Total Immersion Recommended

[Note: Images in this post are photographs from my Leelanau home, not the world of downstate Whiteheart, but I tried to get as close in spirit as possible.]

 

Weeks passed between the day I received my ARC of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel and the evening I finally gave myself the delayed pleasure of opening it and plunging into that rural mid-Michigan world, familiar to me not only from her previous books but also from my years spent in Barry and Kalamazoo counties. It’s a rather different world from Leelanau. The soil is different, the sun rises and sets over different landscapes, and the people inhabiting that world live different lives from most of Leelanau. Most. Not all. The thing is, Campbell’s world is one not often ventured into by American literature, but it's been there all along, waiting to be seen.

 

One of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s short story collections focused on men, another on women, all apparently lost souls to whose lives she brought great sympathy. Her novel Q Road gave us three protagonists -- a man, a young woman, and a boy -- along with a host of fascinating minor characters. Then came Once Upon a River, the novel completely owned by Margo Crane. 

 

The Waters is a different kind of story. Large and ambitious, containing themes and worlds both mythic and postmodern, The Waters gives us from Campbell, for the first time, an entire community, bound together -- and torn apart – and bound together again -- by its own unique history. A community seeking redemption and a way forward in difficult and uncertain times. They often have a hard time showing it, but these people care about each other.

 

The home of Hermine (not Hermione) Zook, healer and matriarch, is a bog island protected by a drawbridge. When local people come to her for healing medicines, consultations take place off the island, out by the house built and formerly lived in by Hermine’s husband, the legendary Wild Will Zook (long ago banished by his wife), a house he lived in alone until joined by Hermine’s oldest daughter, Primrose, who has also disappeared, moving across the continent to California. Molly, a nurse of modern medical ways, is the practical, nearby (and only biological) daughter. Finally, there is the lazy, lovely, magical Rose Thorn, golden-haired mother of eleven-year-old Dorothy, known as Donkey, a mathematical genius made nervous by infinity, a child being raised on M'sauga Island by Herself (Hermine).  

Donkey milks the cow, avoids eating meat, eavesdrops and spies on adults, and longs for a father. Titus is the father she wants, and the choice is logical (passionate Donkey tries hard to be logical), given the electricity that has always crackled between Rose Thorn and Titus. In this postmodern rural Michigan fairy tale, as in European fairy tales of old, however, missing fathers are a recurring theme. Never mind that the entire community of Whiteheart, Michigan, longs to see Titus and Rose Thorn together.

 

“Once upon a time” opens Chapter Zero: Prologue, and Chapter Six opens with an echoing “Once upon a time,” the phrase signaling both history and fabulism. Each chapter bears, besides its number, a sentence heading. Chapter One announces a crucial truth: “Rose Thorn always comes home.” Whiteheart can accept the absence of Wild Will Zook, but they need Rose Thorn. They need Rose and Titus together. This is where we begin.

 

Chapter One introduces us to Whiteheart. With the addition of Smiley, the barkeeper, the men drinking beers and pops at the picnic table outside the Muck Rattler Lounge after church on Sunday – Rick Dickmon, gun-totin’ Jamie Standish, Tony Martin (known as “Two-Inch Tony,” but not for reasons you might at first imagine), Whitey Whitby, pot-bellied Ralph Darling – constitute the core community we come to know as we read. The men reappear singly and as a group throughout the novel, their wives and girlfriends remaining in the background, along with Titus’s father and his Aunt Ada, but together they fill in a picture that foregrounds the reclusive healer and her three daughters. It is, however, Titus Clay to whom all local eyes turn. It is Titus, together with Rose Thorn, they believe, who will hold them together, if only --. But it is Rose Thorn, not Titus, who leaves and returns….

 

Old celery fields, a cranberry bog, a gravel truck that makes its regular run along Lovers Road (that truck reminds me of the caterpillars in Q Road, easily overlooked but a symbol of what life has become in this place), rumbling past Wild Will Zook’s empty house and the Boneset Table where Hermine leaves her cures to be retrieved by those in need. Farm fields and giant black willows. Somewhere in the background, the Old Woman River and pollution from a paper mill no longer in operation. Donkeys and wild, flowering plants, massasauga rattlesnakes (“muck rattlers,” Whiteheart calls them) and church-going people, unsure of what they believe but longing for beauty.

