The healing of the body begins with words.
~ Megan Stielstra in Once I Was Cool
I first heard about Megan Stielstra through another author I admire and loved her first book, Everyone Remain Calm, from the minute I opened the cover. We spoke a while back on the blog (read her Q&A part 1 and part 2) about Everyone Remain Calm, where she said, “all of these things that I see or read or live…get stuck in my head, and what do you do with all of it?—You give it to characters. You find the story.”
Stielstra has written a new collection of stories, essays in Once I Was Cool about what it means to be a grown up and a mother and a teacher and the truth we find in looking back on those moments that get us from there to here.
I love this quote from “My Daughter Can Read Just Fine:”
I write stories because I love reading, and I love reading because my mother put books in my hands, read them with me, asked me what I thought about them, listened as I told her….
But it’s in this excerpt from “Stop Reading and Listen” where Stielstra hits on the importance of stories: how they affect us and why we share them:
9.
Yelling and fighting at 2 a.m., immediately followed by gunshots. My husband called 9-1-1, and we watched out the window ‘til the sirens came; first police, then fire trucks, then an ambulance. Our bedroom was filled with red and blue light. A small crowd collected on the sidewalk next to the Aragon, and later, we’d find out a teenage boy had died. I wish I could say it was the first time it had happened. I wish I could say it was the last.
An hour later—quiet now, and dark—I got back into bed and began the tricky, foggy work of talking myself back into sleep. I don’t know how long I was out before the crying started. No, not crying, that word’s too weak; this was a wail. A male voice, wailing. Low and desperate and destroyed, deep at the base of his throat. Maybe at first, I dreamt it, but soon I was sitting up, fully awake, and back to the window.
Three stories below, the boy’s father stood where his son had been shot. He stood there all morning—3 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m.—and the whole time, he wailed. A single, raw sob; a few of beats of silence; then another. It made me think of contractions—the pause between the pain. My husband and I sat on the bed, wide awake and listening. We sat there in all of our privilege: our newborn son alive and healthy and asleep in his tiny turret bedroom; our safe, warm home; our middle class upbringings and middle class lives, our education and jobs and insurance; our families; our skin color; our faith; all of it so enormous and so puny in the face of all that pain. I considered reaching into the nightstand to grab the little foam earplugs I used sometimes when the Aragon opens its windows because sometimes the noise is too much, the music and the traffic and the violence and the loss. It’s easier to drown it out, to change the channel, to read something else, to believe the same old story, to stick my fingers in my ears and say Lalalalala instead of listening to a grief I couldn’t fathom and the truths in the world that I don’t want to see.
I sat there, listening.
I imagined people awake, listening, up and down the block. Awake, listening, all across Uptown. Awake, listening, across the city, maybe the country.
Are you awake? Can you hear it?
Stop reading and listen.
You can listen to Megan Stielstra read the beginning of this essay online at Poets&Writers HERE (and everyone should hear her read).
Then, check out her website or find out how to purchase a copy of Once I Was Cool.
[Reading] starts the dialogue. It opens my eyes to things I haven’t seen before. ~ from “My Daughter Can Read Just Fine”