“And the music is enormous, frightening in its beauty” (“The Arctic Variations”). Music touches everything. Donald Revell writes in his preface that Bruce Bond comes to “know the condition of music in this world, and in this world now.” The impressions are immediate and countless, speaking of a visceral knowledge that attends to the sound of “constellations breaking down” (“Verklärte Nacht”). Stars literally pulled apart, and spaces carved out between the notes themselves: “the lost between the ivories like a fallen pair of keys” (“Monk”). Revell calls it “a liberation of dissonance from the myth of harmony.” To have one, you need the other.

We could liken Bond to the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who rejected negative-light sculpture because of its reliance on the shadows. He instead chose positive-light sculpture, which presents a purely reflective surface that provides an invisibility of surface like that of still waters, whose presence can be detected only when objects – a tree, the mountains, a ship’s hull – are reflected in them. In Bond’s poetry we see reflected a number of things. For one, language and music representing an ache to connect – to the music, to each other. Bond relates Ornette Coleman’s introduction to his plastic sax, which he discovers in a pawnshop: “How strong it was, and is. This will to connect” (“Wolves”).

And how does music relate to language? Music is “a language for no language, a pulse / beneath the skin of words, the compulsory / insistence of a chisel breaking stone” in the spirit of “making something out of nothing,” for “the first drum was nothing we would call a drum, nothing until we heard it.” (“Measure”). We have to know something before we can call it by name. We also see reflected in this poem an origin story, how the “world’s first instrument was time,” how “night after night / God’s Ocean beats its measures in the dark.” This rhythm best measured in silence, language and air, in passing expectation.

The collection ends with “The Arctic Variations,” in which we see a reference to who I think is the musician Ludovico Einaudi: “Somewhere / the oldest cliffs are coming down in sheets / where a man on an ice floe plays piano.” A remarkable image that paints man against the backdrop of global warming. “The music that you hear is the warmest year on record. I learned that today.” Music flooding the ice sheets that are melting too quickly, forcing us to pay attention. But, will we?

“Dear ice, when I think of you, / I think of this. I see you as a place just north / of north. When I think of life after life, a planetary / furnace blows a phantom through the ocean / floor.” And music is there to witness it all.

Podcast episode: https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/qDNCmBQXbwb

Book: https://schaffnerpress.com/books/liberation-of-dissonance/

The post Review for Liberation of Dissonance by Bruce Bond appeared first on The Wild Detectives.

Asad takes her cultural identity a step further in “Incorporeal.: She sees it as problematic, wishing to be “undefined/ to scrape away that feeling/ of damp wood rotting/ flesh supplanted with language/ other people invented for us.” Poetry is, perhaps, a way for Asad to reclaim an identity using her own language, speaking for herself the way she sees herself.

As the child of Muslim immigrants, Asad both celebrates her heritage and resists categorization. She brings together many things at once: mothers who drink chai, perfect immigrant kids, jilbabs and dupattas, the MCAT, the idea that one must “assimilate or get out” (“Sweet, Sweet Culture”)—all elements of her mosaic world. Asad also comments on the misconceptions others arm themselves with when they peer into this world.

The weight of others’ judgments or expectations introduces pain that is difficult to understand, but an absolutely gorgeous moment arrives in “I drove a car to Venus”: “I gasped/ at the pain that survived, and again at the lightness/ that dawned. A moment where I was weightless/ suspended on an interstellar line of gravity/ A moment where I found my space/ uncarved, unformed, uncombed/ by all but the light/ within it.” The speaker’s radiance treads new ground here, on these very pages. We could interpret poetry as a vital, living instrument that carves out this possibility, this fresh new reality.

The world is full of possibility, and in many ways, we are all the same. The collection ends this way: “Come, let us walk/ Let us speak before the sun/ never rises, before the ocean/ forgets to jewel, before the suburb splits/ like cracked ceramic. We have been waiting/ for the same thing.” I find this invitation incredibly generous, coming from someone who is made up of so many things. It makes sense that we would, and we should, find ways to overlap.

Book: https://bottlecap.press/products/waveborne

Podcast episode: https://anchor.fm/thewilddetectives/episodes/Inner-Moonlight-Ayesha-Asad-e1kamvg

The post Book Review: Waveborne by Ayesha Asad appeared first on The Wild Detectives.

Absence of sound points to some other heightened energy as we see in part II of this collection, where Gann presents ekphrastic poems inspired by steel sculptures of the Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley, a locale that celebrates the landscapes that form part of the artworks themselves—the hills, meadows and forests. Only later, the narrator realizes this isn’t nature but instead a “crisp imitation” or art the perfection of nature (whereas part I of Gann’s collection seems to go with the Thomas Cole idea that nature is perfect art).

One poignant piece, “the poem I cannot write,” wonders “how many more names/ before I can write my poem/ how many more times/ will we have to cross that bridge.” The poem is based on the sculpture Fayette: For Charles and Medgar Evers, named for two brothers who were important figures of the civil rights movement, but Gann includes, in their memory, other Black lives lost.

Another poem, “Peach boy,” written about Isamu Noguchi’s Momo Taro, blends Japanese legend with the poet’s singing inside the aural chambers of a hollowed-out granite “peach pit.” We see the poet interacting with sculptures in a way that brings up memory; he recalls how his mom encourages him to crawl inside the sculpture, although she refuses to join him.

Gann’s collection ends the way it begins: with family. As the poet reflects on the loss of his parents, he reminisces on his and his mom’s last visit to the Storm King Art Center. He eventually returns to sprinkle some of his mother’s ashes around Noguchi’s stones. We find a permanency in art that is lacking in the natural world. The sculpture “Five Open Squares Gyratory Gyratory” by George Rickey, shows that landscape itself is always shifting, “the universe continues to bend” (“post Newtonian”). We move along with it. “What better thing than to wander and be astonished?” (“One possible answer”) These words speak for the entire collection. They speak of a way one could approach life, or an outdoor museum under open sky, or even a collection of poems.

Podcast episode

Book

The post Book Review: Better Ways to See by Alan Gann appeared first on The Wild Detectives.

