Category: Nonfiction

Revisiting H Is for Hawk

Valorie Grace HallinanLeave a comment
H is for Hawk

“….her feet were gnarled and dusty, her eyes a deep, fiery orange, and she was beautiful. Beautiful like a granite cliff or a thunder-cloud. She completely filled the room. She had a massive back of sun-bleached grey feathers, was as muscled as a pit bull, and intimidating as hell….”  H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald

Helen Macdonald’s father, Alisdair Macdonald, was an iconic British photojournalist, and his daughter’s biggest fan. “He was the only person who understood me,” Helen says in his eulogy.

This isn’t hard to believe. Helen is a brilliant entomologist, difficult and eccentric, as portrayed in the just-released movie based on the memoir.

The movie, H Is for Hawk, is good. The memoir is better. It is the story of Helen’s training of a goshawk, a fiendishly difficult undertaking, and a metaphor for her struggle with grief and depression. (A book blogging friend of mine suggested that H stands for Helen, too, and I think she is right.)

At the time of its publication, H Is for Hawk was something of a breakthrough for its unique way of combining memoir with nature writing.

H Is for Hawk is well worth your time if you are up for challenging, multi-layered nature writing that explores the mysteries of human and wildlife psychology. This memoir is a classic.

Here is my post from 2016:

Helen Macdonald’s reaction to her father dying suddenly was to embark on the extraordinarily difficult task of training a goshawk, one of nature’s fiercest and most ruthless predators.

Goshawks are cold-hearted, lifelong loners with no social instincts whatsoever. They bond with no one, not the goshawk they mate with, not other goshawks, not any human who wants to train them. You can’t look them in the eye, either, because if you do they might attack you.

Goshawks don’t respond to punishment. The only way to train a goshawk is to be submissive and patient, eyes cast down at all times. Tim Gallagher, in a review of H Is for Hawk, likens this to being a kind of monk. It is not a part-time thing. Training a goshawk is all-consuming. It takes over your life.

Helen writes about the hawk she is training, whom she names Mabel:

“Everything about the hawk is tuned and turned to hunt and kill. Yesterday I discovered that when I suck air through my teeth and make a squeaking noise like an injured rabbit, all the tendons in her toes instantaneously contract, driving her talons into the glove with terrible, crushing force. This killing grip is an old, deep pattern in her brain, an innate response that hasn’t yet found the stimulus meant to release it. Because other sounds provoke it: door hinges, squealing breaks, bicycles with unoiled wheels – and on the second afternoon, Joan Sutherland singing an aria on the radio. Ow. I laughed out loud at that. Stimulus: opera. Response: kill.”

Two goshawks
Goshawk. Rare Book Division, New York Public Library

When Helen was a child, she and her father spent many days roaming the countryside as Alisdair indulged his passion for airplanes and Helen her growing passion for birds.

After Alisdair died, Helen wanted a distraction from her grief, something deeply immersive and challenging. In this respect, H Is for Hawk is unlike other memoirs. There isn’t a lot about Helen’s father or her relationship with him, or about Helen’s feelings of sadness and loss, per se. These are subsumed into an arresting narrative of Helen’s struggle to achieve what seems to be impossible as she grapples with her grief.

As Helen comes to understand, “Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.”

Helen was, in fact, an experienced falconer, but she’d never taken on a goshawk before. She brought along a companion in her unusual undertaking: T. H. White’s, The Goshawk, White’s account of his own experience training a goshawk in the 1930s. (Remember T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, The Once and Future King, and other tales of Arthurian legend? Even if you didn’t read the books, you’ve probably seen the movie/musical Camelot and the Disney version of The Sword in the Stone.)

This weaving of T.H. White’s experiences into Helen’s narrative is fascinating; White, who was gay in a culture and time when this was unacceptable, was grappling with his own loss and inner darkness. Helen writes,

“It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.”

And this:

“….White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: ‘Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.’ He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.”

Helen’s immersion with Mabel, her goshawk, is harrowing. She holds nothing back in the struggle, and she holds nothing back from her reader.

Ultimately, Helen has to confront her obsession with the goshawk and her nearly complete withdrawal from friends and family. Where does obsession end and madness begin?

Before you read H Is for Hawk, I highly recommend that you read this fascinating review by Tim Gallagher at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology All About Birds site. Gallagher puts the human-training-a-goshawk challenge into context, and I think it will pique your interest. Not knowing a raptor from a falcon from a hawk myself, I wish I’d read this review first. And I’ve a soft spot in my heart for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the good work they do. We live not far from there, and I’ve seen at least one of their research sites in the Finger Lakes countryside.

Read H Is for Hawk if you want a different kind of memoir that demands to be read slowly, one word, one phrase, one sentence at a time. If you’re willing and want to slow down and immerse in another world entirely.

I expect I’ll read H Is for Hawk once or twice more down the road, as I simply couldn’t take it all in the first time through. If I’ve painted a rather dark picture of this unusual memoir, there is light and wisdom gained, too:

“There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, […]”

Coming for the librarians (and the books)

Valorie Grace Hallinan2 Comments

“I’m doing a criminal investigation of your staff. Essentially, the librarians are my suspects.” – county chief deputy officer entering a Texas public school library (transcript of body cam footage from The Librarians documentary )

On Friday evenings, I like to have a glass of wine, make a nice meal, and maybe watch some mindless TV with my husband. But not on this particular Friday night last fall.

Our local public library was hosting a showing of the documentary The Librarians, about book banning in America and, obviously, I wasn’t going to miss it. (For those of you new to my blog, because I’m an avid, lifelong reader, an academic librarian by training, a former children’s book editor, and a writer. And because, of course, Books Can Save a Life!!!)

