Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts by Michelle

Jane Bowles – “A Day in the Open”

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Jane Bowles is a writer I have always been meaning to read – her novel Two Serious Ladies has been on my list for years. But I began my silly advent reading plan yesterday with a short story of hers, “A Day in the Open” which is about two prostitutes taken out for a picnic by a wealthy man, Señor Ramirez, and his friend. The story is set in an unnamed country, either somewhere in South America, or maybe in Spain. One of the prostitutes is Mexican (and suffering from what seems to be a terminal illness), and the other one—the hard, crafty one who drinks heavily—is from the unnamed country.

It’s an odd little story, and it feels somehow unpolished—but I find that nowadays so many older works do when compared to the “heavy polishing” of contemporary writing. In that sense, I like the rough bits of it, the lack of perfectly smooth surfaces and the way the ending just kind of falls off and trickles away.

I’ve embarked on this reading list as a way to take a breather from my focus on politics right now, to let my brain enjoy fiction once again, but the story, ironically, mirrored some of what’s going on. The character of Señor Ramirez speaks in the voice of the United State’s current President-Elect. While driving away from the whorehouse, the car passes a new building and he tells them it will be a museum, saying:

“When it opens we are all going to have a big dinner there together. Everyone there will be an old friend of mine. That’s nothing. I can have dinner with fifty people every night of my life.”

I continued reading with a wry smile, and the comparisons continued as this larger-than-life wealthy man drove the women and his friend to a secluded spot. It was both hilarious, and awful.

“Since it is so sunny out, ladies,” said Señor Ramirez, “I am going to walk around in my underpants. I hope that my friend will do the same if he wants to.”

A reminder that buffoons of this type have always existed, but also how they beg to be caricatured. Ramirez is nothing more than a child, and a cowardly one.

In any case, the foursome start drinking, play a game throwing acorns into a hat (the smart prostitute making sure, when Ramirez keeps missing his throw, to purposefully throw hers far off its mark), they all get naked and at some point, Ramirez takes the prostitute with the illness on a walk into the woods and then carries her into the river. It’s in these few scenes, up until the end, that the story pivots and becomes quite interesting.

I keep reading and re-reading this page and a half—looking at the dialogue, at the positioning of the different characters with respect to the reader and to each other—and trying to work it out, but I can’t. Bowles holds an interpretation of the ending just out of reach. I suppose a reader could grab for an easy one, if necessary, but it felt more interesting to me to keep the possibilities open and wonder what Bowles was working toward.

I’ll definitely read Two Serious Ladies at some point, and will look at more of her short stories – there is an interesting texture to her writing that I’d like to see more of, experience in a more sustained way. This was a great introduction to her work.

25 days of reading

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Someone tweeted a marvelous idea this morning – an advent reading calendar. I sipped my coffee and let my eyes wander over the slim titles of someone else’s 25-day reading plan, and I knew immediately that I wanted to do the same. My brain has been anchored in politics and final novel edits for a manuscript that is finally in my agent’s capable hands and out of my mind for a while (hooray!), and so a little nudge to get me reading broadly and haphazardly is very welcome. I love reading with a plan and often follow a thread from one book to another, but sometimes it’s nice to cast a wide net and see what that can spark.

The only book I’ve been able to focus on recently is Skyfaring by Mark Vanhoenacker, and it is really lovely, but it’s an escape as well, giving me distance from the planet and very gentle commentary on the human love of height, speed, and flying. It’s a great read but I need more and am not sure where to go.

So here is a list of short stories and essays that I’ve never read, that I have already on my shelves and that I’d like to read over the next 25 days. I’ve deliberately left myself four empty spots* because I’m hoping any of you might give me some suggestions and throw me in wild and varied directions – so what is the best short story or essay you’ve read recently?

