Love As A Practice
The Body, Brain, and Books: Eleven Questions with writer and teacher Jeannine Ouellette
Welcome to another edition of The Body, Brain, & Books. If you enjoy reading these quick, insightful interviews brimming with wisdom and hope, please subscribe to Beyond!
What are you reading now?
I’m a person who reads multiple books simultaneously. I wish I weren’t—it seems easier to finish one book then start another, but alas. So, now I’m reading The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald, and two exciting ARCs—Docile: Memoirs of a Not So Perfect Asian Girl, by Hyeseung Song, and A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, by Tia Levings, both important and timely.
And I just finished Rene Denfeld’s huge-hearted novel, Sleeping Giants, and I’m thrilled to meet her for coffee in Portland soon when my husband and I fly there to visit our granddaughter. Rene and I have an uncanny amount in common: she was a homeless teen and I was in foster care, we’ve both been foster parents, and we both work in prisons—Rene does justice work and I teach creative writing. Also, Rene has adopted children from foster care, and my youngest child is currently doing the same. I have admired Rene forever.
I also just finished the 1994 historical novel Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, which was brought to my attention this winter when a writer friend recounted such an enchanting personal memory of that book that I had to immerse myself in it immediately. Funnily enough, it turns out David Guterson is the brother of another novelist I adore—Mary G, who writes What Now?, a newsletter of inventive weekly writing prompts. I’d already gotten to know Mary G through her enthralling comments on Writing in the Dark, where it quickly became clear she’s brilliant. So, it was great fun to discover that I was, by complete happenstance, reading Mary G’s brother’s thirty-year-old novel. Life is strange and wonderful and maybe there are no coincidences.
What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?
My parents never monitored my reading in any way, a benefit of neglect. But also, I didn’t read voraciously when I was young. My childhood was traumatic and although I found respite and escape in books, I also found it difficult to sustain my attention. I grieved the loss of a richly read childhood while watching my own kids grow up as avid readers. That said, I loved Where the Red Fern grows when I was fourteen—it cleaved my heart and saved my life. It’s like, I needed something outside of myself to deeply mourn, and weeping for Old Dan and Little Ann, that beautiful pair of hunting dogs, and for the boy who lost them, externalized the complicated sorrow I carried as an abandoned teenager on the verge of foster care. Also at fourteen, I fell hard for The Count of Monte Cristo, with its themes of escape and revenge, mercy and forgiveness. I also loved E.B. White’s masterpiece books Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan, and was a fan of Judy Blume, especially Deenie and Forever. I mean, Forever was mostly beyond my understanding when I read it, but it still seared into me a lasting and empowering impression of sexuality. Before all that, it was Beverly Cleary. I loved her. In a healthier family, I would have been Ramona.
What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?
I’ve read Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina many times, and both Dorothy and her work have helped shape my writing and my life.
’s Cat’s Eye is another book I’ve read repeatedly. Neither of these are agenda-driven novels, but these two writers both have minds that spark and glow with the truth of growing up female, and that truth illuminates these books in beautiful, savage, and curious ways. I also recently re-read Sue Miller’s The Good Mother, which back in 1986 broke ground with its exploration of the cultural norms around motherhood, single motherhood, sexuality, freedom, and punishment. Miller’s voice in that book is quietly thrilling in its observational acuity. It’s hard to believe it’s a debut novel! I kind of like how dated it is, too, because, sadly, not that much has changed 40 years later. In fact, that novel is like the 40-year-older aunt to Jessamine Chan’s chilling and brilliant speculative 2022 debut novel, The School for Good Mothers. Oh, and two other explosively good books I sometimes re-read for comfort and craft—Justin Torres’s We the Animals and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water.The thing is, I often come to the page yearning for devastation, needing it like my next breath. I find solace in being undone by a book, being brought to my knees by the language of another and the world they build from words, the prisons they paint themselves into and out of. It reminds me I’m not alone in this brutal world and that language is a raft to the future.
What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?
My black cashmere cropped boxy crewneck sweater. It’s light enough for a cool summer evening, but warm enough for a winter day. It’s by Everlane, and it’s made of what they call an “updated blend of GRS-certified recycled cashmere and GCS-certified responsible cashmere” which means it’s partly recycled and has a lower environmental impact than regular cashmere, and any new cashmere fibers come from goats raised humanely. Everlane says it should last “years and years,” but I actually wear through the elbows in less than a year thanks to the wearing it every day. I’ve learned to watch for discounted new ones on Ebay and Poshmark and similar resale sites. But even at the full price—$198—it’s only fifty cents a day for a year and it definitely makes me feel like myself. I love black, I love soft, and I love the boxy cut—it’s stylish and flattering. And it goes with pretty much everything.
