Recipient of the Pushcart Prize,

                 and the National Magazine Award

The New York Times Book Review
Hiestand's pursuit of truth is driven by irrepressible curiosity and a sense of adventure. One story floats elegantly into the next, producing a spirited memoir whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.   More

The Cambridge Chronicle
Emily Hiestand's new book, Angela the Upside-Down Girl, is about how to live creatively, see life through an artist's eye.  With a subversive sense of humor, she takes us on her journey to discover a meaningful sense of place in a chaotic world.  Her place turns out to be North Cambridge which she describes with the freshness and originality of Joyce in Dublin... "Angela the Upside-Down Girl" reveals... an artist's eye for color and form, a cultural anthropologist's ability to get people to tell their stories, and a poet's facility to express what is felt but not seen.

National Magazine Award
"Hymn" eloquently answers the question of why a white woman born in Tennessee, who has not been inside a church for three decades, decided to join a black congregation in Massachusetts. This captivating essay explores religion, community and humanity, regardless of race, and is stylistically perfect from start to finish.

West Viginia University
A book of essays is the short description, but beyond that Angela The Upside Down Girl is also incredibly funny.

Agni

Angela the Upside-Down Girl provides a new paradigm for literary expression as we head into a new millennium: writing as a form of civility, of reciprocity between the writer and the reader.  More

The Worcester Phoenix
"Angela" is Intoxicating.  In this essay collection Hiestand writes about the familiar and intriguing, from community gardens to gospel church services...to a Haitian grocery store.  The author's affectionate respect for Angela also applies to her other subjects, like Joe Bain, the proprietor of Parnel's Convenient Store... Bain is a good man, curious about his customers, and willing to let Hiestand practice her French. The reason Hiestand has chosen to profile Bain emerges later in the story: "My neighbor would be in Haiti still, a prominent homme d'affaires and dispenser of justice, the kind of man the Haitians call 'un notable,’ had not a handful of the Tonton Macoutes, the thugs of Papa Doc Duvalier's US-backed regime, paid a call."  Relaying the sterling interactions of day-to-day life is Hiestand's strength.

Kliatt
With an artist's eye and poet's voice, Hiestand has written a book of essays about geography and place. The author's elegant, often witty commentaries...are good enough to read a second time—as one would a favorite novel.

The Boston Globe

By birth Hiestand is a Southerner, so she has the storyteller's gene.  This other home has also provided her with a rich array of relatives and neighbors. (Or is it Hiestand's comic genius that makes them so?)....She travels easily, unselfconsciously, not only among regions and races but also social classes. That's why she appreciates Angela's artistry; and celebrates the history of her triple-decker. Though she understands that "ours is a paradoxical universe, that all times, all lands, all selves are an alloy of scar and grace, that blight may turn to beauty and beauty to blight"... she doesn't flaunt her erudition. And without it, she would not be capable of describing a turtle crossing the road as "a tragic-comic amalgam: Mr. Magoo and Oedipus at Colonus."

Philadelphia Inquirer
Revealing the story beneath the seen surface Emily Hiestand mines the particulars of life in her North Cambridge neighborhood—the Caribbean mom-and-pop grocery, the community gardens, the jaybirds nesting nearby—and touches wide-ranging, profound veins of wisdom. She is a lucid thinker, a keen observer, a woman for whom language is a way to live more deeply in the world. Whether writing of her Tennessee relatives' penchant for storytelling or the geological groans that resulted, over the centuries, in a local pond, Hiestand reveals the story that lives beneath the seen surfaces of the everyday.

Pushcart Prize 2000 / Publishers Weekly
In this year's collection of winners... "Neon Effects," a memoir by Emily Hiestand, recounts her sudden desire to put purple neon tubing under the carriage of her car, low-rider / U.F.O. style.  It's a gem of quirky vision, with fun riffs like a footnote on the phrase "no problem."

