How to Live

Readers!

Last weekend I was in Missoula for the Montana Book Festival, an event I first attended twelve years ago. I was alone then too, wandering through crowds of writers and their books, listening to panels and readings, and wondering what it would be like to be at this event as an author. Now I know.

On the street I ran into a friend I was an undergraduate with at the University of Georgia. That’s a long time ago and a long way from here. Which is to say: this never happens to me. We drank beer and ate dinner and talked for hours. I met the awesome Dorothy Rice, whose memoir of self acceptance, Gray is the New Black (Otis Books, 2019), could be required reading for all women over fifty, and the men who love them. I got to stay in a hotel room alone and read until the wee hours. And I got to sit on a panel with Helena writer Virginia Reeves, plus two Missoula romance-thriller writers, one of whom once put out ten books in a year. No kidding. She typed while on the treadmill. She dictated prose into her cell phone. Wowsa.

It’s fall. The light, the trees, the energy in the air has shifted. Part of my year of book promotion includes an October trip to the University of Wyoming. I will be a visiting writer at the same institution where I earned my MA in English over twenty years ago. As someone who avoids revisiting my past, let this travel plan symbolize a restructuring of my worldview. Self acceptance. Courage. You knew transformation was coming, after all my posts about grief, the ultimate meteor to one’s self concept.

My brother would have been forty-six last Monday. I spent the day as I did last year, recalling the astonishing sight of him as a small, pink creature with hands and eyes and dark hair, asleep in his bassinet. I still remember the weight of him in my arms when mother finally let me hold him.

Reading Round-up

The Friend, by Sigrid Nunez, a writer I am so glad to discover. In a NYT interview, Nunez says she became a writer because it was something she could do alone. She has always avoided the literary scene, has no social media accounts and did not have kids so that she could devote her life to her work. She’s been publishing books for 23 years, and then this one wins big and she’s known everywhere. That in itself is a story. But this book. Grief, the diminishing status of a writer’s work in modern culture, and dogs. I loved it. The narrator is grieving a dear writer friend’s suicide, then inherits his dog, Apollo, a Harlequin Great Dane. The dog is lethargic, clearly depressed by his owner’s absence. Things are not going well. One day the narrator reads her work aloud as a way to edit and the dog comes to life, giving a booming bark. She begins to read to him and their relationship unfolds. At the heart of the story is the exploration of how to live, always my cup of tea. Here the narrator sums up her take away from Rilke, one of Apollo’s favorites:

Beware irony, ignore criticism, look to what is simple, study the small and humble things of the world, do what is difficult precisely because it is difficult, do not search for answers but rather love the questions, do not run away from sadness or depression for these might be the very conditions necessary to your work. Seek solitude, above all seek solitude.

The narrator, and the novel itself, persistently asks: Who understands this approach to living? Is it relevant anymore? Yes. To this reader, yes it is.

Another find from my weekend in Missoula is Montana Book Award winner, The One-Sentence Journal. This book is a short, beautiful nonfiction work by Missoula writer Chris LaTray. Subtitled “Short Poems and Essays from the World at Large,” this book explores grief, aging, self acceptance and the wisdom that comes from a life carefully lived. Several dogs are featured here, but in the final essay LaTray speaks specifically about Darla, his walking companion who died during the writing of the book. This passage comes as close as anything I’ve read to how I feel about my dog, and all dogs I’ve ever loved:

Sometimes we don’t know how empty we are until something comes along and fills us. I have dear relationships with people too, people I live for and would die for, but Darla gave me something I needed and didn’t know it. She was a guide, of sorts, who led me back to a key part of what makes me someone anyone would want to share time and space with.

Dog Medicine author Julie Barton, featured a few posts back, claims in this episode of Dear Sugar that a primary bonus of the canine relationship is its absence of language. I knew immediately what she meant. Funny that writers should find a non-language cross-species relationship so meaningful. Or maybe not. For all the striving and fiddling with words a writer does, this kind of non-lingual understanding is a relief. There’s an honesty to connection based on facial expressions, body language, and tones. Smiling, laughing, clapping, whooping, arms outstretched, or wailing, coughing, moaning and weeping.

The Nunez novel explores the possibility of dogs understanding language, but finally Apollo and his new owner respond to the ritual itself, a meaningful connection that transcends words. Being understood on this primary level is surely one of the best lessons in how to live anyone could ask for.