Every seat was filled. At least half a dozen librarians were in the audience, and I had the good fortune to sit next to one. So I had a kindred spirit nearby as we channeled our disbelief and outrage while, on the screen, one hard-to-believe book-banning drama after another played out in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and New Jersey.

“This is not a communist nation. You do NOT get to pick our reading material. It is ours.” – Suzette Baker, former Llano County Head Librarian, Texas, fired when she refused to take How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahesi Coates off the shelves.

Right now we are an embarrassment in the state of Florida.” – The Reverend Jeffrey Dove, Clay City, Florida

I could focus on any number of issues regarding the documentary, such as First Amendment rights, the definition of pornography, the removal of marginal voices from American libraries, or what, exactly, is deemed educationally unsuitable. But what most shocked me was how deeply divided communities have become and how harshly some book banners treat community members they may have known or worked alongside for years.

Our library featured a panel discussion, and at some point, someone used the term “religious psychosis,” which resonated with me. I found the story of Weston Brown and his mother a heartbreaking example of this, difficult to watch. Weston, who is gay, was disowned by his mother, Evangelical Christian Monica Brown, and is not allowed to be part of his siblings’ lives.

After she began publicly advocating for the removal of LGBTQ+ themed books from school libraries in their Texas town, Weston spoke out against book banning at a school board meeting that his mother attended. She then came to the podium and, ignoring her son, spoke passionately (and in crude, offensive language) about banning certain books that had been carefully vetted by librarians.

Another thread in the documentary featured the Reverend Jeffrey Dove in Clay City, Florida, who became concerned about the Llano County library director, who had been slandered by community members and removed from her job. What struck me was the sight of Reverend Dove, who is Black, patiently waiting for three hours to speak while the town council (all white) ignored him. When he was finally allowed to speak, Reverend Dove defended the library director and highlighted the value of the banned titles. His is truly one of the most eloquent voices in the documentary.

It seems to me that some have been blinded by a kind of irrational and dangerous religious and/or political fervor that overrides our common humanity.

On February 9, 2026, The Librarians will air widely across the country on the PBS program, Independent Lens. You can also check the listings on The Librarians website to see if it is coming to your city. Better yet, contact your local library and ask them to host a viewing.

School librarian and anti-censorship advocate Amanda Jones tells the story of her efforts to fight book banning in her hometown of Louisiana Parish, Louisiana. Her life was upended, and she felt compelled to tell her community’s story, which is playing out across the country. She says in the memoir that she doesn’t see herself as a writer, and I do wish that she’d had a better editor. Nonetheless, That Librarian is an important and revelatory testimony about book-banning efforts in America.

Midwinter Light

Valorie Grace Hallinan4 Comments
A highlight of the Winter Solstice Lantern Walk along the Eno River, NC, 2025.

The fear is ancient and uncomplicated, part of our human-animal inheritance…will the darkness swallow me, will it swallow us all together? Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice: An Essay

Happy New Year to my friends and readers!

Here is a post full of little treasures to light up your midwinter days and usher in the New Year.

Never in my life have I seen the winter solstice celebrated with so much exuberance. Last year, on our first winter solstice in Hillsborough, North Carolina, I assumed the annual lantern walk along the Eno River would be a quiet affair with a few dozen souls. Not at all. Thousands of people showed up with the most inventive homemade lanterns I’d ever seen.

Before you read past this paragraph, PLEASE click the link below to last year’s walk. It will put you in the mood for the rest of this post, which is full of all things Winter Solstice. In last year’s video, you’ll see drone footage of the magical riverside procession, an illuminated spiral, and beyond-belief lanterns, with a poetic narration by our town’s very own Poet Laureate, Amal Kassir. (YES, our town has a Poet Laureate. More about Amal at the end of this post.)

Here is the link. Please turn up your volume, enjoy, and then hop back over here:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Bo8a6x7qc/

I’ve sprinkled quotes from Nina MacLaughlin’s earthy, primal Winter Solstice essay throughout this post, because it speaks deeply to writer and mixed-media/book artist Suzi Banks Baum, who created and leads Advent Dark Journal. This is an immersion in art, writing, nature, and daily creative practice that I enjoy during the last six weeks of the year.

I’ll write more about Advent Dark Journal in an upcoming post, because Suzi and her creation are worth an in-depth look. For now, here is a glimpse of the small collage and art projects I’ve completed as part of this experience. You’ll see that my Advent calendar has a religious theme, but Advent Dark Journal is not centered around organized religion; rather, it is a “container” of rituals for participants to explore wherever our soulful arisings lead us during this sacred time of year.

“Advent Miracle”
“Earth Holder”

These small, collaged journals and art pieces were sent off to friends – one in Australia – as soon as I completed them. In addition to the art we create in Advent Dark Journal, Suzi encourages us in new, transformational directions. Since I’ve become a regular in Suzi’s workshop, I’ve added a tradition our adult sons and partner enjoy when they visit for the holidays – a fireside Winter Solstice ritual. More about that in an upcoming post, but suffice it to say, Suzi has shown me how to weave a daily creative practice into my life in ways that promote my well-being and that of others in my life.

It is the animal in us that knows the dark. This season stirs that animal in us, and stirs the memories that live in all of us, submerged so deep, of the ancient dark, of a time before gods, before form and words and light….Winter reminds us: the dark was first.

