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The stack by my bedside grows. I just picked up Marilynne Robinson’s ABSENCE OF MIND, which sounds a bit like a murder mystery title but is instead a meditation on the tension between science and religion. Being a science geek with a decidedly non-empirical approach to the world, I’m pretty excited to read what she has to say on this topic.

Robinson is one of our finest novelists writing today. Wait; that sounded lukewarm, and I am scalding hot in my appreciation for this writer’s work. I read GILEAD straight through, and then I turned back to the start and read it all over again. HOUSEKEEPING; HOME — these are master works by a writer who marries an achingly beautiful approach to language to a penetrating inquiry into the nature of morality, particularly as it pertains to human relationships.

And who writes a damn good story.

Speaking of which — I’ve just finished two of those.  Susan Breen‘s THE FICTION CLASS came out in 2008 and I’ve just now read it.  Breen is one of those rare writers who can make you laugh all the way through and then fell you with the earned sentiment at the end.  This novel follows a woman — Arabella Hicks, named for the heroine of a romance novel — who teaches fiction to a colorful assortment of beginners in New York City while juggling the demands of her aging, ailing mother.  Wry, sly, and with not a touch of meanness, THE FICTION CLASS made me laugh, made me tear up, made me laugh again.  I developed a lasting fondness for the characters and for Arabella herself, an old-fashioned and at the same time thoroughly contemporary woman doing her bumbling best to make sense of a world through the stories it offers her.  Extra pleasure for anyone who’s ever taught fiction.

I turned from NYC of THE FICTION CLASS to the Los Angeles and Salton Sea of  CUT AWAY, a short and breathtaking novel by Catherine Kirkwood and published by the inimitable Red Hen Press. Kirkwood has the corner on stunning sentences; this novel may be short in pages, but it’s long on poetry. Surefooted, inquiring, cool in the very best manner, CUT AWAY follows three women whose lives intersect as each gives chase to a missing teenager, a girl who fled her home in search of a clearer understanding of her own identity. Each of these adult women, too, seeks to understand who she is beneath the multiple disguises she herself wears. Los Angeles may be the city of hard surfaces, but it’s the arid, unforgiving landscape of the Salton Sea that serves up the most accurate mirror for these characters — and Kirkwood’s prose is a match for that unrelenting honesty, yielding pleasure at every turn.

You reading anything good, lately?  Or has the world outside snatched your time, too?

Last time I promised more Siberia. Lucky you! There’s plenty of it to go around.

There’s so much Siberia, in fact, that it took Ian Frazier and two Russian pals five weeks and two days to cross it in a diesel-powered Renault step van. He wrote about the experience in a two-part article The New Yorker published last August.

Nearly anywhere Ian Frazier goes, I will follow. I first encountered his writing in Great Plains, his non-fiction account of the huge hunk of land (and its various denizens, human and otherwise) that makes up the American midsection. (Here’s a good interview with Frazier, discussing On the Rez, another of his books.)

Clearly, this is a man unfazed by size.

But if the American Midwest is big, Siberia occupies a different order of magnitude. All of the continental U.S. and most of Europe could fit in the broad swath of land – forty-six hundred miles wide – that’s loosely considered Siberia. It doesn’t exist, officially. Not as a political entity, anyway. But try telling that to the world’s largest forest, the vast expanse of tundra, and the miles on miles of steppe that comprise the region. Try telling that to the thirty-eight million Russians and native people who live there. (If you can find them.)

Try telling New Yorker readers about a landscape that foreign and that daunting – and you’d better have a few tricks up your sleeve to make it work.

My disinterest in Siberia notwithstanding, I read the article, “Travels in Siberia,” with absolute relish the first time through. And then I read it again, more carefully, to try to understand how Frazier manages to keep our keen interest while plowing through material that might more likely be encountered in a sixth-grade report.

The names of the mountains. The names of the rivers. The political borders. The climate, mineral reserves, transportation system, flora and fauna and history. Are you asleep yet?

