'The Irish Goodbye' and 'Frog' are micro-memoirs and essays about everyday life

Hey, it's Emperes Book of the Day, I'm Andrew Limbong.

Outside of my working hours, I've stopped trying to set aside 30 or 45 minute blocks to

read.

It's pretty impossible to do if you have a toddler at home.

Instead, I've been trying to find pockets, 10 minutes here, 5 minutes there, while the

kid is cooking something up in the play kitchen.

Which means I've been partial to short form stuff, collections of essays or memoir or

poetry.

So today, we've got two books for you that fit that bill up ahead and essay collection

about, well, to be honest, some of the most mundane stuff you could think of, but it manages

to come off as beautiful.

But first, the poet Beth Ann Fennelie has a collection of micro memoirs called The Irish

Good Pie.

A lot of it is about the sudden death of Fennelie's sister.

But it's not just sad, it's also funny and absurd.

She talks to Emperes Scott Simon about how the form of the micro essay helped keep the

book totally balanced.

That's after the break.

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And I wish goodbyes when somebody leaves without bidding farewell.

New collection of micro memoirs by the poet Beth Ann Fennelty considers love, parenthood,

old pals, a cherished mother-in-law, but her sister Julie who died in 2008 is a presence

throughout, including in this reflection called, two sisters, one slice in the cake, one choosing first.

Keeping meticulous score was our favorite girlhood pastime, adjudicating the dispersal of this cereal

box's plastic treasure, tallying who had more Christmas presents under the tree.

When given a piece of cake to split, one sister was handed the knife.

The other got to pick her half, quadruple, fanatical eyeballs pressing down on the blade.

It's slow, slow submergence through the buttercream.

And then, poof, you rolled over and played dead.

Took yourself right out of the game, fancy that.

Beth Ann Fennelty was poet laureate of Mississippi and she teaches at the University of Mississippi

and joins us now for Oxford, her book, The Irish Goodby.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Oh, thank you, Scott.

What was it like to write?

There's laughter in here, but also a lot of sadness and anger.

Well, I did hope the book could try to capture the full range of the human emotion,

all the colors of the human heart.

The death of my sister in 2008 is a pretty dark strand that runs through the book,

but I also find that there's a lot of whimsy and humor and absurdity in life.

And the form I was writing in micro memoirs, little tiny true stories about my life,

allowed me to find some of the difficult moments to balance out some of the darker material.

Is that a way of keeping going when you're doing a book like this?

Absolutely, and I also think writing small allows you to go to the dark place

because you know you get to come back out in a paragraph.

Can I ask you to read something else?

Absolutely.

Married love, playing the long game.

Oh, sure.

And I'll tell our listeners this is a poem about a kitchen implement.

Let's put it that way.

Even now, three years later, when she opens the drawer beside the stove for an oven mitt,

she finds the oven mitts folded.

This is because three years earlier during an intense game of scattergories,

when the category was things you fold and the letter was, oh,

her husband had written oven mitts.

Nobody folds oven mitts.

She scoffed and refused him his point, forcing him ever since to prove it.

That's wonderful.

Thank you.

And it says a lot about marriage over the long term, does it?

Yeah, so one thing I was interested in looking at is the love of people who've been hanging out

for a long time because I don't think our culture has an ethos that appreciates that kind of love.

We celebrate in songs and movies, unrequited love or first love.

But married love is its own beast with its own humors and moments of recognition and vulnerability.

So I was looking at that as well.

Can I get you to talk about your sister?

Yes, my sister died very suddenly.

It was a difficult and complicated death because no one sought coming, including her.

She thought she had the flu, but in fact, she died of pneumonia.

I was interested in the exchange that you share with us with an editor who wanted you to

talk about how she died.

And that piece is entitled because my editor suggests I reveal how my sister died.

Yeah, I have a really great editor and she's Jill Bialaski at Norton and I turned the book into her

and she accepted it. And she said, you know, you have to tell the reader how your sister died.

And I did not like that at all because I knew she was right.

And I didn't want to talk about it because it's too painful.

But I'd written all these pieces about mourning her.

