Stevie Z Fischer writes about “the dynamics of people, nature, and power in small-town New England.” Her first novel, River Rules, looks at “how everyday heroes can be forged as lives are changed by forces seemingly beyond our control.” Outside of that, she teaches at several universities. You can find her here.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Fischer about River Rules, her interests in environmentalism and social connections, the pros and cons of modern political correctness, and more!
Lake Victoria, it is said, is what sustains life in Uganda. The second
largest freshwater lake in the world, it breeds the White Nile and the Katonga
River. Transport cargos and ferries carry goods and passengers. Water is
harnessed for electricity. Fisheries are established along the edges.
And
yet, we cannot call it our own. The lake seeps into both Kenya and Tanzania. As
much as we’d like to think so, it belongs to us no more than it belongs to
them.
But that’s the problem of perspective. You might believe something is
yours, and only yours. It only takes a trip over the other side to see this is
really an illusion.…
Because to appreciate the natural world is to lament its swift decline over the last hundred years or so, on miraculous water I not only walk, but also stand still.
What am I saying? Rain is still until it falls, I tell myself, as if pressing a depreciated leaf—mint or maple—branched off from an expired, but not tired, plant or tree—between two fingers, mine, or my other hand’s.
Rain is still until I listen to it drinking from the roots of the tender young shoots, but not tendrils, of an elongated plant, or a minute tree, testing, but not tasting, the dead air, and falling and falling through it, and adding,
all around me, nothing new. Now I fathom all I can rely on when I rely on the slow, so slow, almost time-lapsed, natural world.…
“Give this a chance,” I urged myself as my
gorge began to rise. I was watching a young woman pretend she hadn’t heard a
classroom full of fifth graders return her greeting. She stopped dramatically
in mid-stride, raised a hand to her ear and asked them, “What did you say?”
From one perspective, I should’ve long ago
developed a tolerance for this kind of thing. I’d heard it inflicted on my son,
Riley, and his fellow students before by a wide range of adults, including the
principal at their public school, a camp counselor at a “working farm” and a
docent at a “hands-on” science museum.
But the truth was that each repetition of
this bit of showmanship built on the intolerability of the ones preceding it,
making me wonder: “Do these adults really still believe that what they’re doing
is in the least bit original, spontaneous, genuine, entertaining or even
useful?” …
“What do we do now?” my mother asks, sitting where my grandmother used to sit at the kitchen table. Her siblings have joined her, their four chairs cardinal points on a newly restored compass. They think we, the six grandchildren, can’t hear them now that they have sent us to the living room to play Clue and watch the Red Sox. But their voices are approaching thunder to our listening hearts, which are soft and unripened even though we have lost before and our ages range from sixteen to thirty. …
There’s an essay called “Metaphor as Mistake” by semiotician and novelist Walker Percy in which he explores the cognitive phenomenon of mishearing a phrase and why that mistake strikes us with sudden emotional potency. For example, says Percy, there was the time when, as a child, he heard an African American man describe a bird as a “blue dollar hawk.” The child was fascinated, believing he apprehended something ineffable about the bird in the name, something evocative, true, specific to him somehow, as an encounter with the divine might be. “I know this moment,” I think, as I read. It’s an experience similar to what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “instress”: the moment in which one apprehends what he calls the “inscape” of another being, its innermost self in all its transcendent glory.…
He’s ours the whole night through and there’s no shaking this problem. (We’ll do better with the next one.)
My crooked nose on that misshapen skull, you started brewing on that second date when I went home alone hating your father for all I hadn’t done. I swore to my mother I would never have you— not you, of course, I didn’t know you then— but some you I couldn’t oblige, squeezed out of this swollen, bleeding bluff that could not imagine swallowing pain for anyone but herself.
And I still can’t—sometimes I don’t know if I chose you or if I allowed you, if I wanted you or if I accepted you. But what’s the difference, when I choose you now? You’re here, my Wednesday prince.…
