Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Book of Resting Places
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://thomasmiraylopez.com/
CITY:
STATE: NC
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Williams College, bachelor’s degree; University of Arizona, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2017–2018 Kenan Visiting Writer; the Territory project, editor; DIAGRAM, assistant fiction editor.
AWARDS:Received grants or scholarships from The MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship.
WRITINGS
Contributor of writings to literary magazines, including Georgia Review, Kenyon Review Online, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Normal School.
SIDELIGHTS
Thomas Mira y Lopez is a literary writer originally from New York City who has published pieces in Georgia Review, Kenyon Review Online, and Normal School. Based in North Carolina, he is the 2017–2018 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also editor of the Territory literary project focused on maps and ephemera, and is assistant fiction editor at DIAGRAM.
In 2017, Mira y Lopez published his first book, The Book of Resting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead, a collection of ten essays of how various societies today and in the past have decided how to lay their loved ones to rest. In an interview at Huffington Post with Ellee Achten, Mira y Lopez explained what inspired him to write the book: “My father died while I was in college, a little over ten years ago now, and I became interested in how spaces of the dead, both literally and metaphorically, function as reflections of us.” Recounting how his mother planted a buckeye tree by his father’s grave, Mira y Lopez blends his own experiences with history, myth, and various cultural practices.
He explores methods of burial and caring for the dead around the world from a nineteenth-century desert cemetery in Tucson, Arizona where the bodies were exhumed and relocated in order to build a court house, to the mountain burial plots in Rio de Janeiro, to ancient Roman catacombs where bacteria is eating the city walls, to the futuristic cryonic freezing of bodies and decapitated heads. He also addresses the way people grieve and how we remember and forget the dead. “Some pieces register better than others, but these are wide-ranging and often tender meditations on death,” declared a Kirkus Reviews contributor.
“Mira y Lopez’s honesty about death, about his own failures as a son, as a man struggling to remember his father for who he was and not what he became physically allows it to transcend so much of the cotton-candy fluff that gets written about dying,” said Noah Sanders online at East Bay Review. Writing in Booklist, Emily Dziuban observed that the way “we lay the dead to rest has everything to do with what the living need and believe.” On the Full-Stop website, Christopher Wood observed that “even when Mira y Lopez dips journalistically into some of the curious morbid practices in our current age—tempered in his record by the personal struggle to grasp his father’s death—he encounters a tension between body and essence, a tension that has been preserved in our discourse much longer than our bodies ever will.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 1, 2017, Emily Dziuban, review of The Book of Resting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead, p. 9.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2017, review of The Book of Resting Places.
ONLINE
East Bay Review, http://theeastbayreview.com/ (December 12, 2017), Noah Sanders, review of The Book of Resting Places.
Full-Stop, http://www.full-stop.net/ (January 11, 2018 ), Christopher Wood, review of The Book of Resting Places.
Huffington Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (December 20, 2017), Ellee Achten, author interview.
11/13/2017, 9:57pm
Q&A with Thomas Mira y Lopez, the 2017-18 Kenan visiting writer
Buy Photos
Thomas Mira y Lopez is giving a talk on his essay collection "The Book of Resting Places" at Flyleaf Books. Photo courtesy of Ellee Achten.
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BY Emma Strickland
Thomas Mira y Lopez is the UNC-Chapel Hill Kenan Visiting Writer for 2017-2018 and teaches in the English department. He will be reading from his new book, “The Book of Resting Places,” Tuesday, Nov. 14 at Flyleaf Books at 7 p.m.
Staff writer Emma Strickland spoke with Mira y Lopez about his book, death, burial and nonfiction writing.
The Daily Tar Heel: Can you tell me a bit about what your book is about?
Thomas Mira y Lopez: It’s called “The Book of Resting Places," so the conceit for it is that each essay explores, in some way, a different place where you would put the dead. And sometimes that’s the physical dead — the physical bodies, or the memory of the dead. How would you memorialize them in these different locations? And the impetus for writing the book was that my father died when I was in college back in 2006. Years afterwards, we cremated him, but we never did anything with the ashes. So I started thinking about how I'm remembering my dad, but how am I also losing the memory of him? How are those memories changing? What can I hold onto? What am I losing sight of? And that got me starting to think about (how) everyone else has lost people. How do they go about trying to fix a memory of the dead? That’s the general conceit. The resting places themselves range from a cemetery to catacombs to a cryonic center — where you freeze bodies, and the hope is that they’ll be able to restore them to life, sort of like a resting place where the dead aren’t supposed to be dead. So I started to explore those places both in my personal life and then out in the world as well.
DTH: How does it feel to finish a book? How long did it take you?
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TMyL: I want to say I started this in 2012 when I started graduate school. The essays were actually done by 2016, so that felt good to send it out. And then sending it out and not knowing what would happen with it felt really bad and then it felt really good again to have it picked up and be published. The book's coming out (today). It’s sort of this weird feeling of wanting to be both over it and kind of mourning it being done and putting it away and also being entirely sick of it as well. You go through a range of emotions. I’m excited for it to be out, but I’m excited to keep working as well.
DTH: Do you have a favorite story from your book?
