Reviewed for Cholla Needles by Greg Gilbert
Sweet, simple, and profound.
Becoming Forest is a lovely little book, 234 pages. Its tone conveys a sense of reverence for the natural world without becoming strident, didactic, or saccharine. Its simplicity is that of a close observer, a narrator that is absorbed in the present moment. Its profundity is in what is being seen, the viewer’s inquiries, revelations, and conclusive sense of purpose. The book opens when a young woman who lives in Ireland, Aishling, receives a travel voucher from her grandmother, Greta, so that she can join her in Santa Barbara, California.
Greta’s husband – Aishling’s grandfather, Bran, has recently succumb to COVID-19. He had died in the same hospital where he’d worked for many years as a doctor providing palliative care to help free people from suffering. In her grandfather’s journal, Aisling reads about a “Vision Quest” he’d once made to the Bodhi Tree in India, the site of Buddha’s enlightenment. Also in the journal is a letter to her explaining that he had journeyed to India out of a deep concern over the climate crises, mass extinctions and the uncertainty that young people are inheriting. In the letter, he asks her to pass along to others a message of “deep security.” As a result, Aishling makes her own journey to the Bodhi Tree where she meets a young monk. They travel together and we accompany them. Their travels are revelatory.
Years later in 2050, Tara, Aisling’s daughter, travels from Ireland to be with her mother after the death of her father, the young monk Aisling had met thirty years ago. As with her great-grandfather and generations of women in her family, she too has become aware of the happiness and sense of fulfillment that can come with creating resilience wherever you are.
The structure of Becoming Forest is in many ways a Buddhist story of life cycles and awareness, and, appropriately, of our vast connections to and within the natural world, beliefs that are central to many ancient and indigenous cultures. At the center of the story is the tree of life. Tara recalls her father’s words. “‘Think about it: Catholics have St. Peter’s Square, Jews have Jerusalem, Muslims have Mecca, and Buddhists’ he paused, and then said with a grin, ‘What do we have? A tree!”
Becoming Forest reminds us that all trees are the BodhiTree and, by extension, that we are all are part of a universal web of being.
The book is illustrated with Zen brush paintings by Tess Leak. Her YouTube site explores loss through the creation of haiku.
To learn more about Michael Kearney and his work, click here to visit his site.
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High
Desert Elegy by Michael G. Vail
Reviewed by John Krieg
This
collection of 23 short stories and 12 poems has been written by a man who has
obviously lived a lot of life. He
realizes that what the desert and the human condition have most in common is
the ability to endure if either is to survive.
Vail sets the tone for this harsh stark environment in the very first
paragraph of his very first story of the same title as the overall book’s
title:
On
the Sunday that Maria committed suicide, the morning sun gradually ascended
into the cloudless azure sky, its blinding light filling the dining room’s wide
picture windows. Sprawling across a
prominent ridge top, the handsome house overlooked the little town of Last
Chance. It huddled in the middle of the
valley floor, surrounded by a vast expanse of desolation and creosote bushes (p. 1).
Many
of the stories are set in the late sixties and early seventies; what many of us
boomers consider to be the golden age of rock n’ roll. The author graduated high school in 1970 with
the scars left by the social upheavals of the Robert F. Kennedy and Martin
Luther King assassinations still festering in the national psyche while
opposition to the Vietnam “conflict” was still raging, and some of his pieces speak
of the tenor of those times. Consider that
what was to become the boomer generation thought that they had the blueprint
for a better world resting in their hands with the success of Woodstock in August
of 1969, only to have it laid riven at Altamont in December of that same year. Idealism and cynicism vied for the soul of the
youth of America, and after the Kent State shootings in May of 1970 cynicism seemed
to win out while the corruption of the Nixon Administration drove the last nail
in idealism’s coffin.
There
are ample gritty slices of life available here, not the standard fare of the rude,
crude, and lewd too often available from Bukowski wannabes, but instead, nuanced
conflicted character sketches portrayed with a poet’s sensitivity. Vail provides the pictures’ outline, and the
reader can fill in the colors, or lack thereof.
In
Happy Land, set in June of 1970, a teenage girl’s family
falls on hard times just as she is about to begin college forcing her to land a
job at an amusement park’s resort hotel where she becomes embroiled in scheme
to clean rooms for trysts between prostitutes and their john’s whereby she is
given cash with no questions asked for her services and her silence. But her naivety
and sense of morality well up inside of her causing her to question her part in
the whole sordid affair.
