Robert Root

 

I've been collecting the nonfiction of Scott Russell Sanders for over thirty years now. At the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont, the last writing workshop I attended as a student, I sat with him at lunch a couple of times. I remember he insisted that "nonfiction" or "non-fiction" was not a useful term for what he wrote, since it only identified what his writing wasn't—it was not fiction. He pointed out that it was also non-poetry, non-play, non-article.

 

I tended to agree with him, though I was then deeply involved in "creative nonfiction," the adjective an effort at specifying the nature of the noun. Dropping the hyphen helped. Others preferred "literary nonfiction" or "nonfiction narrative," each alternative suggesting the possibility of "non-literary non-fiction" or "non-creative non-fiction" or "nonnarrative nonfiction." I felt we were stuck with "nonfiction" and later used it (self-consciously) in my own titles and subtitles (The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction; Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place).

 

Sanders' intimate, open essay "The Inheritance of Tools" in Best American Essays 1987 introduced his writing to me and led me to his first collection, The Paradise of Bombs and Other Essays, centered on family and place in the Midwest—he lived and taught in Indiana. In an essay from Writing from the Center (1995), he wrote, "I write from within a family, a community, and a landscape, concentric rings of duty and possibility. I refuse to separate my search for a way of writing from my search for a way of living." I liked the idea of what he termed "a literature of inhabitation." I'd grown up and attended college in western New York, earned graduate degrees in Iowa, and taught for decades at a university in Michigan. Sanders and I were, in a sense, coming to our writing from similar places. His collections like Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (1993) and Writing from the Center encouraged me not to be one of the "nomads who write about no place at all" but to be among the writers who "have settled down and rooted their art in a chosen place . . ."

 

Recently, with the release of his most recent collection, The Way of Imagination, Sanders was interviewed online about his writing. He explained that, instead of "nonfiction," he prefers specific terms for what he writes: essays, personal narratives, memoirs. Over time he has become, increasingly, an investigator of ethical and moral issues centered on daily living, the focus of books like The Force of Spirit (2000), and A Private History of Awe (2006). I particularly admired Hunting for Hope: A Father's Journeys (1998), which alternates chapters about his relationship with his son with his efforts to find reasons for hope in a world that his son thinks has made his father desolate. In the interview Sanders claims, in regard to the calamitous state we have recently been living in, "I'm not optimistic, but I am hopeful." He believes in "the human capacity to change, to learn" and it's the reason he keeps writing essays.

 

Referring to Montaigne, Sanders explains that the word "essay" comes from a French word "meaning to test or to try." In his own writing process, "an essay almost always starts with a question, a question I don't know the answer to or at least I don't have a satisfactory answer for. And the essay is my way of trying to come to a better understanding of the thing that puzzles me or moves me or bewilders me." He thinks that an essay, at least as he writes one, "doesn't start by knowing what you want to end up saying—it's a quest to figure out something or at least to gain greater insight into something. [. . .] And when I'm writing a piece and I feel a sense of discovery, I know the essay is alive."

 

I'm one of the readers of Scott Russell Sanders' essays who has often discovered how alive his essays are. In the very first pages of The Way of Imagination I was aware that I was reading perhaps his most profound and observant collection. Even before I finished reading it, I volunteered to review it for River Teeth because I wanted to urge everyone to read it. It's a very vital volume.

 

Note: Further Reading:

 

Root, Robert. "Creative Nonfiction," Dictionary of Midwestern Literature. Volume Two: Dimensions of the Midwestern Literary Imagination. Philip A. Greasley, General Editor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016:179-184.

 

Root, Robert. Review, "Meditative Naturalist, Intimate Essayist, Visionary Author," review of The Way of Imagination by Scott Russell Sanders, River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, January 8, 2021.

 

Root, Robert L., Jr. Review, A Private History of Awe by Scott Russell Sanders, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 8:1 (Spring 2006): 143-147.

 

Sanders, Scott Russell. Interview by Mitch Tiplitsky, Morgenstern Books. October 3, 2020.

 

Sanders' Website: https://www.scottrussellsanders.com/

 

On the night before the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, partly anxious about potential disruption the next day, memories of earlier inaugurals kept me awake. I didn't expect to have them surface, but memory often decides on its own what you should think about.

 

Biden is the 46th president since our first, George Washington. As someone pointed out the next day, inaugurations have occurred every four years without fail for 232 years, a total of 58 altogether. Biden is the 15th to be sworn in during my lifetime, his inauguration the 19th I might have witnessed. I was barely two years old for Franklin Delano Roosevelt's third inaugural, and though I might have later heard about FDR's fourth one and his death and Harry Truman's victory over Thomas Dewey, it wasn't until Dwight David Eisenhower's inauguration that I was in any way a witness.

