The magic of Amy Leach’s world

Essayist Amy Leach grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist home and church, and her third book is dedicated to unpacking that personal history in the same winsome style with which she unpacks the habits of peas and platypuses in Things That Are and with the same ad hoc, devil-may-care attitude that marks The Everybody Ensemble.

Leach playfully fills The Salt of the Universe with contrasts between the apocalyptic, fundamentalist worldviews of her childhood and the teeming abundance of life that she found later. “While the apocalypse is sexy short-term, long-term it’s a slog,” she writes. She contrasts William Miller, who spent his life waiting for the end of the world, with composer Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn “was not one of those piners for the end: he had a concerto in his head. My theory is that the apocalypse appeals primarily to people who have no concerto in their heads.”

She contrasts Seventh-day Adventist prophet and persnickety dictator of everyday life Ellen G. White with wild woman of the word Emily Dickinson. Dickinson is always trying to set herself free, while White is always locking people up in little rule cages. But Leach also notes that she came to Dickinson through the strictures of White’s worldview. She was teaching literature at an Adventist college and was prevented from teaching fiction, so she started teaching poetry, and that led her to a passion for Dickinson.