Again, September

Once, we were there....
 

Not at all like a thief in the night but perceptibly, on Monday evening, August 21st, a good week and a half before the calendar announced ‘September’ to us, the season turned the corner. Already there had been blackberries fermenting on the stem, wafting their sickly, drunken perfume abroad, and goldenrod putting forth its brilliant pyrotechnical displays, but that Monday evening, as friends and I were finishing up the pizza they’d brought for dinner, which we’d been enjoying outdoors in the shade of black walnut and basswood trees, all at once the temperature dropped and we agreed to have dessert on the porch. The calendar didn't say so yet, but September had come. 

U.P. "home away from home" in the old days

Bessie and Heidi

Superior Hotel, Grand Marais

September used to be the time the Artist and I would take a break after our summer in the public eye – my bookstore, his gallery -- and drive up to the U.P. for a few days on Lake Superior or, the last couple of years, over to Lake Huron, where his grandfather had farmed long ago. All traces of the old farm are gone, but we hunted out his grandparents’ graves in a little country cemetery and one time ran into one of his shirttail cousins having breakfast at a lakeside diner...

... and we ventured down to the tiny crossroads of Glennie and little Vaughn Lake, where his parents had rented a cottage for a few years and for a while owned a lot that David fondly imagined, as he, a boy, cleared away popple trees with his little axe, would be his someday. When a neighbor on the lake became more than a little nutty, however, his father sold the lot. 

“Tell me a story about when you were a little boy in Detroit,” I would say when nighttime found us both sleepless. “Or the time you buried the chartreuse bop cap [his most regretted fashion faux pas] at Vaughn Lake.” Sometimes he would protest, “Oh, you know all my stories,” but I could prime the pump and weasel him into a storytelling mood every time. He was, as all friends and family will attest, a wonderful storyteller. I only wish I had recorded some of those sessions, because he was never interested in writing them down. He sometimes made brief notes for stories but never went further. Maybe, though, record his storytelling would have put a crimp in his style, and I need to be content with the memory of our intimacy and not yearn for wordy details….

I’ve been reading a very dreamy book, Pamela Petro’s The Long Field: Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir. I live daily with "presence of absence” since the Artist died, but the idea she describes of having more than one sense of “home” is familiar, too, and has been since David and I went out West and I encountered and fell unexpectedly in love with mountains. Oh, and then there was Paris – and the Auvergne! I recommend the Petro book to all dreamers, but for now I ask you at least to follow this link for an introduction to the Welsh concepts of hiraeth and hwyl.

 

I did not grow up in the place where I was born, and the place where I grew up is one I longed to leave all through my childhood and youth. I love France, and I truly love Cochise County, Arizona. But Midwest, mountainless, English-speaking, Great Lakes-surrounded Michigan is my home, mon chez moi, and I cannot imagine giving it up. My own life stories are here.

Here, where every mile holds memories

 

A third echo my own life finds in The Long Field is the author’s love of stones, of rock. She writes not only of mountains but also of megaliths, rocks made to stand upright by ancient humans for reasons lost to time. The mystery of them.

 

We know we can’t live forever, but stones can, almost. Right up to the threshold of immortality. So we prop them up and carve them. We make cairns and temples and snuff bottles. Sometimes we shape them to look like us. 

 

I wonder if she has ever read David Leveson (whose name I see I spelled wrong in this old blog post). Stones, rocks, mountains – their “innocence” (as Leveson sees them) and their vast age (Petro’s focus) as compared to our own brief lives combine to make them endlessly fascinating – to those of us fascinated by them, I suppose. Perhaps others are left unmoved. Probably. Chacun à son gout, said the old lady as she kissed the pig.

Hiking Arizona rocks with a neighbor

September, though – ah, September! No more going back to school for me, either as student or teacher, and no more rambles with my love in our familiar home-away-from home, Grand Marais, with its hollyhock-lined, grass-carpeted alleys. (Here was our getaway in 2015, and another the following year.) The haunting music of the song “September When It Comes,” by Johnny and Rosanne Cash, fills me with hiraeth and the bittersweet, unquenchable longing evoked by the presence of absence.

