July and August Storytellers: Two Months of Books

One of my most favorite sonic storytellers, Tori Amos, talked in an interview about "the mythology of ancient Ireland whereby the poets do battle before the warriors do battle and if the poets are good then hopefully they intimidate the other side so much." Maybe poets should have done battle before the national conventions. We need more of the beauty and power of the word in our daily lives, don't you agree? I could listen to Amos tell stories in song form or other all day. She made my reading list, as did a chef, a scientist author/poet, a local historian and a famous frontier author and her daughter.  These were my storytellers for July and August.

 Tori Amos: Piece by Piece, by Ann Powers and Tori Amos, Shaw's Book Shop, Westwood, New Jersey, aprox. $20.


It's funny how books sit on your shelf and wait patiently for their turn.  I've owned this book almost since its release several years ago, but it found me only now. I could relate to Amos' desires to become a mom, although I've never had to endure any of the miscarriages she suffered before she produced her daughter Tash. I also thought of her mother's story about putting aside her own ambitions to follow her husband's path. As I prepare for a wedding in a Catholic church (I'm not Catholic) and have to tell the priest we intend to raise our children Catholic (can I say "intend") I'm struggling a bit with my own path.

The book about Amos is told in dialogue form with journalist Ann Powers with a host of Amos confidants chiming in this work very much about her journey and creative process instead of a traditional biography.

"The romantic myth of the artist says that you are the Source. I have no illusions about that. I think this goes back to my grandfather. That was his great gift to me. Native Americans don't believe they are the Source. They have access to the Source. Endless access.  But don't get confused.

I can have access, but so can a librarian..."

Song Canvas sections give some insight into her works. So many people know her as the Cornflake Girl singer, but to me she's so much more. Her song Garlands, from The Beekeeper album era that disappointingly didn't make the album but appears on an extra with the bonus album, reminds me of my author friend J.J. Brown's Vector: A Modern Love Story. Vector is an ill-fated love story of a young opera student Eva and an older man, Michael set in in New York City. I thought if they made a movie about it, Garlands, where two lovers are meeting in Washington Square Park to go see the Winged Painter in a museum uptown, would certainly appear.

"I'm off in flight towards another light. Rest. Youth."



I love that Amos finds inspiration in the skies of New Mexico. I find creativity in our office painted a sage green and decorated with Southwest fare, with a raspberry colored rocking chair and a book case filled with favorites.  I do declare that I believe my ghost will roam in the Southwest. Where do tap into your creativity?

She talked about her mother, a literature major who dropped out to become a minister's wife after Amos' father switch from pre-med giving her the "keys to the library." Her mother read her Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Browning, and William Faulkner. Amos feels she wouldn't have been a songwriter without this influence of her mother's texts and her father's theology. Who gave you the keys to the library?

I love the chapter "Corn Mother: Genealogies" the most in which she shares memories of her Cherokee grandfather and the wisdom he passes on. Her stories about an ancestor escaping the Trail of Tears is something out of a Hollywood movie. Powers shares here too a Cherokee story. Let's take it in:

"Selu, the Corn Mother, lives with her grandsons in the mountains. The young men are hunters, and Corn Mother provides the staples that round out their meals. The men want to hunt and hunt, and this greed for meat makes Corn Mother sad, yet she loves her descendants and does not challenge them. One morning her grandsons spy on Corn Mother as she makes the corn, which falls from her body whenever she slaps her sides. This terrifies the men, and they reject her. She withers, but before dying, instructs them to bury her in the earth and tells them she will arise again as a plant that will need to be cultivated. Corn Mother does as she promises, but in her new form she cannot be blithely generous. People must learn to cultivate her; they must earn her fruitfulness. With this lesson Corn Mother teaches humankind the need for balance and the love of nature's gifts."

Amos recalls the medicine women coming backstage after 2001 and the Afghanistan War. One said to her, "Do you feel the soul of our land is in the right hands....Would you turn over your physical mother to those who are in control of she who we call America?" Bluntly put, the medicine woman tells her "Caretakers or Takers- you're either one or the other. If the masses keep taking and not caretaking, then your grandchildren will have very little to nurture them....Your loyalty should not be to anyone who claims power over the land at any given time, whose intentions can change on a whim, depending if they've been seduced by power and what it brings."

