At 18, I moved from a rural mountain town to Chicago for college. I knew nothing and was still grappling with the fact that everything I'd known, everything I'd been used to in high school and as a child, was over-- the people I'd grown up alongside had all moved on. With new roommates and friends, I was withdrawn and spent a lot of time in the halls of the Harold Washington Library. By pure chance, I stumbled across The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell and chose to read it based on the cover art. It ended up becoming one of the most influential books in my life. It focuses on the idea of temporality and belonging. Throughout our lives, we brush against the lives of others, sharing wisdom, experience, intimacy and heartache, unconsciously changing one another no matter how long we spend together. Yet we always leave one another because we have no control over our own lives. Life is a fragile thing, especially when we are young and it is in flux, and how we begin is almost never how we end. At the same time, we so frequently worry about whether we fit in or belong, trying to figure out whether we can really connect to the people around us. That fear, that hesitance, is what holds us away. The main character of the book is in a place where he is legally barred from socializing with a people that he is so desperately curious about, but he manages to make them love him anyway through whatever channels he can. I started spending a lot of time observing other people, seeing where their lives took them. I went on many late-night walks by myself, just looking at lights in the windows and thinking about who was there, what their lives were like and what circumstances brought them there. This period of my life led me to a great love of talking with strangers-- I will strike up a conversation with literally anyone. I have learned so much about what it means to be human from simple conversations with people on a street corner, with a barista who is having a hard day, with a doorman who knows more about Lower Wacker Drive than I do. This book opened the door to my empathy for others, and it has changed the way I perceive everything."
"I had originally planned to do another, more “intellectual” book for this project, but the night before the picture was taken I had an epiphany. Maybe the other book taught me to see cultural norms as responses to practical stimuli, but does that effect my daily life? Not so much. The Peterson Field Guide literally changed the way I look at the world. The copy I’m holding is the one I got in grade school, the first of three field guides that have each subsequently been almost constant companions. Knowing that I could find all of these different species of birds if I just paid attention to my surroundings made me take notice of the nature around me, even in the places that initially feel barren. Where most people wouldn’t even think twice about the birds around them (or really even notice that they were there), they’re almost always on my mind. I’m constantly looking up in the air, out on the water, at any rustling branch trying to see which species will show up. A lot of people seem taken aback by how many different birds can be seen at any give place at any given time, even in the city, but I promise, if you take the time to look around you, you’ll see them. The hundreds of sandhill cranes migrating overhead, the brown creepers scurrying up the sides of the trees, the peregrine falcons hunting pigeons in the midst of the skyscrapers; they’re all there if you look for them."
Don DeLillo came into my life when I was 25. I had heard whisperings of his name by different folk artists I followed and my best friend would mention him and his work nearly every time reading was brought up in conversation. Sometime shortly after my 25th birthday, I wandered into Borders looking for something new to read and there he was, staring back at me in a 25th Anniversary edition cover: White Noise by Don DeLillo. I picked it up and haven't looked back since. White Noise was the defining moment in my adult life. I've always dreamed of being a writer and I lost almost all of that dream when I left for college. It wasn't until 25 that I found myself careening back towards it and White Noise was what threw me back at it full throttle. DeLillo has this way of defining and describing our most internalized fears as a person and as society that it feels as if he's talking directly about you. White Noise is the true embodiment of that. It didn't just make me want to be a better writer, it forced me to take notice of everything around me and realize that being an adult isn't what we've been told. It's not about the house or the car or the kids, it's not about the job or how much money you have (or don't), it's about finding the things in life that make us feel full and to appreciate, if only for a moment, the things that make us truly happy. I go back to White Noise once a year to remind myself how far I've come and to let me know I still have so much farther to go.
