The OGQ

For three days in 2002, my mother secluded herself in our guest room in Santa Monica, furious and depressed over my second published short story. I had known she would see my work as a cruel funhouse mirror, so when my story ran in the Santa Monica Review, I stashed my four copies on a high shelf.

Conspicuously identical, they had caught her eye.

The mother in the story, Helen, starved herself of food and starved her teenage daughter, Leah, of affection. A child of Holocaust survivors, Helen was a “wire” mother who raised a nervous girl drawn to science and the safety of facts.

Whereas my mother embraced and kissed me. She taught me to read, curated novels for me as I grew and raised a writer who produced — as I pointed out when my first published story distressed her — fiction.

Still, there lay in my work an encoded truth about how she had mothered me when I was young. She called herself a “psychoanalyst by marriage,” given my father’s profession, so I knew she would perceive that truth in Helen’s relationship with Leah.

Until I was 12, my mother slipped repeatedly from her adoring and caretaking self into depressive states so deep they turned her stony, cold, verbally nonresponsive. This robotic mother made dinner and ironed my father’s shirts, but if she loved me, or even quite knew me, I couldn’t tell.

It terrified me.

In that state of fear, I, too, went numb. Burned into my memory is the image of a girl and her mother silently reflecting each other across a tiny, dark apartment — the parent in her distress looking vacantly away, the daughter in dread, watching carefully from the white of her eye.

Always, I felt enormous relief when she returned to her loving self, reading to me, stroking my cheek.

That time in Santa Monica, I tiptoed past the guest room door and watched my father bring her meals on a tray. “Dyl,” he said, “she’s angry about how you portrayed Helen.”

I had a hundred questions and asked none. Was she having a flashback? Did she hate me? Did my writing make me a terrible daughter? My father didn’t say. I loved my mother madly; I wanted her back.

I hadn’t seen her like this in decades. At 46, I felt 4 again, in the grip of that ancient fear that my mother might wash her hands of me. For three days I felt paralyzed, afraid to knock on her door.

At the same time, I wanted to barge in and defend myself. It’s a short story, I would have said. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!

When she finally emerged, my mother was civil. She didn’t speak about Helen — and my father and I didn’t press her, any more than we had in my childhood. We had acted then like she’d been fine during her depressive spells. She mutely served meals as if they were clay, and my father, still just in grad school for his psychology Ph.D., gamely tried to break the spell with cheerful conversation.

Perhaps it was his inexperience as a psychoanalyst-in-training, but I don’t remember him ever confirming for me that something was wrong with my mother. He would have been devastated to think that his upbeat behavior left me feeling frightened and very alone.

Now I understand that my mother had flashbacks around that time from her own brutal childhood. They spilled over into the horrific stories she sometimes told when she tucked me in — of the medical experiments performed in the Nazi camps, or of how her own mother relentlessly beat her for years.

I remember how her careful detail overwhelmed me, how it kept me voiceless. Memories of childhood violence must have swamped her; why else would she unburden herself to a child?

And all these years later in Santa Monica, she must have felt the slap of judgment in my innocent — or not so innocent — short story.

Five years after the guest room crisis, my mother was helping me tie cushions to my patio chaise longues when she abruptly stopped and stared off with a hard expression.

“You have no idea how difficult it was for me back then,” she said.

I looked at her in alarm; we had been talking about staging my house for sale.

“When you were born on Avenue B, I carried the groceries, the baby carriage, and the laundry up and down six flights of stairs. No one helped me. You weren’t fair to Helen at all.”

She had been chewing on that for five years. I wanted to shout: Helen is fictional — are you still on that?

In her criticism, I heard only rebuke, not the underlying hurt, and fumbled a defensive response that I still regret. She had tried to open a dialogue. It was I who couldn’t face her anger. Now I wish I’d said, “You’re right. My stories do fail to tell Helen’s truth: the weight of your despair, how angry and unseen you must have felt.”

What an act of love that would have been. If I had managed that, I might have added, “Can we also discuss the emotional truth the stories do tell?”

