This leaf, propped up like it is here on its stem and all by itself, was waiting for me when I opened the front door yesterday morning. Do you think it thought I wasn’t noticing?
I moved it for a moment over by the pumpkin
…
Then I brought it inside where I showed it to everyone.
Some of you may remember that on my first try with the Kindle, when I was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, it did not go well, and I switched to the physical book itself. My second try, using the Kindle to read Infinite Jest while I was traveling, went great. I wondered if it was because I’d already held the real book in my hands.
I think it was more a matter of my getting used to the Kindle. A couple of weeks ago, right before Sheri Reynolds‘ most recent novel, The Sweet In-Between, came out in paperback, I wanted to read it. Right that second. Aha. Kindle. I was reading it in about three minutes.
And I totally loved it–even reading it on the Kindle–and was not ready for it to end when it did.
Now to write a post on it without having the actual book. You can see the first problem in the upper right-hand corner.
The second problem was no underlining. BUT the Kindle has a feature called clippings, and I was able to easily pull up all the passages I had marked. So here we go…
borrowed a friend's book for this picture
The Sweet In-Between is written in the first person and narrated by 17-year-old Kendra, who goes by Kenny and who is in the middle of an identity crisis. Her sort-of step-brother’s girlfriend, Sneaky, describes her as follows:
“I mean you’re like a boy in all the good ways, and you’re kind of like a girl in all the good ways too.”
She describes herself here: “I feel funny, like I might not be who I always thought…”
Kenny is an endearing character, one, as Linda mentioned in the comments to the previous post, you want to fight for.
“Here’s the thing: There are holes that never go away, holes that never fill back up no matter what.”
If you’d like to read a book where the voice of the narrator comes shining through, this is the book for you. Here are a few examples:
“I love cutting grass. You can see exactly where you’ve been and where you need to go next. You can’t really hurry. You just move steady, one step at a time, and with that lawn mower handle vibrating in your hands, you know you’re alive.”
“It’s dark out, the moon still hanging around, a good time of day, before everybody wakes up and ruins it.”
“Even though I don’t have a camera to practice with, I like the idea of framing a thing for the world, picking a moment out of all the other moments, and click–there it is. (Or there it will be.)”
Nothing will ever replace real live books for me, but I’m happy to have the Kindle as a part of my library.
Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.” Today, please welcome writer Sheri Reynolds:
My cat wakes me up early, predictably, tapping at my nose with her paw. She’s always gentle at first, but if I don’t get up and feed her, she’ll use her claws, so I get up. Downstairs I make the coffee, wrap up in blankets and go out to the porch swing with my laptop. I’m between writing projects at the moment, and nervous because my editor has had my just-finished novel for three weeks, and I haven’t heard back. So I do research for a new idea – I’m studying the cloth-diaper industry and learning about diaper services – and I write for an hour, just brainstorming. Then I join my partner Barbara out on the back deck, where we watch the day lighten, drink more coffee, visit with the birds.
After breakfast, we walk to the bay. We live on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, and every morning, we take our dog down to the beach to run. Today we wear ear-muffs and gloves, even though it’s only October, because the north wind’s blowing. Home again, I get ready for work.
I have an hour-long drive across the bay to Old Dominion University where I teach. Though my classes only meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have to go in today (a Wednesday) because I haven’t finished some committee paperwork and because we have a visiting writer on campus. My drive over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, connecting the Eastern Shore to Virginia Beach, is always daydream time for me. I work on a character in my head, try to see the world the way she does. This character pictures people as they were in the womb. Everyone she meets, she sees as a fetus. I see fetuses all across the bay: the toll-collector, the highway worker. Even the seagulls I imagine curled up and slimy in their eggs.
At school, I fill out forms for curricular changes and send emails to my advisees, reminding them it’s time to choose classes for next spring. The poet Jorn Ake is on campus to give a craft talk about his poetry, and I’m secretly hoping the room will be packed so I can say hi and slip out. I have a headache, and I still haven’t prepped my classes for tomorrow. But only eight students show up, so I stay. In the end, I’m really glad I did. He’s fabulous. He discusses the way different components of his poems come together, the historical, the political, the personal.
By the time I leave campus, it’s after two, and I haven’t had lunch, so I stop at a strip-mall for a slice of pizza. (Okay, two slices.) I sit in a booth with my journal, intending to make some notes about my creative writing class for tomorrow, but instead I start a little poem. I don’t really write poems – but sometimes when I’m excavating memories, they come out shaped like poems. For some reason, I’m writing about my great uncle Gurley, realizing for the first time that his name sounded like “Girly” and wondering what that was like for him. The TV is blasting – apparently there’s a funny movie on because the guy working behind the counter keeps cracking up.
