Entries from December 2009
December 27, 2009
a new book bag
As some of you know, French was my first passion. The summers after seventh, eighth, and ninth grades I spent seven to nine weeks in Ferrisburg, Vermont at Ecole Champlain, a French camp on Lake Champlain. I just loved it.
While I was there, I had the opportunity to visit Middlebury College. I decided that’s where [...]
December 24, 2009
Christmas magic
You can read Dylan Thomas’ story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” online. You can also listen to the author read a substantial excerpt from the 1952 recording. In addition, you can hear the interesting story of how this recording came to be in this NPR broadcast.
Thomas grounds the story of this long-ago Christmas in [...]
December 22, 2009
send in the elves
My desk this morning, instead of being covered with books and manuscript pages, is covered with Christmas lists. I want to write, but it’s hard to draw my mind away from the unanswered questions and undone errands on my list–with the clock ticking.
I wondered how other writers managed to focus at this time of [...]
December 20, 2009
it is all just shopping
Wanted to share this quote with you from Anne Enright’s The Gathering:
“I love this undertaker. He has that thing that young people got, sometime after I grew up. He does not pretend. He does not judge. He talks about the caskets in a ‘whatever’ sort of way, like it is all just shopping–the real questions [...]
December 17, 2009
the ordinary day
My husband just forwarded me an email, sent to him by a law school and golfing buddy, with a YouTube video of Katrina Kenison, the long-time editor of the Best American Short Story series, reading a seven-minute excerpt from her new memoir.
As an antidote to these list-oriented days, I am passing on The Gift of [...]
December 14, 2009
the signal
In Ron Carlson’s new novel, The Signal, a book that includes both clotheslines and abandoned places, each word counts, as each word should but often doesn’t in novels. The Signal packs a lot into its 184 pages: six days in the life of its main character Mack.
Its cover looks, as one of my children said, [...]
December 11, 2009
what have i done with my life
Behind me climbs a tower of papers, each one containing a thought or a quote or an article that I want to write about here. A few minutes ago, I started shuffling through the stack. About midway down, I stopped on a piece of graph paper on which I had scrawled these thoughts from the [...]
December 8, 2009
books to trees
Writer Anna Clark is doing a series on her blog, Isak, suggesting that we all choose books as gifts for the holidays. Each almost-daily post in the series suggests not only the title of a book, but also who that book would be perfect for, what edition to buy, and where to buy it.
There is [...]
December 1, 2009
A Day in the Life of Elizabeth Benedict
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 Elizabeth Benedict:
I set the alarm for nine o’clock, but can’t sleep past [...]
