from Brenda Miller

About seven years ago, I began to study and practice Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. The Book of Flowers (kind of the Ikebana bible) describes it this way: "Ikebana is an act of space-the space between branches, the space between flowers and leaves, and the space between masses. In other words, the space between flowers and branches comes alive."

Each Ikebana class proceeds the same way: we sit for a minute in silence, to gather ourselves, and then our instructor, Charles, reads a short passage from The Book of Flowers that will set the theme for the day (my first day it was: Simplicity is never a simple task . . .). Charles demonstrates, holding up one branch then another, snipping a little here and there, setting the main lines of the piece, and then filling in with color. He makes it look easy, but "simplicity is never a simple task . . . ."

Then we're set loose to try it on our own. We choose our branches, eye the flowers, try to discern the strong curves or lines, and snip away anything that gets in the way. As we work, Charles roams behind us, nodding gently, arms crossed, stepping in just at the right moment to articulate what is happening in the arrangement. "See how these two branches are talking to one another?" he might say, or "See how the space comes alive if we snip off this twig?" The challenge is always not to do too much, to resist the impulse to fill in all that blank space with color or line. We need to trust emptiness, to allow space to do its work. "Ikebana is a world of encounters," the Book of Flowers says, ". . . always facing the flowers with candor and listening to what they say. The heart must open wide to do this . . . ."

I may have been drawn to the art of Ikebana because in my writing and reading I've always gravitated toward prose that uses white space and silence as central elements, essays that allow some breathing room. Like Ikebana artists, these authors trust space, and they know when to shut up and allow silence to do its work. I'm thinking in particular about Bernard Cooper's Maps to Anywhere, Abigail Thomas's Safekeeping, and Peggy Shumaker's Just Breathe Normally. In each of these works, the white space is like a voice all its own, allowing room for the reader and writer to really encounter one another, to breathe, to settle, to reverberate.

Maps to Anywhere. Bernard Cooper. The University Of Georgia Press, 1997. 160 PAGES, PAPER, $22.95.

Bernard Cooper's Maps to Anywhere is a collection of miscellaneous pieces, many of them short-short essays of one or two pages. In them, Cooper approaches topics from barbershop poles to spin-art machines with a voice steeped in wonder and whimsy. He begins in the small, physical details that lead us into emotional territory that takes us by surprise.

For instance, "Capiche," whose first few paragraphs paint an intricate, but "fictional," picture of an idyllic afternoon on an Italian piazza, ends in a revelation and an offering, a long sentence that startles:

The Chianti sun was coming up, intoxicating, and I was so moved by the strange, abstract trajectories of sound that I wanted to take you with me somewhere, somewhere old and beautiful, and I honestly wanted to offer you something, something like the prospect of sudden love, or color postcards of chaotic piazzas, and I wanted you to listen to me as if you were hearing a rare recording by Enrico Caruso. All I had was the glass of language to blow into a souvenir.

The narrator's breathless urgency to convey his complex and effusive joy is followed by a short but stunning "offering": a "glass of language" that has been exquisitely filled. We now have this "souvenir" to carry with us wherever we go. It is a fragile one, yes, and easily breakable, so we must surround it with the batting and insulation that white space provides.

Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life, Abigail Thomas, Anchor Books, 2001. 192 PAGES, PAPER, $13.95.

Now that I'm thinking about it, many lyric essayists present us with small, fragile gifts of all sorts. Abigail Thomas's Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life unfolds from just such an initial offering. The book is, as the subtitle suggests, "some stories," both from a life and that create a life. She traces the history of herself through a history of her three marriages, an introspection triggered by the death of her second husband. And she does so in snippets that accumulate into a comprehensive picture. The entire second chapter of Safekeeping, titled "Offering," is one single paragraph, set in the middle of the page:

While you were alive the past was a live unfinished thing. Like a painting we weren't done with. Like a garden we were still learning to tend. Nothing was set in stone yet, and weren't we ourselves still changing? We might redeem our past by redeeming ourselves. I had in mind a sort of alchemy. But then you died, and just like that, it was over. What was done was done. Now we could never fix it. All I can do is chip away, see what comes off in my hand, look for a shape.

White space surrounds the paragraph, creating a small island. Paired with the title, "Offering," the words seem literally "offered" to the reader in the narrator's cupped hands. She writes short, fragmented sentences as simple as an Ikebana creation, each line "encountering" the ones around it and creating something new. There is nothing superfluous, nothing inessential. She even creates a sense of space between lines: "Like a painting we weren't done with. Like a garden we were still learning to tend." We move from one image to the next, but with a slight pause, mimicking the mind's (and the breath's) rhythms. She ends in a metaphor that articulates what she will be up to here: "All I can do is chip away, see what comes off in my hand, look for a shape." Throughout the rest of the memoir, she enacts this "chipping away," and we, the readers, peer over her shoulder as the bits and pieces assemble themselves into a story of complicated love and grief-a story that simply could not be told any other way. It's all she can do.

Just Breathe Normally. Peggy Shumaker. University Of Nebraska Press, 2007. 278 PAGES, CLOTH, $24.95.

Peggy Shumaker, in Just Breathe Normally (her memoir of recovery from brain injury), gives her reader a similar "offering" in order to start her fragmented story. While on a bicycle ride with her husband in the familiar territory of their Alaskan home, Shumaker was hit by a boy recklessly driving an ATV. She awoke in a hospital, in unfamiliar territory, with no memory of the accident and with only limited memory of her own life. Her memoir mimics the process by which her memory returned: in slivers. The starting point for this narrative offers us a single scene that seems unrelated, but that provides a metaphor for her entire experience. Titled "Just This Once," it is just two paragraphs long. It begins:

Once, in a wild place, I felt myself quiet down. I listened, drew silent breaths. It was dangerous not to warn the bears I was there, no question. But I wanted to live one moment in a wild place without disturbing the other creatures there. This delicate moment laced with fear-a life wish.

Shumaker offers us this suspended moment in time-a quiet moment in which she "drew silent breaths." The entire scene is infused with space, with silence, with the beautiful tension created between beauty and fear. "Just this once, I told myself. Everyone else snored. Black nets billowed, let in a few mosquitoes." She leaves the cabin and quietly walks toward the edge of the water, where tracks show the presence of bear. She ends the chapter in a crystalline image: "Undisturbed and not disturbing, I stood still breathing in sphagnum's mossy sigh quiet after loon calls, followed unmarked paths left by stars too wild to show themselves anywhere but here, inhaled the nursing musk, the bear I knew was there."

We leave the narrator there, in the presence of danger, in this "delicate moment laced with fear," the thrilling beauty created from the encounter of opposites. We don't know the outcome, but we suspect the narrator emerges unharmed-and transformed. With this image, we then embark on Shumaker's journey of injury and recovery, a process in which she will also encounter her deepest fears and be changed by them. Sometimes this kind of story can only be told with a great deal of space to hold us. One deep breath after another.