Author Archives: Bryn Gribben

About Bryn Gribben

Bryn Gribben holds a Ph. D. in Victorian literature from the University of Washington and a secret MFA in her heart. She teaches literature at Seattle University, with courses focusing on such topics as beauty, dignity, and visual culture. Bryn also taught a course on "Writing for This American Life" at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle and can be heard on episode 4 on the podcast "Closed for Logging." Once, she participated in a celebrity spelling bee, under the name of "Sylla Belle."

Shattered Ankle Scenery: Cornwall, Cheese, Sea Shantys

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Like the apple cut horizontally instead of vertically from yesterday, it does something to your perception of an object to hear it pronounced so differently. For me, it’s always been “GOODa,” which sounds about right. It’s goodanough. Not my favorite cheese, unless it’s an aged Gouda, with lots of salt crystals, about which I learned a lot today. But if it’s “GOWda,” like “COWda” or “Gouge Your Eyes Out,” a lot more comes into play.

The cheesemaker was so my type, in that he was lanky, intense, passionate about his cheese, and not entirely comfortable. There’s a hilarious moment of him standing with his family as they toss two huge wheels of cheese down the line as they pose for a portrait–he anxiously holds his arms out, ready to catch it if anyone misses it. It’s never passed to him. He’s like the stereotype you see in the oldest, middle, youngest child memes going around now: DEAD serious and ready to do it right. (I thank my sister Amber Miller at this moment for absolutely not being that sibling.)

The other half of the episode was about sardines and sea shantys, and the sardine part was more interesting. But what both halves shared was a focus on how many great things don’t get their credit because there simply isn’t a space for them. The cheesemaker’s best aged cheese . . . he only has a few wheels of them because he simply doesn’t have the room to store them. The sardine stand owner said he left fishing and opened the stand because he was frustrated that he saw most of the fish go elsewhere. “People don’t realize they have the best thing RIGHT HERE and they’re just not trying it fresh out of the water, on the grill.”

It’s a classic foodie argument (you must watch The Menu, btw), but what I found potent is that sensation of anxiety when someone has something great–that someone needs to know MORE about it, that MORE Someones need to know about it. Students used to tell me we needed to teach more of particular authors, and we’d say, “We only have ten weeks” (and would generously not point out they often didn’t read everything within that). I’ve had that anxiety about my book–shouldn’t I be doing MORE to promote it? I didn’t have the time last year–I was getting married, (am still) looking for new jobs, and working at three places.

And, anyway, how did books become more like sardines–only good when they’re fresh out of the water–and less like aged cheese, which might be even better in a couple of years?

Here’s to _Amplified Heart_ and the acceptance that, for now, what I’ve done is gouda nuff. Gouda, after all, saved the family farm.

May be an image of 1 person, standing and fruit

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Shattered Ankle Scenery Goes to Cornwall! Again, from my bed, with my cat

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Shattered Ankle Scenery goes to . . . Cornwall!

Ann Tandy and I often discuss how the scale and geography of the British Isles evades us more than we’d care to admit–you spend your life reading British novels and only later realize you don’t really know where “Suffolk” or “Dover” might physically be. It’s both a testimony to reading and a potential mystification caused by it: you’ve “been there” and were not there. Wherever “there” is.

I’d tried to look into Cornwall before, simply because I have spent more time in northern England, and because Tintagel is there. I’d definitely gone through my King Arthur phase in junior high (Mary Stuart books, anyone? Merlin’s cave was in Bryn Myrddin–it gave me a thrill to see my name in a book because I never had) , and I loved the way the word “Tintagel” sounded. (At least, the way _I_ heard it: TIN ta gel. It’s Tin TA gel, isn’t it?)

So, for today, I rewatched the Rick Steves episode on it as a start, but then I stumbled upon Rick STEIN, of whom I know nothing, but he’s BBC and seems to be interested in everything from painting to cooking. I am SURE this is no news to someone, and for sure, he may not be everyone’s cup of tea, no matter how well brewed. But I am committed to honoring charm where I find it.

