Jennifer Searls

Poems That Tell Stories and a Mother of Boys

By Leave a Comment

Read Aloud Poems CoverTo celebrate April as National Poetry Month, I’ve been reading poetry to my boys (most of) these days. When I was shelving J 820s a couple weeks ago I picked this book up and it’s proven to be an excellent choice. It’s a great collection on a wide variety of topics from authors well known, and not.

How fun to find Casey at the Bat included in the “Poems That Tell Stories” section. Many years ago  I memorized this poem and recited it for a school assignment. While I only have snippets of those poetic words still stored where I can find them, I found myself standing right back in my childhood delivery of the poem when I read through the arc of the story other night – feeling all the potential for glory and the danger of conceit, as if it were mine.

Alas, as I poured these memories  into my reading, building the poem to its final stanza:

“And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow”

….my boys followed along with mild amusement and entertained themselves with their vast sporting knowledge: “Three strikes means you’re out.”

Ah well. They may not love to kick, or run, or throw a ball as much as I did and do, but they both love story. And there is a poem called The Reading Mother in this collection! You can read it here. And should. And you can be sure that my boys have now heard these final lines many times over:

Oh, that each mother of boys were such!

You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold, 
Richer than I you can never be —
I had a mother  who read to me. 

2017 Reading Review

By Leave a Comment

And so 2017 was yet another “not much reading” year for me. But there were some good reads in there — a few highlights:

Picture books! I started my job as a library shelver in July and for a couple months I brought home a different picture book to read each day. But that could be a whole post of its own so I’ll just say here that I’m so grateful that routine introduced me to Grumpy Goat by Brett Helquist. It is now one of my favorite picture books.

I’ve never read Elizabeth Strout before and liked the two I read this year. I started Olive Kitteridge too, but my life has been stressful and distracting this year. I didn’t get the book finished before it had to be returned to the library this summer and by that time I had already watched the corresponding HBO miniseries so I haven’t had much incentive to return to the book and find out how it ends.

I read Columbine by Dave Cullen and then A Mother’s Reckoning by Sue Klebold, the mother of one of the Columbine shooters. It was a book pairing I highly recommend. Klebold’s story rooted deep in my mother-heart and I’ve circled back to her words a number of times since I read them last spring.

Two YA books I’m glad I read and do recommend – The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman. Race and mental health, respectively. Now that I think about it, I listened to both of these books and both were good audible picks.

I picked up a kindle copy of How to Survive A Shipwreck by Jonathan Martin early in the year, and am so glad I did. I was not familiar with Martin before reading this book, but found his presentation of faith exactly what I needed to help me grab hold and find language for my own faith again. I was glad to read Rob Bell’s latest book, What is the Bible, to further fuel this work.

I reread Barbara Brown Taylor Learning To Walk In The Dark in the fall because, well…..dark. And Dani Shapiro’s book Hourglass. Oh, my goodness. I love Shapiro’s writing. always. So thoughtful and beautiful.

And then Frederick Buechner released two new books toward the end of the year – The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life and A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory. BAM. Buechner. I will always be grateful for his voice and his exploration of this idea that “If God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives that he speaks.”

Finally, I ended the year with Heating & Cooling : 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly. This really was the first time I’ve paid attention to the concept of micro-memoir and while I may not be a huge fan of this book for the content particularly, I loved the presentation and really enjoyed reading it.

Now, just midway through January 2018 I’ve already read four books. Granted two of them are chapter books and a third is middle grade, but still!! In spite of the notable start, I really don’t have any expectations for this reading year, except that I will get to the end and have read some good stuff.

On Living in Layers of Grey: A Review of On Living by Kerry Egan

By 2 Comments

Several weeks ago my dad sent me a text to say he’d just finished reading Kerry Egan’s new book, On Living, and it made him think of me. My dad works as a chaplain in a senior housing community and Kerry Egan is a hospice chaplain, but Dad said the book was about more than hospice work and gave me enough hints to the book’s content that I immediately clicked over to our library website and put it on hold.

