letters

Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle

beth — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

A giant hot pink book filled with nearly 500 pages of letters, emails, and images, when merely considered as an object, Kristine Stiles’s compilation of of artist Carolee Schneemann’s correspondence is intimidating, impressive, and a little bit sexy. The material is no less overwhelming.

Carolee Schneemann is an artist whose art played with the boundaries of bodies and embodiment, and of taboo and the abject. She produced physical and performance art, and used her own (often nude) body in the production of her art. She has been claimed as a feminist artistic icon (and acknowledges this herself) despite mixed reactions from feminists to her work.

Kristine Stiles offers a wonderfully clear and helpful preface in which she describes the principles she used when editing and annotating Schneemann’s letters so that they could be presented in book form. Although editing would be necessary even if Schneemann had written the most regular and conventional of letters, Stiles explains her commitment to preserving the irregularities within Schneemann’s letters. Such irregularities include those of spelling and misspelling, word and sentence spacing, and the use of columns and marginalia. Stiles makes a great effort to preserve for the reader as much of the aesthetic experience of reading letters and notes written by a prolific artist as can be preserved in book format.

The letters themselves are an education. They are an education in art, in second-wave feminism, in the changes in epistolary conventions. I confess, I haven’t read them all. It seems too cruel to have done so: dipping in and out of them, starting at the beginning, working through in order while also opening up at random and reading anything that catches my eye is so satisfying I can’t make myself speed read to the end. And I don’t want it to end. As long as there are letters to read, then it seems as though she—as the character I am coming to know, and not as the still-alive woman I will never meet—is still vibrant and alive and working and loving and creating. I am inspired to send real paper letters to my friends, hundreds of letters, so that they can experience me (and I them) through the medium of letter writing. Schneemann has a variety of artistic media at her disposal and letter writing is only one of them. This book is no less a work of art than her other artistic endeavors.

A perfect gift for art lovers, feminist artists, and art historians, this book has appeal for for those interested in seeing the way a life unfolds in the compilation of more than forty years of letters.

Written by: kristina grob, March 29th 2011

Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters

farhana — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Marilyn Monroe

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Everyone knows about the tragic life of bombshell Marilyn Monroe, whose nickname “Miss Golden Dreams” would indicate nothing of how brief her existence would be. At thirty-six, the “orphan” with a mentally damaged mother and no father to call her own was found naked and dead in her Los Angeles home, apparently from suicide. With three divorces, several miscarriages, and plenty of roles depicting her as a dumb blonde, not even Monroe’s celebrated curves, sapphire blue eyes, or perfectly heart-shaped face were enough to keep her smiling. No fame or money could save the starlet with the little girl voice from the many demons that haunted her.

Since her passing in August 1962, hundreds of books have attempted to capture the patron saint of tragic screen sirens. Now, forty-six years later, Monroe speaks for herself in Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters, the sleek hardcover edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment. Fragments gives us a glimpse of a woman who was used and misused many times over. Finally, we have the truth of who really was one of the twentieth century’s greatest icons.

This book is a collection of Monroe’s poems, letters, notes, diary entries, and even recipes that were kept hidden-until now. However, the first few pages confirms what many have long suspected—that she suffered from a dark depression, which wasn't widely talked about during her lifetime.

Despite seeking guidance from several doctors, Monroe wasn’t afraid to further examine how she felt, even noticing how her sadness was affecting her physical beauty, including “eyes dulled, cheeks flushed with capillaries that look like rivers on maps” and “hair lying like snakes.” Using a poetic language, undoubtedly inspired by her passion for literature, Monroe expertly depicted herself as “a dancer who cannot dance,” a turbulent storm who couldn’t be embraced by the men she sought.

Monroe’s marriage to Yankees baseball star Joe DiMaggio may have been a match made in tabloid heaven, but it was her relationship with playwright Arthur Miller that proved more telling, and perhaps more damning, than any of her other romances. From her rainbow collection of books, as seen in Fragments, to her determination to attend the Actor’s Studio in New York City, it was of no surprise that Monroe would be drawn to someone who can satisfy her desire to learn. Yet, when Monroe found her husband’s diary in 1956 and discovered how shameful he felt when she was around his intellectual peers, we’re able to feel how heartbroken she must have been over this shocking surprise.