…maybe death is all potential, a means of moving on. And on we go, absorbed into the wet warm belly of eternity, or the roaring big black void, back here as a robin or a wren, in dusted orbit around another planet’s moon, riding on the light. Winter Solstice

Nina MacLaughlin’s Winter Solstice is stellar writing, moody and mysterious. She reminds us of our primal, animal origins; ultimately, we are bound up in the life web and rhythms of the earth, whether we recognize this or not. I purchased Nina’s Summer Solstice essay as well, which I’ll read come summer.

If you are interested in writing that is more traditional, something you can read in small bits alongside your daily journaling or meditation, I recommend Midwinter Light: Poems and Reflections for the Long Season by Marilyn McEntyre. Each day, she includes a poem with commentary that honors this dark season, when growth seems to stop but germinates unseen, to be manifested as the light returns.

“Winter makes us see differently. Noticing is rooted in desires so easily satisfied in spring we barely feel them—for color, for movement, for the sound of birds, and things that bloom. On a walk in midwinter, we experience solitude in a different key. We are surrounded by reminders of mortality and loss, by the absence of what is lush and vivid. We are clothed in layers and aware of our bodily needs in new ways. And the quiet, sometimes, is palpable. It is a good time for prayer: the veil between this dimension and the next seems to have thinned.” Marilyn McEntyre, Midwinter Light: Meditations for the Long Season

Finally, I discovered an excellent picture book with a poem by Susan Cooper and art by Carson Ellis. Both Susan and Carson have won the highest honors for children’s books, and this particular collaboration is special. Susan’s poem “The Shortest Day” is easy to find online. I encourage you to read it. I think you’ll find that Susan’s half-rhymes and cadence create an incantation that perfectly captures the magic and mystery of this dark season.

If you would like the perfect picture book for this time of year, for yourself, or as a gift, I suggest The Shortest Day, written by Newbery Medal winner Susan Cooper and illustrated by Caldecott Honor recipient Carson Ellis.

Happy New Year!

I will return in January with more about Advent Dark Journal, as well as commentary about a provocative documentary you won’t want to miss, especially if you are an avid reader and book-lover.

As Amal Kassir says in her winter solstice poem you may have listened to in the above-linked video, “It only gets brighter from here.”

By the way, PLEASE be sure to check out Amal Kassir’s website and watch her perform her heartbreaking poem, “Broken Arabic.” Her poetry collection, Scud Missile Blues, is available from Amazon. I encourage you to consider purchasing it. We need to support our young poets, and Amal is immensely talented. Just think of all the poems she has yet to give to the world!

Solstice whimsy

Ingrained

Valorie Grace Hallinan11 Comments

If you have last-minute holiday shopping to do and would like to give a fine memoir as a gift, I have a suggestion.

I spotted Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman by Callum Robinson in a local bookstore and thought that my son’s partner, who is an amateur furniture-maker, might like it. Of course, I decided to sample a chapter. Two days later, I’d finished the memoir, having enjoyed a kind of bliss through the entire reading.

This is a superb, deeply personal book that is also suspenseful, sensual, poetic, and universal. I could smell the cedar, pine, and oak as I read. Makers will love this story, but I don’t think you have to be a maker to respond deeply to this nature-based memoir.

The neat flat-cut edge of its end-grain revealing the gently arcing lines of the tree’s growth rings. Dark reddish brown, like burnt umber or strong tea…It is a broad piece of one-inch elm…Fine close grain tumbles down the board’s length. And a tracery of spectral green streaks across it, like the northern lights.”

Callum Robinson, Ingrained

The workshop owned by master woodworker Callum and his wife, landscape architect and designer Marisa, is about to go under, thanks to the cancellation of a substantial corporate project. Already leveraged to the hilt, the relatively young business faces imminent bankruptcy.

They must change direction, and fast.

Chapter by chapter, the story expands to reveal Callum and Marisa’s world: the devoted young craftsmen who work for them; Callum’s father, also a master woodworker, who jumps in to help set the business in a new direction; the small Scottish town of Linlithgow, where their little studio and workshop reside; the beautiful Scottish forests that supply much of the timber from which their furniture is made; and the customers who eventually browse their shop and can’t resist the furniture they see.

And with its flowing organic transitions, to me the grand elm table feels more like a sculpture than a piece of furniture. To one edge of its mighty top, among the swirling purples, reds, and greens, there remains just the tiniest taste of the tree’s true form. A handbreadth of live edge and finely sanded bark, still visible in the straight, sharp, otherwise regimented lines. A perfect imperfection – a signature – like the crimped pie crust or the fingerprint in the clay.

Callum Robinson

Callum Robinson seamlessly blends the past and present as he tells of his own coming-of-age and how he found his life’s work. His story is relevant to anyone concerned with living in a deeply authentic, meaningful way. You will be rooting for these singular people who design and make furniture of great beauty that will be loved and handed down through the ages.

This is a celebration of the human-designed and handmade. Callum approaches crafting fine furniture from some of the world’s most beautiful trees as if it were pure poetry. His writing is the same.

I look forward to reading more of him.


Nostalgia is a powerful thing. An ethereal link. An ache for something long ago, something that might never really have existed. No other material I know can hold it, or radiate it, quite the way that wood can. And almost nothing made from wood will ever have as many stories locked inside as a family table. Used so often it’s almost invisible, passed down through the generations, scarred by the lives and ingrained with the memories of all those who gathered around it. 

Callum Robinson

Our ponderosa pine homeplace in central Oregon, where we lived for a few years.