He spent half the episode talking to a painter who paints on the beach and uses sand for texture. I’ve already forgotten who the painter is, but god, how I loved his paintings. They remind me of Ryan Molenkamp’s earlier work, where somehow a whole waterscape rises up from smudged color and gritty inclusions. Rick Stein also opens the episode talking about how he and his sister would have a contest to see who could spot the sea first, just as my siblings and I would to see who would see the mountains first, and it reminded me that what seems far off and exotic is always someone’s childhood vacation.

He then went to an heirloom apple orchard, a “kind of Noah’s Ark for Cornish apple species.” I just finished reading Elena Passarello‘s _Animals Strike Curious Poses_ (which is wonderful), and her penultimate essay is about “endlings”–the last living specimen of a species before it becomes extinct. (I preferred the word “terminarch,” which had also been considered.) So, the idea of an orchard which, from above, looks like an elegant variegated moss patch, as a haven for vanishing species appealed to my sense of continuity today, in a time when my days’ only continuity is pain and stillness. I actually gasped when the cardigan-wearing orchard keeper cut a Crimson Queen in half, horizontally. There is something in seeing a mundane object dealt with in a way you never have before (as when a friend of mine told me she used to eat tomatoes like apples). It’s like you realize you’ve been missing an opportunity to reenchant the normal.

Of course, there was a lot of head shaking about the state of apples today, and the cliched rhetorical question about why we settle for apples so far from the tree. But the colors revealed to me in that half-world of an apple, red ombred to pink then white, as if the apple skin had been washed in the wrong temperature of water . . . I mean, we all know a Red Delicious is anything but. What would it be like to eat an apple and be really in awe of it.

Overall, Cornwall, then, was pretty. Sometimes I worry living in Seattle / the PNW has made me appreciate real natural beauty less, instead of more. You start to realize, as you travel and when you are surrounded by it, that so many places are beautiful for the same reasons (water, tiny rock isles, flowers, birds) and that people tend to do the same things there (beaches, buying, eating, walks). I sometimes miss those early years when I’d moved from Kansas and would just be stunned by the sharpness of a mountain peak against a cold sky or how sunlight on water seemed “charged with,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, “the greatness of God,” whether God is a presence for you or not.

I like this chance to immerse in a different way and rediscover the apple.

May be an image of fruit

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16Ann Tandy, Barbara Saari Combs and 14 others

Shattered Ankle Scenery: A Trip to the Isle of Wight, From My Bed, With My Cat

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Welcome to Shattered Ankle Scenery!!!

So, I broke my ankle in a million places, so I thought I’d visit a million places–virtually. I’ll be here for quite awhile (in bed, that is–probably a month), and it seems like a good time to see the places I want to investigate and listen to things I want to listen to. Tune in every day as I “travel” somewhere or listen to something.

Yesterday, I watched a documentary on Bormarzo: The Sacred Alchemical Grove. Also known as the Garden of Monsters, it’s the kind of place I deeply regret not having visited while I lived in Rome; however, not having known of its existence, I exempt myself from said regret and will save it for later–the visiting and the regret. Having a working knowledge of Jungian psychology was helpful when watching this documentary, but for sure, being on a strong opioid made it more interesting. What must be it like to walk through this particular park every day?

Today, I “went” to the Isle of Wight, which I DID visit when I was on the SU study abroad trip, albeit an all too brief visit. I was sick as a dog and made the pilgrimage to Julia Margaret Cameron’s house, since I had a chapter on her in my dissertation. The museum director kindly took me next door and gave me tea in a house Darwin had once stayed in, then drove me back to the ferry in his convertible, all contributing to the feeling I was in a Victorian fever dream.

I watched an episode of Crown and Country, in which Prince Edward talks you though the Crown’s relationship to different areas of the country (hence the title–what thinkers); it focused mostly on Charles the First and Victoria, and there was a lot about wine smuggling.

Then I watched the following tour of Osborne House and loved. Did you know that Prince Albert built the Swiss Cottage so his children could–and I quote–“learn about being adults by playing”? They cooked, played, and gardened, each with their own little plots, and would sell their produce to Albert, in order to “learn about commerce.” I’ll bet he would have made them sell their own Girl Scout cookies. Mom, you will love all the fire places.

What I Know About Thunder

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In my creative nonfiction course this quarter, we do an exercise in which they have to introduce themselves with a one-liner story.  “When people say ‘tell us about the time,’ what story do they want to hear from you?” I ask them.  Then, we write those one-liners as three to four paragraph narratives.  And then, I have them choose a title from a set list of four.  “Don’t pick the one that you think is an obvious fit,” I say.  “Now, write another paragraph that ties that title and that story together.” 

