First review of the river book! Sorry it takes a while to download. I’m working on a cleaner copy.

The book itself is available at amazon, Barnes & Noble and other book sellers.

Yield to the river; work toward shore.

My Kind of River Journey: Seeking Passage on the Mississippi

October 7     Susan Carol Hauser will read from her new book, My Kind of River Journey: Seeking Passage on the Mississippi at 6 p.m. at the Bemidji Community Arts Center. A poet, essayist and freelance writer, Hauser is the author of numerous publications. She has received a 2011 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant in Creative Nonfiction and a 2010 McKnight Artist Fellowship, Loft Award in Poetry. Don’t miss her writing workshop in Bemidji on Oct. 8.

October 8    Writer and author Susan Carol Hauser facilitates What Did I Say? In this 9:00 ’til noon workshop, participants will learn ways to read their writing the ways others do, including recognition of values and meanings expressed in the work. The workshop will introduce techniques for discovering both literal and metaphorical meaning in participants’ writings. Participants are asked to bring a poetry or prose writing sample of approximately 5 pages to the workshop. For cost, location and further information, contact theBCAC at (218) 444-7570 <http://bcac.wordpress.com/>.

Measures of Loss

Both of these essays are in the manuscript The Marriage Bed. Stay tuned for more online publications of the essays from the manuscript and for possible publication of the book on Kindle.

NEW BOOK: My Kind of River Journey: Seeking Passage on the Mississippi is scheduled for publication in September by the Center for American Places, Columbia College Chicago, distributed by the University of Chicago Press. It will be available from the usual outlets: amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, etc.

I have been awarded a 2011 MSAB Artist Initiative Grant, $10,000. The Project: Essays based on outings in northern Minnesota’s woods and wetlands, including their botanical and cultural history; a merging of my earlier work in natural history and recent work in personal essay.

From the Proposal:

Introduction: During the project year, I would write a collection of essays that would bring together my earlier work in natural history and my more recent work in writing extended personal essays. The new essays would be two-fold in their direction: they would probe and contemplate the necessary role of nature in the lives of individuals and in a healthy society, and the necessary role of we humans as stewards of our Mother Earth. The essays would be based primarily on my experiences in northern Minnesota’s bogs, wetlands and forests, and would include research on the rich botanical and cultural histories of specific places. For example, I have visited, with a plant ecologist, a traditional Ojibwe maple sugaring camp and a rare jack pine bog both in the Chippewa National Forest. In both of these places (the bog essentially wild and untouched, the sugar bush rich with human interaction), I experienced a powerful calling of the land. It is that calling, a yearning to be of nature and to understand our place in nature, that I would explore and articulate in the proposed essays.

Major Goal: My goal for this project is to accomplish, in a series of extended essays, the integration of factual knowledge of nature with creative expression. My models for this are nature writers such as Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, John McPhee, Edward Abbey and Aldo Leopold. Through artistic expression, they all advocate for the stewardship of nature. While I do not assume that I can achieve their august status, I do believe that I have much to say about our contemporary relationship with nature, especially regarding the specifics of the land in north central Minnesota (including the Bemidji area, where I live). My preparation for this challenge includes four researched natural history books, my scholarly writing (profiles in Scribner’s American Writers and Twayne’s History through Literature), my creative nonfiction writing (in books and magazines), as well as my poetry, which teaches both economy and intensity of expression. I see this integration—the merging of rigorous scholarship with creative passion—as a desirable next-step in my development as an artist.

Work Sample, essay from collection The Marriage Bed:

Celestial Event

At 06:28 on an October morning, I stood outside my house in rural northern Minnesota, calculated the distance above the horizon to nineteen degrees, and scanned the western sky for a moving object, the International Space Station. I had plugged my zip code into the tracker on the NASA web site, and the ISS was due to cross my bit of space in two minutes, at 06:30 AM. It was still dark and cold, forty degrees. The sun was just breaking on the eastern horizon. There was no breeze, no sound. The nocturnal deer were done with their foraging, the diurnal squirrels, chipmunks and birds not yet astir.

