodeng can make “space for feelings” as her dedicated psychiatrist says, then the novel is a triumph, too, offering hope and healing through artful fiction.

Lorraine

Sensational novel inspired by Victorian sensationalism (London, Salisbury, York, England, and the Northwest Passage; 1849 to 1851): “What is life if not loaded with risk?” asks one of the leading characters narrating this gripping historical novel.

The question gives us an inkling into what’s in store for the intrepid literary adventurer on the darker side of Victorian England – on land and the death-defying Artic seas.

Two historical events inspired the two storylines in British travel writer and novelist Lizzie Pook’s Maude Horton’s Glorious Revenge, depicting the best and worst of human nature. Would her novel be quite as sensational if she weren’t “obsessed” as she says with “shipwrecks and adventure,” and hadn’t traveled to faraway places including the Arctic?

An unfair question that doesn’t take into account Pook’s skills on display: a wild imagination, perception of people’s motives, historical research, and finding just the right word to suit the suspense and gruesomeness. Unfamiliar Victorian history becomes vivid, connecting two seemingly distinct storylines.

The technique deployed in this British Naval mystery is Columbo-esque: we’re told who the murderer is at the beginning. The challenge, risks, and dangers are to track down the evidence to prove it. Opening with, “Let us begin at the end, shall we?” we fall under Pook’s spell.

Know what that entails. A novel that’s not for the faint-of-heart. BUT don’t turn away as I almost did, because this blog has steered away from the ghastly. “Bring on the ghouls! the disturbed mind of the suspected murderer, Edison Stowe, excitedly feels. Buoyed though by the Columbo-style investigator, Maude Horton, whose beauty, like Peter Falk’s frumpy appearance, conceals what they’re up to. He savvy from the first episode; she evolves from “reserved” and risk-adverse into a woman who “isn’t distracted by pomp” or “old-fashioned notions of swashbuckling men.” Oh, how we love the making of a strong woman!

Pook’s Victorian England is set when “murder was all you read about in the papers.” Helps sell them especially when “murder mania” swept through London, Salisbury, and York – the land settings; and when the young victim, Maude’s sister, writes at sea that “tales of madness are not hard to come by here in the Arctic” – the sea mystery. Greed and scheming to make money above all else thrives and chills. One of the epigraphs quoted clues us into that theme, from 1842 by the legendary, defunct Punch magazine:

“Murder is doubtless, a very shocking offence; nevertheless, as what is done is not to be undone, let us make our money of it.”

Money-making is also the underlining quest aboard a fictional sailing vessel, the Makepeace, its crew representing Britain’s high and lower social classes. Not the stated, primary mission: to follow the same fated Northwest Passage route famous British explorer Sir John Holland took and never returned from. Holland’s sailing vessels were two sister ships named Terror and Erebus; Pook’s creative version includes a second ship too, The High Regard.

Ironic name the Makepeace, as nothing peaceful happens when Maude’s slightly younger twenty-two-year-old sister Constance, the daring adventuress, disguised herself as a man, as an overlooked “cabin’s boy,” surreptitiously came onboard. She too never returns home. BBC’s series, The Terror, is based on Holland’s disappearance, a mystery that was solved. Pook’s will be too, but not until the bitter end.

Maude Horton’s voice alternates with Constance’s, who on the ship goes by the name Jack Aldridge. Maude’s is a first-person narrative; Constance/Jack comes to us through a journal she hid. Maude received it two years after the naval authorities referred to her sister’s disappearance as a “misadventure,” screaming cover-up. Reading it, Maude breaks free and the investigation is afoot.

Maude’s devotion to Constance, having raised her with their kindly grandfather when their parents died, is deep-seated. The sisters lack experience with men, except it seems with only their grandfather who taught them valuable lessons on “science and art.” A chemist, they lived in his pharmacy, where they developed a keen sense of smell mixing all sorts of medicines. You’ll see how handy this knowledge serves them, though not well enough for Constance aboard a ship of all men. “Monsters are made on ships like ours,” her journal proclaims.

Constance writes about “one good man” who stood out brightly against “dangerous men” who’ve been “sloughed into darkness by lives at sea.” One she calls a “madman.” Constance’s atmospheric entries of a “wild landscape of whalers and lonely seamen” and the “annihilating” wind add to the terror. 

