The season is moving right along

Days begin and end in smoky haze.

Smoke from Canadian fires makes for dramatic sunrises and sunsets, in addition to reduced air quality. I was going to say “daytime” air quality, but quality must be compromised at night, too, though we don't see the haze. 

In my neighborhood, cherry harvest is over for another year. The month of July is over everywhere! Admittedly, the season we anticipate all winter long, summer, always passes too quickly, but I can’t believe how this one is flying by—a blur, as I always tell people when they ask how my summer is going or, later, how my summer was.

Daisies at their peak bloom. This now is in the past.

For now we still have black-eyed Susans, and the raspberries aren’t quite finished, but already daisies are going to seed, Joe Pye-weed is blooming, and the first goldenrod is showing its bright color. Too soon! Too soon! 

Goldenrod already!

What Has Happened

The Friends of Leelanau Township Library wrapped up their summer author series with guest author Aaron Stander, who read from the 12th book in the very popular Sheriff Ray Elkins series, Smoke and Mirrors, set right here in what he calls “Cedar” County. Aaron shared with the audience some background on how he started writing murder mysteries (Elmore Leonard inspired him) and told stories of having an agent (briefly), looking for a publisher (one was interested until she learned the author's age), and—this was the happiest story—having a loyal, trustworthy editor.

"Did I overdress?" he asked me facetiously.

On the home front, Sunny and I had a visit from a couple old friends of mine and the new little dog of one of those friends. How apprehensive I was beforehand! Would my Naughty Barker terrorize the little rescue pup, who had been cagebound for most of his life until he came to live with Sandra? 

Little Milton, visiting dog

They were fine! They were better than fine! Milton was friendly and relaxed, and so was Sunny. My girl barked briefly at introductions, but soon the two dogs seemed to have been best dog buddies all their lives, and their easy-going happiness added to the humans’ enjoyment of the visit. Relieved? I was overjoyed! It was almost as if Sunny Juliet were channeling Sarah….

Getting acquainted...

Accepting...

Posing...

Resting, hanging out after play -- ah!

What’s Still to Come

Please disregard the erroneous headline in the Enterprise story on my upcoming bookstore event. Our township librarian was even more startled than I was to see the words “library event” (she thought she had forgotten something major!) above the story about Tim Mulherin’s August 13th appearance at Dog Ears Books. 

We’ll begin at 7 p.m. that Wednesday, but you might want to come a little earlier to be sure of a chair, because I’m thinking Tim’s topic is one that could draw a pretty big audience.

Even before that, Northport will have on Saturday, August 2, the annual Fly-In and pancake breakfast, and on Saturday, August 9, the annual and always highly anticipated dog parade. The theme this year is Bone Appétit (please note that final 't' is silent), and, please note, I am registering dog parade entries at Dog Ears Books.

AND my sisters are coming for a visit!!!

My Current Reading

I am still reading the book about Aristotle mentioned in my previous post, along with the other book I wrote about there, In the Merrimack Valley, but was sidetracked yesterday by a very small paperback that I haven't finished yet, an account written in prison—of what turned out to be his last days on earth—by Andrei Ivanovich Shingarev. He was arrested and thrown into prison, without trial, on November 27, 1917, and murdered in January 1918 after being transferred to a hospital. What is available online about Shingarev's life is sparse and conflicting. I have to say, however, that when he writes from prison that members of his political party, the Constitutional Democrats, were declared “enemies of the people” by the antidemocratic Bolsheviks, I thought of similar name-calling from our own White House in our own time. He also writes of lies and hypocrisy but is steadfast in his hope that the Russian people will eventually wake up and throw off those who betrayed their revolution. An empty hope, as it turned out, for that country. Will Americans be different?

Words he wrote from prison --

Which leads me to....

My Thoughts on Forgiveness (because it’s something I think about)

If someone hurts me but exhibits remorse and asks for forgiveness, I can forgive that person. If there is no remorse, no “Sorry!”—let alone a mending of the ways—I feel no compulsion to forgive. I can “move on” without it. Because you can’t make people care.

