Reverberations

A too-short night. My pounding heart. The feeling that I knew all along. The map, too red, all blood. The women behind me in the ballot box: my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers, all of the women, black and white, dead and alive, who have fought for a voice in this country. They're fading even as I type: they're slipping from my vision, moving to the periphery, looking on with heavy, hooded eyes.

It took women to vote our woman down.

Our lives won't change, my partner says, as half-hearted reassurance.

That's just what I'm afraid of, I reply.

And we sit at the kitchen table, the morning still dark, the tea grown cold, our hands sweaty, empty. Even touch doesn't help. Later, I stand at the sink, choking back sobs. The grief will come in waves, I realize - a little today, a little tomorrow, the sadness parsed out in bits and pieces for months and years to come.

I try to summon love. I try to send it out, to exude it. I try to think of sunshine, of women's voices, of babies being born. I try to think of families.

No sweetness comes, though - not today.

The hope didn't go away; it's still inside. I'm carrying it in my heart - but there's no place to put it now. 

The Woman Who Will

I was up before four AM. Election day. Election day. My heart has been pounding all week, it feels like, my body pent up with an odd, unfamiliar tension. History is about to change.

Meanwhile, I look around and am hard pressed to recognize the excitement in other people’s faces: this daring to hope. We are on the brink! I want to scream—to my students, my colleagues, random strangers in the grocery store, old women peering at bags of sugar and gaggles of teenagers wheeling a cart to their car. I imagine a glass ceiling, shattered. On my commute, alone in the car, I let myself imagine what it will feel like to see her win. I think of my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers, and of the daughter or son I might one day have. Pride wells in my eyes.

Meanwhile, people are posting on Facebook, and not all of it’s good. One female student of mine posts that she’d rather have a cigarette put out in her eye than vote for Hillary Clinton. I read that and grieve, but only a little; I’m used to it now, the raw hatred. People can’t stand her voice, her face, her figure, her clothes. They speculate on her sexuality; they compare her to Satan. She’s stumbled and fallen and clawed at the glass ceiling; she’s worked hard to understand women’s lives – poor women’s lives – and make them better. She’s faced so much discrimination, so much sexism in her career, and other women, my peers, are slinging mud. It hurts my heart.

I saw Hillary speak once. I was nineteen, a sophomore in college, and Hillary came and spoke in our chapel to a crowd of thousands of women. She didn’t speak with grace or softness; she spoke with strength and confidence. It was almost as if she didn’t care if we liked what she had to say. Someone asked her about her Iraq vote and she answered honestly, carefully, as though she hadn’t been asked it a hundred times before. She voted with the information she had. She regrets the decision. She made a mistake; she changed her mind. I remember leaving the lecture feeling proud, an odd tingle palpable even then—she might be the one.

And today, more than ten years later, it turns out she is.

As a senior in college, I took a course called Women and Development. My professor was Lois Wasserspring, one of Wellesley’s best. The class was small, intimate, a group of maybe twelve women, all seniors I already knew. At the end of the semester, Louis invited us all to her home, a sprawling place in Wellesley Hills decorated with things she’d collected in Latin America.

That night, Lois told us about her experience with glass ceilings. She was one of the first six women admitted at Princeton, and on the first day of class, when she entered the classroom, a man spit on her.

Gloria Steinem was criticized for saying that young women just didn’t understand the feminist struggle. Women everywhere took offense at her critique of Bernie Sanders and his followers, but in all honesty, I agreed with her. I hear women beat each other down all the time. I seem them marginalized. I know how it feels to be seen as prey - all women do. 

Recently, I overheard a conversation between several young women. They were discussing a friend of theirs who’d accused a young man of rape.

Jessa’s my girl and everything, one of the woman said to the other, but we all know she sleeps around.

I’m tired of living in a world where women hate women almost as much as men do. I’m tired of seeing men tear Hillary Clinton apart for the way she sounds and the supposed lies she tells. I’m tired of reading essays by my female students about the times they were raped, the times they were punched, the times they were shut down with a few harsh words. I’m sick of teaching students who got pregnant at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. I’m tired of hearing the regret in their voices, now that they know better: If only I’d had an abortion. If only I’d turned down the ring. If only I’d stayed in school.

If only I’d known I had a choice—had a voice.

