Geography of grief :: April 2025

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The ER waiting room has metal detectors and an armed guard and a lot of chairs that are disconcertingly close to other people. I’ve spent an uncomfortable amount of time in this place the past few weeks because my dad has a terrible cancer that refuses to be stopped. I choose the most isolated seat for waiting and hope that my thin mask will keep out whatever is making the man in the corner retch repeatedly or the woman in the front cough until she sags breathless in her chair. The air reeks one day of bleach and another of vomit and always of worry, if not fear. One day there is a young man lying on the single bench with a bloodied arm raised over his head. Another, there is a woman sitting near the desk asking everyone who passes if she can have a drink from their water bottles. I make a sad little game of watching the startled clutching that follows this request.

I bring my homework with me, try to give my attention to composition theory or Titus Andronicus, but it’s pointless. Any words I read float untethered through my brain, knocking mercilessly against medical jargon and test results and expected outcomes. In the ER, time stretches and then suddenly compresses. Somewhere behind a door, my father cannot keep his eyes open. The bones of his face show sharply beneath his skin. When it is my turn to sit by his bed I see new similarities between us – the shape of our jaws, the narrow slope of our noses. Something inside my skin shrinks from this awareness, wants to retreat from this suffering body whose DNA echoes loudly inside my own. To combat this cowardice I hover around him, adjusting his blanket, the octopus of tubes running from his limbs, the pillows beneath his swollen feet. Already, these actions are taking the shape of memory, as if the time has already passed, as if I am already looking back.

Life splits in two. There is the time with my father and the time when I return to my own life. I feel profoundly present in both spaces. I say yes to every invitation for coffee or an evening out, I take urgent notes in each class. At home, I watch myself attending to ordinary tasks as if they are momentous occasions. Everything seems worthwhile, everything feels like a privilege. Except for when it doesn’t. Suddenly all I can do is drag myself to the couch for another round of British detective shows and watch the dog hair collect on the surface of the floors that last week seemed almost holy in their cleanliness.  

The geography of grief, my friend Missy texts, is mysterious and ungovernable.

~ In these strange days, I’m thinking a lot about how I use my time. I bought a Brick and made my phone into a texting/photo/phone call device only and I ordered the new LightPhone so I can make this a permanent thing. I’m doing a ton of waiting right now – in the ER, in doctor’s offices, etc – but I have no desire to waste these moments in the netherworld of scrolling.

My son and I also committed to 100 days without following the news. I deleted all the political newsletters, blocked the news sites, ignore the headlines which are all designed for maximum fear/outrage impact. Last week I pulled up a weather site to plan for the week ahead and the headline, perched over a 5-day forecast of gorgeous spring sunshine, was “Temps to plummet on Saturday!!” Even the weather requires my dismay and anxiety now. I’ll pass, thanks. I started going outside just before bed to look at the sky instead. Turns out you can feel rain invisibly gathering in the atmosphere ahead of time, that clouds sneak in softly under cover of darkness, that cold reveals itself as soon as the sun goes down. That’s all the forecast I actually need.

     I’m listening to all the things my body wants. Like tea instead of the harshness of coffee, silence instead of music, walks instead of heavy exercise, naps with my kittens and early bedtimes. I find I can’t bear the thought of eating animals right now, so I’m back to the comfort of plants, who seem always ready to welcome me home.

      I haven’t had a lot of bandwidth for serious books lately (though that hasn’t stopped me from stress buying them!), but I’m reading poetry every day, including Mary Szybist’s work, and my friend Kyce Bello’s new book. I’m also slowly making my way through Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, which manages to capture the feeling of grief in such unexpected ways.

      How about you? Are you reading anything good right now? What things are making you feel sane and settled? I’d love to hear.

      Thanks so much for reading, for keeping me in your inbox. I always want to write more. Someday I think I actually will, but I so appreciate your patience until then.

