Posts filed under 'Reviews'
Yes, it’s time now for something completely different, a brief break from the boys, the baking, and the book. I’ve got alliteration on my mind because I’ve just finished Beyond Beowulf, the sequel to Beowulf. What? You didn’t know it had a sequel? Well, it didn’t, not until recently, and it is a roaring good read. Honestly, I picked it up the other night, hoping to be lulled quickly to sleep by the gentle rhythms of the iambic pentameter; two hours later, I was still wide awake, racing to the poem’s end.
Now, I’ve always loved a good epic. I learned Latin in high school and happily read all twelve books of The Aeneid in the original. Eventually I took lessons in Greek, too, though I never did well enough with it to get more out of Homer’s poetry than I had in translation. Still, despite undergraduate and graduate degrees in literature, I’d never read Beowulf. I still haven’t, but now I not only want to read that, but then I want to reread Beyond Beowulf. Truly — it’s a lovely story of a people trying to find a new place to live, plus it has trolls that dissolve into inky stains when they’re touched with fire. What more do you want from a book?
June 3rd, 2006
When I was pregnant with my first child, I dreamt the baby was a girl. She was beautiful in my dreams, blonde and blue-eyed. But, nightmarishly, she was a teenager, one of the popular ones. I woke in a cold sweat at the thought of producing a “mean girl,” like one that had so intimidated me in high school.
I was surprised and therefore also relieved that my baby was a boy; when my second son was born three years later I was surprised again (no mother’s intuition here!) yet also the very tiniest bit crestfallen. I’d just always assumed that, like my mother and my sister before me, I’d have one – or some – of each, a son and a daughter. But here I am, the mother of sons, and quite happily so; what am I doing writing about It’s A Girl?
Honestly, I’d devoured It’s A Boy this winter, finding so many points of common experience with these amazing writers, so many stories that entertained and assured me about mothering sons. I wanted more. Some of these writers appear in both collections; some of them are new to me. All of them spoke to me about being a mother, regardless of the gender of your children; taught me about being a daughter (because of course I am still that); and reminded me to lend a more understanding ear to my friends who are mothers of daughters.
I was moved by “Links,” Jennifer Lauck’s 3 a.m. musings, as she holds her newborn baby girl, on the birth mother she never knew. Rachel Hall’s gorgeous “Breasts: A Collage” has me paying closer attention to nursing as these milky days with my baby wind down. And Catherine Newman’s sweet essay,”Baby Fat,” reminded me what we can and should learn about our bodies and ourselves from our children: “So my job now is to love myself, because…well, not to be immodest, but the baby wants to be just like me… Let her always love [her] tummy. And let me be more like her.”
I love the clear and direct feminism of Rebecca Steinitz’s “Tough Girls,” an essay I thought about a lot recently when, bike shopping with my son, he headed right for a “girly bike.” And while I can’t relate to the details in Miriam Peskowitz’s essay about her cheerleading daughter , I do relate to the message: we need to let our kids be themselves. I thought of my son’s recent experiments with “dress-up hair” when Peskowitz writes of her daughter, “She’s experimenting, of course, as we all are: figuring out who she will be today as she steps out to be in the world, figuring out how to be a girl.”
I was impressed by Jenny Block’s bravery, in “On Being Barbie,” writing about how her own plastic surgery might affect her daughter, and moved by Ann Douglas’ “The Food Rules.” Her essay and Jill Siler’s brilliant, aching “Twenty Minutes” also got me thinking, reluctantly, about mothering an older child. It seems hard some days, my life seems so busy with my four year-old and my almost-one-year old, but I know, truly, our struggles are so uncomplicated, our days so sweet. I hate to think of looking wistfully at Ben’s back as he heads into school, longing for a glance back from him, but I know that day is coming all too soon.
Barbara Atkinson’s essay, “Isolation,” speaks to that longing, too. “But—oh!—where is that sticky hand wrapped around my finger, those feet stumbling slightly as we inch our way around the block, stopping to look at every rock and flower and bug? Where is the weight of that buttery-scented, sleeping head on my shoulder? It’s funny that I ever worried she would not feel separate from me when I find myself so carefully, delicately trying to rewrap those tender threads that connected us.”