I’m tired of feeling like a raging feminist when I tell a man not to use the word “slut.” I’m tired of hearing other faculty members call my twenty-year-old female students “girls” and not “women.” I’m tired of feeling afraid to walk down a dark street, or to wear a tight skirt, or to look a man straight in the eye. I’m tired of being afraid on the trail in the middle of the day. I’m tired of the number of students who sit down in my office, bow their heads, tug at their sleeves to cover thumbprints on their arms. I’m tired of our junky, underfunded Planned Parenthood – one of two in all of New Mexico.

Today, I’ll take a shower and get ready with care. I’ll dress in my best. I’ll vote for the woman on the ballot, and I’ll say a silent prayer that she’ll win. I’ll permit myself a moment to hope, to remember my grandmothers, to imagine the way my great-grandmothers might feel, watching me vote for a woman for president for the very first time.

La-La-Landia

When you realize you accidentally mailed your painstakingly-edited book to a potential reviewer, instead of a clean advanced review copy - an ARC. When you go over the hours and days and weeks you spent reading, re-reading, highlighting, underlining, marking the tiniest of errors, feeling relieved that you'd found them, feeling delight in marking them, knowing they'll be fixed in the end. When you remember the deadline, the email your publisher just yesterday sent: time is a-wasting. When you think of your book, mailed yesterday, god-knows-where by now, dust in the wind, might as well be.

When you frantically email the person you accidentally mailed the edited book to. This person is a respected author, an esteemed professor, and you have never met her. You are emailing her now, trying to conceal your frantic tears, trying to explain the situation. Look for the book, you type with trembling hands, and wait, gnawing the inside of your cheek. Luckily, she replies quickly and is kind. You are filled with relief. She will mail the edited version back to you as soon as it arrives. You spend the rest of the day reasoning with yourself: a few extra days won't matter, right? Maybe the designer can work fast. Publishers always pad the schedule, don't they? Things will be fine.

Later, though, you stave off tears. You miss your book.

When you drive home, teary-eyed, missing your book, and finally pull into your space, and the world just seems so blah. You hate yourself for mailing the wrong book. You unload your purse, your textbooks, your stack of papers to grade, everything BUT your marked-up book, which is now somewhere between here and Chicago, so vulnerable, so precious, so many hours of labor in those 298 pages. You slog inside, look for the cat, find her sleeping and pick her up, fur and bones and cat, warm cat, and you let your tears dissolve into her fur. You miss your book.

When you decide to have another look in your car, just in case but probably not - you don't let yourself hope, you don't let yourself wonder - and you go out again and look in the backseat and there's a tote bag with a tablecloth inside, left over from the Day of the Dead table your co-worker, Liz, made at work, and inside you feel something hard alongside the tablecloth, a frame most likely, the picture of your grandparents you brought to display on the table, but instead, when you draw it out, it is your book, your marked up book, there all along.

Dear readers, this is me. This is where I've gone: Booklandia.

I'll be back soon, I think.

Meanwhile, happy fall, my lovelies. Happy leaves and pumpkins and turkey and witches and winter on the wind, just beyond.

Love and snowflakes,

Kate

PATAGONIAN ROAD has arrived

Well, the review copies have. Meanwhile, as you wait to feast on my very first book, enjoy the press release!

Love and happy changing leaves,

Kate


PATAGONIAN ROAD: A YEAR ALONE THROUGH LATIN AMERICA

One woman’s solo journey from Guatemala to Argentina provides the backdrop for this empowering travel memoir.

“McCahill is a blues traveler, singing for citizens of the world who have no public voice. She depicts beauty within despair, allowing us to hear a comforting melody in an unsettling breeze and see the gorgeous colors within a bruise.”

— Sascha Feinstein, author of Black Pearls

SANTA FE: Kate McCahill’s debut, PATAGONIAN ROAD: A YEAR ALONE THROUGH LATIN AMERICA (Santa Fe Writers Project, May 2017, 9781939650542), chronicles one teacher’s solo journey from Guatemala to Argentina.

Spanning four seasons, ten countries, three teaching jobs, and countless buses, this unconventional memoir personifies a growing culture of women for whom travel is not a path to love but a route to meaningful work, rare inspiration, and profound self-discovery.

