Highlights from this issue...

Living her best life
She's Not There: A Life In Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan. New York: Broadway Books, 2003, 320 pp., $24.95 hardcover, $14.95 paper.

Reviewed by Jennifer L. Pozner

WHEN NOVELIST JAMES BOYLAN was a young boy, he played a game in which he pretended to be an astronaut crashing onto a "Girl Planet" that turned anyone who breathed its air into a girl--body, clothes, and all. As a teenager he covertly tried on his mother's and sister's dresses, thinking, "Why am I doing this?... Because I can't not." Yet no amount of play was enough to calm his anxiety. "I was filled with a yearning that could not be quelled by rayon," Boylan muses.

It would be four decades before James would find peace...as Jennifer. It is this struggle--and eventual triumph--that lies at the heart of She's Not There, a memoir of one man's heart-wrenching journey to become the woman she always knew herself to be. I first became aware of She's Not There when Jennifer Finney Boylan promoted it on two Oprah Winfrey Show episodes. As a man, Oprah's audience learned, James Finney Boylan had had an intelligent, loving wife, Grace Finney, two spunky children, and four critically acclaimed novels--The Constellations, The Planets, Getting In, and Remind Me To Murder You Later. He chaired the English department at Colby College, was considered the one teacher whose class students had to take before graduation, and played in a rock band. It was a good life, a life Jim was proud of, a life he was desperately afraid of losing--yet he was plagued by the knowledge that it was only "the second best life" he could lead. The knowledge "that I was in the wrong body, living the wrong life, was never out of my conscious mind," she writes.

Boylan struggled every day to be a man, hoping love would "cure" him of his desire to be female. At age 42 he lost the struggle. After what amounted to a mental breakdown, Jim realized he couldn't take one more step in male shoes, literally or figuratively. Though he wished to protect Grace from heartbreak, he finally had to reveal to her the reality he'd concealed his entire life: He was transgendered, that wasn't ever going to change, and he had no choice but to face it.

And that, Boylan told Oprah's viewers, is when James began the emotionally, physically, and interpersonally challenging process of becoming Jenny, the articulate, attractive, and dignified woman who sat before them in the studio. Boylan described the impact her transition had on her family, noting that their love has endured even if it has changed along with her gender--she and Grace have stayed married and are raising their children together, though they now live more as sisters than lovers. Defusing contentious questions from the talk TV queen (such as Oprah's accusatory, pulse-of-the-audience query, "What do you think, ladies? Is it selfish to just up and turn yourself into a woman, or what?") with humor, insight, and grace, Boylan struck me as perhaps the most effective spokesperson for transgender acceptance I'd ever seen in any mainstream media interview.

In She's Not There as well as in her subsequent media tour, Boylan presents a picture vastly different from the images broadcast media love to portray of angry, grieving wives and pathetic, selfish husbands. For example, just recently Dateline NBC spent a year following a woman named Joyce and her husband David, who was in the process of becoming Victoria. Reporter Dawn Fratangelo repeatedly badgered Joyce with variations on the question "Why go through all of this? Why stay?" When Joyce said their love would prevail, Dateline was skeptical: "It seemed too calm a response for something so drastic," Fratangelo narrated. The newsmagazine edited a year's worth of footage to highlight Joyce's pain and loss and to downplay the couple's commitment to one another. The implication was that their marriage was bound to disintegrate, despite having survived "so far." Sadly, that sort of framework is more the rule than the exception when media take on transsexuality--which makes Jennifer Finney Boylan's contribution to our political climate particularly important. Since the publication of She's Not There, Boylan has made the media rounds, her savviness as an interviewee resulting in a relatively rare phenomenon: coverage of transgender issues that educates rather than exploits. The same week as Dateline sensationalized Joyce and Victoria's story, CBS's 48 Hours Investigates ran a sensitive, illuminating, and empowering segment (at least by the standards of broadcast news) on Boylan, focusing not on Grace's pain but on Boylan's struggle from childhood until the present, the acceptance she has been shown by the Colby College community, and the reality that she and thousands of others who have had gender reassignment surgery live full lives as well-adjusted, responsible adults. "When people see me," she says at the close of the segment, "they see a good parent. And when you see our family, it doesn't seem like an unusual thing. You see four people who love each other."

IN THE HANDS OF a less gifted writer, the story of a woman forced to spend 40 years of her life trapped in a body that did not match her spirit (Boylan calls it her "being alive problem") would have provoked nothing as much in the reader as the desire to crawl into bed, play a maudlin CD, and bemoan life's cruelty. Likewise, if told by a more self-aggrandizing and less self-critical author, Boylan's memoir could have come off simply as a feel-good motivational tale, a roadmap for those seeking to overcome unthinkable obstacles to claim the identity that would make them feel whole--but this would have offered only a one-dimensional look at a complicated, emotionally tumultuous subject. Instead, She's Not There is fearlessly honest, sometimes sad, and often inspiring.

As professor James Finney Boylan, Jennifer writes, "I used to stand at the lectern in my coat and tie, waving my glasses around, urging students to find the courage to become themselves. Then I'd go back to the office and lock the door and put my head down on the desk." She's Not There brings readers along with Boylan as she finds the strength to take her own advice. Throughout the book heartbreaking anecdotes are tempered with the easy wit of a comic novelist, as when Boylan describes the anguish she felt as a young man trying to cope with an unbearable difference between internal truth and external reality. "I combed out my hair and looked in the mirror and saw a perfectly normal-looking young woman. This is so wrong? I asked myself in the mirror. This is the cause of all the trouble?" Dreaming of "just starting life over as a woman" in a new town, she figured "I'd tell everyone I was Canadian. Then I lay on my back and sobbed. Nobody would ever believe I was Canadian."

