Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day

Mad Creek Books, The Ohio State University Press, Oct. 2021

About

This is an attempt to write a book-length essay about a single day, from start to finish. Inside the container of the day in which I go to court for a civil disobedience action are flashbacks to the action itself (more on that below). I've wanted to try this since I read Nicholson Baker's novel The Mezzanine, which was a snapshot of quotidian moments. Other novels from James Joyce to Virginia Woolf also attempt this mind-watching, which was a feature of modernist interest in consciousness. There are a few examples in nonfiction, like Karl Ove Knaussgard's six-volume My Struggle, but none that I could find that were specifically within a day. I was also very much inspired to do this by Ander Monson and the crew at Essay Daily, which did two very very cool huge projects, What Happened, where they invited people to all write essays about the same day in June 2018 and then again in December 2019. It was so fun! You can read a bunch of the selections on their website.

Advance Praise

“What is unique about Supremely Tiny Acts is the mental freedom Sonya Huber exhibits. Though organized around a peaceful protest, a few hours of arrest, and the ensuing court date, the pages skitter everywhere, from the naïve activism in college to current events, meantime conflating the personal with the historical and political. It is a day in the life of a teacher/wife/student/daughter/researcher/mother/activist which invites the reader to chase Huber’s mind from subject to digression: mental and physical health issues, a socialist German ancestry, then move on to writing, teaching, mothering, and segue into candid ruminations on white privilege, only to return in the end to the quotidian act of being a mother driving her son to the DMV office for his driver’s license. Rather than obeying the literary perspective laws, it uses an all-over style covering every patch of the composition quilt with equal emphasis. Huber embodies Montaigne’s proverbial ‘runaway horse mind’ as it adopts an unwavering self-split stance as both free thinker and keen observer, acknowledging unapologetically her own unruly yet intriguing mental patterns. Reading Huber’s cerebral meanderings, I felt like a piece of wood drifting across the ocean, surrendered to the waves of sentences that kept bumping me from one idea to another and made me not want to be washed ashore.”

Adriana Páramo, author of Looking for Esperanza and many other books

"It’s hard not to be impressed with the ambition of Sonya Huber’s Supremely Tiny Acts, in which she sets a whole memoir in one day. After all, Huber knows a day can be made to encapsulate almost everything: the minor (the simple joy of half and half, inexplicable Shopbop ads, shoplifting from Urban Outfitters) and the major (looming climate catastrophe, dead friends and family, parenthood, sexual violence, and what we owe to one another—and to ourselves). But still it’s a thrill when Huber pulls it off: we rush with her through her thinking and doing and being on November 19, 2019, and in fact we get to be her in some small part, which is what you get by reading a book, and that’s one more reason we should all be reading more books, and it’s a particularly excellent reason to read a good book that stops time for a day like this one does." --

Ander Monson, author of I Will Take the Answer and many other books

Reviews & Press

"Huber’s thoughts are unique and complicated. And with their complication she’s written a book that touches on nearly all the world’s worries and problems, from the internal to the external, the past to the present to our planet-on-fire future....[It is] a book about what it looks like to try. It’s a book that knows exactly how hard it is to try, and how relentlessly, overwhelmingly complicated things get when you do. But we have to anyway because the world is waiting on us—is counting on us—to try." Anna Sims, The Linden Review, May 2022.

"Supremely Tiny Acts: A New, Inventive Book from OSU Alumna," College of Arts & Sciences, The Ohio State University, Nov. 2, 2021

"Huber’s skill shines in her capacity to wind these stories into meaningful narratives when they are presented as the incidental thoughts that pass through one’s mind throughout the day. Like those threads of narrative, Huber also includes delightful, engrossing descriptions that appear as observations throughout the day." -- Linda Levitt, Pop Sugar, Nov. 29, 2021

"As I closed the book’s cover, gathering all of Sonya’s work into one hand, I realized that the title, Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day, ended up being a prophecy: the form of a day-long memoir becoming a powerful, supremely tiny act, for Sonya and for the reader. It revealed the power of form to expose the secret waves of trauma, how they trough and crest around the other parts of our lives....The most courageous nonfiction that I’ve read in a long while, allowing the scrappy details of a single day to open into personal surprises." --Emily Dillon, Brevity, Dec. 20, 2021

"Applying modernist techniques of narrative time bending and stream-of-consciousness syntax, she’s a politically-charged, twenty-first century Mrs. Dalloway." --Kelly Kathleen Ferguson, The Cleveland Review of Books, Jan. 13, 2022.

