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Elizabeth Kadetsky

Report from the Jaipur Literature Festival

March 6, 2020

Elizabeth Kadetsky in front of a sign for the Jaipur Literature Festival, wearing her press badge and standing with her young son, Alexander.
The reporter with her research assistant

“These are very dark times for India and the US. Delhi is in complete meltdown,” writes an author friend in India. The Jaipur Literature Festival, it might be said, is the place where the question feels most urgent: “Where do art and politics meet?” After five months in India, I felt my shoulders relax upon arriving at this forum for open discussion of so many topics taboo elsewhere in my travels—with panelists representing on gay rights, gay marriage, eschewing marriage altogether, Hindu supremacy, the conflict in Kashmir, the P word so rarely spoken in polite conversation (Pakistan). 

In Delhi, a friend who works for a major Indian corporation recently described how an e-mail from management asked a co-worker about his anti-government views. In Ladakh, Assam, and elsewhere, the Internet was shut down, and news of protests against the ruling Hindu nationalist government (might we call it fascist?) filtered out clandestinely. The theme was tied tongue. 

The CAA anti-Muslim immigration law had been unveiled in the final weeks of the previous year. The new decade brought violent protests and incalculably harsher anti-protest crackdowns by the state. Also, there was a government intent upon deflecting from the real problems at hand by casting blame upon Muslims in Kashmir and among the desperate immigrant population along the Bangladesh border. Plus, there was the encroaching of development upon natural habitats, including the roaming grounds of the 600 last Asiatic lions and the 3,000 last Indian Bengal tigers. And, it had been raining, only the monsoon was supposed to have ended months ago: bookmark, global warming. In 2020, the globe’s problems exist in boldface in India. 

Against this daunting backdrop, some 300 authors and political figures and (while it’s hard to get an official figure) as many as 100,000 spectators and reporters joined up for the 13th annual meeting of what the organizers call “a rewarding pilgrimage of the mind and spirit” and what Time Out Mumbai once called “the Woodstock, Live 8, and Ibiza of world literature, with an ambience that can best be described as James Joyce meets monsoon wedding.” 

Thronging happened. One elbowed through crowds in winding outdoor throughways connecting six event tents seating in the range of 500 spectator-participants each. Also vying for attention were tea stands, regional food stalls, a press terrace where one could eavesdrop on the likes of Elizabeth Gilbert, Suketu Mehta, William Dalrymble, and Shobhaa De. There was a handicrafts, ethnic wear, and fine linens bazaar, and a festival bookstore where kids crowded onto the floor reading Dog Man. Come evening, there was a “fashion showcase” and Indian classical performance at the sixteenth-century Amer Fort, and off-site music and art events at posh, New Delhi-style eateries offering curated martinis and pomegranate beer. 

By the weekend of the five day festival, it seemed, if not a fire hazard, sensory overload. Wrote a friend over WhatsApp, “too many kids … to see, be seen, and take selfies … I.e. be kids! Or as I was told to picnic. Although I don’t think the word picnic means the same here as it does to Americans.”

And yet, I thought, how often do teenagers back home flood literary festivals to the point they overtake, annoying the bookish adults? 

Nothing was correct or easy. Why were so many Western and non-Indian writers represented, why were there so many all-white panels, why were there so many all-male panels? Why was the Kashmiri Hindu poet from New Jersey, Rakesh Kaul, allowed to tell the Muslim author also from Kashmir, Asiya Zahoor, that her people’s protest movement was too “angry” and was out of keeping, in spirit, with the “beauty” of the Kashmiri language? “We have long been a part of a story which we have not authored,” Zahoor asserted. 

And yet for every misstep or error on the part of the organizers, the amount of audible criticism or debate on the same seemed to make it all, if not tolerable, exciting, engaged, and engaging. 

