not native fruit

Desert Sanctuary ~ my book is published!

I just wanted to let you know that I’ve self-published a mystery novel called ‘Desert Sanctuary’ under the pen-name of Karen Whittingham.  The book is available online at Lulu.com as a print-on-demand or as an e-book (see links below).  Here is the description of the book given on the website. 

 “In Desert Sanctuary, unconventional healer Madrigal Strahan investigates a mystery in the Nevada desert where she lives near her long-time friend and lover, Blaylock Pritchard.  Their silent and beautiful desert resonates with shock-waves following a mysterious fire in a remote location that reveals long-buried secrets leading to multidimensional resolutions for Madrigal’s family and friends, and an earth-centered spiritual epiphany.”

 

The reason I chose to write about the desert is because my partner and I spent many of our vacations camping in the high desert east of the Sierra and in Nevada .  The beauty of the desert and the mystery of its solitude has always stimulated my creativity.  This book expresses many of my beliefs about the importance of community, closeness to nature and healing.

 

I hope you enjoy reading my book!  

 

Desert Sanctuary by Karen Whittingham, available as print-on-demand:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/desert-sanctuary/17342000?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/2

 

Available as an e-book: http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/desert-sanctuary/17364322?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/4

PS - for readers interested in the Ishmael books or readers of Daniel Quinn, Desert Sanctuary offers a literary fiction expressing a vision of reality consonant with his. 

jack d. forbes, red blood

I'm finally getting around to reading jack d. forbes, university of california, davis, professor of native american studies.  I'm starting with one of his scholarly books, "The American Discovery of Europe" and also his only novel, "Red Blood."  I am really impressed by the novel.  It is written in the peripatetic motif popularized in the English tradition by Smolett, but found also in that sperm-seed of western literature, Don Quixote. So, nothing much happens, there is no suspensful 'plot,' but the protagonist, Jesse, travels around and meets different people of various native american backgrounds, reflects on what he sees, and gains insight into what it means to be native american, or part-native american, at this particular juncture in time. 

It seems to me he covers every possible permutation.

It's a great loss that Jack Forbes has recently died, in February 2011, because he was clearly a man of great insight with a basically gentle attitude toward differences, a lot of love, compassion and intelligence.  A jewel.  He was of Powhatan-Renape and Lenape background, which may mean he looked more brown or more white than the popular conception of what 'Native American' looks like.  He writes a LOT about all the various shades of color and subtleties of feature found in our population.  Young white readers, in particular, (from what I've seen in the comments on blogs that deal with these issues) often find this kind of writing 'racist,' but really, it's just revealing the racism that is already there in our society, but goes unacknowledged.  There's been a fairly large acknowledgement of the racism heir to the plantation-slavery of Africans prior to the Civil War, but there is less awareness of the widespread slavery prior to the rise of the South's cotton industry.  Slavery or indentured servitude were very common throughout the thirteen colonies and early states and involved white, black and red persons, who often united in bands of community and through marriage.  Their descendents, along with the descendants of many later immigrants, form the 'unentitled' masses of America today.  The lower classes and working classes. 

For people who fall into that latter category, 'Red Blood' is a helpful book.  For people like myself, with perhaps only a smidgen of native blood but a fairly wide streak of influence from the native forbears, it is comforting to see just where these influences come from, and that we have a sort of 'right' to our beliefs and our lifestyle.  We are not simply somehow defective white people or 'anti-social' or whatever label might have been applied to us in our difference.  We are not simply 'black' Americans, either, but that is someone else's story to tell, not mine. 

For myself, to look at me, I understand why no one would credit that I am part-native american, or part African, even though my dna tests show that, and my family (barely) acknowledged it, regarding it as something too precious to share abroad, only eliciting criticism, ridicule or negativity.  Rather, our truth was like a precious pearl kept secret in a special container deep inside our home.  Anyway, I'm not going to try to convince anybody - about myself, I mean.  It will be a fairly private thing for me, and an online post doesn't really change that.