 Peace,

Tonia

Oyster Knife :: November 2024

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Last night I dreamed an eagle flew into our house. We screamed and jumped up while it perched serenely on the back of our couch, huge and beautiful, and we ran around hiding cats and looking for gloves, trying to figure out what to do with it. It hopped to the floor and began exploring, clicking across the hardwoods, testing the rug, chasing off the dog. I ran to get my camera to record the event and when I came back, it had grown smaller, about crow-sized. I watched as it picked through the cat’s food with its beak, and by the time someone came back with the gloves, it had shrunk even more. Now it looked like a pigeon bobbing around in the living room. Over the next few minutes it changed again. Its feathers faded, its body hollowed out, a fire ignited in its chest and flamed briefly upward. The eagle put its beak on the ground and tipped over on its side, dead.

I woke sad and a little stunned that my subconscious had given me this story in the night. Yes, I thought, this is exactly what it feels like. Even if the country survives this intense fracturing, what I thought about America, the deepest part of me that trusted in our basic decency and goodness has tipped over, dead.

Since election night, I’ve been looking for torches, something to show me the way forward now. This shimmered out of the dark at me yesterday, from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.”

“I do not weep at the world, I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
— Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston was writing about the limits a segregated America tried to put on her and how she refused them. Despite the pervasive, soul-crushing racism she faced, she saw herself as belonging to the world, capable in it, entitled to that oyster prize like every other human. I love that so much. Maybe I just need to feel possible, to have a direction for all this dismay, but it’s the thought of getting down to work, of honing my blade, that is helping me live right now.

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silences, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art.” ”
— Toni Morrison

Sometimes what I have to offer the world feels so slight, just a thread of words tossed into the wind. But writing is what I do, and I’m going to work now. Here, there, everywhere.

How about you, my friends?

Sending love,

tonia

P.S. You might like Eve L. Ewing’s poem “what I mean when I say I’m sharpening my oyster knife”

Now :: August 2024

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Hello friends,

Outrageously, it is August. Month of sun and smoke. My state continues its annual burning, though we are far away from any flames or damage here closer to the coast. I have been in classes this summer, trading stories with gentle-souled young people. My classmates are beautiful, like rocks you pull glistening from a riverbed, quietly colorful and laced with sparkle. Their stories are full of emotion, all with this reaching, searching quality that makes me want to be good to them and tell them everything will be okay.

Everything will be okay. Maybe we all need to hear that now.

Last night I was standing on my deck as the sun went down and the little bats were coming out to forage. I never have the patience or energy for star-gazing; my night sky pleasure is the little brown bats. I love the way they emerge at twilight and flit like secrets across your view. They live very neatly in the eaves of my house and the canopy of fir trees, but they are not just country creatures. They flutter through city and suburban skies without prejudice. Sometimes when I feel nearly smothered by the pollution of the internet outrage factories I think that every day the bats or the bumblebees or the wood ants are living in an incredible now, without worry, without outrage, or smugness, or despair.

Democracy can be in peril and the cedars dying and the state burning and relationships fractured and cancer licking at the door, and everything will be okay because I am alive, we are alive, now.

This idea settles me somehow. When I was younger, we lived for a day when we would fly away to glory. Here and now was a desolate place, twisted by sin and sharpened at the edges. Pray, wait, endure, long for that some day in the sky. I can look back and see the smudge of days I thought were ugly or beneath my notice, years that I wished away. Now, I just live. Gratefully.  

Now there are blackberries, and a free day, and a little dog who has adopted us. Now there is a kiss in the kitchen and dahlias in a vase. A call from a grown child. Good coffee. Time to write. All this tangled in with the grief and pain and weariness, of course. It is always a tangle. But which one will I stay with?

Soon my class will be done and my new young friends scattered again. I will get a few weeks of summer before I go back. There’s a tree I want to climb, a pasture I want to nap in, so many books I want to read. I would like to write here a little. Be quiet a little.

Do you have any plans for your now?

