Category Archives: time

hoping to discover

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On Saturday, July 3rd, I took a break from lectures and readings and slid into my rented red Prius headed for the past. Even though Ferrisburg, Vermont, lies directly west from Montpelier, Google Maps directed me north to Burlington and then south.

In addition to my purse, I have coffee, water, camera, paper, and pen. I also seem to have some sort of invisible empty box with me that I hope to fill. I am going on a bear hunt and I want to catch a big one.

I wrote in my last post that Ecole Champlain, the French camp I attended in the ’70s now seemed “mysterious to me, as if it’s withholding secrets instead of holding memories.”

But, as is so often the case with my words, I didn’t get that right. Rather, what it seemed was as if the secret to something was there waiting for me to find it. In more words, the place was with me, not against me. In fact, I could almost see it closing its eyes, concentrating, in order to draw me back.

An old map shows the main entrance has always been the one I come in today, the one along the water that brings me in by MacDonough Lodge, now known as Hawley House. But that doesn’t seem right. I figure out that the buses that used to bring us to camp after we flew into Burlington on Mohawk Airlines always used the service entrance, coming in past the stables and down the long straight dirt road to the lodge.

That sweet smell is still here, a smell I’ve come across only a few times since camp. A breeze will go by and there it is. Ecole Champlain. Vermont. Once I smelled it from a bathroom air freshener. I ask the young park ranger. He says it’s the smell of cut hay. July is haying season in Vermont.

The dining hall is still here. The park ranger unlocks the door, and I enter the space where I once ate 7 grilled cheese sandwiches in a contest with a counselor.  Other than a portion of the floor having been replaced, it looks the same–only empty.

The distance between the dining hall and the lodge seems smaller, as I would expect. But as I start down the road to the stables, I’m surprised, and pleased somehow, that this still seems like a long walk.

I peer in the windows of the stables. Then I turn to face the space where the riding rings used to be. When I concentrate, I can see the one across the road where my horse took the jump and I didn’t. And then…the counselors used to call me Strawberry.

What will I discover during this visit? What do you hope to discover when you go back?

I will write more on Thursday…

2nd post in 4-part series on
Ecole Champlain:
Part 1: places that call us back
Part 2: hoping to discover
Part 3: proof
Part 4: writing my way there

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places that call us back

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Among other places–and I’m trying to discover which ones–Ecole Champlain, the French camp in Vermont where I spent three summers–1970, 1971, 1972–is a place that now seems mysterious to me, as if it’s withholding secrets instead of holding memories.

In an interesting symmetry, I have now revisited three times as an adult–in October of 1996, in July of 2001, and a week ago, on July 3rd–this last time with more openness and intention than the other times. Curiously I think this openness comes from writing over the last six months without intention.

It’s as if there’s a surface that I’m trying to get below or a window I’m trying to see through.

In a recent post, Lindsey at A Design So Vast, wrote about the spaces that hold our memories:

Sometimes physical space seems so mute, so indifferent; it surprises me that somehow the important moments that have transpired in a place don’t remain there, echoing, animate, alive somehow. Maybe they do. Occasionally, in returning to a place that hosted an important moment in my life, I can feel that moment, hovering, bumping into me, invisible to the eye but not to the spirit.

During this next week, I hope to write more about my return to this place and why some places call to us from the past, why they draw us back as they do.

Do you have places that call you back?

1st post in 4-part series on
Ecole Champlain:
Part 1: places that call us back
Part 2: hoping to discover
Part 3: proof
Part 4: writing my way there

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the old swing set

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I was in my study on the phone wishing my father a happy day when I glanced out the window to see what my father thought, from my description, was a hawk on the roof of the old swing set, and I called to my son, home from college, who came in and took these two pictures.

“The day grew light, then dark again–
In all its rich hours, what happened?”
Jane Hirshfield, “Apple”

more of this world

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Nine stories make up New Orleans’ writer Barb Johnson’s wonderful debut collection of linked stories, More of This World or Maybe Another. In the first and title story, Delia is the narrator and we meet her boyfriend Calvin and his sister Charlene, who goes by the name of Chuck. Regarding place, often used to link stories, we’re not yet sure where we are, but from the top of the water tower, Delia describes what she sees:

“In the other direction, night is rolled out as far as Delia can see. There’s swamp out there, she knows, and the Gulf of Mexico. Beyond that, there could be anything. More of this world or maybe another.” (17)

In the second story, “Keeping Her Difficult Balance,” the first sentence uses the word place and before the first paragraph is over, place is established, not only for this story but also for the preceding one (and it will turn out, for the collection as well): “this bayou, which is right smack in the middle of New Orleans…Not at all like the one from her childhood in the boonies of East Jesus.” On the next page, the boonies are given a name: “…Gremillion, where she and Calvin grew up.” Two of my favorite quotes come from this story:

“This, Delia decides, is how artists are, how she herself wants to be. Everything isn’t necessarily logical or practical. Life can be this way or that way or some other way altogether when you’re an artist.” (33)

“She’s discovered that, to make Calvin fit into the picture, she’s been shaving away at pieces of herself. The piece that loves to read, for instance…And Delia has realized that she shaved away the part of herself that deep down thinks real, true love probably has more attraction to it than what she feels for Calvin…But she wonders if her crankiness with Calvin might be from having to listen to the shaved pieces of herself shouting at her: WakeUpWakeUpWakeUp.” (35)

The nine stories in More of This World or Maybe Another are linked by character, by time, and by place. Delia is mentioned or implied in every story (although there are three other narrators). Other characters reoccur. The stories appear in chronological order, with at least one character in each story being recognizably older, giving the reader a sense of time passing, of a real world. Every story takes place either in New Orleans or in Gremillion, where Delia grew up. These three methods of linking the stories add to the layered and rich feel of the collection. Recognizing characters we know from other stories and watching them grow up is a way of giving the reader of each story an additional delight—the delight of recognition in a larger world.

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reasons to live

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15 stories in this slim volume from Amy Hempel published in 1985. Only 3 of the 15 written in third; the rest, in first.

My clear favorite is the first-person story “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.” It’s nicely developed and goes deeper than a lot of the others in this collection. [spoiler alert]

One of the interesting things about this story, which is divided into 20 short sections, is the way Hempel uses white space–as in, not the same way throughout the story.

The first 16 sections of “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” are basically one visit of the Narrator to her friend in the hospital. As the story progresses, the visit progresses as well. It all moves forward except section 2, when time seems to stand still as the Narrator steps back from the scene to describe it, and sections 8-10, when the Narrator reminisces at the beach. In sections 1-16, Hempel uses white space stylistically–to highlight moments.

Between sections 16 and 17, the white space denotes a space and time jump. Section 17 begins:

“On the morning she was moved to the cemetery, the one where Al Jolson is buried…”

Then in sections 17-20, Hempel is again using white space stylistically but this time to highlight thoughts. These sections exist in the place and time after the friend dies.

Using white space inconsistently adds to the random, floaty feel of this story that is actually organized in a linear sequence (granted sections 17-20 could be in random order rather than moving forward chronologically, but that seems unlikely given the rest of the story).

Another interesting thing–in the first scene, the Narrator has 2 lines; in the second scene (section 3) the Narrator has 1 line; in the third, 0 lines. The fact that the Narrator does not say much, despite the abundance of scenes, contributes to a feeling that the Narrator is not fully present in the hospital room.

Finally, Hempel uses 4 tenses in this 12-page story. Perhaps to show our split consciousness, where we are when we’re not fully present–thinking about the past, imagining the future, the conditional what-ifs.

All this, and we haven’t even begun to talk about what the story is about…

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rearrangement

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alone on a hill

It looks like spring here in Georgia. The daffodils are pushing out of the ground. The cherry blossoms are blooming.

And it sounds like spring. I’m going to betray my ignorance here, but on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday a flock–as in 50 or more–very excited birds played in our yard. Flying back and forth, singing, having a great time. A bird party.

Just a few minutes ago, I took out my Audubon guide to identify what kind of bird it was–brown belly, dark coat. A Robin. “Popularly regarded as the best sign of spring’s arrival…”

It feels like spring. It’s 62 outside right now, but the sun is so bright, it feels warmer. Even though it went down to 42 last night, according to the weather people, it will be 72 before the day is over.

Last year, I couldn’t wait for March 1st–the day I’d designated to put color back in the header of the blog. Then on the first we had snow here, and I couldn’t bring myself to write the spring post I’d counted on. This year, March 1 came and went without my even realizing it was time.

Richard Yates wrote in Revolutionary Road, “What is spring but a mindless rearrangement of cells in the crust of the spinning earth as it floats in endless circuit of its sun?”

Rearrangement–such a small thing.

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reading like a writer–part 5: taking a story apart

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Before I jump into the story, I’d just like to say that what follows are my notes–opinion not fact. And I hope to hear more opinions from you. Also, LONGEST POST EVER ALERT (I suggest a beverage of some sort, maybe a snack) and SPOILER ALERT:

“Dimensions” by Alice Munro from her new collection, Too Much Happiness:

Type of story: journey

Type of beginning: starting the journey

Type of ending: stopping the journey

Point of View: On my first read, I thought it was third person limited to Doree, but on my second read, it appears that Munro actually moves briefly into the heads of two other characters: Mrs. Sands for a moment in the 3rd section (page 7 of the book) and Maggie for a moment in the 11th section (page 18). So the point of view is third person limited to one character at a time, and the main point of view character is Doree.