Kendra: Icelanders are storytellers. For much of its history, this culture has been funneling many of its creative and intellectual resources into language. As a book built on oral tradition and the interview, the sound of it is something I value. Getting to record the audio book was the most fun I’ve ever had.

I’m so thankful to everyone at Penguin who understood it was a book emphatically about how an object tells stories, how literature fits at this crux—smoothed and polished over time.

Katy: That metaphor reminds me of Petra’s stone collection. I can see that Icelanders attach great value to real and imagined objects and bodies found in the natural world: birds, stones, polar bears, whales, herring, sea monsters, ghosts, elves, trolls. There even exists a collection of phallic specimens belonging to all the various types of mammal found in a single country.

Why do Icelanders connect so strongly to nature and all that inhabits it?

Kendra: It’s so easy to be romantic about the Icelandic landscape, so immediate and beautiful. Iceland is a land that hasn’t had time to erode. It inhabits recent space geologically, spaces where you can see exactly where two tectonic plates have come up against each other. The immediacy is intoxicating and enchanting. You’re close to the elemental forces, bare and raw.

The American version of the book is even printed in a beautiful blue-green ink to reflect some shade of this landscape—the northern lights, glacial blues, moss or lichen.

Katy: Icelanders seem to find and invent stories about the natural landscape.

Kendra: In Iceland, I feel like the more time I spend on the landscape, the more I think about how this landscape impacts the way you think. Having to trust what is and isn’t there. The mist blows through, and you lose the land. Above you, if only it is dark enough and the clouds pass for you to witness, the Northern Lights. We as humans make things of what we can’t see through things we can see, and back again.

Katy: In the book, you write that a particularly Icelandic problem is how to display what can’t be seen. In the Icelandic Sea Monster Museum, were you convinced by the 4,000-plus testimonials housed there?

Kendra: The museum doesn’t have an atmosphere of trying to convince you. As an essayist, I’m concerned with tracking things down and figuring things out. But I’m often much less interested about the facts of what happened than the facts of the stories we tell and latch onto and propel forward. The stories are getting at something we need to talk about. I’m less interested in the question “are there sea monsters?” and more interested in why we talk about them.

Katy: I’m curious about why you chose to talk about certain museums and private collections, and not others.

Kendra: I could have written about every single museum in Iceland—you could make a point of visiting them all in less than a year—but then you’d be missing a lot by making the priority of covering the board. I didn’t want to just talk about the places you could go, but the depth of what has happened at these places.

The Skógar Museum was the second museum in Iceland, and now there are nearly 300 museums—most of which cropped up in the 1990s or later. The lives of that generation of collectors span a shift in the independence of the country. [Iceland became independent from Denmark in 1944]. Their lives span widely different economic fortunes and possibilities, and I think sharp change might precipitate and cause collections to endure because you have such awareness of the thing you’re about to lose, the thing you’re going to forget.

In the heart of Reykjavík, a punk rock museum opened in 2016 in a former underground public toilet. It didn’t exist when I started my research in 2011. You could ask at some point, how many museums do we need? How many can we support? The need for museums will not dissipate, but now we’re moving from an era of trying to hold onto things to an era of trying to let things go.

Katy: When you place something in a collection, you’re often placing ownership over it—holding onto it personally or institutionally—but I didn’t get that feeling with Petra. She didn’t call the Icelandic stones hers, but everyone’s. Soon tourists were coming to her house to view the collection (even complaining about there being only one bathroom).

I’m taken with the idea of the private becoming public. The very act of writing is a private thing made public. In the book, you say that you come to Iceland “because of the borders of this place. Because not just here but always, something happens at the edges.”

Kendra: One of the first things that struck me in Iceland was this malleability. I kept noticing this pattern: the tipping of a private collection like Petra’s becoming a museum. On my second trip to Iceland, on my way to the airport with the daughter of the founder of the Phallological Museum, she pointed out Icelanders use one word for collection and museum; there is no border there to cross.

It makes me wonder if a similar lack of distinction exists between public and private, too. The phrase the Icelanders always use is, “We are so few.” Iceland is a place where the fact that people have survived here for a thousand years is no small feat. You have to assume that knowing your neighbors is part of that survival. Having information shared and passed on is critical.

Also, in Iceland you don’t have one thing that defines you, but maybe six different roles. If you know you have that flexibility, you might naturally see borders as less rigid. Take the crime writer Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, who works as a civil engineer. She was out on some remote project and started writing because she got bored. She manages to publish a book a year without, I’m told, having to give up the day job she loves.

Katy: I’ve read that Iceland has the most authors and readers per capital of any country.

Kendra: Literacy rates are among the highest in the world, and they say one in ten Icelanders will publish a book in their lifetime. Þórður Tómasson of the Skógar Museum was writing a book when he passed (January 2022). He’d written 26 books by the time I met him a couple of years ago. There are books that make me want to become a translator—one documents every polar bear landing on record in Iceland—and one Tómasson wrote about words for Icelandic weather. Before his book existed, one Icelander wouldn’t have known all these words, they’re so regionally specific. For example, the south is windy in a way that it isn’t anywhere else.

Katy: That reminds me of a book, Fifty Words for Snow, by Nancy Campbell. Snow means something different to different people because of where they are. Place makes its mark on language.

Kendra: Always, but sometimes it’s hard to see.

Katy: How do you see the act of traveling alongside collecting?

Kendra: Both are actions of expansion, of possibility. I enjoy the collectors who are good at amassing variation, who attend to how “this is slightly different from that.” You can see the knowledge gained through repetition and through variation.

Katy: And did that idea of alternating repetition and variation help you to organize your book in a way?

Kendra: I love structure. The book is organized by the long essays. I thought of them as pillars and wanted each to stand alone and hold something up. The chapters are sequenced to move you from the individual to the group, from the tangible to the intangible, from the thing to the story.

And still I like the interchangeableness, how you can walk through the book to the thing that draws your attention, exactly like you would in a museum. I feel like Petra is the heart of the book, but that’s not where we start.

Katy: Can you tell me about an unexpected moment you experienced while researching this book?