Bringing home the tree

Inside an enchanting herban apothecary in Portland

Valorie Grace Hallinan13 Comments
herban enclave in Portland

as we round the midpoint between autumn equinox & winter solstice,
the leaves blaze lighting up the darkening sky
before they dance towards the earth.
the moon waxes full as we bask in the light of the beaver moon, a supermoon.
soak in the luminous glow & energies.

times continue to be be unprecedentedly wild
as the cold sets in. this season of release as the light fades
& the leaves fall leaving a bare lacework of branches.
this liminal season, a threshold.

i am reaching out with an offer of winter comfort.
bolstering against both the winter chill & the heartache from the news cycle.

remember always to lean in to the plant allies and the potency of community.

- Polly Hatfield, herban enclave November newsletter

Every CSA (community supported agriculture) venture is unique, but Polly Hatfield’s home-based, herban apothecary in the heart of Portland, Oregon is SO special. You can think of it as community-supported alchemy as well – read on, and you’ll see what I mean.

I was thrilled to have the chance to meet Polly and her teeming gardens, front yard and back, when I was in Portland at summer’s end.

I’d been on Polly’s mailing list for a few years, delighting in her poetic, strikingly visual seasonal newsletter, and occasionally sampling her offerings or sending them as gifts. Every year when I enroll in artist Suzi Banks Baum’s Advent Dark Journal workshop, a packet of Polly’s homemade bath salts is tucked into the envelope of art supplies Suzi sends us. (You’ll meet Suzi and Advent Dark Journal in a future post.)

Portland neighborhoods can be one delight after another: poetry boxes, little free libraries, sidewalk chalk drawings galore, pocket gardens, and other inventive gifts to be shared with the community. But herban enclave stands out. The moment I turned down Polly’s street, I guessed which home was the one I was looking for. Clearly, this was a neighborhood of gardeners, but one lot in particular burst at the seams with late-summer plantings.

No space there is wasted, and I marveled at how Polly and her partner managed to grow and lovingly handcraft so many offerings on this modestly sized patch of land.

For example, in November, herban enclave’s winter csa care package (available to order until November 21) includes:

  • syrup made from aronia berry, rose, and holy basil
  • nasturtium flower finishing salt (with sichuan peppercorns, smoked salt, and rose)
  • a “winter quiet” tincture of milky oats, ashwaganda root, rose, and wood betony
  • a replenishing tea of nettles, raspberry leaf, oatstraw, and other plant allies
  • a soaking salts blend of eucalyptus, lemon, ginger, ashwaganda elixir, and wild rose flower essence
  • A “breathe deeply” oxymel of nasturtium, anise hyssop, holy basil, and aronia berry
hawthorn berries
nettles

(Photos by Polly Hatfield)

Polly’s conjurings have me heading for the dictionary or to my plant and flower identification app because, quite often, I’ve never even heard of the plants and flowers she cultivates that become her ingredients.

By the way, can you tell from Polly’s newsletter sentiments and herbal conjuring names that she is not just a master gardener, but a published poet, too? (Photo by Laura Glazer)

In addition to a seasonal care package, Polly usually has small batch offerings on hand. These enticements and several others are currently available until November 21:

  • nocino (an Italian liquor made from immature green walnuts)
  • a variety of tinctures, topical balms, and salves
  • an herbal gomasio (look it up!) of jimmy nardello peppers, smoked salt, black sesame seed, and rose
  • a douglas fir elixir
Chinese lantern, Physalis alkekengi

The September afternoon when Polly and I visited, the weather was gorgeous. We sat outside in the sun and I soaked up Polly’s earth-based knowledge as she told me the story of how she and her beloved found their ideal home, planted the extensive gardens, and established such a unique CSA.

Before our meeting, I’d asked Polly if a particular book had been her “bible,” one that had contributed to a vision for her work and way of living. “Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate,” she’d said, and I ordered a used copy.

As I write this, I’m two-thirds of the way through Wendy Johnson’s classic book about gardening and Zen Buddhism (published in 2008), still wondering how I got to be my age without encountering this extraordinary title. I’m a middling, on-again, off-again gardener with grander ideas than I know how to execute. I’m an insight meditation student and teacher as well (and I admire the Zen school of thought, too.) So Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate speaks to me on many levels. Turn to any page and you’re likely to find a nugget of wisdom. You’ll never plumb all of its depths.

Author Wendy Johnson is one of the first influential, ground-breaking California organic farmers and gardeners who came of age in the 1960s and 70s. Johnson, Alice Waters, Eliot Coleman and others pioneered the farm-to-table movement. She is the founder of the extensive gardens at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center near San Franscisco and a Buddhist meditation teacher.

In Buddhist texts, consciousness is said to be a field, a piece of earth on which every kind of seed is planted. On this field of consciousness are sown the seeds of hope and suffering, the kernel of happiness and sorrow, anger and joy. The quality of our life depends entirely on which seeds we garden and nourish in our consciousness.

Growing a garden, like cultivating the wide field of consciousness, is original work. Each time we plant a garden we are returning to origin, to the source of every garden ever grown. The word “origin” derives from the Latin verb oriri, to rise, as the sun and moon rise in a cyclical pattern in the day and night sky. Originality has a still older meaning described by the upwelling of deep springwater through stony ground. Growing a garden depends on this double force of originality that is both rhythmic and permeating. – Wendy Johnson, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate

I’ve learned as a meditator that we can deliberately and lovingly set an intention for our days. We can do the work of our intentions in a way that gives meaning and shape to our lives. I think that master gardener/herbalist Polly Hatfield and her partner are doing this every day at herban enclave. I love how the work of gardening and a way of life inevitably become woven together.

