Stories

I am an avid reader--especially when I have lots and lots of time and days spent listlessly lying on the couch in Vermont, or on a beach chair in Maine, or in the middle of Africa--whether it be West or East, watching the lizards pass the time in the same lazy way that I am.

But the stories I love the most come from my sister. Her writing is electric, poignant, personal and always from the heart. A lot of the stories seep with remnants from her favorite writers, but they are never stolen from them. There is influence in the authors we love the most--whether it's the magical realism that stream from Allende and Marquez, or the subtle sadness of life or times past that infuses Plath, Steinbeck or Woolf.

But my favorites of my sister's repertoire are those that chronicle the stories that she has experienced or encountered. She is witty and loose in the stories she tells, and animated like no other person I've met. She has spent years studying and dissecting the greats, in an effort to locate her own voice. And I was fortunate enough a few years ago to be home, somewhere between Peace Corps ended and Law School started, when she was completing her undergraduate degree in Vermont.

I've written about my sister's and my relationship before on this blog--the slow movement from sisters to acquaintances to genuinely great friends. When I had those months at home when I came home from Mali and was applying to law school, generally getting used to the pop culture, consumer based first world life that is the United States, I had the opportunity to be a critic, an invited critic, of my sister's writing.

Her portfolio was personal, raw, and alive. She would read her stories to me, and ask me what I thought. I have never felt so personally involved in the process that is creative writing than the times when she would sit in her desk chair in the room we shared for years, with me perched on her bed, one hand propping my head up, and she would read to me. Read from her book of stories she had developed painstakingly over the past few years. Some of them were so overtly personal that they made me shiver with emotion, and some, some of her best fiction, were crafted in a way that made the reader become so invested in the characters, the places, every image would be perfectly projected into my mind to the point that when the story would end, I would be craving more, but left feeling like I knew where these characters were heading.

Occasionally she posts snippets, mere glimpses, of these stories on her blog. She also includes simply hilarious stories of her current life as an English teacher in rural North Carolina. She posted recently a shortened account of a 12 hour delay in Chicago. I'll never forget when she revealed this story to my family. She read it aloud after her harrowing, multi-day trip on train across country, over Christmas when we were all home. She had my entire family in stitches. My favorite part, and one that remains even in its shortened version, is her names for the different people she encountered. My favorite, of course, being "Chicken Tenders".

She told me when we were home this past Christmas that when her computer crashed she lost many of her best stories, some of my absolute favorites. One of which, called Kid Fears, I thought could have been easily published in any literary magazine. I think she's starting to reconstruct those, and it fills my heart with joy.