I stood on the lip of the hill that drops precipitously down to a plateau, and then to a swamp and a bay of water, and I shivered. I had not bothered to put on socks, just slippers, and was wrapped against the universe only in my terry cloth robe. I saw nothing in the sky except the predictable stars. Perhaps I had the time wrong. Perhaps I had missed it and the three-minute window had closed. I widened the field of my search to the southwest, then to the northwest, then back, and as I crossed again over the due west quadrant, there it was, rising like a tiny sun pursued by demons, relentless in its pace. It was so bright its fire could have come from inside though I knew it was only sunlight reflected. I was startled by its size and proximity. As big as Venus setting on a crystalline evening, it looked round to the naked eye. Through my binoculars, though, it transformed into the shape of its solar panel array, a shimmering rectangle that garnered as much light as it reflected and that powered the ship.

I had expected the Station to look like other dim and distant satellites I had seen at night, untwinkling gray dots keeping faith with the curvature of the Earth. Instead, it seemed close, closer even than the two-hundred and twenty mile stretch between me and it, a four-hour drive in a car on Earth, the distance to Minneapolis from my home. In a useless attempt at perspective, I had tried to imagine the line of that paved road anchored at my feet and lifted like a kite string up to the Station. On this morning, I kept the binoculars raised to it as it swept across the northern sky. When it peaked at thirty-three degrees above the horizon, I lowered my arms and watched it unaided, a star once again falling into morning.

MY LOVE AFFAIR with stars started in the 1950’s, at summer camp. It was there I learned my first constellations: Cassiopeia, Orion, the Pleiades, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper. They are the ones I look to even now, and I still use the two stars on the outer rim of the Big Dipper to lead me, five times up, to its lesser counterpart, the Little Dipper, and to Polaris, the twinned North Star. I used to wonder what it would be like to be out there, to be in outer space, and then, some years ago, I realized it would be no different than being on Earth, that Earth resides in space. I was disconcerted, could feel the desire of the planet to spin out of orbit, to careen wantonly away from the sun. Terra firma suddenly felt timorous to me, vulnerable. Until that moment, Earth had been something to count on and I realized that although I know the basics of the solar system—that the sun is at the center of things for us—that for me, for us, the sun is in revolution around us. The fantasy is corroborated with every sunrise and sunset, and is reinforced by the faithful rising and setting of the moon for which Earth really is the center of things.

My engagement with Earth, as with the sky, also began in my young summer years. I lived near a small lake surrounded entirely by marsh and swamp. It was there that I fell in love—in love with water, with slime, with snails, a dead mouse, the sounds of birds, their songs, their chatterings, the brush of their wings against air. At night, in my room, under the cover of darkness both inside and out, I imagined myself back down there, wondered what was happening in the lake, in the grasses, in the willows that arched over both. In my imagining, the dark was benign and lighted by stars. In that lambent, celestial glow, I imagined I was able to see my way.

WHAT CALLS US to the heavens? Do the atoms in our bodies, our brains, our literal hearts, have some sort of memory, memory of fusing into being in the wild alchemy of the birth of the universe, or of hitchhiking on a comet for thousands or millions of years, or rising up from Earth to cloud and riding down from cloud to Earth in the forty-million year rain that cooled our molten planet into the surface we walk on today? All of the matter we know of came into being from a “singularity,” the term for that which “fluctuated” when space took off in the Big Bang. It was probably pure energy, devoid of matter, though perhaps it was something else for which we have no words. The one thing we are pretty sure of is that something happened to the singularity twelve to fourteen billion years ago, and in the inferno that followed, space, time and matter were born. The first infinitesimal bits of particles bandied about, instantaneously forming and unforming, energy to matter to energy. Within minutes of the initial conflagration, the still-tiny cosmos expanded and thus cooled enough so that just-formed protons and neutrons could hold their own against the heat and could even marry into nuclei of hydrogen and helium.  Those first two elements, the dominant matter of the universe,  still maintain today at their early ratio of seventy to eighty percent and twenty to thirty percent, respectively. The expansion continued, and continues now, not into space, but of space, for space is the universe and it, finite space/the universe, expands into infinity which is not a place but nevertheless passes for space’s container. After three-hundred thousand years, that which was, is, and evermore shall be so had cooled enough to allow electron clouds to form around nuclei, making atoms. All the while, the expansion and the cooling continued, and after three-hundred million years, the cooling allowed the accretion of molecules and the accretions morphed into stars, and their nuclear ovens churned out the rest of the elements, iron, uranium, oxygen and their kin, the stuff of all that we can see around us: planets, moons, clouds, grasses, skin, bone, blood. The particulate matter of all that is now—the protons, neutrons and electrons of every atom—including those in the air we breathe, in the containers of our bodies, in the wings of a mosquito and in the ships that return us to space—the whole of every atom, was generated at the moment of the Big Bang. Our home once was the singularity.

