Margo Orlando Littell's Blog, page 3

A New York Story

There's a New York story I like to tell.October, 2001. I was living in Manhattan, over a hundred blocks from Ground Zero, but the grief and fear following 9/11 were as potent in Morningside Heights as anywhere else in the city. On Sunday, October 7, I went early to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to get my ticket for the Earth Mass celebrating the Feast of St. Francis, a mass that would include the Blessing of the Animals. This is an incredible service--a breath-taking celebration with music and dance that concludes with a grand procession of animals down the center aisle of the cathedral. I went every year I lived in New York.On that particular October day, the mass was as beautiful and moving and comical as always, with tiny pets barking and squirming and escaping from their owners throughout the service. But twined with the cuteness and beauty was a heavy sense of mourning and unease, the horror of 9/11 less than a month past, that New York fear of being pressed with a large crowd inside a city landmark. The search for bodies at the Word Trade Center site was still active. Still, there was the sense of city life carrying on, traditions continuing--daily life its own kind of resilience and resistance.Then, at the end of the mass, the celebrant came to the pulpit with an announcement: the U.S. had dropped bombs on Afghanistan. A war had begun. A president whom almost no one in that city crowd liked or trusted had turned the world upside down.Then the enormous bronze doors of the cathedral opened, and the silent Procession of Animals began, each creature with a handler who was openly weeping as they walked. Birds of prey, ox, kangaroo, camel, llama, cow, sheep. Each paraded by, with an animal’s quiet dignity, calm amid the anguish of their handlers and the crowds.At the end of the procession came the search-and-rescue dogs. They were wearing vests embellished with American flags and had wreaths around their necks. They’d spent weeks searching for bodies but were now in the church, walking calmly down the aisle, a symbol of bravery and peacefulness and love.This was over fifteen years ago, but--those animals. I’ll never forget it.I have kids now, and when I look at them this February I feel a shadow of that familiar heartache. Like those proud creatures who had no hand in changing their world for the worse, my kids are innocent. They have to trust us to keep the world safe for them. Safe: as in open-hearted and kind and reasonable, with respect for intelligence, honesty, tradition, education, the rule of law, and basic human decency. I look at them skipping to the bus stop, snuggling their toys, and I’m grateful that they’re too little to fully grasp the shame of what’s happening.So I'm keeping the news off, selectively skimming headlines, reading a lot of fiction (to myself, and to them), and writing. Fostering empathy by exploring and creating unfamiliar worlds and characters. Doing what we writers and readers do: trying, each day, to walk in other people's shoes.More...I've been posting daily to Instagram--connect with methere if you can! It's a lot more fun than Facebook these days.Sometimes I think about how the characters inEach Vagabond by Namewould react to the daily news--the story seems more relevant now than ever. You can help this book reach more readers by leaving anAmazon review--I need just five more to reach my goal of 50! It's all about the algorithm, so even a sentence will do.

The Last Known Pictures

This post was written on January 10, 2017.

Two weeks ago, in Pennsylvania, my father and I let ourselves into my great-uncle’s house to see if we wanted to claim anything before the house is cleared out and sold later this year. My great-uncle hasn’t died; instead, he’s trapped in the netherworld between mental and physical death, no longer himself, gone but not gone, breathing day after day in a world that no longer concerns him in the same way as before. It was strange and sad to be in his house, more acutely him than he is, the meticulous organization in his basement workshop as vibrant a ghost as you’d hope to find. Every item in the house was labeled with black Sharpie--what it was, where it came from. Each drawer in the office and bedroom was tagged with a bit of white paper and a Sharpied description of the contents. A great pile of Sharpies was on the kitchen counter, the permanent ink now permanently out of use.

Sifting through a bureau drawer in the basement, I found a box of photographs, some of which were over a hundred years old. Brittle and discolored but otherwise well preserved, these pictures had no names or dates but were stamped with the name and location of the southwestern-PA photography studios where they were taken. There were no recognizable people in any of these relics, nor was anyone recognizable in the photos from later in the century. These people were not our family. Clues in a brittle yellowed obituary and a few folded baptismal certificates suggested that these photos had belonged to a relative of my great-uncle’s first wife, many decades deceased. A Certificate of Parole we found among the pictures suggested that this stranger’s family tree had branched in wayward directions.

