My Name was Supposed to be Elizabeth Ann

— Stories from the Roads (Not) Taken

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE

Michele E. Reisinger

2 comments

November 5, 2022

It’s a puzzle, ain’t it? How sometimes life gives you all the pieces but their edges are rough and the colors are blurry and it ain’t till you step a ways back and rearrange that you see the patterns. You know?  You asked what brought me here and I’ll tell you, but first I got to tell you something else. Since Pa died, I barely spoke, but after the ruckus in church a few weeks back my words is like a fountain. You don’t mind, Ma’am, do you? We got time. 

Anyhow, Ma and me live a ways out of town, near where the river bends like an elbow. You can see it from the train bridge, over there. Our house’s the one made of two squares, a big one and a little one, plus a shed out back where Pa kept things like hoes and threshing rakes for Ma’s garden.  The big square is where we done our eating and sleeping, Pa and Ma in a nook off the kitchen and us four children in the loft. Evenings, Pa’d tell stories and Ma’d rock by the fire knitting or sewing up the holes in Brother’s shirt. Sometimes I sat in Pa’s lap, sometimes on the floor. That was my spot, Ma tells me. Near Pa. 

It’s a puzzle, ain’t it? How sometimes life gives you all the pieces but their edges are rough and the colors are blurry and it ain’t till you step a ways back and rearrange that you see the patterns.

The time I’m needing to tell you was one of those days can’t make up its mind to be spring or winter. Ice melting and muddy, but the sun shining like a promise ring.  I remember Ma and Pa both was in a tizzy, though I did not know why. I’s fourteen now. Then I’s only six. Anyhow, we hadn’t a real preacher for longer than I’d been alive, the last one an itinerant came through for the christenings and deaths. Sometimes weddings. So Pa and the other men would do the preaching, telling stories that I thought were Pa’s stories but turns out belonged to Jesus and his own pa, which a course I thought was the same thing. That day we was supposed to get a new preacher and someone, Ma can’t remember, decided Pa should do the welcoming.

Me, I remember the kittens. Kitty had them in the shed in a little soft hole in the corner where Pa told me I could look but not touch, at least until they was weaned or their eyes opened. Which for me was the same thing. He told me I could have one when they’s grown, so I picked the runty one cause she’s little like me but I didn’t tell no one. I’d study them for hours and tell Pa’s stories to help them grow like Pa’s stories helped me. That day, four a them had their eyes open but my runty one didn’t. I knew I shouldn’t touch but I did cause the littlest one wasn’t moving and I wanted to get it to move. It was dead, which I knew but didn’t want to know. I remember running for Pa. He’d told us bout Jesus resurrecting from the dead and I thought Pa could bring Kitty’s runty kitten back alive like he done Jesus. I remember the mud squishing my toes and slowing me down like fingers grabbing at my ankles. I didn’t think I’d ever find Pa, but when I circled the house, I heard Pa and Ma telling my sisters and Joe our brother to settle, and then another voice I didn’t reckon. Both low and loud at the same time, like how thunder starts quiet then blows like a wave through the clouds. I thought, or maybe heard, I don’t remember exactly, that somehow Pa had knew and asked Jesus direct about Kitty’s kitten.

Well, I burst into the house babbling like Ma tells me I used to do and I seen a man who wasn’t Jesus at all but a man in black with a frown like Pa’s scythe and he’s helping himself to the last of Ma’s turnips. Children should be seen, not heard, he says, nodding at Ma to scoop another turnip on his plate. The only plate on the table.

I threw a tizzy, Ma says. I’s so mad cause Pa always told me I should ask when I need something, and here I was asking and he ain’t doing nothing but minding some stranger without manners enough to share. I must of said as much cause Pa said I’s being disrespectful and to wait outside till I find my own manners. I should be ashamed, he said, scampering all over Ma’s clean floor with my muddy feet and interrupting Preacher. Mind you, I did not know Preacher was Preacher until Pa’s service and then it’s too late to hush. 

The day after Preacher came, Pa died and I stopped talking to most everybody cept Ma and sometimes Schoolteacher. Miss Sophie’s the one what taught me to write my stories if I couldn’t see fit to talk them. She came year before last, after the measles took the last one. That ain’t how Pa died, though. Him and the other Pas was plowing the big farm in the hollow over there when one a the draft horses got spooked. No one seen why, least that’s what they told Ma who’s left with four children to raise, me being the youngest. Joe quit school and hired himself out in Pa’s place. Our sisters wasn’t much for schooling, not like me a tall. They stayed long enough to cipher and tally bills at the mercantile. First for us and Ma, then for they own husbands and children. Janie has two and Sarah has one, a little girl with green eyes like mine. I love her especially. She is three and fierce like a lion. Which I ain’t never seen but imagine from the books Miss Sophie let me borrow cause I take care of them and bring them back to school on Mondays and after planting and harvest. Preacher has the running of the school in between harvesting souls. The wheat from the chaff, he says, though he can’t tell a spade from a shovel if you catch my meaning. Miss chuckled when I told her on my slate. Then she told me to tell her out loud and I did. And then I told her about Pa.

Last month, I heard Preacher and Miss talking in the schoolhouse while I’s outside reading and the other children was playing marbles or some such so’s Preacher could have his word. I’d been feeling poorly, like I’d swallowed a bag of rocks, cause Miss said she’d done taught me everything she could and it was time for me to graduate. She’s planning a whole ceremony, she said. A commencement. I never heard that word before so I looked it up in the fat dictionary Miss keeps longside her desk. She’d got it wrong, I read. I wasn’t beginning something, I’s ending. There ain’t no secondary school anywhere near here and besides, Ma said it’s time I got a job like Joe and our sisters when they’s my age. I even wrote another story about it, trying to keep my innards steady, but every time I thought about leaving school, I swallowed another rock. 

Anyhow, my breath got hitchy when I heard my name cause I thought I was in trouble even though I hadn’t done anything wrong that I could remember. Mind you, I was not eavesdropping. Preacher is loud and forgets I can hear just fine. Miss’s voice was happy like sugar and she’s telling Preacher I’s the smartest she ever seen, like a dry riverbed drinking up the rain. She told Preacher she put some a my stories in the post and some school up north wants me to study there, the same school Miss told me she’d gone to. Can you believe it? Tuition included, plus a place to stay. I’d just need travel money and a few extras, which I could get working in the school kitchen once I got there, and Miss asked a course could the church help? 

Preacher, he just laughed. Mind you, there’s all kinds a laughs and you can read them like you read a book. Ever notice? Least I can, and Preacher’s laugh was like someone showed him a porcupine and told him he could magic it to a squirrel.  He said there had to be some mistake, surely one of the boys’d be a better candidate than a half-wit girl and he’d see to fix it. Well, Miss’s voice went from sugar to fire, like each word’s a match, till Preacher said something about contracts and options and how St. Paul certainly had it figured when he told Timothy’s womenfolk to hush. After all, if it ain’t been for Eve talking to that snake we’d all still be in Paradise stead a this Podunk town. Miss got real hushed then. I waited till Preacher left and I seen Miss sitting at her desk with her head in her hands and her face grim like…Well, I don’t rightly know. But she straightened right up when she saw me, she knew I heard. We’ll figure something she said, I shouldn’t worry.

But a course I worried. All Miss done was try to help me, I didn’t mean for Preacher to trouble her. It was like Kitty’s kittens when I’s little. After I interrupted Preacher’s supper, Pa and Ma shared a frown and Pa told me to get along outside, he’d be along after a bit. But the words in my throat was rushing and I did not listen. I hollered something ugly and ran to the shed for Pa’s shovel and some rocks cause I remembered the part about the angels rolling the rock away. Pa’s stories was all jumbled in my thinking, and a course I’s too little to figure the shovel. I cut up my feet something fierce and started wailing at the gush a blood. Pa and Ma both came running, Preacher a ways behind with his napkin tucked in his collar like some flag. Next day, Pa tucked one a the boss’ spare kitties in his pocket meaning to walk home noon hour to give it to me, ‘cept it got loose and spooked the horse. 

I ain’t supposed to know that but I do. I told you Preacher talks too loud.

Anyhow, try as we might, Miss and me couldn’t figure a way to raise the money. Ma had a little extra but it weren’t near enough, and Miss needs her extra for her own ma and pa back home. Miss even wrote to the school but they’s sorry they couldn’t do anything else but hold my spot awhile if need be. You’re right Ma’am, times is tough everywhere. Ma said it’s for the best but her eyes was contradicting her mouth. All this is yammering in my head in church last month when Preacher’s preaching bout prayer.  He’s saying how God is good to His children like our papas is good to us and that got me thinking about my own Pa. I closed my eyes so’s I could remember better. I’s thinking he could a figured a way, Ma said Pa could fix most anything. I missed him a course, but not as hurtful as it used to be. Mostly I missed how he used to explain things sweet and easy so’s I could understand. Pa’s why I loved school so much, least after Miss came, cause Miss learned us with stories like he done. Meanwhile, Preacher’s preaching about asking and receiving and I recollected how Pa used to tell me all I had to do was ask and Pa’d see what he could do. I also couldn’t sit on my behind, Pa said. I had to do some a the work. He said it’s kind a like when you lose something. The asking kind a quiets the yammering that keeps you from seeing what needs seeing. The rest is like walking through an unlocked door.  

But as I’m thinking this, I’m hearing Preacher and he’s telling it all wrong. Like he’s the only one can see who’s asking proper. That got me so mad, let me tell you. Ain’t no one more proper than Pa and Miss, and Preacher got no right saying otherwise. I scrabbled across Ma for a prayer book and turned to where Preacher’s railing and there it is. Matthew’s story, same as my own Pa’s name. Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you. Can’t be anymore clear than that. Anyhow, I don’t even know what I’s thinking. I just stand up and tell Preacher he got it all wrong. He’s gone around telling me and Miss and near half the congregation we ought a hush when it says right there we gotta open up our mouths what God gave us. Ain’t no way He’d of ever wanted us to hush. I said I tried hushing after Pa died, figuring keeping quiet’d fix the mess I made killing my Pa in the first place, even though I ain’t mean to cause I’s little.  I told everybody I ain’t no half-wit like Preacher says, I’s smart and so’s Miss. Miss is the one what figured out my mess when nobody else seen it. She told me Pa wouldn’t of wanted me to feel bad about his accident. She told me Pa was a teacher like Preacher ought a be, telling stories and showing me the right a things. I told everybody about Miss’ school and how I’s gone write and tell them to hold my spot, even if I got to work till next year for the money. Everybody’s looking between me and Preacher then me again, till one of the pas Pa used to work with marches up to the altar and grabs the collection basket. Everybody starts filling it with pennies and nickels, even a silver dollar, and one a the Elders says they needs a meeting bout Preacher’s contract. Ma, she starts crying and hugging me and Miss. Miss just smiles big as a rainbow. Told you, she tells Preacher. She’s the smartest I have ever seen. 

A course I cried too and then I hollered a thank you so loud it woke the babies, but the mamas, they just let em cry.

Which is why I’m heading on the train like you, Ma’am, I got a ticket right here gone take me to my new school. Everybody chipped in, even Preacher. Though I could of swore he done it with a bellyful a rocks. Anyhow, Miss says if I study real hard and practice my speaking, soon enough I’ll be even smarter. I will a course, cause telling you this I figured the last piece a my puzzle. I’m gone write me a schoolful a books, bigger even than the one Miss says is at my new school, and I ain’t never gone hush again. 

*****

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE originally appeared in Stories That Need to be Told (TulipTree Publishing / Jennifer Top, ed.)

*****

Coming next Saturday in Book Talk…. The Road Not Taken or, How My Life Plan Got Derailed in Seventh Grade

My Name Was Supposed to be Elizabeth Ann

Michele E. Reisinger

no comments

August 7, 2019

To give a thing a name, a label, a handle; to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the Place of Namelessness, in short to identify it—well, that’s a way of bringing the said thing into being.