Back home, I collapse in the hammock and reread some scenes from Tennessee Williams’ “Streetcar Named Desire.” I’m teaching it tomorrow in my Southern Lit class. The sun’s out now, warm on my head. The dog and cat have both crashed beneath me in the shade I’m making. I close my eyes and try to send telepathy to my editor, telling her: “Love my book. Love it!” I check to see if she emailed, but she didn’t.
I send her more telepathy while I’m working in the garden. Something has eaten tiny holes in all the kale. There’s lettuce to pick and then wash. I practice a few songs on the guitar while I’m waiting for Barbara to get home from work. Ordinarily I cook on Wednesdays, but tonight we’re meeting friends at the Pub around the corner. It’s a fun night, but by nine we’re home again, in pajamas, wrapped up in comforters and sitting out back in the dark, being dreamy.
AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…
1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?
- Michele Young-Stone’s “A Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors.” (Coming out in April 2010) Her editor sent it to me asking for a blurb.
2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?
- If your writing isn’t happening, just dance or paint or play Wii or watch America’s Funniest Home Videos. It’s okay.
3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?
- I read magazines backwards, preferring to start at the end and work my way to the front.
Books by Sheri Reynolds:
Bitterroot Landing
The Rapture of Canaan
A Gracious Plenty
Firefly Cloak
The Sweet In-Between
I wanted to do a post today. Usually I post much earlier. This is my fourth try.
Each time--writing about a book, about my writing process (ok, obsessed), and even about a single picture I had taken on Tuesday--I was not happy with what I was doing.
I kept wanting to include not one but three pictures. Just a minute ago, I interrupted my last attempt to post so I could accompany my 16-year-old to the door. He was leaving for a late basketball practice
As I shut the door, I saw the last light of day caught in this dogwood tree. And I thought, I give, as I went in search of my camera.
I was planning on doing a post on that need to write but then had the opportunity to write a Guest Writer article on the subject for The View From Here Magazine. It is online today with the print issue coming out November 6th, I believe. Here’s the first paragraph:
For six years, I was a lawyer. I went to law school; I passed the bar exam; I was sworn in, and I paid my licensing dues. Et voila. It fits, doesn’t it?
Far more difficult to know if you’re a writer.
There’s the obvious, “You’re a writer if you write.” But that’s like saying you’re a cook if you cook. When I was in law school, I heard over and over again, “You have to learn to think like a lawyer.” But that doesn’t work here either. What defines a writer is not “thinking.”
I sit at my desk and write on this cloudy fall Saturday, working on this new story. Outside, the leaves are changing. But what keeps drawing my attention is this eucalyptus bush in the left panes of the window. When I first started this blog in September of 2008, the top of that bush, which I planted, was below the window.
I sit at my desk and write. Sometimes it’s easy to see change.
On Friday, I read the essay “Annie Dillard and the Writing Life,” by novelist Alexander Chee who took a class from Annie Dillard in 1989. He writes, “By the time I was done studying with Annie, I wanted to be her.”
On Sunday, when I linked to Moonrat for the “to be read” post, I saw that she had written a post on the essay called, “every writer absolutely must.” I agree. In case you missed the essay, I wanted to let you know about it.
With detail after detail, Chee conjures Dillard during class as she drinks coffee from the thermos cup and eats caramel after caramel, letting the plastic wrappers pile up on the desk. But the heart of the essay comes from Chee’s description of Dillard’s rigorous take-no-prisoners approach to the craft of writing. “Very quickly, she identified what she called ‘bizarre grammatical structures’ inside my writing.” She also identified his overuse of the passive voice and his “museum of cliches.”
Chee shares some of the key points he learned from Dillard:
My favorite line in the essay is in Chee’s voice and about voice:
“You could think that your voice as a writer would just emerge naturally, all on its own, with no help whatsoever, but you’d be wrong. What I saw on the page was that the voice is in fact trapped, nervous, lazy. Even, and in my case, most especially, amnesiac. And that it had to be cut free.”
Read the words from the guy who was there: “Annie Dillard and the Writing Life.” And let me know what you think.
This essay will appear in the anthology, Mentors, Muses, & Monsters, forthcoming October 27 from Free Press.