She's Not There balances Boylan's buoyant sense of joy in her new body with a frank description of the emotional fallout her sex change has had on her wife Grace, as well as on her best friend, tough-guy author Richard Russo, whose afterword, "Imagining Jenny," explores how a bond based in large part on male camaraderie evolved into a unique friendship tested--but ultimately enriched--by the interplay between men and women. It's a tribute to Boylan's beautiful prose that readers empathize with the losses Grace has endured and the resistance Russo felt, yet applaud Boylan's victory over nature, social stigma, and personal fear. In the end, we understand that Boylan's sex change was not so much a choice as a necessity.

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Gender immigrant
A conversation with Jennifer Finney Boylan
By Jennifer L. Pozner

 

Jennifer Finney Boylan (Photo by Bruce Strong)

LIGHT ON POLITICAL THEORY but full of stories about the ways gender politics trickle into our daily lives, She's Not There, which became a New York Times bestseller, is subversive, illuminating, poignant, and funny. The book's working title was "Gender Immigrant": Boylan has traveled from the culture of men to the culture of women and lived to tell the tale. What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation about the ways that gender is "done" in our society, whether trading a plate of ribs for a salad is the result of nature or nurture, and the joys--and unexpected cultural baggage--that come with being female in America.

Jennifer Pozner: The subtitle of your book is A Life in Two Genders. Having lived most of your life as a man, what were your expectations about becoming female?

Jennifer Finney Boylan: It's important to understand that if you're a transsexual, you're not changing genders in order to get a better deal. Having lived in this culture and having been a professor for many years, I had a pretty clear sense of the realities of being female, but what I most wanted was a sense of peace. And that is absolutely what I've found now that my gender and my spirit match. As I go through the course of my day there are things that are aggravating about being a woman and many things that are wonderful--but I can wake up in the morning without having to wonder "what gender am I?" or worry about what to do about a struggle that to most other people is incomprehensible. That is the particular dilemma for transsexuals: The main thing that is required to understand the condition is imagination.

JP: During your transition, you noticed yourself gaining food issues and body image anxieties along with your new breasts and hips. You say the culture had its hooks in you to the point where you felt like you were oppressing yourself. A lot of women can relate to that feeling--but it must have been incredibly confusing to be dealing with issues at 42 that most girls started having to cope with at 11. Or, did being socialized with a male sense of confidence for four decades prepare you in any way to reject negative, external judgments?

JFB: Initially, I had to go through a second adolescence, and it was a time of real awkwardness and narcissism for me. Most post-operative transsexuals eventually become rather unexceptional men and women who go on with the business of their lives unnoticed. People don't look at them and say "Hey, wow, there's one of those transsexuals I've heard so much about." We think, "There's a mother, an English teacher, a musician." You asked whether 40 years of maleness in any way prepared me for this. I was not socialized as a woman and didn't suffer firsthand the slings and arrows that women have to experience. Those 40 years did give me a certain strength and patience, and I needed that to endure the indignity and awkwardness of changing genders. It's possible in a strange, ironic way that the male life I lived gave me the courage to surrender it.

Being trangendered is not about masculinity and femininity, it's about maleness and femaleness. I'm female now, which is to say I have a female body, but I'm feminine in some ways and not in others. I have the right to decide on any given day, just as all women do, where I fall along the femininity spectrum--with Dolly Parton on one end and Janet Reno on the other.

JP: When most of us talk about "finding our voice," we mean it metaphorically. You had to find a literal, physical voice appropriate for your new body. You place an emphasis in the book on the language of gender--how men typically speak with authority yet women often speak with a questioning lilt, as in "Hello, my name is Michelle?" For years, you told your female students to state their names because "Your identity is not a question." Yet, you say that you found yourself introducing yourself as "Jenny Boylan?" What was behind that change: How much of it was about wanting to fit in, how much about unconsciously adapting to female socialization, and how much, if any, was about trying to get used to this new identity as Jenny, after struggling with the identity of Jim for decades?

JFB: Early on I took voice lessons, and learning that feminine inflection was one of the primary things I was "instructed" to perform. But it annoyed me, and in the end, I gave up most of the so-called "feminine" inflections and adopted a more androgynous voice, which feels natural to me.

I think the feminine inflection of voice rising at the end of sentences is a particularly adolescent inflection, and grown women are less likely to do it--which makes sense, since adults are more confident than teenagers. I've also occasionally heard it in the voices of young men. But think about the way you'd ask, on the phone, "Is Mr. Smith there?" You'd ask it as a question, I'd wager. A man is more likely to state it. "Yes, is Mr. Smith there." It's an order, not a request. My guess is that there's a whole lot of socially charged information in that inflection.

We all want to fit in, and I wanted to fit in, too. So I think both consciously and unconsciously I found myself adopting certain social behaviors we associate with women. But isn't that the difference between being an adult and being a teenager--finding the courage to be ourselves, rather than bending under the pressure of our peers, or society?

JP: There's a way most people "do" gender--we mimic what we're taught: shave our legs, apply eyeshadow, flick the blush brush. Then there's the way you had to do gender: As a man, you started out wearing your mother's and girlfriends' clothing, and eventually underwent therapy and hormone treatment and surgery to become female. Now that you're a woman, do you find that you spend more or less time "doing" gender?

JFB: You could argue that all gender is "done." The question is, how consciously? That's the definition of what we go through as adolescents, a time when, through trial and error, we're doing not only gender but our whole character. Trying on our whole persona, finding which songs, fashions, and interests feel comfortable, what creates the effect we desire. We call ourselves adults when all that stuff becomes less conscious. I would say that at some point most of our behavior is performative.

I shave my legs now, and what's interesting is that back in the old days when I was a guy, I felt that this was something very powerful I was doing. I'd sit there thinking, "I am crossing a divide here, I'm being daring, feminine, powerful." And now I think of it only as something tedious, annoying, and inevitable.

JP: You have this great joke in the book about the effects of estrogen pills and testosterone suppressors: "One pill makes you want to talk about relationships and eat salad. The other pill makes you dislike the Three Stooges." Part of the reason it's funny is because it gets at deeply held notions about nature versus nurture. From your unique experience, how much of male/female behavior do you believe is innate, and how much is socialization?

