Below is the dedication of my first novel, Threshold, in which I give credit to my grandparents for sparking the idea to write a novel of hope and possibilities.
Dreaming a New World
Tag: Books
Steinbeck and Erdrich
For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. ~ The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Goodreads.
John Steinbeck’s conviction that latent capacities lie in wait of the challenges we may face is the power of his stories. Steinbeck was a man with his boots set firmly in his homeland: the San Joaquin Valley. He wrote about migrant labor, loss of natural landscapes to industrial scale farming, and poverty created by the concentration of wealth by a few. He sought to understand ecology when he sailed with his biologist friend, Ed Ricketts, to study the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). In The Log of the Sea of Cortez, he and Ricketts articulate how life works in linked communities which predated more contemporary scientific understanding of ecology by decades. I highly recommend this book to Steinbeck readers to understand his curiosity and breadth of knowledge.
In recalling The Log’s philosophy, I am struck with how Louise Erdrich not only comprehends the interrelatedness of all life, but she also found her understanding in the places she grew up: the Red River Valley where the Red River flows north toward Winnipeg from Fargo, North Dakota. Today it is a highly engineered river to meet human and industry needs, but once it ran free, annually flooding its banks in the spring runoff to nourish the valley’s soil into rich black loam yards deep. The story that Louise tells in her recent acclaimed novel, The Mighty Red, is centered in this valley among families beginning in 2008 when an economic collapse stressed working families many of whom lost property and/or became homeless overnight.. Some work in the industrial beet operations, others are rich landowners who have bought out small family farms. Another family is working to improve their land in the old way, come what way may. They preserve native “weeds” and regenerate soil.
Something Louise Erdrich has mastered is THE WEAVE – my concept for threading people’s stories in the geography of place. Louise’s mother is an Ojibwe elder in the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Tribe. Her grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, saved their reservation from the U.S. government’s veiled attempt to take land designated to their tribe by treaties to allow wholesale taking of forests and minerals (Termination under the guise of Emancipation). She told this story in her novel The Night Watchman which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. Storytelling is in her blood as this was a primary method of recording history and imparting values, and cultural and spiritual practices among her people.
Louise Erdrich inhabits a pantheon of great writers who possess piercing insight into contemporary American culture and politics. For Louise, her ready access to indigenous ways of knowing lends the power of truth unadorned but artful. It’s a combination that has drawn a worldwide readership.
Like Steinbeck, she builds stories from decades of lived experience in a particular geography – what Gary Nabhan termed the geography of childhood.
Erdrich is imbued with a wicked humor, gift of elders in her tribe voiced through her unforgettable characters with names like Happy Freshette and Father Flirty. But don’t be fooled that her writing is entertaining in the normal way we might think of a western cowboy genre. Erdrich’s gift is alchemy. The impact is more than its elements. At the end of every book I am better than I began. She has gently led me to reconsider the human condition through her characters, to see it in fine definition, beautiful and tragic, heroic and funny.
I’ve laughed and cried my way through the lives of her characters and come to love the places where their destinies unfold. In The Mighty Red, Crystal and Kismet, Hugo and Gary, are caught up in a teenage love triangle and a mother’s quest to protect her daughter. The geography of place includes the beet farms producing sugar (a poison) while “weeds” are eradicated by an unrelenting war on native plants some of which are highly nutritious, she shows readers the profound irony of modern culture’s misunderstanding of the land under its feet. She brilliantly shows readers the interconnectedness of life, artfully described as the “joinery of nature.”
As she approaches 70, Erdrich is more powerful a writer than a decade ago. Winner of the Pulitzer, the National Book Award (twice) and hundreds of other awards and nominations, she has left America and the world a treasure of stories that speak the truth while encouraging us all about our frailty in the face of uncontrollable forces. Yet, even then, like her grandfather, we ‘grow beyond our work, walk up the stairs of our concepts, and come out ahead of our accomplishments.’
I await her nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Voices for Mother Earth
“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (from goodreads)
“Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human. It is to transcend not only national limitations, but even our species isolation, to enter into the larger community of living species. This brings about a completely new sense of reality and value.” (Thomas Berry, “The Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth, 42). https://thomasberry.org/quotes/
M. Scott Momaday, reading his poetry, A Man Made of Words.
Scott’s understanding of language arises from his deep conversation with the land of the Kiowa. He received the Pulitzer Prize with his first novel, The House Made of Dawn.
To read or listen to powerful voices of people who have devoted their lives to celebrating the Earth is to heal and to find our way home. Each offers us solace and a direction for our lives as we anticipate times of destruction in America and around the world. Earth teaches us to live in community, to know each other and to be in reciprocal relationship with each other and all of life around us. I highly recommend these great teachers, each of whom has helped me understand a way forward in uncertain times. They offer hope and a longer point of view than ephemeral politics. They are an antidote to avarice. We need this deep resonance now to stabalize our spirits and our collective wish for unity, equality and peace.
