By Joan Connor
"What do you do for a living?" the podiatrist (or the photographer or the lady within the teach station) asks, and Joan Connor solutions, "I’m a writer," ready with a balk for the inevitable rejoinder: "Oh, boy, do i've got a narrative for you!" How such choices, no longer tales yet small experiences from the thick of existence, develop into wealthy reflections at the nature of ready and writing, language and love, reminiscence and desire, is the secret of this award-winning choice of essays. touring among the poles of Ohio and Vermont, formative years and motherhood, Connor writes of a peripatetic relatives whose oddities make the quirks of a Thurber family look downright subdued; of a thirteen-year-old son as an not likely better half during the torments of middle-aged relationship; of previous loves and new; and during all of it, of writing as a way of discovering the shortest distance among strains: desire. With language that distills perception from anecdote and transforms the stuff of middling existence into telling metaphor, the area ahead of Mirrors, winner of the River enamel Literary Nonfiction Prize, lifts the telling of a life’s tales into the world of flight. (20060103)
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Additional info for The World Before Mirrors (River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize)
Example text
Perhaps that is why I like the quiet wildness of abandoned places. I am a missed opportunity. I want to haunt some future place, leave some susurrating sheen of fabric, some soft click of pearls. I find these desolate places more civilized than the places I am forced to inhabit as I age. I sympathize with their decrepitude, with the stately decorum of time. Places that have outlived their usefulness observe time’s poetry, the forward march of iambic feet. Spanning time, they scan it. I similarly scan for meaning, survey these places.
It is not horseback riding, or tense shifts (love:loved, a fate accompli). It is not leather jackets or anarchy or nihilism or covered cages or Dianetic Divine Diabetics, or candy hearts in cut-glass dishes. Although it may be all these things and more. But it is not these only. ” I said, “Yes, it is. That’s it. ” And I looked at Norman with his beautiful, worried-boy face, his heart still waiting to be broken. ” And he pulled crane from filament and flew it above his world in his fingers, teaching me to fly.
So you do not sigh. You glaze your eyes while he tells an interminable story about a trick toe. And it isn’t even that tricky a toe; Mr. Ed could at least talk. You long for the waiting room. You have dreams of glossy magazines about Tom Cruise’s latest babe and fly fishing in Canada. Every nerve in your body is coiled to spring from the table into your shoes at a second’s notice. “So,” he sums up. ” Like Hermes you are winging through the waiting room. You are history, golden, gone. The train: the woman who glommed onto you in the waiting room late train has just dropped onto the seat beside you.