Warned of, craved, the blizzard finally barrels across the ice dark street. The known world whittles down to black elm, chiseled hoar frost, and my breath against the slim windowpane, periodic circles of clarity against a gathering snow, a white space.

“I am not a poet,” my student informs me, not by text message or email, but by phone, landline phone. My enthusiasm over the metaphoric possibilities of this student’s obsession with bricks in her narrative on building a new house with her second husband has aroused a knee-jerk reaction—and it’s not a good one.

Already this blizzard must mean something: the white exterior world beyond the cold glass I press my palm hard against. The interior world my breath inhabits, warm with its fireplace flame even as the insistent voice of the anchorwoman ticks off degrees and inches as if the world beyond the window that I cannot yet feel, and the world beyond the self I do not yet know, could be made measurable.

“When I first saw it, when at last the bear of my girlhood unlocked itself from the stone shadows and I could see the fine frosted hairs of its crooked dog legs, I could not leave it.”

From forest fires to mountain lions, Ohio farm to Colorado cabin, violation to silence to reclamation, Kathryn Winograd draws keep attention to the details that braid her own history with that of the land on which she dwells, with her husband, daughters–anyone who has experienced loss and fought for renewal. Her collection of lyrical personal essays becomes a ring of concentric circles–one essay builds upon the next to achieve deeper meaning and truth, revealing, at the center, mercy.

Kathryn Winograd is the author of Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation and Air Into Breath, winner of the Colorado Book Award in Poetry. Her essays have been noted in Best American Essays, and published in journals including Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, River Teeth, The Florida Review and The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, 6th. She will teach for Regis University’s Mile High MFA program beginning in January, 2016.

Chame, Annapurna Circuit, Nepal

Was it only four days ago that I told myself all I had to do was get up each day and start walking? Beware the simple idea. Today’s leg was a long and difficult haul, and the realization that it’s only going to get harder the higher I go is like that recurring nightmare: the one where I find myself at school taking an exam for which I’ve never studied. Dharapani sits at about 1890 meters, Chame at about 2680. That’s an elevation gain of 800 meters (2600 feet) in five hours of walking. But it is, still, a simple idea: just . . . keep . . . walking.

We each fell into our own rhythm, and once again I found myself walking alone for most of the day. With no one else to distract me, each moment stood out in relief, the way I’ve heard moments do when you’re on acid—or about to die.

Alone. If you say a word often enough it empties and expands, empties and expands with meaning until it is no longer one thing, but all things. Alone no longer means joy or pain, love or loss, good or bad. It is only the journey I walk through. Alone is inevitable, and if there were ever a place for inevitability it would be the Himalayas. These mountains know what it is to be beyond loneliness, to simply sift the sun and snow for evidence of time and signs of life.

In Bagarchhap, I bought a small loaf of bread from a tiny bakery. A handful of children began following me, their eyes keeping time with the hard, dark little loaf swinging from my hand. I gave them each a piece, and their grins made the remaining heel of bread more enjoyable, although no less tough and chewy.

As I pushed on to Danaque, I heard bells jingling and was flabbergasted to see two men on horseback appear out of nowhere, bearing down on me at a gallop. I’ve become used to goats, cows, and pack animals, but this was new. It was the first sign that I was truly moving high up into the Himalayas and the villages of Nepal’s ethnic Tibetans.

In Danaque, I passed a whitewashed stone Mani Wall in the middle of the path, lined with a row of metal prayer wheels on either side. In a Mani Wall, each cylindrical wheel is inscribed with the Tibetan Buddhist mantra, “Om Mani Padme Hum,” and each wheel is stuffed with paper scrolls inscribed with the same mantra. An old woman was circling the wall counterclockwise, spinning the wheels—passing her hand along them the way a child might pass her hand along a chain link fence to set the metal vibrating—sending hundreds of mantras spinning to the heavens. I had the strange impression she had been walking around that wall, spinning those wheels, since the beginning of time, and would still be circling there at the end, when the universe stops circling and collapses inward on itself.

Leaving the old devotee to her loop, I continued moving forward to Chame, to meet the moment I’ve been waiting for: my first glimpse of Annapurna II, a true behemoth of the Annapurna Range. How do you describe the way your heart feels when you first fall in love? The way your body feels when you have your first orgasm? The way your mind feels when it first understands that everyone and everything will die, and in the next moment grasps the pure dumb miraculous luck of being alive? It is no wonder that great masters have wandered into the mountains and found enlightenment. Here enlightenment is not only something within, it is something external—so for even the most foolish among us there must be hope to find it.

As evening came, I spotted fresh snow falling on the distant peak of Annapurna II (8000 meters, or 26,000 feet) and the closer Lamjung Himal (6900 meters, or 22,700 feet). With the first sight of snow, came the first night of bone-aching cold.

