Creation Stories: A Review of Lori Jakiela’s, Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe by R. A. Voss

cover credit: Atticus Books

Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe by Lori Jakiela
Atticus Books (2015)

Reviewed by R. A. Voss

Belief. Beliefs are opinions unsupportable by proof. Truth. Truths are facts supported by proof. Indeed, a recent New York Times article decries this curriculum commonly taught to our nation’s youth because those simple definitions belie the reality that sometimes things are both. It’s those places—where belief and truth intersect—that Lori Jakiela probes in her latest memoir, Belief Is Its Own Kind Of Truth, Maybe.

Loss. For adoptees like this author, life begins with loss. Loss of a birth family and the genetic guidance that cues infants in regarding their place in the world, sets them on a quest for the truth surrounding their identity and how they came to be. Although all writers begin a story with an empty page, the task is even more daunting for people like Jakiela, as she notes:

“All first pages are blank, of course, but for adopted people more so.”

So as not to seem ungrateful to her adoptive parents, for most of her life, Jakiela sublimated her sense of something missing. This happened until, in middle-age, another seminal loss—her adoptive mother, who raised her and taught her how to love and nurture her own children—propels it back into her awareness. She acknowledges this in the book’s opening revelation:

“When my real mother dies, I go looking for another one.”

The author’s use of the phrase “real mother” to describe her adoptive mother clues readers that her search generates no Dr. Phil reunion. Her description of the Catholic Charities counselor and office sets the tone for her bare-roots tale:

“The Catholic Charities counselor’s word for this other mother I want after decades to find is biological. Illegitimate is another word for people who end up like me. It’s what I feel now, unlawful, unauthorized, unwarranted here in this office that smells like antiseptic and rubber gloves, hot teeth drilled down to the bone.”

Jakiela’s attempts at prying truth from an organization founded on secrecy and sealed records proves largely unyielding. Forced to settle for “non-identifying information,” she’s denied access even to the medical history she alleges is all she seeks. Yet, readers see through this self-deception to realize she wants more—she wants what all children ask of their moms: Please see me, acknowledge me, accept me, love me.

Throughout her life, the author has imagined and been told personal creation stories by her adoptive family, but the versions are incomplete—partial fabrications that leave her unprepared for encounters that come later. In the absence of facts, memoir crosses into fiction that attempts to restore “…certain lost and key moments that affected [her] life, but for which [she] was not present.” Those parts conjure a birth mother who is a more sympathetic character. But though they provide juxtaposition, Jakiela is at her most powerful in memoir mode when she narrates her experiences and thoughts with scalpel-precision that debrides primal wounds.

Jakiela examines her birth and upbringing through her consciousness of her own strong motherly love and marital ties. She sorts through myriad ambiguities in messages heard from her “real” parents, shifting notions about what is true and what is false, acknowledges what is real in all of it, and squares it with her beliefs. She recognizes one reason that some beliefs become necessary truths for people compelled by their situations to invent their own creation stories. She explains:

“There are so many versions of the truth. All of them would hurt someone, I think.”

But needing to believe in goodness in the face of facts that reveal otherwise, she writes:

“I need to believe in my mother’s buried softness the way I need to know I and my children haven’t inherited a terrible disease. If paranoia and cruelty run like cancer in my birth mother’s bloodline, I’m hoping something else will show up to provide balance.”

This is a book about the lies we are told, the lies we tell ourselves, and the things we just believe without proof. It searches out the authenticity in all of it and illuminates how beliefs sometimes persist because we need both the truth and the lies to make life livable—to keep loving ourselves and each other. Further, it’s about leaving behind the life one inherits in favor of the life one chooses in response to everything sensed since leaving the womb, and having it be better than enough. The story is at times doleful, but the author is always self-sentient and honest.

“I never had a voice in any of this,” Jakiela writes of her conception and adoption, but in this book her voice is strong and her emotion finds expression. Forty-five episodic chapters of varying lengths form a staccato rhythm that echoes Jakiela’s disjointedness as she grieves and strives for wholeness. Yet, by the close, the book becomes legato as all the parts smoothly bond like the city of Pittsburgh, where the author was raised near, “All those rivers and bridges, connecting everything to everything.” Similarly, Jakiela recognizes that the life she has created for herself, deeply connected to her husband and children, is the one that matters, while readers recognize those places in themselves where belief and truth mingle.

Meandering Through Bear Country: A Review of Katherine Ayres’s Bear Season: A Journey into Ursidae by R. A. Voss

Cover credit: Autumn House Press

Bear Season: A Journey into Ursidae by Katherine Ayres

Autumn House Press (2013)

Reviewed by R. A. Voss

Katherine Ayres was already enamored by the legendary world of bears when an encounter with one—coupled with intellectual curiosity—turned an attraction into an obsessive crush. The result is Bear Season: A Journey into Ursidae, a collection of essays that come from her heart and conscience regarding the myriad ways mankind and bear-kind have intersected across time. Intriguing epigraphs preface fascinating explorations of the bear-mystique throughout world history.