But it never happened. Her closed door still frightened me. I did once ask if she’d had therapy as a young mother, and she said we’d had no money for it. She consulted a psychiatrist, though, who offered Elavil. It put her to sleep, and she threw it out. Psychiatry in the early 1960s had little to offer a woman like her — brilliant, literary, wilting in the home while her husband bloomed in grad school.

Philip Roth once told a young Ian McEwan, “You have to write as though your parents are dead.” Blunt, even cruel advice, yes. But as I hear it, he wasn’t preaching contempt. He was speaking to honoring one’s separateness and private truth as an artist, even if it causes pain for those we love. Then, one hopes, we work to negotiate that pain.

And perhaps it’s good counsel for anyone trying to navigate their own truthful path — struggling to come out to a conservative family or explaining to parents bent on rearing a doctor that one yearns to be an arborist. At any rate, I kept on writing like that long after my mother emerged from the guest room.

So it might seem logical that I would start hiding all my published work, sparing my mother’s feelings, and purchasing my literary freedom.

But my parents would have known. They had Google alerts! My mother, a great reader, was fiercely proud of having a writer for a daughter. Had I hidden my successes, even with a loving explanation, she and my father would have felt just as injured.

It was a weight I chose to negotiate. When they came to readings, I curated selections for minimal emotional damage. And I relished my parents’ pride when my first story collection came out in 2009. Still, they both delved into the stories as if analyzing my dreams, and I deflected their questions, craving privacy.

“Fiction is not a mirror,” I protested at one point.

My father, his arm around my mother on their sofa, laughed and said, “Yes, it is.”

If I’d had gentler material in my head, I would have written it. Yet family themes still obsessed me as I made notes for a novel. Fiction writing remains the only language I have found to express and expunge that dreamlike dread I remember from childhood.

I was still writing as if my parents were dead when their health lurched toward failure. I spent five panicky years in a state of devotion. In my family, one did not “visit” the hospital, one moved in, and so I often found myself writing on a narrow banquette in my father’s hospital room by day, then heading to my mother’s hospital room to sleep.

Each time they recovered, they asked about my work, but, weakened, settled for elided answers: “It’s going great, thanks!”

I missed my vigorous parents. But they gave me an unexpected and liberating gift, because the second manuscript was even more radioactive than the first.

When the hardcover came out in 2014, both parents were in wheelchairs, unable to focus on printed matter and grieving the loss of reading.

I recall my mother receiving the novel on her lap as if I’d handed her a kitten, the tenderness of her touch as she weighed it in her delicate hands. She stroked the pink and orange cover, then held it up for my father to admire.

“Oh, darling,” she said, and her tone filled my heart, because here was the loving mother whose constancy I had craved as a child, and now finally had. “What a beautiful book.”

Lester Lennon is the poetry editor for Rosebud magazine and an investment banker whose career in public finance exceeds 40 years. His first book of poetry, The Upward Curve of the Earth and Heavens, can be found in 70 public and university libraries including the Los Angeles Public Library, Yale, Oxford and the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he received his B.A. in English. His second book of poetry, My Father Was A Poet, was published in 2013. His third book, Lynchings: Postcards From America, was published in January, 2022.

FLY, MY DARLING: A LOVE STORY
The Making of a Musical Memoir

by Lisa K. Richter

We sit thigh to thigh on her piano bench, her jeans against my skirt and bare leg. “Like this,” she says, dropping her hand in an augmented seventh. It is effortless for her. Harmonies, tonalities, rhythms. “Like this,” she says, nodding to me, and I find the shape and rest my hand over hers, my breath trembling, the heady scent of cigarillo floating in her hair.

~

“Are you pressing keys ,” she says, “or allowing the music?” 

“Are you creating sounds…or hearing them?”

Lynda Roth entered my life as my jazz piano instructor. An immense musical talent with a renegade past, she was a deeply kind, ferociously intelligent, outspoken woman who enjoyed Scotch and cigarillos and once considered becoming a rabbi. I was a former software engineer, a classically-trained pianist, a beginning writer, a lapsed Catholic living in a gated community with a husband, daughter, and son.