TMyL: I tend to reread it and then hate everything. But I think the first essay in it was sort of a way of verbalizing a thought process and a grief process that I hadn’t been able to verbalize before, and allowed me to play with my own voice on the page. It allowed me to take a step back from myself and look at the person I was, then when my dad was sick, and look at that person honestly and unsparingly, and then also try to tie that into wider questions. That really started getting the book into motion, so I guess I owe it to that as well. As far as favorites, it sort of changes week by week.
DTH: I think it’s tough for an artist in any form when you feel like that work of art can never be finished.
TMyL: At a certain point you have to say “Enough, I’ve read through this now for the thousandth time.” It’s hard to see it objectively at a certain point. It’s also like writing where you don’t want to be too close to an event, at least in my own experience, to write about it. Also, something I’m interested in with this book is you get the feeling that when you start writing about memories you’re actually killing that memory, or changing or distorting that memory. As much as this book was a way to keep the memory of my dad or explore the memory of my dad, I realize in the same time I was writing it, I was actually changing or finalizing that memory in some way.
DTH: How do you feel about writing about a dark/grim subject matter?
TMyL: I always sort of liked cemeteries, like walking around them. There’s sort of a death positivity movement of sorts in the U.S. and kind of worldwide as well, and what’s interesting is that at first I didn’t want to look at the thought of what happens to our bodies after death or where do we put them — that felt taboo. I realized at a certain point in writing this that my aversion to wanting to look at that was actually costing me more. I think realizing this is just something that’s normal and happens to everyone, but we don’t often have the language to know how to deal with it or deal with our own grief. It felt really good to move past that and free it up.
DTH: On a lighter note, what makes you really happy?
TMyL: I love teaching. I love especially this semester — this is my first semester here. What’s always fun about creative nonfiction or essays is sharing essays and narratives I love with students who then catch a spark and then start doing that in their own writing. That’s really cool. It’s a joy. And I like the New York Mets, but they don’t make me happy.
DTH: What do you like about writing nonfiction? Do you prefer it over fiction?
TMyL: What I like about it is that I think it allows you a persona or a voice, because when you’re writing something down, the “you” in your consciousness is never directly on the page. There’s always some sort of translation or some sort of persona going on there. What I like about nonfiction and the essay in particular is that it allows you to take subjects and unexpected subjects and put them in juxtaposition with one another. And seeing what questions arise from that or what sort of unexpected results happen. At least for this book, the strategy was to take a deeply personal narrative and then compare it to the bacteria that are eating away Roman catacombs or to compare it to an astronomical phenomenon. It’s an opportunity to make connection and juxtaposition, and I’m sure that exists in fiction and absolutely in poetry. There’s also something really enticing about taking something incredibly dull and then trying to make that into something.
DTH: How do you think that our society memorializes the dead?
TMyL: One of the things I learned doing this is that we like the monumental, the big statue, the memorial or our name on a big building. I think when we choose a resting place for someone or we choose a way to memorialize them, we’re not really doing that for the dead — they don’t care, they don’t have any voice in the matter. We’re really doing that memorialization for the living and because we want to either say something about ourselves or believe a certain thing about ourselves or we want to believe a certain thing about the dead — that they’ll never ever fade. It’s so we’ll feel better about ourselves or our own situation.
I should also say this is the book of resting places but is also a book as a resting place, too. Because how do we eulogize someone or create elegies for them? We write about them or we make them into a physical object. So part of the goal of this book, too, is looking at how we preserve memories or preserve bodies through physical space, and one of those is actually like a book itself. So I wanted to have that double possibility. That’s part of what makes it so interesting.
DTH: Do you believe in ghosts?
TMyL: I’ve never seen a ghost. I think I said once, “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I want to see a ghost,” and whoever I said that to was like, “That’s never going to work. You can’t both disbelieve, but then also want to see one anyway.” I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m willing to be surprised.
@emmalstrickland
arts@dailytarheel.com
Father’s Death Sparks First Book for Mira y Lopez
12/20/2017 12:13 pm ET Updated Dec 21, 2017
Ellee Achten
Author Thomas Mira y Lopez
I adore author Abigail Thomas—as a writer, teacher and as a human being. So when she put out the word via Facebook that her nephew was reading from his new book in my neck of the North Carolina woods, I told her I would be there. I went to the reading for Abby, but I was delighted to discover Thomas Mira y Lopez and his wonderful collection of essays, The Book of Resting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead (Counterpoint Press, $26).
Mira y Lopez, 31, is the 2017-2018 University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Kenan Visiting Writer and teaches at UNC in the English department. Originally from New York City, he holds a bachelor’s from Williams College and an MFA from the University of Arizona. He loves the Mets, maps and books. Here, he shares the story of his book and his writing life.
What do you say when people ask what your book is about?
I say it’s a book about where we put the dead and why. My father died while I was in college, a little over ten years ago now, and I became interested in how spaces of the dead, both literally and metaphorically, function as reflections of us. America is an exception as a country in that its cemeteries offer perpetual care of the dead; the assumption is that once you’re in your plot in the ground, you’ll remain there forever. I wanted to know what that says about us, about how we treat our land and our history, about what we attempt to remember and to forget.
I love the look and feel of your book. The simplicity of the cover – the image of the shovel; the choice of black and white; no dust/book jacket. Was this your vision for the book? If so, why?