Andrew, flipping through the pile, didn’t pause when a seventies-era photo of a little girl with an old man floated by. “Wait,” I said. “That’s me.” Indeed it was: a stray photo of two-year-old me with my great-grandfather, identifiable only because I was the one looking, able to name the people, time, and place. I don’t know why that picture wound up in this box, with these strangers, but there it was. 

Without any actual knowledge of anyone in the other pictures except for the most tenuously suspected filament linking these people to a former spouse, we were free to speculate. Each picture was a story. The women’s poses, their faces; the cars in the background; the men’s work clothes, and uniforms. All told a tale, each one a captured moment in time. Each picture--as they say--worth a thousand words. 

And yet these pictures, moldering in a forgotten bureau, were worth nothing at all to anyone, anymore. A few of the more “historical” artifacts--pencilled postcards sent home from Europe during World War II, photos of bombers and trucks--may be worth sending on to the local historical society, or some sort of war-history organization. Or maybe not. The postcards are faded and barely legible. The photos of the army trucks, one with the caption “I sometimes sleep in these,” are blurry. They were someone’s memories of war, but not the sort that lend themselves to broader remembrance, significance, or memorial. They were dashed off, quickly shot, sent home. And when their recipients died, they were passed on and passed down and stored away and forgotten. Even if I Googled the heck out of the family names in the baptismal certificates and obituary and located someone who might not only recognize the people in these pictures but also feel a twinge of familial obligation to take them off my hands, years from now these items will simply be cluttering someone else’s basement bureau drawers, vexing the harried, grieving relatives ultimately responsible for cleaning them out. 

They meant so much when they meant something. No more.

The question of worth and meaning changes for me with the very oldest pictures, the ones called “cabinet cards,” a kind of albumen print mounted on card stock that became popular in the 1870s. Their subjects are unidentified and centuries dead. It’s entirely possible that these are the last known pictures of these men and women, even, perhaps, the only pictures of them ever to have existed. I may have been the first person to look at their faces in half a century or more. That gives me an eerie, unsettled feeling, as though I’ve inadvertently stirred, and disturbed, something that had been at rest. It raises questions about the connection between our earthly selves, the images we leave behind, and the spirits we are destined to become. Do photographs serve as a kind of tether, tying us to this earth? Connection--or shackle? I can’t help but imagine the souls long gone waiting for the moment when their final images are destroyed and they’re released, cursing when someone like me comes along and snatches away their chance at freedom.

Or they might be grateful--for a final chance not to be forgotten.

That picture of me with my great-grandfather--a picture that, shuffled and stored away, could save me, a century from now, become my last known picture, when our thousands of digital photos have crashed or become incompatible with new devices; when “the cloud” fizzles; when our failure to actually print out pictures makes our images as perilous as those in the studio portraits fading in that box. 

It feels like a responsibility, having these ancient pictures. These people lived in my hometown, made fortunes and mistakes, went about their daily business in buildings that are now falling over or razed into vacant, overgrown lots. But what exactly am I obligated to do? Splash their faces on billboards, imploring passing truckers--Look at these people! Their faces are in my head now, and maybe--most probably--in no one else’s in the world. In conjuring them, I feel a weird intimacy of near-oblivion. I can almost hear them whispering. 

So here they are. Look at them. These are almost certainly the last known pictures of these faces. Share the curious burden with me. And welcome the ghosts.

