Not just an escapist read: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand.

This book was exactly what I wanted it to be: an escapist story set in a small English village with protagonists who love to read.  There is something about such a premise that gets me every time.  And so, I read without taking notes and in long swathes on the couch and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson is about a retired Major from the British Army who is the epitome of upholding what most would see as old fashioned views of loyalty, trust, and honor.  His only brother dies unexpectedly on page 1 and throughout the story Major Pettigrew is thrown into a number of conflicts.

First,  his father left he and his brother a pair of shooting rifles that were meant to be rejoined and remain a pair when one of them passed away--yet his brother, though uninterested in guns, did not leave his to Major Pettigrew, who is an avid huntsman.  Through the story, he is forced to process through his devotion to this object--and the bitterness that it may have caused in his relationship with his brother.

He unexpectedly develops a kindred friendship with a widowed Pakistani shopkeeper in the village, who his neighbors sadly view as a foreigner rather than a neighbor.    The  Major must navigate his way through not only their prejudice and the deconstruction of the picture perfect world he thought he inhabited, but his own prejudice and the way he has existed and interacted with her for years before the moment that brings them together.

Even though this was an easy, escapist read, I thought it asked some important questions--mainly, about when is it time to reevaluate systems of living that always felt right? I've found that it is easy to maintain the same ideas about life if I never find myself in situations that require me to think outside of what I have always known--whether that is a belief of a region or a belief of a subculture.  But once someone meets and truly gets to know a person who is different from him or herself, it seems crazy to hold onto old views.  So, amidst the tea over Kipling and the countryside gardens, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand challenges readers to step out of their comfort zones relationally.  

Story always seems to be the answer: the narrative structure and emotional health

I read mostly fiction.  I believe--and tell my students--that fiction can often be more true than fact in the ways that it can teach us about life.  What I've come to learn, though, is that it's not necessarily fiction per se, but narrative.  Story.  We are doing a coming-of-age literature unit and my biggest hope is that my students, just beginning some of the uphill climbs of growing up, can find hope in the ways that the protagonists they are reading get through their struggles.  I want them to see that in studying the classic story mountain structure, that there are hills and valleys that are sometimes hard to make sense of or see their way out of, but that resolution comes.  Often, it is not what was originally sought after, but there is a knowledge and a wisdom that appears after making it through.

Everything seems to be aligning, though, because recently I've come across two nonfiction resources that have discussed this same phenomena: that understanding narrative can help people emotionally process through life better.

The first came from the New York Times a few months ago in an article called The Family Stories that Bind Us by Bruce Feiler.  In summary, he discusses the idea that the best thing that a parent can do for a child is to develop a strong family narrative.  He says when child feels that he or she is a part of something greater, the child will be more resilient in challenges, feel safer, and even happier.  The most interesting part, though, was that when they studied children who knew their family narrative, there was a delineation among them that produced a stronger child, still.  The three major narratives were "We worked hard to get all that we have, and we made it" "we had it all and lost it, and we made it" and the third created the most emotionally healthy children: "we've had some ups and some downs, and we made it."

The second comes from Brene Brown, a writer and researcher whose work has been really influential for me since I first saw her Ted Talks in the fall and recently began reading The Gifts of Imperfection with a good friend of mine (one of my few non fiction books this year).  Obviously, she speaks about our state as imperfect humans, and the fact that despite we know that about ourselves, we often live in ways that demonstrate the opposite.  One of the core tenets of her research has been "when we can let go of what other people think and own our story, we gain access to our worthiness--the feeling that we are enough just as we are and that we are worthy of love and belonging." Own our story.  This is a life changing sentence, that brings me back to the idea that the greater understanding we have of the "mountain of action" structure of life--knowing their will be new starts, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution--the healthier we become.

On that note, I'm looking forward to making my summer reading list, which I'll be posting about soon.