The diary fuels the novel’s authenticity, charting Holland’s Northwest Passage sailing “through Baffin Bay and Lancaster Sound, towards King Williams Islands [all in Canada or in-between Greenland], to many islands in Greenland, noting sailing location, longitude, and latitude.

Maude’s repelled by Edison’s “reptilian coldness.” Both sisters’ depictions evoke his creepiness, but it’s Maude who goes after him while Constance is desperate to remain “invisible.” Maude’s the one sees him as close as she can bear. What kind of man reveres bones? Bones from the sea, bones on land when we first meet him, hiding out, too, in a spooky taxidermist’s shop.

Maude’s pursuit of the truth, particularly when her target is a man who denigrates women as “so very vacuous, so very female” we admire. Although we worry she’s gotten herself mixed up way beyond her abilities and physicality, we’re proud of her.

The social reforms during Queen Victoria’s long reign aspired to moral values. To some extent, this helps explain the British fascination with public executions. As many as 30,000 to 50,000 Pook says. All societal classes thronged to witness “spectacles” that turn our stomachs. An insatiable hunger for justice, retribution, and accountability drives the storytelling.

Edison’s mental illness takes a while to pull together. Evil, cruel, he delights in inflicting pain on women, men, and animals. Playing psychologist, might he be diagnosed with sadistic personality disorder? Not psychopathy characterized by empty emotions. We eventually learn the origins of his mental demise, drastically different than how he perceives himself: above most people, a man of “quality” whose been unfairly treated. England’s fanaticism with barbaric public acts befits him.

Pook writes of the past with an eye toward relevancy. Today’s political battles for Justice and Accountability for one thing. The second message applies to Artic exploration speeding up now that warming temperatures are melting ice caps, opening up the conquering of the Northwest Passage. NPR reports the Artic is “heating up twice as fast as the rest of earth,” enabling a Race to the Artic. Resembling the tensions of the US-Soviet space race, with more countries wanting to grab the untapped resources of the planet’s Last Frontier (see: PBS, Politico, Air University).

There’s a long and diverse list of Victorian history and literary references woven in, so take the literary risk if you’re the squeamish type. A sensational Victorian journey on land and sea awaits.

Lorraine

ILLUMINATING BEAUTY AND FEMINISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES (California, New York, England, France; 21^st century sweeping into 14^th century to early 15^th): “Medieval sleuthing” cannot be rushed. Savor this brilliant, richly-detailed historical novel that vividly takes us back to the late medieval era, alternating with 2018 modernity.

Venturing into the medieval period, new for this blog, might not be the case if Cities of Women weren’t so entrancingly written, enlightening, and relevant to our historic era.

Ten years of scholarly research by Kathleen Jones, professor emerita at San Diego State University women’s studies program, triumphantly transitions to historical novelist.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t concentrate as Jones invites us to put on our detective-thinking caps in this medieval whodunit. Not a murder, but an art mystery as to who exquisitely embellished a coveted medieval “Illuminated Manuscript”? (See definition here.)

Created for religious purposes, royalty, and others before paper was invented, the art of illustrating glimmering manuscripts applied delicate gold leaf and brilliant-colored paints along the borders of impossibly hard-to-decipher medieval handwriting scripts, on parchment or vellum (see description, differences, images here), reflects a fervent “determination to bring beauty to life” during the dark Middle Ages.

Dedicated to “invisible” women artists, Jones’ modern-day protagonist, Verity Frazier, is seeking tenure at a California college, depicting what 21^st women in academic settings go up against – the pressures of academia to publish and gender assumptions.

On page one, we learn that Verity’s feminist scholarly interests mesh with her personal preference for female lovers, thus the knowledge, instinct, and sensitivity she brings to bear is a strong belief that the mystery artist was a woman not a man as medieval historians claim and later ones presume too. It’s not that a man couldn’t arrive at the same hunch, but likely not as acutely as Verity, arguing that “the only architects of beauty” weren’t only men” – “as if vision had only one sex.”

Verity is willing to risk tenure to find evidence to alter art history and her tenure chances since she’s been longing for something more radical.

