The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2023, pt. 17: Elizabeth Clark-Stern

 

The Joy of Art in Community: The Pleasure of Reading, Viewing, Listening 2023

by Elizabeth Clark-Stern

 

 

 

It was a bumpy year for me. Losses and challenges in the family, increasing threats to our democracy, the horror of war. I sought community in the arts, finding it in some very unexpected places.

At the Open Mic for local authors at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Washington, I listened to writers of every age, race, and gender identity read from every genre: fiction, comedy, memoir, non-fiction, poetry--authors from small presses, large presses, self-published, and works- in- progress. A  nine-year-old Indian-American girl explained that she was upset about the impact of global warming on the animals of the earth.  Her grandmother said to her, “You are creative, you can write a book about it. That will help the animals. ” This girl went on to illustrate and publish her own book. She stood on a box to reach the podium as she read her story about two girls who saved an elephant and a panda. We all cheered. Her grandmother, in purple silk sari, beamed with pride.  

 Another community available at the flick of a button is Aqueduct Press. I adored Gwynne Garfinkle’s Can’t Find My Way Home. Her prose flows like a mountain stream, the characters so alive you expect to see them standing next to you at the grocery store. The original voice of the actress-heroine sparkles, “I felt my life fragment and reshape itself.” I love the sense of drama, the delight in entering Jo’s mind. I have a theater background myself, and lived through the Viet Nam war era. Garfinkle captured the madness and fury of the time flawlessly. A novel that elevates the spirit with meaning and magic. 

 

Also, from Aqueduct, I read Alanya to Alanya: Book One of the Marq’ssan Cycle by L. Timmel Duchamp. Although it was published in 2005, I was thunderstruck at the relevance to our current global crises. Through the metaphor of science fiction, Ms. Duchamp takes us into the complexity of a world of exploitation and tyranny, while allowing us intimate access to the shadow side of our protagonist, who must fight both external and internal battles. Duchamp’s writing is chilling in its breadth and depth. Such phrases as, “ Magyyt stared at the sky, wishing self could look upon the light of Marqeuei. They had miscalculated human psychology so badly that now they must take nothing for granted. This habit of denial…The humans were perfectly willing to grant extraordinary powers of reality to things imaginary and abstract, but would refuse to grant reality to the obvious.”

Sound familiar? Reading Alanya helped me metabolize the trauma in our world, and in my own psyche.

 

Next I turned to Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century, in some ways a nonfiction version of Duchamp’s Alanya to Alanya. Harari is a world history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of Sapiens and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. While I don’t agree with all of his conclusions about human psychology, it was chilling to read his predictions about the colonization of A.I. in our present and future world

 

This theme was echoed when I visited my 85-year old brother in his nursing home in Austin, Texas. We watched the 1950’s version of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. My brother was a science fiction author in his day (Gods in a Vortex, and Alien Perspectives by David Houston) He loves the original Body Snatchers and considers it head and shoulders above recent re-makes. I agreed, and found myself trembling as I sat next to his bed, watching the movie on a portable DVD player. “So suspenseful,” I gasped. My brother smiled with satisfaction. We agreed that this black- and- white 1956 movie presaged the takeover of A.I. and Fascism threatening our world in 2023.

Also in the nonfiction category, I discovered the global community of authors in The Climate Book edited by Greta Thunberg. Scientists, health professionals, journalists and activists from around the world report on the impact of our warming climate in their countries. While not an easy read, the comprehensive analysis of the reporting pulled me into membership in the global community of writers like Karl-Heinz Erb, Joelle Gergis, Julia Arieira, and 100 others.  In the final chapter, “Hope is something you have to earn,” Greta Thunberg writes, “…some of the best ways of igniting the changes we need have not yet been discovered…You must take it from here and carry on connecting the dots yourself, because, right there, between the lines, you will find the answers---the solutions that need to be shared with the rest of humanity.”

I’m searching for those dots.  What can I do? With whom can I network? I have a renewed passion about our warming world, thanks to the world community portrayed in The Climate Book.

Small wonder with all of this churning in my head and heart, I turned to music for joy and redemption. My eldest daughter treated me to the Woodland Park Players production of Monty Python’s Spamalot, a musical comedy about the tyranny and genocide of the Middle Ages! I had never seen Community Theater so ebullient. The energy of love, connection, and laughter spread throughout the audience and leapt over the footlights. We left humming the tunes. The world be damned, we can still laugh and sing and dance.

 I discovered a less hysterical, but equally elevating musical experience when I took my youngest daughter to see my friend play the erhu in a production of the Seattle Chinese Orchestra at Benaroya Hall. The erhu is a slender, vertical violin with two strings. My friend, an immigrant from Hong Kong, confided that she was very nervous to play in such a big event for the Chinese community, but she did a beautiful job. My daughter was eager to see the performance since she had spent her senior year in high school in Beijing on a School Year Abroad scholarship. She saw people playing the erhu in the subways and on street corners. Her experience in Beijing, as a white kid among the Chinese, was replicated that night at Benaroya. We were definitely visitors –welcome ones—in an audience of exuberant Chinese. The music on the stage warmed all of our hearts and opened my ears and my mind, to a whole new style of music.

Finally the “word-music” of poetry has been important to me this year: Rumi, Mary Oliver, Hildegard of Bingham….

 

 I will close with Amanda Gorman’s The Miracle of Morning:

 

 We thought we’d awaken to a world in mourning,

Heavy clouds crowding, a society storming,

But there’s something different on this golden morning.

Something magical in the sunlight, wide & warming.

We see a dad with a stroller taking a jog.

Across the street, a bright-eyed girl chases her dog.

A grandma on a porch fingers her rosaries.

She grins as her young neighbor brings her groceries.

 

Wishing you all joy in your reading, viewing and listening in the year to come.

The Open mic for local authors in the Seattle Area takes place every third Monday at 6:15 at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park. Check their website for details.        

 

 

 

Elizabeth Clark-Stern has had careers as a modern dancer, actor, teacher, screenwriter, playwright, psychotherapist (an art form in its own right), and most recently, a novelist. Her novel, The Language of Water was published by Aqueduct in 2023. She lives in the Seattle area.