* I’ve gotten some wonderful suggestions, but would welcome more…

1 Dec Jane Bowles – A Day in the Open
2 Dec Jane Hirshfield – The World is Large and Full of Noises
3 Dec Phyllis Rose – Tools of Torture: An Essay on Beauty & Pain
4 Dec James Baldwin – Exodus
5 Dec Katherine Anne Porter – St.Augustin and the Bullfight
6 Dec Anne Carson – Kinds of Water
7 Dec Kate Chopin – An Egyptian Cigarette
8 Dec Constance Fenimore Woolson – Miss Grief
9 Dec Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni – The Lives of Strangers
10 Dec Ada Leverson – Suggestion
11 Dec Charles Simic – Reading Philosophy at Night
12 Dec Olive Schreiner – Three Dreams in a Desert
13 Dec Jamaica Kincaid – Figures in the Distance
14 Dec James Baldwin – 5th Ave, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem
15 Dec Geoff Dyer – Otherwise Known as the Human Condition
16 Dec Rebecca Solnit – Two Arrowheads
17 Dec Sherman Alexie – The Toughest Indian in the World
18 Dec Michelle Cliff – Transactions
19 Dec Lucia Berlin – A Manual for Cleaning Women
20 Dec Jan Carson – Settling
21 Dec Eudora Welty – A Sweet Devouring
22 Dec  Anna Kavan – The Brother
23 Dec  Alice Walker – The Flowers
24 Dec
25 Dec

 

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Agota Kristof – C’est egal

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I’ve written before about Agota Kristof—a Swiss writer, originally Hungarian, who escaped to Switzerland in 1956 and made her life here as a writer and playwright. If you don’t already know it, her work is brutal and provocative. Often difficult to read but yet intense and hard to put down, she is most famous for her trilogy The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie.

I discovered, quite by accident, a small collection of her short stories that came out in 2005, C’est egal. The collection contains 25 very very short and sometimes cryptic pieces. As far as I know, the collection has not been translated into English, although perhaps some of the stories have in different publications. Something I love about her work is the anger in it. It’s palpable and rises up off the page, with sharp teeth. The first story here, “The Axe” is written in the voice of a woman, explaining (innocently? naively? insanely?) to the doctor she’s just called, why she woke up to find her husband dead, his head split in two with an axe. The collection continues in much the same vein.

The title, by the way, comes from one of the pieces and given the context of that story could be translated as It doesn’t matter, or Whatever, or Who cares. This gives an pretty clear indication of the tone of the collection.

In any case, I couldn’t help myself, and have translated two of them here:

The mother

            Her son left home very young, when he was 18 years old. Several months after the death of the father.

She kept on living in the two room apartment; she was on good terms with her neighbors. She did housecleaning, mending, ironing.

One day her son knocked at the door. He was not alone. With him was a young girl, fairly pretty.

She opened her arms to them.

She hadn’t seen her son for four years.

After supper, her son said, “Mother, if it’s all right with you, we’ll both stay here.”

Her heart leapt with joy. She prepared the largest room for them, the most beautiful. But they went out around ten o’clock that night.

She told herself that they had surely gone to the movies, and she went to sleep, happy in the little room behind the kitchen.

She was no longer alone. Her son was living with her again.

In the mornings, she went out early to do her housecleaning and the small jobs that she didn’t want to give up because of this change in her situation.

At noon she cooked them good meals. Her son always brought something. Flowers, a dessert, wine, and sometimes champagne.

The coming and going of the strangers she sometimes passed in the hallway did not bother her.

“Come in, come in,” she said, “they’re in the room.”

Sometimes, when her son was not at home, and so the two women took their meals together, her eyes would meet the sad, battered eyes of the girl who was living with her. And so she would lower her own eyes, and murmur, while massaging a little ball of the soft white flesh from a piece of bread, “He’s a good boy. A nice boy.”

The girl would fold her napkin—she had manners—and walk out of the kitchen.

So much is left out of this story, so much implied. Kristof does this with a lot of her work, leaving implication and insinuation as the largest spaces for the reader to situate themself in, which can be uncomfortable or exciting, depending how you look at it.

The second story has a strange narrator, which is hard to pin down. I quite like that, avoiding the easy interpretations and thinking about this piece in terms of its relationship to the rest of her work–which spent more of its time on issues of war and totalitarianism and psychological oppression, than it did on religion.

The Great Wheel

            There is someone that I haven’t yet wanted to kill.

It’s you.

You can walk in the streets, you can go drinking and then walk the streets, I won’t kill you.

Don’t be afraid. The city isn’t dangerous. The only dangerous thing in the city is me.

I walk, I walk all throughout the streets, I kill.

But you, you don’t have anything to fear.

If I’m following you, it’s because I like the way you walk. You totter. It’s lovely. It’s almost like you limp. A bit like you’re hunchbacked. You’re not actually hunchbacked. From time to time you pull yourself up and you walk straight. But I really love you when it’s late at night, when you’re weak, when you trip, when you hunch yourself over.

