Orion Author Reading Lists

Laurie Kutchins’ Confessions on Reading & Lists

January 28, 2010

My confession is this: it’s easy for me to keep a reading list, easy to suggest lots of titles to Orion‘s readership, easy for me to feel passionate about whatever titles/authors/subjects/genres find their way onto the list.  It is easy for the list to change, to ever-change; easy for the list to grow longer, always longer; it never shrinks. 

My confession is this: it is easy for me to list, but not to read my list. How rarely I fully immerse in one book at a time, or in a whole book over time in such a way that I feel I’ve done it right, in such a way that the author’s breath and experience become part of mine.  I love it when a book changes the way I breathe! I love it when a book makes me disappear, when a book says, or gestures with its pagey fingers, “come hither” and I go wherever it beckons me to go.  But I am a slow reader, and this slows me down in everything I do, even in getting this list to Orion. If I cannot hear the book’s words being uttered aloud between my two ears, if I cannot feel-hear the orb of each sentence, so much of the book’s world is lost to me.  I’m so terribly slow in a world that loves speed. I read slowly, and thus reading lists—especially the long ones!—intimidate me even as I gravitate to them.  And I confess, probably an offshoot of being slow, I am a dabbler.  I read a bit of this, a bit of that, not unlike how I travel, always meaning to come back to that stonecrop poem on the prairie of Jim Galvin’s beautiful kicking poems, or that Garcia Lorca essay, Play and Theory of the Duende where he is describing the lived experience of, rather than the idea of, duende.

So here is not a reading list, but a sloppy video camera panorama—a glimpse (in no particular order), a hodgepodge of the stacks, clutters, chaos of books that currently surround me, and are calling me hither, as I hereby vow to become a better reader, to commit more time, to read faster and longer, to become more organized, more methodical, to remember more; as I promise to complete one list and start another, as I resolve to read all the books scattered in my nooks and crannies, or at least the promise of a title or a first line: (as Rilke’s Book of Hours drifts up from my bedside pile and I open to a blue feather I’ve tucked there and find myself reading both German and English translation ‘If I had grown up in a land where days/ were free from care and hours were delicate...’):

The Fortieth Day, Kazim Ali.
What the Living Do; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, Marie Howe.
Muscular Music; Wind in a Box, Terrance Hayes.
A Private History of Awe, Scott Russell Sanders.
The Necessary Angel (very tattered, yellowed, with a bookmark of a skeleton reading a big book from Paperback Traffic, Polk Street, San Francisco), Wallace Stevens.
The Rain in the Trees, and anything W.S. Merwin.
The Blue Plateau: a Landscape Memoir, Mark Tredinnick.
The Glance, Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks, his great Introduction called “A Soul-Friendship”) Also Open Secret: Versions of Rumi, John Moyne and Coleman Barks.
The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry, Rafael Campo.
The Moonlit Pond: Korean Classical Poems in Chinese, translated and introduced by Sung-Il Lee (opened to page 46, I keep coming back to this first line “Driven out of the court to become a sorrowful bird…” written by “Deposed King Tanjong 1441-1457”). 
The Lessons of St. Francis, John Michael Talbot with Steve Rabey.
Figure Studies and Pinion: an Elegy, Claudia Emerson.
Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone, Gary Ferguson and Douglas Smith (I did read this whole book and re-read the portrait chapters which inspired me to write a series of wolf portrait poems in their voices).
Paradox & Healing: Medicine, Mythology & Transformation, Michael Greenwood and Peter Nunn.
Memory for Forgetfulness, Mahmoud Darwish.
Carpathia, Cecilia Woloch.
What’s Happening to My Body?: The Book for Girls, Lynda Madaras (My daughter is almost twelve—this book is hers, but I’m reading it too—these books have changed so much since I was 12!).
Sing Down the Moon, Scott O’Dell (also hers, but beautiful!).
Dark Night of the Soul, St. John of the Cross—new translation and introduction by Mirabai Starr.
Holy Bible (the copy my 91-year-old friend Osie loaned me—her book so studied and lived by her that there is a path her thumb has worn down the center where she has thumbed for daily passages.)
Winter World: the Ingenuity of Animal Survival, Bernd Heinrich.   

