Review
Title: The Precarious Walk: Essays from Sand and Sky
Author: Phyllis Barber
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Genre: Essay Collection
Date: 2022
Pages: 227
Binding: Paper
ISBN: 978-1-948814-59-1
Cost: $18.95
Reviewed for the Association for Mormon Letters by Julie J. Nichols
I’ve been reading a lot of essays lately. On the surface, this is because I teach creative nonfiction (CNF) workshops to students at Utah Valley University who often don’t yet know what CNF is. I want to give them examples so they can (a) recognize it when they see it, (b) learn some famous names associated with the genre, and (c) try to imitate the forms and attitudes that shape the lines and paragraphs of some of the best writing ever produced. But even if I didn’t “do” CNF by profession, I’d seek out the personal voices, the idiosyncratic thought processes, the generous self-revelations, and wise philosophizing that make up this rich, multidimensional genre, for connection, affirmation, and exposure to gentle, intelligent, craft-conscious minds.
So lately, I’ve been reading Rebecca Solnit on being lost; Ann Patchett on friendship during a pandemic; Jenny Boully and Alice McDermott on writing; Margaret Atwood on the burning questions of the twenty-first century. All women, notice. All bright and clever wordsmiths, people whose personae I come to know as, immersing myself in their collections, I fall fortuitously into their habits of expression and tone. I laugh aloud at Margaret Atwood—how does she stay so wry in the face of the idiocy she calls out in our first-world cultural moment? I am warmed by Ann Patchett—I want to be one of the friends she speaks of with such love. And Rebecca Solnit’s word-savvy, wide-ranging erudition reassures me by the depth of its response to large happenings in small human psyches.
And now there’s Phyllis Barber. As a Mormon woman who writes, who’s gone to Pilgrimage retreats in the canyons east of Salt Lake City, who’s attended Sunstone Symposia and reviewed submissions for Dialogue and Weber, I’ve heard her name for years. I recognize her face–I saw her at the book launch for John Bennion’s new novel just a few weeks ago. But I’m not as familiar with her essays as I might be, and perhaps you’re not either. But let me assure you, you will want to make her acquaintance.
“Occasional pieces” is the name Margaret Atwood gives to the pithy selections in her latest collection (Burning Questions), specifying that they arose from “occasions” from 2005 to 2021. In a similar way, Barber’s current anthology, The Precarious Walk: Essays from Sand & Sky, brings together seventeen self-identified “thought pieces” from 2009 to the present. They come from earlier books (such as To the Mountain: One Mormon Woman’s Journey to the Sacred, published by Quest Books, 2014) and journals like Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Barber has published extensively in other venues too; she has a background in journalism and fiction as well as CNF. But this volume is consciously self-revelatory and personal.
Collections of personal essays need not follow a particular theme, but the title of this volume indicates the unity of direction these essays take: for Barber, the deserts of the West are the beloved material site(s) of her formation, but her spiritual transformation is an ongoing journey, originating in Mormonism, now dancing long distances away. Torrey House, the press that has produced this modestly lovely, easy-to-hold volume, publishes authors who “explore the diversity of human experiences with the environment and engage community in conversations about landscape, literature, and the future of our ever-changing planet” (228). In other words, they’re a regional publisher focusing on a certain philosophy of place. Barber’s essays elegantly fulfill this mission.
Her settings range from the homes of her youth in Boulder City and Las Vegas, Nevada, to spiritual wanderings all over the globe. The titles of the seventeen essays suggest both the particularity and the expansive bandwidth of the map she traverses: “Ode to the Mojave,” “The Desert, Waiting,” and “At the Cannery;” situate her in southwest American and often Mormon (that is, leaving-Mormonism) territory. “Dancing with the Sacred,” “Responsibility: the Essential Gesture,” and “On Being Quiet” float both more inward and further afield as she recounts explorations beyond the boundaries of her earliest learning and deeper within.
Many of the essays reveal the inner conflicts this outreach both springs from and leads toward. Open the book to almost any page and find evidence:
There’s a struggle in me….As much as I’ve tended to books and classical music, I know that, buried inside me—the creative thinker, the semi-concert pianist, and a woman with two college degrees—there is a plain-sense woman with wide hips and calluses on her hands that she hides in the pockets of her skirt, a woman dressed in a gingham apron grinding wheat into flour for bread with half-tied work boots on her feet. (66, from “Great Basin DNA”)
I’m feeling inadequate as a mother and a decent human being. I’m suggestible and therefore not impervious to [the invitations of an evangelical preacher]….I could swoon, though I won’t. I’m precise. I’m in control…For a fleeting moment, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t consider this revival, showing up in a Levi skirt and a homespun blouse. Maybe I’m unyielding and too tight for my own good. Maybe I’m stuck in thinking I have all the answers. Maybe I don’t understand the first thing about Jesus… (102, from “The Knife Handler,” which was cited as Notable in two Best American 2011 anthologies)
It’s good to be in South America with these shamans…good to dance with the most powerful shaman. It’s also good I hadn’t known [my ‘most powerful shaman’ dance partner’s] title. There’s protocol to worry about. But important as respect is, I always seem more concerned with the sacred code of the Other. There are things that matter to my integrity, like making meaningful contact with strangers. (119, in “Dancing with the Sacred”)
Questioning, self-deprecation, gifts of inheritance, and of the Spirit are the material of her journeying. Her readiness to try new rituals and ceremonies among men and women of various faiths and cultures (“The Precarious Walk Away from Mormonism,” for example), and to probe her own psyche in writing (“The Nested Self,” for example), leads her away from orthodoxy and toward what she senses in her dancing bones is a more universal truth. There’s a loving curiosity in her inquiries, a respectful acknowledgment in her dismissals and redefinitions. No urgency; no demands. Just a kind but penetrating reaching out above, around, and away from thoughts, processes, and expectations the Mormon world and the arid southwest desert inevitably impose.
Like the other essayists I’ve been reading lately, Barber extends a hand of friendship through the page. Her genre facilitates this connection. In “The Nested Self,” she says, “I want the reader’s sympathy but need to ask whether or not I’m willing to challenge my own stories about myself. I need to take a deeper look, even with the knowledge that I may never arrive” (210). This vulnerability, this uncertainty, is the inclination behind all creative nonfiction. I can see myself assigning many of Barber’s essays to my classes full of precariously-walking students, both for their striving and for their craft. There’s a lightness and wisdom to these essays. Read them to find comfort, companionship, and guidance if your world feels constricted and cliched. Escaping that world is a precarious enterprise, but Phyllis Barber is there with a knowing smile and a nod, a fitting addition to your list of essayists to connect with in moments of questing and reflection.