CYNTHIA HOGUE: I have been reading your poetry, prose, and fiction for over 30 years, and I realized that the genre of poetry holds a special place in your oeuvre. Would you talk about that place? I believe you started writing poetry before fiction. Is that correct?

BARBARA KINGSOLVER: Oh, sure. Both as a reader and as a writer, poetry came first. I loved poems, and memorized poems just to hear them in my head. I love music and I love language, and lyric poetry is the perfect marriage of those two loves. Lyric poetry puts lights on in my brain. That’s the best way I can describe it. It lights something up. I like to read poetry before I go to sleep at night. It feels like flossing the language-loving parts of your brain. It’s just— there’s something really purifying and lovely about reading poetry.

The other thing that delights me about poetry is that it’s the ultimate, most perfect use of words. I love storytelling, and there are a lot of ways to tell a story, but a poem is all about the words. Every single one is really important. That elevation for me is thrilling. Elevating every word to its perfect position in a poem.

Both my daughters are also very interested in language. We used to play this game when they were little: I would tell them, there are no true synonyms. There are words that mean almost the same thing, but not exactly the same thing. By paying attention to that, you can really refine your sense of meaning and language. It was a game. They would run to me saying, “What about freedom and liberty?” And then we’d talk about it.

Of course, that’s an easy one, because it goes to the history of our language. The Latin-rooted words are high minded, and the Germanic-rooted words are working class. When you say poultry versus chicken, you hear a class difference. You pay attention to the face you make when you say them. Say “liberty,” and then say “freedom.” Freedom is like busting out of a cage. So, a person who loves the specificity of language to that crazy extent is going to have to read poetry and write it.

CH: One of the things I love about your prose is that it is so mindful that it often feels like lyric prose, although you’re writing these big, ambitious novels. You’re one of the prose writers who has an exquisite sense of the lyric possibilities of language.

BK: Well, thank you. I like to think that I do. I mean, even in a 500-page novel, I still want every sentence to be lyrical. To have the right words in it, and none of the wrong words in it. I want it to sing. So I read. Everything I write, I read aloud. I write a passage and then read it aloud to hear it. That’s also another thing to love about a poem. Because a 500-page long project is a slog, but crafting a poem— at least a draft of a poem— in an afternoon, and then maybe working on it for several more days, and being finished with it is marvelous.

CH: In your first volume of poetry, the lyricism is less prominent, because it’s so socially and politically engaged. Ursula Le Guin and Margaret Randall numbered you among some of our great political poets, like Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov, Lucille Clifton, June Jordan. That volume, Another America, Otra América, holds up. When I reread it, Barbara, I agreed with Margaret Randall, that the poems have the same impact. And maybe that’s because of what’s going on in our country at this time. Your choice to make that such a political volume is very distinctive. Would you talk about that a bit? Can you remember putting that volume together?

BK: I surely can. I was very influenced and moved by those poets you mentioned. Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich. Who else? Carolyn Forché. Let’s not leave her out. She was extremely important. The Country Between Us came out right around the time I was in my early 20s and writing a lot of poetry. I started to go to poetry readings and reading some of my poetry aloud. I was very close friends with Rebeca Cartes, a Chilean refugee who was also a poet, and we worked together. She translated my poems. We read them together. These places where we were reading poetry were very political gatherings. They were people coming together around the Sanctuary movement, around protesting immigration policies of the US, protesting the damage that our government was wreaking in countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Those are the circles I moved in. Those were the poets I was reading. My formation as a writer was forged in that moment of political awakening, all of a piece with my activism.

CH: Am I remembering that you were one of the volunteers in the Sanctuary movement?

BK: Yes, I did. Most of my friends were also working in the Sanctuary movement or around immigration. I think what those poets did for me —  beyond what they did for everyone who reads them, which is to inform, to move, to educate and incite compassion—was also a revelation, that a writer is allowed to do that. I remember reading The Country Between Us, Carolyn Forché’s amazing book and thinking, “This is allowed? We can do this?” This merging of two really important parts of my life, this part of me that was very earnestly wanting to help other people wake up the way I was awakened when I moved to that border city [Tucson] and saw the truth about this other America that nobody was talking about. To help other people understand that, and to write poetry at the same time, was a revelation. To bring those passions together really meant a lot to me.