What will become of them all?

 

A customary request accompanying ARCs asks that reviewers refrain from making direct quotes, as changes may be made between advance copies and the book as later released to the public, and only that request and my bookseller conscience could have stopped me. But this post is not even, I realize, a book review, as I have written almost nothing about the conflicts and secrets that create a taut, suspenseful story line. So be it. I waited as long as I could before beginning this novel, because I knew before opening to the first page that I would not want it ever to end, and what I want for you, dear readers, is to have the whole of the pleasure, also, as you immerse yourself in The Waters, of coming to know the world of Whiteheart and its people for yourself, as I did. 

 

Before writing this post, I read no other reviews of The Waters (and still have not), though eventually I’m sure I will. For now, I am simply basking in the luxury of being a small-town bookseller and blogger rather than a paid reviewer who must meet certain conventional expectations. I am also happy, in my modest role of bookseller-blogger, not to be preparing a class in American literature, which would require me to trace out echoes of mythic themes that reverberate through the novel. 

 

(After you read this marvelous story, you may want to review the story in Genesis of the snake in the garden and explore other stories, as well, such as the Brothers Grimm tale of “Rumpelstiltskin” and the Lives of the Saints -- but please wait until after you have read the book! What you already know and what you find in the novel’s pages will be enough for your first time through. Just be immersed in the experience, please.)

 

Afterward. After-word. Ah, yes! I finished the last chapter of The Waters before going to sleep and saved the Epilogue to read the next morning. My last word today is that if an epiphany be tearful and inarticulate, that’s what I experienced. Stillness. Gratitude. Perfection.

 

The Waters

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

W.W. Norton & Company

Janary 2024

Hardcover $30

I will happily take orders in advance for reserved copies!

The “Same” Day Never Is

November 12, 2022, Alamo Township, Kalamazoo County

 

Looking back at old blog posts, I see that any date in any particular year brought very different weather and very different events and thoughts. For example, no previous November 12 in my life was, for me, in any way like this one. The image above is from this morning in Kalamazoo, and below is what greeted us at home in Leelanau Township on November 12, 2019, the day the Artist said we would be leaving earlier from now on to drive to Arizona!

November 12, 2019, Leelanau Township, Leelanau County

This year, also, November 12 was the second leg of my long solo odyssey – well, “solo” with Sunny Juliet as copilot!

Copilot Sunny Juliet

(Do you ever think about words for travel, as I do? For me, as I hear in it the French journée, ‘journey’ seems a day’s travel, whereas ‘odyssey,’ from the travels of Odysseus, I hear as long and challenging, and I also think of my challenging cross-country travel as a ‘trek,’ though I would never consider making it on foot.)

 

Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” brings into focus the same/different aspects of any date on the calendar from year to year. For example, the first airing of the television show “Sesame Street” occurred on November 10, 1969, the birthday of both Martin Luther (1483) and poet Vachel Lindsay (1879). What would Martin Luther have made of Sesame Street? And I was especially struck by the variousness of events on “same” dates by Keillor’s noting that November 9 was the birthday of both Anne Sexton and Carl Sagan but also the infamous anniversary of the horrible German Kristallnacht.

 

Not surprising at all, this difference in “the same,” but I often find the unsurprising as much cause for reflection and wonder as something realized for the first time. 

Where I stayed this past week

I was glad to have loaner wheels while my car was in the shop.

Spending time in a place where I once lived (for many years) also invites notice of change. Kalamazoo was my home from December of 1971 to the fall of 1987, so now, while it is lovely to be with friends and family still here, others are with me in absentia, most notably the Artist, of course, but other friends, also. Ghosts appear everywhere -- including the ghost of my own former, younger self! The past tugs at my sleeve, whispers in my ear, and distracts me from the present with the urgency of Marley’s ghosts! It can be unnerving. Nothing went wrong in Kalamazoo, however, and many things went very, very right, mostly lots of time spent with those I dearly love. And yes, three visits in four days to one of my new favorite bookstores! 