“I want to personally apologize,” responded panelist Fintan O’Toole in response to a question from the audience about the galling gender monotony on the panel “Present Tense,” about current events, climate issues, and water. Water, after all, is a female issue, said the questioner. “I didn’t know this would be an all-male panel and if I had I would have refused.” Another listener grumbled that the same speaker had been spotted on other all-male panels. 

At another forum, an audience member asked, in Hindi, “Why aren’t your panels in Hindi? We should be celebrating the Indian language. “I’m sorry, sir,” responded a panelist in English, if disingenuously. “I could understand you if you asked in Malayali, but I don’t speak Hindi.” 

Indeed, it seemed that at most every discussion, everyone had something to offend or to be offended by, and gluttonous audiences grasped at any opportunity to question, dissect, and call out. At the panel on Kashmir, people stood up and clapped and shouted to support one speaker, then others did the same for a speaker espousing the opposite. An elderly man in a Nehru jacket had to be physically coaxed back into his seat by the microphone bearer. 

I was left with a vivid impression: in India literature matters, and speaking the truth, whatever one’s truth is, is a privilege to be celebrated and undertaken with relish. 

  • Two boys sitting on the floor reading Dog Man books.
  • Author Varun Thomas Mathew
  • Brightly lit stage with three writers at microphones.

Elizabeth Kadetsky is a nonfiction editor at NER, and her new book is The Memory Eaters, a lyric memoir. She is spending the academic year in India as a Fulbright Scholar and attended the Jaipur Literature Festival (January 28 to February 1, 2020).

Filed Under: Dispatches, Editors' Notebooks, NER Digital, News & Notes

Leath Tonino

Beach Reading

November 19, 2019

Mind, text, wilderness—I’ve long been fascinated by their interactions. Specifically, I’ve been fascinated by what happens when we lug books into nature, when we situate our reading within a context of more-than-human energies, when we rest the butt on a barnacled rock or driftwood bench and fill the brain to brimming: sentences, crying birds, definitions, slanting light.

My inquiries into this realm have ranged from spiritual bike tours with Basho and Thomas Merton to arduous ski expeditions with Sir Ernest Shackleton and Gretel Ehrlich. To desert rambles with dusty anthropological monographs. To marshy paddles with iambic pentameter. Hmm, what should I bring this time, I find myself wondering, staring at the bookshelf in my basement, the bookshelf that is literally three steps from a rack of camping equipment.

Occasionally, the answer is obvious—think of Muir’s My First Summer In The Sierra for a Yosemite pack trip, Powell’s The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons for a Grand Canyon float. More often than not, though, the possibilities overwhelm a nerd like me. The Tetons with Mardy Murie are not the Tetons with Isaac Asimov, and the Owens Valley with Mary Austin is not the Owens Valley with Roger Tory Peterson, Kurt Vonnegut, or Geoffrey Chaucer. Sometimes, confused to the point of paralysis—Henry Beston’s The Outermost House is about Cape Cod, but I’m planning to kayak the Maine shore!—there’s only biting the bullet and hoping for the best.

Cut to the Olympic Peninsula’s foggy gray beaches, a thin strip of sand bordered by nearly impenetrable rainforest on one side and wholly impenetrable ocean—ranks of tiered breakers—on the other. Twenty-two and tromping solo, I assumed that a week at the intense edge could make me—well, honestly, I didn’t know what I wanted from the outing. Perhaps it was visceral contact, the tang of salt in my soup? Perhaps it was an elemental scouring, a cleansing of too many months spent indoors, worrying about fame, glory, power, and how to pay the rent, how to afford pinto beans? Whatever the case, I figured Kerouac’s Big Sur, with its Pacific coast reference in the title, ought to make for suitable bedtime snuggling.

Snuggling? Did the fool really say snuggling? Turns out I was wrong, very wrong indeed. Lying in my damp, gritty tent a mere dozen paces from the thrashing water, I discovered that Big Sur documents Kerouac’s descent into alcoholic insanity, what his pal Ginsberg described as “paranoiac confusion.” Furthermore, the story culminates with a dissonant aural hallucination, a poem that is essentially the author’s inebriated ear submerged in surf, fishing for lyrics.