Early in our friendship, after humorously recounting her failed male and female loves, Lynda declared, “Who needs a partner! Hell, I’ve got Zeke [her fat tabby cat]. He’s warm, agreeable, shares my bed, and shits outside. What more could a woman want?”

It turns out she could want quite a bit more. And I could, too.

Pinned to the cork wall in my office, along with wisdom from Adrienne Rich, Elie Wiesel, and Dante, is a drawing of that consequential moment when Alice studies the Wonderland potion she holds in her hand, knowing it will dramatically alter her and her life, quite possibly forever. And cork-pinned below, advice from friend and writer, Heather Donahue: “If you’re afraid to do something and it doesn’t include hospitals or prisons, you should probably do it.”

There was seemingly no stopping it, the onset of our unexpected and profoundly life-altering love. When a few years later Lynda was gone from the world, our time together began to feel like a dream. I had an urgent need to make sense of, and hold onto, those luscious, intense, tumultuous years in the middle of my life. They called out again and again, shouting, weeping, and laughing their way into poems and essays. But there was a larger story waiting. Scenes and memory fragments, some on index cards, others on scraps of paper, spread like scattered pearls throughout my office. I studied them for months, searching for the thread that might link them and make them whole.

I began rereading favorite memoirs and narratives: What was it, beyond their captivating prose, that made them work? What was their thread?

In Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, everything flows from a painting Mark Doty encounters in the opening scene of the book. “. . . I have a backache, I‘m travel weary, and it couldn’t matter less, for this whole scene—the crowd and hustle on the museum steps, which seem alive all day with commerce and hurry, with gatherings and departures—is suffused for me with warmth, because I have fallen in love with a painting. . . .” Doty moves through his life (losing a partner to AIDS, the awakening of a new relationship), past to present and back, the painting always somewhere there, sparking the memory, the reflection.

In Rebecca Solnit’s memoir, The Faraway Nearby, she returns again and again to . . . apricots. They’d been on her mother’s tree, and now she has them, a vast pile of them, spread out before her, slowly rotting. “Sometimes the key arrives long before the lock. Sometimes a story falls in your lap. Once about a hundred pounds of apricots fell into mine. [. . .]The vast pile of apricots included underripe, ripening, and rotten fruit. The range of stories I can tell about my mother include some of each. . . .”

In The Memory Room, Mary Rakow’s writing hits the page in lyrical snips and pieces. Not a memoir, though it feels like one. She once mentioned that until she came across the poem, Todesfuge, by Paul Celan, the book wasn’t finished. She interspersed fragments of Celan’s poem throughout, a thread from which all the memories and poetic reflections could attach themselves, until the entire story became a woven tapestry of recovery.

And then there’s Apeirogon, again not a memoir, though the manner in which McCann portrays the two men (one an Israeli, the other Palestinian) and the conflicts (internal, external, worldly) gives it the feel of one. An intimate story. But it is more than their story. Other pieces of knowledge and historical news are pressed into it. McCann travels freely through time revisiting events from different angles, again and again (the daughters have died, then they are alive, then the men are young, then old, then playing with the daughters), linking the segments one to another with unique hooks, a thought or word in each showing up in the following, creating an intriguing, intellectual puzzle and grounding us in a flowing time fluster.

I, too, had assembled a collection of seemingly unconnected elements: moments of longing, desire, grief, death, birth, rebirth. Visits to hospitals, family farmhouses, local bars. Childhood reflections, philosophical insights, riffs on mathematical and musical concepts. I tried linking the memories, one to another and then another, a method which came naturally but resulted in nothing more than a complex memory map, a decidedly non-flowing time fluster.

Themes begin to emerge. Flying, certainly: the free motion and freedom of jazz. Improvisation in music and love. The sense (need) to let go, in so many ways.

I scrapped scenes, added others. Distilled thick paragraphs down to a phrase, a heartbeat. It would be important, I knew, to acknowledge the unvoiced: the emotive stillness that holds so much truth.

~

“Is there more?” My lips at her ear.

“Oh darling. There is always more.”