 

On a lighter note, if you’re in Ohio and you visit these people, tell them Dog Ears Books sent you. They came to Northport and visited Dog Ears Books on August 29, 2023. 

What Do You Think You Will Remember?

My desk in December

When we arrived at our ghost town hideaway for the winter, I made notes on the route we’d taken west and the places we had stayed: Kalamazoo, MI; Springfield, IL; Sedalia, MO; Wellington, KS; Dalhart, TX; Alamagordo, NM; and finally here, Dos Cabezas, AZ, 15 miles southeast of Willcox, AZ, and about 25 beautiful, winding miles west of the Chiricahua National Monument. The first page of the same composition book was already taken up with lists of things to pack (one list for the humans, another for the dog), and it was only on our second morning in the ghost town that I began keeping a sketchy narrative history of our season here. Back then, happy to be settling in for a few months under a sunny sky filled with wintering sandhill cranes, I had no idea that my notebook would become, in time a plague journal!

I always read a lot of books during our Arizona winters … write letters … blog about my reading and about our Cochise County adventures and explorations. It just happened that this year, for the first time, I also began keeping a journal. I certainly didn’t anticipate that I would be recording historic events; I merely wanted to fix everyday small details on paper. Because those little everyday details, the stuff of short-term memory, are easily lost as days slip into the past, and my time here is precious to me. I want to be able to hold the days in my hand as it were, and look at them again and again when I am far from these mountains and this desert. 

Winter morning

So most of my mornings began, starting in December, with a session of journal-writing. The weather (no, it isn’t boring), social engagements, personal happenings (getting keys to the mailbox is a big deal to me), daily errands, and descriptions of surroundings flowed from my pen, along with re-emerging childhood memories and a few observations of the current national political scene. Quite a lot about hearing coyotes, through the night and in early, still-dark morning. A few notes on books read.

In short, nothing particularly earth-shaking. And that’s how it went, week after week.

… Sandhill crane count … first visit to the Smile4Jesus Thrift Shop … tales of my husband’s new friend in Willcox, the one I call the Born-Again Bear … brief accounts of dreams (very few remembered long enough to write down) … walks and hikes with neighbors.… 

There were only a few words on the impeachment, although I thought it would never end … and very little on presidential campaigns, debates, caucuses, as I tried to keep attention on politics to a minimum … much more on my volunteer mornings at the library bookstore and the elementary school in Willcox. Of course, the political issues bled in from time to time, from impeachment to debates to caucuses to the State of the Union, because that was the news, nonstop, on the radio and television, but I tried to keep my attention locally focussed, as much as possible, escaping from the news to the outdoors.

People I love found their way onto the pages. One of my sisters was in Mexico for two weeks. The other went through the pain of losing an old dog. We spent February 15-17 in Tucson and anticipated a return in March. The Artist had a birthday. Then in late February, my former husband, the father of my only child, was moved (after only three days) from hospital to hospice, where he died a week later, and my son and I began spending daily time together on the phone. 

In the larger world, a few of the Democratic hopefuls began to drop out of the race for candidacy, but too many yet remained, and far from business and home responsibilities in Michigan as I was, I found the world crowding in, events racing along, piling on top of each other without time to catch a breath. In many ways, the world seemed all present, minute by minute. 

Yet only on March 10 did coronavirus come into my journal, when I noted that the Tucson Festival of Books, scheduled for March 14-15, had been cancelled the day before, adding at the bottom of that page: “Politics and coronavirus — our world today.” Two days later, March 12, I recorded that the president had announced, the evening previous, a ban on travelers from Europe, Ireland and the U.K. excluded. We began hearing daily about the terrible situation in Italy. COVID-19, the virus was now called. Less than two weeks ago. And yet now, March 20 as I am composing these thoughts, just past the spring equinox — such a short time since we were first told to stock our pantries for a possible two-week emergency quarantine — almost all universities and public schools are closed, churches have stopped holding services, restaurants all over the United States are open for take-out only, grocery store shelves are near-empty in key aisles (paper products, soaps and cleaning products, the dairy case), and more and more Americans, even those not yet on “lockdown,” are “sheltering in place,” even if they have not put themselves under “self-quarantine.” That is our national language now. 

