REVIEWS
Watershed & Other Domestic Travels
Emily Hiestand (Beacon Press, 1998)

Originally titled Angela the Upside Down Girl; title updated by the author in 2015

Hope Magazine, July/August 1998
Review by Frances Lefkowitz

Enlightening and Enticing — 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 neighbors as she was conducting an oral history project. So maybe [Watershed] 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 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.

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Review by the National Magazine Award Judges, members of the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Columbia School of Journalism

Stylistically perfect — “‘Hymn’ eloquently answers the question of why a White woman who has not been inside a church for three decades, decided to join a Black congregation in her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This captivating essay explores religion, community, and humanity, regardless of race, and is stylistically perfect from start to finish.” 

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Pushcart Prize 2000
Review by Publishers Weekly, August 23, 1999

"Neon Effects" shines — ”In this year's collection of winners...Neon Effects by Emily Hiestand, a story in her recent collection Watershed & Other Domestic Travels, recounts her sudden desire to put neon tubing under the carriage of her car, low-rider/UFO-style. It's a gem of quirky vision, with fun riffs like a footnote on the phrase ‘no problem.’” 

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A reader in Maine
Both 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; and her love affair with automotive neon, which manages to be both transcendental and funny. 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." 

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A Reader in Massachusetts
A Deeply Thoughtful, Original, and Beautifully Written Book
"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.”

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The New York Times Book Review
“Irrepressible curiosity and sense of adventure”

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Cambridge Chronicle, 16 July 1998
Review by Judith Nies, historian, author of Unreal City

The freshness and originality of Joyce in Dublin — Emily Hiestand's new book, [Watershed & Other Domestic Travels] is about how to live creatively, to 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.

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, Tennessee, 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 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, she first introduces herself and her family. We learn that she comes by her talent for talk from her relatives in the 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, 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. [Watershed & Other Domestic Travels] 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.

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Columbus Dispatch, 25 October 1998
Review by Kassie Rose

A Wonderfully Clever, Wise, Observant Book — “The narratives in Watershed & Other Domestic Travels are set in Hiestand's Cambridge, Massachusetts neighborhood, with the occasional forays into her childhood home in Tennessee and [the world of her relatives] in Alabama. In each, she uses a painter's eye to grasp the real nature of things. A large 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 discusses ideological borders, including those of color and ownership. In ‘Hymn’ she joins a predominantly Black congregation for Sunday worship and experiences how it feels to be a minority, and the difference it makes to choose that status voluntarily. In ‘Plot,’ city dwellers cultivate gardens in small neighboring plots, and when nasturtiums lean into vegetable gardens and cornflower seeds drift beyond their allotted ground, Hiestand demonstrates how nature plays with our concept of possession.

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 store owner across the street from her house. Bain, who works 12-16 hours every business day, observes that ‘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 findings in this wise, observant book.”  

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Review by Jim Armstrong, poet, literary critic, and professor

Intelligent, funny, moving explorations of home — “Emily Hiestand's latest book of essays takes as its central theme the idea of home, though it is clear from the beginning that for Hiestand ‘home’ covers a lot of territory: the Oak Ridge, Tennessee of her childhood, the south of her mother's Alabama relatives, and the urban Boston of the author's maturity. Each place has contributed something crucial to the author's psyche, and in meditating on this spatial triumvirate she comes to better articulate what it might mean to feel at home in the world.

[A] more cosmopolitan interpretation of home often begins at the point where our expectations and desires are suddenly inverted — as when the mother of two next door turns out to be a famous exotic dancer.  Hiestand encounters this unusual neighbor when she first moves to Boston, fresh out of art school. Faced with [her neighbor’s] manifest sense of aesthetic dignity Hiestand must expand her definition of ‘art’ and ‘work’ to keep up with a neighborhood which seems much larger — and more interesting — than she had thought.

This serves as a model for the essays that follows. In the essay "Maps," for instance, Hiestand belatedly realizes how unusual it was to grow up in the Oak Ridge of the 1950s, where fathers could not discuss their work, children collected fireflies for scientists experimenting in cold light, and where every morning the deejay on the radio called out, "Up and at 'em, Atom City!" This sense of the foreignness of her own past leads her to ponder the paradoxes of the nuclear family in Cold War America — the nobility of articulated ends, the enormous destructiveness of means.