The books that sit on Lynn Neary’s “shelf of constant reproach” are “the books I know I should have read…but haven’t.” She borrowed this term from Luis Clemons, who chooses which authors to interview for NPR’s Tell Me More, and who refers to the worthy titles that don’t make it as “the shelf of constant reproach.”
Emily, of Evening All Afternoon, would take issue with this view. “…the level of stress and sheepishness about even having a to-be-read stack is a little dismaying to me….should a person feel guilty about the number of books…waiting to be enjoyed? I feel strongly that we shouldn’t….”
Nevertheless I often feel, as piscivorous tweeted yesterday, that “a stack of books is following me about the house.” I have a book shelf full of books I’ve already bought that are waiting To Be Read (see photo). In my head is a list of books I feel I should have already read. Finally, I have books I want to reread. And new books are being published all the time.
Moonrat came up with a list of 100 books that she wanted/needed to read. She labeled it her: Project Fill-in-the-Gaps. Once the book is read, the ink changes from black to red. [list toward the bottom of her sidebar]
How to make sense of all these books? How do I decide what to read next? Infinite Jest had been on my to-be-read shelf for 13 years, but Infinite Summer persuaded me to dust it off and open it up. Recently I began adding how I chose the book I was reading to my Reading List page. I thought this might make me give the selection a little more thought. But other than my monthly writing group selections and review deadlines, it seems to be similar to the way I choose what to write about–at that moment it’s just what gathers enough weight to cause me to reach for it.
And you?
Poemcrazy: freeing your life with words by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge is a book I forgot I had on my shelf–a forgotten book. Every now and then, I will pull a book off the shelf that looks unfamiliar–an old book–and thumb through its pages to see what it has to say to me now and whether I should keep it in my library or send it on a new journey.
Poemcrazy was published in 1996. It’s difficult to believe that in that short amount of time, the pages have yellowed around the edges, giving it the look of a book that was surely published before I was born. But no, 1996.
As I said in the last post, I do not write poems. Still I loved reading this book. It’s divided into 5 parts: following words, listening to ourselves, hi there stars, open the window, and lights and mysteries. Lovely. These five parts are further divided into 60 short sections, many offering writing exercises.
Wooldridge writes that it is often when she is walking that words and poems come to her. Then she gives us this snippet from poet Brenda Hillman:
“We walked through night ’til night was a poem.”
As I mentioned in the last post, Wooldridge often writes or tapes words on tickets. “Like a poem, a ticket is small, often colorful and valuable, allowing entrance to a special place.” She loves E.E.Cummings: “love is more thicker than forgot.”
Wooldridge gives us little bits of Emily Dickinson: “Inside a moment, centuries of June.” And Wallace Stevens: “…there never was a world for her/Except the one she sang and singing, made.” Little facts like: “Donald Hall claims he wrote 150 drafts of his poem ‘Henyard Round.’”
Wooldridge suggests keeping a notebook and a flashlight on the night table. “We have to be quiet and listen for a bell or a knock. And we have to open the door.” Then she gives us the poem “Writing in the Dark” by Denise Levertov.
I am putting this book back on my shelf.
the after photo
Last week, before I went out of town, I was looking for my new book, The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. I looked on my ToBeRead shelf–not there. I looked behind me on this long built-in shelf that theoretically holds the things I’m working on–not there. I glanced around at the various piles of books on the floor.
I knew it wouldn’t be on my regular shelves because I hadn’t read it yet. Then I remembered the shelves to my right–my reference section, so to speak. I had stuck it there.
These four shelves–one for poetry, one for short story collections I refer to as I write, one for books on craft, and one for books on writers writing about writing–were overflowing with papers stuck everywhere, books piled horizontally on the tops of other books. When I had looked for Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor on my computer a while back, I had thought I didn’t have it, but here it was. So I realized that none of these books were on my computerized list of books. New project…
Taking one shelf a day, I wiped off dust, looked through tables of contents, thumbed through my underlinings, discarded the ones I no longer needed (and by discarded I mean put in a pile to donate to the library) entered the title in my computer, and re-shelved in alphabetical order. Well, they had to go back on the shelf some way. And yes it could have been randomly or by color, but, as some of you know, I’m an alphabetical type of person. I need to just admit that and move on.
During the process I discovered Poemcrazy: freeing your life with words by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge. I don’t write poetry, but I love words. In this book, the author writes about how she collects words. And prints them on tickets–admit one. More about this book later.
Do you have books you’ve forgotten about? What books do you refer to when you write?
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