Monthly Archives: December 2008

something more

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img_11171My favorite passage in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway:

“Do you remember the lake? she said, in an abrupt voice, under pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said “lake.” For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks between her parents and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, “This is what I have made of it!  This!” And what had she made of it?  What, indeed?  sitting there sewing this morning with Peter.”

This grappling with the fact that we are now the same person we were when we were a child reminds me of the passage that so struck me in Mary Gordon‘s The Rest of Life.  With one important difference.  Here, the narrator, Mrs. Dalloway, appears to be judging her life and finding it coming up short. This was in 1925.

Almost a hundred years later, so does Clara in Dani Shapiro‘s 2007 Black & White:

“…invariably Clara walked away from them feeling that there was a secret club of motherhood, complete with a password no one had ever given her.  Why did this all seem so satisfying to them–the cupcake baking, the constant scheduling, the endless games of Candy Land?  And what was wrong with Clara, what psychic disease caused her constant yearning for something more?”

into the woods

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My story, “Into the Woods,” appears in Storyglossia’s Issue 32, December 2008.img_0994 

Here’s how it starts:  

Georgia was putting Tyler’s baseball schedule into her computer when she heard the racing of a car’s engine, followed by the squeal of tires trying to adhere to pavement, and then the desperate sound of tires screeching to stop.  Finally a silence she filled with— 

maybe it was nothing. 

 

a good story

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img_1095How do you tell a story? 

First sentence:  “The man arrived after morning prayers.” 

The first paragraph goes on to paint the scene of that morning.  “The man waited, and the boys watched…”

The second paragraph drops back to explain:  “Men often came for children.”  There were some more likely to be chosen.  There were others more likely to be passed over.  “Ren was one of them.”

The third paragraph continues:  “He had no memory of a beginning…”

If you want to read a good story, The Good Thief, by Hannah Tinti, is the book for you.  It is a solid, old-fashioned story–as in, something happens and then something else and then something else.  On Monday night, it won the 2008 John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize. 

In a New York Times review, The Good Thief was described as “an American Dickensian tale with touches of Harry Potterish whimsy, along with a macabre streak of spooky New England history.”

I couldn’t put it down.

december 1

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Sunny and cold.img_1092

The long, December shadows

of  bare trees

run far away from the woods.


So begins Ted Kooser’s short poem, “December 1.”

In the fall of 1998, as he was recovering from cancer, Ted Kooser, still six years away from being the thirteenth Poet Laureate of the United States, began taking walks.  Because he was supposed to stay out of the sun, he walked in the early morning darkness.  At that point in his illness, he hadn’t been writing for some time; but one morning in early November, after his walk, he found himself writing again.  And then every day.  He started pasting his morning poems on postcards and mailing them to his friend Jim Harrison.  Winter Morning Walks is a collection of one hundred of these poems.

Some of you may have noticed a slight change in the photograph header for the blog.  As a nod to the winter months, the shorter days, and the changing light, I thought we would look at the world in black and white for a while.  Maybe we’ll see something we hadn’t noticed in all the brightness of color.