Tag: Guest Folio

A Brief History of Ice

The iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave

Elizabeth Bishop

Outside the Tate Modern on Christmas Eve,
everyone is touching the blocks of ice two artists
have shipped from the Arctic so we can feel
their melting: a petting zoo of ancient beasts

we slaughtered by accident, now guiltily
glide our hands along the smooth high ridges
of their incisors in the gloveless sun in this
two thousandth eighteenth year of the lord

(how many of us are believers? and in what?
a future writ in water? enough right people
reading this braille before it melts?)—these
blocks calved off icebergs calved off an ice

sheet, a boy now lifts the smallest chunk of
to smash on concrete—leaping joyous at its
shatter as his mother scolds, although the sign
says listen to it, smell it, look *at it, put your hands on; *

studies show we humans are poor abstractors—
will do more to help 20 starving people than 2,000;
need our own hands to tell us we don’t live
in snow globes with tiny houses redolent with pine

and woodsmoke sheltered by glass poles—
a Platonic Christmas Eve of families trailing
the Millennium Bridge, fur coats and velvet
despite the heat (how many generations

have believed in Santa at the North Pole?
Angerona, Greek goddess of winter days?)
(millennium before, her name warned of anguish
from the too-little-time, before the light falls, to do

what’s noble); fathers taking photos of their kids
with the ice, of light through ice, of the guitarist
playing “Pachelbel’s Canon” beyond the ice, as
my husband slides his hand above a vein of water,

blue-green glowing, trapped, otherworldly
(which is not how I should think of it) and says,
It’s perfect he’s playing the most predictable song ever written
as Rome burns. To which say, yes, but I’ve always kind of

loved it;repetitive, but aren’t our lives variations
on tired themes we are not tired of: hope, child,
house,Christmas morning, love—it feels new:
the old threat of coal in our stockings, candy if

we’re good (in older stories, the Whipping Father
boiled children so Santa had to resurrect them)
(we tried to warn ourselves, didn’t we?) (or have
we confused ourselves with resurrections?):

this ice dripping drains to the Thames until
a miracle freezes another future: positive and clear
as the crystals I wore as a pagan teen channeling
good as I walked the aisle to “Pachelbel” to marry

a boy I believed I’d love forever (so many notes
could be predicted, have been predicted), my hand
tracing one fading fin of ice until its slip to concavity,
a landscape that doesn’t belong to me and does;

a roughened slickness I want to compare to manta rays
I felt once in a shallow pool at Sea World, though
doesn’t this have to be about more than describing
loss as another kind of wonder we don’t deserve?

Six 100-word Memoirs

Paul Doherty

IRISH

From the sunroom off the parlor, now converted to his sickroom, my father would call out as I left the house, “Remember you’re Irish.”  I believed his good-bye to be ironic.  Unlike his own father, a zealous Fenian, my father was pleased and proud to be American and had no interest in supporting or celebrating Irish causes.

Another of his valedictions was for any family member heading off to Mass.  “Remember me to the Reverend Maurice.” Father Maurice O’Connor was pastor at St. James, classmate and close friend of Cardinal O’Connell.  My dad thought both men too full of themselves. 

WOODWORKER

My father’s hobby was woodworking. I can just barely picture him at his cellar workbench—when I was a child he was a dying man—but several of his wood creations remain—the massive workbench itself, the miniature toolbox he made for me, and the platform, built so that we could share the workbench. For the beach he made a scow and tugboat. That tugboat is a masterpiece—iron keel, dowel smokestack, intricately carved pilothouse and gunwales.  He built a second cellar stair railing, low, at just the right height.  I suppose that it’s still there in my childhood home. 

“MRS. DOHERTY”

My mother called our neighbors by their surnames—Mrs. McCabe, Mrs. Murphy, Mrs. Porter.  Her life was circumscribed by my father’s long illness, which kept her homebound.  Groceries were delivered from the Arlmont Market.  When the “Arlmont man” came, he waited in the kitchen until mother had accounted for each ordered item.  One year she did venture from the house, enrolling in a Red Cross home-nursing program. Mrs. Riemer told me later that my mother mastered the hospital tuck better than any of the other women.  I was not surprised, only delighted that my mother’s extraordinary competence was on display.   

IN THE KITCHEN

I was probably seven or eight when I had my tonsils removed by our family physician, Dr. Carl Barstow.  The procedure took place in the kitchen of my home.

Why at home?  To save hospital costs?  A family tradition of home tonsillectomies?

I don’t know.  I do have some clear memories of the day.  I was placed in a kitchen chair, my folded arms tied to it with towels.  Gauze, soaked with anesthetic, ether I suppose, was held beneath my nostrils.  All went well.  Later that day I walked across to Robbins Farm and watched my friends play tag football.   

