The idea of survival and trauma and healing in all three of these indelible works brought me so low, but, as the best literature does, it lifted me, my spirit. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” which, every time I read it, I hear the atrocious Native Boarding school era’s mantra, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” but instead in Russel’s story it becomes “Kill the werewolf in her, and save the girl.” Having spent a great deal of time reading about chess and studying it, my having to reread all three of these works for my upcoming course was like taking a defibrillator right to the chest: I woke up.
I revamped my literature course to include The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, and The Round House by Louise Erdrich, as well as a scattering of poems and short stories, such as Karen Russell’s “St. Chess became therapeutic, and I learned an important lesson:ĭuring the summer, still sticking to things I had already read, I had to prepare my college courses for the fall. I read and studied books like Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess by Bobby Fischer, Chess Fundamentals by Jose Capablanca, Discovering Chess Openings: Building Opening Skills from Basic Principles by John Emms, Logical Chess: Move By Move: Every Move Explained New Algebraic Edition by Irving Chernev, Modern Chess Openings by Nick De Firmian, and many more. Megan Devine’s It’s OK That You’re Not OK (Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand) became medicine, and Jeffrey McDaniel’s Holiday in the Islands of Grief: Poems touched something in my soul-especially “Wooden Bench”-I don’t know where I’d be without that piece.Īs time moved forward, reading got easier, but I still found it hard to pull away from the comfort of Netflix, other streaming services, video games like Skyrim and Fallout 4, and chess, which became a strange addiction when my mother moved on. And so I found it difficult to move on from what was familiar, but at times I did find myself able to read new work, was able to move forward into the present that hurt. “Joy” brought me joy, but not enough to heal, fully, the pain I felt.
Mom loved us both the same regardless of our headlines. Sure, mom did this deliberately, but I’m unconvinced it was out of pure irritation or anger. For years, my mother kept two newspaper clippings on her fridge: one about me, and one about my sister.Ĭhicken, potatoes, vodka stolen from grocer.” The story was one I had read to my mother, and one we laughed at, but it was made funnier by the notion of making the newspaper. Mitya thinks he’s famous for making the news, and the story ends with him running out to go tell others in the neighborhood. With great dialogue and pacing (I mean, it’s Anton Chekhov), readers learn that Mitya came out of a tavern, drunk, and slipped and fell under a horse, which terrified the horse, which ultimately jumped over Mitya, and a part of the sleigh wacked him and knocked him unconscious. In this story, a disheveled and excited Mitya Kuldarov burst into his parents’ apartment at midnight, waking his mother, father, his sister, and his two little brothers to tell them-to show them-that he made the newspaper. I spent a great deal of time rereading works I read when my mom was alive, and I can tell you for certain the very first thing I reread was “Joy” by Anton Chekhov, translated by Robert Payne. But I did read-I did find occasional solace in literature as a means to heal. I didn’t read as much as I normally do in a year. My mother’s death really impacted my ability to read. Of the highs, I have a book coming out in 2022 and my nephew was born, cute as a could be (flawless, dashing-what a head of hair!-and otherworldly in the way babies are).
#Modern chess openings 13th edition full#
Two thousand twenty-one has been full of highs and lows. “I’m very sorry,” the officer began, and you can figure out the rest. But the only person to descend those stairs was one of the two officers. 15, 2021, I stood at the bottom stairs of the apartment complex where my mom lived-a place in Bangor, Maine, that housed Native tenants only-and I waited for the officers to complete their wellness check, waited for mom to come down the stairs in her pajamas to yell at me, as she often did when people checked in on her when she didn’t want to be bothered.
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