Becoming a writer has been a long, long process of coming out of the closet for me. Because I grew up loving to read, loving books, and having absolutely no belief I could ever be a writer myself. That was ground into the stuff of me. I could not be a writer. I didn’t dream of being a writer when I grew up. I didn’t imagine I could. I’ve thought a lot about that. Why was it so certain that a little girl growing up in a little town in eastern Kentucky could not be a writer?

I think it’s two things. One is that, people in working class places don’t have the same access to the processes of making art. No published authors came to my school, let alone Barack Obama! We country kids didn’t have access, or imagine access to culture, or being the makers of culture.

But there’s also this cultural phenomenon in rural places, especially in Appalachia, which is that you don’t get above your people. And I could quote seven different phrases that I heard all through my childhood. “You’re getting above your raisings.” “It’s not the whistle that pulls the train.” “Don’t go parading yourself around.” It’s humility. And I value that humility in my home culture. But I also see that it keeps the lid on. So I didn’t want to get above myself by calling myself a writer.

CH: Do you think it was gendered, as well?

BK: Absolutely. “She’s parading herself around.” I never really heard anyone say, “He’s parading himself around.” So you’re right. I think it was gendered. I would also say, in Appalachia, even men don’t boast. It’s considered impolite. So when people tell stories here, whether it’s a man or a woman, you always make yourself the butt of your own joke. Which is why I always tell people, “JD Vance is not Appalachian, because he’s the hero of his own book.” That is absolutely not something an Appalachian can do.

So yes. I think that all of us kids heard that, not to get above our people. But I think girls heard it harder. We took it more to heart. It took me a long time to claim the title of writer. Even now, to say I’m a poet, I find a little scary. That seems like it’s above my pay grade. Although that’s a joke, right? Nobody pays you to be a poet. [Laughter]

CH: I’ve discovered that to be true! Before we move on to the next book, I wondered if you’d read one of the poems from Another America, perhaps “The Monster’s Belly,” which is so moving.

BK: I will give it a little context. This was dedicated to Ernesto Cardenal, who was a poet I discovered during those Tucson Sanctuary days. He was a poet, a liberation theologist, a Catholic priest. One of his central beliefs was in what he called “revolution without vengeance.” And that was an idea that just gave me chills to think about. Because revolution and antagonism and war are all about vengeance. And here is this man who’s saying, “We will liberate ourselves without killing the enemy. Without wishing harm on those who have kept us down, but finding a way for all of us to rise up together.” That was so moving to me, especially having grown up in a culture of the Cold War. Hate was this monster that was the stuff of patriotism.

So I was very moved by Ernesto Cardenal’s work, and then discovered as an adult that we lived very close to each other when I was growing up. Because he spent time as a Trappist monk at the monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky, which was just down the road from where I lived. That was a poem to me, so I wrote “The Monster’s Belly.”

CH: Let’s move on to your recent book, How to Fly. It’s more personal, although you still have that foundation of political and social awareness that enriches the poems. But you start with this series of directives, the “how to” poems. What’s going on with that?

BK: I didn’t write this book as a book. This book was written in the margins of my life for many years, maybe decades. I’ve always written poems in the margins. Literally in college, I wrote them in the margins of my textbooks. I still have my college chemistry textbook, and it’s got poems written in the margins while I was in chemistry class saying, “I’m not a writer. I’m going to be a scientist.” And then, you know, after college, when I had real jobs, I wrote in the margins of my real jobs. And now, for I guess the last 25 or 30 years, my real job in terms of paying the mortgage has been as a novelist, but I’ve always written poems, because it is such a lovely thing.

Poems arrive. I’ll be walking on a trail, and see a clump of ghost pipes, for example. This happened one day. I saw ghost pipes, thought about their life history and how it was similar to my life history, and bing, there was a poem. And I went home and wrote it. I love how poems can come to you like that. Which is not to say that there’s not work involved. Because what you write quickly is a draft, and then you work on it and work on it until it actually is a poem. But when they arrive, I try to be available to catch them.

And so I had been putting poems away in my desk drawer for years and years. And I noticed that I was writing “how to” poems. But they were very subversive, crazy things. How to shear a sheep, how to cure sweet potatoes, how to be grateful when you have a broken leg. I think that we’re surrounded by directives all the time. Buy this, eat this. Don’t eat this. Look like this. And I liked the subversion of poems in terms of how to do things that nobody really needs to do. So I started looking for “how to” poems, how to be hopeful, how to survive this.