Birdy

 A little of this and that:

~ Reading the last of the Cromwell trilogy with Simon Haisell. I’ve been putting this one off because I know what’s coming, but the slow pace and the company of a group helps. Simon is a terrific host and offers so much insight into these dense, intelligent novels.

~ Listening to this repeatedly.

~ Been mixing things up by avoiding the streaming services and getting old-school DVD’s from the library on a Friday night. Sometimes it’s helpful not to have so many options. In the current stack: 

First Reformed,

Drive My Car,

Trainspotting

~ Just about to start The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control

~ Why I Hate Instagram Now.

I’ve been off Instagram and all other similar platforms for years, but I sometimes scroll my husband’s very boring (sports-algorithmed) IG feed, so I can recognize this frustration. Remember when we thought we were using these platforms to connect with each other?

“Meta, Instagram’s parent company, still says its mission is giving people “the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” As it thwarts my efforts to see all the photos posted by people I know and chose to follow, I call bullshit. Injecting Reels in my feed, then refusing to let me abolish those diversions, hasn’t just put my loved ones in competition with viral nonsense––it has repeatedly subverted my attempts to ensure that my loved ones win.”~Conor Friedersdorf

~It’s the magnificent James Baldwin’s 100th birthday. Here’s a nice article about where to start with his books.

~Are Novel Covers Alienating Male Readers? These covers are alienating me, so I can see it!

OK! That’s about it for this month. Shall we meet here again soon?

Peace keep you, friends.

tonia

 

 

of reading and roaming :: February 12, 2024

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Halfway.

We are poised between winter and spring now. Around Brigid’s Day I joked a bit about it being my real New Year, but I discovered that my mind and body were in firm agreement with this. I didn’t fuss about the 1st of February or anything like that, I just sat with my journal that first week and dreamed some dreams. Suddenly all these little green shoots were wanting to emerge, things I might let grow and blossom in 2024. The first? I want to make friends with the sun and follow her around the year.  I’ve begun a 100 day project of greeting the dawn outdoors. Every morning, out for a walk in the dark while the sun slowly emerges over the horizon. On the days I can’t walk, I will take my tea to the porch and greet her there. Today was my fourth dawn and I can’t wait for tomorrow.

But there are still so many dark hours to enjoy as well. I am finding a lot of joy in reading this winter. Especially re-reading books I’ve loved before. I have a large selection of books on my To-Read shelves, but I don’t feel urgency about them. I will get to them eventually. Or maybe not. They aren’t passing fancies I’ve lost interest in, they are placeholders in a stream of thought, reminders to follow up on authors and ideas, fuel to stoke the writing fires. Every one of them means something to me and my intellectual journey.

part of the to-Read Shelves

What to read and how to know what to read are some of the things people contact me about the most. I absolutely love it when people want to talk about books, so I’m always glad to get your notes and happy to explore ideas with you. But I thought we might talk a little more generally about that subject in this space this month.

As many of you know, though I am currently working on a university English degree, most of my reading disciplines I developed entirely on my own. I say this because I am often surprised by the timidity people have in talking about the types of books they like or the books that feel accessible to them, etc. Reading is so common to most of us, I think we forget that it is a skill that evolves with use. The more you put yourself in contact with challenging texts, and the greater the variety of texts, the better you will be at understanding and retaining them. I have always read absolutely anything that interested me, from young adult genre novels to literary fiction, from nonfiction to academic commentary that was/is way over my head. I have consistently and intentionally attempted books that were too difficult for me. My early Goodreads reviews often went: “I mostly didn’t understand this book, but I liked what she had to say about ___.” It didn’t matter if I understood it all; I almost always came away with some new thread of understanding that I didn’t have before. I’ve done this all my adult life, but it is essentially how my classes work now too. I wade through an enormous amount of literature, talk about it, write about it, and occasionally retain something. The learning comes when this is repeated over many books or many classes. A poet shows up in a history class, a political theorist turns up in a novel, an essay about writing illustrates a technique in a short story. You dive into a deep pond and swim; slowly you become a fish.

