Solace: Rituals of Loss and Desire

by Mary Sojourner

Overview

NPR commentator Mary Sojourner, "a pithy yet sensuous, spiritual yet ferocious writer" (Booklist), delivers a powerful memoir about the joys of rejecting the pace, addictions, and false values of society...and learning to live without compromise.

Twenty years ago, Mary Sojourner was a mental health consultant and counselor in Rochester, New York, a divorced mother of three, longing for her real work, her real home. She found it in Flagstaff, Arizona, in a remote two-room cabin that had no running water and only a wood stove for heat, but offered Sojourner everything she needed in terms of light, beauty, joy, and the perfect setting for writing and reconnecting.

Solace is a book about obsession and release, and the lifelong search for balance in a world revolving around appetite and acceleration. Written in short, beautifully crafted pieces, the book carries the reader through Sojourner's life, from a restrained Catholic childhood to the excesses of her generation, through motherhood and divorce to her quiet, solitary existence in the Southwest, where she has learned the importance of living at the right pace.

Sojourner's voice is as compelling on the page as it is on the radio -- lively, funny, moving, combining the outspoken out-of-stepness of Anne Lamott with the environmental activism and poetic prose of Terry Tempest Williams. In chapters with titles such as "God Is Coming and She Is Pissed" and "How to Leave: Leave," her vivid personality, passion, and sense of humor come through. This is a book for women everywhere -- those who recognize their own truths in Mary's life and younger readers who will find inspiration in her hard-won wisdom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416593270
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	11/01/2007
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	293 KB

About the Author

Mary Sojourner, now sixty-four, started writing at age forty-five. She is also the author of Delicate, an acclaimed book of short stories, and is a contributor to NPR's Morning Edition. She teaches writing in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Read an Excerpt

Solace

Rituals of Loss and Desire

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By Mary Sojourner

Scribner

Copyright © 2004 Mary Sojourner
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-2968-1

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Chapter One

Soul-Kissing in Purgatory

When does loss lead to desire? Desire to loss? When does a kiss become obsession? A touch the key that does not unlock, but imprisons? I think of a child who is rarely touched. Or told touch is a sin. I think of Catholic girls of my generation.

I was fifteen. I was luscious. I sat paralyzed with shame in the Monday Religious Instruction class of a Catholic church in Irondequoit, New York.

It was late spring of 1955 and that weekend I had allowed a boy to "go further." Which meant he had rested his hand uneasily on roughly three inches of the pleated tulle and strapless bra covering my young chest. His breath caught. "I love you," he said. I waited to feel something even better than his words - there, in my armored breasts. "I'm sorry," he said, "I shouldn't have rushed you," and took his hand away. I was silent. Not from what he might have thought, but from disappointment.

The boy was tall and lanky, with a blond brush cut and tender eyes. His first kiss had unsettled me for weeks. I wondered why girls were told that boys wanted something girls shouldn't give them till marriage. I had no idea what I wanted, but I knew that what moved in my body, what took away my appetite and made my nights wonderfully sleepless, was not the boy's, and would never be. It was fully mine. It lived in the same place as story. What bad boys wanted didn't matter.

I was not alone. My girlfriends and I invited boys to Joyce's basement rec room. We drank her mom's apricot brandy, smoked her brother's cigarettes, slow-danced to "Unchained Melody" and were baffled - and delighted - by how boys managed to walk with that long, hard thing in their pants.

The priest walked up to the blackboard and began to write. Commandment Seven. The boys in the class poked each other and grinned. We girls sat mesmerized, still as sacrificial maidens before the slaughter. The priest continued to write: Thou shalt not commit adultery. The boldest boy scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed it to the guy behind him.

"I will explain this commandment," the priest said nervously. "You all know the soul is like a blackboard. A venial sin is like a chalk mark that can be removed with prayer and penance. A mortal sin is a mark that can only be removed by time in Purgatory."

I waited. Aeons of gray Purgatory Time seemed to stretch ahead.

"Now," the young priest said, "if a woman rides horseback and gets, shall we say, pleasure from it, she commits a venial sin."

The room was silent. Everybody, sniggling boys and wordless girls alike, looked dumbfounded.

"And," our teacher went on, "if the woman gets back on the horse for more pleasure, it is a mortal sin."

Dead silence from a dozen normally rowdy teenage kids.