Listening
Here is a brilliant conversation between Robin Wall Kimmerer and Emanuel Vaughn Lee of Emergence Magazine. Robin describes the wonderful serviceberry tree and what she has learned from its generosity. I also recommend Emergence Magazine for its films from artists and thought leaders across our great planet. I go there frequently to keep the balance.
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimerer. I am awaiting my copy!
The Warp and Woof of Democracy
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. ~ Abraham Lincoln
I’ve tasked myself with reading more about our history and our changemakers. In Our Ancient Faith by Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln is preparing for a debate with Frederick Douglas and jots down this idea above.
Democracy at its root is relational.
If an indiviudal would not be a slave, he must not deny the same to others. Consent of the governed is the fundamental principal on which our government carries forth the will of the people.
In these very turbulent times, most recently demonstrated in a violent asassination attempt on the life of former President Trump, the nation has paused to consider how this could happen and what caused the youmg man to engage in such an act. We also reexamine how separated we have become, how violent rhetoric has caused people to distrust each other exemplified in the last seven years of political divide, vitrieolic language and extreme othering.
Lulu Garcia-Navarre revisits Robert Putnam’s study of the state of our Republic in the New York Times (July 14, 2024). In light of a new 2oth year edition of his book Bowling Alone, updated to include social media, they discuss why there has been little progress, even worsening separation among us, deepening the loneliness epidemic and consequent fear of each other.
Putnam discusses Alexis de Tocqueville‘s famous studies of American democracy published in 1835 and 1840. He observed that we were joiners – members of dozens of clubs and group affiliations. We were intensely relational including both close relationships and more social relations from hunting to sewing clubs, societies and guilds.
Garcia-Navarre and Putnam exmine how these kinds of relationships over the life of a citizen facilitate democracy. This brings me full circle to consider how Abraham Lincoln described democracy as relational. If I would not be a slave, I would not be a master.
Would more frequent nonpolitical relating to each other prevent the growth of misunderstanding and mistrust among us?
I encourage you to listen or read the article.
Related to this is how our founders understood morality. Founders thought about how each person manages oneself: restraint, kindness, courtesy, honesty, etc. It had nothing to do with the imposition of values on free citizens. To founders it was about improving oneself and continually self correcting by personal inventory over a lifetime of striving to be the best person possible. Self management.
Perhaps this is honed in an array of relationships throughout our lifetimes and that is why we see a weakened American democracy for which our relational lives is its essence. See the National Constitution Center’s discussion of how our founders thought about morality as self control and self management. Character.
What do you think? Leave a comment so that we can discuss this matter.
A Reading Life
“A reader lives a thousand lives before [s]he dies . . . The [hu]man who never reads lives only one.” ~ George R.R. Martin
Readers of this blog know that nature is a constant theme in my writing, reading and public work. We all have our roots plunged in soil we call home as did Lauren Groff, a magnificent writer who first found her inspiration at the family farm in New Hampshire.
Groff’s recent novels The Vaster Wilds and Matrix. pose profound questions about how religious and cultural practices have led to the depletion of nature’s resilience and how both men and women contribute to it when acting from an anthropocentric view. The journeys of discovery of both female protangonists is personal, imbued with hopes and dreams in the crucible of living their lives in times when women possess little social agency.
Groff is currently writing the third in the “triptych” of stories that carry the thread of inquiry and discovery. Readers are led to consider our present predicament of killing the very thing that gives us life: the living Earth.
Here are two excellent interviews that explore how Lauren Groff came to write each story, all the complex threads of thought, stories and influences that helped her conceive these outstanding novels.
The first interview explores The Vaster Wilds which takes place briefly in Jamestown colony in the “starving time”and mostly in the American wilds in 1609 North America.
The Matrix concerns Marie de France, the first published female poet in France, a poet and deep thinker whose writings are surprisingly free of social and religious strictures on women at a time of low female agency. Many sources contributed to the final story Groff tells. I found this instructive and supportive for writers of fiction.
This lecture from the University of Notre Dame is in my view the best exploration of how Matrix evolved and the exceptional thinking of one of America’s most brilliant writers of our time.
As a writer who shares the theme of nature I am so grateful to Lauren Groff for demonstrating the power of fiction to move us to understand the deep roots of our misunderstanding.
David Hume Revisited at the National Constitutional Center
David Hume and the Ideas That Shaped America
See the National Constitution Center site for this discussion. Includes bios of the David Hume scholars and additional resources to explore after the program.
What can modern American citizens and our political leaders learn from Hume? How were the views of our founding fathers shaped by the great philosophers of their time? How do they influence modern understanding of our Republic today? See this link to Federalist Paper 10 which considers the power of a government system to stem the tidal pull of dangerous fractions.
Jeffrey Rosen leads the discussion with three scholars of Hume. Original sources are suggested and links embedded in the chat during the discussion and provided on the wesite link above.
