by Britton Gildersleeve

It is, as a short review of this book by Marge Piercy notes, “never easy” to write about the Holocaust—the Shoah—especially now, as disbelievers/deniers multiply, which makes Gail Newman’s book Blood Memory even more of a tour de force.

Newman’s collection weaves the lives of her mother and father, their battered hearts and minds, through the bloodstain of the horrific deaths by the Holocaust. But despite its terrible, tragic subject matter, Blood Memory often shimmers with beauty, gleams with the polish of well-loved family furniture.

Writing of the ways Jewish document workers in Łódź, Poland, changed the official ages of children and the elderly to save them from deportation, Newman describes the printed words that sentenced them to life in concentration camps: “the script/soldiers straight across the page.” And we see the lines of soldiers waiting beside trains, the lines of children and their grandparents waiting for death, all in this single image.

Elsewhere, Newman paints vividly the horrors of the Holocaust—“body bloated or bone thin./Some were children . . ./. . . pushed to the side or into the gutter . . . their bodies cold, blue, finished/with God.” She juggles these nightmare images with more quotidian snapshots, like this one, in which her mother returns to her home before the war: “My mother came to a dead end called Poland./The shops gone, the house no longer home . . ./the city that was not her city.”

When people find out I study—revere, even—the literature of wars, of dispossession, of the evil we do en masseto one another, they ask (almost always) why. I read to honor poets, novelists, graphic artists and the others who—like Newman—detail these evils. But I also read because there is no beauty without loss, and what is more shattering than the loss of remembrance? In one of my favorite poems in this book, “Abandoned Cemeteries,” Newman asks plaintively:

Who is the trustee of the dead?
Headstones fall over, cracked,
covered in lichen, moss, neglect.
No stones or bouquets left in remembrance.
No mourners or words of comfort.
Only the shipwrecked listen,
only the forgotten remember.

But through Newman’s lucid narrative—so many of these poems are perfect stories! —we engage her father, “the family tummler[1]”; her mother, whose “time is reeling in, a line cast/from shore”; a nameless survivor she meets in a march through Auschwitz-Birkenau “clinging to his granddaughter’s arm.” Each has his or her own story, all of which follow Newman around, she complains. “The dead,” she says, “are patient. One century bleeds into another.” They haunt her as she stands at graves, as she walks through a field of flowers. They are often nameless, but she will not forget. Nor do I, her stunned reader, while the “living go on living—washing hands,/peeling apples, stirring soup. . . .” Living their lives. Lives that were ended decades ago but still resonate within the music of Newman’s work.

There is an exquisitely painful beauty in the pages of Newman’s book. Here, time is as fluid as the spilled blood Newman evokes, and more than once she seems to hear voices from the very ground she lies on. That she can share with us her own translation of once ordinary lives and their extraordinary deaths, as well as her own clear-eyed confrontation with each, is a rare gift. It is because, as her last line notes, “I remembered them.” With clarity. With honor. With love. This is a book well worth buying, reading, and reading more than once again.

—

Britton Gildersleeve’s creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared in Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, This Land, and many other journals. She has published three chapbooks and was the director of the Oklahoma State University Writing Project for twelve years.

Gail Newman is the child of Polish Holocaust survivors and was born in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany. She later immigrated to the U.S. with her family. Newman is co-founder of Room, A Women’s Literary Journal, and shehe has worked as a museum educator at the Contemporary Jewish Museum and as a poet-teacher and San Francisco coordinator for CalPoets. She has another collection of poetry, One World, from Moon Tide Press, as well as two books of children’s poetry.

Blood Memory by Gail Newman. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk P, 2020.

---

[1] Tummler: entertainer, comedian. Yiddish.

by Courtney Spohn 

(Note: Courtney is leading a virtual craft workshop titled Poetry Is but a Dream: Using Dream Analysis for Poetry Revision on Sunday, November 8, 1:00 p.m. CST.)

Because many poems flow easily from conception to page, the writer always finding the precise words and emotions, this post will be a waste of time. This post is for the rare writer who has written that wayward beast of a poem—the poem that is hungry for flesh — or is it flowers? The poem that creates one path, branches into two, and ends up caught — or is it liberated? — in the mud. I want to share a writing technique to try on these poems we love that just don’t have the zing we’re looking for. If you have one of these poems lying around and are interested in playing with your intuition, please allow me to share this twist on a dream analysis technique I learned as a life coach. 