As I see it, though, forgiving wrongs done to others is an entirely different matter. That is not a matter of forgiveness for me. It is not up to any unharmed and uninvolved person but up to the person or persons harmed to offer forgiveness—if they are still alive and can find it in their hearts to forgive.

In this light, when I look at what is being done in the name of my country in today’s world, at members of our own government who are inflicting harm in our name within our borders and around the world, I not only hold them responsible but also those who put them in office and continue to support them. Can I ever forgive these people? I doubt I will ever be asked, but if I were, my answer would be no. I could forgive ignorance if the truth were inaccessible, but it is not. I could forgive honest mistakes if they were admitted and ways mended, but this is not happening. And even then, I myself cannot forgive violations of the rights and liberties and lives of other people, the ones wronged. 

People who support these violations and call themselves Christian (or Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu or whatever!) can ask their God for forgiveness. Rudolf Vrba wrote a book about the Holocaust and the concentration camps and titled it I Cannot Forgive. As I see things (and I realize not everyone will agree), he was right not to.

And as the unforgivable continues to take place day after day, so does rallying around the golden calf. Where is Moses when we need him?

Never malicious —

That’s one of the things I love about the world of plants and sky and rock. Any of these can hurt you, but they never do so intentionally. Even poisonous plants bear us no malice. They are—and I appreciate this from the bottom of my heart—indifferent to human life. Storms may rage, winds may howl, and trees may crash to the ground, but they would do the same if we weren’t in their way, and if we are—well, that’s our bad luck. 

Nothing living lives forever.

Only one of our fellow living beings can push us off a mountain ledge. We may be alone and slip on loose rock, but the mountain is not responsible. There is no one to blame and nothing to forgive. I find that infinitely comforting.

I love their indifference.

What will I practice this year?

"What's up, Momma?"

 Whatever you practice

grows stronger.

 

Those five words stopped me in my mental tracks. They’re from a little book called Radical Compassion, by Tara Brach. A practice is intentional, whereas a habit is often unconscious, but in either case repetition creates a groove.

 

(1)       Only yesterday I was looking at the pages of my very first sketchbook, given to me by the Artist Christmas of 2004. It came in a wooden box (with carrying handle) that also contained pencils of all kinds, watercolors, brushes, and pastels. Trying out the pencils that first morning took courage on my part, but even in this first book, before any classes, there are a few drawings made as time went by that I see now as “not awful.” (Many, admittedly, are pretty lame.) Much more importantly, for each one I see, I recall the place, the day, the circumstances, such that together they constitute a kind of visual diary stretching from 2005 to 2010, many entries from winter months in Florida. More than does a photo album – because a drawing takes so much longer to produce – they bring the past back to me and give me pleasure. And so I inch slowly, in thought and preparation, back into my once-daily practice of drawing, a way of recording the ordinary stuff of my everyday life.

2006

2009

Big jump here. 

us

 

(2)       Giving and loving, in thought and action, is a practice for which my marriage was a school, and now that the Artist is no longer with me, I have been consciously and intentionally expanding outward that small,  personal world. How far can my loving intentions reach?This thought will connect to others (perhaps) in what follows.

 

(3)       In general, over my lifetime, humor has not usually been my first response to anything (and I can be obtusely literal at times), but lately I’m finding it a better response than my habitual reactions to a lot of situations. Instead of leaping to argue or withdrawing to brood, my slower response (because I am not a fast thinker) is gentle and often leads me to laugh at myself. Because whether or not another person intends to say or do something cruel or dismissive or presumptuous – and often they don’t intend that! – if I don’t feel I deserve it, why would I want to take it on and feel bad and launch an angry exchange? Or silently hold a grudge? If the other is speaking or acting from such a negative space, isn’t that just sad? Don’t they need, maybe, reassurance? At least a smile! – I don’t know. I’m just today beginning to work through these thoughts. (Note: Snippy or smart-ass humor would only be anger in disguise. Not what I’m talking about.)

