Brenda
Miller

Brenda Miller is the author of Season of the Body, an autobiography told in essay form. The book was a finalist for the PEN American Center Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Forward Jewish Book of the Year. She co-authored Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction. Her work has received four Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in such periodicals as Witness, The Sun, Utne Reader, Fourth Genre, and Creative Nonfiction. She is an Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Bellingham Review.

Season of the Body:
In this remarkable debut collection, Brenda Miller creates an autobiography that locates her body as its central reference point. Single and unable to bear children of her own, Miller details a life in relationship to the extended human family, a journey that traverses realms physical, emotional, and spiritual. From her training in massage and reflexology, to her volunteer work in a hospital’s infant ward, Miller remains a constant seeker and humble teacher. Raised in a suburban Jewish household in the Sixties, Miller grows up to find herself sitting in meditation for hours at a time, both bemused and intrigued by Buddhist precepts. Or she engages in her own ironic brand of mindfulness while caring for two little girls or attending the birth of her godson. She brings us to Portugal, Syria, Israel, and the deserts of southern Utah, but these are no mere travelogues: they become, instead, maps by which to navigate the intricate maze of our lives. These personal essays vary from the lyric to the narrative to the humorous, but always we warm to Miller’s authentic voice as she explores personal joys and heartbreaks within a larger domain.

There’s a moment in the first movement of Beethoven’s violin concerto: the orchestra has been beating a careful pulse beneath the soloist’s violin—a viola plucked here and there, a steady percussive beat in the background—and then suddenly, without your knowing it, the orchestra has vanished and the violin soars out there by itself, light-headed in space. It floats untethered—no, not floating but flailing upward, into the stratosphere, trying to reiterate melodies the orchestra has already negotiated, but the air’s too thin, it won’t quite make it; the violinist tries though, and in this striving cuts a path through the brain, stenciling its own shape: that sharp triangle of wings. And if you listen to this music carefully—if you set aside everything else and just listen, eyes closed, hands at rest in your lap—you’ll feel that violin right behind your eyes, the place where a deep pool of lamentation abides, before specific tears shape themselves for a specific grief. And just when you think the violin will have to quit, to clatter broken-stringed to the ground, a viola edges back in to help: plucking, sidling up the way you might approach someone in pain, unsure if she really wants help and so you just hold out your hands to see if she’ll grab on...

— from “Secret Machine”

“Names, lineage, the dark history of the body, even the promise of a transcendent body carried within her bones–all of these, Brenda Miller meditates upon in a prose that sacrifices none of its lyricism for its breath-catching honesty. Miller shows us that a love of language is not merely the province of the poet, but that in the hands of a skillful and original prose writer, the essay becomes, in its own fashion, an ode, an elegy, a sonnet, a sestina. With this debut, Miller takes her place in the first ranks of contemporary prose writers.”

— Robin Hemley

“These sensuous, memorable essays are an inquiry into what it is to be a body in a world of bodies, an alert, receptive, physical woman moving through interlocking realms of culture, geography, and spirit. ‘It’s not just the animal body I want,’ Brenda Miller writes, ‘the mathematics of sex, the coupling: I want another heart, an extra one, a contrabassoon to echo my everyday pulse.’ And these sensuous, memorable essays are, in a way, just that: the inner life captured in language, a pulse captured on the page.”

— Mark Doty