"Virtuosic...Huber couldn’t pull any of this off if she didn’t display 1) the perfect combination of seriousness and humor, 2) a gift for language, and 3) a storytelling sense....Huber’s book works like many of our great contemporary memoirs do, but on a miniature scale. And Huber manages somehow to be a miniaturist with a maximalist’s heart. " --Sebastian Matthews, River Teeth, Jan. 7, 2022

"There are those words again, TINY and ACTS, that make up a life of being very conscious, very concerned....The acts written with strength and clarity will make you want to live within." Kathryn McCord's review-essay on Essay Daily, Jan. 24, 2022.

"Supremely Tiny Acts: A New, Inventive Book from OSU Alumna," College of Arts & Sciences, The Ohio State University, Nov. 2, 2021

"Huber’s skill shines in her capacity to wind these stories into meaningful narratives when they are presented as the incidental thoughts that pass through one’s mind throughout the day. Like those threads of narrative, Huber also includes delightful, engrossing descriptions that appear as observations throughout the day." -- Linda Levitt, Pop Sugar, Nov. 29, 2021

"There are those words again, TINY and ACTS, that make up a life of being very conscious, very concerned....The acts written with strength and clarity will make you want to live within." Kathryn McCord's review-essay on Essay Daily, Jan. 24, 2022.

"What would a small book of wonder look like in the dwindling days of civility? And what would wonder be made from? Sonya Huber’s lyrical and affirming book-length essay answers these questions by demonstrating the flow of principled consciousness. The writer has an autoimmune disability and must martial her strength (something all “Spoonies” know about) even as simultaneously she protests climate devastation, gets arrested, struggles through the brutal judicial machinery of New York City, observes her allies who offer up their voices for survival, and yes, takes care of her students, family, and her own traumatized body. One sees hints of Normal Mailer’s march on the Pentagon, hints of Harriet MacBride, hints also of Zen stalwartness—take the first step and keep going—but ultimately the effect is of a soul among souls and one feels the effort is Thoreau-esque in the best possible ways."--Stephen Kuusisto, Wordgathering, Fall 2022

Interviews

Interview with Amy Fish, Hippocampus Magazine, Dec. 6, 2021

Creative Nonfiction Podcast Interview with Brendan O'Meara, in which we wonder whether I'm the Weird Al of CNF and swear a lot. Brendan generously calls Supremely Tiny Acts "one of the best experiences I had reading a book in 2021." Dec. 2021.

Drunken Odyssey: A Podcast about the Writing Life with John King, Episode 507, in which we talk about activism, reality and tangents from it, and storytelling. Jan. 22, 2022.

Playlist

Here's a Spotify playlist to go along with the book, including some political favorites and a few songs I mention in the book.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4jXaWsDyfYK9f4K7VEPd2Y?utm_source=embed_v2&go=1&play=1&nd=1The Action

The Action

https://youtu.be/q-WL1nTTtCQ

This is a great video about the action. You can see me here in the still image before the video starts.

I'm that little head with the pink glasses peeking out behind the flag and looking completely terrified.

Music for Activist Inspiration

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4jXaWsDyfYK9f4K7VEPd2Y

Climate Crisis

This book centers around a protest organized by a group called Extinction Rebellion started in the UK and with chapters all over the world. For more information on that group, their accomplishments and strategies, click here. You can also support the work of XR with a donation. A portion of my speaking fees and royalties will be donated to XR.

Book Trailer

https://youtu.be/g2F4sn2C4sU

Events

Please feel free to contact me to schedule a free "Day-In Event." More info here