Sitting on a bench in my favorite tiny woods, I heard the twigs crack in an uneven rhythm and expected to see a chipmunk hop and scurry past. Instead, I turned into a gaze of intention, steady and unwavering, which made me question my intentions. I was used to being the one who watches to determine when it might be safe to stay, or to go. I barely took a breath, moving with caution to snap a photo of her in the wild. I wondered if this would break her focus. But she was direct, she would not be moved. Not by fear or by doubt or by question. Not until she so desired. I admired such character and her willingness to sit with me in my own moment of doubt. I had questions for her then, but her eyes fluttered as if to say, This isn’t the time. It’s simple trust. Her expression relaxed, and so did I.
I met Myles Hopper when Lisa Rivero and I co-editedFamily Stories from the Attic (Hidden Timber Books, 2017). Myles and I worked closely together on his essay, “Exodus Redux.” I came to know him as a writer with great introspection and dedication, one who strives not only to uncover the pieces of a story but to retell it in a way that builds meaning and insight, for the author as well as the reader. Today he shares excerpts from his forthcoming book, THE COLOR RED: That Was Then & This Is Now, which speaks to the power of writing and the art of the story.
The Color Red is a collection of stories that comprises a memoir, rather than a chronological autobiography, which isn’t how I remember my life, nor is it the way many other people remember theirs.
The experience is like standing in an editing studio ankle-deep in old-fashioned, raw film footage, searching for missing pieces. Some can be found, and memories can be refreshed; others, alas, are lost, perhaps forever.
Nevertheless, the search has been productive. The result is this book, in which characters and events move back and forth in time, the same way memories present themselves in unexpected flashbacks and associations.
Preparing this collection has been a long process. A story
of mine, first drafted in 1992, languished in a file folder for the next twenty-five
years. Before it had been relegated to that folder, another author had
encouraged me to write the rest of the stories I wanted to tell. I told him I
probably wouldn’t––actually, I told him I couldn’t––though writing was what I
most wanted to do. To his “Why?” I said, “Because, I don’t know if I’m able to
tell the truth, and if I don’t, none of this is worth writing about.”
“The truth about what?”
“About my relationships with
members of my family, maybe my father, most of all. There was a great deal of
love and caring, but there also was violence and rage, and I still have trouble
dealing with the lifelong aftermath.”
“Then I guess you have a decision
to make.”
Though it took many years, I made that decision to finish
what I had begun. It has helped me to keep in mind Joan Didion’s final sentence
in her preface to Slouching Towards
Bethlehem, where she reflects
upon how her interests as a writer run counter to those she writes about: “…writers
are always selling somebody out.” [emphasis
hers]
I was determined to avoid writing only for myself, about
myself. My purpose has been to write this book in a way that might provide
readers an opportunity to gain new perspectives on some of their own life experiences,
to discover something of value that might have eluded them, to gain a deeper
understanding of themselves.
These stories acknowledge childhood trauma, tragic losses,
and confusing, sometimes violent relationships within a family; they also
celebrate the love and reconciliation, acceptance, and forgiveness. The result
can be transcendent.
Winter 2017
December came and went, and it was my seventy-fifth January birthday. On that day, I had already lived five years longer than the too-short lifespan of my father. Frequently, throughout the winter, my thoughts drifted to how difficult it had been for me to unravel our complicated relationship. I recalled the day when, in my mid-twenties, a half-century earlier, I had been regaling my therapist with stories of my father’s magnificence.
“So, your
father can walk on water?”
“Huh?”
Thus, began the
healing. It has been a slow, sometimes imperceptible, process until heart and
mind could remain open to understanding life experiences in new ways. I needed
to arrive at a place where my love and admiration of a father––gone now more
than thirty years––weren’t expressed in order to camouflage my darker feelings.
I have needed all of that time to cease repressing or denying what was painful
and debilitating. Only then could I allow another reality to emerge and
coexist. To heal has required embracing the “other” and transcending the
limitations of being lost and drowning in the lonely “self.” To heal has
required relegating certain memories, photographs, and spoken words to a place
called “that was then,” and cradling close to the heart the ones that are
called “and this is now.”
Now, when I think of the person I was then, I imagine him walking slowly on a path under a canopy of foliage, all veiled in a gray, pre-dawn fog. He isn’t aware of my presence close behind him. His unhurried steps slow until he comes to a halt, and I give the slightest of nods as I pass him.
At the sharp bend in the path, I look back just as beams of sunlight penetrate the canopy. In the light and warmth, he begins to dissipate along with the night fog. I watch until I see only green leaves glistening at daybreak.
