Bridgeport: Tales from the Park City

Opportunities multiply as they are seized. — Sun Tzu

Good news: friend and frequent Holy Embers commenter Eric Lehman has a new book out. His first published book, Bridgeport: Tales from the Park City is a collection of stories about the adventurous, even heroic, characters that helped bring their small Connecticut town to prominence in the 19th century. A few chapters in, however, and it’s apparent that Eric’s written not a cultural history of Bridgeport but of the country as a whole: a history of America in miniature.

The book, available here, is an engaging, entertaining account of figures grand (P.T. Barnum) and small (General Tom Thumb). I’ll leave you with the end of the book’s prologue, a fitting summary of the initiative and ingenuity which marked Bridgeport during its golden era and for which America became famous.

. . .

[The Marquis de] Lafayette did not foresee it, but this small town would become a center of creative industry and would one day evolve to be the largest city in Connecticut. Its people would watch the sea and take to the sky. Its inventors would transform the fields of metalwork, sewing and dental hygiene. There would be famous colonels and famous cartoonists. Two of its citizens would go on to become the most popular entertainers of the nineteenth century. Thousands of others would help America win both World Wars. But first, those people needed a little elbow room. Twelve years after the famous hero of the Revolution passed through Bridgeport, the townsfolk asked for a charter from the state of Connecticut. They would become their own city at last, and live proudly in the inspired vanguard of the possible.

Potato Eaters

Each night at dinner, in lieu of grace,
my mother lit the center candle
on the table. We children
were allowed two fingers of wine
from the icy jug that was kept cold
out on the front porch. The seven of us
shared bread and casserole on our full plates
and the light filled the room with luster.
Each of us had a task: clear the dishes,
wipe the table, snuff out
the half-melted candle,
its smoky trail reaching to the ceiling
like fingers folding into prayer.

When the washer was full,
we'd stand by the sink, my mother and I,
her hands plunged into the soapy water,
mine holding a dish towel,
removing the dripping pans from the drainer,
and wiping the water away, to expose the shine.
We'd stand there in the evening hour
quietly perfecting every keepsake minute.

Later in life, I stand in class, by the desk
in front of students as we discuss short fiction,
plunging into emerging themes.
A daughter and mother in one story
bathe together in a tub infused
with herbs and barks;
the same characters travel to market
to gather bread, butter, and fish
to prepare together later.
The mother preserves the daughter's childhood
in a trunk: plaid dresses and yellowed blankets,
mementos aired out and refolded again.

In capital letters I write ritual,
chalk powdering the folds of my slacks. Together
we learn that these acts are connective tissue that bind
our muscle to bone. Though pages away,
miles, or even years, we, as characters
break bread, fold hands into each other's,
light the light that will unblind us.

—"Ritual" by Amy Nawrocki


Heads up, Emberlings! I have news not of culinary practices and the cultures in which they manifest, but of a book, and a book of poems at that. I'm delighted to announce the publication of Potato Eaters by Amy Nawrocki. Amy, a friend of mine and wife of frequent Embers commenter Eric, has been attracting a good deal of attention for her deeply felt work. Potato Eaters is Amy's first book and the result of a number of years of diligent craft. Writers, you know what this takes.

Potato Eaters will be available in early November and is available for pre-order from Finishing Line Press.

P.S. This just in! Congratulations, too, to Phoenixville's own Ocean Earth Wind Fire, sanctuary for yoga, massage & whole living, which celebrates its first anniversary!

Becoming World

Understand, I'll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd, when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks. I'll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows, with only this one dream: you come too. — Rainer Maria Rilke

There is a moment late in Dances With Wolves when the medicine man Kicking Bird says to John Dunbar: "of all the trails in this life, there is one that matters more than all the others. It is the trail of the true human being." My friend Eric has long wandered this path alone, seeking truth, but tomorrow he joins Amy in marriage. The match could not be more fitting: both are writers (he a novelist and essayist; she a poet) and teachers of writing.

There was a time when Eric pretended he was doomed to roam the northern wilds alone, a solitary Ranger of the North. He chronicled this period in his essay "The Last Hermit in New England," which also, however, catalogued a veritable bestiary of women with whom he had become entangled along the way. This was my favorite passage of the essay — in part because it betrayed the aloneness so solemnly professed — and it was Amy’s favorite too. She wrote, in an e-mail message secured by unknown sources: “I don’t know what it is exactly that separates me from them, and the other travelers that you met, but whatever it is, I’m glad I have it. Perhaps it is my own love of solitude. In this case, I like being an epilogue.”

