“Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” is an evocative exploration of loss. The book of poetry and prose vignettes opens with author Claudia Rankine as a child witnessing her father looking flooded, leaking, breaking, broken. He was grieving his own mother’s death, and Rankine climbed the stairs as far from him as she could, distancing herself from his unfamiliar expression.
“He looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness,” she writes.
The rest of the book ranges over the territory of loneliness–mourning, depression, oppression–with a poet’s flare for imagery and economy. A friend submitting to cancer, safekeeping her death with a do-not-resuscitate sign. Another gazing listlessly at the TV while asking for “the woman who deals in death,” meaning the show Murder, She Wrote. Her sister, a psychiatrist, unable to help herself after her husband and children are killed.
This is challenging terrain, but Rankine navigates it masterfully, evoking sadness, anger, and resignation without belaboring them.
She pierces our illusions with tight analyses of the news of the day, such as a 13-year-old convicted of first degree murder for killing a 6-year-old while play wrestling. “The boy was tried as an adult or he was tried as a dead child,” she writes. “To know and not to understand is perhaps one definition of being a child. Or responsibility is not connected to sense-making, the courts have decided.” This is an unexpected brand of poetry.
Her writing is particularly charged when exploring the visceral, personal experience of grief, disconnection and futility wrought by media depictions of racial violence. She juxtaposes the brutality of police sodomizing Abner Louima with a broken broomstick against the violence of a reporter asking him how it feels to be a rich man after he settles for $8.7 million.
The hybrid prose-lyric-poem form gives Rankine space to both describe and question her experience of news like Amadou Diallo’s senseless death in a hail of bullets. “Sometimes I think it is sentimental, or excessive, certainly not intellectual, or perhaps too naive, too self-wounded to value each life like that, to feel loss to the point of being bent over each time,” she writes.
The opposite, though, is the callousness of President G.W. Bush, unable to recall whether two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in Texas.
I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness.
The poetry of “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” is most of all, I suppose, in Rankine’s refusal to argue a point or come to a clear conclusion. In her decided opacity on what to do with the tensions she’s illuminated, revealed in the abundant white space separating passages. And, of course, in the occasional verse.
Define loneliness? Yes. It’s what we can’t do for each other. What do we mean to each other? What does a life mean? Why are we here if not for each other?
Quoting Paul Celan, she concludes the book by likening a poem to a handshake. “The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another,” she writes. “Hence the poem is that–Here. I am here.”
It feels like this is her way of saying, my work here is done. I’ve extended my poem, myself. Don’t let me be lonely. Perhaps that’s all we ever get — an extended hand, a call to risk connection.
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Danielle Evans’s collection of short stories recasts young-adult angst as heartrending drama, with smart, intriguing characters navigating the unexpectedly treacherous terrain of friendship, sex and family.
Each of its eight stories is powerful in its economy, perfectly tuned domestic tensions, and well-drawn diverse characters. A teen avoids her lunch lady mom, embarrassed by the hairnet cutting a line in her broad, sweaty forehead. A grandmother’s cruel rejection pushes a nine-year-old to the edge. A mother throws herself into Christmas “with an enthusiasm as profound and suspect as that of the department stores.” An Iraq vet flails after discharge, unable to make sense of a world that gives him nail gems and cherry blossoms to thank him for his brutal service.
Evans conjures such crossroads with exceptional skill, placing her young protagonists in scenarios that challenge them to make weighty choices with lifelong repercussions. Even her youngest characters perceive that they’re facing significant moments, though they lack the experience or imagination to grasp that they’re defining, identity-forging ones. That the pursuit of independence, status, visibility, help often comes at great cost.
The tales are melancholy without being melodramatic, and they’re attentive to race, gender and class without being preachy or heavy-handed–a rare feat. Take her depiction of a college dorm room bursting with the vital, competitive energy of young women grappling with their power to bring forth life and the limits of their capacity to nurture it.
