Nestle into a cozy couch as author Barbara K. Richardson reveals the value of a flashlight and the passage of (decades of) time in writing a historical ancestral Western epic. Yes, it's a "Between the Covers" guest blog for Denver's Tattered Cover Bookstore.Some Novels Write Us
At age 36, fresh out of graduate school with a bunch of dead poems and a despondent heart, I had a visitation. Clair and Ada, my two main characters, came riding out of the Void and descended together in a dream. They chatted and revealed themselves and their lives in early Utah, and took up nightly habitation. These women had a mission. They wanted to be on the page. They knew a greenhorn novelist has a lot to unlearn. Namely, the literary control I’d spent my MFA years perfecting would make writing about my Mormon ancestors nearly as much fun as pushing wet concrete up a slide. Perfectionism, polishing, cleverness, language for language’s sake, intelligence and the desire to be profound—all these went overboard in the first twelve years of writing my novel Tributary, which just hit bookstore shelves this September. I actually remember the pleasure of not remembering grammatical rules. Of not caring whether I came across as literary. Of cutting pretty writing to get to the goods. Of following a character’s heart which blazed out of the Void with its own sure track into little black marks that indicated its presence on a page where others could find it . . . Read more by clicking here. Thanks, Tattered Cover, for adoring books and helping authors do what they love most. Support your local bookstore, which supports the community and you!
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![]() In 1966, I ran the 100 yard dash alongside Dilaun Terry and all of the boys in our fifth grade class. I won. In sixth grade, Dilaun won the pentathlon. Fleet of foot, tiny, slender, with straight flying dark hair, she outran, out-jumped and out-threw every strapping young adored boy and girl Adelaide Elementary School placed at the starting line. (OK, it was a five-way tie with a basketball toss tie-breaker. Still, she won!) 43 years later, Dilaun and I re-met on Facebook. 45 years later, Dilaun read and reviewed my novel Tributary. She doesn’t normally read literary fiction. She’s a sculptor and a painter. She didn’t think she could write. She sent the review to me to see if it would do as an online review. I said, Oh my goddess—she’s outpaced the professional bloggers. I love this review.
Thanks so much, Dilaun. The stronger the woman, the better the tale.
![]() Why is it so often that humiliation and grace appear together, or in close proximity, if we are willing to listen? Do you remember a hugely humiliating time, when you were little, perhaps, when your spirit was reduced to cringing ashes? And did anyone or anything insert a saving grace? I Break All the Rules at Ben Franklin Elementary I am talking to a hundred of them about death, God and the Indians when one of them farts loudly and time stops; the silence and the stink hang there. All of the scoldings and whippings and public humiliations are not enough to stifle the low wave of giggles and then I say, Who farted? All hell breaks loose. The teachers are lined up along one wall; their faces freeze over. The principal rises, her jaw set like iron pipe. Jeffrey, she intones in an icy rage, you go wait in my office. NOW. The little boy rises from the sacred circle I have so carefully made. No, I say, able to save only one face, hers or his. I put my arm around him and sit him up front, next to me. When I am done she comes up to me with a look that would bring God to heel. 3 things you never do in a school, she says handing me my $50 check, Talk about God or death or violate a teacher’s authority. I give her back the check, which stops her in mid-reprimand. She seems pleased and dumbfounded. As I walk to my car, the students along one side of the building bang the windows and wave to me. They do not know I have just purchased Jeffrey’s redemption, all they know is that here is a man who laughs at farts and does not like the principal. —Red Hawk Humiliate, by root definition, means to bring low, to be made humble. So although we tend to avoid humiliation like some dread plague, the agonized captivity of it can somehow spring the trap for the soul’s release. Take two of the most humiliated women in Shakespeare’s plays, Desdemona and Ophelia. Hamlet wounds Ophelia’s heart cruelly, infecting her with his scorn and germy indecisiveness, until she drowns herself in the river. Desdemona—Othello’s perfectly attuned true wife—suffers at his hands literally, when he is duped into believing she has cuckolded him. Othello strangles her at play’s end. Put them in Pasternak’s hands and you get this. English Lessons When it was Desdemona’s time to sing, and so little life was left to her, she wept, not over love, her star, but over willow, willow, willow. When it was Desdemona’s time to sing and her murmuring softened the stones around the black day, her blacker demon prepared a psalm of weeping streams. When it was Ophelia’s time to sing, and so little life was left to her, the dryness of her soul was swept away like straws from haystacks in a storm. When it was Ophelia’s time to sing, and the bitterness of tears was more than she could bear, what trophies did she hold? Willow, and columbine. Stepping out of all that grief, they entered, with faint hearts the pool of the universe and quenched their bodies with other worlds. —Boris Pasternak, tr. by Mark Rudman and Bohdan Boychuk Northwestern U Press, “My Sister—Life” Grace/release usually comes utterly unexpectedly. One