Monthly Archives: November 2010

it was a good autumn

Posted on by

5

I dropped the last packet of the six-month semester into the FedEx box yesterday afternoon. After I fill out some end-of-the-semester forms, I will have completed the first year of my two-year program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

To celebrate I went to run in the rain–a new personal best: two miles. Twelve weeks ago, I started running again–starting at one mile and g r a d u a l l y working up to two miles.

The first week in October I started wearing contacts. I’ve gone from taking an hour to get them in to just a couple of minutes.

It was the air, really–the clear brightness of the air that in the evenings now held the first chilliness of autumn, and brought with it that subtle undercurrent of old longings and new chances which autumn often brings.

from Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout

thanksgiving

Posted on by

5

from the archives: november 27, 2008

 

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 pleasure,

what was here to be done having finished.  img_10684

From “Spell to Be Said upon Departure”

The Lives of the Heart

if I didn’t already persuade you

Posted on by

0

Another thing is the dialogue. In the early pages of By Nightfall, Peter is in bed with his wife, and they’re flipping channels on the TV. They stop on Vertigo. I’m going to cut into the middle of the conversation where the line that starts the conversation is repeated a second time by Rebecca:

“We can’t get hooked on this.”
“Why not?”
“I’m too tired.”
“Tomorrow’s just Sunday.”
“You know how it turns out.”
“How what turns out?”
“The movie.”
“Sure I know how it turns out. I also know that Anna Karenina gets run over by a train.”
“Watch it, if you want.”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“I’m too tired. I’ll be cranky tomorrow. You go ahead.”
“You can’t sleep with the TV on.”
“I can try.”
“No. It’s okay.”



By Nightfall is sharp and well-written. A delight.

by nightfall

Posted on by

10

So much to love about Michael Cunningham‘s new novel, By Nightfall, set in the New York art world. One of my favorite things is the way the main character Peter describes his world by reference to literary markers. For example, on the first page, he describes a man on the street like this:

An elderly bearded man in a soiled, full-length down coat, grand in his way (stately, plump Buck Mulligan?)

Later in the novel, he describes a place like this:

Pay no attention to that which encircles New York City: the fences topped with concertina-wire circles guarding factories that may or may not be out of business, the grim brick monoliths of housing projects….The eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg would not be entirely out of place here.

Still later, although less subtle, is this description of a house:

It’s not Gatsby’s house, it’s Daisy Buchanan’s; it’s the source of the green light across the water.


words overflown by stars

Posted on by

2

Words Overflown by Stars, edited by David Jauss, is the craft book from the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program. I started it about this time last year and just finished it a few weeks ago. 432 pages of craft essays–a text book with the feel of a novel–the first half on prose and the second half on poetry. I highly recommend it, and here are some of the highlights:

In “Before We Get Started,” Bret Lott writes about the importance of the little words.

Ellen Lesser’s essay, “The Girl I Was, The Woman I Have Become,” is full of examples of reminiscent narrators, as well as an excellent analysis of “the point in time from which the story gets told.”

I’ve already written a bit about David Jauss‘s essay “From Long Shots to X-Rays” on distance and point of view in fiction. I’ve probably read this essay five times. (It’s also in his craft book, Alone With All That Could Happen.)

“In this essay I will attempt to present a more accurate conception of point of view by closely examining the actual practice of authors and explaining how they use point of view to manipulate the degree of emotional, intellectual, and moral distance between a character and a reader.”

Diane Lefer writes about “Breaking the ‘Rules’ of Story Structure.” Regarding the so-called rule that a main character must undergo change, she writes: “In spite of conflict, confrontation and crisis, people often don’t, can’t, or won’t change.”

In “Notes on Novel Structure,” Douglas Glover breaks the novel into six major structures: point of view, plot, novel thought, subplot, theme, and image patterning. The key to plot is “to develop a consistent resistance, the force pushing against the achievement of the concrete desire.”

Laurie Alberts writes in “Showing AND Telling”:

Herein lies the distinction: We don’t resent a bossy, judgmental narrator who is original in his or her observations and who draws us into the tale through vivid, significant detail. We do resent a summarizing narrator who either over generalizes or takes away the mystery, the act of discovery for us.

If you’ve ever wondered what the difference is between personal essay and memoir, Sue William Silverman answers this question and more in her essay on the subgenres of Creative Nonfiction.

