The Art of Reading: A Conversation with Donna Seaman

Donna Seaman’s earliest account of reading takes place on her mother’s lap. A young child slowly turns the pages of Chinese Fairy Tales, transported by its pictures and mesmerized by its “round and inviting” words, cozy and safe in a maternal embrace.

            It’s a potent image that immediately establishes an association between the act of reading and a mother’s love. It’s also the perfect launching point for Seaman’s memoir, River of Books: A Life in Reading (Ode Books, 2024), which recounts Seaman’s life-journey from Poughkeepsie in New York’s Hudson River Valley to art school in Kansas City to Chicago, home of Booklist, the book review journal of the American Library Association. Books accompany her at every turn. Jo March is her childhood inspiration, David Copperfield her early crush, Anne Frank her beloved friend. Books become her addiction, her nourishment, her refuge. Reading, Seaman will ultimately conclude, is “the realm that would always sustain (her).”

            Life on the River of Books is busy. For more than three decades, Seaman has served as a resource for America’s readers as an editor at Booklist (she was recently named editor in chief). She has taught classes at The University of Chicago and Northwestern University and served as writer in residence at Columbia College. She has interviewed countless writers at literary hubs like the Chicago Humanities Festival and the American Writers Museum where she is also a member of the Content Leadership Team. In addition to River of Books, she has authored and/or edited Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven Woman Artists, Writers on the Air: Conversations About Books, and In Our Nature: Stories of Wilderness, an anthology of short fiction.

            The whirlwind around River of Books has only placed more pressure on Seaman’s schedule, as she jets around the country for readings and interviews. I’m so grateful she took time to correspond with me for TriQuarterly.

Kathryn O’Day: Congratulations on this rich and delightful book! I so appreciate its intimate tone, particularly in some of the later chapters, when you address the reader directly. One of your chapters opens with a quote from Nabokov about what it is to be a “good reader.” What kind of a person did you picture reading River of Books when you were writing it? Did this reader change over time?

Donna Seaman: Given that it was the second Ode Books title, the second in a series of concise books by book people about books and places devoted to books (the first was Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale by Pau Yamazaki), I assumed that anyone who would be drawn to River of Books would be an ardent reader. Someone for whom reading was an integral and necessary part of their life. This made me very nervous; I was afraid of not writing up to their level. This concern was a useful spur.
 

KO: I’m wondering if you could comment on the book’s cover art, a painting of a skeletal fragment floating on an inky river that is bordered by thick foliage. The image is so compelling—I can’t stop looking at it. Where did this image come from and why did you choose it?

DS: Thank you for asking about the image. It’s a detail from one of my watercolors, River Styx 2. As I write in River of Books, bookish as I am, I went to art school. I loved using watercolors to paint images of water. Eventually, after I graduated, I made a number of river paintings, some, including this one, inspired by the River Styx, the underworld river in Greek mythology across which the souls of the dead are transported by the ferryman Charon to Hades, where they are judged. I painted a dark river surrounded by dense dark foliage and upon the river, skeletal bone boats. I was thrilled to be able to use one of my river paintings for the cover of River of Books.

KO: I loved your description of the art school you attended, an environment you describe as “muscular” with power tools and metal-casting. The experience is so intense that it invades your sleep, and you dream of jumping from key to key on a massive typewriter. Could you talk a bit about the physical impact of writing? How does the body influence writing, and how does writing impact the body?

DS: Writing is hard on the body. It may seem counterintuitive, but it takes a lot of stamina to sit still and concentrate. Writing takes a toll on one’s back, shoulders, neck, hands, wrists, and eyes. Many writers verge on or suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome from all the typing and mousing.

The body influences every aspect of writing. Our sensory experiences determine how we view the world, they shape our memories and inform our writing. What we notice, how that makes us feel, what we remember, what triggers memories—the body determines all of this. Writers have long known that we inherit trauma along with other traits, that emotions are bred in the bone, a phenomena under study as part of epigenetics.