Ann Pancake’s Reading List

January 07, 2010

Most of what I’ve read in the past year and hope to read for the next falls into one of two camps. The division reflects how I live divided always between two beloved places: Appalachia, my spiritual home; and the Pacific Northwest, my physical one. At times, I find the division a grief. At other times, a gift. As I look back over my have-read and to-read lists, I’m filled with gratitude for the gift. 

2009 was a rich year for Appalachian writers and those who like to read them. Just the past few months have brought four new works on mountaintop removal mining, including Silas House and Jason Howard’s Something’s Rising, a rousing and historically important collection of interviews with and essays about Appalachians fighting mountaintop removal. Howard has also edited We All Live Downstream, an anthology of poetry, short stories, essays, and novel excerpts, again, written by people directly involved in the mountaintop removal struggle. Plundering Appalachia, edited by Tom Butler and Doug Tompkins, features photographs and essays on the mining practice, and Silas House, Shirley Stewart Burns and Mari-Lynn Evans have published Coal Country as a companion to Evans’ new film of the same name. (I should note that Shirley Stewart Burns’ 2007 Bringing Down the Mountains is, in my opinion, the most comprehensive discussion of mountaintop removal available.)  Two more books I’m looking forward to are Ron Eller’s highly praised Uneven Ground (2008), a history of economics, “development models,” and community in Appalachia since 1945, and Chad Montrie’s To Save the Land and People (2003), a history of resistance to Appalachian strip mining.
Here are a few more very recent books by Appalachian writers, all written out of a deep connection to place:

• Unthinkable: Selected Poems, 1976-2004, from the fierce and original West Virginia poet laureate Irene McKinney;
• Lark and Termite, the National Book Award finalist by novelist Jayne Anne Phillips;
• Upheaval, a collection of short stories by Kentuckian Chris Holbrook;
• Bucolics, by poet Maurice Manning; and
• Thin Places, in which West Virginia native Ann Armbrecht reflects on the places of Nepal and the human soul.

Now I turn toward the norther, wester, and wetter part of my place identity. A year ago, I saw an exhibit of Salish Coastal art at the Seattle Art Museum. I had no background in Northwest Native art and went to the exhibit out of sheer curiosity, but the experience was so profound that it launched for me a year of transformative reading about Northwest Coastal art, culture, and shamanism. Here are some of the most memorable and affecting books of my excursion so far:

• Tangible Visions: Northwest Coast Indian Shamanism and Its Art by Alan Waldman, haunting and sublime; 
• Story As Sharp As A Knife, Robert Bringhurst’s translations of classical Haida myth, surrounded by his brilliant reflections on anthropology, literature, aesthetics, and more;
• The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed by John Valliant, which examines Haida Gwaii’s past and present, the history of Northwest logging and trade, and a contemporary outlaw environmentalist;
• Shamanism: An Expanded View of Reality, a collection of scholarly articles on the subject edited by Shirley Nicholson; 
• What I’ve Always Known, Tom Harmer’s first-person account of studying with inland Salish elders;
• Preston Singletary: Echoes, Fire, and Shadows, by Melissa G. Post, a retrospective of Singletary’s stunning interpretations in glass of traditional Tlingit art;
• Monkey Beach, a novel by Haisla native Eden Robinson;
• Raven Travelling: Two Centuries of Haida Art, edited by Scott Steedman; and
• Eirik Johnson: Sawdust Mountain, by Tess Gallagher, Elizabeth Brown, Eirik Johnson, and David Guterson, bewitching photographs of the devastated beauty of the post-industrial rural Northwest, which take me full circle back to visions of Appalachia.

Finally, I close with five books, all concerned with place and spirit, that I’ve read in the past five years and that still surface in my mind almost weekly: 

• Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky, essays by Trudy Dittmar
• Strange Piece of Paradise, a memoir by Terri Jentz
• Ordinary Wolves, a novel by Seth Kantner
• King Baby, poems by Lia Purpura
• The Abstract Wild, essays by Jack Turner

Ann Pancake is the author of Strange As This Weather Has Been, a novel about a West Virginia family devastated by mountaintop removal mining and a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award. Her collection of short stories, Given Ground, was a Bakeless Prize winner.

 

Joni Tevis’s Bookshelf

December 17, 2009

Alaska
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I started reading this during the summer, while on a research trip to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. After a long day of paddling the Canning River, it was such a pleasure to curl up in the tent and read a little Brothers K by the light of a 2 a.m. sun. I’m close to the end now; the trial’s about to start. Suspense!