 

Back to the drawing board

Drawing, giving and loving, laughing are all practices I’ve chosen to focus on in this new year. The last one on my list, (4) forgiveness, is the biggest challenge of all for me, but I am hoping that the others will help me get there. BLTN. Better Late Than Never. Mieux tard que jamais.

 

My bookstore Christmas tree dropped almost all its needles at once, making procrastination not an option for taking the tree down and putting away the ornaments, and that in turn cleared space in the front window to showcase other green plants, living plants, which received a much-needed beauty treatment, ridding them of dead leaves and cutting back where needed. Having live things indoors with me helps on these gloomy-skied January days.

Window greens

Because yes, the sky is grey, and the days are dreary and cold. “Do you miss Arizona?” someone asked. Mornings in the mountains of the Southwest aren’t much warmer than northern Michigan mornings, but I do miss the almost daily appearance of the Arizona sun and the way it brought the temperature up considerably by afternoon. So, the sun. And the mountains. I miss the mountains.

“When you were in Arizona, did you miss Michigan?” No, I said, because I knew I would be coming back to Leelanau in May. I didn’t have to miss Arizona in summers past, either, when I could count on returning to the mountains in winter. Life is different now. But it’s okay. I am not unhappy about where I am. This is my beautiful home, and when we finally get more snow, it will be even more beautiful. Update: It's Saturday, and it's snowing!

 

Only the beginning -'

There are exciting aspects to 2024 Michigan winter bookstore life, too. For one thing, the long-awaited release date for Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters, draws near! As the buzz builds, my impatience grows! Meanwhile, in addition to the Tara Brach book quoted at the top of this post, I am rereading one of my favorite Walter Mosley novels, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (a book I find absolutely perfect) and have read William L. Andrews, the editor’s, introduction to a paperback edition of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, a novel (yes) by James Weldon Johnson that I will jump into as soon as I reach the last page of Mosley. Finally, from the Grath collection of river books, I most recently chose to read (or re-read? I don’t remember) a book titled Little Rivers: A Book of Essays in Profitable Idleness, by Henry van Dyke. Obviously, a book with such a title is not one to race through, so I read the preface and first chapter and then slid it back in its place, to pull out again perhaps on Sunday afternoon. 

 

Many more thoughts percolating about enchantment and right and left brain stuff, but I will keep those for another day. 

To be continued....

Difficult Family Matters

The book I want to highlight for your consideration today was written by a woman close to my own age. She is, unlike me, an avowed and devoted Christian with an intense focus on the Gospels. She is a college-educated wife, mother, and grandmother, deeply appreciative of her life on this earth but with heaven never far from her mind. She also practices yoga and does volunteer work (not proselytizing) with young people caught up in the life of street prostitution in Seattle. Her husband was always the gregarious half of the couple, and for years she felt invisible beside him. As it turned out, though, she discovered that her journey to visibility had more to do with freeing herself from her own demons than with quieting or competing with her more vocal, outgoing spouse. 

The book is Hidden in Plain Sight: One Woman’s Search for Identity, Intimacy and Calling, by Becky Allender, and from the title you might suspect that you have read this book before, in numerous other versions, by various American writers, male and female, but I think you will be surprised. I know I was.

It was a picture-perfect, materially comfortable existence from the outside — the side people saw — but that smooth surface hid a surprising degree of pain: the legacy of a cold, unloving mother; an unpredictable, bipolar father; and a startling rape during her undergraduate college years. Even within a mostly fulfilling marriage there was the pain, physical and emotional, of three miscarriages basically suffered alone and silently — because Becky had learned as a child not to ask for attention but to keep quiet, lest others become upset and angry with her.