Kendra: I remember going down into the national library’s map collection with a librarian whose name means a mountain covered with snow in Icelandic. The librarian said that maps are made by outsiders. I would have thought that one would need to know a place to make the map, but his point was that if you know a place you don’t need a map. This official defining record of a place is made by other people trying to make sense of it.

Katy: And as an outsider, you are perhaps thinking about Iceland in ways that Icelanders do not or cannot.

Kendra: Several Icelanders told me they were interested in reading my book because they have curiosity about how the world sees them.

Katy: How do you see them?

Kendra: I relied a lot on the kindness of Icelanders, on being invited in. The best interviews I did in Iceland had someone sitting in as translator. It slows things down, and many good things happen when you slow down. The translator was usually a friend or neighbor who’d say, “oh, you should tell her about that other thing.”

Something that doesn’t make it into the book is a napkin collector on the Island of Heimaey, Eygló Ingólfsdottir. Napkin collecting strikes me as a particularly Icelandic practice. Napkins are mass-produced but in such variety. They change over time and tell this story about graphic design, baptisms and weddings, different social groups getting together. I have this vision of a group of kids trading napkins like baseball cards.

Eygló Ingólfsdottir and I had our interview at her kitchen table. A fair number of the most memorable interviews were at kitchen tables, often over waffles with rhubarb jam just coming off the stove. There’s maybe no more holy act than having someone invite you to their kitchen table to tell you their story.

The post Interview with Kendra Greene appeared first on The Wild Detectives.

Artistic representations of the body function as signs of new motherhood, blurred relationships, floods of light or sequential openings. “How wasteful it felt to lie there, letting it happen, / yet how beautiful to watch the nourishment / of my body going into the world so materially, / as evidence of love, a flourishing like these / white lovelies scoring the air, their brief / and beautiful wingbeats like white hearts / and you running out to meet them, arms open” (“Early July and the Faint White Butterflies”).

Not only are bodies inscribed and charged by ideas about the comings and goings of love and loss, that cyclical mark of life, but they also come to signify anxieties about new roles and expectations. In “Fault Lines” the poet is clearly aching for the way her life used to be: “I loved / the quiet of no one, / the upside / down of mother.” The poet misses the “looseness of being.” And that time her daughter has a high fever, “her forehead a hotplate, / her hand a flame. The bed wasn’t big enough / for our trouble” (“Fever”). The course of parenthood seems characterized by learning, over and over, what is gained and what is lost.

I really appreciate the way Illich explores the body’s relationship to nature, the way it frames our interactions and makes sense of them. “I want us to be a Pittsburgh or Budapest, / a city where rivers meet, rivers / because we are the bodies / in their beds, current lathing / between our legs. I can’t help / but think of you as / the rain, as en route” (“Pittsburgh or Budapest”). Isn’t that a great way to look at it? As being bodies, in motion, en route, pausing just briefly enough for Illich to capture these fleeting moments in time. In “Eclipse,” we learn what a momentary possibility looks like: “Pictures of cracked pavement with light / through trees cast as shimmers / of bright crescents like signatures / of this exact moment when our moon / covered the star.”

In Illich’s poems there is so much light creeping in to warm things. But sometimes we see more clearly in the dark. “Darkness takes separate things / and makes them indivisible” (“Uncovered”). Publishers don’t provide content warnings, so anyone who wishes to read Fingerspell should be aware that it contains some violence, situations involving ambiguous sexual consent, and infant loss. There is much joy and light to be found within the pages, yet the buoyancy of Illich’s language sometimes comes to serious terms with trauma.

Illich offers us “Instructions for Survival,” though, a manual on how to navigate the curves and bumps of an unpredictable, messy life that still holds meaning. She writes, so beautifully:

“I thought my son might be a poet / When he asked, barely three years old, / So this is it? Every day’s the same? / Son, hold the sun against your chest / Long enough and love grows / Like bacteria and millions of years later / You’ll climb out of bed onto land / And breathe your first like a volcano / Erupting and then a girl / Is reading the book and comes / Suddenly alive. We are born. / Because we survive by determining / the wonder out of gray ore. / We survive spore like, hovering / along coasts, pointing out species / of trees. We survive by noticing / at closing when they cut the lights / at Target, a soft blue replaces the white / fluorescence. We moved through / the light as if buoyed by it. There / are nouns all around us and more / to come and that / is the kind of joy I’m betting on.”

Lindsay Illich was the guest for The Inner Moonlight Podcast episode in August, you can listen to the conversation  here

You can find this book here

The post Poetry Review: Fingerspell by Lindsay Illich appeared first on The Wild Detectives.

The paradoxical celebration of the inner beast and the quelching of its power resonate throughout the collection. “You fear the animal you can become at will” (Duena Del Bosque), and yet the animal inside is that which produces an element of visceral desire essential to sustain life itself.  Quiñones explores this in Still Life With Wadded Paper Towels when the speaker says, “And though I’ve touched a body not mine, / I’m surprised by your heat, how / I can perceive this desire so easily– / we are betrayed at our most animal.”

There is the ache to break free of the constraints that come with having a bodily self, with its desire for intimacy and connection. In Ode to Hysteria + Anhedonia, for instance, the speaker says “let’s sleep together / since my legs are your legs / & your hands are my almost-twins / sometimes I crave your mouth / more than my own– / together we read the stars / & decide I’m our best prey / I ask us both again / & again / why don’t we just / drown each other.” Self assertion is often combined with self destruction.

Boundless desire, that all-consuming point at which you feel most alive, is drowned out again and again, pushed beneath a watery surface. In Ode to Desire the speaker says, “but on those nights / I need you to / make me into / whatever version / you like best / & sink it.”  Quiñones straddles the line between alive and not alive, land and sea, personal identity and collective history.

The impulse to position herself within that transitional space provides a source of momentum. Perhaps this line illustrates it best: “I explain how to gut a fish: / if it’s done quick, you’ll see the heart beating” (Omens I Choose to Ignore). We arrive at a critical juncture where life and death occupy the same moment in time and space. This is what Quiñones seems to do best: she places two extremes side by side. It is uncomfortable, disorienting. It feels like standing at the threshold and not being given permission to pass to either side.