“I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really,” Monroe reveals in Fragments, later stating, “I think to love bravely is the best and accept-as much as one can bear.”

Despite that Monroe was desired by thousands of men as the dress flying “girl” or diamond-obsessed Lorelei Lee, the real life pinup suffered from the same sorrows that all women face when they’ve been betrayed.

While Monroe was one of the first actresses to launch a production company in spite of the star factories of Hollywood studios, Fragments shows that her accomplishments weren’t enough to fulfill what she always wanted: love.

It’s certain that loyal Monroe fans will instantly fall head over heels for Fragments. Even curious listeners can also learn a thing or two about the actress who continues to captivate audiences a century later.

There are still many unanswered questions, yet Fragments ultimately reveals how Monroe was a curious, hopeful and passionate woman willing to overcome the many obstacles that came her way by trying to control of her fate. Fragments exposes not the love goddess we’ve come to worship, but the misunderstood mortal who wouldn’t live long enough to find what she so desperately searched for.

Written by: Stephanie Nolasco, January 29th 2011

Dear Sandy, Hello: Letters from Ted to Sandy Berrigan

brittany — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Ted Berrigan, Sandy Berrigan, Ron Padgett

Coffee House Press

With the post office on the verge of collapse and Facebook statuses eclipsing emails (which not so long ago eclipsed snail mail), I fret for the future of love letters. Decades from now, letters that would have been discovered in a forgotten old box will instead wither away into password-protected oblivion. We will no longer indulge our imagination in the real-life lust and longing of by-gone days, at least not in their raw, unadulterated letter form.

Dear Sandy, Hello is a relic of that (not-so-distant) past when lovers put pen to paper (or typewriter) to express their affections. In this case, it’s a book full of Ted Berrigan’s daily missives on love, life, and literature to his wife and muse, Sandy Berrigan.

Dear Sandy, Hello is also a testament to the (also not-so-distant) past when a woman’s sanity was regarded in direct proportion to her obedience. Just days after Sandy’s marriage to Ted, a struggling-artist-cum-gifted-poet, she is forced by her parents to enter a mental hospital on the basis that “on the date of the marriage she was deprived of reason and incapable of exercising rational judgment.”

It was the uncomfortable awareness that it was a mere thirty-something years ago when a woman could be institutionalized for marrying the man of her choosing, alongside my fascination with the dying art of letter writing, that drew me to Dear Sandy, Hello.

The book opens with a telegraph dated February 13, 1962 from Ted to his friend Joe Brainard: “I was married today at two o’clock in the afternoon to Sandy Alper of Miami Florida. She is nineteen. I am twenty-seven.” A letter addressed to “My darling Sandy” immediately follows—and there begins three months worth of “Letters from Ted.”

For those who do not know Ted Berrigan, as I didn’t before reading this book, he is a prominent figure in the New York School of Poets. That is, he is the poet equivalent of a Jackson Pollack. He is most widely known for a collection of poems called The Sonnets.

His letters document the emotional ups and downs of two lovers torn apart in the height of their lust. As days pass, Ted shifts from zen-like compassion, insisting “that even those who seem to be hurting you love you... that is why I can bear them no malice,” to unforgiving, cold fury. Although written in reference to the specific injustices of their separation, the letters persuasively and poetically articulate a more general struggle against the majority that is hostile to the unconventional. Ted likens himself to Henry Miller and others—artists who resist comfort to be more alive and who ultimately are the “true prophets of the future.”

“Sandy’s Letters to Ted”—amounting to forty pages as opposed to his 200—only appear, incongruously and as though an afterthought, at the end. I read Ted’s letters with a nagging sense that I was missing something, and in the end I wished it’d been left that way. The Sandy of my imagination was more nuanced and intriguing than the woman captured in a few scant letters.

Whether professing his undying love, railing against society, or recounting the most recent book/museum/poetry that he’d explored, Ted’s letters flow as poems do—a web of vivid imagery and thoughts, impressions superseding logic. Taken as I was by the writing, ultimately I couldn’t stomach his artistic hubris overshadowing her injustice.