            “Josh——coof——patra—— / Aye ee mo powsh——”

            Um, beg pardon?

        “Ssst——Cum here read me—— / Dirty postcard——Urchin sea—— / Karash your name——?”

For five days I stumbled through frothing foam and mazes of mist, encountering only seals and crabs, and for five nights I listened to shrieking schoolchildren, bellowing monsters, eerie techno-symphonies, the incessant rush and rip of tides. To my dismay, the Kerouac forced consciousness into an inhuman chaos of waves, sans wetsuit.  I heard voices: fluid voices, crazy voices, inner voices blending with outer voices. Voices nonstop.

I suppose that Big Sur was, in a sense, the ideal book, an echo of the ocean’s severe strangeness. But “ideal” is after-the-fact talk, armchair-philosopher talk. During the actual hike—gulp—I was immersed, in over my head, frantically swimming. Come 3 AM, tossing and turning, dreaming that I was drowning, I would have given anything for the dry, soothing logic of a toaster oven manual or the buoyant minutiae of a treatise on Florentine jurisprudence.

Which leads to questions. You were after a raw vivid encounter with place, right? So why flee? Why seek the safety blanket of distracting prose, that soft fabric woven of familiar syntax? Why not embrace the sloshy weirdness of Kerouac’s scribbling or, better yet, eschew language entirely? Why not skinny-dip? Why not bare yourself?

Simple answer: easier said than done. I’m a human, a social animal, and language is my home. What’s a tent but a portable domicile, an attempt at carving from the rugged backcountry the skimpiest of hospitable alcoves, a means of getting close but—aye, there’s the rub—not too close to the capital-O Other? Maybe a book is just a different form of shelter, a paper-and-ink tent, a balancing act, half retreat and half forward march?

For all its magnetic attraction, for all its ancient mysterious allure, the ocean is simultaneously hostile, horrible, repellent. I love it. I hate it. I want more of it. I want less of it. Sure, we may have crawled from the primordial soup untold millennia ago, but that doesn’t mean the gargantuan surging thing is Mommy. Nope, the great untamed and untameable Other is not a parent, at least not in my experience. It doesn’t tell stories that begin Once upon a time and conclude Happily ever after.

Mind, text, wilderness—odd, odd, odd. At the continent’s margin, there are only those scraps of literature we import. Those scraps that a part of us wishes will be washed away, taken out to sea. Those scraps that another part of us clings to with a fierce, grateful, terrestrial grip.


Leath Tonino is the author of two essay collections, both published by Trinity University Press. The Animal One Thousand Miles Long was published in 2018, and The West Will Swallow, from which this piece has been adapted, will be published in November 2019.
http://tupress.org/books/the-west-will-swallow-you

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative nonfiction for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings. To submit an essay to our series, please read our guidelines.

Filed Under: Confluences, NER Digital, News & Notes

Kristin Keane

Paintings for the Future

October 30, 2019

Installation view Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, October 12, 2018–April 23, 2019, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

It has been a dark winter: my mother’s cancer has spread rapidly. I come across Hilma af Klint: The Paintings for the Future exhibit at the Guggenheim when I visit a friend after months of bad news. The Ten Largest burst at their canvases’ edges. Shapes bump against sides suggestive of mortality, the afterlife. Forms escape their boundaries, go on unseen outside the frame—a circle begins, breaks at a corner, returns elsewhere.

It is spring and the flowers have arrived—patches of wet color, scraps of grass bursting green in sidewalk boxes. The park is verdant and pregnant with bloom, already tipping or about to tip into violet, azure. In af Klint’s art, color also works as energy: circles are blue as robins’ eggs, white becomes yellow and then orange and then—a color I cannot name. Like the lines, they too pour over the edges as if they could be caught in cupped hands.

The question of color and lines plagues me—what is the difference really between yellow and orange, purple or blue? Where is the border where one becomes the other? I am terrified of how quickly things shift shape. Things are alive and then—they are not. We’ve stopped tracking the edges my mother’s cancer has crossed. Of the spaces it takes up.