Do you remember?

THE SPACE STATION travels at seventeen-thousand miles per hour, circumnavigating Earth every ninety minutes, sixteen times in twenty-four hours, in each loop passing through sixteen orbital sunrises and sixteen orbital sunsets. Looking down at Earth from the Station, the line between night and day is distinct, the subtleties of twilight not perceptible from two hundred miles up. On the daylight side, Earth is a blue marble, an aggie, with variations in green, brown and red, its continents, oceans, even the major rivers easily discernable. I am reminded of a poem by Robert Creeley: “One day after another. / Perfect. / They all fit.” Land to water to land to water. Perfect. It all fits.

Perhaps it is that simplicity that calls to me: from the perspective at the edge of our atmosphere, even a hurricane is elegant, a vast pinwheel mimicking the shape of our galaxy, its arms feathering out, as though reaching for more. It ignites in me a desire to see Earth from space, not merely in pictures, but for myself. I want to visit the ISS, to live there, the curvature of the Earth constantly at my elbow, my time filled with a mix of high-minded science and the putterings of life aloft, the machinations of civilization far below me. It is a safe desire to indulge in as there is no possibility that it will be fulfilled. The only qualification I possess is the desire, the only skill I have to offer an ability with words to sometimes parse the human circumstance.

I CANNOT KNOW if my compelling interest in the Space Station comes from a source as far away as the origin of time, or as close as my childhood summers. I am certain only of my fascination with it. I started watching the NASA channel the summer after my husband died. I could not bear to watch the shows we had watched together, and I stumbled upon a daily Space Station briefing and succumbed to the lure of life at the rim of our atmosphere. Every night at 6:00 PM, a NASA commentator takes us through the day’s work on-station where the astronauts swim about in their tubular, room-size capsules. With easy push offs, they propel themselves as though through water, or they pull themselves along using strategically placed handle-grips. They work out three hours a day so their bones do to not turn to rubber, though even with that there is some deterioration, and they vacuum, for even in space our skin sheds the cells it is done with, the fine powder accumulating on surfaces as it does on Earth.

In my nightly visits to the Station, I come to know by name and face and persona the humans who live there. I miss them when they leave at the end of their six month tours, and watch with fresh interest as a new crew brings its own personality to bear in the weightless confines of the ship, or when an Orbiter—a Space Shuttle—crew arrives, bringing tokens and news and work from Earth. I watch, and watch again in replays, Earth-to-space interviews with the astronauts. Some are with actual media personalities who generally ask mundane questions: “What if you run out of oxygen?” “What if you can’t get back down to Earth?” “Did you watch the Army/Navy game?” It is the interviews with school children that liberate intimacy: “If you eat M & Ms, will they float up from your stomach and out of your mouth?” “Do you have different dreams in space than you do on Earth?” “Did anything surprise you in space, something you were not prepared for by your training?” Mike Foale answered that one. He was surprised by how bright the sun is outside of our atmosphere, nothing between him and it to temper its light.

When the interviews end, the astronauts return to their routines, working, taking a break, working, eating lunch, working out, working, keeping house, calling home in what passes for evening in space. Home to families. Home to Earth.

SIMPLICITY. ELEGANCE. Singularity. These are privileges of perspective. As I write this, I am a few feet from the spot where I stood the first time I saw the Station course overhead. Now, however, there is a wall between me and that space—the wall, the atmosphere, of my house. I have the window above my desk cracked open, letting in the fresh, hot summer air. A breeze makes its way in, toys with the papers on my desk, and raises the ambient temperature above the comfort zone. Nothing is elegant here. The hill and swamp and bay that I see from my window are astir with the breeze and with the life that inhabits them. A great blue heron rises from a mass of reeds, hang-glides down the creek and disappears again into the mess. The water around the edge of the bay is choked with bullhead lilies.

