Joyce Carol Thomas

[asakiyume]

I just found out that Joyce Carol Thomas, the author of Journey, which I just finished reading thanks to rachelmanija's review, is no longer with us! This is too bad because I wanted to write her a note telling her how much I loved her use of language and that she includes so many beings and perspectives beyond the human, and one very sweet interaction between the protagonist and a boy who likes her.

It was a kind of a strange story--there were a lot of observations from different characters' points of view, plus authorial observations, and various problems of life were glancingly or directly looked at, but then there was this suspense-novel plotline! But I really loved reading it, I think because I liked all those observations. I just liked spending time with the author as she told this story. (I wasn't actually so into the suspense-novel plotline, but I didn't mind it either; I was able to just go along with it.)

And the language, just great. I quoted some last time I talked about the book, but here's a little more. Here, for instance, is what I mean about all the living creatures in the world being present and part of the world in a way you don't often get (and that I love):

And [the teens] started running, like the deer who lived in the forest, but the deer bending over Eucalyptus Lake looked at the teenagers out of the corners of their velvet eyes and wondered at the young folks looking a little like trees and shrubs moving so resolutely down the hill, going into the town the deer visited more and more to get away from the evil that the lake had warned them about. (p. 109)

Or how about this, about lightning:

From her window Meggie watched the dance of lighting on Inspiration Mountain.

A configuration of white sticks clashing.

Far off a rumble smothered in a smokeless smoky sky.

A white leap of lightning overhead. White hot to the eyes.

A long-legged acrobat strutted, hissing between the sky and earth.

How lighting danced.

The hide-and-seek show changed everything to shadow; lightning, jealous of the light, left the red-leafed trees looking like a negative on a photograph. (p. 110)

It's not just the beauty of the images, it's that Thomas says the lightning is jealous of the light--it's that living-ness of everything. Just adore it. ... And mind you, she put this in a story of [rot13 for spoilers] grraf orvat noqhpgrq fb gurl pna or fnpevsvprq gb erwhirangr anfgl byq zra. I'm so glad she did! And so glad this story got published!

One more, when a boy who's been teasing her asks her why she doesn't like him:

Meggie suspected that past the despairing eyes, down, down into the depths of this person was an inquiring soul searching for his own blue quality of light. (p. 63)

His own blue quality of light. Did you know that that's what people seek? It feels so right.

I thought Thomas must be about my age, but no: she was my mother's age. She's a whole generation above me.

From Wikipedia:

Thomas was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the fifth of nine children in a family of cotton pickers. In 1948 they moved to Tracy, California, to pick vegetables. She learned Spanish from Mexican migrant workers and earned a B.A. in Spanish from San Jose State University. She took night classes in education at Stanford University, while raising four children, and received the master's degree in 1967.

Well thank you for everything Ms. Thomas. I really admire your outlook, your observations, and your writing, and appreciate what you gave to the world.

Comments

[sartorias]

A really individual way of expressing those images. I really like the teens and the deer, but then I often delight in the unselfconscious grace of young animals, two or fouor legged, out exerting themselves in play under the breeze sunlight.

[asakiyume]

Absolutely, absolutely. The writing was just full of appreciation for everything the author set her eyes on.

[sovay]

A long-legged acrobat strutted, hissing between the sky and earth.
How lighting danced.
The hide-and-seek show changed everything to shadow; lightning, jealous of the light, left the red-leafed trees looking like a negative on a photograph.

That's wonderful. I'm glad she was in the world to write it.

[asakiyume]

Me too--so grateful I encountered the story.

[minoanmiss]

Awww! *raises a light to her memory*

[asakiyume]

🕯️🕯️🕯️

[light_of_summer]

Thank you for writing about Joyce Carol Thomas and including those fascinating excerpts from her work—now I am interested to go read some longer pieces of her writing!

Before this, I think the only Joyce Carol I had encountered the work of was Joyce Carol Oates.

I love lightning, and rarely get to see it. I wouldn't have thought of it as a clashing of sticks, myself, but it's interesting to try on the thought.

For five years during my 20s, I was a Morris Dancer, and I actually did dances with clashing sticks, as well as dances with waving white handkerchiefs.

Here's a video of some Morris Dancers (who I don't know) performing one of the stick dances that I used to like to do: The Black Joke

[asakiyume]

I love Morris dancing! The son of friends of my parents did it, and so I was introduced to it at a young age. I remember stumbling across some people doing it on a church lawn when I was in grad school, too--what a fun experience. And one of my other LJ/DW friends is also a Morris dancer and lives nearish to me, and one year her group came over and danced in the snow near my house for the winter solstice. So cool

How great that you had the experience of it! I bet it's a good memory.

When I see lightning, it's only ever one bolt at a time, but I've seen pictures where there's many of them in the sky at once. I can imagine that looking like them battling.

[light_of_summer]

Oh, cool that you encountered Morris early, and have had a performance at your house!

I ran across it by accident, myself, in that the local group did summertime practice in a park across the street from the house where I lived at the time.

Me: Hi. What's this?

Bearded stranger with an English accent: It's MORRIS Dancing! Why don't you JOIN us?!!!

I, myself, never loved Morris, as a specific kind of dance—I like feeling graceful, and Morris mostly didn't. I always thought it looked best when danced by slender men who could jump a lot higher than I could, and even then, the forms of the dances are not the best for grace.

BUT! Dancing is generally better than not dancing, in my experience, and finding Morris was a very lucky chance for me because many good things came into my life that were in some way related to doing Morris, including my two closest current friends and my long-time APA membership. (Neither of those friends were dancers, but I met one of them through a dancer, and the other through the first one. The first one started the APA I'm still in.)

I know what you mean about seeing only one lightning bolt at a time, in real life, but sometimes seeing multiple bolts in photos. Actually, seeing even one at a time is pretty rare for me—it's more common for me to just notice a flash of light without seeing an actual bolt, or just hear the thunder without even seeing a flash <wistful sigh>.

But, these days, it's good that this is not an area where summertime thunderstorms are likely—even so close to the coast, the unirrigated parts of the landscape are VERY dry, this time of year. I know that lightning strikes cause a lot of wildfires, further east. It's good that we don't have that additional cause for them, here.

In the last year or so, I put the Watch Duty app on my phone, and I've gotten a really eye-opening number of notifications of fires in my county. Knock on wood, they all got dealt with before reaching the size that makes non-local news. May that continue!