Reading for Wild Thought
by Lynne Jensen Lampe
If I were one of those people who kept a reading journal, this post would be much easier to write. My cousin Judy records every title and her reactions. She once sent me a postcard with a map of Wisconsin on the front and a neat scribble on the back listing her top 5 faves in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and classics. As kids, we played hide-and-seek in cornfields and skated the pond but never talked about books. Now we always talk about reading. Writing, too.
In September 2022, Ice Floe Press published my debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane, poems about my mother and her severe mental illness diagnosed a few weeks after my birth. The process of writing and revising showed me how afraid I was of being considered wrong, different, broken. How little I really knew of my mother’s struggles. Much of my reading this year served to fill gaps in knowledge and memory, to help me break through my stodgy resistance to wild thought. I read poetry and books on mental illness as well as imaginative, off-kilter short fiction. Oh, and The New Yorker. I live in Missouri but still read the restaurant reviews, entertainment offerings, the poetry and at least one long-form reportage. I run a hot bath, set the timer on my iPhone and settle in with water bottle or wine and a hand towel so I can turn pages with dry fingers. One article I especially remember is “Finding a Way Back from Suicide,” by Donald Antrim, who voluntarily committed himself to a psych unit. The article came out in August 2021, but I reread it as I revised my manuscript.
My hunt for books that reflected what I knew (or thought I knew) of my mother’s illness and hospitalizations (incarcerations, she called them) brought me to several nonfiction books. W-3, by Bette Howland, is a reprint of the 1974 memoir detailing her time on Ward 3, the psych wing in a Chicago hospital. I’d been searching for hints of my mother’s experiences in public and private facilities, but she’s dead, my father can’t speak of it, and I lacked the courage to ask (or maybe had the wisdom not to) on social media for patients’ stories. Two elements of W-3 that meant most to me were Howland’s interactions with her husband and her descriptions of the other patients on the ward, the former because my father always visited no matter the distance or the conditions, and the latter because my mother always wanted to tell us about the other inmates (her word) and we never wanted to hear. In recounting her first day on the ward, Howland writes, “I should explain right away that I didn’t belong here. But that goes without saying, no one belonged here. …On W-3 you encountered the terrible force of a generalization, and it had to be resisted.” The ward is a soup of idiosyncrasy, illness, and intimacy. The main text and endnotes provide personal, social and historical contexts.
In The Great Pretender, Susannah Cahallan (author of the memoir Brain on Fire) examines the 1970s experiment in which psychologist David Rosenhan recruited seven individuals with no symptoms and no diagnoses to each seek hospitalization at different facilities. Rosenhan and the other participants each related at intake they heard voices. All of them were admitted, at which time they stopped pretending. One of them was hospitalized for almost 2 months. Cahallan’s book questions the purpose, veracity, and ethics of the study, looks at the individual experiences of the participants, and ponders psychiatric and societal attitudes toward (in)sanity. As with Howland’s memoir, the endnotes are informative and well worth reading. Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness is Catherine Cho’s intimate, harrowing account of the onset of and treatment for postpartum psychosis diagnosed during a trip she and her husband made to the United States to introduce their infant son to relatives. Early in the book, Cho describes the Korean custom for a new mother and baby stay home the first 100 days, pointing out the ways it influenced her anxiety over travel, her emotional lability, and her increasingly disrupted sense of reality. Another factor was a past traumatic relationship, also discussed within a cultural context. Again, of great interest to me was the husband’s response to Cho’s psychosis at home and at the hospital, but even more important was the stab I felt, my heart recognizing my mother’s story more than 50 years prior.
How important is a sense of reality? When is it useful to loosen our grip and live in our imagination? To cut loose from rules? Several small books led the way for me. All had an unusual narrative structure and wild characters. Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu, was a tangle of story and stereotype, enthralling and disturbing. It’s formatted as a screenplay and I wasn’t always sure where real life ended and the script began. But that was the point, I think—Yu’s book jolted me, forced me to wrestle society and self. Heartland Calamitous, a collection of flash fiction by Michael Credico, carved itself into my heart, most memorably with the story “Killing Square” (first sentence: “It’s the manipulations that end you.”). I reacted similarly to Wild Milk, by Sabrina Orah Mark, with titles such as “Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt,” “The Maid, the Mother, and the Snail,” and “The Stick Figure Family.” A surreal river of words that carried me so swiftly I never once asked why or how I believed. Then there’s Something Dead in Everything, by Lannie Stabile. Reading this collection, I had one foot in the everyday, the other in the fantastic. Even Stabile’s shortest story, “Eldredge Knot,” which opens with the words “The mortician couldn’t have known” and ends after two paragraphs, takes the reader somewhere unexpected, weird—and logical.