The dream analysis goes like this: have a dream, write it down, read what you wrote, and circle the top three images or objects that stand out to you. For each of these three, ask the image/object two questions: “How would you describe yourself in three words?” and “What is your message for me?” Then go back to what you’ve written and replace each nistance of the image or object with your responses to the questions. Reread your dream and see if these new images help you understand any messages your unconscious mind wants to share.  

These are the linear instructions to the technique. In our case, we’ll be using a poem instead of a written dream. Once you find and dust off the poem you’d like to work with, reread it and circle three words or short phrases you believe really hold up the poem—words that have a lot of power behind them. After choosing your words, let your linear, logical mind take a little break. When you ask the phrases to describe themselves, try inhabiting the words. Can the word fit into your body? What does your body feel like as each word? Answer the questions from this perspective, and try using your non-dominant hand to help access your non-linear mind. What do you see, feel, and hear from each word? What are these words trying to tell you? Use whatever comes up — don’t force anything. But don’t settle for something if it doesn’t feel right, either.  

As you go back and replace your original words, you can see if the process brought any new insights. Play with your poem from there. You’re trying to see what it’s telling you, so let it be messy for a bit. Then use your logical mind again to see what needs to be cleaned up and what can stay.  

Here’s an example using a snippet of a poem I wrote, with the words I used in the analysis, and the answers I heard, in bold: 

Original snippet: 

What I want back are those summer days and nights. I want to stay in my own bed. I want you to lick my toes. To go to the end of the Earth. To tell me a funny joke.  

Snippet after the analysis: 

What I want back are those sweaty griefs that travel the path of my skin, the path where the scary things sit. I want to stay in my own bed. I want you to lick my differences and keep going through the bitter and salt. Go to the end of the Earth. I want you to tell me a funny; keep it light, jump around, move your body, come to a grinding stop. I want it to be feelgood in the belly. Your head is too heavy. 

As you can see, the analysis gave me more words to add to my existing poem; or I could just ditch that poem and start massaging anew one. I have more interesting questions to ask the second poem, questions the first one just didn’t reveal. 

 I hope this technique might also help you access more words and a deeper understanding of what your poem is trying to say. Your not-quite-there poem is so close to having your attention; enjoy your time with it! 

—

Courtney Spohn lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she has participated in various poetry readings. Her work has appeared, with Sheila E. Black, in Otoliths. She is a member of Nimrod’s editorial board, and she helps others learn to talk to themselves in a kind way through her life coaching at courtneyspohn.com.

by Colin Pope

Letters to a Stranger
Thomas James
Graywolf Press, 2008 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1973)
Paperback, 108 pages ($16)

Most anyone who’s engaged me in a conversation about lyric poetry has endured my screeds on Thomas James. I’ve written about him on this very website before. I will continue to write about him after this blog posts, and I’ll continue to recommend him to anyone who’ll listen. He’s underappreciated and stop-you-in-your-tracks phenomenal. The people who find him tend toward rabid fandom.

Perhaps this fervency has something to do with the stories behind Letters to a Stranger, his first and only collection. In the reissued book—part of Graywolf’s flagging “Re/View” series, which publishes forgotten books of exceptional merit—Lucie Brock-Broido provides an introduction that does some justice to the mythos surrounding the manuscript. Her version echoes one I heard in grad school from one of my professors. Upon publication, the book was largely ignored; it received a single negative review and went out of print after the first run. Then, for the next 35 years, the book existed solely as a re-Xeroxed artifact passed around between creative writing teachers, grad students, and poets lucky enough to know someone. It was nearly impossible to find a physical copy; Brock-Broido writes of searching for four years before stealing a copy from a library in Pittsburgh. Later in life, she contacted a friend at Houghton Mifflin to find out more about the book’s provenance. Beyond a record of a literary agent in Illinois recommending the manuscript, there’s nothing. No editor is named, no pathway to publication, no notes on ordering or editorial suggestions. It is as though the book appeared out of thin air and evaporated just as quickly.

The story of James himself is similarly mysterious. Born Thomas Bojeski in 1946, he grew up in a tiny house in Joliet, Illinois, with his parents and five other relatives. James came from a working-class family and was raised poor, eventually working as a night watchman in the same factory where his father was a security guard. Both his parents died within ten days of each other in 1972. Not even two years later James placed a .45-caliber gun to his temple and pulled the trigger; like Sylvia Plath—his largest and most obvious influence—James died at age twenty-seven. But the evidence for his suicide is a bit muddy. As Brock-Broido writes, “No one in the family believes that Thomas killed himself.” Though he was right-handed, the gunshot wound was on the left side of his head. He was also found lying in bed, which, to surviving family members, seemed a strange place for him to shoot himself.