Midsummer 2017
In late afternoon, I leave my writing
behind and walk outside to the garden. The oversized terra-cotta pot has been
back in its place since early spring, and now the white rosebush it contains is
blooming, as is the rest of the garden. In the midst of this loveliness and
tranquility, it takes only a few seconds for a perennial fantasy of mine also
to be in full bloom. In it, my father is alive and I ask him to work with me in
the garden––mine, not his. He welcomes the request, and I welcome his
suggestions regarding the placement of new plants and the appropriate
preparation of the soil.
At the end of the day, we sit on
the patio, enjoy a glass of scotch, and admire our accomplishment: Not only has the garden been improved, but
we’ve spent the day working as father and son without an angry word between us.
It waits until our second glass for
me to tell him how much I learned as a boy and as a man during those times when
we had been able to work and play together in peace. Then, I tell him that I
have provided my children the chance to experience a garden’s peaceful beauty,
but never have demanded anything from them in return. I tell him that they, now
adults, take pleasure in asking me which plants they should choose and how to
care for them. They do this not because I am a gardener, but because I am their
father.
I know he understands everything he
has heard from me, because he gives one of his self-conscious laughs, more like
a quiet clearing of the throat, revealing the depth of his emotions.
By the time I emerge from my
fantasy, shadows have grown long and advanced across the patio and the garden
and onto the lawn, but there is one more task to complete before dinner. I
select the proper spade for transplanting a languishing rosebush, so it will
receive the sun and nourishment it has been deprived of for too long. At the
new site for the rose, I lift a handful of the loamy soil and inhale its clean,
sweet aroma.
On this day, nothing eclipses my sense of well-being, not even as my foot presses on the shoulder of the spade, and I remember standing at the side of my father’s open grave and releasing a shovelful of earth onto his coffin.
Myles Hopper is the author of the forthcoming collection of stories, THE COLOR RED: That Was Then & This Is Now––a memoir. As a cultural anthropologist, he taught in several universities in the United States and Canada, and consulted with nonprofits engaged in strategic planning and organizational development. Writing is now his full time pursuit, with the exception of occasional consultations with organizations whose mission he supports. He and his spouse are parents of two adult children and live in Shorewood, Wisconsin.
“We walk to find our prophets, our guides, our ancestors, but ourselves most of all, and through ourselves, we find one another.” ~ from A Walking Life
When I first learned of Antonia Malchik’s new book, A Walking Life (Da Capo Press, 2019), I thought, Good timing! It’s summer, I’ve got a few hikes planned, I’ll be reminded about the health benefits of walking–physical, mental, emotional. I took my time reading, savoring even the contents page with chapter titles of Toddle, March, Stumble. What I found as I moved deeper through the pages, though, was much more than a book on the simple, almost medicinal, act of walking.
Malchik has done her work curating a rich selection of research on history, science, culture, and philosophy and has built an intricate story about humanity–our innate desire to put one foot in front of the other, the disconnect we experience when we ignore that desire, and the joy and healing when we embrace it.
I can’t rave enough about this book. In fact, I’ve been talking it up for weeks, quoting it here and there. I’m thrilled to host Antonia Malchik for an interview and am giving away a copy of her book to one lucky reader. Enter the giveaway by Tuesday, July 30th, noon, for a chance to win A Walking Life.
Now, welcome Antonia!
Christi Craig (CC): Your book, while centered around the simple act of walking, is rich in information on history, culture, philosophy and takes the reader down a winding path of discovery, insight, and new understandings. How did this book unfold for you as an author?
Antonia Malchik (AM): A friend once described the structure of my essays as being as like fish scales. I tend to think of them as mosaics. I love taking stories and research that seem widely disparate, and diving deep to find out what connects them. A Walking Life added an extra level of complexity for me because there is a ton of detailed scientific research about things related to walking, from how we walk, which should be almost physically impossible, to the connections between vestibular impairment in children and their hippocampus development. I had to figure out how to convey that information in ways that were factually correct but narratively interesting.
That was actually really hard. I kept going back to the scientists I’d talked with to make sure that metaphors I used to, for example, describe the process of infants learning to walk or the paleoanthropology of disability weren’t misleading in the way they explained the science.
But at the same time I didn’t want to publish what I think of as a “study dump,” which I ran into a lot while researching: briefly present an idea, then give lengthy descriptions of the study behind it and repeat that process for hundreds of pages. I think that’s the key difficulty of science writing. Humans need metaphor and story to make sense of our world, but science relies on precision. Science communication has to combine those things without either muddying the science or boring the lay reader.
On a broader level, I spent a lot of time sifting through the articles, books, and scientific papers I’d read, trying to find the threads that connected stories and themes across the arc of the book. I didn’t know where to begin because walking is a massive subject that affects us at every level of our lives, but I had to start somewhere and trust that the story would show me where to go next.
