Enchanted Prose

Weaving magic into a staggering story of enslavement (North Carolina and New Orleans, West Africa spiritually; 1800s before the Civil War): Can literature set us free?

“Let us descend into the blind world” could have been penned by poetic, literary genius Jesmyn Ward. But it comes from Dante’s epic 14^th century poem, Inferno, inspiring the title and hellish journey depicted in Ward’s new historical novel, Let Us Descend. Of epic proportions.

An NPR story, Remembering New Orleans’ Overlooked Ties to Slavery, inspired the setting and ethos of 19th century slavery, centered at the virulent hotbed of America’s slave market in New Orleans.

“Grief and sorrow” are embedded into this deeply felt story told by a teenage narrator, Annis. It’s Ward’s grief and sorrow too. For her brother, ancestors, community, while composed in the rawness of tremendous personal loss: her husband suddenly died right before COVID had a public name. While millions were grieving too.

What happens when you’re hit with so many unbearable losses? Ward contemplated stopping writing. We’re grateful she found a way to pour her emotions into an intense story aimed at engendering empathy.

Ward’s intention isn’t to focus on historical details. Rather, on the history of a culture that dehumanized black people, women the focus, in every way possible.

We know that even before we open the pages. The exceptionally moving book cover isn’t the typical image. Let Us Descend rightfully draws from Ward’s affecting words, printed like a poem, excerpted from an interview with former President Barack Obama in Vanity Fair. On the front cover, Ward beckons us:

      “Sit with me.

            Let me tell you a story . . .

          It feels as if I have been in the dark,

      journeying with this character,

                                            for a long time.

“It is difficult to walk south with Annis.

      Her narrative descends from one

hellscape to another,

            but I promise that if you come

      with me, you will rise.

                      It will be worth the work,

               worth the walking.”

Those words depict how the words inside move us.

Quoted on the back cover is Ward’s writerly purpose: to “get readers to feel with and feel for the people I’m writing about.” The former president understood what she was after: “The power of empathy . . . that we need to “see somebody’s backstory” or else “we end up reinforcing our prejudices, our biases, our fears.”

Let Us Descend is powerful, but can it change deep-rooted hatred? Can any book, or volumes of books, have that kind of power?

Ward is one of those exceptional writers who can take us further than we’ve been. Far deeper into darkness, far longer than we care to go. If you’ve read any of her work, such as her 2017 Sing, Unburied, Sing, recognized for the second time for the National Book Award, you still remember those ghosts of Mississippi and trust she’ll lead us into the light. Don’t expect that, though, to happen soon. To tell truths based on history she can’t. 

The otherworldly spirits in this novel expand to many more. They stretch us.

These spirits are a way of transcending being “owned” and “bound” to earth’s inhumanity, to be unbound by a spiritual world. But not all the spirits are good. Some are evil. Annis must learn to tell the difference. How do you when they set traps? How do we learn whom to trust?

When life on earth descends so brutally, when Annis descends alone from the Upper South to the Deep South, the spirits arrive. Historically, this movement reflects what happened after 1808 when America banned bringing anymore slaves into our country, like Annis’ grandmother Aza who came over from West Africa. Aza was one of hundreds of thousands of slaves raped on our shores. Aza’s Mama is the product of that violence. Annis, from the rape of her Mama.

Aza’s true spirit stands out from the rest. She’s the one Annis and her Mama trust seeking to protect. She’s the kind of fighting spirit that strengthens them both. Annis’ mother is called a “warrior,” teaching Annis some of the fundamentals of how to fight, or not – “a part of fighting too” – when they find fleeting moments to flee into the woods.

The other spirits that flow through this extraordinarily soulful novel appear when Annis is desperate to free herself from the “unbearable same.” These spirits have many symbolic meanings – biblical, mythological, cultural, psychological, literary. Some are named like the Wind Spirit, Water, Those Who Foretell, Those Who Take and Give, She Who Remembers. Some we understand, others we guess at.

Opening when Annis and her Mama are slaves on a rice plantation in North Carolina. They don’t call the plantation owner master. He’s only the “sire” – sired like animals. Ward shows us she’s a master of finding words that tug at our hearts. Reaching down to find the right word that calls out penetrating, harsh truths.

