Wild Apples by Joanna Penn Cooper
Ethel Zine and Micro Press, 2020
Rarely do we take sufficient care with others’ stories. We nod out of time with their speech patterns, contemplating our next rhetorical move. At a key interchange, we fail to account for another’s personal history—or remember it too well, taking it up as a weapon.
Doing this and more to ourselves, we deflect the details of our lives, leaving the investigation at this is something that happened to me, or we bruise ourselves with blame.
Joanna Penn Cooper’s Wild Apples invites a course correction. The flash memoir collection builds and breaks the mystery of another person, one moment at a time.
Cooper’s delicate craft—strikingly self-aware, yet never too revealing—is matched in physical design. The book reveals the hands of Sara Lefsyk, who literally stitched together Cooper’s revelations. Take care with the pages of another’s life, it whispers when touched.
Calling us to handle her with care, Cooper dares to ask more. Each essay is paired with a writing prompt—and the book with a companion notebook in which to understand our own lives. Cooper leaves us refreshingly without excuse.
The writing itself lands a million little punches, jogging memories, rearranging sense of self. Cooper casts herself as a narrator just outside “normal,” forever wriggling from the grip of simplistic identities.
“The Doll” documents childhood in Michigan, where brutal, propulsive winds “gave me nightmares about Frankenstein and industrial spaces.” An elderly neighbor presses a doll into young Cooper’s hands, initiating a lifelong wrestling match with giving and receiving care: “I was the heart being held, holding the heart, all the other hearts. I didn’t know if I could do it.”
“Author Bio” sifts social expectations projected onto girls: “Perhaps she’ll be a model, said a man looking down at her. Perhaps she’ll be a social scientist, said her mother.” Real, fleshy life happens somewhere between, Cooper later observes in a devastatingly funny line: “In a conversation about her childhood, her mother remarked, ‘Some people are stunningly beautiful as babies and then just average-looking adults.’ ”
Visions of Joanna, as she sees herself, come in markers: Bob Dylan’s bedhead or would-be rock star boyfriends (“the boys I liked. Maybe wanted to be.”). Cooper learns to dart away from the defining eyes of men, making her own meaning and mythology. Memory and distance create a semi-permanent record, impressed upon her “like those kits you get where the sun makes a print of leaves pressed onto developing paper,” she writes in “For the Record.” “The print shows the edges shadow makes where a growing thing is pressed down onto a surface and then exposed to light.”
Cooper presses herself on the page, then shines the light on all of us. “Write about the mystery of boys. Or of girls,” she prods. Write out a dream or compose a letter to someone you used to be. Tell the past in present-tense.
These exercises can explain us to ourselves. Cooper’s writing is evidence enough; its worth far outweighs the slight and graceful volume set in our hands.
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Aarik Danielsen is the arts editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri, and teaches at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He writes a weekly column, The (Dis)content, for Fathom Magazine, and has been published at Image Journal, Plough, EcoTheo Review, and more.