New Writing! by the next generation!

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Just published by Teresa's daughter Gabby, and available at the market . . . 

Gabby, with her nose in a book, as usual!

Gabby is the second of my three daughters and she has been telling stories since she could talk. And thinking them even before. I remember her lining up her little Sesame Street characters along the edge of the second shelf of the bookcase, just at her height, moving  them around as she told stories in two year old gibberish. She made everything into a story, even narrating the mixing up of ingredients to make cookies, as in (when the flour was added), "And then there was a giant avalanche and all the villagers were covered in a thick layer of snow!" Yes, Gabby's stories almost never ended well...

As soon as Gabby learned to write, she began writing her stories down. I think she was in about third grade when she began writing a novel. That one never made it to the finish line, but nowadays she always has several works of varying lengths in the works.

AS LONG AS IT TAKES TO MAKE THE WORLD

 by Gabriela Santiago

This short story is science fiction and was written as a gift for her grandfather, Herman Brockman. I think the best way to describe the book is to quote Gabby, as she says in the author spotlight in the book.

Gabby in Henry's field as a child.

"(This book) is a love letter to a childhood spent helping out on my uncle's farm every summer..., learning to love nature and farming and to respect the land. And it's a love letter to the worlds within worlds that children create, all the hours that my sisters and cousins and I spent building forts by stacking tree branches around old twisted oaks, and weaving hammocks out of old twine until we were called back to help with the mesclun, and digging through the old scrap heap to find shards of toy teapots that we would glue back together. And it's a thank you to my whole extended family for impressing upon me a love of the complexity of science, a love of stories and literature, and an understanding of the need for respect for and stewardship of the land we owe our livelihoods, and indeed our loves, to."

Come to my fruit stand to browse the book, and purchase it if you like.

It's difficult to synopsize the story, but I'll just say that Gabby creates a future world designed and run by the soft, pale hands of the Preservitors. But there are a few people who still work The Land, and they still recite the words of "the great farmer-poet of The World That Was."

Yes, that's Wendell Berry, and the story's title is from his poem:

How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way
to the high, original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow
of the grace of the strait way’s ending,
the shadow of the mercy of light.


Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come into the woods you must leave behind
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.