This week was so exciting for me as a writer and teacher. I was invited by Artspace Guahan to present writing and journaling strategies for the “Enhancing Response and Services for Survivors of Domestic/Sexual Violence.” While this workshop was initially designed to provide low-cost, creative, and easy-to-teach strategies for survivors, I also demonstrated quick and simple activities that care providers could benefit from. I was able to incorporate two of my favorite community-based class activities together (gratitude writing and sensory-inspired writing) in the hour-long breakout session with plenty of time for participants to put the activities into practice and to chat with their peers. What was most gratifying for me was seeing the high levels of engagement from the audience. It was the second afternoon of a pretty emotionally and intellectually heavy conference, and I was fully expecting the participants to be lethargic and distracted after their full day. However, the group were active participants through both activities, and the sense of fulfilment I had watching them work was immense.
A few days later I was able to collaborate with RCubed Coffee Company at their Valentine’s Day weekend self-love event. The intimate afternoon began with sound healing followed by tea blending and foot or hand scrub making. Kendra, one of the owners, is very passionate about the healing and nutritional properties of herbs and flowers, and her teas are all made with the intention to promote wellness. From waking up to calming down to promoting digestion, Kendra had something from the natural world to solve that problem. I helped to close out the event with a journaling session, and I loved seeing a couple of familiar faces from my last journaling class. It looks like more gratitude journaling classes are on the horizon for me, and I’m excited to have a new “classroom” to work in.
In terms of reading, I have two buzzy books to discuss today. The first is the long-awaited memoir of Lisa Marie Presley, which was largely made possible by her daughter, Riley Keough. The other is a historical fiction book that was one of the most borrowed books from American public libraries in 2024 but ultimately let me down.
From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough
When I thought of Elvis, I thought of the hair, the larger than life personality, the sparkling white outfits, the voice, the dance moves that shocked and captivated America. I vaguely remembered his premature death and legacy of leaving behind a young daughter, but this nostalgic and grieving memoir showed me how much of the story I was missing. Lisa Marie Presley had been in the process of recording and organizing her memoir when she passed away, so her daughter took on and finished her mother’s story. What a beautiful gift this labor of love is. Throughout the story, Keough works to understand the complexities of her mother more clearly, and, by extension, she comes to better understand the famous family she is a part of. Presley was a woman known for her famous father, her famous husbands, and the tragic losses that haunted her life. However, to reduce a woman down to the tabloid sound bytes of her relationships is to scrub away her humanity and the nuances that made her the person the Keough loved.
The audiobook is beautifully composed with the audio recordings of Presley, the voice of Keough, and the calming words of Julia Roberts weaving Presley and Keough’s memories and recollections together to create a cohesive remembrance of a misunderstood and forgotten woman. The memoir opens with Presley’s memories of living in Graceland and her early memories of the larger than life man with larger than life emotions. Her devotion to him and to the sprawling estate they called home was apparent, as was the trauma of being present on the night that he died. While Elvis’ official cause of death was his heart, the drugs he was taking are believed to have played a role in the fatal event. Elvis’ drug use was not the only time that drugs would hurt the Presley family; after being prescribed painkillers for her C-section, Lisa Marie Presley developed an opioid addiction that escalated to the point of her taking 80 pills a day. Presley’s son, Benjamin, ultimately took his own life after struggling with depression and addiction at the age of 27. The deaths of her father and son were two of the most memorable and poignant scenes in the memoir, and the irreparable hurt these losses inflicted were clear in the mourning and grief that were detailed. Presley chose to keep her son’s body in her home for weeks while she processed his death and slowly said goodbye on her own terms, something she could not do after her famous father’s quick and unexpected death.
While Presley’s voice dominates the narrative in the first half of her life, Keough’s voice and memories begin to take center stage for the second half. Her four marriages to four famous men, while fascinating, do not get the spotlight. Rather, Presley’s role as a mother is the gravitational pull of the second half of her life. While she was not perfect, she loved her children immensely, and they loved her. Keough wanted to convey that her mother’s life, while shaped by fame, was ultimately relatable, and the emotional moments of loss make that abundantly clear.
While there is great sadness, there is also great storytelling, and the narration really elevates and enhances the whole narrative. The waitlist to pick this up from your library will probably be long, but I think this is a celebrity story worth waiting for.
