The life of a broken bough

This post has gone much longer than I’d anticipated because I found I wanted to savor each of the seven contributions to the anthology. So, fearing that you may miss it, I am going to promote to the top what I had intended to put at the bottom.

Each of the entries in When the Bough Breaks ends with a short meditation on the creative process and a writing prompt, “Try This.” On Saturday, February 27, the women of KaBooM! are conducting a writing retreat, Try This, at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, 10:00 am to 4:00 pm. Cost is $100.:

Isn’t it every writer’s dream to have an entire day without agenda or distraction—to have nothing to do but write, write, write? Join members of the KaBoom Writing Collective for a quiet day of writing, sharing, and responding. Bring work in progress or a notebook and pen to capture new words. KaBoom members will present invitations to write taken from their book, When the Bough Breaks, or you are welcome to develop or extend a piece you’ve already begun. Bring a bag lunch.

Save your spot today by calling 859-254-4175

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I want to write you an appreciation of the anthology When the Bough Breaks published by the KaBooM Writing Collective.

The story of how the book came to be is told here at Public Republic. It’s an exciting story about generousity and cooperative effort and I think you will enjoy reading it. The resulting book is a work of art.

But I don’t want to talk about the book as artifact. I want to talk about the words inside the book.

I’ve known the women of the KaBooM! collective for years. I’ve been mentored by them, taken workshops with them, shared critiques with them, laughed and cried with them. So when I opened the book and began to read, I expected the work to be good. I was pleasantly surprised at how good I found it.

The seven authors of KaBooM! are two poets, two essayists, and three fiction writers.

No, that’s only for the purposes of the anthology. To be honest, both the poets, Leatha Kendrick and Pam Sexton, are also writing novels. Mary Alexander, who contributed one of the short stories, is also a well-known area fiber artist. Susan Christerson Brown, who wrote one of the essays, has an MA from Lexington Theological Seminary. She blogs at Mildly Mystical. Jan Isenhour, who contributed one of the short stories, is a well-known essayist and has been director of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, I think, since its inception in 1992. Gail Koehler, essayist, is a local activist, editor of Peaceways, a newsletter published by the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice. Lynn Pruett, fiction writer, is on the faculty of Murray State University’s brief residency MFA.

And, oh golly, I still haven’t gotten to the contents.

As might be expected with a collection of writing from women of a certain age — especially one that takes its title from the most famous lullaby in the English language — the pieces in When the Bough Breaks deal with family matters, parenting. And yet within those perimeters, there is a great variety of voice and mood.

The two essays that bookend the collection deal with the changes motherhood brings. Gail Koehler, the activist, takes us fast-paced into the collection, Her essay, “Everything, Changed,” recounts how she tried to get it all figured out ahead of time, what these mothers meant when they told her “Just wait. . . everything will change.”

I demanded: ‘How? How does everything change?” When pressed, they became vague, shrugged, avoided specifics, insisted: “It just does.” The answer left me increasingly both uneasy and unclear. . .

What Gail learns, of course, is that with motherhood everything is always changing, that it’s an experience of “intense love and sharp disappointment, earth-splitting devotion and mind-numbing exhaustion.” She concludes what all of us know but can’t articulate so well,

I’ll continue to step off of the familiar into the wide open of the strange, all my life as a mother.

And I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t stop when they’re grown.

Susan Christerson Brown, the contemplative member of the group, the Mildly Mystical one, meditates in her essay on the ways in which motherhood encroached on her need for solitude. She is “Rooted in Solitude,” but as a mother she had to learn not only her need to have time away from her beloved family but also how to use those blessed rare lonely times. Here is a snippet of her thoughts on a retreat to the Abby of Gethsemani:

Our culture does not teach us how to be alone or encourage us to value silence. But since the third and fourth centuries, when monastic life took root, the monks have grappled with the challenges of solitude. The desert fathers and mothers of that time fled the degenerate culture of the cities and the politics of the church to answer the call they heard to pursue their own spiritual path. Their need to escape the clamor of daily life drove them to the desert, where they could free themselves from distractions and seek God. Something of that desire resonates in me, as I seek time apart for creative work. Yet I also share, at least in part, their dismay at finding that when they were finally alone, the source of their distractions was within themselves.

