Dear Patrick Madden,
You have written a collection of essays so enjoyable that, instead of relegating it to my nightstand for evening reading, I carried it around everywhere, failing to protect it from my 2-year-old. His sticky fingers smeared chocolate on the edges of several pages, tore the corner off “Freewill,” and scribbled on numerous lines, wanting to copy my underlining of so many beautiful passages. I am usually much more careful, and I don’t know why I didn’t learn my lesson after the first incident of vandalism, but your collection put me in an amusable state. It showed me that everything is worth smiling about. It is a collection of joy, depth, and life that has now, by happenstance, collected my toddler son’s destructive curiosity, and I will always be grateful for that. I like the idea that perhaps he just wanted to be one of your collaborators.
You feature other essayists in your pieces the way singers bring other musical artists into their songs to play with tone, add insight, create community. Your collaborative essay “Laughter” featuring Jericho Parms, embodies this spirit beautifully as we see the two of you connect over your experiences with belly laughs, the ones that move through people to create a shared joy. And again when you and Desirae Matherly write about “Expectations,” and you come to realize, “I think I have always fled from death, in ways that I am ashamed of but unable to overcome,” I was touched in a way few essays have been able to affect me. Yes, the contents of the pieces were emotionally rich, but it was the form—the collaborations themselves—that made me catch my breath, they were so refreshing. I felt as if I was being invited into a conversation between some of my favorite thinkers and writers. You demonstrate through these collaborations one of the best parts of writing: as much as the physical act is often done by one person alone at a screen or piece of paper, all the “writing” leading up to the typing or cursive is communion.
Writing essays is talking with other essayists, talking with our readers, listening to our families, listening to the world speaking to us in countless ways we miss every day. Talking, listening, and then being willing to contribute; remembering, as you put it, “that we are participants in the creation of the universe, that our observations are necessary to the resolution of possibility into actuality, that, in the words of Alan Watt, ‘We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.’”
Thank you for sharing your observations. The witness you create with this collection is gracious, playful, complex. Ultimately, you achieve your aim: “to reassert the value of the disparate, which controverts reason, which shakes our certainties, which lightens our burdens, which alleviates our sorrows and brings us to laughter (of insight or humor) as it sidesteps ‘reality’ to create a reality in which art and idle thought are worthy pursuits, worthier, indeed, than all our getting.” When you play around with proverbs and write “Don’t count your chickens before they cross the road,” I am reminded to laugh at my inability to remember sayings and think that maybe my mix-ups aren’t such a bad thing. When you sidestep my expectations for an essay on grief and write a crossword puzzle grappling with the loss of your mother in “Repast,” I am lightened. My sorrow at the loss of my own mother is actually “gladdened by this elegant hope” you create when considering how writing could recover the past, recover our dead—thank you. Thank you for the haiku, reminding me how fun language is. Thank you for writing a collection that, with all its disparateness, made me feel a bit more whole.
Your fan,
Courtney Ruttenbur Bulsiewicz
Much thanks, Courtney, for this fun and generous review of my book. It confirms that my hopes were, at least in this case, fulfilled: that my writing be a way of connecting, even with those too young to read. What a hoot!