I've never understood how things like clean water, air and soil ended up so low on our list of national priorities. It won't matter as much if you can't pay off student loans when the water isn't good to drink. One of the greatest environmental threats of our times I believe is the danger to our water supply by oil companies and politicians promising jobs and domestic energy production in the area of "natural" gas. I've written about my opposition to fracking, the process to extract natural gas, before. Fracking sounds like the premise for a dark science fiction story - but it's true. There was an article in The New York Times, "Tapping Into the Land, Dividing Its People" about fracking in the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana - so they can pay off debts for building a failing casino?  My thoughts: when an oil company comes bearing gifts for your community's children - run. Burn their contracts. In Colorado, farmers are now competing with oil companies for water for these great domestic jobs and energy source. I need not consult a psychic to see higher food prices acoming. They're even tapping into municipal fire hydrants. Who do you think will win?

There's been a few news reports about cleaner air as a result of natural gas when it's used instead of coal, but does cleaner air trump polluted water? Not for me. Politicians only need to use the words "jobs" and "domestic energy" to generate applause. Both Obama and Romney support natural gas. On this issue, I call them takers, not caretakers. I applaud Obama's efforts with wind and solar, but am so disappointed when he speaks of  the 100 year supply of natural gas and the jobs it's going to create. He's mentioned it in the State of the Union and at his acceptance speech at the DNC. I would like to see Romney and Obama drink from a water supply that's been fracked or send their family members off for a week to take part in these "good" jobs. I hope they'll join the side of the caretakers.

On a lighter note...Bon Appetit! The Delicious Life of Julia Child, by Jessie Hartland, free, the library. The hardcover retails for $17.99 (is that what children's books cost?!) While everyone was looking at their fancy gizmos waiting in line for the bus at Port Authority (I'm often listening to music on one), this time was cheerfully lost in this most charming children's picture book about the life of Julia Child. With her 100th birthday coming up in August, I was searching for books and discovered a slew of new Child fare
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Who says you can't learn something new from a children's book? One of her projects while working at the OSS (Office of Strategic Services in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka) was to help develop a shark repellant to keep curious sharks away from underwater explosives meant to destroy enemy ships. I also learned her high school French class was a disaster, it took her two years to speak well enough to get by once in Paris, and four years to become fluent. I've taken community school French classes here and there and love the language, but have never put a serious effort into it. Really, it was most fun to socialize with other Francophiles.

Minette's Feast, by Susanna Reich, free, the library.

Less informative biography wise but very sweet about Julia and her cat Minette. I'm loving all things feline lately - maybe the spell of watching Disney's Aristocats hasn't worn off yet. I think I'm so drawn to Julia's path even though I don't share much of her cooking beliefs (this vegetarian won't be deboning a duck anytime soon!) I'm always fascinated how Julia didn't figure out her path until she was in her 40s. I'm grateful - vey grateful - for my job, but I wonder about passions for a career.

The Goffle Road Murders of Passiac County: The 1850 Van Winkle Killings by Don Everett Smith, $20, Well Read Book Store, Hawthorne, New Jersey.

An intriguing account of the murder of a judge, John Van Winkle, and his wife, Jane, in Hawthorne, the county's first murder trial that would send the killer to the gallows. Crowds came to watch as high as Garret Mountain on execution day. Imagine if there were public executions today. I pass the house the murders took place in nearly every day and never knew its dark story until this book found me at this wonderful local bookstore, which I decided to support with my purchase.

The author starts the book with the haunting "The House with Nobody In It" by Joyce Kilmer, which talks of an old farmhouse the narrator passes,

"I have never seen a haunted house but I hear there are such things;
That hold the talk of spirits, their mirth and sorrowings.
I know this house isn't haunted, and I wish it were, I do;
For it wouldn't be so lonely if it had a ghost or two."

The poem ends...

