Fiction
NonFiction
Poetry
MEB
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 You, Me, and the Insects
by Barbara
Henning
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Our narrator, Gina, is a widow with two grown children. An artist with
a profound interest
in yoga as a life-changing philosophy, she travels annually to Mysore
to study with different
gurus. This year, she hopes she has found the one who will fulfill her
expectations.
Kris Lawson, Rain Taxi
Barbara
Henning’s astonishing new
semi-autobiographical
novel, You, Me and the Insects,
is set in Detroit’s Cass Corridor, New York and
finally in Mysore, India, some 20-odd years
later. While in India, Henning’s
narrator, Gina grows spiritually, developing a profound relationship
with her
guru while discussing yogic traditions manifested in India and the
United
States, as well
as the history of Hindu mythology and sacred Vedic texts. But
one of the few clear philosophical
directives he gives her—“It is your duty to
be joyful”—illuminates the foundation of their work together,
and informs Henning’s
project as a whole: Discipline is an undeniable component in a
spiritual quest,
but creative force is equally vital. Enlightenment is not for the
passive. In You, Me, and the Insects,
Henning has written a testament to living and
devotion. Lynn Crawford, Metro Times, Detroit, July 6-12, 2005
You, Me, and the Insects
is a heartening,
bittersweet story of a spiritual struggle and
transformation, told in parallel universes of mother,
writer, wife in
secular USA and dedicated
struggling western yogini in luminously detailed
India. The
writing is marvelously rich, layered,
the narrative is compelling. The
phenomenal world is the source of terrific insight, delight and
surprise. This
is not a pretentious New Age memoir but an ageless picaresque and
imaginative
voyage. A major accomplishment for this
extremely salient, charged writer. Anne
Waldman
This
is a miracle of a book. Barbara Henning has taken
seemingly unpromising materials–the
demanding study of yoga in southern India;
the daily incidents of life there; the recollection of
starting a family with a
husband now dead–and transformed them into a narrative that is
gripping,
entertaining, and intensely moving. It is a triumph of
imagination restoring
irresistible vivacity to the
perishable treasures of memory. Harry
Mathews
To
understand the future one has to investigate what
comprises the ascent or gathering of spirit
above all things. A spirit that
shoots itself into the future on the sonic blasts of anger and hatred
will
materialize, for instance, in alarums of personal vendetta only;
personal
vendetta enlarged
can only result in a clash of egos. So it is that out of
the
personal particular, Henning has constructed
a series of prose narratives in You,
Me, and the Insects that confronts the questions Where
do we
come from,
Where are we now, and Where do we go from here. I say
narratives in the
plural
because it is not through one conception of the present
that we receive
news of the past. It is
through a repeated investigation of the past (in this
case a personal past) that allows for the arc
of spirit that accumulates toward
the end of You, Me, and the Insects.
Through a repeated approach
to life
in India, Gina, the artist at the center of Henning’s novel, comes to
understand the small
activities of day-to-day survival in cosmic tableau. What
shows through here, I think, more than
anything is the seeming perennial
American approach to writing as a search for influence in world
literature.
It’s still the same, this attending to size and scale as an approach to
what a
literary text
is supposed to be transmitting. What Henning Transmits in You,
Me, and the Insects is a constant,
eternal figure within the act of writing
itself that does not move higgledy piggledy independent from
self-reflection.
This is a novel of what modern convenience can be distilled to mean for
our
future.
KGB’s book party introduction
Barbara
Henning
Barbara
Henning was born in Detroit, Michigan. She has lived in
New York City since 1984 and is the
author
of three collections of poetry, Smoking in the Twilight
Bar (United Artists, 1988) Love Makes Thinking
Dark
(United Artists, 1995), Detective Sentences (Spuyten Duyvil,
2001), a novel Black Lace (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001),
a
novel You, Me, and the Insects (Spuyten Duyvil,
2005); three artist book collaborations,
Words
and
Pictures
(with Sally Young), The Passion of Signs (with Georgia
Marsh, Leave Books), and How to Read
and Write
in
the Dark (with Miranda Maher); and two pamphlets, Me and
My Dog from Poetry New
York, In Between from Spectacular
Diseases
(England); and a series of photopoem
booklets, Found in the Park, Up North, Aerial View,
Teacher Training,
Thakita
Thaka, and My Autobiography. A teacher for many
years
at Long Island University, she now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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