On any given day, I’m in the middle of a poetry book. On the kitchen table are two by Mary Oliver: American Primitive and Why I Wake Early. I pulled them from my shelf when our household was running low on hope. Oliver views nature—wild things and human—up close, in great detail and loved. “Morning at Great Pond” delivers a dawn moving and urgent:
forks of light
slicking up
out of the east
flying over you,
and what’s left of night—
Others I haul with me everywhere: Outskirts by Heathen (aka Heather Derr) and Wiregrass and Other Poems by Moira J. Saucer. These are strong poems. Startling, walking-on-coals poems. I read and reread these two books to remind myself of the way society—always and still—misperceives women, especially those who deign to defend their right to take up space, to champion their beliefs, to live.
Heathen opens their collection with “Uxor Pilate” (the wife of Pontius Pilate)—
I want no country, least of all
this one. Gather in the fields
on the outskirts of the village,
each of us a body turned to cloud
and “Joan, Director’s Notes”
When the girl dies in martyr stories her head goes on singing or testifies
Silence is all we get from the dead in this century or a ghost
Stark violences and violations, women wresting control, standing firm.
Then there’s Wiregrass. Saucer begins with autobiographical poems of life after the onset of chronic illness, her words pointed as shards of glass. Angry, devastated, compassionate, beautiful. The poem “When you fall” starts out with “most people fall away. It’s human nature.” Saucer doesn’t judge the reader, even though “The world judged me harshly.” This change in health and circumstances, left her
nowhere soft
to curl up
like any animal would
and mourn
the death of the woman
that was me.
In
“Homeless and broke,” she writes of “a tent of opaque anguish” and says “When
pain takes everything, fear wraps you in his arms.” The male pronoun here shouts
to me that as a woman, my comfort in society is an illusion, my power more
tenuous than I thought. In “Loss,” Saucer fights “terror trains” and “dystopian
theft” by creating:
In ugliness, I found evidence of beauty.
Pastels, beautiful colors
rolling onto the emptiness of
white space. I wept
Another
intense, complex collection is Peculiar Heritage, DeMisty
Bellinger’s debut collection, taught me history, politics and protest, the
blues. The moon. Freedom and what you can give, what you can take. In the
titular poem, Bellinger demands of the enslaver,
if you look at her eyes and forget
the other livestock on your farm,
does it make it easier to take her
where your wife won’t see?
In
“Sowing Season,” she feels her mother’s fingers
crossing corn rows
th-rip th-rip th-rip
plaiting Africa
into my hair
I know that a poem can have multiple meanings, and I know that no reader (or poet who’s written it) will realize them all. When I read Bellinger’s collection, I sensed meanings I can’t yet articulate and wonder if, as a white woman, I ever will. Peculiar Heritage, like other books in this post, calls for deeper reads and will carry over to next year’s list.
Other poetry books fed my thoughts, expanded my sense of self and view of the world—I want to share them, if only by title and author: Solve for Desire, Caitlin Bailey; Loss and Other Rivers that Devour, Gustavo Barahona-López; Partial Genius, Mary Biddinger; The Gleaming of the Blade, Christian J. Collier; A Map of Every Undoing, Alicia Elkort; Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir, Barbara Harris Leonhard; Dor, Alina Ştefănescu. Music thrilled me too, especially The Shattucks, Daniela Gesundheit, Beth Bombara, and Johnette Napolitano singing “Take Me Home” (listening so much I finally wrote a golden shovel using a line of the song).
Nothing too soft or gentle here, but it’s comforting to know I can immerse myself in different realities and always return home. I think my cousin Judy would agree.
Lynne Jensen Lampe’s debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022) concerns mother-daughter relationships, mental illness, and antisemitism. Her poems appear in many journals including THRUSH, Figure 1, and Yemassee. A finalist for the 2020 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize and BOTN nominee, she lives with her husband and two dogs in mid-Missouri, where she edits academic research. She designed a number of covers for Aqueduct books in the first few years of the press. Visit her at https://lynnejensenlampe.com; on Twitter @LJensenLampe; or IG @lynnejensenlampe.
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