Quiñones’s poems complicate the dualities inherent in life and ask us to consider whether safety is worth it. In her poems, we see that the most whole life can also be the most fractured.

Page Quiñones was the last guest for The Inner Moonlight Podcast, you can listen to the conversation  here

You can find this book here

The post The Best Prey appeared first on The Wild Detectives.

When did “home” become embedded in human consciousness? When did we come to embrace the magnetic property of home and allow it to align everything else around us? Is our sense of home instinctive, or are we, at root, nomadic?

I write about anthropology—the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, in particular—and how the First Americans made their way from the Old World to the New World. I look at how they adapted to new climates, hunted big game, used plant fibers to create basketry and fish netting, buried their dead. How they turned rock shelters into temporary settlements that would be occupied off and on for the next few thousand years. How they arranged a satellite of residential camps and workshops around a single megafauna kill.

It appears that throughout much of human prehistory, our ancestors’ home may have been little more than a small fire and the light it cast on a few familiar faces.

Home is home, and everything else is “not-home”

In whatever way the concept of home entered our consciousness, it’s always been a way of organizing space in our minds, of constructing the world. Home is home, and everything else is “not-home,” you could say. Not that you can’t feel at home in other places, but there’s a psychological difference between feeling at home and being home. Feeling at home in Bangalore or Glasgow (if you aren’t native) is a way of saying that the foreignness of those places has diminished since arrival.

Some people, as they move through their lives, rediscover home again and again. Some unlucky ones never find another after once leaving home. And, of course, some people never leave the one home they’ve always known.

Gaston Bachelard´s The Poetics of Space delves into the domestic spaces we inhabit. Althought this 1958 book is classified as a study on architecture, it is more a personal response to buildings in both life and literature, with an emphasis on the lived experience in architectural places and their contexts in nature. It’s a philosophy of at-homeness rich in emotion and memory: “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box,” Bachelard wrote. The house is a shelter without which the human would be a dispersed figure. The house collects and contains past, present and future; it integrates thoughts and memories and desires by allowing the human to daydream in one of its nooks and crannies. Bachelard admits that “every house is first a geometrical object of planes and right angles” but asks his reader to ponder how such lines welcome human complexity, idiosyncrasy, how the house adapts to its inhabitants. Influence is mutual – the house makes an impression on the human and the human makes an impression on the house. The house is the human’s first universe. How the human experiences and makes sense of this first universe determines their relationship with larger space later, with the entire cosmos.

Let´s go back to Carson Ellis´s Home. What emerges is a playful and gentle reminder that however different our walks of life—as illustrated through her depictions of the Kenyan blacksmith´s shack, the babushka´s kitchen, the Slovakian duchess´s mansion, among other homes—we are united by our profound desire for a place to call home.

Ellis guides the reader through this common thread of belonging by sprinkling little markers of continuity throughout the book: the same house plant graces multiple homes, a pigeon visits the young girl in Brooklyn and then perches on the Russian babushka’s window and speaks to the reader on the last page, asking “where is your home?”

My current home is a result of my imagination

As an expat living abroad, I am used to making myself feel at home in places that are distinctively not-home. I like the idea of knowing that my current home is a result of my imagination having brought something to life. I like the idea of feeling increasingly at home in the larger world. The freedom of coming and going.

So this idea of not going away, being confined at home due to our new reality, becomes an exercise in treating the home as a universe in its own right. Hidden in tiny corners of dusty book shelves are old receipts and foreign coins and bobby pins. Everyday practices are suddenly endowed with new meaning. The common habit of making the bed in the morning and pulling up the blinds to let the sun’s warmth in become precious rituals, as sacred as the Japanese tea ceremony.

As a writer, home is an important place. Usually, it’s the place where creation happens. The building of ideas one on top of the other until something is achieved. Nabokov was born into one of the most Aristocratic families in Russia, splitting his childhood between an estate in Siverskaya and a large St. Petersburg townhouse—a place he would describe as “the only house in the world.”

Mark Twain, writing of his Connecticut abode, where he penned both Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, said “To us, our house … had a heart, and a soul, and eyes to see us with … it was of us, and we were in its confidence.” The way he describes his home, as having eyes, a heart and soul, is the way one might think of a person. And that is, in fact, what a house can be: a character. Drenched in its own eccentricities, with secrets tucked away under rugs and in closets, draped in its own history.

A house can be nostalgic for something just like a person can. It can wish for days that filled it with laughter and the warmth of a fire. For days when its people danced inside it to the tune of Billie Holliday, to the times when friends gathered for whisky and a book exchange. Home contains our joys, cries, passions, fights and reconciliations. An extension of who we are. A hope of a certain kind of future. Anais Nin said that “one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me – the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living.” Writing, then, is a type of home, offering up a world (or worlds) in which the writer can inhabit. It is precious space.

Check Katy, in conversation with Logen Cure, on Inner Moonlight podcast.

The post Meditation On Home appeared first on The Wild Detectives.

Jazmina: I like this idea that we’re all lighthouse keepers at the moment. Lighthouse keepers have to isolate themselves to take care of other people, what they´re doing is looking after people at sea. We’re also isolating ourselves to take care of those around us, even strangers. The book has had a strange relationship with readers during the pandemic. It talks a lot about solitude and many people have recommended it for these times.

Katy: There is also movement in the book, which contrasts with the static, stoic nature of lighthouses. You take us from the Oregon Coast to New York to rural France to Asturias. There’s an opportunity to escape the confines of home. How involved were you with this journey, Christina?

Christina: I was very involved with it, in that sense of travel. The moments I really loved were moments when Jazmina lets the light shine on her. You have these amazing stories around her, but there is pain and sorrow and worries. All those things are going on with the lighthouses, and that reflects on the experiences of lighthouse keepers—for example, their isolation and depression some of the time.  That’s what I really liked about it, I felt I had been given an invitation into Jazmina’s life.

Katy: Ishmael, in Moby Dick, suggests that all men’s roads lead to water. At what point in your life were you drawn to water, specifically towards the act of collecting experiences around lighthouses? 

