A Lesson in Art & Life by Geri Lipschultz

Photo of Denali by author

I’ll say right now that I did not see Matanuska Glacier or Kenai fjords or Resurrection Bay or the bright blue ice, and I did not venture to fly into the frozen recesses of Denali, where small planes landed on the three-mile-thick glacier where the courageous seeker of the recondite might dare to tread. I did not go hiking on the Bluff in Palmer, Alaska, although I did spot Pioneer Mountain turn reddish-pink while I was doing dishes, and I ran out to take it in, wearing only socks, and I alerted my cottage-mate, and the two of us took photographs, and she called it alpenglow.

She knew what it was.

I learned something, and I’m still learning it, and mainly what I’m learning is that I have so much more to learn.

***

A year after my car struck a young deer, I was first on a waiting list for a residency in Alaska.  A week or two later, they notified me—I’d gotten in.  

It was fiction that I’d sent in with the residency application. I would arrive late because my daughter’s orchestra was coming to the US and performing in Carnegie Hall. I couldn’t miss it. The decision to actually leave the cabin I rent in the Adirondacks was a tough one. In addition to my attachment to the land, knowing that I’d likely miss the blossoming wave of early Spring, there was a combination of inertia and fear. More than one person warned me about bear attacks, and for a while I obsessed over whether to bring bear spray or a bear bell, but in the end, what weighed down my baggage was a five-hundred-page manuscript I wanted to revise—hard copy; I did not pack the large, scholarly book I had been reading for well over a month preparing to cobble together a review. 

Between the desire to see even if just a smattering of Alaska and the logistics of sharing space with other writers, not to mention jet lag, I can say that in what amounted to a few handfuls of hours, I managed to recast that novel.

I felt pretty serious gratitude for the adventure that had me airborne in the silver bird, aloft with a perfect south and west-viewing window seat in the sun-flared air, above landscape laden with glacier and elevation, so white and frigid, such that while everyone else was sleeping or agaze in screens of various sorts, my eyes and cold nose against a window were glued on frozen land thirty-five thousand feet below. My next-seat neighbor, an Alaskan, eventually telling me the names, Bering Glacier, Chugach Mountains, as we circled into Anchorage. 

I would hear of many more formations acquiring the surnames of European explorer-colonizers along with their indigenous counterparts—most I wouldn’t have time to see, but I would hear seductive descriptions that stayed in the air—like a platter of desserts, wherein I might allow myself to take a spoonful of—just one, thank you.

That one being Denali, or Mt. McKinley, as it were. 

And that from a distance of about 200 miles but closer than I’d ever dreamed.

Flying above the Yukon was particularly engaging for my recently having read Jack London’s Call of the Wild, which for some reason was not mandatory in High School, where instead we read Waiting for Godot and Hesse’s Siddhartha. 

Early on in the reading (warning—this could be construed as a spoiler), I skipped to the end to see whether London would kill off the dog I’d fallen in love within the first ten pages.

Had he done so, I would have had to close the book, given it away, which I would have done for my own self-preservation. I have told my students that literature is meant to be better than life. As a reader, I cannot bear to subject myself to violence without catharsis, without redemption. 

Somehow, I decided that the violence would have been gratuitous if by the end London had elected to kill off Buck.

I wasn’t troubled by the idea of people finding their sad fates while plundering the pristine frontier, but to enlist and torture the four-leggeds, for such foolishness, and then to kill off your hero—well, it would be too much like life for my tastes. 

***

The intrepid part of this journey was merely a willingness to get on a series of planes, along with a willingness to share space with people I didn’t know. I would be with others, lovely women, all of whom, age-wise, could have been my children. 

Not that they required mothering. 

And so it happened that the day after my daughter’s orchestra’s first performance at Carnegie Hall, I flew to Alaska, where I would meet my three residency mates, with whom I would share living quarters in Mountain Field Farm—a wedding destination when it’s not a writer’s residency—in Palmer, which is about an hour’s drive from Anchorage. There, I would meet the writer of A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest, and after they described the book to me, I would tell them, that based on their description of the book, I would like to review it. 

I arrived in Anchorage a few days after the others. One of the writers came to pick me up. She gave me a tour of the two buildings the four of us writers would inhabit—she was in a tiny house, would share what was called “the barn,” with the only writer among us who’d had a book to their name. I was in a two-bedroom dwelling known as “the cottage.” On about twenty acres of level property, once an old potato farm, were now fields planted with peonies in preparation for the weddings. Later, I would walk the fields, read of the varieties of peonies, imagine what was now essentially soil with some early foliage, would soon rise up overflowing with color, redolence, women strolling with flowers in their hair, daylight lasting almost twenty-four hours. Even in early May, at 10 PM, it was not yet dark. Driving we had passed an entrance to Resurrection Bay and a large bluff. The two women, the driver and my cottage-mate would hike them. The writer of the book would go out alone and hike. My single excursion outside of the residency proper, except to buy groceries at a larger-than life Kroger-like store by the name of Fred Meyers—and a birch ice cream cone not far from the store—would be when this writer would drive us to Talkeetna, where I had a friend from graduate school. A writer, professor, and outdoors-man, he’d moved there, given us a grand welcoming. He met us at a lookout where the sky cleared for us, so we might view the Denali range. We went to a museum, saw a film of the harrowing railroad, breaking people and mammoth boulders to make its way to Alaska. 