Writing can also benefit the body; it’s certainly good for the brain. Creative writing can spring the trap on suppressed emotions, help one work through perplexing situations and dilemmas and anger and outrage. Translating feelings into words is liberating. Writing of any kind takes us away from the churn of everyday worries and ushers us into a more ordered and productive frame of mind. Although deadlines and other pressures can ratchet up anxiety, whenever one is able to lose oneself in writing, it’s transformative for body and soul.

KO: The natural world plays an important role in this book, from your decision to use the river as your central metaphor to countless passages about your relationship to terrain. (At one point you say that you feel “ambushed by a city’s flatness.”) There’s an organic element, too, in your writing style—almost a stream-of-consciousness, moving from the history behind a street name to the evolution of your family name to a short story by Toni Morrison. How does your relationship to the natural world inform your craft?

DS: From a very young age, I’ve been entranced by nature’s wonder and beauty. I found the natural world so moving, I was often moved to tears. I still am. This awe also drew me to art, and as I was able to read more sophisticated books, I became enthralled by evocative descriptions, thrilled to discover that others had a sense of beauty, as I did, and that they found a way to express that in words. I aspired to do that, too. I filled notebooks with attempts at detailed and emotive descriptions. Trying to get things right, trying to capture the specific elements that struck me as wondrous, or, conversely, trying to write about tragedies and horrors, steered me to the dictionary and the pursuit of precisely the right word. There is such exquisite nuance in language, I spend a lot of time trying to nail down the feeling or impression I hope to share. I’m profoundly inspired by nature writers and poets and their keen responses to the natural world.

KO: The book is not long, but incredibly rich, spanning three cities, multiple decades, and hundreds of books. I’m wondering if you could talk about your method of blending and distilling research, description, story, and musings.

DS: I attribute this to my long practice of writing and editing concise reviews for Booklist. I call this form the haiku of book reviewing. It is a practice that requires making every word count. Every word has to bear weight; it has to be essential. Writing reviews of 200 words about large, complex works requires precision and distillation. Another factor in how concentrated River of Books turned out to be is my initial reluctance to write about myself. I wanted the personal elements to serve merely as water floating the books. I wrote much more than what ended up in River, deep dives into books and writers with lots of quotes. Much of that was cut in favor of more autobiographical passages. This process led to my going back over everything again and again, infusing as much as I could into each section, drawing on my reading and research, memories and musings. Ode Books titles are meant to be brief. As I complied with that, I didn’t want to give up sharing thoughts and feelings that surfaced, so River became quite saturated. The weaving you describe is wrought in revision.    

KO: A few of your chapters take the forms of lists: “What I hope for in books,” “Why read?” etc. Other times you list the books that you read almost as incantations: “I read Toni Morrison…I read Nella Larson… I read Thomas Wolfe.” What role do lists play in your writing process?

DS: I began keeping lists of books I wanted to read and books I did read at a very young age, filling little notebooks with wavering towers of titles. When I learned there was a magazine called Booklist, I laughed and thought, that’s where I need to be. I’ve long made lists for every aspect of life. Lists are aspirational and chiding, clarifying and discouraging, orienting and impossible. I need lists to wrangle the conflicting to-dos in life. Lists prioritize; they also anchor us in the flow. I’m a constant notetaker, too, and those can take the form of lists.

When I was working on Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists, I did so much research, lists were essential in organizing the material, including the artworks I wanted to focus on in the narrative and those I hoped to showcase in reproductions. I kept lists to keep track of where each profile stood in the long writing and revising process. Finally, I made lists of sources and the illustrations. In writing River of Books, lists were crucial as I decided which books to include. When I realized that I needed to share my take on why one should read and what makes a book worth reading, I thought of the soundings riverboat pilots take to measure the depth of the water. I wanted a similarly precise expression, a shorthand, so I created the lists “Why Read?” and “Good Books, Books I Revere.” And, of course, I had to list all the books I mentioned throughout the book, hence the final, chapter-by-chapter list, “The Books.” 