Jazmina: It started with a trip I did to the coast of Oregon. I went with my family and we stayed at the Sylvia Beach Hotel, where the rooms were all decorated according to certain writers. There was a beautiful lighthouse near the hotel. I was also reading To the Lighthouse, so I wanted to write about the reading experience in combination with the travel experience.

Katy: I see that pattern play out throughout the book—the way you pair the reading and travel experiences and in traveling, how you literally collect places.

Jazmina: It’s true, I was traveling to lighthouses in Spain when I wrote the travel log at the end of the book. It’s interesting that the book starts with a dialogue between To The Lighthouse and the travel I was doing while reading it, and the book ends with this reading experience of the Sir Walter Scott book [Northern Lights: Or, a Voyage in the Lighthouse Yacht to Nova Zembla and the Lord Knows Where in the Summer of 1814] and the travel I was doing at that time.

Katy: It’s interesting that you write about Sir Walter Scott in the present tense and your own journey in the past tense because, as you write in the book, you feel “as if what happened to Scott so long ago is more present than what” you’re experiencing. How did you approach the integration of literary texts like this, Christina?

Christina: One of the things I had to think about was what to do with the literary sources that are used in the book, how to integrate them into the text in English. After you do this a few times, it’s a bit like Chinese whispers. Things don’t always match up from one language to the other. It was particularly true with the Sir Walter Scott part in the final section of the book. Sometimes he’s using quite archaic language in English, which isn’t really there in the Spanish. I thought, “I’ve got to look at these references, find the originals.” The world he’s describing  isn’t that long ago really, but it just felt like a thousand years ago.

Katy: Do you enjoy this research element of your translation work?

Christina: Yes, and it was particularly fascinating to learn more about the technology of lighthouses. Sometimes, I was tearing my hair out, putting myself in a science position. But I quite loved the responsibility of getting the terminology right. I couldn’t just make it up and hope that readers wouldn’t notice. That was something that took me to a different area, which was a nice thing to do.

Katy: And how did your personal research influence the writing of your book, Jazmina?

Jazmina: I was initially doing research on lighthouses out of curiosity. I got obsessed, and I fell in love and started reading more about lighthouses and taking every advantage to visit other lighthouses. It began to build as this collection of experiences, travels, and books. I wanted it to be like a cabinet of curiosities. It was a visual process for me. I wanted the fragments to be like objects. Because collections are an important theme in the book, I wanted the whole book to be a kind of collection. I wanted the fragments to dialogue with each other, as the objects in a collection talk to each other, in a way.

Katy: You write that you’d like to rescue lighthouses from invisibility or keep some of their stories alive, as well as be guided by the objects themselves. How did you visualize your texts as objects in a collection?

Jazmina: I actually had a program called Scrivener. It has an option to play with Post-Its and move them around and put labels on them. You can have a board. I don’t know what I would have done without that. I was living in New York at the time, so I didn’t have the space to move physical objects around.

Katy: During your research and process of assembling texts, did you consult some of the log books of past lighthouse keepers? Did that inspire the log at the end of the book?

Jazmina: Yes, I did. Many of them are quite technical and talk about things like the weather, or times of day the lights were lit. Yet, with such scare information you can put together a story. A couple of books were very evocative for me: Robert Louis Stevenson’s book about his family of engineers, and the Sir Walter Scott book that he wrote when he was in a boat with Stevenson’s grandfather traveling to lighthouses around the Scottish coast. At the end of my book, I wanted the log to have a direct conversation with Scott’s book.

Katy: In a way, your book represents subjective motives in conversation with the external world. That idea that a journey is the externalization of an interior seeing. Was this intentional or accidental?

Jazmina: It became a question of the book: to what extent do we write about ourselves when we write about something else? And vice versa. There is, for example, the metaphor of the lighthouse as the travels, the external elements, stories, and I used the metaphor of the well to talk about introspection, the subjective and the personal. The book tries to combine those two discourses and to reflect on the differences between, say, the travel log and personal diary. What kinds of genres are they, and how do they relate to each other? I really enjoy those kinds of books, the ones that create a relationship between the subjective and the external and the rest of the world. I tried to do that and to talk about the necessity of escaping oneself and the impossibility of doing so at times.

Katy: How were you trying to escape exactly? 

Jazmina: By placing my attention in nature, in other stories that were so appealing to me. The topics around the lighthouses that are so attractive: solitude, madness, the sea. What became rather obvious at one point was that all of that reflected, in a way, what I was feeling, so there was no escaping the place where I was. It finally got through in the book. In a way, it’s a very sad book. So I think that even though I wasn’t trying to write so much about myself, it became a book about myself at that point in my life.

Katy: Christina, when you were translating the book, was it difficult to convey the emotional resonance of the text? I suppose it’s easier to translate facts than emotions.

Christina: I’m not sure translating factual information is any easier. When you go deeper and deeper into the text, to some extent, you are sharing the emotions.

Katy: How did you get at the rhythm of the text?

Christina: I’m not 100% sure. Some people have an ear for music and can pick up a tune very easily. I seem to have an ear for music in a text. Maybe it’s the way my mind works, or the way I read. I’m truly reading with that music, that rhythm. Maybe it’s one of those things you’re born with. You’re sort of dancing to the text when you’re translating—with your fingers.

Katy: I suppose the tone emerges as the text takes on rhythm?

Christina: The tone, I think that comes about itself. It develops. Translation is like stepping into someone else’s shoes and walking around in them. Once you do, the tone becomes natural to you to some extent. Then you go to some other project, and the tone is all wrong. But the tone in the translation can never be exactly the same as in the original.

Jazmina: Yes, and every language is also a tone in itself.

Katy: Did the English version become its own entity apart from you, in some way?

Jazmina: It’s wonderful for me to read the English version. It’s like reading a book I really like, written by someone I have a lot in common with, but that is still new. The words feel fresh. It’s a very different entity. I love the feeling of reading the translation.

Christina: The translation allows the authors to stand back a little bit, to put some distance between themselves and their work.

