Stories to Gather All Those Lost by Ona Siporin (review)

168 Western American Literature This is not to suggest that P rivate Voices, Public Lives is a painless read about the triumphs of essayists. Poignant accounts of laying aside w om en’s fic­ tion for years in order to pursue a Ph.D. in m asculinist literary criticism , of the excruciating journey of reading one’s self back from estrangements, of the death of a child, make the collection one that should be read chapter by chap­ ter in order to give each essayist her due time. In fact, this reader wished even greater variety among the essayists’ class background and ages, for the very thing I found appealing— book as mirror— at times seem ed self-indulgent. (This privileging of som e w om en’s private experiences is one criticism of the personal essay as now practiced by fem inist academics such as Jane Tompkins, who wrote the foreword to this collection: is such a revealing essay the pre­ rogative of the already-published successful woman?) However, in P rivate Voices, Public Lives., most of the essayists attempt to forge links between women through common experiences and texts-in-com m on. In fact, for traditionally-trained women to delineate the incremental steps that brought them to achievem ent is, as several contributors revealed, the hardest writing some had undertaken. This discomfort results in beautiful prose, “. . .this new possibility of perfect bliss: writing from my whole self,” as Ann Romines puts it. The often gorgeous, com pelling essays that emerge give hope to all academic writers who think there is scholarly writing or cre­ ative writing, another dichotomy that this collection disproves through inspir­ ing example. The evocative writing is som etim es put to unsettling use: the two essays on children lost still haunt me as I wonder whether I should send them to a colleague whose ten-year-old son suddenly died, a grim tribute to their staying power. Elsie M ayer’s essay on how those of us trained in New Criticism analytically dissected texts rather than treating them as living, com ­ plex organisms brings pangs of guilt. Yet ultimately, as Sandra Parker argues, the best pedagogy is truth-telling, however painful. This collection can guide the next generation of scholars to various ways of coming to more integrated, authentic voice through openly proclaiming our love for our reading, writing, and teaching. JUDY NOLTE TEMPLE U niversity of A rizona Stories to G ather A ll Those Lost. By Ona Siporin. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1995. 117 pages, $19.95.) The Irish essayist Hubert Butler observed that the past is “a mosaic of tiny pieces, a fragment of a larger picture” inlaid on history. The minutiae of daily observations surround memory like an object immersed in water. How to involve a reader in that mosaic, to dislodge the intimacy of self afloat in histo­ ry is the writer’s task. Because the past is tricky and elusive, grounded in the Reviews 169 blur of childhood and subjectivity, the personal and idiosyncratic minutiae that call back lost moments from which memory springs can resemble fiction as much as memoir. Ona Siporin’s collection has entered this territory of mosaic and memoir, winding memory around history in an act of recording that becom es the central, redemptive necessity of the collection. Using the natural world both to ground and associate im pressions, Siporin takes us from rural Iowa to the austere beauty of the canyons in Utah’s Wasatch Range. Geography serves not only as backdrop to visceral experience, but also triggers associations with the past. In these vignettes, most aired previously on Utah Public Radio, the natural world, with its insistent rhythms, transports Siporin from landscape to memory to meaning. Looking out her kitchen win­ dow at the scrub oak and rocky slopes of the Wasatch Range, for example, a more embedded memory surfaces of M azar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, where Siporin lived briefly before the Russian invasion. She m oves deftly from the private intimacy evoked by a silver pitcher given to her as a gift to piece together place, history, and loss. The more com plex associations happen in the juxtaposition of...