On Living Kerry EganI haven’t been reading much lately, but David picked the book up for me a couple days before Christmas and there it sat at the top of my stack when I was poking around for something to do toward the end of last week. On Living is an accessible book, starting with the layout. Within the hardbound green covers are pages with wide margins and plenty of white space between lines of text. A bit of an aside –  Pantone announced their annual color of the year in December and chose Pantone 15-0343 as the color for 2017. “Greenery is a fresh and zesty yellow-green shade that evokes the first days of spring when nature’s greens revive, restore and renew.” Greenery is the color of life. And, while not quite Pantone 15-0343, the color of life is the cover of Egan’s book, made more complete by the image of 5 life-sized leaves collected there. They are the color of spring.

Egan is a good storyteller and I was easily drawn to her side in this collection of stories where she regularly sat bedside with people through the dying and stood with their loved ones after. Her reflections are laced with honesty and she includes points of her own failure and fear. Through it all she sifts for meaning. And in this work, I was sold. With her stories, Egan draws focus to the very essence of living. “Things are never only as they appear. My hospice patients have taught me that. There are always layers to people’s lives, unseen memories under every face, every decision, every movement or lack of movement. There is always gray between the black and white.”

Throughout the book Egan weaves a grey thread from her own life into her storytelling by including some details about the drug induced psychosis she acquired during the birth of her first child and endured for months following. She integrates the telling of her own traumatic break with reality even as she examines the nature of self and soul in the living and dying of her patients.  “Do we have an essential soul, or is our identity at the mercy of what happens to us?” My experience with a traumatic brain injury more than a decade ago gives explicit shape to these questions in my own life and I may wrestle for the answers until the moment I die.

Egan’s search for meaning in her stories of the dying and the living is accessible, honest, and rich. I am grateful for her voice and I found deep resonance in the stories she told and the questions she raised. “Is your life one of regret or hope? Does it have to be one or the other? Is your body the locus of trauma, or a source of joy? Can it be both at the same time? Can you find kindness toward yourself and others amid your pain and anger and fear? Is there something real in all the facades and personas we create, or in the mysteries we encounter? Can life be both beautiful and crushing at the same moment?”

Both. And.
I think, Yes.

 

Favorite Books From My 2016 Reading List

By Leave a Comment

I read good books in 2016.

These were my favorite:
When Breath Becomes Air
Orbiting Jupiter
Pax
Silver People: Voices From the Panama Canal
Just Mercy
Behold The Dreamers
What Alice Forgot
On Living

A Few Quick Observations:
3 of my favorites were Middle Grade/YA: Orbiting Jupiter, Pax, Silver People
The book that set me on a path to learn more: Just Mercy
Books I wanted to talk about when I finished: What Alice Forgot & Behold the Dreamer
I suppose it is not surprising that this shortlist has When Breath Becomes Air and On Living for bookends – explorations of meaning-making in the complex stuff of living and dying.  And that….is why I read.

On Reading And Living: 2016 Reflections

By 1 Comment

I finished reading a couple books yesterday. Just in time to mark them on my 2016 Reading List. Just in time to make this NOT MY WORST READING YEAR since I started keeping track. BUT WAIT!  I just looked it up and nine years of tracking titles says: Nothing weird about this year! Weird was 2013 – 2014.

2016 – 35
2015 – 34
2014 – 86
2013 – 120
2012 – 41
2011 – 32
2010 – 39
2009 – 49
2008 – 25

So then, as I added the final two books to my list today, why did I feel like I’d just (barely) saved my reading year? My 2016 list has some good books on it. Books I am glad I read. Books I would recommend. I think the fact that my reading year FELT bad is simply a reflection of my lived experience with reading this year.

It was hard. I started a lot of good books that never made the list.

