Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

A writer takes a minute for a closer look

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  • Bright night fliers a fine lure

    Bright night fliers a fine lure

    There’s a lovely Truman Capote short story, something he wrote for a woman’s magazine in the ’50s, when he was minting his writerly self. A Christmas Memory reads as memoir and describes a little boy and his elderly distant cousin, unlikely friends in a not very friendly household. Each Christmas, they make each other paper kites.

    Kites come in all sizes, colors and complexities, but nothing has really changed. You attach to a string a thing that the wind will catch, and then watch it dance. Every year in Long Beach, Washington, kite lovers celebrate this dance — wind and human connected by a filament — at the Washington State International Kite Festival that lasts days and draws tens of thousands.

    We went this year but car trouble kidnapped us and didn’t free us until late in the day. We did arrive in time for the night fliers. We parked ourselves in a comfy spot on the sand, and as the cloudy sky lost light, the kites came alive with sparkling color.

    Why am I telling you this now? Well, the festival happens annually the third full week of August. We tried reserving a campsite for the festival starting last February, but every slot on the Washington side of the border within an hour’s drive of Long Beach was already booked. Hotels? Forget it. People love this festival and come from all over for it.

    We managed to get a campsite on the Oregon side, at the Fort Stevens State Park. One brief taste of that night kite show convinced us we’re going next year and have marked the calendar.

    Something about the tug of a small sail attached to a string in my hand. Something that lets a part of me fly free.

    A note about that Capote story: I love it so much I often gather friends at Christmas so that we can read it aloud. I have it in The Complete Stories of Truman Capote, but it can be found online. For my writer friends, if you need a guide on the value of showing vs. telling, read it.

    Photos by Craig Cherry

  • Early reviews: They’re making me giddy

    It’s a fine thing when friends and family say they like your book. That fine feeling gets better—excellent, let’s say—when a publisher says, “We think we can make money with your book.”

    Now the opinions on The Booker Rebellion have begun to arrive. Somebody hand me a cool drink and a fan.

    Snippets:

    There’s a moment early in The Booker Rebellion where Jack spots a raven in the driveway and has to decide whether to hit it with a rock. He doesn’t, because ravens remember faces and hold grudges for years, and he doesn’t want one waiting for him every day after this. It’s a throwaway beat, thirty seconds of page time, and it tells you everything about how carefully Susan Palmer has built this family’s relationship with the land they live on.—Los Angeles Book Review

    This is a confident, well-built adventure that doesn’t condescend to the kids reading it or insult the adults reading alongside them. I would recommend The Booker Rebellion to readers who liked Hatchet and want something with a body count and a working knowledge of Sun Tzu.—Chicago Book Review

    A suspenseful wilderness adventure with young heroes worth rooting for.—Kirkus Reviews

    Launch date is November 20. Maybe my pulse will return to normal by then.

  • Marge Piercy’s poetic heart still keeping good time

    Of course I would read The Hour of My Death, the newest and possibly final work by Marge Piercy. Her 1980 collection of poetry The Moon Is Always Female is the single thing my first lover gave me that I kept after that relationship went down in flames. I still have it.

    The yearlong journal Piercy kept after a medical emergency that led to the insertion of a pacemaker is being released by Sibylline Press in October. Sibylline, also the publisher of my forthcoming novel, specializes in women authors. Getting Piercy’s journal is a fine coup for the growing California-based press, and I jumped at the chance to do an early review.

    The Hour of My Death: A Journal of the Year After I Died is written in a loose form the Japanese call zuihitsu, which means “following the brush.” The flowing style lets writers play freely with fragments of thoughts, personal essays and poetry. Piercy’s journal wanders, doubles back on itself, and shifts gears. But just when you think you’ve learned everything you want to know about Piercy’s three cats or the summer squashes in her vegetable garden, she will nail a point to the wall with all her ferocity, wisdom and smart-assery. Then you will think, I wish I’d known her when. Look, you can know her when. Her books are all out there, waiting for you.

    The heart trouble that almost killed her happened when she was 86, and coming back from it was an act of will that belies the frail-old-lady stereotype we all have of that age. Piercy got on with things. Her annual poetry workshop was one of those things. It involved selecting twelve participants from the hundreds of applicants, doing a deep analysis of the poems the successful applicants submitted, and then spending five days leading writing exercises and discussions.

    The poems scattered through the book include “Body Bingo,” a wry, dry analysis that gives pain a voice. In that poem, the ankle asks permission from the eyes before launching its own pain signals.

    Besides the essays and poems, Piercy has included recipes and isn’t fussy about them. She presumes her readers are sufficiently savvy to figure out things like cooking temperature, quantity of protein and/or vegetables needed and appropriate amount of spicing. You can imagine being in the kitchen with her and watching a pinch of this and a hunk of that and oh, here’s something that ought to get used going into a pot. There’s a generosity of spirit in this kind of recipe, as though Piercy is saying: Of course you’ve got this. You’ll sort it out.

    A few one-liners that made me feel I’d been in the room with her:

    • I died last October but the rescue squad revived me into my new life, more fragile, now wide open to each moment drab or shining.
    • I’ve never been ashamed of growing up poor and never lost the radical edge that gave me. I don’t forgive or forget.
    • It’s a shitstorm being old but I wouldn’t erase my experiences for anything.

    If you don’t know Marge Piercy’s work, don’t start with this book. Go get one of her fine novels, Gone to Soldiers, say, or a poetry collection. Know her work first. Then settle in with The Hour of My Death. Expect a lively, sharp, poetic, philosophical conversation with a woman who has thrived amid turmoil and written passionately about her generation.

    A note: The book is available for preorder at Sibylline.