JFB: I'm nervous about declaring "The Truth" about nature versus nurture even from my own perspective. I am a storyteller, not a sociologist.

Here's what we know: There is a physical, neurological genesis for transsexuality. To get technical on you, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis of the hypothalamus is 40 percent larger in women and in male-to-female transsexuals than it is in non-transgendered people born male. It's not caused by hormone use, it doesn't have anything to do with being gay, lesbian, or straight. It's there your whole life. That's real.

Now that I've said all that, I'm going to contradict myself. People in the "genderqueer" community are saying a very different thing. They say it is our duty or at least our prerogative to mess with accepted notions of gender, to turn every assumption upside down. They're particularly suspicious of some kind of hypothalamus litmus test to judge whether you're "really" transgendered or not. They say it's wrong to imply that there's just one thing that makes us this way.

JP: That sounds similar to the debate in the gay community about whether finding a "gay gene" would help end discrimination by showing people it's not a "chosen lifestyle," or whether it would give fundamentalists a way to isolate the "cause" of homosexuality in order to "cure" it.

JFB: From the research I've seen, the biological components of transsexuality seem to be a lot clearer than those involved in the genesis of homosexuality. But even if people could choose to prevent transsexuality, I hope they would not. As difficult and painful as it was, in many ways I consider myself to be very lucky. It is a great gift, this ability to see into two worlds.

Nurture, nature--the short answer is that a lot more is nature than any of us would like to think. We live in a patriarchal culture that we have to resist. I agree with that. But, hormones and genetics help to make us what we are. This makes us uncomfortable because it seems to take away our free will. It doesn't do us much good to cover our eyes to facts, and one of the facts I know is that hormones do matter.

But when I found myself worrying about my weight and ordering salad--that had nothing to do with biology and everything to do with culture. So, I made damn sure to stop acting like an idiot and eat the baby back ribs if I wanted them. In some ways, some things have become more complicated than they used to be. I don't have a constant internal battle about gender anymore, but I do have to make a conscious decision to have the ribs for lunch in a situation when people are going to notice and perhaps disapprove.

JP: You've said your students no longer see you as an authority figure because you're female.

James Boylan in Florence, Italy, 1999. From She's Not There.

JFB: In class, I was apparently more of an authority figure as a man. Students would write down what I'd say. Now I find they often sit there with their books closed, during the same lecture in which they used to take notes. They are more likely to challenge me now, to question my knowledge. There are advantages to this, in that it's easier to get a discussion going, but it also irks me because I want to be an authority figure sometimes. I reject the cliché that women always have to be empathic and sensitive and specialize in "talking about our feelings." I'm glad if students feel more comfortable with me now, but who knows? This may only be because I'm more comfortable with myself.

JP: One thing that comes across in your book is the sense of surprise you felt during your transition when bartenders started trying to offer Jenny sports insights Jim already knew, car dealers tried to hustle you, and neighbors addressed you as "just" Jim's sister. Was it really that surprising to you?

JFB: When I went to New York for the first time as Jenny, the level of harassment just walking down the street was amazing. I'm a professor of culture studies, and I've been a guy, and I have two eyes. What was the big surprise? It was everything that I knew to be true, but it was happening to me, not someone else. Faced with that aggressive attention, I felt scared, singled out, vulnerable, and angry. But here's the kicker--there was some part of me that thought, "Well, looking good today, Jenny Boylan." There's just enough adolescent in me to look to men for validation.

I'm in bars sometimes with my band. This guy came up to me last week and his first question was, "Can I French kiss you?" Just like that! I shrugged and said, "Well, no!" And my friends asked me, "Why didn't you say 'Go screw yourself?'" You know, I don't have a long history with that. There is nothing in a man's experience that is like that.

JP: In one of the most powerful scenes in your book you describe a guy in a bar who stared at you all night, followed you into the parking lot, and tried to attack you. That scenario would be familiar to far too many women. You fought him off, got to your car, and escaped. You called it "immersion learning," and gave readers a glimpse into your mind after the encounter: "What did I do to him, why does he hate me so much?"

JFB: I was terrified. I hadn't done anything other than to be attractive to him and then to say no, and suddenly I was an object of fury, lust, and loathing. I was on the receiving end of a hatred I'd never imagined before. It's no surprise to me that such moments exist for women, but it had never happened to me. I was never particularly physically intimidating as a man, but I wonder, if I had not had those years of male assurance, when he came at me would I have shoved him away, would I have fought? Or would I have already surrendered, just hoping to get through the situation without being killed? Sometimes I think it was because I still had enough male history in me that my first instinct was self-preservation.

JP: Drawing distinctions between sexual orientation and gender identity, you write that the main thing gays and lesbians have in common with transsexuals is "that we get beaten up by the same people." As a woman and as a transgendered person, how do you cope with being at risk in public space?

JFB: What do you do, both as a woman and as a visible transgendered person, if you want to live your life? You swim against the tide until you get tired, and then you swim with the tide until you get your courage back. I pass pretty well, so some of the violence that is reserved for people who are visibly transgendered is not shown me. In general people leave me alone. Rural Maine, where we live, is a wonderful place. Yankees generally respect each other's privacy. I have not been on the receiving end of much cruelty or stupidity yet--most of the burden I've had to shoulder is the result of being female in this culture, not because I'm transgendered.

JP: As a media critic I remember watching you on Oprah's show and getting frustrated at how often you and other transgendered guests were asked to repeat the same fundamentals ad nauseum--that being transgendered does not equal being gay, does not mean you're a drag queen, is not about clothes. I was struck by how viscerally angry the audience was when families were involved--they cheered when Oprah asked if it wouldn't have been better for you to stay miserable since now, your wife is miserable. How did you feel about that question, and about media coverage in general?

JFB: There's this assumption that people in so-called Middle America won't understand. But if people in rural Maine get this, people can get it anywhere. When I came out almost everybody knew what transsexuality was. I wasn't the first transgendered person they knew of. Yet the media is stuck in this idea of novelty. There's been no shortage of shows about transgendered people, but they tend to always be the same. I've done a lot of TV, and yet I constantly seem to be echoing the same interview I saw on TV with some other host, with some other transsexual, 15 or 20 years ago.

