Memoirous

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1974670597 https://tinyurl.com/m4eg5jf

Crossing Pajtim Statovci Translated by David Hackston Pantheon Books, New York, 2019 I like to think of myself as a fairly astute and close reader: I literally did not see the ending of this book coming. But once I read it I understood and wanted to immediately begin reading it again. Let me start at the beginning: Albania, a place so foreign and exotic that there is no category for it. It is a land that has been trampled over and over by foreign invaders and then largely left alone. Their language is quite like nowhere else. We traveled to Albania via a tourist bus from the small country of Montenegro. In Tirana we slipped away from the tour group. We had a contact of a diplomat, an attaché staying in the capital. Little did we know the little we knew. Albania had just emerged from a repressive regime on the scale of North Korea. Under their version of Kim Jong-un, Enver Hoxha erected a series of bunkers—in case the West invaded. They only wished. Albania was a...

Today politics has gone beyond surreal. I’m not sure what words actually mean anymore. Definitely the doublespeak has to be decoded, but now the doubling-down on lies is an unbroken circle, like a snake biting its own tail/tale. As a kid I remember trying to figure out what a fascist was. How was that different from a dictator? Communism—when explained it didn’t sound so bad, then I read Animal Farm , and, again, I was confused. At first glance populism sounded great, like power to the people. Farmers in Kansas experienced a series of difficult years from the late 1880s to the early 1890s. Out of this dissension came the People's Party, a reform movement with roots across the country but particularly strong in Kansas. How could populism go wrong? Then along came Donald J. Trump, a populist candidate. He broke the mold of the established politician seasoned in rhetoric that is frustratingly accommodating to the status quo. The amount of time it takes to pass a law or...

This story, Big Thompson, was something I had on my mind for awhile--in a couple different pieces. Listening to Rebecca Makkai at OCWW talk about how she composed a few of the stories in her collection Music for Wartime I went home and tried to do the same thing. She wrote down two of her strongest ideas and then tried to tie them together into one plot. For example, the collection ends with “The Museum of the Dearly Departed,” a story that focuses on an apartment house that had a gas leak which killed almost all of its inhabitants, save one couple—who also survived the Holocaust. Relatives move into the apartments, and one of the new residents is an artist who is creating a project—a dollhouse structure using found and donated objects from each apartment. Record albums serve as a focal point for each miniature room: Glenn Gould, Maria Callas, Joe Cocker. Whew! This could all seem like such a jumble--but under a deft hand it can all come together. So I combines images of water ...

In 2002 I was invited to the Breadloaf Writer's Conference where I attended on a scholarship because I served on the waitstaff. at the time I didn't understand how selective this invitation was and how prestigious the conference was. The history of Breadloaf goes back to Willa Cather and Robert Frost to name a few. Through the years it diversified. Several years before me a wonderful poet Agha Shahid Ali was on faculty (an honor for any writer). In December 2001 he died too young of brain cancer. Agha Shahid Ali came to the US as a student from the Kashmir region. He became enamored of the poetry form called ghazal. At Breadloaf the waitstaff was each presented with The Country Without a Post Office, a book of his poetry. I always loved the lonely little line from the book: "The world is full of paper. Write to me." The book refers to a point in time and a place. Kashmir is a disputed territory belonging to India but more aligned with Pakistan. It is here that wo...