But how do you find these books to swim in? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with just reading bestsellers or beach novels. My first rule for a reading life is that it should be pleasurable. But if you want to challenge yourself and develop your ability to find pleasure in new kinds of books there are many ways to go about it. You could use a formal approach, like following a university literature list (here’s one from New College Oxford) (and one from Berkeley) or a library list (The Library 100). I love a good list, but I often find that reading one selection after another from a list like that leads to a feeling of disjointedness. I prefer an interest-led approach that allows me to make connections and follow them, something I think of as roaming.

In a roaming approach, I might start with a list, but as soon as something starts catching my attention, I wander off the path and follow it. It might go like this: a character in a novel quotes Sylvia Plath: “I eat men like air.” I look up the poem, I look up the book, which I read and find vaguely disturbing, but also, who can ever forget “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air”? I read articles about Plath. I read a biography of Plath. I discover Plath is a lot different than I originally thought. The bio tells me she liked Auden. I buy a collection of Auden but I don’t read it. I think about Plath’s hunger to be both a mother and a serious writer. I read Rachel Cusk’s  A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. I read Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy. Cusk has a short story on “the self in visual art” in the New Yorker which takes my breath away. I think about art and artists. There’s an article in the Guardian about the painters Celia Paul and Lucian Freud. I look up Paul and am mesmerized by her portraits. I order her new book, Letters to Gwen John, even though I know almost nothing about either of the artists. The book goes on my To Read shelf with Auden. Celia Paul was 18 when she met Lucian Freud (54). I read Claire Dederer’s  Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma about what we are supposed to do with artists whose personal lives make us cringe (or worse). And on it goes.

       This roaming and enrichment can go on forever. The first thing I do when something begins to sparkle at the edges of my attention is start googling. What else has the author written? Is there a documentary? A well-written criticism of their work? A movie adaptation? A People magazine article where they reveal the music that inspires them? What other books get recommended to me if I plug this title into Goodreads?

        Do this over and over and you find that you are suddenly recognizing a current of connectedness that links artists, writers, and thinkers from every part of life. It’s a lovely pond to swim in. Of course none of this even touches the other riches available through re-reading, marking up books, keeping commonplace books, writing your own summaries or thoughts about what you read, doing a deep dive into a time period, or an author’s oeuvre, or exploring a niche genre (how about Afrofuturism or Native American Horror?) , reading author biographies, listening to book podcasts, joining literary book groups, taking classes, etc. The pond reveals its depths, widens into a sea, and you discover you will never reach the opposite shore.

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Phew! That was a lot! I don’t know if any of it was helpful or not, but often, it seems people just don’t know where to start. I say start where you are now. See what is sparkling at you, research your favorite author, find their influences, find early writers in their genre, or look for new writers that are experimenting and taking the genre in new directions. Most of all, you should feel excited by what you read and not worried about if anyone else likes it. I guarantee you someone somewhere does. Perhaps in your travels you will find that person, or a group of people, who feel the same. And then you can swim even deeper.

I hope February is being good to you. Let me know what you are reading and exploring, and let’s enjoy the last of the dark season while it is with us!

tonia

dawning new year :: January 14, 2024

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            I barely noticed crossing the 2023 finish line and entering the new year. The year of the owl was a tough one; it lasted twice as long as it should and death circled on all sides. I hardly had energy to notice that we are supposed to be starting again. I’ve thought it before, but I feel it more intensely now: January, coming in the heart of winter, deep on the heels of all that enforced merry-making, is a terrible, terrible time to have to find the motivation for new routines and habits. I want January to be a month to rest and reflect, to curl up with old journals and pots of tea. I want long, unembarrassed naps, already-watched movies, and thick books about naturalists or explorers enduring harsh conditions outside while I warm my toes under layers of blankets. There’s nothing stopping me from doing this, of course. I can begin a new year of habits on February 1st,  or March 23rd. It makes no difference.

