Ana Maria Spagna lives with her wife, Laurie, in a remote community in the North Cascades accessible only by foot or boat. She is the author of several books, such as Reclaimers (stories of people reclaiming sacred land and water), the memoir/history Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus (winner of the River Teeth literary nonfiction prize), The Luckiest Scar on Earth (a novel about a 14-year-old snowboarder), and three collections of essays: Potluck, Now Go Home, and Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going. Her writing on nature, civil rights, LGBTQ issues, and life in a small community has appeared in many journals and magazines, including, Orion, Ecotone, Hotel Amerika, the Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, and Brevity.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with .…
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“qualia” (n.): the internal, private, subjective component of sense perceptions, referring to the “what-something-is-like” aspects of conscious experience
a tintinnabulation of rain
on the tin roof
or—
I was underwater in the warm sheets, the
quivering crackling of rain above me like
last night’s fire, resin sizzling off the fat
pine, and was someone playing a piano?
here it is, I promise:
a december drizzle awakened me
gently, like a mother’s touch, from
childhood dreams into an envelope of
electric blanket warmth, and through
silvery rivulets on the bedside window’s
thick glass I glimpsed an early covey of
quail muttering, disappearing, into the
misty mississippi morning wrapping
greyly around spindly skeleton trees
above deep jade gardens, the brick
courtyard a dried blood red, and the
world was singing an ode, or a lament,
or both—
so, then,
a tintinnabulation of rain
on the tin roof.…
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That on a day like any other
I walked hand in hand with my mother
away from the rose garden where my father
stood with his hunting rifle pointed towards
the sky; a place of promises, paradise and stars
or unseen angels who watched over the meek
and the wicked and sometimes intervened
if wishes were granted, if enough Hail Marys
were said and if some saintly soul
long dead was watching out for you.
That on that day like any other I heard
my father break my mother’s heart
with his threats of violence to himself
and anyone in close range, where I’d been
mesmerized by two robins who fed their young
as they flew back and forth from their nest
of twigs maybe a hundred times between them,
when my mother pulled me along the cobblestone
path into a grove of trees; our makeshift shelter
where bullets might weave in and out
of leaves and never find the mark or even
that mama bird whose beak was full of berries.…
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Pariya Tenammi suffered from a unique problem that became the source of all his misery. It was this that rendered his life a mess, turning it into a series of unfortunate heartbreaks unfolding one after the other. For as long as anyone can remember, whenever Pariya fell in love, seconds after, he’d turn into a gigantic octopus.
He was all of eight when it first happened. One humid August evening, his new neighbour, Nomi, eagerly tagged along with her mother to make introductions. Pariya, shy, withdrawn, approached the playful Nomi, close to his own age, with some caution and an extended hand. An ageless offering of friendship. So, when Nomi cheekily swatted away the hand and pulled Pariya in an embarrassing embrace, he was flushed with something he’d never felt before.…
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When you tell me you are writing about your heart, ask me for metaphors in triplicate, I suggest cake, sedimentary rock, the earth’s boiling core, knowing that your sadness is beyond the power of written language. The chanting of indigenous rainforest tribes might capture the essence of your suffering.
When you drive to Mississippi because your lungs are crowded with Midwestern flora and fauna, persistent mold that grows in viper tongues and slithers into the basement while you sleep, I know your family doctor has pills, breathing treatments, the right tone of voice to assuage the fire in your chest.
When you buzz my phone at five in the morning, with descriptions of coffee, hungry dogs, weather forecasts, admonitions to eat eggs, I breathe easier, knowing that I wait for other words. …
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On a bike. On a path. In the woods. Just rained.
Mud always sprays all around like the spotted redness of horror films especially when I twist the handlebars, curve the back wheel around at a sharp curve. This isn’t just a digging into the bowels of nature. We spray everything, marking each thing as ours. Every object. A tree, a path, this food, that animal, this person, that person, this idea, that philosophy. If it isn’t ours yet, it will be soon. And everyone acknowledges our conquest.
Our tracks are impossible to hide. If others follow our lead, they will find us. Even if we try to hide. They tread over the tracks. Even after a dry spell, the treads are the most natural pattern we know.…
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