And in a way, it directed the reader to think about her death, but I never talked about her death.

I never gave the reason why. And I went the fastest and most painful route.

I could think of just a tear off the bandaid, which was quoting from my sister's autopsy report.

And I wrote the piece really fast and then the book was actually done.

How did that feel?

Horrible.

But necessary?

Yeah, necessary. And in a way, I mean, I guess I'm 54, Scott.

I'm not interested in holding anything back anymore.

I'm not interested in protecting myself or being coy or photoshopping my emotions or my life.

I simply didn't talk about that because I didn't think I could.

And finally, getting it out, I think might help free some of the burden I carry.

You devote the last piece in your collection to a brief episode where you worked as a nude model.

Well, that's almost putting it too strongly.

I didn't work as a nude model.

That's, you know, a little salacious.

I did pose.

I was one of 12 people in my little town of Oxford, Mississippi, who posed for an artist.

I didn't mean to be salacious.

I was saluting your professionalism.

Thank you.

Well, I didn't really get paid, but yes, yes.

I did do this thing that shocked me and still shocks me, actually.

Well, I mean, you didn't have to.

What led you to decide it would be something you wanted to do?

Well, almost exactly what we were just talking about, Scott, in the regard that I'm

interested in vulnerability.

I'm not interested in shrouding any more, anything.

And this artist who I respect said he wanted imperfect bodies.

And I happened to have an imperfect body.

And his name is Robert Townsend, and his work is so beautiful.

And I trusted him.

So I did pose as an experiment to see if I could accept being that revealing.

And I'm glad I did it, but I did really have to do a lot of thinking about it,

and that's why I wrote the essay.

At this point in your life, what do you think about memories?

Do we revise them as we go along?

Do we pack them up into satchels?

We can carry along?

I think we think we pack them up into satchels, but every time we unpack our satchels,

we revise them.

And writing a memoir, of course, is an interesting exercise in what truth is,

because we realize our memories are faulty in that when we're

recollecting things, we have our own biases.

So I did try to fact-check my own memories with anyone I could.

And if I mentioned anyone by name in these pieces,

I asked them to read them and sign off on them.

Beth Ann Fennelly, her collection is the Irish Goodbye.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Oh, thanks God. I really enjoyed it.

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When I was a kid, I was taught that essays are supposed to be clear arguments.

In this essay, I will show XYZ.

But those are kind of boring, aren't they?

In Fatemann's new essay collection, called Frog and Other Essays,

doesn't live in the black and white space of making clear arguments.

But instead in the weirdness and beauty that is our everyday lives.

Here's NPR Scott Simon again.

And Fatemann's new book of essays take on topics that might not seem the most urgent of our times.

But we soon learn otherwise.

She writes about a pet she couldn't pet, a Hewlett-Packard laserjet series to printer,

that she couldn't bring herself to replace.

Eating M&M's according to color and how that relates to relaxing her as scrupulous rules for grammar.

She is one of the foremost essayists in America and her new collection is called

with characteristic precision, frog, and other essays.

And Fatemann who's also a professor and writer and residence at Yale joins us from New Haven.

Thanks so much for being with us.

It's wonderful to be with you, Scott.

And I can't think of a better way to begin than by asking you to read the first paragraph

from the title essay.

I'd be delighted.

Until last summer we had a dead frog in our freezer.

When Bunky died, George and I thought we should wait to bury him till both our grown children were

home, so we put him in a ziplock bag and propped him on his side on a shallow shelf in the freezer door

just above the ice maker.

Bunky was flat and compact and very soon as rigid as a cell phone.

He fit perfectly.

I'd always wondered what KitchenAid intended that shelf for.

It was too narrow for any food I could think of, but now we knew.

It was intended to hold a frog.

Well, bless Bunky, how did he enter your family life?

By accident, like most unpetable pets of his sort, via a tadpole coupon left under a Christmas tree

by a grandmother eventually redeemed and a tadpole arrived in the mailbox.

And at that point, we thought that this tadpole would be as evanescent as most frogs seem to be,

but he lasted for at least 16 years.

It does the fact that Bunky was utterly silent.