I
didn’t think much about the immorality of the shenanigans that were going on until
a week later. I entered a room right
after the hooker and her john had left.
Setting in plain sight on a nightstand next to the unmade bed and its
dirty sheets was a brown leather wallet.
I picked it up, intending to turn it in at lost and found. But first I rifled through its contents. My curiosity had gotten the best of me. Perhaps there was something in the wallet that
would give me a clue as to what kind of man paid for sex with a stranger…
The
next thing I found made me wish I hadn’t looked in the wallet. It was a family portrait, obviously snapped
by a professional photographer. Smiling
at the camera was Eddy. At his side sat
a strikingly beautiful young woman with long, curly red hair and, between them,
a darling little towheaded boy, perhaps five years old.
Why
would someone with all of this sneak off to meet a prostitute? I couldn’t get my head around it (p. 84).
One of life’s most dependable truth’s is that when most people reach adulthood, or at least sexual maturity, very few of them change after that. This point is hammered home in the book’s longest and most convoluted story entitled: Too Many Empty Hearts. A man who is cheating on his wife becomes involved in the murder of a woman that he is having casual sex with when her new boyfriend, a short-tempered biker type, confronts the two of them at her apartment, and in a fit of rage stabs her to death. The biker runs off and gets away to Mexico while the unlucky man is seen running from her apartment in an effort to seek help, but instead is charged with the murder. Just when it looks like he will be convicted his fast-thinking attorney digs up some photographs that tie the biker and the woman together at least to the point of instilling that all-important shadow of a doubt in minds of the jurors, and he is set free. On November 15th he assures his wife, who stood by him through the whole ordeal, that he would remain true blue from here on out. But a leopard famously doesn’t change its spots, and while standing in the unemployment line on December 1st he meets an attractive woman and nobly assists her through the induction process.
After
he explained the process and gotten her into the correct line, they went their
separate ways. But an hour later, they
happened to run into one another again as both left the building.
“Why not? Now that I’m unemployed, I don’t have any place I need to be.”…
“Should we get another round?” he said.
“My place isn’t far from here,” she said.” “Why don’t we go there?”
“I like that idea,” he said (p. 141).
There
it was; motive and opportunity all tied up in a tidy little bow. A leopard doesn’t change its spots.
In
real life Vail divides his time between California’s coastal communities and
the high desert, but his stories seem more centered in and descriptive of the desert. There are rock strewn hillsides, cactuses, wide
open spaces, blistering heat, frigid cold nights, rattlesnakes, and surrealistically,
in October of 2016, Sir Paul McCartney holds an impromptu concert in a local’s
bar in Pioneertown.Zany and eccentric
and oftentimes lyrical High Desert
Elegy is a fast-reading romp across the arc of a well-lived life, and
Michael G. Vail didn’t miss much of it in his observations which he generously
shares with his readers. In all, an exhilarating
and wild ride down a high desert highway with no end to the horizon.
And
then there’s the poetry:
Then
the
Howling
stopped
As
quickly as
It
started
And
the desert
Fell
too lonely
Once
again (p. 169).
There
is something about the desert, that’s for sure, and this book celebrates it and
the fact that nothing could ever completely explain it. That’s the best part.
Click here to purchase on-line
Laying Stone is a beautiful collection of full color art and poetry by Bonnie Bostrom. The large format of this book allows you to see the brushstrokes of the paint along the details of the images within her words and world. Bonnie Bostrom is the author of nine other books, The Way Showers, Women Facing Retirement: A Time For Self-Reflection, Quicksilver Dreams, Buddha Nature of The Southwest and Image and Word: A Dialectic, as well as Born Crazy, Love, Always Love, Duet and Uncommon Constants. She relishes time to paint and write as she lives happily in the Land of Enchantment with her husband, Jim. See more at bonniebostrom.com
This is not a review of David James Duncan’s Sun House, more a Writing Meditation of gratitude. Sun House is a looong booook, which is one of its many attributes.
The
novel’s length matters because it engulfs the reader in an immersive
experience, “immersive” as in sensory and extrasensory stimulation. Sun
House is rhythmic and embodies various forms of meditation, worship,
prayer, awe, reverence, and zazen. An oceanic rhythm carries the lives of the
characters as they experience duhkha, Sanskrit for suffering; discovery,
and moments of satori, the genuineness of each passing moment, the eternal NOW.