Written by: Alicia Simoni, October 11th 2010

The Desires of Letters

priyanka — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Laynie Browne

Counterpath Press

In 1994, poet Bernadette Mayer published The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, a collection of loosely structured and un-posted letters written over a nine-month period while she was a new mother in New York in 1979.

Now Laynie Browne, in The Desires of Letters, takes Mayer’s flowing style as muse and resonates profoundly with her own ruminations on motherhood and daily life. Author of nine collections of poetry, she uses her talents to describe the experience of motherhood and desire, which I find is often like trying to nail water to a brick. But she turns the brick to water.

When does it get easier (you ask). The answer is yes and not when. Since time has nothing to do with us now. We live in a timeless realm where the effect of difficulty is cumulative, like labor, not each event taken on its own. There is no tense one could call ‘later.’ Each tantrum or disaster formally speaking is returning home to feel an outing has been successful, no matter how humble, to buy milk for instance, if everyone is still alive.

As a writer and a mother with young children, I often find it difficult to connect to voices so far removed from the disjointed and often surreal world my children and I inhabit. But in The Desires of Letters I felt at home. Taking the writing, the experience of being a writer, then wrapping it around the children and their needs, and the day to day that translates in such a different way than it did as a singular person who was not so bundled in with other human voices.

Naomi Stadlen, in her 2004 work titled What Mothers Do Especially When It Looks Like Nothing said that, “Mother’s live in a universe that has not been accurately described. The right words have not been coined. Using habitual vocabulary sends us straight down the same… footpaths. …There are whole stretches of motherhood that no one has explored.”

Laynie Browne has offered a beautiful new step toward this exploration.

Written by: Jen Wilson Lloyd, October 4th 2010

Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Aífe Murray

University of New Hampshire Press

The popular image of Emily Dickinson is that of an almost ghostly woman in white, secluding herself in an upstairs bedroom alone, but Maid as Muse's innovative approach shows her frequently in the kitchen. There, she is found stirring puddings, baking her famous gingerbread, and living on familiar terms with the household help. She shared her dreams and gossiped with her favorite maid, the Irish-born Margaret Maher, who Dickinson referred to as her dear Maggie.

Murray uses a wide range of documents, including maps, advertisements, letters, photographs, and oral history interviews with descendants of the Dickinson's domestic staff to recreate the material and intellectual milieu in which the poet wrote her celebrated works. Murray demonstrates that the quantity and quality of Emily's writing output—in letters and poems—varies with the presence and absence of reliable servants in the household. Only when there are competent people to help with the heavy load of housework that a nineteenth-century homestead requires is Emily able to find the time, the energy, and, most significant, the concentration to write at her best.

Furthermore, Murray shows that the servants' vernacular speech—often quite different from the staid Yankee rhythms of the poet's family and neighbors—influenced Emily's compositions. The poet herself quotes sayings in her letters by the Irish immigrant Mrs. Mack, for example, and notes how differently her maids pronounce certain English words. Emily's famous slant rhymes and staccato lines of poetry also have startling parallels to the reported conversations and personal letters of her staff.

Murray traces the contributions of Black, American Indian, and British-born servants to the life and work of Emily Dickinson. She points out the places where Emily revealed the prejudices of her times, the classism and racism, yet she also acknowledges how Emily managed to rise above those prejudices and see poor people and other outcasts as sympathetic human beings. This is an enormously rich book, impossible to summarize briefly, well worth exploring, not only by the many fans of Emily Dickinson's poetry, but anyone interested in cultural history and the development of American society.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, June 21st 2010

The Tricking of Freya

admin — Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Christina Sunley

Picador

The Tricking of Freya is a multi-generational family story narrated by a girl named Freya Morris, following her life from early childhood through middle age. Freya grows up in suburban Connecticut, but her heart lives in a small village called Gimli, the Canadian settlement of her Icelandic ancestors. In Gimli, her family is revered as the descendants of two of Iceland’s best-loved poets. Freya learns early that Icelanders love words so much that many immigrants carried heavy books in their suitcases as their only belongings. She grows to love words as well, hoping to become a writer in the tradition of her family.