Becky’s book is not about religion, per se: it is about her life in all its myriad aspects, physical, emotional, and spiritual. Her religion is clearly very important to her, even central to the woman she has become, but don’t look for preaching in these pages. Hidden in Plain Sight is, basically, the kind of full and honest account that Becky would have loved to have had of her own parents’ lives, in order to understand them better — and love them better — while they were alive. 

Since we all have parents, and since no one goes through life without accumulating scars, I think that whether or not you belong to a faith community or engage in anything that could be called spiritual practice, you will find Becky Allender’s story engrossing and compelling, and you will be — yes, inspired by her search for understanding and forgiveness, as well as by her dedication to going beyond her comfort zone for strangers. 

This is a beautiful, professional, and very moving work. If you happen to be, as is the author, a practicing Christian, your experience of the book will have added depth as you work through the questions and suggested writing exercises included at the end of each chapter. The layout and organization are very reader-friendly, and the frankness of the story is matched by the quality of the writing and presentation. 

Full disclosure: Hidden in Plain Sight would most likely never have come to my attention at all, except that Becky Allender is my first cousin. Our fathers were brothers, and we were thrown together from time to time when my parents and sisters and I made the summer trek back to Ohio to visit extended family. We cousins lived two states apart when growing up, however, and I left my family home for good at age 18, so we cousins never knew really each other well, even as children, and as adults we have had (up until now) almost no contact whatsoever. I owe my reading of cousin Becky’s book to my sister Deborah.

Twenty and thirty years ago, everyone was writing screenplays, and now it seems everyone is writing books, whether novels or memoirs. That being the case, one cannot help approaching cautiously a book by a friend or relative! But my cousin Becky Allender has written a beautiful book, and I am proud to be able to recommend it without hesitation. Because the Artist picked it up and began reading and I had to demand its return so I could finish it first, I know that men as well as women can find themselves caught up in this very frank and well-written account of one woman’s continuing struggles and joys. 

Yes, “continuing” — because we are all “works in progress,” for as long as we live, aren’t we? And I especially love what Becky says near the end of her book, after sharing an anecdote about one of her granddaughters. Echoing the little girl, the 65-year-old writer declares, “I am not finished!” — and how glad I am that she is not! 

Perhaps Becky and her sister and my sisters and I can have a girl cousins reunion one of these years soon and finally get to know each other. That would mean a lot to me.

Book Review: THE UP SIDE OF DOWN

THE UP SIDE OF DOWN: WHY FAILING WELL IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS, by Megan McArdle

NY: Viking, 2014

(On sale February 11, 2014)

Hardcover $27.95

When teaching philosophy, I used to tell my students that getting a concept wrong, being confused, misunderstanding or misstating an idea or position were all positive signs. “It means you’re thinking, not just memorizing and regurgitating.” This is a lot of the message of Megan McArdle’s new book: failure can lead to learning, which can lead to growth and success.

One thing you should know, however, is that this is not a self-help book. You and your problems and issues (or me and mine) are not McArdle’s focus. Her canvas is much broader. And that broader vision is both the book’s strength and its weakness.

The big picture approach helps to situate personal experience and individual concerns in a broadly psychological and social context that allows the author to commend or criticize government and corporate policies and programs, as well as the aims and strategies of individuals. On the other hand, it is a weakness when examples drawn from disparate realms are tossed in with insufficient discussion (“punish” puppies to house-train them? How? “spank ... immediately” to discipline children? For what range of offenses, one instantly wonders with some alarm) or when huge global issues such as poverty are brought in for a brief paragraph, acknowledged with a nod, and then left by the side of the road.

Those are my caveats. Having issued them, I want to assure my readers that this book is well worth their attention, for as many reasons as the topics it addresses.