Still, though all of us are affected, each of us is experiencing these days of isolation differently. We are spread out across a very large country, and while some friends find themselves alone, far from family and close friends, others see their households expanding with schoolchildren and college-age sons and daughters home all day. I lost my volunteer jobs, but many other people have lost paying jobs, jobs they needed for basic food and shelter. “Lucky” ones see their savings “evaporating before our very eyes,” while the homeless appear at intersections, holding up cardboard signs. No one can hope to remain unaffected, from the most expendable part-time hourly wage worker to the most pampered trust fund baby whose investment portfolios has plummeting in value.

Here’s another personal note, this one I know shared by many — the strange realization that, simply because of our ages, the Artist and I are in a “vulnerable” group, members of an “at-risk” category. It was already strange enough just trying to get it through our heads that we are no longer young — hell, no longer middle-aged! — we still can’t fully believe that! — and now we are also particularly “at risk”?

For me, personally, there is the added strange feeling of being disconnected, physically, from the world that has been mine for almost 27 years, i.e., the world of books. I am not, after all, in my Northport bookstore, weighing the question of whether to entirely for the duration of the crisis or stay open to process phone and mail orders, make sales through the front door (or deliver books to local customers), and gratefully accept whatever help my little community might offer, along with doing what I might do to help the community. I’m not there. Instead of being “on the front lines,” as it were, I only read each day in Shelf Awareness what is happening with other bookstores around the country. So peculiar and unsettling! My feeling must be something like what my sister felt when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans just after she had moved away, that feeling of I should be there! Then added to that the uncertainty of not knowing if we will even be back in early May as planned — if that will be possible at all. 

That’s part of my story. Everyone else has a story, too, quite different from mine. The general point I’m making is that each of us is having a unique subjective experience of these times, which means that together we will have a staggering number of stories, coming from myriad different vantage points, looking through lenses offering a kaleidoscope of perspectives. 

So, are you keeping a “plague” journal? Years from now, what will you remember? What is strangely ordinary about this time for you? In what ways does the crisis seem real or unreal? What other times of crisis does it call to your mind? How is it unlike anything else you’ve ever experienced? 

What books are you reading, and what kinds of meals do you find yourself putting together? Are you able to get outdoors for fresh air and exercise? Do you listen or watch or in some way follow news compulsively, every waking minute, or do you ration what you let into your consciousness each day? Do you sleep through the night or lie awake? If you sleep, what do you dream? If awake, what are your thoughts? How do you seek out comfort, and what gives you comfort?

With how many other people are you “sheltering in place,” and how is that going? Are you spending more time on the phone, calling and texting, or on your computer, e-mailing and following friends’ posts on social media? Do you feel more or less connected to those you love? Differently connected?

What is the best and worst aspect of this time for you? I should add so far to that previous question, shouldn’t I? Because we don’t know yet what will be the best and worst in the days and weeks ahead.

When I look at my own handwritten journal and see that I only used the word ‘coronavirus’ there for the first time ten days ago, I can hardly believe my eyes, but there it is on the page, although subjectively, right now, it feels like at least a full month that we have been obsessed with this news, every waking minute, to the exclusion of almost all else. I know I heard the news from China before March 10, but at that point, as the absence of it in my journal illustrates, the danger must have seemed very remote, a foreign problem only. That’s how fast everything has been happening.

Friends, I see some of your posts on Facebook, but those “news feeds” will be superseded overnight, you know, by whatever comes next, and even a year from now we will have a hard time remembering exactly when and now the pandemic (another frequently occurring word these days) first touched us personally. And besides, as long as you are “sheltering in place,” wouldn’t you like to use some of your time to make a lasting record for yourself and those who come after you? In all human lives, there are watershed events, some personal, others part of a national or world-historic fabric, and this is one of those times that will stand out whenever, in future, we look back on our lives. If you don’t see yourself as a writer, maybe you can keep a scrapbook or a photo album or make a quilt of “plague times.” We don’t have to be greedy opportunists to find opportunity in crisis. 