Despite the fact that I’m not a poet, I just love what Mark Doty writes about metaphor in  ”Souls on Ice”:

But I’ve learned to trust that part of my imagination that gropes forward, feeling its way toward what it needs; to watch for the signs of fascination… that indicates there’s something I need to attend to. Sometimes it seems to me as if metaphor were the advance guard of the mind…

I will leave you with a quote from François Camoin‘s essay on “The Textures of Fiction”: “Writing is best done by those of us who don’t know precisely what we mean…”

what it’s like living here

Posted on by

2

I wrote a guest post for Doug Glover’s blog, Numéro Cinq, in the series he’s doing on what it’s like to live in various places. Here’s the first paragraph:

In Columbus, Georgia, the seasons change, but they take their sweet time about it. First summer doesn’t want to let go, and then the leaves cling to the trees. Not until late October do the golds, oranges, and reds sprinkle this over-green world with color.

To read more…

How We Spend Our Days: Bruce Machart

Posted on by

21

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 Bruce Machart:

For the past seven years, I have lived a tad more than 1800 miles from the woman about whom I care most, my fiancée Marya.  This is not the set-up of some lame, testosterone-laden joke in which the success of a relationship is attributed to distance. The time zones between us are most assuredly not the reason why we are still together.  Rather, that distance was the elephant in the room (in the hemisphere?) for years.  Now, we are quite vocal in our loathing of this damned pachyderm. But the facts remain the facts:  I have a job and a child in Houston, Texas, and Marya has a job and two kids on the North Shore of Massachusetts.  Simply put, I have two homes.

desk in Houston

After three hours of cramped, shuddering air travel, I flinch as the plane slams its tires down onto the runway and taxis to the gate.  When I turn on my cell phone, the thing sounds like a carnival on amphetamines.  I have voicemail.  I have text messages.  I have email.  If the damned thing could tell me that I have a bad case of self-consciousness, I’m sure it would.  Before I disembark, I find the messages I am looking for–one from Marya, welcoming me “home,” as she always does, and one from my older brother, Chris, who has flown with his wife to Boston for the first time.  The plan is this: Chris and his wife will sightsee in Boston for the day; I will take all the luggage via commuter rail up to Marya’s house; Marya will finish work and then meet me there.  Later that night, Marya’s parents will arrive.  Tomorrow, my editor will come to town from NYC, and we will celebrate with three or four dozen friends and neighbors at the publication party for my novel.

But now, after the crush of bodies on the T, and after hugging my brother the way I was taught, so many years back, by that wonderful Philip Levine poem, I’m once again traveling on my own.  I’m on the commuter rail.  God, how I love trains.  The conductor announces each stop, and I lean my head against the window as the world works its way by, thinking, as I do, about the character in my novel who leans his head against the window on his way out of harm’s way.

I am in Boston.  Then I am in Chelsea.  Then Lynn…then Salem…North Beverly…but I am a hundred years back in time, living the life of a young man who never breathed air as a human being except within the pages of my book, except within the heartwood of my imagination.  In the next three weeks, I will give more than a dozen readings in more than ten cities.  I will meet and greet and read and teach, and I will call Marya and say, “I miss you, love,” and she will be strong, and she will wish that she could see what I see, hear what I hear, feel what I feel.  And I will miss her all the more for her empathy and for her patience, for the myriad desires for which I can offer no immediate satisfaction.

But that is all in the future.  Right now, I am a man on a train.  I am going to see my beloved.  I am a novelist.  I am a father.  There are people in the world, most of whom I will never meet, turning the pages of my book.  Some of them will feel compelled to pass judgement on what they find inside.  Some will print those judgements in newspapers or on blogs.  Some will love the book, and others will hate it, and it’s unsettling for me that, most of the time this happens, I will have no idea whatsoever that it is happening.

Outside, the leaves are turning to show their favors to the earthbound before they flutter with their helpless, final fanfare to the earth.  The windowglass is cold against my temple.  And then the train lurches into a short tunnel, and when I emerge from the darkness…it will only take seconds…I will know, with an unexpected thrill and novelty, that I am exactly where I am meant to be.  I am home.

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…
1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

  • Peter Geye’s Safe From the Sea, which I’m actually right in the middle of right now, but I can already tell that this is a special book.  Lyrical, loaded with compassion for its characters, one of which is this arresting, dangerously alluring coast of Lake Superior.  This is a gripping wonder of a book.

2.Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

  • Description is transient, not static.  We don’t look AT things.  We look from one thing to the next.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

  • I’ve never written a full rough draft of anything in my life.  I revise every day, page by page, as I move forward.  It’s a terrible, inefficient way to go about it, but it’s the only way I know how.

By Bruce Machart:

The Wake of Forgiveness