I think about other home gardens we enjoy seeing in another part of Portland when we visit extended family. They have a gorgeous new garden, and another more vintage garden that is a vital part of the Montessori school they founded, where very young folks spend lots of time playing, learning, and enjoying nature’s riches.

Portland is a city of gardens and garden lovers. Here is one of two home gardens created by my niece, sister-in-law and family. (This is the new garden.)

The Montessori garden, where children spend time every day.

As I write this post at my desk, the wind is kicking up, I hear the patter of raindrops, and I’ll need to close my studio window soon. After a balmy Indian summer, the temperature here in North Carolina is expected to drop twenty degrees. We’re entering the cold, dark time, when Polly’s makings (even simply reading about them) can give us warmth and comfort.

And with that, I will let Miss Polly have the honor of signing off:

may you allow yourself to rest.
to sink into a season of dormancy.
& to tend your heart well.

with love & full moon blessings galore,
heal // whole // holy
warmly & always with love, polly

Here is a link to Polly’s newsletter, with ordering information (order by Nov. 21, 2025).

https://mailchi.mp/b57eef719645/rose-magic-summer-spell-solstice-love-12930906?e=b8a80062f5

You can find Polly Hatfield on Instagram, and sign up for her seasonal newsletter on her linktree site:

https://www.instagram.com/achilleaswooning/

linktr.ee/Miss_Polly

Cabin 135: A Memoir of Alaska

Valorie Grace Hallinan17 Comments

TIME

“During the Great Depression, the federal government created new agricultural settlements in a number of states, including Alaska. Farmers who had run out of other options applied for the chance to start over in one of these government-sponsored colonies. In 1935, over two hundred families were accepted for the Matanuska Colony.”

***

“She might as well have said, you know you’re going to make an offer. How can you not? A unique house. Acreage for your horse. Exquisite views. A ready-made vegetable garden. A separate plot for potatoes and a raspberry patch in a swale north of the house. Chuck and I glanced at each other with a look that said ‘this is it.’ We didn’t consider there might have been reasons that the place hadn’t sold during a year on the market…

In May 1983 we moved into the house that had been built forty-eight years earlier for the Matanuska Colony. Chuck was returning to the community where he’d grown up. I was yet another person in a long procession of migrants to Alaska.” – Katie Eberhart, Cabin 135: A Memoir of Alaska

Annie Dillard advises writers to “give voice to your own astonishment.” Katie Eberhart does just that in her memoir of Alaska, Cabin 135.

When we moved to Bend, Oregon, I wanted to connect with other writers. I came across Katie Eberhart’s website, and I realized she didn’t live far from me. I hesitated, not wanting to invade her privacy, but sent her an email anyway to see if she wanted to meet for coffee. Katie responded graciously and invited me to join her small writer’s group. Lucky for me, because it was an excellent group, and Katie and I became friends.

Katie was in the final stages of revising her memoir and negotiating a publishing contract with the University of Alaska Press. Cabin 135 was published in December, 2020, part of the Alaska Literary Series. It was gratifying to watch Katie find a publishing home with editors who understood her vision and wanted her book to be part of their distinguished series. A few months ago, I listened to Peggy Shumaker, editor of the series, interview Katie at a virtual reading hosted by Fireside Books in Palmer, Alaska. Their rich discussion captured the expansive nature of Katie’s story.

I’ve read Katie’s memoir twice and, with a third reading, I’m sure I’ll continue to glean new meanings and insights. This is a book I can’t fully grasp on a first reading; Katie has a singular, uncommon sensibility, and she explores her fascinations in a nontraditional narrative. Instead of a linear story, you will find in Cabin 135 a text divided into thematic sections such as Time, Cabin, Earth, Terrain, Greenhouse, Migration, Sky, Denali, and Archaeology.

 


Cabin 135, within sight of three mountains: Matanuska Peak, Lazy Mountain, and Pioneer Peak.

Done well, as in Katie’s memoir, this type of narrative has momentum and captures the cumulative, unsentimental emotional power of a life thoughtfully lived. I suppose my reaction is partly personal: Katie and I are about the same age, we raised two sons at about the same time, we have in our histories relationships with older, complicated, quirky houses, and we value nature and place – although for Katie, these passions arose earlier in life, and have been more intentionally explored.

In Cabin 135, you won’t see much of Katie’s husband or sons and their daily lives. But her family is there in the background; I heard the echo of little pajama’d feet bounding down the cabin’s stairs, which reminded me of domestic scenes with our own boys. 

Instead of the dramas of family life, Katie focuses on time, history, imagination, geography and memory – on what we remember and why we remember it. Her story is centered largely on the parcel of Alaska frontier she called home for thirty years, and on her travels, as well. An idea I’ve encountered often in my recent study of eco-psychology is that we are moved by a place – its landscape, flora, and fauna – because it mirrors the landscape of our souls. Katie captures something of this reciprocity in her memoir.

I’m intrigued with Katie’s writing process and how much can be communicated by juxtaposing seemingly disparate ideas. Her narrative pulls me along: where will she go next, I wonder, and what connections will she make? I think, as a reader, if you are receptive to this kind of reading adventure, you will quickly become comfortable and fully committed to going along for the ride. 


The fantastic literary map of Alaska, by Alaska-based artist and graphic designer Ruth Hulbert, and published by Fireside Books in Palmer. Can you find Katie’s memoir? I see a number of other books I’ve loved, or hope to read in the future. Ruth also designed the memoir cover.