On this side of the wall, in my habitat, household work and writerly tasks await attention—the daily necessities of food and clothing, publishing projects, ideas for new writing. On the far side of the house, away from the swamp, a door leads to the driveway that leads to the road that leads to town. There, the neat grid of the streets is deceptive: the human endeavor of the planet is in disarray. At a time in the history of our species when we have the wherewithal to provide for every one of us, we do not do so. We peer downward as though through a magnifying glass at our individual, our cultural, our national troubles. Too often, we fail to see the horizon, let alone the circle our planet manifests in profound space.

I no longer watch the news. My abstinence is a cloistering of sorts, an unnatural partitioning. I am brought back to John Keats’ poem “Ode to a Nightingale.” In it, he has been transported to Nature’s lofty realm. When he returns to his worldly state, he asks, “Do I wake, or sleep?” Which of the realms is the real one? Does the atmosphere of our existence keep us in, or out? Could we better find our way in the unfettered light of space? Even there we do not escape our human skin: it sheds and the astronauts have to dust.

##

Listen
1.
It is winter, the day before New Year’s Eve.
It has been snowing hard, again,
and I can hear on the road, through
the woods, the snow plow, its blade
rumbling over the blacktop, half
threat, half promise.

Inside, at my desk, my feet warm
on the heated floor, I watch through
the north window the snow accumulate
steadily on the ground, in spite
of the company of wind that bats it about,
lets it rest, then picks it up again.

2.
I stayed in all day, worked on a poem, took
a nap, worked again on the poem. The snow
continued its own work, though slackened
as the temperature dropped. The wind
kept faith, building drifts in the yard
and down the driveway.

When it was dark, I turned on the outside lights,
watched the snow rise and settle, listened
to the wind, then gave in to the day-long impulse:
gathered myself into my outside gear and set out
for the mailbox.

The driveway bends through a maple grove, then
opens to a neighbor’s field and then to the wide
berm of the county road. No traffic either way.
I mind the strips of ice laid down in the tire paths
and cross to the box, place the mail in the satchel
I carry. I leave in the box one envelope to go out,
lift the little red flag into its salute position, check
again the silent road for cars and cross back
to my driveway.

There I stop, realize I have been holding my breath.
I let it go, feel it rising and falling, then tend to that larger
breathing of the wind, one long whistle that began
in the west and will exhale all the way across
the continent.

3.
When I stepped out of the house into the yard, I
wondered how well I would be able to see after
the drive curved away from the house. I am experienced
at this kind of walking, into the night, away from light:
I know if I am patient, my eyes will adjust, except
for looking down: snow on snow does not allow visual
discrimination. I land each foot with clear intent, accept
the terrain as it rises and falls from drift to driftless,
hips and knees making the accommodation. For guidance
I use the line of trees that leads me inevitably to the road,
where I note the light at a distant neighbor’s that flickers
like a candle through the trees.

4.
I am not foolish: I called my son before I left and
will call when I return; I have my cell phone in
my pocket. I think of Jenny who lived here long
before I did, her story about Roland riding horseback
twenty miles into town, about the blizzard that rolled in
while he was gone, its only warning a graying sky
and escalating flurries. It was lambing season.
She stayed in the barn wondering if he had taken shelter
or was trying to get home. For three days she tended
the sheep and her fear. When the sky blew clear
and the cold set in, that deep, relentless, blue-skied cold,
she stayed still with the lambs.

Late that afternoon, he rode in, as simple as that.
Not there. There. Here, putting up the horse, looking
at the lambs, stomping the snow off his boots in
the kitchen entry. Jenny heated soup, made coffee.

5.
I closed my eyes as I stood at the end of the driveway,
the wind surrounding me. No cars went by, no pickups,
no logging trucks late home from the road. I was warm
except for my cheeks, heat streaming away from them,
carried off by the sub-zero wind. Still I stood there, eyes
closed, listening. I began to lose my balance, adjusted
my stance, feet farther apart, arms out slightly from
my sides, head lifted back as though to hear better
a higher sound streaming down from the treetops.

