Book Review: Blue Thread by Ruth Tenzer Feldman. (Ooligan Press)

100 years ago, women in Oregon were, after their sixth petition, finally given the right to vote. Blue Thread is a YA novel set during this time in 1912 Portland, and follows the main character—sixteen-year old Miriam Josefsohn—in her discovery of, and growing involvement in, the women’s suffrage movement. Miriam wants nothing more than to work in her father’s print shop; however he is strongly opposed to this based solely on the fact that Miriam is female. Her parents want to marry her off to a nice Jewish boy, a fact which alarms Miriam… she may not even want to marry! She meets two sisters who have opened a milliners store in downtown Portland who are quite active in the suffrage movement, and when Miriam learns that her own father printed a scandalous postcard encouraging men to vote "no" during the last petition for suffrage she becomes outraged and flings herself into righting his wrong.

Author Ruth Tenzer Feldman has published many nonfiction books on historical figures and events for children and young adults, and this is her first novel. Her historian’s research is reflected in impeccable descriptions of clothing, mechanics—such as the old printing presses—and events throughout the novel, but Blue Thread is not just historical fiction. Fans of the fantastical YA novel, don’t despair—along with fighting for women’s suffrage, Miriam travels through time using a prayer shawl handed down through the women in her family that contains blue thread from Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors to encourage the Daughters of Zelophehad to petition Moses for women’s right to inherit land in the absence of a male heir. It’s in the Torah! Well, kind of.

Somehow it makes sense for a nonfiction author to allow her imagination to truly run free when writing a novel, and although I have not read a lot of YA the weaving of these two worlds happens pretty seamlessly, and seems fitting for the genre. The linking of these vastly different moments of women’s history, separated by thousands of years, came from an actual historical document that Tenzer Feldman references in the novel: a photograph from 1908 of a suffrage parade with women carrying a banner: LIKE THE DAUGHTERS OF ZELOPHEHAD WE ASK FOR OUR INHERITANCE.

While a relatively minor Biblical story, the Daughters of Zelophehad stood out to Tenzer Feldman when she studied the Torah. She says that Blue Thread is a “modern midrash—a narrative based on a centuries-old Jewish tradition of reinterpreting or 'spinning’ the facts or words in a text—often the Bible—into another story that adds to the original or pulls the reader into another time and place. Think ‘homily’ without the sermonizing.”

It’s hard to say how young readers will identify with an upper-middle-class Jewish girl from the early 20th century encouraging women to speak up to Moses, but I found Miriam an important literary heroine. Her indignation at being treated like a second-class citizen just because she was female is relatable across all time and cultures. What started as personal became political when she sees she is not the only person being treated like this. The magical prayer shawl does not figure prominently, but it is an important novelistic device that symbolizes the thread running through all generations before us, and all generations to come to fight against oppression. Plus time travel is really cool and I have not read about a lot of young female heroines who do it!

The nonfiction side of Tenzer Feldman’s brain pushes it way back to the forefront, after the novel is done doing its fiction, by an afterward that documents what is true and not true in the story. Tenzer Feldman touchingly ends with: “The magic in Miriam’s prayer shawl is real. It is that quality of something inside us that pushes us to do the right thing when we least expect it.” That’s a lesson that should ring true no matter what century a young woman finds herself in.

This blog was first published by Bitch Media.

Book Review: Glaciers, by Alexis M. Smith. Tin House Books

I read this 'novel' in one sitting. (Although I loved the book I am still skeptical of this work being called a novel: it's 174 pages, and the page layout has top and bottom margins of almost two inches). But me reading it in one sitting has as much to do with being carried away with the story which is sweeping in its brevity.

Glaciers is beautifully written, which is not suprising considering it is published by Tin House Books. Tin House literary journal is one of the most distinguished literary journals in North America. I am sure the task of publishing a young unknown writer for their 'new voice' series is a hard one, but one that I am glad they make.

The story follows one day in the life of twenty-something narrator Isabel, who is a librarian living in Portland, OR (represent!). It is a quiet third person narrative that follows Isabel's internal thoughts and longings. Although she lives in a city she notices the little things that get can get lost in our fast-paced world: the sounds of birds, the light through leaves, the small patch of sunlight in the kitchen in the morning, the taste of honey on a spoon warmed from tea. She collects old postcards from thrift stores and dreams of traveling to Amsterdam. She is even in love with a soldier who works with her at the library- a veteran from Iraq. Glaciers is a modern day American twist on the romantic aesthetic of Europe in the early twentieth century; Isabel is the heroine of the nerdy, book-loving, vintage clothes wearing, tea-drinking lady who loves her cat (yes, this is why I loved the book so much).

I can see the comparisons to Margarite Duras and Virginia Woolfe that Tin House touts - Smith reveals the inner longings of a woman on an extremely macro level while setting it beside a metaphor of something larger (in this case Glaciers, a natural wonder under threat from global warming). Part of my frustration with this work being called a novel is that I would have loved it to go further - to truly unpack the wonderful imagery, to go deeper into the characters, to extend the story beyond the postcard and into letters spanning years. However the sparseness adds to the modern day twist. (I loved that I could read a 'novel' in one sitting, something I can barely do these days with all that flashy information out there competing for my short attention span). Glaciers is like a little analogue warmth in a cold digital world, like listening to vinyl, or posting a letter in the mail. It is a story that resonates and humanizes, and seeks to connect.




***I am lucky I am a book nerd living in Portland, OR 'cuz I get to see Alexis M. Smith read at Powell's on Burnside this Monday, 9th January at 7pm.