Cambridge Chronicle, part two
The opening sentence of "Angela" presents the author as "flotsam...drifting into [her] future in a Chevrolet Bel-Air, turquoise with vestigial fins." A Southerner with a Southerner's sense of social cohesion, she was also a child of the Atomic Fifties raised in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where her father worked for the Atomic Energy Commission. ("We must have been among the only girls on earth who went regularly to the Atoms for Peace Museum to practice being nuclear engineers...") After art school, she and her friends moved to Boston, to Winthrop to be precise, working-class Boston. "The first formal social invitation I would receive in New England," she tells us, was to go to the Combat Zone to view the strip show of her neighbor Angela whose headline act involved stripping upside-down while standing on her head. The author, of course, accepted, and recognized that, in her own medium, Angela was an artist. The book is structured in two parts with the first half presenting the migration from her Southern childhood into an artist's life in the North. The second half focuses on Cambridge and includes the highly original "Watershed: An Excursion in Four Parts" presenting a multi-dimensional Cambridge geologically, socially, politically, historically, spiritually. It is rare to have such a gifted writer focus on familiar locations we take for granted such as Massachusetts Avenue, Whittemore Garden, Porter Square shops, the Union Baptist Church in Central Square, Fresh Pond. We see her curiosity at work: "One afternoon, circumnavigating Fresh Pond with a Xerox of an 18th-century map in hand, I see that our local pond was once linked by a series of rivers to the Atlantic Ocean, that for all but the last hundred years of existence our inland region had a direct channel to the sea."

She decides to explore the larger watershed and with her husband sets out by canoe from Alewife Brook to the Mystic River into Boston Harbor. On the way we learn about geology, hydrology, modern infrastructure, fishing, paleo-Indians, harbor design. Hiestand's first book, "The Very Rich Hours: Travels in Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece," was named one of the five best travel books of 1992 by the San Francisco Chronicle. She combines a traveler's eye for the unexpected outcroppings of deep history with a resident's ability to hold repeat conversations--like the one with the Haitian proprietor of her street--who might not yield a story to a transient writer.

However, like the good Southern woman she is, she first introduces herself and her family. We learn that she comes by her talent for talk from her ancestors in the deep South. "On the Callahan porches and in the Callahan parlors, the basic building block of the universe had long ago been discovered and named: It was talk, and its constituent elements were mama and papa, yellow-dog Democrats, grits and red-eye gravy, and, of course, God A-mighty..." An important model was Aunt Nan Dean, a one-woman public works department in Tuscaloosa County and a woman "whose genius was to both subvert and embody prevailing conventions of Southern womanhood." Readers will long remember the 6-year old author sitting in her aunt's metal glider on the porch "watching fireflies swim in the gray-green aquarium of an Alabama dusk."

Some years ago I worked in Washington as a congressional speech writer and was in a Weight Watchers group on Capitol Hill with Tip O'Neill, a man whose conversation held the narrative power of Dickens. From him I heard about the brickyard that used to be where Bolt, Beranak and Newman is today, discussed the magic of Verna's donuts, and learned the history of the Irish immigrants who worked as mechanics and drivers in the trolley barn on Massachusetts Avenue. I came to understand the density of neighborhood life that lay beneath his famous dictum, "all politics is local." His seemingly random anecdotes contained larger themes of migration, technology, ethnic culture, and fun. These are also Emily Hiestand's themes. With the single exception of Tip O'Neill, North Cambridge has never been presented more poetically to a national audience. "Angela the Upside-Down Girl" reveals Emily Hiestand's exceptional talents which include an artist's eye for color and form, a cultural anthropologist's ability to get people to tell their stories, and a poet's facility to express what is felt but not seen.

Boston Sunday Globe Book Review
"Do I navigate the fine line about this life?" Emily Hiestand asks in her enchanting new book of essays. The life in question is led by the book's namesake, a Combat Zone stripper of the 1970s, who performed her entire act of deshabillement while standing on her head. It was a life "redolent of limitation," the award-winning poet writes of the peculiarly talented stripper (or "gymnastic dancer," as Angela herself would resolutely say), "but of little she made much." The same could be said of Hiestand, whose enviable gift is to squeeze every droplet from the least of her own life experiences.