— Iff to Haroun in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories

This is the story my mother told me:

A few weeks before their due dates, my twenty-three-year-old (almost) mother chatted long-distance with her friend, Dorothy, whom she met at Fort Bragg. After Uncle Sam drafted their baby-faced husbands and shipped them off to Vietnam, Dorothy returned to Ohio and my mother to Philadelphia, where she lived with my father’s family while awaiting my birth. My mother tells me the friendship was a source of comfort despite their geographic distance. Though both women were surrounded by family, each felt an isolation that only the other could understand. Which partly explains why my mother never told Dorothy how angry and hurt she was by what happened next. Dorothy, who hadn’t decided on baby names as of that conversation, delivered her daughter first and named her Elizabeth Ann–the name my mother had reluctantly revealed she had always intended for her own child.  

So I became Michele Elizabeth. Michele with one L. Remember that. It’s important.

*****

In Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories–a wonderful book, by the way. You should read it–Haroun’s father Rashid, a professional storyteller, “[runs] out of stories to tell” after his wife runs off with the neighbor. Iff the Water Genie reluctantly agrees to help  Haroun reconnect Rashid’s access to Story Water, the magical source of Rashid’s extraordinary gift, and tells him to select their means of transport. “Pick a bird…any bird,” Iff insists, which makes no sense to Haroun. They’ve met accidentally in a houseboat bathroom, and the only bird Haroun sees is a wooden peacock bed, incapable of flight.

“Iff [gives] a snort of disgust. ‘A person may choose what he cannot see,’ he [says], as if explaining something very obvious to a very foolish individual. ‘A person may mention a bird’s name even if the creature is not present and correct: crow, quail, hummingbird, bulbul, mynah, parrot, kite. A person may even select a flying creature of his own invention, for example winged horse, flying turtle, airborne whale, space serpent, aeromouse. To give a thing a name, a label, a handle; to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the Place of Namelessness, in short to identify it—well, that’s a way of bringing the said thing into being. Or, in this case, the said bird or Imaginary Flying Organism.’”

The Genie opens his fist, and Haroun’s “eyes almost [fall] out of his head.” Creatures smaller than fingernails cavort on Iff’s palm.

Names, you see, are magic.

*****

Here is another story:

When I was four and my brother was three, my mother told us we would be getting a new big brother and sister. The details arise in my memory like photographs looping through a slideshow. Me seated at my play table behind the front door, Barbie on my lap. Philip sprawled on the floor pushing a truck. My mother, hair headbanded and looking equal parts flustered and severe. My father is absent, though he could not have been. The doorbell rings. The dogs scamper and bark. A matronly social worker enters with two children. Share, Mom had told me and Philip. And be nice. So I ask my new big sister if she wants to play Barbies.

Her name is Michelle, with two Ls.

*****

Big Michelle sticks.

Little Michele does not.

I become Michele Elizabeth, all one word. Micheluhlizabeth. Then Elizabeth, but only within the family. Not in school, not among my friends, never at work. I meet my husband and tell him, I’m Michele. People who know these stories ask, Why didn’t you change your name? Surely it was confusing, a sister with the same name? How on earth did you manage?

By a P2C2E. A Process Too Complicated to Explain. This is Iff’s answer to all of Haroun’s impossible questions, and it is partly the answer to my own. Truthfully, part of me did not acknowledge the chaos.

Most of me delighted in it.

*****

The summer I meet my new big sister, the six of us, our two dogs and a turtle travel to Ohio, where I meet Elizabeth Ann. A year or two later, her family travels to Philadelphia. Eventually, our families lose touch. Why, my mother does not recall. Nor do I recall much about the girl. She was nice enough and had brownish hair. 

Now, I wonder whether she knows the story of her name. Whether her mother knows that in stealing from my mother, she magicked a unique landscape for my childhood.

*****

My name was supposed to be Elizabeth Ann.

I’m glad it’s not.

LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO MY READER FRIEND LESLIE

Michele E. Reisinger

6 comments

April 6, 2024

(third in an occasional series on BOOKS THAT MATTER & THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM)

Leslie Stack speaks in tongues.

Not like that. 

Like this:

While listening to audiobooks, Leslie has a subconscious tendency to assume their voices, mimicking them with convincing accuracy. Once, when her two sons were boys, they drove to Washington DC to visit the Smithsonian and tried using the Metrorail to navigate the city. After missing their train, they perused the schedule board to determine a better route, and as she considered their options a man nearby interrupted to ask what part of London she was from.  Chagrined, she blushed and admitted to playacting. She’d been channeling Jim Dale, narrator of the Harry Potter series she and her boys were reading. 

Her boys just rolled their eyes. “They’re used to me,” she said, shrugging. “I do it all the time.”

And no wonder. 

When I asked Leslie to explain her bio’s claim that her books are “plotting to take over,” her description of her house sounded like a description of a library, with bookcases in every room and every shelf teeming. There’s a memoir shelf, a biography shelf. Shelves for history and inspiration. For travel and quotations. Fiction and how-to. There’s even a book closet and a shelf that contains only books she rereads. 

Smiling, she leaned toward the camera and tapped a black ballpoint against her mouth. She’d wanted to be prepared for our video chat and had taken detailed notes. “It used to be much, much worse,” she confessed.

Worse? I wondered. 

That sounded like heaven.


“[You should] put as many books as you can in front of kids. You need to give them that opportunity.”

In books as in life, there are people who try to learn from their mistakes, and people who won’t. People who reflect on their own and others’ tribulations and determine to do better, and people who use their own suffering as justification for self-interest. No one helped me, those latter types say. Why should I help anyone else?

In books as in life, I am no fan of those types.

Leslie, however?

Her, I like.

While Leslie’s relationship with books is a signature theme of her adult life, influencing personal and professional endeavors as a musician, educator, writer, and mom, she wasn’t always as possessed by books as her Metro memory suggests. 

In fact, she told me “reading was not a big thing” in her childhood family. Her history teacher mother’s resources populated a single bookcase, and their Maryland home’s isolated location made acquiring books difficult. “Other than school, you couldn’t really go to the library. You couldn’t really walk anywhere.” Nor did her elementary school seem to encourage reading for pleasure, instead limiting access to its library to scheduled turns. “And if you missed your turn for whatever reason,” she explained. “You had to wait.” Middle and high school routines followed similar patterns.

So what changed? 

She recalled reading My Side of the Mountain and the Little House series, then borrowing her mother’s books on the Holocaust at around age twelve. But it wasn’t until she earned her driver’s license at about 17 that the literary world began to open up. She began driving herself to bookstores and libraries, and reading about significant American events and figures such as Kent State, Woodstock, and JFK. However, she didn’t really fall in love with books until her early twenties, when she moved to Norfolk and began working full time in Virginia’s Old Dominion library.

“That [experience] was definitely a turning point for me,” she said. 

Decades later, the memory still evokes a noticeable joy. Typically, she explained, you go to a library or bookstore and you head to the same sections because that’s what you like. That’s what you know. When you work in a library, however, you have to shelve books. All kinds of books in all kinds of genres about places and people and subjects you’ve never heard of, let alone known to imagine. She would peruse the carts of new titles and titles needing to be reshelved, then investigate the sections of ODU’s library where they were housed. “I saw what I’d been missing,” she said. “And from that point on, I was hooked.”  

A self-described lifelong student, Leslie constantly seeks opportunities to learn something new and to create those opportunities for others. She gravitates toward stories about overcoming and about people (real and imagined) striving to make our world a better place for all of us because such works inspire and challenge her to be her best self. 

And that’s one of my favorite parts of Leslie’s story.

While she “didn’t have the mentors or teachers [she] needed,” she loves “helping others to become lifelong learners” and tries to be the type of role model her younger self needed. That theme is key to understanding why books matter to her and why she believes you should “put as many books as you can in front of kids. You need to give them that opportunity.”

Just as she did in her own classrooms and with her own family.

“Because you can’t have peace without hope,” Friday nights, she, her husband, and boys would have dinner at Peace A Pizza and dessert at Hope’s Cookies before heading across the street to Borders. The four of them would scatter to their favorite sections, then gather their finds and meet in the store’s cafe to compare notes. While her sprawling home library includes works from some of those forays, most were discovered in independent bookstores or secondhand at the flea markets and thrift shops she and her husband love to treasure hunt.   

Eventually, her collection numbered in the thousands, spilling from the shelves into the hallways and stacked in teetering columns. Even the basement housed the portion of her collection intended for students and other recipients. Whenever someone expressed an interest in a new (for them) subject, she’d recall her own reading and scurry downstairs to retrieve titles she thought might meet their needs, then she’d allow them to borrow or have her copies, or note the titles and authors so they could find copies later on their own. 

Adult Leslie often wonders how child Leslie’s life might have unfolded had someone done more of that for her. 

*****

While Leslie occasionally still mimics her favorite audiobook personas, her boys are now in their early thirties and she’s cut back a bit on buying books, instead increasing her library patronage because physical copies remain her preferred medium. A few years ago when her books really threatened to take over, at least in terms of square footage, Leslie began purging her collection, donating between six and seven hundred books through the Little Free Library her husband built and installed near their local Veterans’ Park. At the time, she was serving as her Rotary Club’s president, with education and literacy issues the focus of her term, and becoming an LFL steward seemed a fitting project. You can see Leslie and her husband, Chris, in the photo above.

As our scheduled time drew to a close, I asked whether she had anything else she wanted to share. Anything else she wanted me to know. “Oh yes,” she said, rifling her notes. “My favorite quote.” 

She didn’t need those notes to recite the line perfectly. “‘Make me a blessing to someone today.’ It’s from [Jan Karon’s] Mitford series. Father Tim says it after every prayer.” She explained that the line reminds her the world’s needs are greater than the individual’s. That she shouldn’t just ask for or expect change, but rather act on things that matter most. 

I could understand why that line resonates with her and suggested it’s the thematic thread weaving together her life’s many ambitions. I’d certainly noticed it while reading drafts of her own fiction and essays over the five-ish years I’ve known her.

“Hmm,” she said, nodding and tapping her pen once more. “I like that. I never thought of it that way, you may be right. I may have to write that down.”

*****

LESLIE STACK is a musician and retired teacher who is surrendering to her love of writing. You can usually find her doing research behind dark glasses on a park bench. She lives with her husband in a house in Pennsylvania where the books are plotting to take over.

two BOOKS THAT MATTER to Leslie Stack 

MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS, by Tracy Kidder

The non-fiction narrative focuses on doctor and humanitarian Paul Farmer, who spent much of his life fighting disease in Haiti, Peru, and Cuba. 

A YEAR BY THE SEA, by Joan Anderson

This memoir recounts the author’s experience reinventing herself after her sons have grown and her husband takes a job far from home.

*****

Looking for more posts in this series?

You can find them HERE and HERE.

Coming up on MY NAME WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ELIZABETH ANN–

I’m working on a couple of pieces and am not yet sure which I’ll be posting next month. However, I do know I’ll be participating in May’s StoryADay challenge. This year marks founder Julie Duffy’s fifteenth challenge, but only my sixth. You can learn more about StoryADay’s annual writing challenge HERE.

Fun fact, I met Leslie through StoryADay’s online writing community.

Thanks for reading!

5 Reasons Books Matter: Conversations with Some of My Reader Friends

Michele E. Reisinger

3 comments

March 2, 2024

(Second in an occasional series on BOOKS THAT MATTER AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM)

So what IS a book that matters? And who gets to choose?

When I spoke with my friend Lorita Foster for this series, she confessed to being initially annoyed with my questions. “They’re not fair,” she said, thinking I wanted a definitive list. “How can I determine what matters to everyone else?”

We laughed. For nearly twenty years before I retired, she taught junior and I taught senior English across the hall from each other, and this exchange was a variant of hundreds–if not thousands–of conversations we’ve shared not only about the books we read for our own enjoyment but about those we read with our students.  Experience has taught us that not every book speaks to every reader, no matter its reviews, awards, or accolades. That’s why, as she explained, “All books matter. Whether they’re fiction or non-fiction, they’re somebody’s voice. Their dream. Every book connects [readers] to the someone who wrote it.”