The Last Known Pictures

Two weeks ago, in Pennsylvania, my father and I let ourselves into my great-uncle’s house to see if we wanted to claim anything before the house is cleared out and sold later this year. My great-uncle hasn’t died; instead, he’s trapped in the netherworld between mental and physical death, no longer himself, gone but not gone, breathing day after day in a world that no longer concerns him in the same way as before. It was strange and sad to be in his house, more acutely him than he is, the meticulous organization in his basement workshop as vibrant a ghost as you’d hope to find. Every item in the house was labeled with black Sharpie--what it was, where it came from. Each drawer in the office and bedroom was tagged with a bit of white paper and a Sharpied description of the contents. A great pile of Sharpies was on the kitchen counter, the permanent ink now permanently out of use.Sifting through a bureau drawer in the basement, I found a box of photographs, some of which were over a hundred years old. Brittle and discolored but otherwise well preserved, these pictures had no names or dates but were stamped with the name and location of the southwestern-PA photography studios where they were taken. There were no recognizable people in any of these relics, nor was anyone recognizable in the photos from later in the century. These people were not our family. Clues in a brittle yellowed obituary and a few folded baptismal certificates suggested that these photos had belonged to a relative of my great-uncle’s first wife, many decades deceased. A Certificate of Parole we found among the pictures suggested that this stranger’s family tree had branched in wayward directions.Andrew, flipping through the pile, didn’t pause when a seventies-era photo of a little girl with an old man floated by. “Wait,” I said. “That’s me.” Indeed it was: a stray photo of two-year-old me with my great-grandfather, identifiable only because I was the one looking, able to name the people, time, and place. I don’t know why that picture wound up in this box, with these strangers, but there it was.Without any actual knowledge of anyone in the other pictures except for the most tenuously suspected filament linking these people to a former spouse, we were free to speculate. Each picture was a story. The women’s poses, their faces; the cars in the background; the men’s work clothes, and uniforms. All told a tale, each one a captured moment in time. Each picture--as they say--worth a thousand words.And yet these pictures, moldering in a forgotten bureau, were worth nothing at all to anyone, anymore. A few of the more “historical” artifacts--pencilled postcards sent home from Europe during World War II, photos of bombers and trucks--may be worth sending on to the local historical society, or some sort of war-history organization. Or maybe not. The postcards are faded and barely legible. The photos of the army trucks, one with the caption “I sometimes sleep in these,” are blurry. They were someone’s memories of war, but not the sort that lend themselves to broader remembrance, significance, or memorial. They were dashed off, quickly shot, sent home. And when their recipients died, they were passed on and passed down and stored away and forgotten. Even if I Googled the heck out of the family names in the baptismal certificates and obituary and located someone who might not only recognize the people in these pictures but also feel a twinge of familial obligation to take them off my hands, years from now these items will simply be cluttering someone else’s basement bureau drawers, vexing the harried, grieving relatives ultimately responsible for cleaning them out.They meant so much when they meant something. No more.The question of worth and meaning changes for me with the very oldest pictures, the ones called “cabinet cards,” a kind of albumen print mounted on card stock that became popular in the 1870s. Their subjects are unidentified and over a century dead. It’s entirely possible that these are the last known pictures of these men and women, even, perhaps, the only pictures of them ever to have existed. I may have been the first person to look at their faces in half a century or more. That gives me an eerie, unsettled feeling, as though I’ve inadvertently stirred, and disturbed, something that had been at rest. It raises questions about the connection between our earthly selves, the images we leave behind, and the spirits we are destined to become. Do photographs serve as a kind of tether, tying us to this earth? Connection--or shackle? I can’t help but imagine the souls long gone waiting for the moment when their final images are destroyed and they’re released, cursing when someone like me comes along and snatches away their chance at freedom.Or they might be grateful--for a final chance not to be forgotten.That picture of me with my great-grandfather--a picture that, shuffled and stored away, could save me, a century from now, become my last known picture, when our thousands of digital photos have crashed or become incompatible with new devices; when “the cloud” fizzles; when our failure to actually print out pictures makes our images as perilous as those in the studio portraits fading in that box.It feels like a responsibility, having these ancient pictures. These people lived in my hometown, made fortunes and mistakes, went about their daily business in buildings that are now falling over or razed into vacant, overgrown lots. But what exactly am I obligated to do? Splash their faces on billboards, imploring passing truckers--Look at these people!Their faces are in my head now, and maybe--most probably--in no one else’s in the world. In conjuring them, I feel a weird intimacy of near-oblivion. I can almost hear them whispering.So here they are. Look at them. These are almost certainly the last known pictures of these faces. Share the curious burden with me. And welcome the ghosts.And in the World ofEach Vagabond by Name...I’m over the moon thatEach Vagabond by Namemade theTournament of Books Long List! This is an amazing annual “competition” where books are judged head to head in basketball-style brackets. Whether or not it makes the Short List, I’m so excited to see my small-press book among much more high-profile contenders like Michael Chabon, Ann Patchett, Richard Russo, Margaret Atwood, and Elizabeth Strout. What company to be in. I'm humbled.Sooo close to my goal of 50 Amazon reviews--just nine more to go. Like recommending a book to your friends, leaving an Amazon review (just a sentence!) is an effective and essential way of supporting the books you love (likeVagabond, of course).Click on overif you’re so inclined.

