March 15, 2020
New reviews and excerpts from a book that includes my work COYOTE ON HOLY MESA – and accompanying photographs – the University of Massachusetts Press’ astonishing nonfiction anthology STRANGE ATTRACTORS: LIVES CHANGED BY CHANCE, edited by Edie Meidav and Emmalie Dropkin. Featuring contributions by Ana Castillo, Rikki Ducornet, R.O. Kwon, Rebecca Wolff, Sejal Shah, and others, the anthology is available at your bookseller or library of choice.
COYOTE ON HOLY MOUNTAIN was selected as a featured work in one of my most beloved magazines The Rumpus, which especially delights me because it was initially considered a work of fiction until we discussed my strong opinions on the emergent efforts of decolonizing nonfiction – in essence, the definition of nonfiction erroneously excludes all cultures and traditions in which a conventional definition of “reality” renders the complex shamanism, mysticism, and diverse realities of global experience. I’m a bit (slightly) more eloquent (and strident) about it if you read the link above.
ABOUT STRANGE ATTRACTORS:
Edie Meidav and Emmalie Dropkin asked leading contemporary writers to consider these questions, which they characterize through the metaphor of “the strange attractor,” a scientific theory describing an inevitable occurrence that arises out of chaos. Meidav’s introduction and the thirty-five pieces collected here offer imaginative, arresting, and memorable replies to this query, including guidance from a yellow fish, a typewriter repairman, a cat, a moose, a bicycle, and a stranger on a train. Absorbing and provocative, this is nonfiction to be read in batches and bursts and returned to again and again.
NEW REVIEWS AND PRAISE:
“Each essay reckons with contradictions, consequences, and risks. The moving, muscular collection holds an unexpected sort of magic, a sparkling nudge to stay open to change.” —Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe
“These essays on chance encounters and redirections are absorbing, unexpected, yielding—I am a genuine fan.” —Beth Kephart, author of Strike the Empty: Notes for Readers, Writers, and Teachers of Memoir
“A wonderful book, unique in all ways, truly and deeply full of wonder. What a stunning constellation of seekers, believers, wanderers, questioners. A collective spiritual autobiography like nothing I’ve read before.” — Elisa Albert, author of After Birth
“Strange Attractors reminds us that even chaos has a pattern, and now more than ever, we are grateful for it. Attraction is evidence of the sublime. The very idea sparks revelation.” — Annie Liontas, editor of A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors
“Chance—the charm of chance—that permeates these stories is startling, often dazzling, and always life-affirming. You’ll wish most of these talented women writers were your friends.” —Susan Fox Rogers, author of My Reach: A Hudson River Memoir
“Urgent and reflective, infused with a revelatory grace, Strange Attractors is a wondering wander of a book, a curiosity shop of stories filled with surprise and clarity, longing and transformation. Lyrical, experimental, or conversational, this collection’s voices explore encounters that change the course of our lives.” —Cathy Chung
I am here for the removal of my skin. There is a place to make a slice, perhaps along my spine, to let me out. There is a membrane that contains me and I will say quite clearly that it needs to go.
Underneath is something breathing. Lungs that rise and fall in billows of dusky blood. The muscles are being gnawed by teeth, by a coyote, by the teeth of a coyote, sipping the red nectar from my heart, emptying it into his belly. There is a coyote between my hips. There is a coyote between my thighs. There is a blue gold orange violet black coyote that has crouched between my hips and has no need for my skin, only what he can feed on that’s inside it.
There is a coyote that is filled with desire. It flicks its tongue against my clitoris, tasting.The teeth have been sharpened to points with a rough knife called communion.There is movement under my skin of the beasts of the holy mesa. There are juniper roots pulling at my veins.
There are emeralds in my incisors.
Tonight the snow falls on the holy mesa and this desert is home, this space between white ice and sky. The taste of fur on my face. My second skin, unpinned.
He has opened my ribs. My chest is the mouth of the cave and I listen for the wings of bats, silent in the dark, listen to the heart of a small dark creature hanging low. My heart, a fist, upside down and dreaming. This small dark angry thing, awakened. A mat and tangle of black membrane, folded before flight.
(c) 2019 Quintan Ana Wikswo “Coyote on Holy Mesa” in STRANGE ATTRACTORS, University of Mass Amherst Press