In the opening piece, “Protection,” the author notes how the series derived from a visit by a black bear outside her residence in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. When she sees the bear roaming her property, she initially registers it as trespassing. On further contemplation, she recognizes the behavior as territory-marking, which signals the bear declaring ownership and leads Ayres to speculate whether the visitor has caught her scent and “wonders who and why.” Alone in her new home, as the bear claims the yard, Ayres marks the house. Poetically, she shares how she rolls her “loneliness from paint cans onto drab walls, making them glow—lemon sorbet, rose parade.”

As she meanders deeper into the bear’s sphere, she probes the incongruity of laws established to shield bears against human predation, observing that:

“We humans protect these large, magnificent giants of the forest so we’ll have more of them to hunt and kill” (5).

Such topical revelations ponder the intricacies of how to determine the bear population a territory can support while considering farmers, residents, hunters, and wildlife management agencies. A gruesome example of how parties clash over these issues occurred on December 9, 2013, when an 18-year-old Pennsylvanian-woman was mauled by a mother bear during a deer-hunting expedition. While recovering from her wounds in the hospital, the traumatized woman received a letter from a representative of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The official suggested that the woman discontinue hunting and consider the terror that animals experience at the hands of hunters. The incident underscores the relevance of Ayres’s book in the ongoing conversation.

As the essays unfold, Ayres delves into the disjunction between people’s admiration for bears and cruelty against them—amidst images of cuddly bears and the fierce reality of mammals in their normal environment. This separation is brilliantly illuminated by her recounting of how Teddy Bears were created after a political cartoon satirized an event that was by turns terrible and noble. She writes:

“President Theodore Roosevelt had been on a hunting expedition, but had not shot a bear. Companions on the trip chased a bear, hounded it, exhausted it and tied it to a tree. When they showed it to Roosevelt, he refused to shoot such a beleaguered creature” (28).

The story inspired a toy manufacturer to produce Teddy Bears to commemorate Roosevelt’s presidential pardoning of the badgered beast. Its inclusion reveals Ayres’s ability to parallel external events with internal scrutiny of the concerns that plague these iconic animals. Covering subjects as diverse as dancing bears, endangered species, bear stock markets, and Russian political bears, she seeks answers to the central question: How can people and bears coexist harmoniously? Ayres’s appreciation for the natural world inspires every page as she examines the ecological, global, and personal—searching for the bear’s-eye view without slipping into anthropomorphism.

In “The Wise Man,” Ayres discusses the merits of labeling while pointing to the dangers of stereotyping and value judgments. Even the scientific nomenclature for bears—Animalia, Chordata, Mammalia, Carnivora, Ursidae, Ursus, and Ursus americanus—becomes something thoughtful and accessible through Ayres’s uplifting prose:

“I realize that I’m drawn to these names—to their scientific accuracy and their musicality. Writers are lovers of words after all—connoisseurs of sound and meaning transcribed into symbol” (24).

In some essays, a light-hearted approach balances the serious tone imparted by others, like in “Bear Etiquette” when she compares the “bare etiquette” practiced by nudists—“One doesn’t stare. One doesn’t walk too close or… touch by accident.”—to the appropriate “protocol when a bear has come into sight.” 

“Fake Fur” reviews the species of bears that currently prowl the planet. From the common brown bear to the South American mountains’ little known speckled bears, which are the only bears to roam the southern hemisphere, she informs readers about survival risk factors like habitat loss from shrinking forests and climate change, noting that though black bear numbers are increasing:

“The Sun bears, Sloth bears, Spectacled bears and Asian blacks…, also face human poaching and predation for food, folk medicine, and sport hunting, as well as capture to secure animals for performing, fighting and even as pets.  As a species, we humans have a very mixed record of living respectfully with our Ursidae neighbors” (40).

The woe worsens in “Unbearable,” which provokes stomach-turning outrage and a wilderness of misery due to images of bears suffering immense cruelty that linger after one finishes the read: bear baiting, Russian bears playing hockey in ice skates, and circus bears performing unnatural acts. And “In Sickness and in Health” awakens readers to the procedure of bear milking—bile extraction for homeopathic medicinal treatments. Ayres explains:

“Somewhere between eight and ten thousand live bears are currently being farmed in Asia for the production of bile. These bears are obtained as cubs, then caged in enclosures so small that an adult bear cannot fully stand or extend its body. The caged bears have injuries to their heads and faces, and broken teeth from trying to bite through the bars to escape” (154-155).

This deplorable practice continues despite the fact that the efficacy of using bile for the treatment of such ailments as hemorrhoids, fevers and alcohol over-indulgence has never been substantiated.

Throughout this all-encompassing survey of bears, Ayres’s respect and affection for them is evident. Facts are plentiful—deftly interspersed with answers dispensed at the exact instant questions arise in readers’ minds. By journey’s end, having used research, folklore and anecdotes the author accomplishes her task of raising awareness while creating an entertaining, absorbing, and well-formed portrait of these impressive creatures.