On earth, Annis’ story becomes more hellish, taking her on a long, burning, rope-chained walk. The walk she imagines Annis taking. The walk her Mama likely took. It winds south through the sweltering heat, drowning rivers, dark infested swamps from the North Carolina plantation to a Louisiana sugarcane one. In front and back of Annis, tied to a rope that “eats” at her skin, are women she doesn’t know, nor want to. It’s on this harrowing, death-defying walk that Annis learns “what it means to be alone.” “To know only grief in this new world.”

We can wish all we want for only the benevolent spirits to descend onto Annis’ starved life. Starving for tenderness and touch, from brutality and literally a paucity of food. But that wouldn’t be telling hard truths either.

Annis surpasses any humane concept of vulnerability. Yet there’s something about her that also surpasses our concept of resilience.

Hers is a life that, “ain’t living.” “Everywhere, hot knives of pain. When: “There is no one to carry us back.” That’s told: “Tell them who you are. You more than laying on your back.”

Annis, though, tells herself: “I tried to remember that I still had plenty inside he couldn’t take.” And also told be a wise plantation cook: “Most people can’t see all the layers in a person, just like they can’t taste all that goes into a pot.” “You got to know the taste of what heals you.”

Ward’s prose sears and soars. By the time we understand to “fight for it all” also means know what you’re fighting for, we feel the weight of lost love and kindness. Memories can though, eventually, be a propelling force.

But to rise you must first descend. Count on these “farseeing women” to help us ascend.

Lorraine

Self-discovery immersed in the Dutch Golden Age (cities in The Netherlands; 1976 to present-day): “In every age, art is an experiment for every artist, just as, in every age, life is an experiment for every person,” wrote Benjamin Moser years ago in an article, Can Writers Still ‘Make it New’? Soon after, he wrote about writing as a “calling,” as “an inner purpose,” and “a means of understanding, and thus of elevating, our everyday lives.”

Those essays were written during Moser’s quest to learn “something new” about the great Dutch artists and their 17^th century masterwork paintings as his way to understand and connect with the new country he moved to when he was twenty-five, The Netherlands. The Upside-Down World: Meeting with the Dutch Masters took nearly twenty-five more years to accomplish. 

Can you imagine spending nearly half your life “consumed” by one thing? Granted a huge undertaking given how prolific the era was, and how difficult to unearth something new for most of the artists he applies a microscopic art critic’s lens to, most unknown to many of us. Repeatedly he chants, “Almost nothing was known.” The challenge for others, Rembrandt the most famous, was to discover something new that meshed with Moser’s mission to find “something higher” for mastering “something about life” – and himself.

From an art appreciation point-of-view, you will learn why Rembrandt was “great in every field,” even if many of his paintings are too dark and gruesome for your taste. The real intrigue, though, is understanding the man behind the book who devoted so much passion, dogged pursuit, research, and speculation immersing us in Moser’s study of the Dutch masters.

The writer sparks interest since the two books he’s written garnered the kind of recognition for excellence he strives for. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector was named finalist for the National Critics Award, Notable Book by the New York Times, and won Brazil’s Cultural Diplomacy State Prize for his biography of their Ukrainian-born novelist. Sontag: Her Life and Work earned him a Pulitzer-Prize.

As a reviewer of memoirs, I can offer opinions. Art historians can address the rest.

Handsomely designed with high-quality glossy paper and over 300 illustrations, Moser’s third book looks and feels like an art book. So why is it billed as “a revealing self-portrait”?

Because the memoir is something new. Seeming to say you don’t need to know my intimate details to know me. Know what matters to me, instead. Thus, casting an atmosphere of mystique like some of the artists known for their atmosphere, moods, perspectives.

Moser admires artists whose work is subtle. So is he. Attracted to the elegance of subtlety, he’s drawn to art that “evoked emotions that were more intense because they are indirect.” Is Moser explaining his memoirist approach demonstrates his intensity of purpose by being indirect? (Direct exceptions found in the Introduction and Afterword.)

“When you see Vermeer’s work together,” you “wonder what they are really saying,” echoes how we feel assessing what the author’s art critiques and commentary are really saying about himself.