I follow you, you tremble. From the cold or from fear. Although the weather is hot.

Never, nearly never, maybe it has never been so hot in our city.

And what is it that could make you afraid?

Me?

I’m not your enemy. I love you.

And no one else is able to harm you.

Don’t be afraid. I’m here. I’m protecting you.

I’m also suffering, you know.

My tears—fat drops of rain—run down my face. The night covers me. The moon lights me up. The clouds hide me. The wind tears me apart. I feel a kind of tenderness for you. Sometimes this happens to me. Only rarely.

Why for you? I have no idea.

I want to follow you for a great distance, everywhere, for a long time.

I want to see you suffer even more.

I want you to have had enough of it all.

I want you to come begging to me to take you.

I want you to desire me. Want you to want me, to love me, call out to me.

And so I would take you in my arms, I would hold you close against my heart, you would be my child, my lover, my beloved.

I would take you away.

You were afraid to be born, and now you are afraid to die.

You are afraid of everything.

You shouldn’t be afraid.

There is just a great wheel turning. It’s called Eternity.

I’m the one turning the great wheel.

You do not need to be afraid of me.

Nor of the great wheel.

The only thing that can make you afraid, that can hurt you, is life, and you already know it.

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“the heaviness lies…”

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I am deeply saddened and angered – furious, I’m furious – by the world’s recent political events. I believe I filled my Twitter timeline with enough obscenities to get me through November 9th as the votes rolled in and the reactions occurred. I broke my “books only” Twitter rule that day and I will continue to break it unapologetically.

This experience has sent me directly back to Nadine Gordimer. If you’ve been reading this website for any amount of time, and especially back when I began it ten years ago, you’ll know that I’ve read and written about each of Gordimer’s fifteen novels. I did not examine then what sparked my interest in Gordimer’s work. I just loved her project – but now I think I understand why I felt such an urgency to read and re-read her work.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the US, which is not known for its racial diversity – but I had the unique experience of attending elementary school in a majority black neighborhood. I was one of two white children in my 1st and 2nd grade classrooms. This was in Seattle, WA. When my family moved to Oregon, we lived in NE Portland, and I attended middle school and high school in schools which were fifty percent African-American. I’m so thankful that my parents never considered sending my sister and me to private schools. I’m so thankful for my urban, vibrant, sometimes rowdy public school education and the diversity of kids I grew up and learned alongside.

I experienced racial tensions, yes, but from the privileged white side of things, aware that there were things I did not understand and also, less consciously, that I did not need to understand. Fights in the halls. Students killed in shootings (One each year at my high school.) Racial divisions between student groups. My father is a retired Lutheran pastor, and his church when I was growing up sat at the edge of a black neighborhood and it worked with youth at-risk of joining the city’s gangs. He received death threats for performing gay marriages, and my sister and I were taught to walk outside on “condition yellow” after that. But many good things, too. He worked to develop a weekly evening jazz service with neighborhood musicians that was wildly successful and brought so many different cultures together, and it was really urban-style ministry with open doors and loads of inclusive programming. There is no perfect way to educate your children about issues of racial and social injustice and I’m sure my parents were as flawed as the next person in their approach sometimes, but I’m lucky my parents were committed to try. And although I have a lot of criticism for religion and am no longer a part of any church, I also see the good that open-minded communities of any motivation, faith or otherwise, can bring.

There is more to this story and it’s long and takes me to where I’ve ended up — living in Switzerland, and now holding Swiss nationality. What is interesting to me is thinking about the ways in which I remain connected to America. Like many emigrants, I have a complicated relationship with my country of origin (add to this the fact that I was born in Japan), but where I have remained passionately connected to the country is in the ongoing story of its racial issues. And I know this comes from growing up in the context I’ve just explained.

This is a long way of getting to why I am drawn to Gordimer’s work. She was white (I wrote “is” and am very sad to have had to correct that) and privileged, and yet her 60-year body of work is a deeply sincere engagement with what those two terms meant in the context of apartheid South Africa and its aftermath. She is an absolute inspiration to me, and not just from a technical craft perspective. There is no replacing the joy and responsibility of reading the works of writers of color as they create their art in response to their lived experiences, but alongside this, I find comfort in knowing that white writers can investigate these issues and make art from an honest position within their privileged experience. Gordimer provides a road map of sorts—and even if it isn’t the same country or the same time period, maps are endlessly fascinating in what they reveal.