Oh, he wasn't silent. At night, he ribbit it.

Well, I met in response to you, but are you?

In response to us.

Yes, his ribbits very poignantly were theoretically to attract female African clawed frogs.

And of course, the nearest African clawed frog was God knows how many hundreds of miles away

and wasn't going to respond. But thinking about Bunky's role in our family

made me ask myself questions like, well, what is a pet?

Must there be reciprocal affection? What do we owe a pet?

We owed him more than we gave him.

And that's what this very ashamed, guilty essay on a seemingly trivial subject is about.

You seem to really love a good list.

What's the attraction there?

I think a good list is almost like a poem.

I love the notion of gathering a bunch of disparate things together and thinking very carefully

about which things should be next to other things.

What sequence do we want? What's going to sound good in my own essays?

I'm certainly not a poet, but lists are maybe the closest, clumsy thing I can do to approach a poem.

Let's give that a try. Could I ask you to read the supplies carried by Robert Falcon Scott's first

Antarctic expedition on the discovery?

Absolutely. So this takes place in 1902.

Its cargo included guns, axes, saws, sledges, skis, compasses, cronometers, barometers, thermometers,

microscopes, telescopes, magnetographs, theodilites, fireworks for signaling,

explosives for blasting through ice, a windmill to generate electricity, a balloon for aerial surveys,

a set of magic tricks, a collection of theatrical costumes, a piano, a harmonium,

36 cases of sherry, 5,000 pounds of marmalade, and more than 1500 books, 48 of them by Sir Walter Scott.

The discovery also carried a single typewriter, a Remington number seven, on which Ernest

Chackelton, the third lieutenant in charge of holds, stores, provisions, and deep sea water analysis,

would perform an additional and perhaps even more vital duty as the founding editor of Antarctic

has only magazine the South Polar Times.

All right, you've convinced me. That's kind of poetic.

Thank you. I'm glad that you see it that way.

What struck you about the South Polar Times, which I confess, I let my subscription lapse?

Well, most people have. It was a pretty hard magazine to subscribe to.

Each issue came out in a very limited edition, as in one copy.

So there were these two expeditions to Antarctica, led by Robert Falken Scott in 1902 and 1911,

and because for many months of the year, it was pitch dark and they couldn't try to get to the

South Pole and they couldn't do any scientific work. The idea was, how do you keep the men from

getting depressed and going nuts? And part of it was, let's have a magazine. And so every month

or so, a new issue would come out with hand drawn illustrations, contributions, many of them

comical by the men on the expedition. It was passed around and chuckled over and read hundreds of

times. One of the most touching periodicals I've ever heard of because all these men were facing

grave danger and the strong possibility of death as soon as the sun started to come out and indeed

five of them did end up dying on the way back from the South Pole. But boy, they just acted like

teenage boys making fun jokes and sharing in crowd humor.

That kind of reminds you of the power of the printed word, doesn't it?

Yes. And of course, in this case, it was the typed word. Each expedition had one typewriter

and that typewriter belonged to the editor of the South Pole or times.

In these days of short bursts for attention, do people have time anymore for real essays

that can have a complexity of thought? I think we have to make time. And I'm always scratching

my head because so much of technology is supposed to save us time. We should have a lot of time left

in our lives to not only read an essay, that's pretty short. We should be able to read word in

piece. So if we can't even read an essay, I think that we're really in a pickle.

But I wonder, have people grown to indoors, click by click,

strident opinions, but not complex nuanced ones of the kind you can find in your essays.

Yes, why do you think I wrote these essays? Okay, that was easier than I thought.

I'm trying to break through that kind of black and white yes or no. Let's say it in less than a page.

Let's make the opinion always clear. Let's never change our opinions.

You know, that sort of thing is okay for the newspaper, but it's not okay for the essayist

who lives in a grayer, more nuanced, I hope, sometimes more subtle, and mainly more surprising

area. The essayist I like best, surprise me, and that's what I try to do in mind. I'm sure not

always with success, but that's what I'm attempting. And Fatemann, her new book, Frog and other essays.

Thank you so much for being with us. It was a total pleasure.

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