I now understand that the secret to good farming – a secret shared by all the farmers in this book – is to care for the farm than for any product that the farm may produce….all these farmers are much more focused on the soil – both literally and metaphorically….what occupies their attention day in an day out, is the complex web of interactions among animals, plants, and nutrients.

I saw this book being discussed over at Tweetspeak Poetry and their interesting conversations inspired me to check it out and join in. I didn’t learn anything particularly new to my way of thinking, but it was a good read and a thoughtful exploration of the importance of applying an integrated, holistic lens when managing a farm, and in the same way, when caring for the body-soul-mind.

“I will learn the steady accumulation of devastating losses that often accompany chronic illness, one loss after another after another, each one a new reckoning of grief and a new reorientation to the discipline of joy.”

This book is full of honest story and I appreciate that. Perhaps I would have gotten more from it if I’d read it with my eyes. But as I listened, somewhere in all the words, I heard this line about the discipline of joy and BAM. The book was worth reading for that.

The picture you get at the end of a connect-the-dot activity really depends on which dots you decide to use. So try things and go through phases. Put down a lot of dots. Later you can look back and pick any of those dots to create a picture of how you became who you are. And if you don’t like the picture you end up with, you can always choose different dots, which just goes to show destiny isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

This book of essays as memoir was laugh out loud funny at times and fun to read all the way through. But for me it also felt jumbled and too wide ranging – making me work to connect some of the dots. It was thoughtful, but it also felt very particular to white middle class mom culture and stopped short in the development of some resonate universal themes.

I enjoyed the two interviews I heard with Mary Laura Philpott in August >> First here with Anne Bogel on What Should I Read Next, which inspired me to request Philpott’s book from the library. And then it was fun to find the book had arrived on my hold shelf the same day I listened to Jonathan Rogers interview her on his writerly podcast, The Habit. (+it’s fun to hear her talk about Parnassus Books, having been through there myself these past two summers).

Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don’t want to think about the rest. Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.

This book, hanging out at the edges of my TBR list for a long time now, I’ve finally read it. Listened to it, actually. And that matters. I probably wouldn’t have bothered to finish if I was reading with my eyes. But the audible narration carried me along. It’s well written, but too much work for me. I didn’t care enough. There are more books to tell the story of these two friends of a particular time and particular place. But I don’t need to read them.

Please be aware, I am writing to you to make sense of myself.

…we have both arrived at the same point in our lives. More behind us than ahead of us. Paths chosen that define us. Enough time left to change.

I liked this novel-in-letters. Easy-to-read, with lots for me to think about having come to the middle ages myself. And it’s a debut novel by a 70+-year-old! Go on.

I forget things—I know that—but I’m not mad. Not yet. 

I listened to this one and liked it that way. Losing your mind stories fascinate me. This was good, but I thought the ending wrapped too easy.

Where you, cancer, copy furiously,
I fumblingly create.
You can not uncreate me.

I learned of this poetry chapbook when I heard Jonathan Rogers interview Katy Bowser Hutson in the first episode of his new podcast The Habit: Conversations With Writers About Writing. Her words resonated with some of my own experiences with trauma and so I went looking for her book, Now I Lay Me Down To Fight. I wanted to see for myself what she had made from the place of vulnerability that is cancer in her body. She writes in the intro: “There is a magic, a medicine to putting words to terrible things. I wrote through all of it: to face fear, to say it out loud, to pray, to fling it all away from me.”

Out of terrible things, she has made art. A gorgeous handhold for the journey.

You will either remember reading this and know why you remember reading this, or you will remember reading this and not know why you remember reading this, or you will not remember reading this, possibly forever.

I am not much of a re-reader. This was a re-read for me. The truth is – I don’t much remember the character or the content (or perhaps care), but the style and the structure and the writing….studying that. Nicely done.