 

My family leaned Republican politically. My father, my uncles, and some aunts had seen military service during World War II, conflicts between North and South Korea were heating up, and everyone I knew "liked Ike," a celebrated general. Eisenhower was inaugurated in January 1953 and, for the first time, we could witness it live on television, as it was happening, rather than wait to read about it later in newspapers or magazines like Life.

 

I saw it on the small television screen in a large wooden cabinet in the house of friends. We clustered in front of it until urged to clear away so everyone could see the screen; the sound of on-screen speakers alarmed their little dog Maggie and she barked and growled at the machine until they put her outside. I don't really remember much of the ceremony.

 

It was a grand year for pomp and circumstance. About six months later we watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, a somewhat grander occasion than the inauguration. I made sure to buy the View-Master slide reels of both events so I could see images of them over again. I probably watched Ike's second inaugural as well but don't recall View-Master recording it.

 

In 1960, when John F. Kennedy campaigned in our town, I saw him among crowds on the Big Bridge over the Erie Canal but didn't pay much attention. By the election my friend Dave and I were in the Southwest and, returning across the border from Mexico into California, we were asked by an official whom we'd voted for. When I told him I'd have voted for Nixon, my family's choice, but was a week and a half too young to vote, he approved, told me I was also too young to have crossed into Tijuana on my own, and cheerfully sent us on our way.

 

I started voting in college, somehow more liberal than my parents. The Vietnam War, which I was against, determined my politics. In the 57 years and 15 elections I've been allowed to vote in, my preferred candidates served 24 years, my rejected ones 32 years. At one point I felt as if my vote jinxed the candidates I favored.

 

If I review my lifetime voting record, I'm aware that I haven't been strictly partisan. I've voted for candidates who were likely to support those causes I care about—education, environment, employment, healthcare, diplomacy, peace—or, since the candidates I most admire seldom win their party's nomination, for candidates who might do the least harm. I supported moderate Republicans over ideological Democrats—William Milliken in Michigan, Robert Ray and Fred Schwengel in Iowa, for example—in the days when it was possible for Republicans to be moderates and when a bipartisan approach at least produced somewhat positive results, if not as fully positive as the general population needed them to be.

 

I've often said that I'm against what Republicans stand for and don't know what Democrats stand for. I know that what the party in power stands for may change when it's out of power, and vice-versa. At this year's inauguration, I thought all the generalized positions the speakers espoused were encouraging, all the promises positive. Much of it was moving and reassuring. But then I remember, before he was elected, all the accurate negativity his own party rivals expressed toward the character and motives of Donald Trump, how loyally and aggressively they supported his character, motives, and behavior once he wielded power, and now how sternly they decry the deeds they themselves fostered and abetted. Truth is the proper thing to uphold before abundant falsehoods lead to destruction, not something to pretend to promote later on.

 

It was inspiring to listen to the promises Biden's administration is making. I watched the inauguration all the way through. I hope it will be one I want to remember.

 

 

When the City of Waukesha's warning siren sounded one Friday morning, I opened its website to learn what it was warning about. Vague possibilities entered my head—in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, armed vigilantes in Michigan had swarmed the state house to intimidate their governor and partisan politics in Wisconsin could get as menacing. A host of memories emerged from long seclusion. I needed to know what the city thought I needed to know.

 

The city tests its weather warning sirens at 9:30 a.m. every Friday from April to October, the website explained, to see if they work and if we all can hear them. I could confirm, if asked, that they did and that I could. But the website also claimed that the tests "will not occur if threatening weather is possible." That wasn't reassuring, suggesting that, if I didn't hear the sirens, threatening weather was likely and if I did hear them, it was unlikely. I didn't ask how often threatening weather might occur at 9:30 a.m. on Friday mornings between April and October.

 

But rather than a weather warning, the first thing I thought of that morning was the catastrophe preparation I'd been grilled in during my school days growing up in Western New York. It wasn't natural disaster we were taught to be alert for but forms of destruction brought about by fire or aerial bombardment.

 

Sometimes during the school year, preferably on a sunny, temperate day, we'd hear the fire alarm sound and line up in our classrooms for a swift but orderly departure from the building. We'd move out onto the sidewalk circling the school or perhaps onto the playground or playing fields and wait for the all-clear signal. Sometimes firemen showed up, especially if the fire drill were the result of a defective alarm or a careless or reckless child, but most often we simply stood around until re-entering. The message of the drills was direct and brief: in case of fire, get out of the building.

 

The air raid drills were more ominous, preparing for a foreign power to drop bombs on our community—our troops were fighting in Korea, and our Cold War with the Soviet Union included a nuclear armament race. We needed strategies ensuring survival. People built fallout shelters in basements or backyards, underground refuges stocked with emergency provisions and supplies. Students were taught to stay in their school buildings during air raids, away from doors and windows where glass and debris might spew across the classrooms. "Duck and cover," we were told. We were shown filmstrips of people dropping wherever they were, in parks and playgrounds and shops, curling under whatever was nearby. At the warning signal students either hid under desks or, given enough time, made swift but orderly progress into hallways to kneel facing the walls, bending our heads, and covering our necks. When the all-clear sounded and we rose to return to our lessons, we didn't ask how curling up in a ball on the classroom floor would have saved us from the blast of an atomic bomb.

