Monday Required Reading. Notice I dropped the "Morning"? Yeah. I almost never get my act together enough to have one of these posted in the actual morning, so I am just admitting defeat. I picked up Rebecca Lee's short story collection Bobcat and Other Stories on a whim when I was in the bookstore. It's part of some sort of program Chapter's runs, so it was on a special shelf and I was sucked in by the Canadian author and the short story format and the first line of the first story: "It was the terrine that got to me." I took it with me on a flight to Edmonton the next day and had finished the entire collection by the time we landed. It is incredible. Her characters are so strikingly real, and I often felt as if she had taken some aspect of myself and put it down on the page. "Fialta" is the last story in the collection, and since the crucial action takes place at a Thanksgiving meal it felt appropriate to share it today. You'll probably see more from Lee on this blog, but for now, here is "Fialta":

From where I stand, on the bridge overlooking the Chicago River, the city looks like a strange but natural landscape, as it arises as surely and inevitably from the hands of life as does a field of harvest wheat or a stand of red firs. After all, the city was designed by country boys -- Mies van der Rohe, Rook and Burnham, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan -- all wild and dashing country boys, dreaming up the city in the soft thrum of the countryside. 

But the buildings that most reflect nature, at least Midwestern nature, in all its dark and hidden fertility, are those by Franklin Nostbakken, the so-called architect of the prairies, that great and troubled mess of a man I once knew.

Three years ago, when I was a senior at Northwestern, I sent Nostbakken a packet of drawings and a statement of purpose. Every year Nostbakken chooses five apprentices to come live with him on the famous grounds of Fialta, his sprawling workshop, itself an architectural dream rising and falling over the gentle hills of southwestern Wisconsin. My sketches were of skyscrapers, set down with a pencil on pale blue drafting paper. They'd been drawn late in the night, and I knew hardly anything about how to draw a building, except that it ought not to look beautiful; it ought to be spare and slightly inaccessible, its beauty only suggested, so that a good plan looked like a secret to be passed on and on, its true nature hidden away. 

Two months later I received back a letter of acceptance. At the bottom of the form letter there was a note from Nostbakken himself that read, in spite of your ambition, you hand seems humble and reasonable. I look forward to your arrival. 

I had been reading, off and on, that year, a biography of Nostbakken, and this moment when I read his handwriting was one of the most liberating in my life -- in fact, so much so it was almost haunting, as if a hand had leapt out of the world of art -- of books and dreams -- and pulled me in. 

[KEEP READING]