This is what I wrote in class Tuesday.

 

When I was two, my parents believed I was reincarnated from a poor black child.  I had a heavy Southern accent and would paint myself all black with water colors.  I spoke often of “Tom and Peggy.”  “Who are Tom and Peggy?” they’d ask.  “My parents,” I’d say.  “From my other life.”

One day, the UPS man came to the door, and I answered. “Hi,” I said, looking up at him, a tall African-American.  “We’re all white here—except for my dad.  He’s black, too.”

There were no African-Americans in my western Kansas town.  There were Hispanic field workers and two adopted Korean children.  And my dad wasn’t black.

Years later, I’d ask my dad if he remembered me talking about Tom and Peggy.  “Oh god, yes,” he said.  “That used to creep me out.”  My mom read a lot of Shirley MacLaine in those days, so she was down with the past life idea.  When my grandmother died, I asked my sister how she explained death to my four year-old niece.  “Oh, you know–the reincarnation stuff Mom told us:  energy, moving into anther life.”  We’d grown up Catholic, and the niece was being raised Methodist.  But sitting on my lap after the funeral, she stared hard at a woman wearing all white, consoling us.  “Are you my grandma’s new body?”  The woman smiled sweetly.  “Oh, I’m sure your grandmother has a new body in heaven now.”  “Noooo,” I said.  “She wants to know if you are actually our grandma’s new body.”

What I know about thunder is that it is an indication something’s shifting in the atmosphere.  It rolls across the plains like a finger swiping right on Tinder, starting a conversation:  thunder calls, lightning responds, and then the sky cracks open with the rain.  My “past life” opened me, even as a child, to the possibility that difference was in me, that Western Kansas was not the world, that a black man at your door might be a brother from another mother.  My niece, at four, was looking for a way to give a voice back to the dead, and we had an atmosphere for that possibility in my family.

Poetry Dance Break!

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We interrupt this series of musical meditations because the author took a poetry and photography workshop Saturday with Sierra Nelson and Rebecca Hoogs, and it felt so good to write poems again.    

I have a theory on poets versus prose writers, and I’ll share it here, at the risk of irritating the prose writers:  whereas prose writers are, whether they like it or not, on the alert for a good narrative, poets are interested in the moment and only find it come together as they write it.  Maybe that’s true for prose writers, too, but I like to think I’m a poet at heart, loving the way the language feels as I find it, not always knowing or caring where it takes me.  That’s why I still think of my essays in terms of Walter Pater—episodes of burning with the hard, gemlike flame, instead of sacrificial offerings to the pyre of a good story.  

Recently, a friend asked me if it seemed like maybe these essays would turn away prospective suitors.  I told her about how Jason once emailed me, the year before we dated, to tell me he’d been reading my essays.  We weren’t active friends, hadn’t ever hung out—we’d run into each other at an event, and he added me on Facebook.  So I was surprised to find he’d been reading the essays, that he looked at my Facebook world at all.  “For what it’s worth,” he wrote me then, “I really like them and think you’re doing something worthwhile there.”  A year later, when I wrote an essay about us falling in love, I got another email:  “After years of reading these, it’s so moving to have one finally be about me.  Thank you so much, you sweet woman.”  That essay still seems like a poem to me:  incomplete in its insight, fragmented, merely time spent, in writing, with the feeling we both were having, a feeling neither of us thought would end.  

I would write two more essays about him because we thought we had a narrative, but we were wrong.  

So maybe I should have stuck with poems.

If this all sounds like an elaborate defense for these prose essays, it may be because all writers face that moment when someone wonders aloud if your writing records your life or if you’re using your life (and the lives of others) to seek out the good story.  I made a mix tape once for a guy, with liner notes for each song, and he broke off things with me.  “I get the feeling I’d just be another flavor on your emotional schmorgesbord,” he wrote.   I can only hope those I’ve loved believed, as Jason did, those moments were for burning, not for research.  If it seems I move through hearts in search of the next story, be kinder to me:   I’m just a poet who can’t keep it short.

 

The Poems

With that, here are two poems from the Poetry and Photography workshop.

