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The unfairness of things (9): Dao Strom

It is tempting to submit to temptation and concede that, from this chair, the real unfairness (and not an unfairness at all) is that Dao Strom is far more talented than I, for she has published two volumes of fiction, reaped a good handful of luminous awards for her efforts, and recorded one album of songs from the American folk tradition -- Send Me Home, in 2004 -- that were sufficiently striking to merit a small piece in ND's March-April 2005 edition.

(Well, there was never any danger that music-making might prove to be among my gifts. And I have not attempted to write fiction for years, at least not on purpose. No regrets, though the impulse remains and may yet resurface. Or so it promises most nights on the cusp of sleep.)

Presumably because we had corresponded briefly as I sought to acquire a photo to adorn the short profile John T. Davis wrote, Ms. Strom was kind enough to have a copy of her second book, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, sent my way. It came out a year or more ago, and languished among all the other books on the floor awaiting shelving or assignment or recycling, or reading. But when I did finally make time to do those things, I was, unexpectedly, in the mood to read fiction. And still curious. So I am, this morning, mostly through reading the four linked short stories which make up her second volume.

I will use the excuse of that word volume to transition awkwardly to the one evening we did not meet, during SXSW '06, best I recall. She had an 8 p.m. showcase at one of those nameless clubs on 6th in Austin. The venue next door had a metal band playing, whatever walls separated us from them hadn't an ounce of insulation in them, and an equipment manufacturer had parked its specially appointed bus outside this club's open window. Strom and, I think, a trio of acoustic musicians were playing quietly in the front of the club, but could not be heard. I had mentioned to several friends that she might be worth checking out, for I could not tell from her album what kind of live presence she might have.

One or two of them came, since there are rarely conflicts during the 8 p.m. slot, and the club was more or less conveniently located. I walked in a few minutes late, and found a chair next to Rounder co-founder Ken Irwin. Not the first time I have seen Mr. Irwin where I did not expect him to be, but this time I asked and found that someone in the shipping department (or so memory argues), had told him she might be worth seeing, and so he came. That he would listen speaks well for him. Irwin is, in a quiet way, a much more assertive man than I am, and seemed deeply offended by the way Strom's music was being treated. He, at least, caused the windows to be closed, which helped, and may have said something to the people running the bus. And perhaps to the fellow at the sound board.

A couple other people in the room could have done much for Strom's musical career, including Jim Olsen of Signature Sounds, who is proving to have first-rate ears (see: Mary Gauthier, Lori McKenna, Josh Ritter, etc.). But she could not be heard. Other performers might have surmounted the obstacles through some force of will, but she did not, did not try to. It is quite possible that music is a therapeutic sideline for Strom, an adventure and not a vocation. But she was diffident, took her punishment quietly and without incident. She bent with the winds, and left quietly. (As did I, a few songs into Jeffrey Foucault's set, Bo Ramsey having wisely turned his amp up.)

Dao Strom is, in any event, a writer, a product of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the daughter of writers. A writer first, one suspects. And she writes careful, nuanced stories that work hard to reveal small things and seem effortlessly to dodge the obvious. I am too blunt a writer and reader to enjoy or apprehend the symbolism she has so carefully polished, but not quite so dense as to miss the rootlessness of her protagonists, all Vietnamese women in various phases of their lives, all somehow disconnected even from the intimacies of those lives. It is not clear that they would be more connected were they still in Vietnam.

No wonder she is drawn to the comparatively deep roots of the Anglo-American folk tradition.

The literary world is as cruel as the music business, and subject to most of the same pressures. Her first book, Grass Roof, Tin Roof, was published by Houghton Mifflin and won the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren award (which I did not know existed, but it pleases me to know that the author of The Man With The Golden Arm is remembered, at least occasionally) and a James Michener fellowship and an NEA grant. The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys was published by Counterpoint, a division of the Perseus Group. Which suggests (not to read too much into machinations which are fundamentally none of my business) that, like so many artists whose work I am drawn to, her sales did not match the quality of her work.

Regardless, I hope she makes another record one of these days. That she becomes more comfortable with and within her creative powers, though I type that knowing it to be a presumptuous assessment. But as a reader and a listener I want her to let go, a little. To trust us more, to reveal more, to reach further. To find or acknowledge her center.

The unfairness, then, may be that we think we know somebody through their work. Through their art, in this case.

Posted by grant on September 9, 2007 10:16 AM | Permalink