When
a boy’s mother dies, we embody his rage as he bicycles wildly through traffic.
When a young Jesuit descends into a crises of faith, we suffer with him. As
characters fall in love, the writing swells with their passion, becomes
romantic, hopeful, euphoric, and at times disillusioned. In chapter length
effusions of satori, Duncan surrenders his mindful prose to celebratory releases
that lift away from the page like sea mist. These are important rhythmic,
meditative elements in a book that is itself an experience. Think of breathing,
taking it in and releasing it, becoming lost in thinking and then releasing
your thoughts. Think of becoming enmeshed in the natural world, of being tested
by it, physically enduring its challenges, and then finding release in its
glaciated summits and healing waters.
In
his afterwards, the author explains that our divided world calls for
celebratory answers rather than ceaseless condemnations. Sun House is
rich in information about the earth, its dwindling gifts and enduring miracles.
The earth is as much a character as anyone in this epic story. Sun House
is a love song to the natural world. Duncan reveals the musicality and
interconnectedness in all things, wind, rain, and high altitude thermal ponds.
His writing sings of the music in dulcimers, folk singers, electric guitars,
human voices, and the natural world, all of it without cliché because his
writing is centered in the authentic experience.
The author gave 16 years of his life to creating this gift, and among my friends are those who have awaited his new book as though it were a visit from a long separated loved one. Sun House is a smart, funny book, one that satisfied my longing for the wit, humor, and earth loving reverence of Ruth Ozeki, Richard Powers, Charlotte McConaghy, Herman Hesse, TomRobbins, Kurt Vonnegut, Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder (ants and pebbles / In thethin loam), Thoreau, Rilke, and too many others to name here. Sun House is aname for the earth.
If you give yourself the gift of this book, you will be paying it forward for David James Duncan and all of us who yearn for a time of healing.
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This
book comes at you like a semitruck going the wrong way on the freeway. And Joe West is not about to hit the
brakes. In some ways reminiscent of
Bukowski, and in other ways reminiscent of Whitman, this story is shocking and
repulsive on the one hand and tender and touching on the other. Gritty and crass versus uplifting and
sensitive. The protagonist Frederick
Bickel is a master of caustic observations and a fountain of unexpected yet
hilarious descriptions. It’s been a long
time since I’ve read a novel this entertaining or this good. A slice of life account of blue-collar working
class-struggle that questions why anyone suffers through it when the payoff at
the end is always the same. An
exhilarating romp through the American
low life as it truly is.
By
the author’s own admission, and the protagonist’s constant personal beratements
we all learn early on that Freddie is not a nice person, is a class A fuck up,
and doesn’t much give two shits about anything except for getting high, drunk,
and laid; frequently all at the same time.
Freddie, who has just turned 50, is limping through life, and has come
to expect very little good to come from it.
He frequently intimates that he doesn’t care whether or not he lives or
dies, spends an inordinate amount of time contemplating suicide, and does as
little as possible to change his station in life. He works as a security guard at a high-rise
office building in downtown Saint Louis, Missouri and has little to look
forward to except for ogling twenty-something Sunday, a curvy stacked bombshell
who works as the receptionist on the rarified ninth floor, and engaging in
conversation with Thom, a homeless ex-radio deejay who inhabits a dumpster
outside the building. Sunday initially
won’t give him the time of day, while Thom has all the time in the world that
causes Freddie to find him endearing:
He
smells like wine and cigarettes, firewood smoke, McDonald’s
cheeseburgers with extra pickles, and chocolate pudding cups. Thom is what I imagine Christ was like. Just a good guy you could have a beer with,
who made you feel better without making you feel like shit for it. I cannot help but root for him. We are both born losers, just with different
jobs (p. 12).
While
Sunday rubs shoulders with the corporate muckety-mucks Freddie knows that she
may be in their world but she is not of their world. He and Sunday have a lot more in common than
she realizes.
There
is a thin line between Sunday up here and me downstairs, We are both merely needed, not
necessary. Someday we’ll both be replaced
by the next generation of pretty idiots.
A workforce of ambitionless, brainless, borderline alcoholics yearning
to have their lives predetermined for them by an all-knowing, all-powerful God
called America. Until then, we are just
hoping for the best and preparing for the worst (p.23).