In the two essays about her mother's relatives in Alabama, Hiestand claims the rural south as part of her heritage. Paradoxically, Alabama becomes most truly home when its genteel and hilarious voices only exist as ghostly magnetic traces on the taped interviews which the author sometimes listens to at night.  But this leads to the insight that home is often only a skein of remembered voices….[and] the affectionate and often humorous tales one tells about them later.

In the rest of the book, Hiestand carries this narrative sensibility north to Boston, where she combines with it her artist's eye for detail and her considerable resources as a scholarly investigator. At this point the book expands to consider the ways in which nature and culture intertwine to make that home we call the modern city. Whether she is discussing the geological history of Fresh Pond, describing the nesting habits of an urban blue jay, observing the comings and goings at the Haitian grocery store across the street, or negotiating with the local mechanic to have a ‘neon effect’ installed in the undercarriage of her car (a trick she has learned from young men of Boston's Hispanic population), Hiestand's ability to show us the [remarkable] in the familiar (and vice-versa) is by turns intelligent, funny, and moving.

Her keen sense of the philosophical currents which circulate just below  the mundane, combined with her obvious love for a gorgeously-tailored sentence, make the book a memorable meditation on what it might mean to live fully conscious of both the material and the imaginative value of one's place. When Hiestand turns her thoughts to the issue of race relations (the essay "Hymn" was recently published in The Atlantic), her analysis of what it will take for Blacks and Whites to feel at home with each other is worth the price of the book alone.”

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Overview from Beacon Press
A dazzling, often hilarious exploration of identity — ”Emily Hiestand opens this journey — between North and South, Black and White, decorum and glitz — by explaining how she and three other young artists make the decision to come north, and how they find themselves living in a low-rent seashore town near Boston…. How Hiestand constructs her life — one that unfolds with grace and passion… is the crux of Hiestand's hugely rich exploration of identity and of America's scarred and enduring landscapes.”

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Boston Sunday Globe Book Review, 5 July 1998
Review by Jeanne Schinto

What a good book this is! — "‘Do I navigate the fine line about this life?’ Emily Hiestand asks in her enchanting new book of essays. The life in question in the opening essay is a local stripper of the 1970s, who performed her act of deshabillement while standing on her head. It was a life ‘redolent of limitation,’ the award-winning poet writes of the 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 drop from 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 surprisingly level-headed neighbor, and in Cambridge.

[From her Southern relatives] Hiestand has gained the storyteller's gene. The region 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, who employed the death-defying pump-and-coast method of acceleration but lived to be 100. Oak Ridge, the 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 a 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 the sense that some grown-up customs and beliefs bear scrutiny — and jettisoning, when found lacking. 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. 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 [relatives,] 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 [Watershed & Other Domestic Travels] 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 joumou 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…Hiestand has taken the more unusual risk of writing about the quotidian, and produced a tour de force.               
                              

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A Reader from Chicago:
Riveting Essays — ”I applaud and recommend [Watershed & Other Domestic Travels]. If you let the sinuous language, humor, and thoughtful insights swirl around you, you will be rewarded with a surprising, poetic sense of the interaction between the natural and cultural worlds. You will also laugh out loud if my reaction is any indication. The loving essay about attending a Black church is worth the price of admission alone, providing a vivid, unique, and intimate perspective on one of our major cultural challenges.”

A Reader from California
A Stand Out Writer — ”A wonderful and unusual essay collection. The voice that takes you into them is smart and funny and serious all at once. So they are great fun and leave you with lots to think about. A whole world that goes very far beyond one person's life.”

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Kliaat, September 1999
Review by Penelope Power

Elegant and Witty — With an artist's eye and poet's voice, Hiestand has written a book of essays about geography and place, one in a series of the Concord Library (of Beacon Press). The author's elegant and often witty commentaries on the landscapes of Tennessee where she was raised, on the Alabama of relatives, and on the northern urban neighborhood where she now lives are good enough to read a second time, as one would a favorite novel. One short essay is a read-aloud gem. ‘Hose’ begins with the topography of the street of her childhood and segues into a hilarious memory. In another piece she compares the process of filling a cavity in her tooth with the geological process that filled her Cambridge neighborhood during the Pleistocene era. Her eye defines beauty where others see dross [and] the author's philosophical bent follows the curve of the earth and leads us to revisit our own landscapes.”

