A Book is a Basket
“The proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”
In the fall of 2022, when I was forced to confront a level of financial instability and exhaustion that felt almost unbearable, I began to find a pathway through story. I made a goal: to write 1500 words a night. I was a new mother in the middle of an inexorable dissertation in anthropology, with no space, mentally or physically, to think theoretically or piece the fieldwork notes together that would usher in its completion. I felt alone, isolated, and lost. I walked daily with my baby on my back and wondered how I’d wound up in a space so existentially fragmented. Thoughts began to surface — questions about the meteoric split of my family years earlier, about justice and injustice, about the ways abundance falls on some for their positionality and not others. Those questions involved race and class discrepancies — there was a fuel shortage in the UK, where I was living at the time, and people were paying vast amounts to heat their homes or simply living in the cold. Despite global trauma, the pandemic felt as if it had been erased. Where was our world going? How could elected officials and corporate actors make overt decisions to hurt others? How did and could they get to such a dark place of complacency and denial? Was the capacity to hurt a response to previous hurt? Was it the result of moral injury? Does all hurt begin close to home? I began to imagine, to let objects lead to worlds and worlds lead to characters. I wrote about the trauma of soldiers, of children, of witnessing. I let characters dance an agentive dance my keyboard caught until there was a thing, haphazardly woven, but there.
A book is a basket.
To Will a House tells the story of a farmhouse on the Penobscot Bay and its inhabitants through the perspectives of several interweaving characters. It is a tale of sisters, of womanhood, of family, of masculinity, of witnessing, and ultimately, of indigenous reparations. It unfolds like a house, quite literally, through architectural drawings, and metaphorically, through a narrative that begins, like an attic, with dense recollections, before progressing through various “stories.” It went through three major revisions: it was told by a single, first-person narrator, then it incorporated an alternative beginning and a series of journal entries; it briefly became a play. The book relied on readers and editors, who asked questions about the characters and plot that led me to re-weave an intergenerational story told through multiple perspectives. While walking in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park one day, the thought came to me to transform the story into a will itself. What would a reflexive, colonial house, built on sacred land, will for its future?
A professor of creative writing, commenting on the phenomenon of Artificial Intelligence, said to me not long ago, “writing is a dying art.” To Will a House was written without the aid of GenAI tools. It came from the oceanic core of imagination we all carry internally — where, if we listen — we can find worlds that exceed the machinic, and always will. Writing, you see, is an art I believe desperately must go on living.
When To Will a House was almost complete, I gave it to some of my students to read. The process of querying had left me disheartened — I barely heard back from anyone, even to reject my story — so I asked if they would tell me what they honestly thought and if it spoke to them. The answer was “yes.” Even if the gatekeepers of the publishing industry did not believe in the basket I was weaving, there were readers urging me not to give up.
A book is a basket.
To Will a House incorporates the images and art of some of those generous readers. It does so to resist the limitations of a market rooted in the demand for a commercial and technological magnification that risks eroding creativity. It incorporates their hearts and minds and stalwart belief in the power of stories to become seeds that germinate a world we can more gratefully co-create. In this world, we begin to unpack how the harms that sediment within us when we are children, or even before that, as genetic information, ripple out to inform the decisions we make forever as a global community.
This book would not have been possible without those who wove its basket with me — who saw in it a vessel, a lighthouse, a world worthy of becoming. May it find you if you need it. May it give you what you need. May it serve as a reminder that words are living worlds we forever make together.