Reporters want to print a story around the heartbreak caused to the family. That's one of the reasons my wife, Grace, has not participated in any media stuff. When people see me in an interview, they see a woman who found the courage to become herself, but that isn't as interesting to media as stories about depressing, broken families. Even the title of Oprah's show was "The Husband Who Became a Woman." From the outset they define me as a man who betrayed people and broke everyone's hearts.

There's an old saying in creative writing: Show, don't tell. There are so few good examples of transsexual people living their lives with dignity, self-respect, and a sense of humor. All I really had to do on Oprah was sit there in my Ellen Tracy suit and smile. That did more good in terms of making people understand than all the lectures I can give. When people see me, they encounter a well-adjusted, nice, funny, middle-class English teacher. The funniest thing someone said was, "The weirdest thing about you, Jenny, is that you're so normal! You're like somebody I might actually know!" People tell me, "I didn't understand before, but now I get it." That's a pretty good day's work.

One thing about transsexuality, it takes a lot of explaining. It's not a great topic for short TV segments. At least on Oprah I got a whole hour to myself, and then I was a panelist when she did a second show. That's an eternity compared to the Today Show, where I had 6.5 minutes. And one of the minutes is always devoted to, "So, are you gay?" while another is always, "How sad is this for your poor wife?" The thing I hate about these short little shows is that they don't give me room to be funny. I don't get to be myself. I feel like I'm doing a book report: "How I Changed Genders on My Summer Vacation." It's very hard to have an intelligent discussion in these forums, because it's always okay to make fun of transsexuals--we're seen as pathetic and freakish.

JP: Media must have a harder time plunking you into their pre-written "family heartbreak" stories, since you and Grace have stayed together.

JFB: That's the thing people are most uncomfortable with--they're telling me, in effect, what people have told women for decades: I won't be a "real woman" until I find a nice man and marry him. Even people who have dealt with my transition in a very sophisticated way are uncomfortable with the fact that we are two women living together and legally married.

Somebody said to Grace, "Don't you understand? You need to get a divorce and move on with your life." And Grace--this is how phenomenal she is--Grace said, "No, you don't understand--this is my life."

JP: You seem to have gone to great lengths to make sure everyone around you was okay with your transition, not only your close family and friends but also Colby campus administrators, faculty, and students, as well as any number of current and former acquaintances. And your book seemed to be written with that same care. Why has taking care of other people's adjustment to your transition been so important to you?

JFB: I wanted to bring as many people along with me as possible. It's sadly true that most people, including liberal, compassionately minded people, don't understand transsexuality. They think it's some nutty lifestyle, or that it has something to do with being gay or lesbian or wanting to be "feminine." Alas, many people think that male-to-female transsexuals define themselves as women in terms of skirts and makeup and high heels and sponge cake.

Why was it so important to educate people? Because I wanted them to understand. Because I wanted people to recognize that in me, as a woman, they would find someone who is generally familiar to them, that as a woman my issues are pretty similar (although, admittedly not identical) to the issues of women-born women. It's also fair to say that some people will never get it. In which case, what can you do? You move on.

JP: You mentioned once that you don't want to be a "model transsexual." But your wit and your articulate style seem to have made you a bit of a media phenom. Are you actively involved with the transgender movement?

JFB: I am not involved in the transgender "movement," which is not a movement but a series of different groups of people doing different things. I've decided I can do the most good by concentrating on what I do well, which is telling stories, and just going about my life. It seems as if that has connected with people in some way, though, and maybe that is its own revolution.

I guess that for a little while I'm going to be a transgendered spokesmodel. There will be other people. I don't see myself being defined by this for the rest of my life. I'll write other books. I'll go back to fiction. But I'm glad to be in the public eye for the time being, because we need more good role models.

I'm tremendously proud of my book, because it did something I've always wanted to do in my writing, which is to stay in that zone between the tragic and the comic. This book has connected with a lot of people, and surprisingly so--my publisher, Random House, certainly didn't expect it. I like to think that this book connects to such a wide audience because the main question I'm asking is not, "How do you have a sex change?" but "How do you live an authentic life?" That's a question all people ask themselves, or should. The book isn't long on obscure gender theory or on gory details about the surgery. People don't necessarily want to know about that. They want to know about how they can be true to themselves, and what will the cost of that truth be to them and to the people they love. At the heart of the book are very mainstream questions: How do I tell the truth? How do I live my life with honor?

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Longing for persimmons
Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia edited by Sandra L. Ballard and Patricia L. Hudson. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2003, 673 pp., $45.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Trish Crapo

DURWOOD'S WAS A STUFFED-FULL dry-goods store in the mountains of North Carolina, the kind of place where dusty boxes of outdated Christmas ornaments were jumbled on the shelves with hammers, "which were mixed in with screwdrivers, which were mixed in with drill bits, which were mixed in with extension cords.… If you were wanting nails," Ruth, the narrator of Catherine Landis' novel Some Days There's Pie, says, "you had to scoop them out of a wooden keg and weigh them on a rusting scale, and there were cats everywhere. I worked over there at Durwood's, selling his wife's homemade fried pies, something you might not expect to find in a hardware store… Durwood's was a place where people went for more than what they could buy. You can go down to Kmart for a box of nails if that's all you want."

Listen Here is a lot like Durwood's. Landis is only one of 105 women writers represented in this new anthology, in which fiction is mixed in with poetry, which is mixed in with children's literature, drama, memoir, and nonfiction. Writers with one book appear alongside those who've published 20. The account of an 1891 miners' strike written by Mary Harris (Mother Jones) is followed by Jane Wilson Joyce's plainspoken, contemporary poems. The diversity of genres and styles spanning 170 years gives Listen Here a wide open feel, and its editors have chosen refreshingly generous criteria for belonging. Writers who left Appalachia ("Appa-LATCH-ah," a character in one story tells us) as kids and writers who chose it as adults are included as graciously as those whose families have been there for generations. It's not how long you've lived in a place that matters, editors Sandra Ballard and Patricia Hudson assert through their choices, it's how well you paid attention.