One lasting consequence of my brain injury is that the filters in my brain that are designed to help me sort and process input are now much more susceptible to overwhelm which effectively floods my brain and shuts it down. Through the years, I’ve learned strategies to avoid and manage these floods, but still, the effort is ever present reality. And when life throws curveballs, the work increases.

2016 threw curveballs.

In the first days of January, David wrapped up a chess game in a job change and by the end of the month we had moved back to Anchorage. We slept on the floor and ate off paper plates until our stuff arrived by delayed ship in mid February. In March and early April I navigated scary waiting rooms made specifically for breast lumps and biopsies. In April I flew to Oregon for my last WaterAfrica event – my 8th annual Walk4Water. In June I officially resigned from my design communication role with WaterAfrica, an organization that gave me the gift of opportunity and purpose in my early accident recovery and where I’d spent 10 years of volunteer and paid time. Not long after that I finished moving most of my design communication clients to other service providers and I effectively quit that work. In September, my boys both started in new school systems, and so I did too. In October I made the final decision to let my teaching license expire. In November I had my 3rd surgery in 4 years – this time an ankle tendon repair. The recovery has been challenging and continues into the new year.

The stuff of my 2016 left less of me available for the work and the reward of reading. And I felt the loss.

2016 challenged me to wonder again and again, who am I and what am I about? These are obviously not new questions for me, but this year they presented new angles and, in some cases, challenged me to make decisions and take definitive actions with consequences yet unknown.

So as I logged final books to my list this year, perhaps my sense that this act somehow saved my reading year is actually a reflection on the validating, hopeful words I read in the final pages of Kerry Egan’s book, On Living, where she writes:

I’ve heard people say – usually in an attempt to comfort or motivate others, or sometimes to stifle their grieving – that loss, tragedy, trauma don’t define you.
That, of course, is utter bullshit.
Anyone who has been through a great loss or a terrible trauma knows that the experience defines you. If there’s one truth that runs through my patients’ stories, it’s that. At the very end of their lives, they defined themselves by the stories they chose to tell, of the hard things they had been through.
But in watching how their stories developed – how they reflected on and reassessed and made new connections between those losses and other events of their lives – it had become clear to me that if those hard things define us, it was equally true that each of us gets to decide exactly how they define us. We get to decide what the definition is. We get to decide what it means.

Tomorrow I’ll start a new reading list. And continue my work on living.

2014 Reading Reflections

By Leave a Comment

It seems my reading rhythm requires a writing reflection on January 6. Second annual. Or is this the first annual if it’s the second time I’ve done it? Or is it even a numbered annual if it happened on the same date accidentally?  In any case, I counted 86 books last year. Here’s some breakdown:

17 audible
29 read aloud
10 ebooks
59 eye books
61 female authors
25 male authors
75 unique authors.

I attempted to record a little more data about my reading this year, but it turned out that I didn’t really care about keeping track of when I started and when I finished reading a book. Talking myself into recording details on a spreadsheet was rather ambitious anyhow and by mid-year I had settled agreeably back to simply writing a title down when I finished.

I think I quit more books this year than I ever have before. And I finished several I really didn’t care that much about and could just have easily aborted. I used no standard criteria for either of these solutions.

Speaking of criteria. I have long wondered about my criteria for including a book on my reading list. I kept track of page numbers for much of my early 2014 reading and in the process I decided that didn’t have anything to do with how I judge a book worthy of my list. I did read some books to the boys that didn’t make it to the list. It wasn’t that they were fundamentally different than the books that did make it to the list.

It basically comes down to the fact that it’s my list and so I make the rules. Maybe my rules are a bit evolutionary, but whatever. The books on the list are there because I read them.

As the year came to a close I found myself feeling like it’d been a year without any highlights. And then I looked back and saw these:

Diana Wynne Jones – what a story master. I’m not much of a rereader, but I reread Witch Week just to see “how did she do that?!”

Still Writing – Dani Shapiro : This easily landed itself on my favorite writing books list. And it inspired me to read Shapiro’s backlist to see how she uses her content in both fiction and nonfiction writing.