The prose is both elegiac and down-to-earth. Valuing authenticity, not following another artist’s style, render Rembrandt’s followers as not rising to greatness. Great art doesn’t have to be loved, but it does have to create something unique.

Artists in this group include Pieter Saenredam’s architectural perspectives. “Was he aware, at the time, of the enormity of the task?” Moser asks. Is this also a statement about his young self when he began this enormous endeavor?

That the Houston born American connects with artists who “saw beauty in old things,” felt a “closeness” to these Old World artists tells you something about his sense of belongingness in a world that valued craftsmanship. A stiller world, one that brought him peacefulness.

“Puzzled” by the meaning of an artist’s painting seems to imply puzzlement with today’s upside-down world. This is also an art term Dutch artists used for describing art that turned the bourgeoisie world on its head.

Discussing “realism” versus “idealism,” Moser points out that although one of the genres the Dutch are famous for — still-life paintings — may not have been as realistic as they appear since life in the 1600s was harsh for the majority of Dutch people. Strikingly, many artists featured, and their families, died young. Forty, “old.”

We shouldn’t be surprised artists want to lift us up. Vermeer a prime example of brilliant light. Hendrick Avercamp for his spirited ice skating scenes.

Left: Vermeer [CC BY 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons; Right: Hendrick Avercamp [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Moser too seeks lightness, “happiness” not loss. “Artists know their failures as well as anyone, which is why I don’t like to dwell upon this painful thought.” 

The prose is the work of a wordsmith who has a “fear of ignorance.” You’ll learn new words. The one that pleases especially is sprezzatura, defined in the art world as a work that gives the impression of ease but took considerable effort – like this unusual memoir told through art.

You will come away with some historical details you won’t forget. For instance, 165,000 “starving” Dutch people after the Holocaust waited in long lines to see a Rembrandt exhibition. Mosher’s heartening explanation is that art is a “symbol of dignity of a free people.”

It’s refreshing that even though a “jewel-like” Vermeer painting may be “so perfect,” others “shocked.” Moser reactions are telling as those failed paintings brought him “closer” to the artist as “a man struggling” – like he apparently has.

Moser wrote the Vermeer chapter in the third-person voice – “the man who writes this sentence is forty-five years old” – when he could look back and feel “proud” of his work. The struggles he went through, he says, are no longer as important to him as when he began his journey. Failure isn’t “the end,” rather the “beginning.”

Moser has revealed himself as a man of seriousness, scholarship, dedication to writing as a noble profession creating his own “aura” of the grace he attaches to Dutch paintings.

The concept of grace plays out, then, artistically and personally. A painting’s “charisma” defined as “that indescribable quality of grace.” It’s one of many observations and speculations that make you stop reading to think.

Memorable painters include: Paulus Potter for the animals he painted that “elevated” their status – serene cows roaming, animals in the barn, majestic dogs. Jan Steen for his moods, “warning against vanity and vice.” Meindert Hobbema for the “balletic sway of the trees.” Jacob Van Ruisdael for his landscapes Moser explains differently than our Nature imagery. Its “land-shaped” reflecting how Dutch land had to be shaped by man due to its flatness and waterways. Moser feels “close to this invisible man,” to his “introspection” and “meditation,” aspects that fit his thoughtful commentary.

Top Left: Henk Monster [CC BY 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons; Top Right: Jan Steen [CC BY 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons; Bottom Left: Meindert Hobbema by Gandalf’s Gallery [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED] via Flickr; Bottom Right: Jacob van Ruisdael [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Moser still lives in the same 17^th century Dutch house in Utrecht when he set off on his coming-of-age journey. The same house Vermeer lived in! He loves – and we appreciate how much it means to him – to look out the same windows seeing what the great artist saw. Sharing what matters to him.

Lorraine

Inside a specialized world and how it can help us (Cuba, eastern/western US cities, Israel, Rome, Haiti, Trinidad; 1950s to present-day).

“Love is a phenomenal adhesive,” says Rosa Lowinger in an interview about her groundbreaking memoir, Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair. The distinguished Conservator in the arts and architecture traces her personal and professional lives uniquely. Opening up to outsiders, as a first, her scientifically-based, highly specialized academic field, she then applies the materials, concepts, and philosophies of her discipline to her personal story, with important lessons for us.

