Awakening
of Poetic Awareness
Foreword Magazine Review by Robert Root
Pulling Down the Barn:
Memories of a Rural Childhood
In this memoir, when the author's family pull down the barn in
1994, they find a board that dates the structure back a hundred
years. The center of her family's farm, inland from Lake Michigan,
the barn is also central to her childhood in the fifties and sixties,
its destruction really an epilogue to events that loosened her
connection to farming life. To write that epilogue, she must reconstruct
the barn and her connection with it from memory.
She begins by trying to recover the sound of her grandmother's
voice: "I am trying to hear hers and the voices of that childhood:
the words, the unwords, the other languages, the machines, the
fields, the barns and their animals. I am trying to connect again
through the inconsistency of memory-a spill of a girl, liquid
and wet, soaking into the fabric of that time-longing to know
what was being said on that farm."
The book then opens up into a series of vignettes and episodes-riding
out to the hayfields, running naked in the rain, jumping deer
in a rye field, picking apples and asparagus and washing cherries,
swinging on a rope in the barn-all imbued by the author with a
vivid immediacy and a restrained reflectiveness.
Oomen's book fulfills two primary responsibilities of memoir.
It serves the writer's needs, by allowing her to comprehend the
inadvertent trajectory of her life, and it serves readers' needs,
by inviting them into the author's experiences and connecting
her life with their own. It also helps stretch our appreciation
of the possibilities of the memoir form. Memoirists are often
hampered by a mistaken desire to heighten the drama of their memoirs
by constructing a smoothly flowing narrative, developing characters
and scenes, and providing a conclusive resolution of conflicts-adopting,
in other words, the formulas of well-made plays, uplifting novels,
and popular films and running the risk of being less honest, less
accurate, less factual and more fabricated. Oomen evades all of
these pitfalls by fashioning a book that, like our memories themselves,
is essentially a series of evocative and revealing vignettes from
a rural childhood; its episodes resonate within the reader cumulatively,
building as the book progresses.
Oomen, creative writing chair at Interlochen Arts Academy, brings
her talents as an actress, performing poet, and playwright to
her prose. The interlinked essays read like scenes from a one-woman
autobiographical play, a series of reflective reminiscences presented
as blackout sketches, an accumulation of gentle epiphanies arrived
at in intermittent stages of soliloquy. Most of the moments are
brief, quietly told, and carefully nuanced, as when the narrator
falls from a rope in the barn and has the breath knocked out of
her; despite her mother's assurances that she hasn't died (as
the child suspects), at that moment she realizes something about
the tenuousness of life. This realization is circumspectly reinforced
in other segments.
The vignettes are all grounded in commonplace events. The longest
essay is set at a Catholic girls' school in Grand Rapids, where
the narrator falls under the spell of a roomful of Madonnas and
"The Man from U.N.C.L.E.," but it puts the excursion
into religious calling into perspective by returning to the farm.
None of the highly-charged moments-such as when her brother's
bee allergy is discovered after he is stung by the wild bees allowed
to build a hive in the walls of the house, or when the narrator
loses control of the tractor she's finally been allowed to drive-never
lead to tragic consequences around which so many memoirs are constructed.
However, the narrator's continual reawakening to aspects of life
to which she had been oblivious is all the more convincing because
it is so universal. If growth and wisdom depended on extraordinary
events and heightened drama, most of us would remain simple and
unsophisticated all our lives. More than idiosyncratic lives (and
memoirs) can, Oomen quietly introduces us to our own lives by
introducing us to hers.
She effectively inhabits a child's voice on the page and her
use of present tense throughout creates a heightened sense of
immediacy. Though this occasionally complicates reflective sentences
that suggest an adult perspective, it is highly effective in recapturing
the naïveté and burgeoning understanding of a developing mind.
At the heart of this book is a quiet awareness of the subtle and
incremental ways a child?s comprehension of the universe expands
and alters over time. By interlinking observant, evocative, lyrical
essays to form a richly reflective memoir, Oomen deftly and quietly
brings these moments of change to life. (November)
Robert
Root
