28 Authors, 28 Variations on a List: <br />Day 1. Lisa Wells

December 1, 2011

photo by Jaclyn Campanaro

Today we kick off 28 Authors, 28 Variations on a List, a series that let's us feature a bunch of our Northwest authors and their holiday book recommendations. We'll link their gift recs back to their favorite NW indies, making it really easy for you to click and buy. We hope you'll stay tuned, for a lot of reasons, but mainly because the authors in our neck of the woods have some inspired and totally unique ideas for what you could be reading or giving this season. It's going to be a lot like walking into an independent bookstore; you never know what you might find.

On the first day of December, this author gave to me, seven books for a dysfunctional but literate family . . . We're thrilled to have as our first guest Lisa Wells, the author of Yeah. No. Totally. (Perfect Day Publishing, 2011) and the forthcoming chapbook of poems, BEAST (Bedouin Books, 2011.) She lives in Portland, where she shops at Powell's Books. She writes:

My coworker says that she hates Christmas because she doesn’t get along with her family. Another friend grew up in foster care where the holidays served as a painful reminder that she was alone in the world. During the holidays we fixate on family, on our ability to be near them, by literal distance or by temperament. Of course, 20 years ago, if you were short on cheer, you need only endure a few weeks of “Jingle Bells,” but these days? They’re playing “O Holy Night” at the mall in early November. Sure, it’s a jazzy, subliminal, less explicit “O Holy Night,” but all the same. The tyranny of the Folgers commercials, where frighteningly chipper people in flannel robes pretend to be a family, is that they establish an ideal real life fails to achieve. Functional, happy families are the exception, not the rule.

I happen to love my own screwed-up family and wouldn’t trade them for the world. I suspect a lot of people feel the same. That’s why so many holiday stories revolve around quirky types who find ways to love each other despite their resentments. These stories hold particular relevance for those of us living in the West, on the far shore of migrations that left our progenitors scattered behind, remote as a comet’s tail.

In honor of real families, here are a few books that might help you appreciate your people this season.

Joan Didion. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. When it comes to family, any Didion will do. One is tempted to recommend Blue Nights on account of its newness, but Slouching has one of my favorite essays on Didion’s family, “On Going Home.” In it she describes taking her husband (the writer John Gregory Dunne) to her home of origin, in California’s Central Valley.

“My husband likes my family but is uneasy in their house, because once there I fall into their ways, which are difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate, not my husband’s ways . . . we appear to talk exclusively about people we know who have been committed to mental hospitals, about people we know who have been booked on drunk-driving charges, and about property . . . We miss each other’s points, have another drink and regard the fire.”

Cynthia Cruz. Ruin. This is a book of poems for anyone who spent their childhood afternoons trying to score drugs in the trailer court. These poems are tight little fairy tales where crowns and magical kingdoms coexist with madness and meth-addicted brothers:

Joe the Lion

Ruined at the Greyhound,
Mania, God's sweet basement
Meth, flooding every cell in your brain.
Your ticket to Cleveland
Soft with sweat and crumpled
In your small-girl hands.
Thin, then, on a music
So terrible. And black,
Your hair cut short to soft mohawk.

You knew I sold
My blood for money. And for love,
I've done things I'd rather not say.
I'd do anything not to be human,
If this is what it is.

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“” width=”90″ height=”135″ /> Dan DeWeese. You Don't Love This Man. In DeWeese’s debut novel a bank manager is robbed on the day his daughter is to marry his best friend. A little like Father of the Bride, for the smart set. This is some of the best writing I’ve read in years.

“Paul is utterly sympathetic even in his faults, and as he comes to a sort of reckoning with his own limitations–and with what, exactly, he is losing on his daughter's wedding day–DeWeese details the process with subtlety and humor.”—Alison Hallett, Portland Mercury

Louise Glück. Ararat. Poet Louise Glück probes the subject of her family with the precision of an ice pick. Truly one of our greatest living poets. A great buy for the sullen daughter of emotionally distant parents.

Late December: my father and I
are going to New York, to the circus.
He holds me
on his shoulders in the bitter wind:
scraps of white paper
blow over the railroad ties.

My father liked
to stand like this, to hold me
so he couldn't see me.
I remember
staring straight ahead
into the world my father saw;
I was learning
to absorb its emptiness,
the heavy snow
not falling, whirling around us.

Martha Grover. One More for the People. (Perfect Day Publishing, out December 13, 2011) I’ve been following the quirky Grover family for the last 8 years through Martha’s Grover’s beloved zine, Somnambulist. One More for the People is a collection of the best short essays from the Somnambulist years, revolving around her family and her diagnosis and treatment of Cushing’s, a rare and potentially fatal disease. There is so much to laugh and cry about in this book. To quote Scott McClanahan, “It’s the type of book you put down, wipe the blood off your face and your hands, and shout, ‘HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, MORE LIFE, PLEASE!’”

Jimmy Santiago Baca. Martin; And, Meditations on the South Valley. Jimmy Santiago Baca was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1952. When he was two years old his parents abandoned him. Baca grew up in an orphanage and later, a detention center. He started living on the streets at 15 and at 21 he began a five year stint in a maximum-security prison on a narcotics charge. In prison, Baca taught himself how to read and write and developed a passion for writing poetry.

Baca's semiautobiographical Martin and Meditations on the South Valley follows the journey of this “detribalized Apache.” Here’s an excerpt from his epic opening poem:

“ . . . From the orphanage my tia Jenny
drove me to Pinos Wells
to visit grandma. All Saturday afternoon
her gnarled fingers
flipped open photo album pages
like stage curtains at curtain call
the strange actors of my mestizo familia
bowed before me wearing vaquero costumes,
mechanic overalls and holding hoes in fields.

At the six o'clock mass
with clasped hands I whispered
to the blood shackled Christ on the cross,
begging company with my past –
given to Christ who would never tell
how under the afternoon sun in Santa Fe
the rooster slept and black ants
formed rosaries over the hard dirt yard”

Charles D’Ambrosio. Orphans. (Clear Cut Press, 2004). This is one of the best (not to mention underappreciated,) collections of essays I’ve read. Put out by the now-defunct Clear Cut Press, the collection includes essays on a Russian orphanage, the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, whaling and reminiscences on growing up in Seattle. One of the collection’s most moving essays chronicles D’Ambrosio’s troubled family through a series of documents, a poem by his father and letters from his brothers. You can read it at The New Yorker.

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