Possibly the most delightful surprise for me in When the Bough Breaks came with Jan Isenhour’s short story, “His Place in the World.” I have known Jan as Director of the Carnegie Center and I have read her fine essays. I knew she is at work on a novel. But this is my first experience of her fiction. It’s good stuff. It takes the man’s point of view, and deals with fatherhood. Robby Dean, a Kentuckian, divorced, travels into Ohio to find seasonal construction work, boards with his aunt and has only week-end visiting rights for his son J.P. and a shaky romance with Sherry, a woman with more education and middle-class aspirations.

For what seemed like the hundredth time, Robby asked himself, lighting his cigarette, if he really needed women in his life. . . .He had tried to stay busy, but no one seemed to care much one way or the other. He had put WD-40 on the squeaky hinges, fixed a leaky toilet, and made numerous trips to Kentucky to see J.P. and Sherry, letting on to this friends that he was surely pussy-whipped to go back and forth so many times, but the truth was he didn’t know what to do with himself. He had lost his place in the world and was having a hard time finding it.

Robby’s rebellion takes him near tragedy before he learns a vital lesson in a story that isat once gritty and tender.

Lynn Pruett’s short story “Heartichoke” is about a woman who knows her place in the world and it is really getting up her nose.

Lila L’Esperance woke up on Christmas morning and thought, I would like to lick something. In a different marriage, with a different man, I would lean over and lick his ear until he wakes, tingling and excited. Instead she lay in the stillness of the house. Peace is what I love, she thought .

This is Lila’s last peaceful moment in a Christmas dominated by dysfunctional in-laws and her need to keep things happy for her children. Lila’s story is one of the constraints of marriage, motherhood, and family. Her love is like a straitjacket.

Indoors, this life was turning her into a murderess in thought, and a suicide in soul. So why am I in it? Because I am like the winter, bare, cold, hopeful that spring will return. . . . Oh I love my children—they are what saves my life. She wanted to go in and hug them to her and kiss them all over, but she knew they would pull away, more interested in their new toys. The coffee burned and she poured the thick liquid into the sink.

Lila runs away into the snow and into childhood delight with snow. But it’s a respite only. The snow is in a graveyard. And anyway, her life comes for looking for her.

Mary Alexander’s “Late Blooming Daisy” is a mother in her older years who discovers that, after all, she is capable of the heat of desire.

Daisy suddenly felt a warm flush spreading from the pit of her stomach to her chest, up her neck to her face. My goodness, was that a blush? Daisy couldn’t remember blushing sinceshe was sixteen years old. Maybe it was a hot flash. She hadn’t had one of those in thirty years, but if there was anyone who could reactivate her hormones, it was the man in front of her.

The story is affirming and fun and when Iget to the end, I am ready, like Daisy, to leave my cane behind me.

And now, the poets.

Pam Sexton has been my friend in poetry for the last decade or so. She is, in a sense, a displaced person, having left her childhood home in Wyoming many years ago to come live in Kentucky. The change from Rockies to Appalachians is a dramatic one, and Pam’s work is filled with loss — loss of landscape, loss of home. But her work is also of what she has found, a new landscape, a new family of husband, children, grandchild.

It might not be an exaggeration to say that Pam’s sense of motherhood encompasses the whole world. Her work is deeply rooted in landscape, whether it be in her back yard in Lexington, in the Rockies, or in the Appalachian. It is a landscape closely observed, as in the opening lines of “Going Hungry”

Ants pick along stones
and leaves to the mess
and bones of a leftover bird.
They claw air and stone alike—
confused, a jerky train—
stopping to massage ghosts
before they go on.
They mime confusion.
They have a mission.

And if landscape is loss in Pam’s work, it is also consolation, as in the end of “These Days,”

Still, there is the cardinal on the fence
heralding fire—
feathering out—
the fierce,
permanent red

Leatha Kendrick is a poetic force in Kentucky. Her work is loss and affirmation. In this anthology, she includes poems about mothering grown daughters, how they are her joy and support, as in “Second Opinion,” the title poem to her current book, in which her three daughters laugh with her in the radiology waiting room, where she is waiting for a confirmation that she has breast cancer:

The receptionist gives us a hard look when we laugh.
We’re linked, silvery with happiness
glinting out even in this waiting place.
I finger the necklace I’ve just bought, touch
the curative moonstone, murmuring “hope”—
I want to believe in sudden remisision,
in some way to avert what we are certainly
headed for. What I can believe in
is the healing of their fingers laced through mine.

I was going to talk more about Leatha’s poetry, which I love, but I think I will stop with that. Our children are laughter in the face of death.

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