There was a time writer Kim Charles Younkin would have agreed with Lorita. Now, however, she’s more selective, noting that advancements in e-publishing industries have come with a significant cost. While writers enjoy greater access to and control over independent publishing channels, the fact that anyone can publish anything has, in her opinion, diluted the medium’s overall quality. “At this point in my life, books that matter are the ones that resonate with me because of an author’s voice, a beautiful story, and characters that are real people to me, and [because they address] issues that mean something about our shared humanity.”

Similar distinctions arose among my nearly two dozen reader friends I interviewed for this series. 

Writer, artist, and educator Marta Pelrine-Bacon confessed that the more she tries to settle on a definition, the more she wonders. Those that matter most, she said, are “books that [offer] new ideas and perspectives … and those that make me laugh while making me understand the pain in the world. [They] change how a reader sees the world they’re in or who they are.”

Katy Hewitt (not her real name*) is a poet, essayist, and middle school English teacher who ascribes to Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s belief that, while adults can appreciate literature distinct from their lived experiences, young readers in particular need books that function like windows, mirrors, or sliding glass doors. That’s why diversity and choice are crucial.

Poet and short story writer Neha Mediratta explained that her definition evolved as she did. “When I was young, the ‘books that mattered’ were the ones my elder brother read [because] I wanted to do everything he did. As I grew, [they] became a conduit to experiences different from mine. Now ‘books that matter’ means something else entirely. I look for solutions … rather than escape and comfort.” 

Walter Lawn, who also writes poetry and short fiction, distinguished between the books that matter to him personally and those “which changed the way we read and write our language [and those which] affected history, outside the field of literature.” While the latter titles remain fairly constant, the former can change.

So which books qualify? 

As I wrote in January’s post, each of my reader friends offered titles as evidence to support their definitions, yet very few matched any other reader’s list. Including, of course, my own.

On this, however, we all agreed:

Books matter, YES, but so too does access to them. 

Not only for the benefit of the individual, but for the benefit of the human collective.

You, me. The person you see on your daily commute but have never met. The person who lives in that country whose name you can’t pronounce and will (probably) never visit. All of us.

Why? 

Here’s what my reader friends told me:

5. THEY ENABLE YOU TO SEE YOURSELF IN THEIR PAGES AND REALIZE, “I AM NOT ALONE.”

Books about characters and people who look like us encourage community and validate our place within it.

Two of my former seniors described their adolescent reading as gravitating toward characters whose struggles resonated with their own.  As a child, municipal real estate planner Sharmaine Belton struggled with the mechanics of reading and loved books that she could relate to. “Anything that might help me get through things, that’s how I started to love reading.” Gina MacDonald, who now teaches ninth grade English, shared a similar preference, explaining that such stories offered both escape from her worries and encouragement to resolve them. That philosophy, in part, informs her teaching practice.

Such books are incredibly powerful, novelist Fallon Brown agreed. While even a “cheesy romance” matters if it resonates or “makes you smile when you’re having a bad day,” they recalled a dearth of relatable characters from their youth. “I’ve read a lot of books in the last several years where my reaction upon finishing them was ‘I wish this had existed when I was a teenager.’ If I had ever heard the term nonbinary before I was 30, I wouldn’t have spent so much time hating myself when I was younger.”

4. THEY ENABLE YOU TO ACCESS INFORMATION, PEOPLE, PLACES, AND TIMES THAT YOU COULDN’T OTHERWISE EXPERIENCE. 

Whereas genetics, culture, and economics can foster inequities, books foster opportunities.

Sixth grade teacher Travis DiMartino explained books that matter “give you something you can take with you. Sometimes it’s nice to immerse yourself in a world where anything is possible.” While such stories can be escapist, the best ones develop critical thinking by encouraging readers to situate themselves within the story world and evaluate characters’ decision-making. Educator Chris Tracey called such books “keys.” They are a way to unlock a deeper understanding of the self and the greater world, he said, and they have the potential to build otherwise impossible relationships. 

Such is librarian Kim Martino’s philosophy, as well. She curates books that “meet students where they are” and that encourage them to consider the bigger world, the latter of which is key to developing a growth mindset.  

3. THEY ENABLE YOU TO EXPERIENCE PERSPECTIVES DIFFERENT FROM YOUR OWN AND REALIZE, “I AM NOT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE.” 

If reason four is the invitation, reason three is the RSVP that, once accepted, allows strangers to make transformative connections. 

Said writer Gabrielle Johansen, “I was taught from a very young age that knowledge shouldn’t be hoarded or denied.” She recalled a teacher chastising her for reading Rita Mae Brown’s Southern Discomfort and asking seventh-grade Gabrielle what her mother would think if she knew. “I blinked at her and said, ‘My mom gave me that book to read.’” Gradually, she came to recognize “that books are portals to observing and understanding other worlds, other cultures, [and] ways of being other than my own. [They show] me what we all have in common.” 

Writer and educator Leslie Stack’s eyes sparkled as she described immersing herself “in the perspective of someone outside of [her] norm, particularly those written by new voices that haven’t been heard before.” Such books, she said, inspire and challenge her to be her best self.

Angelica Johnson, former student and now data analyst for a major gaming platform, described a love of reading forged among similar kinds of stories. She categorized books that matter as those which impacted her own journey and those which make a difference within our shared humanity. Regardless of genre, they are the books, she said, that address big ideas and difficult topics that some may find challenging to discuss. However, that’s exactly why they’re needed in the world.

2. THEY ENABLE YOU TO NAVIGATE THE NON-BOOK WORLD WITH GREATER EMPATHY AND COMPASSION.

Whereas reason 5 recognizes the power of seeing your physical and emotional selves reflected, reason 2 recognizes the power of trying to understand rather than demonize difference.

Former student and poet Abigail Greenwood thrills to books that make her think, especially those that ask tough questions about civilizations’ ugly chapters. “Seeing different perspectives helps us see and feel the humanity of the experience and to understand why people do what they do–even the bad guys. It helps us understand life’s ‘grays’ and act accordingly.”

That awareness reverberated throughout every definition, every memory, every title my reader friends shared. Books that matter aren’t merely entertaining and instructive, but rather a force for change. 

How?

1. THEY ENABLE AND ENCOURAGE US TO CREATE.

Books that matter nourish the curious and generous spirit that says, “I want to share what I’ve learned. I want to add to our understanding.”

While my reader friends acknowledged the very real dangers of hate speech and the validity of monitoring a child’s access to adult content, they celebrated their identities as readers and the significant and necessary role books have played in their lives, art, community involvement, and professions. “That’s one of the most important reasons for reading,” said writer and former corporate attorney Robin Stein. “To develop who you are by accepting, rejecting, questioning, [and] by listening to people. By throwing the book away or giving it to all your friends because you love it so much. Let people read and have arguments and think, because we don’t do enough thinking.”

Chatting with this fascinating group of readers has certainly made me think, particularly about books’ creative impacts. Sadly, so much of our current discourse centers around what we SHOULDN’T say. What we SHOULDN’T read.

What if, for a little while at least, we just listened to each other’s stories?

What kind of world might we then help create?

My reader friends have some ideas.

See you back here next month and they’ll share.

***** 

THANK YOU to all my reader-writer-educator friends who so graciously contributed their time and insights. I’ll be sharing more of our book chats over the next several months.

Can’t wait? Check out more from my reader-writer friends, below, and participate in the conversation. What is YOUR definition of a book that matters? What titles do YOU recommend? Share your thoughts and recommendations in the comments.

*****

FALLON BROWN is a nonbinary writer from northwestern PA, spending their days writing about queer characters falling in love and solving mysteries. They live in a small town with their husband, 2 children, 2 dogs and a cat who thinks she rules over all. Find more of them at Fallonbrown.com and on Instagram & Threads @frbrown906.

KIM CHARLES YOUNKIN can be found on Instagram @thedoggedwriter. 

ABIGAIL GREENWOOD is an aspiring author and poet. She finds inspiration from personal life experiences as well as causes that she fervently supports through action and via the written word. Abigail has written poems for decades and has reached the moment in her career where she is willing to be vulnerable and share her poetry publicly. Her writing style contains lyrical tones hence the name of her website, Siren Song. Abigail is a lover of art in all its incredible forms and loves to find new ways to express herself. If interested in becoming one of Abigail’s songmates, please find your way to her personal website at Siren Song Poetry. You may also connect with Abigail on her Facebook page called “Don’t Talk. Just Write.” or through TikTok. 

KATY HEWITT* is a poet, essayist, playwright, fiction writer, and educator, the latter of which is why she prefers anonymity. Her district is a bit, eh-hem, regimented about who can say and/or read what.

GABRIELLE JOHANSEN creates fiction from her home in Charlotte, NC. She is an avid reader, board gamer and sometimes crafter. Her main partners in all of the above are her wonderful husband and sporadically terrific teenager. Sometimes her two cats try to join the games, but their strategies consist of knocking pieces off the board. Gabrielle’s stories have been published in the premier issue of Haven Speculative and Across the Margin. Connect with her on X  @ellareine17 and Instagram @ellarain17.

WALTER LAWN writes poetry and short fiction. His work has been published at On the Run Press, Heartwood Literary Magazine, Every Day Fiction, and Lily Poetry Review. Walter is a disaster recovery planner and lives outside of Philadelphia.

NEHA MEDIRATTA is an independent writer, editor and consultant based in Mumbai though she enjoys gallivanting around the globe virtually and in real life.

Managing home, hearth, and work, she writes about the things she has mulled over for more than two decades.

She has a postgraduate degree in English Literature and has widely studied Eastern Philosophy, Ancient Indian Martial Arts and Creative Writing. A combination of ancient oral, hands-on teaching, contemporary academic and Indian non-formal teaching methods have gone into making her a pursuer of The Writing Arts.

Most of all, she is interested in digging up and reviving processes of being human—which have been few and far between—in her experience. 

Check out more about her work here: www.nehamediratta.com.

MARTA PELRINE-BACON was born and raised in the bloody heart of the Sunshine State, and she
lived to tell the tale. Then at 17, she high-tailed it out of there to the cold and wild north where
she earned her BA and MA in English literature. She joined the Peace Corps and lived in the
humor capital of the world in Bulgaria (where she also learned about the witchcraft of Baba
Yaga). She married, had a kiddo, and adopted too many dogs. (Kidding! There’s no such thing
as too many dogs.) Cancer tried to work its dark magic, but she got lucky. She is, therefore,
decidedly grateful to be here.

Marta writes, makes art, teaches English, takes care of her dad, and generally fails at work-life
balance. Stories about women and girls, impossibilities and magic, and friendship and strength
interest her most. Read her work and you’ll see. Her first novel, The Blue Jar, is currently
available on Amazon. Her first story collection, A Brief History of Boyfriends, is also available on
Amazon. She’s had stories published in Enchanted Conversation Magazine, The Austin Review,
Flash Fiction Magazine, 50 to 1,    Cabinet des Fees, and Your Turn (In Character). Other stories
appear in print editions of Whigmaleeries and Wives’ Tales and Adelaide, Year V, Number 35,
April 2020.

Marta’s been interviewed in a few places too: Out of Context, New Literati, Seven Impossible
Things before Breakfast, State: The Magazine of Indiana State University, and by author Ami
McKay. Her art has also been published here and there: Onomatopoeia Magazine and The
Fairy Tale Review.

You can find her art and her stories at https://www.patreon.com/martapelrinebacon, https://www.etsy.com/shop/WordsAreArtStudio?ref=seller-platform-mcnav, and https://martapelrinebacon.com/. Connect with her on Instagram @mapelba.

Marta isn’t big on giving advice, but she does say to look at the moon next time you’re out. The
moon is a lovely thing. And please pour her another cup of coffee black as midnight on a
moonless night. Then there will be stories.

LESLIE STACK is a musician and retired teacher who is surrendering to her love of writing. You can usually find her doing research behind dark glasses on a park bench. She lives with her husband in a house in Pennsylvania where the books are plotting to take over.

ROBIN MAYER STEIN grew up in Jackson Heights, New York, across the street from the public library–her second home.  She studied English literature at Queens College, attended Boston University School of Law and worked as a consumer law attorney while continuing to write.
Her work has appeared in 50 Give or Take, The Paterson Review, and Fiddlehead Folio. She speaks at schools about her children’s book, My Two Cities: A Story of Immigration and Inspiration, and leads Writing Workshops in the Boston area. She loves to swim, play piano and create stories with her three grandchildren. Visit her on Facebook or at robinsteincreative.com. 

