The premise is simple: a series of short vignettes about interesting encounters while out on walks with the dog. The dog is Lilith and she is the driving force of these small fables written by her human, Susan M. Schultz. Lilith Walks is a three-year journey through a suburban neighborhood on O’ahu, Hawaii through the COVID era, small, curious stories in a strange and conflicted world.
While Lilith Walks is not labeled as to genre, fiction or nonfiction, let’s call Susan the narrator, and Schultz the author, the chronological journal entries flash creative nonfiction, and the color photos documentary in nature. Lilith greets us at the start of the book in a color photograph. She is on a path at the edge of a field, large ears high, short legs low, eyes keen on something in the foreground and paw tucked ready for action. This quality of fearless attention is the theme and thesis we encounter in the pieces throughout.
Susan is a white college professor who lives in a town house with her native Hawaiian husband, and each day aims to walk Lilith up to a cemetery which has a popular walking path. Neighbors, acquaintances, strangers appear and disappear, along with the many dogs who are friends or frenemies of Lilith, a small to midsize mutt who is highly intelligent and opinionated, much like her human.
The first vignette “Divorce Emissary” begins with, of course, poop. While Susan is scooping, a stranger in a blue van asks her to deliver an envelope to a neighbor at the end of the courtyard, for which the driver will give her $10. Susan arrives at the townhouse with the envelope of divorce papers and tells the man who lives there, “Don’t ask me how I got involved in this.”
In “Lilith Goes to School” dated 1/30/2020, Susan brings Lilith to the classes she is teaching at the university, and for a walk around campus. The dog rebuffs the many people wishing to pet her. The narrator muses:
I wonder at that human intensity toward her. The reaching out to touch an animal. The disappointment when she turned away. A sense of loneliness, of need for contact. Of need for a pure expression of love.
We are aware that the world is about to change, and the foreshadowing of loneliness and the pause of time in classrooms makes the visit more precious. Schultz captures how we all found ourselves in a different society, but in familiar surroundings, disoriented.
The prose moves with its own faithful intensity and focus on interactions with people and their dogs which often and quickly become political, a surprising and difficult aspect of leaving the house during COVID quarantine, during the Trump presidency. The narrator’s mandatory walks with Lilith push her out into that world, the microcosm of her neighborhood. Schutz the author reveals how anxious people are: about Trump, the rudderlessness they feel, the unpredictability. In “Lilith and the Rice Rocketeer” Susan and Lilith encounter a neighbor who holds similar beliefs, “the ginger haired haole guy with the rice rocket… He walked toward his front door loudly proclaiming he didn’t know why anyone would want someone who talks like that as president.”
Other encounters find her face to face with people she has known in passing and is now confronted with their dissimilar politics. On 1/7/21, the day after the capitol riots, Susan observes a neighbor pushing her toddler in a stroller. Both are wearing Trump 2020 T-shirts.
Schultz is less interested in describing flora, fauna, weather, and other natural wonders of Hawaii, than the people and dogs and their words, feelings, attitude. There is a sense of equanimity, of giving equal attention to all no matter what their circumstances or opinions, even as Susan is anything but passive. The journal entries are immediate, dialogue often paraphrased, clipped, and genuine. We can feel the urgency of Schultz’s documentation, perhaps quickly scrawled the moment she arrived at home to pen and paper.
In a piece dated at the end of May 2020, the book takes another turn, and that is the document of the writer making sense of the project that is becoming the book Lilith Walks. The piece entitled “The Man in ‘Ahuimanu Park” ends with a series of study questions, the kind English teachers like herself work with all the time when contextualizing a piece of writing:
Did the author know she was going to write about this while it was happening?
Would it matter to you if she did? In what ways?
Susan acknowledges her privilege and her passion, and is fearless to point out falsehoods and half truths when she hears them. This offering of witness, and of participation, when so many of us were isolated, or could not process what we were experiencing, is a great gift. I had to root her on when she screamed at a pickup truck flying a Trump flag on 11/10/2020, the day after Biden was elected president. “HE LOST! HE LOST!” (caps hers).
Schultz writes economically, preserving the spontaneous moment of each walk while condensing time by skipping days or weeks and alluding to past encounters, and just simple delightful details:
For many years our townhouse block in Kane’ohe had three Gary’s in a row, all of them Yankees fans.
The book culminates in an entry where Susan is invited to read her work in public when some of the earlier pieces in this book were published in the magazine Bamboo Ridge, a reminder of the world opening up again.
Schultz is the author of Dementia Blog (Singing Horse Press, 2008) about her mother’s illness, which takes much the same form as this book, but is categorized as experimental poetry. She is a critic and scholar whose more experimental works subvert political language with the Spoonbill Generator, an oulipo technique that invites the random to point out the absurd.
Schultz’s uncaptioned color photos feature Lilith: inspecting a statue of Buddha, being pet by a construction worker. These wordless vignettes are a part of the book’s storytelling. It is a credit to BlazeVOX (“publisher of weird little books”) and its founder Geoffrey Gatza for offering this author’s unusual vision without compromise.
In that same spirit of generosity, Schultz includes a poem by one of her students after Lilith’s classroom visit, Richmond Luzar’s “A poem of Lilith’s journey.” One stanza reads:
Stop, focus
focus, focus
to which Susan responds, “Wonderful!”
Lilith Walks, by Susan M. Schultz. Buffalo, New York: BlazeVOX Books, October 2022. 104 pages. $22.00, paper.
Karin Falcone Krieger’s recent reviews, stories and poems are in The Decadent Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Lit Pub, Santa Fe Writers’ Project, The Literary Review, Tofu Ink Arts Press, Viewless Wings Podcast, and in the anthology, A physical book which compiles conceptual books (Partial Press, 2022). She taught writing as an adjunct instructor for 20 years, and was an adjunct union representative. She earned an MFA at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, and published the zine artICHOKE from 1989-2008. She occasionally types poems made to order in public space. When not writing, she is probably organic gardening or cooking. Links to these and other projects can be seen at karinfalconekrieger.com.
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