Tag: book-review

530: “Things Were Not As They Are Now” (Dayton Edmonds & Darcie Little Badger)

                “When the Mother Earth was extremely young, things were not as they are now. Just as things are not now as they will be, for growth and change are constant. One night […]”
                -Dayton Edmonds (Caddo Nation), “Coyote and the Pebbles,” in Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection vol. 1

                “Yes, there will be a future. There are gonna be generations beyond ours. The question is how these futures will happen.”
                -Darcie Little Badger (Lipan Apache), “A Conversation with Darcie Little Badger,” hosted by the Urbana Free Library. March 12, 2025

                I was seventeen when a need-based scholarship to need-blind Amherst College made it possible for me to fly across the country and start studying in a place I’d never been. (Need-blind meant that Amherst considered my application without factoring in my family’s finances; by admitting me, they agreed to offer as much need-based scholarship as I needed). I thought that was How School Worked. Not all schools, certainly, but some, and I’d set out to apply to need-blind institutions. Later I learned how my grandfathers went to school through the GI Bill. So that was part of How School Worked. Later I tried to support my students as they figured out how to go to school, and if they wanted to, and what kind. I read graphic novels and other texts by Indigenous people telling their family stories of Indian boarding school systems designed to rip children from their parents, siblings, languages, sometimes lives. I learned about the Sixties Scoop, so much more recent than its name suggests. I wasn’t alive in the 1960s but I was alive for part of the Scoop. What I’d thought was far away was close. And the context of my life was close to so many things that were (by some descriptions) far away.
                There is a lot to talk about here, but what I’m walking towards just now is the way stories can ground us into how transitory this particular moment is. There are so many ways that school has been made to work as a horrifying weapon and a wonderful support and sometimes, strangely, both at once, and other things too. As I read the news lately, I think about that famous description (often attributed to Philip Graham) of journalism as the ‘first rough draft of history.’ In that description, for me, history feels almost stable. Written. The dust clears, and we see what’s happened. In contrast, in the writing and reading of so many stories, I feel history as more oceany: with channels and currents, certainly, but always flowing. A wave in choppy seas. I turn to that, now, because Dayton Edmonds and Darcie Little Badger recall me to a practice of hope. There will be a future. Things will be different than they are now. I and my moment will be distant ancestors to another time as How Things Work keeps growing and changing. So, Little Badger asks one evening at the library, the question is how those futures will happen, and how our work interacts with changing waves.

by Azlan

502: “Stories Upon Stories” (Darcie Little Badger)

                “Stories upon stories. Sometime I’m just going to do a story in a story in a story in a story…” -Darcie Little Badger, speaking at the Urbana Free Library on March 12, 2025

                My partner and I just got back from our local library.
                I could skip that part, start with the “idea.” But it’s interwoven lives and places that are alive inside this “idea.”
                We went for a long walk, spring opening warm as we chatted about the work we want to do and the challenges woven through it. Then to the library to hear Darcie Little Badger talk about her wonderful books. (On Saturday we finished Elatsoe). In the library’s auditorium we ran into friends, and acquaintances who might become friends, and other folks with whom I actually have tense relationships, and all of it felt living.
                One of the things that makes me heartsick with fiction is the way a story arc can anoint a main character. Can collapse complexity into the specification narration of what the Chosen One sees, says, and wants. We joke about that, right? About people with “main character energy,” who make it clear that everyone else is a side character at best. And one of the things I love about fiction—one of the gifts Little Badger reminds me about—is the way storytelling can recognize stories as already woven together. Todays with years ago, and your morning with my morning somewhere else, and our shared moment, now, and so many tomorrows. Darcie Little Badger’s book and her talk, and my conversation with a friend, and the walk my partner and I took among opening flowers, and winter’s brown leaves, and a library where for a moment a scattering of us sit together, laughing, listening.

by Azlan

490: “Imperfections and Incompleteness” (Sarah Travis)

                “I sometimes worry about the imperfections and incompleteness of it all. […] But maybe it’s supposed to feel unfinished […] In that spirit, I am resisting my urge to polish up this letter too much…”
                -Sarah Travis, “Friendship as Scholarship: a Path for Living Inquiry Together,” Experiments in Art Education, p. 178

                Someone told me once that reading the beginning of a novel is like walking into a room and meeting an author who hands you things: here, a description of a fallen tree. Hold this. Here, a child climbing the fallen branches. Here, a quick pair of fluttering wings. The author’s trick (this someone said) is to have the pieces pull together into a story the reader wants to keep reading before the reader gets overwhelmed or bored by what they’re being asked to hold.
                I see what they’re saying, this someone. They’re right sometimes. And sometimes…

                In my teens I started lying awake at night, thinking back over the day to trace out what I had accomplished. What made this day worthwhile. I started doing that for reasons that made good sense at the time, and it might be an interesting practice, sometimes. And sometimes…