It’s actually something we—my agent and I—went back and forth with Counterpoint about until we worked towards this. I had never thought of the shovel as a possibility but it feels right to me, something that’s both playful and surprising. I love the size of the book and the paper over boards, which Counterpoint was able to do at the last moment. It gives it the feel of a gift, this little volume you can walk around with.
You perfectly blend your personal story with the historical, the research that you did. How challenging was it to get the mix just right?
Oh man, it was very challenging. A few times the mix felt like it came just right and that was exhilarating, to set up the subjects in such a way so as to produce the desired resonances and layers. But more times than not it was a struggle. I get carried away when I research—everything becomes fascinating, everything seems to have some connection to the subject matter at hand—and so I had to figure out which leads were dead-ends and which I could round into shape.
When did you know, okay, I’m writing a book of essays?
I started writing this book in grad school and that was the time when I learned about the capacity or possibility of essays, something that felt profoundly exciting. So I decided fairly early on that that was what I wanted to write. The structure of a graduate program and its workshop seemed more aligned to me with writing essays than working on a full-length project. Of course, figuring out what type of book, or what type of essays, I wanted to write became a whole other matter.
Which piece was the most challenging to write? Why?
“The Eternal Comeback,” I think, which is an essay about cryonics—the practice of storing bodies at extremely low temperatures with the hopes of future technology bringing them back to life—as well as the people who sign up for it. The amount of information to synthesize proved a challenge, alongside knowing when to include my own story and how much to press upon that. Ethically as well, I wanted to listen to and respect the reasons why people chose to sign up, while also acknowledging my own skepticism.
Which piece is your favorite? Why?
I don’t know if I really have a favorite, but I feel as if I have a couple essays or passages that I secretly cherish, moments that feel like outliers in some way but that I would also defend. In this collection, it’s “Capricci,” which is an essay about the 18th century Venetian painter Canaletto who produced these cityscapes that are a combination of real and imagined architecture. It has nothing to do, technically, with resting places, but at the same time it’s also all about substitution, alternate selves, and the practice of seeing something the way we want to see it instead of how it really is. All of that, I’d argue, matters when we start to think about how we remember the dead.
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Your father died in 2006 when you were in college. Do you have any regrets about that period of your life as it relates to your dad?
I do. The book lays these out better than I will be able to here, but I didn’t know how to handle his illness and so I tried to pretend like nothing was happening. I was out of the country when he was sick and I regret not moving back to spend time with him and my mom. There’s obviously nothing I can do about it now, except recognize that tendency in myself and warn others.
How did writing the book assist you with your own grief?
There’s a definite value to the thinking that such writing necessitates. It’s a sort of reckoning really; it asks you to scrub away all the film and dead cells that build up over time. And it’s helpful as well to place an individual story in a larger societal or cultural context, to examine it from multiple angles, to know that it signals larger avenues of thought.
Where are you today with his passing?
The book is a book of resting places, obviously, but it’s also a book as resting place: one more place where we attempt to remember or preserve the dead. I’ve found that writing it has been another way to maintain contact with my dad, to obsess and study over things the way he might have, and so letting it out into the world also means letting it—and him—go in some sense. That’s been tricky to deal with.
This is your first book. How has the reality of being published differed from what you imagined?
In a way, it’s a lot more diffuse than I expected—my agent is in New York, my editor and publisher are in California, and I’ve been in North Carolina and Ohio—and so the good news that arrives often catches you unaware, at moments when you’re not really able to digest it. And you have to become a different person during the publishing process than you were when you wrote the book. But everyone throughout the process has been amazing. It’s a shared labor, and a humbling one to realize how many people breathe life into the book.
What do you want your students to take from your book?
From a craft perspective, I hope they see it as a way to consider what happens when the personal is taken from another angle, when it’s juxtaposed or paralleled with research or journalism. I go on and on in class about how any topic or object, no matter how mundane, can be interesting if you ask the right questions about it, if you situate it in the right context. And I hope they see it as a reason to write with honesty, to recognize that you have to give a part of yourself away when you write.
You come from a family of writers – your late grandfather was renowned science writer Lewis Thomas, who wrote The Lives of a Cell. Your aunt Abigail Thomas has written several books and is probably best known for her memoir, A Three Dog Life. How have they influenced your writing life?
They’re there all the time. I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I think most writers write with a few imagined readers in mind; my aunt and my grandfather form a part of those for me. I’m lucky to have that. Although I have to be careful not to try to write like them because that won’t fly.
Who else has influenced your writing life? How?
Oh so many, of course, in ways that I know about and ways I don’t. For this collection, I looked mostly towards other essay collections that had a shared theme but also diverged from that theme in refreshing ways. So I’ll say Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land, John D’Agata’s Halls of Fame, Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, Ander Monson’s Vanishing Point and Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Joni Tevis’s The Wet Collection.
What would your father have thought of your book?
He would have liked it, I think, and he would be proud of its existence. He might have grumbled at certain parts. We didn’t have the same reading habits—I remember showing him an Italo Calvino book I was reading while he was in the hospital and he just rolled his eyes—but I believe our thought processes worked in similar ways.
What has been the reaction to the book?