            For now, I can feel the pull of winter on my animal body, drawing me into quieter spaces. This feels like wisdom I should attend; the earth and I are made of the same stardust, after all, but she is much, much older than me and has passed beyond the need to prove herself or produce for show. I find myself wanting to lean into her side and burrow into her skirts, let her decide when we start moving again.

            I don’t mean that I want to stop living though. When I was younger, I thought rest was just the absence of tasks. I thought it involved reclining my body and letting the laundry sit in the dryer and eating take-out or something. In this way, I managed to avoid all sorts of growth and personal development. I could keep myself spinning during working hours with a list of busy tasks and then be too tired to do anything meaningful with my remaining time (like my own art or creative work). And then, because I misunderstood the meaning of rest, I would refuse to create or journal or spend time alone with a notebook in the evenings or on the weekends because I had categorized that as “work” and I knew it was healthy to “rest.” To be fair, rest meant something different to me in the years I was raising and homeschooling four children than it does to me now. There are seasons. But there are also thousands of ways to procrastinate, aren’t there? 

            This winter season I am turning toward myself, going deep into places I have been avoiding. Some of this is the gift left by the owl, some of it is the lines on my face and the silver in my hair, the growing awareness that time does not stretch on indefinitely. If I would become someone, I must become that someone here, in this now. 

            So I set my alarm twenty minutes earlier, spend the time on writing morning pages, discovering that the pen has access to places in me that I have never uncovered. I do this out of desire, not demand. It doesn’t feel like habit or discipline I am building so much as a self I am quietly discovering, the emerging awareness I sometimes have in dreams or in the blurred spaces between waking and sleeping.

            And then because rest is regenerative, the morning pages extend to more words. I feel like seeing where a story might go. I feel like writing a letter, meandering around the soft corners of this winter hour. I feel like finishing, and so I do. Afterward I am more steady in myself than I was before. There is nothing strenuous about these meetings with myself, no intent to produce. And yet the words pile up, the creative spirit stirs.

            In a recent newsletter, L.M. Sacasas wrote about how slowly the sun arrives each day. Dawn is a gradual affair if you are attentive to it. I saw this recently when we were at the beach and I went out early to watch the ocean at sunrise which, according to my weather app, was supposed to arrive precisely at 7:42 am. I walked down about 20 minutes before that, when the sun was beginning to pink the clouds behind me, and headed home an hour later when the eastern sun was up enough to glint off a slant of western water. Maybe we can let the new year dawn on us like that too. Accept that January 1st is just the first pink signal that a new day is arriving instead of the starting gun for a race where we run fast now or fall behind. Maybe after the slow dawn of the new year, we’ll be better able to see what shape it wants to take, how we might live well in the light of it.

            How about you? Are you starting the year running? Or are you feeling the need for more time? Either way, I am holding out for a happy and deeply nourishing year for all of us.

Thinking of you all here, this quiet and encouraging community, with gratitude. Let’s share more words together this year if we can.

tonia

 This and that.

 *Reading: Claire Keegan’s novella Foster. Just exquisitely good storytelling. (Next I’ll watch the movie adaptation: The Quiet Girl.)

*Reading: the story of David Douglas, the Scottish botanist who collected and catalogued many of the indigenous NW plants for the British.

 *Reading: Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, about what we are supposed to do with problematic artists.

 *Making: this little blanket

*Making: an art journal with Suzi Banks Baum’s Dark Advent Workshop, learning to be imperfect and work with visual media. So hard for this perfectionist and yet so rewarding.

*Watching:  Ondine, Chinatown, and a selection of movies for a class I’m taking on Conspiracy Theories.

*Watching (soon): the new season of True Detective with Jodie Foster

 *Thinking about: Elizabeth Gilbert shaving her head and saying fuck it to beauty culture.  This whole interview is marvelous.

*Thinking about: Eliza Rathje’s gentle volumes of The Journal of Small Work and how we might envision a different future one small dream at a time.