Vicki Madden

@vlmadden

Teacher, very slow writer, lover of libraries & trains. Essays: Heart Problems in A Public Space (Pushcart Notable) and The New York Times Rewilding my 1/3 acre garden, mending and darning socks and my little corner of the world vickimadden.net

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Vicki Madden@vlmadden· 5d

My own history felt like thin broth. A sense of danger or loss underneath silence. Our family stories consisted of my father’s narration of a big, happy Irish family that was poor but didn’t know it, a kind of nostalgic boosterism for Montana frontier ranchers. On my mother’s side, nothing. #wip

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· 10d

#wip Matrix of Memory: ...the mysterious pathways of process I had long resisted led me, through many discursive detours among the dead, among my dead, to some kind of home, not the original geographical place but what one Montana writer called “that ultimate shelter which is a coherent self.”

Hippocampal ripples and cortical dimensionality expansion is what the researchers call these processes. From those two dots, we elaborate history into a 3D landscape based on the story we know or our own current perspective, but is it accurate? Is it frozen in time contemporaneously? Or does it change, based on who we are now and what we know when we retrieve that memory? Or how many times we’ve pulled it out, like a gas station roadmap, unfolded it and examined all the connections, then tried to refold it -- but it won’t return to its original pristine flatly folded state.
Reluctantly I had set out on this family history investigation. And the mysterious pathways of this strange thing I had long resisted, a creative habit, led me, through many discursive detours among the dead, among my dead, to some kind of home, not the original geographical place but what one Montana writer called “that ultimate shelter which is a coherent self.”
To make contact.

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· 12d

...my consciousness was a universe of fragments going in all directions into outer space, like the dark crackly moon flights we watched on television. There was no resting place at the center where I could trust my reflexes, my ability to read adults and react accordingly, relax when possible. #wip

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· 13d

May or may not appear in the final version of my #wip currently titled A Long Line of Nobodies: A Geneological Detective Story. Was my unknown cousin a serial killer, as my uncle told me? Or just a plain old murderer?

Louise was not the first or the last person to conjecture about killers in the West.
The poet Richard Hugo, who grew up in the neighborhood where I was born, claims the mid-Twentieth century acceleration of loss is to blame: “There is more than just temporal correlation between the destruction of the Louis Sullivan buildings in Chicago and the Sharon Tate murders in Los Angeles.” I guess poets are entitled to intuitive leaps, at least as much as the criminal and medical experts in this story, but the only Louis Sullivan building razed in the decades leading up to the 1969 Tate murders was the Garrick Theater, once among the tallest buildings in Chicago, an imposing noble site of drama, which did suffer a very American fate. “After a long decline that began in the 1930s, the Garrick was razed early in 1961 and replaced with a parking structure.” They paved over paradise.
Caroline Fraser in Murderland attributes the high rate of serial killers in the late 20th century to lead poisoning from unregulated smelters.
The British writer Jonathan Raban, long settled in Seattle, goes further back in time to the Montana origins of my own family. He kept meeting people in Seattle who’d left homesteads in eastern Montana and were silent as stones about that past. In Bad Land: An American Romance, Raban wants to know what happened in Eastern Montana that scarred so many into silence. Raban arrives in Terry, Montana, the town of my own beginnings--because my parents met there--in a chapter called Fictions.

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· 14d

Betye Saar, a visionary in myriad ways, always inspired and awed me. She died a few days short of turning 100.

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· 14d

#wip #memoir tentatively titled "A Long Line of Nobodies: My Montana Triptych"

How can we understand why some information surfaces from below and becomes knowable and seeable, something we can act on, while other things remain unsayable, unprocessed grief from past unknowns driving us blindly. My family culture, perhaps caused or influenced by all that silence Jonathan Raban investigated, said: don’t want things, don’t ask for too much, don’t tempt fate, definitely don’t ask for assistance, silent solitary skill wins the day; knuckle down, buckle down, do it do it do it.
Louise foretold and foretold, she asked to be heard, she asked for help, and her warnings were not taken seriously. Did they see her as a hysteric, overreacting and suggestible, rather than objective? She was wrong about the specific type of killing, but she was right that Kenneth would kill someone. In hindsight, it’s the judge and the probation officer who seemed filled with wild fancies and unfounded conceptions. Louise foretold and foretold, but her warnings weren’t intuition or chimeras. She was simply keeping track of the due dates set by the court systems, seeing the patterns, taking notes and making phone calls. She was paying attention to the whole history, not fortune-telling.

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· 27d

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· 28d

A whole bunch of people are putting in this comment, in support of the change. It is nonsense.