Home Is So Sad

I’ve been dreaming about my childhood home, the one I lived in until I was eight years old. Yellow brick, three stories, old wooden window frames that shuddered in the wind--it was one rented half of a duplex, my parents’ first married home in southwestern PA. My bedroom was painted yellow, with alphabet decals parading across one wood-paneled wall. Under the windows was a wall-length art table that my grandfather made to fit around the radiator. There were two small wooden chairs at that table. I had a little record player, a white vinyl hobby horse, a stack of sticker books.For my eighth birthday, the last I spent in that house, I asked for and received a cassette player. I still have it.My memories of this home are specific and visceral. In the kitchen: the taste of Kool-Aid in Dixie cups; frozen grapes stabbed with toothpicks; an experiment with sugar-crusted johnny-jump-ups. In the living room: playing library, squeezed between the couch arm and bookshelf; the large front window that clattered with teenagers’ corn kernels hurled on Halloween. In the middle room, a dining room-slash-office-slash-playroom: we drew with chalk on the linoleum floor.The house where my parents now live is only one block away from this home of origin. Since leaving home at eighteen, I’ve made a point of walking past during every visit. It’s been a ritual, a pilgrimage. Over the years, the house grew steadily shabbier, until shabby became too generous a term. At the end of this past summer, I took a picture of a doll abandoned by a tree outside. Junk was piled on and around the porch. Windows were broken; railings were bent. It was no longer a young family’s first home but just another slum rental, in a town too full of them.Last month, for the first time in thirty-two years, I went inside.A friend gave me access. She bought the property recently, building up a rental property portfolio in the area, and the side of the house I once lived in had been vacated two weeks before my visit. The tenants had been evicted. Angry, vengeful, they stuffed pieces of raw meat in the walls before leaving.I’d been given fair warning about going inside, but really I had no idea what I’d see. First, there was filth--a level of filth that seems incompatible with daily life. Carpet teeming with fleas and dirt and garbage. A pile of garbage in the attic stairwell. Dog feces on the floor. A single bathroom so toxic, so rusted and filthy and stained and horrible, that it seems impossible that anyone used it, let alone the children who lived there. In my sister’s old room--a mattress burned and gutted in the center. Windows broken, plastic blinds like skeleton fingers reaching. A dirt-cheap rental for troubled, careless people with nowhere else to go.Already emotionally raw in the changed world following November 8, I was gutted by what I saw. The word that echoed in my head that day was desecrated. Because that house had been sacred. It had been ours, our family’s, and in the pictures from that time--golden, fading--we’re happy, the house is full of our treasures and projects, my sister and I are running barefoot down the hall.Being back there, in those warped, ruined rooms, was like being inside a nightmare--where everything loved is gone, and everything good has disappeared. And, indeed, in the weeks since my visit, I keep dreaming of that house. The dreams are full of unease and fear, anxiety and confusion. In one, I discover that a door at night is open wide, and I know there are intruders in the house, but I can’t see them, can’t find them. In another, I’m in empty rooms--clean this time, the carpets swept--trying to explain something to people from my New Jersey life, but not finding the words, not making myself understood.That feeling of incomprehension is at the root of what affected me so deeply that day. I’d driven to southwestern Pennsylvania the morning after Election Day, leaving my affluent, liberal town where people were weeping in groups in the street--and arriving in a place that until that day was the one place in the world I thought I’d always feel was home. But Trump signs and billboards covered the landscape like fallen leaves. Trump banners were tacked across broken-down tractors by the roadside. Even the most decrepit mobile homes ordered passersby to Make America Great Again. And I--who had been born and raised in this place--was, finally, an outsider.The night of the election, people in my town shot their guns in the streets. A month ago, the walls of my childhood house were full of meat. When I walked into that house, and saw those rooms of my life overtaken by a kind of existence my children will never be able to imagine, I understood clearly for the first time that I’ll probably never go back; and even if I do, even if we decide one day to dial down our life, scale back, live simply in the mountains, the home we make will never be the same as what that home, to me, once was.A Philip Larkin poem, long a favorite, has been murmuring in my mind:Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,Shaped to the comfort of the last to goAs if to win them back. Instead, bereftOf anyone to please, it withers so,Having no heart to put aside the theftAnd turn again to what it started as,A joyous shot at how things ought to be,Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:Look at the pictures and the cutlery.The music in the piano stool. That vase.I know this sadness will fade. Christmas is coming; we’ll gather, back home, with good food and traditions. My landlord friend will make my old house safe and clean for tenants with fewer bridges to burn. When I walk past next time, perhaps there will be mums in a pot, a wreath on the door. Happiness inside instead of hopelessness, abject, nightmarish despair.Holiday NotesThe best gift you can give a first-time author is a review on Amazon. Just a sentence or two will do! Reviews are crucial to reaching new readers.Click on overand help a book out.Don’t forgetEach Vagabond by Nameas you dive into holiday shopping for friends, family, and co-workers. It’s a book about a small-town apocalypse wrought by unchecked xenophobia--an eerily relevant and timely read.Connellsville and Pittsburgh friends: If you’re doing your holiday shopping offline, you can find a copy ofEach Vagabond by Nameat several places nearby, including Barnes & Noble (Greensburg), The Appalachian Creativity Center (Connellsville), The Book Case (Connellsville), The Stepping Stone (Scottdale), and Tupelo Honey Teas (Millvale).

