Books – Susan Feathers

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.

There is a music interlude to begin. Start of the Interview is 5 min. 23 sec

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.

https://youtu.be/iaFL2xulyeM

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.