Distance at the beginning: The first few sentences (in fact the whole first paragraph with the exception of one sentence) seem distant, with Doree being observed which I think Munro starts with for three reasons: 1) because the gory subject matter to come needs distance to avoid melodrama; 2) so she can dip into the other two characters without jarring the reader; and 3) so the reader can look at Doree as separate from the reader because Doree does things the reader finds difficult to believe.

Structure: 31 pages>19 sections (marked only by white space, which Munro uses mainly to mark shifts in TIME )

[green =forward action/red=backstory/blue=Mrs. Sands/orange=Maggie]

1st section: Munro gets the story moving forward—literally and figuratively. We know something happened but we don’t know what—the unknowing adds tension and moves the story forward. And we have enough concrete details and action that we’re willing to wait for the “what.”

2nd section: Introduction of new character: Mrs. Sands (we guess she’s some sort of therapist and is “the reasonable person” to anchor the reader in the story). *[If you're reading the story in The New Yorker, this section splits here creating 20 sections total instead of 19-I'm guessing she combined them in the later version to avoid 2 sections of backstory at the beginning.] Then a moment of backstory that starts when Doree meets Lloyd and clues us we’re going to lead up to what happened.

3rd section: Story moves forward again. Brief dip into Mrs. Sands POV. This section serves to reassure the reader that there is a story and that the character we just met is part of it.

4th section: Hunk of chronological backstory—the sure hand of storytelling.

5th section: Out of order backstory—I asked myself WHY? I’m guessing it serves to give the reader a little more information about what happened so we don’t get antagonistic. It also acts as foreshadowing and adds tension.

6th-10th sections: Chronological backstory with new character—the friend Maggie. Munro filters Doree’s reaction to the murders through Maggie (dips into M’s POV) to avoid melodrama. Also Munro needs the character of Maggie during these pre-Mrs. Sands scenes. (Maggie and Mrs. Sands are both “reasonable people” who arguably stand in for the reader. Including them and dipping briefly into their POV seem to be the equivalent of the story putting an arm around the reader.)

11th section: All the threads come together (red, blue, orange) for the “what happened” and then push past it.

11th-19th sections: The story moves forward from the “what happened,” with the continued appearance of Mrs. Sands as stand-in for normal as against Lloyd, which is the battle that is going on in Doree’s head.

12th: Doree’s INTERIOR THOUGHTS- she thinks back to being on the bus at the beginning of the story-no physical location of her body-and apparent continuation of interior thoughts in previous section-SO WHY DOES MUNRO SEPARATE THIS SHORT SECTION BY WHITE SPACE instead of adding it to the end of the section before?

  • I think to draw attention to Doree’s realization of getting off the bus as a possibility, which foreshadows the ending
  • And to highlight Doree thinking for herself
  • And to have the opportunity to mention “good or bad” twice
  • “When she realized what was in her head, she should have got off the bus. She could have got off even at the gates, with the few other women who plodded up the drive. She could have crossed the road and waited for the bus back to the city. Probably some people did that. They were going to make a visit and then decided not to. People probably did that all the time.”

18th: Munro pits Mrs. Sands against Lloyd (good versus evil & echo of the ”did it make you feel good or bad from sections 11 & 13 that bookend Doree beginning to think for herself in section 12)

  • “And who had given it to her? Not Mrs. Sands…”
  • “Lloyd had given it to her. Lloyd, that terrible person, that isolated and insane person.”
  • “…THE THOUGHT THAT LLOYD, OF ALL PEOPLE, MIGHT BE THE PERSON SHE SHOULD BE WITH NOW. WHAT OTHER USE COULD SHE BE IN THE WORLD—SHE SEEMED TO BE SAYING THIS TO SOMEBODY, PROBABLY TO MRS. SANDS—WHAT WAS SHE HERE FOR IF NOT AT LEAST TO LISTEN TO HIM?”