I look forward to reading more Jack Forbes and I encourage you to read him too.

suze rotolo: memory lane

I read online a few weeks ago that Suze Rotolo had died about a month ago, age 67.  Of course, I recognized her famous photo on the 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan' album, and learned that she has written a memoir called 'A Freewheelin' Time.'  I picked it up at the library, and soon bought my own copy. 

What a trip down Memory Lane!  Not just the folk-music scene stuff - yes, that was somewhat meaningful to me, since I was an afficianado of the genre at the time, in the early sixties, before it had become 'popular' among my peers.  No!  What I found fascinating was just the story of her life - THAT was what I could really relate to.  Her socialist-oriented parents (a polite way of saying 'communist'), her humble working-class origins (in Queens), the fact that she initially took the subway to Greenwich Village to 'connect,' her problems at school (just like mine!), her life in the old 'bohemian' style, her work creating sets in off (and off-off)-Bwy theatre productions, her natural artistry which manifested in her clothing innovations and jewelry - I could relate to all of that, I suppose because I did all of that! - a few years after Suze, and in another city.  Maybe it was the times, but it wasn't what was happening in our community - I kind of had to go out and find it.  And yet, in another way, I guess I could say I was tuned in to my times.  Anyway, her story sure brought back memories for me!

Also, I shared her experience of being emotionally and sexually connected with a very unusual artist who initially seemed very much on his own, in need of a friend shall we say, but soon became 'attractive' to 'everyone' and who was intimately tied up with notoriety and 'fame' - ye gods, spare us that albatross - and who desired a very different lifestyle from what suited me.  We both had the courage to walk away from what wasn't working for us, to find our own lives, so I could relate to much of what she wrote about that too.

I've taken a look at some of her more recent book-art at Medialia Gallery - I think Suze Rotolo is my new patron saint!

dalva and crazy horse

My husband has read the Mari Sandoz book Crazy Horse: the Strange Man of the Oglalas two or three times and has always encouraged me to read it as well.  So, finally, just a few weeks ago I took out Larry McMurty's book, Crazy Horse: A Life on CD's from the library and was able to hear it being read while commuting through the park to work - about a 45 minute trip - twice a week, and also while driving on any other little errands or visits.  It was only three disks and went fast.

In the meantime, I was reading a memoir called Off to the Side by an author named Jim Harrison, whom I'd never heard of, but then I don't keep up with the NY Times Best Sellers List.  I have a more Daoist approach and let the Dao brings books to me. :-) And this is an example of how that process works!  I still haven't finished the memoir, but I liked it so much that I decided to try one of Harrison's novels, and as luck would have it, Dalva was the first novel to come into my hands.  And who is one of the featured characters of the major sub-plot?  Crazy Horse.  So the story of Crazy Horse, and his friend He Dog, and the military outpost of Fort Robinson - all of this was fresh in my mind as I read Dalva.  I've visited Fort Robinson once, by the way, knowing nothing of Crazy Horse's death there, but feeling averse to 'the energy' as they say.

Anyway, Dalva is a masterpiece of writing, most of it first-person narrative with a female voice (Dalva's), told in flashbacks to adolescence and other stages of life from a 45-year old standpoint.  The central section of the book is narrated by a crazy professor who is researching the journals of Dalva's great-grandfather, an early comer to the Sand Hills area of Nebraska, and someone sympathetic to the Sioux, in fact an agonized witness to their demise.