CH: My question with that poem was, why don’t you tell us how we are to survive something?

BK: Because that’s the part you have to do. The artist only does half the work. The reader does the other half. You bring to this poem what it is you don’t think you’re going to get past. And I tell you, essentially, “Yep, you are.”

CH: Would you read that poem?

CH: Wonderful. It piques the curiosity for a reader, what “this” have I thought I would never survive, but I did.

BK: Right, right. So there’s an irony. I think all of these “how to” poems have a current of earnest intention that’s overlaid with a lot of irony and fun. Because nobody can really tell you how to live. That’s the whole point.

CH: Then you moved into the much more personal, elegiac series. I wanted to ask you to read one of them. When you were writing Another America, you were living in the Southwest. You were identified for your work with the Southwest, and very much with some of the strong political activism of those days. Then you and Steven, your husband, moved back home to the western part of Virginia close to Kentucky.

BK: Right, just over the mountains from Kentucky, where I grew up. And this area is actually my ancestral home. I didn’t know how deeply rooted I was here until we moved here and learned that seven generations of Kingsolvers have lived in this Virginia county. I could go to the cemetery with my kids and put flowers on Kingsolver graves.

The whole time I was in Tucson, which was 20 years — I loved being there. I was young. I really came of age there in a lot of ways. In political ways, as we’ve discussed. Also, I had my children there. But Tucson never felt like home to me. When I had the opportunity to move back here and embrace the mountains and the language and the culture of my childhood, it felt very good to me. And it’s interesting to me that both my daughters, even though they were born in Tucson, identify as Appalachian. Because we have history here. And also —the green mountains, and the water — it feels like a place I belong.

CH: I wanted to ask you to read one of those ancestor poems, “My Great-Grandmother’s Plate.”

You’re such an empathic writer, Barbara. And in this poem, the empathy extends to the past. To the object that resurrects the sense of the woman who was your great-grandmother.

BK: If we’re lucky, we have objects that have been passed down in our families. I think the reason we love them is that they give us this physical connection with the ones who gave birth to us. In my case, the oldest thing I have is my great-grandmother’s plate. It is so fragile, and I’m terrified of breaking it. But I also want to use it, because holding it in my hands makes me think about her. This woman I barely knew, who received this plate as a wedding present long before I was born, when she was probably 18. I only get it out on special occasions. This is kind of a sestina. We’ll say it’s sestina-ish. You can hear the repetition of sounds in the last word of each line in the stanzas.

CH: Just beautiful. The sense of the economics of that long-ago couple who were doing the hard work of getting a farm started for themselves.

BK: Yes. And how snow, this romantic idea I have of snow — “Oh how cozy”— was a terrible hardship for her. This plate, that I treasure because it’s so old, is the newest thing she has, and a burden to her in some ways because it is so special and so fragile. It’s this anti-sentimental notion that when you take hold of these objects passed down to you, you realize you have no idea what their lives were like.

CH: The word that leapt out to me when you were reading was “cosset.” That is an old word. I actually didn’t look it up. I should have. Is that regional? It’s not a word that you hear every day.

BK: No, it’s not. And I chose it for the same reason that I chose to make this a sestina. I chose an old-fashioned, constraining form. And I used some old-fashioned language and diction. Appalachian diction can be very old-fashioned sounding, because it hasn’t changed as rapidly as language has changed elsewhere in the United States. Those were all intentional choices, to try to give this a constrained, antique feeling.

CH: And then referencing that word and moving on to the later poems in the volume, one of the things that’s been striking to me is the quite marvelous wordplay. It gives your poetry such a dexterous sheen. The formal brilliance combines with your empathic and moral conscience, Barbara. I wondered if Dickinson’s and Frost’s use irony was instrumental in the way you employ irony strategically, often with an edge of subtle social critique.

BK: Right. Well, I think of writing as a huge conversation. Because everything I can think of to say has been said before, somehow, by somebody, surely. So my way to say it needs to be precisely mine, from this point in the universe I occupy. That’s the only thing I have to offer. But also, with the gifts in my hands of these poets who have gone before.

