Nancy Geyer’s essay “(Dis)Appearances” won Terrain.org’s 4th Annual Nonfiction Contest, judged by Kathryn Miles, and is featured in Issue 34: Elemental. Here, Nancy offers her reading recommendations, suggesting a few works that have helped shape her writing.
To a Distant Island by James McConkey
In April of 1890, Anton Chekhov left Moscow and traveled across Siberia to Sakhalin Island, by train, riverboat, troika, and steamer, to investigate conditions at the island’s penal colony. But some biographers believe he was propelled by a crisis of spirit—that the prison was, in part, himself. In To a Distant Island, James McConkey recreates this arduous, 6,500-mile journey, during which Chekhov “saw little that was green or hopeful.” Part biography, part fiction, part literary criticism, part memoir (for McConkey had suffered his own “spiritual paralysis”), Distant Island defies classification.
This elegantly written book haunts. I used to live in upstate New York, in a house that sat near the base of a wooded hill crowned by a long, low-lying factory. At night you could see light from the factory’s windows blazing through the trees. From my front porch, only the top row of windows was visible, one bright rectangle after another, as if a train had come to a stop in a forest. Long after I put away Distant Island, that train and those woods were Russia.
Rough Likeness by Lia Purpura
Few writers are as sharply attentive as lyric essayist Lia Purpura, or as alive on the page. (She once said in an interview that she’s “calibrated to register language physically,” and you can feel it in the writing.) Because Purpura’s sentences tend not to run along well-worn grooves, the reader often finds herself in new territory. That new territory might be rarely explored subject matter, but it’s also located in the space between a word and the thing it’s trying to touch (to borrow Purpura’s phrasing). Word and thing never do touch, of course, but a gifted writer can seem to narrow the gap.
“Jump” is one of my favorite essays in Rough Likeness. It begins: “It’s a small thing that holds me. On the sign that reads Last Death from Jumping or Diving from Bridge, June 15, 1995, it’s the or I can’t shake.” Another favorite is “There Are Things Awry Here,” in which Purpura is fitness-walking around the big box stores and chain restaurants near her hotel in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I can’t figure out how to get my body to land in a land where the present’s not speaking,” she writes. “Where stories won’t take . . .” Which only fuels her determination to find them.
Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir by D.J. Waldie
When it comes to exploring how a place can shape a life, no book has excited me more than D. J. Waldie’s Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. The land in question, laid out in a grid (“seen from above, the grid is beautiful and terrible”), is the postwar “not-quite-middle-class” suburb of Lakewood, outside Los Angeles, where Waldie has lived in the same house since he was born, and worked as a city official until he retired in 2010.
Alternating between the intimate (his father’s death behind the bathroom door) and the impersonal (the history of tract development), in prose by turns poetic and matter-of-fact, the 316 numbered sections that make up this wonderfully odd and mysterious book build on one another to cumulative effect. I use the construction metaphor because the book’s structure echoes the process of building from scratch an entire suburb, house by house.
“The critics of suburbs say that you and I live narrow lives,” Waldie writes. “I agree. My life is narrow. From one perspective or another, all our lives are narrow. Only when lives are placed side by side do they seem larger.” So, too, is Holy Land greater than the sum of its parts.