“I had a thing inside of me that I could not afford, and Laura had things inside of her that she couldn’t afford not to sell, and on the other end of it there were women spending tens of thousands of dollars to buy them because they felt their own bodies had betrayed them,” she writes of one character’s pregnancy and another’s egg donations. “Any way you looked at it, where there should have been a child, there was a math problem.”
In another story, a father and daughter struggle to connect. He clings to her old photographs and craft projects and imagines her adult life as “an elaborate series of barricades against him.” Meanwhile, she bristles at his concern, worries over the line between self-sufficiency and loneliness, and awakens to her self-centeredness.
“She wondered sometimes if it wasn’t all pretense–if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn’t really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself,” Evans writes. “Every day she felt herself losing things it was unacceptable to mourn.”
Evans’s deftness with such an array of characters heralds a bright future for a tremendous literary talent. She captures the innate drama of young adulthood in ways that move readers and remind them of the good fortune of surviving one’s youth.
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Gail Godwin’s “Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir” is a graceful meditation on the author’s years aspiring to publication and her subsequent decades navigating an increasingly cutthroat, capricious industry. Wisdom, perseverance and faith lurk amid the lines of her spare, droll writing, making this an understated yet inspiring read.
Godwin exemplifies a keep-on-keeping-on ethos in sharp contrast to writers like Harper Lee, whose concerns about topping past popularity prevented her from continuing to create new work. From a sales perspective, Godwin’s career peaked in 1982 with the publication of “A Mother and Two Daughters,” which sold more than 1 million copies and was a National Book Award finalist. But she’s still writing today and has published 14 fiction and nonfiction books since.
“Publishing” opens at the University of North Carolina in 1958 with young Godwin presenting five pages of her novel-in-progress to scouts for Alfred A. Knopf. The pages were rejected and Godwin muses: “As I slogged along inside my bubble of failure beneath the Great American Novelist’s ancient trees, it struck me for the first time that I was nothing new, just the latest model of a young person hungry for success, and possibly one of the very many who was not going to make it.”
Of course, the reader knows that Godwin did indeed make it. She went on to publish more than a dozen novels, becoming a National Book Award finalist three times. With a light pen, Godwin uses “Publishing” to offer some insight into how she did it. She highlights deep-seated personal ambition, the role modeling of her writer mother, and the encouragement of teachers and friends. She colors it all with a bit of drama and no shortage of good humor.
The quick read, illustrated with pen and ink drawings by architect Frances Halsband, offers helpful perspective for aspiring writers, all of whom are likely to meet much frustration and rejection along their own publishing paths. The lesson Godwin imparts by sharing her story is that it is how you greet the challenges over the long haul that matters.
For years, Godwin battled insecurity, humiliating failures, and the sense that time was running out on her writing career. Still, she simply kept writing, learning, connecting. “I wrote the next chapter of my remote novel that wouldn’t sell enough copies, and trudged home under the starlit canopy of obscurity,” she wrote of her response to yet another rejection.
She learned this tenacity in part through the example of her mother, who wrote plays during her own studies at Chapel Hill, sold love stories to pulp magazines when rearing Godwin, and wrote novels under a penname while raising three younger children from a later marriage. Some of the most endearing parts of the book feature Godwin and her mother making up stories together, acting out scenes based on people from their church and reading rejection letters her mother received from publishers. They made a duet out of a particularly vexing one:
“Writes like the angels!” (soprano)
“With notes of monstrous tedium!” (alto)
“Merry Christmas to you!” (soprano)
“If you pare the fat!” (alto)
This same sense of levity and steadfastness served Godwin well after she finally won her first book deal in 1968. Her tangled publishing journey since then has included seven different editors and as many publishers, thanks to untimely deaths, industry upheavals, and intractable egos. With great candor, she writes of coming to understand the fear plaguing publishing today and of learning to brace herself for calls announcing the firing of her editor or publisher or both. She also sheds welcome septuagenarian perspective on questions of what’s new and what’s not in today’s publishing environment.