~

I worked out a rough chronological throughline with past events woven in—a story structure with the bones of a beginning (the searching and finding), a middle (the losing), and an end (the finding again). Segments were shuffled. And shuffled. The number of drafts grew. How would I get this right?

Don’t force it, I heard Lynda say as she had so often in the past. Listen.

I began to envision the story as a musical composition in words—poetic phrases surrounded by pulses of silence, allowing the tones, the emotions, to sing. And more: I realized the story’s beginning, middle, and end patterned themselves thematically after classical sonata form—a three-part musical structure in which each movement explores a central theme or motif. Basically, the first section introduces the main theme in a lively allegro tempo; the middle section (the development) challenges that theme, creating a counter melody, slower, pensive, often somber; the third returns to the original idea and quickened pace, somewhat altered, and occasionally in a different key.

A love story in three movements?

It felt right. Still, it was unconventional. Would anyone get it? Would it matter if they didn’t? 

When I googled sonata form and uncovered this poetic description in Encyclopedia Britannica online of the form’s second movement—an astonishingly accurate telling of the story’s middle section—I knew I was on to something:

“In sonata form, the point at which [the second of three parts] passes into [the third and final part] is one of the most important psychological moments in the entire sonata-form structure. It marks the end of the main argument and the beginning of the final synthesis for which that argument has prepared the listener’s mind. The preparation for it is usually a long passage of gathering tension. As a result of the events in the development, the listener perceives the subjects in a new relationship rather like a traveler who glimpses the parts of a valley separately as he climbs a hill and then, when he reaches the summit, sees the entire landscape for the first time as a whole.”

And so, yes, a love story in three movements.

Allegro opens with Lynda standing in the doorway of her cottage as I approach that first afternoon, the sky a deep blue, the air rich with beached sea kelp, salt. The upbeat theme: a sense of anticipation, promise, a knowing that something more will come. The beginning of flight.

Adagio challenges that optimism; the mood turns pensive, soulful, then somber. It’s a passage of grief then spiritual realignment after Lynda’s death, a gradual moving upward toward something, something. . . .

~

I rest my hands on the keys.

It has been a while.

~

When the sun’s fire drops into the Pacific, I uncork a bottle of wine, the aroma intense, like my grandfather’s crushed black grapes. His own wine so pungent the color was nearly blue. 

The close of another day, one more. 

“Keep me open to accept the way forward.”

~

In Allegro con brio, the finale, I open the door to Paul who arrives with his guitar. There’s a sense of closure and of new beginning, a return to the theme of anticipation and promise and love, Lynda still spiritually present; an upbeat tempo—flying, freedom—in a decidedly different key.

The thread I’d searched for, of course, was music. It had been there all along.

EXCERPT FROM “MOCKINGBIRD”

by Mark Coggins

Spade is trying to find out what happened to the real falcon by searching Floyd Thursby’s abandoned possessions.

Spade stepped off a street-car on Geary near Leavenworth and walked half a block to the Geary Inn Hotel. He went through the miniscule lobby to the desk and asked a square-chinned man with pomaded hair to speak to the hotel-detective.

“We don’t have one,” said the square-chinned man.

“Then let me speak to the manager.”

The desk clerk went away, and presently a door by the side of the reception window opened and a sleek man with dark hair and a moustache appeared. He said: “You wish to speak with me?”

Spade nodded. “A guest of yours was killed, a Mr. Floyd Thursby. Shot four times in the back—just outside the hotel.”

The manager pursed his lips and swallowed. “That is so. An unfortunate incident that had nothing to do with the hotel. May I ask what business it is of yours?”

“I’m Spade. My partner was killed that night by the same gang.”

The dark man looked at Spade and nodded thoughtfully. “So I understand.”

“The police—Lieutenant Dundy and Detective-sergeant Polhaus—would have questioned the staff, searched the dead man’s room. Did they leave anything behind? Belonging to the dead man, I mean.”

The manager drew his head back. “That’s not something—”

Spade leaned forward, the v shape of his mouth pulled taut over the v of his jutting chin. “Look, this business isn’t finished, in spite of what the cops think. If you want to avoid further mentions of the hotel in newspaper stories, you’ll play ball.”

