Guest Post! by Mána Taylor

The Iceland my father grew up in had no television, no highway. He likes to explain that he had never seen a pizza until the age of 10 when they went on a family trip to Copenhagen. It was only 60 years ago that the rest of the world ignored this little island.

I inherited a keepsake from that time. I’m not sure how it found its way to my hands, maybe when my grandfather passed away, it was passed onto me. It was sent to my dad from his dad in 1964, when my dad was just about to turn three. My father is one of five children, but this postcard was sent to him individually. I wonder if my grandfather sent each of his children a postcard that my grandmother then read aloud to each of them. (When you send a postcard to a child I guess you acknowledge the adult who will read it to them)

There are many aspects of this postcard that mark its era. The address is incredibly simple: “Skógaskóla, Eyjafjöllum, Iceland.” Eyjafjöll is the region now known widely as the mountain where the unpronounceable volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted. When my dad was growing up, they lived in a small village called Skógar, which translates to “forest.” There aren’t many trees in Iceland, but there’s a small trail of trees in Skógar tall enough to cover the sky and enclose the space around you. My grandfather also planted hundreds of trees around his house, birch trees that surround the small A-frame house we still go to every summer. He was the principal of the school “Skógaskóla,” which just means school of Skógar (or forest school). There were only a few houses then, so I’m not surprised the postcard made its way to my dad swiftly with only three words as its address. No numbers, no street names, just the one and only school. Besides the school, there was a church and a few turf houses. You can visit them as part of a museum now.

I can barely read my grandfather’s writing in its small cursive. “This is an enormously big city,” he writes. “I am seeing a lot that I have never seen before. I’ll tell you all about it when I’m home.” He then mentions my father’s brother and his sisters, “I hope you are playing together. You’ve always been good kids.” In that instance, I could hear my grandfather’s voice. He would often say to me and my sister “duglegar telpur” which is a very old-fashioned way of saying that we were talented and good, though I’ve never been quite able to translate this word “dugleg.”

There is so much reassurance in the brevity of a postcard. I am well, I hope all is well with you, I’m sending my best, say hello to so-and-so! In the smallest amount of details, we can still convey so much. The image on the postcard is a portal to a place we are writing from. But it’s one of the least personal images one can send as well, as there are hundreds of repeat images traveling across planes and ships to other postcard-receivers. It doesn’t send any detail on specific places the sender might have visited. It’s also an incredibly spontaneous act, one of momentary writing.

If I hadn’t known it was the Chicago skyline, I wouldn’t have guessed it from the image. The skyscrapers that adorn the Chicago of today make these buildings from the 60’s barely discernible. The Hancock tower was completed in 1968, the Willis (formerly Sears) tower in 1974, the same year the Icelandic ring road was completed. I happened to spend half of my childhood in Chicago, which also made this postcard more magical. I found out later, when asking my aunt, that my grandfather was on a Fulbright which is why he wrote in October that he’d be “home in the winter.” The postcard is a mere fragment I have of the months he spent in a city I know so well now, a small instance to connect through words, time, and place.

Mána [Hjörleifsdóttir] Taylor is a writer and art critic currently based in New York. You can learn more about her here.

Postcards (we're back!)

I’ve had a busy seven months or so: my dad died, my husband and I bought our first house, then went up for tenure at the University of Tulsa, I spent a week in the hospital, then got sicker after I was released but was finally (after two years of serious mystery health problems) diagnosed with two autoimmune disorders, and my novel (The Extinction of Irena Rey) came out, which meant I got to travel (on a heavy dose of steroids). I went to New York, Boston, South Hadley, Tucson, Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Brisbane, and Sydney, and, having never been to Australia before, I fell head-over-heels in love with Sydney. My twins turned two, and my husband and I were awarded our tenure (hooray!).

I still have some book-related travel coming up—Edinburgh, back to New York, Austin, Miami, Mobile, Columbia (South Carolina)—and I am still crushed by the loss of my father. But I am getting some time now to get back to a beloved project I was calling Notes on Postcards (it might have a different title now). Yesterday, Boris and I laid out a little bit of my collection for a section of the book on why I’m so fascinated by postcards, and I liked the result so much I thought I’d go ahead and share it here.

More from that section coming soon! And in the meantime, if you’re in possession of a postcard that’s special to you, I’d love for you to write a guest post about it—ideally with a picture of the postcard (one or both sides). Email to jennifer-croft@utulsa.edu. I’d love to hear from you!

Malcolm Forbes, The Washington Post, and Joy

When I was a child writing travel stories in spiral notebooks, could I have imagined someday being reviewed in The Washington Post? I don’t think so. For one thing, I didn’t learn of the existence of newspapers other than The Tulsa World until much later.