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· Jul 12

"The Times article, combined with Frank’s Butte connections and Momma’s tenacious memory of triplets, gave me the idea that maybe the doctor had palpated multiple babies. That would be a reason for a C-section and, if Frank were planning to sell the extras, Marge would need to be knocked out."

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· Jul 8

On my 21st birthday, we sat on a bench on the median strip at 108th and Broadway, with a bottle of whiskey, 3 glasses, and a bowl of ice. It was humid. Later that night, between midnight and one a.m., more than an inch of rain would come down in one hour. #memoir #wip #amwriting

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· Jul 7

I never worked up the courage to ask, knowing that before I could even finish my sentence, it would be choked off by my mother’s “no, we can’t afford it, can’t, no, no, no.” I imagine those syllables as the rhythm I heard in the womb, the whooshing drumbeat of her heart, or mine. #memoir #wip

For years, I read the classifieds in the Seattle Times, the horses for sale, Palomino, Morgan, Buckskin, Appaloosa, Quarter Horse, Bay. I made lists of costs and how much I could earn, babysitting, paper routes, picking strawberries. I knew I wouldn’t be going door to door to sell greeting cards or other items advertised for young entrepreneurs in the back of my brother’s Boys Life magazine. I didn’t have the stomach for human rejection, so much scarier than falling from a horse or jumping off a roof or tree to avoid getting caught smoking or throwing apples at cars. I made the lists and plans, rehearsed my presentation, but I never worked up the courage to ask, knowing that before I could even finish my sentence, it would be choked off by my mother’s “no, we can’t afford it, can’t, no, no, no.” I imagine those syllables as the rhythm I heard in the womb, the whooshing drumbeat of her heart, or mine.

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· Jul 4

A family tree used to be clarity itself, neat boxes linked by straight lines and a limited set of choices, up, down or sideways. But out of sight, underground, a tree is weighed down by a web of interrelations: mycelium, fungi, subterranean stitching of huge transport networks, interstitial macrame.

We see what we are prepared to see, and my young heart felt as arid and empty as the Eastern Montana sky. I slipped away from people and places easily. But my body said something else, shedding big chunks of hair from my head after a visit home.
Once I could see a clear clean line. Through an argument, across the country, up the socioeconomic ladder. Now I find myself almost buried under a web of too many connections in too many directions. Is this simply the effect of time? I thought time stripped things away.
A family tree used to be clarity itself, neat boxes connected by straight lines and a limited set of choices, up or down or lateral. But a tree, no matter how inert it appears, is pushing down and pushing up and pushing outward all at the same time. Out of sight, underground, a tree is weighed down by a web of interrelations: mycelium, fungi, subterranean stitching together of huge transport networks, interstitial macrame.
It was through this matrilineal line that I came, eventually, to see the landscape and territory from which I sprang. Though it looked like empty space, a blank document, It was so crowded with history that I couldn’t see there was anything there. A sleight-of-hand trick, like my grandmother’s seventh storage space, full of nothing but empty clothes hangers.

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· Jul 3

"The only person who foretold the events, rather accurately it would turn out, was Kenneth’s sister, Louise. Our Cassandra. Louise foretold and foretold but nobody wanted to hear it, especially not Kenneth’s probation officer, who responded to Louise’s urgent warnings by hanging up on her." #memoir

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· Jul 1

Will we ever have true public servants? Will we ever enter an era when we are governed by people who are not: -corrupt thieving people, like Trump -spending public money to defend against sexual assault accusations -trading on Wall Street using info gained due to their role as a public servant?

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· Jun 29

“We were living out in the country,” Marge said about the first divorce,“in a big house that looked like a log cabin. Roberta was little. She pointed at the wall near the chimney and said the house is on fire. I ran out to the well to get water and poured it down the chimney." #memoir #inheritance

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· Jun 22

With the exception of his birthdate—-New Years Eve in 1932 when Eulene rode atop a horse-drawn sled from Wyola to Lodge Grass— every factual answer Kenneth gave was either definitely or most likely a lie. #familyinvestigation #essay #amwriting #montana #wipsnips #wip

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· Jun 16

"I came from a world of sitting under the under the big oak tree, eating dirt, playing with rocks and acorns and hazelnuts in their fuzzy dun-colored skins and pieces of fossilized lava from our nearby volcanos, Mount Rainier and Mt St Helens." #memoir #wipsnips #jung #typology #jungianfunctions