As an adult, Freya lives in New York and is composing a series of letters to the as yet unknown cousin she is desperately seeking. The story of her life is recalled through the events of the family past to present, much as one would update an out of town relative on all the gossip from back home. We see a tragedy that will shape the future of the entire family, as well as lead to Freya’s uncovering a long buried secret that she must try to solve by retracing her steps through the past. The story moves from the history of the immigrant settlers of Gimli to that of the descendants of those who stayed in Iceland, and is rich with the folklore, dialect, and culture of the country.

The story carries you along with Freya through her adventures, with beautiful descriptions of Iceland and its inhabitants, as well as poignant descriptions of family members lost and sought. The “tricking” referred to in the title is a mystery at the core of the story, which the reader solves along with Freya, coming each to their own conclusions about what may be real, what may be believed, and which of those is closer to the truth.

Written by: Melissa Ruiz, May 13th 2010

From Rage to Courage: Answers to Readers' Letters

admin — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Alice Miller

W.W. Norton

Alice Miller alleges that "most people (ninety-five percent of the world population) were beaten as children." You might think these are some pretty hefty charges: so did I. This book, in my opinion, does not seem to have any purpose besides encouraging readers to read Miller's other works, and also for blaming bad parenting as the root of every societal illness.

Perhaps I would have better appreciated From Rage to Courage had I been familiar with Miller's research, or if the book provided any empirical data supporting her claims. Instead, I was inundated by Miller's recommendation that readers acknowledge the childhood abuse they suffered, even if they didn't remember it happening. This book encourages everyone to delve into their psyche to try and find some hints of abuse.

I am skeptical of Miller's proposition that ninety-five percent of the world's adults suffered childhood abuse, but what really struck me as odd in this book is the claim that victims must embrace rage and shun forgiveness to cure themselves. I believe that anger can be a very liberating emotion, and I agree with Miller that victims of abuse should acknowledge the perpetrator's role in hurting them. However, I do not think a lack of forgiveness and a permanent angry state is even remotely healthy. My experience with anger leads me to believe that when a victim holds on to grievances, she is the one punished—not the abuser. Anger leads to bitterness, and both poison a person from the inside out. Forgiveness is not something that excuses the person in the wrong: it is a means for the victim to make peace with their past and go on to live their lives without dwelling on their pain.

According to From Rage to Courage, abuse victims need to dwell on this pain in order to "free" themselves. Without an explanation as to how this is accomplished, however, the book just sounds like an exhortation to permanent resentment, without any means to get to the next step of recovery. Perhaps Miller outlines this in her other works, but as a book considered in its own right, this one doesn't stand up.

Make no mistake: child abuse is horrifying, and probably occurs much more than is reported due to the helpless nature of its victims. I fully support awareness of this issue, as there is no doubt that child abuse affects people negatively all their lives. Alice Miller's collection of her own letters just seems a bit melodramatic to affect any change, and her goal seems more to increase her book sales than to offer solutions.

Written by: Sam Williams, March 20th 2010

The Quotable Abigail Adams

admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:01:00 +0000

Edited by John P. Kaminski

Belknap Press

In an age of constant and instant communications, we have to sadly admit that letters are becoming a lost art. Gone are the times when lovers exhausted themselves writing page after page to send slowly across the sea, replaced with 140 character tweets or an iPhone vibrating with a picture message. While it’s ignorant to wish we could return to a previous era of correspondence, beautiful letters can still be read, appreciated, and celebrated for their historical and literary importance through collections like The Quotable Abigail Adams.

Edited by John Kaminski, the director of the Center for the Study of the American Constitution at the University of Wisconsin Madison, The Quotable Abigail Adams gives a glimpse into the life and letters of the amazing woman who counseled and consoled one of the most influential men in the birth of the United States. With quotes gleaned entirely from the letters Adams used to keep vital contact with her husband, children, and closest friends, Kaminski shows us the complexities and wisdom that make her an invaluable female role model from a male-dominated period of history. The book’s short biography and quotes depict a woman who is at once lacking confidence in her informal education yet one of the President’s most valued advisers; self-identified as more adapted to small, simple pleasures but an adept and experienced in foreign affairs; a mother and wife who gains strength from her family yet is able to endure years of their absence.