 

In the memoir’s epilogue, Katie writes about her process:

“I write interactively, one revision after another. Each version exists, however briefly, as a quasi-meditation…

Writing provided a framework to explore place as both a literary construct and abstraction….The overlap between multitudinous narratives plus motivations, lucky breaks, and weird confluences proved fascinating, but the stories in this book represent only one possible route across a dimensional terrain that’s spatial, biological, societal, temporal, and laced with ideas – and where a small log-built house occupies a certain plot of land. As is the case with any memoir, much has been left out – omitted, ignored, or forgotten.”

A couple of ideas I want to highlight here: that each draft is a kind of quasi-meditation. I have never thought of the writing process in this way, but Katie’s insight helps me better appreciate the richness of our quirky, individual writing paths; our creative instincts, given free reign, possess a kind of logic and aesthetic sense that may surprise us.

And, secondly, across your own life span, which dramas, scenes, and moments stand out? We choose from an infinite number of moments to tell our stories. And yet we each have within us a multitude of stories.

TIME

“I wonder about the future of Cabin 135 and its surroundings. I imagine the house and the well. Or perhaps the town will overtake the house, and there will be city water, not a well. In a hundred years, the raspberry patch will be something else. Or the raspberry patch will still be a raspberry patch, but the raspberries will be different. I hope the startling flavor of the raspberries never changes.

Each summer, no matter where I am, when I bite into the first raspberry, memories flood my mind of city gardens and country gardens – my mother’s garden, my grandfather’s, and mine, but also generations of gardens. Indeed, even centuries of gardens. Gardens that no one remembers, well-tended or gone wild, and that hint at what comes next.”


Ruth Hulbert’s custom-made map of Cabin 135 territory.

(Still) reading Barry Lopez

Valorie Grace Hallinan10 Comments

Stories…offer patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives…As long as it took for me to see that a writer’s voice had to grow out of his own knowledge and desire, that it could not rise legitimately out of the privilege of race or gender or social rank, so did it take time to grasp the depth of cruelty inflicted upon all of us the moment voices are silenced, when for prejudicial reasons people are told their stories are not valuable, not useful.  – Barry Lopez

About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory, Barry Lopez

Here is my third and final reposting of my Barry Lopez Books Can Save a Life writings, in honor of his passing on December 25, 2020:

In the introduction to his essay collection About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory, Barry Lopez tells of meeting a man on a plane who asked what words of advice he could pass on to his teen-age daughter, who wanted to be a writer. This is what Lopez said:

She must read, and her choices should be whatever she is drawn to.

She should read the classics, too, but she’ll have to work harder to find stories of heroism, love, and our noblest values that are written by women.

Second, she must “become someone” and “speak to us from within those beliefs.”

Third, he advised that she “separate herself from the familiar.” After exploring other places and meeting a diversity of people, she`ll know why she loves the familiar and share this knowledge through her writing.

Early on, Lopez felt he was noticed, accepted, and rewarded as a writer in part because he was white, male, privileged and well educated. If you read his work, you’ll find he is keenly sensitive to the fact that many voices haven’t been heard because they are different or not within traditional circles of power. He thrives on traveling to the far corners of the earth and seeking these people out –  artists, artisans, farmers, naturalists, explorers who live close to the land, indigenous peoples, and others.

I was mesmerized by an essay in About This Life, “Effleurage: The Stroke of Fire.”  An Oregon potter and builder of a unique anagama kiln invites clay artists from around the world to fire their work. Jack doesn’t care about marketing or commercial success; he’s totally immersed in the process of making pottery out of materials from nature. Every three or four months, up to twenty artists bring their work to be fired in the Dragon Kiln.  Families, friends, even pets tag along. The firing goes around the clock for several days. Building the tremendous fire that heats the kiln is an art in and of itself. Different kinds of wood – black locust, maple, cherry, Lombardy poplar, red cedar – make different kinds of fires, and keeping the fire properly stoked is a community effort of like-minded artists who put aside their egos for the benefit of the group.

Lopez says you must become someone to write. I think he would agree the kiln designer and the clay artists are “becoming” through their life’s work, just as their clay pieces are forged in the fire. It’s a process that never ends. Even the clay pot continues to change, subtly, after the firing.

Crow and Weasel book cover

Over and over, Lopez celebrates journeys into the unknown, strangers who become friends, coming home again, and the writing of the story. You see this in About This Life and in his fable, Crow and Weasel.

Recently, Lopez published a revelatory personal essay that has received a lot of attention, “Sliver of Sky,”  in Harper’s Magazine, about a period of sexual abuse he endured as a child. That Lopez waited until his seventies to write about this suggests how deeply confounding and wounding it was. The trauma and years of silence may explain in part Lopez’s empathy and compassion for others who were silenced for one reason or another. And no doubt it has contributed to his sense of mission as a writer.

I’ve written about years of being silent and feeling silenced by others because of my mother’s mental illness. I think that is partly why I didn’t make the commitment to becoming a writer when I was younger. How can you mature as a human being and as a writer when you can’t work with the very material that is woven into your identity?

If we’re silenced, we’re blocked. We don’t become our fullest selves. Diminished in what we are able to offer the world, the world will be diminished, too. It is in our best interests to see that no one among us is silenced.

So I find reading Lopez to be a rare and important form of encouragement.

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Lopez says he’s viewed as a nature writer but, actually, he is writing about humanity.

“Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader; each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can harm or help the community of which he or she is a part.”