What stories will you have to tell years from now?

We each see the world from our own little corner....

New Beginnings?

Hoppin' john, collard greens, cheesy biscuits

January 1-2, 2019

Dos Cabezas

When you think about it, the idea of a ‘beginning’ to anything is strange. I wrote those words out long-hand on a pad of yellow-lined paper on the morning of January 1st, but they were really (as I also wrote) a continuation of what had begun on my laptop screen two weeks previously as “Desert Diary,” and that was only picking up again a record of descriptions and thoughts written last winter and three years before in blog posts and letters to family and friends.

Cabin from wash on snowy New Year's Day

Was 2015, then, the beginning of all this writing and of my love for mountains and high desert? If so, why did my heart leap up when the owner of our cabin first told us about it, uttering the words “high desert,” “open range,” “ghost town,” words that thrilled me even then? 

Sarah & fence

I’d never longed to see Arizona — it wasn’t a dream for me, like the dream of seeing Paris — but the truth is that I had always, as a young, horse-crazy girl, dreamed of going West, dreamed of the West from the front porch (west-facing) of our family home on the Illinois prairie as I gazed over and past the cornfields across the road and imagined myself on horseback, riding beyond those prosaic fields, into the sunset. Out under — at last! — black skies pricked by innumerable stars, far from any city or suburb. As it always had and perhaps still does to Europeans, “the West” represented freedom to the child I was, fenced about by social rules and expectations. “No running in the house!” Could they not see that I was not running but galloping? That I was not a child but a wild horse? As I galloped, indoors or out, or dreamed on the front porch, gazing across cultivated fields, I imagined boundless wilderness, open and challenging. There were pictures in my head from television cowboy shows, but there were no sheriffs or bandits or range wars in my fantasy. I had no wish to conquer anything or anyone, only to be there, to “breathe free,” and test myself, not against adults or other children or social mores or any arbitrary will or rule, but against natural reality, harsh though it might be.

[Sidebar: Some, I know, will immediately want to compare my girlhood dreams to those of a boy, so I’ll pause here to say that I am not interested at all in that comparison. Men, usually the ones to raise the comparison questions, can only speculate about how their youthful experiences compare to what they can only imagine were those of someone now a woman. They cannot truly compare, as the only experiences they had were their own. And the only experiences I had were mine, so I cannot compare, either, but comparison is not what I’m about. I am only describing my dreams, and I can say definitely that I did not dream of surviving a Western wilderness as a girl, only of meeting the challenges of nature. Perhaps a boy’s dreams center more on becoming a man. Perhaps their dreams are more gendered. I don’t know. I suspect there are as many differences among boys’ dreams as there are among the dreams of girls, but I find questions of gender when they intrude on my experiences with the natural world, whether actual or imaginary, annoying and unwelcome, because part of what I sought to escape in my childhood imagination was just such restricting social norms.]

Back to the more interesting (to me) question of beginnings, though. Did the feelings I now have for my winter Arizona surroundings begin with a child’s dreams as that child gazed across an Illinois cornfield, imagination ablaze with Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and company? Or was the beginning further in the past, when my parents attended their first rodeo out in South Dakota while I was still in my mother’s womb? South Dakota, my birthplace and scene of my conception — would such a place not mark a child with an invisible brand, not to be erased by subsequent moves and homes? Or do I go beyond reason with such a question?