Piece after piece in Listen Here resonates with details that are a joy to encounter. Florence Cope Bush, in "Dorie: Woman of the Mountains," describes how the Cherokee of the early 1900s made chestnut dumplings with such precision that you could make them yourself if you could only find corn shucks. For dessert, you could roast wasp larvae on sticks over an open fire. Lily May Ledford, one of the founders of the Coon Creek Girls, America's first all-woman string band, learns at the age of seven to play a "groundhog hide banjo"--one of many phrases in Listen Here that made me wish for an accompanying CD. At 19, Ledford tells us in her memoir, she went to Nashville to make a record. A fan, worried that she might be homesick, sent "a live, crated possum" that "wouldn't let itself be petted, nor would it eat anything I brought to it. It just huddled up and grinned. How I longed for persimmons, favorite food of possums."

How I longed for persimmons, too! Or blackberry jam or cherry pie or the "great big cake covered all over with little white strings of coconut" that the famished characters in Lee Smith's novel Saving Grace eat by the side of the road after their car blows up ("pow!") and catches fire. Who doesn't long for a world in which a stranger would drive up and bestow a cake on you just when you needed it, or where people sit on the porch in the evening and talk about politics while "munching on fried fish" the way Nikki Giovanni's grandmother does? As readers, we want more than a Kmart box of nails.

But this longing can easily mutate into cheap romanticism or, worse, exploitation. In her poem "The Vampire Ethnographer," Amy Tipton Cortner describes a "hillbilly vampire" who "lived in a condo/called Mountain Heritage Estates./He had many degrees/and many publications in small magazines." At night, he could be found "prowling the bars and the back roads/looking for fresh information/whose heart-blood of mountain lore/had not yet been discovered/and sucked dry/tape recorder fanged and to the ready."

In Elaine Fowler Palencia's "Briers," one of the few short stories presented in its entirety, a similar character shows up in the form of a writer who buys an old homestead in Kentucky. His wife grouses--"God, where am I going to get arugula?"--but the writer gushes, "This is so authentic.…The whole ambience is American Primitive. And besides, it's just for one year. One year for me to write my book about getting away from it all in a forgotten corner of Appalachia. I'm going to do for this place what Peter Mayle did for Provence."

The collective narrators, who watch from the edge of the yard in the first paragraph, seem at first to be children: "The new people were wrong for us. We could tell by their smell…" but turn out, rather gratifyingly, to be the brier bushes of the title. As the story progresses, they creep into and across the yard, snagging the woman, clambering over the antique apple tree, and finally entangling the writer as he hacks at them with a scythe. "Slash slash slash he went, his eyes hot and bright. This was what he had come to the country for: to feel his blood pumping, to feel alive."

But though the writer has grown a beard and learned to play a few twanging notes on a dulcimer, he has dangerously missed the point. You can't adopt someone else's authentic life as your own.

AT THE KEY WEST WRITERS' SEMINAR on The Spirit of Place in 2000, Dorothy Allison, whose novel Bastard Out of Carolina is excerpted in Listen Here, spoke bluntly about the relationship poor people have to "place." "Place ain't easy," she said. "That place I loved, I hated." Her sister had scoffed at the lofty sound of the seminar's title, Allison told the audience, and had urged her not to lie about where they'd grown up. "The spirit of that place was nasty," her sister said. And Allison, commenting on how many times her family had to move to make way for development, quipped, "We lived in the future of Greenville, South Carolina."

The excerpt from Bastard in Listen Here tells of the derision a working single woman encounters when she tries to have the court-stamped word "illegitimate" removed from her daughter's birth certificate. The novel as a whole is a magnificently written and frightening account of the effects of poverty on the lives of well-meaning people.

Similar struggles are depicted in other excerpts. Rebecca Harding Davis' 1861 novella, Life in the Iron Mills, portrays the soul-crushing daily grind of the mill workers' lives. Irene McKinney's poems from her collection Six O'Clock Mine Report tell of the stultifying environment of the coal mines:

At Hardtack and Amity the grit
abrades the skin. The air is thick
above the black leaves, the open mouth
of the shaft. A man with a burning

carbide lamp on his forehead
swings a pick in a narrow corridor
beneath the earth. His eyes flare
white like a horse's, his teeth glint. (p. 430)

There is plenty of joy to be found in Listen Here as well. There are births and marriages and an old woman fending off burglars by being smarter than they are. Annie Dillard gives us the joy of paying close attention to nature; Barbara Kingsolver, the joy of her fluid, right-on-key voice that poured over me like a thick, literary balm. There are plenty of familiar and well loved writers in Listen Here--childrens' writers Rebecca Caudill and Cynthia Rylant, novelists Gail Godwin and Jayne Anne Phillips--but just as satisfying was stumbling upon work I didn't already know. I learned of a movement of black women poets called the Afrilachian poets. Betsy Sholl's long poem "Appalachian Winter" carried me through Hansel and Gretel's forbidding forest to a peaceful Appalachian front porch. Sharyn McCrumb gave me a glimpse into insider/outsider relations at "The Cosmic Possum Hikers Hostel" on the Appalachian Trail. I read old-timey rhyming poems thick with dialect and poems in the speaking voices of contemporary women, meant to be performed live.

The sheer number of entries--and their necessary brevity--made for a sometimes slapdash format. Many excerpts were introduced as a "scene" and were only a page to a few pages long. At times, I felt as if really interesting women were rushing past me, offering only scraps of their stories, as though they were shouting from a train. I barely got situated on a front porch or in a mine shaft, barely figured out what kind of person a narrator might be--or in the case of "Briers," what kind of plant--before the scene was over. Near the end of the book, however, my washing machine broke, causing me to read great chunks of it in laundromats, which--as I read about women giving birth or hoeing gardens or stitching quilts--struck me as thematically satisfying. The shortness of the pieces, which had bothered me before, turned out to be perfectly suited to a 50-cent dryer cycle.

