You know how it is when you steal that time to read the book you desperately want to read? I have been stealing that time.
Among the many wonderful people I met at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference (a conference I attended so that I could spend more time with the great Jayne Anne Phillips)—Brooks Hansen, Anne Lamott, Jane Satterfield, Leslie Pietrzyk, Jay Kirk, Olena Kalytiak Davis, my first editor, Alane Salierno Mason (W.W. Norton), my second editor in chief, Janet Silver, Grace Paley, even—there was a young scholarship winner named Susan Tekulve, who hailed from the south and told intriguing tales. Through the years Susan and I remained in touch as she published short stories and built a reputation as a fine teacher at Converse College in Spartanburg, SC. She traveled to and taught in Italy. She spent time among the Appalachian hills, where my great grandfather had left a mark. She brokered fascinating details. She was always humble and she, like me, loved chocolate, cats, and gardens.
Not long ago, Susan won the South Carolina First Novel Prize for
In the Garden of Stone, which will be released in a beautifully designed package by Hub City Press in late April.
Kirkus gave it a huge star.
Library Journal named it as a Spring Break. None other than Robert Olmstead, Thomas E. Kennedy, and Josephine Humphreys have sung its praises, and I asked for an early copy.
This is the book I've been desperate to read, and my joy for Susan, my enthusiasm, my deep respect, I'll use the word "awe"�it overflows. I'm 100 pages in and now must leave it for a spell to do some corporate work. I'll write a full response in a few days. But for now let me say that this generational book about the south and southern Italy (yes, they combine to perfection here) is so brilliantly built and quietly affecting that I could choose any single paragraph and it would impress you.
Here's just one. It's 1924, the first evening of a southern honeymoon.
Around the mountain pool, the butterflies flattened themselves against long, polished stones, drinking the water held in their dimpled surfaces. Emma took off her shoes and walked across the slippery rocks. Water sprayed her face and arms as she dodged the drinking butterflies and stood at the pool's edge, watching the giant trout swim around the pool. Dark blue and mottled, they skulled just below the surface, gulping up butterflies and water, their stomachs filling like empty buckets. She saw now why her husband had released them. She, too, was satisfied just to know that they were there.
It has become my habit to wake at 1:47 most nights, two hours of sleeping in. I make my decision—to wait in the upstairs dark, to wait in the downstairs dark, or to somehow make use of the time.
For many weeks now (I am not counting, I am afraid), I have made use of the time—doing the work set down before me, leaving all the stacks of books that aren't required reading somewhere to the side, for an intangible, mythical then.
Today when I woke I realized that I had a very small pocket of time that was indeed my own. And so I came downstairs, turned on the light, and opened a book that had been sent to me weeks ago by my long-time friend Jane Satterfield. Jane and I met at Bread Loaf years ago and never lost touch, though sometimes too much time goes by without a correspondence. I saw Jane most recently during the Bruce Springsteen Glory Days symposium at Monmouth University. We hardly had the time to speak as we like to speak. It was a public forum.
In any case, Jane's book,
Her Familiars, is a third collection of Satterfield poems, and there was no way I was going to rush through it. Jane has a habit of filling her poems with entire worlds, of researching an idea, committing history to the page, surprising the reader with allusion and symbol. She writes magnificently, and without shortcuts. I wanted to take her poems slow. I did.
Thankfully, for those who aren't nearly as well-read as Jane, Jane includes, in
Her Familiars, some end notes to help contextualize her work. And so, poem by poem, I read, thinking—
This is the one I will share on my blog! Or, This is the one I will read to my students! Flipping back to the note pages, always, to be sure I received the full intent of the poem.
And then I got to the title poem, "Her Familiars," which begins like this:
Just past her birthday (thirteenth)
my daugther's engrossed
in the antics of the Pretty Committee
who, swish bags in tow,
shop for
amazing LBDs....
and then sweeps into its larger meditation on beauty, age, oddness, the recharge of time—coiling higher and higher, in trademark Jane style, thrillingly, to this mid-point passage:
... Just look at
the woodcut, frontispiece to
The Discovery of Witches,London, circa 1647, where one-legged
Elizabeth Clarke, whose
mother (maybe witchy
with words or wise with a cure?),
a heretic, hung before her.....
And, toward the end, leaves us with this line:
.... The feeble, the poor, &
otherwise popular didn't
stand a chance.....
I knew, reading, that I loved this poem. But I also knew that I didn't fully understand it, that I had not fully penetrated its many reverbing layers, its codices, its effects and affects, so I went to the notes and found this:
Nigel Cawthorne's Witch Hunt: History of a Persecution (London: Arcturus, 2003) provided useful background; the "Pretty Committee" appears in the YA Series, The Clique. This poem is for Beth Kephart.
I could read no further. I had to stop. Had to thank Jane Satterfield right then, right now—for being my friend, for putting up with my ridiculous schedule, for writing so magnificently, always. For remembering me and for bringing me solace, in the midst of another dark night.
You are the true and brilliant poet, Jane.
As readers of this blog know, it has been a tumultuous time here—a sinking realization that not all the people you trust to get something right (or to do right) do. A sense of helplessness about a false newspaper claim. And so many friends stepping in to cry out against the injustice.