I love reading poetry as much or more than I love writing it. I feel like Emily Dickinson and Lucille Clifton have a whole lot in common. The way their poems look on the page, the brevity and also the domesticity — and I love that domesticity and the ways it takes different shapes in Wendell Barry’s poetry, for example. I love Jane Hirshfield for a lot of the same reasons. WS Merwin. All of these poets are very different, but they inform me in similar ways. So yes, I do feel that especially in poetry, we can reference these conversations in a lot of ways. Through language, through form. Just a little tip of the hat.

CH: Certainly the “Insomniac Villanelle” is just so rich. To imagine someone who’s having trouble sleeping, as I do every night, reading great literature into the night.

BK: [Laughter] That’s so funny. I thought of that as a very silly poem, and I almost didn’t include it for that — I don’t know. Pretty much every poem in this collection, I had some reason to not include it. But I thought that one was silly, so I appreciate that you appreciate it. And also, a villanelle is really hard to write. I was awake all night nailing that villanelle. [Laughter]

CH: I wanted to honor the fact that you have a master’s in biology, that you thought you were going to be a scientist. And you married a scientist, an ornithologist. Steven Hopp. And you have the breadth of ecology that you move into towards the end of the volume. Would you read a poem that combines some of that linguistic dexterity and a very deep knowledge of nature? Maybe the “Mussel, Minnow” poem.

BK: Sure. And I will also give this context. Freshwater mussels happen to have a starring role in Appalachia. This county where I live, this region, has the highest diversity of freshwater mussels in the whole world. They’re a little creature that people mostly don’t notice living on the bottom of the river. But they are marvelous. And that’s what my training as a biologist taught me, that nothing is to be overlooked. Take any organism on this earth and look at it closely, and you will discover a marvel. What’s amazing about these mussels, which you think are just stuck to the bottom of the river, is how they get around. They have a secret. Also, these mussels, these many, many mussels, have really fun and interesting names. The poem opens with a recitation of different interesting names of mussels. Okay, here we go.

CH: That is just marvelous. We learn so much from your meditation on this species.

BK: It’s a great story, right? People need to know. [Laughter]

CH: Are all of those names for the mussels the same kind of mussel?

BK: No, no, those are all different species. There are hundreds of different species. They don’t all have common names, but the ones that do have such great common names. Heelsplitter, you can guess where that one came from. You step on it. It’s interesting. As I confessed earlier, I didn’t write this book to be a book. So when the time came and I saw, “Oh, I probably have a hundred poems in there, maybe that could be a book,” I honestly wasn’t sure if my publisher would be delighted to hear I had a book of poetry. Happily, they were. So I pulled out those 100 poems and winnowed them down. They organized themselves into the “how to” poems, and then there’s a long cycle of poems that I wrote for my mother-in-law about taking her to Italy. The peregrination of taking her back to her homeland. And then the elegiac poems, and then ending, of course, with the biology stories that I had poems about.

CH: Why end with the biology poems?

BK: Because it felt right. For me, it was just going back to ground. And also, a lot of them are ironic. There’s some humor in the literally brainless mussel. I guess I liked that shape of opening with a little bit of sparkle and humor, and then building up to the odes to the past. The more serious poems. And then coming back to home ground.

CH: Yes. Home ground that is informed deeply by your knowledge about and your love of nature. But also, the kind of study that you and Steven have made in the world. The kind of explorations that you’ve done. It’s quite marvelous.

BK: Well, thank you. I never know quite what people mean by “political art.” And it has gotten a bad rap in history. In American history, especially. People lost their jobs for it, over it, and their lives over it. But I always just think about engagement. I like for my work to be engaged with the world I live in. And whether that means engaging with people who are risking their lives to cross the desert, to try to escape persecution and death in their homelands, or whether it is engaging with these creatures that live in my rivers and streams that are endangered, or engaging with the wildflowers that I see on the trail beside my hiking boot. It’s all about getting out of the self and attending to what’s around us. I love that anthem from Alice Walker: “Anything we love can be saved.” And I would reverse that. You have to love it first, so you can care enough to save it.

I think if there’s one abiding directive I feel in myself as a writer, it’s to help readers engage with what’s around them, whether it’s a child or a tree. It needs to be loved. And that’s what we’re here to do.