Editors Ballard and Hudson had hard choices to make, and they chose inclusiveness over depth. Their introduction quotes West Virginia Poet Laureate Irene McKinney: "I'm a hillbilly, a woman, and a poet, and I understood early on that nobody was going to listen to anything I had to say anyway, so I might as well just say what I want to." The goal of Listen Here, Ballard and Hudson state, "is to ensure that more people have the opportunity to listen." Given this goal, the broad sweep makes sense. While I might quibble over some of the entries--a few struck me as overly sentimental or as mainly of historic, not literary, interest--I found them all to be well introduced and supplemented with lists of both primary and secondary sources, and connected to the whole by thematic concerns of place, family, social justice, and love, to name just a few. I admire Ballard's and Hudson's ambition, and there's a certain charm to the anthology's breathlessness--as if the editors can't wait to introduce you to the next writer. Even the last entry isn't really the "end"--following it is a 12-page list of "More Women Writing in Appalachia" to pore over.

In her excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes that she is "telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead." Listen Here, too, leads us into this region, convincing us of its vast treasures. If readers find themselves, as I did, scribbling down the names of writers to track down later, Ballard and Hudson have accomplished their goal.

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The special camera
The Red Passport by Katherine Shonk. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003, 209 pp., $22.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Mary Cappello

RUSSIA HAS FIGURED MIGHTILY in the American imagination, but, perhaps consequently, it is still rarely chosen as a place of real travel by Americans. Author Katherine Shonk has not only visited Russia but has inhabited the culture long and sensitively enough to have woven a collection of stories in which contemporary Russians and Americans meet. We expect snow in Russian-based stories, that infernal cold that has presumably produced the Russian soul. But time and again in Shonk's stories, snow appears as a mistake: One character mistakes the sweep of poplar seeds through the air for snow; another is made to see that it is snowing inside her house--the flakes, visible only through the lens of a special camera, are radioactive fallout. Like the snow transformed, these stories, too, offer moments of unexpected lyricism and illuminating shock.

The Red Passport abounds with details that are moored to place; without stereotyping or attempting to "capture" Russia or Russians ethnographically, the author incorporates such particulars as Moscow's quirky cat circus alongside the emergence of Western-based franchises like McDonald's and Baskin-Robbins, the reruns of Santa Barbara that appear on Russian TV, and the habit of Russian police of stopping dark-haired, dark-skinned men in the metro. Shonk richly imagines, which is to say, forges story, in the space between Russian and American drives and naiveté, between their quibbles, their expectations, and their living conditions. In this sense, thankfully, these are never quite stories "about" Russia from an American point of view; rather they are tales of American interlocutors, eavesdroppers, Slav-wannabes, and ancestrally deprived sojourners.

The meeting of Russian and American in these tales is helped by Shonk's eye for drawing uncanny connections. Take, for example, the kitten that appears in "The Death of Olga Vasilievna," "a kitten smaller than the rest but as still and black as the forged revolutionaries who crouched beneath the [metro] station's wide arches." Such uncanniness never works only to poetic effect in Shonk's stories but seems rife with political significance. In this same story, Shonk exposes the incongruity, the ideological disconnect, of what would appear in an American context as an exchange of mere pleasantries. An American businessman asks the unemployed husband of the Russian woman who works for his wife what he "does for a living." "A living?" the Russian repeats. "You know, like where do you work?" the American goes on. In a visit to the Russian couple's apartment, the American wife, named Melissa, a woman who breast-pumps milk that is then delivered to her baby's nanny, blurts, "I love your place, you two!" The Americans come off as bumbling yet "refined" creatures whose baby, in the end, is bitten by their Russian hosts' cat and whose relationship with the Russian couple is strained by the questionably desirable life that the Americans, as conduits to capitalism, can make available to them.

The Red Passport might threaten to devolve into a too-easy juxtaposition of Russian disillusion with American perkiness, but it is rescued by the deft handling of just this dynamic in a story about an American who wants to introduce Russians to group therapy, American style. In "Kitchen Friends," Leslie, an American and near victim of terrorism in Russia, gathers together the Russians who also experienced the attack for a healing session. "Kitchen Friends" opens with a flat description of an explosion in Moscow. Well-drawn sentences offer up a clichéd Russophile: "Leslie established an identity as a true Russophile, known for her love of Tolstoy, her painstaking dissections of glasnost and perestroika, and the dramatically patterned shawls she wore through Milwaukee winters." But the story develops into a complex meditation that opens onto larger, culturally significant questions: Have our own mechanisms of cure, by turning shallow commodity, failed us? What resources do Russians have for survival, witness, or "healing"? Or is healing simply not an end to which Russians devote their energies, is healing not part of a Russian lexicon? Russians, one character explains, don't have the luxury of being preoccupied with the past. Leslie wants her new Russian compeers to talk about their post-traumatic stress; they want only to find out if any of them has been materially compensated for being harmed in the explosion. Finally Leslie's motives for reaching out to Russian victims are exposed: She had hoped to amend the wrongs of her peasant-oppressing ancestors. She wants to "reveal the shameful history of her real family to her surrogate one." The story ends on a startlingly macabre note as Leslie, abandoned by her therapy group, curtsies before a pile of flowers, placed in memoriam, wilting on a trolley track.

CENTRAL TO THE RED PASSPORT is Shonk's masterful configuration of Russian/American encounters, and yet, in some ways, the most complex, lyrical, and subtle tale in the collection is also the only story in which Americans don't appear. "The Young People of Moscow" treats an elderly married couple, pensioners, reduced to selling books of the husband's poetry in the metro corridors in order, literally, to survive. The story is haunted by the couple's loss of their child years before and by the sudden attention they receive when Vassily, the husband, recites a children's poem in what had seemed a delirium but which turns out to be a beautiful lucidity. Fable-like poems are recited for a reporter's cameraman; the lights go off; and suddenly, Nina, formerly Vassily's guide, cannot see a thing. The story moves brilliantly between the allegorical and the mundane, between the dreamlike and the real, between remembering and forgetting, and between deeply private and deeply cultural realms.