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage – Ann Patchett: I hadn’t read her before and thoroughly appreciated this collection of essays. Exploring her bookstore is on my Nashville To Do list.

Redefining Realness – Janet Mock: I’m so glad to have read her story. I can’t begin to understand her complex and difficult journey as a trans woman, but in reading, I hope –  a step toward greater awareness and care.

Surprised By Scripture – NT Wright: Yep. I want more of this story.

Hannah Coulter – Wendell Berry: A highlight because I really have never finished a Wendell Berry book until this. Kind of slow and quiet (True. I HAD just finished Game of Thrones) and I liked it. I’m recently interested in stories set in Place – and I’ll probably return to read more of this Port William community.

Barbara Crooker and Marie Howe – These were my poets this year.

Anne Lamott:  I re-read Traveling Mercies in September and I’m glad I did.

The Princess and the Goblin – George MacDonald: A regular re-read for me and always an intriguing favorite.

I read a lot of kids historical fiction this year and connected a lot more pieces of history than ever before. This is good.

 

Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner – Or – Thoughts on a Sweet Little Story

By Leave a Comment

Sitting in my chair by the window this morning, I was thinking about my September calendar and only half attending as I read aloud to the boys. Blue sky + white puffy clouds + sunshine replaced yesterday’s cold rain in my window view as my eyes ran fast across the words on the page in front of me. We’ve been working our way through a book list that features early America, and this morning we were reading The Cabin Faced West by Jean Fritz. It’s a sweet little story for younger kids about life on the western frontier = Western Pennsylvania in 1784. It’s a quiet tale about a little girl, Ann, who has moved with her family from Gettysburg to western Pennsylvania. Ann didn’t want to move west. She misses her cousin Margaret, school, and her life back in Gettysburg.

When we started this book a couple days ago, apparently I skipped the first page, which turned out to be basically a brief introduction by the author. bread_salt_wineIt clearly hinted that something toward the end of the story was true….and cool. I missed it. So this morning when we got to the part where George Washington appeared out of nowhere and asked Ann if he could come to dinner that evening, I guffawed. or something like that.

Then I read the final pages of the book and discovered the “postscript from the author” which essentially revisited the point of the first page: “Most of what happened to her (Ann) in this book is just a story, but some of it is true. There really was an Ann Hamilton; she was my great-great grandmother. As long as she lived, she told the story to her children and her children’s children, about the wonderful evening when George Washington rode up Hamilton Hill.”

Ah well. That IS cool.

But just prior to reading this remarkable bit about a famous dinner guest, I had been drawn out of my plans for September by this scene where Ann receives a surprise new cover for her diary:

Ann fitted the new deerskin cover over the diary. It was very handsome, made from the underpart of a deer’s skin where the brown shades into a honey color. It looked like a real frontier diary now, Ann thought as she stroked it. She began to turn the pages over, re-reading parts she had written. All at once it struck her that on the inside her diary wasn’t much like a frontier diary. For the first time she noticed that she had hardly written anything about the Western Country. Most of her entries were about Gettysburg, about Margaret, about her homesickness. If any outsider were to pick up this diary and read it, he might not even know where it had been written. She turned the pages more slowly. She had never mentioned what Hamilton Hill looked like. Ann jumped up. She didn’t want to think about Hamilton Hill now. She didn’t care if her diary did have a handsome new cover, she didn’t feel one bit like writing in it. She went inside the cabin and put the diary up on her shelf.

All day long as Ann went about her chores, she felt out-of-sorts and out of courage (emphasis mine). It wasn’t only that the McPhales had gone East while she was staying behind. She didn’t know what was bothering her, but everything she did went wrong. She cut her finger when she was chopping pumpkin for her mother to make a pumpkin pie. She spilled half a pail of milk as she was taking lunch to the men in the field. She caught her dress on a prickly bush and tore it. And every time she picked up the baby, he cried.