Katy: Jhumpa Lahiri’s bilingual memoir, In Other Words, reveals that she feels freer writing in Italian than in her native Bengali or in English. Is there a language in which you feel more free?

Jazmina: I don’t think it works that way for me. I studied English literature, and although I love it, I never felt I had as many tools as I needed to be able to write creatively in it. Beckett said something about saying what you need to say in fewer words. That’s an interesting challenge as well.

Christina: There are some things I find much easier to talk about in Spanish than in English. Sometimes Spanish molds itself to what I want to say more easily.

Jazmina: Yes, and it happened to me a lot in New York, where I found myself thinking things in English, things I was living in English. It’s an interesting thing to think about. I don’t know if there are things that are easier for me to think about in English, but I suppose there must be.

Katy: What was it like working closely with a translator, watching your text evolve into a slightly different version of itself?

Jazmina: First, I have a friendship with Christina so there was a lot of interaction in every sense. More communion and communication.

Christina: After we met at a book launch in New York years ago, I thought, “This is somebody I like, this is somebody I want to read.”

Jazmina: Oh, thank you! Every translator has a different style, and you really engage with the text, Christina. I remember you sending me questions and problems related to the text, but you always suggested such wonderful solutions. I think, in a way, it’s a better book in English than in Spanish because it has an extra layer of work. I’ve taken notes of everything so when the Spanish version gets reprinted I can use what we did to make that version better. 

Katy: I’m glad to hear the book will be reprinted soon. How has the reception been overall?

Jazmina: I really liked the experience of being published in small presses around the world. Next year it will be published in Argentina, in Italian, in Dutch. The excitement of the editors is palpable, and it translates into the excitement of the audience. This energy speaks to how lighthouses are a universal symbol.

Katy: To quote the book, “A controlled flame is an indication of human presence; their message is, first and foremost, that human beings are here.”

Jazmina: Yes! Even if people don’t have the literal building of the lighthouse, many people use fire in ways that work as lighthouses for fishermen in coastal towns. People everywhere relate to this book in one way or another. The English translation was a bittersweet experience because it started with so much excitement, and we had so many plans for the book tour in the US this year.

Christina: It was great to see how people engaged with the book. At Two Lines Press, our editor was initially uncertain about publishing it, but he said, after a while, that he couldn’t get it out of his mind; that it was there all the time. This is the effect it has had on many people.

Katy: Will you write more about lighthouses in the future?

Jazmina: It’s a book I could have kept writing forever because it has such a free structure, you could keep traveling to lighthouses. There are so many of them, and each one is like a house of stories. So it’s an infinite book that I decided to abandon at a certain time, because I wanted to write other things, not because it wasn’t interesting for me anymore.

Katy: Lighthouses are constantly personified in your book. You describe it as the guardian of the sea, a constant watchman, a “living and intelligent person.” So, out of all the lighthouses you’ve “met,” which one has been your favorite?

Christina: My family is Irish and we spent every summer on the southwest coast. One year, when I was about 8 or 9, we rented a cottage in the coastal town on Ballybunion. I shared an attic room with my sisters. On our first or second night in the cottage, I climbed onto a chair to look out to sea through the dormer window. What I saw was a strange light flashing on and off in the distance: I watched for a long time and convinced myself that the light was in fact due to pirate activity. The next morning, all excitement, I reported to my parents that there were pirates in Ballybunion and maybe we needed to tell someone. They laughed. That day we drove to Loop Head, across the estuary of the Shannon. My pirates were a lighthouse.

Jazmina: That’s a beautiful memory, Christina. You should write it!

Christina: You write it, and I’ll translate it.

Jazmina: My favorite lighthouse is not actually in the book; I went to visit it after I had finished the book. It’s a lighthouse off the southern coast of Chile. You have to take a boat to get to this island, where there’s only the lighthouse and a large colony of penguins. It’s such a wonderful place, a fairytale. I kept imagining living there and being the lighthouse keeper and having a relationship with these beings that are so human like, in a way, so strange and beautiful.

The post On Lighthouses appeared first on The Wild Detectives.

But art doesn’t just happen to us. It’s work. Books give us material with which to think: new registers, illusions, spaces. Even a chance to reflect upon our day to day life—what we do, when we eat, how we love. After that, it’s up to us.

I wanted to know how book people—especially those whose livelihoods depended on books—were coping, so I decided to ask. What follows are a set of mini-interviews with authors, booksellers, journalists, professors, poets, and literary translators. People who create the art that moves us both within and without states of alarm.

I asked each of them the same question: how has the written word carried you these past few weeks? Here’s what they had to say:

Clémentine Beauvais, York, UK
Clémentine is a children’s and young adult author and translator, and a lecturer in Education at the University of York. https://www.clementinebeauvais.com/eng/

The crisis coincided with a deluge of deadlines for literary translations I’m currently doing. So, every day, I sit in front of written words—in English, and I rewrite them—in French. There is something extremely soothing about that precise exercise of linguistic negotiation; that creation of a new text which belongs and doesn’t belong to me, and which helps literature cross borders and meet new readers. In that sense the written word has been “carrying me” and I have carried it, too. We’ve helped each other out, perhaps…

Nick Warden, Tokyo, Japan
Nick is the owner of Infinity Books, a bookshop and event space in Tokyo.

The heart of a bricks and mortar bookseller can sometimes be turned to stone, through nothing else but the will to survive, looking past peoples’ common good, and to just look at the titan fighting to upend you, casting you aside, disregarding parchment, paper and glue.

And then It happens, people reach deeper to what is important, call it a love for things familiar, be it a common cause, a need to connect when no one can, there it is! The Book arises from the ashes…

Lindsey Tramuta, Paris, France
Lindsey is author of The New Paris and the forthcoming The New Parisienne: the Women & Ideas Shaping Paris (July 7, 2020).
https://lindseytramuta.com/

Despite having the launch of my book and the associated book tour postponed to July (and the format of such events permanently changed), I seem to have consumed more books than I expected. To be sure, I was distracted by the events unfolding, the case counter mounting in France for nearly eight weeks, but every time I felt myself getting dragged into the loop of grim news, I turned to books to transport me elsewhere. From Tom Hanks’ short stories in Uncommon Type to the mythical world in Circe, books were the most comforting balm I could offer myself for this moment. I hope they continue to offer healing as we all embark on the unknown path of the next several months.