great example of this comes in Father Gregory Boyle’s Tattoos on the Heart. Boyle is a brand new priest, serving in Bolivia. He’s asked to give Mass at a native Quechua community high in the mountains where locals harvest flowers for their living. He starts a flop sweat on the drive up, because not only does he not speak Spanish well, he doesn’t even know mass in English without his missive, which of course he is missing. These people have not received holy communion for a decade. They await Father Boyle in a huge open field, hundreds of them. He recalls, “I hobble and fake my way through the liturgy of the Word, aided by the health workers, who read everything in Quechua . . . ![]() I’m like someone who’s been in a major car accident. I can’t remember a thing . . . lifting the bread and wine whenever I run out of things to say, I can’t imagine this Mass going worse. When it is over, I am left spent and humiliated. I am wandering adrift, trying to gather my shattered self back together again . . . I turn to discover that I have been abandoned. The field where we celebrated Mass has been vacated . . . I am alone at the top of this mountain, stuck, not only without a ride, but in stultifying humiliation. I am convinced that a worse priest has never visited this place or walked this earth. With my backpack snug on my shoulder and spirit deflated, I begin to make the long walk down the mountain and back to town. But before I leave . . . an old Quechua campesino, seemingly out of nowhere, makes his way to me. He appears ancient . . . As he nears me, I see he is wearing tethered wool pants, with a white buttoned shirt greatly frayed at the collar. He has a rope for a belt. His suit coat is coarse and worn. He has a fedora, toughened by the years. He is wearing huaraches, and his feet are caked with Bolivian mud. Any place that a human face can have wrinkles and creases, he has them. He is at least a foot shorter than I am, and he stands right in front of me and says, ‘Tatai.’ This is Quechua for Padrecito, a word packed with affection, and a charming intimacy. He looks up at me, with penetrating, weary eyes and says, ‘Tatai, gracias por haber venido’ (Thanks for coming). I think of something to say, but nothing comes to me. Which is just as well, because before I can speak, the old campesino reaches into the pockets of his suit coat and retrieves two fistfuls of multicolored rose petals. He’s on the tips of his toes and gestures that I might assist with the inclination of my head. And so he drops the petals over my head, and I’m without words. He digs into his pockets again and manages two more fistfuls of petals. He does this again and again, and the store of red, pink, and yellow rose petals seems infinite. I just stand there and let him do this, staring at my own huaraches, now moistened with my tears, covered with rose petals. Finally, he takes his leave and I’m left there, alone, with only the bright aroma of roses.” --Tattoos on the Heart p. 36-38 Reposting my most-read blog, from one year ago today. My ex-husband gave me this as a card once long ago, and I burst into tears. Here was the secret woman I was not, a woman writing in a room filled with air and light. A woman undistracted. The painter is Vuillard. No painter has loved women and interiors so dearly. ![]() I spent a dozen years with my writer-desires hidden in a tumble of life, like sheets, pulled over me. A potent simple love-filled sleep, and then I remodeled and walked and sewed and knitted and gardened my way through the birth-pangs of my first novel. It went nowhere in the real world. This longstanding pain remained private. The manuscript, after two years going the rounds with various publishers, collapsed in a closet from exhaustion. About a decade after receiving that Vuillard card, I visited The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. One painting in particular stopped me. I stood mesmerized by this very small, very intimate portrait called “Woman Sweeping.” I trembled and I wept. I simply could not believe the domestic radiance, the woman and the room warm as velvet. The patterns wrenched me out of my twentieth-century freedoms into the intimacy of belonging somewhere. ![]() This unassuming, glorious 17” x 18” painting is by Edouard Vuillard. Yet again, I didn’t choose Vuillard as a favorite painter. Vuillard chooses me. He helped me through the brighter years, the green period when landscape design and planting trees and still a bit of sewing for tranquility flung me into the arms of a new novel, a contemporary novel, the novel where perfectionism dropped in a puddle and I wrote like a drunk on fire. Guest House. How fitting that most of Vuillard’s paintings are interiors. Interlocking interiors which glow with belonging. Belonging is a central theme of Guest House. And still the story goes. Just last week, I went to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, to see a Post-Impressionist exhibit. I expected to be ravished by some of my old pals, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne. I have to admit I loved Renoir’s “The Dancer” so there was a small contest for my heart—but truly and utterly, Vuillard won the day. And I’m proud to say the painting among his half-dozen paintings which threw me over its shoulder and hauled me into its crazy den was “Profile of a Woman in a Green Hat.” Can you begin to calculate the impact this 8” x 6” card-sized portrait has in a hushed crowd of reverent onlookers? With a Picasso blaring trumpets at it from across the room? I laughed out loud. I love it dearly. It’s Olive Oyl asking Popeye to can the spinach and give her a kiss.
