Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

A writer takes a minute for a closer look

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  • In praise of the forced pause

    In praise of the forced pause

    An electric vehicle changes everything about a road trip.

    I’m a deep believer in flying down the highway at 60 mph. The momentum, the smacking rhythm of the tires, the small-town gas stations, the pee breaks in the sagebrush by the highway in the dark. There’s music in it, somehow.

    Alone in the car, my creativity fans out for deep consideration. The idea for my first novel came to me on a road trip between Logan, Utah and Kalispell, Montana. The characters for the second novel muscled their way in somewhere along Highway 101 between Brookings and Bandon.

    Traveling with another person, I’ve found that conversation has time to unwind and rewind and play again. Spend a week on a road trip with someone and you know them in ways you rarely know people.

    I once logged 11,000 miles on a six-week meandering trip from Anchorage to Phoenix and back again.

    The route I’m most familiar with, though, is Eugene, Oregon to Lethbridge, Alberta. I’ve run that route maybe two dozen times. In the last five years before my mother died, I did it twice a year.

    Two months ago, Craig bought a fully electric vehicle and we’ve done two road trips in it. First thing. You don’t wing a road trip across vast stretches of the West in an EV. Sucking down the power to nothing in an EV isn’t an option. Not like a gas powered oops which results in a slog to a gas station and humping back the gallon of fuel to your car.

    The unexpected benefit: We’ve stopped in two towns I’ve sped by for decades.

    Ritzville, Washington? Always a flash on our way out or home on that endless stretch of Interstate 90 and Highway 395 between Spokane and the Columbia Gorge’s Interstate 84.

    This year we stopped in Ritzville because it has fast charging power. And because charging the EV takes longer than filling a fuel tank, we had time for dinner. Which is when we discovered an Indian restaurant with rich aromatic food you want to linger over. Ritzville has shifted from a signpost to an actual place I view fondly.

    Later on that same trip we dropped in on Grass Valley, Oregon, on Highway 97. Hot summer day, low on power. Grass Valley has exactly one store that does quadruple duty: liquor, groceries, deli. Also, a charging station. We had cold drinks at the store with its antique-household-goods decoration while we waited for the car to power up.

    At first I didn’t care for this slowing down and pausing.

    But I’m shifting away from my urge to hurry. I’m looking around. And it’s not just what’s here at this place I must wait. It’s how did this place come to be here? What do they do here? Who might I meet here?

    In Grass Valley, the owner of the store was helping out in the deli, chatting up customers at the register and grinning when I congratulated her on the presence of mind to add the charging station. She was of an age where you’d expect her to be relaxing and watching the great-grandkids bang around.

    Two new towns I did not see before. But I do see now. Mind’s eye. Places a story I’m pondering might need.

    Photos by Susan Palmer

  • The moon, there when you need it

    The day before the smoke from Eastern Oregon’s wildfires smudged the Eugene sky, I saw the moon in the morning, on the wane in its unglamerous phase between full and half, known as gibbous. That Latin word isn’t the one I’d have chosen. If I were the boss of English, it would be the belly moon, a friendly, funny, relaxed word, a word that invites you to settle in.

    I love the daytime moon almost as much as the nighttime one. When it was full last week, while we were camping, it was so bright you didn’t need a flashlight to find your way. It cast sharp, long shadows of the pines up around Waldo Lake. Night shadows and moonlight, what a pair.

    Today, hidden in our region by smoke from horrific wildfires, it’s officially this moon’s last quarter. Tomorrow it’ll be waning crescent. Knowing it’s there, always there whether I see it or not, is an anchor I hold onto regardless of what’s happening on the noisy, fraught and sometimes perilous ground.

    Photo by Susan Palmer

  • Julia Park Tracey’s ‘Silence’ spoke to me

    cover of novel "Silence" by Julia Park Tracey

    A horse named Raven pulled me deep into this story, a historical tale set in Puritan-era New England where a woman named Silence is punished for expressing outsized emotions and must endure a year of not speaking.

    Of course I would gravitate to author Julia Park Tracey’s book. A while ago, I took up that subject myself in a fantasy short story titled The Exile’s Tale and published in the collection Imagination Fully Dilated. In my story, the women of a village are forbidden from speaking once they pass their child-bearing years. It’s not the wisest limitation, denying half of the most experienced community members their ability to share their wisdom.

    As in Tracey’s powerful rendering, at some point the men want the silenced women to speak up.

    Of course the women don’t. Not in my version. Not in Tracey’s.

    Tracey’s book captured me in a way that always delights me when it happens. I start reading, and the story is fine, the writing is good, and I continue because I want to know what happens. But a phone call, a knock on the door, a remembered task — any of those things can pull me away from a book that is simply good.

    In the best books, a turn happens. It could be anything, an ingenious plot twist, a surprising character development, a beguiling landscape. A shift occurs. Everyday reality drops away, sparking an intimacy between me and the text. At that point, it’s hard to put the book down.

    In the case of Silence, it happened for me on page 142. Don’t mistake me. I was fully enjoying the book before page 142. Then the character Silence takes a moment to stroke the face of the horse. She tickles Raven’s blaze, brushes back the forelock. Raven nickers and tries to nibble her sleeve. Then this sentence: “I lean down to pluck some grass to palm for her, and she takes it with whiskery lips and a saucy nodding of her head.”

    At that sentence, I quietly fell inside, and didn’t fully emerge until the last page.

    I’ve stopped trying to explain these moments to myself or others. I’m ensnared, not only by the tale, but also by the skill in the telling, where a small, arguably inconsequential moment is given its due by an author for whom there are, perhaps, no inconsequential moments.

    This book is rich in the daily-life moments of constrained women. Its plot engine runs on power dynamics in the era where witchery accusations could still be a death sentence, religious tolerance itself a sin. But, to turn an old phrase upside down, its angels are in its details.