Two more new books from This Is a Bookstore

Still, it felt good to resume my travels, barely ahead of the season’s first Michigan snow, which caught up with me in Amish Indiana, where my copilot was entranced by the sight of horse-drawn buggies on the road. But you will have to imagine those sights, as my copilot can operate neither car nor camera. She just keeps me company, but that's a lot.

Her new outdoor wear makes leash-walking much easier.

Revisiting the "Old Vienna"

In Leland, many years ago

"Ah, but that was the old Vienna!” One of the Artist’s favorite phrases. Yes, life brings change, day by day and year by year, but if we are among those fortunate enough both to have known many happy times in our lives and to remember them, the latter years are saturated with rich memories. 

 

On Tuesday, June 14, family and friends of the Artist gathered in Kalamazoo to share stories of the man we all loved, David Grath. The weather was hot but the venue (Bell’s Back Room) large and comfortable, and David’s daughter Carson had outdone herself with the arrangements. I took a couple of the memory boards I’d put together and also the bust of David done by John Martel of Kalamazoo. Carson had many memory boards of her own, including a marvelous one of the legendary “House in the Woods” down on Shell Lake in Leelanau County. Our dear friend Laurie Kaniarz (who also provided me with room and board overnight) was emcee for the evening, and James Burkett led off reminiscences (of which there were many) and played music and encouraged others to jam with him after the talk became more informal. 

Photograph of family in Kalamazoo by Susan Kallewaard

I drove home the next morning, after picking up Sunny Juliet at the kennel where she had stayed overnight (Was that puppy glad to see me! You would have thought we had been separated for years!) and was happy to make the trip by myself, with just the pup, because it gave me quiet time to reflect on conversations from the night before, as well as all the changes I’d observed in burgeoning Kalamazoo. I took a different route home, too, west on M43, north on M40 through Gobles and Allegan, and so on and so forth, providing occasional commentary to Sunny on places her daddy and I used to visit, such as Crane’s Orchard in Fennville (for apple pie in the fall), before falling silent once more.

 

My sisters from Illinois had driven to Kalamazoo and came on up to Leelanau County afterward, so Wednesday evening found the three of us gathered on my front porch, and by Thursday all three of David’s kids and their spouses and three of our four grandchildren (one sick with COVID in Maine) and my son had arrived, and we got everything set up at the Old Art Building (OAB) in Leland for another memorial gathering that evening. And let me say that right from the beginning, when I called the OAB from Arizona to secure a date for the building, and throughout the planning period and the event itself, I felt extremely well cared for by staff Becky Ross, Sarah Ross Mills, and Abby Chatfield, while Board president Dan Lisuk was another pillar of strength. Great people, great place, full of David Grath memories and connections over the years -- we could not have gathered anywhere more appropriate.

 

Although in my mind I can see on Thursday evening, from the front (southeast) corner of the room, people filling rows of chairs and standing all around the back and clustered in the doorway, none of us in the family took photographs of the evening. Carson had arranged for a photographer in Kalamazoo, and I could have done the same in Leland but didn’t think of it, so all I have are those few (above) of our setup earlier in the day, one of the Jeff Haas Quartet taken by Pam Yee (which I stole from Facebook) before many people had arrived, another of Laurie Kaniarz with Jeff Haas (who took that?), and a lovely shot of the building from back toward Main Street by photographer and long-time bookstore customer Angela Wolney. But that’s okay. We were all “being present in the moment,” as one of my sisters put it, and everything came together almost perfectly: Everyone loved the beautiful music (JHQ), raved the artistic and delicious catering (Island Thyme), and enjoyed the wine (Verterra). David Chrobak’s floral arrangements were fabulously colorful. Laurie Kaniarz once again acted as emcee, and all of David Grath’s old friends who spoke of him to the assembled crowd shared meaningful and often emotional memories. 

