Thank you, Ashley Bryan

Artist/Author Ashley Bryan died on Friday, February 4, 2022. He was 98. 

I’m one of the lucky people who had the privilege of meeting Mr. Bryan in person. That was in 2016 in Augusta, Maine at the Reading Roundup Conference where he received the Lupine Award for his picture book, Freedom Over Me. Frail in body (he was pushed to the stage in a wheelchair) but still so exuberant in spirit, he had everyone in that audience of 300+ on their feet, clapping and cheering as he received his award with a call-and-response prose poem from the podium. 

He was absolutely one of those rare humans you’d describe as “incandescent.” He was lit from within, and in that crowded, overwhelming space I couldn’t help marveling at how he brought light to each room he entered and kind attention to each individual he encountered. It’s reported that visitors to his Maine home/studio on Little Cranberry Island were greeted with hugs and gummy bears … and as the recipient of one of those hugs, I can say: they were pretty amazing.

I can think of no better way to honor this special human than to focus on his work, and I hope in the weeks and months ahead fresh attention will be drawn to his many, many books. He signed my copy of Freedom Over Me that day I met him, so I’ll share a bit about that one.

Inspired by a document Bryan acquired years ago — an estate appraisement dating back to 1828, in which eleven slaves are listed for sale with the cows, hogs and cotton — the book brings to life not only who those eleven might have been, but their dreams for themselves. It’s a gorgeous, fabulous leap of empathy and imagination, and — dare I say it? — so, so important. Especially given the paucity of the “record.” We know nothing as a fact about these souls, save for their estimated age, the name they were assigned by their enslavers, and the price they fetched.

There’s a horror in that paucity, and in that specificity. It calls to mind the records the Nazi’s kept at concentration camps. It reminds me of my visit, years ago, to the Famine Museum in Strokestown, Ireland, where all that remains of the thousands of evicted tenants who worked the land of the Strokestown Park House are their names and ages, listed on the passenger rosters of “coffin ships” bound for the U.S. and Canada. 

In a column published only last week, the writer Jamelle Bowie explores this conundrum: in recent decades, vast amounts of data about the slave trade has been curated and made available online. The SlaveVoyages website is an incredible resource, making the sorts of paper scraps Ashley Bryan acquired and saved and considered available to the world. But to what end? As Bowie writes: 

“How exactly do we relate to data that allows someone — anyone — to identify a specific enslaved person? How do we wield these powerful tools for quantitative analysis without abstracting the human reality away from the story? And what does it mean to study something as wicked and monstrous as the slave trade using some of the tools of the trade itself?”

It takes someone with as big a heart and as compassionate a vision as Ashley Bryan to prevent the sort of distancing and abstraction Bowie warns us about. It takes art, to turn an appraisement document into a celebration of lost souls. It takes triumphant books like Freedom Over Me.

Ashley Bryan saw the world in all its brokenness and still found room for hope. He showed all of us who hope to create, how to gather the shattered bits of life into something beautiful. 

A page from Freedom Over Me

Ashley Bryan delivering his remarks ...

... to a standing ovation!

Left to right: Maria Padian, Ryan Higgins, Melissa Sweet, Ashley Bryan
at Reading Roundup 2016

Snowstorm Stack

Another big snowstorm is headed our way! 

The good news: great skiing and snowshoeing ahead.

Bad news: dangerous traveling and possible outages loom. We had to cancel plans to visit friends/The Daughter in Vermont’s Upper Valley because of the weather. So what to do? Especially since I finished knitting The Hat during last weekend’s blizzard. Guess it's time to read! And wow, have I got some recommendations. 

First up:

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is without question the best thing I’ve read in years. I’m embarrassed to confess it’s the first book of Keegan’s I’ve picked up, and now I’ve gone and ordered EVERYTHING else she’s published. Set in a small Irish town in 1985, it is narrated from the point of view of Bill Furlong, who is a father, coal merchant, and Catholic, and makes a startling discovery while delivering fuel to the local convent during the Christmas season. 

To adequately describe what this story is “about” would be impossible, because it is “about” so, so much. Fear. Courage. Resilience. Complicity. In one gorgeously crafted sentence after another, Keegan creates scenes and moments which offer glimpses into the very real, beating human hearts of her characters, in particular this one “ordinary” man. Confronted with an extraordinary, shocking situation, his perspective on his community, his relationships, and the circumstances of his entire life shift, freeing him to act … or not … in ways he never could have imagined before.

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich is fiction inspired not only by actual events but also by her grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, on whom one of the main characters, Thomas Wazhashk, is based. Thomas is a Chippewa council member and the night watchman at a factory in rural North Dakota. A quiet man devoted to his family, Thomas finds himself prompted to take action — and travel farther than he ever dreamed — in order to stave off the disastrous consequences of proposed actions against the Indian nations by the U. S. Government.