In a previous book, "The Very Rich Hours," she recounted extraordinary journeys to Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece. This time, Hiestand has stayed close to home--in Winthrop, where Angela was her surprsingly level-headed neighbor, and in Cambridge, where Hiestand admits, she now lives "a life so marginal, I can spend most of a day watching blue jays nest." By birth Hiestand is a Southerner, so she has the storyteller's gene. This other home has also provided her with a rich array of relatives and neighbors. (Or is it Hiestand's comic genius that makes them so?) She writes of driving with her great-aunt Nan Dean Blackman of Tuscaloosa County, Ala., who employed the death-defying pump-and-coast method of acceleration but lived to be 100. She recounts deliciously the childhood prank she played on her hoity-toity neighbor in Oak Ridge, Tenn., squirting her with a garden hose from behind a privet hedge, and feeling such "savage glee" that, four decades later, she wanted to go back and thank poor Mrs. Bayliss. Oak Ridge, home of the atomic bomb, is where Hiestand's father took a job "lawyering" for the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947, the year Hiestand was born. Oak Ridge children were paid to catch lightning bugs. And she and a friend could well dream of building a rocket ship "for which we had most of the parts we needed."

Yet Oak Ridge in the mid-1950s, for all its forward-looking familiarity with neutrinos, was still just another segregated town. And when Hiestand was 8 or 9, she and a white playmate drank from the "colored-only" fountain in an act that was "a combination of scientific interest--calmly testing to see what would happen to ourselves or to the five&dime if this curious division were breached--and a child's inborn antenna for the weak places in adult logic."

Hiestand has never lost this sense that every so-called grown-up custom or belief bears scrutiny--and jettisoning, when found lacking. It leads her, as an adult, to have neon tubing installed on the underside of her car, even though a salesman cautions her, "It's only boys who buy this stuff—you know, ethnics, Hispanics." Her refusal to "get stuck in history" also brings her to join a predominantly African-American church. She travels easily, unselfconsciously, not only among regions and races but also social classes. That's why she appreciates Angela's artistry; and celebrates the history of her triple-decker. Though she understands that "ours is a paradoxical universe, that all times, all lands, all selves are an alloy of scar and grace, that blight may turn to beauty and beauty to blight"... she doesn't flaunt her erudition. And without it, she would not be capable of describing a turtle crossing the road as "a tragic-comic amalgam: Mr. Magoo and Oedipus at Colonus."

Like her Tuscaloosa progenitors, Hiestand believes "the basic building block of the universe had long ago been discovered and named: it was Talk." She listens to people the way her Fresh Pond neighbor, a linguistic anthropologist, does. She hears "not so much the facts of their narratives, which are the ordinary facts of our lives--met your grandfather, tended the post office, nuts and oranges in our Christmas stockings--but how they talk, how life's watersheds and minutiae are phrased." One of the most delightful features of "Angela the Upside-Down Girl" is its bounty of speech patterns and sounds, and Hiestand's commentary on them.

Great Aunt Nan Dean, for example, pronounced "die" with "an extra syllable and a springy uplift at the end (like a fancy ice-skating jump)," the word suggesting to Hiestand "not a mournful event, but a rather enticing activity." "You should taste jouroumou before you cook him," says Joe Bain, the Haitian owner of the mom-and-pop store across from her triple-decker. "You might not like him." As for the rejoinder, "No problem!"--well, it "wants a whole essay for itself," says Hiestand. Many personal essayists today try to capture our interest by being confessional but run the risk of revealing, like clumsy strippers, what we'd really rather not see. Hiestand has taken the more unusual risk of writing about the quotidian, and produced a tour de force. 'Oooouuuweee!' as her cousin Bill would say. What a good book this is.

Amazon Readers
Transcendental and Funny, An Eloquent Witness
Hiestand is one of Robert Frost's true poets, "one upon whom nothing is lost." As she trains an eye of the rarest perception on the world we thought we knew, we discover the heart of light within ordinary and not-so-ordinary things. I marvel at her scope: her Weltyesque Aunt Nan Dean; her eloquent witness to the power of faith and community at the Union Baptist Church; her love affair with automotive neon, which manages (as Emerson never could) to be both transcendental and funny; and of course, there's Angela, whose gravity-defying grace can be seen as a figure for the whole book. Most engaging of all is the voice of our guide--the unifying principle through the book's many travels, wise, witty, shimmering in its clarity."

Deeply Thoughtful, Original, and Beautifully Written
"Thoreau lives! Emily Hiestand could take you on a trip down the most familiar street in your town and show you things you've never seen before. She has a way of noting the realities of everyday existence that simultaneously lights up their surfaces and illuminates their deeper significance. I simply loved this book.