Before dinner, I showered under a slender strand of lukewarm water so spare it only warmed one body part at a time, leaving the rest of my body a map of gooseflesh in the rapidly cooling high-altitude air. I made the mistake of washing my hair. It refused to dry and I shivered through dinner, even though I wrapped in several layers of clothing and pulled a wool cap over my wet head. Every few minutes, I left the dining area to stand by the kitchen woodstove with my cap off, trying in vain to dry my hair and warm up.

Several porters sat around the stove and we swapped pleasantries. Alan, a dark, compact porter with a wide, white grin, taught me several Nepali phrases, including the common greeting, “Kosta cha?” (How’s it going?), and the standard reply, “Ramro cha!” (It’s going great!).

After dinner, Nat philosophized about the spirituality and simplicity of Nepal’s mountain cultures. “The people who live in these mountains don’t stress over all the crap that drives the rest of us mad: getting ahead, buying a better house or car, working more to get more. They don’t concern themselves about acquiring things or attaining wealth the way Westerners do. As long as they have enough food to eat and a home to sleep in, they’re happy.”

Zack’s response was, “Yeah? Well if they’re so satisfied with what they have, why do their kids keep asking for my fucking pens?”

Seems to me we’re climbing to a place where both happiness and madness are beside the point.

Dawn seems an exaggeration: there’s a teeming dimness, a gloom or muffled glow alive with swirling palenesses. What light there is creeps up from the strangeness that yesterday was our valley, or down from where the sky must still arch over. Now and then, here and there, the scrappy swarm grows sparse and the southwestward ridgeline appears; gray-green smudges or brushstrokes emerge from the general effervescence . . . a feeble attempt at distinctness that’s quickly overcome by freshly thickening curtains of snowfall. . . .

The flakes themselves soon become weightier. They plummet, wobbling or tumbling, through the rising brightness (we understand the sun has cleared the eastward peaks); and suddenly the storm reacts . . . as when passion—anger or elation, for example—begins to give way to a not-quite-calm . . . that mildly agitated exhaustion to which we so often resign ourselves, out of which we fashion contentment. . . .

Now the storm-cloth is growing threadbare. A blue brilliance shines through in spots, then in patches. On the opposite mountain, shadows spring from the pines until each tree stands forth in relief, edged with cold fire . . . as if engraved in gold. Soon enough we notice that the storm has unraveled into shreds of mist, a frosty raggedness adrift in the valley . . . the way the mind wanders over the floating world when there’s nothing more to say.

Just imagine…but then imagine it in your own home after these deliciously warm books have shown up on your doorstep.

Is there much better in life?

We don’t think so either.

So go on, wander down the isles of our new bookstore, and stay warm as the next winter storm rolls in. And, if you promise not to tell anyone, we’ll give you a 20% discount on your entire order if you enter the promotional code welovereaders when you check out. Shhhh.

]]>http://conundrum-press.com/we-have-a-brand-new-bookstore/feed/0#ReadWomen2014, Part IIhttp://conundrum-press.com/readwomen2014-part-ii/
http://conundrum-press.com/readwomen2014-part-ii/#commentsThu, 11 Dec 2014 17:37:10 +0000http://conundrum-press.com/?p=1763Yesterday, we wrote a post praising Kathryn Winograd and Cara Lopez Lee, two of our creative non-fiction authors published in the last two years as part of the #ReadWomen2014 campaign.

Today, we celebrate two poets, Eleanor Swanson and Juliana Aragón Fatula, and a novelist with a just-published book called Glassmusic, Rebecca Snow.

Every door in this hand-crafted house of poetry opens into a room inhabited by possibility.” –Andrea L. Watson, author of Collecting Life, Poets on Objects Known and Imagined

Memory’s Rooms, poetry by Eleanor Swanson

Swanson’s Conundrum collection, Memory’s Rooms, was published in 2013, and is comprised of poems that are distillations of moments and memories, using imagery and emotion as frame. In “Threnody,” the poem’s narrator starts, “On water, through glass, shining through mist/diffracting and breaking like a song interrupted…” and remembers a person long-lost, a person whom the narrator describes as, “the fish and I am the hook./Someday you will be mine again.” There is movement over the course of the poem, an affirmation of connection.

Eleanor has written several books, both fiction and poetry, always with such care and attention of linking abstractions to concrete images. As a result, we readers come to full attention when we’re in the midst of the lines, waiting to see where the poem will lead.

And then we have Crazy Chicana in Catholic City, Juliana Aragón Fatula’s first collection of poetry. Conundrum republished it in 2012. She is a fifth-generation Coloradoan and she is a three-time winner of the Southern Colorado Women’s Poetry Competition.