Plants of the Western Boreal Forest and Aspen Parkland, Johnson, Kershaw, MacKinnon, and Pojar. Another Refuge read. I bought it for its sections on mosses (seep-swamp, dung, peatland) and lichens (club, leaf, crust and hair), but its explanations of grasses and sedges are wonderful too. Clear photographs made this book worth its weight in my backpack, and now that I’m back home, the lively notes make me hungry for field work.

Seasons of Life and Land: The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Subhankar Banerjee. Incredible photos and thoughtful essays about the vast swath of land some call “America’s Serengeti.” I’m saving up for a return trip in my Bush Pilot Fund, but in the meantime, this book of photojournalism reminds me of how mind-blowing that place is.

Tanaina Plantlore/Dena’ina K’et’una, Priscilla Russell Kari. This useful book shows how closely plants, fungi, and lichen are linked with Native lifeways in central Alaska. Practical reading for anyone who wants to learn how to “read” that landscape more closely.

Carl Donohue, blogger, http://skolaiimages.com/journal/.  A friend and fellow devotee of the Refuge, Donohue lives the good life up in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. He’s an amazing photographer and an insanely knowledgeable and competent guide. I check his blog to see what autumn’s looking like in the boreal forest—and to find out if he’s managed to snag any good wolf photos yet.

Teaching
Swallow the Ocean, Laura M. Flynn. I just finished teaching this fine memoir to my nonfiction workshop. My students responded to Flynn’s deft scene-making, integrated research, and depictions of place. And every time I reread this book, it rewards me with new particulars to admire. Truly a keeper.

The Next American Essay, John D’Agata, editor. Another book I’m teaching in my nonfiction forms workshop. Where else can you find essays to fit themes like “Fable,” “Improv,” and “Unusual Shapes”? I want my students to know how to write personal essays, memoir, and lyric essays—and to look at shapes from their daily lives (football games, pop song lyrics, debates) and use those shapes in service of their material. This anthology helps them see the wide range of what’s possible in the essay form.

History
Blood Ties and Brown Liquor, Sean Hill. The Winchester Monologues and Night-Sea, Rachel Moritz. Lately I’ve been in the mood for poetry that harnesses the power of voice and historical specifics, and these three books accomplish that, exploring African-American life in Milllegeville, Georgia through the persona of Silas Wright; the mythos surrounding Sarah Winchester, heiress to the gun fortune; and the public/private lives, and griefs, of Abraham Lincoln. I love all three of these books. Emphatic reminders of the variety and vitality in contemporary American poetry.

The Men and the Mills: A History of the Southern Textile Industry. Mildred Gwin Andrews. I’m working on an essay about work and place in three kinds of Appalachian factories: glass, steel/screw machines, and textile mills. I live in upstate South Carolina, an area that historically had a lot of textile mills, but most of them closed ten to twenty years ago. This book gives context for what once defined this area economically.

Addictive & Amazing
The Bible. King James Version. Always on my nightstand. I’ve been rereading James lately—succinct, practical, wise. Maybe the long haul of Brothers Karamazov is to blame, but I’ve been enjoying the counterpoint of short books, like the minor (so-called) prophets Habakkuk, farmer Amos, and Hosea, with Gomer his heartbreaking wife.
The Truant Lover, Juliet Patterson. Patterson’s work is rich with compression, power, and a precision I’d like to steal for myself. These poems are a lodestone I return to again and again. They make me want to get back to Lake Superior’s North Shore, with its cobbles, spruces, and dark blue water.

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather. Once I finish The Brothers Karamazov, I’m going on a Cather jag. I read Death Comes for the Archbishop not long ago, and I only wish I’d read it sooner. I’ve taught My Antonia for years, and it’s still fresh and surprising to me; I think I’d avoided Death Comes because of its title. But now I think the title is the counterbalance to the rest of the book, a picaresque history of the title character as he lives out his life in New Mexico. Moving prose.

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville. One of my all-time favorites. Scientific information! Immersion journalism! Vivid images! Weighty monologues! The scene where Starbuck tries to convince Ahab to turn back to old Nantucket, and the captain almost, almost relents—it gets me every time. As Cather says of Antonia, I say of Moby—it’s “a rich mine of life.” And well-suited for dinner party read-alongs.

Joni Tevis is the author of The Wet Collection (Milkweed Editions), a book of lyric essays exploring connections between natural history, ancient texts, and family myths. She teaches literature and creative writing at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.