 

Catastrophe, we were encouraged to believe, was always imminent, even if relatively remote. My parents worried more about polio—58,000 new cases and over 3,000 deaths in 1952—than school fire or nuclear attack. But times change. Today, with students at risk from random gunmen, schools require active shooter drills to prepare students to lock themselves securely away if a killer enters their hallways. Unlike my childhood drills, we now need to guard more alertly against one another. Eight years ago, as my wife and I shopped at a mall, in a salon across the street a man killed his hairdresser wife and two of her co-workers and wounded three others before killing himself. Such events are no longer rare.

 

As I write this, the Coronavirus has infected over 23 million people and killed over 385,00 in the United States. The pandemic still surges rather than abates. As I write this, our Capitol and our Congress are recovering from assault by supporters of a malign and sociopathic narcissist. We're uncertain at the moment how much insurrection and sedition we and our long dysfunctional and ineffectual government still have to face. The combination of plague and anarchy is daunting.

 

The present moment should remind us of the constant need to be ready for disaster, catastrophe, possible annihilation all the time. None of those we've gotten through in the past were overcome without cost; complacency puts us in peril, as the scale of our latest losses and persistent alarm makes us aware. If we are alert to what may be imminent, we'll be able to cope with what we don't want to be eventual. We'll have no need to duck and cover.

 

 

This morning, like so many lately, low hanging clouds seem tempted to become freezing fog, and I gaze at gray skies above snow-covered roofs and lawns, empty street and driveways, and stark leafless trees. None of the condos across from ours show signs of life, as if, like me, none of my neighbors feel the urge to rise and start the day. I witness no bustle anywhere. For a moment I pretend my glumness is not mine alone but, since I don't interact with my neighbors, I can't verify that assumption. I've often allowed myself winter blues, but I know it isn't only the weather affecting me.

 

I keep reacting to the times we live in. The pandemic that has killed so many people and broken so many families will continue to surge while, in America at least, efforts at prevention and healing will constantly be hampered; the impact of climate change with its fires, floods, storms, and species extinction will increase while we continue to exploit the earth. If I scroll through posts on Facebook or check online news at NPR or CNN, my levels of foreboding rise. The president who in his single term decimated every aspect of American life I value—education, environment, employment, health care, human rights—continues relentlessly to undermine the democracy, this week inspiring riots in our Capitol building. I want to be cheered by the presidential election and the shift of power in the Senate out of the hands of committed hypocrites but still feel the weight of uncertainty and tension.

 

I lived through the last half of the 20th Century. It had abundant moments of social and political and environmental upheaval but, living the life of a reasonably well-educated and relatively solvent citizen, a reliable worker and responsible family man, I usually felt like a distant observer, a bystander only vaguely distracted by the news of the world. So far, the 21st Century hasn't provided any reassurance about my remoteness from the public sphere. If anything, it's been heightening my remoteness from the most intimate aspects of my own life.

 

I'm now at the age my grandparents were in my youth, when their siblings were passing on and I attended their funerals with my parents, not always certain who the person we were mourning had been or who he or she had been related to, seldom recognizing that person's offspring, often unsure if I had ever even met that person before. Now I tune in to year-end recitals of the prominent deceased, remembering some songs they recorded or a film they appeared in or one or more of their books. Often, they are either my age or the age my grandmother was at her death or occasionally younger and I nod when someone says they left too soon. I check birthdates in all obituaries.

 

In 2019 my sister, my cousin, my aunt, and my closest colleague all died, and I learned of earlier deaths of relatives and friends I hadn't known about. I attended only one funeral before planned memorials were postponed by the spread of the pandemic. In mid-2020 my younger brother died unexpectedly, his funeral put off indefinitely. All these occasions would have required travel and none of their bereaved wanted friends and loved ones to gather until . . .well, whenever it would be safe. For all of us, any sense of closure has been curtailed indefinitely, any acceptance of their absences suspended.

 

There are absences among the living as well. We haven't visited our son in California in over a year, will not be with our daughter in Florida and her family for most of the year ahead, see our daughter in Wisconsin and her family half an hour away only intermittently, only wearing masks, social distancing, and air hugging. Too often I feel confined in our condo, less a home now than a cell or a fortress under siege. I'm challenged by the lack of connection I feel with the people I love most and with the outer world in general and haunted by the awareness of the deaths I've distantly experienced of family members and friends.

 

And the very world we live in seems tormented by uncertainty, its air suffused with the virility of the pandemic, its democracy reeling, our daily existence nothing we can comfortably take for granted. I keep looking out my windows, noticing that the fog has lifted though the sky is still all one single shade of gray-white. I look off to the southeast. I wonder if there's any chance of sun at all.