City of Toys: Essays (21st Century Essays)

City of Toys: Essays (21st Century Essays)

A genre-defying debut that distills memoir, cultural criticism, and poetic inquiry into a kaleidoscopic meditation on motherhood, memory, art, and transformation. Composed in a postpartum blur and finessed as Lesley Jenike settled into established motherhood, the essays in City of Toys careen from exteriority to interiority, from high to low culture, and from the manufactured to the natural world, all on a quest to understand creativity, mothering, and how art drives and shapes us. With madcap acuity, Jenike casts her eye on cultural flash points from Harambe the gorilla to Steven Spielberg and Ada Lovelace to Yayoi Kusama. At times she doubles back to her own experience as a young performer, and at others hurtles into her children’s possible futures, when AI starts to dream, imagination is commodified, and the polar bear drowns. All the while she wonders what we owe our children and what we believe (rightly or wrongly) our children owe us. Fascinated by creativity and peopled by dolls, automatons, robots, ghosts, puppets, and historical figures, this exuberant and devastating debut asks, What world are we building, and what are we tearing down? “ City of Toys is a beautiful and masterful work of obsessions, the essays stunning in their focus and in how they accumulate. There is a universe built within every piece, with handfuls of connective threads, and they are woven together brilliantly.” ―Hanif Abdurraqib “These essays are brisk, hilarious, canny, and full of life. Nothing about Jenike’s genre-bending writing is replicable. A finely researched, ruminative, and looping feast of a book, City of Toys makes the vastness of its knowledge, its fine bursts of understanding, and the deep well of its wisdom seem easy.” ―Mary Cappello Lesley Jenike has published poetry, creative nonfiction, and criticism in Image, West Branch, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She teaches writing, literature, and philosophy at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio, where she lives with her husband and two children. Lavender An Overture —for some little girl A text message comes in. “re: the work. how’s it going?” I’m on the couch hunched over my phone, thumbing a reply to my text-only therapist while my kids throw each other around the room. I look down at my phone in my hands, my hands in my lap. I realize I’m like a folding chair. You can take me anywhere, shake me open then shake me closed again. I ask, “What work do you mean?” I wait. Ping. “Self-care.” Oh. I type, “I don’t have any time for that.” I wait. Ping. “But what do you practice for self-care?” the therapist asks again. What did I say that she’s not getting? “I run,” I say. “I sleep. I drink wine. I write. I read.” “Which of those things feeds your soul?” I don’t like that word. It immediately tells me something. I type, “Writing. Reading, I guess?” But that’s the work I get paid for. Is that the work we mean? What if self-care isn’t an activity, monetized or otherwise. What if it’s a state of being? It occurs to me I should’ve said, a clean surface. Clean surfaces feed my soul. There are no clean surfaces in my world anymore. Something is always overlapping something else, touching someone else—toys on the floor, feet on the toys; drawings on the desk, grocery lists on the drawings. My work is picked up then put down/picked up then put down. Someone is always in my lap/reaching for my lap/leaving my lap until the work has become about laps, lapping, overlap. I look down at my body again. I’m so awfully folded. And when I say lap, I mean one portion of a complete person—integral to the whole but inferior on its own. When I say lap, I mean luck, as in, it just fell into my lap. But none of these things make any difference. In the middle of laughing/fighting my children ask for milk, a snack. A diaper needs to be changed. One starts to sing and the other says, “Stop it!” because that’s pretty much all he says these days. I text, “What do you really mean by soul?” Uh oh. Here I go again. I wait. In the preschool TV series Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Daniel reminds us that “when you wait you can play, sing, or imagine anything,” so in my mind I replay an On Point podcast. Self-care isn’t, psychologist Sarah Pollak purrs, a podcast. Nor is it a mani-pedi. It’s not a lavender-scented bubble bath or a cocktail with egg white in it. It’s not a massage or a pulp novel by a pool. It’s all about breath, about waiting to calm down, about stepping away from your routine for a moment, about recognizing your selfhood in the middle of a break down. So, I guess self-care is documentation? A monk’s job in the old days was to illuminate. That’s the kind of work I’d be into, spending afternoons in fields not speaking only thinking, or busy brewing beer or making perfume in redolent barns with high dusty ceilings. And mornings are for bending over a holy book, drawing weird little monsters in the m