The priest sighed in relief and rubbed chalk dust from his hands. "I hope that clears the Seventh Commandment up for you. Next week, we will discuss the Eighth."

He dismissed us early. We did not burst from the building as we usually did. The boys walked slowly in silent groups. The girls held their books to their young bosoms and looked away from each other, and from the boys.

My friend's mom offered me a ride, but I walked home alone. I felt shattered. It was hard to breathe. The light seemed even duller than our normal lakeshore gray. I knew exactly what the priest had been talking about - impossible choices. Be good and give up the only physical warmth I'd been given in years. Be bad and give up my soul. Good. Bad. Good. Bad. I put one foot in front of the other. Good. Bad. By the time I came to Titus Avenue, I was trapped between good and bad. Between tenderness and sin.

It was just past five o'clock and traffic was heavy. I looked to my left and thought, It would be easier to die. I lifted my foot to step in front of an oncoming car. Before my foot touched down, I felt an unsought and most welcome clarity move in me like a good strong breath. I jumped back. "No," I whispered. "No."

In that instant, I left my father's church. I could hardly wait for my next date with my boyfriend. This time, I guided him. This time, when he apologized, I put my hand gently over his mouth and whispered, "Guess what comes next?" This time we moved in Animal Time, at the slow, slow pace of our wise young bodies, in what seemed an endless unfolding of pleasure.

I became a good bad girl. An A student who loved her lover's mouth on her breasts. The editor of the high school newspaper who knew that power lay in words - and in the way I could make a boy lose control.

For the first time in my young life, I deliberately chose paradox, and in that choice, saved my own life. I was shameless. A girl on her way to being a difficult woman, a girl on her difficult way. A girl who could not have guessed at the way connection can become disconnection, especially when the connected one lives in a world that fears shameless women, a world that tells them their pleasure is not theirs. A girl who, if you had told her she would spend forty years doubting her body and using men's desire to keep a false faith, would have laughed in your face.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Solace by Mary Sojourner Copyright © 2004 by Mary Sojourner. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

What Goes Around Comes Around

What Goes Around Comes Around

Scheherazade: A Woman Tells Stories to Save Her Life

Scheherazade

Red Canoe

The Morning in the Heart of the Dark

Soul-Kissing in Purgatory

Kidnapped

Using

Smoke: Visible Vapor Given Off by a Smoldering Substance

The Windows in the Gypsy Wagon Are

Sheets of Mica

God Is Coming and She Is Pissed

Chief of Police Nixes Naked New Yorkers

The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm

Fast-Forward

Brother Blood/Sister Solitude

Burning

Hunting Shelter, Finding Sanctuary

Hunting Shelter, Finding Sanctuary

How to Leave: Leave

I'm Scared. I'll Do It.

