Phipps reads at Authors’ Sala
July 21, 2006

Marilene Phipps is a painter, poet and a short-story writer who was born and grew up in Haiti. She has won fellowships at the Guggenheim Foundation and at Harvard’s Bunting Institute, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, and the Center for the Study of World Religions, as well as a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts.Phipps is also a Grolier poetry prize winner. Her poetry manuscript “Crossroads and Unholy Water” won the 1999 Crab Orchard Review Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press.

(The manuscript had also been a finalist for the Walt Whitman prize from the Academy of American Poets.) Her poetry is anthologized in Sisters of Caliban and in The Beacon Best of 1999; it has also appeared in magazines such as Callaloo, Ploughshares and River Styx. Her short fiction was published in Transition magazine, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review and The Best American Short Stories 2003, as well as listed in The Best American Short Stories 2001. A new poetry manuscript and a short story collection are currently being reviewed for publication.

Phipps will be reading poetry from her new manuscript, “God, Love, and the Leap of Frogs.” She will also be showing slides of her paintings.

Following is an excerpt from her novella The House of Fossils
Most days, the heart knows how to pace itself. Most days. 
And I am not counting moments when it suddenly takes to jumping, in uninterrupted, short, quickened beats as if an owl had just called out, in the night, in your back. 

But, waking up from a strong dream, a painful dream, the heart does not know itself yet, does not know its pace, it hangs in doubt, and weighs imprisoned in an unformulated clutch. 

Alive but alone is what the heart feels when waking from such dreams, as if you had just come from, and survived, many lives; alive and alone, like the half-drowned survivor of a shipwreck washed to the shore of an island that feels like a desert. 

You remain bruised from the imprints of people’s features, people familiar to your life but whom you have just discovered to be forever unknown to you and mysterious. Yet you feel, find and recognize in all the layers of your flesh the lairs that each has dug. 

You sit on the edge of the bed as odd to yourself and vulnerable as if you stood on that beach—the beach of your wrecked survival and escape, sensing that behind the dense shrubbery a small distance away, a diffuse mass of natives is observing you as they try to formulate to themselves what you are and what they should do with you. 

And so you make some steps towards the bathroom or towards the kitchen as you would towards the hidden people in order to tell them that you are like them, you are human, you belong to their real world. You want them to know that they do not need to define who you are, they do not need to find a place for you in which you might fit—coming out of the water as you just did, it is enough to be able to open your own eyes, touch your arm, your neck, recognize them even, and then still be able to say “I am here.”

From such a dream I woke on my last night in Spencer’s Island. 

I got up and walked through the house. I felt awkward. I looked at the fossils, overwhelmingly present that morning, as if I had intruded in their house—they had only tolerated my presence although they had desired it. They had been patient with me until now as good parents are with a child who is learning to stand and take a step forward. They had seemed to be parents filled with humbled dignity and delight, yet also with the distance and infallibility of those possessing knowledge of past ages. 

I touched some of the fossils and instead felt their jagged edges—marks of brutal breaks, unnatural separation. 

That morning, the fossils no longer had for me that quiet, deep and wise acceptance of beings existing in receding time. They held the same pathos as a broken jawbone found on the sand, attesting that a sacrilege had occurred; a piece had been ripped from the whole for which it continually yearned and to which it forever belonged. 

I had once thought of my good fortune at finding myself, albeit for a short while, in a house full of fossils. I relished it as a similarly sudden, thrilling and short lived opportunity as when we get a sighting of whales—dark, sleek, impressive—emerging boldly in full sight, like ideas suddenly do, before plunging back into the deep, leaving in us the awe and the persistent longing for what they had helped us wondrously but questioningly glimpse of nature and ourselves, of the universe, our place in it. 

I no longer saw tectonic plates as simply matter forced away by movement and heat that shaped the earth and continue to do so. 

My intellectual distance had ebbed.
Tectonic plates were now for me living entities. Human beings themselves now also seemed to be tectonic plates—each confronted with and manipulated in their core by forces incomprehensible, uncontrollable and viciously whimsical. I saw the tragedy of plates that, in their sloping movement and shifting away, irretrievably left parts of themselves behind. 
Life itself seemed a voyage on a tectonic plate: we are slowly and imperceptibly drifting away and losing sight of our original shores. Childhood is a hazy landscape where our roots encroach and of which we only keep immutable images that are fossilized in us and weigh like a petrified egg that never hatched.

While I stood in the house, surrounded by fossils, I felt myself in the company of animate forms that were the result of endless, hapless crushing or pulling apart, and fragmentation of their beings through millennia. I looked at them and saw my fellow human beings in them—misshapen, dark, weighed-down, frayed, brittle, broken, divided, sharp-edged, randomly set and stored at different levels, shelved to furnish, decorate and accent the small house our universe makes. 

I picked my hat up from the dining table and walked out. The fog brought inland with the evening tide was still there, but out of a distant rent in the low sky a different light could be glimpsed. I sat on the big tree trunk that was no longer more than washed-up driftwood in front of the house. This grey-white skeleton had a kind of softened hip-bone where I nested my buttocks, my back remaining straight up and eyes far at sea as if I were on the lookout for the return of something missing and dear. 

Stripped of all former majesty and pretense, the big driftwood was now only a random bench and shelf where the idle unload their minds and where shells get abandoned by small hands that had first picked them up as treasures for keepsake in memorabilia boxes hidden in the back of a bedroom drawer.


Susan Page

Susan Page’s most recent book, published in May, is Why Talking Is Not Enough: 8 Loving Actions That Will Transform Your Marriage. The following information is taken from the author’s website (www.susanpage.com). See the July 14 issue of Atención for an excerpt from the book.

The Eight Loving Actions

The Eight Loving Actions that move you completely beyond the old model of relationship communication skills are these:
1. Adopt a Spirit of Good Will 
2. Give Up Problem-Solving 
3. Act As If 
4. Practice Restraint 
5. Balance Giving and Taking 
6. Act on Your Own 
7. Practice Acceptance 
8. Practice Compassion 


The Five Principles of Spiritual Partnership

Here are the Five Principles of Spiritual Partnership presented in Why Talking Is Not Enough:

1. Use loving actions instead of communication when you come to an impasse. 
2. Never try to solve a problem by asking your partner to change. 
3. No matter who is “right” or “wrong,” exhibit a spirit of good will. Ask, “If I were going to behave in accord with my highest spiritual self, what would I do now?” 
4. Strive to keep in balance the times you stand up for your partner’s needs, and the times you stand up for yourself. 
5. Don’t discuss problems; don’t try to solve problems. It is an illusion to think that if you can solve your problems, you will be happy. Most problems don’t have a solution anyway; they are not problems, but facts of life. Instead of trying to solve your problems, do something to create a harmonious atmosphere in your relationship—right now.

Authors’ Sala Readings By Susan Page and Marilene Phipps
Friday, July 21, 5–7pm, Posada San Francisco, Plaza Principal 2, 50 pesos