“Publishing as a family business, as a literate, gentlemanly occupation, had already taken on the sepia hues of nostalgia, but the new publishing, whatever that creature would turn out to be, hadn’t reared its head yet,” she writes of the early days of her publishing career. “Not one of the seven houses that wanted to publish ‘A Mother and Two Daughters’–eight, counting Knopf, who reserved the right to match the final bidder–stands by itself today. Six of those bidders are now subsumed into two of the ‘big five’ publishing corporations.”
Throughout “Publishing,” readers can gain a glimpse into the deals, publicity campaigns and industry maneuverings that bring books to the public. One section describes how a book meant to be titled “The Red Nun” wound up with a bodice-ripper-evoking misnomer “Unfinished Desires.” Aspiring writers can take heart at Godwin’s evidence that frustration, rejection and adversity are just a part of the journey–even for some of the most successful writers.
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Tara Mohr is on a mission to help women speak up and influence the world for the better. She says her lifelong calling is ”to recognize where women’s voices are missing and do what I can, in my corner of the world, to help bring them in.”
As a child, Mohr advocated for an English curriculum that featured more women authors and female protagonists. Today, she’s running a global leadership program and sharing its central tenets with a wider audience through her book, “Playing Big.”
Heartening and pragmatic, the book reads as if Mohr is giving an extended pep talk to an imagined reader who has great promise but craves support. “You are that talented woman who doesn’t see how talented she is,” Mohr declares in the opening pages. “You are that fabulous, we-wish-she-was-speaking-up-more woman.”
The message is a variant of the encouragement she’s given to thousands of women through her coaching practice. The book is a distillation of the best material generated in that laboratory–those exercises and advice that women found to be most helpful in creating the lives and careers they sought.
Mohr’s Inner Critic 101 Training and toolkit of 15 ways to quiet fears are worth the cover price alone. Collectively, the many lists, steps and journal prompts fill the void left by other manifestos that tell women what to do without explaining the mechanics of how to do it. For every grand declaration (“One of the most important mental shifts a woman can make to support her playing big is to start thinking of criticism as part and parcel of doing important work”), Mohr offers multiple tips and tools to make it concrete.
What the book lacks, though, is much of the fire and heart that makes manifestos persuasive and memorable. You’ve got to bring your own motivation to this text because it lacks the spunk of Lisa Bloom calling out women for letting celebrity culture distract us from social ills, or the sharpness of Anne-Marie Slaughter listing the 1,001 ways women are thwarted in efforts to advance. Mohr’s tone is decidedly pleasant (not accusatory), in keeping with her stated belief that “tender friendship” is more potent than criticism. While I appreciate how her writing reflects her gentle ethos, I must admit that saltier approaches make for livelier reading.
In fairness, the subtitle is “practical wisdom for women who want to speak up, create, and lead.” It wasn’t designed to awaken latent aspirations. It’s for the woman who already wants to lean in and doesn’t know how.
That’s not to say the book is just for corporate climbers. The text’s frequent references to women of diverse ages, professions, circumstances and aspirations suggests that the advice is widely applicable and effective. Mohr references women from many walks of life who have practiced Playing Big. For example, there’s a Silicon Valley sales director who wants to launch a new line of business, a researcher emboldened to approach a rival lab about collaborating, a social worker who wants to transition into advocacy, and a literacy specialist who wants to open a camp. The women could not be more different, but they all benefitted from Mohr’s core set of tools for quieting criticism, communicating powerfully and taking productive action.
Mohr’s focus on inner work, versus the details of salary negotiations or other tactics with narrow applications, assures the book’s appeal to a wide range of women. And unlike many women’s empowerment books, these practices are not meant to be deployed in a grab for more power and prestige. Mohr’s stated goal is to help women move past self-doubt to create whatever’s meaningful for them. It could be launching a business or winning a promotion, but it could also be leading a community initiative or writing an op-ed for the paper. As Mohr puts it: “This is the very heart of playing bigger: having the vision of a more authentic, fully expressed, free-from-fear you and growing more and more into her, being pulled by this resonant vision rather than pushing to achieve [external] markers of success.”