Dwell time is a term that refers to allowing enough time for the chemical processes in conservation work to set. To bond. In turn, we’re asked what happens when not enough time and attention is given to our human bonds?

An impactful memoir that dazzles comparing what Lowinger learned over her forty-year career that also offers a special way to understand healthy and unhealthy relationships:

“There’s no magic here. It requires talented hands, but also belief and patience. That’s true of all repair, redemption, healing, restoration. It only works if you start with the notion that you have a chance of succeeding.”

Conservationists are careful not to jump to conclusions too quickly in determining the cause of damage and best method for fixing what’s broken. Similarly, we see how Lowinger’s palpably painful physical and emotional abusive upbringing is told with care, not condemnation. With an empathetic, tender eye, she examines the root cause of her mother’s uncontrollable rage beating her only child for hours, and her father’s anxieties, fears, “manipulations.” A man who’d “shrink under the weight of what could have been.”

The understanding the author displays in her challenging interdisciplinary field is also seen in her understanding of her parents’ and grandparents’ trauma as East European Jews fleeing 1920s Romania escaping sweeping antisemitism for tolerance, setting out for America but only making it as far as Havana, Cuba due to US legislative immigration quotas. Havana is Rosa Lowinger’s birthplace and where she lived until her parents were able to immigrate to Miami when Castro took over. One of the historical surprises is how welcomed Jews were in the pre-Castro days (20,000 Jews back then, today dwindled to around 1,000).

Lowinger’s escape from her toxic family environment is arresting, brilliantly compared to the toxicity of plastics. And yet, she’s also able to appreciate the good too. “There was also active kindness, humor, and generosity in my family,” she says. Over the years, she’s learned acceptance and forgiveness, but will never forget.

Conservation is a “transformative profession.” Lowinger’s early life was transformed by her future profession. By her scholarship, determination, creativity, independent-spirit, and a humanitarian’s passion to lift awareness, restore, and preserve art, history, culture, humanity around the world. Proof also comes from noteworthy achievements, building “one of the largest woman-owned art and architectural conservation firms” in the US and winning the century-old Rome Prize awarded by the American Academy of Rome in 2008. 

Lowinger doesn’t dwell on the trauma inflicted on her. By page sixteen, she dives into her first prestigious conservation project for New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, restoring a rare Numidian marble fireplace mantel from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art collection from Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Manhattan mansion. Ambitious, she moves from one fascinating and different project to another while weaving the intimate into her story.

Lowinger does want us to know her non-professional diagnosis that her mother suffers from a personality disorder stemming from permanent psychic damage having spent ten formative years from ages four to fourteen abandoned by her own father to a Cuban orphanage. For all the damage she does to her lonely young daughter, she repeatedly tells her she did everything out of love.

“How do damaged items become whole again? How much destruction is necessary in a cycle of true repair?

Damage connects Lowinger’s personal and professional lives. Chapters are organized by the damage to the materials of conservation: marble, concrete, ceramic, plastic, bronze, bone, pigment, silver, terrazzo, wood, steel, mosaic, paint, glass. Disasters and graffiti complete the chapters, screaming for repair.

“Conservation is a mix of art, science, and hand skills, but it is fundamentally the art of understanding damage.”

Lowinger can also be seen through the lens of healer. “Conservation is a healing art.” For us, the eloquent and compassionate prose loaded with poignancy captivates, teaches, and helps us see ways to better our lives.

Inspired by Primo Levi’s masterpiece memoir, The Periodic Table, Lowinger has swapped Levi’s literary structure organized by chemicals with the materials of art and architectural conservation.

Lowinger connects with Primo Levi. His Holocaust survival story is the stuff of “martyrs and saints,” as noted in the video clip below. Levi was a chemist from Italy. Drawn to his extraordinary story and powerful writing, her memoir opens with his belief: “Understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves.”

Lowinger’s tale brings a wealth of historical details to the narrative: Cuba’s revolutionary forces; America’s foreign policies; Los Angeles and Haiti earthquakes; black history riots in the poor Watts neighborhood of southern Los Angeles, also the site of her largest outdoor project (see below); environmental degradation of ancient Greek and Roman ruins along Israel’s coast. The list goes on and on. 

