The Remembering: Reflections on Love, Art, Faith, Heroes, Grief and Baseball was meant to be an innocent collection of essays that kept amassing in Jason Warburg’s archives since the 1990s – some published, most of them not. Warburg returned to them “in earnest,” he says, when humanity returned to sourdough in earnest – during the 2020 summer of lockdown. The fact that he had just lost his job of more than a decade, as communication director for Middlebury Institute of International Studies, had something to do with it, too.
Warburg has been around on the Monterey Peninsula since 2009 when he moved from the Bay Area. His parents, writer Sandol Stoddard and architect Felix Warburg, met in the ’50s on the East Coast and relocated West. They both died within the last couple of years, and those events influenced the book tremendously. Warburg realized the essays, while episodic, create a sort of memoir.
“It changed on me,” he says of the project, but that didn’t bother him. He is already an author of three other books: another essay collection (My Heart Sings the Harmony, nonfiction about music) and two books of fiction (Believe in Me and Never Break the Chain). He’s comfortable in both modes. “Both are fun,” he says. “With fiction, the fun is you get to create an entire world. And the problem is… you get to create an entire world.”
Warburg grew up observing his mother writing. “She was passionate about it,” he says. “She would always say that us, the four boys, were her life’s work, but it was normal that she would shut herself away and write with a singular focus.”
The Remembering is organized chronologically. The pieces from the ’90s don’t shy away from politics. Moving forward, flashy subjects gradually take second place, yielding to memories. The newest essays were written in 2020 and their pain and intimacy feels fresh.
“Writing about politics is disheartening at times,” Warburg says when asked about this change of tone through the book. “Everyone is just shouting at each other. It’s like we are sitting in a box without a way out.”
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