Greetings from snowy Vermont! The dogs are running in and out of the house, shedding snow, and I am ready to come home to the Pacific Northwest.
I’ve been thinking about Thom Jones and his visceral writing lately. Thom Jones lived and worked and died in Olympia in 2016, and wrote short stories that reflected his life experiences in almost brutal, frank and exacting language.
His first collection, published in 1993, "The Pugilist at Rest" was a finalist for the National Book Award, and garnered him comparisons to Hemingway and Raymond Carver. His books are widely available for purchase and are available at the Timberland library.
He wrote from his military and boxing experience, having been raised around the boxing community and was greatly affected by his father's suicide.
He suffered from seizures due to a boxing injury he sustained during basic training and only found success as a writer in his 40’s. He published two more collections of short stories, "Cold Snap" and "Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine" in his lifetime.
His writing is boisterous, blue-collar, dark and humorous. He had a great ear for how people actually spoke, for how to bring us into his characters minds and hearts.
He wrote deeply about the Vietnam experience, in everyday almost pressured language, launching into the stories almost in the middle so you feel like you are constantly catching up to him.
He thought about good and evil, and what we owe each other as human beings. I think a lot about this passage from the title story "The Pugilist at Rest."
“The world is replete with badness. I’m not talking about that old routine where you drag out the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, Joseph Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, etc. It happens in our own backyard. Twentieth-century America is one of the most materially prosperous nations in history. But take a walk through an American prison, a nursing home, the slums where the homeless live in cardboard boxes, a cancer ward. Go to a Vietnam vets’ meeting, or an A.A. meeting, or an Overeaters Anonymous meeting.”
Written nearly 30 years ago, this rings true now if not more so. At times I feel like we are saying this over and over into the wind, and it feels heavy, like there’s no change, no progress in this.
While Jones lays bare some of the worst parts of humanity, he also reminds us that “The human heart rebels against this.”
In this time of uncertainty about where our country is headed, standing up for what our heart tells us needs to be challenged will build bridges, communities and hope.
I’m sitting at the breakfast table with my family having those deep conversations today and urge you to do the same.
On this day we honor Martin Luther King, who urged us to find ways to “walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future.”
Let us reread voices that ask these deep questions, let us be cognizant of what we are and want to be. Let us remember his insistence that, "We will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope."
Let us also celebrate a man who worked as a janitor for the North Thurston School District, who continued to write, trusted his voice and gave us beautifully human stories that stand the test of time.
Let us trust ourselves to face what happens in our lives by turning toward each other, using our voices and doing what we know to be right.
Amy Lewis focuses her column on the literary world of Thurston County, spotlighting writers, small presses, book artists, poets, and storytellers of all types. Contact her – amy@thejoltnews.com – if you have a literary event, book, or reading.
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SheriB
Thank you Amy!
Monday, January 20 Report this
Qphillips
Excellent review of Jones work. Thank you for keeping his memory alive.
Tuesday, January 21 Report this