She loves flowers and presses them between pages of photo albums. I’m noticing more, she says. She means sky and color. She means things there are not words for.

Af Klint (1862–1944) was a spiritualist curious about the unseen world and reincarnation before her sister died during childhood, but the event marked a deepening interest in the realms beyond life. Many of spirituality’s adherents were also searching for deceased loved ones. The advent of x-ray and other technologies cracked open new possibilities then: what had been before invisible, could now very suddenly be seen. Energy transmitted. Af Klint began pushing her boundaries, she began stretching off the page.

It was during a séance with “The Five”—a group of women she founded to channel and record dispatches from mystics referred to as “High Masters”—when a message came over the medium. She was to make paintings on a transcendent plane representing immortality—a project which would span nine years and 193 works. The Ten Largest is the fourth group in the Paintings for the Temple collection which represent the stages of life: childhood, youth, adulthood, old age. Inside the museum over one hundred years after she painted them, they are sequenced, a varicolored wall tapestry each over three meters in length.

My mother communes with spirits—she too believes in what cannot be seen. She has her aura read, seeks counsel from telepaths. I do not practice these same beliefs, but the fear of losing her has turned everything upside down, it has strangled me with uncertainty. All my colors have begun running. How will I find her in death? Where will the line be between me here, and her on the other side of it?

It is during oncology visits with her tumors projected fat and white on screens when I begin imagining them filled with flower petals instead of disease. Congratulations, I want the doctors to say about each new growth, their stems stretching into nearby organs. You are so full of exquisite life.

Adulthood, Number 7, the signature painting of The Ten Largest, is a bulb opened to blooming. Biomorphic play typical of af Klint surrounds the form—a beetle could be a bird; a stamen perhaps a vine. The shapes are alive and tensile, unworldly and concrete.

The Ten Largest, Childhood, No. 1, 1907, Hilma af Klint, courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation.

But it is Childhood, Number 1 that unfastens me. It vibrates with a blue as bold and dark as the sea. A mandala-like figure takes the center, two organic rings entwined like daisy chains hover above—the kind my mother showed me how to braid as a child using the rim of my thumbnail. It has a large message written in a conjured alphabet, at its center two ovum-like forms encased in a floral hoop reminiscent of lichen.

The painting is alive but it is also lifeless. Somber spheres in the shapes of coins line the bottom of the canvas surrounding a withered tree-like figure as if marking a grave. Is this meant to depict labor? A last gasp before the final push into life?

In birth, the thing a mother creates is put outside her, the burden and fear of death now everywhere: she understands the life she produced will now come to know of endings too. The other nine paintings extend across the gallery wall but I get stuck in this image. I think of my mother’s cells stretching the two of us into different dimensions, divided in half by a traverse-less sea. I am desperate to know how I will cross it.

When I tell my husband I’ve visited the exhibit I say “Paintings of the Future” by mistake. Perhaps that moment in the room with the canvases lined up, it comforted me to see it that way—not as an expectation of time, but as a certainty within it.

For my mother I want our future to be filled with af Klint’s colors, to burst with a different kind of life. I have imagined many times that the indecipherable script at the bottom of Childhood, Number 1 is a note written just for me.

You will find her again, it says. I tell myself it insists.


Kristin Keane lives in San Francisco where she is a doctoral fellow at Stanford University. Her fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Normal School, Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative nonfiction for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings. To submit an essay to our series, please read our guidelines.

Filed Under: Confluences, NER Digital, News & Notes

Phoebe Stone

Teapot in Turquoise

September 26, 2019

Hear the podcast: Phoebe Stone reads her memoir here.

I was with my mother at Christmas time in England when she found the tea set. It was late in the day, I was eleven years old, and there it was, sitting in a cramped low-ceilinged antique shop next to a pillar. I can see the tea set clearly now in the oval orb of memory where it floats, dusty and blue-green and delicate with gold edges around the scalloped cups and plates. My mother knew immediately that she wanted to buy it.