One of the most compelling portions of the book describes a conversation she had with her childhood dance instructor, who told her that American women were liberated but not empowered, because they lacked imagination. Mohr understood that to mean that women weren’t fully claiming their freedoms because they lacked a “specific, vibrant, compelling vision” for doing so. In short, they were stuck recreating the status quo of playing small because it was modeled all around them and they hadn’t cultivated the inner capacity to create new, better alternatives. This is a compelling idea that bridges the personal and social dimensions of Playing Big. When more women do it, more will see it and do it too.
At several points in the book, Mohr tries to raise the stakes of women playing big beyond the realm of individual happiness to evoke global import. (“In the minds of women around the globe lie the seeds of the solutions to climate change, poverty, violence, corporate corruption.”) She writes that women who speak up are “naturally” change agents and revolutionaries because today’s public, professional and political lives are “not yet reflective of women’s voices or women’s ways of thinking, doing and working.” This is too much of a leap for me. Sarah Palin speaks up, but what she says is ignorant and divisive. The content and intent of speech matters more than the mere fact of it. The elevation of women’s voices is necessary but not sufficient for positive social change.
Although Mohr’s rallying cry fell flat for me, the book’s practical advice remains valuable. It succeeds in equipping ambitious women, if not rousing them.
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Jim Trelease’s “The Read-Aloud Handbook” is so much more than its title suggests. Sure, it explains what to look for in storytime selections (no dialect, obscenities or weak plots, for starters). But its real strength is a smart and compelling explanation of why parents should read to their children early and often, from infancy onward.
Raising a lifelong reader is the single-best investment a parent can make, Trelease insists. Enthusiasm for reading ensures the range of knowledge and learning capacity that kids need to face challenges in school and beyond.
Importantly, Trelease urges parents to provide reading inspiration, not reading instruction. In his view, parents don’t have to learn the ins and outs of phonics and phonemic awareness or even do alphabet drills in order to lay the groundwork for their children’s academic and life success. Quite the opposite, Trelease posits that parents’ first and most important work is merely introducing their children to the world of print in ways that make them want to read. That is, cuddling up daily and enthusiastically reading great books. No specialized training or fancy curriculum required.
In fact, the book argues that much of what kids need to learn about reading from their parents is more “caught than taught.” That is, it comes through consistent exposure, not explicit instruction. Our efforts during the thousands of hours before children enter school — and outside of school in later years — set the tone for their lives. A steady diet of read-aloud time at home can spark sufficient reading inspiration to render much of the school-time remediation we call reading instruction unnecessary.
“Contrary to the current screed that blames teachers for just about everything wrong in schooling, research shows that the seeds of reading and school success (or failure) are sown in the home, long before the child ever arrives at school,” he writes.
As proof, he offers academic research and anecdotal accounts of parents who inspired their children to read through daily reading and role modeling. Kids who are read to, encouraged to discuss books, see a wide variety of printed material at home, see their parents reading, and have ready access to pencils and paper fare better than their peers raised without a literacy emphasis, he says.
Now in its seventh edition, the book has grown in depth and includes stories of people who have put Trelease’s ideas to work and experienced great results. Stories like that of Erin Hassett, whose parent started reading to her on Day One in 1988 (and documenting the books and her reactions), enrich the book. These real-life examples remind us that raising a reader is a years-long process and give parents a vision of the results they may attain with dedicated daily reading.
To nudge readers from contemplation to action, he devotes the latter half of the book to a treasury of thoughtfully vetted books to read aloud to children from infancy through high school. Authoritative, but not definitive, it’s meant to jumpstart reading aloud by pointing to some appropriate and accessible titles, including picture books, novels, poetry and folk tales. Each entry includes a recommended listening level to give you a sense of the text’s difficulty and appropriateness for your child.