What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?
A year ago, Maria Popova said: “Nothing, not one thing, hurts us more — or causes us to hurt others more — than our certainties. The stories we tell ourselves about the world and the foregone conclusions with which we cork the fount of possibility are the supreme downfall of our consciousness. They are also the inevitable cost of survival, of navigating a vast and complex reality most of which remains forever beyond our control and comprehension. And yet in our effort to parse the world, we sever ourselves from the full range of its beauty, tensing against the tenderness of life.”
Popova’s words could not be more urgently wise. I’ve shared this quote often, including with my grown son, who said in response, “That’s good advice, Mom. I veer toward certainty.” I was so wowed by his self-awareness. I love him a whole lot.
Popova’s framing of this sentiment catalyzed a shift for me. Before, I’d mostly considered uncertainty as related to creative work and artmaking, especially Keats’s concept of negative capability and the necessary befriending of uncertainty. But something about Popova’s opening statement about how we hurt ourselves and others with our certainties, that stopped me short.
Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?
I’ve written about Frannie, our 9-pound Maltese-Pomeranian, here on Substack. She’s a very wise teacher and healer. I went through a profound loss five years ago, something complicated that’s become chronic. But when it was acute, I didn’t know how I’d persevere in the face of it, or even if I could.
That’s when Frannie came into my life. I say “came into my life” because she wasn’t even supposed to be my dog. And she was never socialized. She had extreme hypervigilance and reactivity. She barked like a maniac at everything and nothing. She could barely be walked on a leash and trying to work at home with her barking was so stressful I’d be in tears by the end of the day. But Frannie’s progress has been monumental. She can now interact with other dogs pretty well—an absolute miracle—and her fear of people is vastly reduced, too. She’ll always be extra cautious. But she is simply not the same dog she was.
Frannie and I have really learned each other. And to really learn an animal, and have the animal learn you, is beautiful. There’s so much to discover about ourselves through the relationships we form across species. Which reminds me of another incredible book, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a hybrid masterpiece that feels like one part poetry, one part essay, and one part something altogether new.
Anyway, Frannie follows me like a lamb, naps with me on request—at 9 pounds, she’s the exact size and shape of a human baby—plus, she has a vast English vocabulary which makes chatting with her delightful. She has this way of tilting her head—first this way then that way—as she works to discern what I’m saying. I love her with all my heart. I didn’t know it was possible to love an animal this much. It’s glorious.
What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?
I did not expect to be a university instructor. I dropped out of college when I was 20 to get married and have a baby, and I never finished my undergraduate degree. I’ve had this wild, circuitous career path—and life path, actually—where very little has happened in the expected order. But somehow, in my mid-forties, I found myself working as a “principal writer” for the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. At first, all I did was edit highly technical evidence reviews. Huge learning curve. But, during my fourteen years at the U, I’ve managed to complete an MFA in fiction, publish a memoir and a good batch of literary essays and short stories, and found my own tiny but mighty creative writing program. And as I progressed as a creative writer and teacher of writing, my day job at the University evolved too. Now, I teach a class called Writing for Public Health and guest lecture in graduate classes, and I facilitate narrative health forums through the Project for Advancing Healthcare Stewardship, a small initiative funded by the Institute for Advanced Studies. I still edit evidence reviews, but I do it differently now, and better. I’m thankful for the University and kind of amazed I landed there.
Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?
When I read this question, all I can think is, “neither,” and it makes me doubt, a little, how healed I am, even though I feel generally quite healed these days. In my memoir, The Part That Burns, the narrator says this:
I never learned how to sing alone without looking over my shoulder. Not even in the shower. If you sing with me, though, I will find you. I will layer my voice on top of yours, inside of yours, like wax pooling in a candle, contained and alive in that column of light.
When babies cry, we sing. Our voices pull anguish into melody, float fear and sadness between layers of sound.
When the page before us is empty and untamed, we take it into our mouths. We chew it, fibrous and thick, until we can finally swallow it down.
Maybe that’s my answer. Sure, I do yoga. I dance with my grandchildren. I run and play with Frannie. I jump on my Bellicon mini-trampoline, one of the best investments in joyful movement I have ever made. But, at the end of the day, I’m still finding my way back into my body, and my greatest joy and healing still comes from chewing the page, fibrous and thick, and swallowing it down.