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Philadelphia Inquirer, August 22, 1999
Review by Andee Hochman

“Revealing the story beneath the seen surface “Emily Hiestand mines the particulars of life in her 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 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.”

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The Improper Bostonian, September 23, 1998
Review by Mopsy Strange Kennedy

Found Art — ”Cambridge resident Emily Hiestand grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of the atom bomb, where Wonder Bread optimism hovered over the town's ominous product. Ever since, she's been watching and brooding on places, their deep ancient histories and their tender, ironic flavors. Searching for the original lay of the land — now malled and highwayed over – she muses on the Great Swamp whose enduring watery footprint is now Fresh Pond. And, with her husband, Hiestand goes exploring on an almost rural canoe trip in the midst of the city under "the titanic legs of the Tobin Bridge." She magpies through local scenes — a Cambridge community garden, a Black church of which she's a minority member, and triple-deckers including her own apartment with its own poetic history holding such findings as a fading 10-cent McCall's pattern. "Anyone who has loved a house may agree that not only do we infuse our houses with the steady sedimentations of home, but that houses have some spirit of their own which they, by a silent, steady appeal, infuse in us." 

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Bostonia Magazine, Fall 1998
A storyteller and a poet — Hiestand’s domestic travels [take place in New England and also in the American South] in memory and in fact "with a tape recorder on my knee.” When she settles in wonderfully-mixed North Cambridge, she is a traveler still, quietly becoming the only White member of a Black church, tending a plot in the community garden, hanging out in a mom-and-pop Haitian store, and everywhere savoring details. Paramount among her details, lovingly polished and presented, is language. Brought up to know that "the basic building block of the universe...was talk," she savors the speech of her great-aunts and uncles, the testimonials preceding church services, the taciturn diagnoses at Nai Nan Ko Auto Service. Hiestand is a graduate of [Boston University's] Creative Writing Program  and — it may be superfluous to add — a poet.  She has also co-produced "One Side of the River," a two-CD compilation of readings by local poets, among them Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, fellow alums Mary Campbell, Teresa Iverson, Sue Standing, Mark Wagner, and herself. 

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West Virginia University, 1999 Recommended Books List 

Incredibly Funny — A book of essays is the short description, but beyond that [Watershed & Other Domestic Travels] is incredibly funny, insightful, chock full of interesting details of Hiestand's life in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Cambridge, Massachusetts. She's also a poet; it shows.”

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Agni Review
Review by Colette Kelso, Fall 1999
Majestic Juice: A new paradigm for literary expression — 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 [Watershed & Other Domestic Travels] are truly edifying in that they reveal the misplaced detail — what we might lose or forget because 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... Ms. Hiestand has a short but fortuitous history of leaving, suggesting not a lack of commitment, but an appetite for adventure.

The book starts with Ms. Hiestand's arrival in Boston, but before she quite moves in, we are taken back to revisit relatives and a tragi-comic upbringing in "Atom City" (Oak Ridge, Tennessee)... There were many trips to Tuscaloosa County, Alabama; ‘the land of my mother's people,’ where, ‘on the Callahan porches in the Callahan parlors, the basic building block of the universe had long ago been discovered and named: it was Talk.’ [Hiestand's relatives] are provided with a canvas for their colorful elaboration, and her preservation of a deeply cherished history. The respectful approach used here might come as a relief, perhaps even a tonic, for the reader who has felt inundated by the depiction of familial dysfunction.

’Certainly by middle age, one knows 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, like mischievous changelings teasing the stolid. Certainly we all know that our land is one supple carnival of misrule, a mesh of redemptive improbability and change.’ ("Watershed")

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. 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... Part One of the book ends with "Hymn," [recipient of the 1999 National Magazine Award], a story about race and spirit...Part Two begins in North Cambridge, where Ms. Hiestand eventually settles. In [Watershed & Other Domestic Travels]... Hiestand constructs a world, a home for the reader...and it becomes a place to live, a way to be. [This book] 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:

‘Here, the eye is schooled in the play between diffuse and close attention, taught to count on surprise, to rely on minute things — a dark red leaf encased in ice--to unlock meaning for the metaphor-loving mind. The patterns of light and shadow, thickets and tangles into which we can see but partially, the unspoken-for patches, the water surface that skates toward the horizon — all these are forms and shapes that offer possibilities for mind, ways of being.’  ("Watershed").