A Sacred Meal on a Styrofoam Plate

Up today at Real Pants, a short essay I wrote about strangers, small-town spaghetti dinners, and the real meaning of the food served up in those church halls--click on over to read"A Sacred Meal on a Styrofoam Plate."

From Summering to Storytelling

And so the school year begins. First grade started last week; pre-K began today.I’ve had back-to-school butterflies in my stomach for over a week, and the girls’ new beginnings are only partly to blame. My own re-start is also roiling in my gut. The truth is that I haven’t sat down to write in months. This stepping away from new work was deliberate:Each Vagabond by Namedeserved my full attention, and I’ve enjoyed every second I’ve spent on promoting it. Writing about my novel and trying to reach new readers has been lots of work, much of it rewarding. That said, I’m a creature of habit, and having been out of the daily fiction-writing process for so long makes the prospect of returning to it daunting.A couple of weeks ago, I opened up the Word doc of my novel-in-progress, and read the first few lines. Seeing my yellow-highlighted jumble of paragraphs and chapters and all-caps editing notes and ideas--without any kind of comprehensive memory of what-all I’ve actually written, changed, deleted, inserted, brainstormed, planned, envisioned--was panic-inducing. This is the problem with dipping in this way, a few minutes at a time--there’s no time to get a foothold, or even a toehold. As a result, the three hundred pages of semi-coherent sentences hit me like the powerful waves at the beach this summer that knocked my kids off their boogie boards. Crashing over me, pushing me under, leaving me scrabbling on the sand.Those stolen minutes can stretch out now, and I can breathe a little. Starting today, I’ll be able to actually read through my draft carefully to get a sense of where I stand. With four hours a day to work, I’ll be able to make steady progress. First: reread the draft. Next: make notes. Finally: dig into revising and rewriting. The way forward is clear.And yet…Anticipating a return to my writing life isn’t at all pleasant. Though I swore I’d be a plot-focused, efficiently outlining writer for this novel--avoiding the many drafts of pointless meandering that have always been my roundabout path to finding my story--there is a lot, lot, lot of pointless meandering right now. A lot of dead ends, an unclear trajectory, a question of what, exactly, the novel is about. You’d think, three hundred pages in, that I’d have an answer. And I will. I know I will. Even if I don’t right now.And so the work looms. Starting today, I’ll once again be bee-lining home after preschool dropoff, pouring a cup of coffee before sitting down at my desk, my storyteller figures from Taos at my elbow, where I’ll spend fraught hours writing and rewriting and scribbling lists and notes that won’t make sense to me the next day but are vital to getting the revision done.It sounds awful. Is it that awful? It’s kind of that awful. But on the other side of these next few months is a new draft of--something. Something that will have a coherent beginning, middle, and end. And digging into that draft--the one where the story is finally clear--will be so much fun. I can’t wait to see it, to work on it. The me of November, or December, will be so grateful to the me of right now, who bore down on the rewrite despite being certain, at this juncture, that I need to scrap the whole thing and start something new.Daily, I’ll be tempted to set the pages on fire.Onward, friends.I’m so grateful to those of you who’ve recommendedEach Vagabond by Nameto others, and to those of you who’ve left an Amazon review! If you haven’t done so, why notclick on overand leave a few words? I’m eeking ever closer to my goal of 50 reviews. Just a sentence will do! It’s the best way you can help new readers discoverEach Vagabond by Name.Fall is the season ofEach Vagabond by Name, which means it’s the perfect time to select it for your book club! I’m happy to join the discussion via Skype or in person.Email mefor more details.