I am genuinely curious if there is an equivalent white American writer – writing about race issues as honestly and as openly as Gordimer did, for such a long time and from the particular position that Gordimer takes? I can’t think of one, but there must be and maybe my brain is just mushy from all the awfulness of the last two days.

Because of recent events, I am drawn to re-read her first novel, The Lying Days, which was published in 1953. The South African National Party came to power in 1948 and first strengthened the racial segregation that already existed in the country, and then institutionalized it into apartheid. The last third of The Lying Days takes place in 1950, and I’d like to excerpt a passage, a long reflection by the novel’s narrator Helen who is grappling to understand what the new political system means. It is a little long but I find it frightfully prescient:

Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. We wanted a quick shock, over and done with, but what we were going to get was something much slower, surer, and more terrible: an apparent sameness in the conduct of our lives, long periods when there was nothing more to hurt us than hard words in Parliament and talk of the Republic which we had laughed at for years; and, recurrently, a mounting number of weary battles—apartheid in the public transport and buildings, the ban on mixed marriages, the Suppression of Communism bill, the language ordinance separating Afrikaans and English-speaking children in schools, the removal of coloured voters from the common electoral roll and the setting aside of the Supreme Court judgment that made this act illegal—passionately debated in Parliament with the United Party and Labour Party forming the Opposition, inevitably lost to the Government before the first protest was spoken.

When the impact on individual, personal lives is not immediate and actual, political change does not affect the real happiness or unhappiness of people’s lives, though they may protest that it does. If the change of government throws you into a concentration camp, then your preoccupation with politics will equal that you might normally have had with your wife’s fidelity or your own health. But if your job is the same, your freedom of movement is the same, the outward appearance of your surroundings is the same, the heaviness lies only upon the extension of yourself which belongs to the world of abstract ideas, which, although it influences them through practical expression of moral convictions, loses, again and again, to the overwhelming tug of the warm and instinctual….

… it was only very slowly, as the months and then the years went by, that the moral climate of guilt and fear and oppression chilled through to the bone, almost as if the real climate of the elements had changed, the sun had turned away from South Africa, bringing about actual personality changes that affected even the most intimate conduct of their lives.

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“Queer how tired apprehending a war made you.”

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Two passages from Anna Kavan’s story, “Glorious Boys” from her collection I am Lazarus, published in 1945:

What a fiendishly efficient machine war is, she thought, remembering him as he was and the writing, a bit immature but sensitive and with much integrity. Now he would never write the things he might have written when he had learned to write well enough. It destroyed very thoroughly this war machine, this incinerator of individuality and talent and life, forging the sensitive and creative young into the steel fabric of death, turning the out by the million, the murder men, members of Murder Inc., the big firm, the global organization. Suddenly, she felt acutely angry with him.

And later:

Of course it’s lunacy: we’ve all of us gone insane, she said to herself, thinking of the planes streaming out, crossing the incoming enemy stream up there in the freezing sky. Did they signal like passing ships or just ignore one another? The demented human race destroying itself with no god or external sanity intervening. Well, let them get on with it. Let it be over soon. She was very tired of the war-world and only wanted everything to be over. It seemed not to matter anymore what happened. There had been far too much happen already. Queer how tired apprehending a war made you. The war had always been there in the different countries, but it had taken London to bring her the apprehension of war. This can’t go on, she thought sometimes, waking suddenly in the night or moving about a room: this can not go on. But it went on and on and she went on somehow, only feeling always more and more tired.

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shaped language: Müller, Carl, and Hirshfield

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This week I’m reading three books, moving from one to the other and back again. The books are: David Carl’s Heraclitus in Sacramento, Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates and Herta Müller’s The Appointment. What an odd and wonderful conversation these books are having. All so different, all turning over similar questions about how language works to make meaning.

The Appointment is fiction, obviously, but it’s running a careful hand along the idea of individual identity in a system which wants to forbid (destroy might be a better word) individual thought. The novel covers a single day as a young woman rides the tram to an interrogation session. She’s being watched because she was caught sewing notes (‘Marry me’, with her name and address) into the lining of the men’s suits bound for Italy from the clothing factory where she works. This is life under Ceaușescu.

The worst thing is this feeling that my brain is slipping down into my face. It’s humiliating, there’s no other word for it, when your whole body feels like it’s barefoot. But what if there aren’t any words at all, what if even the best word isn’t enough?