That was the year my mother couldn’t say no to anything antique for a table. Not here in this quirky, quaint country where she felt so isolated, like an island herself. Not when she wanted to go home to America so much. She often cried and told my father so over and over again. Many of their terrible fights were about money, money we didn’t really have, money my mother was spending on little English antiques that seemed to her so reasonably priced, they were almost free. Almost.

 As my mother looked at the teapot, she imagined she would bring breakfast on a tray to my father in bed. Their lives would be transformed by the tea set. She imagined a morning as the sunlight hit the edge of the turquoise scallops. My father would look up at her as if in a painting. He would be lying among yellowed folds of linen, propped against a pillow, a tray on his lap overflowing with sunlight and this tea set tucked up with buttered toast and boiled eggs.

While my mother bought the tea set, I looked through the window. Outside the air was crinkly and bright with tiny Christmas lights along the cold nighttime street. Sweet shops and tea shops shimmered; the air was steeped in excitement and yet rubbed with a layer of anxiety, a layer of foreign snow, and unfamiliar Christmas carols about a mother in a blue robe hiding with her miracle baby in a barn from a cruel king named Herod in a desert country thousands of years ago…

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,
Bye, bye, lully, lullay

Memory and dream mix and mingle. It was Noel, the season of Good King Wenceslas in England and yet everything seemed dark, blurred with the cold colors of stone and gray brick, chanting choir music, the vaulted ceilings of cathedrals we had toured, and then Christmas lights, the twinkle of anticipation, the thread of magic, wonder, edged all in gold. There were thorns of holly, wreaths, crowns, and pricked fingers bleeding in the snow, drops of blood like berries falling from green boughs . . . . Once in royal David’s City . . . and the flaring eyes of King Herod, a Jewish king. And me—a Jewish girl or half Jewish. My teacher at school would drill past my desk, pierce holes in the air around me. “Christ was killed by the Jews,” she would say and then she’d look deep, deep, deep into me.

What did I have within? I was but a girl, eleven years old, who stood there holding back with her weightless, narrow body what was to come. I was but a small church with a blue ceiling and in the back next to the organ, hidden behind a door not yet opened, my pitiful Jewish father hanging by his neck from a rope, no, a bathrobe belt, his long boney and beautiful feet drifting above the floor, the soles of them almost touching wood, almost touching stone . . . almost.

Perhaps my mother and I drove home that evening with the box of turquoise dishes on the car seat. Or maybe we walked with the cold English night air blowing through our coats, my mother carrying the box in her arms. Where were my sisters? I cannot say. All that remains is this orb, this isolated oval of memory, a turquoise tea set floating there in the shadowed store.

For Christmas at school I was to be one of three angels in white alone on the stage singing, “Angels we have heard on high.” I had a white choir gown, ironed freshly, smelling of pressed cotton and steam and starch and soap. I was to kneel in front of the audience with the other two girls chosen. In practice, we sang, our voices quavering with high notes, clear and blue, like the interior of a chapel painted the color of sky. But do not open the door in the back next to the organ, for therein, you will find his legs, the pierced palms bleeding, the boney knees slumped above the long tender feet almost touching the floor.

The night of the Christmas performance at school my mother and father attended, all dressed up, my father in a neck tie, my mother’s face bright with tears and moisture and lipstick. They came into my school and sat in the audience…in our classroom? I cannot recall. All I remember is the moment before I went out onto the stage with the two other girls in white. That moment, I discovered a way to look like I was singing without singing. It seemed like magic to me. Oh, a trick I just invented! I will mouth the words and not sing, and no one will know.

And so, as I knelt there, I opened my mouth and pretended and I did not sing. There were only two voices of two angels, the third mimed the words and made circles and squares with her lips and was silent. It would have been a triumphant moment had I sung. I had, it seems to me now, a beautiful child’s singing voice, but I didn’t sing. I had a crowning moment within my reach, and I had dropped it, not realizing. I had broken it.  Instead of clusters of glory, praise and passion and cookies dripped in green icing, my father was bitter with me after the performance.