The facts: in 1953, Senator Arthur V. Watkins of Utah introduced into the United States Congress a bill to abolish the treaties which had been made with American Indian nations. Had this bill passed, it would have resulted in the eventual termination of all tribes, including the one which Erdrich’s family belongs: the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. 

Erdrich does a terrific job bringing to life the land and community her grandfather inhabited, and helping us see — and feel — what was almost lost during this fraught period of history. 

Red, White and Whole by Rajani LaRocca just won a Newbury Honor! And to think: I was only just sitting near her at the Bath Book Bash! Sigh. But seriously: big congrats to Rajani and her excellent book, which I am reading right now with my tutee, Monique, who recently came to the U.S. from the Democratic Republic of Congo with her family. Although Monique is African, not Indian like the protagonist in Rajani’s book, we’ve found much within these pages about the “new arrival” experience for Monique to relate to.

Told in prose-poem form, this middle grade book is narrated by Reha, an Indian girl who came to the U.S. with her parents. Reha does a beautiful job describing the challenges of growing up in America while also honoring the traditions and culture of her family. It’s hard, and to make matters harder: Reha’s mother becomes seriously ill, forcing Reha and her father to take stock of what really matters and how to move forward when you think your whole world is crumbling.

I’m about halfway through Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days, a collection of essays she penned during the pandemic, and I’m reading slowly because I don’t want it to end! From her three fathers (yes, three!) to her thoughts on knitting, Snoopy as a literary influence, and her friendship with Tom Hanks’s assistant, Snooki (a friendship which sparked the title essay) this collection is delight after delight. I have a few other books I’m SUPPOSED to finish fairly soon, but I may just hunker down with this collection during the weekend’s storm.

Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am by Julia Cooke is on my supposed-to-read-for-book-group list and you know? It’s great. Telescoping in on that halcyon period when air travel was supposed to be glamorous (1966-1975), Cooke introduces us to the stewardesses who were part of an elite group of young women carefully selected by the airline.

Thousands applied and the requirements were strict: you needed a college education and fluency in two languages. You had to be 26 or younger at the time of hire; between 5’3” and 5’9”, and weigh between 105 and 140 pounds. Moreover, you needed the savvy and sophistication of a Foreign Service officer, not to mention the courage of an American GI, as Pan Am enlisted many of its flight attendants to aid in the evacuation of Saigon and Operation Babylift, during which two thousand children were flown from Vietnam to the United States.

This entertaining, informative book is giving me a fresh perspective and new respect for the women who chose to “Fly the World” with Pan Am. 

Here's The Hat knit during the last storm.

Okay, that’s all for now. What’s on your stack? Got any suggestions for the next storm?

What Was I Thinking??

Oh, wait. I wasn’t. 

For some reason I went wild in the final months of 2021 and bought every book I wanted, without hesitation. This stack represents what’s closest to the alarm clock on my bedside table, which means what I’m most likely to crack open at night. It doesn’t include the Recently Read (James McBride’s “Deacon King Kong”) or the Audio Books I’ve listened to while exercising (Louise Penny and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “State of Terror” and David Sedaris’s “A Carnival of Snackery”) or the three other stacks of Intended Reads taking up the rest of the table. 

It’s a fairly capacious beside table. Any more capacious and it’d be a book shelf. And I won’t tell you how many unread books are on my bookshelves … 

What’s WRONG with me?? I’m so greedy, SO greedy when it comes to books! And then, I spread myself too thin, trying to read them all at once. It’s like a box of mixed chocolates, where you take a bite of one, then return it to the box (for later) while you move on to the next.

True fact: you never go back to that half-bit chocolate. And you wind up with a ruined box of once perfectly good candy. 

Books are too precious to waste. 

So I’m making a resolution. Putting it here in a blog post, for goodness sake, just to make it REAL. Getting it on the record. Making myself accountable, if you will:

From this day forward, I will finish all books I begin and I will do my very best to not read more than three at a time. 

Yes: three at a time. That’s because I’m in two separate book groups, plus I need to have a new Young Adult read going at all times, plus there are all the OTHER books I want to read, so … three is an absolute bare bones minimum.

Right now I’m ripping through “Lost Children Archive” by Valeria Luiselli because one of my groups meets next week to discuss it and I’ve got miles to go. I’m also halfway through Lily King’s new short story collection “Five Tuesdays in Winter” and I’m doing this really horrible thing (I’m sorry, Lily!) where I’m also reading George Saunder’s “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” which is essentially a masterclass on the short story, using Chekov and other Russian Greats as texts-in-point. I’m kinda then examining how Lily pulls it off … 

Which trust me, she does! I know: friends don’t let friends compare each other’s work to Chekov. God knows my books couldn’t hold up to the comparison. But I’m working on my own short stories now and “learning” from the best. Which includes Lily King. 

Okay, it’s 7 degrees outside right now so I’m off to throw another log on the fire. And READ.