TOM HANKS, DAISIES, AND THE MAKING OF A REAL LIFE MASTERPIECE

Michele E. Reisinger

2 comments

February 11, 2024

The last time I talked to my mom, I told her my book club was reading Tom Hanks’ new book, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, and her eyes lit up like I knew they would. She’s  loved Tom Hanks ever since ‘Bosom Buddies’ and has watched, I think, nearly every movie he’s been in except maybe Green Mile and Road to Perdition. She never did like scary movies or violence. iPad, she whispered, which meant she wanted me to add it to her Audible account, but I told her I’d wait until after I’d read it. She might not like it, I said, and she already had five or six books in her queue. 

As I spoke, I stood to the right of her hospital bed and helped her sip ice cold ginger ale, a grayish brown and white toy dog tucked into the crook of her arm. My daughter and younger sister, eyes red-rimmed and damp, sat on a blue vinyl couch beneath a viewless window.

Mom died the next day, January 11, at 10:54 PM. She was eighty years old. 

Mom and me, circa 1967

My mother Helen Judith was named after her maternal grandmother and never really knew her own mother. The youngest of two brothers and a sister, she was born to Irma Rose and Stuart Rowen on Halloween 1943 and was, according to family lore, a complete surprise to both parents and doctor as no one had realized Irma was expecting. Though my grandmother had been feeling more poorly than usual, she and her doctor falsely attributed her nausea and bloating to the ovarian cancer for which she had been receiving treatment and from which she would die a mere two years later. My grandfather, a busdriver for the Philadelphia Transportation Company, hadn’t funds sufficient to bury his wife and so her brothers stepped in, not only burying her at a considerable remove from what had been her marital home, but also erasing her marriage from her grave. SISTER, her headstone reads, beneath the requisite name and dates.  

As a mother of two preschoolers, I visited my grandmother’s grave with my mother and one of her brothers. The cemetery was difficult to find, the grave even more so, at the end of a rocky path and overrun by weeds. To Mom, however, it was beautiful, for until that day she hadn’t even known her mother’s exact birthday. That same day, we visited her father’s grave at a different cemetery. For several years following his wife’s untimely death, he had struggled to work and raise his children, relying on his two boys to care for their younger sisters. Mom adored her big brothers. Idolized them. They combed the girls’ hair and helped them with homework. Walked them to and from school and prepared their meals–mayonnaise sandwiches for lunch. Oatmeal for breakfast and supper. Eventually she recovered from the sandwiches, but until the day she died, she loathed the taste and texture of oatmeal, the memory of deprivation it conjured.

Eventually, my grandfather embarked on a marriage of convenience to a widow with three children–my mother’s aunt by marriage. She needed a paycheck to feed and shelter her babies. He needed a nanny  to feed and clean the shelter for his. The family did not blend. Eventually, it ruptured, scattering the children, with much of the blame placed at the feet of the woman I eventually learned to love and call Gramma.

Meanwhile, my grandfather’s stroke orphaned my 21-year-old mother a few months before her marriage to the 19-year-old boy who would become my father. I’ve often wondered about their timing, whether losing her father precipitated her rush into a completely unsatisfactory and dysfunctional union. Or perhaps it was the drumbeat of Vietnam’s conflict escalating in the background, a soundtrack to life’s irrationality. I never wanted to disrespect her by asking and so will never know. 

There’s a lot about my mother I do not know. A lot she would never discuss. Of this, however, I can speak with certainty: Her greatest joy lay in her children and grandchildren. She bore three of her own and adopted two more from foster care, though to be precise, the adoption was never formalized. While Mom tried repeatedly, their biological father balked at terminating parental rights and Mom, fearful that a protracted fight could result in the children’s removal from our home, abandoned her efforts. Regardless, she always–always–considered them as much her own children as those of us who shared her DNA. Likewise, when divorces and remarriages introduced stepchildren into her circle, she counted them as family. Heart stood equal to blood.

In fact, Mom’s guiding principle was love. As much as she could, she lived a life of service. She was a Girl Scout leader and church deacon. She crocheted blankets and scarves for those in need. She drove neighbors and friends to grocery stores and doctors appointments. She donated to causes she believed in, and she opened her home to those without one. Adult children and grandchildren, yes, but also their friends. When I was in seventh grade, she welcomed a mother and her three children escaping their abusive husband and father. They stayed with us for several days before moving in with family in a nearby town.

None of which is to say my mother was perfect.

She wasn’t. 

She was no more perfect than you or I or anyone whom I have ever known or known of. Sometimes Mom’s generous (and somewhat naive) perspective made her vulnerable. She could be cranky and selfish, impatient and passive aggressive, and sometimes she’d put her foot in her mouth or avoid difficult conversations because she loathed conflict. After declining health and mobility forced her to sell her home in 2016 and move first with me and then with my younger sister, those negative traits bloomed like weeds, fed by grief over her eroding independence, the loss of a life and home she’d worked so hard to achieve. It could have choked her relationships with us children, yet it didn’t.

How on earth? as Mom used to say. 

The answer is as messy and complicated as any of life’s big questions but involves, I think, our basic awareness that none of us are perfect, that eventually we’re all going to mess up. We’re going to disagree and argue and throw up our hands in frustration. 

Okay, but then what do we do about it? We have to find a way to move forward.  We have to think about our gardens. After all, we know you don’t only reap what you sow, you reap what you cultivate. You can’t just scatter seeds and hope for the best. You have to work at it, and sometimes you succeed and sometimes you fail, but if you envision a certain kind of harvest–if you really want to achieve it– you have to do your part to grow it. And sometimes it won’t be fair. It won’t be equitable. And sometimes despite your best efforts, the elements seem to be conspiring against you. Okay then. Go ahead and quit. 

Or don’t. It’s up to you. 

That’s kind of, I think, what Mom was like. The kind of  example she tried to set, just by going about the ordinary business of living and working and raising children. She wasn’t flashy or preachy about it, she just…did it. Just tried her imperfect best to be a decent human being, and we children followed her lead. 

The so-called evil stepmother I mentioned? 

She’s an example of what I mean about Mom:

While I would never presume to weigh in on Nell’s relationships with her other stepchildren, Mom never lost touch with her stepmother-aunt and eventually, gradually, in a process whose details I was never told, the women came to an understanding based partly on Nell’s willing admission of guilt and responsibility and partly on Mom’s willing offer of forgiveness and reconciliation. My junior high and high school summers, Gramma Rowen slept in my room on the matching white wood twin that used to be my older sister’s, before she married and moved across the river. We’d go to the mall and Friendly’s with Mom and my younger siblings, and evenings we’d sit on the back porch watching fireflies or downstairs watching reruns, and sometimes we’d stay up late trading stories. Me, about boys and school and what I planned after graduation. She, about WWII and her family’s exploits. About being widowed young and living her golden years in her daughter’s home. 

My grandmother is long gone, and now my mother is too, but those stories? Those memories?

I will treasure them until the day I die.

*****

My mother’s passing and  funeral were not happy occasions, but they were accompanied by many happy moments, many moments of grace. Each, like seeds, anticipating a harvest of peace.

Surprisingly, reading Hanks’ Masterpiece was one of them. 

I hadn’t really wanted to read it. The reviews were mixed, my interest in its plot merely tepid. I’d bought it only because my book club had selected it, and I’d mentioned it to Mom to distract her because I knew she was scared. Scared of the dark and of dying alone. Not of death itself. Moments before my daughter and I walked into her hospital room, she’d told the nurse to remove the wires and tubes connecting her to a chirping monitor. She was tired and she was ready and my younger sister burst into tears. My daughter, too.

We knew. We all knew. 

But goddamnit, I would not cry. Not yet. I would hold myself together, not for myself but for my daughter and sister. For Mom, because I knew the thing that scared her the most wasn’t herself but whether we would be okay, after. Whether we would be okay when she left us, even though we were all grown and gone and with children of our own. ‘Yes’ was a gift I could give my mother. She deserved that, after all she’d endured the last year.   

I gave her a concrete gift, as well, a soft grayish brown toy dog she named Daisy, after her last, beloved pooch. It even looked like Daisy, which is why I had picked it from the hospital gift shop. She clutched it to her side, one finger stroking its fur, as I talked about ordinary things and held a cup to her lips and told her she could sleep if she was tired, we weren’t going anywhere. We loved her, and we’d be there when she woke up. 

Except she didn’t, not really, and eventually I wept, and when I flew back home I tucked Daisy in my backpack, wondering what my fellow passengers must be thinking seeing me, a 56-year-old woman, carrying a stuffed dog through airport security, its floppy ears bouncing behind my head. Mom would have laughed. Paybacks, she’d have said, for that time in the grocery store when my younger sister and I were kids and a geyser of Pepsi had exploded in front of Mom’s cart, soaking her in sticky brown cola while sister and I ran off, hysterical, laughing so hard we cried and snorting giggles each time Mom’s shoes wEEk-wEEked along the aisles as we finished shopping. Needs must, after all. She had a family to feed.

Forty years later, and I’m smiling as I write that.

I never did make it to book club, but I did read the book when I arrived back home, even though I struggled to get into it and almost quit several times. Like Mom, I needed a distraction, and I’d promised I’d tell her what I thought about it–that mattered to me–so I kept reading and ended up liking the book,  really liking it, even though, structurally, the reviewers are right–it’s a hot mess. 

Masterpiece is about a boy who meets, then is abandoned by, his WW II veteran uncle and who, eventually, creates a comic book depicting said uncle’s war exploits. Meanwhile another guy–a big shot movie producer–eventually stumbles upon a dog-eared copy then writes and films a screenplay loosely based on the uncle, the eponymous masterpiece (SPOILER ALERT!) whose script appears at the end. There are too many characters, too much backstory, and you no sooner get vested in one person’s conflict than someone else interrupts. Then there are the comic books, which Mom would have most likely skipped had she been reading a hard copy, and the footnotes, which she would have found distracting while listening, and the QR code at the back, which she would not have known how to access. In her last year or so, Mom preferred straightforward plots with straightforward characters, and Masterpiece has neither. 

Tom Hanks notwithstanding, Mom would have hated it.

Why on earth did I like it so much, despite its flaws and inconsistencies?

Because it spoke to when and where I was at that moment, a daughter both mourning and celebrating her mother. Trying to read the map of a world I’d known about but never visited, trying to plot my way forward.

Because Masterpiece is messy, but so is life. Messy and complicated but so very beautiful, if you know where to look. If you’re willing to even try.

So often we place ourselves at the center of humanity’s narrative, our births and deaths the bookends of complete and tidy lives, but the truth is we are all supporting cast in each other’s throughlines. Like the book’s made-up film and my metaphorical garden, we cannot flourish without intervention, without food and light or someone–many someones–willing to get their hands dirty, then gather the harvest in boxes or baskets. Take it to the markets. Feed it to the masses, then repeat the process again and again and again, until eventually someone’s turn ends and someone else’s begins.

I thought about that in the days leading to and the day of Mom’s funeral, as I spoke with so many people–dozens of people–to relay the news, to thank them for gifting my mother with their friendship. Mom treasured that–treasured them–so very much. And in the way people do, they shared their stories with me, each different in content and presentation but not form. All of their stories were love stories, and in each retelling I found such peace. Such joy. Thank you, all of you, for those gifts.

Mom’s life mattered, in more ways than I had ever known. 

That’s the real masterpiece, I think.

*****

Daisy and me in the Tampa airport

BOOKS THAT MATTER AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM

Michele E. Reisinger

4 comments

January 14, 2024

I’m not much for New Year’s resolutions, but I do like the idea of resets and fresh starts. In that spirit, I’m trying something a little different this year, sharing not only stories about books that matter to me, but those that matter to my reader friends, an occasional series I’m calling BOOKS THAT MATTER AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM. 

Why this, now?

Three reasons.

Actually, four.

More on that, later.

First, what IS a book that matters? 

