New York Times<\/em>, \u201cShe put much of her roving, rowdy life onto the page in vivid stories that garnered the respect of a modest audience and now could be on the verge of making her posthumously famous.\u201d<\/p>\nI count myself as part of that \u201cmodest audience\u201d who was lucky to know Berlin and her work before her death in 2004. I met Berlin when she was my teacher in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Colorado, and I was immediately taken by her as a writer and as a person.<\/p>\n
I wanted to hear all Berlin\u2019s stories: About how she and her jazz musician husband used to hang out in New York with Amiri Baraka back when he was LeRoi Jones.<\/p>\n
Or about how she took a class taught by Edward Abbey at the University of New Mexico where he said \u201cthe Renaissance rushed into Europe like waters flooding a desert arroyo during a sudden storm\u201d and all the girls swooned.<\/p>\n
Or about how she was a close friend of the mother of Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton in Oakland, was the only white person invited to his funeral, and declined when Newton\u2019s mom asked her to write Newton\u2019s biography because, as she told me, \u201cA white person shouldn\u2019t write that book.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sure, I also loved Berlin in part because she was effusive with her praise. I just found a copy of a story I wrote in 1998, with Berlin\u2019s delicate script ringing the text on the first page: \u201cJenny\u2014you can write about anything and it is full of love & promise & grace. I don\u2019t think one story yet has passed by without bringing tears to my eyes and you are\u00a0NOT<\/span>\u00a0sentimental even; or even\u00a0sweet<\/span>.\u201d<\/p>\nYes, I know she sweet-talked all my classmates in her fiction workshop, not just me; she showered love and praise on fellow writers like an old-fashioned lawn sprinkler that distributes water over parched ground and then goes back and does it again. It was just this sort of\u00a0 praise that saw me through the decade-long slog of failure and rejection that I experienced after I left her classroom that eventually resulted in my publishing my first novel.<\/p>\n
But Berlin\u2019s own fiction amazed me even more than the stories she told about her life and the encouragement she lavished on students. Any time I made new friends who could appreciate her work, I\u2019d foist one of her story collections, published by Black Sparrow Press, on them, and whenever I taught a fiction-writing workshop, I\u2019d include some of her stories as well.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m so pleased that forces in the literary world with much more power than mine have at last taken over my mission to keep Berlin\u2019s important words alive. Now that I don\u2019t have to persuade others to read her writing, I can dip in and discuss the wonders to be found in her stories, such as her uncommon sensibility for writing about Catholicism even though she wasn\u2019t Catholic.<\/p>\n
I once gave Berlin a copy of Kathleen Norris\u2019s\u00a0The Cloister Walk<\/em>\u00a0for her birthday. She looked at me with her crystalline blue eyes and said, \u201cThank you for knowing that I would like this.\u201d<\/p>\nI think she thought of herself as a sinner, or at least imagined others saw her that way. She married and divorced three times, raised four boys mostly on her own, worked blue collar jobs to make ends meet, and struggled with alcoholism for years. She was\u00a0over all that by the time I met her, when she was sixty-two. She suffered from double scoliosis that caused a rib to puncture one of her lungs, leaving her tethered to an oxygen tank, which disconnected her oxygen tank for the occasional forbidden cigarette.<\/p>\n
And Berlin relished gossiping and appreciated men. \u201cIf only I were twenty years younger,\u201d she told me about one writer she was corresponding with whose work and other qualities she admired.<\/p>\n
But although she enjoyed being a little bit \u201cbad,\u201d by far her dominant trait was her generosity, evidenced by the reams of letters of recommendation she wrote, the complimentary critiques she gave of students\u2019 work even after they had graduated, and the blueberry blintzes she prepared for me despite the constant pain she was in when I used to visit her in her trailer in Boulder a few years before she died.<\/p>\n
Also, she had a thing for nuns. In the story \u201cStars and Saints,\u201d she writes of a Catholic school she attended as a girl in Texas: \u201cWhenever a siren sounded outside in the streets, near or far, Sister Cecilia had us stop whatever we were doing, lay our heads down on our desks, and say a Hail Mary. I still do that. Say a Hail Mary, I mean. Well, also I lay my head down on wooden desks, to listen to them, because they do make sounds, like branches in the wind, as if they were still trees.\u201d<\/p>\n
Berlin wrote autobiographically almost exclusively, though of course she embellished and changed things around in her fiction. The narrator of \u201cStars and Saints\u201d is too awkward to make friends with the other girls\u2014she\u2019s always the new kid, moving wherever her father\u2019s job in the mining industry takes her, and has to wear a back brace for her scoliosis besides.<\/p>\n
So when she figures out that one of the nuns can\u2019t bear to remove dead mice from the traps in the kitchen, she volunteers for the job, and then lingers there every recess rather than face the other kids in the schoolyard: \u201cThe nuns were so pleased they didn\u2019t say anything about me being in the kitchen, except one of them did whisper \u2018Protestant\u2019 to another one.\u201d<\/p>\n
The child finds comfort in the rituals of the Catholic Church, though her mother forbids her to convert. She sneaks inside a confessional one day anyway: \u201cI\u2019m not sure how long it was before I found myself inside, my heart pounding. It was more exquisite\u00a0inside than I could have imagined. Smoky with myrrh, a velvet cushion to kneel on, a blessed virgin looking down upon me with infinite pity and compassion.\u201d<\/p>\n
To be continued tomorrow.<\/em><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jenny Shank is a novelist whose first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.<\/p>\n
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