I admire criticism enormously and, when it’s done well, I find it as suspenseful and engaging as any fiction. The review is a particularly delicate subgenre, however, one that I have struggled with myself. Unless you have a very strong opinion—love or hate—it can be hard to wrestle with hundreds of someone else’s pages in only a few hundred words. (In point of fact, I’ve found it hard to sum up love, as well, so perhaps it is only hate that lends itself to easy-breezy review? I’d be interested to know people’s thoughts here.)

In the time leading up to the publication of a book, it’s hard not to get at least a little nervous. I know I’ve been nervous. For one thing, the person who edited The Extinction of Irena Rey, the excellent novelist Daniel Loedel, just quit his job in publishing to go off and write excellent novels, leaving me to face critiques and readers alone. (Although of course Daniel is around and no doubt ready to duel on Irena Rey’s behalf should such eventualities arise.)

But the other thing is that I finished the manuscript of The Extinction of Irena Rey when I was eight months pregnant with twins and could no longer access the keyboard of my laptop due my sprawling abdominal region (and the football-like festivities therein) and the fact that my third trimester wreaked havoc on all of my body, blurring my vision and giving me carpal tunnel syndrome.

Yet this was nothing in comparison with what came next! Because my ingenious editor, the aforementioned Daniel Loedel, came to me with notes for a massive overhaul of said manuscript when my twins were in their fourth trimester, that is, a time of nobody sleeping ever and everybody weeping all the time (but especially my husband and me), and so, while trying to keep two infants alive, I massively overhauled the manuscript.

It was the best edit I’ve ever done, of anything, and for reasons I assume are obvious, it was the hardest one, too. After that main revision, there was a flurry of smaller ones, and in addition to trying to keep two infants alive, I started a new job. So that in truth I’m not sure how what I wrote got written, and I’m not even entirely sure what parts got cut and what parts stayed in, what I threw in at the last minute, whether I said that thing I meant to say, and whether I took care of all my characters, in the end, because I do love these characters and want them to thrive and be well in the world, but there are a lot of them, and they’re all very strong-willed.

My first book, Homesick, was partly about learning to give up needing a sense of control over the world and what happens. I wrote it in a very controlled way: pristine (I hope) prose, neatly cropped photographs, a logical, chronological narrative that rises to a climax and then subsides, spreading outward like water after the crash of a wave.

But, and even putting the circumstances of writing and revising aside, I wanted The Extinction of Irena Rey to be the opposite of all that. There was a reason I set my second book in Europe’s last primeval forest: I wanted my translator-characters to go wild, and I wanted to go wild with them. (Actually there were several reasons, but I can talk about the other ones some other time.) And nothing is perfect in the forest, everything is unruly and in motion and filthy and uncivilized, even, to our eyes, bizarre.

How lucky I am, then, to have had The Extinction of Irena Rey reviewed by Malcolm Forbes, who brilliantly summarizes everything I hoped to achieve when I set out to write this book. Forbes is famous for his brilliant reviews, of course, which he has written for The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and lots and lots of other publications. He is an incredible reader, and he is uniquely capable of transmitting both the intellectual and the emotional experience of reading to the readers of his reviews.

How overjoyed I am to read and reread Forbes’ encapsulation of The Extinction:

“Croft subverts expectations with a blackly comic, fiercely inventive drama that explores the cult of celebrity and the art of translation (an art this critically acclaimed, award-winning translator has mastered) while spotlighting disparate individuals working together and falling apart.”

Forbes is such a beautiful writer I almost forgot, on my first read, that these words even pertained to mine. And I love that Forbes says the book “is powered by rambunctious energy and packed with quirks and anomalies.” I love this! It reminds me that, before I was buried under two screeching, hopping toddlers, I, too, was rambunctious once!

And there is everything he says about translation:

“Does Alexis have the right to “civilize” Irena’s text by making amendments? Do translations “adulterate” their originals? At one point, Emi declares how important translators are — “how we mattered, and how we dissolved, which came to the same, like the horizon at sea.” Elsewhere she notes ruefully that “Irena’s works were eternal, but our translations were no more enduring than socks.””

This makes me feel like I’m strolling with an old friend whose work I admire—there are so many ideas that are important to me here, and they are so perfectly, gorgeously encapsulated, the hundred thousand words of the novel boiling down to just this paragraph of his.

“Like her 2019 memoir, “Homesick,” Croft’s novel is interlarded with beguiling photos. They add to the display of creativity on show — a frequently dizzying display, which leaves the reader both disoriented and exhilarated.”

The dizziness and disorientation Forbes mentions in his conclusion are integral parts of The Extinction of Irena Rey; it makes me happy that he felt them, and I can feel (and I hope that you’ll feel) his exhilaration across the whole of the review.

I know no one writes reviews of reviews, and this will probably be the only one I’ll ever write, but I loved and admired this so much, in addition to feeling so honored and understood, that I thought the occasion deserved more than just a private celebration with my cats (who are also, alas, unmoved) or a squawk into the void of X, devourer of exclamation marks.