Prompt #1:  Use a photograph from your past (or one that was never taken).  I used two photographs  taken of me and a college friend in Spain, at the Prado.  Who wants to come over and help me figure out how to scan them into this?

“Photo Album, Age 20, the Prado, 1994”

One picture has us, backs turned,

before a painting of which I no longer know the name

(her green parasol, his red hat)

our waist-long hair like the “before” pictures

in make-over-gazines.

 

Your blonde hair will get a lot of whistles; we’ll learn

“Sueca” is the word for “easy Swedish babe.”

My red hair’s not my own:  you too can have this color,

but I’m the only one who does.

 

Still, we are so innocent, big sweaters and round faces,

in awe of flesh tones and Velazquez.   Even

la Infanta Margarita, age 5, looks wiser than we are

about where men’s eyes go.

 

But I am alone with Goya—

you’re back with Bosch in the Garden of Earthly Delights—

and it’s just me and her,

la Maja so Desnuda.

 

She knows I understand at last her gaze,

all pillow talk and stop-talking-now,

the one that you won’t know until

your wedding night three years from now,

 

and there’s no photograph of this,

except the postcard that I buy, in secret, then,

and send to him.

 

maja

 

Prompt #2:  We will pass a series of images to the right; you have 30 seconds to write a word or phrase before passing it on.  We will do this for 10 minutes.  Then, pick a term from this glossary of photographic terms as your title.  (This one is crazy—but it teaches me a lot about how I do move towards narration or synthesis.)

“Correction Filters”  (for Sara Wainscott)

Grotto of the foxes, still and gray,

the dime store photo booth reveals

the picnic that my best friend thinks she had,

but no Norwegian eats those onion rings.

 

Hands off!  The cake is mine (I hope),

but I don’t know which end to plant.

We’re going to save those books,

no matter what sharp knives it takes.

Let’s slice up the sky—how raw.

Let’s stick it all on poles.

 

You cannot drag your own eye socket down, you fool,

and there are easier ways to give a cat a bath.

They’ll turn out all too fluffy, much too full; their

ears will grow three times, then melt.

 

Why you have to look so sad, my friend?  There’s

still dirt enough for all.

 

I cannot keep a straight face in my coven

with all these horns.
Take this, bitches!  I’ll ribbon up your wishes

for the fox back in the grotto:

their fuzzy tails amoeba like,

their Goldies locked (wrong story now, wrong beast),

but the debris cuts me to pieces now

(it used to tie me down).

 

This isn’t what we meant to do with moss.

 

All the damned birds want condos now,

except the pigeons—but who else can rest

on all those nails?

 

Nobody’s fooled—a palm tree, by another other space, is still a lie,

and

what we all cry for is real.

 

When even I find it to be too much,

the lounging carpets on the walls,

the rabbits turned to ottomans,

I’ll wrap my ribbon ’round a sword

and pray to Mary, foxes,

or whichever beast leaps nearest

to the gods.

 

 

Valentine’s Day Writing Challenge–Day 5: My Best Friend’s Best Friend

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The Song
“Love” by The Sundays

The Memory
This is not a memory about a lover at all. Instead, it is one of those myriad associations stored up in memory, a link that may seem weak and yet, in fact, makes me feel like there is an ever-stronger web of joy netting me into this life.

When I think of this song, I think of J.E. Johnson’s friend Tobias Becker. There are layers of removal from intimacy there: one of my college best friend’s high school best friends. I probably only ever hung out with Toby under ten times. I know he loved girls wearing sundresses and once made the most beautiful teapot in ceramics class–one with the face of Hermes on it. I know that now, he is happy, with many babies. What was always clear was that he was a gentle soul, and he loved this song, and I remember him singing his favorite line from it, unabashedly:

Well, if yoooooou
don’t have a clue about life
then I’m happy, happy, happy to say
neither have I
although I’m not going to shrug my shoulders and suck my thumb
Thiiiis time

Sometimes, people I adore move in and out of my life with a speed that should make me nauseated. As a teacher, I’m only just now getting used to the fact that students who bond with me during their four years (or even just in their first year) will probably disappear into the ether after graduation, our closeness like a B-12 booster for their growth.

Of course, the opposite is true, too: I maintain many, many deep connections with many, many people.