Rhythms and Anchors: life truth from young adult literature

I've been reading up a storm lately, but you couldn't tell by looking here.   I recently finished Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rivka Brunt and reread Crank by Ellen Hopkins with my students.  I  also reread the young adult Tales of the Madman Underground by John Barnes for my graduate class and loved it just as much the second time around.  It is set in a small Ohio town in 1973 and the Karl, the high school senior protagonist has been a part of a therapy group at school since elementary school.  They dubbed themselves the Madman Underground, since they know everything about each other's lives, but generally stick to their own social circles outside of therapy.  Karl's dad passed away and his cat-hoarding mother drinks her nights away and steals Karl's money to pay for it.

This calendar year has felt like a whirlwind to me: planning a wedding, moving to a new (fixer upper) apartment, and going back to graduate school on top of grading essays and state tests has left me feeling scattered and in survival mode--I've spent quite a bit of my walking time getting from one place to the next dreaming about getting upstate with some English breakfast tea, hiking boots and a pile of books.  In the midst of the crazy, I came across this passage from Madman from a scene when Karl feels exhausted and overwhelmed and looks over to a list of household projects and chores that his dad made for him before he died:

Dad had left me a list, month by month and week by week, when to do all the stuff he'd shown me how to do.  I couldn't always keep up with it, between Mom and the cats. I knew it would all fall to shit the minute I left for the army.  Still, mostly I kept it up.  Nights when I couldn't sleep, I'd just turn on my desk lamp, point it at the wall, and read that list to myself til I knew where I was in the world again (110).

I actually teared up thinking about Karl re-grounding himself in rhythms that were passed down to him by his father and the way that rereading them enabled him to remember his true identity.  This is the piece that I have often gone without this year--I have kept going and going and the easiest things to let go of were the rhythms and anchors that remind me of who I am--be it through writing, running in the park, cooking a meal.  We are also in the midst of our final unit: studying Coming-of-Age literature and thinking about what it means to grow up, and this wisdom from Karl is some of the best advice I could ever give a teenager, and also helps put their lives and craziness into perspective.

There was a crazy day last week when I didn't have time to cook but couldn't bear to order in food that wouldn't feel good to my body.  So I decided to make a meal that would take the longest to make, of course: risotto with spring vegetables.  I was filled with anxiety and my mind was looming with deadlines, but decided that it was worth it to walk to a grocery store much further than the two closest to me to get higher quality vegetables.  Within a block of walking I was so taken by the late spring evening light and my neighborhood's energy that I was able to completely reset my mindset.  It was a mental miracle.  

So.  I realized that I needed to build in some time for anchoring myself just like Karl did.  This week I started reading Brene Brown's The Gift of Imperfection with a friend of mine (after seeing her game changing Ted Talks last fall and being blown away).  One of the first things she talks about is recognizing the moments when you feel yourself becoming depleted and to do something about it in the moment--remembering your anchors and truths.  This past week I've been able to climb out of the craziness bit by bit and breathe.

It also helps that summer is so close.

Under the Magnolia.

I came across this poem this morning while reading one of my favorite blogs.  It was timely because in my graduate class this week we were discussing poetry and I realized how much I had been missing it lately.  There is no other form that can capture so much with so little and, like the nerdy English teacher that I am, it hurts my soul that it is such a misunderstood genre.  I try to teach my students that poetry is one of the most powerful ways to share their voice--it distills the most power and leaves out the unnecessary that clogs so many texts.  

I've been talking with some people lately--and even in my last post--about living thankfully and gratefully, especially for the intangible.  This poem made me stop and think and breathe.  And it makes me want to write.  














Under the Magnolia by Carolyn Miller

I give thanks because I do not have
a great sorrow. My village has not
burned, my child has not died, my body
is not ravaged. I sit here on the ground
lucky, lucky. Somewhere, villages are burning,
somewhere, not too far away, children
are dying; in this great urban park
painstakingly constructed over sand dunes,
people live in the flowering bushes. But
just here, in front of me, is a bride and groom;
here is a child running with
a red ball; another child is rolling on
the grass. All I have to do is to decide
how much fear to let inside my heart
in this fragile, created place, this bowl of grass
surrounded by palms and cypresses and
shaggy-barked cedars and trees
whose names I do not know, long fronds
falling, clusters of lilac fruits depending like
bouquets. All we can do is trust
that we belong here with the flowers: white
iris and Iceland poppies, a blur
of primroses, beds where flowers are
a crowd of color, where they close in the dark,
where the first light finds them starred
with dew. The trees seem to know
what I do not know; even the cultivated grass
understands some chain of being I can only
guess at, whether it is God’s mind, or
the erotic body of the Goddess, or some
abstract kind of love, or
some longing for existence that includes
the fern trees, the new buds of cones on the
conifers, the white butterflies, the skating boys,
the hooked new buds of the magnolia
that look like claws holding on
to life, the curved thick petals of magnolia
in the grass, some gone to rust, some creased,
some streaked, others freckled, others magenta
at the curved stem end, others cracked,
all lined with long veins branching out
to the petal’s edge.

