Local books

tOm mONtGOmerY FAte

The Long Way Home

ICE CUBE PRESS

tom montgomery Fate, prairie Lights, Iowa City, tuesday, Sept. 20 at 7 p.m., Free

to be born in the Midwest is to become acutely aware of the term “flyover country.” And once you are aware of it, you must decide whether or not you’ll embrace your life here regardless or denounce it and move somewhere else, somewhere more conventionally beautiful and wild.

Maybe, if you’ve chosen the former, you might harbor some guilt, fed by backhanded comments from people who have left or people who are aiming to leave. But if you find a little bit of beauty in where you are regardless, or if you’re trying to, Tom Montgomery Fate just wrote the perfect book for you.

The Long Way Home is a memoir that does not follow the rules of a traditional narrative. Rather, it combines themes of prayer, belonging and fishing into essay-style chapters anchored by Fate’s experiences traveling across the globe.

Each bite-sized essay reflects on a different journey Fate embarked on: from a writing residency at H.J. Experimental Forest in Oregon, to a revolution in Managua, Nicaragua, to a sabbatical at a Benedictine abbey in Maquoketa, Iowa. Through each chapter, readers ponder the relationship between life and death, prayer and fact, religion and spirituality, relationships and the self.

Fate reminds us persistently that the journey itself is the destination; home is not a place, but a feeling. And while these are cliches every reader has heard once or twice, Fate contextualizes them in a very personal way that is accessible, especially to those of us who share his midwestern roots.

Fate’s stories take place throughout different periods of his life, from childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic. Such a long time frame is necessary to frame the complex themes that are being discussed here. But there are times when conversations about life, meaning and prayer are accompanied by conversations about the

there are a lot of very big topics at play in The Long Way Home. How many of these discoveries happened as you were writing the book? Well, you know, this is a memoir in essays. When memoirs became bestsellers all of a sudden, people understood that a memoir was not an autobiography, but looking through some aspect of your life, through the lens of that experience. It could be a birth memoir, cancer memoir, whatever. And so, for me, the challenge is always trying to figure out how to thematically link the disparate pieces. And travel, which is a pretty big frame, allowed me to connect these together. And the idea of journey, or journeying of course, is another huge idea. So journey can be internal, external; travel can be internal, external. And so that idea kind of made more sense to me as I worked on the book. That would be the thematic unifier.

WHEN YOU GO tO ANOtHEr CULtUrE, WHAt IS It? WHAt IS prIVACY? HOW DO pEOpLE LIStEN HErE? WHAt DOES It mEAN tO bE COUrtEOUS? WHAt’S A LINE? WHAt’S A CLEAN bAtHrOOm? WHAt’S pUbLIC trANSpOrtAtION? HOW DO pArENtS rELAtE tO CHILDrEN? pandemic, politics and social media. These are the only moments when the 160-page book edges on preachy and decentralized. There is a world where all of these topics fit together cohesively, but in such a small sample size, these parts feel like a lot to chew on. Regardless, I found a lot of peace in Fate’s new release. It’s clear by the end that the only thing Fate is advocating for is for readers to slow down: physically, mentally, spiritually—and give ourselves over to the epiphanies that we only find with time and presence. Considering his incredible experiences across the globe accompanied by his honest self-reflection, I think it just might be worth a try. The Long Way Home is the Iowa native’s fourth release. It is available now on Ice Cube Press.

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Little Village, 623 S Dubuque St., IC, IA 52240 One of the most interesting parts to me was your experiences in the benedictine abbeys. Would you ever go again? Yeah, I would. In the academic world, there’s a lot of negativity about religion, almost as if you’re stupid or diminished because you haven’t gotten over that yet. And of course, I’m thinking of Kathleen Norris and Wendell Berry and all the writers who still haven’t gotten over it yet. But one thing I’m trying to do in this book is to open up the idea of religion a little bit. Yes, there are right-wing nuts. One of them was president, who used religion as a marketing tool and read the Bible like it was an instruction manual rather than a work of art. The benefit of going to the abbey for me is a kind of intellectual and spiritual discipline. In your book, you mention feeling like a tourist or out of place in some of your travels. What do you think is valuable about that discomfort? So, it’s a lens on your own culture. When you go to another culture, what is it? What is privacy? How do people listen here? What does it mean to be courteous? What’s a line? What’s a clean bathroom? What’s public transportation? How do parents relate to children? So I mean, it’s hard because everything’s new. But again, it teaches you what all of those ideas mean in your own culture. What was the process like to get this book to where it is now? Well, the process I used to go through is, I used to write a 400-word essay. I used to call those framed moments. There’s some charged moment that I see in memory or see in front of me, and I get it down. And then I’d go from those 400-word snapshots to about 1,000word essays, which I would try to publish in the Chicago Tribune or Christian Century or other places that typically take my work. And then from there, when I got a sabbatical, a few years later, I would flesh all that stuff out to 2,000 to 3,000-word chapters. So there was a systematic lengthening, from an emotionally charged moment to a complicated, more developed essay over time. With this book, I would say it was more going from the 1,000-word essay in the Tribune, which a lot of these pieces are from originally, to the longer chapter. But I sit with these pieces for years. —Lily DeTaeye

SArAH tHANKHAm mAtHeWS

All This Could Be Different

VIKING

When I started reading All This Could Be Different (Viking, 2022) by Sarah Thankham Mathews, I was nervous about the passive voice, tonally similar to other books I’ve recently read which I felt lacked substance. But this is intentional. Our narrator, Sneha, is apathetic, barely teasing interest, she merely exists for the first part of her own story.