"So whenever I go to Suffern along the Erie track
I never go by the empty house without stopping and looking back
Yet it hurts me to look at the crumbling roof and shutters fallen apart,
For I can't help thinking the poor old house is a house with a broken heart."

Think of all the lonely old houses you've passed. Do you believe in ghosts? Consider all the storytellers there are about our very own local history. Why the nation is consumed with "reality" television when history serves up so much more interesting fare, that's the greatest mystery to me.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer's Life, by Pamela Smith Hill $9.94, Amazon.com.

"If you write for children, then I am in my second childhood," Wilder's editor George Bye declared. Anyone who has found these books as an adult will understand that sentiment. 

The book made me a better Little House reader. I've read through By the Shores of Silver Lake. The book examines closely the relationship Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane shared professionally and looks at some of the fact and fiction of the book. No, Lane didn't pen the books, but according to Hill did largely lift large parts of Laura's unpublished (rejected) Pioneer Girl manuscript to piece together Lane's Let the Hurricane Roar. I think what most surprised me is that the Ingalls family was made to sound so isolationist when they weren't. That snug winter in the surveyor's house? They had a boarder. All alone in The Long Winter? They had a couple with them who had to have a shotgun wedding. No going to see the railroad with Pa in By the Shores of Silver Lake. He would have never taken her along.  In the books they always looked West. Not so in real life, as they backtracked.

There was also some interesting history here. I didn't know Little Women is considered the first young adult novel. Wilder's books start out as children's books but branch out into young adult fare as Laura's journey grows.

Rose Wilder Lane instructed her mother to "show not tell" readers, and show she does in her magnificent Let the Hurricane Roar. Dare I say it, I almost liked this more than some of the Little House books.

I inhaled my library copy before the one I ordered from my favorite online book retailer Better World Books arrived. I just couldn't wait a day longer for it.

This book is a cautionary tale against accruing debt that could be true for any age, and reminds us of the humbling power of Mother Nature, which simply doesn't care about your plans. Spoiler alert: after the grasshopper invasion strikes as it did in On the Banks of Plum Creek," she writes,

"Grasshoppers, going west - like the railroads, like the people, like cities and settled lands and law and government. Yet grasshoppers were as alien, as indifferent to human suffering, as wind or cold. Perhaps they were no more indifferent to human beings than human fate itself."

Natural Supernatural Love, J.J. Brown, $8.99, Amazon.com. A collection of poetry to read in your comfy, coziest share under a blanket with some tea. Sharing one of my favorite poems here, what seems like a perfect end to this Storytellers column.


Library Lantern

light a candle in the lantern
this quiet evening to read by
and close the patterned metal door
to watch the shadows cling to the wall
as people have done evenings
for ages and ages past
lean against the bookcase
and imagine each book is a person
lined up side by side
and take one from the shelf
to leaf through captured thoughts
of lives that refused to end
light a candle in the lantern
this quiet evening to read by.



April Storytellers: A Month of Books

One of the first pieces of furniture I brought into our new home was my bookshelf. Books are going to be in every room. Pioneer books in my Laura Ingalls Wilder-prairie themed guest bedroom, Native American and Southwest books in the Southwest office along with the bookshelf, cookbooks in the kitchen of course, nature books in the room that leads to the patio, a book on my nightstand. Before the unpacking was done and many things accomplished, I headed straight to my town library since I got the DMV change of address stickers for proof of residence. I felt like a kid in a candy store. But I also felt like I was part of a community: of seekers of knowledge, dreamers, adventurers.

These were my storytellers for April.

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By the Shores of Silver Lake, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, $6.99, Shaw's Book Shop, Westwood, New Jersey. I found most of the Little House books thrifted at Housing Works but this one was missing, so I wanted to support my local book shop. The Ingalls family has just battled scarlet fever and Mary has gone blind as a result. Laura is the eyes for her, and her descriptions of the West are as poetic as ever. Imagine if you had to be the eyes for a blind loved one and had to look at the world and note what you saw. Think of how honed your observation skills would be. They are now on the move to South Dakota. The railroads are being built just up ahead. The landscape and the country are changing. Laura quickly hones in on a difference here, not just in grasses and wildflowers, but, "There was something else here that was now anywhere else. It was an enormous stillness that made you feel still. And when you were still, you could feel great stillness coming closer. All the little sounds of the blowing grasses and the horses munching and whooshing in their feedbox at the back of the wagon, and even the sounds of eating and talking could not touch the enormous stillness of this prairie."