looking for beauty and remembering how to live.

Springtime is when I come alive again--especially this year when winter seemed to stretch way too far into April.  The blossoms in the park and on the streets and behind my apartment make my heart swoon--and I'm always trying to capture them with my camera as their fleeting nature always gives me a sense of urgency and the beauty reminds me of what is real and true.

I'm currently on page 445 of 605 in A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.  My thought when I picked this one was that I was moving through books so quickly that it would be wonderful to have a long read that I could linger in for a while--I'm definitely lingering.  My nightly exhaustion from unpacking and setting up our apartment left me making about 5 pages of progress a night.  Luckily we are finally feeling more settled and I've resumed my mostly normal reading habits before bed. Then, of course in the past week and a half I've also had to read The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer and Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson for my graduate class.  Talk about a disrupted reading life. Ha.

Through the class I've been learning a lot about myself as a reader alongside how to best teach my students.  We moved in about a month ago now and I can say with absolute certainty that not taking time to write about my reading each weekend--which is basically taking time to reflect on the world around me and where I find myself in it--has left me feeling unsettled and not like myself.  So even though I'm not quite done with the book yet, I feel compelled to write about where my brain has been lingering over the past month or so while reading it.

A Fine Balance is a book about how 4 people's lives come together in India in the 1970s: a woman who was widowed in her 20s after three years of marriage and has struggled and strived to remain independent, an uncle and nephew pair who were bold enough to learn a trade above their caste and left their village to seek work in the city, and a young student who was sent by his parents from their comfortable home and general store in the mountains to the city to study.  What I've been able to get to know the most through this book beyond these characters is an India that I confess I was utterly uneducated about: when in 1975 the Prime Minister declared a state of emergency that allowed the President to rule by decree and suspend elections and civil liberties.

When the student comes from the mountains to study, he is stunned by the way people live.  His new friend tells him: "The problem with you is, you see too much and smell too much.  This is big-city life--no more beautiful snow covered mountains.  You have to learn to curb your sissy eyes and nose," (238).  As a wide-open-spaces lover turned long-time city dweller, over the years my own eyes have shifted into what I find beautiful.  Growing up, I spent so much time in t
he woods or in my midwestern suburban town where everything seemed picture perfect.  Beauty in New York is defined differently than my creekside wildflowers, backyard tomato garden, or street medians with planters.  New York's beauty is mostly man-made, be it in the architecture or the energy, but it is also side by side with rats and urine-baked sidewalks in the summertime and of course, millions of people, most of whom do not live in luxury apartments or take cabs to work.  

The question I've been left thinking about is "what is beauty and how do we construct our lives around it?" The two tailors in the book live in one of the city's slums until the government forcefully removes the residents and levels the slum in the name of "beautification."  Of course in reading the story, I got to know not only the tailors, but the way of life in the slum and see pictures of the people there: and once you know the people, you begin to see the beauty--even if it's amid a mass "toilet" that lies on the other side of the train tracks. Because there is a line that forms at sunrise to fill a few buckets with water from a single pump and the people in it are capturing water for their families to sustain their lives and having conversations and living life together.

So, sitting here in my apartment I've worked hard to make visually appealing and to feel like a home, I want to challenge myself to seek out true beauty this week: to look for it most of all in the spirits of people--be it my students, the deli guys who know my coffee order by heart, the people I sit next to on the train, or the ones I pass by on the street.  I want the spirit and beauty of humanity to be as much of a comfort to me as springtime blossoms or coming home to clutter-free counters and a tea kettle waiting for me.