Jeff Haas Quartet (photo by Pam Yee)

Jeff Haas and Laurie Kaniarz

Photo by Angie Wolney

James Burkett told of how he had met David Grath when he, James, was only six years old and David was 23. Cris Telgard talked about old days at the Bluebird, including the autumn when David talked Cris into giving him a temporary bartending job and invented two legendary drinks (recipes were lost long ago, but their names live on), the “Muscovy Duck” and the “Cosmic Crowbar.” Charlie Hall spoke of a unique friendship built on caring and absolute trust, and Charley Murphy addressed the life of an artist and how David told him to “revel” in it. [Correction: what Charlie said David told him was to savor living the life of an artist. Savor.] There were lots of connections made through art and through the Bluebird, but Joe Tiedeck met David when he, Joe, came to Leland as David’s mother’s hospice nurse, providing a different perspective on David and his gift for love and friendship. Susan Ager asked at the end of her remarks, “Who will enchant us now?” Of course, there was much, much more, including Will Case from the sidelines and Bob Adler from the audience.

 

The kids and grandkids and I agreed afterward that we could have listened to people talk about David Grath all night, but as the crowd was S.R.O. it was only kindness to the people who didn’t have seats (and some who did but were probably tired of sitting) to adjourn for food and wine before the evening got too long in the tooth. And then I began to make the rounds, although I did not get the chance to speak to everyone, which is the way such times always are. Finally, as they had with setup, family and friends pitched in to help put everything away.

 

“Are you happy?” I was asked by two people. The question took me aback. Happy? Now a widow? But I understood what was being asked, and yes, I was very satisfied with the occasion. It was beautiful in so many ways, and people kept saying, “David would have loved it!” and that had been my goal all along: to put together an evening for him. 

 

The next day, Friday, was a family day, at David’s gallery and in our farmhouse yard, under the trees, for a big family dinner – another time we were simply present to each other and not documenting with phones or cameras. By late Saturday morning everyone was gone. I spent a couple of hours mowing grass. It was a beautiful day....

*** 

But ah, yes, books! On Tuesday night at Laurie’s house, instead of reading either of the books I’d packed (for less than 36 hours away from home), I started into a book from her shelves, the title having caught my eye. Grief’s Country: A Memoir in Pieces, by Gail Griffin, could not have been more pertinent to my week. 

 

In the past 15-1/2 weeks, I’ve read several books about death and loss and grief and mourning and bereavement, but this one, although the circumstances under which Gail was widowed were vastly different from my own, jibes most closely with my experience. That is to say, this particular widowed writer expresses feelings that most closely mirror my own. That is not to say that she describes general feelings on losing a beloved partner better than anyone else, because responses to such a loss vary widely from person to person, but that she writes, for the most part, of feelings I have known myself since David died. She is a beautiful writer, too, which never hurts. 

 

I am paralyzed by contradiction. It is impossible that this has happened, yet I know this has happened.

 

Some part of me seems to be functioning as a kind of emissary from the unavailable remainder of myself. 

 

I tried to quiet and calm myself viscerally, as if I were a traumatized animal in my own care. 

 

I want to be put somewhere safe until I am fit to live.

 

My house is the only safety; it feels like a cave of comfort and protection from a random and terrifying world.

 

My mind is still a minefield. I move around it cautiously.

 

I can’t bear to tell the story …, and I can’t bear not to.

 

That is a sampling, fewer than the number of lines I copied out in my journal but illustrative of passages that resonated with me. 

 

It turns out that my friend Laurie is friends with the author, who lives in Kalamazoo, and that the book was published by Wayne State University Press as part of their Made in Michigan series, so I will be ordering it for my bookstore soon. 

 

“One foot in front of the other.” That’s my answer to the unanswerable question, “How are you doing?” 