McArdle presents fascinating information from diverse disciplines and draws from it her own conclusions. She writes engagingly not only when recounting very personal experiences (the kind that don't usually make it into books on economics) but also because she brings an open mind to national debates, debates often rigidly polarized in American society at large and treated superficially in familiar sound bytes. The publisher identifies her as “an outspoken Libertarian,” yet time and time again McArdle acknowledges an active role for government, and never does she seem to be hewing to a party line –conservative, liberal, or libertarian. More than once her even-handed discussion reminded me of Aristotle: no one person or group is wrong (or right!) about everything, and she gives every position its due issuing her critique. Then, too, her criticism is based on empirical evidence, not personal opinion or blind ideology. Very refreshing!

What we need, this book implies, is more information, more experiments, and even more gadflies and whistle-blowers. Will that eliminate or even reduce failure?

In your dreams! 

Despite the most thorough market research, scientific research, psychological research -- at the end of the day the market is still made up of human beings, and human beings are and always will be unpredictable.

So why bother? 

Because we can do better. Because we can prevent failure from turning into disaster.

To manage failure and learn fast enough to stay clear of disaster, we must be aware of common errors in the way we process information. Because of the normalcy bias, it’s hard for us to see a crisis if everyone around us is acting as if things are all hunky-dory. (I think of this as the “Emperor’s New Clothes” bias, but really, someone does need to blow the whistle there, wouldn’t you agree?) Then, once we’re all convinced we’re going down the right road, the confirmation bias kicks in to reassure us and will even “bend the map” in order to discount information that would otherwise clue us in to the fact that we are lost. The lesson here, as we used to say to each other in grad school philosophy classes, reading one philosopher after another who started out with what he considered self-evident propositions, “It isn’t always obvious what’s obvious.” Too often we just see what we look for. And then there’s risk aversion, or what I always think of as the why-we-are-in-Vietnam syndrome: We’ve put too much into this! We can’t get out now! Throwing good money after bad makes for disastrous gambling, with ever-mounting losses. Excuse all my Memory Lane quotations today, but it’s true that “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”

To anyone familiar with the work of Tversky and Kahnemann or Dan Ariely, news of the ways in which our reason is contaminated by irrationality is no news at all. The thing is, “knowing” as in “being able to choose the correct answer on a test asking about risk aversion facts or statistics" is not at all the same thing as knowing how to avoid the pitfalls, so any book that reminds us to double-check our thinking is probably a book we need to read. In one book I recently read but did not review, Alex Stone’s Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind, the author, who never believed in fortune-telling in the first place visits a fortune-teller, focuses on how she’s doing what she’s doing, sees clearly what’s going on – and yet

Later that day, I caught myself brooding over what Stephanie said – that is, until I remembered the source and pushed these thoughts aside. And yet, no matter how hard I tried to dislodge them, they had a stubborn way of creeping back into my consciousness....  

One of the scariest things about mentalism is that even after you understand how it works, it still feels believable.  

- Alex Stone, Fooling Houdini (2012)

How scary is that?

Okay, I said that The Up Side of Down isn’t a self-help book, but McArdle does have a few words of advice for unemployed job-seekers, most of them good. Her take on why the long-term unemployed slack off on the searching is that the longer they have to look, the more anxiety and unhappiness they experience and that discussions on unemployment benefits should take this into account, to reduce job-seekers’ anxiety and keep them moving – presumably to wherever there are jobs. This was basically a good discussion, as far as it went, but the number of jobs that have gone overseas is left unaddressed, and the advice to spend time with others in the same boat, other unemployed people, for “support” didn’t convince me. After all, you won’t get job leads hanging out with other people who are out of work, and you might just get more depressed and feel more hopeless. I wonder if McArdle has read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch. I’d love to see Ehrenreich and McArdle onstage together, not debating, per se, but conversing these important issues at a deep and meaningful level.

There’s much more in this book than what I’ve covered here. For instance, Chapter 8, “Blame,” begins with the way human brains work, brains looking for patterns, causes, and agency – brains jumping, therefore, from accident to intent, positing intention and design to what may be random events, assigning blame where there may not even be responsibility. Just as having control reduces stress, so believing we have control reduces stress. -- But if we’re all in control, designing events to conform to our intentions, isn’t someone always guilty? -- Not so fast!!! We may have only imagined the intention....