I find it interesting that I've characterized the professor, Michael, as 'crazy' and that this was also the appellate of Crazy Horse.  Harrison mentions that for the Sioux the word 'crazy' really meant something closer to 'enchanted' or 'magical.'  Well, the professor's academic mind is something like fly-paper, everything sticks to it, and his personal mind is very mobile, not being undergirded by a strong character.  He is thoroughly opportunistic, desperate and needy, but talented!  Harrison does a marvelous job in capturing the chaos of someone like Michael.  In fact, all of Harrison's characters are rich, nuanced and feel thoroughly authentic.  Despite Michael's failures, Dalva and her family are very kind to him, protective and nurturing, rather like the attitude of the Sioux towards those they regarded as 'crazy', such as Dalva's great-grandfather, a johnny-appleseed-Methodist Minister whome they saw as 'too strange to kill.'

Much of the book takes place in natural settings around the Niobrara River, the kind of country I just love and tried to depict in my own novel, Desert Sanctuary.  Harrison recreates the vitality of life lived close to nature.  Anyone who has ever experienced such a life will be grateful to him for this book, and other readers will appreciate the window onto a life that is still available here and there in the west.

What an incredible book!  And what a wonderful coincidence to have read McMurty's Crazy Horse: A Life just before reading Dalva.

jim harrison

i've discovered a new author i like a lot.  jim harrison has written poetry and fiction set usually in the areas in which he grew up (Michigan, Minnesota, northern mid-west states) or where he maintains a second home today in the southwest, Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California.  his writing reminds me a bit of louise erdrich, and i'll say more about that later.

I discovered jim harrison by (uncharacteristically) reading a mystery novel set on the north coast of California (one of my favorite places on earth) by Janet LaPierre who has one of her characters, Verity Mackellar, mention that she is reading a good memoir called "Off To The Side."  So, I googled that title, and discovered that it is a real book, by author Jim Harrison.

I began to read the memoir, and wasn't sure whether or not I was going to connect.  His voice is very masculine, his concerns seemed at first not to relate to me - a friend said his concerns were very regional, midwestern - booze, dames, and hunting.  But I found that I really did enjoy his style of self-disclosure, his way of communicating something honest, yet occasionally diverting, in the sense that he can surprise me with a turn of phrase, and not just a knack of phrasing but a nice juicy sliver of insight.  I began to feel this guy is like some kind of Americana wisdom-bum combining the likes of Erich Fromm, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac and Carl Sandburg - if you can believe such an ungainly combination - plus something that is characteristically himself.

The more I read, the more I liked.  And so I soon went out and picked up one of his novels, an early one called Dalva, written, I believe, in 1988. 

This is when I began to see the similarities to Louise Erdrich.  I began thinking to myself, is this a style of writing that is somehow organically produced by the north-country?  I was thinking 'he is like the male version of her, and as an author, she is the native-american-part-white voice to his white-american-part-native voice.'  in other words, erdrich, who is part-German and part-Ojibway, and writes both parts brilliantly (imho), specializes perhaps in the native-american perspective in her literature.  i'm assuming harrison is part-Sioux because he always includes part-Sioux characters in his novels, (although i don't recall if he mentioned it in his memoir, however, it seems likely to me, given things he writes about his father's people).  Based on my own experience with home-grown variety native-american people (as differentiated from hollywood-style or even AIM-style "indians"), I would say that both of these authors write the white, the native-american and the mixed characters very very well, and offer us something of a perspective that I seem only to find in literature that combines these two American influences quite consciously.

This indicates to me a degree of authenticity.

Let it be said, simply, that i am very happy to have found jim harrison's work, and to put it on my shelves next to Louise Erdrich's.  Oh, and by the way, just out of curiosity, I googled 'jim harrison + louise erdrich' and found that others see similarities in these two writers too! 

I may write more about harrison in the near future, as there are some specific topics he gets into, in Dalva, that I find interest me personally.

human traces by sebastian faulks

I loved this book and hoped it would never end.  For me, it could easily have continued past its 570 pages. I've read some reviewers who thought the book was too long, but a lot of the material on the brain, the history of psychiatry and neurology was not new to me, and therefore not a struggle or tedious for me to read. In fact, I enjoyed reviewing so much that had fascinated me when I was younger, and I also gained some biological insights into consciousness that were new to me, from the thinking of Julian Jaynes, Thomas Szasz, J. Crichton-Browne, among others.

