Kathleen Stocking’s “Long Arc of the Universe”
By F. Josephine Arrowood
Sun contributor
Writer Kathleen Stocking wants to change the world. The acclaimed author of Letters from the Leelanau and Lake Country has just published her third book of essays, The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale. In it, she takes readers along on her incredible journeys from her home in seemingly peaceful, picturesque northern Michigan to some of the world’s most unstable and terrifying places. Like a modern-day Scheherazade, she brings her skill with words, language and storytelling to protect herself, as well as teach an incredible range of students: from hardened criminals in maximum security prison to the offspring of Central American despots; from poor African-American children traumatized by gang warfare in their urban neighborhood to Third World children in Thailand and Romania.
In between her travels, she also taught literature in local schools, served as a writer-in-residence for three years on a grant from the Michigan Council for the Arts, mentored community college students, authored articles and essays, and won numerous honors for her work.
Along the way, at home and abroad, the writer did what she always does to connect with others and make sense of her world: she asked questions of people, wondered about their relationships to place, studied their roles as community members, and pondered government’s responsibilities to its citizens.
As a person, Kathleen Stocking is stout-hearted, generous, and fiercely passionate in her point of view of the world. She is a clear-eyed visionary, a relentless advocate for the people and causes most dear to her, and a formidable foe. If you are lucky enough to have her in your life, she will talk with you about things that truly matter: raising children well, making an honest living, creating and keeping community, and staying open to the tangible beauty and goodness in a sometimes brutal world. She will do more than talk, however: she’ll nourish you with gifts of her homemade cooking, flowers from her garden, articles and books to inform you, and practical advice to live by.
As a writer, Stocking brings these qualities and more to her work. The New York Times called her a modern-day “seer,” one who observes not only the vivid details, but also connects them to the larger patterns of situations like our prison systems, education, immigration and human trafficking, and the costs to everyone of treating each other inhumanely.
Yet far from being a grim, doom-laden jeremiad, The Long Arc of the Universe carries a strong message of hope about humankind’s need to belong and our tremendous capacity for kindness. This is due to Stocking’s strong moral compass, and her skill with language and imagery; she knows how to bring to life the places and people she encounters. In her essays, she rolls up her sleeves and wades into the thick of everything with the ferocious grace of a world-champion pugilist. In “California,” she recounts one effect of teaching writing to inmates at Soledad, a notorious maximum security prison:
“When you’re in a room with twenty guys the size of refrigerators, and you know half of them are killers…and the huge, stoic guy who is reading is so choked up he has to give his writing to someone else to read, and several of the guys have tears in their eyes, and the writing is stunningly good and honest — about the cause of the Zapatistas, about the father who died in prison, about the wife he loves and will never be able to hold in his arms again — all you can do, like being in church, is sit quietly.”
In a recent interview, she talked about the art of the essay and her evolution as a writer.
“One reason I fell into essay-writing was that I was doing it naturally. It’s a personal letter, about 1,000 to 1,500 words long; you can throw everything into it but the kitchen sink. It has to be honest, basically kind-hearted, and it has to have a sense of humor.
“I studied writing with Donald Hall at the University of Michigan. Poetry is telegraphing images to your reader; an image is a moment of beauty.” After college, she worked at Woman’s Day in New York City, describing the craft processes of various immigrant crafters. By 1975, she was a divorced single mother, back in northern Michigan, and working at Traverse City’s daily newspaper, the Record-Eagle.
“In 1975, women were not reporters there,” she says. “They put me in charge of ‘society’ news: clubs, obituaries and weddings. I did that for about six weeks, and features as well. I would beg to be put on the news side.”
When an opening came up unexpectedly, her editor said, “‘You have two weeks — If you can’t cut it, you’re out of a job.’ We had to write very fast, and take in the information; we had White-out and carbon paper.” She honed her journalistic skills at the Record-Eagle for three years, including a series on influential local women in politics, like Mary Sutherland and Elizabeth Weaver.
Eventually Detroit Monthly called with a proposal to do a regular “Up North” column. Stocking had never explored this form of non-fiction, but says editor Kirk Cheyfitz told her, “Go toward what you’re drawn to. If you’re not interested in writing it, no one is going to be interested in reading it,” a sage piece of advice that has guided her work ever since.
