[REVIEW] The Only Sounds We Make, by Lee Zacharias

224 pages, $16.95

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

Lee Zacharias’s most recent book, The Only Sounds We Make, is a collection of essays that discuss everything from where writers write, to the history of vultures, to the pleasures of photography, to destructive, document eating dogs. However common these threads may (or may not) be in our own lives, these essays interrupt our expectations instead of blandly repeating them. And they are wonderfully interruptive. Blending personal nostalgia, social or historical discussion, and intellectual statements, the twelve essays in this collection interweave all of these threads interestingly and adeptly.

The essays I enjoyed most were: “Geography For Writers,” a nuanced look at how surface plays in inspiration, and “Morning Light,” a paean to the creative delights of photography. Both fascinated me with their questions of place and location in relation to artistic endeavors.

The essay “Geography For Writers” starts as an exploration into the different lucky places and tables Zacharias was inspired by while writing. She reminisces about when she precociously tried to write a novel: she wrote it “in the junior high…in a stenographer’s notebook I carried from class to class, waiting for study hall to pen the next chapter.” The piece then moves to remembrances of her first major writing projects as an adult and the details concerning where she wrote them. In one fascinating aside, for example, Zacharias discusses the iterations a writing desk on which she worked on her first novel went through. She writes:

[The novel] did time on . . . a desk I bought for eight dollars from a friend when she inherited her grandmother’s secretary. The desk had a single drawer and deep shelves down one side. Later, when Lessons was published . . . I painted my friend’s desk white, topped it with a plastic pad, and used it for my son’s changing table . . . later still he moved it to the garage and piled it with fishing line and reels.

It’s a geological account of the history of an object which discusses how her writing intersected with it.

While “Geography For Writers” initially moves through a series of nostalgic vignettes, it eventually opens up into unusual descriptions of some of the desks or offices used by well-known writers. Often these are delightfully visceral, and the descriptions run the gamut from the flamboyant (like the overbearing view of trophy heads from Hemingway’s workspace) to the risqué (Victor Hugo and Benjamin Franklin both wrote nude) to this unusual reference:

More recently the San Francisco Chronicle published “A Room with a Muse,” describing the [office] of . . . Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket. Thus we can read Lemony Snicket with a mental picture of Handler writing at the gynecologist’s table he uses for a desk (sans stirrups), though if this seems a bit naughty, we might recall that Voltaire outdid him by using a lover’s naked back.

It’s all tremendous fun to read, a sort of dizzying, Montaigne-esque foray into writing surfaces only with teeth.

“Morning Light” is a terse, stunning series of remembrances surrounding how and why Zacharias got into photographing landscapes. The essay contains a series of lyrical passages cataloguing several geological features which she gracefully photographed in morning light to appease her obsession: Mather Point at the Grand Canyon, countless wildlife refuges, Florida beaches, the Pacific Ocean. Her lifelike, colorful descriptions, such as this liberal passage in which she describes the Ocracoke Island’s harbor, are often achingly poetic:

I am the only visitor awake . . . Some mornings I trap its fire behind a low cloud of lavender just as it traces the puffing at the upper edge with flame, gilding the harbor and streaking the sky. Others the sky is plumed with clouds that ignite along the bottom . . . [and] [w]hen I come back from the beach each morning, I wash the sand from my hair in a wooden shower stall . . . where I can watch the harbor traffic as barn swallows dip and turn around me, flashing their golden bellies. It’s heaven.

There is a wonderful sense of vastness within these descriptions that makes you think you might be able to see new worlds in them, a kind of turning movement, as if you are riding the sun’s reflective path into the water to reach it.

The twelve essays in Lee Zacharias’s The Only Sounds We Make are on a dizzying array of subjects: her mother’s onerous childhood after her grandmother’s death, her experiences of counterculture in the 70s, her father’s suicide. All of them are both deeply intellectual and deeply personal. The balance she negotiates between them, how her writing does not ever become overly cerebral or overly sentimental, is the strength of this collection. It’s perfect.

***

Hannah Rodabaugh received her MA from Miami University and her MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School. Her work was included in Flim Forum Press’ anthology: A Sing Economy. Recently, her work has been published in Defenestration, Used Furniture Review, Palimpsest, Similar:Peaks::, Horse Less Press Review, Smoking Glue Gun, and Nerve Lantern. Her chapbook, With Words: Verse in Concordance, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.