The oddity of the book’s background, however, means very little next to the power of the text itself. In some ways, its survival represents a grand reprieve for the legacy of Plath’s Ariel. One of the first, stupidest criticisms of Plath’s work went something like, “She wouldn’t have been remembered if she hadn’t killed herself.” And yet James took his own life (maybe) and his book survives on its own obvious merits. What I mean is that, since the age of the printing press, such soulful, haunting poetry always seems to find its way into the collective memory. Just as Neruda’s work spanned continents and languages, so was James’s work destined to span time.

And, not unlike Neruda, one of James’s talents is the ability to relabel or remake for his own poetic purposes. I’m thinking here of Neruda’s Odes to Common Things, a book that contains poems dedicated to and about the poet’s socks, the spoon, soap, the gillyflower, the tomato. James performs from a similarly taxonomic impulse, though his poems frequently consider people and processes rather than objects: “Waking Up,” “Old Woman Cleaning Silver,” “The Bellringer,” “Frog,” “Dragging the Lake,” “Dissecting a Pig,” “Wild Cherries,” “Cold August.” Plath shares this approach, to an extent. But whereas Plath skews toward the familial, domestic, and deathly, James tends toward the ghostly, the haunted, and the undead. In the lone review Letters received, the reviewer attempted a putdown by claiming James a “pale Plath.” This seems, in hindsight, an apt description if we think of James not as an imitator but a gothic, ink-and-quill-by-candlelight poet of his own methods and preoccupations, inspired by Plath the same way H. P. Lovecraft was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. Like Plath, but paler, more grotesque, more averse to the light.

Most of my favorite poems in the collection revolve around death—James writes about death with startling clarity of mind and stark revelation. Take the poem “Snakebite,” which begins:

Now I am getting light as cotton candy—
Out of two red holes in my heel
Infinity pours, goodbye to all of me.
It was pleasant to watch my leg begin to swell;
An incredible headiness washed over me,
I didn’t feel a thing. The color of a bluebottle,

 The sky hit my skin like water from a pitcher.

What I’m struck by is the precision of the language as set against a seemingly imprecise, chaotic situation. The victim here appears either already placidly unconscious or accepting enough of their death to study it as a phenomenon occurring to the body, separate from the mind. When I say haunting in relation to his work, this is what I mean: there’s a clinical separation between mind and body that is at once frightening and beautiful. I feel connected to the mind that imagines this death in a way that makes me scared of myself, for myself. For example, while I’ve never witnessed a snakebitten person dying, I somehow know they’d turn “the color of a bluebottle.”

Similarly, James’s most famous poem, “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh,” enacts the persona of a dead young woman witnessing her own mummification. It is grotesque, but grotesque in the same way we find true crime grotesque, in the way we’re fascinated by murder stories and medieval torture devices. After an opening stanza wondering about the world she’s lost—“Is it still there, that place of mottled shadow, / The scarlet flowers breathing in the darkness?”—the woman gives the reader a glimpse into the process by which her own body is being preserved. “They washed my heart and liver in palm wine,” she says. “My brain was next.”

My eyes were empty, so they filled them up,
Inserting little nuggets of obsidian.
A basalt scarab wedged between my breasts
Replaced the tinny music of my heart.

The narrator, at first hesitant, nervous about what she’s lost, appears now to be enjoying the process. Whereas the eyes and heart are temporary—“empty” and “tinny”—the objects replacing them seem eternal, lasting, made of obsidian and basalt. The next line: “Hands touched my sutures. I was so important!” The poem’s ability to imagine this dying as a pleasant violence speaks to James’s own seeking for comprehension of death. Aren’t we made “important” by death? Don’t we lie still in death as people attend to us, as though we’re royalty? And, perhaps his biggest question: why be alive when death gives you importance and eternity?

By contrast, Plath seems to me most concerned with what death means for her, alone. She wants to throw it in the face of her parents and the society they represent. James, on the other hand, appears to want to examine the very nature of death and what it means to be human and have knowledge of your own mortality. This is not to say Plath’s work doesn’t contain this question as well; rather, James makes this one of his central focuses. In doing so, his poems attain a singular voice that, in a surreal, unbelievable way, enact the very seeking toward which they strive: what does it mean to be mortal in a universe that privileges the immortal? This second-to-last stanza of “Mummy of a Lady” seems to address the question; think of the story of James’s work making it back into print, into my (and hopefully your) hands, and how this seems to demonstrate the power to which great poetry aspires:

 Shut in my painted box, I am a precious object.
I wear a wooden mask. These are my eyelids,
Two flakes of bronze, and here is my new mouth,
Chiseled with care, guarding its ruby facets.
I will last forever. I am not impatient—
My skin will wait to greet its old complexions.
I’ll lie here till the world swims back again.

