Unfolding Time

A brand new book: Beginning Middle End (Valeria Luiselli). An old favorite: My Ántonia (Willa Cather). I read one following the other in afternoon pockets of time.

Luiselli offers fragments, mythology, history, the open-fisted quandary of what is a mother, and who is a daughter, and where in the world do we belong, and what are our responsibilities to the “stones of time”?

I realize that the kind of storytelling I understand most deeply right now, in this strange moment when the world feels on the edge of something ineffable but also terribly concrete from which we may never return, is one that tries to figure out how to tell time differently, how to feel it more acutely instead of imposing on it predictable, comfortable linearity, stories with ears that can detect the things that go missing, or about to go missing, stories with eyes that follow the invisible threads that tie it all together.

Cather offers narrative continuity, a steady gaze on a red-grass landscape, an orphaned boy finding happiness in the sun, a boy (at the start) who does not yet know the girl, Ántonia, who will become his unforgettable friend. He is just a boy being a boy in a world brand-new to him:

There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more…. That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

Such different novels read over the course of one week, but are they, really, so different? Couldn’t these two books, written a century apart, be experienced as a single twinned invitation to live inside unmarked time? To set ourselves adrift, to pause our own thrumming narrative, to receive (or to become) the stranger in new lands?

(Might we think of the art we make as our chance to unfold time?)

There is a bird bath in my garden now. It sits on an old plant stand among mostly dried wildflower husks beneath a tree still finding its height. It’s a clay bowl that my husband made and it rests inside the shade, and now, twice a day, my husband stops making the art that he makes and heads outside with a bucket of fresh water and fills the bath. When he returns, he stands at the kitchen window and waits for the birds to come. There are finch, bluebirds, robins, catbirds, sparrows, cardinals, mourning doves—each of them strangers to this new bird-bath land.

“We have customers,” my husband will say, and then I’ll go and stand beside him. Our narratives paused. Our time stilled. Our happiness greater than ourselves, held by invisible threads. A story written by birds.

Paid Subscribers: I have been making bookmarks out of my cyanotypes and monoprints, each strip of original art stitched onto a stiff Arches-paper backing. I sign them. I offer them now in sets of three to new or renewing paid annual subscribers. To mark the pages. To mark time. To give as a gift or to keep. Just send me your U.S. address.

Teaching: “The Ideal Sentence,” a Zoom recording of my presentation on the voice, tone, and pace of the words we write and keep, is available for a short time from Craft Talk.

Upcoming: I’ll be at the History Book Festival this September in Lewes, DE, for two very special events—a pre-Festival craft lecture and a conversation with New York Times #1 bestselling author Elizabeth Letts.

My books of memoir and on the making of memoir, along with other writing resources, my award-winning novel, Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story, and my Pattis Family Creative Arts Book award-honored My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera can be found here.

Visual Poetics: Links to my published words + art work can be found here.

My Etsy shop can be found here.