Starting Out…Launching THE MEMORY ROOM

The Reading in Berkeley, CA

Lip Service West and SPAD presents writer Mary Rakow reading a selection
from her work at Pegasus Books, Berkeley, CA.

WE CAN SHARE HOW AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL OUR NOVEL IS
00-7:47   Reading
-Barbara gives a lecture to her therapist titled, “What Every Buried Child Knows”
-Why dirt is not one thing
-Every child seeks a moral order and creates one when it cannot be found

The Reading at University of Iowa

“Live From Prairie Lights.” (Audio) Reading by Mary Rakow, Q & A with Julie Englander.
University of Iowa; November 18, 2002
WSUI 910 AM. The Writing University and Digital Research & Publishing, University of Iowa.
Listen to the interview: Mary Rakow — Live From Prairie Lights

The Interview in LA Times

“Three Questions for Mary Rakow,”  Susan Salter Reynolds
The Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2002

Question: How do you compare the private horror of sexual abuse with the very public horror of the Holocaust?

Answer: For me, to compare the two would come from a desire to place horrors on a kind of grid. It would be an act of cowardice. This kind of measuring dulls compassion, or at least it would in me. And writing–in fact all art–can and perhaps must be an act of compassion.

Q: Do you feel the form of the novel is inadequate to describe the cruelty (and maybe also the beauty) of the world?

A: Writers work the way that pleases them. You want this congruence between what you put on the page and what exists in your head. And when you’ve “nailed it,” then you feel intense pleasure. I think pleasure drives these things more than statements about the viability or death of certain forms. I did not set out to write a novel that was unusual in form or that engaged in these kinds of questions.

I wrote “The Memory Room” so that the ink on the page, when read, was as close as I could get it to how I heard the words in my own head. I read very few novels and I finish even fewer. I mostly read poems. In most novels I’ve tried reading there is just way too much information compared to the sensation of movement.

Q: You’ve said that you are a very “new” reader, by which I think you mean reading outside of academia. How has becoming a reader changed your writing?

A: I only began reading fiction and poetry in my mid-40s, about halfway through “The Memory Room.” Now I read all the time. And the new work will form a kind of dialogue with what I read, as it must be for all writers. I am trying to learn, though late in the game, what the domain of the page is. What can happen on the page that cannot happen anywhere else.

It is the moral seriousness of Rakow’s book, as much as the literary inventiveness, that elevates her work to the realm of literature.
–Jonathan Kirsch, “Art After Auschwitz,” The Los Angeles Times.

Then…Launching THIS IS WHY I CAME

I started every reading talking about my method. This novel explores iconic stories in the Bible, one of the most ancient texts on the planet. A book about which people have strong and mixed feelings. But the stories have been salvific for me since childhood, dealing with issues I explored in my first novel, The Memory Room.

The Bible, like all great art, is mostly emptiness. We go into that emptiness with ourselves, coming up with our own answers to questions the blank spaces give rise to in us. Why was Jonah angry? Why wasn’t Joseph at the Crucifixion? What did Zaccheus do for the rest of his life? We write from our own distinct perception of the world producing, over time, the story only we can write. And when we do this, we don’t just make stuff. We make art. Let’s help each other do exactly that.

Below each video, I’ve highlighted useful tips for the making and sharing of our art.

Reading: The Jesus and John Chapters

Reading: The Noah Chapter

Reading: The Abraham and Isaac Chapters

Reading: The Zaccheus Chapter

Reading: The Jonah Chapters

Reading: The Nativity Chapters (audio only)

Fireside Podcast: New Words, with Mary Rakow (9/13/2021)

“I think the best art always asks questions that it can’t actually answer.”

— Mary Rakow

Listen to the Podcast here