***

 

So, looking back, there was my old life with David in Kalamazoo and our more recent life together in Leelanau County, first in Leland and then, since 2001, at the farm. It was, as he would say, the "old Vienna." On Sunday morning I found photographs from our drive north from Avignon through central France. Blesle! That village in the Auvergne where we spent a magical evening, night, and morning! I also found announcements and invitations David had saved from artist friends for their shows, a literary magazine containing half a dozen poems by an old friend, letters, cards from his children, more and more photographs. It was/is the “old Vienna,” over and over -- here, there, and everywhere -- and it is priceless.

 

I’ll close today with a poem the Artist himself wrote. It’s called “Eschewing.” At least, I consider it a poem and suspect he intended it as such, but the scrap of paper is undated and contains no additional notes beyond these lines, and when I found it I was seeing it for the first time. Sorry I can’t seem to type in the numbers he used without having Word insert a number at every line break, but this is as close as I can come to transcribing. 

 

“Eschewing,” by David Grath

 

I’m taking time out

of nothing to practice

the practice of eschewing.

I will become expert at:

 

The laying off of hands

 

Pissing behind doors

while the dinner

parties quack on

 

Having several or

no meals a day

 

Not acknowledging

months like January

June and July

 

Will “feckless” cover me

When I get good at it?

 

There was no one else like him, ever, and there never will be again.

Photo by David Brigham

Good and Exciting Things Still Happen

Sunny Juliet post-paddle

The puppy and I are home. SJ loves the yard at the farm, and she had her first dog paddle in Lake Leelanau. We are still adjusting, but in time what I call her “good girl potential” is going to come shining through, and we will be fine. Meanwhile, the world has gone on turning – and besides all the bad news and my personal grief, there are some wonderful and exciting things happening, too.

 

A Pulitzer Winner

 

For instance? Well, someone I know won a Pulitzer Prize. And she’s a Michigan poet, too. 

 

Originally from Niles, Diane Seuss (cousin of a friend so dear he and his wife and kids are like family) first appeared on Grath radar when she was one of a number of women poets (the event was billed as “women poets”) reading their work in a classroom setting at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. (Yes, there really is a Kalamazoo, but there is only one.) It was a small event that the Artist and I attended together, at the suggestion of our friend, Michael, the poet’s cousin.

 

Diane, as I recall her on that long-ago day, was young, barefoot, and wore a long cotton hippie sort of skirt. Instead of standing behind the desk and reading from the small lectern, she sat on the desk, bare feet swinging. I remember being somewhat dubious and not expecting much. 

 

Then she read.

 

At the end of her first poem, the Artist and I looked at each other in amazement. Had we really heard what we thought we heard? I wish now that I had made notes (and kept them) of the pieces that made our hair stand on end that day. I do remember going to see our friend, her cousin, Michael, soon afterward to tell him that I would be more than happy to type Diane’s manuscript for free if she needed a typist, so that her work could be published with the least possible delay. 

 

But her career did all right without my help. A Guggenheim Fellow in 2020, she received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. And now, for her frank: sonnets, she has won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer committee said of this book that it is “a virtuosic collection that inventively expands the sonnet form….” Wow. I mean -- wow! A Pulitzer!!!

 

 

Coming From Way Behind

 

Then there was another winner, the long shot, come-from-behind winner of the 2022 the Kentucky Derby, which I was unable to watch as I was on the road that day, traveling the last stretch of my cross-country odyssey home to Michigan from Arizona. I had no idea of the horses running that day, and the names would have meant nothing to me, but someone posted a link on Facebook, I watched it a couple days later, and -- Oh my God, I have never seen such a race! Has there ever been such a race? The announcer himself, focused on the front runners, never saw the upset coming, even as Rich Strike was coming up through the field, passing every horse in sight.

 

What a horse! What a race! Nunca te rindas! Never give up! 80 to 1 odds! Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! It is an exciting race every time I re-watch it!

 

 

Life Is Hard, Driving Is Easy

 

How many of my friends offered to fly out to Tucson and drive back with me across the country to Michigan? I lost count. There were a lot, and quite honestly, not to sound churlish or ungrateful, I had a few moments of annoyance at all the concern. Did my husband’s death render me suddenly incompetent and/or foolish? And how could I even begin to imagine making that long, familiar, cross-country drive David and I had made together so many times with anyone who wasn’t David? The very idea, so popular among my friends, I found unthinkable. 

