Catching Days
is a blog about writing, reading, and life--how they meld, clash, and astonish. It's a net for catching days.My fiction on the web…
"The Empty Armchair" in Contrary Magazine
"The Splitting Sound" in Clapboard House
"Watching" in Six Sentences
"Frosting" in Contrary Magazine
"Into the Woods" in Storyglossia
My essays on the web…
My reviews on the web…
Kim Wright's Love in Mid Air in Contrary Magazine
Francesca Kay's An Equal Stillness in Contrary Magazine
Mari Strachan's The Earth Hums in B Flat in Contrary Magazine
Rachel Cusk: The Slow Construction of a Writing Life in Blogcritics
Elizabeth Diamond's An Accidental Light in Contrary MagazineCatching Days is one of Powell’s Books “Lit Blogs We Love” !
Favorite Posts
- 12 keys to stronger writing from Annie Dillard via Alexander Chee
- a bent cover
- a gathering place
- are we losing our senses
- feeding the buzzards
- full circle
- life is meals
- like a wick
- row houses
- russian dolls
- sixty potential first sentences
- taking a story apart
- that sinking feeling
- the days cottages
- the street ran on
- the writer's notebook
- word journey
- wordable awareness
Read with me:
A Doctor's Visit: Short Stories by Anton Chekhov
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Blog Stats
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I’m @catchingdays on twitter…
- I can't throw this NYTM cover away: Laura Linney: To be a talented and daring actress on the rise--at 46 http://nyti.ms/dp74vD #inspiration 1 day ago
- PRT @randysusanmeyer Interview w/ @robin_black by @annaleighclark captures plight of how older women are portrayed. http://bit.ly/b5m9jG 1 day ago
- RTs @robin_black Yayy! @GirlsSentAway @Urrealism: now that Franzen's written the 2 best novels ever n history, the pressure's off. PARTYYY! 1 day ago
- 67 degrees in Columbus GA this am--Happy Fall! #september1 1 day ago
- I always appreciate it, Darrelyn! RT @ficwriter RT @catchingdays Eudora Welty's potato salad: wp.me/pjPSw-1C0 #readandeat #recipes #laborday 2 days ago
Monthly Archives: November 2008
a mercy
I just finished Toni Morrison‘s new novel, A Mercy. Which was amazing. Yet I now regret that, while I was reading it, I spent so much time trying to figure out the story. I believe that if I had just let myself succumb to … Continue reading
having eaten
Jane Hirshfield writes: Having eaten the pears. Having eaten the black figs, the white figs. Eaten the apples. Table be strewn. Table be strewn with stems, table with peelings of grapefruit and pleasure. Table be strewn with … Continue reading
concatenate
In Remembering the Bone House, Nancy Mairs writes, “Here I develop that ability to concatenate events which characterizes human consciousness and makes ‘daily life’ possible.” I had to look it up. To concatenate is to link together, as in a … Continue reading
the yellow house
Remembering the Bone House is one of my all-time favorite books. Nancy Mairs wrote this memoir in 1989. It was out of print for a while, but then Beacon Press did a new printing in 1995, for which the author wrote … Continue reading
Posted in Nancy Mairs, favorite books, illness, memoir, memory, reviews
Tagged Remembering the Bone House
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rough red brick
The Gathering, by Irish writer Anne Enright, won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. I read it in April. In this novel, the narrator describes her family of origin in terms of the labels we acquire, as families and as individuals in a family. “The … Continue reading
Posted in Anne Enright, awards and prizes, craft of writing, family, marriage, memory, reviews, truth
Tagged The Gathering
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folded
If I weren’t reading all of Rachel Cusk‘s books to look at how her writing develops over time, I would not have finished her sixth book, In the Fold, published in 2005. As one reviewer wrote, “too little happened to too many people.” Or … Continue reading
Posted in Rachel Cusk, awards and prizes, journeys, recurring images, reviews, shapes
Tagged Arlington Park, In the Fold
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wonder
“I wonder what it would be like,” she said to me on one of those days that make you feel that you have chosen the right profession, “if I could once and for all get my mother out of my … Continue reading
companion
Just as Home, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award in Fiction, has been called a companion to Gilead, this post is a companion to yesterday’s. Prompted by comments, I wanted to add that if you enjoyed Housekeeping, Marilynne … Continue reading
Posted in Marilynne Robinson, accumulation, awards and prizes
Tagged Gilead, Home, Housekeeping
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home
For anyone who enjoyed Gilead, Marilynne Robinson‘s second novel, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, you will love her new novel, Home. For she has just crossed town, so to speak, and turned around to tell us the story … Continue reading
Posted in Marilynne Robinson, awards and prizes, novels, perspective, reviews, shapes, words
Tagged Gilead, Home
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who would you be
“That’s not what she means,” I said. “She means, like, we are what’s happened to us. So if you take away what’s happened to us, then, you know…Well, who would you be?” “I’d be someone different.” “Exactly.” Dialogue from Nick … Continue reading
Posted in dialogue, first sentences, humor, marriage, movies, truth
Tagged A Long Way Down, How to Be Good
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“It’s hard to tell somebody what you mean to say. And that’s an idea that I’m obsessed with. It’s why I write. It’s why everybody writes.”
--Jonathan Safran Foer