***

Sometimes the majesty of the world pulls you out of yourself, and you are almost entirely witness.

I was having that kind of experience the day I hit the deer. 

I had just turned left, off the Benson Road, when I hit the deer. 

The Benson Road is one with a reputation for beauty in the autumn and treachery in the winter, and I was between the two. 

Before I hit the deer, I was thinking that sometimes your whole life is a poem. I was thinking about those oaks, how they not produced acorns, that the entire animal kingdom would have to adjust. I was alone, driving, in the dwindling light of an afternoon in winter far north. Rather than the spectral beauty of autumn leaves, I was taken by their absence. As if a curtain had parted. So much more lay beyond, an expanse of mountains now visible. 

Before the moment of deep shock—the only experience I had of such a strike was the suburban bunny I’d hit trying to swerve around it. This bunny I had seen. Its body under my wheels. I stopped, found something in the trunk to hold its trembling self, and in the end, I buried the small animal.

I had also the second-hand experience of reading and memorizing and then teaching William Stafford’s masterpiece of a poem, “Traveling Through the Dark,” about his finding a dead doe on Wilson River Road: “…she was large in the belly…/ her side was warm; her fawn lay there, waiting…/… I could hear the wilderness listen.…/ I …/…pushed her over the edge into the river.”

But Stafford did not hit the deer. 

Also, there had been this palpable thought, a series of thoughts along with a palpable feeling of goodness, a feeling that produced this hyperawareness, while I drove, my eyes fixed on what surrounded. Even the old road signs became capable of revelation. It was something different than the panorama of unfathomable colors, leaf-play with light. I pondered paths that curved into an unknown cluster of trees with trailheads and clearings. 

My mind going from absent leaves to road signs to the evergreen trees, their branches in plié and relevé. And I thought of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. The sublime. Along with Saint-Saëns Dance Macabre. The Profane. The birch trees in rehearsal. Branches bowing. It’s a courtesy to bow. An impressive performance. And in the distance a rooftop with its garment of snow, snow upon their heads, besotted, a cape. 

The world in this regard imbued with a holiness. 

This beauty progressed among my thoughts, about how to see, how to open so that I might see more, that I might grow.

I knew that there was this thing. People tend to be acquisitive in how they look at a thing, how they see. Maybe, I too looked with the eye of someone who sees only that part she wants. I wondered about this. I wondered if I, too, was looking with the eye of someone who sees only that part she wants, the part she wants to take. I was thinking that this way of seeing is pointless. How it was dangerous. How it was like a gun taking aim at a target. 

I began to ruminate on this, whether there was an alternative to this way of seeing. And then, I wondered if we are ever really seeing the same thing twice? We are told that we don’t walk into the same river twice. I did not wish to simply see what I was used to seeing. I wished to open. Even if it were to be a shock—yes, my thinking did pursue itself unto this. I wished to be shocked into learning. I wished to be supple in my thoughts. Beyond this memory, this series of past thoughts that guide us, that drive our eyes and our minds to focus until the thing upon which we have seized. I wanted more. I prayed for that shock; I said give me that shock. 

Yes, I literally asked. These were words spoken aloud.

Aloud to the listening world of William Stafford.

Beholden to the branding by Virginia Woolf. 

It was hers.

This idea of a shock, a rupture. As in an escaped electron, a recalcitrant proton, a wayward quark. 

That shock I’d asked for.

I looked at the fir trees against the sky against the setting sun. That shock of beauty, that shock of color draining, the second beauty that resembles death, Shakespeare’s “death’s second self.” 

How we see both the cause and effect of what we think, who we in fact are.

The trees turning white, they were turning gray, they were losing, they were losing their color, they were building into a blackness. They silhouetted themselves; they silhouetted themselves until I gathered my sight in a different way, similar to the way the view changed when the leaves dropped their pretense, or the way a holiday comes, and you light up the world either tastefully or over the top blasting with color. 

And, of course, the roads we drive define what we see and how we see, the world so framed for us; we have blueprinted the planet, and I think about the four-legged, my pup in the back seat, my judge and teacher. She sometimes whimpered on this drive, on those curves, those rises and falls of the beautiful Benson Road.

The dog my witness.