“This just isn’t your day,” her mother said toward the middle of the afternoon. “Why don’t you go on down the road and try to find some grapes? You’ll like that. But mind you don’t go too far.”

Oh Ann!!! How I know you, dear child!! That afternoon trip to find some grapes turned up a very famous dinner guest, and whatever I may think about the art of storytelling here, I found compelling messages embedded:

1. Sometimes life takes us places we don’t want to go.

2. Sometimes the effort and energy required to inhabit a place takes all the effort and energy we can muster and we can’t accurately find words. Or don’t have any.

3. Sometimes we need time and space to just go look for grapes. It is a gift to have people in our lives who recognize this and even more, to help make it happen.

So now……think George Washington’s coming to dinner, or maybe more to the point: thread from a great great grandmother.…After I finished reading and was thinking on these things, I came across this song entitled North, which was inspired by the artist’s newly purchased home but indeed I found so much more. (To be clear  – I am not simply talking about geographical Place in this post. Though the irony of this song title is not lost on me!)

4. As we inhabit whatever our place, may we find the strength and the nerve that it takes…..Give us Bread, Give us Salt, Give us Wine.

Reading and Re-Reading

By Leave a Comment

Last week I finally updated my 2014 Reading List here. It’s so hard for me to make a favorites list because I read books for a variety of reasons and so I’ve got a lot of different angles to evaluate. This is the first year I’ve noticed that I’ve spent a lot of time reading books that I haven’t bothered to finish. There are some books on the finished list that could just as easily have never got there. Maybe I’ll tell which, maybe I won’t. But in any case, I find I’m more willing to let books go these days.

That said – The Chrestomanci books, Barbara Crooker’s poetry, Still Writing, The Goldfinch, Redefining Realness, Surprised by Scripture, When We Were on Fire, Ice Whale, A Song of Ice & Fire, and Hannah Coulter have been highlights. (yes – really. George R.R. Martin and Wendell Berry side by side. Ah! the complexities of Jennifer’s reading choices.)

I follow a lot of trails in my reading and I’m generally not much of a re-reader. But George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin shows up repeatedly in my annual list making. It came up early this year. I think there’s something intriguing about a book that I look for and read more than once. At least … I’m intrigued. This book is short and manageable. Perhaps that’s why. It’s a kid’s fairytale after all. It’s got a princess, goblins, a wise mother, and a poor miner’s boy. It’s got danger and heroic action. It’s got friendship and family. And it’s got this bit about an invisible thread….

The Princess has a mysterious old great great grandmother who lives high in the castle and can only be seen by those who have eyes to see her (the Princess can). In one scene the grandmother gives the Princess a “shimmering ball…something like spun glass” that is attached by invisible thread to a ring made of fire-opal, which the grandmother also gives to the Princess. The Princess, enamored with all the loveliness, is at once disappointed and confused when her grandmother takes the ball back and shuts it in a drawer:

‘But what use can I make of it, if it lies in your cabinet?’

‘That is what I will explain to you. It would be of no use to use – it wouldn’t be yours at all if it did not lie in my cabinet. Now listen. If ever you find yourself in any danger…you must take off your ring and put it under the pillow of your bed. Then you must lay your forefinger, the same that wore the ring, upon the thread, and follow the thread wherever it leads you.’

‘Oh, how delightful! It will lead me to you, grandmother, I know!’

‘Yes. But, remember, it may seem to you a very roundabout way indeed, and you must not doubt the thread. Of one thing you may be sure, that while you hold it, I hold it too.’

Oh! the thread-following faith of the Princess! A frightful, beautiful story. Please tell it to me again.

I’ve finished 62 books so far this year and have read many more pages of books I either didn’t finish or haven’t finished. When I started keeping track of my reading trail, 62 would have been a very high final number for one year. Last year I logged 121 books. I think this might be a bad thing. I am competitive. I’m running behind. That is all.