Following the trek Paul Theroux outlined in his 1979 travelogue, The Old Patagonian Express, McCahill transports the read- er from a classroom in a rugged Quito barrio to a dingy rented room in an El Salvadorian brothel, and from the sto- ried neighborhoods of Buenos Aires to the heights of the Peruvian Andes. As McCahill chronicles her own struggles with language, romance, culture, service, and homesickness, PATAGONIAN ROAD: A YEAR ALONE THROUGH LATIN AMERICA ultimately becomes a testament to courage, solitude, and the rewards of taking risks.

About the Author:

Kate McCahill lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she is a member of the English faculty at the Santa Fe Com- munity College. Her writing has been published in Vox, The Millions, and in the Best Travel Writing and Best Women’s Travel Writing anthologies by Travelers’ Tales. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Patagonian Road is her first book.

www.katemccahill.com.

On Twitter: @katekristiina

PATAGONIAN ROAD: A YEAR ALONE THROUGH LATIN AMERICA

By Kate McCahill

Published by Santa Fe Writers Project, Distributed by IPG

Non-Fiction | 230 pages | 5.5 x 8.5 | $16.95 US | Trade paper | ISBN: 978-1-9396505-4-2

Available at bookstores everywhere and through IPG
814 N. Franklin, Chicago, IL 60610 | Orders: 1-800-888-474 | ipgbook.com

The Man Who Quit Money

Published in 2012, Mark Sundeen’s account of Daniel Suelo’s intriguing, humbling, and penetrating life is required reading – even if you just get around to an excerpt. For all of us who have stayed up fretting about the contents of our bank account, or have spent hours in traffic on the way to or from work, or have moved to a city or an apartment because work dictated such, then The Man Who Quit Money is the book for you. Your life doesn’t have to be the way it is; this is the essence of Suelo’s captivating story. He is the man who quit money –gave it up in 2012 and has lived without it ever since. Some days are hard, but most aren’t. Life without money is liberation, the ultimate freedom – at least as far as Suelo is concerned.

The Man Who Quit Money begins with three quotes, one excerpted from the Bible. Jesus said to his disciples, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or your body, what you will wear…Look at the birds of the air. They do not sow or reap or store away in the barn…Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?”

And this is who Suelo has become: Once a fundamentalist Christian, now a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Christian and a member of the Church of the Great Blue Dome. He does not hoard; he does not fret. A man can live for weeks without food. Wool stays warm even when it’s wet. Have faith, and the Lord will provide. The Man Who Quit Money made me a believer, not a born-again Christian but someone who trusts the earth a little bit more, and her capacity to provide, and protect.

The Man Who Quit Money isn’t organized chronologically; rather, each chapter addresses an element of Suelo’s life as a vagrant, a pauper. One chapter talks about food, and how he gets it – in dumpsters, in the desert, in the forest, and in the kitchens of friends. One chapter addresses sex and love – how does one fit romance into a life with no money? (Not very well, it turns out – the other person kind of needs to quit money, too, and it’s rare to find someone who wants to go live in a cave.) One chapter chronicles Suelo’s life before quitting money – social work, the Peace Corps, a few months in India tracking sadhus. The result of this arrangement is a slow teasing out of ideas – that poverty is accepted around the world, but not in America. That America’s greed, her addiction to material possessions and to wealth, has sickened her, maybe permanently. That we’re trained treat the poor with cruelty.

It’s impossible, pretty much, to live as Suelo does, and as Jesus himself did – penniless and ragged. Living without money is definitely illegal – you need to pay taxes, earn money, pay what’s owed. Taking up space on this planet costs dollars. Suelo lives the way he does because he’s educated, fit, clever, and single. He’s free in more ways than one; still, his lifestyle takes work, and he’s constantly explaining himself to those who so fiercely depend capitalism. Giving up money in this day in age makes you a slacker, a mooch. Once, though, we did live without money, and this is part of the book’s point – we bartered, we traded, we used the woods and our wits to feed and clothe ourselves. We were closer to the land, and all that the land had to provide.

Sundeen’s chronicle of Suelo’s extraordinary life is written with tight precision and acute description – and the pages glisten with hope. In between the narrative come flickers of what our lives might look like without money – our bodies would be healthier, worn by the land, the outdoors, and not the hunch of a commute or a cubicle. Our work would be valuable, tangible, and probably minimal – caring for the self, the family, the land, need not be all-consuming. Money is fake, the book screams. Money is not true validation; it’s an illusion. In the end, more stuff only leaves us emptier.  

