Monthly Archives: February 2010

hidden from view

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Devotion, the new memoir by Dani Shapiro, is divided into 102 sections. Number 54 is one of my favorites. In it, Dani writes about two subjects that have intrigued me for some time.

The first one not surprisingly has to do with memory. She writes:

“Why do we remember the particular things we do? …why random, ordinary moments?”

So many moments from my past, I feel as if I can actually see: sitting in French class in third grade with my French name (which I can’t remember) written on a piece of construction paper and folded tent-style on my desk, sneaking out of a window at the Latin Convention, what I wore to the Cat Stevens concert in ninth grade.

And then there are all those forgotten moments. Someone recently mentioned a Rita Coolidge/Kris Kristofferson concert I apparently attended.

The second subject is related to the first yet strikes off in its own direction. It has to do with what Mary Gordon calls “the wick,” what Tim O’Brien describes as “a blade tracing loops on ice,” and what Virginia Woolf writes about in this passage from Mrs. Dalloway. It’s the russian doll aspect of life–that I am in fact now, still, the little girl that sat in that desk with the French name. It’s the through line Dani writes about here:

“I understood feeling like a completely different person…and when I thought back to my teenage self, my twenty-something self, I had a hard time understanding how I had gotten from there to here…Was there–surely there must be–a through line connecting the disparate parts of ourselves?…I knew that each part of me…is linked one to the next, like a fragile chain of paper dolls….These layers of ourselves are always there, waiting for the right moment to emerge…A jumble, perhaps, but nothing is ever missing. Just hidden from view.”

In this section Dani wonders what rises to the surface and why. I wonder about that too. This idea of the surface fascinates me. One of the reasons I love writing is that it pushes all these things to the surface.

not that I’m counting

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One of my friends refers to me as “the scribe” because I like to write stuff down. And one of the things I write down is how many books I read a year. As my tower of unread books grows taller and spawns little towers, it’s a way to prove to myself that I am reading. It’s a way to measure progress.

Every year I tally up. My number was down for 2009–42. But it did include Infinite Jest.

Not that numbers are important. In fact, at the moment, I’m trying to slow my reading, pay more attention, see how they’re doing it.

In any event, here are my numbers for recent years:

2008: 51

2007: 50

2006: 48 (+ lots of random stories)

2005: 74

2004: 50

Two questions occur to me from looking at these numbers, both involving the word cut. One, if I can only read 40-50 books a year, does the book I’m holding in my hands make the cut? Two, what else can I cut out to make more time for reading?

Do you know how many books you read a year?

not firmly based

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24

I haven’t had a morning in a while where I’ve allowed myself to drift from one thing to the next without accountability. When I was practicing law, I used to have to account for every six minutes.

This morning I was trying to locate a Virginia Woolf quote from A Writer’s Diary, and I got lost in the pages.

Saturday, November 2, 1929–almost a hundred years ago:

But I am more concerned with my Waves. I’ve just typed out my morning’s work; and can’t feel altogether sure. There is something there (as I felt about Mrs. Dalloway) but I can’t get at it, squarely; nothing like the speed and certainty of the Lighthouse: Orlando mere child’s play. Is there some falsity of method, somewhere? Something tricky?–so that the interesting things aren’t firmly based?

Then on Boxing Day (December 26):

All is rather rapt, simple, quick, effective–except for my blundering on at The Waves. I write two pages of arrant nonsense, after straining; I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; til my writing book is like a lunatic’s dream. Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading; and pencil them into some sense. Still I am not satisfied. I think there is something lacking…I press to my centre…And there is something there.

There’s so much more on the ups and downs of her writing days. Do any of you step outside the writing to record how it’s going?

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from the jersey shore

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It’s true. I’m somewhere else. When I was home on Thursday for about fifteen hours, my husband said,”Glad you could stop by.”

I didn’t plan to go on two trips in one week. It’s just that one was already planned when the opportunity for a weekend workshop with Robin Black arose.

So I’m in Avalon, New Jersey, with Robin and five others. We each submitted a 25-page manuscript, and we’ve all read them. But instead of taking an hour for each story as is the norm, last night Robin discussed beginnings, using examples from our stories. This morning, point of view. Later tonight, endings.

It’s a powerful way to study the craft of writing–what third person might do for this story or the present tense for that one. Instead of  taking a story as a whole, breaking it down into its components.

I’m behind in answering comments, but I wanted to let you know where I was. Looking forward to catching up with all of you next week.

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from santa fe

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Silver Moon is the name of the 19-foot Airstream Bambi trailer where I’m staying at a writing/spa retreat in the hills above Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ten Thousand Waves is the name of this Japanese-style spa where they leave a chocolate fortune-telling Buddha on your bed, and the refrigerator is stocked with homemade granola, filtered water, coffee beans, and rice milk.

Complimentary wi-fi and no cell phone service. Writing, reading, hiking, soaking, massaging. Everything I need in the tiniest, coziest amount of space:

bed

desk

food

lines connect in thin ways

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On October 28, 2002, a rainy night in Georgia, I drove from Columbus to Atlanta to hear the poet Lucille Clifton read at Georgia Tech. If I remember correctly, she opened by reciting the short poem, “Why Some People be Mad at Me Sometimes.”

Lucille Clifton died on Saturday. She was only the second woman, and the first African American, to be poet laureate of Maryland.

She told the audience that rainy night that she wanted to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted. Toward the end of the reading, she recited “Hommage to My Hips,” and then said, “In some cultures I am what’s happening.”

Our eyes met when she spoke to me and signed my book, A Good Woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980. One of my favorite lines in this book, for its power:

Things don’t fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept.

Here’s the end of a poem of hers I love about a fox:

Child, i tell you now it was not
the animal blood i was hiding from,
it was the poet in her, the poet and
the terrible stories she could tell.
from “Telling Our Stories“

Thelma Lucille Sayles, who became Lucille Clifton, was born in 1936 and lived 73 years.

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devotion

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“Yogis use a beautiful Sanskrit word samskara, to describe the knots of energy that are locked in the hips, the heart, the jaw, the lungs. Each knot tells a story–a narrative rich with emotional detail. Release a samskara and you release the story. Release your stories, and suddenly there is more room to breathe, to feel, to experience the world.”

Devotion, Dani Shapiro’s new memoir, is a beautiful book both inside and out. Her son Jacob is “the beating heart” of this journey, yet there is something about this book that felt necessary to me, that I’m guessing will feel necessary to each of us.

“To pause. To be still–not leaning forward, not falling back. Steady in the present–not even waiting. Just being.”

And with the stillness, she writes, “I was starting to see what was there.“

In the best book trailer I’ve seen, Dani talks about Devotion:

Dani has described the form of this book as “puzzle-like.” In Devotion, she quotes Virginia Woolf, “Arrange the pieces as they come,” a quote I also have on my desk. “Is there any other way to live than arranging the pieces as they come?” Dani writes. Some of those pieces: her search for meaning, her son’s illness, their post 9/11 move from New York City to Connecticut, her relationship with her mother and her ties to her father.

Yesterday I asked Dani why 102 pieces: “The book ended on 102 simply because that’s where the story ended–and I did like the number, and the roundness, the symmetry, the evenness of it–but really the arc of the story had come to an end.” The story of Devotion may be complete, but on her new website, Dani recently began a Devotion blog, where she continues beyond the book, a concrete manifestation that the journey is never over.

As I read Devotion, it was as Mary Oliver wrote in her poem, “I Want to Write Something So Simply“:

…by the end
you will think–
no, you will realize–
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your own heart
had been saying.

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