6.
Back in the house, I report that I am in, then look
at the mail. Nothing worth any kind of risk, but outside,
the wind continues its siren call, half threat, half promise,
and snow blazes through the beam of the porch light
that, to a distant eye, flickers like the flame of a candle.

========================================

Elegy

In the pew in front of me, a man leans slightly
toward his wife, gently removes a bit of lint
from the shoulder of her sweater. She seems
to not notice but I’m betting that she does,
that she feels the slight pressure of his thumb
and forefinger against the blue-gray fabric,
a kiss in passing, a touch of gratitude
for her being here, next to him at this place,
saying goodbye to their friend of forty years,
his wife sitting on the other side of the aisle
next to the children, the grandchildren, she
smiling as she can at the sweet words pouring out—
how we all loved this man—a river of love
flowing away from her, too fast, too far,
singular, relentless.

====================================

Elegy
for Bill Borden

It was evening when I heard
the snow geese coming,
late migrators following the first snow
of the incipient winter.

I heard them even through the walls
of the house, their calling, crying, yelping,
even barking, the sound coming toward me
the way a storm travels, relentless in its mission.

I went outside and faced north, hoping to see them,
their almighty wings white against the evening sky.
They turned, though, before they got to me. I heard
them go down in a distant field
their voices dwindling, then silent.

They are in for the night. I also abandon the dark sky,
step back inside. Out of reach. Out of sight.
=====================================

More to come!

You will have to take my word on this: we loved each other. We were married to other people, we fell in love, and finally we were together and then married, for thirty years. We both expected Bill to die first, he was twenty-seven years older than I, and through all of those years, even from the beginning, I told myself that I could live with his absence because our love would carry me the way a wave carries the light of the sun. It would not be the way it was when my younger son Aaron died at age nine in a bicycle accident, the floor of the earth, the vault of the heavens untimely opened and all of us swallowed whole. Bill’s death would be timely and it was, in the end. He was eighty-five and failing, his body done, though he was sorry to have to go.

During Bill’s last six months, after he’d been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, I did not think about what I would do, how it would be, “after.” I tried to, at first, but it maddened me, so I followed Bill’s lead, as I so often had: I ignored the fact of our eventual separate paths and stayed as much as I could in the well-worn, comfortable track we had forged over the years. After all, when it happened, he would still be with me in ways that counted. Our consummate mutual trust, our knowing each other in inexpressible and sometimes inexplicable ways, our not being alone even when apart — these would hold, I was certain, and would keep me safe. I imagined myself in a sort of beatific state, clothed not in widow’s weeds, but in light, a noncorporeal manifestation of our marriage.

I trusted this belief, even in Bill’s last days, as we lay together, often awake, my body curved to his back, my arms curved above his head in an arc, because the weight of them on his shoulders was too much. I trusted it as he took the little spoonfuls of morphine; I trusted it as his body cooled and finally stopped. I trusted it in the first weeks after his passing, when I wept and then wailed, like a widow in an old Greek movie, and even when I quit wailing, and finally stopped weeping, falling silently into sleep curled against a pillow, my arms arced above my head.

I was surprised by the relentless crying, but it was not until the second year that I realized I’d been wrong about love and light carrying me forward through an emotionally blissful life. I missed Bill. Though I sometimes sensed him waiting for me at home, or coming in from the yard while I was making dinner, every time, he was not there, did not come in. He kept on not coming back; he keeps on not coming back. He does not feel present to me, in spite of occasional moments when memory sparks into brief flame, as though he were here. And as his physical presence faded and fades, so does the palpability of our love: it does not feel present to me. Untested by day and deprived of touch by night, it, like Bill, has become a memory.

EVEN BEFORE BILL DIED, our mattress was in need of replacement. The weight of our bodies had pressed valleys into our respective sides, an almost imperceptible spine, like that of an incipient mountain, rising between the two. Often as we slept we fell back into those cradles, half waking now and then to regain the middle ground, a leg or arm extending over the breach, a hand or foot making landfall. When Bill was on the other side, I did not notice the stress of the mattress on my back, the ache perhaps relieved or even prevented by the warmth of our paired sleeping. With Bill gone, I could not find a place to lie that did not hurt. I tried sleeping on his side, and sleeping in the middle, and turning the mattress over and around. Nothing worked. For four years, nothing worked. Finally I decided it was time for change. I went to the furniture store. The old bed was king-size. By switching to a queen, I could get a better mattress and have more space in the modest bedroom.

