When I was a five year old with the chicken pox, my mother read me Charlotte’s Web. Near the end, when Charlotte the spider died, I could not be consoled.

My awareness of death was formed then, and yes — by fiction.

An avid reader, I certainly didn’t shy away from trying to get my head further around the concept. From Black Beauty through The Yearling, I put myself through sorrow and mourning on a regular basis. I also went through an extended “beheaded queens” phase, riding my bicycle to the public library to exchange books on Marie Antoinette for others on Lady Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn. I tried to understand how it felt to know when, where, and how you were going to die. I tried to imagine the night before, the creeping dread, the walk to the guillotine, the event itself.

Then, when I was eleven, my father died. He had a heart attack and died instantly – he was forty years old, and he and my mother were on their first trip without us. My mother had to bring his body back in a sealed coffin, so we never saw him again.

To say that I became even more obsessed with death would be an understatement.

We were raised without the religion that (according to the books) sustained so many beheaded queens, and I’ve never managed to believe in an afterlife. My childhood curiosity devolved pretty quickly into anxiety, all-out fear and self-soothing behaviors, primarily reading and television. Stories. They continue to sustain me.

My mother remarried when I was fifteen, an astute and kind man. Along the way, I lost several friends and a dearly loved cousin, my age. My step-father died when I was 41, unexpectedly in an accident. For a first world, middle class woman of that age, I had lost a lot of people.

I took to reading the few pages about the death of Charlotte the spider at each funeral and memorial service. I also reread the book, out loud, to each of my three children.

I still think of Charlotte and her legacy – not her webs, the words she wove to save Wilbur — but the turning of the seasons, the three spider daughters who decide to remain in the old barn with their mother’s friend, and the spot in Wilbur’s heart that will always be reserved for Charlotte. It still makes me cry.

One morning after Sunday Mass my dad carried me up to meet the priest. The sheen of his gold leaf Bible lured me in. Talking with him I got the idea that God had written it. I just about lost it. You mean the man who lives up in the sky and made everything… wrote a book?! I have to learn to read IMMEDIATELY! But my parents shrugged me off. I was only two years old at the time so unless I wanted to wait a literal lifetime and a half for school, I’d have to teach myself. Duty-bound, I grabbed my Speak & Spell and set out alone to learn to read on pilgrimage.

Today for lodestar fiction I use The Nova Trilogy. It resists being understood in the typical sense and yet still cuts straight to the quick. In intriguing, unknowable ways it raises just the questions I like. The story chronicles an ongoing struggle between the Nova Heat and the Nova Mob. The Nova Heat are a hapless group of pervert artists trying to spread the word that infinite consumption on a finite planet might not be such a bright idea. They’re up against the Nova Mob, a gang of apocalyptic forces trying to suck the world dry before they blow it up. Their main thing is snatching bodies at will; seducing everyone with all the most depraved, exciting vices. In the end the author, William S. Burroughs, doesn’t declare a winner. The struggle persists as it must.

Maybe my favorite thing about it is the way it uses the stuff of dreams: word salad, repetition, psychological refuse etc. Through these literary discards, to the patient reader The Nova Trilogy reveals itself to be a paraliterature—a literature designed to go beyond itself and take the reader along. But when it succeeds, where does art that goes “beyond” actually go? Publishers Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer must’ve had an idea when they snagged Ulysses, the chaotic novel that brought Random House to prominence. What did they see? Why were they right? Where does the march of the avant-garde, art’s front lines, lead?

At its best, the page can provide neutral grounds where we might encounter the sublime. Like the space that holds both the yin and yang (“the wuji”), readers can potentially meet both the terrors and miracles of life and self simultaneously. If the piece works, it does a demi-transubstantiation in its reader. It changes into something that stirs its reader’s world, even if only subtly. Hopefully, through this encounter the reader is compensated for their time with at-least slightly improved skills toward the ends of having really lived before dying. From Ulysses to The Nova Trilogy to Lincoln in the Bardo, the march of the avant-garde proves itself a heartbeat of sorts, beckoning audiences to know the world beyond the confines of themselves. In this way the avant-garde shows itself as being on its own pilgrimage, shadowing the death-defying call of life itself.

In my mind, the book still sits on a shelf in the tiny library of Oakridge Elementary School in Salt Lake City, Utah, about as far away from the Ozarks as a child could be. With my parents’ permission, I used my allowance and bought a hardback copy of Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls and donated it to the library so that other young readers at the school could experience what I just had. That was over fifty years ago. It’s doubtful whether the book survived, though if decimated by eager grimy hands or even stolen in order to become someone’s salvation, so be it. The donation served its purpose. It wasn’t just a book, after all, but a totem. For the first time ever, I understood this wasn’t just a story about a boy and his dogs. It wasn’t even about “Billy”, with whom I shared a name, the protagonist. It was the first time I could remember a book being about something other than just ‘what happens’. Like a clarion call, the author’s work taught me how a story could render hope, fear, regret, wonder, nature, love and even God. One who, all my life, has kept me guessing and takes from me just as often as He gives, with purpose, just like in the book. My whole life, I’ve had dogs that loved me unconditionally only to slip their chain one last time for the Great Beyond. When Little Ann crawls atop Little Dan’s grave and dies, I was being taught how one soul could bond with another, regardless of how many legs it has, and grieve. It’s a profound lesson at any age but as a young boy, I knew to look out for opportunities to fall in love on as deep a level as these souls and welcome not only the potential for that highest level of happiness but for complete and total annhilation that comes with it. There’s a sort of irony there and I’ve been on the lookout for it ever since, in literature, but mostly in life. I constantly seek the majestic or the divine though I wouldn’t say that I’m a religious man and, compared to certain others I happen to know, I wouldn’t consider myself all that well-read though I collect books and they are my most treasured possessions. My appetite for all of life’s joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, and what some people call God can be found on the pages, in text, and when it reveals itself, the truth is transformative, like the love Billy enjoyed from his dogs, a love I have been questing for my entire life, a love to be shared, discovered, and cherished. A love that appears in movies, in art, music, or inside a book on a shelf in a tiny school library, waiting to be read.