Answers to that question are as varied as my fellow bibliophiles. To me, it’s a book that STICKS, a book that STAYS IN MY HEART. It REWIRES MY BRAIN, helps me to MORE FULLY UNDERSTAND myself and my world. It SHIFTS MY PERSPECTIVE, maybe slightly but always measurably, enabling me to EVOLVE and ACT. CREATE, rather than destroy.

They are the books that I return to, the ones I keep on my physical and mental bookshelves. Reading their titles is a way to read me.

I recently enjoyed a brief conversation about such topics with one of my Facebook friends and former students, Erika Green, who had commented on one of my posts depicting a donation I’d made to a Little Free Library. An avid reader–she challenged herself to read fifty books last year and read 148!!!–Erika rarely keeps her books, but made an exception for one we’d both enjoyed, The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. She explained, ‘I don’t keep many of my books anymore unless I KNOW I’m going to re-read them, [and that book] went immediately on the keep shelf. My 8 and 11-year-olds asked me what it was about and want me to read it to them, too.’ I smiled and gave her a thumbs up, recalling similar happy memories with my own (now grown) children.

So that’s reason one for this, now. I am nourished not only by books themselves, but also by connections with my reader friends, and I want to celebrate and share that communion. Sadly, too many of us have forgotten how to talk to strangers. We demonize difference. We define those who don’t share our viewpoints as our enemies, deserving scorn and in extreme cases, annihilation.

That’s reason two. A lifetime of reading and a thirty-one year career in education have demonstrated over and over and over again the power of story to forge connections among former strangers. And by story, I don’t mean only fiction. I mean all stories, regardless of genre. Essays, of course. Even poetry and plays. That awareness echoes in the mission statement of StoryCorps, an independent non-profit that actively curates Americans’ lived stories rather than censors them because its founders are ‘committed to the idea that everyone has an important story to tell and that everyone’s story matters.’

That’s reason three, some of which I discussed in my October post. I am deeply troubled by the steady assault on libraries and schools and the false claims that books are somehow being used to weaponize and corrupt impressionable minds. I want to participate in that conversation by introducing you to some of the best people I know, fellow bibliophiles.  

Beginning in March, you’ll hear from members of my writing community and reading groups, from my former colleagues and students. They’ll share their definitions of books that matter, as well as personal stories about lives enriched by reading, by their relationships with the transformative worlds of story. And of course they’ll share titles of specific books that matter to them, though–spoiler alert–our lists rarely synchronize.

That’s part of the fun, I think, and I hope you’ll join us.

You’ll recall I mentioned four reasons.

Here, right now, is my most important one, and the person to whom I’m dedicating this series:

Christmas Eve, 1977

In the above photograph, our mother reads Twas the Night Before Christmas to my siblings and me. That’s ten-year-old me on the hearth beside my younger brother and reading over Mom’s shoulder. My mother Helen and I are close but not confidantes. We are very different people with very different personalities and preferences, habits and histories. Yet books are our native language, allowing us to communicate when life, work, and geography have diverged our paths. She is my first teacher, my first reader, and my life would have been very different had she not nourished and encouraged my bookworm tendencies.

As I write, she lies in a Florida hospital, where she’s been since a few days before Christmas, the fourth hospitalization in 2023, and now the first of 2024. Each stay has become increasingly lengthy, increasingly difficult, and now she can neither see to read nor concentrate on audiobooks. I’ve offered to read to her over the phone, from my home in Pennsylvania, but each time she’s refused. Maybe next time, she said, she’ll be up for it. Now, however, she can’t answer her phone. She’s forgotten how it works, forgotten how to speak.

Much of the impetus for embarking on this series comes from witnessing her decline. I’m flying to see her Wednesday. I hope I make it there on time.

Because I know the ending to her story, and I am not yet ready to read it.

But someday I will honor it–honor her–by sharing it.

I READ CEMETERIES LIKE BOOKS

Michele E. Reisinger

1 comment

December 2, 2023

Death terrifies me, yet I read cemeteries like books.

Each graveyard is like a library. Each stone, a chapter in its collection. My imagination resurrects their dead, gives them flesh and features. A voice. I am no vampire, yet their stories nourish my soul.

My fascination began in 1976, with the cemetery around the corner from my house in Dauphin, Pennsylvania. Sometimes nine-year-old me walked there, sometimes I rode my green banana seat bike, cutting through the poplars lining our backyard through the neighbors’ lawns to Charles then Floral Lane, all the way to where pavement became a dirt road slicing the old growth woods within which a drug-dealing, child-eating murderer resided.

That last bit we children made up from scraps of overheard teenage gossip and the eerie lights and noises rising from the forest’s Halloween enchantments. I never trick-or-treated down that road.

Strangely, however, its cemetery neighbor never frightened me. 

Maybe because I never visited it at night (I’m not THAT brave). Maybe because I didn’t really understand what dead meant. Everyone I knew was alive. Literally, of course. Corporeally. But also metaphorically, in the factual and fictionalized stories that were told about them. My imagination conjured characters from their pages, so of course they were as ‘real’ as people populating my physical world. In the months approaching America’s Bicentennial, I’d read Johnny Tremain several times, and I’d sung Yankee Doodle in Middle Paxton’s school pageant, flag waving, while costumed in my red, white, and blue Little House bonnet. Imagine my delight then, to discover not one but over a dozen tombstones commemorating local Revolutionary War heroes.

Since then, of course, I’ve lost too many colleagues and classmates, too many family members and friends. Cemeteries resonate much differently now, yet still I wander their pathways. Searching, reading. Trying to understand.

Recently, I spent solitary hours of a New England road trip doing just that in Salem’s  Charter Street Cemetery and its adjacent Witch Trials Memorial. Summer had come late to Massachusetts—90+ degrees in September—and although we had traveled New England years ago, this was my husband’s and my first visit to Salem.

Day one, we walked miles exploring the village’s infamous history. Day two, we logged several more miles exploring its western shore, including the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, more famously known as the setting of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. 

While the mansion stands where it was constructed in 1668, the property’s other five buildings were relocated from throughout Salem as the mansion transitioned from a private residence to a national historic district. On our morning tour, our guide had explained that in the early 1800s, Nathaniel Hawthorne would frequently visit his much older cousin Susanna Ingersoll, who regaled him with stories of their shared history, as well as her home’s architectural metamorphosis. In Hawthorne’s lifetime, the house lacked its now famous gables, as they had been removed by a previous owner who loathed its gothic silhouette.

Since then, the mansion has not only been restored, it’s been adapted. Caroline Emmerton, who purchased the residence in 1908 intending, in part, to preserve its legacy by converting it to a museum, recognized that much of its attraction lay in its connection to Hawthorne’s novel. Thus, the additions of Hepzibah’s penny store and the secret stairs hidden behind the dining room hearth, two features the original home never contained. Like a weaver at his loom, our guide alternately entwined and unraveled the threads of fact and fiction’s interconnected past, ultimately creating a tapestry that illuminated  Hawthorne the writer and man. Haunted by an unrepentant ancestor’s role as judge in Salem’s bloody witch trials, his life and fiction strived to answer questions his cousin’s recollections could not: 

Must we repeat familial and historical mistakes, or can we learn from them and act to improve our futures? 

The Turner-Ingersoll mansion, aka The House of the Seven Gables

Such questions haunted me that day as well, so I bought a copy of Hawthorne’s novel and headed to the Witch Trials Memorial, while my husband returned to the hotel to literally chill.  

As I approached the memorial’s granite boundary, a weak breeze rustled the surrounding leafy canopies but provided no relief. A forecasted cold front had yet to manifest, and despite thin, gray clouds, the heat had become nearly unbearable, the humidity steaming like a stove pot. Locust trees within its grassy middle offered welcome shade, but fewer than a dozen visitors had crossed the memorial’s stony threshold to where they beckoned. Most who did were grouped in the far left corner listening to a tour guide and village native share his aversion to his hometown’s touristy commercialism. I think it’s important to take a few minutes to recall that people died here, he told them. Innocent people were murdered.

Reading the threshold’s interrupted benediction, I nodded. 

Twenty, to be exact. 

Nineteen of them hanged, one of them pressed to death by stones. Five more innocents died in prison awaiting trial. Rebecca Nurse, at whose stone bench I stood for several minutes, had been initially acquitted by her jury. However, confronted by the jeers and contempt of spectators attending her June 1692 trial, they returned to their deliberations and this time returned a guilty verdict. Two weeks later, the 71-year-old grandmother and mother of eight was executed, hanged on what became known as Gallows Hill. In October, Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor William Phips ordered the trials’ cessation and the release of approximately 150 accused still imprisoned in Salem’s inhumane dungeon jails. 

His wife, you see, had been recently accused of witchcraft.

The threshold to Salem’s Witch Trials Memorial, above. Rebecca Nurse’s bench, below, lies to the left.

Exiting the memorial, I crossed to the cemetery’s entrance, where an attendant offered paper maps and answers to any questions my contemplation of its grounds afforded. I thanked him, then circled right, avoiding the flow of visitors gravitating toward the clockwise path. Several yards ahead, a familiar black and white checked blouse meandered among a cluster of tilted tombstones and what appeared to be a mausoleum. It was the woman from the morning’s mansion tour. She’d seemed as  intrigued as I by the intersection between fiction and historical record and likewise had peppered our guide with questions, eagerly darting ahead of me through the hidden entrance to the narrow attic stairs. This would be my room if I lived here, I told her as we gazed through a gabled window to the harbor and grounds below. Now here she was again, wandering Salem’s graveyard. 

Established in 1637, the now National Historic Landmark was reopened in 2021 following a years-long restoration of and improvements to its grounds and several tombstones. Strict instructions for ensuring its continued preservation greet contemporary visitors, including Stick to the Path and Look, but Do Not Touch. A deceptively easy admonition, because unlike more modern graveyards–uniform tombstones and gridded plots–Charter Street’s hodgepodge markers are irregularly spaced, irregularly oriented, some of their faces turned away from their neighbors’ and mine as if engaged in cosmic hide-n-seek. Likewise, the ravages of time and weather have smudged and frequently erased the carvings on softer, older headstones, rendering their inscriptions impossible to discern. 

Nonetheless, I read what I could, discovering such notables as Mayflower Pilgrim Thomas More and witch trials judge Col. John Hathorne, author Nathaniel’s great-great grandfather.  However, like most graveyards, most of those buried within its 1.47 acres were ordinary people like you and like me. Someone’s child, someone’s spouse, living and working until one day they didn’t, leaving on this side of the soil those of us who somehow must go on.

Until, of course, death calls us to join them.   

I settled on a bench, prolonging my necessary departure. From its perspective, I could see the entire cemetery and the memorial beyond. Few visitors remained within. The sky had darkened, its earlier smooth gray slate replaced by herniated purples, its breeze no longer stultifying but cold and pimpling the flesh of my forearms. Even the trees seemed to shiver, anticipating rain. I wondered how long they’d stood witness, how much longer they’d remain upright.

Standing, I crossed to the attendant. I had questions, and he promised to give me answers.

A lifetime spent reading cemeteries has taught me that, like memorials, they reveal at least as much about their living as their dead.

Even omissions tell a story.  Consider, as I did, a child’s grave marked only with their given name, their birth and death years identical, their parents’ stones like arms on either side.

I know you can read that story. I know you know how absence feels. Omissions form the foundation upon which truth must rest.

As I’d suspected, the attendant told me none of the murdered twenty are buried within Charter Street. In fact, none of the murdered were even Salem residents but lived in outlying villages and farms. Most likely their bodies were retrieved by family who, perhaps obscured by nightfall, buried them in unmarked graves somewhere on their homesteads rather than risk further retribution.

We’ll probably never know.

Nor will we ever know the identities of those who lie beneath the graveyard’s blank stone markers. While some of them are documented in early 1900s photographs, the attendant told me, many are not. Those inscriptions are lost to time and memory, as are the hopes and dreams–and failings–of those whom stone itself failed to immortalize.

Perhaps you wonder, Why does that even matter? What point is there in wondering  about the so-long-dead and gone?

I say, Because their histories reflect on our present. 

Because someday, our present will be tomorrow’s history, our tombstones a kind of portal through which our legacies travel. 

