🧵 Thursday Thread: It's Time for Another Book Thread!
What are you all reading right now? And why is it holding your attention? And most importantly, why should the rest of us be reading it too?!
If Andrea Gibson’s too-early death made anything clear, it’s that words have real power—real, lasting power—in real people’s lives, in real time. The outpouring of genuine grief over losing Andrea’s physical presence with us on this earthly plane came mostly from people who, like me, never knew Andrea in “real life,” never met them in person, never hugged them or even shook hands, and yet … we felt like we knew them, and I bet I’m not the only one who also felt known by them.
How astonishing, that words can do that.
Not every writer’s words will reach as many people as Andrea’s words did, so it can be hard to remember, if you are a writer who does not happen to be famous or widely read, that your words truly matter to other people and can change their lives. But it’s happening all the time.
I saw it happen (and still do sometimes) with The Part That Burns. People wrote to me often in the first couple of years after that memoir came out, wrote to say the most astounding things. Women in their ‘70s who had been sexually abused in childhood and never told anyone until me! Women who carried the shadow of abuse in ways they had not fully understood, and who felt seen and understood for the first time. Social workers and teachers and judges who felt, through my story, the staggering impact of their work in the world.
We don’t have to write a book, though, for our words to matter.
Thing of what happens here, in the Writing in the Dark community, week after week, as we do language together, wrestling with words and sounds and images, striving to arrange them in a way that is alive and true, so that other people can find their own humanity in our sentences. Just think of how you’ve gotten to know each other’s stories—the corners of old loss, thick with dust, the real-time unravelings, houses unbuilding themselves in the dark, the hungers and aches folding into themselves, and also the blindingly bright dreams, so hot we can barely speak them for fear of burning our tongues. And yet we do, we do speak these stories, whether wearing the cloak of fiction or naked as we came (thank you, Sam Beam for that fragment of language that will never, ever not hit me in the heart).
And as we speak the stories in the language of art, real art, literary sculptures of shape and sound, we see each other in a new, clearer light, unobscured by the protective personas that keep us safe out there, where the water is not as warm. We come to see ourselves as we truly are: the unfinished brushstrokes, the hanging threads, the asymmetry and the wobbles, and also each other’s beautiful humanity, the way it moves among and between us like wind through grass.
It is my great, great honor to share this power of words, art, and community with you, and to not only witness the depth of creative connection and friendship happening here, but also take part in it as one of you, which I am.
It makes me grateful, too, for the writers “out there” who make work that inspires us and keeps us evermore connected to the enormous influence of the art of language in our lives.
And since we have not talked about books since February, it’s about time. I happen to have two novels on my nightstand right now—in addition to a stack of nonfiction—and they are The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong and North Woods by Daniel Mason.
I had already started North Woods when, as part of our Power of Place intensive, several of you pointed me to the first chapter of Emperor, so I stopped and read that in order to learn from it, talk about it, and teach it in our intensive as a stunning example of place as not just setting, but a force that exerts itself in the story, pressing on characters, pushing, pulling, and shaping them.
Somewhere right around that time, I signed with my agent for my second book, and since then I’ve been consumed with completing the book proposal, therefore, I have stalled on both novels. Now I have to decide which one to return to first (with nonfiction, I can have ten books going at a time, but I don’t love reading two novels at a time; I prefer to be wholly immersed in one story so that it feels realer than real).
As for why I chose these two books, well, Ocean Vuong, obviously. As for North Woods, my stepdaughter highly recommended it, and, based on the publisher’s description (and incredible reviews), I was immediately hooked:
When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: As the inhabitants confront the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.
This magisterial and highly inventive novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature, and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment, to history, and to one another. It is not just an unforgettable novel about secrets and destinies, but a way of looking at the world that asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone?
What about you? What are you reading now, or what have you read recently, or what can’t you wait to read, and why?
And, most importantly, what should all be reading with you?!
Love,
Jeannine
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