Cristina Rodriguez, Dallas, USA
Cristina is general manager at Deep Vellum Books, brick-and-mortar bookstore and cultural community center in Dallas’s historic Deep Ellum neighborhood.

In the last few weeks it has become harder to take things day by day, when it feels like everything is abruptly changing moment by moment. One minute I feel content and seconds later restless and sad. Books have helped me these past few weeks learn how to slow down, be introspective, and patient with myself. They may not be able to give you all of the answers to life, but I do believe books offer guidance when you need it the most.

Anna Louie Sussman, New York City, USA
Anna is a New York-based contributing reporter with The Fuller Project, a nonprofit journalism organization reporting on global issues impacting women. She’s currently working on a book about capitalism and reproduction.
https://www.annalouiesussman.com/

When New York went into lockdown, I had 27 books checked out from the library, many of which were due in late March. But sometime in March, the library shut down its physical branches, and the books were now mine to read, until further notice. Mornings as I brush my teeth and putter around, and evenings for an hour or two before bed, I’ve been working my way through them, an escape from the small apartment where I spend most of my day interviewing people by phone and writing things on the computer.

I’ve finally read Educated by Tara Westover, Love and Trouble by Claire Dederer, The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, Spinster by Kate Bolick, Pretty Things by Virginie Despentes, and many others, mixed in with books I own that I had been looking forward to reading for a long time, and still others that I am reading for my own forthcoming book project. And I still have many more ahead! I miss my friends and family terribly, but one small silver lining is that I’ve been able to “meet” so many wonderful authors in this period.

Paloma Reaño, Lima, Peru and Madrid, Spain
Paloma is co-founder of Pesopluma Press, a Peruvian independent publishing house focused on contemporary Latin American literature, and a bookseller at Desperate Literature, in Madrid.

As editorial director and bookseller, I can assure you that books have been the wild table of my mental health in times of house arrest. I live alone in the center of Madrid—one of the cities hardest hit by the virus—and even though my publishing house and the bookstore I work for are suffering the financial impact of confinement, books & e-books (reading, basically) have been the basic self-medication to stay hopeful and busy. When reality out there is so surreal, fiction seems to be the only refuge for understanding.

Craig New, Sydney, Australia
Craig works at Story Factory, a non-profit creative writing centre for young people in Sydney, and can read while walking without bumping into things.

I’ve always had so much going on in my life that I’ve had to carve out reading time almost aggressively. As an avid walker, this meant that over time my daily reading began to occur almost exclusively while walking to and from work, or in those brief moments when others might reach for their phone. With the pandemic confining me to my small apartment and an extra workload, my reading has actually taken a hit and I’ve really felt it. I’ve had to create new habits to squeeze it in, like taking short lunch breaks that never previously existed, or mini reading-breaks throughout the day (as I pace circles in my apartment). The written word has always been a huge support both mentally and physically, and this year I’m just being reminded of how grateful I am for that.

Dr. Meg Marino, New Orleans, USA
Meg is a children´s book author and pediatrician. 1000 copies from the first printing of her book Chepecho and Her Clippity Flappity Floppity Friends, are being given to children affected by war and refugees through Project Peace.
https://www.megmarino.com/

In the last few months I have worked more than I have in years and I find myself taking refuge from reality by reading. Reading about the struggles protagonists face, the heroism required to overcome conflict, makes me remember that we are still at the beginning of our story and that a happy ending still awaits us.

Christina MacSweeney, Norwich, UK
Christina is an award-winning literary translator specializing in Latin American literature. She received the 2016 Valle Inclan prize for her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth. Other works include: Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s Empty Set, and Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses.

My life hasn’t drastically changed over the last weeks: I’m working on the translation of a novel by a Cuban writer, Karla Suárez, set in Havana, so much of my day is spent virtually in that city. At first I found it hard to concentrate on non-translation reading: I’d find myself thinking, “How can all those people be sitting together chatting in a bar?”, silly things like that.

Non-fiction works better, and I loved reading Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which put a positive slant on not quite knowing where I was. I’ve also been reading Eavan Boland’s poetry collection, A Woman Without a Country, and one poem particularly impressed me: “One Thought, One Grace, One Wonder at the Least.” It’s about reading, reading as being somewhere else. And that also fits with my sense of translation being somewhere else.

Vappu Kannas, Helsinki, Finland
Vappu is a literary scholar and writer. Her debut novel, Rosa Clay, presents a fictionalized account of the life of the first African woman to gain Finnish citizenship.

Books have definitely helped me during the self-isolation, although at first I had trouble concentrating on reading. I have plowed through George Eliot’s Middlemarch and turns out nineteenth-century literature is perfect for the slower pace of life we’re now experiencing. Since my first novel came out during this bizarre time, me and my publisher also had to come up with ways to launch and promote the book virtually. I had a virtual book launch with a live video on Facebook which was a very nice experience, also an Instagram live video interview and several phone interviews with journalists. So, in short, I’ve actually enjoyed working and promoting my book from home, something which I think writers are already pretty familiar with.

Logen Cure, Dallas, USA
Logen is a queer poet and professor. She curates Inner Moonlight, the monthly poetry reading for the Wild Detectives. Her debut poetry collection, Welcome to Midland, is forthcoming from Deep Vellum Publishing.
https://www.logencure.com/

I’m an English professor at a community college, and I teach a course every spring where students create our campus literary magazine. It’s always an intense and rewarding experience for everyone, but the abrupt shift to online learning put my community of editors in isolation. My students suddenly faced so many bizarre challenges in their everyday lives, but their care and dedication for making the lit mag never wavered. They made a gorgeous, dark, unsettling issue and I’m so proud of them. They give me hope.

Anna MacDonald, Melbourne, Australia
Anna is a writer and bookseller at Paperback Bookshop in Melbourne, and a Splice contributor. She has previously reviewed for 3:AM Magazine and the Sydney Review of Books, and she also writes regularly for the Australian Book Review.