Any reader will be able to find quotes that speak to them as well as quotes that raise an eyebrow. Many of her words transcend time and geography, and are astutely applicable in today’s world. In a letter to her uncle, Cotton Tufts, she writes “It is high time that we had a Government who knows how to conduct our affairs with steadiness, judgment, & equity that they may not make themselves contemptible in the Eyes of all Europe.” Writing to John Adams on sexism, she chastises, “I cannot say that I think you very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives.” Adams intelligence shines as she quotes Alexander Pope, Thomas Paine, and Michel de Montaigne, blended with her own observations on topics ranging from bachelors to the French Revolution.

While the art of writing letters may no longer be practiced in any substantial capacity, The Quotable Abigail Adams is a time capsule in which we can escape the LOLs, SMS, and IMs of our current existence and revel in the wisdom of an icon of American history for whom words and letters were like “cold water to a thirsty soul.”

Written by: Melissa Ablett, January 29th 2010

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace

admin — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:05:00 +0000

By Leslie Marmon Silko, James Wright, Annie Wright

Graywolf Press

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace is a rare and beautiful collection, illustrating the power of artful expression in a time when communication is, more often than not, abrupt, cursory, and expedient. The book, composed of letters exchanged between Leslie Marmon Silko, a celebrated fiction writer, and James Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, is an "epistolary classic," and it performs the remarkable feat of capturing, in a tangible, material way, the nature of a friendship.

Their correspondence ranges over little more than a year, and in that short time, their relationship sees Silko's divorce, child custody struggles, and professional turmoil, and Wright's own family tragedies, flourishing career, and finally, his illness and death. They write each other at a spirited pace, even while Wright travels through Europe and while Silko bounces across the United States; detailed address lists and itineraries are tucked into their notes about landscapes and heartaches. Their devotion to one another is made all the more extraordinary by the fact that their friendship was initiated and maintained almost exclusively through letters. Its success was due, in part, to their shared facility with language, which allowed them a candor that would have been lost in the hands of less capable writers. The missives are written with such charm and sincerity that they do not feel like mere evidence of friendship, but like the substance of it.

The correspondence begins timidly, with some mutual flattery and formality, but blooms almost immediately into intimate conversation:

"Dear Mrs. Silko," Wright begins, "I trust you won't mind hearing from a stranger... I have finally had the chance to read _Ceremony, and I am moved to tell you how much the book means to me... I am very happy that you are alive and writing books."_

"Dear Mr. Wright," Silko returns, "Your letter came at a time when I needed it most. So many sad things have happened with my marriage and my children—it is good to know that my work means something..."

Silko writes with the ease of a natural storyteller, ambling from anecdotes about her farm to her personal and professional troubles. "Dear Jim," she writes in her second letter, "I just fed the rooster a blackened banana I found in the refrigerator. He has been losing his yellowish collar feathers lately, and I'm afraid it might be that he isn't getting enough to eat. But I suppose it could be his meanness too." Wright volleys with his own observations about writing and teaching. Where Silko writes with tenacity and sadness, Wright's letters are milder but more ominous. "It has been a pleasure to teach and work here in Delaware, but now once again I can feel time closing in on me, and there are still many tasks to be performed and many duties to be met," he writes, a foreshadowing of the cancer diagnosis that will kill him a year later.

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace was first published in 1985, and its reprinting today seems designed to point out that these kinds of epistolary relationships have all but disappeared. One may be tempted to blame email and blogs and Twitter, but to lament the informality of modern communication is miss a greater truth: Silko and Wright's remarkable correspondence was born out of their mutual love for writing. Their letters were crafted with a mixture of skill and affection that has always been rare. The immediacy and volume of modern communication may have diluted the frequency of clear, heartfelt expression, but this collection shows that our appetite for it is undiminished.