Thank you to Malcolm Forbes for the incredible care you took with my book, and thank you to The Washington Post. And thank you to my characters, out in the world on their own now:

“Her translators are a colorful bunch, particularly Serbian Petra, who swears Irena’s home is haunted, and Alexis from Arkansas, whose English translation of Emi’s book we are reading, and whose catty footnotes are a source of joy.”

(Thank you to all my characters, but I do also especially love Serbian Petra and Alexis from Arkansas. And Alexises everywhere.)

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Two poems from the Willowherb Review

I became aware of the wonderful Willowherb Review, a London-based journal celebrating nature writing by writers of color, only after its publishing era came to an end. Fortunately there are five issues available online, each packed with fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that is consistently striking, intriguing, and thought-provoking. Today I read two poems from Issue 5: Constellations. The first is by Annina Zheng-Hardy, and this won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me, but it has to do with translation.

The poem’s epigraph is a photograph, simply framed, of a sign posted on a tree trunk that curves against a backdrop of pine forest and mountains and sky hazy with sun. It is in English, first, and then, slightly smaller, in Chinese. The sign is blue, almost Yves Klein blue, while its contents are snow-white. The sign reads:

Forest such as

love, fire on every-

one.

The poet’s task, then, is to briefly yet insistently interrogate this translation, using her own Chinese as well as Google Translate, and giving us the opportunity to do the same by including the Chinese characters in the poem itself: 护林如爱家，防火靠大家。Google Translate is interesting partly because it’s eternally in flux, which means that my results were different from Zheng-Hardy’s: “Protecting forests is like loving your home, and fire prevention depends on everyone.” In fact, there is so much poetry to these two lines, AI-generated though they may be, and I especially love the sound and impact of the phrase “prevention depends.”

I love being guided on this double journey, along a trail I have never set foot on, and through a process of linguistic recovery and transformation that I can access only with the poet’s expert help.

So certain in its presentation, yet so unclear — fire
on everyone — it is both and neither command 
nor declaration. Until I read the Chinese written beneath,
as context beside the painting, the author’s note 
after the poem. 护林如爱家，防火靠大家。

This straightforward tone also really appeals to me in poetry, and these line breaks are clear and effective—it’s hard to argue with strong finales like “fire” and “command,” but these also work perfectly as breath markers.

Interestingly the language gets murkier as we come to understand the meaning of the sign. We’re supposed to help prevent fires, definitely, but how to imagine a catastrophe in such idyllic surrounds? The distance, the drift that follows this and floats away at the poem’s conclusion beautifully compliments its bracing opening, asking us to think beyond linguistic and cultural differences and reckon with the final limitations of our human thought.

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The second poem is categorized as non-fiction at the top, but it reads like a spell, and because its spellbinding whirl of points and insights revolves around the question of what poetry is, and how to reach it, I thought of it as poetry throughout (then again, I am not someone who cares too much about genre labels, or other labels). A much longer piece, “A Discipline of Kindness” could be read as a list, a chorus, or, as I read it, an incantation, and it builds in power and heartbreak and hope with every earnest entry, simply phrased or intriguingly at odds with itself.

I thought the mysticism of this worked so beautifully with the casual prose of the explanations, as the poet introduces us to her location “at the end of the world,” in the Puget Sound, where she immerses herself in the past and present of indigenous peoples like the S’klallam, Suquamish, and Swinomish, while thinking of her own ancestors, ancient and recently lost, like her auntie, who in turn introduced her to essential rituals of poetry by teaching her how to access true names.

This is the key question of this piece, and one I loved and am fascinated by: What is the transcendental power of a name? Does everyone and everything have a symbolic heart that, with the correct attention, can be heard beating all the way across the universe?

“To destroy the sovereignty of a people, you must first destroy their name,” we read in an epigraph credited to “common knowledge.” White goes on to analyze her own names (“The name White is most certainly the name of the plantation owner, given to those enslaved on the land”), naming ceremonies of Yorubaland, place names, all while carefully considering the weight of a humpback whale’s heart (“about as much as the weight of three average adult human beings”). As she prays for the whales, she wonders:

• How do we call to those who are refused a name? How do we sing to them? How do we say they are known?

Another thing in this piece that really resonated with me was its inquiry into grief, which comes back again and again in elegantly, almost as if by magic, reformulated positions:

• Grief is a threshold emotion. Meaning, it is an emotion that carries its own opposite within it. We only experience loss to the degree we experience connection to what we have lost. We only experience the death or passing away of a thing to the degree we have felt its vitality within and vitalness to us. We only experience grief to the degree we have experienced love.

This is so beautiful, and so rich, I feel I’ll go on thinking about it for a long time to come, especially as I continue to struggle with the grief of losing my father in November, a struggle I’m sure will continue for the rest of my life.