Wildflowers and Ghosts

We spent last week in New Hampshire, our final stay of the summer. Our visits there begin every year in May, and we track the season in the trees and wildflowers; last time we were there, in July, the roadside was bright with tiger lilies and black-eyed Susans. All of them are dead now. The the tangled clumps of tiger lilies are wilting, the flowers long gone. The gold petals on the few remaining black-eyed Susans are fading and crinkling to brown. When we walk down the road now, we mostly see cattails, a few purple clover, and ghostly Queen Anne’s lace.It feels different there in the fall--more remote (if that’s possible), less ours, like the house itself knows our visits are numbered and is preparing itself for winter, when it’ll return to the mice and ghosts.Not that they’re ever too far away. We had several mouse visitors this trip, including one that peeked repeatedly out of our bedroom closet. As for ghosts--it’s hard not to feel them, especially at night, with the fisher cats screaming in the woods, bats swooping close over our heads, and clouds drifting across the stars. Or in the barn, where Andrew’s grandfather’s license plate collection and old tools have been untouched for years. I wandered in there alone near the end of our trip and sensed something quietly waiting for our departure.And now: one final week of summer at home. I took the kids to the library this morning, probably our final leisurely weekday visit. We took out a ridiculous number of books. We visitedEach Vagabond by Nameon the library shelf. When this summer began, my book had just been born.It’s been a summer to remember.Lots of book news this week!A pickup truck, a cup of black coffee, a terrifying late-night phone call...Each Vagabond by Nameis all these things and more inMonkeybicycle’s “If My Book” feature. This was great fun to write!Late Night Librarydid an excellent interview with me aboutEach Vagabond by Nameas folktale, the lure of my small-town setting, and the charged language that reveals so much about my characters’ fears.Mom Egg Reviewdiscussed the setting ofEach Vagabond by Nameas a microcosm for our response to displaced people worldwide. Very gratifying to have this layer of the book explored in depth.As always...I’m so grateful to those of you who’ve recommendedEach Vagabond by Nameto others, and to those of you who’ve left an Amazon review! If you haven’t done so, why notclick on overand leave a few words? My goal is 50 reviews, and I’m over halfway there. This is one of the most important ways you can help supportVagabond!

Mom Egg Review

InEach Vagabond by Name, "a Pennsylvanian town stands as a microcosm for our response to the millions of immigrants, refugees, and displaced people on the move across the world." It's so gratifying to have this layer ofVagabondexplored in depth. Read more atMom Egg Review!

If My Book...

A pickup truck, a scalding-hot cup of black coffee, a terrifying late-night phone call...Each Vagabond by Name is all these things and more. Check outVagabond's "If My Book" feature onMonkeybicycle!​​

Late Night Library

Super excited to have an interview up atLate Night Library! Great questions aboutEach Vagabond by Nameas folktale, the lure of my small-town setting, and the one image from the book that says it all. Please read and share!