I decided to not think about it much, about the symbolism of the gesture, the release of the marriage bed, the decision to purchase one better suited to one person, and I chose a good mattress, one that would last, and I had the new bed delivered and the old one spirited away. I made up the new one with the too-big king-size sheets and then I lay on it on my back, right in the middle, then turned over on my belly and stretched out my arms. I could reach over both sides at the same time with my hands, able to encompass the breadth of the bed in my arms. I arose and stood at the foot and looked at it. No cradles. No room for ghosts. I was proud of myself. It was my bed now, not ours.

It remains inexplicable to me that we can finally become happy again, ever, after someone we love has died. Yet there I stood at the end of my bed, a scant four years out, feeling happy. Was this not betrayal? It does not help to say that they are gone and do not care. The problem of grief is never with them; it is with us, with those who remain. Like the bed we lie in, it is ours.

I LIKE LIVING ALONE. This was a surprise to me. I had never lived alone until Bill died. I married the first time at nineteen, and when I divorced at twenty-nine I had my children with me, and then Bill and I were together. And my life now is neither lonely nor dull. I have family and friends who love me and whose company I enjoy. Andrew, my older son, Debbie, my daughter-in-law and Wren, my granddaughter live close by, and I am with them almost every day. I have good work to do, in my writing and my job. Sometimes I fear that I prefer to live alone and even prefer to be alone in my bed. Other times I fear that the desire to lie in bed with a man, naked together in thought and deed, will forever light the corner, a melancholy lamp.

Perhaps I have not waited long enough for love to rise above grief. Perhaps I am doing something wrong, not trusting the love, not letting it illuminate the room. Perhaps I want too much. Most people, I think, never have, even once, the kind of love we had. Why shouldn’t I be happy that I did? Satisfied?

I am not satisfied. I want to be crazy in love again with someone who is crazy about me. In the parking lot one day at the university where I teach, I sat in my car and wept as I watched a long-married couple, teachers nearing retirement, get out of their car and walk next to each other up to the building, their shoulders touching now and then. I wept for myself; I wept for them.

I HAVE DREAMS sometimes about my son Aaron, and now about Bill. I awake from having been with them. At first I am comforted; then I am angry. Dreams are a cruel game, reminding me of what I had, and then of what I do not have. That is the thing about death: we are left with only memories, pale, deteriorating reflections of something that no longer exists. This thought reveals a bitterness that bubbles up but does not linger. That is the thing about grief: the path from the moment of impact to the season of peace is neither straight nor predictable, and doubling back seems inevitable. Although the dreams are bittersweet, I am glad I have them.

THE MOST BRUTAL experience for me after Bill died was the ritual presentation of the death certificate. Six months out, I went around town taking Bill’s name off our mutual accounts: electricity, telephone, mortgage, banking, savings, retirement, car license. At every turn I had to present a certified copy of proof of death. The people I dealt with were always kind, but in each instance I had to say out loud, “My husband has passed away,” and hand over the paperwork. They’d photocopy it and give it back to me and I would take my proof back to the car and put it in a little case on the seat beside me, where I kept it because I needed it more than I thought I would, at places I’d thought it would not matter. Once I was even required to close our joint account and open a new one in my name alone. Though I resented this, the experience turned in my favor: I filled in the application form and my choices for marital status were “single,” “married” or “divorced.”

“I’m widowed,” I said to the clerk. She did not know what to say, and neither did I. I left the item blank.

“Widowed,” I thought as I returned to my car, proof of my status in my hand. “I am a widow.” I wondered why I had not thought of it before. In that moment I was returned to a relationship with my husband in the eyes of society, if not in my bed. I was pleased. Not long after that, I had occasion to go on a shopping spree. I bought new shirts and tops, bright colors, suggestive silks, scooped necklines. “From the ‘Widow Steps Out’ collection,” I said to my companions, and thought that Bill would have been pleased.

