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5. The Microclimate of Trees

This story was a finalist for the Glimmer Train August 2013 Short Story Award for New Writers but has not yet been published.

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Look and Listen . . .

W. H. Auden wrote the poem “September 1, 1939” during the first days of World War II. It deliberately echoes the stanza form of W. B. Yeats’ “Easter, 1916” and similarly moves from a description of failures and frustrations to the possibility of transformation. (See text.) Here it is, as read by Dylan Thomas:

Note: Since I posted this, I have read Edward Mendelson’s “The Secret Auden,” which shows that Auden was a great person as well as a great poet.

An Affirming Flame
22 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
Taken literally, “Pūt vējiņi” (“Blow, winds”) could be a sentimental folk song about the defiance of a reckless rake whose beloved’s mother had broken a promise to give her daughter’s hand in marriage because he drank and raced horses. (“I drank on my own tab / And raced my own horse. // And married my own bride / Without her parents’ knowledge.” But his longing to return home, as well as the reverend way that Latvians started to sing it made it a surrogate national anthem, sung during times of oppression, when something more provocative such as “Dievs, sveti Latviju!” (“God, Bless Latvia!”) would have elicited harsh reprisal from authorities. Here it is as sung at the closing concert of the 2008 Latvian song and dance festival (Dziesmusvētki):

Blow, Winds
22 November 2013 Ilse Munro 1 Comment
Brett Candlish Millier: “[Elizabeth Bishop’s] ‘One Art’ is an exercise in the art of losing, a rehearsal of the things we tell ourselves in order to keep going, a speech in a brave voice that cracks once in the final version and cracked even more in the early drafts. The finished poem may be the best modern example of a villanelle and shares with its nearest competitor, Theodore Roethke‘s justly famous ‘The Waking’—’I wake to sleep and take my waking slow’—the feeling that in the course of writing or saying the poem the poet is giving herself a lesson, in waking, in losing. Bishop’s lines share her ironic tips for learning to lose and to live with loss.” (See the full text of the poem.)

The Art of Losing
22 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
From 1944 to 1945, the approaching Soviet Army forced many Latvians to find escape routes to other countries. According to one source, about 250,000 people became refugees. Many got stuck in Courland, and some 50-60,000 were murdered by Soviet troops in Poland and Germany. After the war, approximately 6000 Latvians found refuge in Sweden, 120,00 in West Germany, 3000 in Austria and 2000 in Denmark. In later years, Latvian emigration spread to the United States, Canada, Australia and other countries. Some succumbed to forced repatriation by the Soviets; most expected to voluntarily return once Latvia was free, though that rarely occurred.

Leaving Latvia
21 November 2013 Ilse Munro 3 Comments
Although Tom Petty uses “refugee” metaphorically, his song captures the meaning of the word. “This was a reaction to the pressures of the music business,” he said. “I wound up in a huge row with the record company when ABC Records tried to sell our contract to MCA Records without us knowing about it, despite a clause in our contract that said they didn’t have the right to do that. I was so angry with the whole system that I think that had a lot to do with the tone of the Damn the Torpedoes album. I was in this defiant mood. I wasn’t so conscious of it then, but I can look back and see what was happening. I find that’s true a lot. It takes some time usually before you fully understand what’s going on in a song—or maybe what led up to it.”

Live Like a Refugee
21 November 2013 Ilse Munro 1 Comment
For the opening lines of The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers wrote: “It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person and hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.”

An Unjoined Person
21 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
The following is an interview with 83-year-old Mirdza Balas, a librarian in the Sonoma County system. She drove the bookmobile and subsequently became manager of Sebastopol branch, from which she retired in 1989. Balas relates her memories of growing up in Latvia before and during World War II and moving through Europe as a displaced person before she came to the United States in 1957.

An Oral History
21 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
The Economist, 22 May 2008: “Being burnt in effigy on the streets of Moscow by nationalist hoodlums must count as a kind of Oscar if you are a Latvian filmmaker whose aim is to expose modern Russia’s blindness to the criminal history of the Soviet Union. The ire of Young Russia’s protest outside the Latvian embassy this week was directed at Edvins Snore, whose film Soviet Story is the most powerful antidote yet to the sanitisation of the past.”

The Soviet Story
20 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
The musical Eslingena premiered in Toronto, Canada in 2004 at the 12th Latvian Song Festival. At the end, as Andris Straumanis reports, “the audience joined hands and, led by the actors and crew, sang again the closing song: ‘Vai tu vari mani tagad pateikt, Kas mums dzīvē notiks?‘ Can you tell me now what will become of us? It is a question that is as relevant now as it was in the Esslingen DP camp, and as it has been in much of Latvian history. We don’t know the answer. That’s why I cried.” Here is a parody of a Soviet attempt to convince Latvians in the DP camp to repatriate:

Forced Repatriation
19 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
Latvian-American artist Markus Rotkovičs (Mark Rothko): “I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”

Tragedy, Ecstacy, Doom
19 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment

More videos →

Consider . . .

Salman Rushdie having a discussion with Emory University students.

“So my subject changed, was no longer a search for lost time, had become the way in which we remake the past to suit our present purposes, using memory as our tool.”

Salman Rushdie, “Errata: or, Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s Children,“ 1983

Errata
17 December 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
A barrack in Dolinka, a village at the center of the gulag system in Kazakhstan. (Source: Reuters)

“Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.”

Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, 2006

Magnificent Reason
16 December 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
Storage Battery Assembling Department, Thomas Edison’s factory (Source: National Park Service.)

“There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.”

—Joshua Reynolds, often misattributed to Thomas Edison, who liked it so much that he posted it around his factory.

An Apt Misattribution
3 December 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
Dinaw Mengestu in Washington, DC in 2012 (Source: Getty Images)

“What was it my father used to say? A bird stuck between two branches gets bitten on both wings. I would like to add my own saying to the list now, Father: a man stuck between two worlds lives and dies alone. I have dangled and been suspended long enough.”

Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, 2007

Between Two Branches
2 December 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
11 September 2001, World Trade Towers, New York City, NY (Photo: Robert Clark)

“Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.”

—Ian McEwan, The Guardian, 15 September 2001

Imagining . . .
24 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment

More quotes →

ILSE MUNRO

Welcome!

One month after I was born, my family and I were forced to leave our native land. In this way, I became what is officially called a "displaced person." When I arrived in the United States as a five-year-old, I learned that the term, shortened to "DP," could be used pejoratively. These days, I simply see it as an apt descriptor and even take perverse pride in having been identified as such. In doing so, I acknowledge that it continues to apply today.

I have lived in Latvia, Austria, Germany and, in the United States, many places in Michigan, Massachusetts, Alabama and Maryland. But being a DP is as much a state of mind as it is of residency. Often a solitary one, so I would be delighted if you shared my wanderings, as presented in the posts and pages of this site. And added your own unique voice, as well.

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An Apt Misattribution 3 December 2013
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Imagining . . . 24 November 2013
An Affirming Flame 22 November 2013
Blow, Winds 22 November 2013
The Art of Losing 22 November 2013
Why I Write 21 November 2013
Leaving Latvia 21 November 2013

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