Hope Magazine
Like her Aunt Nan Dean, Emily Hiestand is "particular about the particulars," and her collection of fourteen stories about "domestic travels" is full of rich, revealing, and often hilarious details. This book travels between only two places...but it travels so deeply into each place, both their pasts and their presents, that you come away from it feeling enlightened and enticed, and ready to hop on the next train heading north or south. "I'm not writing a proper history," Hiestand once explained to her southern neighbors as she was conducting an oral history project. So maybe Angela is an improper history, which looks at bits and pieces of these places, like the shops in her multi-cultural Cambridge neighborhood, or her formidable Aunt Nan Dean, who, in 1934, was one of the only women in her Alabama town to learn to drive. With a great ear for local dialects, Hiestand focuses on people--rich, palpable characters that bring these domestic places to life.

Columbus Dispatch
A Wonderfully Clever, Wise, Observant Book.
The 14 narratives in "Angela the Upside-Down Girl and Other Domestic Travels" are set in Hiestand's Boston neighborhood, with the occasional foray into her childhood homes in Tennessee and Alabama. In each, she uses a painter's eye to grasp the real nature of things. A pay telephone is a "regular phone on steroids," and Oak Ridge, Tenn., a site of nuclear-weapons research, is "a spaceship landed, not very softly, in an alfalfa or tobacco field." In addition to impressions of a 1940s and '50s childhood in Oak Ridge, topics covered in this collection range widely and include sympathy for a red-maple swamp lost to a cinema megaplex and ruminations on a day's errands. Each topic is treated as a significant journey. This should not surprise readers familiar with Hiestand's accounts of Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece rendered in "The Very Rich Hours," a book of travel essays in which she reveals meaning in the ordinary—but on more foreign ground.

Even though she visits no foreign countries in her new book, Hiestand nevertheless discussed ideological borders, including those of decency, color and ownership…She often quotes literary figures in her narratives, such as Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James Baldwin, and also the people she meets, such as Joe Bain, the Haitian storeowner across the street from her apartment building. Bain, who works 12 to 16 hours every business day, insists, "Joy is a thing that you can create in your life. Because when you find some place you enjoy, and you find great people, that is....riches." This isn't new information for Hiestand, who knows that the real world traveler leaves the self and arrives at the abundant and mysterious "place" Bain refers to. It is a rich, joyful place...Hiestand discovers it wherever she looks and we can be thankful she shares her finding in this wise, observant book.

Agni Review
"Majestic Juice"
As an accomplished visual artist, poet and essayist, Emily Hiestand is a wizard of imagery, conjuring reflections and simulacra with smooth moves. The essays in Angela the Upside-Down Girl are truly edifying in that they reveal the misplaced detail -- what we might lose or forgetbecause it is so familiar...[H]er words are fully rounded, mindful observations that create a fine detailing of the places we could call home. She has an eye for the particular that captures the brilliance in clear-cut, Renderings.

The themes in these essays are communion, preservation, and revelation. Alienation and angst are secondary to the recognition and celebration of a kindred spirit, and the land that provides the essential background strokes. A compassionate understanding and heartening perspective--a smile--is evoked from elegant description of place rather than feelings....(T)his elucidation of the here and now is perhaps one of the author's greatest gifts: her incredible capacity to be completely immersed in the present. She tells us what it is to simply "be."

In addition to this presence, there is a rousing compassion that has evolved from a lifetime of careful, practiced attention. It shows up in her writing as a kind of x-ray vision, the ability to see beyond appearances to what is invisible, what is long past but still felt. Emily Hiestand...sees where the human intricacies of thought, remembrance, desire and confusion can be overlaid, like a black-lined transparency, onto what is clear and wide and slow to emerge out of that past...

Angela the Upside Down Girl" is a good read, not because it takes you away, but precisely because it allows one to appreciate there here and now, whenever and wherever that may be, and because we know by now that these are not just essays about North Cambridge, or Oak Ridge, Tennessee, or Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, or Fresh Pond:

The epigraph is from the Duino Elegies, by Rainer Maria Rilke: "For when a traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley, he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead some word he has gained...Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window--..." The book ends with "Neon Effects" (the story for which Ms. Hiestand won a Pushcart Prize), and appropriately, the words "Ooouu, la luz," because she does indeed bring light into the room, and allows the unsayable to be said.

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                                                                                   Photo: ©2004 Emily Hiestand