The following chapter, “Punishment,” may surprise many readers (and I know from teaching undergraduates that there will be strong resistance here), because in it the author lays out the well-supported claim that visiting vengeance on criminals (‘vengeance’ usually called in this context by the milder term ‘retribution’) is usually counterproductive. She does not argue against punishment in general but says that the consequences, to be both effective and cost-effective, must be immediate and inevitable. No letting small violations slide and then, unpredictably, crashing down with harsh verdicts. Actually, the harsher the verdicts, the more 3-strikes-you’re-out, “the higher the incarceration rate, the less it discourages....” The probation program she introduces to us mainlanders is from Hawaii, called HOPE, and the judge’s message to his probationers, people who have failed usually several times in many different ways, is that everyone wants them to succeed, that the focus from here on in will on the future, not the past.

Closely monitoring probationers costs less than keeping criminals in prison. Likewise, providing free housing to homeless people, even if they are alcoholics and/or drug addicts, is cheaper than the myriad costs to society of homelessness.

With bankruptcy, as with criminals and homelessness, this libertarian author takes a surprising position, namely that choosing bankruptcy can make much more sense than remaining under the crippling burden of debt year after year. Bankruptcy lets people start over. And since so many entrepreneurial endeavors fail, it’s important that people willing to take the risks of starting new businesses should have the opportunity to try again after failing.

In so many ways, in so many realms, forgiveness costs much less than punishment. This should be a wake-up call to individuals, voters, and government officials.

Realizing that McArdle's book originated as essentially ten separate magazine features (the author is a long-time blogger and a writer for Bloomberg View, The Atlantic, The Economist, and Newsweek) helped me make sense of the variety of topics brought together in a single book under one umbrella title. It isn’t the book I expected, but it brought together many intriguing issues, and I look forward to future books from Megan McArdle.

Book Review: THE CRYING TREE

Part I, Chapter 1 of The Crying Tree, by Naseem Rakha, begins on October 1, 2004, as prison superintendent Tab Mason learns that an execution date has been set for one of his death row inmates. Daniel Robbin has been on death row for 19 years-- half his life--convicted of the May 1985 murder of 15-year-old Shep Stanley, son of Nate and Irene Stanley, but now Robbin has stopped appealing his sentence, and Mason will have to arrange for and preside over his first execution.

Chapter 2 takes us back in time to September 20, 1983, the day Irene Stanley’s husband, Nate, came home to announce that he wanted to pull up their family’s southern Illinois stakes for a move to Oregon. Irene protests. The farmhouse the family lives in was built by her great-grandfather, and Irene grew up in it. She and Nate graduated went to school in this community and were married in her family church. Everyone they know is here. But Nate’s mind is made up. He wants a change.

From these two different starting points, the two tracks of the story move forward, each in turn, though we know, from Chapter 1, even before meeting the Stanley family in Chapter 2, that Shep died a violent death two years later. Daniel Robbin, the prisoner on death row, seems a cool, unemotional man. He shows no fear of his own death and expresses no regrets for Shep’s. The omniscient narrator, however, is only putting a couple of cards at a time on the table.

Irene Stanley and Tab Mason are the two main characters, and we see most of the story through their eyes, share their feelings through most of the novel’s chapters. Slowly, gradually, their secrets are laid open. Irene and Tab are not the only ones who have secrets, however, and the story’s tempo accelerates as more and more secrets are revealed. There is no one, it seems, who has nothing to hide.

If The Crying Tree were a thriller, secrets and revelations would carry the weight of the story and serve as its focus. Instead they are—not merely incidental, because they reveal some of the deepest aspects of the characters concerned--but certainly secondary to the more important questions of this novel: Can terrible psychic trauma be forgotten if starved of attention? What of forgiveness? Is it a human possibility, or are some acts unforgivable? Can one “move on” without forgiving? Is it possible to find “closure” for the murder of one’s child, and what would make that possible?