—

Colin Pope‘s debut poetry collection, Why I Didn’t Go to Your Funeral, is forthcoming in May from Tolsun Books. His poetry, essays, and criticism have appeared in such journals as Slate, Rattle, Ninth Letter, The Los Angeles Review, Best New Poets, and others. He holds an M.F.A. from Texas State University and a Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University.

 

by Courtney Spohn

On June 24, 2020, I listened to Sarah Jane Abbott, a children’s and middle-grade editor, during one of the Highlight Foundation’s Writer Chats. Abbott said her publishing house is looking to publish happy stories now because, as moderator Sarah Aronson said, “we all want to be happy right now.” I heard this and wondered what types of books I’ll read to my young son a couple of years from now. Are we going to miss the emotional import of this moment because we’re looking for happy stories? As a poetry editor, I want to read happy poems only if they are genuinely happy poems. I want to read sad poems, grief-filled poems, angry poems, love poems, hopeful poems only if they are genuinely sad, grief-filled, angry, full of love, hopeful. I want to encourage all poets to feel the emotions they’re actually feeling and write their poetry accordingly.

Please “go there” when you feel safe enough to do so. I’ve read quite a few poems recounting difficult, even traumatic, events that seem to be autobiographical, and I’m stopped when a writer relies on the experience to speak for itself or when the writer wants to put a lesson or moral on it before the experience feels ready to be packaged in such a way. Conflicting advice that I’ve given and read is to “show, don’t tell.” When I’m reading about a difficult event, I want to know what meaning the writer finds in it. When we’re looking at a personal experience in a poem, I want to hear more than the details of the event. I want to hear how the writer feels. And how does the writer see it now? These are not questions that need to be answered literally. I want to hear clues about how a writer put their hand to paper after something damaging happened to them. How did you do that? And why? Again, these are not literal questions looking for literal answers. Tell me through emotions—I believe this is how we understand each other.

I also believe we skip over a few emotional steps when we try to package our experience in a way that makes it look culturally acceptable—we can look virtuous, for example, if we say we learned a lesson or deepened a value, like forgiveness. Yet our experiences, and where we’re at with them, may not honestly be leading us toward cultural acceptability. Many of us feel the tension between saying what we mean while wanting to feel a sense of belonging in a community. So we observe the community’s rules and may hide the parts of ourselves so that we can hold on to the sense of belonging. I encourage writers to write what they really mean—to express how they really feel. Tell us about the conflicting emotions or the emotions that many people (I like calling those people “idiots”) tell us are “too much.” Tell the truth about where you are and see what happens in your writing.

I share this to encourage writers during hard times—when that battle between being true to themselves or their community feels like an all-or-nothing proposition. Many of us understand a wide range and depth of feeling and have the capacity for all kinds of stories, not just the happy ones. Please trust your authentic voice and, when it feels right, please share this voice. Our authenticity helps develop our sense of connection.

—

Courtney Spohn lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she has participated in various poetry readings. With Sheila e. Black, she has a poem published in Otoliths. She is a life coach and blogger at courtneyspohn.com.

The editors of Nimrod International Journal are delighted to announce the winners, honorable mentions, finalists, and semi-finalists of the 42nd Nimrod Literary Awards.

Nimrod Literary Awards: The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry

FIRST PRIZE: Rebecca Foust, CA, “Blackout” and other poems
SECOND PRIZE: Janine Certo, MI, “Home Altar in the Year of a Pandemic” and other poems

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
A.D. Lauren-Abunassar, PA, “Victim Impact Statement” and other poems
Richard Michelson, MA, “A Horse-Cure” and other poems

Nimrod Literary Awards: The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction

FIRST PRIZE: Mohit Manohar, DC, “This Has Not Been Enough”
SECOND PRIZE: Gage Saylor, OK, “Jailbird”

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Carol Dines, MN, “Grace’s Mask”
Hayley Lynch, KY, “The Tremendous Machine”
Grace Newman, NY, “Initial Consultations”

Nimrod extends deep appreciation to all who submitted and would like to congratulate all winners, honorable mentions, finalists, and semi-finalists. Selecting the poetry and
fiction finalists was a task that dominated the lives of Nimrod’s editors all spring.
They approached their mission with dedication and discretion, reading and
rereading the final group, comparing notes, and speaking for favorites. The
finalists’ manuscripts, without cover letters or names, were sent to the judges for 2020. Kaveh Akbar served as poetry judge, and Joy Castro served as
fiction judge. They chose the winners and honorable mentions from the finalist
groups.