Graduate School + Moving = Not good for the old blog

I started a new graduate program in January and my usual reading-for-pleasure time has been confiscated by reading-for-school time, which, for the most part, has been really engaging and forced me to spend some time in young adult literature as well as reading some professional books.  I've been reminded of how powerful literature can be for my students when paired with opportunities for response.   I've written about the books I've read for class--Charlotte's Web, Wringer, Esperanza Rising, Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, and Chains in my "reader's notebook" for class and  I'm hoping that I'll have the time to write about a few of them on this blog, but with the tempo of my spring so far, I'm a bit doubtful.  

I started packing up my old apartment about a month ago.  I moved in to the new apartment about a week and a half ago.   On top of moving, I had family in town, went out of town to visit family, had stacks of papers to grade and units to plan, and a major project for my graduate school class to complete.














I've read some incredible books in the midst of it all, that again, I hope to write about on Saturday mornings in the near future: Night by Elie Wiesel, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.  Currently, I'm slowly making my way through A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, which was not only recommended by two of my favorite literary kindred cousins, but I was reading it on the subway one evening and a woman came up to me to tell me what an incredible book it is.

My days at home have been spent painting and cleaning and unpacking, so I'm hoping for a day in the near future to curl up and have a few hours to make some serious progress without wanting to just fall asleep immediately.  Here's a shot from this morning.  I'm hoping this is a sign that normal life is right around the corner.

On packing an apartment & Fahrenheit 451

I started a new graduate program and although I am doing one class at a time, it has, as I feared it might, taken a toll on my reading-and-writing-for-pleasure life.  The good news is my current class is called Literature for Older Children, so the books I'm reading and the thinking I'm doing aligns quite nicely with my passion for literacy.  But it also means I have a stack of 4 books I've finished that I want to write about.  I chose today's book based on the other current time-stealer of my life: moving.  

My new lease a few blocks away starts next Saturday, so I spent last night packing and ended up with 20 boxes of books.  I admire when people move here with a suitcase or two, and part of me craves the simplicity of space that accompanies such a move.  But I remember when I moved to New York almost ten years ago now and felt  I needed to bring my books with me so that I would remember who I was in this brand new city. And through 5--almost 6--apartments I have packed and unpacked and added to the stacks.  Handling every book I own last night was an incredible experience in reflection because I began to see my story in the conglomeration of texts: my elementary reading self in my mid eighties copies of The Wizard of Oz and Number the Stars, the eight Virginia Woolfs I read in half a semester and how I was never the same again, the striking poetry contained in the prose of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy that cultivated the kind of book I love to read as an adult.  

In keeping with my New Years resolution to read book I already own, I finished Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury a few weeks ago and it reignited (see what I did there?) my passion for not just reading as much as I can, but for getting as many books in front of my students as possible.  Reading in 2013 the futuristic book Bradbury wrote the book in 1950 was fascinating (and reminded me of reading Super Sad True Love Story a few years back) because though his portrayal of futuristic technological and political powers were close enough to feel incredibly eerie.  

Montag, the main character, is a fireman--and in his time that means they start fires to burn books rather than put fires out.  Books cause people to think and to question--they disrupt ones mental "peace"--so the government has decided to do away with them.  Montag begins to feel restless and decides to quietly figure out what it is about books that makes them so dangerous.  

He is asked by a closet former reader: "How did you get shaken up? What knocked the torch out of your hands?" 

Montag replies: "I don't know.  We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy.  Something's missing.  I looked around.  The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years.  So I thought books might help." 

"It's not the books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books...Take it where you can find it, in old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.  Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget.  There is nothing magical in them at all.  The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us." 

Yes. And so upon reading this book I was re-reminded to keep my eyes open for the mysteries and to ask questions.  I was re-reminded that if my life feels off-kilter, chances are I'm forgetting to dwell in the details that make life rich and instead choosing to occupy myself with errands and to-do lists.  Packing up my own books reminded me of the stories that enrich my story and grew my desire to share this with the 100 students I see everyday: that they might question the world and seek beauty and desire understanding.  And I can't do that unless I am living in such a way myself.