Marble, the first chapter, introduces us to the conservator as “an expert cleaner of marble” like her mother. Marble, a polished stone associated with “wealth and elegance,” is strikingly out-of-sync with the Cuban orphanage that punished her unruly mother by having to clean food off of marble tabletops that wasn’t easy. Now 91, her mother is still feisty but more loving. Still, the indelible mark she left on someone she claimed to love left her daughter feeling: “Never being enough or always being too much.”

Cuba looms large – emotionally, architecturally, aesthetically, politically. Once a vibrant place of Cubist, Surrealist, and Fauvist art styles, its architecture had remained intact for half a century. Fast forward thirty years when the author first returns to Cuba, it has become “dense with very damaged concrete buildings” due to erosion from the salty environment. “There was so much contradiction here. So much wreckage mixed with so much beauty” is a statement about Cuba’s decaying structures as well as her troubled marriage at this stage of her life.

The Bronze chapter, like everything else, means more than the heavy metal’s use in the art world. Technology turned this corrosive material into important commercial uses, “reverting” back to something less “reactive.” Then hitting us with: “Don’t we all wish to revert to states of being that are calmer? To be less reactive to our surroundings and circumstances?”

In asking what’s “needed to be lost before we could be found?” Lowinger asks us to reflect on our unprecedented times.

Lorraine

Elitism, at what cost? (Upper East Side, Manhattan, present-day): New York City is a state of mind.

It’s the state of minds of seven Mommy characters (professionals, singles, SAHMs/stay-at-homes) that drive Elizabeth Topp’s acutely perceptive second novel, City People.

Turning the reader into a psychological detective, you’ll find yourself combing the electric prose for the subtler emotional clues that lurk beneath the façade of upper-class perfectionism – looking the part, hiding truths, ignoring, repressing, denying them – all for the all-mighty, insanely competitive, coveted world of private school admissions as the ticket to a guaranteed future of “wealth, power, prestige” when one of the Mommies commits suicide, leaving her two young children, ages five and two, behind, along with her husband.

Two plot points, one unfolding infecting the other. Some Moms more than others. Their reactions – or not – reveal their pasts, secrets, agendas.

The fact that Susan was a psychologist emphasizes how difficult it can be to recognize the warning signs that someone you know is in crisis.

Susan’s husband, aware of his wife’s history of mental illness, isn’t the focus. It’s the other six women through proximity of their preschool age children attending the same elite private school, and all competing for a slot for their child to be admitted into the next step in climbing the educational ladder of privilege: entry into one of the most elite K-12 private schools in New York City. Fictionally named Kent; in real life The Dalton School where Topp graduated from. 

Topp has taken to heart the write-what-you- know canon. Using it deliciously, voyeuristically to give us an inside scoop into a rarified world most of us haven’t been privy to. She’s lived on the Upper East Side her entire life in the same pre-war apartment, and, as noted, draws from her real-life experiences of attending The Dalton School that she projects onto Vic, who thinks it’s the most elitist school in the world. Depending on which rankings you look at, it’s in the top tier in New York City. Topp through Vic makes it clear the school has changed a lot since she went there. The reason Kent seems inspired by Dalton and not another top NYC private school is inclusion of its “anti-racist curriculum.” Founded in the early 1900s on progressive values of Equity and Diversity, today it boasts its inclusiveness. Tuition costs of over $61,000 a year; “over 20%” receive financial aid.

One of the truths made clear early on is that these women weren’t really friends with Susan, even Vic who thought she was. Readers who are mothers can relate to how they may or may not have become friends with their children’s school playmates. For two of the mothers – high-powered corporate types and women of color, race and ethnicity become an issue. One of the many reasons Topp’s exposé reveals an underbelly of resentment, anger, and rage despite acting like all is well.