The ‘dark red leaf encased in ice — to unlock meaning’ are words that allow this reader to enter into the only place worth being, a place where meaning is honored, cultivated, and revealed exquisitely. ‘Here’ she is saying, ‘here,’ offering and showing something unexpected, a surprise — and literature becomes an act of civility…. Civility begins with attention, which is everything in a world that is more a barrage than a tableau. Hiestand is as skilled at a zen-like mindfulness as she is in describing what she discovers. In the midst of an information and memoir overload, it occurs to me that Watershed & Other Domestic Travels 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 and the lives lived by both.... This would mean a shift in perspective, perhaps collectively, from inward darkness to outside of ourselves, towards connection rather than alienation. Outside to a place that looks like home — where your feet are planted and your eyes are watching; where you find the familiar. ‘But as always, the familiar when closely observed reveals itself as an exotic.’ Emily Hiestand does this so well:

’It was not only the words, each one opened up, entered into and walked around in, but the majestic juice of the sound — the sweeping river of the woman's voice...and the going so low, so sweetly, so solidly of the male voices.  There was a moan at the center, and even so, long after the record went back into its cardboard sleeve there was gladness and buoyancy. It was a serious sound, and it also jumped. This was more than song, this was philosophy... the call and response tradition whose template must be the creative play and reciprocity in life itself.’  ("Hymn")

The book’s 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, mountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window...’ The book ends with ‘Neon Effects’ (the story for which Hiestand won a Pushcart Prize), and appropriately, the words "Ooouuuu, la luz," because she does indeed bring light and awe into the room, and allows the unsayable to be said, with such tender fervor.”

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The Worcester Phoenix, August 20, 1999
Review by Sally Cragin 

An enthusiasm for place and people that intoxicates — “Any editor will tell you that writing short is more difficult than writing long. Today we think of American writers like Henry James or Edith Wharton as the authors of grand, many-leaved novels, but both of them were accomplished at short fiction and essay writing. In a compressed work, a serious writer must convey a mood or the flavor of a situation in very few words and keep the reader's interest on a sentence-by-sentences, rather than page-by-page, basis. Emily Hiestand and Nat Segaloff take unlikely topics and create memorable entertainment presented in brief episodes.

For Cambridge writer Hiestand, no vista is too small for her discerning eye. In her new collection, Watershed & Other Domestic Travels (Beacon Press. 1998), Hiestand writes about the familiar and intriguing, from community gardens to gospel church services to customized cars to a Haitian grocery store. This charming essay collection might be categorized as ‘creative non-fiction,’ as Hiestand blends the biographical with the topical.  In ‘Angela the Upside-Down-Girl,’ she recounts her experiences as a freshly minted art major who, with her girlfriends, rents an ocean-side apartment in Winthrop, upstairs from a stripper named Angela. It was Angela who ‘issued me…the first formal social invitation I would receive in New England,’ writes Hiestand. The proposal was, of course, to see the dancer perform at her club. ‘I saw that we were a novelty mix of mascot and country mice, that we were bits of paint on Angela's palette that night, adding to her star, and I felt confused and glad.’

The country mice duly arrive, and though there is little doubt about what they will see, ‘how this would actually occur was a source less of erotic tease than of sheer logistical drama and suspense.’ In the end, Angela ends up charming Hiestand and her friends, as well as maintaining an air of dignity. The author’s affectionate respect for Angela also applies to her other subjects, like Joe Bain, the proprietor of Parnel's Convenient Store, American & Tropical Foods, the main character of ‘Store.’ He ‘will laugh easily but there is always a flinty alloy available to his sweet nature.’ Bain is a good man, curious about his customers, and willing to let Hiestand practice her French. He's also a sharp businessman, and his stock (lottery tickets, sugarcane, newspapers) reflects the disparate interests of his Haitian and non-Haitian clientele. One reason why Hiestand has chosen to profile Bain emerges later in the story: ‘My neighbor would be in Haiti still, a prominent homme d'affaire 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.’

The relaying of small yet sterling interactions of day-to-day life is Hiestand's strength. She crafts portraits of these regular folks, depicting their heroism, as well as their charisma. Hiestand also includes short memoirs of her girlhood, which blend in with her East Coast themes — family, community, and landscape. Hiestand's enthusiasm for place and people intoxicates.”