For years, I’ve kept a record of the books I read and when I read them. Now, flicking back through the pages of my 2020 diary I can track the onset of lockdown not by any direct reference to COVID-19, but by the thinning register of books begun, and books finished. In mid-March, I was reading Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. I finished it a month later in a world made strange by fear and for the rest of April I was unable to settle to another book; I couldn’t believe in the words on the page. It was Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook Trilogy (trans. Alan Sheridan, David Watson and Marc Romano), recommended by Max Porter, that finally shocked me out of my own disquiet and into reading once again. And it has been Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things that has consoled me in the face of persistent fear and uncertainty. I read one of his essays every morning over coffee and his words give me faith, they set me up for another day.

Terry Craven, Madrid, Spain
Terry is a visual artist and co-owner of Desperate Literature, an independent bookshop and cultural event space in the heart of Madrid.

Over the past months reading the entries for our literary prize has been a huge ballast during these mad times. We got such a wide range of entries and we’ve put together such a wonderful short list. It’s currently with the judges and will be available for purchase in .pdf format here.

The post Book People in the Time of COVID appeared first on The Wild Detectives.

Kathryn Nuernberger: The title is meant to evoke the sequence of poems that describe the botany, history, and folklore surrounding plants historically used for the birth control and also, since the book is also about feminist fury in the face of patriarchal hegemonies, to evoke the idea of that someone (maybe a husband or a boss or that guy on the street or that other guy at the bar or a senator or doctor or supreme court justice) will come to “rue the day.” I also chose rue as a the titular plant because it is a plant that can be used for birth control, but it can also be used as a medicine or a culinary herb, it has been used in amulets to prevent the evil eye, and in spells to see a person’s true nature, among a host of other marvels. It is a plant that doesn’t exist for any one particular reason, as none of us exists for any one reason, other than to be fully itself alive in the world.

KD: RUE features plants that were historically used for birth control and interweaves them with poems about key figures from the history of botany and ecology, as well as more personal narratives about family and love. How did you come to explore these intersecting themes?

KN: When I was living the loneliest version of my life on a small farm in rural Missouri I developed a habit of going for a walk in the fields behind my house every morning. I’d give myself the challenge to meet a new plant, harvest it sustainably for food or medicine or a bouquet, and then do some research and writing about it. I soon learned that a great many of the plants in my field were abortifacients, which eased my sense of isolation; I felt surrounded by and connected to at least this kind of radical group of friends who shared my frustrations and indignations.

That research also took me deeply into the history of science – I became interested in the stories of other people like me who seemed to find their most meaningful connections in the green world as opposed to the human, though for the most part those human scientists disappointed me in the end with the limitations of their understanding and how permeated their work was with racism, imperialism, colonialism, and sexism. As I have at times been just so disappointed in my own work and my own self. RUE is a book about telling the truth about anger and though a lot of that anger is directed outward, a lot of it was also directed inward. It wasn’t until I came to other side of the wringer this furious muse was running me through that I began to be able to imagine and write about participating in human connections and friendships and love again.

KD: Your poem “Translations” remarks on different shades of green, as well as the ways we register color. How should a poet use color?

KN: In that poem I was particularly interested in the ways that the visible spectrum has posed a number of challenges to philosophers who contend with what perception is, whether we can trust our perceptions, and how we can trust that we are actually sharing experiences of perceptions with other perceiving humans. “Translations” is a conversation about perceiving color that is really a conversation about whether inner and outer worlds are different and if they are different, whether a person can perceive that difference. I wrote the poem in the months after I had a miscarriage, when I was feeling a very confusing and sad blur about where I ended and other beings began – thinking about how humans perceive color was a way of thinking through how to live with grief, loss, and mortality.

But I have no guidelines for how a poet should use color. Poets should follow their bliss!

KD: Many of your poems point to the natural world around us, to the prairies, to the forest, to the homes that snails build. How are we like the living things around us? What have they to teach us?

KN: I would say that we aren’t like the living things around us so much as we are part of them and they are part of us. We are all beings sharing ecosystems, eating and being eaten by each other, fracking or not fracking each other’s groundwater, pollinating or fertilizing or spraying poison on the blooms that will become someone or other’s foods. I try to avoid thinking about non-human beings as metaphors for human ones – I fear it is disrespectful to all parties and I also find it is a missed opportunity that prevents me from perceiving the fullness of being. I do try to imagine how it feels to be other beings – a bobtail squid, for example, has a colony of bioluminescent bacteria behind its eyes that it can use to camouflage itself to the moonlight filtering through the water. That process of imagining does bring me into greater awareness of the various relationships that are in closer proximity to this body of mine – my symbioses with various bacteria living in my mouth and gut and brain, my responsibilities to and impacts on my human loves, the places the water I’m drinking passed through to reach me.

KD: You often investigate the intimate relationship between parent and child, as in your poem “Toad,” which feels at once tender and painful. How do you strike that balance?

KN: I find parenting to be a balance between tenderness and pain. I’ve written elsewhere about the terrifying realization when my child was first born that the best case scenario for the two of us is that I would see her watching me die, as opposed to the worst case scenario, which was that I would lose her first. That feeling of constant precariousness has subsided since those first post-partum months after a frightening and medically-complicated delivery, but there are other tensions too. In “Toad” I explore feeling pulled between a child’s desires and needs and the parent’s desires/needs/responsibilities/obligations, which is a sensation that is often intensified by this sexist culture for people in the mother role. I think the balance you have described finding in this poem may be a consequence of my desire to tell the most complete truth I can about an experience, which often means articulating parts that are taboo alongside more socially acceptable material. Another interpretation is that I am chronic ditherer and dithering in poetry can be understood and appreciated as “balance” unlike the way it is totally “annoying” in daily life. I do love how everything is made better in poetry, most especially ugly feelings.

Kathryn Nuernberger will perform on March 11th with also poet Jenny Molberg, at Inner Moonlight, The Wild Detectives monthly poetry reading series. More info here.

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