Simeran Maxwell, of the National Gallery of Australia, says about our Olive: The face is an enigma. The conspicuous brow evokes a variety of responses in the viewer. Is the woman anxious, persecuted or suspicious? Is she shying away from our intrusive gaze, archly teasing us, questioning what we are looking at, or crossly glaring at us? Simeran, she is saying: I am in my place. Don’t you envy my green lucidity? Edouard Vuillard lived with and adored his mother for sixty years, his dress-maker mother. He loved his best friend’s wife chastely and was often in their company. The radiance of his heart seems the topic of each painting; love of women and their interiors. A gal could do worse for a favorite. "I don't paint portraits," Vuillard once said. "I paint people at home." Ah, there’s the attraction. Being at home. NPR on Vuillard. The New Yorker on Vuillard. And for the first time on my blog, here is the man himself . . . stunning. I am rewriting my Utah historical novel, Tributary, for the last time. It will be published late this year. The first draft arrived in 1992. Only now, at age 55, with all of the events that have happened since I began, am I able to give my character Clair the full power and range of her voice. The most recent and remarkable life event came three weeks ago when I accompanied a Shoshoni healer, Rose Soaring WhiteEagle, to the Washakie graveyard thirty-five miles north of Brigham City. Rose was born in Brigham as were both of my parents, and all of my Mormon ancestors who displaced the Shoshoni from their lands. Tributary is set largely in Brigham City and northern Utah. Traveling with Rose in this deeply loved land, boundaries dissolved. She and I blessed the graves, marked and unmarked, of her ancestors at Washakie. I sang a lullaby in Shoshoni to the twenty children buried there. Animals and spirits guided us, because we asked them to. No act was taken without first asking.
This generosity is the generosity of the land. This way of living counteracts a separate self. Spirits in these latter days, and the healing has begun. Hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park yesterday, I sang—heaven help me—“Rocky Mountain High." I pondered a Henry James novella I’d just read, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Because I wore brown-tinted sunglasses, the beetle-kill pines stood out on every slope, and I could not feel anything but implicated in and convinced of our changed planet.
In James’ story, the hero John Marcher misses the event of his lifetime. He feels chosen by an obscure destiny, waiting as if anointed for some beast to leap onto him and render his life profound. May Bartram, the only friend who knows of his obsession, stands beside him for decades, waiting, but Marcher’s self-absorption is so complete he only realizes when flinging himself on May’s grave that he has missed out on her love. That was his unrecognized beast. The twists and turns of James’ syntax far exceed plot points, and I dismissed “The Beast in the Jungle” as a windy staid study in the human ego; profound—the beast is within not without us—and a dated sleeper written by a man who spent all his time indoors. But as I hiked the thousand feet up toward Lake Helene, surrounded by vast browning slopes, the power of his novella came at me from an unexpected quarter, haunting my climb. James’ protagonist fit perfectly our environmental dilemma: we cannot really love the earth, though it offers itself, so we use it and simultaneously feel cut off from it, valuing our self-importance more than the opportunity to genuinely live, which makes us unable to stop pillaging, unable to stop missing the point, and we're just about to throw ourselves on its grave in misery and cowardice, like James' hero. Empty, when what is offered us is so full. I have found no good way to face such a grand-scale environmental demise. Which leaves me in the Jungle with John Marcher. Whatever you can do to plunge into this love, do it now. 1. Selling novels is like pushing wet cement up a slide.