Taken together, the stories in The Red Passport offer a sense of some of contemporary Russia's pressing concerns--from the radioactive fallout of Chernobyl to the war that continues to be waged in Chechnya, from the diminished lives of disabled pensioners to the hope and dismay of Russia's youth. The range of the collection's subjects produces the occasional story that seems like an experiment, as if the author asked herself, what would happen if I wrote a story about "x"? Some of these arrive at unconvincing endings that seem either sentimental or driven by the narrative problem the writer set herself. An occasional unsatisfactory ending, however, does not diminish the power of the collection as a whole, the ambitious undertaking that the collection represents, or the vast affective terrain it charts.

One might ask of such a collection that its language take more risks, that the language be willing to wander more or to break. And yet, I do not want to conclude that these are neat stories about messy matters. The book reads as an interesting companion piece to Andrea Lee's beautiful Russian Journal (1981) and as an antidote to condescending guidebooks like Victor Ripp's Pizza in Pushkin Square: What Russians Think About Americans and the American Way of Life (1990). Though it could be argued that the female characters in The Red Passport are too often mere foils for masculinity-in-crisis, at bottom, this collection raises important questions about the forms that intimacy takes and even of what counts as intimacy in different cultures.

In "My Mother's Garden," a daughter visits her mother in her home near Chernobyl, even though she is putting herself and her own family at risk by doing so. "It never ceases to shame me," the daughter reflects, "this fear I have of touching my mother, of carrying the poison in her skin and clothes to my daughter." At one poignant moment, the mother presents her daughter with a photo: "The photo was painted on thick paper in tones of green, and the image was strewn with faint white dots. 'See the snow?' she said, 'The American said it's radiation. He said he has a special camera that can see it.'" Shonk resists casting Russian realities through the lens of a "special" American camera that can see things about Russia that Russians cannot see for or about themselves. Instead, she imagines scenarios in which American pragmatism meets layers of disbelief or in which Russian and American disillusion are met by forms of trust invested in various manifestations of friendship and of love.

Toward the end of The Red Passport, a Russian man selling ice cream to an American child of Russian descent exclaims, "Russian, American, what's the difference?…We're all friends now." Of course, the difference remains huge, the sameness goes unacknowledged, and we only pretend to be friends. Russian red passports and American blue passports continue to have a wildly different currency in the world. The image invoked by Katherine Shonk's title and richly atmospheric and finely crafted tales pushes us to consider what the red passport signifies, and for whom? Who claims it, and where can it take you?

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The view from above
The World: Travels 1950-2000 by Jan Morris. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003, 458 pp., $27.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Barbara Sjoholm

JAN MORRIS, author of several dozen books of travel and history and hundreds of articles about place and politics, is no casual traveler. Chance encounters, tedious hours in bus stations, hapless adventures with local guides; hunger, exhaustion, disorientation, and fear--which often form the very stuff of travel books--crop up rarely in her writing. From the beginning of her journalism career, she went to places that mattered--not always to her, but to history. The first reporter to break the story of the summit of Everest in 1953, she went on to become the Middle East correspondent for The Times. Later she joined the staff of The Manchester Guardian, which eventually sent her to Africa, South America, Australia, and the United States. Throughout the '50s and '60s, she contributed stories about Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, the rise and fall of African despots, and the bitter paranoia of the cold war.

Jan Morris was James Morris then, of course, product of Oxford and the army. As a man she was a vigorous, curious, and cool observer. The style she forged as a foreign correspondent was vivid and artful, yet impersonal. As she writes in the introduction to The World, a sweepingly ambitious collection of excerpts and articles that spans five decades, "I was not often profoundly involved in the matters this books describes. I am by nature an outsider, by profession an onlooker, by inclination a loner." Yet few were (nor are) better at capturing the flavor of a place in a few sentences and swiftly conveying the mood of a political situation. Describing Cairo in the early '50s, she places herself on a hill and first gives us a long view of the pyramids, then the city itself:

A forest of incomparable minarets springs out of the crumbled hodge-podge of its streets: one with a spiral staircase, one with a bulbous top, some single, some double, some like pepper-pots, some like hollyhocks, some elegantly simple, some assertively ornate, some phallic, some demure, rising from the huddle of houses around them like so many variegated airshafts from an underground chamber. (p. 20)

It is a blazing place. It blazes with heat. It blazes with a confrontation of opposites, the clash of the modern and the traditional. Above all it blazes with the glare of contemporary history. Pause on a bridge in Cairo, amid the blare of the traffic and the shove of the citizenry, and you can almost hear the balance of the powers shifting about you, as the black, brown and yellow peoples come storming into their own. (p. 21)

Often taking a bird's eye view, from an airplane, a hill, a bridge, or a window, Morris grew increasingly adept at setting a scene without appearing in it herself. By the late '60s and '70s, when she'd left newspapers for magazines and the writing of books, she'd mastered omniscience; her literary tone remained confident and trenchant, even as she allowed herself stronger opinions and a more impressionist, fanciful style of description. Describing London in 1975, she indulges her pleasure in gorgeous hyperbole:

It is a gift of London, or a rather a technique, that through the dingy and the disagreeable, the fantastic habitually looms. Illusion breaks in! Its principal agency is that monarchy, whose heraldic lions, unicorns, crowns, roses, thistles and Norman mottos are as inescapable in this city as Leninist quotations in Moscow… The mystique of London's royal presence, the fetish feel, the mumbo jumbo, colours the sensations of this peculiar city, and often makes it feel like a place of pilgrimage, a Lourdes or a Jerusalem, or more exactly, perhaps, like one of those shrines where a familiar miracle is regularly re-attested, the saintly blood is annually decongealed or the hawthorn blossoms each Christmas morning. (p. 211)

"I was twenty-four years old at the start of the 1950s, seventy-four at the end of the 1990s…" says Morris. The World is divided into decades, and Morris provides a brief gloss to each span, a summary that reminds us how much happened in that tumultuous half century. As a witness to history, Morris takes us back with her to Baghdad and Berlin in the '50s, to South Africa as apartheid's tentacles grew, to Hiroshima post-bomb and Cuba post-revolution. Her portraits of cities in Eastern Europe at the height of the cold war conjure up the tensions of the '60s, while her homage to Manhattan captures a city that doesn't exist any longer.