It’s really hard to categorize David Carl’s book Heraclitus in Sacramento. It’s a study, really. A collection of writings and thoughts around the acts of reading and writing. There is a fictional or personal thread as well, which draws it all together. But not tightly. Although it’s a bound book it feels more like a bursting folder collecting notes scribbled and torn from the margins of other books; these notes are in dialogue with so many other works, as is the elusive narrator. It’s a slow and curious read, and I’m really enjoying it. The first section is called “Lucubrations” and here is some of what it looks like:

Is he still at liberty to believe that the reading of words might improve him; might go some distance in making him a better person?

He still believes in such things as better and worse; if not in perfection, then at least in perfectibility. He believes there are things he can do that will make him better than he is, as surely as he believes that there are things he can do that will bring him pleasure.

But what do words have to do with this?

That is a question for him to live with a bit longer.

According to Aristotle, “Poetry is the product either of a man of great natural ability or of one not wholly sane.”

Poetry is the liberation of language, and language the very possibility of poetry.

Nine Gates is Jane Hirshfield’s collection of essays on understanding poetry. It is more classically academic in tone than the other two, but Hirshfield’s language remains lavish and alive even when she’s in an explaining mode. The first essay of the book is about concentration and it reminded me of Jan Zwicky’s interview printed at the back of her collection Chamber Music, in which she talked about “that wordless configuration in the world which lit up, arrested my attention” and the idea of “lyric availability.” Hirshfield gets at this from a number of different directions, using other poets’ ideas as well as her own descriptions. Everyone trying to describe the state of heightened attention involved in artistic creation.

In a passage about how poetry connects the poet with the reader, or the poet with his or her own past, there is this marvelous line:

Shaped language is strangely immortal, living in a meadowy freshness outside of time.

She is writing about the intimacy of repeating words—one’s own or someone else’s. Giving them form in the mind or aloud. How this formulation/formation works through the reader or the thinker. This sentence speaks to both The Appointment and Heraclitus in Sacramento, bringing my reading into a little conversation that will keep me company as I continue through all three books.

 

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Four women in translation

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Again in the spirit of women-in-translation month, here are four books in translation, of women writers, which I had the pleasure to review over the last few years.

The first is Swiss even! Noelle Revaz’s With the Animals, translated by W. Donald Wilson. Here is a part of my review which can be seen here at The Rumpus:

The book involves an element of the grotesque that rises up from time to time as a bizarre form of comedy. Paul is so ridiculously out-of-touch, so pathetically calculating and selfish. And so he can only lose, no matter his stubborn violence and wretched attempts to assert his power. Watching his downward spiral would be more thrilling if the reader wasn’t so certain he will cause plenty of damage in his descent. The book isn’t interested in revenge or balance or catharsis – despite a gentle movement in those directions.

If Rousseau, a Swiss writer of an altogether different generation, wanted to convince us of primitive man’s inherent nobility, than Revaz is calling out his theory in the plainest terms. There is nothing ennobling about Paul’s love of dirt and cow shit. Nothing but cruel freedom in his disassociation from other members of his species. But that very challenge makes the book a thoughtful and provocative read. And Revaz’s writing is both daring and defiant.

The second is Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall and translated by Philip Boehm, published by the wonderful Peirene Press:

This premise—that something as intangible and fragile as the connection and love between Shayek and Izolda should trump all impossible distances and insane governmental decrees and genocidal rules—is where the novella hinges. It is not so much that Izolda believes that within the context of the war she still deserves the success of her life and love, but rather despite it. On a purely psychological level, Izolda operates as if the war simply does not touch her. While her actions and movements are all prescribed and countered by what is happening in the Polish ghetto, in various prison camps, in Vienna, even in the Guben labor camp, her mindset remains firmly beyond these prescriptions. And this is this novella’s most remarkable offering.

The entire review can be seen here.