I thought about this, too, after I bought my new bed: “The Widow Gives Up Her Bed of Sorrow.” And although I know it is not always true, I do sleep easily and well on the new mattress. Sometimes I sleep near one edge, just to prove to myself that this is not a single bed, that there is room for possibilities. And sometimes I still turn and face Bill’s side and pull a pillow close against my chest and belly and pelvis, or I lift my arms in an arc above my head, and I say, “Goodnight, Bill,” and let love carry me down into the respite, however brief, that is dream.

Published in The Sun, August 2008

Copyright 2008 Susan Carol Hauser

Seeking Passage is a story about river qua river: literally, it is about how the Mississippi moves and where it goes; metaphorically, it is about how the Mississippi serves as a rich metaphor for our lives and where we go. It is about the river that we have not lost, the river that can still bring meaning to the human drama, and that readers can discover through this story.

Many people yearn toward the Mississippi River and its destination. In 1997, I followed my yearning by taking this boat trip. My river experiences – those leading to the journey, the journey itself, and the return home – are the overt subject of Seeking Passage. The undercurrent is the story of the river itself, of the water and the manner of its going, of the rivers of our lives, and of transformation. As with the river, the undercurrent is all.

The book is contemplative creative nonfiction, in the sense of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, Henry Beston’s The Outermost House and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. The reader goes from the trickling beginnings of the Mississippi to the encompassing embrace of the Gulf of Mexico, from uncertainty about the destination, through encounters with fear, to a sense of well-being:

I expected to feel sad at reaching this conclusion, but it does not feel like an ending. I can understand holding this as a thought, the movement of water as perpetual transformation, but did not expect to feel it. When the water reaches the Gulf, its work is not done. Although the insistence of the river has vanished along with its constraining banks, its meaning remains grounded in the water that accommodates the complexity and the mystery of our experience: the river and the sea have intent and purpose enough for all.

Along the way, I encountered the will and insistence of the river, contemplated the changes manifest in its 2,500 mile plummet to sea level, and found meaning at every turn:

Before seven, I am up and off the boat. I walk around and around on a circular path that rings a park by the marina, glad that I can keep the boat in sight, as though it might leave without me, or even disappear as though it had not ever been there. Bill and Bob are still asleep. Although it is cold, fifty degrees, I sit outside for awhile, hands under my folded arms, and watch the sun in an audacious display as it breaks into being in the clear sky above the eastern tree line. The moisture that usually tempers the morning light shivers down close to the water. The trees are crazy with birds chirring and chirping, some calling “phiew phiew,” a sound I almost recognize from the woods at home. A great blue heron flies in from somewhere, right toward me, then diverts and lights on a driftwood branch, branch and bird held in silhouette by the sun that is now liberated above the tree-mad horizon.

Seeking Passage differs from other books about Mississippi River journeys in its focus on the river and the water, and on the larger journeys of our lives. The reader is invited onto the boat, sees the river from the boat, rather than from bridges and overlooks, and participates in the author’s experience of the river. In the end, it is a book about hope and peace of mind, about destination and destiny.

Helen Bonner, author of First Love Last and Cry Dance, says this about Seeking Passage: “If you are tired of fast-paced, extreme, exaggerated fiction and nonfiction, and would like to spend some time slowly descending the Mississippi River with exquisite, poetic company, this is your book. You will arrive at the Gulf of Mexico refreshed, and with new insights into love and the river.”

Here is the foreword to the collection:

I promised this book to myself several decades ago, long before most of the events described took place. I was writing commentaries for public radio. They were short, around three hundred words. The air-time window was three minutes. In that slight opening I had to engage listeners, take them somewhere, and bring them back. I enjoyed the challenge of it and the shimmering, poetic feel of the intensified writing that relied on sound and image as much as on idea.

Sometimes, though, I wanted to say more than the commentary form allowed, wanted to follow a notion beyond its immediate boundaries. I loved reading the sustained work of other writers where image led to thought, thought to image, the conversation continuing like a long walk on a country road, ending only when it felt right to turn around, to go back home. How do they do that, I wondered? How do they keep the discussion going? I wanted to do it myself, to see if I had something more to say than could be said in a few minutes. I also wanted to explore writing that stepped beyond the particular decorum of the airwaves. What did I have to say that I was not saying? How closely, I wondered, was I heeding a childhood dictum: if you cannot say something nice, do not say anything at all. It was not that I wanted to be rude or gossipy, but I knew that my commentaries implied that I was always pleasant, even-tempered, and that I preternaturally accommodated all griefs. I felt like I was writing only half of who I was.