“Why didn’t you sing?” he said. “I didn’t come here to listen to the others singing. I came here to listen to you sing.” He turned, buttoned his coat and walked away.

I didn’t know what I had done or what I had missed or even why I done it.  My white choir dress lay wrinkled in my arms and we must have gone home then, leaving me with that single  orb of memory, being in the glaring bright light, in the silence, the voices of the two girls singing, “Angels we have head on high,” my mouth going up and down, opening and closing and uttering not a sound.

My mother must have put the turquoise tea set in the kitchen in a cupboard. She might have used it after a dinner she created in the tiny dining room where the large upright piano stood. There was no window in that dining room, only a small coal fireplace and sometimes a table. We had a roast beef dinner there that holiday season with wine goblets and English silver crystal and heavy sterling forks. My father spoke with reverence about Châteauneuf-du-Pape wine and we each had a sip of it poured into our delicate wine glasses. It tasted harsh and burned like blood in my throat, thorns of holly, swaddled in folds of memory. We taught our fingers that night to go along the rim of the wine glass at just the right angle to make a high-pitched whine, a wailing cry, a keening siren sounding. A warning.

The roast beef was too fatty. I felt sick. The room too small, the silverware too heavy, the coal fire too hot. Did we have tea in the turquoise tea set after dinner? It seems now in my mind to have been threaded to that Christmas, as if those delicate turquoise Copeland Spode butterflies were in the air or passing lightly over our plates, hovering above a mandarin orange pie baked by my older sister, a butter crust such as I have never tasted since.  And tiny tender canned orange slices, doll sized. Everything around us exuding mystery, as if even the air were wrapped in Christmas paper or in a kind of blue luminescence, tinsel at the edges all around the rims of my memory.

And then the next day, my father pulled me aside in the hallway, while my mother napped or vanished in her gray foggy raincoat to the park along the Cam down the street. She loved to walk along the river where the swans floated, her face awash with longing, flickering joy and homesickness, a conflicting blend, like the black watch plaid skirt she wore.

“I bought a Christmas present for your mother. Would you tell me what you think? Will she like it?” my father said. A secret moment between us, we stood together, he and I, leaning in and out, my father revealing his tenderness, his youthfulness, the young boy lying within behind the sad eyes. At that moment he was darkly romantic to me and anguished and pulled a tiny red leather box from his pocket. The light so bright, the little box in the palm of his hand trembling. Leaning towards the wall, he was the skinny poet, long legged and hopeful, a nervous suitor, a shy lover, all revealed, all pretense dropped. “Do you think she will like it?” he said. “It reminds me of her, the face of the woman.”

How honored I, as if bestowed with a gentle mantle, a mantle of trust, responsibility, adulthood, a tiny slice of what was to come, I stepped for a moment into the waiting body of my future self. My opinion? My father wanted my opinion. I, the fallen angel, the eleven-year-old watcher, I who looked down at myself in the bathtub, seeing my tiny breasts forming and pubic hair beginning in strands of blue against my milky child’s skin, all in the green water as I floated there, the curved porcelain tub holding me, lifting me into my new forming body stretching out under me, light as wood. Me the awkward singing angel who was silent? My opinion?

My father opened the little box and inside a ring, a delicate gold band with red stones surrounding it, a tiny painting of a woman, a lovely face set among red jeweled facets of the ring. Oh, such a tiny treasure lying in his large, moving palm.

“Do you think she will like it?” he said again.

“Oh yes, Daddy. Yes, it’s beautiful, so beautiful,” I said, my little hand on his back, my eyes heavy, weighted.

On Christmas eve, I lay in my steely bed with my older sister, the cold night sky outside full of candles and songs of angels and clouds of fire, sharp green ivy and pine, blood red holly berries. Was I a Jew? Was Christ killed by the Jews?  “What my teacher says, is that true?” I once asked my father.