The third I want to mention is Taeko Tomioka’s Building Waves, translated by Louise Heal Kawai. Much has been said about another of Dalkey’s Japanese list (and for good reason!), Hiromi Kawakami’s The Briefcase. But Tomioka’s novel is wonderful and interesting and bizarre and deserves to be more widely read. Here is part of what I said about it, and the whole review can be read here:

Tomioka wanders through this socio-economic context using a feminist lens. Kyoko and the other women in the book—Kumiko (who becomes Katsumi’s lover after Kyoko), Ayako (Katsumi’s wife), Yoko (one of Kyoko’s friends whose husband leaves her), Amiko (a young mother), and Misawa (an older woman and artist)—are all bumping up against these expectations of what it means to be a woman, a mother, a wife. Kyoko sits at the farthest end of the spectrum, the woman who has mostly decided to reject traditional roles, and the other women fall in an untidy line somewhere along the range. What binds them all, to Tomioka’s credit, is that each is more searching than resolute, more hesitant than decided. And the book’s ultimate tragedy—although represented through a single and sad event—is a kind of despair at the paradox of refusing the superficiality of an unexamined life but knowing, at the same, that there are no easy answers, if there are answers at all, to any of your questions.

And the fourth is an old favorite of mine, always worth revisiting. Love, Anger, Madness by Marie Vieux-Chauvet, translated by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur. I so wish more of Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s work would be translated. Her novel Fille d’Haiti is incredible and powerful and deserves to be read widely. I reviewed the book at The Quarterly Conversation, here is part of what I had to say:

Love, Anger, and Madness also demonstrates Vieux-Chauvet’s impressive stylistic range. The diary technique in Love renders Claire, an otherwise despicable and dangerous woman, sympathetic. Granting the reader such unfiltered access to her thoughts reveals the complex nature of her situation and the influence of her troubled past. Vieux-Chauvet’s confident use of the third-person omniscient in Anger places each family member within the reader’s confidence. Yet suddenly, halfway through this second novella, Vieux-Chauvet switches into two back-to-back monologues by siblings Paul and Rose. These two narratives are powerful laments, swan songs about the dashed hopes and disillusionment of a generation of Haitian youth. And finally, Madnessreads much like a play, with clear echoes of Greek drama, a technique which highlights the “staged” or “forced” quality of the very violence the story seeks to indict.

Julia Allard Daudet – Women in Translation Month

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August is Women in Translation month. I’m quite sad that to-date I haven’t managed to place any of my women writer book projects with a publishing house. This is something I’ve been working hard toward over the last two years – writing samples and querying publishers. I know that one of these projects will take, but it takes a long time. Patience is necessary.

BUT – I have had published a few short translations of women writers in several issues of Spolia Mag and going back to one of them this month seems like a good idea:

  • Julia Allard Daudet’s The Unknown Woman in Spolia’s The Wife Issue

There is a short excerpt of The Unknown Woman here, which includes my favorite line from the story, spoken by the narrator as s/he introduces the strange woman who has arrived in the small, Alpine village and inspired such curiosity with the villagers:

            What other motive than a great misfortune could inspire this desire for isolation?

I loved working on this story, loved discovering Daudet’s careful writing and vision. It comes from a collection of very time-period appropriate pieces. Early 1900s, the concerns of a certain slice of Parisian life. Both domestic and intellectual. It’s a shame Daudet did not publish more in her own right.

If you’re interested in the story and in Daudet, at the time the story came out, Spolia asked me a few questions about it all. The entire interview is here, but below is one small part of it:

Q: I love the strange atmosphere of this story, all of the things that we don’t know about this woman. I chose it to lead off the issue, because the wife, particularly when we are dealing with the wife of great men and their biographies, can be so mysterious and walled up. I liked the tone is set. What drew you to this particular story?

A: Within Daudet’s collection, Miroirs et Mirages, it really stands out. Not just because of its pastoral setting compared to the other more urban stories, but with exactly this atmosphere you mention. It feels very much like a legend, and I love how this woman remains so completely unknown. We don’t even know if she dies in the fire or not, and I love the possibility of escape that Daudet gives her.

Also, I love the context that surrounds this piece. It was published in 1905 at the height of the excitement about “L’Inconnue de la Seine” (The Unknown Woman of the Seine) and it’s clearly an homage to this romantic idea of a beautiful young woman lost to the world before her time. I can’t help but imagine Julia Daudet having one of those death masks in her salon, and it being a witness to the many discussions and writers passing through. And then one evening Daudet sits down after a party and writes her own version of the story.

 

 

 

What if the sun…

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A lovely parcel arrived in the mail today, with my copies of WHAT IF THE SUN…

I love this cover so much – a huge thank you to Onesuch Press for choosing so carefully. It suits the mood of the book. It’s gray here in Switzerland today, which is fitting for the book’s story of a village waiting and hoping for the sun to reappear after months and months of no direct sunlight, and a prediction from a village elder who has told them all that this year, the sun won’t come back to them.