My dog and the clouds that were looking down, that symphony, and my last thought before I left the Benson Road and turned left was that the entire world itself and every last little thing it holds is art. 

When my car struck the deer, I had forgotten about asking for that renegade electron. I had forgotten about asking for shock.

***

I was utterly taken by the title of Charlie J. Stephens’s book, A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest. Even before I knew that it was the first line of a Dickinson poem, the title captured me. And then the writer described the book: the child of a single mother retreats to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, where the child finds refuge. For some reason, I did not think to ask why the child might seek refuge. I did not ask why the child might be retreating.

As in from what.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I started reading the book. I had to wait until I’d finished writing the other review, finished finding a home for it, and there were some revisions, some back and forth. 

But when I finally came to reading A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest, I was immersed in its world. The descriptions—the images really captured me. Reading, I remember calling to mind the views of the Pacific Northwest. As in the flight to Alaska, I had a window seat on the way back, where instead of flying over Canada, we were to change planes in Seattle. On the flight from Anchorage, I saw Mount Rainier and other large mountains that looked like they had been splashed with white paint. Otherwise, unending verdure. It did not resemble east coast cities. And in the group of writers, I sensed a difference that was not simply the gap in our ages. I think it was cultural. My cottage-mate was officially Canadian, but her parents were from India. She and her husband lived in Colorado. The other two writers were from Oregon and Washington State. The writer who drove me was an enrolled member of the Lakota nation—and both this writer and the writer of the novel used the third-person plural, regarding pronouns. I became aware of a different relationship with identities, a feeling of the projections and perceptions and navigations. The interpretations of language.  All so important. So much to remain conscious of. So many possibilities for misreading, misrepresentation. 

One cannot be careful enough.

And also in our gathering, there was considerable speech about the state of the world, about coding. I sensed a dissonance. 

I remember saying this thing that I often think, namely that we’ve lost common ground.

Only to be corrected by the writer whose book I would ask to read, who said, “What common ground? There never was common ground.”

I found myself looking down, avoiding eye contact, body language associated with shame.

***

Stephens’s book is abound with imagery, both imagery of the natural world where the child, who is named after Smokey Robinson—Smokey—finds refuge, and imagery of bodies, bodies described by the child who also finds refuge in the closet, where they sleep. The woods and the closet, their escape from a physicality of the adult world no child should witness. 

I had a hard time accepting the mother’s inability to provide protection for this child, she not quite a child herself—age twenty—when she brought the child into the world.

At times I felt pity for this character, the mother—but I also felt the antithesis of pity, which sometimes is contempt.

Because of this, and because of where and how the plot resolves, I felt I had to change my mind about writing about this book, despite the beauty of the writing, despite the compelling nature of many moments, such as when the mother and child go camping, when the child expresses hope that she may no longer need the company of these bad men—these men who are bad are white men. The child tells us this. And there is a moment when the mother informs the child that their father is of color.

The only man the child approves of, the only kind man among/within this “tornado” is indigenous—but we are later told that his people will not tolerate his having a white mate.

A tension builds in the book, especially when there is a new man on the horizon, and the child retreats to the forest.

There are also subplots, the child and their adventures in school, their adventures with a neighbor, another child horrifically harassed by their mother’s lovers. 

***

When my car struck a young deer, I almost didn’t stop. 

I pretended something. 

I denied something.

Or maybe I denied first, pretended second.

Perhaps a slight invisible wall rose up or fell down somewhere in the well of my brain, a consciousness divider. Perhaps it was a reflex, a pattern, a habit, a way of being that kept me alive once or twice upon a time.

There was a rupture, undeniably, this moment disrupted my journey.

But I turned around. I became conscious. I became responsible. I did not know what I could do. I did not know what would happen. 

On impulse, I looked in the rear-view mirror.

The car behind me had stopped.

I knew I should stop.

Now, I could not not stop. 

***

My dog was in the car. I parked, I left the dog in the car, and then I walked. Each step toward the deer was more difficult than the step before. I kept feeling that feeling of terror. With each step, the terror grew. I saw the man had gotten out of his car, had parked on the other side of the street, had stooped down. And then, he was unthinkably dragging the deer across the street where there was an opening into woods. Cars had stopped. Another man parked his car behind the car of the man who was holding the deer with both hands around its neck, dragging the animal across the street. The other side of the street was banked with trees, behind which was a house with cars. 

As I walked, I heard that terrible sound, a sound that I cannot describe. Only to say that it struck my heart. Each time I heard the sound, I felt a shattering. The kind of shattering you don’t think you can survive. I begged for that sound to stop. But the sound came again and again. I thought it was the man trying to command the deer, the man who stopped. He was dragging the young deer across the street. 

I thought it was his—the man’s—voice. 