The hunt for a medieval female artist buried in history proves elusive and transporting. Splendid atmospheric prose combined with unknown familiar history and art is charismatic.

Historians know who wrote the manuscript, but not the name of the artist who adorned it with intricate artistry and devotion: Christine de Pizan was prolific, “regarded as one of Europe’s earliest female professional writers” (https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/06/christine-de-pizan-and-the-book-of-the-queen.html). The British Library’s online comments and images, refers to this medieval manuscript as “one of our best-loved (and most-requested).”

Verity takes us to the London-based library, considered one of the greats and largest, on her quest to pursue truth, accountability, recognition. Housed in their Treasure Gallery, Christine’s stunning manuscript survives. Commissioned by the Queen of France, Isabeau of Bavaria who reigned in the early 15^th century, it’s called The Book of the Queen or Harley 4431. Jones describes how and why this extraordinary work came to be.

Alternating mostly between the 1300s and 2018, the medieval chapters consume much of the story. Opening when Verity is late submitting her dissertation, only the final chapter left. Interestingly, it’s already been critiqued for not sounding scholarly, rather in the writing style of a novelist. Cleverly mirroring what Jones has done.

Prior to leaving America for Britain, Verity attends a medieval lecture and exhibition in Manhattan at the Morgan Library, J. P, a voracious collector.

There she stumbles on a mesmerizing medieval painting an astute female librarian notices her admiring.

“Tantalized by its central image: a large initial C decorated in the brightest blue she’d ever seen. The initial was fitted inside a square illuminated in glittering gold, while out of its edges tumbled tendrils of vines and other flora in red and green, with gold-flecked flourishes . . . the longer she stared, the more it seemed as if the gold-embossed letters, tendrils, and halos were some kind of multidimensional time machine: incandescent, ethereal, and luminous, transporting meaning beyond the ordinary boundary of understanding. It was like seeing dust burst into flames.

“She took out her notebook and wrote one word: Beauty.” 

Creating Beauty, the primary theme, shows why women seek “beautiful things” in the darkest of times.

Other important themes include Learnedness, Integrity, Justice, and Reason. Leading female characters choose to tell stories of “charity and goodness and the welcoming embrace of a community of women” instead of dwelling on the darkness. The Morgan librarian is pivotal, suggesting Verity read Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies. From there, the sleuthing ignites. 

This timeless, affecting story portrays women standing up for their beliefs and values no matter the odds against them, or the sacrifices they have to make.

Verity reasons that for a female to climb the ultimate echelons of respect for her talent during the medieval ages when knights, kings, clergymen reigned supreme, Christine wouldn’t choose a man to partner with. So who was the female medieval artist Christine trusted with her life’s work?

History is shown to repeat itself, including personally when another woman, a professor from France notices Verity at another library, this one in London. Her scholarly interest in medieval women isn’t new, like Verity’s (who specializes in 19^th century female French revolutionaries), so she offers to assist with her research, also leading to a tender love affair fraught with jealousy on the part of Anastasia. A name that becomes very significant in the investigation.

Past and present history also converge with wars and a pandemic. During this medieval timeline, The Hundred Years War between France and England and The Black Death (bubonic plague) happened, each killing millions. The Great Plague, history’s worst, millions more.

Poverty versus wealth; the hypocrisy of sacred values and sexual abuse in the church; transformative childhood influences; and human emotions that run the gamut from grief, loss, lust, violence to love. All stand the test of time.

Moreover, Cities of Women shows people with divergent agendas coming together. Can that comparison between the ages happen today?

You’ll be introduced to technical words in the laborious process of making parchment or vellum, creating “suede-like” sensations derived from drying and stretching the young skins of cows, sheep, and goats. Single pages of medieval manuscripts are called “orphaned leaves;” a double page “bifolia”; a collection of pages “quires”; bound pages transformed into a book “codex.” Artistic embellishments were intended to push past the ugliness” to “make beauty burst into it like a bright light.” 

Paris is seen as a thriving center of medieval paper-making for book publishing. Today, when you walk along the Left Bank of the Seine you’ll still see booksellers lined up but their status is unclear because of the upcoming Olympics.