Not if you’re reading the article. If you’re reading, you’re on the edge of your chair. The river does what? you say. No shit! How big are the logs? How cold does it get? Tell me more!

Because you are there, and that’s your buddy Ian pointing out some of the more interesting aspects of the place to you. He’s giving you some background information, weaving his presence, his agile intelligence, his wit, and his personal credibility into language that is both accessible and deftly structured for maximum pleasure.

If you give much thought to rhetoric – not just how to construct an argument, but, more broadly, how to structure any written work to persuade the reader to join your corner – this article is a goldmine of successful strategies.

The Ural Mountains, which cross Russia north to south from the Arctic Ocean to Kazakhstan, are the western edge of Siberia. The Urals also separate Europe from Asia. As a mountain range with the big job of dividing two continents, the Urals aren’t much. It is possible to drive over them, as I have done, and not know. In central Russia, the summits of the Urals average between one thousand and two thousand feet. But after you cross the Urals the land opens out, the villages are farther apart, the concrete bus shelters along the highway become fewer, and suddenly you realize you’re in Siberia.

In general, abstract facts are stingily allotted short sentences. Frazier saves his words for the tangible – what the reader can see, hear, feel, imagine – and varies the sentence length so that no paragraph feels overburdened with either fact or image. And he is constantly, constantly interjecting narrative: the obvious narrative line of his travels, and the oblique introduction of brief stories to illustrate ideas.

Makes me want to go somewhere. Kathy and I are headed to Tucson for a brief jaunt – springtime in the desert, all that jazz – but we’ve been kicking around the idea of a longer trip, too. We’re thinking maybe it would be fun to take a month and walk the Camino de Santiago across Spain.

In the meantime, I’m content to travel along with writers who can make me see and smell and feel the place they’re moving through.

Any recommendations of writers who have done that for you?

With all apologies due James Taylor, there’s something powerful about the way a place – even a place you’ve never visited – can stand in for a state of being.

Siberia? I think: Cold. Isolation. Hard labor. Okay, tundra. Maybe caribou.

There are few places in the world I don’t want to go to as much as I don’t want to go to Siberia.

Not so for the unnamed narrator of Per Petterson’s latest novel, TO SIBERIA. Called Sistermine by the brother she adores, she dreams of traveling the vast region by rail, leaving her native Denmark to escape to a place of “open skies that were cold and clear, where it was easy to breathe and easy to see for long distances.”

Like Petterson’s 2007 OUT STEALING HORSES, TO SIBERIA gathers its emotional weight from the intersection of personal life with the rise of the Nazi threat in northern Europe. As her brother becomes increasingly involved in the Resistance movement, her own isolation and disengagement grow more profound as she watches the effect of the war on her parents, her neighbors, her schoolmates, her town.

Many of Petterson’s gifts evident in OUT STEALING HORSES – the later, more mature work – are on display in this novel as well. His long lines, with their unconventional breaks. His descriptions of place, less often as landscape and more as a felt experience of water and rock, a way of breathing, the chill in the bones and sounds carrying down the streets of the town. Some of his images are breathtaking: a fisherman approaches, the holes in his layered wool sweaters overlapping at places; the girl and her brother lie on cows for their warmth, matching their breathing to the animals’ deep respiration.

TO SIBERIA is no match for OUT STEALING HORSES in its psychological acuity, though. For me, there’s something off in the author’s efforts to capture the sexual awakening of a young woman. There’s a kind of narrative flatness in the sex scenes that seems intended to stand in for the character’s overall social estrangement – making them function more as a device and less as a natural outgrowth of who she is.

But when she dreams of Siberia, it’s a place where “the houses are built of timber that gives off the good smell of tar and warmth in summer, and when the long winter sets in the glow stays in the logs and never fades. The wood contracts and waits and stretches out when spring comes and drinks in the wind and the sun.”

That’s sexier than it ever gets in the rest of the novel.

Next up: Ian Frazier goes to the real Siberia – and gets bitten, real bad. Stay tuned.

And for you?  Any place carry a mythic weight?