I developed an interest in neurology and psychiatry early in life, because of a friend who suffered from grand mal seizure and who also had to deal with a psychiatric diagnosis.  I seriously considered studying psychology and neurology, and wrote some fairly decent papers on the brain for school, although I never pursued this interest professionally.  I thought that Faulks did a great job of covering many aspects of mental illness - illustrating in fictional form what it might have meant to be mentally ill or working with the mentally ill back in those days (and still today in some parts of the world, which I've also read about, and believe me, it is colorful). Some of the lectures, and the case study of Katharina von A, for example, were a bit longish, but in a certain way, these elements, for me, made the book even more compelling because of their educational value, being quite authentic for the period, and presenting the various competing psychiatric points of view in a straightforward almost didactic style - yet all the while tempered by the personal interest we take in the lives of the members of the little Midwinter-Rebiere family.  The cow-shed in rural France, the asylum in Britain, the hospital in Paris, the sanatorium in Austria all recreate the modalities for 'treating' the mentally ill in nineteenth-century Europe.

Yet surrounding the 'educational' dimension of this book is a plethora of the kind of detail and beauty we've come to expect of contemporary 're-creations' of 19th century literature. (There must be a better expression for conveying what I mean!) The book is like a living, moving painting in its vivid descriptions of nature, place, and character.  In fact, I found the characters believable, sympathetic and, also in terms of their inner lives, rich.  I loved the way the author took us through time with the main characters Sonia, Thomas and Jacques. Found them thoroughly believable and was interested at every turn in their unfolding lives.

I would love to see this as a film, if they could recreate the texture, color and moodiness of the novel (as was done, for example, with Charlotte Grey) but I don't wonder if the psychiatric dimension might be too disturbing for a popular audience. Maybe not, modern films are quite disturbing, after all. Anyway, films always manage to truncate, abridge and change novels, so perhaps it's best to keep it as a fabulous book that takes a nice long while to read.

Honorable Mention: I also enjoyed the side-trips to California, Africa and - having never read Faulks before - the scenes from world war 1 were just stunning in their vividness, beauty, and horror. I felt the sketching of the character of the young soldier was revelatory of a passion that finds a fulfillment in the situation of war - not in the killing - but in other aspects that I think we see in the best literature and art on the subject of war. Apparently, Faulks is well-known for war-writing.

But in this book, that is only one chapter. The rest is devoted to something else, the quest for healing, for wholeness, for 'being human' - a quest which has been a part of my own life (I did choose a medical profession, in the end), and I enjoy books that explore that quest intelligently.

This book is superb on so many levels, I really can't praise it enough.

joanna field

i'm re-reading, with my blind friend, a book I read back in the mid 1980's, while i was at theology school, called 'a life of one's own,' by joanna field.  we tried to find the book in a recorded format for my friend, but it was not forthcoming, so i decided it might be fun to actually get together once or twice a week and read the book aloud.  it works, partly because she is now located on my way to work, and/or if i go to the Y for a swim or workout, she is not far from there.

joanna field was the pen-name for analyst marion milner, a friend of d.w. winnicott. in this first book of hers, she writes about her experiments in happiness, or to put it another way, her experiments in the use of her attention to discover what made her happy, unhappy, or accounted for her other moods.  her discovery of the duality inherent in our awareness no doubt played some role in her decision to become an analyst.  but this book was written about her own early youth, when she was working, apparently in some sort of social-work field, not clear exactly what.  at any rate, i think it's just a great book for illustrating how a working-person can, on their own, achieve a depth of perception into himself or herself and a more vibrant experience of life.  so, i recommend it.

