First Show w/ guest Jordan Thomas
Greetings from the studio,
Not Your Literati spoke with Jordan Thomas, the creator of an undergraduate reading series in downtown Iowa City’s Public Space One. He read from a non-fiction essay entitled “Blood and Water and Fire,” a piece outlining Thomas’ past relationship with his family, namely his father. It is a gripping piece, especially when heard through Thomas’ earnest baritone voice. He weaves vignettes of his life through interchanges of pure, childish emotion and painful self-affliction.
A selection from “Blood and Water and Fire:”
“I don’t remember many things about my childhood; most of what I do remember is second-hand, stories told to me by my mother and my older brother. I don’t remember, for instance, the night my father threw me against the wall of our living room because I was awake past my bedtime. Nor do I remember him placing me on top of the refrigerator and refusing to let me down when I was young and small enough to fear even that short fall. I don’t remember why he did this, but I’m told it was because it amused him. I don’t remember many good things about my father.
This is what I do remember:
My father spanking me for breaking a vase in a furniture store. He took me behind the building, pulled my pants down, and spanked me so hard that I couldn’t sit down for hours afterward.
My father coming into the bedroom I shared with my brother, singing “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” to wake me up. “Rise and shine,” he’d say. And then he’d carry me on his shoulders down the stairs to the kitchen for breakfast, sunlight streaming through our patio door.
Working in his dental office and seeing him being friendlier and more civil with his patients than he was with me. I am still confused by this and can’t reason out why that was the case.
A road trip to Atlanta, just him and I. This was before I graduated high school, after my parents separated. He would tell bad jokes because I was the only one who found them funny. We would listen to NPR. He’d lecture me on the follies of my mother and her family.
Yells rattling the pictures hanging on the walls as he raged towards my brother for his poor grades or my mother about bills and finances. I would cry into my pillow when this happened. My older brother, in the bunk above me, pretended to sleep, offering no words to comfort me.
I also remember the funeral.”
Jordan’s Picks:
“Notes from No Man’s Land” by Eula Biss, A Selection of American Essays
Specifically: Back to Buxton and No Man’s Land
Buy it on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Notes-No-Mans-Land-American/dp/1555975186
It’s late,
Literati
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