I want you to hold something in yourself as I do this, I'm told, perched atop a red-rocked creek in central Arizona. When I arrived, the water felt cool enough to get a couple cans of beer to a useful drinking temp, but in short time, the icy flow had mellowed to a bath water reminiscent of Mobile Bay. I wanted to exist alongside my recent loneliness, the ongoing mourning of lost friendships, or at least dormant ones.
     Selah Saterstrom's collection of essays, Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics, draws parallels between the practices of divination and reading (and writing), offering its entries as lessons on various divination methods, as if to say to the reader, "Perhaps this may be of some use to you." Saterstrom establishes this in the Opening Notes. "I have come to think of divination as a form of reading-as-being." Indeed, the overlapping realms of writing and divination pervade these essays, from attempts to reconcile loss of a sibling to using other people's stories to "divine us back into our lives."
     There are seven essays contained within: one structured after a Catholic Rosary, containing "multiple narratives" which mimic a rosary's beads; "Writing From the Exclusion Zone," which takes as its mover the inability to visit Chernobyl; "The Tale of Brother and Sister," in which two siblings address each other and commune over their pain; "On Other People's Stories," where Saterstrom collects and narrates her friends' stories; lastly, "On Writing for the Movies" and "On Ideal Suggestions and the Paintings of Matthias Grünewald," which take images as a meditative source for a divinatory practice.  
     Each essay contains notes informing readers of the divinatory form, which Saterstrom calls meditative practices at one point in the book. As a storyteller whose writing drip with levels of mystery—these essays drip, too, I should add—Saterstrom knows these cryptic glimpses can help unfurl (what do flower petals do?) her novels, as if they needed any more replay value. Upon reading these essays and understanding the approach to their composition, one might begin to seek answers to mysteries in her other texts.
     As I read her essays again and again, at times supine and at others right-angled, or acute, always with a cat orbiting my body, I'm reconnected with the mystery of the text. What does this text mean? What does this sentence want to tell me? What space am I in at the end of this paragraph? Is it different than my space by paragraph's middle? What about the beginning? The previous page?
     Saterstrom emphasizes the importance of the "attempt" present in any writing and divination practice. The etymological roots of the word "essay" are well-documented, but Saterstrom's alignment of writing and divination brings the act of attempting a thing into a new space.
     In the essay "Writing for the Movies," Saterstrom provides instructions for a method of divination that uses film to attempt to inhabit an emotional space. In her method, a still from a film is combined with the object of the attempt—"to exist amidst the death of my step-father" / "to recover from a romantic upset." From this spiritual union, a screenplay is generated, the film still used an object through which the attempt may be registered complete.
     In"Screenplay I: A History of Eastern Europe, as Told by Scotland," the film still—the left half some curtains, the right half a portrait of a man with a mustache—precedes a series of text-images—a man in a taxi, a murdered lounge singer, a village idiot, death, sweat, a boy, despair.
     In "The Tale of Brother and Sister," Saterstrom writes a conversation between siblings, brother and sister, communicating to each other their pains, struggles, joys, sadnesses. Each page contains an address:

"Brother, how do we see when our eyes are closed?"
"Sister, when you find another way of being, there is less pain."
"Brother, once we kissed in winter's blue light while visiting mother's stomach."
"Sister, it made me sad it made me sad it made me so Jesus suffering fuck mad, imagine."

     The notes following the essay reveal that it was first conceived about Saterstrom's stillborn son, but through time, revisitation, and consultation, she learned the essay's space was not about her stillborn son, but rather her deceased twin brother, who died in utero. Saterstrom considers her uncertainty toward the essay's sustain, its ability to "hold his voice."
     Voices held, spaces made. These essays demonstrate some tools by which one person attempts to attune herself to a voice, a space, a pain, a joy. It feels impossible to give away too much about these essays in this review. It's not that kind of book. It's a book whose entire purpose is the experience of reading it. And yet I can't help but attempt, in a manner different from Saterstrom, to elucidate some meaning from the constellation of mysteries which unfold in these pages.