All is definitely not well. How could it be when Susan tells us in a one-page prologue she’s finally at peace having decided her children will be better off without her? How does someone come to conclude they’re a burden to their children? It’s one of the signs of suicide, shown in this video by a suicide prevention group, bethe1.com, Topp recommends, among other resources: 

The skillful unraveling begins with Vic, who’s shocked to hear Susan’s died. The next Mom’s voice is Kara, who barely knew Susan and yet she immediately grasps the unstated cause of death. Why doesn’t Vic? Topp silences her voice for a while, cleverly using the structure of her rotating-character-voices novel to reflect why. When Viv realizes Kara was right from the start, she must confront how good a friend was she? Her self-doubt expands, deepens to the core of her identity. How could a four-time novelist fail at the very thing she prides herself on: understanding characters?

Topp’s uncanny juggling of the psyches of seven women is another strength. Perhaps she became a pro at multi-tasking through her other occupation as a personal assistant to one of the city’s major philanthropists. Aren’t you dying-to-know more about another opaque world that inspired her debut novel, Perfectly Impossible? Count me in as I rushed to buy a copy. Yes, City People is that stirring.

Topp could be a psychologist. Better yet, she’s an incisive social and cultural commentator, astutely attuned to people’s hidden emotions.

An interesting, realistic element – a transit strike – makes its way through these women’s stories, impacting how they handle the madness of the private school admissions process when one of their group has perhaps warned them in a horrific way:

• Vic: the so-called good friend. Struggling with writer’s block and how she’d pay for Kent, if her daughter was accepted since she’s separated and faking that she doesn’t need any help.

• Kara: the outsider from the Midwest pretending to be one of them. For the hoops she jumps through, the obsession she descends into, the aloneness she’s left to deal with over three-crazed weeks, she’s the character you’ll likely empathize with the most.

• Chandice: the former corporate lawyer going through a medical crisis. Hits the right buttons when it comes to being a strong Black women who feels patronized by and not sold on Kent’s diversity commitment. Recent race eruptions at The Dalton School add fuel to controversial fictional realities.

• Amy: the mysteriously guarded single mother. With family ties to Taiwan, she has a lot at stake to prove herself despite the incredible wealth she already has.

• Penelope: the most scrupulous. Has more “access to privileged information” than the others, which we don’t appreciate until we do. Addicted to an anti-anxiety drug enabling her to project perfect coolness along with her perfectly put together designer outfits.

• Bhavana: has made a career on beauty. From India, she’s taken her mother’s village impoverishment to the ultimate extreme, wanting the “best of everything.” Long-term user of people for personal gain.

Provocative, City People leaves you asking more questions than you started with.

Do you have a special friend? Does she/he pick up on your moods, show they care? Do you consider yourself a good friend?

Do you know or wonder what it’s like to be a Mom always on edge, always assuming “worst-case scenarios” that keep you in a constant state of depleting, free-floating anxiety?

Do you believe a private school education is superior to a public one? If yes, would you go so far as to shelve your true self, lose your identity, so your child could join the elitists? How do you think that might gnaw at your state of mind?

“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger,” writes award-winning writer, essayist, feminist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her 2021 Notes on Grief.

How ungentle the lives of these seven women are. Desperate to have it all, tearing them down. Was it worth it? Topp’s message.

Lorraine

A love letter to the majestic beauty and lifegiving powers of the ocean world (Pembrokeshire, South West Wales, and sailing the North, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Celtic, Caribbean seas; mid-2010s to present): If it only takes 120 minutes a week for humans to feel the benefits of being in Nature, what does that tell us about Welsh-born Hannah Stowe who says, “There was never a time when I did not know the sea”?

For Stowe, who grew up in a “cottage by the sea,” enveloped on three sides by the waters of St. Bride’s Bay that empties into the Celtic Sea and the English Channel, she found “solace,” “energy,” and “always felt safe.”

Tucked away on a secluded tip of the southwestern coast of Wales, lulled by a “lullaby” of “gentle worlds,” Hannah Stowe learned to swim when she learned to walk. Fascinated by “celestial light” and the “beacon, of Strumble Head Lighthouse,” she climbed treetops to get better views of the seascape, bicycled to the rocky beaches where she explored coves, tidal pools, eyed sea birds, seals, dolphins, snorkeled, surfed, and became “obsessed” with walking the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path, considered one of the most beautiful walking paths in the world. 

For Stowe, this meant “there was a current inside me” “as natural and as essential as the act of breathing.”