While much of the book’s content was not new to me, I closed the book with a sharpened focus on what I should do with the information as both a parent and a citizen. My commitment to daily reading with my daughter was strengthened, as was my drive to advocate for libraries and community-based family literacy programs. “The Read-Aloud Handbook” offers persuasive arguments that reading starts at home and a welcome wake-up call for us all to spread the word.
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I celebrated Dr. Seuss’s 112th birthday by donning a red and white stovepipe hat and reading “The Cat in the Hat” to eager first graders at University of Texas Elementary School.
On my way over, I worried that the book selection was too young for them. As the mom of a four-year-old, I knew the elementary schoolers should have mastered Cat in the Hat vocabulary years ago. They’re beginning readers, I thought, but they’re veteran listeners too. A chapter book might better capture their attention.
Continue reading “How to Be a Read-Aloud Rockstar”June is a big month in this literary town. Austin’s African American Book Festival celebrates its 10th anniversary on the 25th. Swing by the Carver Museum and Library (1161 and 1165 Angelina St, 78702) between 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. to take part in the program, which promotes literature by and about African Americans. The festival features young adult author Sharon Flake and also provides a platform for new, emerging and self-published authors to pitch and sell their work.
I produced a short video to celebrate the festival’s big milestone and explain why it’s worthy of our community’s support. “Our festival is important because it brings readers and writers together,” founder Rosalind Oliphant says. “It creates a space for conversation, for dialogue, for creativity, and hopefully in those discussions we’re expanding our thinking, our creativity, and our activism.” Click below to learn about the origin and impact of the small and mighty event.
Continue reading “Must-Attend Austin Literary Events (June 2016)”A recent visit to Chicago for BookExpo America transported me back to 2005, when I visited the offices of historic black newspaper The Chicago Defender. At the time, I was a grad student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, visiting to interview then-editor Roland Martin about his plans for reviving the paper at its 100th anniversary.
Martin peered over a sleek silver laptop, surrounded by books and papers, and opined in an authoritative staccato about newspaper lifecycles and the coming convergence of print, radio, television and web media.
With his signature mix of substance and swagger, Martin recast the 18,000-circulation daily — known at that point for delivering yesterday’s news tomorrow — as a formidable American brand on the cusp of ascent.
Continue reading “The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America”Hello, it’s Maya, and I’m back with another five-star read. The year’s half over, but I still would like to spend today talking about Shonda Rhimes’s “The Year of Yes.” This is a fantastic book that’s not really just about saying yes to everything that comes your way. It’s really a book about pushing through discomfort to do some of the things that are really worthwhile for your personal and professional development.
The kinds of yeses Shonda is giving are unlike anything most of us are experiencing. She’s saying yes to [appearing on] Jimmy Kimmel, yes to giving a commencement speech at Dartmouth in front of 10,000 people. Those aren’t the sorts of yeses most of us can say, but I still think there’s a benefit to reading her story, and learning to push past the things that scare us, whatever they may be.
Continue reading “Year of Yes”I read picture books to my daughter for nearly five years before I gained a deep appreciation for the form. Sure, I read them daily and with enthusiasm (mostly). But I read them the same way I would read a chapter book or an illustrated dictionary. That is, I read them as if the pictures were servant to the text, secondary and utilitarian.
If I referenced a picture at all, it was to capture Zora’s attention with quick questions like: What color is her shirt? or How many ducks do you see?
Then I attended one of Carmen Oliver’s picture book seminars offered through The Writing Barn in Austin. Oliver, author of Bears Make the Best Reading Buddies, teaches the art of picture book writing, but her seminar was just as valuable as a picture book appreciation primer.
Continue reading “Watch What Happens When You Give Picture Books a Fresh Look”