Just Shelved

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Beautiful Georgian home in decay? Check. English country vistas? Check. An expose on a crumbling class system? Check. A believable, yet not entirely reliable narrator? Check. Well-drawn characters? Check. Descriptions worth savoring? Check. A can't-put-it-down-can't-wait-for-the-bus-ride-home suspenseful plot? Check. Tingles of the spine and other extremities? Triple check.

A true Gothic psychological thriller with a brain! Couldn't put it down.

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Just Shelved

Tinkers by Paul Harding

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I think I want to read Tinkers again. It's a slight book -- I finished it in a day and change. It's also completely beautiful, like some extended, hypnotic free verse poem that plays lovingly over and over the possibilities of language and description the way light plays over the surface of water.

Marilynne Robinson provides the blurb for the cover, and there are certain echoes of her lyrical masterpiece, Gilead, in Tinkers' quiet meditation on observation, natural beauty, and a father/son relationship. However, in structure and approach, I would compare the book more aptly to a novel like The Lover -- a self-contained and interior lyric work. Despite all the risk inherent in this kind of fiction, there are almost no missteps, save for a couple of overly big words that clank unnecessarily in their sentences, and one abstract lyric passage in the last few pages that interrupts the power of the closing scene. Other scenes, however--like that of a home being moved down a snowy track in the heart of winter--are the kind of images that stay with you, long after you've closed the book. In fact, in an odd way, I feel like Tinkers is the kind of book I've always wanted to read about snow and silence and trees and seasons. It creates its own readers.

On a final note, hats off to whomever designed Harding's cover. It drew me in from across the room, and after reading the first page, I knew I would have to buy the book. The story of Tinkers' voyage to print is heartening for any "emerging" writer. I look forward to Harding's work to come.

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New Story in Quick Fiction!

My story, "Reaching," has just been published in Issue 17 of this magazine that specializes in "precious little fictions in 500 words or less." This is the second time I have been published in the journal, and although this time you will not be able to read the full text of my story online, you can browse previews of all the stories in the issue and order your own copy but clicking here.

Happy reading!

(image credit: "Tightrope Walker" by Laura Niemi Young)

Just Shelved

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The title of this book could just as easily read The Age of Wonder: How the General Reader Will Discover the Beauty and Terror of Science. I just flat out loved this book. Holmes is an engaging biographer above all, and the principal "characters" of this book leap to life as engagingly as any in a novel. Joseph Banks, William Herschel, Caroline Herschel, Humphry Davy -- I had no more than a passing knowledge of any of these figures before reading The Age of Wonder, but now I have a vivid sense of their lives, preoccupations, and above all, their uniquely brilliant minds.

I think, even more extraordinary than rekindling the reader's awe at scientific discovery (and awe certainly abounds -- Thrilling balloon voyages! Solo treks into the jungle! Crazed astronomers peering into deep space! Well-heeled literati huffing nitrous oxide!)is Holmes' ability to render the context for these discoveries and the ripples they made in artistic thought as well. It turns out that prominent Romantic thinkers and poets such as Coleridge and the Shelleys and Keats cared deeply about questions of the Universe and how it came to be and how science and art should treat the central subject of the human soul and a human God. Who knew?! Well, actually, I didn't really know this. Or, more accurately, hadn't considered it at length. I loved the chorus that The Age of Wonder creates: scientists, philosophers, and writers all approaching the same questions from their own angles, debating vigorously and oftentimes admiringly along the way.

Holmes shows us a band of scientists who are only just discovering their identities as "scientists" (indeed, the term is actually coined in the events of the book), finding a way to exist and have relevance in civic life. Simultaneously, he reveals some of the most beloved poets and novelists of the period articulating the terror and hope of science in their own works. And, and....well, and lots more.

Before I give anything else away, you should probably go and read this book.

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Obsessions

A few weeks ago, I saw "Exit Through the Gift Shop," a film by reclusive British street artist Banksy. I'm about as unhip as they come regarding street artist culture, but I have to say, the film is one of the most thought-provoking pieces about art and artists that I've come across in quite some time. It begins, ostensibly, as a peek into the forbidden and secretive world of prominent street artists through the (obsessed) eyes of a dogged film-maker, who shoots tape after tape of these intrepid folks as they teeter at the bases of billboards and rooftops, pasting up large faces and mysterious down-the-rabbithole images.

Then, the film takes an unexpected turn, and becomes about the obsessed film-maker. He (Thierry Guetty) moves from chronicler of the artistic process (albeit, a chronicler who can't cohesively express what his chronicling has meant) to co-opting the artistic process of those he has followed. Banksy, a true artist and provocateur, winsomely turns the camera around to witness his acolyte becoming appropriator, as Guetty the film-maker commodifies the very art he has adored.