For us, it means Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea is a captivating, coming-of-age story of a sea observer, navigator, researcher who became a marine biologist offering us an authentic voice for the sea. It also means you’ll be treated to some of the most exquisite nature writing, awakening and refreshing us to ocean worlds we may get glimpses of but haven’t experienced in the immersive, intensive way Stowe has.

Stowe’s story highlights the growing body of research and a movement called Ecopsychology, which provides scientific evidence on the connections between our physical and mental health. Transporting us to how she’s felt and what she’s learned over her twenty-something years “being out there in the elements” that “creates an entirely different state of mind.”

More expansively, the memoir makes the case for how our health is affected by the health of our waters, Stowe having witnessed the human impact of commercial exploitation and climate change on the health of the marine animals who depend on them.

A story that’s painted with vivid imagery by an author who, like her mother, is also a painter. Each chapter is introduced presumably by one of Stowe’s charcoal sketches of the animals you’ll learn about. If it weren’t for the beauty of the prose, you could almost tell this story through images. Then again, if it weren’t for enchanted prose those images would not be painted for you at all or as deeply. 

That’s why there’s six chapters named for seabirds and sea mammals – giant, large, and small: Fire Crow (the Cornish Chough), Sperm Whale, Wandering Albatross, Humpback Whale, Shearwater, and Barnacles.

Only one chapter, Humans, veers dramatically different, although the lure of the sea is fundamental to Stowe’s recovery, healing. Riding a wave bigger than she could tackle, she suffered a serious accident, leaving her in excruciating nerve pain, two surgeries, and a lifetime of adjusting to knowing her limits when they seemed limitless. In spite of it all, when Stowe could get out of bed she returned to her university science studies and later bought her first sailboat she aptly renamed Brave.

If you’ve been raised as a city slicker, you might find Stowe’s remote UK homeplace terribly lonely rather the sustenance she derives from natural landscapes with endless horizons and stunning wildlife, including sightings of majestic sea creatures and discovering smaller delights.

There’s too many seabirds to list. To give you a sense of an impressive one, here’s a description of the Manx Shearwater:

“Elegant of wing, making a long gliding journey north from South America, up the eastern seaboard, following the Gulf Stream, to take up residence in burrow nests on Skomer, Ramsey, and Skokholm” (islands in Wales where the world’s majority breed).

The memoir, then, is a mix of the personal with the science, ecology, history, and the living, breeding, birthing, nurturing conditions of an amazing winged creature known for its ability to migrate thousands of miles from their homes.

Stowe’s prose is vibrant, tingling with an itch to explore seas around the world beyond the “western edge of Britain, the edge of my world.” Even if you’re not a sailor, you’ll relate to how “bonds form quickly at sea, when “you are trusting each other [sailmate(s)] with your life.” 

The first ocean going vessel discussed is the Valiant 40, a research vessel Stowe volunteered to assist on led by Professor Hal Whitehead, a global expert on cetaceans – whales, dolphins, porpoises. Meeting his then doctoral student Laura Feyrer inspired her career direction. Now we see the author as a strong feminist voice rising above male-dominated traditions when it comes to the sea who had to “work twice as hard for half the opportunity. You prove everything, and prove it ten times again.” Loved the irony when Stowe points out boats are named after women!

It was on this expedition that Stowe, manning the deck in the dark of the night, “felt a deep presence” of an “ocean giant.” Awe, in hearing a sperm whale’s eerie whale songs. “The loudest single animal in the ocean” shows us the importance of sounds, not just sightings.

The whale is a persuasive example of environmental activism making a huge difference as these giants almost became extinct in Antarctica in the mid-sixties. Boycotts, quotas, bans, and legislation made it illegal to kill whales for commercial reasons, though a few countries still do.

Stowe’s captivating journey continues to enlighten and carry us to other sea creatures, such as the Wandering Albatross, a “bird of legend” known for the “mastery of its force” flying through fierce winds, requiring both parents to switch turns to care for their young.

And then, “Sometimes, something is just beautiful. You don’t know why, it just is, and the world is better for the fact that it exists,” Stowe writes. The literary world is better for her story of the sea. She hopes, so will the health and future of the seas.

Lorraine