Western American Literature

Jennifer Sinor's elegant and elegiac voice in her opening essay is sustained throughout Sky Songs, as she grapples with themes of risk, danger, mortality, and transcendence. That essay, "Headwaters," juxtaposes her nascent first pregnancy with the death of her paternal uncle from exposure during a trip through arduous, threatening Alaskan terrain. Thus the stories of her uncle and embryonic son are interwoven, one preparing to enter the world as the other leaves. Likewise, her parents' voices are interwoven through much of the book.

Sinor tells her uncle's story because he no longer can and her unborn son's because he is not yet ready to tell his own, her stories implicitly transcending mortality. Paradoxically, in her essays danger heightens awareness, rather than transcendence, of mortality, whether encountering dangerous men while running, confronting her husband's life-threatening illness, or fighting to keep the family from drowning on a perilous canoe trip. [End Page 404]

Juxtaposition of mortality and immortality permeates Sinor's reflective walks through a Mormon cemetery near her home, where she felt "alive amid all that death, thankful for the many shades of green and the sound leaves make in the wind" (42). Physical danger and mortality are not the only adverse forces confronted in Sky Songs. As outsiders who have moved to Utah, she and her husband faced the ubiquitous cultural force of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, particularly through a neighbor's zealous and oft-repeated efforts to convert them. The failed efforts ended only after Sinor ordered him out of her house. A pair of young Mormon missionaries was similarly evicted. While resistant to the rigidity that she perceived in Mormonism, Sinor's view became more complicated, nuanced, and reflective, primarily through her Mormon students at Utah State:

Each semester several students in my creative nonfiction classes write about their mission experiences. Mission stories run the gamut, from the righteous to the rejected. The ones that break my heart are the ones by the students who have to return early from their two years of service and, therefore, return home without honor. Whether it is a sick family member, a psychological break, a health problem, or a crisis in sexuality that prompts their return, they arrive in my classes broken and ashamed.

(67)

Subsequently, while she did not invite young missionaries into her home, she conversed with them forthrightly but amicably and without rancor.

Sinor's selective use of second voice to address readers, a device that could seem contrived, is skillful instead, creating a conversational sense of intimacy. For example, reliving a frantic search for her lost child at a beach, she wonders, "Will you see only a flash of suit, or will his whole body roll up the shore like the dead birds that often scatter the morning wrack line? The water will bite your skin when you go in, will burn, and the sea will try to take you deeper into its body" (75). Anyone who has ever searched for a missing child, especially near water, has probably experienced similar racing thoughts and panic. Yet in other essays this sense of panic in confronting [End Page 405] mortality is offset by the reflective, meditative qualities indicated by her subtitle's reference to the essays as "meditations."

Sinor draws readers into her meditative experiences, which include various degrees of transcendence, through a sense of divine presence, whether in a Catholic mass, the presence of the Dalai Lama, the crowds of Mumbai, or jail. Her weekly sessions as a meditation leader for jailed women begin with a descriptive weather report to inmates, helping transcend the windowless absence of sun, clouds, or sky. The incarcerated women hear rain sometimes by pressing their ears to the concrete walls. In her final essay, "Incantation," Sinor refers not only to prayerful and meditative incantation but also to her parents' favorite songs, including the narratives in those songs, as sources of her own love for...