And it is Atkinson who writes the sentence I want posted on billboards as reminders to us all: “No man is an island, but every new mother is a sandbar, with regular tidal flooding and the occasional threat of submersion.”
Sunday is Mother’s Day. It’s A Girl (or it’s sibling, It’s A Boy) would make a fine, meaningful gift for any mother you know.
May 11th, 2006
I still remember when my sister first contacted me about a writing group – with childcare! — that was starting up in Berkeley. I was a new mom in San Francisco, journaling like crazy, trying to make sense of my changed life, but I couldn’t get it together, too overwhelmed by my colicky boy, to join the group. Months later, the group was becoming a website and some time after that, I was invited aboard as an editor. It’s hard to believe that colicky boy is now a robust preschooler and Literary Mama is now a thriving website with a gorgeous anthology.
But, despite my opening, I don’t have maternal feelings toward the book. Others were much more directly involved in the birthing of this collection. And although editors are often referred to as midwives, I don’t have that relationship to the book, either. Rather, I feel toward the book the way I do when I run into a mom friend, familiar from the playground, all dressed up for a cocktail party. I almost don’t recognize her in her finery – she’s so familiar, yet I can’t place her at first — but I’m delighted when I do: Wow! You look great!
So after pausing to admire the gorgeous cover, to appreciate the comfortable weight of the book, I dove right in to see how the essays I know best, the ones that ran in Literary Reflections, look in their new home. Joanne Hartman’s lovely, quietly funny Evolution of a Muse speaks to me even more directly now that my first muse has started to talk back, and my second reminds me to capture these fleeting baby moments before they evaporate.
Lizbeth Finn-Arnold’s encounter with Henry Thoreau in Out of the Woods (an essay which is inspiring some thoughtful discussion over at Midlife Mama and at ReadingWritingLiving) starts bitterly: Thoreau may advise “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,” “But Thoreau wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes in his tiny cabin with my two tots.” But a visit to Walden Pond with those rambunctious kids helps Lizbeth figure out how to create the solitude she needs to write in the midst of her chaotic life.
Finally, poet Nicole Cooley’s essay starts “A confession: I was one of those people I shake my head at now, a woman who thought having a baby would not change my life.” She goes on to detail just how completely, how importantly, her baby changes her life and her poetry.
The revelation to me, with my essay-writer’s bias, is the poetry in the book, which I confess to rarely reading on the site. Lori Romero’s shape poem, Pregnancy, opens the anthology with a wonderfully fresh take on what can be, in less assured hands, something of a gimmick. Her recitation of the distractions and discomforts of pregnancy almost made me miss it. In Meegan Mulholland’s extraordinary Miscarriage of an English Teacher, the speaker’s careful, continually correcting grammar tries to keep a tight rein on the emotions of dashed expectations. Rachel Iverson’s gorgeous Namaste brings tears to my eyes with its simple, lovely wishes for her child: “a lemonade / stand white sand, green corn / tamales, sidewalks and marine / layer mornings/ newsprint on your fingers, / bubble baths, earthworms in / black dirt, satellite t.v. and / at least one big win…” And Linda Lee Crossfeld’s moving Packing the Car makes me grateful that my son is still just packing a lunchbox.
But the writing in this anthology is not all poignant moments and wistful reflections. These writers are funny. The fabulous Jennifer Eyre White’s Analyzing Ben flat-out cracks me up. In Lisa Rubisch’s How to Make a Meat Pie and other Tales of the Ambitious Mother, cooking for her toothless child inspires one of my favorite sentences of all time: “Feel terrific about this milk shake of meaty love you’ve created for your son.” These writers are sexy, whether they’re flinging chocolate at their daughters to teach a lesson about love, or stealing away for a charged moment with another kid’s dad. These writers are smart, compelling, and tough.
I could go on. I shouldn’t go on. Stop reading this blog and start reading the book.
February 6th, 2006