Not to be evasive, but I don’t know if I can answer that, just in the sense that I’m not with each reader, in their mind, when they sit down with it. What’s meant a lot is sharing it with my family and my friends, many of whom were with me around the time my dad died and afterwards. Writing can be so solitary, and it takes so much time, that to finally put something in their hands (or, rather, give them a link to click on) means the world. And to get notes—from people I both know and don’t know, from people whose work I admire—is deeply buoying, just to know there’s some connection or transfer there.
What do you think happens to us after we die—regardless of our resting place?
Oh, who knows, probably nothing. I will say whenever I think of heaven, I’m prone to think of it, spatially and temporally, as this vast and endless concept. But instead of eternity, maybe it’s just a five or ten minute alteration in brain chemistry that takes place around or shortly after death. Though perhaps that makes it sound like I’m advocating for the afterlife as DMT trip—there are certainly worse options.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on a couple of things, testing them out and seeing if there’s breadth or breath enough to make them a full-length. I have a nonfiction project about secrets, another about antiques, both of which take impetus from what I was previously at work on. And then maybe some fiction about Brazil, the country where my father was from, a place I’ve always had a complicated relationship with. Those three are circling around and hopefully I’ll know which will stick soon.
What do you wish someone would ask you?
Taking a shortcut here but, you know, no one’s asked me what my dad would think of the book. I had never had to think of that before. I’m glad that this was occasion to.
Ovid Urns: An Interview with Thomas Mira y Lopez
By sonorareview
in featured, Interviews with Writers, News
on
February 22, 2018
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THOMAS MIRA Y LOPEZ is the author of The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint 2017). His work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The American Scholar, and The Kenyon Review Online, among others. He is an editor of Territory, a literary journal about maps, and currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at The University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.
Jon Riccio: In The Book of Resting Places’ first essay, “Memory, Memorial,” we encounter “a 200-year-old cathedral of a tree” where you seek refuge during childhood games of chase. Repeated climbing results in the snapping of a branch essential to escape. Your father’s solution is a two-by-four plank stable enough to be called “oblivion’s antithesis.” How does stability function throughout a text focused on the transition from life into death?
Thomas Mira y Lopez: My hunch is that when we encounter something unstable, such as a life at its end, our instinct is to find an alternative narrative that offers permanence and keeps things as they are. That’s maybe in part why we have embalming, or headstones made of material that ages and weathers finely but also does not erode. Or why our president asserted not just his genius, but its stability. So that instinct for stability and the difficulty, if not impossibility, in achieving it can offer tension, I hope, in a text that explores that transition. It’d be funny to check if that plank is still there. I doubt it is since the house was sold twenty years ago.
JR: The living amass their plethora of items they can’t take with them. “Possessions become both vocation and evocation,” you tell us when writing about your mother’s hunkered-down living quarters, a New York apartment by any other. It’s as if accumulation grants the accumulator a titch of imperviousness, though you admit “that if I’m there to help her preserve her tomb, I may also be the one who robs it.” At what point do our talismans become our detritus?
TMyL: To answer that, I think I’d need to figure out the question’s inverse, that is at what point does our detritus become our talismans? In some ways, the answer seems the same as the question about stability. That these talismans—or the transformation of trash into talismans—offers us a sense of stability and control. Just a titch though, to borrow your phrase. There’s a woman who lives a floor below my mother who became a hoarder after 9/11. She worked a block from the Twin Towers and since then amassed everything—including every newspaper she came across—so much so that the building had to go into her apartment and clear stuff out. I’m embellishing or misremembering somewhat—I have no idea what the co-op regulations are for entering someone’s private residence—but I’m drawn to that idea of a separate order being created after a chaotic, cruel event. At what point does that order lose its coherence and become perverted?
JR: Tucsonans will prize The Book of Resting Places for its references—Stone, Alameda, and Toole Avenues; Ken the Bug Guy’s Exotic Pet Shop; Metaphysics World; November’s All Souls Procession—and impeccable writing alike. Your essay “Overburden” is equal parts Valentine and viaticum where Tucson is concerned. To what degree is the collection a marker of your time in Arizona?
TMyL: Thank you, that’s kind to say. From a practical perspective as a graduate student, which I don’t have to remind you about, a lot of that writing centers around Tucson because that’s what I had the time and budget to explore. There are subjects there that felt like they could only have existed in that particular part of Arizona—the gem and mineral collections in “The Rock Shop”; the cryonics institute moved to the desert because of the safety the landscape provided—and places that felt like they could be stand-ins for myriad places in the country—such as the defunct cemetery in “Overburden.” I’m one of those people who can’t write about a place until after it’s gone from my life—that might also be the case for me and people as well—and so much of the writing about Tucson felt like it happened after I left.
JR: “The Path to the Saints” is rich with catacomb epitaphs, a “maze of honeycombs and orthagonals” you explore in Rome as an undergrad studying abroad. My favorite part is the friendship between you and Paolo, the architect with whom you boarded: “when my father died, I found him.” Was there anything Paolo taught you that friends before or since could not?
TMyL: I’m always a sucker for those moments in life or a movie where much is communicated without much being said. I cherish those, whatever that says about my love languages or the types of masculinity I’ve considered viable for myself. Paolo taught me about patience and concern, and how those can thrive within a set of constraints. I mean that in the sense that he wasn’t able to communicate with me as he would with someone who spoke his language. But also in that he made room for me in his life and his home in all these unspoken ways, he accommodated me while I was going through a difficult time and shaped a home and a life to fit this foreign energy. That’s a difficult thing to do; that hospitality is something we all probably could aspire to.