KO: Early on in River of Books, you describe the process of sorting through old notebooks in your childhood home after the death of your parents. Your sister’s sudden and untimely death also plays a pivotal role in the story, culminating in your realization that literature is your “dwelling place” at her funeral. Would you mind talking about the role grief played in your writing process?

DS: This book was shadowed by loss. When I was invited to write it, everything was all right with my parents, but they were of advanced age and I had a very strong sense that everything was going to go very wrong before I could finish the book. So powerful was this prescient feeling, I asked for a contract without a due date. Thus freed from added stress, I began working on the book, which, as you note, involved looking through a lot of old notebooks. I also asked my parents about their reading lives and how important libraries were to them when they were growing up. As my father’s health declined, we spent a lot of time together and he told me stories from his past I’d never heard before. After I lost both my parents, my grief surrounded and filled me as a sort of cloud or haze as I cleaned out my parents’ house and came across many objects, papers, and photographs that deepened my memories and introduced new visions of our past. When I was finally able to return to the manuscript, I had to change the verb tenses in many passages. Grammatical grief.

So, there is sorrow in River of Books, but there is also discovery and humor. And it is the tale of my past with a mostly happy ending, because even though I started working at the American Library Association soon after my sister’s death while still in a fog of shock and grief, it was a life-saving arrival.   

KO: Much of this book was written during or shortly after the COVID pandemic. Its release just happened to coincide with the recent presidential election. How did these and other events impact the book’s composition and reception?

DS: It’s an odd and somewhat unnerving fact that both Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women and River of Books reached their final stages during harrowing presidential campaigns. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy inspired a surge of women’s pride and confidence and fervent voter activism. I remember my editor for that book saying won’t it be wonderful to have a book about forgotten women artists appear soon after we inaugurate our first woman president? Then we hoped that River of Books would be published on the very day Kamala Harris would win that election, finally uplifting our nation with our first woman president. Both were vanquished by the same candidate and we are now facing another four years of infamy.

When I started working on River of Books, we were all coping with COVID and all the changes it brought. For a homebody who spends her time reading, writing, and editing, the lockdowns were not as deeply disruptive for me as they were for others. The worst consequence was being separated from my parents. Having to limit exposure to other people did help me spend more time writing, though COVID was horrifying in so many ways.

The other plague that impacted my writing River of Books was the precipitous rise in book bans and threats against librarians and teachers. It was paramount to me that I address censorship and the assault against our freedom to read in my book. We always have to speak up and stand up to protect what’s crucial to our survival, whether it’s nature itself or our civil rights. Freedom of speech and the freedom to read freely are essential to our growth as individuals and to the health of our democracy.

KO: You discuss this disturbing trend in River of Books, particularly in relation to libraries, which you describe as places of “conflict and confrontation.” This makes me wonder about the impact censorship is making on the publishing industry.

DS: Libraries are primarily places of communion and community, of sharing and inspiration, entertainment and guidance. “Conflict and confrontation” occur when books are challenged and librarians are under siege, most often for providing books that a very small minority of people are told and believe are somehow harmful for young people. One can’t help but worry that publishers will shy away from potentially controversial books.  The books most often banned are books by and about LGBTQ+ individuals and books by authors of color. Publishers may well be rejecting such books, but I see no evidence of that. Quite the opposite; not only do we regularly receive submissions for new books of the type that are being challenged, publishers are protesting book bans, joining law suits, making sure banned books are available, and supporting book groups reading banned books. Take a look at the National Partners page on the United Against Book Bans website https://uniteagainstbookbans.org/(join while you’re there) and you’ll see many publishers. I hope that means that publishers will remain committed to publishing a rich and resonant array of voices and perspectives.

KO: Thank you so much for this interview and for writing River of Books. Reading it was like eating a comforting, hearty, and nourishing stew on a cold and gloomy day.

DS: Thank you so very much for reading and appreciating River of Books and for your very thoughtful questions.