Bobcats, ways of looking, doppelgängers
Dear friends,
Anyone who’s followed me since the bloggy aughts might remember how for years I worked on a quasi-autobiographical novel. I wanted to write a novel that was distinctly not my life but also a novel that in some way replicated every difficult formative emotional experience of my life. I would try something and it would move too far away. I would try something else and it would get too close. I gave myself the teeniest space to maneuver this way and that. I resisted the suggestion that I might be better off getting it out in nonfiction and writing a novel about something else. At last I ended up writing Ancestor Trouble, et voilà! I feel cleansed of that predicament now.
Sometimes I think it would have helped in those years to read Alexander Chee’s essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, even though it didn’t exist then and Alex himself wrote novels before he wrote essays. Probably I just needed to spend all those years intricately crafting scenarios and scenes that will, thank goodness, never see the light of day. But all young writers should read Alex’s book.
The night before last, I dreamed a large seed pod fell from the sky and sprouted into a baby bobcat. It was cool except the bobcat grew rapidly over the course of a day and suddenly I had a wildcat in Queens. The more I think about the dream, the more excited I get. It feels connected to the fiction I’m writing now, which is only a little like what I was writing before. But it’s loaded with ancestor trouble.
Last spring I wrote a piece for Rob Spillman’s 13 Ways of Looking, and it’s up now at LitHub: 13 Ways of Looking at a Family: Maud Newton on the Imagery of Ancestors (Including Her Own). I’ve loved this visual feast of a series since reading installments from Lauren Groff, Dantiel W. Moniz, and more at its former home over at Pioneer Works.
My entry includes work from Fang reliquary artisans, Chagall, Marie Koo, Susan Maddux, and Michael Aaron Lee, alongside some of my own family photos and documents.
Here’s the bonus entry (14 ways of looking!) at the end:
Ancient monuments like Stonehenge that align with seasonal astronomical phenomena are some of the most magical and most grounding human creations—as are standing stones to commemorate the dead, which the stones of Stonehenge arguably, if not obviously, are.
While I was finishing up the book, the discovery came that the massive bluestones at Stonehenge came from somewhere else, possibly a stone circle in Wales. This discovery, in combination with isotopes from cremated remains found at Stonehenge, led the lead researcher to conclude that Stonehenge was constructed to commemorate the ancestors of the original people who lived there. Others scoff at this interpretation of the existing evidence. As I note in a endnote to the book, it’s hard to imagine what, short of a sign saying, “this site was used for ancestor veneration,” would satisfy skeptics; at the same time, it’s true that there is no definitive evidence of the purpose of these particular standing stones in this particular part of the world where these particular remains were carefully moved from elsewhere and buried.
Some links and recommendations:
Have you met your doppelgänger? You might share DNA with them.
I read Lily King’s Five Tuesdays in Winter—I picked it up in the Atlanta airport on the way back from dealing with a family emergency in Asheville—and adored it.
I also listened to four Silvia Moreno-Garcia audiobooks in the last couple of weeks—1, 2, 3, 4—and they helped me find my way back to creative work after that Asheville visit. The third I listened to was her latest, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, and it probably had something to do with my bobcat dream.
I recommend Dan Bouk’s insightful and important Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them. I’ll be discussing the book with him in an event for the National Archives Museum—details in the list of events below.
That list also includes Jeanna Kadlec’s October launch for her debut memoir, Heretic, which I blurbed! (Full quote: “In this outstanding debut book, clear, elegant, and precise as etched glass, Jeanna Kadlec recounts a detachment from her own heart and desires so profound and carefully inculcated that desire for anyone other than God felt like transgression. Her prose is wise and erudite, undergirded by plain speech and an open heart. Heretic is a light unto the path of every former evangelical who longs for communion beyond the condemnation and spiritual abuse of the church, and a crucial window for outsiders into what it's like to grow up handed a birthright of original sin.”)
A couple books I’ve preordered recently (I know I’m forgetting far too many others): Nicole Chung’s A Living Remedy, a memoir of “class, inequality, and grief—a daughter’s search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she’s lost,” and Greg Marshall’s Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It, which “grapples with family, disability and coming of age in two closets—as a gay man and as a man living with cerebral palsy—while exploring with trenchant humor what it means to ‘transform’ when there are parts of yourself you cannot change.”
Next January, the new International African American Museum opens in Charleston; the museum reportedly “will include ways for Black Americans to research their ancestry.” More than 40% of all enslaved Africans first entered the U.S. through the city.
Megan Mayhew Bergman on landscape, memory, Georgia O’Keefe, and where we find our home.
I have some events coming up, in and/or remotely through Pittsburgh, D.C., Brattleboro, Nashville, Little Rock, Brooklyn, and Miami.
August 30: City of Asylum Books, conversation with Geeta Kothari on writing about family (in person, vax required; and virtual). Pittsburgh, 7–8:30 EDT.
September 8: National Archives Museum conversation with Dan Bouk about his book, Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them (virtual). Washington D.C, 1–2 p.m. EDT.
September 9: Brattleboro Literary Festival Literary Cocktail Hour conversation with Rebecca Donner, author of All The Frequent Troubles of Our Days (virtual), Brattleboro, Vermont, 5 p.m. EDT.
October 15: Southern Festival of Books, details to come (in person). Nashville.
October 25: Books Are Magic, launch conversation with Jeanna Kadlec about her debut memoir, Heretic (in person, mask and vax required; and virtual). Brooklyn, 7 PM EDT.
October 28: Six Bridges Book Festival, conversation with Stephanie Maxwell Newton (virtual). Little Rock, 4 PM CDT.
November 19-20: Miami Book Fair, precise date and details to come (in person). Miami.
All good wishes until next time,
Maud
Love, love, love that Alexander Chee memoir!
I enjoyed your part about Stonehenge and the Blue stones that came from Wales. I find the blue stones fascinating. They must have been hugely important to the people. There is no doubt about that.