now, a little bit off the subject, but related to it.  i'm going to add a new category to my blog, called 'free association.'  i do find that trying to compose a post that is coherent and makes sense is sometimes not as life-giving as just writing 'free-hand,' not unlike the way joanna field did in 'a life of one's own.'  (this book influenced me so much in my own mid-thirties.  it's really fun to re-experience it now.  i thought my friend would get a lot out of it, and i certainly don't regret reading it to her.)  anyway, i've always had a tendency to write what i call 'fragments,' and sometimes they become poems.  but i will begin including 'fragments written free-hand' soon on this blog, called free-association.  It isn't exactly what the psychoanalysts call 'free association' but the process has worked something like that for me, a kind of tracing back through myself.  it has helped me to find the coherence in my life, and a kind of truth for myself.

the secret by eva hoffman, mind-body identity theory fiction

while i've been recuperating from a sprained ankle, twisted elbow and the flu, i've been reading eva hoffman's 'the secret.'  I stumbled upon eva hoffman by reading 'yesterday's child' where her memoir is often cited as an account of a well-integrated immigrant identity.

perhaps because we live in the united states, such a nation of immigrants, we take the immigrant experience for granted.  i've always suspected that psychologically it's a much more difficult process than many people realize.  anyway, i'm enjoying the channel andreea deciu-ritivoi has opened up for me through her book, and have since been hoping to read more of her work.  soon after conceiving this intention, i found one of her novels, "the secret," at our local library.

i don't think it's much of a secret that the protagonist is a young girl who is a clone on a search for her identity.  in a certain way the story could be written of any young person raised with a scientific world-view, trying to understand whether or not there is any real personal 'identity' beyond the label of a name and social security number or whether one's perceived identity is just a trick-of-the-mind produced by chemical processes. 

many of the scenes of mother-child symbiosis could also apply to most mother-daughter relationships and the issues of separate identity that frequently arise between them.

the book is extremely well-written, a pleasure to read, and dips into many compelling areas on its journey to fruition. 

when i was an undergraduate at ucb, a long time ago, i studied the mind-brain identity theory as a philosophy major.  philosophers were constantly citing comparisons to artificial intelligence in their discussions of the human mind-brain identity problem.  i recognize some of those posited questions given 'flesh' (so to speak) in the story of Iris.  I recommend this book.

proud shoes

an aquaintance of mine is reading a book called 'Proud Shoes' and i decided to take a look at it.  i like what i see and so i include some excerpts from the introductions to the book.  i relate to a great deal that the author says in her introduction, plus i am intrigued to read more about an African-American family that acknowledges and processes its 'white' heritage - one a slave-owning heritage, the other a product of an early phase of american life about which we hear very little today when people intermarried freely among the so-called 'races.' 

published in 1955, Proud Shoes' author, Dr. Pauli Murray, is an episcopalian minister and graduate of Harvard Law School.

On July 18, 1933, a young Pauli Murray scribbled a sketch in her diary that would eventually blossom into the family memoir Proud Shoes.  Over the twenty-odd years that it took to write this story, she thought a lot about what it meant to be an artist.  She was at times so pained by the process that she had to set the project aside.  But a healing clarity always followed the pain, enabling her to paint life as she saw it.  What she created is a compelling family saga that gives us two views of the American experience: one a close-up that follows her family – the Fitzgeralds – from the early 1800’s to the beginning of the twentieth century, the other a wider angle that situates her ancestors’ story on a larger cultural mosaic.

Although Proud Shoes was conceived as a children’s story to be shared with her nieces and nephews, it became a defense of a personal and collective heritage that challenged the ethnocentrism of the 1950s.  It spotlighted black achievements that had been ignored or denied.  It exposed the ‘secret’ of rape and voluntary interracial sex that so characterized the American South.  It raised the lid on racial passing and on class and color conflicts within black communities. 