This story covers the years 1983-2004. I cannot imagine any shorter period of time would have sufficed for the journey made by Nate, Irene and Bliss (Shep’s sister) Stanley, Daniel Robbin and Tab Mason. Even if you read this book in two days, as I did, you will feel time’s cruelty and the family’s sense of the horror of continuing injustice, year after year. Mason’s failed marriage and the daughter he has all but lost, along with the enigma of Daniel Robbin, present different kinds of scar tissue. Everyone is wounded and struggling to carry on.

As the date draws near for the execution, the first in Oregon in many years, the press is hungry for answers. They want precise details of the procedure. They ask if the prisoner will feel any pain.

Mason wanted to say, Of course there’s pain, you assholes. There’s always pain. The pain of knowing, the pain of waiting, the pain of anticipation. And then there’s that other pain. The pain of planning out an execution. ... A job governors, kings, and heads of state have given to lesser men throughout time. Men never meant to sit with society—the pariahs, the recluses, the ones with the hoods, who either found a way to separate themselves from the results of their work or died from it, one execution at a time. That guy who’d done fifty executions in Florida had quit. Just up and quit one day. Told Mason that he couldn’t get the eyes out of his head. Fifty sets of them, staring.

There were tolls, Mason wanted to say. Tolls both sides of the road. But the press hadn’t asked about that. And if they had, what would he have said?

What Mason has to say to the press is carefully scripted: Stick to the cold, dry facts. Use official terminology. Refer to the execution as “the procedure.”

I believe that how it deals with violent criminals is one of the severest tests of any society. I also feel strongly (I know it is true for me) that forgiveness, whether for great betrayals or minor offenses, is one of the greatest spiritual challenges that human beings face. Another is asking for forgiveness.

The questions at the end of my paperback copy of The Crying Tree were formulated by the author. She introduces them by giving her own background to this story:

In 1996 I was assigned to cover Oregon’s first execution in over thirty years. At the time I had never given much thought to the death penalty and what it would take for the state to plan out, prepare, and then kill a man. After the assignment, I wanted to learn more so I began to interview death-row inmates, the people they had harmed, and the men and women we entrust to carry out our nation’s most severe sentence. During the time I heard many stories, some of them abhorrent and some heartbreaking, but by far the most compelling were those told by the people who had come to terms with the murder of a loved one and no longer felt it necessary to seek retribution. This arc, from the most desperate kind of anguish to reconciliation and even love, stunned me....

The questions that follow are thought-provoking and would add greatly to a discussion of the book, but I want to pose different questions, though they too can only be considered by readers who have first read the entire novel. Realizing that this book is fiction, then, and the details of its story not those of any particular capital case:

How did you feel during the last scene? Had Shep been a different person, had Daniel been different, and this scene therefore not possible, what feelings might you have had at the end of the story? Suppose Shep’s father had not come home while Daniel was in the house? Would Irene’s forgiveness of Daniel make as much sense if the facts of Shep’s death had been different? (Remember when Irene comes to the point of forgiveness and how much she knows then.) How far are the lessons learned by this fictional family over the 19-year period of the novel generalizable to other human beings suffering similar losses? If you think that the novel is "not realistic," which parts of the story do not ring true to you? In your own life, have there been lesser traumatic events which you still struggle to put behind you?

I ask these questions because I have taught classes in applied ethics and, knowing that no one comes to the issue of capital punishment without a strong opinion, I’m sure there will be those who would dismiss The Crying Tree as “only a novel,” “not real life,” “nothing like most murders,” etc. The first hurdle to a fair assessment, therefore, will be to enter as fully as possible into the world of the novel. The second will be to accept its possibilities while wrestling with the questions posed by our everyday reality.

This is a very challenging novel, well worth taking the time to read and reflect upon. I would suggest that reading groups follow up with a true-life memoir, Dreams From the Monster Factory, because these issues are not going to fade away in our lifetime.