The Women by Kristin Hannah
Hannah is a buzzy author in the historical fiction world. The Nightingale was all over Instagram a few years ago, and while the influencers did influence me to read it, I didn’t see the hype as being justified. In a world with so many women-centered World War II books, I did not see The Nightingale as a clear and obvious stand out. I wanted to give Hannah another chance with The Women because it was topping the charts in libraries across the country. I taught The Things They Carried last year and wanted to see another literary representation of the Vietnam War, especially because of the medical and women-centered focus on it.
The story, for me, would have earned so much more praise if it ended while our protagonist, Frankie, was serving in Vietnam. Everything that came after that point, which happened to be the real heart of the story, felt overly dramatic, traumatic, and increasingly upsetting and depressing. The story opens with Frankie’s brother going to war, following a proud family legacy. Inspired by her brother’s service, Frankie chooses to join as soon as possible as a nurse. She rejects any branch that requires extensive training away from combat and signs with the army to immediately get into the action. However, she learns that her brother has been killed in combat, and her parents don’t share the same pride and enthusiasm for their wealthy daughter serving her country. Frankie quickly learns that war is hell as she sees men, women, children, soldiers, and civilians suffering for a war that the American public increasingly doesn’t support. As a sheltered woman with practically no nursing experience, Frankie’s innocence and naivety are quickly stripped away as she becomes, of course, one of the best nurses in the field. Along the way she makes two best friends that love and support her through her years and years of heartbreak and challenges (Frankie rarely, if ever, seems to extend the same favors of support in any capacity) and finds herself the object of attraction for every man she seems to meet. And guess what….these men are married.
The story becomes cliche and tiresome pretty quickly as Frankie opens her heart to the wrong man, has her heart broken by tragic loss, finds a new (wrong) man to open her heart to, has her heart broken by another tragic loss, opens her heart to a man she doesn’t love, ends things, falls back to an earlier wrong relationship that has become even more clearly wrong for her, and on and on and on.
Frankie’s return home from war gratuitously and tiresomely repeats how unsupported and unwelcome Vietnam veterans were and how forgotten and ignored women veterans were. Frankie’s family and community are unsupportive, and her unhealthy coping mechanisms and selfish and hurtful relationship choices result in her spiraling and emotionally hurting others. The tragedies that were supposed to define her character turn out to be false information, and the losses, while still sad, feel increasingly less believable and more and more like a television medical drama. Spoiler: bringing two supposedly dead men “back from the dead” is just overkill.
The story held a lot of potential, but it became too cliche, repetitive, and heavy handed for my taste. If it was shortened by a hundred pages, I think it would have been a far stronger story. A war story doesn’t need to be a series of never-ending trauma to be a successful one, but if that were the measure, then Hannah would have won. I hope that more compelling writing and fictional stories about the Vietnam War are published because it is not talked about enough, but this is not one that I can recommend.
Watching: Tom and I have been playing along to old seasons of Celebrity Jeopardy and really enjoying racing against each other to answer the questions.
Doing: We got our engagement photos taken over the weekend, and I’m so excited to see how they turned out. We went down to a more secluded beach with some breathtaking views, and we had so much fun with each other. Our wedding is in a little over 100 days, and I can’t believe how quickly the big day is approaching.
Eating: Tom took me out to Capitol Kitchen for Valentine’s Day dinner, and the five course meal was some of the best food that I’ve had on Guam. We got to meet the chef at the end of our dinner, and he was proud to tell us that 80% of the meal was sourced locally. The kitchen utilizes a hydroponic garden, an herb garden, and a local farm to ensure they have access to fresh ingredients, and the locally grown herbs and citrus really did make a big difference on the plate. My favorite course was a ricotta and mushroom crepe served over a blended red pepper sauce and topped with edible flowers. It was visually a beautiful dish and had a great balance of flavors to it. Plus, Tom liked that the chef was a huge fan of the Chiefs and had plenty of football paraphernalia on display.
Drinking: Tom set up the espresso machine that I got him for Christmas, and I am so thoroughly enjoying our fancy cups of coffee in the morning. My dad packed us three bags of his roasted coffee, and we’re currently enjoying Devil’s Gorge. The crema is perfect, and the blend is balanced with a rich depth of flavor. I’ll have to ask Dad to send us a care package of coffee soon!
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