“Juliana Aragón Fatula writes histories so terrifying they feel as if they were written with a knife.” –Sandra Cisneros

Crazy Chicana in Catholic City

Crazy Chicana’s poems recount Aragón Fatula’s past, her ancestors and her own life and the stories that resonate with the history of the land and the human body. Nothing is off limits in her work; she does not shy away from violence or sickness or death, all fundamental to the stories that made her into an artist.

Published just last month, Rebecca Snow’s gorgeous novel about early twentieth-century Norway and a young girl who struggles with her pious family’s secrets and disharmony. Glassmusic explores the sometimes devastating realities of loyalty and jealousy, with philosophy, music, and love serving as her guides.

“The world through Ingrid’s eyes is fragile and fraught with danger. Snow’s debut novel is as beautiful as the frozen landscape she describes with such precision.” –Tiffany Quay Tyson, author of the forthcoming Three Rivers

We are so gratified to have such strong women represent Conundrum Press through their work. It really is a reason to celebrate.

“From a small American literary journal’s vow to dedicate a year’s coverage to women writers and writers of colour to author and artist Joanna Walsh’s burgeoning #readwomen2014 project, readers – and publishers – around the world are starting to take their own small steps to address male writers’ dominance in the literary universe.” –The Guardian

2014 has been dubbed “The Year of Reading Women,” a title which arose somewhat accidentally after writer and illustrator Joanna Walsh began making bookmark-shaped New Year’s cards of her favorite women authors in an effort to draw more women into mainstream literary culture:

#ReadWomen2014 has become a rallying cry to celebrate the talented women in our midst, and as 2014 draws to a close, we at Conundrum Press want to celebrate some of our own wonderful women writers and encourage you, dear readers, to usher in an even better #ReadWomen2015.

Installment #1 (of 2): We are honored to publish Cara Lopez Lee, a fiery woman with an unmatched zeal for the written word. Her memoir, They Only Eat Their Husbands, is unparalleled in its emotional honesty, personal questing, and brilliant prose. [Brilliant: extremely impressive, beautiful, or skillful; so bright as to blind the eyes temporarily.]

After a lover threatens to kill her, twenty-six-year-old Cara Lopez Lee runs away to Alaska. There, she finds herself in a complicated love triangle with two alcoholics: Sean, the martial artist, and Chance, the paramedic. Nine years later, sick of love, she runs away again, this time to backpack alone around the world. They Only Eat Their Husbands is a memoir about this yearlong trek—including sojourns in China, Thailand, Nepal, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Ireland—recounting with dazzling honesty and humor one woman’s journey to self-discovery.

“It’s rare when an author really opens up and divulges her innermost insecurities. No matter your background, you’ll be able to take something from this book, whether it’s how to stand up for yourself, how to steer clear of an unhealthy relationship, how to trust your instincts, or how to live according to your rules.” —Susan Blumberg-Kason, author of Good Chinese Wife

We are also honored to publish poet and lyric essayist Kathryn Winograd: rarely will you meet someone who chooses her words with such careful precision, like picking the finest dahlia-flowered zinnia amidst a field of Colorado wildflowers: any would be beautiful, but only one is perfect. Kathryn’s collection of lyric essays, Phantom Canyon, will leave you breathless.

“When I first saw it, when at last the bear of my girlhood unlocked itself from the stone shadows and I could see the fine frosted hairs of its crooked dog legs, I could not leave it.” From forest fires to mountain lions, Ohio farm to Colorado cabin, violation to silence to reclamation, Kathryn Winograd draws keep attention to the details that braid her own history with that of the land on which she dwells, with her husband, daughters–anyone who has experienced loss and fought for renewal. Her collection of lyrical personal essays becomes a ring of concentric circles–one essay builds upon the next to achieve deeper meaning and truth, revealing, at the center, mercy.
“In these lyric essays, Kathryn Winograd mines the ore of girl, daughter, mother, wife, and writer, wilding her selves against Colorado’s high country. The immediacy and traction Winograd gets by pinning herself to mountain place and women’s emotion, whether alive now or in memory, is breathtaking, at times, sublime. What a tough essayist–and tender voice–the West has been waiting for all these years, ever since the ancient ones first arrived.” –Thomas Larson, author of The Sanctuary of Illness, The Saddest Music Ever Written and The Memoir and the Memoiris
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So here’s to you, Cara and Kathryn: we celebrate you and all the wonderful words you write. #ReadWomen2014

We are thrilled to introduce The Conundrum, a biannual collection of some of the finest fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry from the American Literary West. It is our gift to you! Share it. Talk about it. Love it. We’ll make more.

Read it online for free! Download it to your favorite reading device–click here then click “download”.