On New Year’s Eve I opened a new book that I took up again in the morning, as the new year officially began. A gift from friends who were here in the cabin for six weeks before our arrival and the most appropriate possible reading for me, here, as we usher out the old and welcome in the new far from northern Michigan, the book is Drum Hadley’s Voice of the Borderlands, poetry of his cowboyin’ experience along la frontera, the mountains and high desert of Sonora, Mexico, and Cochise County, Arizona. Names of familiar places recur in narrative vignettes: Sulphur Springs Valley, Willcox Livestock Auction, Agua Prieta, and there are mentions also of places I know only from maps, such as Guadalupe and Antelope Wells. I finished the first section, “Cowboys and Horses,” with great satisfaction as the new year began and the first snow of 2019 fell on Dos Cabezas. On the morning of January 2nd, we are under a winter storm warning still, with accumulations of eight inches possible at elevations above 5,000 feet (that’s us) and temperatures not to rise above the freezing mark until Thursday.

Beginnings, endings. Human beings designate moments, days, years as such, but are those designations anything more than mileposts we drive into time as a way to organize our stories?

The Road West: Conversation Sampler

Topic 1: Which is lovelier, a herd of cattle all one color, such as all white Charolais or all black Angus, or a mixed-color herd? David plumped for an all-one-color herd, and I could see the beauty in that scheme, yet when I saw mixed-color herds, they were beautiful, too, in a different way. It’s still a limited palette, after all: black to reddish-brown through the lovely tan of

Jerseys to the cream color of Charolais. That palette (and I remember thinking the same thing in southcentral France) seems to echo the colors of the rocks and earth and trees. And to digress from cattle, sometimes those rocks along the highway look almost fake, like the big faux rochers of the Buttes de Chaumont in Paris. Or so they struck me, and David agreed.

Topic 2: When pioneers were plodding west in ox-drawn carts, did they stop and settle down in Missouri because that’s where an ox died or an axle broke? David’s hypothesized thusly, while my speculation went in a different direction. Had they continued to California, I said, they knew they would have to cross serious mountains, so why wouldn’t they have looked around the rolling, wooded hills west of the Mississippi and said to each other each other, “Why kill ourselves dragging over mountains? What could be better than this? Pretty little creeks, clean water, rich soil, plenty of stone and wood for building.” That’s how Missouri looked to me. Very appealing, a place it would be easy to call home. And again we agreed. Interesting how often we come at a topic from very different starting places and agree on a conclusion -- though admittedly one not derived logically from the original question.

Topic 3: Those neat trees in orderly rows, plantings that look so much like pecan groves -- they can’t be pecan trees, can they? We’re not that far south! But wait! All those signs advertising hand-turned walnut bowls – can these be walnut groves? Walnut trees grow as far north as Michigan, so Missouri would probably be congenial. What the trees are, of course, is a matter of fact, not opinion, and we may be wrong in what we’ve agreed is a good guess, but it doesn’t matter as we’re rolling west. We’re just keeping eyes open and minds in gear.

Topic 4: Any travel brings to mind former travels. The rocks reminded me of a park in Paris, the sycamores of southern Illinois and Ohio. Signs for particular exits brought to David’s mind trips he made one year between Arkansas and Michigan. He recalled a memorable conversation between two strangers in the seat in front of him on a Greyhound bus, both of them returning home to family after adventures gone very wrong. He described to me the worst lightning storms he’d ever been in. The next day, in Oklahoma, I told him the story of our junior high school band and orchestra raising money to charter a train to go to the National Music Festival in Enid. We lived on the train during the festival and were the talk of the town. “You’re the kids on the train!” Yep.

So there we were, rolling along at 70 mph, talking about Paris parks, 19^th-century pioneers in ox-carts, trips to and from Arkansas, lightning storms in Arkansas and in Leelanau County, Michigan, cross-country train travel, and I happened to glance across a pasture where one black Angus steer had taken it into his big beefy head, for who knows what purpose, to stroll downhill like a busy, self-important lawyer headed to a newsstand. There were David and I, existing in multiple times and spaces, and this animal was busy enough living his own life, with no thought to ours. Parallel worlds.

Later (still rolling along) we began listening to a book on tape, Anthony Bourdain reading his A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal, all about traveling around the world seeking good food and adventure. Our adventures are more modest, but we enjoy them. 

We're somewhere different!

Texas uses wind

New Mexico -- landscape changes again

Cowboy country, all of it

And here, in closing tonight, is a song of the West, the link sent to by friend Marjorie back in Northport, Michigan.