Book Review: 'Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? By Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson is one of those prolific authors, like Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates, who I can always rely on when walking into a used bookstore. Often I will just buy a different edition of one of their books that I already love, but if I want something new to read but am not in the mood for taking a risk there is a long list of titles I can choose from those old faithfuls. Jeanette Winterson is probably the most quotable author I have ever read, especially for those of us who live passionately, love obsessively, and believe that art can (and will) change the world. If you ever want a cool literary tattoo just read one of her books—you are sure to find some kind of quote that resonates.



Winterson, who was born in Manchester, England has written 10 novels, a comic book, a book of short stories, a collection of essays, children’s books, her fiction and poetry is featured in many journals and anthologies, and she has worked as a journalist; her writing is, thankfully, everywhere. Her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) written when she was only twenty-three, is perhaps her most well-known, winning the Whitbread Award for first novel and having been adapted into an award-winning BBC drama. Semi-autobiographical, Oranges is the story of a young woman, named Jeanette, who was adopted by a fanatically evangelical couple, and leaves home at 16 to be with another woman after her parents' church failed to exorcize the gay demon inside her. Fairy tales are inserted throughout the narrative; Winterson’s works as a whole have a fragmented, magical realist quality to them. The fact the main plot points overlap with Winterson’s own life experience has always been well-known, but with the release of Winterson’s memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? in October (in the U.K—official U.S release date is March 2012), the harsh reality of Winterson’s upbringing stand out even more starkly against the layers of her non-linear, heavily metaphorical, fictional work.

The image portrayed of Winterson’s adoptive mother, whom she calls Mrs. Winterson throughout Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is as looming and terrifying as the "fictional" Testifying Elsie from Oranges: “Mrs. Winterson was not a welcoming woman. If anyone knocked at the door she ran down the lobby and shoved the poker through the letterbox.” Jeanette was often locked outside, left on the doorstep for hours as a very young child. Apocalyptic Bible quotes were pasted around the house. Books were banned (except for the Bible) and Mrs. Winterson burned Jeanette’s secret stash of paperbacks (“it is probably why I write as I do,” Winterson writes when she picked up the leftover fragments of burnt pages the morning after her books were burned, “collecting the scraps, uncertain of continuous narrative.”) Mrs. Winterson was physically as well as emotionally abusive, and yes, subjected her fifteen-year-old daughter to an "exorcism" because Jeanette was in love with another woman. The title of the memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a direct quote from Mrs. Winterson, hurled at Jeanette when she decided to leave home at 16 to be with the woman she loved.

While leaning heavily on her childhood experience split between an abusive home in a tiny, northern working-class English town, and the escape into books through her public library, Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? moves in a steady linear fashion up until Winterson’s time at Oxford (and how she had to fight to get in). It then very consciously skips twenty-five years between Winterson being in college, writing her first novel, and becoming a famous author, into her present experience of seeking out her birth mother. This is done in a very Winterson-like way, with a small chapter titled "Intermission" in which she states “I measure time as we all do, and partly by the fading body, but in order to challenge linear time, I try and live in total time. I recognize that life has an inside as well as an outside and that events separated by years lie side by side imaginatively and emotionally.”

Although Winterson chooses to skip her twenty-five years as a professional writer her landing in the present in the last third of the book is not layered by fiction or a magic-realist narrative, it is a very stark and real account of a long-term relationship break up, Winterson’s subsequent mental-health breakdown and suicide attempt, and the painful process of finding her birth mother.
Whether or not one is familiar with Winterson’s fictional work, this memoir stands alone. Despite tough subjects it is warm, often funny, and like any great memoir, redemptive. While offering tremendous insight into the experiences that shaped this writer’s unique voice, this memoir is not about how to become a famous writer, or even really about Jeanette Winterson—it is a memoir about seeking identity, seeking love, seeking a mother, and the power of sharing words and stories. The life-saving quality of books is celebrated: “This is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place, it’s a finding place.”

It’s all I can do to not quote all my favorite passages from Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? until I've quoted the whole thing. Here is another one: “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.” Yet Why be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is nonfiction narrative that is medicinal as well, and here, quoting Winterson again, is why this fiction writer’s memoir is so effective: “Personal stories work for other people when those stories become both paradigms and parables. The intensity of a story releases into a bigger space than the one it occupied in time and place. The story crosses the threshold from my world into yours. We meet each other on the steps of the story.” I think those last two lines will be my next tattoo.






Published on the 'Bibliobitch' Blog:

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/bibliobitch-jeanette-winterson-was-never-normal

Bitch’s Bedside Table

(From September B-Mail)

Our publishing intern Jyoti Roy geeks out about good publishers as much as great writing. These are her most favorite recent reads that also showcase independent/ small press publishing.

yeah. no. totally. by Lisa Wells (2011) {Perfect Day Publishing}
At first glance this title seems to be aimed solely at the short-attention span generation. This slim volume of short non-fiction pieces does offer a quick read, yet the writing is dense and poetic and packs meaning into every sentence. Born out of this generation, yeah. no. totally offers a critical lens in which to view the experiences of our times, framing it in a way that is personal yet far reaching and universal.

Little Green by Loretta Stinson (2009) {Hawthorne Books}

The backdrop to this story is 1970's Pacific Northwest drug culture. The protagonist, Janie, is a young runaway who is in a relationship with someone who is abusive and an addict. It handles dark situations with glimmers of light, strength, and hope. With an introduction by Robin Givens, a spokeswoman for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, Little Green makes no judgements, and offers us a realistic view of the complexities of love, abuse, addiction, and redemption.

Zazen by Vanessa Veselka (2011) {Red Lemonade}
Imagine the poetic parts of your life happening against the backdrop of war. Or how random explosions and global acts of self- immolation can make the mundane parts of your life become infused with meaning that is slightly out of your level of understanding. This novel is mysterious and unsettling, and eerily familiar. Veselka's dystopic first novel has gained wide recognition (read our review here) and follows one woman's search for connection in a completely disconnected society.