“I’d read Annie Dillard … the personal letter is the basic prototype for the essay, about 1,500 words. You have the negative and the positive, and you have to work those off each other: ‘On the one hand, on the other hand …’ You do it in a subtle and deft way, so you’re leading the reader, like taking a walk or dancing with someone. You bow, you take their hand, you go around the room. At the end, you deposit them in another place. You bring the reader into the music of the writing — you take them first one way, then another.”
She composes pieces in her head over the course of days or weeks. “I’m taking compost out, the dog for a walk, going to the grocery store. In my chapter on El Salvador, which is a very long essay, over a hundred pages — at the time, I was writing letters home to people, trying to process everything. I couldn’t talk to anyone, except the teacher who lived next door to me, who was fired after a few weeks.” Despite the very real dangers she faced while teaching at an exclusive school for the children of the ruling junta, she asserts, “A good writer has to be fair and open-minded about the people around them.”
As a writer, Stocking also reads voraciously from newspapers, magazines, biographies, histories, poetry, and anything else that will help to illuminate her chosen subject. She gets out one book after another to read passages aloud to a visitor: Ogier de Busbecq, who wrote over five centuries ago in Turkish Letters; Peter Fleming, Ian Fleming’s travel-writer brother; and D. H. Lawrence. Typically, her volumes bristle from all edges with post-it notes and newspaper clippings.
“Good writing lasts,” she says. “You learn to write by reading. You read, you think, and you feel; you try, like a painter who is trying to see and capture an image for the viewer.” She likens her role to “being a seismological station that measures every tremor. You have to take it in, then process it and give it back to the reader. It’s exhausting.”
What caused Stocking to leave the relative peace and bucolic surroundings of her Leelanau County home, time after time, to live and work in places like Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, and Craiova, Romania? In addition to needing to find work where she could be “useful”, she says, “I started thinking, why are so many people in prison? It wasn’t like that when I was growing up here, but by the time I was teaching school at Lake Leelanau St. Mary’s, everybody I knew had a family member in jail,” or so it seemed.
“I’m interested in basic fairness,” she explains. “This is my country and I’m not going to get another one. I’m 70 years old, I’m outta here, or on the way out. But I have grandchildren. In the national parks, for instance: when they — Theodore Roosevelt — created them, it was to preserve, in part, their hunting and playing grounds. For the past eight years, I’ve written letters to the Park Service: why aren’t black people represented there [in the parks’ histories]?” She has researched, lectured, and written about African-American pioneers in northern Michigan (see her August 8, 2013 article in the Glen Arbor Sun); they were prosperous and contributing members of the community, and some of their descendants still live in the area. They still are, like the Native Americans who came before them, invisible and marginalized by histories written largely by and for middle-class white people. And she notes that the parks don’t seem to have a lot of African-American visitors; they don’t see themselves there in the history.
“I have black grandchildren; my father Pierce Stocking’s name is on a road in [Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore].” She hefts a book by Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains, which documents the first grassroots antislavery campaign in the 1780s against the British slave trade.
“A writer’s job is to look and comprehend,” she says. “It’s not advocacy journalism. I’m an essayist, saying, ‘Look, how did we get here, and what do we do?’ With the Internet, there are no more borders. I think it’s a wonderful thing, by the way. Somewhere, somehow, people find out, it’s not a secret anymore.”
“I’ve always been so eccentric and stubborn, yet I’m human, too. As much as I’ve felt like a loner and an outsider, people in these small towns recognize that I’m different. But they see me and support me. Like when I was teaching: change doesn’t happen right away, but when they [students] finally have a breakthrough, they can see you’re working to help them be human, and they really love you.”
As her San Francisco Jail writing students told her, she was the scariest person they had ever met. “You just don’t quit,” they had said. She says now, “Maybe you’re not who they were expecting, but when it starts working — in extended education at the community college, or at St. Mary’s, or teaching in such hard places around the world — it’s such a high. There’s love there,” she states with conviction.
Stocking will appear at a book signing at the Cottage Book Shop in Glen Arbor on Sunday, June 26 at 11 a.m.