I spent much of last night watching the TV and staring at the computer screen, stunned by the images of a Haiti under siege. The disastrous earthquake and its death toll, the very literal ticking clock as relief workers toil to rescue those still trapped, and the misery among the survivors – who will face not days or weeks but years of work to rebuild their lives – it’s a disaster of such scale that it’s almost impossible to comprehend.

Haitian-born author Edwidge Danticat is a MacArthur Fellow and the author of Krik? Krak! and Breath, Eyes, Memory, among other books. She spoke with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now about Haiti’s troubles (“Haiti devastated…”). In the report – which combined reports of collapsed buildings and general mayhem with some history of Haiti and Haitian immigration to the US – Danticat mentioned the work of some of the long-standing relief organizations doing positive work in the country.

One of those, Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health, was profiled by author Tracy Kidder in the bestselling Mountains Beyond Mountains. The organization’s mission is “to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care,” and they’re fulfilling it in an inspiring way. Right now is a good time to donate at the Partners in Health website.

The health care needs of this country, always enormous, have increased exponentially in the wake of this disaster. The Red Cross, USAID, and teams of rescue workers and medical providers from around the globe have rushed to bring aid to the injured and supplies to those in need. Part of the problem, though – said a weary Nan Buzard, a senior Red Cross coordinator in the country – is the difficulty presented by the need to transport supplies through a devastated countryside.

Accurately updated maps and other geographic information is critical in any disaster. That’s why I’m so impressed by the work of MapAction, a British-based NGO that works to provide “frequently updated situation maps showing where relief help is most urgently needed.” They take a boots-on-the-ground approach to gathering and assembling geographical data that can help advise relief agencies on blocked transportation routes, physical dangers, and other impediments to their work, helping them make decisions and save valuable time.

They’ve published a free downloadable handbook called MapAction Field Guide to Humanitarian Mapping. It teaches relief workers how to use free, open-source Geographic Information System (GIS) software to guide their humanitarian operations.

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By which I mean to say:  this story is the real shit, and you should rush to read it.

We talked a lot in the workshop in Taos about ways writers reveal place, and I looked at this story with a special interest in how Quade tackled the task.  (I’ll try not to spoil your experience of the story by giving away plot points.  Seriously, you’ve got to read it.  It’s online.  Click on the first link above.)  First – clearly – there aren’t many other places in the country where secret societies of men reenact the Passion annually.  “This year Amadeo Padilla is Jesus,” the story starts.  “The hermanos have been practicing in the dirt yard behind the morada, which used to be a filling station,” and – bingo – we’re set not just in place, but roughly in time.  The story continues to accrue details that set it squarely in present-day northern New Mexico: we learn we’re close to Espanola, we get “Law and Order” and “America’s Next Top Model” on satellite TV, we meet Amadeo’s fifteen-year-old daughter Angel, pregnant and enrolled in parenting classes.  This is no caricatured New Mexico; this is the place in all its rough glory, with its cholos and its lowriders, its fringe Catholicism and contorted views of women and sex, its sense that family is all you have and that that’s why you betray them, again and again, for the sin of their importance to you.

What we don’t get are sweeping vistas of iconic landscapes.  We don’t get blue-framed windows or blossoming hollyhocks or adobe walls or howling coyotes.  We get exactly the details this story requires: nothing less, and nothing more.  An unnamed village where Amadeo Padilla grew up, the “roll of skin where skull meets thick neck,” the crucifix, “violence in the very carving,” hanging in the morada.  These are the details we need to understand the movement of the story, the slow burn of Amadeo Padilla’s growing awareness of his role in Christ’s Passion as well as in the human one unfolding before him.

I have nothing against hollyhocks.  I like adobe walls.  But in the same way that writers can rely on readers to conjure a picture of Paris in their minds without mentioning the Eiffel Tower, I’m happy to see this particular writer lay off the iconic images and direct our attention to the details that matter.