Because legacies are like themes–the meanings inherent in both stories and in life– and are created not only by the visible but by the buried. By the friction between what should be there yet isn’t, and the understanding that arises through our quests to reunite them, allowing us to see both our individual significance in humanity’s story and our opportunities to impact its arc. 

The dilemma, of course, lies in how we choose to act on those opportunities. 

You see, it’s not the death of our bodies that terrifies me. I know none of us are getting out of here alive. 

I’m  terrified by the death of our souls. Of whatever you want to call the universal light within our human consciousness that prompts us to be our better selves. So much of what I see in our world celebrates our baser tendencies–Ignorance. Greed. Self-interest. They couple with hatred, birthing evil, and I wonder, In such an ugly world, why bother striving, why bother caring when humanity seems hellbent on its own destruction?

Reading cemeteries helps me keep my better self alive. 

They tell me stories not only of endings, but beginnings. Stories of good versus evil. Hope versus despair. They remind me that I am not alone. That my actions have power. Influence. Impact.  Even inaction alters history. Mine. Yours. Ours. Each choice to confront or collaborate with evil inextricably binds us in ways far beyond our immediate capacity to know and understand.

Barely twenty years after her death, Rebecca Nurse was the first of those convicted to be formally exonerated. Three hundred years later, the Witch Trials Memorial was dedicated by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Weisel. And just last year, August 2022, Massachusetts formally exonerated Elizabeth Johnson Jr., the last of Salem’s falsely condemned, following the efforts of eighth-grade civics teacher Carrie LaPierre and her students.

Col. Hathorne must be rolling in his grave to be thus thwarted.

Dauphin, Pennsylvania, cemetery markers
The stone marker mapping some of Charter Street’s graves

As I finished speaking with the Charter Street attendant, our phones shrilled with a National Weather Service alert. The storm had intensified, its wind and lightning potentially life-threatening, and anyone in its path was urged to take cover. I power walked the mile or so to our hotel and arrived just as the skies burst. However, despite the forecast’s promised fury, by the time I exited the elevator at the fourth floor, the storm had all but passed, leaving no more damage than a few leaves skittering among the sidewalk puddles. Husband and I showered then changed for dinner, walking hand in hand to an Italian restaurant we’d seen earlier, a few blocks away. 

How’s your book, he asked me afterwards, college halftime catastrophizing on the flatscreen.

Twilight winked through our floor to ceiling window walls and illuminated foot traffic crossing Artists’ Row to Essex Street’s pedestrian mall. Sinking into a fat orange armchair, I opened the hardback on my lap.

I’ll let you know, I said, turning to the preface.

I wanted to binge, but I savored, reading through chapter one that night, then bookmarking my stops as we continued our trip through Maine and New Hampshire. Through Vermont and back to Pennsylvania, where I finished a few nights after our return home. 

There are some books that speak to the child you were. Some that speak to the adult you hope to be. 

Gables, for me, is the latter. 

Not merely because of the story within its pages–Its prose can be convoluted, its pacing tortuously slow. 

Rather, because the fictional story within its pages continues the factual story without–The House of the Seven Gables isn’t only about Maule’s execution and Hepzibah, about whether Phoebe will wither among the mansion’s shadows or dispel them. It’s about Hawthorne asking and answering questions much like those I asked myself while reading the Charter Street Cemetery. It’s about Hawthorne sharing his conclusions with the universe, about his trying to affect its trajectory for the better.

Not perfectly, perhaps. Not definitively. The novel’s perspective, like its author’s, can seem dated to contemporary audiences, and Hawthorne the man was likewise an imperfect creature.

Yet authorial intentionality notwithstanding, he could have written a different book. He could have written a different ending. He didn’t, however. He wrote this book with this ending and thereby changed our conversations–our records–about one of the ugliest chapters in American history. History isn’t destiny, his novel suggests. We can do better, and we must. 

The woman in the checked shirt seemed to agree. 

Our paths had crossed again, beyond the Peele family lot and Governor Simon Bradstreet’s tomb, and we chatted a bit more. Like me, she had temporarily abandoned her traveling companion to reckon with the village’s ghosts and to some extent, her own. 

I never learned her name. I never gave her mine. 

Yet, we both smiled to have discovered a kindred spirit so unexpectedly, so very far from home. 

Using a wooden model, our guide dismantles and reassembles the mansion to demonstrate its metamorphosis. The woman in the checked shirt stands between us.

*****

I usually post the first Saturday of each month.

NEXT UP: The first in an occasional series on BOOKS THAT MATTER, including conversations with reader friends about the books they cannot live without.

And later in 2024: HARRY POTTER AND THE CULTURE OF ERASURE

Thanks for reading 🙂

BANNED BOOKS, MOTHER GOOSE, AND THE MONSTER THAT SWALLOWED MY MOM

Michele E. Reisinger

5 comments

October 7, 2023

In my earliest memory, I sit on my mother’s lap as she reads Mother Goose. Wait here, she says, sliding me onto the couch before standing. I’ll be right back. 

Sunset stripes the room with shadow monsters, the darkest one yawning in a corner. It swallows her whole. Feet, legs, body, crown. She is there and then she isn’t, which frightens me. But I am a good girl, so I wait like she told me. I press my nose to the pictures. I trace the squiggly black lines with one finger. My finger does not work like hers. Hers magicks squiggles into sounds, sounds into words. Mine merely smudges the page. 

Tick, tick, tick, the clock says, and still she does not appear. I bang my feet. I call her name. She promised to tell me a story, but she stopped in the middle and now I am not frightened but mad. How will I ever learn what happens?

I am 18 months old. 

Literature, quite frankly, saved my life.

Mine was not an extravagant childhood, but thanks to my mother I always had books. 

Library books, mainly, but acquiring them was an adventure, baby brother tucked in his coach, I grasping its frame and tromping Torresdale Avenue to a red brick kingdom. Climbing its steps was like climbing a mountain, but I was not a baby. I was three, and I could read. I could push its doors open (almost) by myself. Later, when I turned six and we left Philadelphia for Dauphin, the local library was housed 20 car minutes away in Colonial Park Mall, our trips sandwiched between stops at Pathmark or Hills, sometimes the doctor’s, the now five of us kids piled into our orange and brown station wagon. Time was money, and money was tight.

But sometimes, my mother found a little extra for book fair paperbacks. I would pour over Scholastic order forms, desperate to stretch my dollars, wishing my siblings would share their allotments. They didn’t read, not like I did. They bought tri-colored pens and boy band posters–quickly broken, quickly trashed–whereas I, I needed my books.   

Engrossed in their magic, at recess I curled on icy concrete sills to read, oblivious to cold, to kickballs and jump ropes slapping the rutted macadam.  I stayed up past bedtime reading, annoying my big sister. I tucked books in bathroom cabinets and claimed a stomach ache so I could read instead of doing my chores, annoying everyone. The worst punishment ever?  Taking away my reading privileges. My mother did that to me exactly one time in third grade, after she’d gifted me a subscription to Nancy Drew. I was a good kid, yes, but not perfect, and must have broken who knows what rule. I broke another when I sneaked my newly arrived book from her dresser before catching the school bus and reading behind opened textbooks until THE END on the return bus home.

The first–but certainly not the last–time I ever binged. 

The first–and definitely last–time I was ever without a book.

Teenage me read my mother’s magazines and romances, she read my Agatha Christie. Only twice did she censor my selections. The first time, when I was twelve and we evacuated during the TMI nuclear disaster. The second, when I was 33 and reading Harry Potter to my five-year-old son.

Nor did anyone else censor me. Not my teachers, not my librarians. Rather, they helped me find books. They made recommendations. They encouraged me to read not only beyond my grade, but beyond my experience and imagination. That’s how I discovered not just stories, but literature, and literature, quite frankly, saved my life.

Hyperbole? No.

Because mine was also not a safe childhood, but thanks to my books I always had an out. Books gave me answers, alternatives.

Hope.

While my father raged, I escaped into stories. I world-hopped and time-traveled. I dreamed and I planned. I learned to step outside of myself, outside of my geography. My era. Eventually, finally, I escaped in real life. I attended college, then grad school. I began a thirty-one-year career in education. I married and had two children.

And I kept reading. Essays and poetry. History, drama, fiction. Whereas high school AP had introduced me to the primarily Western canon, university and reader friends introduced me to everyone else. Everyone else taught me more than I could have ever learned on my own.

I learned I am unique, yet like so many others. I learned to celebrate that friction.

I learned even adults can be wrong. I learned how to check.

I learned how to think for myself and how to ask for help. I learned to distinguish their difference.

I learned that what you read isn’t nearly as important as how you read it– How you use it to create something new. Bold. Transformative. 

Beautiful.

Aside from love, there is no greater magic.

That philosophy grounded my teaching. 

That’s why my heart cracks every time I discover another book challenge, another book ban. Particularly by those who haven’t even read the book, who not only reject any challenge to their own worldview but who demand others conform to it. Like my mother’s pastor, who warned his congregation of Harry Potter’s evil. He had never even read one of its then-four books but based his judgment on scuttlebutt and lies, which my mother repeated to me as gospel even though she too had never read word one. (I’ll be chatting more about that in a future post.)

You see, I learned that ignorance is a yawning, gulping shadow like the one from my infancy, swallowing not only the individual but those in its path. I didn’t know that then, of course. Then, I knew only that I needed to hear the whole story, which meant I needed to yell at the shadow, demand it return my mother, and demand she finish what she started.

So I did. 

*****

Memory, of course, can be unreliable. 

However, years later when I recalled that story, my mother confirmed its accuracy. The room I described was our apartment’s living room. The dark corner, the basement doorway. She’d been gone mere minutes, switching a load of clothes from the washer, and hurried upstairs when I tottered too close to the rickety steps. She scolded me, then drew me back to the couch to finish reading. Neither of us remembered which story rhyme, but we agreed I couldn’t have been any older than eighteen months, as we moved farther up the avenue shortly thereafter, to a rowhome whose upper windows framed the Tacony-Palmyra drawbridge. I was terrified of that bridge. That bridge gobbled trucks and spat smoke-belching ships. I scrunched my eyes shut whenever I was forced to cross it.

Nearly twenty years later–newly married, newly employed–I returned to the city of my birth and drove that bridge almost twice daily, for 31 school years.

And nearly 54 years later, I still have my Mother Goose. I read it to my own babies, but they didn’t enjoy it as much as I had. He preferred Alfie. She, Madeline. Eventually, I packed Mother Goose into a box, the box into the basement. As I wrote this, I tried and failed to find her. Instead, I found five more Nancy Drews, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and an Emily Dickinson collection, all of which I carried upstairs to my library to be shelved. My husband shook his head and told me I should stop buying books, I have no more room.

I told him, I will always have room. 

And I will always keep looking for Mother Goose.

I’ve saved her a space right there, next to Nancy.

*****

I usually post the first Saturday of each month.

NEXT UP,

November 4th: CEMETERIES, SECOND CHANCES, AND MY FIRST EVER VISIT TO SALEM 

December 2nd: TEN BOOKS THAT CHANGED ME FOREVER

And coming up in 2024: HARRY POTTER AND THE CULTURE OF ERASURE, plus conversations with reader friends about the books they cannot live without.

Thanks for reading 🙂

THE WORLD’S GREATEST LIE: On Five-Year Letters & Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist

Michele E. Reisinger

5 comments

July 8, 2023

(WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.)

I wish I could remember her name.

Tallish, thin, with pixie-cropped gray hair and sky-blue eyes framed by glasses, she taught the gifted program (as it was then called) at Northside Elementary when I was in sixth grade. Once a week, she escorted me and a classmate down the hall where we played for hours within our small cohort. Now, such programs are called enrichment. Then, it felt like magic, with Missus (I’ll call her) cast as the fairy godmother and I, the ash-girl turned princess beneath her tutelage. 

And even though I never saw nor spoke to her again, until I graduated high school, come June she’d send me presents.

*****

In Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist, an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago longs to travel the world and, with his father’s blessing, begins a years-long journey to Egypt.  There, according to a gypsy woman’s interpretation of his recurring dream, treasure lies buried beneath the Pyramids, though its contents and value she cannot determine. This quest is Santiago’s Personal Legend, the thing he is destined to achieve. We are all born with such desires, the King of Salem explains early in the boy’s journey, yet most of us leave them undefined and unfilled.