The 43rd Nimrod Literary Awards competition begins January 1, 2021; the
deadline is in April. We welcome your submissions, knowing that each
year brings new discoveries, often from those who have submitted to the
competition before.

All entrants not previously contacted by Nimrod about their work may consider
their work released at this time.

Fiction Finalists
Jean Ferruzola, WA, “Burn Brightly and Rise”
Jessi Phillips, MI, “Anything You Ask Me To”

Fiction Semi-Finalists
Kristyn Childres, IN, “The Northeast Kingdom”
Alice Hatcher, AZ, “Caesura”
Sasha Hom, CA, “Always, Peanut”
Alex Hughes, OK, “Crown”
Grace Spulak, NM, “More Than Bright”
Nicole VanderLinden, IA, “Fiddler”

Poetry Finalists
Jubi Arriola-Headley, FL, “Peacocking” and other poems
John Blair, TX, “Seeking Dr. Einstein” and other poems
Chuck Carlise, MI, “Solana” and other poems
Jehanne Dubrow, TX, “Metamorphoses”
Benjamin Gucciardi, CA, “I Ask My Sister’s Ghost to Write Her Own Elegy” and other poems
Youssef Helmi, FL, “Scarf” and other poems
Caroline Mei-Len Mar, CA, “Dream of the Lake” and other poems
Jessica Pierce, OR, “We all have our work to do” and other poems
Sean Reynolds, IL, “The Year My Voice Began to Crack” and other poems
Frances Richey, NY, “Bloody Mingo County” and other poems
Darius Simpson, CA, “Yea I Did It” and other poems
Alice Templeton, CA, “Youth Sermon” and other poems
Theresa Q. Tran, OR, “Mercy” and other poems
Jeanne Wagner, CA, “Speaking in Tongues” and other poems
James Wyshynski, GA, “Counting Out the Cost” and other poems

Poetry Semi-Finalists
Yasmine Ameli, MA, “History Lesson” and other poems
Yvonne Amey, FL, “Bad Brains, a Woke Mosh Pit, and a D.C. Haiku” and other poems
Shannon Austin, MD, “Dollhood”
Diane Beck, CO, “History of Winter” and other poems
Imani Cezanne, CA, “No Crowns Allowed Through TSA” and other poems
Lauren Coggins, SC, “Eating Light” and other poems
Marsha Truman Cooper, CA, “The Rapture of Bees” and other poems
Marissa Davis, NY, “When the Blood Came” and other poems
Tyler Dunston, NY, “8 lines in the Grace Church garden” and other poems
Bernard Ferguson, FL, “juxtaposition with death” and other poems
Jana-Lee Germaine, MA, “Learning Curve” and other poems
W.J. Herbert, NY, “The Latin Lesson” and other poems
Anthony Immergluck, WI, “Madre Matryoshka” and other poems
Karen Kovacik, IN, “Farsickness” and other poems
Susan Landgraf, WA, “Out of the Roase Garden” and other poems
Kathleen Michael, VA, “Cowbird” and other poems
Amy Miller, OR, “The Church of the Hair Salon” and other poems
Oak Morse, TX, “Sashay” and other poems
Gail Newman, CA, “Two Men Talking” and other poems
Wendy Scott, PA, “Two Body Problem” and other poems
Emily Van Kley, WA, “Affidavit for Self-Care & Other Questionable Ephemera” and other poems
John Walser, WI, “Give yourself over to the trees, to the sun” and other poems
Amie Whittemore, TN, “First Self-Portrait with the Artist” and other poems

by Rebecca Harrison

What is a public library with no public? When the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered the physical doors of our 24 library locations, the leaders and employees at Tulsa City-County Library quickly posed this question. And, almost as quickly, they began formulating answers. As the adage goes, a library is more than a building. It’s something bigger, fiercer, more idealistic. With our customers forced to stay home for the foreseeable future, we adapted nimbly, reminding those in our community about our myriad online resources. Folks could check out one of our thousands of eBooks to help manage the endless tedium of quarantine. They could visit our Facebook page for virtual yoga classes, book talks, and even gardening advice. If you were feeling pressure to use all this newfound free time to pick up a new hobby, the library could point you to digital books on knitting, drawing, or playing guitar. We leveraged our social media reach to connect with our customers, to let them know that even when the world seems to be falling apart, we’re still there.