Heading Home

Big Window

Animal Time

Dead Bill

Minimum Wage

Crack in the World

Ev

Deathwatch

Crack in the World

Razor Vision

Now Somebody Else Knows

What Comes Around Goes Around

Drastic Measures

What Catches You When You Stop Running

What the Simplicity Gurus Leave Out

Never Leave Your Machine

Medicine

Doing Nothing

Daily

Occupying Less

The Essential

Spirit Line

Road Time

Spirit Line

Gratitude

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

NPR contributor Sojourner writes about her life from a "scrap-and-wallboard" cabin with no running water near Flagstaff, Ariz. She shepherds readers from her difficult girlhood with a mentally ill mother through the birth of her children and her discovery of feminism to a mature adulthood pocked with unhealthy relationships to men, alcohol, her computer and slot machines. Along the way, Sojourner, originally from Pennsylvania, finds a love for the American Southwest, moves there, then chafes at all the other newcomers who she believes are ruining the landscape and the environment. The result is a book that addresses the author's addictions, environmental activism and progression of messy relationships. Alas, Sojourner does not fully develop any of these threads. Moreover, rather than illustrating her life with stories, Sojourner reports, without meaty narrative backup (e.g., she glosses over the collapse of her first marriage: "I had sleepwalked and jangled my way through the earlier marriage to the college poet and, in an act more merciful then [sic] I understood, left him and our baby. I had fled to a new man, and when he left, run straight into the second marriage"). The book vacillates between periods of despair and epiphanies that soon evaporate (e.g., as Sojourner is trying to quit spending so much time on the Internet and return to writing, she notes, "Words spilled from the pool of witness and recollection. And as they emptied out, I felt full. For a while"). Still, Sojourner's passion, prickly vulnerability and deep humanity are engaging when taken in small, essay-sized bites. (Mar.) Forecast: Sojourner's NPR fans may pick this up, along with the author's forthcoming (in March) collection of short stories, Delicate (Scribner, $13 paper 272p ISBN 0-7432-2970-3). Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In Walden, Thoreau declares his intent clearly: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach." Few people in our fast-paced, technology-obsessed, and voyeuristic society take this paragon of deliberate living to heart. In this fiercely personal study, Sojourner, a commentator for NPR and a poet/writer (Delicate), amply demonstrates her choice to follow in Thoreau's venerable footsteps. She vividly depicts her journey of self-discovery and her deepening awareness of connection with her environment. Rebel, feminist, environmental activist, and writer, Sojourner transitions gradually from the familiar to the unfamiliar, speaking her mind in a style that is frank, thoughtful, and eloquent. Ultimately, her memoir beautifully captures a most profound lesson of life: it takes immense courage to learn to let go and keep letting go. To do otherwise is to resist living in our present. Short chapters and a conversational style delightfully illustrate the essence of grace. Recommended for public and academic libraries with feminist/sociological collections.-Dina Komuves, Collingswood, NJ Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Engaging memoirs of a search for life with meaning that has taken the author from young wife and mother to hippie peacenik and feminist counselor to writer and environmental activist. Sojourner (Delicate, 2001), a contributor to NPR's Morning Edition, begins with her Catholic childhood in upstate New York. Unsettled by a brilliant, neurotic mother and weak, frightened father, she found her security in reading stories. The following decades brought early marriage and motherhood, a succession of lovers, life in an "urban, anarchist, agrarian commune," and deep unrest and unhappiness. With rent, food, and childcare covered by various Great Society programs, she returned to college to study sociology, had her consciousness raised by a women's-studies class, and within a few years was teaching feminist courses and getting even with all the wrongdoing men in her life. In middle age she discovered the work of Edward Abbey, particularly The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire, and moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, where she now lives alone (her children are grown and on their own) in a small cabin with electricity but no running water. In graceful, brief essays, Sojourner writes about finding her life's true work and her spiritual home, about slowing down the pace of a too-fast life, connecting with a place, and making friendships with other people who care for that place. Keeping her memoirs from sliding into a smugness are revelations about the author's devotion to casinos and slot machines, her addiction to her computer's Scrabble game and e-mail, her troubles with drinking, and her disappointments with men. A portrait emerges of a strong, mature woman, thoughtful, witty, candid, and, if notexactly serene, then content with and even proud of the life she has made for herself and the work she is doing to preserve the beauty of the land around her. Tonic for malcontents: goes down easily and leaves a lingering, pleasantly sweet and sour aftertaste. Agent: Judith Riven

Kirkus Reviews

John Nichols Author of The Milagro Beanfield War This is a lovely memoir, written with humor, insight, chutzpah, and great tenderness. Mary Sojourner is an original, as feisty as they come, and dedicated to the struggle to forge a better world. She is also a writer of tremendous passion and compassion, expressed in a simple, lyrical, wonderful prose style that carries you along effortlessly like a beautiful ocean wave.

Craig Childs Author of The Secret Knowledge of Water This is damn beautiful writing. Cruel with honesty. Erotic as wind, filthy like mud-stomped shoes. Mary hides nothing. Her words will track all over your soul. Savor this stuff, this terrified, righteous nakedness of hers. It is rare.

Rudolfo Anaya Author of Bless Me, Ultima Fierce and poetic. Solace is a tempest of singing the blues, recording a life fully lived, and crying out with passion to save our Western lands. These honest and sometimes heartbreaking revelations are not only for women, they're for all who have tasted the raw emotions of life.

Page Lambert Author of In Search of Kinship Mary Sojourner has the wisdom to envision a new life and the courage to embrace it. Solace is both challenge and meditation.

Ann Cummins Author of Red Ant House: Stories Readers and writers 'aching for their own company, afraid to find it,' can take refuge in Mary Sojourner's lovely memoir.

W. D. Ehrhart Author of Beautiful Wreckage: New and Selected Poems Sojourner examines her life with an unblinking honesty that is touching, fascinating, and often startling. It is a story of loss and recovery, courage and discovery, a woman constantly finding herself and her place in the world.

From the Publisher