It's hard to imagine such stillness in modern life. No airplanes overhead or humming of cars in the distance. The closest I came to the stillness she describes was when Steve and I were in the parks in the Southwest, many in Utah when we were some of the last hikers about. There was a reason, though, for the some of the stillness Laura describes,

"Laura saw old Indian trails and buffalo paths worn deep in the ground and now grassed over. She saw strange large depressions, straight-sided and flat-bottomed, where now the grass was growing. Laura had never seen a buffalo, and Pa said it was not likely that she ever would see one. Only a little while before vast herds of thousands of buffalos had gazed over this country. They had been the Indians' cattle, and white men had slaughtered them all."

It's funny how books enter your life. My next storyteller was Louis Erdrich's The Birchbark House.

I bought a used copy for about $3.50 including shipping from Better World Books, an online bookseller my writer friend J.J. Brown told me about. I was excited to learn about an alternative to Amazon.com, which made headlines with questionable labor practices in Pennsylvania. Since the book has a recurring thread about respect for the environment, it's appropriate I got a recycled copy from an ethical retailer which takes many discarded library books and resells them. I discovered Louis Erdrich at Our Thrift Shop in Westwood, New Jersey, where her Love Medicine was waiting for me for 25 cents. Upon looking up online reviews for the book which I haven't read yet, I discovered she penned a series considered to be the Native American version of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series. Erdrich's Birchbark House leapt to the top of my reading list. Omakayas is a girl of seven winters who, as a baby, was the only one to survive a small pox epidemic that wiped out her village. I love thinking of one's life of the winters one has survived, for winter at that time truly was about survival. No trips to ShopRite for stockpiling of food upon a weatherman's report of three inches of snow like here in New Jersey. This is a great book if you are reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books with your children or even on your own since these are essentially the people who the Ingalls displaced. The attitude in the Little House books is very much this land is all ours for the taking. Not so in the Birchbark House. I love that when they need to use the birchbark tree for the house, the grandmother acknowledges the tree, "Old sister...we need your skin for our shelter." When Omakayas and her sister have to trap birds who threaten their corn she says, "Forgive us, forgive us, we have need, we have need." It's very much about need and reverence. I've mentioned before how if we are saying grace for meals, shouldn't we also thank the farmer, the animal and the land? From fracking to obtain natural gas (I've written about my opposition to it) to opposition to everything from solar panels to Mrs. Smith's towels hang drying both due to aesthetic reasons, it's still a little too much, this is my land for the taking attitude in 2012.

Like the Little House books, the Birchbark House focuses on seasonal challenges but also delights, namely two of my favorite things: food and stories. Little Omakayas so loved story time on cold winter nights and maple sugaring time. So did Laura. Laura talks always warmly of food often. After a New Year's feast at Mrs. Boast's of oyster soup, "When the last drop of soup was gone, and the last crackers were divided and crunched, there were hot biscuits with honey, and dried raspberry sauce. And then a big dishpan full of tender salty popcorn." I think I shall make biscuits with honey, and some raspberry jam and think of Laura.

The Courage of Sarah Noble by Alice Dalgliesh, 25 cents, garage sale.

I'm not ashamed at all to say I'm reading more children's books this year. This book was published in 1954 and tells the tale of young Sarah Noble, traveling with her father in the woods of New Milford, Connecticut to build their new home. She's on the journey to cook meals for her father, and remembers her mother's words, "Keep your courage, Sarah Noble." It's a simple and short story but one that will stay with me. Sarah father instills great respect for the Native Americans, and Sarah makes friends with them. She encounters briefly a mother and her children who have fear in their heart. When Sarah's mother arrives at the end, she's the same ignorant racist Ma Ingalls is. What's with these narrow-minded pioneer women?

Please share your thoughts on my storytellers or any great ones you'd like to share.