                If you were to give me today, if you were to hand over the trees and the fluttering wings and the thoughts that child-me and older-me and our friends are having, apart and together, it wouldn’t make a very clear story. As a reader I might say why are you giving me that. That’s what I mean, sometimes, when I tell my partner at the end of the day wow today feels so long. Going over to feed Jackie’s cats? That was just this morning. There isn’t a nice finished arc to this today-ness. There’s a warm crackling fire. Ash on my hands. A cold, cold wind. Voices. A delicious mouthful of fish. Clothes scattered on the floor. Imperfect and incomplete. Sometimes like my friend Sarah Travis I worry about that, and sometimes like my friend Sarah I celebrate that, because it—whatever it is—is not ending right now. Oh no. It’s snuggling up with blankets. Then it’s dreaming. Who knows after that.

by Azlan

482: “All The Water” of Us (Sayaka Murata)

                “‘[…] there’s a different air about you.’”
                […] Yukari was right I thought. After all, I absorbed the world around me, and that’s changing all the time. Just as all the water that was in my body last time we met has now been replaced with new water, the things that make up me have changed too. When we last met a few years ago, most of the store workers were laid-back university students, so of course my way of speaking was different then.
                ‘I guess. Yes, I have probably changed,’ I said with a smile, not elaborating.” – Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

                Earlier today my sister-in-law, Fa, and I ended up chatting over the different ways we see ourselves in our friends and family. She told me about meeting one of her roommate’s sisters: “Just wait,” the roommate said, “meeting my sister is going tell you so much about me.” And it did. In their mannerisms, their phrases, their playfulness, Fa recognized the sisters by seeing them together.
                I often feel that way. There’s a kind of American individualism that’s really attached to an inner, essential, solitary self, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that—but sitting here now, what I feel is the wash of water as different people fill me. My parents, of course, and my siblings. Even from thousands of miles away I was looking at a palm tree today, and the way I looked at it came in part from my dad. I said hello to someone who passed and my mom’s phrasing washed through me. And then there’s my spouse, my spouse’s siblings, my friends, the other people I meet. In the last few days I’ve met a lot of my partner’s cousins, uncles, and aunts, and already I hear new phrases on my tongue. I find myself making new jokes. It’s fun.
                I used to love jumping into puddles. The splash. The reflection. The game. I’d stand and watch the changing water, too, the rippling tree branches and the sky. Sitting here I splash and reflect and play, my own little puddle self. Smiling, just like Sayaka Murata’s character.

by Azlan

478: Drawing “What We Cannot Yet See”

                “How do we draw—or write—the emotions and parts of ourselves that we cannot yet see?”
                -Rachel Gu  my friend!) and Azlan Guttenberg Smith (that’s me!), “Our Monsters, Our Breath,” Experiments in Art Research

                Rachel and I sat next to each other in a grad seminar. Hour by hour, I watched shapes and shades wash out from the colored pens she brought with her. The pattern from a classmate’s shirt. The arrangement of our tables. A few branches, framed by our classroom window, and an abstract shape that was Rachel’s response to a piece of today’s reading.
                I’ve been scared of drawing for a long time. A mark on a page can feel so final, so I tried to put down perfect marks, clear edges, and everything I drew felt stiff, self-conscious, incomplete. And I’m also entranced when I watch people drawing. Smudging. Erasing. Playing out ratios and relationships.
                I started drawing along with Rachel. Class by class period, first with the pens she shared with me, then with colored pencils I brought to share with her. I picked up specific techniques, of course. (She dripped water from her bottle onto the table, and used it to smear her pen’s ink, and I loved it). But more than the specific techniques, I felt the space of drawing opening, the fear I’d felt settling into one tree in this rustling forest of shapes and shades as Rachel ran ahead and I followed—or turned off to wander a different way. Months after Rachel helped me start drawing again, I helped her start writing some poetry. These practices together led to the chapter we wrote for Experiments in Art Research, where you can read some of her poems and our translations. And these practices helped me—I hope us—sketch our way into a version of studying that is a kind of making space to share ourselves and share what we cannot yet see.

by Azlan

453: All Ghosts, All Together (Caitlin Doughty)

                Usually when I write I’m scared. Scared of getting enough done, scared of how long it’ll take, scared I’m not good enough or funny enough or fast enough. It’s like that game where kids carry an egg on a spoon and try to walk faster faster but my egg is already smashed. Smeared on my spoon. Clear and yellow pulp crunchy with eggshells. And any moment someone will notice I’ve always already failed.
                I wish when I wrote I was talking to you. I wish we were together at the lake with the first hints of the storm ruffling the surface, and maybe we’ll go in soon, before the rain really hits, but for now you say I keep thinking about the horror of having a body and I say I think about broken bones, the way they twist, the way all bones are broken bones that haven’t broken yet and you say I read this essay from a mortician who’d held a skull that day, a complete skull, cooked clean by the cremation chamber, and she was looking at the skull, holding this which used to hold a person, though now it was covered in ash and scorch marks and she was thinking about how sometime every part of her will be something that somebody else holds, and she’ll come apart, and she realized it’s important to sit sometimes with the fact that none of us are the center of the story, or at least not the center of the story for very long, and while we might be stardust, the iron in us literally made in the furnace of stars, we are also borrowed stardust, we are iron that was earth or roots, that was something else, and will be something else and I say wasn’t that Caitlin Doughty and you say yeah, I think it’s in Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and then you pause and you say the rain’s really starting to come down. And for a little while we’re sitting there, you, me, and Caitlin Doughty, all ghosts, all together, this together we’ve made as the surface ripples a reflection of the clouds and the trees.

by Azlan