Review: A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is another of my Indigenous reads for my English course this year. We decided to base our first unit in second semester with some of these essays as exemplars. So, I took the time to read the whole collection.

Alicia Elliot is a Tuscarora writer who has divided time between the US and Six Nations reserve near Brantford. This collection reflections on her childhood and her experience with mental illness in her family and her own. The essays are brilliant, but raw and sometimes really really funny. She combines a really reflective spirit with her awareness of the impact of colonialism on both families and her people. It is not a comfortable read, but it is a good one of this late 50s white male settler.

Definitely worth reading, but with trigger alerts for depression, trauma and suicide.

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Review: Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman by Walter M. Miller Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is, admittedly, a very strange book. It is the sequel, prequel, something of the classic sci-fi novel, A Canticle for St. Leibowitz also by Walter M. Miller, which is a very strange blend of post-apocolypse and pre-Vatican II Catholic spirituality (especially from the religious orders). The earlier novel follows the Order of St. Leibowitz through the post-apocalyptic wastelands from nuclear war sometime in the 1950s or 60s and mass Simplification which wiped out most of human learning until it was painful reconstructed and humanity does it again. This book is placed about a century or so after the second book, Fiat Lux, and follows a disgraced monk of the monastery of St. Leibowitz into a story which combines the post-apocalyptic landscape combining Catholic spirituality, Native American spirituality, colonialism, power plays and what looks suspiciously like an Avignon papacy. And strange.

Part of the strangeness, I think, is that this is only based on a manuscript by Miller, so another writer has completed it. It is really hard to tell what is Miller being strange and the editor adding things for modern sensibilities. There is more sex in this novel than Canticle, which I wonder if that isn't added. But it is very much the same world, told, this time, from more in the centre of the action.

It is still worth reading, if you've read Canticle. Disorienting, yes, but an interesting story about power, faith and human understanding. It deserves to be read more.

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