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Tissie & Babe: The Fear of Words.

November 26, 2012 by Exangel

by Alena Deerwater

“I was born dancing,” my grandmother says from her wheelchair in the nursing home. Four words. My only gem from the entire interview.  But it is perfect and whole.  Tiny and beautiful.  Thank you Grandma, for the glimpse into your life.

She is having a hard time speaking.  And I?  I am eager and naive.  After about an hour I crash, heavy with disappointment.  She won’t talk.  I ask questions.  My Mom tries to cajole her into answering.  We get a word, maybe even a sentence.  But no story.  The heaviness sinks over me, tamping down a hidden vein of anger.  Speak, woman, speak!  I want to know our family’s stories.  I love stories.  I read them, I write them, I study them.  I’ve read over two-thirds of the books on the Masterpiece List for my exams in graduate school.  I’ve taken special seminars on Faulkner, James Joyce, Dostoyevsky, and Virginia Woolf.  I know Greeks myths.  I know Torah stories.  God said, “Let there be light.”  My grandmother says nothing.  Well, nothing I can sink my teeth into.

 

We’ve been struggling ever since I turned on the small cassette tape player with the microphone attached.  I had bought it back when I was taking oral histories in school.  She is my first family interview and I believe I have failed.  Or she has failed me.  Tissie, she has been called most of her life.  Tissie, short for Isabel.  Isabel Batavia Jacobson.

I try interviewing Granny Weil, my father’s mother, later in the week.  Most everyone calls her Babe.  She will live to be 100.  Granny is much more forthcoming.  Telling of how her mother said reading books was bad for girls. Quoted her own mother saying, “That hump in your back? It’s from sitting and reading, reading and sitting, Reading, reading, reading.”

Granny calls me in a panic the next day.

“Erase the whole thing!” she pleads.  “I only want to say nice things about family.”

What is with these people?  Why can’t they talk about their lives.  Tell stories to be passed down the generations.  That’s what people do, right?

I sit here now, over 20 years later, writing from my own life.  Oh. It is hard.  I get a word, maybe even a sentence.  But no story.

Tissie, Babe, please forgive my younger self for her impatience, disappointment and anger.  God, it seems, had an easier time creating the universe than my ancestors and I have creating our lives, telling our story.

 

 

Filed Under: EAP: The Magazine, Winter 2012: Words

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In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

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In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

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