 

I wrote recently, “This trip was, for me, a kind of pilgrimage but not to one particular destination: the entire length of the journey was its point.” It was, if you will, a kind of secular-marital Camino de Santiago, driven rather than walked, and I had to do it alone. We walked around the square in this little town. It was on this stretch of country two-lane road that we saw the armadillo. My memories would mean nothing to anyone else.

 

The other thing is that since the Artist died, missing him so terribly, I do a lot of crying in the car. A second person would have constrained that tearful freedom, conversation would have impinged on my memories, pushing them aside, and silence would not have been the comfortable kind that comes about in a marriage after decades of crazy passion, sturm und drang, quiet, mundane happiness, and all the rest, whereas alone on the road, I had no need to respond except to my puppy, and while Sunny Juliet occasionally makes demands (she is both vocal and physical in making her needs known), she never asks questions. 

 

“But who will help you with the driving?” people frequently asked. At the end of my odyssey, I was able to put into words what I had known intuitively from the beginning, which is, as the heading of this section of my post puts succinctly, “Life is hard (well, it can be), but driving is easy.” Driving for days requires focus on the task at hand, but except for puppy needs I had no other responsibilities. All I had to do was cover miles. I could take the roads I wanted to take – roads the Artist and I had traveled before – and stop when I wanted to or keep going if I didn’t need or want to stop, consulting only Sunny’s requirements and my own inclination. The hardest part of the odyssey had nothing to do with driving. It was that Sunny slept so much in the car that she wasn’t tired at the end of the day, and I had to amuse and entertain her for three or four hours in the motel when all I really wanted to do was fall asleep over a book or in front of a movie.

One ear up and one ear down

But, as I said up there at the beginning today, we made it, and now we go on from here, day by day. Thanks to David’s gift of a puppy and Sunny Juliet’s presence, I am not alone. Then, too, there are all our friends! 

I'm not alone

So feel free to quote me: "Life is hard, driving is easy."

And then, the other evening in Leland –

 

Summer art classes in Leland, Michigan, began in 1922, a century ago, thanks to Allie Mae Best. Fifty years ago Michigan State University began offering six-week, for-credit art classes every summer in Leland. My late husband, David Grath, a.k.a. “the Artist” here on Books in Northport, came to Leland to study as a master’s student from MSU (having discovered Leland somewhat earlier, but that’s another story), and so for the 100^th anniversary celebration I was asked to loan one of his paintings for the show, which opened Thursday evening, May 12, and runs through May 18 (open 11-3 daily). The show included works by students and instructors from as long ago as the 1960s.

 

I wasn’t sure I was up for a big public event. What would it feel like to be there, in the building where the Artist had so many one-man shows over the years and where so many friends and acquaintances would be gathered? Could I handle it? I just didn’t know, but a friend said she and her husband would meet me outside and we could go in together. 

 

It was a lovely, lovely evening! I was so, so glad to be there and was so glad in retrospect that I didn’t miss it that I had to stop by again to photograph a couple things I missed on Thursday evening. Here, then, are a few of the images that touched my heart. 

 

"Every Day You're Getting Prettier and Prettier"
and 
"Tricoastal"
by David Grath

Paul Welch

"Painting of Portrait," by Paul Welch

"Vanitas," by Paul Welch

"Gauntlet," by Janine Germaine

"Cat? What Cat?" (from the Monster series), by Janine Germaine

screen by Jane McChesney

"Eden," by Cliff McChesney (typical large work of his)

"Soul Catcher," by Cliff McChesney (atypically small for Cliff)

You must forgive me some sentimentality in these choices. I was never a student in the summer art classes but fell under the spell of Cliff and Jane McChesney (as had all their summer art students) when I met them at a dinner party at the home of Jim and Linda Harrison. They were truly lovely people. So while I have no personal memories of the summer art classes, I have my own set of memories, and many of the names invoked on Thursday evening were names I recognized, calling up fond thoughts of years past.