The energizing spirit of persevering women artists in the face of atrocities and adversities is palpable. Makes you wonder how many other great women of the arts have yet become visible.

Lorraine

Reflecting on what matters most in your life (New Jersey suburban neighborhood close to Manhattan; present-day): There’s a good reason Olivia Strauss is Running Out of Time has been released on the first day of the new year when you may have made a resolution to follow a dream you keep putting off. New beginnings are reflection points, provoking thoughts on whether you’re satisfied with how your life is turning out and what you could do to make it better.

Since Angela Brown’s witty, wacky, science-fiction-y contemporary novel hits a realistic nerve, it’s a fitting way to kick off 2024 when Americans are making resolutions to “improve mental health” and “be happier,” according to surveys (see here and here).

What if you knew how much time you had left on this planet, would it change how you view your life? Your routines? Priorities?

These questions asked because Time is Olivia’s overwhelming issue, triggered when she turns thirty-nine. A mid-life crisis researchers, psychologists, doctors say typically spans your forties to sixties. Still, how typical is it at Olivia’s age to have a full-blown mental breakdown about her “expiration date,” disturbing normal life cycles, organized into four parts: Death, Life, Afterlife, and Birth? A tip-off you’re in store for some twists-and-turns you’re likely not see coming. What you will see is how relatable Olivia is – practically, emotionally, philosophically, existentially.

Repeatedly Olivia reminds us her nickname Liv sounds just like “Live!” Mortality, the fundamental theme. Would you even want to know how long you’ll live? What if you did find out?

That’s the fantastical premise of Liv’s comedic, disguised, serious tale that pulls us in through her earnest narrator’s voice. Ironically, she’s become possessed with finding her authentic voice – her literary voice, her unfulfilled dream to be a published poet. She knows what that felt like once, from her NYU college days when she entered a poetry contest, won, and was elated to see her name in print in a literary journal. Since then she hasn’t written a word. Marriage, motherhood, and moving out of energizing Manhattan to suburbia, likely in New Jersey where the author lives, are culprits. How big a role does Liv’s personality and mental attitude play?

Over the years she’s seen her husband Andrew, and her best friend Marian, both with history and fond memories from college, become writers. Andrew seemingly content to be a reporter for a local newspaper; Marian a food writer combining the pleasures of meals with the memories they hold. Liv, though, has been too busy, too frazzled, juggling parenting, home, and a job teaching high school English (though not her dream job), feeling she’s let too much time go by to write what she wants to. How can she carve out quality time for herself if she doesn’t have enough for her adorable, precocious, five-year-old son Tommy? Andrew, a devoted dad, is seen as spending the most time attending to Tommy’s needs and wants.

Liv blames suburbia. Not the first writer to tackle the ennui of conventionality, rules, expectations, feelings of shallowness, emptiness. Mind-numbing for some, causing them to act crazy (see https://enchantedprose.com/the-hundred-waters/); for others the American Dream. It’s a friendly neighborhood, overly so for Liv. Gossipy, superficial, insufferable. Then again, what does she really know behind the facades?

Liv’s mid-life crisis is fired up when Marian surprises her with a far-out, utterly unique birthday gift. A cockamamie crystal ball, psychic fortune-teller that uses DNA testing to fly into the magical, mystical stratosphere, claiming clairvoyance. Would you even undergo genetics testing that tells you how much time you have left to do what you want and be who you want to be? Would you even take this test seriously? What if you did?

Intellectually, Liv knows the new age-y wellness clinic Marian takes her too is a fake; emotionally a different matter when it gets in her head obsessively.

Depending on a number of factors – life circumstances, challenges, desires, mindset – you may not empathize with Liv’s mental health crisis. Blessed with a loving spouse, a terrific boy, a good roof over her head, a genuine friend, and only a hop-on-the-train-ride into a city that’s a state-of-mind for creativity – so what’s the problem you might ask?

For one thing, Marian tells her she’s not fun anymore. Yeah, she has responsibilities now, and she’s a modern woman who wants more for herself. Maybe if she stopped making to-do lists, elevating her anxieties, always rushing around, always late, falling short, on edge she could find time for a room of her own? Maybe not an original idea, but the zany plot is.