Barry Lopez brought us I, Snow Leopard

Valorie Grace Hallinan3 Comments
Snow Leopard

Photo by Tambako The Jaguar Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

“I, SNOW LEOPARD is both a lyric and an elegy. It is easy to imagine its lines being loudly hailed in whatever country the poem finds itself in. It’s publication comes at a time when people everywhere have begun to wonder what a voice like this, suppressed for centuries, wishes to say now, in this moment when the Snow Leopard’s human brothers and sisters find themselves side by side with him. Imperiled.”   Barry Lopez

Barry Lopez

Happy New Year, everyone! In honor of Barry’ Lopez’s passing on Christmas Day, I’m reposting my previous Books Can Save a Life writings about him. I wrote the following post on April 16, 2016, after Lopez visited Rochester, NY:

Barry Lopez came to Rochester this week to receive “The Art of Fact” award for literary nonfiction presented by The College at Brockport Writers Forum and M&T Bank.

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that Barry Lopez is one of my heroes, not quite at the level of Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama, but close. (See my blog’s header quote.)

Lopez is one of the very best nature writers, and if you love animals and wildlife, you’ll love his nonfiction books, essays, and short stories. He has travelled to 90 countries and has a tremendous respect for the animal world and the many indigenous peoples he’s come to know.

I, Snow Leopard

Lopez came to Rochester to receive his award and to deliver to us the poem “I, Snow Leopard” by Jidi Majia. 

I wasn’t familiar with either the poet or the poem, but Lopez said that when he found out “I, Snow Leopard” had been published in Asia and Europe, but not in the United States, he had to set things right.

He felt that it was vitally important that the American people hear the words of the snow leopard in this poem. So he saw to its publication here, and wrote the foreword to the English edition.

Jidi Majia, a member of the indigenous Nuosu (Yi) people who live in the mountains of southwestern China, has won numerous literary awards.  As far as I could tell from what I found online, few of his poems have been translated into English.

Majia’s poem is written in the words of a snow leopard, which is viewed by the Nuosu as a wisdom keeper, a being with “biological authority,” according to Lopez.

He told us that when he first began traveling the world and exploring, in his thirties, he viewed wild animals in an amateur, superficial, childlike way, until he learned to embrace the much more refined view held by native peoples.

A poem is a door anyone can walk through, Lopez said, and this poem is the mysterious and elusive snow leopard’s expression of grief and a warning to human kind:  “Do not hunt me any longer.”  Human violence toward animals puts everyone in peril, animals and humanity alike.

Before Lopez began, he said he wasn’t worthy to read “I, Snow Leopard,” but he’d try. He said that, as far as he knew, we’d be the very first American audience to hear the poem.

We listened to this exclusive reading in the soaring space that is the chapel in Rochester’s Temple B’rith Kodesh. “I, Snow Leopard” is beautiful, haunting, simply expressed and accessible even to listeners not accustomed to hearing poetry.

Uncia_uncia
Photo by Bernard Landgraf. CC BY-SA 3.0

After the reading Lopez answered questions and spoke informally and earnestly. As we listened, the audience seemed to be hanging on his words.  Here are some direct quotes I managed to scribble in my notebook:

“Each soul is essential to the warp and weft of the universe.”

“I want to see people come alive.”

“We know what to do and we have to do it now.”

Fixing our world “will take people of great courage. People like you. Because Washington is not doing it.”

“We should be holding hands.”

“The only thing that really matters is to be in love.”

I wrote down the following words, too, but I don’t recall if they are from the poem or if they are Barry Lopez’s words. I believe they are both:

“There is no other place for any of us to go.”

“I, Snow Leopard” is available on Amazon. Barry Lopez told me it is also to be published in a future issue of Orion Magazine.

Of Wolves and Men

If you’d like to read Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams, his nonfiction work about the Far North that won the National Book Award, is a great book to start with. I haven’t yet read Of Wolves and Men, but when I saw the mesmerizing cover photo of a wolf on display at the reading, I added it to my to-read list.

Lopez writes fiction, too. I especially liked his subversive collection of short stories, Resistance, which he wrote shortly after 9/11, about surveillance and “parties of interest” to the government.

If you want to know more about the fascinating snow leopard, Peter Matthiessen’s memoir, The Snow Leopard, is a great read.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, with Ben Stiller and Sean Penn, is one of my favorite movies. Watch it. You might spot a snow leopard.

Barry Lopez passing, gathering words

Valorie Grace Hallinan11 Comments

The role of the artist, in part, is to develop the conversations, the stories, the drawings, the films, the music—the expressions of awe and wonder and mystery—that remind us, especially in our worst times, of what is still possible, of what we haven’t yet imagined.  – Barry Lopez

Barry Lopez passed away on Christmas Day, 2020. You can read a brief, beautiful account of his passing by his wife, Debra Gwartney, on his website. Over the next months, his family will begin the work of restoring their home on the McKenzie River, which was burned in the 2020 wildfires.

During the next week I’ll be featuring some of my past posts about Barry. Here is one, which I wrote in 2013:

When I began this blog I chose for my tagline a quote by Barry Lopez about stories because it rang true for me. But I’d never actually read any of Lopez’s books. So I began with Arctic Dreams, which won the National Book Award.

If you want to be an armchair traveler of the world, if you love nature, if you crave being transported to another time and place by extraordinary writing, you must read Barry Lopez. Arctic Dreams has some of the most dazzling and poetic passages about the natural world you’ll ever encounter.

“The aurora borealis, pale gossamer curtains of light.”

“The mother-of-pearl iridescence of the sun’s or moon’s corona in clouds.”

“The outcry of birds, the bullet-whirr of their passing wings, the splashing of water, is, like the falling light, unending.”

