Spark: An Imagination for Lament with Apricot Irving

Apricot Irving joined me for this week's podcast, to help us have an imagination for lament in our everyday lives. Apricot is the author of The Gospel of Trees, a lyrical meditation on ecology, loss and the tangled history of missions in Haiti. She reported on post-earthquake recovery efforts in the north of Haiti for the radio program–This American Life.

She has taught literature and writing in many contexts and countries and as a writer she spends a great deal of time interviewing and listening to the stories of others. For her memoir she also had to do a lot of listening to herself: Within her work and her own life there is a kind of listening that requires a deeper awareness of the practices and habits that surround lament.

Below is a piece she wrote that was published in Granta. It shares a different part of her story than we had time for in our conversation together on the podcast an gives a wider glimpse into why she is drawn towards lament:

The father that I have been trying to love my entire life gave me a pair of hiking boots just before I left home at seventeen, along with my first overnight backpack, metal-frame and clunky; old-school wilderness style. It was the first gift I can remember him giving me. He isn’t fond of shopping. His second gift – the one I can never repay – was to give me his journals from the years when we were missionaries to Haiti.

My father’s anger is hereditary, handed down from men who worked long hours in the dry heat of the family date ranch, pushing their bodies to exhaustion as they wrestled irrigation pipes at midnight and beheaded rattlesnakes, coached and relentlessly cheered on baseball games, packed picnics up the canyon in the back of pick-up trucks, threw their children against walls, and grew into benign and genial grandfathers, pinching our cheeks when they were confined to wheelchairs, although I am among the descendants who never forgot what they were capable of.

Harm that comes through the hands of those we love must be wrestled with; it does not simply disappear.

From https://granta.com/climb-the-mountains/

For more information on Apricot and her perspective on Lament, join us for this week’s Spark podcast.