A
third of the way through the narrative Freddie espouses his true feelings
towards what it’s like to be a cog in the machine that is corporate America:
The
corporate robots file into the lobby as they have programmed themselves to do
since getting hired. Everyone looks
disappointed to be here yet again. The
saddest people that I have ever seen leave this building are the retirees on
their last day. Two-thirds of their
lives comes to rest in a Banker’s Box accompanied by a sheet cake and a signed
card. There is no joy, no anticipation in
their eyes for a hard-won freedom as they shuffle towards the front doors
knowing they are never coming back inside (p. 73).
Freddie
meets Sunday’s mom Jerusalem when he helps her take some boxes out to their
waiting vehicle and mom immediately invites him to dinner. Here the heartbeat of the story begins to
thump as mom becomes revealed as a partier who revels in Freddie’s after dinner
pot stash and shortly thereafter gets Freddie into bed. It wasn’t very difficult on either count as
Freddie is adept at scoring all manner of drugs and is blessed with being a
sexual athlete capable of instantly achieving erections and occasionally experiencing
multiple orgasms. Sunday has a
seven-year-old son Octavius who Freddie takes a shine to. Soon Freddie is a fixture in their household,
and the drinking and drugging is such that Sunday unwittingly climbs into bed
with him and he unwittingly penetrates her while she’s half asleep thinking
that she is Jerusalem. He realizes his
mistake, as does an annoyed Sunday, but both remain quiet about it, and Jerusalem
remains clueless until Sunday turns up pregnant.
Freddie
is filled with remorse when Thom unexpectedly dies. He pays for a meager pauper’s funeral and as
it comes to a close, he questions his own existence through the lens of Thom’s
life:
…He
was looking for something that he couldn’t describe to anyone, but I figured it
was what most men are looking for: the meaning, the reason for it all. Why are we even willing to try and shovel the
shit life gives us all in the first place?
Who the fuck knows is all I ever got by going down the rabbit hole, be
it sober or tripping on psilocybin tea,
To
discover life is meaningless is to declare insanity. To admit this cosmic chess board we all move
upon is nothing but a figment of our collective imaginations, that there are no
rules, no God or grandparents waiting patiently for us when we die, is when the
thin line between civilization and chaos disappears (p. 114-115).
A
recently divorced and completely disgruntled mass shooter gets past Freddie one
day, makes it up to the fourth floor, opens fire, and kills his ex-wife. Freddie summons the courage to run towards
the danger, sees the man kneeling over his victim, sneaks up on him, and
severely strikes the man over the head with a fire extinguisher. Touted as a hero, he is given a $15,000
reward, and life is good. Easy living is
not the forte off Freddie Bickle and he finds a way to screw it all up when he
takes the two women to Las Vegas to get married as a threesome. Now the hero is reviled on social media and
shortly thereafter fired by the self-righteous office manager. Lost and
rudderless he finds another job but hates every second of it.
Redemption
of sorts occurs when Freddie wins a wrongful firing lawsuit and gets hired back and elevated from security
guard to receptionist. Sunday decides
that she doesn’t want to raise the baby and that she wants out of the threesome
relationship altogether. Now richer by $25,000.00,
Jerusalem and Freddie decide to give it a go at raising the baby when it
arrives and supporting Octavius in any way they can which they know is going to
be difficult when it’s discovered that he is autistic.
The
kid, though, is doing real good. I got
him into a private school for special needs children. His teachers have found a shitload of problems:
dyslexia, Autism, Add, and fucking depression.
How in the fuck can a little kid have depression? But it’s all good. These people take care of kids like him every
day, they even got degrees in college just so they could. Life never ceases to amaze me (p. 223).
From degenerate semi-drug addict and functional acholic to quasi-responsible step-grandaddy Freddie Bickle’s hero’s journey was rife with mistakes, fuckups, and misguided attempts at trying to help people so dysfunctional that they wouldn’t even help themselves. He went from not caring if he died to having a reason to live. At it’s core, this is a book about redemption, and it’s a fool’s errand trying to predict who is and who is not redeemable. Someone has to be open to the idea of it, and when they are, fate never ceases to amaze any of us.
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Reviewed by John Krieg
John Krieg has written many books. His recent book of five short novellas is entitled Zingers.