GLOVE

In 1948 the great Red Sox infielder, Johnny Pesky, conducted a baseball clinic in Arlington.  My brother loaned me his Bobby Doerr glove for the occasion.  At the clinic, we young infielders gathered around Pesky. He asked to borrow a glove.  I held the Bobby Doerr out for him.  Pesky fielded ground balls, emphasizing positioning, balance, and footwork. When the clinic ended he handed the glove back to me. “Nice glove, son.” I ran to where my brother had been watching. “Nice glove, son!”  He would not have heard that.   I was pleased to report Johnny Pesky’s amiable professional judgment.

LITTLE BUILDING

The Little Building, a blocky structure on the corner of Boylston and Tremont, is now an Emerson dorm.  But in its heyday between the wars it was Boston’s largest office building.   Trips to Boston with my Aunt Molly included a visit to the office of her childhood chum, Nora Hurley.  There, in a room cluttered with bolts and scraps of cloth, Nora embroidered—altar cloths, priests’ vestments.  But Nora’s eccentric-ities interested me more than her needlework.  You could not mention FDR in her presence; you could not convince her that her refrigerator light shut off when the door was closed. 

City Kingfisher 

By Marina Richie 

The belted kingfisher I pursued all summer on a wild stretch of Rattlesnake Creek now perches on a high wire above the Clark Fork River in downtown Missoula, Montana. 

He’s gone urban this winter. How could he have become such a suave, natty bird who seems to have forgotten the meaning of the word skittish in the environs of crows, pigeons and house sparrows? So many times he eluded me in the labyrinth forests of cottonwood and ponderosa by the cold, clear creek. 

The bird I thought I knew belongs four miles upstream from Rattlesnake Creek’s nearby confluence with the Clark Fork River, a place the Salish (Séliš ) people knew as Nɫʔay, translated “Place of the Small Bull Trout.” Not so long ago, the sizzling fragrance of fresh trout cooking on a fire permeated their camps, as they caught, dried and stored fish for the winter ahead. 

My kingfisher pays no heed to the rumbling cars rattling across Higgins Bridge, the honking of horns, or the thudding passage of walkers and runners. He likely comes from generations of male kingfishers flying downstream in a seasonal pilgrimage to find the ice-free waters with best fishing on a river then unencumbered by a small city of 70,000. 

His mate has flown south and will return by late March or early April to the home nest bank along Rattlesnake Creek. By then, my kingfisher will have flown upstream to guard his prime nesting territory from upstart males. 

I come to see him often, finding some patterns in his movements. If not on the wire, he tends to be poised on a cottonwood tree limb, or he’s patrolling his mile-long winter territory from Madison Bridge by the University of Montana downriver to the Orange Street bridge. 

On one late sunshine day, he scrunches down on the high wire. His feathers appear fleecy gray without a speck of the typical blue. His crest flurries into a peak with that distinctive two-part divide. From a distance, he looks like a baseball impossibly balanced on the wire. Through binoculars, he’s slimmer and alert, snapping his tiny tail and peering at the ice chunks coasting downstream.

He is predictable only in context of the dynamic river and shifting ice. With below-freezing temperatures, the ice expands from the shore outwards. The wire allows him access to the river’s center, where he dives headfirst at an angle to pluck an escaping trout from black waters. 

One day as I watch him on his wire perch, I have the feeling of not being alone. I turn to see an unshaven middle-aged man in a torn jacket standing a few feet away. 

“A kingfisher!” I say and point where my bird has flown to the limb of a young cottonwood leaning out over the river close by. 

“Yes, a kingfisher!” He nods back and we stand together in silent appreciation of the bird with the tousled crest, head cocked forward and bill pointed downward. 

A kingfisher doesn’t stand out like a bald eagle swooping down to nab a duck on the ice, or a great blue heron stalking the shallows with long-legged precision, or the mergansers and goldeneyes rafting the waves. He’s more like the man I met, invisible until you become aware of him. 

This kingfisher I watch does not divide urban from the wild. By the river’s edge are red-osier dogwoods and willows among boulders that harbor a broken whiskey bottle or a torn shirt. Beavers gnaw trees. The wilds nudge into the city. The city nudges the wild. I’m always cheering for the wild to win, yet acknowledge that if a kingfisher could vote, he’d endorse the presence of wires over the river that give the ideal view of the fish below.

