Katrina Kenison's name is, I'm sure, well known to you all. As an editor she brought important books into the world and spent many years binding together each year's most essential works of short fiction in Best American Short Stories. As a writer she has been inspired by her children, her neighbors, her urgent dreams of peaceful, meaningful living to craft books that have found countless readers—immediately upon publication and consistently throughout the years. As a blogger she inspires and makes whole legions of seekers. As a force for good she has been interviewed in the New York Times or written for the Huffington Post and other major news outlets. As my long-time friend, she has listened, coaxed, assured, read, remembered, and, even while under all manner of personal pressure, written words that help me understand my own books better. She is a letter writer and a prose poemer. A practitioner of yoga and a cook. She has a really adorable dog. And when the world shatters, as the world has lately shattered, Katrina is the companion and friend you turn to for binding wisdom.
While the rest of us wish we knew how to make book trailers that were far bigger and better than book trailers, Katrina has gone ahead and blazed a significantly different kind of path by making videos about books that also stand alone as life lessons. Just look at this trailer for The Gift of an Ordinary Day. More than 1.6 million other people already have.
This morning I am proud and happy to share Katrina's newest work of video art, which, among other things, introduces her new book, due out in January, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment.
"Love," Katrina writes in its pages, "is the answer to your most urgent question: What am I really" here to do?"
"You have work to do," she urges. "Begin it."
Katrina worked hard and for a long time on her new book. She thought a lot about how to tell its story with audio and film. She conceived of and posed for the book's cover. I'm not the only one who believes Magical Journey will soar. Here, for example, is Publishers Weekly:
In this intensely moving tribute to the importance of enjoying every moment of life, Kenison (The Gift of An Ordinary Day), former longtime series editor of The Best American Short Stories, tells a tale inspired by loss and confides what can be gained from it. After a dear friend dies from cancer and her two sons head off to boarding school and college, Kenison is forced to question what remains relevant in her life and how such an introspective examination might portend a change in priorities. Identifying a common and paralyzing fear (“I am so used to doubting my worthiness that the minute I decide to do something, I start convincing myself I’m not up to the job”), she turns to intensive yoga studies, where she learns that “the best antidote to anxiety about the future is to be present in the here and now,” and that finding contentment in what one is rather than what one thinks one should be is critical. Her journey will inspire tears and determination, and remind readers that anything, “done from the heart, changes the world in some small way for the better.” Agent: Steven Lewers. (Jan.)
This beautiful young man is my nephew, a child growing up on the outskirts of London. He is buoyant, instantly generous, loving, and a fine host at his own party. I like how he smiles. I like how he plays, how he relaxes with the hour. I like how his job, right now, is happiness.
I thought of this happy kid as I read the
New York Times Op/Ed piece (penned by Tim Kreider) on busyness, and its many bedevil-ments. "If you live in American in the 21st century you've probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are," Kreider begins. "It's become the default response when you ask anyone how they're doing: 'Busy!' '
So busy.' '
Crazy busy.' It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: 'That's a good problem to have,' or 'Better than the opposite.'"
Kreider was, of course, aiming his pen at me. (Hey, as
a memoirist/narcissist it's a conclusion I'm bound to draw.)
Crazy busy was my theme song.
Overwhelmed was my word
du every
jour.
I'd like to, but I can't. Yes, folks. That was me. A lot of it was circumstance, pressures and responsibilities I had not actively chosen for myself. But much of it stemmed from choices I had made—to endlessly shore up family finances, to write (again), to volunteer (some more), to chase spider webs at midnight that no one but yours truly can see.
Not long ago, I declared my desire for
a lesser life—one less crammed with to-do lists, less amenable to busy boasts. I wanted to, needed to, sleep more. I wanted to live more. I wanted to have more time away from the computer, more time in gardens, more time with books, more time to experiment in the kitchen. I wanted, frankly, more time for walks with my son, more time to scheme up art projects with my husband, more time alone. I bought close to three dozen books—recent classics I had missed—and set out to read them. I made time for walks with long-time friends. I sat and looked at photographs—not in a hurry, and for no applicable reason.
And when client work arrived, as client work must and will arrive, I didn't promise a next-day delivery. I did the work, best as I could, same high standards in place. But I didn't do it in a breathless rush when the rest of my timezone was sleeping.
I'm liking me better this way, but I know how hard it will be to avoid relapsing into BusyNess. I am keeping Kreider's article close, therefore, for when I'm tempted to fall off the wagon. I share this Kreider paragraph, with the hope that you'll read the whole:
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more
and I'm beginning with Katrina Kenison, who took a virtual walk with me this afternoon (we were on the phone; we live many states apart; I walked by this stream; I took a picture. Snap.). Katrina's newest book, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, came out this past fall and has been doing what thoughtful books do, over time—which is to say that it has been gaining momentum. Visit Katrina's web site. Watch the video she's made. Let her tell you about the life she has been living. You'll see why her book is touching so many lives, and why it's likely on its way to becoming a word-of-mouth bestseller.
I'm moving next to Rebecca Skloot, whom I met years ago at Goucher College, when she was teaching, and her dad, Floyd, was teaching, and I was teaching—and it just went down like that: teachers teaching. Rebecca was talking even then about a book that she was writing, something, she kept saying, about the immortal cells of a woman named Henrietta Lacks. We talked about structure in the abstract back then, and over the next many years I either heard first-hand or read (on Rebecca's blog) about the journey she was taking with a book she so believed in that no amount of raised eyebrow on the part of ersatz publishers had the power to diminish. Rebecca had a story to tell. She had a story that defined her and defined us and had, she knew, to be told. She was in New York City writing, she was in her beat-up Honda driving, she was at a friend's farmhouse revising: Wherever she was, she was determined to get this story told.
You've heard of that Henrietta Lacks story in the meantime, right? You've heard Rebecca on ABC News, Rebecca on Fresh Air, Rebecca on All Things Considered. You've seen Rebecca in the pages of Oprah and let's not forget Rebecca three times in one week in the New York Times or Rebecca on her four-month book tour. We're talking about that Rebecca Skloot, my friends. The one who never stopped believing in her dream.
Finally, I am shouting out today on behalf of one of my very dearest friends, Alyson Hagy. We won a National Endowment for the Arts grant years ago. We started a correspondence. We're in touch, because I'm lucky, nearly every day, and Alyson has seen me through thick and thin, she has sent me her weather via email, she has cheered me through teaching because she's a teacher herself (the likes of whom Michael Ondaatje, Don DeLillo, Phillip Gourevitch, Joy Williams, and Edward Jones come to visit), and she has sent me early pages of her books to read because I so believe in her. Alyson's Ghosts of Wyoming came out a few days ago. It's already been featured, brilliantly, in the Boston Globe, The Believer, New West, and Denver Post, and do you want to know what Susan Salter Reynolds of the LA Times said about my friend Alyson this weekend? Do you?
Reynolds said this: These eight burnished stories confirm Hagy's importance in American literature; her seamless blending of landscape and lives, her very modern understanding of the vulnerability of kindness.
Yeah, baby. Oh, yeah.
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3 Comments on <em>Tonight I){kind=small}
, last added: 2/12/2010
I just read Magical Journey and I loved it - every word. Just as you say, Katrina is the kind of person who distills the essence of life, and her wisdom is precisely the kind we all need, always, but especially in a time like this. xox