Entries from October 2009
October 26, 2009
a practice
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 [...]
October 24, 2009
eucalyptus
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 [...]
October 21, 2009
12 keys to stronger writing from Annie Dillard via Alexander Chee
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.”
Over the weekend I kept thinking about that essay. Then on Sunday I saw that [...]
October 18, 2009
to be read
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 [...]
October 15, 2009
poemcrazy
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 [...]
October 9, 2009
wildlives
In Wildlives, Quebecois author Monique Proulx creates a magical world out of the stuff of our world. Memory, silence, flowers, summertime, the lake–everything is alive.
“The lake rose and fell and murmured beneath his paddle like a primitive animal mass, then fell silently back into its mineral existence.”
What is happening in the novel is so magical [...]
October 6, 2009
unfamiliar
For today, I had planned to write a review of the book I finished yesterday, but as I sat down to write, I realized that the piece of fiction I started on Saturday and continued with on Sunday and Monday is the first altogether new piece of fiction I’ve started in over two years.
In the [...]
October 1, 2009
A Day in the Life of Adam Braver
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 Adam Braver:
I never thought of myself as an early riser. I always [...]