I’ve chosen to give Liv some slack since the only thing she does spontaneously these days is curse in front of Tommy, negativity that’s not enchanted, since she knows it’s not good for Tommy and wants to stop. Each time she errs, he reminds her, melting our hearts, to drop some punishment money into her “curse jar.” Will she stop? Can she?

While it all starts with Liv’s birthday, actually it starts with everyone’s nemesis: Time. “Time. That’s the problem, Olivia says on the introductory page. “There’s never enough.” You never know what life brings. The use of humor and absurdity deflects from dealing with the most consequential issues in a purposeful life.

Brown captures what many of us may have been doing since the pandemic: taking stock of our lives.

“Middle age may be dislocating for some,” says an Australian professor, “but there’s little evidence it is a period of crisis and despondency.” That statement made in 2019, pre-pandemic. There’s plenty of evidence the pandemic has caused Americans to reevaluate their lives. For instance, many have quit their unsatisfying, poorly-paid, unappreciated jobs, or had or found remote jobs they don’t want to give up for the perks, such as freeing up time at home and avoiding long-commutes. Time magazine’s headline on how the pandemic “caused a widespread existential crisis,” echoes Liv’s angst. Different reason, similar questioning. 

The prose sparkles with humor and ridiculousness, and the ultimate question of how much time we have in life makes for addictive reading.

“The problem is no one knows . . . Maybe tomorrow. Or next year. Or in a hundred years. Or never. Well, not never. But it sometimes feels that way, doesn’t it? Never. Never me. Never you. Never us . . . We still have time. Time to put off. To try again . . . To apologize. To meet for coffee. To take someone’s breath away. To say I love you. To kiss good night. To whisper good morning.”

Birthdays are like New Year’s resolutions, offering “a brief sense of hope,” when “we tell ourselves this will be our year.” Let’s hope so. For us, and a world needing all the brightness and hope in 2024.

Here’s to making more time for reading in the New Year, Lorraine

A graceful writer embraces the grace of the natural world and all its living creatures, counteracting what’s lost and vanishing (Nashville, Tennessee; 2022, and past years): As soon as you read a few pages of Margaret Renkl’s new essay collection A Comfort of Crows, you’ll feel calmer. Call it literary therapy, a quieting mind-set, a potent self-help antidote needed for a world when so many are grieving, suffering, struggling.

A poet for fifteen years before she became an essayist, Renkl’s poetic prose shows us the enormous comfort she derives from Nature and all its wild creatures; some we don’t see, others we disregard or stay clear of. Through fifty-two mini-chapters, week-by-week, season-to-season over one year in her own backyard, these intimate reflections, meditations, enlightenment, part memoir, part naturalist, reveal how deeply Renkl has internalized her daily life to the rhythms of Nature, truly “straddling two worlds.”

When Renkl writes about “landscapes of enchantment,” she’s not writing about the Land of Enchantment – New Mexico – that inspired the title of this blog and the value placed on enchanted prose. Instead, she’s sharing her observations, engagement, and lamentations of what’s happening on her half-acre of land surrounding her home of thirty years in Nashville, Tennessee, expanding her “miniature ecosystem” to the rejuvenating walking trails nearby. Here is where she and her husband Haywood, a teacher, she a former one and volunteer teaching English to refugees, raised three boys, all grown up and living elsewhere. Here they also “buried five dogs,” and “let an unaccountable number of fallen leaves lie in a life shot through with leavings.”

The leavings are ingrained in the book’s soul. Some leavings are raw: her mother’s recent passing, her emptied out home, entering her sixties, all causing Renkl to reflect on the passage of time and what matters most in a life well-lived.

Crows, highly intelligent birds, are greatly admired for sticking together as families, mourning the loss of one of their own. The prose conveys wistful, nostalgic, sorrowful emotions that resonate as our lives have changed so much over the past years, including the devastation of climate change – if we’re paying attention. Renkl wants us to pay attention, though maybe not as acutely as she does.

That’s why a Mary Oliver poem – “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work” – is one of the epigraphs introducing this gorgeous book. Both the prose and the striking art accompanying each week created by her brother Billy, a fine arts “collage artist,” illustrator, and teacher.