Among the many things the film questions, I think one of them is sincerity and appreciation. In our market culture, does a measure of appreciation eventually lead to callow and empty repetition? Is there a wringer a "real" artist must travel through in order to prove his/her authenticity? "Exit Through the Gift Shop" light-heartedly suggests a yes to this question, and I appreciated the way the film-maker flipped the script and made me probe these ideas, and the others things that fall between getting one's art up/out there and reaping profit/influence/imitators. Also, it made me feel a modicum cooler. For like an hour.

***

Continuing on the theme of obsession, I am obsessed with Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder at the moment. I expect I will have more to say on the book when I have finished it and my thoughts have cohered a bit more, but I cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone with an interest in the Romantic period, the history of scientific experimentation, or mad, obsessed people who succeed in changing the world. A.K.A. I cannot recommend it highly enough to everyone.

Story Up at City Arts(!) and Other Musings

First things first, a short story of mine, Mitigation Report 1, is now up on the City Arts magazine website. It has also been published as an excerpt in the print version of the magazine. For those unfamiliar with City Arts, it is a monthly arts magazine devoted to covering Seattle, Tacoma, and the Eastside. It's free for the taking, and widely distributed around the Seattle metropolitan area. I am pretty excited to be published in its pages. As I like to say, it has all the quality (free!) arts coverage of a publication like The Stranger, but without the snark. Last month, their cover story focused on letterpressing and the mad, brilliant folks who still painstakingly set type on vintage machines in order to craft something more personal in our digital age. Good stuff. This month's cover story focuses on the Seattle International Film Festival. Give it a gander, and click on the link above to check out my story.

Speaking of my story, a link on the right side of this page can take you to an audio file of me reading Mitigation Report 1 last year at Castalia, a UW-sponsored reading series at local literary center, Richard Hugo House. As I explain in my preamble to the story, I was inspired to write this particular short short by the work I have been doing this past year as a legal assistant for a criminal defense attorney. Legal work requires the (oftentimes tedious) organization of reams and reams of documents. This often includes mitigation documents.

I was unfamiliar with the idea of "mitigation" in the legal sense until taking my current position, but the presentation of mitigation evidence in a criminal trial often forms a crucial aspect of what is called the "sentencing phase." At this point, the jury has already returned a guilty verdict, but the presentation of evidence is not over for the prosecutor, or the defense attorney. Now, evidence is presented that mitigates against the seriousness of the crime and attempts to elicit some mercy from the jury or judge before a sentence is returned. In a capital case, this element of the trial proves especially important, as garnering sympathy or understanding from the jury can quite literally be a matter of life or death.

In these high-profile capital trials, a mitigation expert will often be retained by defense counsel. This expert completes the work of obtaining voluminous documents from all stages of a client's past -- from childhood to adulthood. These social history records comprise everything from birth certificates, to records of child abuse and institutionalization, to adult correctional facility records. The mitigation expert then crafts a kind of story from these records and attempts to ask, and answer, the question: Who is this person who sits before you for judgment? How might he/she have arrived here, in this courtroom?

Although it would be inappropriate of me to comment on the mitigation records I have reviewed for specific clients, I will say that as a writer, I find them extremely compelling. In these photocopies are the stories of children running away from home, being abused, lashing out, begging for help. In short, they are the story of a life. Reading them puts me, and I would imagine a jury member, in the interesting position of seeing two people: a person who has been found guilty of a heinous crime, and that person as a child; an innocent who will be formed by the experience he or she encounters -- formed, and perhaps hardened and twisted beyond repair. It was with these two people in mind that I composed this story, interspersing the "official" language of state and legal agencies to add an institutional flavor to the collage piece.

This is what I find amazing about legal work: at its base, it is the messy stuff of life itself. Children growing up; parents making mistakes; the state often tragically late in coming to the aid of those in need. Since taking this job, I have thought a lot more about what it means to be merciful, what it means to "condemn" a person, and the conflict inherent in despising someone's acts, while understanding (partially at least) how they came to the juncture where the act was committed. In short, I have had to negotiate my relationship to that child, and to that child as an adult.

Oh, and speaking of archives and records, I have now begun sorting through a collection of beautiful old letters and photographs and postcards, most pre-dating 1930, that belong to my mother's family. I hope to blog about this in the future, and perhaps write some flash fiction about the experience of cataloging these family records...

(http://www.archives.gov.on.ca/english/about/preservation/pics/documents_2_520.jpg)

April = Not So Cruel

I have just received word that another of my stories, "Reaching," will be featured in the next issue of Quick Fiction! This is a charming jewel of a publication, and I am very excited to be published in its pages once more. I have also been named a runner-up for the second consecutive year in the Summer Literary Seminars Unified Writing Contest. Lastly, a story I wrote last year is forthcoming in a future issue of local arts magazine City Arts. This is a lot of fun news, especially after a ream of January rejections. Please give Quick Fiction and City Arts a gander. They are both big favorites of mine.

(image credit: http://www.pictures.pixelda.biz/UserImages/White-Cherry-Blossom---Work.jpg)