JR: Your book made me appreciate the afterlife of defunct cemeteries as much as it edified me on the works of 18th century Italian cityscaper Giovanni Antonio Canal, aka Canaletto, he who painted “scumbled skies” and “sunlight without the sun.” What are the parallels between the artisan possibilities of Canaletto’s cities and resting places of the dead?
TMyL: I got carried away by Canaletto, by the sense that all these fantasy cities and fantastic views could exist and be mistaken for the real thing (though that real thing is itself a construction, just one more fantasy). Those possible cities felt like an echo of a defunct cemetery and the archaeological strata it digs up since they both point to these alternative versions beneath our feet or around the corner. Those are all realities—those residents are all there and alive, in some sense—except we have limited perspectives, we’re unable most of the time to do what Canaletto did and inhabit an impossible field of vision.
JR: My mancave teams with sheet music, comics, Burger King glasses, and Time Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown series, so the hodgepodge of bizarreries in “The Rock Shop” garnered my attention, the Scandinavian iceman in particular. Spartacus’ knickknacks were the clincher. It’s a pyrite-a-palooza until your online research uncovers the owner’s list of -isms and ultra-conservative leanings, to put it mildly. Was it hard for you to complete the essay, given the turn of tone it takes? Were there any craft insights you drew on once the shift occurred?
TMyL: That’s funny you ask because I think about this quite a lot, how this essay would have changed or reached a different conclusion based on when it was written. I finished it maybe six months before the election, when the notion of our current president still seemed too ridiculous to be true. And so I was more generous than I would have been had I written it immediately after the election. I think if I wrote it now, more than a year out, I would have written it how I originally did. That is, I would hope to meet this man with love even if there was no hope. I would certainly, however, respect someone’s choice to end this with middle fingers blazing. I got a lot of help from other readers on this, especially that this couldn’t end on just a revelation about what this man is like, but that it must pause a beat and consider the response to that revelation.
JR: I sleep better knowing there’s a star, Scorpius RA 17h57m 40S – 37º 33´, renamed for your father, mother, and you—Rafael, Judy, Tommy. We glean this fact in “Parallax,” whose near-final passage “cannot reach the you I truly want to reach,” a you who needs, perhaps, “a starry messenger to crackle through the line and relay these words.” Are writers better caretakers of pronouns than they are stewards of those who’ve passed?
TMyL: I would hope so, in some way, though it also feels as if there’s no difference between passed and pronoun. The move to the “you” came from being assigned Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” in a graduate class (Fenton Johnson’s class; though maybe it goes without saying that if Martin Buber is on a grad syllabus at Arizona, Fenton is teaching it) and learning that the thou or you stood in for something beyond one’s reach, in this case God. I didn’t understand anything else—and am likely even misapplying this—but it was worth it to stow away that trick.
JR: Cryonics begets cryonauts in “The Eternal Comeback” where the latter pay to preserve either their heads or full bodies, should the prospect of revivification bear out. After touring the Arizona-based Alcor cryonics facility you arrive at the question “why not go into death hoping that it might result in life?” What struck me most about this essay was its balance of science and soulfulness. How was this achieved?
TMyL: I have a terribly hard time parsing the scientific so that, if it does come up, I try to translate it, over and over, into a language I can understand (does that change its concepts? quite possibly). What was particularly hard in writing about a custom that is necessarily still based on speculation is parsing the relative viability or level of wishful thinking in each hypothesis. Who really knows? I, for one, sort of hope cryonics bears out, though that also doesn’t change my reservations about the motivations for signing up. As far as those motivations, as with Roger and the Rock Shop, I tried to meet the people involved with generosity and self-reflection about my own wariness.
JR: We served together on the journal Fairy Tale Review where you were a managing editor; I think we were fellow Sonora Review-ers in the days when staff meetings took place at alternating cohorts’ houses. I noted a few of the collection’s mythology references—a Tithonus here, a Philemon there. What role does folklore play in The Book of Resting Places? The supernatural? Are there any myths you came across that get the immortality quandary right?
TMyL: I remember those Sonora Review meetings. They happened at my house actually, at least the second year. We always ended up with some very odd and very cheap cookies bought at Safeway. I looked towards mythology for examples of counterpoints to what I was working on. It was almost as if I were going towards some older and more respected member of the community and asking them for their advice. The stories I referred to had to do with transformation and mutation—at least, I imagine I found or could find most of them in Ovid’s Metamorphoses—and this was helpful, as you pointed out, when trying to determine how stability functions between life and death. I imagine all the myths got the immortality quandary right; that is, they all seem to say living forever is a bad idea.
JR: I had no idea you worked as a wood splitter one summer in Tucson, and here it features in your final essay, “Coda, Codex”—“At times, stripping a round off the blade was like flaying open veins and arteries, the edges of a quartered mesquite just like the marbled fat of flesh”—juxtaposed with the mourning quilt “sewn together from scraps of my father’s old clothes.” The Book of Resting Places’ seamlessness of requiems blankets you (and by extension, the reader) to the extent that, “for a while, I would not be so alone.” Was there a moment when you realized the collection had moved from ten pieces on griefitecture to the connected cathedral it is?