When Sneha does express something early in the book it’s haunting and familiar: “This is what my parents wanted for me, what everybody wanted. To be a dish laid out before a man’s hunger. To be taken, to be quiet. Disappear into hair and parts. Disappear, in time, into marriage and motherhood.”

Subtly, cleverly, as Sneha gains interest in her own life, her voice changes, the book becomes harder to put down, her interests not just alluding to a future in which she has something to say but finally saying things. Mathews gives an expertly crafted example of how to write character growth. Sneha may be the most multi-dimensional character I’ve read in recent years. Her coming-of-age is (like it is for many of us) framed as a love story, but is far more about finding out what love is than holding on to romance. It is heartwarming and challenging.

All This Could Be Different deals with trauma and coming-of-age, the relationships we have and reject as we find ourselves as young adults, but while we follow Sneha through her revelations and crises, we are not forced to endure any of those horrors. Mathews saves us the trigger warning by showing impact instead of its catalyst.

Sneha’s opacity and malleability challenged me to look inward—it felt like learning a funhouse mirror was not at all warped—in moments when she was honest with herself: “I did not know how to explain this stubborn love for my parents that I staggered under, iridescent and gigantic and veined with a terrible grief, grief for the ways their lives had been compost for my own.”

For a book that could be difficult and dated (it takes place in 2013), Mathews has created something universal and lingering. We have all experienced the feeling of being alone with ourselves and longing for something else. We have all been surprised by love. Sneha “felt dizzied by all of it, by how in my hands her hips felt like the time I found an animal’s skull in the underbrush of my family’s home when I was a child and lifted it into the air: this hard, breakable, animal thing.” It is a fast read with a satisfying ending.

The shift in Sneha’s ideologies,

prejudices and self-image as she comes to live outside of her head is slow and raw and palpable. That’s one of the things that makes the shape of Sneha’s story so powerful: it could be a day in the life but it is, instead, an evolution.

You wrote a novel before ATCBD. How were those two writing experiences different? I wrote All This Could Be Different, in a fever dream, mostly over the summer and fall of 2020, after working for seven years on a completely different project, after having written nearly 800 pages of attempt at it. That project ended up feeling bloated with too many characters, digressions and themes. I felt determined to put every lesson of failure from that previous project to use when writing ATCBD, which felt in many ways like my second round in the ring.

I left the characters and setting and premise of that previous project behind, thanking them for what they’d taught me. “Keep it tight and propulsive this time around,” I warned myself. ‘Seduce the reader; first withhold and then give them something good, again and again. Make them laugh. Pay attention to structure. Only one year of time will be covered in this novel. No more than four important characters at any point. Separate yourself emotionally from the protagonist. Everything that happens has to have a downstream effect or it gets cut.’

Sneha’s development as a person changes the shape and tone of the narrative. I wanted to show this young person growing up and becoming themselves. In order to do that, you have to show change. I wanted to show a self being formed through other people, write a novel of interdependence and, if you will, a compound love story. I believe that the sentences and the thematic choices have to be in a happy marriage, as a novel. I would watch YouTube timelapse videos of plants blooming over months, and it supplied me with an effect I tried to recreate for the reader: petal by petal, this prickly, compressed narrator opens up, to her world, but also us, the readers.

Did you intend to write about othering / trauma / identity or was it a consequence of the story you ended up telling? I wanted to write a novel where the main characters were as deeply imagined as I could pull off. Sometimes, for me, there is a flattening, overly causal quality to centering trauma in literary narratives. I prefer to think about it through the lens of personal history: What is the sum total of this person’s past, and how do they relate to the different pieces of the past, with denial or acceptance or nursing of wounds or something else entirely? Sneha does not cherish the fact of her trauma—she denies it. She’s a proud,

“bOOKS SAVED mE AGAIN pained, spiky, multifaceted character who sometimes

AND AGAIN WHEN I WAS hurts, sometimes gets hurt, and I saw my job as repre-

YOUNG AND LONELY. I senting the intricacies of her full self, as she navigates the painful, glorious journey of what it means to find a home WOULD LIKE tO DO tHAt FOr and make a life. SOmEbODY ELSE, SOmEDAY.”

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Little Village, 623 S Dubuque St., IC, IA 52240 Has your work in mutual aid influenced your writing? Has your writing influenced your work in mutual aid? Ultimately both deal in stories we tell ourselves about who has worth and who has power. And the fact that the world as it is is a made thing, and by that logic can be remade. I think that’s a quiet throughline that runs through ATCBD.

Why do you write? Books saved me again and again when I was young and lonely. I would like to do that for somebody else, someday. I think doing language is what makes us human, is one of the greatest measures of us as a species, the closest thing I have found to a “meaning of life.” I write to think through what’s difficult to me, to address and commune with people I’ve never met and to give myself to the future. ––Sarah Elgatian

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