Maud Lavin’s latest chapbook Silences, Ohio (Cowboy Jamboree Press) is set squarely in the Midwest, a place I’ve spent very little time. As a native Californian, who grew up on the rural edge of Silicon Valley, I didn’t expect to relate to these tales from the middle of the country. But in this collection of essays, I recognized the silences, and the exclusion that often comes with them. These are the same silences that my grandmother carried with her from Wisconsin when she moved to the West Coast, and that she taught her California-born children to hold onto, that I learned from my mother and her siblings.
In her powerful collection, Lavin moves through the decades from her youth to more recent high school reunions, and offers glimpses into her Ohio home from different points in her life. I was especially struck by “4-H Church Basement Meetings,” in which she recounts time spent in a 4-H sewing club. She includes the pledge in the story that I remember from my own stint sewing and raising a rabbit as a kid. But the kick of the story is that Lavin learned decades later that while the other girls were often invited over to someone’s home for dinner, she never received an invitation. I know that silence of exclusion, and the way it gets filled up with extrapolation about what might be wrong with you, or what you might have done to deserve the exclusion. I have my own tale of a friend whose parents would not allow her to visit my home, but never gave a reason for it.
“I really really liked 4-H,” Lavin writes. “If I’d known how much I was left out of the dinner social scene around it, that would’ve ruined it for me. I would’ve felt horrible.” Lavin chooses to hold onto the positive memories, and to cherish the adult relationship she has with a friend who attended 4-H with her. She doesn’t ask her friend about the dinners, or the why she wasn’t included. The silence in this instance provides a protective buffer.
In “Night Swim or Silence Only Goes So Far,” Lavin recounts an encounter with an old crush from high school when she returns for a visit in her late twenties. It harkens back to the first piece by her I ever read, “Bodies, Water” a vulnerable CNF piece published in Roi Fainéant’s “Heat” special issue. In this new body of water story, Lavin flirts with the idea of a romance with this old crush, though stays faithful to a boyfriend she has back east. The next they meet up, the boy has become a man who has shifted into a new being, a conservative who openly uses racist slurs. This time, Lavin speaks up and calls him on the inappropriate language, a rebuke he brushes off by calling her a “humanitarian.” The encounter is the last one she has with him.
While most of the 14 short essays focus on a specific person or encounter, in “To Someone Moving to the Midwest,” she offers some advice for how to break silences, and how to speak up for your ideals. “The bigotry spreads wide. Be prepared to say, ‘Oh, I have a really good friend who is X.’ Make that friendship unassailable, ‘We grew up together. She was my neighbor, we’re still in touch decades later.’ Cast aside prejudice for the moment.”
Like Lavin, I have been silent for much of my life, and like her, I have found a voice through writing. In times such as the ones we are living through now, post-2024 election, we must use our voices to speak up for ourselves and for those around us who may not have the power to break their silences. Lavin provides the beginnings of a blueprint for what we can find in the quiet if we let our words out.
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