TMyL: There were definitely moments when I had to decide what sort of book it would be. Should I maximalize it and make it a tour of different burial sites, a sort of panoply of urns and graves? I ultimately went with something more pared down, in terms of both form and length. I was more concerned with tracing an emotional content, and seeing how it played out across different registers and times, than in foregrounding any one site. Once I knew the end of the book—and how it would mirror the beginning—things became much easier. There was no real light that came on, just a feeling of peace. As with the characters in some of these essays, there were many alternate forms or paths the book could have taken, but at the time it became what I felt it needed to be.
JON RICCIO is a PhD candidate and composition instructor at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers where he serves as an associate editor at Mississippi Review. His work has appeared in Booth, Cleaver, Hawai’i Review, Permafrost, and Waxwing, among others. The poetry editor at Fairy Tale Review, he was a past reader for Sonora Review.
Thomas Mira y Lopez's first book, The Book of Resting Places, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press in November 2017.
His work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review Online, and The Normal School among others. He holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona and has received grants or scholarships from The MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Colgate University's Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship.
He is an editor of Territory, a literary project about maps and other strange objects, and an assistant fiction editor at DIAGRAM. Originally from New York, Mira y Lopez lives and teaches in North Carolina, where he is the 2017-2018 Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill.
The Book of Besting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead
Emily Dziuban
Booklist. 114.5 (Nov. 1, 2017): p9.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Book of Besting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead.
By Thomas Mira y Lopez.
Nov. 2017.224p. Counterpoint, $26 (9781619021235). 814.
At one point in this debut, a researcher compares excavation to arranging a tapestry--an apt analogy for Mira y Lopez's essay collection itself. His mother believes that an Ohio buckeye tree planted by her deceased husband, the author's father, is his spiritual resting place. His mother's belief leads Mira y Lopez to thoughtfully observe the practice of laying the dead to rest across cultures. Each chapter alternates--or weaves--between his personal experience and history, myth, and societal practice. In a standout chapter, Mira y Lopez visits the construction site of Tucson's new courthouse, built over a government cemetery after its inhabitants were exhumed and "re patriated." How we lay the dead to rest has everything to do with what the living need and believe. The most shocking resting place belongs to the members of Alcor, a cryonics corporation Mira y Lopez visits. In addition to intact corpses, severed heads are stored with totem-pole practicality to allow the minds to choose new bodies when they are, hopefully, awakened with yet-to-be-invented technology.--Emily Dziuban
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dziuban, Emily. "The Book of Besting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead." Booklist, 1 Nov. 2017, p. 9. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515382876/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=69ccb39c. Accessed 13 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A515382876
Mira y Lopez , Thomas: THE BOOK OF RESTING PLACES
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Mira y Lopez , Thomas THE BOOK OF RESTING PLACES Counterpoint (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 11, 14 ISBN: 978-1-61902-123-5
A series of essays functions as a memento mori.Mira y Lopez's first book is a thoughtful, intriguing collection of 10 personal essays dealing with the dead and where they end up. Many have been previously published in a variety of publications, including the Georgia Review and the Alaska Quarterly Review. Throughout the book, the author delicately interweaves remembrances of his mother and dead father. "Overburden" is about Tucson's National Cemetery, created in the late 1800s and now defunct. "A city buries its dead just so it can keep on living," writes Mira y Lopez. "Whether exhumed or not, a grave doesn't maintain what's been lost so much as it concedes the ghost is never really coming back." Then it's off to the Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome. A bacteria discovered in the catacombs in 2008 was eating away the walls, creating a dilemma: "What is to be done when the only thing left alive in a place also destroys it?" The author's sharp, illuminating essay on the 18th-century Venetian painter Canaletto, employing a slightly modernist structure, doesn't deal with death at all except, briefly, the painter's. The artist who had produced nearly 600 paintings left behind some old clothes, household items, a smattering of paintings, and an incredible documentary record of a city both real and imagined. The longest and best piece, "The Eternal Comeback," is about the author's tour of the cryonics lab of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Begun in 1972, the company houses nearly 150 bodies, and brains, all preserved at minus 196 degrees Celsius in liquid nitrogen. While outside Hutchinson, Kansas, 650 feet underground, in the "most secure underground vault in the world," rest memory boxes put together by their clients for when they return, "At least, if all goes according to plan." Some pieces register better than others, but these are wide-ranging and often tender meditations on death.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mira y Lopez , Thomas: THE BOOK OF RESTING PLACES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217490/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7bd8ecfd. Accessed 13 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217490
January 11, 2018
The Book of Resting Places – Thomas Mira y Lopez
by Christopher Wood
[Counterpoint Press; 2018]
Thomas Mira y Lopez’s The Book of Resting Places is a monumental collection, if only because the essays in this first book examine so many of the grand structures humans have assembled throughout history to house and commemorate the dead – pyramids, vast networks of catacombs and cemeteries, looming obelisks, empyreal arbores. In addition to this architectural legacy, the book also draws on the literary heritage of death with unassuming erudition. Rarely have Virgil, Dante, and Hans-Georg Gadamer sounded so conversational. Up against this heft of tradition, the present can seem small. But even when Mira y Lopez dips journalistically into some of the curious morbid practices in our current age – tempered in his record by the personal struggle to grasp his father’s death – he encounters a tension between body and essence, a tension that has been preserved in our discourse much longer than our bodies ever will.