Then, right on the heels of a historic pandemic, the world shifted again. The 99th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre occurred in the midst of a global awakening. Again, the public library recognized its duty to provide access to information and to guide our customers to resources to help them navigate important topics like the Black Lives Matter movement, anti-racism, and white privilege. Our staff set to work developing nonfiction and fiction book lists on these topics. Our CEO, Kimberly Johnson, issued a statement voicing TCCL’s support for the “collective action to end systemic racism.”

But it’s not just our library. Libraries all across the nation are stepping up; if you’re not local to Tulsa and haven’t looked to see what your library has been up to, you might be surprised to find out they’ve been quietly making a difference in your community. Let this be a nudge for you to check out what your library has to offer—as we face these times of uncertainty and disruption, I am proud to be part of an institution that strives both to serve and to lead.

—

Rebecca Harrison is the manager of Adult Services at the Central Library in Tulsa, Oklahoma. When she’s not at the library, you may find her writing, reading, or marveling over how cute her cats are.

In 2018, I made the choice to keep track of all the books I’d read in a single year: when I started them, when I finished them, those sad few I abandoned prematurely. I’m surprised and only mildly horrified it never occurred to me to do this before.

In 2018, I read 30 books.

In 2019, I read 23.

And as of early March of this year, I had finished only two.

This put me on the concerning track toward failure. I was not on pace to meet my annual goal (the one I had imposed on myself with no consequences awaiting me one way or the other) of 30 books, and thinking back on my previous years’ quantitative accomplishments filled me with shame. But wasn’t there something to be said for the fact that the two books I had finished were both nearly 800 pages?

The first was a modern classic: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. The second was a classic’s classic: Middlemarch by George Eliot. As friends plowed through novel after novel, I worked to bat away the expectations I had of myself and embrace the slowness, the difficulty, and the late-arriving gratification of moving through a longer work.

I sought to retrain my brain and reframe my thinking—where before I saw plodding and drudgery, I now aimed to see precision and diligence; where there had been dread, there now was expectancy.

As with all feats of persistence, satisfaction’s counterpart is sacrifice. It’s similar to the way you discover new depths and capabilities within yourself when training for a race. Except when you’re reading, not only are you learning those things about yourself, but you’re also learning them about the characters and the author. As with real people—and who’s more real than fictional characters in whom you see your own self mirrored?—you have to spend time with them to afford them the opportunity to change. If you write them off, you’ll never see how they could have surprised you or what they could have taught you in the end.

However, for me, this practice of endurance came at a cost. The more I progressed with these works, the more frequently I had to forgo starting new ones . . . or doing basically anything else. But, over time, the more I chose to wrestle with the task I had set for myself, the more I grew to appreciate this act of discipline. And the thing is that I was choosing. It wasn’t a mandate someone else had put on me. It was a deliberate choice I was making to chip away at a goal I wanted to meet. I had nothing to prove to anyone but myself—though, of course, we’re often our own cruelest critics.

The concept of expectation is something these novels brought to the forefront of my mind, where it’s stayed, inconveniently, throughout this strange spring of 2020. As time unspooled before me and with the agency to fill it as I willed, I found I gravitated toward books and away from nearly all else. This brought up the question, Why do I do those other things at all? Yes, there are standard obligations, but why have I bowed to others’ expectations and placed them unflinchingly upon myself? It’s questions like this that I continue to ponder and hope to have some answers to by the time life is back to “normal.”

I continue to sift through the difficult notion of expectations, and as I do, it is a cognizant choice to weigh each day, and each new book I pick up, on its own. Comparison is the thief of joy, as they say, and I fight daily to unfetter myself from my tendency to compare and instead aim to see things anew, as if for the first time. This is freedom.

Structure is good. Boundaries (such as those imposed by a quarantine) can be healthy and often spark creativity. Choosing to draw lines around your life—the things you eat, your reading selections, the music you let wash over you all day, whether you will or won’t text that person after all this time—can be helpful in crystallizing what you really want. Goals are worthwhile, but they and expectations are not equals, and I’m learning to measure myself against the former rather than the latter.

My reading goal for this year is to complete 30 books. My expectations for this year? Simply, to read.

—

Andrea Avey, a native Tulsan, was an English teacher for five years and now works in the private sector. She devours literature and writes as often as she can.