I started writing longer essays, five-hundred to a thousand words. It was difficult for me to sustain them but I liked the way the effort stretched my abilities. Some of them were published in magazines, some in a collection, Girl to Woman: A Gathering of Images (Astarte Shell Press). But the real leap forward for me came from a tangential writing project: biographical profiles for Scribner’s American Writers, reference books that are carried in most libraries in the United States. The requirement was for ten-thousand words per subject. At the suggestion of the series editor, Jay Parini, I broke each article into eight or nine sections, making the total manageable. It was strange and wonderful to write expansively. By the time I finished three profiles (John James Audubon, Witter Bynner, Carol Bly) I had the hang of it.

My first long essay after that, “The Marriage Bed,” the title piece for this collection, spun out to eighteen-hundred words. The second one, “Celestial Event,” made it to two-thousand. “Writing Teaching Writing” propelled itself to an astounding five-thousand words. I did not know I had it in me. I had found my stride.

Most of the essays were written over a three-year period, half of them during a sabbatical leave from my position in the English Department at Bemidji State University. A few, the very short ones, were written some years ago but seem to fit here, stepping stones between the longer iterations. There are four essays that I am most proud of: “The Marriage Bed” for its honesty, “Celestial Event” for its science (which I could not have articulated without the help of two physicists, Larry Pinsonneault and Paul Weber), “The Value of x” for its bravery, and “What I Know” for its crankiness. I like that the first sentence and the last sentence of the book are the same, an idea I had when I wrote the first one. I like that “Ammy’s Doe” falls perfectly into two sections, each with almost exactly the same number of words, and I especially like that this happened spontaneously: I did not realize it until long after the writing was complete.

My writing origins are in poetry. I was driven to prose by the desire for an income, a way to make a living in northern Minnesota, and by the desire to become more fluent with words. The analogy I gave myself was the artist who understands the chemistry of both watercolors and oils. I sweetened the deal by making another writing promise to myself: some day I would return to poetry as my only genre, retrieving it from years of occasional indulgence and long periods of neglect. With the completion of this collection of essays, I look forward to fulfilling the promise for a while, but I know I will amend it: I am not likely to give up the pleasure of the long reach, the hard pull of writing an essay.

My website is now current. It includes my resume, bibliography and rights available (publishing-ese for manuscripts seeking publishers).

Regarding the McKnight Artist Fellowship–Judge Marilyn Nelson had this to say about my manuscript: “I was touched by the generosity of these poems in the sharing of grief and the upward and downward tides of the ongoing cycles of birth, death and the seasons. They deftly elevate the individual facts of the quotidian toward the simplicity of myth.”

Below is a poem from the submission manuscript.

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This Morning

This morning, with the loons calling across the lake, and a creature in the swamp galumping, and the drawl of a distant mourning dove pulling at me, so that I turn my head to listen better in one ear,

this late-July morning in northern Minnesota, with the leaves of the oak trees approaching their deepest green, and the reed canary grass outside my window already gone to seed, and the thistles that I let grow this year topping off with purple flowers, and the bay of the lake calm in the still air, the pelicans, in their morning cruise around the perimeter traveling each with its own image stitched alongside it, the image exactly equal to the pelican itself except that it does not exist,

this morning, this late-July morning, the trees speaking the tongue of songbirds, I do not miss you.

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I have received a 2010 McKnight Artist Fellowship ($25,000) in poetry.  This is the closing poem in the award manuscript:

Guests at the Table

Pickled beets; deviled eggs.

Sweet potato soup.
French bread.

Blueberry pie with ice cream.

Coffee: hot, black, strong.

After, a walk down the country road
in a starless dark so thorough
we lose our balance, put our arms
out like oars and, one to the next,
touch at our fingertips, proceed,
as always, in a ragged line
into the deepened night.