Written by: Rebecca Zerzan, December 17th 2009

Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women

admin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 08:53:00 +0000

By Marnia Lazreg

Princeton University Press

We are not [wo] men for whom it is a question of either-or. For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but go beyond it. _ — Aime Cesaire, _Discourse on Colonialism

These are the words that begin the autobiographical journey Questioning the Veil, where Marnia Lazreg, an Algerian-American professor of sociology at the City University of New York, touches on one of the most sensitive strings of Islam, the hijab.

Is veiling mandatory for all Muslim women or is it a cultural, political, or a social practice? Lazreg presents her research in the form of a collection of letters, where each letter analyzes interviews with several Muslim women combined with Lazreg’s personal experiences growing up in a Muslim family. From modesty and sexual harassment to cultural identity, Lazreg distills the very many explanations used in adorning the veil to deconstruct its religious substantiation.

Lazreg further analyzes modesty and its association with the veiling practice. She poses questions: if modesty is a prime explanation given for wearing the veil, would a woman who does not wear a veil, but dresses conservatively be considered immodest? Similarly, what if a woman wears the veil, but is immodest in her mannerisms. As more and more prepubescent girls are being made to wear the veil based on the notion of modesty, Lazreg points out some of the mind-boggling questions that had disturbed her back in the days when she was coerced to adorn the veil upon reaching puberty.

As a child, Lazreg often questioned the partial adoption of the veil amongst the global Muslim women. As she grew older and sexual harassment was revealed to be another factor leading to the hijab, she often questioned the men who continued to harass women wrapped up in hijabs.

From the ‘reveiling’ trend in the West to the imposition of veiling laws in Islamic countries, Lazreg reveals how coercion more often than choice or faith ultimately results in veiling. Yet, using the veil to strike against anti-Muslim prejudice in the West or rejuvenate the Muslim civilization is not a means to women’s liberation. Ultimately, Lazreg’s research depicts how the practice of veiling is constructed out of reasons external to what a Muslim woman really wants to do. Until states mandate veiling by law, as in the Islamic Republic of Iran, or prohibit veiling by law, as in France, Muslim women will never realize the meaning of autonomy and choice. Their human rights will remain marginalized.

Wearing the veil is not the triumph of Islam over its detractors. At the present historical conjuncture, it degrades Islam to the level of a creed and impoverishes its humanistic import. This is time for women to free themselves of it and by the same token free men, too.

Cross-posted with Gender Across Borders

Written by: Maria Khan, October 17th 2009

Searching for Tamsen Donner

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:10:00 +0000

By Gabrielle Burton

University of Nebraska Press

Westward expansion meets the women’s movement in Gabrielle Burton’s Searching for Tamsen Donner, a memoir about a mother’s journey West in the path of the doomed Donner Party pioneers of 1846-7. Most people associate the Donner Party legacy with cannibalism. The pioneers spent a horrific winter stranded in the Sierra Nevadas with no supplies; forty-two died and many of the remaining members survived on the remains of their friends and family.

Tamsen Donner, wife of the party’s captain, stayed behind with her dying husband as the last relief party left with her children. Her name has gone down in history as a paragon of traditional womanly virtue, a loyal wife who sacrificed her own life to be with her husband in his last moments. In Searching for Tamsen Donner, Burton seeks to show a different side of Tamsen, one that showcases her many roles as wife, mother, schoolteacher, botanist, letter writer, and traveler against the background of the Donner Party legend. As William Lederer tells Burton at a Bread Loaf writer’s conference in 1972, “Most people survive by eating each other. You’re going to write a book that shows a better way.”

Five years later, Burton sets off en route to California from New York with her family, weaving together the history of Tamsen Donner through pioneer gravesites and memorials, museums, maps, scholarly research, and surviving letters and diaries from the Donner party. Burton’s memoir charts her own participation in the feminist movements of the sixties and seventies, and her decision to become a writer while caring for a husband and five daughters. Burton’s struggle to balance career with family is a central tension of her journey. “I was afraid the summer would go and we’d find we had piddled the trip away in side trips to snake farms and Stucky shops,” she writes, these family diversions suggesting that, “I was not a writer at all but always and exclusively a mother.”

