Idra Novey’s Take What You Need speaks to the teen in me who took welding in high school (metal shop was required) and is grieving the loss of a complicated person. Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Northern Appalachia, this beautifully written novel is about so many things. It’s an exploration of the place a young woman is from and her return there to a profound sense of not belonging. It’s a lesson in modern female artists (sculptor Louise Bourgeios, 1911-2010, and painter Agnes Martin, 1912-2004): “No real art, Bourgeois said, was possible without a fight with one’s material.” It is about the loss of a parent: “This morning, I read that repeating the name of the deceased can quiet the mind when grieving for a complicated person.” It’s about imposter syndrome, an affliction of even the most successful of artists, let alone a middle-aged woman finding her way to metal sculptures of immense proportions in her living room. It’s about how Northern Appalachia has changed in the last decades, economically, politically. The book is a commentary on making art in desperate times. You will find other themes here. I’m glad I found this book, as I make a concerted effort to read authors writing about Northern Appalachia, where, low and behold, I grew up. (Northern Appalachia = 235 counties in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia.) Quick craft note: Novey toggles deftly between alternating POVs, one in first person present, the other first person past, allowing the reader to experience two timelines until they converge. Thanks to WANA (Writers Association of Northern Appalachia) for recommending the novel.
Favorite line: “You have to become more than yourself is what Louise said when she passed sixty-five. . .”
For years, like so many raising kids and working, where I might want to go and what I might want to see didn’t even cross my mind (see the photo above). But—How do you want to explore?—this seems to be asking a next level question, both exacting and pressing.
This past weekend I went home to Lit Youngstown’s Fall Literary Festival featuring Ross Gay. I confess to being late to the Ross Gay train, having just read The Book of Delights before the conference, laughing my way through it, parceling out the essays over the course of a week in order to really see what he reveals in layers of detail. His speaking voice shares the same gentle ripples his written words engender, like low-tide waves of wisdom and generous spirit. Gay engages all our senses, his writing practice consisting of noticing and fostering delight as a kind of world-building (his word) that reinforces a delight-filled existence that might-could perpetuate itself. He sees himself as neither an optimist nor pessimist but certainly exudes a quiet charisma and an unassuming groundedness. He still has an aunt (a great aunt?) in Youngstown and visited with her each day. He laughs readily, contagiously, and doesn’t dress up for the occasion, which is more than okay with the crowd.
My own speaking voice has sounded muted, trapped in my head, indistinct and losing, just a bit, its accuracy and tool-like agility off and on since 2017. Sharing my voice has been an effort of late. I have wondered about stress factors, hereditary hearing loss, and entering the second half of adult life, which seems to demand a different kind of utterance. How do you explore when the senses have maybe begun to diminish? Or is that even what’s happening?
Ross requested “no photographs/selfies before or after the reading, please,” which is certainly fair enough, but left me wondering when, if ever, it was okay to photograph him, especially since the auditorium forbade photographs during an event. I had just driven from Cleveland to Youngstown through Amish country, where it is also rude to gawk and photograph, thus no photos in this post of Ross Gay nor the Amish, alway industrious and therefore often out and about.
On the drive, I noticed for the umpteenth time that my home state of Ohio is a state of dichotomies comfortable with its dichotomous state, where in thirty minutes time you can drive from this kind of industrious,
then past the positively pastoral homesteads of the Amish, line-drying their clothes and ploughing with horses fields lined with orange and golden trees.
This is the same place where in the airport a thirty-three-year-old Cleveland guy in sales finds it perfectly normal to spend an hour talking quarterback character, T.J. Watt, and Taylor Swift with a middle-aged, female Steeler fan. Here, a working-class Midwesterner/northern Appalachian generally won’t hold your education against you but will applaud you for it. And in front of the Butler Museum of Art in Youngstown, the blue-green copper patina statue of a Native American shares a lawn with the neon sign advertising the showing of Paul Stanley’s paintings (think KISS), although the Plains Indian in full headdress does seem to be peering in the opposite direction while shielding his eyes.
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Ross Gay is very good at thinking out loud and has long, elegant fingers he uses to speak. I’m certain he can palm the nubbed surface of a basketball and probably writes about that somewhere. Even for the sake of hitting all the senses, I won’t scrounge up, additionally, examples of taste and smell, although there were many, mostly positive. A Google search suggests seven senses, not five, adding two “vestibular senses,” movement and balance, which bring me back to the question, How do you want to explore? To which I might respond, less so with a backpack and hostel stay, like in the student days, but certainly with movement and balance that permit and promote noticing.
Turns out the strangeness of my own voice and the electric thumping noises at night just might be due to a general state of depletion caused by under-hydration and a lack of certain nourishing vitamins (maybe minerals, too?) brought on by a vegetarian diet. Perhaps. If I had jumped on the advice of the audiologist and the ENT without also getting guidance from a writing friend who practices TCM, I would never have noticed that the hearing issues are but the canary in the coal mine.
I would like to explore by going home and going afar. I would like to explore by noticing. We writers are striving to notice what matters. The conference (specifically, Jill Christman, author and editor of River Teeth) reminded me that writing is more about what we discover than what we know, which sure takes the pressure off demonstrating how knowledgeable we are. Both Gay and Alison Stine said revision is a revealing, another kind of noticing, and perhaps, as Christman implied, a movement toward the strange. Workshopping a la Gay is about supporting the wilderness in others, not taming it. And since Gay talks a lot about love, which is what we are all working towards, it is perfectly permissible and apt to quote Rilke: “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” Love is the ultimate noticing.
I went back to where I’m from and was reminded that there is no better way to be in the world than by noticing. I stuck my tongue out at a friend and her husband, and they used their TCM expertise to observe my depletion. Sometimes, as in the festival panel on Domestic Fabulism with four poets, we unlock—through attentiveness to the everyday—the next level, a transformation, even a healing.
P.S. Ohio strange/Victorian normal—President Garfield’s tomb in Cleveland Heights has gargoyles!