We should read this book for what it is, an exquisite and groundbreaking work of creative nonfiction.  Because it was written at a time when genre distinctions were for some sacrosanct, Proud Shoes became an archetype for a generation of writers who would later merge novelistic techniques and nonfiction.  (the above paragraphs are taken from Patricia Bell-Scott’s  Introduction to Proud Shoes)

From the Author’s Introduction to Proud Shoes:  “My maternal grandfather’s family was one of the clusters of free people of color, the Fitzgeralds of Delaware and

Pennsylvania

.  By contrast, my grandmother’s people, the Smiths of Chapel Hill, North Caroline, were a white slave-owning family of local prominence.  My dual family heritage made a deep impression on me as a child.

As my (research) work progressed I gained a new conception of history.  I was amazed to find that apparently anonymous men and women, living in ways that seldom attract public notice, leave behind them a personal record of activities which may illuminate the social history of a nation or an era as much as the activities of the leaders, the movers and shakers.  These personal records live hidden away in old documents. 

Following (a) joyous romp through the early history of the Fitzgeralds, I had to face the difficult and painful decision of including my grandmother’s “Smith side” of the family story – a decision with which I had been wrestling during the months of my research.  The Smith story awakened long-dormant, unresolved questions of identity and intensely conflicting emotions.  It also resurrected the ominous shadow of slavery which still hung over the South of my childhood.  In the telling of my grandmother’s story I had to embrace all the tangled roots from which I had sprung, and to accept without evasion my own slave heritage, with all its ambivalences and paradoxes. 

Thus the writing of Proud Shoes became for me the resolution of a search for identity and the exorcism of ghosts of the past.  No longer constrained by suppressed memories, I began to see myself in a new light – the product of a slowly evolving process of biological and cultural integration, a process containing the character of many cultures and many peoples, a New World experiment, fragile yet tenacious, a possible hint of a stronger and freer America of the future, no longer stunted in its growth by an insidious ethnocentrism.

This view was not altered by my later exploration of my African cultural roots during an eighteen-month sojourn in

Ghana

in 1960 and 1961.  My experience in

Ghana

cleared my vision of whatever negative stereotypes had blurred my understanding of the African background; but it also strengthened my conviction that I was of the New World, irrevocably bound to the destiny of my native

America

.

The self-image which emerged from my exploration of my roots did not anticipate the intense Black Consciousness which developed in the decade after the publication of Proud Shoes, with its accompanying polarization of the races.  It may be that I telescoped history, projecting my vision into the future, leaping over the intervening stages of pluralism and ethnic consciousness.

Yet Proud Shoes and its portrayal of the entanglement of the races is not a unique story.  Over more than two centuries, enough criss-crossing of racial lines and recirculation of genes within designated races has occurred to make the notion of racial purity a highly questionable biological concept for many future Americans.  Multi-racial origins of both blacks and whites are realities; they may be ignored but not wholly discounted.  The acceptance of the possibility of relatedness would do much to defuse the highly charged discussions on race.  Ultimately, it might help to ease the transition to a more humane society.

Throughout (my) early struggles my grandmother’s tradition was always in the background: her acceptance of her relatedness to the dominant class and race; her view of her own life as a symbol of the possibility of reconciliation between races and classes, however fragmentary the symbol may have seemed.”

the beet queen by louise erdrich

this book is the sequel to Love Medicine and chronicles the tale of three children abandoned by their mother in a rather comical fashion, of how they separate and eventually come back together again over the course of forty years.  it also the story of three women and a child - two cousins, an in-law and her daughter - living in a farming village in north dakota.  the native americans in this story are more or less peripheral, yet powerfully portrayed, and there is one main character, the part-native gal, Celestine, who becomes an in-law to the two cousins.  while i didn't enjoy this novel as much as love medicine, i will say that l.e. writes at times some of the most outrageously funny material i've ever read, including the scene where Aunt Mary teaches her niece's first grade teacher a lesson, and another scene that must be the funniest death scene ever written (probably) - and not disrespectfully so - I would imagine the deceased would never have wanted it any other way.