Recovery Go-Bag: Kerry Madden-Lunsford

“A canister of lip gloss with my mother-in-law’s picture, mother of thirteen, that her kids made for her celebration of life to give out to everyone.”

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I kicked around an idea for “Desert Island Discs” for recovery for a couple of years. However, instead of your top-five favorite music albums you’d take with you to a desert island, it’d be the recovery books or comfort items you’d bring.

I had this experience when, out of an abundance of precaution, we left our home and neighborhood semi-urgently during the recent LA fires. What did I throw in my bag? Well, two physical copies of my marked-up version of “When Things Fall Apart” by Pema Chödrön and “How to Do Nothing” by Jenny Odell. I took those two because I feel like I’ve studied them and used them enough during various crises, both existential and familial, that I know how beneficial they are and how essential they’d be had we been away from our home for an extended period or, God forbid, lost everything. We were fine. And I was fine, and I knew if I stuck to my books, I would be fine even if something terrible did happen.

It gave me the idea to ask other writers, artists, and musicians about what they’d bring with them if shit went down and they were forced to only bring a few items with them to help keep their recovery intact, well — what would those items be?

Today, our guest is writer Kerry Madden-Lunsford.

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What would I bring? What would I bring? What would I bring?

1. Book(s). How to choose. I would bring Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li as her luminous words of the loss of her two sons shore me up these days to keep living in the land of unknowns. I’d bring Kathryn Schulz’s book on grief, Lost and Found, as I discover something new in it each time. I’d also pack by Niall Williams, This is Happiness, because I know those people down to the marrow.

2. Objects. I would bring my son’s childhood teddy bear “Teddy.” I’d pack my
grandmother’s Noir cigarette case, akin to what Barbara Stanwyck used in “Sorry, Wrong Number.” I’d bring a tiny jar of red dirt that says: “Red Georgia Clay from Andalusia, Home of Flannery O’Connor.” We gave our son, Flannery, a literary name because we’d just moved to LA from Georgia pregnant. We found Certified Nurse Midwives in Culver City who took checks. I named him Flannery because I wanted people to know we were a literary family in case I never wrote anything of substance. A small blue bottle that Flannery gave me when I found him living beneath the Sixth Street Bridge, because he knew I loved old medicine bottles. A pocket-sized, framed photograph of my great-
grandmother, Kate McLaughlin, from Malin Head, Donegal, who watched her mother sail away to America to visit her adult children, after having saved the egg money in secret to buy a steerage ticket against her fisherman-husband’s wishes/commands. A canister of lip gloss with my mother-in-law’s picture, mother of thirteen, that her kids made for her celebration of life to give out to everyone.

3. Another book or two. I would bring A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith as it accompanied me to all three births of my children. I’d also bring Brenda Euland’s If You Want to Write, Carl Sandberg’s favorite book on writing, because she gave me courage to write, and she wrote chapter titles like: “Be Careless, Reckless! Be a Lion! Be a Pirate! When You Write.”

4. Photographs. Pictures of our kids and weenie dogs (who’d be coming along) — what the heck, let’s go clear to Ireland where I’d try to get Irish/Euro passports for the family.

5. Another book. The Collected Works of Shakespeare, so we could act out plays in our spare time outside a stone cottage in Ireland while walking miles on the moors.

6. Journal and laptop. I have a memoir to finish, a novel to finish, picture books to write, notes to take . . .

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Kerry Madden-Lunsford is an author, teacher, and essayist. Her latest novel is Werewolf Hamlet. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a regular contributor to the LA Times OpEd Page. She is the mother of three children. After living for thirty-five years in Los Angeles, Kerry currently lives with her husband in Birmingham.

ALSO: Check out our podcast interview with Kerry.

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Previously:

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