by Lisa Moore

I kept thinking about the famous Salvador Dalí painting called "The Persistence of Memory" while I was reading Lisa Moore´s marvelous new novel, February, which could easily be subtitled "The Persistence of Grief." Moore, who lives with her family in Newfoundland, takes a historical event as the foundation block of her novel: the 1982 sinking of the oil rig Ocean Ranger in a huge storm and the drowning deaths of its entire 84 member crew. Moore explores, often in fragmentary or elliptical and always in evocative language, the effects of that terrible occurrence on the lives of Helen, whose husband Cal´s death by drowning leaves her a young widow with three small children. Moore takes us back and forth in Helen´s life, from the early years of her marriage to the present, from the immediate sense of being struck down by unbearable grief to her constant awareness of having to move through the days without Cal´s presence in her life. This is a book for those who enjoyed getting into the head of the eponymous Olive Kitteridge in Elizabeth Strout´s collection of linked stories, or those who appreciated the writing of Christine Schutt´s All Souls. I loved February: it was moving (but not soppy) and insightful. When I finished it, I went back to find Moore´s two earlier fiction titles-a novel, Alligator, and a short story collection, Degrees of Nakedness. I´m really looking forward to reading them.

by Tori McClure

Tori Murden McClure is an incredibly accomplished woman: she was one of the two women (out of a total group of six) who skied 750 miles to the South Pole; she was also the first woman to summit Lewis Nunatak, which is part of the Queen Alexandra Range in Antarctica. She has several advanced degrees (including law and divinity) and has had a variety of interesting and challenging jobs (including working with the boxer to set up his Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky). But after reading her memoir, A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean, I have to believe that of all her achievements, the one that she´s proudest of is that she was the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean. How and why she chose to attempt the crossing (twice, actually, since her first trip was halted by a hurricane) is uplifting without being at all sappy. You can see why she must be a terrifically inspiring speaker, especially for teen audiences. I was fortunate enough to meet Tori at a rather large dinner in Chicago a year or so ago, and felt that there were many questions I wished I could have asked her in order to learn more about the incredibly diverse experiences that she´s had.

As always, the first line of a book is incredibly important to me, and Tori´s is pretty great: "In the end, I know I rowed across the Atlantic to find my heart, but in the beginning, I wasn´t aware that it was missing." And I was taken by the fact that it was Muhammad Ali who, knowing her well, encouraged her to try a second time, by saying to her that she didn´t want to be the first woman who "almost rowed across the Atlantic."