“And exactly how will letting you examine Mr. Thursby’s possessions keep the hotel out of the newspapers?”

“I’m looking for a link to other gang members. Gang members the police haven’t caught. Now, do you still have anything of Thursby’s or not?”

The manager looked down. “Mr. Thursby had a valise with clothing and other personal items. The police didn’t take it, and no family members have claimed it.”

“Let’s see it, then.”

The manager clasped his hands behind his neck. “All right,” he said at last. “Follow me.”

He led Spade through a small office to a door that opened on a storeroom. He took a scarred cowhide suitcase from a shelf and brought it to a library table where he placed it on its side. “This is it.”

Spade’s thick fingers undid the catches and sorted through the contents with deliberate care. Shirts, socks, a union suit and a new package of handkerchiefs were examined and set to one side. He opened a box of thirty-eight cartridges and took out a round, grunting while he held it to the light. “The brother of one of these got my partner.”

“You have my condolences,” said the manager.

Spade made no reply to that and set the bullets aside. He reached into a side pocket of the suitcase and drew out a matchbox and a stack of paper. The matchbox was bright red with the words Shanghai Low, 532 Grant Avenue, San Francisco printed in a typeface meant to mimic the brush strokes of Chinese characters. The uppermost paper from the stack was folded into quarters, and when unfolded was revealed to be a receipt or bill written in a foreign language. Numbers written on the receipt indicated two of something had been ordered, but the price for the item was given in a foreign currency, so its cost was unclear.

The remaining papers in the stack were all copies of a wanted poster from Hongkong printed in English and Chinese. The wanted individual was named Huang Xiaolin, alias “Big Ears,” and the picture seemed to corroborate the nom de guerre. A lumpy-faced individual with protruding ears and fleshy lips, Xiaolin appeared to be in his early thirties and was pictured in a silk shirt with a mandarin collar.

Spade folded one of the posters into quarters and put it and the receipt into his jacket pocket. “I’ll hang on to these for now. Thanks for your help.”

A puzzled look spread over the manager’s features. “I can’t see what help it’s been, but you are welcome.” He hesitated. “And you’ll keep the house out of any future scandal?”

“I’ll do my level best.”

Spade went back to the lobby and out the front door. As he crossed the threshold, a bullet kissed a hole in the door-frame inches from his nose. Another ventilated the crown of his hat. He fell back inside.

♤

Effie Perine held Spade’s hat, wriggling a finger through the hole as she stood by his desk. “It’s a miracle you weren’t killed. Did you see who it was?”

“I was too busy trying to bite the floor,” he said from his swivel-chair. “I have a pretty good idea, though.” He cocked an eyebrow at the girl.

She frowned at him. “Samuel Spade! This isn’t a game. Who then?”

“Polhaus came by to sweep up the glass and comfort the living. He let slip that Wilmer Cook escaped from jail.”

“The boy who was working for Gutman?”

Spade reached for his tobacco and papers. “Yeah, the gunsel. But he killed his boss in the end, and before that, he let Floyd Thursby have it right in front of that selfsame hotel.” Spade finished rolling his cigarette and chuckled.

“What’s funny?”

“I had just finished assuring the hotel manager that I would keep his joint out of the papers. He’ll be the lead story now.”

Effie Perine sighed and reached for the pigskin lighter. She flicked it under Spade’s cigarette. “I knew that Russian was trouble. I never should have let him in the office.”

Spade leaned back to draw on his cigarette. “We’ve got to make rent somehow,” he said as he exhaled smoke.

“What will you do next?”

He pulled out the papers he had taken from the hotel and held out the receipt. “It’s as much what you’ll do. Thursby had this in his suitcase. I think it’s a bill of sale for two lead copies of the falcon, written in Turkish. Can you get your cousin the professor at Berkeley to ask one of his egghead buddies to confirm that?”

“I could do that,” she said, curiosity replacing her previous scolding tone. “What would it mean?”

