When I was growing up in California, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, sent me postcards. In her 50s, 60s, and 70s, she traveled widely, to Stockholm and Shanghai. She wrote from her home on the Finger Lakes, too. Her style was casual, spoken, ironic—there were never more than 10 words between jokes or wry observations. That she wrote toward me in this urbane tone made me feel elevated, addressed. As if sensibility was shareable information, just like the weather.
My grandfather, my father’s father, who was born in San Francisco just after the Great Earthquake and Fire, shared in a different way. When he traveled, we didn’t get postcards. Instead, after each long trip he and my other grandmother took, my family gathered in front of the 1970s version of Instagram—the slideshow—and watched their vacation.
Growing up between the poles of these grandparents, whom I loved and who loved me in different ways, I inherited a few ideas about being in the world. Some of which I’ve had to figure out how to undo. The world isn’t out there, for instance, unless you separate yourself from it. Still, one notion I’ve kept—and which wound up related to reading, for me—is this: There’s a pleasure in sharing remarkable journeys.
This article appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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My first writings were attempts to reply in kind to my grandmother’s letters. These communications were short on incident and long on vocabulary that I didn’t fully comprehend. I once, at 13, signed off a note to her, “I hope this letter was voluptuous enough for you.” I think I was reading a lot of Thomas Hardy at the time.
As I began to read constantly, my vicarious experience—the news from my heart—caught up with my vocabulary. Though I had not even left the country, thanks to my reading of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas, and Ralph Ellison, I felt as if I’d crashed in the Sahara, that I had spent all day trying to get to the Godrevy Lighthouse. I had lain indoors in a rainy winter in Wales listening to the chimney’s music. I had walked vaulting up 125th in Harlem, feeling at once homesick and home.
In my teenage years, my older brother brought home a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Planet News, and I was transfixed by its casual brilliance, the spoken toward feeling of the poems. Even in his LSD-influenced “Wales Visitation,” I could feel the poet reaching through the lines as if to ask, Can you see me seeing this vista?
Away at college, I discovered that my roommate’s high school teacher had invited Ginsberg to speak to his class, and so I wrote to invite Ginsberg to speak at my tiny Quaker campus. After some cajoling, there was Allen Ginsberg, in my dorm room, sitting in a circle of students talking about dharma and poetry and Ezra Pound. One of the magics of the reading he gave later that night: All of us in that room of many hundreds of people, all of us felt we were being talked toward.
Another visitor to Swarthmore who made me came that spring: the editor of Time magazine, Roger Rosenblatt, who had been to Rwanda that summer. He described the devastation of the genocide he’d reported. He returned wondering, How, after you see the worst things that humans can do to one another, do you decide to entertain? To amuse? To share small news? How, in the face of such slaughter, do you choose to tell such stories?
The talk made a huge impression on me and several other people in the room. Six of us became journalists. Drawn into a world to communicate by love, but living in a world made in part by slaughter and domination—not to mention collaboration, the evolution of life forces, migration, and wonder, too—I struggle to know how to choose what to say, what to tell, what to pass along. What counts as an extraordinary journey? It is not a simple question. Drawn to write by a simple impulse—I saw this, it was wonderful, can you see it, too?—I realized I had accepted a calling far greater than myself. A calling to see the world and how it was made.
That I get to ask “Can you see this with me?” and I don’t have to write it on postcards? Wow. I only hope when you read my essays, you understand I write this toward you.•
CALIFORNIA REWRITTEN: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE GOLDEN STATE'S NEW LITERATURE, BY JOHN FREEMAN