A pilgrimage to Alcor’s cryonics lab in Arizona provokes this tension, as the sensible author and his girlfriend get a freakshow tour of every appliance and extreme measure in force to keep dead bodies and dismembered heads from further degeneration. Setting aside the debate over how likely it is in the medically-advanced future to thaw out the bodies and bring them back to working order, Mira y Lopez is struck by the indignity of keeping a body going beyond some kind of natural threshold. In his caring tribute to his father, he also wrestles with the ambiguity of this threshold, the natural time to go, and for loved ones to let go, against an “unnatural” macabre delay. “What seemed not just surreal but downright unnatural,” he writes in “The Eternal Comeback,”
was that I believed I was going to a place that ran counter to the human body’s most natural instinct. I thought of my father and his seizures, his craniectomy, and how when a quarter of his skull was removed, his brain seemed to breathe of its own accord. I thought of how his body was sending a message, however much I didn’t want it to, that it bore intolerable pain and wanted to rest. I thought how life meant death: that this was what we’ve been told everywhere, all the time, as long as we’ve been alive. How then did a group of people convince itself so thoroughly of the opposite?
A conventional piece of feature writing would end it there, choosing its side and ridiculing the opposing subculture through a series of superficial gross-outs. But here, this is only the beginning of an essay that dives head-first into the futuristic crypt to a depth of genuine curiosity and soul-searching, striving to decode the hidden values behind an unknowable opposition. The virtue upheld by cryonics supporters is that although much of their high-tech practice is rooted in their blind faith in the future, this faith is a wager on human progress. Their hearts are in the right place, and yet the “totem pole” of heads crammed into a single pod symbolizes some kind of essential violation the author can’t ignore. “It wasn’t exactly the viscera that unnerved me, or the body’s desecration,” he reasons. “Instead it was the sense of hope that threw me off, the violence that accompanied such wishful thinking.”
There is an unavoidable politics of death that marks this collection like so many headstones. How societies treat their dead says a lot about their management of the living. This continuity manifests at the personal level in the opening essay, “Memory, Memorial,” which plants associations between parallel fragments about the illness and death of Mira y Lopez’s father, Rafael, the mythical river Lethe and about the buckeye planted by Rafael before his death, on the grounds of the family’s second home in Pennsylvania. This essayistic impulse to forge continuity extends across the country in several essays, and it manifests globally when Mira y Lopez writes about experiences abroad in Venice and Rome.
“Overburden” follows Mira y Lopez from the Manhattan haunts of his youth to Tucson, Arizona, where his assumptions about the eternal safeguarding of sacred burial grounds is rudely laid to rest. Old favorite restaurants and video stores die, but cemeteries live forever. Or do they? When Pima County inspects the site for a new courthouse, they discover an unmarked cemetery. Retracing the history of Tucson through this site, and researching some of the 1,300 human remains buried there, Mira y Lopez turns investigative reporter, gaining access to the site and unearthing the reality that even permanent resting places are in flux, whether through old land acquisitions or more recent city planning. In the ongoing struggle between the dead and the living, the local burial grounds are like “a grandparent who has you by the ear,” our underworld cicerone intones. “A cemetery,” he continues,
needs an audience to pass along its memories of a city’s past occupants, yet it’s also there to send a message, a basic inevitable truth: a city of the living one day turns into a city of the dead. Though we all die, with the proper record-keeping and a bit of endowment, we might not all be forgotten.
So much of what delights in this collection goes beyond official documents and authorized histories. At the same time, facts and fact-finding shape several essays. One in particular, “Parallax,” begins almost like a grade school science report, so fascinated it is by Galileo’s study of sunspots. This leads to Mira y Lopez recalling the sunspots on his father’s skin, a kind of skin he also has, this organic connection with his father. Unlike cold hard facts, people from Mira y Lopez’s past are subject to change and vanish. At age twenty, his life is upended by his father’s passing, yet by reflecting on this change, his understanding about memory – the life-source of essays – evolves to recognize the importance of place, which makes this loving tribute also an impressive collection of travel writing. “By staking memory to a place,” states the author, “we absolve ourselves its full weight; the bookmark replaces the finger that might have been kept on the page.” In the case of Paulo, a somber host while visiting Rome, the experience of exploring the catacombs is indistinguishable from memories of the hardworking person who shared quiet dinners with Mira y Lopez. Years later, this same Paulo can’t be found on any social media search, and so has met a kind of death.
Mira y Lopez’s encyclopedic interests flirt with the ready information saturation of the current moment, but his facile movement between subjects, both cerebral and intimate, honor the careful attention of authorship over hiveminded wikis. The book’s subtitle, “A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead,” makes clear the autobiographical cohesion of the project, and moves beyond formal anxieties about the classification of longer works, be they novels, novels-in-stories, or, in this case, a memoir-in-essays. The development of characters, though ostensibly true to life, impart a crafted, though genuine-seeming, novelistic build. The reader comes to know several of these people quite well, or aspects of them, putting into practice what Mira y Lopez has learned about the impossibility of remembering another, even his father, in a comprehensive way that satisfies his encyclopedic desire. Knowing the history of a place, or a person, isn’t the same as spending time with that same person.