Frequently, Thoughts Take Wing

A few mornings back, a friend e-mailed me one of his poems-in-progress, one in which he, the writer, is “condemned to earth” while crows and even tiny sparrows have the power of flight. One does not argue with a poem. A poem is not an argument. Yet I couldn’t help thinking that I would not trade places with the highest-soaring of birds. It is they who are “condemned,” in my eyes, year-round, to a constant and often uncertain search for food. But do they feel condemned? Jealous of other beings? Surely not. Surely they are incapable of such feeling, of comparing the lives they have with lives they cannot have, and in that incapacity must lie their true freedom.

Then came into my hands a most unusual little book, only 16cm tall and 12cm from spine to fore-edges. Its unusual nature is extended by the fact that it is two books in one: Hold it one way, and you have one title and author’s name; flip it over, and read words announcing a different title and author. Read from either cover, and midway you must stop, flip the book over, and read from the other cover back to the middle. The book is Checking In/Checking Out (New Orleans, NO Books, 2011), and the authors are Christopher Schaberg (Checking In) and Mark Yakich (Checking Out). The subject is human flight – airplanes, flying, airports – fear, security, danger, and the everyday work involved for support personnel, poetry, reading, ecology, and evolution.

Schaberg loves flying and will fly stand-by, via any circuitous route, anywhere in the world, it seems. Yakich approaches unavoidable air travel with clammy hands and imaginings that all his attempts at meditation cannot subdue. But there is so much more than elation and fear in these first-person essays. Yakich brings musings on poetry and books and reading to thoughts and memories of air travel, while Schaberg, equally unrestrained by gravity and location, suggests that airports have their own ecology and that air travel is part of evolution.

For instance, Schaberg recounts an anecdote about a gopher snake hitching a ride on a big 747:

It occurred to me that this sort of counted as an evolved form of migration: the snake had found a rather quick way to a new bioregion. And then it dawned on me that, strictly speaking, evolution encompasses everything that happens; there’s no getting outside it. Airports are a human phenotype, and other creatures interpenetrate these techno-cultural spaces, showing them to be actual ecosystems, through and through.

Yakich observes the importance reading on planes, for himself and for other travelers:

Like flying itself, reading connects me to others through space and time. Particularly on take-off, reading helps because it’s the one thing about the flight that feels in my control.

He also says that while he often sleeps with a book, he cannot imagine sleeping with an e-reader, because “once you’ve had one Kindle you’ve had them all.”

Checking In/Checking Out is, physically, one of the littlest books I have ever read. Its font is miniscule. And yet, in the course of its 100 small pages I took multiple wild flights, imaginary and speculative.

My own very infrequent flier history stands in marked contrast to the number of flights the authors have experienced. I am able to count mine on my fingers:

RT Joliet-Chicago

RT Traverse City-Chicago

RT Kalamazoo-New York

RT Chicago-Paris (3x, 1^st time by way of Iceland)

RT Paris-London (1)

RT Traverse City-Paris (via Detroit)

RT Traverse City-Aspen (via Chicago)

RT Traverse City-Phoenix

Because it’s the way my family always did things, the way I grew up, I buy newspapers, read books on paper, and write letters to mail at the post office, preferably with beautiful or at least interesting stamps. Because my father (civil engineer), grandfather (train engineer), and two great-uncles (one a train engineer, the other a conductor) worked for railroads, our family took trains wherever we went, from South Dakota to Illinois, to Ohio, and to Florida, at a time in American history when other vacationing families were driving the new, wide postwar highways and staying at Howard Johnson motels. 

I took my first train trip before the age of three, when my parents moved from South Dakota to Illinois. If there were still trains between Traverse City and Chicago, I would be taking them to visit my mother and sisters. The little demitasse cup and saucer you see here were given to me by the dining crew as a memento of that first trip. (What three-year-old girl isn’t precious?)