What are your hopes for yourself?
I want so badly to finish my novel! I am going away with Billie, my youngest adult child and collaborator at Writing in the Dark, in June, on a three-day, super serious writing intensive, and I think that’ll push me to the endpoint on the manuscript. I already feel the full story, I can hear it, I know its shape, it’s all so real. I just need the concentrated time to complete the draft. I know I can. Everyone around me, everyone who loves me, sees that time is the thing I most need. My kids gave me, for my birthday last week, a stunning gift—an hourglass, crystal clear and delicate and unmistakable in its silent but resounding message.
I set that hourglass on my mantel where I can see it from almost all angles at all times. It is both a reminder and a talisman.
What’s a kindness that changed your life?
Two women during my adolescence took me into their homes when my parents abandoned me. And that’s a term I only recently claimed: abandonment. Because that’s what it is to be left on the street by your parents. It’s taken me a lot of years to accept the truth of that, because it was painful and ugly and, at the time, I really wanted it to be different than it was, obviously. But when you are placed in foster care as a teenager with two living parents—and neither of those parents visit you or interact with you in any way while you are coming of age in the system—that is an experience of abandonment. And when I was going through that and the years that led up to it, these two women—first was Eve, a woman whose daughters I babysat, and then Cheryl, my Spanish teacher and the mother of one of my friends—took me in. They cared for me, paid for my school lunches, bought me clothes, took me out to dinner with their own families. And more than anything, they told me that I was a good kid, that I was smart and kind and solid, and that my situation was not my fault. They told me that my mom needed help, and that they wished there was more they could do. They told me things would get better when I turned eighteen, and they promised me that eighteen wasn’t as far away as it felt. I was only fourteen and fifteen when I lived with those women, and they were so smart to know that for a miserable kid, eighteen seems like another galaxy, like a horizon you’ll never reach, like some kind of cruel mirage in an imaginary future. But these women swore to me that my eighteenth birthday, and the legal freedom it would bring, would come sooner than I realized. They told me to hang on. Ultimately, these women were not able to prevent me from ending up in foster care, because my mom refused to let them continue helping. But they did prevent me from losing faith in my future. I will never, ever forget the kindness of those two women. They changed my life. They saved my life.
What’s a guiding force in your life?
Love. Definitely, love. And for me, love is about looking very closely at things as they are, seeing them truly, and acting with as much wisdom and generosity as possible in light of those truths. When I practice this diligently, it becomes easier to be genuinely loving because I am more able to accept challenging and sometimes painful truths that cannot be changed or are not mine to change.
I spent a lot of years trying to make things perfect. Perfect self, perfect marriage, perfect motherhood, perfect family, perfect life. What a waste of energy! Perfect is impossible, and perfect is the enemy of good. I did harm to myself and others in the name of perfection, through well-intentioned but misguided efforts to protect certain people or situations from forces I could never control, or to fix things that were not in my power to fix (or, in some cases, things that were none of my business). I thought, I really did, that I was operating from a place of love because I felt love for the people involved. Sigh. Life is complicated, and I can be forgiving to my younger self, who was doing her best. But sometimes love means getting out of the way entirely. Sometimes love means letting go. Sometimes love means agreeing to disagree and understanding that people can view the truth differently. And, sure, of course, sometimes love means putting up a fight. It’s the power of discernment that’s so crucial. It’s not easy!
The practice of paying close attention to the external world, which I came to first through my creative work, helps me add more love to the world without trying to control what doesn’t belong to me. Being in the world and attending to the world as a writer makes my life exponentially realer and more loving. For me, writing really is a metaphor for living. It’s all part and parcel.
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Just gorgeous, Jane and Jeannine. I love the deceptive simplicity of this interview and the telling of your story. The “getting out of the way” within the stark telling of it. It blooms so large in the spaces you both leave, and in the cracks of the bounty of all you have created, learned, and accepted since. Why isn’t there a verb for wisdom? Because you have both really really wisdomed well and we are all better for it.
I have been learning from Jeannine since I discovered Substack. I tend to lurk in the background of most conversations but I always find value in her words. Thanks for sharing the interview Jane. Also, I just finished Sleeping Giants by Rene Denfeld (which I received through a giveaway here) and it is phenomenal.
I am also a trauma survivor and I believe that we really have to learn to have grace with ourselves. It is a complex path to navigate and for most of us it takes a lifetime. But books and writing and friends and lots of long walks with the dog can work wonders on the soul. Thanks to you both.