When the Farmer Clutches the Rake: Writing the Real
by Cheryl Strayed
from Post Road 22

The first story I ever wrote featured a talking parrot named Poncho who busted a trio of diamond thieves on a late night train. What a fantastic story! my seventh grade teacher scrawled in red ink on the top of the page. She was right. It is, literally, my most fantastic story to date — my writing in the intervening years swirling ever further from the farfetched and toward the real, if not the mundane. I write fiction. I write nonfiction. I move back and forth across that genre divide, but the real is the thread that joins the two. In my tiny literary universe of one, style supersedes genre at the root. My avian caper aside, my primary ache as a writer is to do as Robert Lowell famously suggested and simply say what happened.

It took me a while to accept this. I feared that what happened was hohum. But I’m the sort of writer who believes that writing is a calling and furthermore that when we’re called to do something we don’t get to be terribly picky about the details.

There was an actual moment during which this became perfectly clear to me. I was in graduate school, taking a fiction workshop taught by George Saunders. There were only four students in the class, so instead of meeting at school, we met in George’s living room, where we reclined in cozy chairs around a coffee table on which sat a very large book that featured reproductions of paintings various artists had made over the past several hundred years. One week George opened up the book and asked idly which of the paintings we each thought most closely represented who we were as writers. We all gathered in to look as he turned the pages, the search on for the one that was “ours,” though — at least speaking for myself — search is not precisely the word. There was nothing lost, then found. When I saw the painting that compelled me to say “that one,” the sensation was more like rounding the final bend on a far-back road and spotting at last the familiar house one knew was there all along.

The painting was a portrait of a farmer so meticulously accurate, so particular and true, it was more vivid than a photograph: the farmer’s pale level gaze, his rough hands clutching a rake, the parched yellow crops in his field. It wasn’t the prettiest picture in the book. It wasn’t the most innovative or outlandish or even, perhaps, the one I’d most like to hang on my wall. But there it was: mine. Something and everything about that image seemed to be lodged in my chest. Looking at it was like gazing into a mirror, my own intentions reflected back to me. It’s the best way I can express what I strive for in both my fiction and my nonfiction: I madly, deeply, honestly want to show you exactly how it looks when the farmer clutches the rake.

This is a long way of saying that the real is my road and the genre is my vehicle. It’s from the standpoint of content and style that I make the decision whether to write a particular story as fiction or nonfiction. The question is always how best to convey what is most true. Will it be the freedom and invention of fiction that shows readers most acutely what I hope they’ll see, or is it the constraint and wondrous specificity of how it really went down? Does the story demand that I mine a character or excavate a life?

There isn’t one answer to these questions for me. I’m often asked if it’s hard to switch back and forth between the two genres, but it would be much harder for me to limit myself to one. Like playing a piano with only one hand, it could be done, but there are keys I’d inevitably find it impossible to reach. There’s a symbiotic relationship between the two genres and also a funny paradox, in which each yearns to achieve the greatest effect of the other. When we praise fiction it’s often credibility at the core of our delight: these characters seemed like real people to me is high praise indeed. Nonfiction writers are lauded for something like the opposite. It’s only when they transcend the self, when the real person behind the prose disperses into someone more universal, that the reader feels altered by the life of another.

This isn’t to say I think the two genres are the same. Writers who assert there isn’t much of a difference between fiction and literary nonfiction baffle me. In my mind the line is clear and bright: on one side you can write whatever you want; on the other side you can write whatever you want without making shit up.

The not making up of shit is the magic dust of nonfiction. It won’t do your work for you — even if you’ve had an incredible life, your writing could easily be crap — but if you hone your craft and find your story and figure out what it means and write it well (which is to say without fear, even if you’re frankly terrified), the fact that you didn’t make this shit up is capable of blowing your readers minds into smithereens.

That power is also the reason they’ll want to sue you if they later learn you lied.

I write nonfiction when I think the story I have to tell would be best told through the thinnest possible screen. There really isn’t anything like the author standing right before the reader saying this happened to me. And there’s nothing like it’s opposite either — when the writer is free to manipulate the possibilities of action and interaction and plot, as one can do in fiction, and therefore set the intimate on the grandest possible stage. Can the self tell the biggest story? is a question I ask a lot when I’ve opted to write something as nonfiction. Sometimes the answer is no, other times yes. Sometimes it’s both.

The biggest story of my own life so far, the one that’s obsessed me as a writer, is the death of my mother at age forty-five. Turns out, my grief is more enormous than any one genre can contain. I wrote about it fictionally first, in my novel Torch, because I had a story of loss to tell that wasn’t just mine. And then I wrote it about nonfictionally, in my essays and memoir Wild, because I had things to say about love and sorrow and healing that so breathtakingly belonged to me I couldn’t possibly locate them in someone else.

I’m working for something slightly different in each genre, but in each I plow the same field. This is what I mean when I say I write the real instead of I write fiction or nonfiction. I’ll do whatever it takes to transform the paint into a guy standing in a yellow field with a rake.