Category: books

Sitting Up With The Dead by Pamela Petro

I bought Pam’s book off of the author table in the Marran Gallery at Lesley University the week I graduated. She had been my thesis advisor and the semester had gone well, so I was excited to read some of her work. This was the only book of hers they had, so I picked it up.

It’s a travel book about southern storytellers. In each chapter, Pam talks about a particular storyteller and frames them geographically, temporally, and in the course of her journey, including a story by them. Its outermost framing is four road trips that took place over the course of the summer of 1999, so the book has the feeling of a road journal. Each chapter is different, some having a formal story set in a different typeface intermingled with or slighty set off from Pam’s text in a separate font. This allows her the ability to interject observations or comments in the flow of the story, and have them easily identified. There’s one fascinating chapter where she juxtaposes three different versions of the same story against each other, two in identifying fonts, one described in Pam’s text. It’s a fascinating exploration of the folk process.

That’s only one chapter in the book: every experience with a storyteller is different, and every chapter of this book takes its own shape. There’s gorgeous writing — both in Pam’s descriptions and in the stories she collects. David Holt’s story “Ross and Anna” is horrific, heartbreaking, and gorgeously told. There are several trickster stories, including a faithful telling of The Tar Baby from the Brer Rabbit stories, and a Jack story (of Jack & the Beanstalk fame) as told by Orville Hicks. Orville’s Uncle Ray gets an entire section of the book, deservedly. Another favorite of mine is Annie McDaniel’s “My First Encounter With a Flush Commode”, a recalling of a childhood memory which tells us about the south’s journey into modernity, and how recently things we now take for granted and consider necessities were new and alien. There’s history in these stories that goes back hundreds of years (at least two stories are about Kings) and there are ghosts lurking around almost every corner, both within the stories and around them.

The book pairs up nicely in my mind with Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music”, mining the same territory, though the time frame is different. Instead of inhabiting what Greil Marcus describes as the “Old, Weird America” of the pre-electrification south, Pam collected these stories in the penumbral pre-shadow of 9/11. As such, the book has historical value as a journey through a part of the world that has undergone changes since. For instance, the Pre-Katrina levee at the south end of the Mississippi River stands as a backdrop in one chapter. I think Sitting Up With the Dead is a great book. I don’t feel qualified to capitalize those words, but in my mind, they ought to be. It drips cultural significance, and I can’t think of another like it.

It’s also a wondrously good read.

Goth quotient: 72

Rating: 11 stars.

My Ten Favorite Book-Length Memoirs

I’ve only been reading memoirs with any sense of purpose for the last couple of years. I applied to the Lesley MFA program hoping to get into the fiction genre, but I also applied to their nonfiction genre track, “as a backup,” I thought at the time. It turns out that I am much better at nonfiction, which was pointed out to me at the time of my acceptance into that genre at Lesley. Looking over the two writing samples I sent in after the fact, I have to agree.

That doesn’t come out of nowhere. I learned much about writing from reading top-tier rock journalism, with the staff of the long-defunct Creem Magazine being my most essential teachers-by-example. Through a longstanding fascination with Native American history, I have also come to love the writing of Peter Matheisson, Mari Sandoz, and Dee Brown.

As a student of nonfiction, I have been given a number of great books to read by people who know the genre much better than I do. The majority of the titles on this list came from my teachers: one is by a teacher of mine. There are a few things here that I’ve found on my own. Every one of these books has taught me something about the craft of writing.

This list is not in any particular order.

  • All the Strange Hours by Loren Eisely
    A surprisingly lyrical, if dark, recounting of his life by the pre-eminent popular science writer of the 1960s.
  • Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
    Perceptive and harrowing, this coming of age story by a woman who lost half of her lower jaw to cancer while in her early teens offers no easy answers or pat endings.
  • Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
    Elegantly written recounting of a woman’s complex relationship with her mother. It’s a model for anyone’s work in the area of memoir.
  • Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures by Kyoko Mori
    Blunt and controversial story about the author’s conflicted relationship with her home country, her father, and her stepmother, and also tells of her self-discovery and new life in America.
  • She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan
    Important to me on many levels, I read it as I was beginning the process of my own transition. I recognized many things about myself in its pages. It gave me courage.
  • Violence Girl by Alice Bag
    This book thrives for me through Alice’s eye and fierce honesty, on its lens into the earliest days of the LA punk scene, and her upbringing in an East LA barrio. Uncompromising and powerful.
  • The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
    Memoir as queer theory tract. Iconoclastic and deeply felt excavation of a relationship, a life, and our culture.
  • Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
    One of the greatest voices of the twentieth century brings you into the trenches with him when he fought for the Anarchists (and against the Fascists) in the Spanish Civil War. Gorgeous and heartbreaking.
  • Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven by Susan Richards Shreve
    Written with vulnerability and honesty, this book captures the discomfort and self-destructive awkwardness of adolescence.
  • The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper
    Account of a privileged childhood lived in a land about to be plunged into a disastrous civil war that would change everything the author knew of the world.