Submit! Submit!

We're open for business, so send your writing and art to the Santa Fe Literary Review, the hottest little rag in town. Postmark December 1. Include a sweet little note and I'll put your submission on the top of the slush pile.

Meanwhile, happy almost-fall, dear readers! Let the season of cozy fires and reading under blankets commence.

Patagonian Road: In Print!

It's official, dear readers!

PATAGONIAN ROAD is due to hit presses in the spring of 2017, with a soft release in February and an official, real-deal, bigtime release in April! Thanks to Andrew Gifford at the Santa Fe Writers Project for believing in this project.

While you await my pages, do feast your eyes upon the preliminary cover, as well as the tantalizing copy that we hope will lure in readers near and far.

Thanks for the years of support, dear readers. It's finally happening!

Spanning four seasons, ten countries, three teaching jobs, and countless buses, Patagonian Road: A Year Alone Through Latin America chronicles Kate McCahill’s solo journey from Guatemala to Argentina. In her struggles with language, romance, culture, service, and homesickness, she personifies a growing culture of women for whom travel is not a path to love but a route to meaningful work, rare inspiration, and profound self-discovery.

Following the route Paul Theroux outlined in his 1979 travelogue, The Old Patagonian Express, McCahill transports the reader from a classroom in a rugged Quito barrio to a dingy rented room in an El Salvadorian brothel, and from the storied neighborhoods of Buenos Aires to the heights the Peruvian Andes.

A testament to courage, solitude, and the rewards of taking risks, Patagonian Road proves that discovery, clarity, and simplicity remain possible in the 21st century, and that travel holds an enduring capacity to transform.

“McCahill is a blues traveler, singing for citizens of the world who have no public voice. She depicts beauty within despair, allowing us to hear a comforting melody in an unsettling breeze and see the gorgeous colors within a bruise. If a feeling of loneliness pervades her essays, so do feelings of wonder and pleasure. It’s simply impossible not to share her joyful and frequently bewildering sensations of travel.”
— Sascha Feinstein, author of Black Pearls

Seeing Palenque

This is Palenque: green and growing and growing 

and it is summer and we are in love.

THE NIGHTINGALE: Luminosity

Kristin Hannah's sweeping WWII novel, The Nightingale, offers a narrative scope reminiscent of Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See. The novels are similar; both detail the horrors of war as well as the human beauty, the strength, that always prevails. Both tug at the heartstrings, leaving readers sobbing, sympathetic not only for the victims but for the brutes, the Nazis, many of whom were victims themselves, prisoners to a dangerous idealism and with families of their own at home. Both The Nightingale and All the Light are rare books, magnificent sagas that span time and space, generations, cultures, and languages. They're books that leave the reader grateful for the written word, for the power of story, and for the relative safety we Americans inhabit today.

Yet Hannah's work is different than All The Light, or any other war epic that chronicles men's experiences. Cold Mountain, The Things They Carried, Birds Without Wings, All Quiet on the Western Front, For Whom the Bell Tolls; these are the great war stories of our modern age, the many books about the soldiers on the front and the women who stayed behind. Yet so few attempt what Hannah has succeeded in executing: a well-written, expertly-researched chronicle of the women only, not the ones who "stayed behind" but the ones who watched their men, neighbors, and friends get torn away, who waited for the war to end and meanwhile protected their houses and land, their farms and children, paying for that protection with whatever they could muster: their words, their meals, their bodies.

The Nightingale follows the lives of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, both French. From their small town of Carriveau, Isabelle jets around France, stealing through war-ravaged Paris and across the icy Pyrenees, hustling fallen Allied pilots across the mountains to the safety of Spain. She falls in love; she comes under fire; she gets shot at and interrogated, imprisoned in a special concentration camp for female traitors. Vianne, meanwhile, holds down the fort, protecting her children's lives with her own, watching as her town is decimated by soldiers. Her body is ravaged by hunger, illness, and rape. She commits an accidental betrayal, and her best friend is taken away to be murdered. She carries a Nazi's baby, gives birth, and never tells her husband the truth. Some secrets are better left untold.

