Alison Hawthorne DemingCritiques

This is one I read some time ago and cannot recall enough about to review.

This is not what I expected, but I found it so interesting. It is a memoir of sorts told in several love languages. She searches for a more complete picture of her matrilineal heritage. She remembers her grandmother fondly, but knows little about the details of her life. Her great grandmother was a dressmaker in France, emigrated to NYC by way of Mexico and created a couture business that lasted through two generations. This was what drew me to the book and I was not disappointed with the background history she unearthed. But then in counterbalanced chapters Demming turns her focus to the fishing industry off the Northern Atlantic coast in New Brunswick. Her family summered on this island and she became fascinated with the history of herring weirs. And if you are me, who knows what those are? I learned so much. As much as the author frames her life through natural surroundings she also remains fascinated with the world of high fashion. Such a contrast and yet she finds commonalities that are realistic and apt.
This narrative rambles from one thought to the next, then is randomly and regularly infused with historical references. Amazingly it all hangs together and is more compelling with each chapter. The writing is lyrical (the author is a poet) and sweeps the reader along from one dress to another fish story. I am so glad I found this book.

This book was almost perfect for someone like me. It included new learning, one of my favorite things; the facts about animal nature were fascinating. Then there’s the writing. The essays were the perfect length and eloquently written to the point my mouth was wide open in awe at the end of them. Lastly, it was partly memoir and I really like her and related to her. I want to be her friend. The themes were a repetitive towards the end though.

Alison Hawthorne Deming is a brilliant writer whose work often serves as an inspiration for my own. Her prose is beyond reproach, but I give it four and not five stars because the book as a whole fell short of my expectations. For one, I expected it to be a bit more focused on the "writing" piece. I'd mistakenly put it on my bookshelf with my craft books when it clearly belongs with environmental writing. Of course, she does discuss how the four places she takes us to in each chapter influence her craft, but that piece of it seemed to arise not as the purpose of her stories but more out of the fact that she is a writer writing about her life so the writing part of her life will naturally come up. There's also just very little to the book itself. There are 140 pages in the volume, but AHD's words take up fewer than 90. I haven't read other books in the Credo series, but I assume the others are similar. My critique, then, is less of the author and more of the publisher.

It's easy to see why Deming's Zoologies was a nonfiction finalist for the 2015 Orion Book Award. Each chapter of this book is an essay exploring a different connection between humans and non-human animals with great insight and expertly precise language, and though there is lamentation, there is also hope. For me, one of the most powerful moments of the book was toward the end when Deming wrote, "Ten thousand years from now, I want someone to say of us, 'What amazing courage they had, and what spirit. How smart they were, how inventive—and how profoundly they must have loved Earth.'"

I had the pleasure of meeting Alison when she visited Iowa State earlier this year, and she signed my book with this inscription: "In hopes this work feeds your own—" Such simple words, such a simple hope, and it couldn't have been more realized.

Read it!