“What do you think?” he said, turning away again, his face merging into shadow. My mother was not a Jew. My father was a Jew. What did it mean? What about the churches we visited all last autumn? Endless arched doors we had entered. Tintern Abbey all in shambles, grass everywhere inside it, grass climbing over the tombs, over the statues, the figure of Christ seen just barely through the broken stones and blowing soft green leaves. And then in bigger cathedrals the long statues of dead kings stretched out on top of heavy tombs, or the sad queens in marble lying cold with their beloved pets, a carved greyhound at the foot, a favorite dove nestled in hand. What about the line of choir stalls, the tearful red stained windows above the kneeling sorrow, the feet of Christ crossed at the bottom of the body, pierced with nails, the palms bleeding . . . long boney feet, the soles almost touching the floor?

I knew my mother did not like jewelry. I never saw her wear a necklace or bracelet or a lovely ring. She told my father over and over again, “I want a silver teapot for Christmas. Sterling for English tea.” Her face half turned to the window, the wan English light casting her profile in longing for home, for America.

That Christmas, that winter, as I lay in the long tub of green water in the large bathroom upstairs, dark linoleum underfoot, I drifted there in the water and as I drifted, I changed, transformed into a stranger to myself, tiny breasts grew larger, soft pubic hair thicker. I floated there unknowing. Asleep. Awake. Startled.

My father in early March in a rooming house in London tied a bathrobe belt around his neck and hung from the back of a door, his body dropping low under him, his long expressive feet almost touching the floor. Into the folds of yellowed memory, he disappeared. And never came back.

But who was to blame? Who caused it? No one. No one was to blame.  It was not the ring, not the money for the turquoise tea set, not the angel with tied vocal chords who did not sing. It had been something already in motion, already set and ready, like a trap poised to snap or a teapot waiting to be filled on Christmas morning with warm, soothing, healing water.

Many years later on another Christmas morning, when I was in my twenties, my mother gave me a gift in a brown cardboard box. I would cry over it as it as it lay there in my lap, the turquoise tea set, each piece swathed in newspaper. I would see the butterflies through rips and holes in the wrapping. I did not know then that my life would be a kind of puzzle with a pattern. I did not know the pattern of the turquoise flowers and butterflies on scalloped white porcelain would somehow repeat itself or weave itself into my days, my months, my years.

And then one night in another Cambridge, in Massachusetts where I was living later, I had the tea set on the counter in the kitchen. And when a nail gave out, a cast iron frying pan fell off the wall suddenly and knocked the teapot to the floor and smashed it into pieces. I sat up all night gluing every single piece back together, every morsel of china so that when finished, the tea pot looked to be whole, although it could never hold water again.

It sat on a table glued together at breakfast. The repairs barely visible, the blue green delicate pattern overriding the cracks, the fissures. But when the light from the morning sun fell across the body of the teapot, casting shadows on hidden moments, you could see clearly the pure and the raw, the shatter of it.


Phoebe Stone is a painter, poet, and author of seven novels for young adults—most recently Romeo Blue and The Boy on Cinnamon Street—and three picture books, including When the Wind Bears Go Dancing. Phoebe grew up in Vermont, in a family of poets and novelists, and has spent most of her life painting and writing. Before concentrating on creating books for children and young adults, Phoebe had a successful career as a fine art painter and exhibited her work in many museums and galleries all around New England and New York City. She is presently working on a series of memoir/short stories for a book. Read another excerpt here.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative nonfiction for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings. To submit an essay to our series, please read our guidelines.

Filed Under: Confluences, NER Digital, News & Notes Tagged With: Phoebe Stone

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Cover art by Ralph Lazar

Volume 41, Number 4

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Writer’s Notebook

Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

Shara McCallum

Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

Answering such queries typically falls to novelists. But, being a poet, I felt compelled to ask poetry to respond.

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