***

Once upon a time, I was a single mother. I did not have a tornado of men. I lived alone until the weekends, when the father of the child would come to visit. He did not wish to marry me. 

Unlike the mother of this child in the novel, I had the agency of a thirty-five-year-old college adjunct instructor. I wasn’t someone whose father told her she couldn’t make it as an artist, working in a literal factory. I had not only a bachelor’s degree, but a master’s degree from a school that still manages to impress people when I mention it. The father of my child agreed to help raise the child, although he wasn’t sure about marriage. It would take him until my child was ten years old to make the decision to marry me. 

I shouldn’t judge this character. I knew even while reading the book that I couldn’t judge her, that she was doing the best she could. Even the child understood this. The mother confided in the child, acknowledged the child’s brokenness, felt, somehow, that just as she had overcome her own brokenness, so would the child. 

***

The difference of family background, of an undergraduate and graduate education, the age difference upon finding oneself pregnant and unmarried. Such things did not matter—none of it mattered when my car struck the deer, when I sat there with what were now five men with guns in their cars and a very young deer whose face was bleeding, whose legs were broken. 

Somewhere in the forest was the mother of this deer. 

Not even a minute after I made the turn, I heard the small thud. I saw the spot of brown fur. She was on the passenger side. I was going slowly. I did not think to stop right there, but when in the rear-view mirror, I saw a truck behind me stop, I turned around. I made a U-turn, and I parked the car on the other side of the road. 

A U-turn, then parking on the shoulder of the country road, where it rises up from one of the forty-four lakes in the county.

You are not yet thinking about repercussions, although there is a sound that sends tremors to your heart. 

The deer will never grow antlers. The deer will never be shot for sport. The deer will never have progeny. The mother of the deer will be searching and never find what she’s searching for—no, all this does not yet occur to you. 

But it will. 

***

I stayed and stayed with the man with the beard who held the deer, until other men came, until the sheriff came, and when the sheriff told me I ought to leave now, that I didn’t need to be there anymore, I drove off.

But then I made a U-turn. I returned to the scene of my crime. I slowly passed the sight where they had dragged the deer from the side of the road into the woods.

I heard the shots. There were two.

And I drove back to the cabin. 

And I was broken. 

***

The rest of my story is of a world that gives, human beings, yes, with guns, caught off-guard, caught in that moment when they see a helpless breathing innocent torn, unable to participate in the moment, its life cut terribly short by the human being with a weapon in her control, gratis of Henry Ford, gratis of whomever invented the wheel and persisted, a human being without the wherewithal to live in the wilderness without the terrible history—this human being at every stretch of the road trying to make sense of her existence, even now, even at this juncture with its catastrophic consequences, she tries to penetrate the interior of the fabric of flesh and blood and material beauty—this world that gives and gives, and this world that takes. 

***

At times reading the book, I also felt a dissonance. As I do, I must admit, in the poem, itself, the Dickinson poem, wherein the deer who is hurt rises. 

Wherein the one who suffers transcends their suffering—and leaps.

When I read the book, I found myself in an unanticipated place. 

The narrator an eight-year-old child of a single mother—a child who must contend with the mother’s “tornado of men,” but they are a child with resources.

At least for a while, they are.

This nonbinary child without the privilege—without even the reflex to deny what they see. 

Among their resources is an abiding ability for nurturing, an abundance of love, an awareness of the self and the needs of the self, along with a willingness to deny the self. Or shall I say a profound wisdom of acceptance—an acceptance that grants them access—and it’s this access that is telling for the reader. To say more would be a spoiler.

A child with the instinct to acknowledge evil and the inordinate ability to read the adults in their world.  Additionally, with a deep understanding of and love for the Oregon wilderness to which the child retreats. An animism characterizes the telling. We sense that the deer, so to speak, has the child’s back. 

I use pronouns befitting the nonbinary nature of the child.

Using pronouns in this manner disrupts. It forces the brain to reset itself, to become conscious of itself.

To “see” the child differently. 

To refrain from projecting an identity upon the child—and equally important, to see the world through the child’s eyes, no matter how painful.

An entirely different way of seeing. 

This alone might be sufficient reason to read this book. 

***

We read fiction not for answers but for questions. In fiction, the questions are not asked; they are posed or implicated in the stories. 

The defamiliarizing here, in this fiction, is similar to what happens in a book of magical realism, in the art of magical realism, in the creations by writers and artists that produce disturbance, the art that does not settle its scores, the art that states its case without logic—the art that is so like life. 

Twice a Pushcart Prize nominee, Geri Lipschultz has published in Terrain, The Rumpus, Ms., New York Times, The Toast, Black Warrior Review, College English, among others. Her one-woman show was produced in NYC by Woodie King, Jr. Her novel will be published by Dark Winter Press in 2025. Read more at gerilipschultz.com