For me, the best part of flying -- which is otherwise, let’s face it, a lot of hassle and inconvenience, not to mention discomfort – is the view from the window, the view above the clouds, above mountains, fields, rivers and cities. But then, despite the charms of dining car, cone-shaped paper cups to fill at the drinking fountain, cunning little sleeping bunks, and miniature sinks, my favorite part of riding the train, too, was the always-changing view out the window. Yet earthbound, my imagination was unrestrained and subject to wild flights.

If you don’t believe me, ask my younger sisters, captive audience to my long-ago railroad story-telling.

But more important is the news that Mark Yakich will be at Dog Ears Books on Friday, June 28, from 2-4 p.m. Writer of fiction and poetry, as well as nonfiction, he's coming to us straight from New Orleans, so plan to be on hand for fascinating conversation and riveting poetry. More about this in the weeks ahead.

Who Doesn't Love a Free NEW BOOK?

First, here’s a little about the book to be given away, followed by conversation with the storyteller and the writer, and then I’ll tell you how you can win a free copy.

* * * 

The Honey Thief  is a unique book of stories told by native Afghani Najaf Mazari to writer Robert Hillman. It is a portrait of the Hazara people – an ethnic group in the hills between Kabul and Kandahar. Man Booker Prize winner Thomas Keneally praised it as:

[A] dazzling narrative is full of wonders and unfamiliar magic, shadows and lightnings. The tales it tells are fascinating in their ordinariness and their strangeness. The Honey Thief is simply delightful to read on its own terms, but it also illuminates the real Afghanistan, that country many great powers have proved keen to invade but rarely to understand.

Filled with both fascinating facts and tall tales, The Honey Thief preserves the intimacy and beauty of the Hazara tradition of oral storytelling.

In “The Behsudi Dowry,” the character of Hameed is thought to be foolish and absentminded for his love of books. His parents can see no value in reading fiction. How was reading literature for pleasure viewed in your household and community growing up?

Najaf:  In Afghanistan, only a few very educated people read books other than the holy books. If my brothers or my father or my mother had seen me reading a novel, they would have thought I was insane and would have called a doctor or a mullah to fix me.

How did you become interested in the narrative of the refugee?

Robert:  At the time I first met Najaf, the Muslim refugees who were arriving in Australia on ramshackle boats were being characterised as criminals and terrorists in the press. This demonisation suited the politics of Australia just after 9/11 (or “11/9” as it is known here). It struck me that something vile was happening in my country—something that I might look back on in years to come and think, “Why didn’t you say something?” I wrote Najaf’s story as a way of saying something. The friendship we formed led to Najaf telling me more and more about the culture of the Hazara. The stories in The Honey Thief are, in a way, the backstory of Najaf’s life told in The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif.

The themes discussed throughout The Honey Thief—the importance of love, work, hope—are universal, crossing all kinds of boundaries of culture, faith, geography, and socioeconomic status. What is your hope for this book? More broadly, what role do you believe literature can play in uniting people across borders?

Najaf & Robert: Stories like those in The Honey Thief make a small difference here and there to the sympathy for people who are struggling through life. Literature cannot change people’s hearts completely. Just a little. A little is okay. We must remember that if stories that honour courage and enjoyment of life could suddenly change everything, then another book that teaches distrust and hatred might also change everything back. People don’t read stories like those in The Honey Thief in order to have their eyes opened. They read them for enjoyment; for pleasure. If it happens that some readers feel that they have gained more than enjoyment, that’s a good thing. We hope that readers will enjoy this book in the same way that they enjoy fresh food cooked by someone who loves good food. We hope that people will smile as they finish each story and say, “Well, that was wonderful!”

* * * 

Was that enough to pique your interest and whet your appetite? I’m sorry that (1) only readers with U.S. addresses (p.o. boxes okay) are eligible for the giveaway and (2) only comments, not e-mails, make for eligibility. So, to enter please leave a comment (that is the challenge!) saying what aspect of the information above interests you in reading this book. An assistant and I will put slips in a hat and draw out the winning name. We will then need your mailing address to send to the publisher.

Give it a try! Good luck!