Burton’s family is supportive, however, and their cooperation and support efface the home/career divide that underscores popular images of successful women. With Tamsen in the foreground, Burton reminds us that history is filled with strong women—women who juggled domestic duties and personal aspirations long before movements for political equality had met with any success. Searching for Tamsen Donner is also a road story, and much of the pleasure of reading Burton’s memoir lies in the plucky characters she meets throughout her journey. These characters straddle history and modernity, blending tales of local life with their own struggles as farmers, small business owners, and casino employees. They also tell the story of the careless destruction of American landscapes—of highways built over historical markers, vandalized memorials, and toxic government testing sites. These acts of destruction present a very different picture from the serene visual landscapes described by Tamsen in her extant letters, all of which appear in Burton’s memoir.

Burton’s emphasis on pioneer history occasionally seems to leave unquestioned the frontier mythology of discovery, the manifest destiny that masks nineteenth-century imperialist narratives of westward expansion. Burton’s self-identified focus on Tamsen shows that a more complete depiction of pioneer history and its displacements and dispossessions are beyond the scope of her memoir, but sometimes one wishes for a less peripheral depiction of Native and Mexicans populations in her retelling of Tamsen’s journey West. Burton’s quibbles with the Mormon Church and culture, too, may seem a bit strident to third wavers. But Burton’s account of her journey and Tamsen’s are (second wave) at its best, and her story is an inspiration to all women seeking to balance personal ambitions, adventure, and family.

Arriving just in time for summer road trip planning, Searching for Tamsen Donner is a moving exploration of a legendary American woman through the eyes of a modern heroine.

Written by: Barbara Barrow, April 23rd 2009

Letters From Black America

admin — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 08:51:00 +0000

Edited by Pamela Newkirk

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

While it would help to appreciate and admire the historical importance of preserved letters, you don’t have to be history buff or correspondence enthusiast to delight in Letters From Black America. In a time of quickly typed emails and SMS, tangible letters hold weight for many who value thoughtful, deliberate communication. In this compendium, Pamela Newkirk skillfully compiles an assortment of missives from the past three centuries that shine a light on the humanity and continued struggles of ordinary and exceptional African American men and women.

Divided into seven sections, the collection of 200-plus letters examines family dynamics during and after slavery, education as a locus for social activism, and Black military service from the Civil War to Iraq. In everyday yet often poetic language, details are revealed about married couples separated by the slave trade and babies born without the presence of their fathers. Open letters previously published in newspapers are included to showcase a wide range of letter writing and how it can be used as a tool to promote public discourse. Prominent Black artists and academics correspond and share visions of hope. One man proposes marriage and later asks to set a date, confirming his lady’s affirmative answer, though the reader never knows what else was actually said.

While the collection does include an interesting cross-section of letter writers and receivers, many are notable figures in Black history, and many—like W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Derrick Bell Jr., and Booker T. Washington—have letters included in several sections. This is not without merit, but letters to and from prominent, highly educated Black leaders are more common than those passed between ordinary citizens. This does not diminish the significance of the selections. At times, it is rather helpful—if not necessary. The often-lengthy writings of Frederick Douglass, for example, comprise a significant part of the letters about politics and social justice. This is not a burden, but an opportunity. Many of these letters are not easily found, even in a time of ubiquitous technology and information. Each letter is introduced with background about the writer and recipient, and these small but critical details make Letters From Black America an incredible reference guide.

While many of the book’s sections are enthralling—love letters from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Coretta Scott (King) and a coming out letter from Joseph Beam to his parents are particularly noteworthy—the climax of the compilation is the third section, “Politics and Social Change.” Some of the most formative communication of our time is found here, including letters between Shirley Du Bois and Langston Hughes, Bayard Rustin and Eldridge Cleaver, and Toni Morrison to then-Senator and Presidential candidate Barack Obama.

To address the changes in communication over time, the book ends with letters from “Across the Diaspora.” Communiqués between Pan-African leaders of the last hundred years, across oceans and decades, remind us that even as we move into a time when travel and the Internet make our work easier, we have come very far and yet have so very far to go.

This review is cross-posted on Girl w/ Pen.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, February 7th 2009