But part of Valentine’s Day for me is always about the time-lapse film of connections running through my head. It could feel like a string of losses. Or–and this is what I like more–it could feel like the end of Cinema Paradiso: a reel of all the good parts, spliced together, separate from their narratives but beautiful all alone.

The Sundays – Love

Valentine’s Day Writing Challenge–Day 4: Meow Meow Meow

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The song
Made-up songs we sing to our cats.

The Memory
Alright, this isn’t really a memory, as much as it is a daily activity. And I do think I make up and sing more songs about Judy than any other cat I’ve ever had.

The most common one is a short ditty: “Judy / the Wonder Cat / not too tall and not too fat.”

The other morning, the first words out of my mouth were a spontaneous song to her, celebrating our differences: “You are made of furrrrrr / and I am made of skiiiiiiinnnnn / Your name is Judy, and my name, dear, is Bryn.”

Real love songs aren’t always good because they’re true or profound. They’re good because you want to sing them, to tell another living creature your heart fills with music because they are near.

Valentine’s Day Writing Challenge–Day 3: PJ Harvey and the Cosmos

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The song
PJ Harvey’s “One Line”

The Memory
The night before I started my move to Missouri, the Final Ryan and I went to Golden Gardens beach. I did not know my move would be temporary, that I would not be able to stand being away from this city, much less this magical beach, which is scattered liberally with the glass hearts of others for the weeks after Valentine’s Day. He had already broken my own glass heart once that summer when he told me he wasn’t physically attracted to me and then, mysteriously, continued to want to be with me for the rest of my time. More mysteriously, although perhaps not, given my own fragile state, I let him.

We split a bottle of prosecco and an iPod, and in one of his more boyfriend-y moments, he put his sweatshirt on me, since the night was cool. We could hear another couple making out nearby us, and we couldn’t stop giggling. Then we were silent for a long time with the stars, and this song came on: “Do you remember the first kiss / stars shooting across the sky?”

I kid you not. We saw a shooting star. And Ryan, who was not as in love with me as I was with him, gasped, grabbed my arm and kissed me.

I called him the “Final” Ryan even at the time, not only because I’d dated too many Ryans in a row but because I knew, even if I didn’t want to know, that while I might see him again after I moved, this was really the end. I also knew he was syndecoche for all of Seattle. What I still don’t know is what I was for him.


Valentine’s Day Writing Challenge: Day Two–How 80’s Music Ruins Our Lives

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Day 2
The Song: “For Just a Moment”–the Love Theme from St. Elmo’s Fire.

The Memory
This isn’t a love memory for me as much as it is a memory of driving. During high school, I took piano lessons thirty minutes away, in another town. There were no towns in between my town and that town. There was a feedlot and some scattered roadside farm houses. Every week, I would drive myself to piano and, since it was the early 90’s, I listened (on tape) to SO MANY love songs. I preferred sound tracks , in those days, and this love song, I would argue, is typical of the kind I favored: a song about lost love, nostalgia for a time gone by, or simply the pain of growing older, time passing as we speed towards death. (Others of its ilk included “Separate Lives” from White Nights and a song from a movie called Stealing Home, which I watched obsessively on HBO, every time it came on.)

I was 17. What did I know of love at all, much less love lost? I was always moving towards pre-emptive nostalgia, missing the thing before it had happened. Did all those songs prepare me for the worst or prepare me to let go too soon?


Valentine’s Day Week Writing Challenge: Day One

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(A repost from a new project–see “These Arms Were Mine” in previous posts for a full version of the story.)

Valentine’s Day Week Writing Challenge: every day, I’ll give you a love song and a memory. If you have a memory associated with this song, please write a comment.

Day One
The Song: “These Arms of Mine” by Otis Redding.

The Memory: I was a camp counselor at musical theater camp, and I’d been carrying on a destructive and illicit affair with a camper since I was a camper myself. I think I was 19 and he was 16 or something bad like that. I was trying to break away from this kryptonite-like attraction and had mostly successfully pushed him away that week. But at the camp dance, he walked up to me during this song and simply took me in his arms to dance. There was no divide for 3 minutes. The physical spell was so powerful that we both forgot about all the bewildered eyes upon us and sank into that song in a way I’ve never danced again.