CH: Oh, Barbara, thank you for that last comment. I thought we might end with your poem, “Dancing with the Devil: Advice for the Female Poet,” since Persimmon Tree is a journal that is for everyone, but all the artwork in it is by older women. And we have reached that number ourselves — having started out together as young poets.

BK: [Laughter] Yes. There are many references in this poem. There’s a reference to Sylvia Plath, a reference to Virginia Woolf. A wonderful thing about being the age I am, which is 70 — which I feel so happy about — is that I’ve lived long enough to see what’s nonsense. And so much of what we feel we have to do as younger women is just nonsense. “Advice for the female poet” is [laughter] “learn to recognize nonsense.” The opening is all of the things we’re not allowed to do. And if we don’t do them, we’re not allowed to do that either. That’s worse than nonsense. It’s soul-killing. So here it is.

CH: Brava. [Laughter] You know, I didn’t get the references. I mean, I got them as you were reading them, but I had read the poem several times and I didn’t think of Plath or Woolf.

BK: The oven, the stones. Yes. I wish — if Virginia Woolf were my neighbor, I think I could have saved her. [Laughter] “Come on, Ginny. Put the stones back on the ground. Let’s go for a walk.” [Laughter]

CH: Well, Barbara, I’m going to thank you for this generous discussion.

 
to Ernesto Cardenal
 
In the epic drought of my growing years,
I practiced leaping under my desk
to survive the rain of Cuban bombs.
I learned to kneel on a splintered floor
and with the carnal fervor
of a body aching from boredom and tortured knees,
to pray to God that the Communists
wouldn’t come now, and make us stop praying.
 
Now, Father Ernesto, I find you were there all along
with the monks at Gethsemani, Kentucky.
I could have walked there
in my blunt shoes, could have visited you
and your laughing Lord who made the best rain fall
on beans and rice. What a difference
to have known this Lord, or at least to know
he shared the same small sky with mine, who promised only
that the horned and headed monster
would come out of the sea
for the purpose of ending the world.
In your dark shirt smelling of leaves,
I would empty out the ache of my natural childhood
to find some greater love than the end of the world.
 
But the roads I knew were lost at the edge of town
in willow forests of apprehension. You and I
were no closer than the living and the dead
who share a cemetery on a Sunday afternoon.
Father Ernesto, you were a citizen of the domain
of your profound desire to kill the monster,
and I was already in its belly.
 

 
O misery. Imperfect
universe of days stretched out
ahead, the string of pearls
and drops of venom on the web,
losses of heart, of life
and limb, news of the worst:
 
Remind me again
the day will come
when I look back amazed
at the waste of sorry salt
when I had no more than this
to cry about.
 
Now I lay me down.
I’m not there yet.

 
—  For Lillie Auxier, 1881-1965   
 
New Year’s morning, standing
at the sink watching new snow drift,
I cosset a hope that this weather might
persist, bundling a household
of family into one more day as mine
before the world calls us out again.
 
It whitens the woods while I weather
a washing-up from last night’s happy ending:    
the grass-stemmed goblets, dorsal spines
of underwater forks, and last, the white
china platter with lattice edges, a gift
to my great-grandmother for her wedding.
 
I use this plate because I want to know
how it might make me one with her, my hands
slipped into hers like a pair of gloves as I lift
and admire its fragile rim, sharing our standing
as householders, dutiful washers of porcelain.
But instead, a presence from behind me takes
 
my shoulders, and I feel her dread of a snow
like this for her new husband’s sake,
a man called out to cattle in any weather;
feel her brooding on a shuttered-up morning
for its cost in coal. This delicate wedding
gift might plague her for the note her mother
 
will be expecting soon, along with other
good news. A washing-up left for the morning
would not have been her liberty. My hands
may reach but cannot share this porcelain gift:
the newest stake of her household,
the oldest one in mine.

 
The chore of blunting night’s tormented edges
Austen, Byron, Cather, Dickens, Emerson
while cats of sentience creep out on the ledges
 
demands some dull device for driving wedges
Faulkner, Garcia Márquez, Hugo, Ibsen
into the ticking torment of night’s edges
 
a steady, flogging tedium that fledges
Joyce, Kazantzakis, Lessing, Merton, Nin
tense flights of apprehension from the hedges,
 
hounds spirits from the stairs, and slowly dredges
Orwell, Plath, Queirós, Rilke, Stein
regrets like broken glass from night’s deep edges
 
and still tomorrow’s weary pending pledges
Tolstoy, Updike, Verne, oh patient Whitman
are cats of sentience sprawling on the ledges
 
Saint-Exupéry will pass, Yeats, Zola, Austen,
Jane—and you again, Cather, Eliot, no! Byron
this blunt and beaten night has lost its edges.
Now there’s birdsong, daylight on the ledges.