Like millions of the novel’s international readers, I was captivated by the young protagonist’s outsized ambition, curiosity, and fearlessness. Although decades removed from his coming-of-age conflict, I recalled my own struggles toward adulthood and found that many of his challenges still resonated. 

They certainly resonated with my seniors, when I began teaching the book in 2011. Regardless of  whether they were natural or indifferent students, whether they were excited about or wary of graduating high school and entering the real world, most recognized that life offered no guarantees of happiness or success. Worse, “life” favored some more than others, and that, distracted by poor choices, poor habits, or poor friendships, they may have hobbled themselves. 

So how do you make a plan for your future when the odds seem stacked against you? 

Studying Santiago’s journey helped them evaluate and plan their own.

As he pursues his Legend, he befriends strangers and falls in love. He learns alchemy and the language of the world. He is also  lied to, robbed, kidnapped, threatened with death, abandoned, and beaten. He debates quitting his dream, returning home, remaining a shepherd. Contenting himself with the things he knows, the life he trusts. At least he tried, no one can begrudge him that.

No one, that is, except Santiago himself.

*****

Missus’ first gift arrived as seventh grade ended, a yellow-clasp envelope stuffed with assignments sixth-grade me had completed, along with a short note in which she wished me well and explained she’d be sending these missives every so often. Memory summons their mimeographed tang, their smudged purple faces,  and yet I can’t recall their exact contents nor what I did with them. I would read them and smile, remembering, and then I would forget about them, about her, until the next one arrived, not every year, but every so often, the last one coming as I prepared to graduate high school and major in journalism at Penn State. In that envelope, she’d enclosed a survey I’d taken upon entering the program, stating my interests and strengths. I want to go to college, I said. I want to be a writer.

How lovely to be reminded of where I’d been. 

How encouraging to be reminded of what I could become.

That was her gift, you see. Not the objects themselves, but the opportunity to reflect on my progress. To consider whether I’d become lost or was on the right path, and to adjust accordingly. 

What an incredibly simple, yet powerful tool. By senior year, I’d begun to understand Missus’ intent.

A few years and adjustments later, I became an English teacher rather than a journalist, and I struggled with a particularly difficult and disengaged student body. How do you encourage young people to strive toward a future they can’t even imagine, let alone articulate? I recalled the example Missus had set, and I  asked my September 7th-graders to imagine themselves in June. 

Write the letter your future selves would want to read, I said. 

June, I delivered their letters then asked them to write to their senior year selves. When I began teaching seniors, I asked them to do the same, promising to send their June letters five years after graduation. Few believed I would hold on to them for that long. Fewer still believed I would mail them. 

Until letters started arriving as promised. Until siblings and friends received theirs, and each new class started asking in September, When are we writing our letters? 

Someone’s going to read your letter, someone’s going to read your life.

What story do you want them to tell?

As Coehlo asserts in his Introduction, “The secret of life…is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.” So why do so many of us stay put when life has knocked us down, as if we’re waiting to be rescued? According to the king of Salem, we give up because we’ve fallen for “the world’s greatest lie…that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.”

In other words, we wrongly believe that if something is meant to be, it will be, with little to no effort on our parts, and we interpret obstacles as “proof” that the “something” we desire isn’t possible. Ask any successful person in any endeavor how they achieved their goals and they will all tell some version of the same story: 

Setting a goal is merely the first step. Destiny isn’t magic, and believing it will do the hard work for you is the fool’s path to certain failure. 

You also can’t do it alone. 

You need teachers.

And no, I don’t mean the ones in classrooms, though they can be.

The king calls them omens. People and events whose examples–good and bad–teach us how to achieve our goals, how to avoid distractions. We learn from them as we observe and interact, as we try and fail and try again. They are like stars, illuminating what we may not otherwise see. Encouraging us not only to STAND UP when we are knocked down, but to envision where we can be if we do.

Like The Alchemist, and like those letters. 

Before I retired from teaching last June, I introduced the letter unit to my last senior class. I reminded them of Santiago and what they discovered by evaluating his failures and successes. I encouraged them to review their goal cards they’d made in September and posted around our classroom. Then, I showed  them an empty manilla envelope marked like its predecessors. CLASS OF 2022, TO BE MAILED JUNE 2027.

A hush settled.

Some students frowned.

Others leaned in. 

Ohmygawd, someone said. We’ll be so old.

They laughed, because there’s one in every class, just as there’s always one who wants me to guarantee their letter will reach them.  

What do you do with them, they asked when I revealed the envelope marked RETURNED. Because while most of the letters arrive safely, some of them come back to me, their faces marred by yellow stickers. Undeliverable, they say. Or, no forwarding address. 

I bet you throw them away, someone else said. I would.

No, I said. I never throw away returned letters.  I try to locate their writers. Social media helps, so do my students. I’ve had former students email with their new addresses, others pop in with updates on themselves or a classmate. Once, I found someone after eleven years. 

But what if you can’t find them? What if they’re, you know… dead? 

What they really meant was, Us. What they really meant was, I.

Few ever laugh at those questions. 

Because sometimes, yes, the writer has died. Sometimes predictably, sometimes unexpectedly. Always, however, far too young. When that happens, I strive to be respectful. I reach out to the family or to someone close and ask, Is this letter something you want? What do you need me to do? Then I do it.

How many of you have ever received a letter in the mail, I asked as I distributed blank envelopes. A real letter, written by someone dear? When Missus sent me my letters over 40 years ago, people corresponded all the time.

No one raised their hand.

While some of them had been drafting their letters for months, some of them had no idea what to write. Fewer still knew how to address an envelope properly. I gave them guidelines but told them, Write whatever you want. This is your letter, not mine. I don’t read them. 

But someone will. Someone’s going to read your letter, someone’s going to read your life.

What story do you want them to tell?

*****

When I cleaned out my classroom, I brought their envelope home and placed it with five others, four marked with the year of their mailing, one marked RETURNED. A few weeks ago, I emptied one of the envelopes’ contents onto my home office desk.  

Class of 2018, it reads. To be mailed June 2023. 

As I’ve done hundreds of times before, I resecure the back of each letter and double-check the postage. I read each name and coax their faces into view, and I send a wish for them into the universe.  Serenity. Courage. Wisdom. 

I hope the universe delivers.

I haven’t thought about them in years, but as I deposit them into the mail slot of my local post office I remember where they sat third period. I recall their humor, their foibles, their strength. How they challenged me each and every day to be my best, to be what they needed. To be what they deserved.

I know I tried. I know I didn’t always get it right.  I know their examples still encourage me to stand and try again, even though I’m no longer in the classroom.

Have you ever written a five year letter to yourself, one of my honors students stopped writing to ask me. If not, you should.

They were my teachers then. They are my teachers still.

And always, they make me smile.

*****

So does Santiago find his treasure? Does he achieve his Personal Legend?

You should know me by now. You should know I’m going to tell you, Read the book.

I will tell you this, however. 

Santiago’s story is about more than travelling and treasure. There’s a reason Coelho called it The Alchemist.

In the book’s Epilogue, Santiago has returned to where his story began, at an abandoned church somewhere in Andalusia. He recalls the people he’s met, the tribulations he’s endured. He shouts at the sky, If you knew I’d end up back here, couldn’t you have spared me from suffering?

No, a voice answers, and Santiago smiles.

I’d like to think Missus is smiling, too.

*****

I usually post the first Saturday of each month.

Next up, August 5: Original flash fiction inspired by May’s recent StoryADay Challenge

Thanks for reading 🙂

IT MUST BE BY HIS DEATH: On Character Assassinations and the Lies We Tell, Part 2

Michele E. Reisinger

1 comment

June 3, 2023

Approximately two weeks after my mother-in-law was granny-napped and installed at her oldest daughter’s family-owned care home, her daughters arranged to escort their mother to her bank and lawyer’s office. Her son (their brother and my husband), who at the time was her POA and property caretaker, had been seen on numerous occasions stealing furniture and other belongings from the house, some of which he had burned in the side yard. There were allegations of a more serious nature, as well, including mail theft, mismanagement of funds, and elder abuse, and they intended to stop it, first by accessing their mother’s accounts and then by revoking the original POA and installing one of them in his place.

While traveling to their arranged meeting place, however, the middle daughter was hospitalized with appendicitis, which required the oldest one to follow through with their plans. Whether they had overestimated their powers of persuasion or underestimated their mother Millie’s (not her real name) stubbornness and distrust, the daughters were only partially successful. Millie insisted on meeting her representatives alone and, because she could at times sound perfectly fine and reasonable while conversing, her representatives agreed. The original POA was revoked, but a replacement was neither created nor approved and oversight of her accounts and home remained in limbo.

Afterwards, they drove to a neighbor with whom my mother-in-law had routinely entrusted her keys, the other set six hours away in my husband’s care. Millie wanted to see for herself the damage he had wrought, inventory the things he had stolen. 

Upon entering, however, both were aghast, dumbfounded by what they saw within. Oldest daughter tracked her mother’s meanderings as she looped through the house repeating, He didn’t touch nothing. He didn’t touch nothing.

The house was exactly as Mother left it, she told my husband later. As if she’d just gotten up and left it, intending to return.

He’d never stolen or mismanaged anything. Exactly as he had told them.

Many of us can be convinced lies are truth and act accordingly, spreading falsehoods and, sometimes, adding new ones to the mix. Even when all the evidence, all the facts, contradict those beliefs, we struggle and often fail to change our minds.

Why?

While Julius Caesar is based on historical events and, according to Frank Kermode, relies heavily on Plutarch’s Lives of Brutus, Caesar, and Antony, it is not a documentary. Rather, Shakespeare’s method in this and his other histories is “the double one of dramatizing an extensive historical narrative and achieving a sharper focus on the relevant political issues and personalities.”1 In other words, the playwright’s invention functions as a lens through which to investigate Elizabethan concerns and also, I would argue, contemporary ones.

That’s what I have always LOVED about literature, how a well-crafted story not only transports us to other times and places but allows us to live within them. Reading entertains, yes, but more importantly it enables us to experience others’ struggles vicariously and, having done so, more clearly understand our own lives and our shared world. 

So what can Brutus teach us?

In last month’s post, I suggested oldest sister’s argument with her hairdresser shared similarities with Brutus’ Act II, Scene 1 soliloquy wherein he justifies assassinating Caesar. I asked why he is convinced murder is his best–his only–option when he is reputed to be an honorable, noble man. As Act 1 reveals, part of the answer lies within his nature: He “[loves] the name of honor more than [he fears] death.” Part of it lies within his judgments: He erroneously ascribes to Cassius a similar motivation and thereby sets himself up to be manipulated by him. Cassius recognizes that Brutus’ “honorable mettle may be wrought from that it is disposed” and confesses in his own soliloquy that he has forged testimonials supporting Brutus over Caesar and will, obscured by nightfall and a portentous storm, throw them through Brutus’ windows. “For who so firm that cannot be seduced,” he muses.

Turns out, many of us are like Brutus, susceptible to those like Cassius.

No, I am not arguing we’re all capable of murder, nor that arguing with one’s hairdresser about politics is the equivalent of plotting an assassination.

Rather, I’m suggesting many of us can be convinced lies are truth and act accordingly, spreading falsehoods and, sometimes, adding new ones to the mix. Even when all the evidence, all the facts, contradict those beliefs, we struggle and often fail to change our minds. Millie’s daughters made just such mistakes in judgment when they believed, spread, and acted upon lies about their brother.

Why?

As part of the Apple News in Conversation podcast series Think Again, host Shumita Basu discussed those tendencies with author Malcolm Gladwell. According to Gladwell, we receive new information and experiences through the filter of what we know (or think we know) to be true. Revising those initial impressions can be difficult if not impossible for some of us, not only because as individuals we hate to look stupid, but because there is such an intense public stigma attached to being wrong. Particularly, he argues, in the political spectrum, wherein those who change their minds are labeled hypocrites or worse, their careers and reputations jeopardized.