All these merely formal and epistemological dissonances culminate in a masterful tale, “The Rock Shop,” set in Old Tucson. The survival of a creepy curiosity shop in the iPhone era makes an unlikely hero of its “telluric” proprietor, Roger. In this piece, Mira y Lopez trades the digressive animus of Melville for truly Poe-like arabesques. The kind shopkeeper invites the visitor and his mother to see an ancient mummy Roger “inherited” from an Egyptologist (every gladiator’s skull and mummified pack rat has a story behind it), but the real horror surfaces, in a contemporary twist, when we read Roger’s hateful messages on Facebook. But the tangential quality of this climax calls attention back to the journey, the campy benediction over a 3,500-year-old mummy named Heck, hiding in the American Southwest next to a teepee once inhabited by Geronimo’s supposed grandson. In this scene, as elsewhere in the book, Mira y Lopez’s mother, Judy, brings her funny blend of superstition and portent. Objecting when her son rubs the mummy’s head, she punches him in the arm.
For all the studied excavations bound up in The Book of Resting Places, the people remembered in its pages, those passed and still with us, remain glowing torchbearers for the living.
Christopher Wood is a native of Springfield, Massachusetts, who now lives on Long Island.
Review: The Book of Resting Places by Thomas Mira y Lopez
December 12, 2017
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The Book of Resting Places
by Thomas Mira y Lopez
Published 2017 by Counterpoint
$26.00 hardcover ISBN 978-1619021235
By Noah Sanders
It is a true pleasure to engage with a book like Thomas Mira y Lopez’s The Book of Resting Places, a collection of essays that chronicles—in the wake of his father’s passing—his obsession with where our dead are laid to rest. Where so much writing on death piles on saccharine platitudes, Mira y Lopez’s writing is fueled by both sadness and a sly, caustic anger burning just beneath the surface. Coupled with his keen eye for observation and a fascinating breadth of subject matter, The Book of Resting Places becomes a refreshingly honest and critical look at death, grieving, and how burial becomes a our means to remembering, and forgetting, those we’ve lost.
The impetus for Mira y Lopez’s deep exploration of how we bury our dead and what exactly it means is the death of his father from a series of strokes in 2006. The opening essay, “Memory, Memorial” sets the tone for the entirety of the book. Mira y Lopez visits his mother in the rural Pennsylvania home she now lives alone in with only her poodle for company. They visit his “dad’s tree”—an Ohio buckeye planted by his parents when they purchased the home, now repurposed as a memorial to his deceased father. The simple ritual—walking to the tree, admiring the tree, mourning his father—one Mira y Lopez in his cynical way immediately admits to caring little for. The tree has become a symbol of the healthy man his father was in life, not the shriveled husk he became as death inched closer and closer. In enshrining his memory within the healthy tree, Mira y Lopez believes his mother is choosing to “remember him as she prefers: as strong and healthy instead of decaying.”
The Book of Resting Places is about death but approached from the angle of how we, the grieving survivors, use burial as a means to memorialize, to remember, to forget those we’ve lost. The author explores catacombs in Rome, an unearthed cemetery in Tucson, a death artifact collector’s store in the desert—each subject a catalyst for Mira y Lopez to intertwine his knowledge of classic literature, history and the sharp pangs of his own grief into keen, if not occasionally abrasive interpretations of what it means to be “put to rest.” In “The Eternal Comeback” Mira y Lopez and a friend visit Alcor, a cryogenics storage vault in Scottsdale, AZ. The author never dabbles in the platitudes so often associated with death, and though an essay on cryogenics could quickly devolve into “how weird is this shit” (and the essay certainly entertains the notion) Mira y Lopez puts his hangups on the shelf and writes a stunning piece on what it means to accept, even want the possibility of living forever. “To delay the acceptance of what’s lost harms the lives that survive that loss,” he writes, “Death remains one of the words I can think of for which the adjective universal actually holds. How lonely would it be to want to exist outside of that?”
Mira y Lopez’s honesty about death, about his own failures as a son, as a man struggling to remember his father for who he was and not what he became physically allows it to transcend so much of the cotton-candy fluff that gets written about dying. His father’s death has left him angry, cynical even, with himself and his actions in the months that preceded his passing. The Book of Resting Places is the author’s attempt to grapple with his own regrets and his own sadness. As with death, there’s no sunshine-y ending to these essays, rather just the grim realization that no matter how many trees, or catacombs or frozen bodies with throw out in the hope that our loved ones will exist, somehow, after they’ve passed, in the end, all we’re left with is scant, almost arbitrary memories. “I have learned the hard way,” he writes, “that when someone you love dies, the real shame is that your memory of them dies as well.” We bury, cremate, build memorials for the dead because we want to keep them in our minds in a certain way. Death is hard on the living, and though Mira y Lopez might be too cynical, too educated to buy into the human need to immortalize some aspects of our loved ones, he comes to a simple understanding of just why we do: “When it comes down to it, you do what you do to survive.”