Every ending, we know, is a new beginning, and every writer knows the significance of opening lines and how hard they are to come by. The writing life is one best pursued in solitude, for the navigation of outer and inner worlds demands the artist’s steady hand, and freedom. The writer draws upon love for the natural world — stars, trees, trails — to produce an inward cartography that charts fleeting moments, the ache of longing, and sometimes violent elemental forces. Eric championed the solitary life, gathering lore and gaining woodcraft, and yet the impulse was never selfish.

I would visit Eric's northern domain once or twice a year. With Eric as my guide, I learned the need for retreat into the wilderness, into the Source. Root and bark, leaf and stone, these became the lexicon of a new call to action. Eric’s restlessness pushed him towards, in his words, “persistent transformation of knowledge into practice.” But his greatest gift may be his prodigious capacity for pure enjoyment, for sharing the best of the world with others who may not yet see what it, and they, are capable of. His lust for life (there is no other way to say it) grabs hold of you and infects you in a way that is irresistible.

Frankly, there was never any doubt that Amy would find Eric on the trail, and he her. And if Amy is an epilogue, then she marks the best kind of ending, one that is both surprising and inevitable. She has drawn out of Eric a previously undiscovered patience, the stillness of a poet’s eye, a willingness to linger in a moment, to savor its weight and texture. (It is no accident they have found a shared passion for wine tasting and experimental cooking.) Amy and Eric have joined together without surrendering the vast distances within themselves. They have earned Rilke’s famous definition of love, wherein “two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.” Individually they have held to what is difficult; together they have created a new and wondrous trail magic.

So, Eric and Amy: slip quietly away. The noisy crowd, the world, will wait.

Random essay c. 1999

Editor's Note: In sifting through the detritus that until recently filled a goodly portion of my domicile's available space, I came across some photographs of people I didn't know and poems by people I didn't remember. It seems that in a former life I worked with my friend Eric and a scrappy undergrad to assemble one of those pre-blog thingies called a zine. Oddly enough, last week Eric sent me what was to be the opening editorial of the inaugural issue. But I moved and got a real job, our junior partner vanished with the majority of our files, and the zine never happened.

P.S. And speaking of well filling, do be sure to check out Brett's nasty little secret.

Welcome to FAKE Life: Journal of ThoughtCulture . . .

Our mothers like to ask us, "So when are you going to get a real job?" Since at least two of the three of us have been found unfit for further graduate study, and since nothing real has prompted us to leave our fake teaching positions, we decided to launch a magazine. Oh, we continue to lurch in quasi-academic circles, but we needed something else to put off. Hence, FAKE Life, a record of what we aren't doing.

We find that "fake life" is not only the commodity that everyone shares, but also an imperative. To fake it is all anyone can do. You read the right books, scorn the right political figures, wear the right clothes — maybe even get the right job.

But who, really, ever gets it right? (Make your life a call to action.) The challenge, as we see it, is to celebrate glorious Artifice, in all Its wondrous forms, and all Its phony perpetrators. Create something. Make it go. That's the Spirit.

Our intention at the outset is to promote a decidedly undemocratic forum, one that is overtly biased, but one that is nonetheless open to all. The forum of FAKE Life should incite riots of neural activity. Avoiding methodology may help, but to continually challenge is optimal, whether by breaking limits or placing new ones. Certainly, regularities will surface; after all, something that looks like a magazine is desirable. Or perhaps the simulacrum of a magazine will replicate itself at regular intervals.

What do we interact with everyday, with whom do we communicate? The fake life witnesses the coalescence of cultural forms in all sorts of media and genres: consumer products, psychotropic biotechnology, public health policies, advance screenings of film trailers — all intersect, all stream through, the nodes we call individuals. How are these nodes defined, limited, separate from everything else? Where do we make the cut between Self and Other?

In this inaugural issue of FAKE Life, we reflect on the Limit. When we say "limited," our speech act invokes a negative connotation, relegating the concept to the abyss. But this does not yield function. The fake machine produces limit, along with masses of orbiting conceptual satellites: borders, failures, frontiers, freedoms, transcendings, and schisms. Subsequent issues will tread other waters.

We might talk about the science of FAKE Life, the formulas that an individual can follow to achieve a specific, repeatable result. Each ofthe contributors may have performed his or her own experiment, have found "what works" in a particular context, a precise set of circumstances. Some may have failed. There are no guarantees. We invite you to add your own recipe.