“For my mother, Dora Vázquez Older, 
whose careful and appreciative first readings 
encourage me through every book, 
chapter by chapter.

There are other ways to live.”
-Malka Older, dedication for The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles

                My partner and I are in Illinois again, back from our trip to spend time with my parents, siblings, and niblings. Tonight we’re starting a new book: Malka Older’s The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles. Tonight I’m also sending the revised draft of my dissertation to my mom and my dad. Both of them appear in it. They’re there with me, learning and teaching and walking along.
                Whenever I write, I read what I’m writing out loud. I listen to the words, feeling how they rise and fall, wondering if they say what I mean. Wondering how they might carry us along, and to what kind of meeting. When I read I hear my parents’ voices in my voice. I think I was thirteen or fourteen when my dad first read a story I’d written out loud. I listened, surprised, because in his voice the possibilities I’d imagined came to life just like The Lord of the Rings. (He read those to me a lot, at home but also along rivers and up on mountain passes). When my niblings were young I’d go sit with them while my mom read a bedtime story. Some of the stories I remembered, like Enid Blyton’s The Magical Faraway Tree. When I didn’t remember these characters, this world, I always remembered her voice, rising and falling, pausing and dancing along as it carried us. There are so many other ways to live. I listen, grateful for all the ways my family (and Older’s family, and so many families) encourage us to reimagine the possible, chapter by chapter, and in the relationships between us as we share chapters.