You will find uncommon truths, beautifully expressed. Here is Lopez on the great Arctic explorers of the past: “The day after a little trouble on the ice it is possible to imagine, if but imperfectly, the sort of reach some of these men made into the unknown, day after day.” 

“I think we can hardly reconstruct the terror of it, the single-minded belief in something beyond the self.”

“Inescapable hardship transcended by a desire of spiritual elevation, or the desire to understand, to comprehend what lay in darkness.”

“What dreams there must have been that were never written down….that remained in the heart. The kind of dreams that give a whole life its bearing, what a person intends it should be, having seen those coasts.”

If you want to write, how can you move closer to this kind of mastery of language?

old dictionary

As I was reading Lopez, I happened to make a happy discovery in my writing bible, Priscilla Long’s The Writer’s Portable Mentor:  Lexicon Practice. Lexicon Practice involves looking up words you don’t know and words you want to know better, not in in a pocket dictionary or online, but in a mammoth 600,000-word dictionary, the kind you still see in some libraries. 

(Long advises writers to search online for a dictionary published in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. They aren’t cheap, but they are a wise investment.) Copy the definitions of a word in a notebook. These old dictionaries have detailed diagrams and illustrations, and occasionally I copy these as well.

I write down the word in its language of origin, too. If it has a Latin, Italian or Spanish root, I can brush up on my foreign language vocabulary. Long instructs you to write out the sentence where you found the word and make up a sentence of your own, preferably a sentence you can use in a piece of writing you’re working on. You can choose a lexicon theme based on the work you are doing at the moment. Since I’m writing a memoir, for example, I have a lexicon with words commonly used in the 1960s – products, types of clothing, etc.

Long believes in Lexicon Practice. Otherwise, our writing derives from the uninspired language of generic, overused words and phrases we find in newspapers, magazines, advertising, and social media. As a teacher of writing, Long knows immediately when a writer doesn’t have a Lexicon Practice. She mentions Lopez as the kind of master writer we can emulate. He uses words with Old English and Old German roots, and “…he favors concrete words…that can be seen, smelled, touched, tasted, or heard. For Lopez, language is a musical instrument…”

Now, Lexicon Practice is a geeky, writerly thing, but it appeals to me. This kind of practice slows you down, teaches you to choose words with care. If you want to write rich, compelling fiction or nonfiction, you need to be in love with words in this way, or allow yourself to fall in love with them by doing work of this nature.

Definitions and drawings

Culling words from Arctic Dreams was an inspiring way to for me to establish a habit of Lexicon Work. A variety of birds populate the first pages of my first lexicon: plover, whimbrel, curlew. There are many boats and nautical references: pinnace, tender, portolano chart.  Geographical terms, too: archipelago, scree, promontory.  (As I write this, my word processor does not recognize a few of these uncommon words and highlights them as misspellings.)

Long advises writers to compose word lists, too. Her examples: every possible synonym for blue (sapphire, smalt, cobalt, woad) and all the parts of a fiddle (peg box, side rib, bridge, button). You can work according to a theme. Chairs and chair parts. Types of roofs. Clothes for people who love the outdoors. Get an L.L. Bean catalog and find words like cargo pants, fleece, sun-washed, twill, seersucker, Mary Janes, wellies.

I found that keeping a lexicon is a good excuse to buy one of those expensive, fancy journals I love. Mine has a silvered filigree cover designed in Germany around 1800. (I haven’t kept up a lexicon practice as of 2020, but I do it from time to time for specific writing projects.)

I am now using the second edition of Pricilla Long’s The Writer’s Portable Mentor, published in 2018 by the University of New Mexico Press. It has been updated with all new craft models and to reflect changes in the publishing industry.

***

If you want to be uplifted or if you would like encouragement in your life’s work, listen to a few minutes of this conversation between Barry Lopez and Bill Moyers.

Here is a moving and enlightening interview with Barry Lopez on Idaho Public Television from 2019. He talks about his latest book, Horizon, (which is a wonderful and urgent read!!!) and opens up about the impact of childhood sexual abuse on his life, and what he hoped to accomplish by finally writing about it in the New Yorker as an elder. Those of you writing memoir about traumatic events will find it helpful.

Here is a link to the McKenzie River Trust, which is devoted to conservation of the western Oregon region where Barry Lopez lived. Much of the river corridor was destroyed by the fall fires. If you wish, you can make a donation in memory of Barry Lopez.

Hope in the Dark

Valorie Grace Hallinan5 Comments
A backyard in San Francisco, September 10, 2020

“This morning was perhaps the most unnatural-feeling and unnerving of my life, with darkness rather than daytime rolling in. People around California reported that the birds that would normally be singing were silent. On some of the days, since the freak lightning storm in the heat wave of mid-August launched this explosive fire season, the sun has been red, and when the moon was full it was also red near the horizon, but this morning there was no sun to be seen through the murk. Ash was falling, the ash of trees, forests, homes, towns, dreams burning up. In the strange light, the world around us looked ghostly, otherworldly, unnatural, unnerving, disturbing.”

Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian, September 10, 2020

There are no words to describe my grief over the fires in Oregon, California, and Washington, so I’ll defer to Rebecca Solnit and her Hope in the Dark:

“I write to give aid and comfort to people who feel overwhelmed by the defeatist perspective, to encourage people to stand up and participate, to look forward at what we can do and back at what we have done. This book was always for them. And if you’ve read this far, for you.”

“….sometimes it’s the most unlikely people who rise up and take power, the housewives who are supposed to be nobody, the prisoners who organize from inside, the people who have an intimate sense of what’s at stake.”

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal…”

“To hope is to give yourself the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”