Of war, Vianne remembers at the end of the book, the men tell stories and the women get on with it. Such is the style of The Nightingale; perhaps women have even more to lose in war than men, and so it's easier - healthier - to forget whatever traumas were endured than to keep them alive. Though Hannah is a storyteller more than a poet, her writing poses lingering questions that will resonate with any reader, of any gender or age: What constitutes a full life, and what constitutes a fair trade? What makes living worthwhile? Which secrets should always be kept? What do we as a society forget as the years go by, and what are we destined to relearn?

Get thee to a library, dear reader, and put your name on the list for The Nightingale. You may have to wait, but I can assure you, my lovelies, that it will be worth it.

Irish Eyes

In Ireland, people ask us where we’re going if they see us looking at a map. Sometimes, they tell us to put the map away, and then they just walk us to where we want to go. Community meetings happen in the schools or in the pubs, and everyone we walk past smiles. Lovely day, they say, even on the shittiest days. All the drivers wave when they pass by.

At the bar the other night, I sat and read the news: fifty dead and fifty more hurt, a massacre of unutterable horror. One man hid in a bathroom stall while, in the next one, everyone inside was gunned down. One woman remembers the last drink she ordered before she made it out the exit, just in time. Cell phone videos play a pumping beat, a shrieking crowd – drunk, euphoric – and the guns sound like part of the song. I sat at the Irish bar and felt sick, and the bartender, his eyes so kind, asked what was making me sad. I told him, and he didn't say he was sorry, or how terrible, or how sick. He looked down at his hands – big workman’s hands – because somehow the Irish know when words just won't work.

In Ireland, no one mentions Donald Trump unless we bring him up first. Many Irish have relatives in America now. People ask me when my wedding is, ask about my dress – even the men ask about my dress. Every morning when we leave for the next town, they wish me a lucky marriage. They make little jokes about grandkids, and they wave as we walk away.

It’s a kind place, Ireland, a gentle and beautiful place. At least, that is what we see: rolling hills, sweeping views, crashing coasts buffered by munching sheep. We see sweet, smiling faces and polite, well-behaved children. We see friendly cows, friendly dogs, shy but friendly cats. People offer us rides and seem embarrassed when we push money into their hands. They push it back towards us, shaking their heads.

Every night as I wait for sleep to come, I marvel at this beauty: unsullied and raw and real. Still, every place knows death, knows blood, and these shattering coasts are no exception. Everywhere there’s ugliness; every day you can find it, if you look. I think back to a dark-eyed, brooding student who, in the middle of class, said something to the woman next to him that made her scream and leave the room. Neither of them ever came back. There’s the woman I met in Santa Fe who walked there from Guatemala, and on the way, her baby died. She had to leave him behind. Him, she said, a fist against her mouth. There’s the boy I knew my whole life who, when I brought my college friends to my hometown, raped one of them beneath the toboggan chute before it was even dark out. All tragedies, all small compared to fifty people dead. The horror of that guy in the bathroom stall still pervades my dreams, and I think that life is too fucked up to fathom.

Who have you lost? a friend recently asked, and I thought of a life cut short beneath thin ice, another halved by pills and booze, a third crushed beneath the weight of sorrow, small at first but enormous by the time a decade passed. I thought of my father’s face in his hands the day his mother died. Without death, I know, we couldn’t live. Without blood, there would never be beauty.

Still, to make sense is impossible.

So the best we can do is to mourn and then learn. We must grieve, weep, and remember. We must rally, lobby, speak out, and educate. We must change our laws. We must change our minds, and once that's done, we must be brave and fight to change other minds, too.

Meanwhile, may we the living seek out beauty today, and say a prayer: For the stranger who shows you the way. For the lover who teaches you trust. For the wedding that’s just around the bend, and for all the years that stretch beyond it  – happy years, you hope, but of course you never know. For the child who runs into the rain just as it’s starting to fall: she’s dancing now, and her grandfather runs out to join her. For the bird that smacked the window and fell, and for my partner, who went out and stroked it and stroked it until finally it beat its wings and flew away. For all the little gifts that make up a day, and for the lessons we might take from the horror. For the laws that might change when we finally decide that we won't lose our freedom if we put down our guns.

To all those beautiful lives lost on a terrible Florida Sunday: May your deaths not be a waste. May we learn from this terrible loss. May beauty grow up from your ashes.