I’m fresh off the experience of teaching at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference, a seven-day rush of great words, wonderful people, and – certainly for me, and I’m hoping for the 25 writers (in two groups) who traipsed about Taos by my side – terrific visits to places that reveal the heart of this region. The week started with a five-day “Writing the Where of It” course, alternating days in the classroom with days in the field, and closed with a weekend workshop, “Writing Around Taos,” spent exclusively out and about. I got to hang around with a bunch of talented, interesting, exuberant, good-spirited people who share a love for writing and a curiosity about Taos. What could be better? Well, watching people’s ideas and images bloom on the page in real time – and that’s what the workshops afforded me: the real-time unfolding of beautiful work inspired by the question of place and by the real places we visited.

I’ve got a few people to thank for all the fun I had. First, hats off to Sharon Oard Warner, who launched the first Taos Summer Writers’ Conference eleven years ago on a wing and a prayer, and who must be crazy-proud to see it grow into such a tremendous success. She’s got a crackerjack team working with her. Barb van Buskirk has an infectious smile and a handle on every last detail, and the MFA student interns are smart, cheerful, and always a step ahead of any trouble, quick to head it off at the pass. Teddy Warner (sex and pumpernickel, Teddy? – well, you got us all to smile for the group photo) was everywhere and did everything that needed doing. And Sam Tetangco, Lucy Dupertuis, Robin Brontsema, and Bruce (what’s your last name, Bruce?) were each stellar in carrying out their duties as van drivers for the groups – and brilliant writers to boot.

And the participants? I don’t know how I got so lucky, but to a person both groups were filled with the most engaging, accomplished, good-hearted writers a teacher could ever hope to meet. Watching you guys get to know one another, loosen up in your writing, and enjoy this place I love so much was a true delight for me, and one I won’t forget soon. Sam, Linda, Nancy, Pintki, Ian, Dove, Susie, Valerie, Cathy, Allyson, Lucy, Anne, and Leslie in the first group, and David, Tom, Julia, Jan, Marjorie, Marie M., Marie R., Kim, Jeanne, Suzanne, Robin, and Bruce in the second – you guys rock. Write on, and write well. You’ve got what it takes.

Writing is such a lonely occupation, most of the time. We sit at our desks or draped in our armchairs, the pen poised or computer humming… and we rarely get the chance to exchange ideas with other writers, to talk shop or compose together, to offer our work or listen attentively to others. For one week in July, the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference changes all that. I’m so glad I got to be a part of it.

Living as I do in the wilds of Taos County, I catch most of my movies long after they’ve left the box office.  FROZEN RIVER is no exception.  Debuting at Sundance Film Festival in January ’08 and entering theaters across the country in a limited release six months after that, I’m nearly a year – and a couple of Oscar nominations – behind.

No matter.  FROZEN RIVER stands up to time.  It is a splendid film, with rock-solid acting and an unsentimental story line, and I found it both edge-of-my-seat compelling to watch and deeply moving to reflect on.  How many films that pivot on a piece of ice can claim that combination?

It’s no ordinary piece of ice, though.  The frozen river of the title is the stretch of St. Lawrence that bisects the Mohawk reservation.  Treacherous and unpredictable, the river forms the border between the U.S. and Canada.  “No border,” insists Lila (Misty Upham), a young Mohawk woman who forms an uneasy alliance with Ray (Melissa Leo), a white woman down to her last dime.  “It’s all Mohawk land.”

Ray is sinking, trying to raise her two kids on a part-time salary cashiering at a dollar store, and the distinction is lost on her – until its ramifications come clear.  Border Patrol lacks jurisdiction on the reservation.  The river, frozen enough to drive over in the winter months, is a conduit for undocumented immigrants willing to pay to be smuggled into the States.  Lila has the connections and Ray has the car, and both women – single mothers teetering on the razor edge of poverty – are in desperate need of the cash that’s passed through the car window in crumpled paper bags.

The landscape is austere and unforgiving; both the tin-can trailers the women inhabit and the snow-covered roadsides they travel leave little room to negotiate.  These are women who know how to tow a car, fire a pistol, start a recalcitrant engine.  Necessity has taught them those skills – just as it has taught them never to trust another human.   Not your boss.  Not your husband.  And definitely not the woman of a different race who is quick to take advantage of the slightest weakness on your part. 