Yet we can't help noticing what's missing from this account of "the world." The enormous social upheavals that roiled the United States in the '60s and '70s--the civil rights, anti-war, feminist, and gay liberation movements--all of which, one could argue, did more to change the established order than changes of government in Africa and South America, have barely a reference in Morris' essays. Neither Birmingham nor Berkeley is on her list of stops, and her Manhattan doesn't include Christopher Street.

Morris' bird's eye perspective, the persona of omniscient narrator, continued when she completed, as she's written, "what is vulgarly called a sex change" in 1972. James Morris had an unmistakable voice on the page, and Jan Morris has the same voice: large-hearted, lively, immensely erudite, never ponderous or pontificating, invariably charming--a sensual voice, yet curiously disembodied. If her shift from man to woman weren't so well-known, and if she herself didn't include an excerpt from Conundrum, her 1974 book about becoming a woman, there would be little in this substantial collection to reveal the gender of the author except, perhaps, a certain assurance and privilege often associated with being a man.

As a city Casablanca is something less than romantic, being mostly modern, noisy and ugly in a pompous French colonial way. The experience I was to have there, though, struck me then as it strikes me now as romantic to a degree. It really was like a visit to a wizard. I saw myself, as I walked that evening through those garish streets, as a figure in a fairy tale, about to be transformed. Duck into swan? Scullion into bride? More magical than any such transformation, I answered myself: man into woman. (p. 206)

Toward the end of The World, I grew a little impatient not only with the omniscient voice, but with Morris' very style of travel. Paul Theroux, in an essay on Bruce Chatwin, "an inveterate leaver-out of things," says he believes a travel writer should give information for the reader who wants to take the same trip. Never one to make the logistics of travel part of the story, by the last two decades of the 20th century, Morris becomes a complete "leaver-out." I sometimes had the sense she'd arrived by teleportation in one high-rise hotel after the next, sent by publishers to capture the feel of a place before departing again. This floating style of description has many merits, yet in a travel writer such luxurious distance can lead to generalities when we want specifics. Unlike many literary travelers, V. S. Naipaul and Jonathan Raban, for instance whose sometimes illuminating and sometimes uncomfortable interactions with the people they meet are part and parcel of the story and help us to believe the writer is giving us the real texture of a place, however biased--there can be something specious about Morris' pronouncements. This is what she thinks about Sydney; what about the people who live there? She's not above making sharp judgments and rude comments, but she doesn't do it face to face.

For just as she's often invisible, so are the inhabitants of a place, except as local color. About St. John, Newfoundland, she writes:

The moment you arrive they take you up Signal Hill, high above the harbour, where winds howl, superannuated artillery lies morose in its emplacements, and far below the ships come and go through the rock gap of the Narrows. Within an hour or two they are feeding you seal-flipper pie, roast caribou, partridge berries or salt cod lubricated with pork fat. (p. 323)

Marvelously vivid--but, who is "they?" The lack of human contact, named or otherwise, eventually made me curious. I found myself wondering whether Morris was deliberately removing herself from situations in which she might be hurt or challenged. At no point after the sex change does she record anyone responding to her, much less making a crude remark as she passes in the street. Perhaps that's never happened or perhaps it doesn't matter to her if it does. Yet--and it's noticeable in a book about encounters with other cultures--this distance gives a sense of disengagement that no amount of talk about Sydney's "swank" or Manhattan's "fizz" can personalize.

Perhaps it's no mistake that Morris' world shrinks slightly over time, and that large, anonymous cities come to interest her most. Urban centers such as Sydney and Hong Kong seem to be where she's most at ease. Yet Morris is also an ardent Welsh patriot. Her most personal book, in fact, is the lovely A Writer's House in Wales, in which she takes us all around her house in a Welsh valley and shows a feel for the natural landscape not always apparent in her descriptions of cities. It's in Wales, in her family house, surrounded by maps and books, that we see her most intimately. The persona slips, the writer self is at home, and family members and neighbors are within reach, named and loved. Homesickness is the other side of travel, and especially after 9/11, home is where Morris longs to be. The World ends with a return to Wales on September 10, 2001. "The very next day, far away in dear old Manhattan, the next zeitgeist declared itself."

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Poetry by Jody Bolz

What You See Last Time You See

What you see last time you see
your hand opening a last time
holding nothing

wherever you lie last time you lie
in your bed or some bed
behind a numbered door

or out in broad daylight
fingers scrabbling the last time
in dirt as you listen

to the last thing
lurch of wind in birch boughs
sirens and shouting

truck gears grinding
on a nearby highway
last phrase of the soundtrack

you've been hearing for a lifetime
song without lyrics
no mention of the tenderness

you're startled to admit
you feel these days for everything
ants shimmering on pavement

slap of plastic flags
above a crummy car-lot
hovels fences trainyards

blossoming in rust
each ugliness disarming you
each injury each failure

the botched heart
that woke you up
in terror

all the years you fought
this last thing:
moment when your body

like every body
becomes a slab of stuff
despite the trust

with which it arched
beneath a lover's mouth
or bent across

the turned earth
of a garden-plot
despite its open gestures

its eyes frank with longing--
moment when your body
which seemed to you

inseparable
from will and joy and fury
is trash to burn or bury.

Rescue

we're digging a grave in the sky
--Paul Celan

Reverse the tape
and billowing ash takes shape
suggests a wall--no, a tower--
and two dark figures
(a man and a woman?)
each with close-cropped hair on end
who rocket skyward
hand in hand.

--September 11, 2002

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