“It would mean that we would need to give Mr. Floyd Thursby a lot more credit than we have. That he didn’t show O’Shaughnessy the blind loyalty that everyone said he did. Instead of being crossed by her, he crossed her. He contrived to have O’Shaughnessy end up with one fake, either by substituting it after she stole the real one from the Russian or by taking the real one directly from the Russian and leaving the copy for her to steal. Then he left a second fake in the Russian’s trunk so he wouldn’t tumble to the theft until well after they were gone, if ever.”

Color rose in the girl’s cheeks. “What did he do with the real one?”

Spade plucked a shred of tobacco from his lower lip and smiled up at her. “I can’t say for certain, but if I were Thursby and I were dippy enough to stick with O’Shaughnessy after taking it, I might do as she did and find someone on La Paloma to transport it from Hongkong to San Francisco before jumping on the faster boat with her.”

EXTREMES AND THE SPACE BETWEEN

by Erin L. McCoy

Seeing the movie Jaws effectively put an end to my childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist. But it wasn’t the shark that did it.

Those shots looking out into silt-swept pelagic space, deepening waters extending into a distance it was impossible to gauge—those were what scared me. But what scares us most is often what haunts us. For as long as I’ve shrunk in the face of what mysteries those waters might contain, I’ve also been unable to look away. So while my career in marine biology ended early, I’ve persisted in asking questions—asking more than answering.

My first poetry collection, Wrecks (Noemi Press, 2025), was inspired by the great auk, a flightless seabird driven to extinction around 1844. The book was sparked, initially, by the true story of one of the last great auks, killed by a small group of sailors from the remote island of St. Kilda, Scotland. The sailors, stranded in a storm, became convinced that the auk was a witch and was causing the storm, and killed her to stop it. As I dug deeper, I learned that St. Kilda had only recently been converted to Christianity, and therefore likely still clung to some of their pre-Christian beliefs.

Ultimately, Wrecks engaged not just with the history of the great auk but with the question of why many of those who came across the bird described the auk, with slippery pronouns, as having human characteristics—“it walked like a man”; “he made no cry”—yet immediately thereafter, killed the bird. These encounters evoked Freud’s work on the uncanny and the phenomenon of the “uncanny valley”—that is, those liminal spaces in which nothing sits easily in a single category. We react to categorization ambiguity with great discomfort. We lash out.

Having grown up in rural Kentucky a non-Christian, I knew how dangerous it could be not to fit into any accepted “slot.” Many of the poems in Wrecks evoke the violence that has historically arisen—that still arises—in an attempt to put people and animals and the natural world “in their place.” This place almost always sits within a hierarchy—on a scale of better to worse, superior to inferior, worthy to unworthy.

The first poem in Wrecks, reproduced below, evokes all of these themes. But there are as many ways to tell this story as there are beings to live it. And when I began writing my first novel, Underlake—forthcoming from Doubleday on April 21—similar threads emerged. What I was interested in exploring in Underlake was not so much the space in between, but the extremes.

We all invent our own versions of the world. We build them in our heads; we construct them of brick and beams, and seal ourselves inside; we paste them all over our walls; they drip down our personalized news and social media feeds. They reflect us back to ourselves, reinforcing what we believe to be true, and when left in isolation, unchallenged, they can become wildly distinct from anyone else’s version of the world.

In Underlake, a series of underwater cottages isolated for decades each comes to occupy its own mythology. As a result, everything outside of any given cottage becomes a space of discomfort, squirming with challengers to what the occupants know to be the truth. But a single, unchallenged truth is perhaps the greatest danger. That gray area between categories, between truths, between worlds—that, I believe, is where we learn.

That is why, as a writer, I resist answers. I believe my job is to keep asking questions—even if they’re the same ones over and over, each time a word revised, each time a different context. There are as many answers as there are people to ask the question. My hope is that, in time, we are all asking more than we are answering.

White whales

from Wrecks by Erin L. McCoy

Water can disguise itself: chapped
lips, gnawed tundra, or the glass
stomach of an abyssal fish with still-

burning mammoths inside it.
In captivity one auk liked to flaunt
her swimming at the end of a rope.