Changing our minds becomes even more difficult when we only accept information that agrees with our viewpoints and reject that which does not. This confirmation bias creates a kind of idea echo chamber that amplifies extreme voices and claims, then worsens the divide between dissenting viewpoints.

In “That’s What You Think”2 Elizabeth Kolbert comments on that phenomenon, citing The Knowledge Illusion by cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Ferbach. “‘People,’” they say, “‘believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people….’ Where it gets us into trouble…is in the political domain. It’s one thing [for us] to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another…to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what [we’re] talking about.” Kolbert suggests further insight can be found in Denying to the Grave by psychiatrist Jack Gorman and public-health specialist Sara Gorman, his daughter, which “[cites]  research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure–a rush of dopamine–when processing information that supports their beliefs. ‘It feels good to “stick to our guns” even if we are wrong.’”

Does that mean there’s no hope for us? No way to bridge our differences? 

Whereas Kolbert’s article ends on a pessimistic note, Gladwell’s interview offers strategies to develop an intentional open-mindedness, starting by recognizing that people and circumstances change, that our collective knowledge evolves. 

Think about it this way: 

If our personalities remained fixed, we would be the same at age fifty as we were at age five. If our knowledge remained fixed, we would still recommend smoking to stay thin and whiskey to soothe an infant’s painful teething, common practices in my childhood. We wouldn’t have developed rocket ships or cell phones, electric cars or life-saving gene therapies.

Opinions can and should also adapt accordingly, especially when we’re trying to address shared problems. Once, humans believed the sun revolved around Earth, that disease was caused by demons and witches, that women  lacked the requisite intelligence to vote, that slavery was a just and necessary institution. 

Now we reject our forebears’ ignorance. Now we recognize the absurdity of such arguments. 

Now, can we please do that for ourselves?

As a novice teacher in 1991, I planned each lesson to the minute. I even wrote scripts, anticipating each and every question my students could possibly ask. I told you, remember, I DID NOT want to fail. I DID NOT want to look stupid.

LOL, as my former sophomores’ sophomores would now say. 

That model lasted a mere few days. Not because it was too much work, but because it didn’t work. 

It didn’t allow for the fact that we all had different learning styles.

We all brought unique backgrounds to the classroom. Unique perspectives and needs. 

Instead of fighting that awareness, I embraced it. 

I embraced them, and in so doing became a better teacher and human being than I could have otherwise done. I am forever grateful for their lessons. Forever grateful for their insights.

If only Millie’s daughters had done the same with their brother, I’d be writing a different story. 

*****

In March 2020, no one expected my mother-in-law to survive.

Nights, we visited her in the hospital. Days, my husband called his oldest sister to update her on their mother’s progress, and she updated the middle sister in turn.

They were good conversations. Open, honest. Sincere. While their relationship had never been easy, he wondered–hoped, perhaps–whether this time things might be different. Maybe this time, they could get it right. 

They didn’t. 

I may live to regret it, oldest sister told him. But if I have to pick, I’m going to pick [middle sister].

Mid-April, Millie was discharged and came to live in our home. By June, her mobility had improved, as had her swallowing, and even the rotation of in-home nursing had ended. She insisted she’d made a full recovery and had been clamoring to return home, six rural hours away. However, the damage to her vision and cognition was permanent and would most likely worsen over time, rather than improve. 

We had told her–the doctors and nurses had told her–that she might be cleared at some point for a supervised visit, but she would not be able to live independently. 

Nonetheless, she had talked herself into a miracle and was furious when none was forthcoming. 

Furious with me. Furious with my husband. 

TBIs can wreak terrible havoc with one’s personality and judgment. Hers certainly did so.

Later, we learned she’d been telling the most god-awful lies about us to anyone who would listen, anyone who might take her back home. 

Later, we learned she had told similar lies about the oldest daughter and her husband. 

In a letter the middle daughter wrote to Millie while in the care home, she cautioned her mother against those lies, not because they were lies BUT because saying the same thing about oldest daughter that she’d said about son wouldn’t look good if they ended up in court. 

We found that letter among Millie’s things after she passed, along with several opened pieces of our mail which the post office had erroneously forwarded to the care home. Instead of returning them to us unopened, the care home had given them to Millie. 

Middle sister was right about one thing. Ultimately, yes, they did head to court, as my husband needed to clean up the mess the three women had wrought. He’d made a promise to his father, you see, before his father passed. 

He promised to take care of his mother.

No matter what.

*****

In Julius Caesar, Brutus’ struggle evokes a sense of inevitability. Things don’t have to happen this way and yet they do–because Brutus adjusts neither his thinking nor his actions when confronted by evidence of his mistakes.  That, I believe, is his real tragic flaw.

The same is true of this story. This story was never going to end happily. 

For every lie told about my husband (and me) there is either no evidence to support it or plenty of evidence to refute it, including letters and texts written by Millie’s daughters themselves. That’s why the Orphan’s Court judge ruled in my husband’s favor, restoring the documents his mother established years before her fall. 

That, and Millie herself. 

When deposed by her court-ordered attorney, she could not recall the August meeting with her former lawyer. She could not recall revoking her POA,  nor of removing her son as her caretaker. In fact, she said, she would never do that.

It’s clear, my husband was told after the ruling. You’re the only one of her three children that she trusts. The neighbor to whom she’d given her keys? She’d also given him a note instructing him to allow no one into her house except herself…

And her son.

He has that note in his files.

And yet….

Millie’s daughters wanted to believe the worst of him because doing so made them look better by comparison. Doing so made them the victims in the family drama, not the villains.  That’s why their lies continued. After the ruling. After her passing. It didn’t have to be that way, and yet it was.

No wonder the hairdresser can’t get it right. 

No wonder we can’t get it right in our country. 

We can’t even get it right in our families.

And that’s the real tragedy.

*****

  1. “Julius Caesar” by Frank Kermode, pp. 1100-1104, The Riverside Shakespeare (1974).
  2. “That’s What You Think” by Elizabeth Kolbert, pp. 66–71, The New Yorker (February 27, 2017).

*****

I usually post the first Saturday of each month.

Next up, July 1st: THE WORLD’S GREATEST LIE, On 5-Year Letters and Paolo Coehlo’s The Alchemist

And coming August 5: Original flash fiction inspired by May’s recent StoryADay Challenge

Thanks for reading 🙂

IT MUST BE BY HIS DEATH: On Character Assassinations and the Lies We Tell

Michele E. Reisinger

1 comment

May 6, 2023

(part one)

At some point after the 2020 election, my husband’s oldest sister had to find a new hairdresser and was terribly upset. COVID restrictions had been somewhat recently lifted, and she’d been looking forward to her cut and color ritual, the meandering and soothing chitchat that typically accompanies such salon appointments. However, instead of the usual innocuous topics–families, movies, meals, vacations–the hairdresser talked politics non-stop. Despite months of speculation, investigation, and bipartisan evidence that the presidential election had been neither rigged nor stolen, the hairdresser remained convinced that the defeated candidate had actually won, repeatedly offering debunked and fallacious conspiracy theories to support their claims. 

She told my husband the story as an aside to one of their phone conversations about their mother’s care. Her retelling was peppered with f-bombs that carried across the room to where I sat, trying to read a book. She’d felt trapped, assaulted almost, by the virulence with which the hairdresser condemned those who disagreed with them, by their refusal to accept evidence that disproved their conclusions, and by their professed willingness to act on conjecture rather than truth. They couldn’t be reasoned with and she couldn’t justify continuing to patronize a business whose hate-filled vision ran counter to her own. She just did not understand how people could be like that.

I nearly dropped my own f-bomb, because that’s EXACTLY what she had done to my husband, when she and the middle sister conspired to granny-nap their mother.

Have you ever done something that later you really regretted?

Have you ever been talked into something really stupid?

Of course you have. Me, too.

*****

In Act II, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Brutus awaits dawn in his orchard, musing about joining those plotting Caesar’s assassination. While I’d read the play several times before, I first taught it in December 1990, as a UN-backed coalition of international forces prepared to defend against Saddam Hussein’s annexation of neighboring Kuwait. A TA in the University of Delaware’s English Department, I had taught ESL, remedial English, and Freshman Comp throughout my graduate program, but the convoluted requirements of public school certification mandated I student-teach a five-week Winterim. 

Thus, I found myself assigned to a cooperating teacher a few months shy of her retirement. Before taking over her sophomore classes, I observed from the back of the room as she lectured leaning against the chalkboard, arms crossed behind her back. She ignored her students’ questions, ignored their chatter. Ignored their spitballs missiling non-stop at her head, and come time for tests and quizzes, ignored the blatant, rampant cheating. Every class, every day.

To paraphrase the aforementioned oldest sister, what the effity eff?

I was dumbfounded.

Livid. 

Not with the students.

With the teacher. 

She was the adult, they were the kids. Sophomoric, by definition.

And she was stealing from them. Not money or things, but opportunity. Possibility. Theirs and ours. Recall please, that humanity benefits from an educated populace, not an ignorant one.

Good luck, she said when I stepped in. 

I should probably mention, I also had to teach a research paper unit and three units of vocabulary. 

Yikes. 

She expected me to fail.

I refused to. 

Not only for myself, though I do HATE to look stupid. 

I refused to fail for her–for our–students. 

But Shakespeare? Lordy.

In high school, I used to watch recorded BBC performances in the library while reading along, just so I could figure out WHAT was happening, let alone WHY it was happening and WHY it mattered. And I loved to read. English was my favorite subject. 

Fortunately, I had some pretty terrific teachers throughout my schooling, and I drew on what they’d modeled for me: Education isn’t merely the absorption and regurgitation of information, but rather the ongoing acquisition and development of critical thinking, communicating, and creative skills that enable us to navigate our shared world, regardless of discipline and post-secondary vocation. 

In other words, the complex becomes accessible and actionable when first made simple and relevant. 

So I focused and layered my units’ objectives. I determined what I wanted my kids to know and be able to do at the end of our time together, and then I worked backwards to locate my starting point. I asked them, Have you ever done something that later you really regretted? Have you ever been talked into something really stupid?

Of course they had. 

Of course YOU have. Me, too.

Now let’s discuss WHY. 

Brutus’ s Act II, Scene 1 speech is a soliloquy, a literary convention in which a character is alone on stage and we have direct, unfiltered access to his thoughts. To his version of truth. On first reading, it seems like he’s debating killing Caesar, but he isn’t. He’s already decided to act and is justifying that decision to himself.

Just look at not merely what he says but HOW he says it. His monologue begins with his conclusion that “It must be by his death,” and what follows lacks concrete, verifiable evidence to support that claim. Instead, he offers his  “reasons” in the conditional (would, could, may, might), a tense used to SPECULATE rather than REPORT on events. Brutus even discounts his own firsthand knowledge of Caesar’s character and admits he’s lying to himself, saying “since the quarrel will bear no color for the thing he is, fashion it thus.” In other words, he’s perfectly willing to MAKE THINGS UP if doing so will enable him to get what he, Brutus, wants. Even if that means murdering a man in cold blood. 

Okaaay, but WHY? 

What does he want and why does he want it? And what about all those other senators? Brutus doesn’t act alone. Cassius woos him. Casca flatters him. Dozens of senators join and execute the plan to murder Caesar which–SPOILER ALERT–precipitates the fall of the Roman Empire. The very thing they claim–alone and to each other–that they are trying to prevent.

WHY?

And HOW?

And while we’re on the subject, what does any of this have to do with hairdressers and granny-napping? With anything really, in the right here and now?

Come back again next month and I’ll tell you.

*****

May means the STORYADAY writing challenge, which I’ve participated in since 2019. As I write this, it’s Day 5 and Story 5, though my rough drafts are more rough than story. Oh well! Revising is for June. Here are some links to stories I wrote to past STORYADAY prompts:

Ask and Ye Shall Receive

7/10/98, A Truish Story

Lesson Plans

I hope you find something you enjoy 🙂

Thanks for reading!

*****

I usually post the first Saturday of each month.

Next up, June 3rd: IT MUST BE BY HIS DEATH, Part 2

And coming July 1st: THE WORLD’S GREATEST LIE, On 5-Year Letters and Paolo Coehlo’s The Alchemist

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