Their sister-brother artistic relationship fascinates. This is the second time they’ve collaborated on a book. (See: https://milkweed.org/book/late-migrations.) The synergy gained by combining a sister’s poetic voice with a brother’s visual one deepens the reading experience.

Some collages are quite clear as to their earthly inspiration; others more mystical, conveying a celestial and spiritual reach-for-the stars impression. On Billy Renkl’s website you can see these images: https://billyrenkl.com/fine-art/the-comfort-of-crows/. Note how he explains the role of his artistic visions with the prose:

“The collages braid together three threads . . . the natural world as a source of curiosity . . . . astonishment and devotion, and as a model for understanding ourselves in relation to each other and the world.”

An artistic brother’s artworks are wondrously in sync with his sister’s prose, emotions, and spirit.

The harmony between sister-and-brother seems forged from the time they ran free in the woods where they grew up in Alabama. Those memories nurtured the author’s becoming, and gratitude for the wild world she repeatedly calls a “praise song.” The term can be viewed as biblical, secular, or existential in inspiring our purpose on Earth, expressing the beauty and fragility of all forms of life. Human and nonhuman.

An abundance of trees, plants, wildflowers, and wild species, seen and unseen, enchant the pages. Among them are tadpoles, butterflies, lightening bugs (when was the last time you saw those “flashes of brightness” light up the night? Renkl asks), crows, opossums, even the sighting of a bobcat!

The Author’s Note tells us that while the book’s subtitle limits the timeframe to one “backyard year,” Renkl has been penning thoughts over years. Makes sense, or how else could she punctuate so finely each week’s journal-like musings introduced by snippets of prose by so many contemporary authors and poets? A formidable task to have read all these books, finding the precise set of words to fit what she’s saying. Words from Claire Keegan on crows, Catherine Raven’s fox, Maggie Smith on animals, Camille T. Dungy’s soil, Ross Gay’s delights, Ann Patchett’s life in “constant revision,” Richard Powers on mourning what’s gone, for instance.

Renkl is extraordinarily attentive to all sorts of winged creatures. Some like hummingbirds and bluebirds she watches carefully from bird feeders hung in front of nearly every window of her house. The dangers of interfering with the natural world are discussed, but the food and shelter provided is reasoned by “natural systems aren’t natural anymore.”

Two bright purple flowers with alluring names – passionflower and beautyberries – and a hummingbird’s iridescent patch of feathers called a gorget that comes in a variety of colors including purple are examples of what’s in store to stir your senses:

Exuberance for Mother Nature is pure joy. The warmth exuded attributed to: “Age has given me an internal warmth.” But we know better. This is who the elegant writer is. You can pick that up in this video taken in Renkl’s backyard:

Renkl aims to infect us with the same love and gratitude for our natural environments and those we love. Hers has a higher purpose beyond observing and appreciating. She’s an eco-warrior, fighting to preserve what she can. She wants us to do that too, in our own backyards.

“More and more I ponder words like bounty and replete and enough. I think of what we are losing from the natural world and of what we will leave behind when we ourselves are lost. The trees. The stories. The people who love us and who know we love them, who will carry our love into the world after we are gone.”

When someone moves away from her neighborhood, Renkl is hit by the sound of heavy equipment tearing down their house, taking with it the fond memories she and her neighbor carry. Her quiet outrage is a yearning for people to stop building bigger, so contractors will stop knocking down trees and fauna, disturbing, destroying a piece of the natural world.

Eco-grief or ecological grief is a relatively new term describing the devastation climate change has wreaked on those who pay attention and care. An element of that winds through Renkl’s contemplations without sounding preachy. Her heartfelt sorrow is far from paralyzing. She’s dogged at finding, exalting, and contributing to preserving the beauty that still exists, or can with a little help, unfolding around her each season.

Margaret Renkl’s eloquence is a gift for all of us, elevating our passage through time. 

This post will likely be the last in 2023. Not by accident. I wrote it a little while ago, but decided to delay until December. Because it hit the pitch-perfect tone of balancing all the grief and sadness of the year with an uplifting way to carry on that comes from the heart.

Warm wishes over the holidays. With thanks for reading with me.
Lorraine