Sonia Connolly

“Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors” edited by Grist

March 30, 2024 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Grist is a non-profit news organization that reports on climate change with a focus on equity. They run an annual short-story contest called Imagine 2200 and publish the winning and runner-up stories. This is the 2021 collection. The stories are available on Grist’s website

Many of the stories create a plausible future world that includes disaster and moves beyond it to show thriving and surviving communities. The stories are written by diverse authors and include characters from a variety of cultures, with a variety of skin colors, sexual orientations, genders, and abilities or disabilities. These futures include us all.

I had read Marissa Lingen’s story A Worm to the Wise before, and was happy to see it again. The other stories and authors were new to me, and I liked almost all of them. One of them made me cry, in a good way.

The stories all include some kind of hope, and they all include grief for what is lost. This is not “lalala we can ignore climate change,” but “let’s talk about how we can learn new skills and change our priorities so we can survive and thrive.” Recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg

March 2, 2024 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Freeing the Writer Within

Recommended to me by: finding it in a little free library

Natalie Goldberg combines writing practice and Zen practice in short chapters where she shares about her own writing adventures, and repeatedly admonishes the reader (or herself) to just sit down and write. I appreciated her ongoing willingness to sink into the depths of herself and write whatever showed up. The book veers between writing exercises, Zen wisdom, and her anxiety about eating too many brownies.

“A writer’s job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken to the specialness of simply being.”

“If you give yourself over to honesty in your practice, it will permeate your life.”

“We are good, and when our work is good, it is good. We should acknowledge it and stand behind it.”

I wonder if this book would have landed differently for me if I had read it when I was still writing and sending out an article each month. Since writing is not something I’m trying to make a living at, I don’t have the urgency or intensity around it that this book speaks to.

Recommended for people wrestling with being a writer as an identity, a practice, and/or a career.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Boston Girl” by Anita Diamant

February 17, 2024 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: thistle in grey

I picked this up because I enjoyed “The Red Tent” a long time ago. They have in common gripping characterization and story, careful research, and being centered on Jewish women. The writing is note-perfect and pulled me forward through the whole book.

This is the sweeping story of Addie Baum’s life, as told to her beloved granddaughter from the vantage point of being 85 years old. She was born in 1900 to struggling immigrant parents from Russia who settled in Boston. She seizes any bit of luck, care, opportunity, and friendship that comes her way, and works fiercely to make her way and succeed. She offers luck, care, opportunity, and friendship to people struggling around her when she can. She both flees and stands by her family.

She faces a lot of grief and loss. The book tells the stories, but does not linger on the pain. Perhaps it makes sense from the vantage point of being 85 years old. Perhaps a relief for the modern reader when the losses touch too close to home, like those from the 1918 flu pandemic (although this was published 5 years before the start of the Covid pandemic). At times it felt dismissive, although “face forward and don’t think about it” must have been the mantra of the times.

As a Jewish reader with immigrant parents who settled on the East Coast, I appreciated the resonances in the book, even though my parents arrived half a century later and did not struggle with poverty in the same way. I wonder sometimes what it’s like to be part of the dominant culture and have almost everything resonate like that.

Highly recommended!

Available at bookshop.org.

“brown girl dreaming” by Jacqueline Woodson

January 31, 2024 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Reading Jaqueline Woodson’s children’s book The Day You Begin

In spare, elegant poetry with each word exactly as it needs to be, Jacqueline Woodson takes us back before her birth in her family history, and then slowly forward in time. She shares her sensory experiences as a young child in Ohio and then in the South, and later after her family moved to Brooklyn, NY. The writing is lyrical, gripping, joyous, painful.

Life is dangerous for a Black family in the 60s and 70s, and she grieves for relatives as they die, at the same time as she struggles with reading in school and bonds with a neighbor girl as Forever Friends. She is aware of the struggle for civil rights, and participates as much as she can.

Highly recommended! Every word is worth reading, through the acknowledgements and end notes all the way to the photographs of family members as children at the very end.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry” by Rosalie K. Fry

January 27, 2024 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Sanguinity

10-year-old Fiona McConville doesn’t thrive in the city, so she’s sent back to her beloved islands to live with her grandparents. Imbued with the fierce magic of the sea, this book shows what can happen when children and adults are attuned to the sea and to each other. The events in the story are not always gentle, but the storytelling is gentle and everything comes right in the end.

The pen and ink illustrations are also delightful. Highly recommended! Originally published in 1957.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Just Being at the Piano” by Mildred Portney Chase

January 13, 2024 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Harmony Begins in the Soul, Long Before the First Note Is Played

Recommended to me by: the Little Free Library down the street

A meditative little book on how to learn and teach piano in a kind, body-centered way. Mildred Portney Chase was a musical prodigy, playing piano by ear at age 3 or 4, and went on to be a concert pianist. She writes in detail about how she finds relaxed, sensitive movement in her fingers, hands, and arms to play her best. She fiercely defends the right of young students to improvise and learn at their own pace.

I have only studied a little piano. Some of the book is applicable to singing, and some of it is specific to the piano, which as she says is an instrument that cannot be brought close in to the musician’s body. I passed the book along to a piano player and teacher, and I’ll be curious to hear what she thinks of it.

Recommended if you’re interested in music and musicians, or if you play piano and want to create beautiful tones.

Available at bookshop.org.