And while I will never be able to leave this cruelty behind—for it is not about me (about that I would not care) but about someone I deeply love—I did physically leave home very early yesterday morning to join friends at the Glory Days Symposium, an intelligent gathering of people who recognize that Springsteen does so much more than entertain. (One of my own—many—appreciations of Springsteen is
here.) I was proud to join April Lindner, Jane Satterfield, Ann E. Michael, and Ned Balbo on a storytelling panel, and deeply inspired by the conversations I heard along the way. I was happy to at last meet Mark Bernhard, an associate provost at University of Southern Indiana, who puts so much of himself into this event.
Mid-afternoon I slipped away to Asbury Park and walked the boardwalk alone. Sea and salt and time to be. A quick but essential exchange with my editor, Tamra Tuller. A funny, I-am-the-luckiest-mother-on-earth text carnival with my son.
Monmouth University, where the Glory Days Symposium was held, is a green campus, architecturally cohering and whole. At its center stands Wilson Hall, a Horace Trumbauer designed mansion originally built, in 1929, as the private residence of F.W. Woolworth Co. president Hubert Templeton Parson. In the summer of 1916, in a building lost to fire on this same site, Woodrow Wilson worked through his presidential campaign. If this Trumbauer building looks familiar to you, that's because it served as the set for the movie,
Annie.
I share above some images from the day.
Yes, it has obsessed me, but it is done. "Raw to the Bone: Transported to Truth and Memory by Springsteen's River Songs" is written at last, and it will slumber now, until September, when I will have the great pleasure of joining April Lindner, Jane Satterfield, Ned Balbo, and Ann Michael at the Glory Days Symposium at Monmouth University. This blog will now return to its regularly scheduled (ha, I never schedule anything) program.
From the paper:
The music will rise through the soles of my feet. It will scour, channel, silt, and further rise. In the dark cavern of my hips it will catch and swish. Outside, perhaps, the stars have come up, and probably the deer have vanished, and maybe the cicadas are rumbling around in their own mangled souls. But inside, a river churns, widens, roars, and steeps, and I am dancing Springsteen.
Could there be anything more thrilling (for a reader-rocker) than reading the beautifully researched, impeccably written David Remnick profile of Bruce Springsteen in the July 30 issue of
The New Yorker? The story is called "We Are Alive," and most everyone read it before I did, because my issue didn't arrive until late yesterday afternoon. I'd read pieces online. I'd read the raves. But yesterday, after a very long day of corporate work and minor agitations, I found a breeze and read the profile through. I didn't have to fall in love again with Bruce Springsteen; I've been in love since I was a kid. But I loved, loved, loved every word of this story. I would like to frame it.
(For those who haven't seen my Devon Horse Show photos and video of Jessica Springsteen, who is as sensational in her way as Bruce is, I share them
here.)
Perhaps my favorite part of Remnick's article was discovering the way that Springsteen reads, how he thinks about books. You don't get to be sixty-two and still magnetic, necessary, pulsingly, yes, alive if you don't know something, and if you don't commit yourself to endless learning. Reading is one of the many ways Springsteen stays so connected to us, and so relevant. From
The New Yorker:Lately, he has been consumed with Russian fiction. "It's compensatory—what you missed the first time around," he said. "I'm sixty-some, and I think, There are a lot of these Russian guys! What's all the fuss about? So I was just curious. That was an incredible book: 'The Brothers Karamazov.' Then I read 'The Gambler.' The social play in the first half was less interesting to me, but the second half, about obsession, was fun. That could speak to me. I was a big John Cheever fan, and so when I got into Chekhov I could see where Cheever was coming from. And I was a big Philip Roth fan, so I got into Saul Bellow, 'Augie March.' These are all new connections for me. It'd be like finding out now that the Stones covered Chuck Berry."
Next week, I'll begin to write my paper for
Glory Days: The Bruce Springsteen Symposium, which is being held in mid-September at Monmouth University, and where I'll be joining April Lindner, Ann Michael, Jane Satterfield, and Ned Balbo on a panel called "Sitting Round Here Trying to Write This Book: Bruce Springsteen and Literary Inspiration." I don't know if I've ever been so intimidated, or (at the same time) excited. I don't know what I have in me, if I can write smart and well enough.
But this morning I take my energy, my inspiration, from the friends and good souls who have written over the past few days to tell me about their experience with
Small Damages. We writers write a long time, and sometimes our work resonates, and when it does, we are so grateful. When others reach out to us, we don't know what to say. We hope that thank you is enough. And so, this morning, thank you, Alyson Hagy and Robb Forman Dew. Thank you, Tamara Smith. Thank you, Elizabeth Ator and Katherine Wilson. Thank you, Jessica Ferro. Thank you, Hilary Hanes. And thank you, Miss Rosella Eleanor LaFevre, who interviewed me a few years ago about
Dangerous Neighbors, and who has stayed in touch ever since. I don't even know how to say thank you for
3 Comments on Bruce Springsteen, Glory Days Symposium, and Thanks, last added: 7/30/2012
Congratulations to Susan! I loved the imagery in this excerpt, especially the gulping trout buckets. It was a nice change to imagine butterflies and flowing water during a snowy week.
What a lovely passage.