My friend Bethany Bell, who’s a journalist for the BBC, had reported on a situation at the border of Austria and Hungary, where Syrian refugees were waiting to be allowed into Austria on their way to Germany. I remembered that she’d posted photos on Twitter, including one of the Red Cross’s pile of donated shoes and others of abandoned shoes. It kept hitting me that humans have been subjected to war and environmental devastation over and over and over, and no matter what we’ve built as individuals or societies, we’re often free to take only one action, which is to walk away. When Bethany described the situation in more detail to me over Skype, she said something similar, so that’s where I started.
My mentor Alan Weisman told me before I began writing that the number one thing I should do was to constantly question and push against whatever my biggest assumption was about the subject. My biggest assumption was “walking makes us human,” so I tried to push against that from any angle I could think of. It led me in a lot of unexpected directions. Like, I knew that disability would be a central subject in the book — that was important to me because almost no book about walking even mentions disability — but didn’t know I’d write so much about community, loneliness, and the future of digital technology.
CC: A Walking Life covers a range of topics from social capital and the importance of walkable cities and towns in creating stronger communities to the power of healing walks through a labyrinth or organizations like Warrior Expeditions founded by military vets and their Warrior Hike (to “walk off the war”). There’s so much we could discuss in this interview and so little space on this tiny blog. One section that stands out to me as the heart of this book, the power in walking, is your first time in a labyrinth. You write, “As a person who is less spiritual even than she is religious, if that’s possible, I tend to be skeptical of any spiritual or religious practice that claims to put us in touch with the divine, much less with ourselves.” What follows is an amazing moment for you. Would you share a bit of that experience here?
AM: I’m still untangling that moment! I stumbled across a labyrinth at Norwich Cathedral in England, and knew I should walk it, since I’d researched labyrinths but had never been to one. For some reason I had an urge to walk around the outside first, and as I walked I began to form a question — how do we, or I, walk in the world as vocal and visible defenders of justice, say, and cope with the fear that inevitably comes? I think about this a lot because my paternal grandparents in Russia had survived so much under Stalin without giving up their ethics and commitment to honesty. Where did their strength come from?
As I entered the labyrinth, my footsteps slowed down as if compelled, almost like I was for the first time aware of the gravitational pull of the planet dragging me back, making me pay attention. It was eerie. As I walked the labyrinth, an answer came, which was simply, “Be the light.” Not light from above, but light from below, which I’m not sure makes sense to people. It really was a powerful experience. I keep trying to recapture it as I walk around my hometown, or in the woods. I have to slow my steps down a lot to reconnect with that feeling.
CC: I love the walking resources you offer on your website, from local & national walking groups to meditative practice resources. Do you have a favorite resource you refer others to often?
AM: Through a friend, I came across the work of a walking coach and change facilitator in Holland named Donja de Groot. She has a set of walking meditation cards that I ordered from her and love using. They have different prompts for questions to carry with you as you walk, especially walking in nature. She doesn’t advertise them, but I believe still sells them if you email her. I like how versatile they are, how I can just pick one up on my way out the door and have some guidance if I’m struggling with something, or just want to be reminded to slow down. This is her website: http://dao2change.com/Home/.
CC: What are you reading these days?
AM: A clerk at our local bookstore recommended N.K. Jemisin’s science fiction. They’re some of the best things I’ve read in a long time, and led me to finally read Octavia Butler. For nonfiction, I’m just starting Jane Brox’s Silence (her book Brilliant on the history of artificial light was incredible) and am slowly working my way through Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Classics are a go-to when I need some recentering — I just reread Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, which had a big impact on me when I was 20, and am about to start Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, which I haven’t read since high school. And a local friend recently started a book club. We read Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red, which was just as heartbreakingly beautiful as I remember, and we’re now reading The Overstory.
CC: Favorite pair of walking shoes or accoutrement?
AM: I invested in a pair of Frye boots several years ago that I pretty much live and die in. They’re incredibly comfortable and I hope will last me the rest of my life. Good socks are the real key, especially if they’re fun. My sisters have bought me socks every year for holiday and birthday gifts for decades now, and they get increasingly silly. Which is good. Life is too short to wear boring socks.
Antonia Malchik has written essays and articles for Aeon, The Atlantic, Orion, GOOD, High Country News, and a variety of other publications. Her first book, A Walking Life, about the past and future of walking’s role in our shared humanity, is published by Da Capo Press, a division of Hachette. She lives in northwest Montana. Read more about Antonia and her work on her website.
Don’t forget! Enter the book giveaway by Tuesday, July 30th (noon) for a chance to win a copy of A Walking Life.