FROZEN RIVER is about trust, though.  This film about a physical border is also, deeply, about the borders between people – and, just as the melting river ice introduces a new element of danger to the treks Lila and Ray make back and forth across it, so does the thaw between them put them each at risk.

This is an honest and unflinching movie, but it is not brutal.  There are no villains.  There is only a profound empathy for the choices we make when we’re pushed to the wall.

The play between languages in a given piece of literature is, at its best, a dodging back and forth across the border between cultures.  The fugitive dirt of one cultural and linguistic terrain can’t help but stick to the soles of the writer’s shoes, and be tracked all over the other.  I love this.  When it’s done appropriately and well, it can be breathtaking.

I just finished reading two books written in English in which Spanish is used liberally and effectively.  Eddy Robert Arellano’s newly released “Cuban Noir” novel, HAVANA LUNAR, and his graphic novel DEAD IN DESEMBOQUE are quirky, surprising, sometimes exhilarating, amazingly cool modern stories that plumb old forms (the detective novel; the comic book) to tell new tales.  I love how Arellano plays off genre conventions to put a new twist on the young man’s (often drunken) stumbles through the landscape of unrequited love, insufficient sex, and unreliable friendship.  (Smiley face.)  And I love still more that these adventures happen during the “special period” of Castro’s Cuba in HAVANA LUNAR, and down through the deserts of Mexico in the wacky/brilliant DEAD IN DESEMBOQUE.

Writers use alternate languages at three different levels, I think.  First is as a kind of surface gloss, a provider of “local color” that might even generate a little street cred for the piece.  That’s language as vivid detail, tropical hues in the author’s more subdued English palette.  Second is because an isolated character or action requires it, and can’t be brought to life otherwise.  Third, and most profoundly, is because a place or set of cultural concepts is untranslatable.  In this case the reader is introduced to not just a vocabulary but to a whole place and way of life.  HAVANA LUNAR is like that.

For the writer who uses more than the occasional word from another language in a piece of writing intended for monolingual readers, a bunch of questions come up.  To what extent do you have to explain the words’ meanings in the text?  How much ambient knowledge of the language will you expect readers to bring to the experience?  What degree of ambiguity do you think readers can tolerate? And – if you’re going to dish it out – how can you use that ambiguity to your benefit?

Some authors opt for a glossary at the end of the book, but unless it’s addressed creatively, a glossary can be pedantic and irritating.  It seems to work much better to integrate the information into the text itself.  Introducing single words is pretty easy; you can talk directly about them, or weave enough ambient information in adjacent that it’s possible to get a clear picture without being provided a definition. 

Using another language in dialogue is much more complex.  Cormac McCarthy, who does this extensively, often follows a line of Spanish with a direct translation as return dialogue.  Arellano has passages where he expects the reader to follow, mystified, for quite a while before he reveals the meaning.  Sometimes that’s rich and even suspenseful, especially when wordplay is involved; but other times – when the payoff doesn’t make it worthwhile – it’s kind of an obstacle to pleasure.  To watch this dance is to recognize the delicate balance that must be struck between the vivid authenticity of alternate language, and the reader’s necessary comprehension.  To complicate matters, the fulcrum shifts reader to reader.

For American writers who grew up bilingual or whose first language was not English, the successful ability to slide back and forth from one language to another can offer a gorgeous display of strength and versatility.  It’s kind of an embarrassment of riches, and Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Arellano and others have made an art of it.  (It’s no surprise that the authors that come to mind are those using Spanish, not Mandarin or Anishinabe.  Spanish words are so embedded in American English that a writer can rely on at least a moderate familiarity among readers.)  Even those of us raised on nothing but cornflakes and the King’s English find it essential sometimes to tap other languages to tell the stories we are motivated to tell.  For that, these writers are a guide and an inspiration.  It’s not just what you hear, but how you lay it on the page that counts.