A Reliable Wife - A Review

Visceral stimulation is an understatement for the lingering feelings I have after finishing Robert Goolrick's A Reliable Wife.

I tore through this book like an in-n-out cheeseburger customized to my exact ravenous desire. It happens that my cheeseburger simile is an appropriate choice, as the subject matter of this book was in fact ravenous desire. Ravenous desire that consumes us, creates us, destroys us, and leads us from one day's dark into the next's light. There were moments while reading this too-short novel where I felt all was lost and there was no redemption to be found in the Tundra Heart of Northern Wisconsin's frozen terrain. But the snow did melt, and the jewels lost in the blinding snow storm were eventually found - survived the winter under ice though their value was ultimately depleted to nothing but the regret we all carry around with us.

This book is about three relationships between three people and the intricately woven ties that bind them. With every deception, wrong--and sometimes right--that is perpetuated by one against another, these ties grows stronger, all the more unbreakable. However, this tightening of the strings that hold these people together only serve to more tightly choke out any hope of freedom from the pain.

I don't know anything about Robert Goolrick, but I read his afterward, which he entitled "Beholden". It was a brief expression of gratitude to the author of a book he had written about the frozen Northern country during the "diseased end of the 19th century" and how the country--the rural and remote place that we think of without much thought--is actually a hothouse of people's interactions, destructions, love and loss. Madness and fury, lust and love, incest and iniquity, goodness and evil are part of all people - it is the human condition. The life of the country is not pristine and innocent: it is as horrific, complicated and beautiful as anywhere else. Where there are humans, there is the human condition.

A Reliable Wife is holding a spot in my top ten reads of 2010. This is going to be a contentious year.

An Exercise in Engagement

It is so very difficult to sustain interest in those things that are funny/interesting/cool long enough to say or think anything meaningful about them. I've decided to blog along with my class--if the purpose of this project is to capture in words one's ties to motivation and inspiration then wouldn't it be hollow if I weren't doing the same thing? I have high hopes for my students - and I know first hand how procrastination and a disaffected attitude are poisonous to the longevity of success.

What the heck am I talking about? In the handout "Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity" one stuck with me: "Beware of Turning Hobbies Into Jobs". This didn't sit quite right with me - I would love to do my hobby for a living, but I can't for the life of me imagine who would pay me to watch Judge Judy for 40 hours a week. Also, I watch enough Judge Judy now to know that sooner or later, I would get sick of her (I already argue back to her on the screen, which is quite embarrassing). However, there is one thing about which I am passionate that I would actually really love to turn into a career: writing. I have always kept journals, written little poems on postcards for my friends, and invented embarrassingly dramatic short stories and novellas throughout my youth. When I was a freshman in high school--fourteen and gawky as all hell--I wrote a screen play and forced all of my friends to be in. We put on a lunchtime production in the drama room and it mortifies me to remember the plot and characters - I was essentially playing Barbie with my friends, and the drama closely resembled an episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 (which I was watching intensely at the time - oh, the 90s!).

Regardless of the embarrassment of "Strangers" (and yes, I had to Facebook an old friend in order to remember the name of that god-awful play), it is pretty amazing that I had the gumption to write an entire screen play at 14, and luckily I had some pretty amazing teachers along the way who encouraged me. I wrote and wrote - reams of poetry, short stories, editorials, and even an entire newsletter that culminated in my leading a protest against my high school administration for excess homework. And then I went to college and wrote more. I was published in a scholarly journal (yes, really) and was a consistent op-ed contributor in the Jack (Humboldt State University's campus newspaper).

Then, I finished college and all that momentum was lost. I managed a coffee shop, ran a non-profit program, and starting working at the Academy. But where was my writing? One day I woke up and realized I had not written anything in years. One of the "Keys to Creativity" is to start a blog. Can it be true that writing about the work that other artists are doing will exercise the creativity muscles of our own artistry? I hope do. So, as we embark on this journey of exploring the relationship between motivation and success, I challenge you, dear student. I also challenge myself. Let's blog and create and create and blog. Let's see if it gets us anywhere.