La Conquistadora at the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, commonly known as Saint Francis Cathedral, at 131 Cathedral Place in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on November 11, 2019. Photo: © gnagel / Adobe Stock.

My first published piece was in a book referred to in my family as Touched by a Virgin. The book is a collection of testimonials by people who have been touched, healed, or otherwise interfered with by the Mother of God. I did not submit my piece for inclusion in this book. It might best be categorized as the kind of book a great-aunt might buy you for a confirmation gift, and that you never read but somehow never give away. It’s a Chicken Soup for the Soul: Mariolatry Edition.

I do not list this publication on my CV. In fact, maybe we can agree between us to keep the fact of its existence a secret.

When I was twenty-five, in graduate school studying fiction writing, my grandmother called me from Santa Fe to tell me that at Mass that morning, she’d met a writer. “A real writer,” she clarified, as I did not yet count as a real writer—to her, to myself, to anyone.

“Oh, was she nice,” my grandmother said. “I told her you wanted to be a writer, too.”

I didn’t think much of this. My grandmother is always meeting people. In a family full of introverts, my grandmother is the outlier. She favors bright colors—golds and magentas and pinks and reds—and loves a party. When I was in high school, spending summers with her, if we were out for dinner, she’d ostentatiously place her margarita on the table between us so I could take sips. If we were downtown together, in a shop or on the Plaza, in any kind of proximity to a good-looking guy my age, she’d nudge me forward to talk to him, then finally, in exasperation, strike up a conversation with him herself. She makes friends everywhere: on airplanes, at the grocery store, in public restrooms. Of course she’d befriended a new face at Mass.

My grandmother went on to say that she’d invited this real writer home for lunch, and had shown this real writer my “beautiful story” and that this real writer had asked to keep a copy of it. You can see where this is going, but I couldn’t. Read More

In 1954, the Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker met her life partner, Ernst Jandl, with whom she would live and collaborate for nearly half a century. In the wake of Jandl’s death, in 2000, she wrote a series of books documenting the swirl of her grief. Two of these memoirs have been translated by Alexander Booth and compiled as The Communicating Vessels, which was published by A Public Space Books earlier this month. A selection from one of the books, 2005’s And I Shook Myself a Beloved, appears below.

Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker at a public reading in Vienna, 1974. Photo: Wolfgang H. Wögerer, Wien, Austria. CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

In the end people are unconscious / so : when they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone, so Gertrude Stein, and my maternal grandmother had the habit of not being able to spend a lot of time in one place : at a tavern with her family she wanted to be at home, at home she complained about having to be at home and that no one came to visit, when someone came to visit she yearned to retire to her room or take a walk, I have inherited this unquiet body of hers this character, standing too, leaning against a window or door, standing balancing a bowl from which I’d eaten and drunk while standing, and I can’t spend a lot of time in one place, and whenever I visit someone, walking in, I say I can’t stay long.

I never knew what to say, I was unable to start a discussion or join a discussion because I am unused to being with others, isn’t that so, preferring to talk to myself or reading a book, which, outside of writing and walking, is my favorite activity, etc.

Because my throat, I mean, my throat is tied and making me cry, which is always a sign of having a lot of work to do, isn’t that so, here in these legendary surroundings I am familiar with the sky and whether it has something to say or reveal about the weather to come, which means I am so familiar with the little sheep when they come, and the vapor trails disappearing beneath them, and I have learned that a whirling evening wind means rain the following day and, likewise, when I am in unfamiliar surroundings and unfamiliar with the sky’s signs I just have to let myself be surprised by the weather the following morning, isn’t that so. Read More