2. Truckers are avid readers. 3. The best carrot cake in the Intermountain West is at the TA Travel Center truck stop restaurant in Boise, Idaho. Ask for Mike. 4. Love is patient and kind. 5. You can simultaneously not care at all about the ultimate outcome of your crazy tour, and crave big results. Being a writer, I am used to such dichotomies. 6. The trunk of your car is not a bad place to sell books. 7. There are truckers who only manage to get home one day per month. 8. Trucker couples rock. I met a dog trucker who’d been on the road nearly a decade with his driver partner. Woof! 9. We all love listening to someone read aloud. 10. Wet cement continues to interest me. ![]() Still more of my favorite books, little known and much deserving of your time, interest and affection. A Stay By The River short stories by Susan Engberg This gorgeous, quiet set of stories has brought me back many times over many years. It is my favorite book of short stories after those of Willa Cather. Engberg displays her profound sense of ease with sane characters whose struggles are more to understand than to suffer. I simply love this book. And on my wish list, Engberg’s new collection, Above the Houses. A Stay By The River Above the Houses The First Coming non-fiction by Thomas Sheehan Once in a great while, a writer lays out a truth you’ve only intuited and it’s like having the text come from within you. Sheehan, a philosophy professor, treats the life and teachings of Jesus with such clarity and sense, laying to rest mountains of confusion. His subtitle: How the Kindgom of God Became Christianity. It is the first coming of Jesus that mattered. The First Coming 84 Charing Cross Road non-fiction by Helene Hanff You may have seen the movie with Bancroff and Hopkins, and loved it, but reading these letters from crusty impoverished American writer Helene Hanff to button-down British antique bookseller Frank Doel are laugh-out-loud funny with a stunning power to move the heart. Doel’s reserve slowly melts, parcels are sent to ease the bookshop’s post-WWII food rationing woes, and friendships build before your reader eyes. The two follow up books are also a delight, but Charing Cross delivers big love. 84 Charing Cross Road Sunset Song a novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon I will never forget reading this Scottish classic. The Brits do not have a corner on great novels about strong women who fight and win their identities amid rural poverty. The music of the inflected Northern Scotts language and the true daring of Gibbon to go epic in a tale of one young woman, Chris Guthrie, riding the turn of the century into the first World War… Give yourself many long weekends of reading pleasure. Get lost in Sunset Song. Sunset Song Willa Cather & the Politics of Criticism non-fiction by Joan Acocella Acocella quite simply knocked me into happiness with her analysis of how Cather’s works have been received by critics through time. Clearly an adept Cather fan, and a brilliant thinker, Acocella skewers the reviewers. I was not at all surprised to learn, years after reading this book, that she is an esteemed dance critic for The New Yorker. No wonder she’s adept critiquing critics. I love her love of Willa who “wasted no energy protesting against the forces that might have stood in her way. She just opened the door and walked through it. For this lordly action, she has been made to pay, mostly by women.” Strange to say, but this book of criticism is a reading romp. Willa Cather & the Politics of Criticism ![]() A palm reader once told me that I was an artist. I had everything it took. Not just the talent, or the drive, or the circumstance, but also the sensitivity, the perspicacity, the need. I had it all at thirty-one. She pointed to a tiny trapezoid with a caved-in side, a little leaning box formed by intersecting lines on my left palm. It glowed red under her scrutiny. “Shy,” I said. “Angry,” she replied. And true enough, the formerly unnoticed boxed-in flesh burned. I am fifty-three now, and my first book will be published this spring. I have been writing for eighteen years. I have been longing to write since I was eight. For an entire decade, in my twenties, I forbade myself to write anything at all. I was unhappy. What was the point? The world had abundant evidence of sorrow already. And I had a burning trapezoid. The hand-box has not changed, though it looks bigger now. I see it bigger. Constriction is a writer’s friend. Legions of spirits therein. ![]() A palm reader once told me that I was an artist. I had everything it took. Not just the talent, or the drive, or the circumstance, but also the sensitivity, the perspicacity, the need. I had it all at thirty-one. She pointed to a tiny trapezoid with a caved-in side, a little leaning box formed by intersecting lines on my left palm. It glowed red under her scrutiny. “Shy,” I said. “Angry,” she replied. And true enough, the formerly unnoticed boxed-in flesh burned. I am fifty-three now, and my first book will be published this spring. I have been writing for eighteen years. I have been longing to write since I was eight. For an entire decade, in my twenties, I forbade myself to write anything at all. I was unhappy. What was the point? The world had abundant evidence of sorrow already. And I had a burning trapezoid. The hand-box has not changed, though it looks bigger now. I see it bigger. Constriction is a writer’s friend. Legions of spirits therein. |