My jungian analyst told me, though he would probably object to that verb, three things: take my dreams seriously, get a creative habit, and, what I struggled with most was his pronouncement that understanding is overrated.
I was a champion understander, collecting insights like stamps or coins. Except they weren’t real in the way stamps and coins are. Extracting aphorisms from experience is not wrong, I guess, but maybe the problem is it’s still an abstraction, an airy intellectual construct made at a distance. This breakdown was somehow calling me to get closer to actual earthiness, the body, the material world, which for me was in the realm of what Jungians typologists called my “inferior function.” I found this assessment hard to believe because I came from a world of sitting under the under the big oak tree, eating dirt, playing with rocks and acorns and hazelnuts in their fuzzy dun-colored skins and pieces of fossilized lava from our nearby volcanos, Mount Rainier and Mt St Helens. I came from cooking all our food from scratch, picking and canning dozens of jars of peaches and containers of strawberry jam. I came from extreme thrift, sewing my own clothing and washing out plastic bread bags to reuse, practiced by two parents who’d been born in the Dirty Thirties in Eastern Montana, a time and place of drought and depression. How much earthier could you get?

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· Jun 8

Mice who receive a shock when they smell a particular scent continue to shudder at that scent for all their lives, even without the shock; their children and grandchildren shudder, too, though they never received the shock. #wipsnips #memoir #inheritance #truthstrangerthanfiction #trauma #bodies

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· Jun 6

"Still, there were dangers, as discussed by Dr. Murdoch J. Cameron in his 1923 guide to the technique, based on 107 sections he’d performed while losing only one mother, making him something of a guru." #memoir #montana #familysecrets #wipsnips #guide

In 1935, the year of my mother’s birth, a cesarean section would have been
risky. A reliable supply of penicillin, eventually developed in Peoria, Illinois,
in a single moldy cantaloupe—from which most of the worldwide supply still
derives—had not yet been established. There was strenuous debate in obstetrical
journals in the first half of the twentieth century, eventually establishing the low
cervical transverse incision as the safest approach rather than the historically
used classical vertical incision. Still, there were dangers, as discussed by Dr.
Murdoch J. Cameron in his 1923 guide to the technique, based on 107 sections
he’d performed while losing only one mother, making him something of a guru

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· Jun 1

When I began to investigate family history, following an intuition that something about Marge’s births could shed light, even just symbolic or mythic light, on the loss of my daughter, I didn't yet know that I contained cellular ghosts from my mother's womb and from Marge's womb. #memoir #chimera

When I began to investigate family history, following an intuition that something about Marge’s births could shed light, even if just symbolic or mythic light, on the loss of my daughter, I didn't yet know that I contained cellular ghosts from my mother's womb and from Marge's womb.
Chimera, according to the Oxford English Dictionary:
from Greek, a she-goat or monster
1 a fabled fire-breathing monster of Greek mythology, with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tale
2 figurative. with reference to the terrible character, the unreality, or the incongruous composition of the fabled monster:
a. a horrible and fear-inspiring phantasm, a bogy.
b. An unreal creature of the imagination, a mere wild fancy; an unfounded conception.
c. an incongruous union or medley

The womb, it seems, is crowded with cellular remnants of previous occupants and apparently of the scraps I’d picked up while in my mother’s womb. I carry my people close to my heart, apparently. Without a living daughter, I am carried, as a chimera, by fewer and fewer, perhaps only by my sister and her daughter. It comforts me sometimes to know that Annie and my older brother Bob, who both died too young, left cells in me, cells whose specific function appears to be healing injuries to my heart, though I don’t know what that even means. Micro-chimerism promises some kind of internal communion, but with what? A fire-breathing she-goat resident in my heart, suggesting the fears of fetal monsters old obstetrical journals speak of. Or is all this just wild fancies or unfounded conceptions? When we allow our bodies, not our rational minds, to manifest, what horrors might it bring forth? What secrets might be revealed?
Perhaps the monsters are just unbearable feelings, operating in the dark, underground, Hades’ realm. Or they are the fierce protectors of those too tender feelings, experiences frozen inside us in the absence of an empathetic witness.

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· Jun 1

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· May 30

The science of our connections to family used to be simple inheritance. But over my lifetime, so much complication has come into play. We are entangled in all directions, invisible threads of DNA, epigenetic pockets of trauma, and, now micro-chimerism, small monsters hiding inside us. Or some of us.

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· May 29

Raban kept meeting people in Seattle who’d left homesteads in eastern Montana and were silent as stones about that past. In Bad Land: An American Romance, Raban wants to know what happened in Eastern Montana that scarred so many into silence. #wipsnips #memoir #montana #essay #amwriting

Caroline Fraser in Murderland attributes the high rate of serial killers in the late 20th century to lead poisoning from unregulated smelters.
The British writer Jonathan Raban, long settled in Seattle, goes further back in time to the Montana origins of my own family. He kept meeting people in Seattle who’d left homesteads in eastern Montana and were silent as stones about that past. In Bad Land: An American Romance, Raban wants to know what happened in Eastern Montana that scarred so many into silence. Raban arrives in Terry, Montana, the town of my own beginnings--because my parents met there--in a chapter called Fictions.