Fatmucket, Snuffbox, Wartyback, which
among these bivalves stuck for life
in creekpebble bottom could wrest much
notice from the spiny higher-minded —
we who hitch our wagons to stars?
 
What of Heelsplitter, Plain Pocketbook,
Higgins Eye Pearly, just so many peasants’
plow blades dug into their own mucky turf?
A mussel’s hopes are small, it would seem,
and all downstream from here. But look:
 
This is life wide and strange upon the earth
Where even the lower orders have tricks
up a sleeve. In this case her own mussel flesh
encased in shell, but now coquettishly exposed
in a minnow shape, with false eye and fin.
 
Or arranged as crayfish appendages, dangling
claws, jerky gait. Or a glutinous fishing line with
a lure at its end. Each of these gifts, a Trojan horse
devised to tempt the large-mouthed fish
to cruise in close for a bite, or for urgent love —
 
and get instead in its startled fish-face
a milky blast of a thousand mussel children.
With tiny claws they grasp gills, sip blood, catch
a ride upstream. Then drop and settle on clear
cold pebbled pastures, stuff of molluscan ambition.
 
One could pity the fish, our protean kin,
the nerve and backbone and brainy upward
mobility of it all. But in the countinghouse
of the higher mind and its endless debts to desire,
my money’s on the literally brainless mussel.

Remember about being quiet.
Canny, rowdy, quick, hitting
any nail in the vicinity of its head:
these could be the death of you.
Observing all posted speed limits:
that could be the death of you.
 
When the choice is speak now
or forever hold your peace,
remember how “peace” comes around
in time to feeling like this crocodile
you are trying to drown.
 
Remember bloodletting was medicine
back in the day. And who did it.
 
Remember to leave a window open,
oven door closed, stones on the ground
not in your pockets. Maybe just one
precious in a fist, or against a hot cheek.
 
Remember all the openings,
same ones used for pushing out
filth, lullabies, the blues, brand-speaking
life bellowing at both ends? That’s
what you get. And in defiance
of all higher rulings ever handed down,
remember who lives longer.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Barbara Kingsolver for making this interview possible, and Lily Hopp Kingsolver for her help in finalizing this feature.

“The Monster’s Belly,” from Another America, Otra América by Barbara Kingsolver. Copyright © 1992, 1998 by Barbara Kingsolver. Reprinted by permission of Barbara Kingsolver.

“How To Survive This,” “My Great-Grandmother’s Plate,” “Dancing with the Devil, Advice for the Female Poet,” “Insomniac Villanelle,” “Mussel, Minnow” from How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) by Barbara Kingsolver. Copyright© 2020 by Barbara Kingsolver. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

Countermelodies: A Memoir in Sonata Form

by Ernistine Whitman

    Countermelodies, winner of both the NYC Big Book Award and the Indie Reader Discovery Award for memoir, is a coming of age story about the powerful relationship between a protegee and her mentor, and the devastating effects when that mentor betrays her by withdrawing his support just when she needs it most. A young woman who yearns for her father’s approval is constantly overshadowed by a brilliant older sister. Her self-doubt vanishes when, at age thirteen, she discovers a passion for the flute and studies with a charismatic teacher who becomes her surrogate father. Years later, she wins an audition to work beside him in the Atlanta Symphony, where she is the youngest and one of few women in the orchestra. After her exhilarating first year, the mentor turns against her and threatens to destroy her professional and personal life. Her love for the flute and drive to be a musician sustain her through additional encounters with abusive men as she tries to succeed in the competitive field of classical music. “A disturbing and compelling tale of resilience, determination, and musical passion.” — Kirkus Reviews “Whitman explores power dynamics, patriarchal oppression, and music as personal salvation. … a story of persistence and survival in a world at the mercy of toxic misogyny.” — BlueInk Review https://ernestinewhitman.ag-sites.net/index.htm Available from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent bookstore.

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