These same ideas are not only alive and well in our current political deliberations but also illuminate what has gone wrong and why. We can all use a dose of Hume and Madison to understand the forces that can threaten or aid the pursuit of happiness, meaning the common good.
Highly recommended to readers on this blog. Please forward to friends, neighbos and teachers and leaders in your communities. It is a non partisan discussion for all political persuasions to consider and for understanding the original thoughts and ideals that influenced the founding of America.
Hats off to the National Constitution Center, its guest scholars, and to Jeffrey Rosen for his able leadership.
Indigenous American Authors: Great New Books in Fiction and Nonfiction
You haven’ lived without reading a new writer of fiction, Angeline Boulley.
You haven’t lived without reading a new writer of fiction, Angeline Boulley. The Firekeeper’s Daughter, her first novel (2021), was listed on the New York Times Best Seller List and has been nominated for numerous awards, and is being produced on Netflix as an episodic story. I was drawn to read it by my local book club but also because Louise Erdrich, Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning Native American novelist, raved about it. See Birchbark Books, Louise’s independent book store in Minneapolis.
In a recent interview by Louise with Angeline, Boulley describes why she wrote the book and its sequel (Warrior Girl Unearthed). Both novels are Young Adult but all adults are reading it as well because the values and knowledge Boulley emparts to readers is chicken soup for the soul, or “how things should be” among us human beings. Her Objibwe culture is generously described throughout the book in an engaging way through the main character, Daunis Fontaine. Boulley was Director of Indigenous Education at the U.S. Department of Education. Her father is a firekeeper in his tribe (a keeper of tradition and culture) and Angeline has been in leadership roles in her tribal nation. Imparting understanding of her Ojibwe traditions is purposeful.
During this interview, I learned about Marcie Rendon, another Ojibwe writer. Murder on the Red River is the first book in a mystery triology with the lead character, Cash Blackbear, a 19-year old kickass woman. Like Boulley, Rendon incorporates current and past issues for Native Women and Native Peoples in America. The issue addressed in this book through Cash is the foster home abduction era when young native children were removed from their homes by BIA officials to be “rescued” from what was considered “bad homes”. Cash has endured seven foster homes before ending up in Fargo, North Dakota. The local sheriff received Cash each time she was kicked out of a foster home for her behavior and continues to observe and intervene with compassion. Their partnership to solve a murder is endearing, gritty and funny. The book is a three part series – Sinister Graves is heading toward my mailbox with Girl Gone Missing next in line. Rendon has that clean-sentence-no-nonsense way of telling a story that allows the reader’s imagination to spark and fire. I read the book over a day. HIghly recommended for you mystery readers!
In Non-Fiction, I recommend Ned Blackhawk’s new The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. It is very well written and riveting as Dr. Blackhawk lays out the book and then shows how Native American tribal communities influenced and shaped outcomes before, during and after the Revolutionary War and Civil War. Ned is a historian whose prose is easy to read but well sourced. It won this year’s National Book Award for Nonfiction. It is a book that can be read over time and should be on every history readers’ bookcase for reference on American history that is inclusive of the great traditions and historical importance of Indigenous peoples.
See below an interview with Dr. Blackhawk at the National Constitution Center.
And just like that, a second novel
Well, that second novel has been “cooking” in my mind for many years, and builds on years of experiences that reach back to 1990. That year I moved to Yuma, Arizona to teach middle school students at Crane Junior High School. Yuma first introduced me to the Sonoran Desert, and naturally, I experienced the hottest part of it first. Yuma temps that first summer hit 122 degrees Fahrenheit. My friends and neighbors taught me how to stay safe while traveling, and how to get out early in the morning before the heat made it impossible.
All around the school and neighborhoods where I lived, agricultural fields stretched out in long even rows with canals as borders, while row upon row of blue water soaked into the ground, evaporating in the intense heat. Surrounded by a sea of broccoli, my school was embedded in the large-scale industrial farming operations in which many of my students’ parents labored. On these intensely hot days, I wondered at the ability of human beings to endure hard labor in those fields.
Then, the fact that the water came from the high Wyoming plateaus and Rocky Mountains was only vaguely in my awareness. Precious river water poured down through deep canyons into the dams that controlled the North American Nile, and by a complex system came to Yuma and the Imperial Valley to grow 90% of America’s leafy produce between November through March. Then, I was focused on my students’ daily struggle to learn and grow up under harsh conditions of poverty and discrimination. But, all around us was a BIG STORY about a river, its people, and how it came to be the most controlled and overused body of water in North America. Indeed, the Colorado River is so over-allocated that it no longer winds its way to the Gulf of California as it did for thousands of years. The magnificent delta region, one of the world’s largest and most productive wetlands, literally dried up and died.
This is the subject of my second novel, The American Nile: Voices of a River and Its People. I am working with a talented editor and should have a solid draft completed before I return home from Tucson in late April.
Susan Feathers 