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· May 26

When I met up in Billings with my mother and Uncle Stan, they were as curious as I was about old questions, especially why their father had secretly had their mother sterilized. The last night, Stan said "that’s why Kenneth became a serial killer.” #wipsnips #haunted #memoir #familysecrets #fate

But thirty years after I’d left home for New York, I met up in Billings with my mother and Uncle Stan. They were as curious as I was about old questions and old crimes, especially why their father had secretly had their mother sterilized. After four days of gathering in a rental house where the television soundtrack narrated the Kavanaugh hearings, after we visited Little Big Horn and Crow Agency, sites of my mother and Stan’s childhood when Crow territory was still run by whites, after we made a timeline on the wall to track all their fifteen or sixteen moves by mail truck or milk truck or on a bus with a three-legged dog or a box of kittens, Stan surprised us all by capping a story about their moonshiner uncle’s bad deeds with the statement, “And that’s why Kenneth became a serial killer.”

Until that moment, I had never heard of Kenneth, or so I thought.

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· May 26

But thirty years after I’d left home for New York, seeking some kind of reconnection, I met up in Billings with my mother and Uncle Stan. They were as curious as I was about old questions and old crimes, especially why their father had secretly had their mother sterilized. After four days of gathering in a rental house where the television soundtrack narrated the Kavanaugh hearings, after we visited Little Big Horn and Crow Agency, sites of my mother and Stan’s childhood when Crow territory was still run by whites, after we made a timeline on the wall to track all their fifteen or sixteen moves by mail truck or milk truck or on a bus with a three-legged dog or a box of kittens, Stan surprised us all by capping a story about their moonshiner uncle’s bad deeds with the statement, “And that’s why Kenneth became a serial killer.”

Until that moment, I had never heard of Kenneth, or so I thought.

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· May 24

"Perhaps if I hadn’t taken such pride in those awards bestowed by authorities, if I hadn’t been so eager to be renamed, I wouldn’t have ended up stuck so badly in mid-life, carrying a diagnosis I couldn’t shed: Failure to Progress." #WIPsnips #memoir #amwriting #writingcommunity

After that first award, I slowly picked up speed at the process of garnering new identities, so that by the end of high school, they were pouring in: top debater, National Merit Finalist, Rotary Youth-of-the-Month, even Senior Prom Queen (I know, I know, I’m not the type, but I can explain.) In hindsight, maybe being voted “Most Academic” in my high school yearbook wasn’t the shiny compliment I believed it to be; maybe it meant I couldn’t actually do things? I left my home in Washington State on the strength of those awards and relocated to a dorm room on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. These days, I have reason and time to re-examine all this: perhaps if I hadn’t taken such pride in those awards bestowed by authorities, if I hadn’t been so eager to be renamed, I wouldn’t have ended up stuck so badly in mid-life, carrying a title I couldn’t shed: Failure to Progress.

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· May 23

Epigraph to my #wip titled A Long Line of Nobodies 'We sense the dead have a vital force still. They have something to tell us, something we need to understand. I come from a long line of nobodies.” -Hilary Mantel #wipsnips #memoir #montana #writesky #grief #writingcommunity

empty Montana winter landscape with a sagging old house about to fall down

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· May 22

The first bloom in my NYC tree pit garden. Planted these grown-from-seed coreopsis and asclepias tuberosa seedlings last year. Many survived NYC winter, drought, Ocean Pkway traffic & trash & dog pee. First bloom of the year. Go ahead--try new things! #FridayFlowers #nativeplants #pollinatorgardens

single coreopsis bloom in a tree pit garden in NYC

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· May 22

"Perhaps the pages were redacted or maybe the Pierce County Superior Court records clerk assumed that anyone requesting these documents would be looking for information relevant to the case, not an opportunity to learn more about their own family history." #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WIP #memoir

The deposition then jumps to page 24 and picks up in about 1996, roughly sixty years later. I wanted to know more about Louise’s memories of Lodge Grass and Wyola and Crow Agency in the 1930s, about Hallie’s moonshine business, his nickname Montana Whitey. Perhaps the pages were redacted or maybe the Pierce County Superior Court records clerk assumed that anyone requesting these documents would be looking for information relevant to the case, not an opportunity to learn more about their own family history.

Vicki Madden@vlmadden· May 21

That night I still believed I could change my fate, if I were clever enough and made the right choices. I didn’t yet know anything about this unknown cousin, the history of women’s bodies on my mother’s side of the family, and cellular ghosts. #WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts