Chanticleer Book Reviews

Tag: #NonFiction

ACROSS the DISTANCE: Reflections on Loving and Where We Did & Did Not Find Each Other by Christina A. Kemp – Memoirs, Biographies of Women, Dysfunctional Families

In her nonfiction debut Across the Distance, Christina Kemp showcases a collection of eight personal stories that delve into the most poignant relationships throughout her life.

The well-crafted narratives encompass relationships with her parents, brother, childhood friends, boyfriends, and mentors as they moved in and out of her life. Themes of love, loss, distance, self-preservation, and healing rise to the surface.

Within the book, Kemp ponders the course of a romantic relationship as she realizes that love cannot make underlying differences disappear. At thirteen years old, her father died, and Kemp analyzes how she was able to come to terms with his death, reflecting on his kindness and heroic deeds. Several years later, she is diagnosed with the same condition that took her father; she feels as if she carries her father’s memory in the cells of her own body.

There is a clear distance between herself and her mother. Harmful and passive-aggressive tendencies placed the two at odds. While Kemp appreciated the Saturday morning conversations they often shared, her mother seemed more concerned with criticism than connection. The woman could shove her daughter across the room without reason. Regarding her rage, the author aptly describes it as “hot explosive sandbags that otherwise leaked at the seams.” Eventually, Kemp learned to accept the child/parent schisms.

With a background in counseling psychology, Christina A. Kemp delivers an in-depth assessment of her personal connections that will resonate with readers.

Examining these relationships brings clarity to familial ties and how they affect every other relationship in life. Indeed, Kemp better understands how to love on her own terms and realizes when to leave a relationship. One could spend a lifetime attempting to understand the landscape of relationships that make us who we are.

Each of the stories opens with a simple black & white photo.

The magpie cat, Lucy, stretches on hind legs, looking for an escape beyond the confines of her new island home. The model beauty of Kemp’s mother shows with full wavy hair and makeup, a scarf tied jauntily around her neck. A lone sailboat on distant waters captures the lingering loss of her father. Each image renders a stark, yet ethereal quality connected to Kemp’s life.

Kemp’s styling renders the beauty and harshness of significant moments in artful detail.

One day, the author overhears a lively conversation between a father and daughter about college plans; it is with shame and sorrow that Kemp realizes she’ll never share that experience. And then, amidst the rural surroundings of a northwest island, she considers the natural beauty of the changing seasons. The colorful descriptions and intimate detail throughout the text prove refreshing. Consider, “the island winds playing like a symphony.”

Across the Distance is most definitely a personal journal. However, even as the author finds catharsis in her stories, readers, too, will find meaning in the telling.

Readers are invited to take the book as a sequential whole or read one story portrait at a time. Either way, they will gain insight and understanding as they journey through this book and explore the intimate workings of relationships.

Across the Distance will appeal to those who seek to understand the connections and divisions we so often encounter in our lives.

February 21, 2022
THE BUBBLE: Everything I Learned as a Target of the Political, and Often Corrupt, World of Youth Sports by Maya Castro – NonFiction, Youth Sports, Soccer

Maya Castro, the daughter of a Puerto Rican father and Anglo mother, mixes memoir and personal essay styles in a passionate narrative describing her experiences as a minority soccer player on an elite, mostly white, high-school soccer team.

Castro joined her middle-school soccer team in seventh grade, in order to avoid dodgeball in regular PE. She soon finds playing soccer better than “roller-coaster rides, a sugar-rush, or a present on Christmas day.” From that innocuous beginning, playing the game becomes her passion, and by the end of middle school, she develops advanced skills in the sport.

At the end of eighth grade, Maya opts to transfer to a high school in a different part of town which has a highly-rated soccer program, where she hopes to learn more about the sport and further improve her skills. That decision leads to personal growth as an athlete but also results in a painful, profound loss of innocence relative to the roles and motives of adults associated with this program dominated by school politics, “entitled” students, and hints of racism.

Castro cites detailed descriptions of events and her perceptions. These often engender reader empathy and raise reader awareness of the emotional fragility of early adolescence. They also suggest that a “wink and a nod” are still alive and well in many areas of competitive team sports.

This story works well and carries with it a social statement. The voice is strong and unique, often written in vernacular. It reveals interesting aspects of the author’s personality—passion, humor, and a well-defined sense of right and wrong–someone the reader would like to know, and someone we will want to hear from again.

Maya relates her experiences to those of other athletes whose stories have recently been “front page” news. She provides a strong indictment of individuals who “… overlook misconduct (for their own personal gain) rather than correct it.”

Her concluding words will resonate with many parents, coaches, and fans. “The sooner the ‘grown-ups’ on the sidelines understand that to overlook corruption, in all of its stages of severity is to enable it, the safer and more meaningful the youth athletic environment will be.”

The Bubble: Everything I Learned as a Target of the Political, and Often Corrupt, World of Youth Sports by Maya Castro is a strong statement, reflective of one young woman’s experience in youth sports, a treatise that coaches, parents, and young players will do well to note. Recommended.

November 5, 2018
MEMORY into MEMOIR: An Anthology by The Red Wheelbarrow Writers – NonFiction, Memoir, Anthology

This curated anthology shows the collective creative effort that the Red Wheelbarrow Writers have dedicated to “Memory into Memoir,” each one a nugget of remembrance cloaked in the wisdom of time’s perspective and expressed in well-chosen words and memorable well-crafted story telling that will capture your heart and expand your soul.

Below are a few samples of the superb writing in this anthology.

The collections start with author (Beyond the Scope – Truth Turns Deadly in the Congo) and former US Embassy staffer Nancy Adair, who recounts, in “Just Say No,” being called upon to provide “community control” for a planned visit from Nancy Reagan to her post in Malaysia. Disaster follows disaster as plans fall through, the weather refuses to cooperate, and Reagan’s anticipated speech is four words long. Adair learns that far from being “one of those introverts who doesn’t like to disappoint people” as she initially imagined herself to be, she is secretly feisty, feisty enough to say “no” to the First Lady when the situation requires it.

Blogger Sky Hedman’s “The Chosen Day” examines a distraught family trying to reconnect on a mountain picnic. The narrator, her Alzheimers-ridden mother and silently suffering sister Martha barely dodge tragedy on that outing, only to face it days later, along with an acknowledgment of fractured relationships: “The time to know Martha better had passed.”

In “Thank You, Grace Paley,” aspiring Novelist Barbara Clarke recalls her remarkable personal meeting with the feminist icon over a late-evening cup of tea. Discouraged with her attempts at writing, she asks for and gets en-heartening advice from the famous author: “Just keep going.”

University instructor Kate Miller’s “Elemental” is the memory of her eleven-year-old self, happily receiving a much-desired chemistry set, then balking at using it when she discovers the many vials containing poisonous substances: “What if I spilled two chemicals that weren’t supposed to mix?” Her escalating concern sparked by an active imagination causes her to stow the set away; later in life she is diagnosed with panic disorder, but still sometimes dreams of the chemistry set and its many messages.

In “Leaving the Roman Lands,” world-wanderer Kenneth W. Meyer recreates his adventures overseas when in 1976 he and a traveling buddy agree to drive four wealthy students from Istanbul to Pakistan. In those days, foreign travel, the author states, “was like walking in space: you detached from the capsule, fed out your line, and enjoyed the spectacular view.”

The final piece in Memory into Memoir, “The Great Moratorium,” is the fascinating story of a young woman “busting out of the beige life” at age 18, only to find herself in a highly abusive relationship. Escaping that, she later becomes a therapist for victims of domestic violence and embarks on a one-month experiment in “relationship moratorium” that stretches out to eighteen elucidating years.

Superb writing styles blend with ease in The Red Wheelbarrow Writers’ first anthology of thirty-two non-fiction works that are a pleasure to read. Offering something for most everyone to appreciate makes this anthology a wonderful gift and a welcome addition to any writer’s library as an inspirational read. A consortium of writers has produced this engaging collection of life’s vicissitudes remembered.

The Red Wheel Barrel Writers

According to members Cami Ostman and Laura Kalpakian, the Red Wheelbarrow Writers in Bellingham, Washington, call themselves a “loose collective of working writers” who have “monthly Bored meetings (yes, that’s the correct spelling)” and eschew formal designation as a club or non-profit (“when we need money we pass a hat”). The writers have conspired to inspire with this array of 32 short memoirs.

The group takes its name from a poetic work, XXII, by William Carlos Williams:

So much depends
upon
a red wheelbarrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

Underscoring this theme, each memoir begins with a quotation from Williams chosen by the individual writer.

April 30, 2017