With winter’s approach, white feathers
bloomed at her neck. She slipped off;
soon rumors of a body limp ashore

at Gourock; how to know except
to cut her open, plumb the gut
for hemp fiber and milk? Am I just

another thief? Have I taken her blood
for my blood instead of bleeding?
A pet is a costume for a feeling—

shifts according to need, like water.
Where anything is forgiven, there’s
no need for mercy. I can twist any

crime into a fateful error
till everything’s a child’s drawing:
house, barn, horse, cross, terror.

ON FINISHING MOBY-DICK ON THE BEACH IN SF

by Mark Gozonsky

I commemorated my most recent finishing of Moby-Dick in December of 2025 on a dune at Ocean Beach at the western edge of San Francisco, beyond the Golden Gate, next stop Pacific Ocean. That’s where it happens, the ultra-climax of this novel that never ends.

To commemorate this third or fourth Moby-Dick reading of my lifetime, I turned on the beach to the chapter titled “The Pacific,” and found Ishmael looking my way. From the other side of the ocean and 180 years ago, he remarks how the same waves he contemplates from the Bashee isles also wash “new-built California towns” and make “all coasts one bay.”

That was really transportive. I took solace in the novel’s universal embrace on this morning after two more mass shootings. Later in the day, Peter Orner, teacher of this great Community of Writers course I’ve been taking on the book, would start off our last class, “There’s a lot going on in the world and I’m glad to be here.”

I’ve been thinking about his eloquent simplicity, and it makes me want to say a little more. Moby-Dick is suited to public mourning. A paragraph before Ishmael looks out towards California, he dwells upon the dead at sea:

And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potter’s Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

Melville gives us so many gifts of solace in this sentence, starting with the first word, “And.” Sentences that start with And suggest radical continuity. The next word, “meet,” was already archaic in 1850, a holdover from the Book of Common Prayer and King James Bible. Here, the old-fashioned way of saying “fitting and proper” connects Ishmael’s reflections to those sacred texts.

Then we get into the oceanic rhythm of the prose, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing through sounds infinitely rich. Millions of mixed. Shades and shadows. Behold this rare pearl of a word — somnambulisms. Bask in the reverie of dreaming, dreaming. All of this beautiful truth as prose cresting to the metaphor of ever-rolling waves generated by the spirits of the drowned.

Moby-Dick is made of coping with grief. Ishmael’s story is an elegy for his shipmates and the redemption of his survival. On page one, he fends off suicidal survivor’s guilt by committing to tell the tale. Off he goes to whaling towns, paying his respects at a chapel where the walls are inscribed with terse, heartbreaking memorials to sailors lost at sea. It is not just human grief Melville registers. He feels deeply for the hunted whales, their dying heads “turning sunwards.” Ahab’s head turns sunward often, too. I could tell I was under this book’s spell because of how often I thought about it when I looked at the sun.

Before the Pequod is fully under sail, Ishamael eulogizes one sailor who stands for all:

Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing — straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

I took some notes on the many smart and/or arguable things people in this class I’ve been taking said. This one guy, Michael, said something to the effect of, this book teaches us how to read it. At first I thought, does it really? Because, you really do have to will yourself through long, long chapters about ropes and whale skulls to feel what I felt reading on the beach, looking out at the ocean Melville describes as “the tide-beating heart of earth.”

It really does help a lot to read this with other people because that’s what gets you through the hard parts. Also, I have come to realize that Michael was exactly right. “Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing – straight up, leaps thy apotheosis” is how the redemptive power of Moby-Dick works.

You read through this amazing, stultefying, amazing, stultefying book, all 820 pages. On page 819 you know everything there is to know about whaling. You have entered the mind of God on this topic. And then, on page 820, it’s gone. Not only gone, but as if it never was. Nothing ends so completely as the ending of Moby-Dick.

Until you pick the book back up, maybe right away, maybe years later, maybe both, maybe life is just what we do while we’re reading Moby-Dick. Here it is, the universe once again unfolding, different each time, but always with generations of devout readers as companions, an epic Kaddish for reading and carrying on together.