Here is a long passage from early on in the book, when one of the young men from the village climbs up higher into the mountain, despite the snow and the bad weather, to see if he can get a glimpse of the sun and prove to himself and the others that it’s still there…

He kept telling himself that the sun was above him. And, indeed, it seemed that the sun must show itself soon, because above Métrailler was a thinning of the clouds like a cloth whose weave has loosened. And, on the other side of the ridge, a reddish tint had begun to appear. Métrailler raised his head and, growing prideful now with his solitude, said, “I’ll show Tissières, I’ll show everyone!” He arrived at Grand-Dessus, which was a kind of platform jutting out like a peak from the ridge. In good weather, the view extends from there for more than 100 kilometers on both sides. Nothing could be seen, but Métrailler was not looking to see anything in terms of a view. He held his gaze now toward the sky. He sat down on the frozen snow and lifted his head with astonishment toward a window that had just appeared a little above him and to the south through the thinning canopy of fog, on the other side of a great ridge of mountain that we began to be able to see. It was there, indeed, where it came out—the sun—or something that could have been the sun, and it was there that it must have come out from behind the mountain, just in time to hide itself again.

But it had grown red and the rock where Métrailler was standing became red; and the sun up above had not shown itself, although it seemed that we had shown it; it had not risen, although it seemed that we had lifted it: disheveled, and all wrapped up, entwined with clouds which were themselves like clots of blood.

Exactly like a severed head around which the beard and hair still hung smoking; that we lifted in the air a moment, only to let fall again. And already the fog and the darkness had come back to their place.

The book is available from Indiebound, Amazon, and you can always order it from your local bookshop.

 

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“I am what is missing.”

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For two years now, I’ve helped organize a small writers’ retreat in France with two other women. I’m immensely lucky to know the writers Laura McCune-Poplin and Sara Johnson Allen, whom I met when we were all three studying for our MFA in Boston over ten years ago. They are both talented, passionate writers and teachers – not to mention being quite a lot of fun to spend time with.

When Fog Island Mountains came out, the three of us had a mini-celebration over pizza in Mystic, CT of all places and got to talking about lives, schedules, writing, and teaching. We are all busy juggling work and writing and families and… none of this is surprising, this is how everyone in (most of) the world now seems to live. Sigh. Constant juggling, constant striving for balance. In any case, we threw ourselves a challenge that day—to manage a week away, once a year, no kids, no spouses, no cooking, just writing, just book talk, just walks in the country. And we wanted to provide this space for other writers, too, especially those in the same kinds of situations.

We founded L’atelier writers’ retreat and workshop within weeks, found a location and set a date.

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A word on the location because we could not have been more lucky—this is a small, rural bed and breakfast in France run by teachers and booklovers. The staff members have pooled their personal libraries to fill the place with books. And when we arrived last year for the first retreat, we were all delighted with the atmosphere—a mixture of elegantly eccentric and charmingly rustic. Think architectural salvage put to very good use mixed somehow with summer camp and the whole thing works. The sheer number of books in all the buildings and rooms that make up this unique hotel create the best ambiance.

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In any case, I’ve just returned from our second annual retreat and am still feeling inspired. It’s a rare indulgence to take a step back from the all-too-often-horrible, always-busy world and just focus on the things I love the most—reading, writing, talking with other readers and writers. It’s also an immense pleasure to hear how other writers approach their work and see their projects develop through conversations with other writers/readers. I’m not a natural teacher because I can be very nervous speaking in front of large groups, but I absolutely LOVE thinking about and discussing how people work through internal questions (both emotional and aesthetic) through poetry and writing and story. This fascinates me.

Last year we were five, this year we were ten. We brought our books, short stories, and poetry to this rural hideaway, we brought our internal libraries (a source of immense pleasure in discussion), we brought our critical minds and our humor. And we worked really hard.

I’ve come to associate the first stanza of Mark Strand’s poem, “Keeping Things Whole” with l’Atelier and I’ll put it here below. There’s a long story why I associate this stanza with this retreat, which I won’t go into… but here it is, because it’s lovely, because it recreates the feeling I have when I indulge this need of mine to take a step out of the world and be quiet and singularly focused for an entire week:

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
I am what is missing.