19th: The first line: “So she found herself travelling on the bus again…”

  • Lloyd versus Mrs. Sands: “Who but Lloyd would remember the children’s names now…Mrs. Sands…did not even call them children but ‘your family,’ putting them in one clump together.”
  • accident, bus stops, driver tells everyone to stay on the bus but Doree gets off “AS IF SHE HAD NOT HEARD THAT, OR HAD SOME SPECIAL RIGHT TO BE USEFUL, DOREE GOT OUT BEHIND HIM.”
  • Similarities between Doree’s children and the victim:
    • The driver refers to the victim as “kid”
    • Doree sees him: “The boy was lying on his back, arms and legs flung out, like somebody making an angel in the snow….He was so young…”
  • “Be quiet, be quiet, she wanted to tell them. It seemed to her that silence was necessary, that everything in the world outside the boy’s body had to concentrate, help it not to lose track of its duty to breathe.”
    • Echo of beginning of story with Doree not wanting to talk.
    • Also a bit of her taking charge, at least in her own mind
    • And these are words she could be saying to Lloyd and Mrs. Sands
    • I also see Doree as the boy here
  • Unusually beautiful sentence from Munro with echoes of the “journey” aspect of the story: “Shy but steady whiffs now, a sweet obedience in the chest. Keep on, keep on.”

The ending:

    “Go on,” Doree said. “I’ll hitch a ride to town with them and catch you on your way back tonight.”

    He had to bend to hear her. She spoke dismissively, without raising her head, as if she were the one whose breath was precious.

    “You sure?” he said.

    Sure.

    “You don’t have to get to London?”

    No.

About the ending:

  • The key to the meaning of the story can be found in the concrete: in the repetition of the word USE.
  • In the beginning of the story, there is death; in the end, life.
  • Despite all the ugliness of Lloyd, he is “useful” to Doree because that’s how she knows to breathe life into the victim.
  • Doree does not choose either Lloyd or Mrs. Sands but finds her own place in the world.
  • The reader “knows” Doree will not go back to Lloyd because she has found another reason to be in the w orld.
  • In a beautiful return to the game she played in #1, Doree makes the word “no” out of the word “London.”
  • Also by her not saying the last two words, only thinking them, there’s another return to section #1—Doree not wanting to talk to people.
  • She got off the bus. Her life has changed. Munro shows this in the quietest of ways.

So if this is NOT ENOUGH MUNRO for you, I actually made a simple, color-coded chart that just shows the movement of the threads, but I can’t figure out how to include it here. If you would like to see it, just request a copy in the comments section (no need to put your address in the comments) and I will email it to you.

Hallelujah I’m done!

Despite the fact that I’m done, this post does not exhaust the ways we can take apart this story. There’s still how Munro uses distance throughout (it changes), how she presents the different characters, how many times and why she repeats “three,”…….

Other posts in this series:

Part 1: Reading like a writer

Part 2: Taking it to a new level

Part 3: Questions to ask

Part 4: Reading a story

Part 5: Taking a story apart

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frozen

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Vermont

At 10:15, this day appears to be another one of those where I feel like my right arm is going in one direction and my left in completely the opposite, the same with my legs, and my head just might explode. I want to do so many things ALL AT ONE TIME.

Each thing I do leads me not to an end but to a new beginning. Case in point: I post a comment and the reply comes with a question. I want to make a post but it turns out I really want to make four: on the frozen state of Columbus, Georgia; on the pictures I took in Vermont; on what I did in Vermont; and on how to read a story like a writer–how to take it apart.

So often on days like this, I end up frozen and accomplish nothing.

I remind myself, one thing at a time, one step at a time:

There’s something about the sound of water–the ocean, rain, the trickle of a fountain. We don’t live on the water, but a few years ago, we splurged on a fountain for the front yard. This is the way it’s looked ever since I got back from Vermont–frozen solid, a block of ice:

Georgia

Columbus, Georgia, has had 11 consecutive days where the low was below freezing and the high has not exceeded 47 degrees.

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a new book bag

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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 I would go to school. And I would live in their dorm Le Chateau and speak French all the time.

When I was a junior in high school, I spent a weekend skiing in North Carolina–in blue jeans. I froze. I decided I could not possibly go to school any farther north than North Carolina. I found a school as much like Middlebury as I could in North Carolina–Davidson College. That’s where I went, and I loved every second of it.

Nevertheless, I have always kind of regretted that I wimped out on my dream.

Tomorrow, with a different dream, I’m finally heading into a Vermont winter. I have snow boots, a down jacket, a hat, a scarf, gloves, and a new book bag. I’m going back to school–to Vermont College for my MFA in Writing.

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Christmas magic

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img_1207 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 real details–snow and fire brigades and uncles–and yet he tells it as if it were a fairy tale.

The ending: “I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”

[Annual Christmas Eve post]

the ordinary day

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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 an Ordinary Day:

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what have i done with my life

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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 character Glory in Marilynne Robinson’s Home:

“But oh, the evenings were long.  I am thirty-eight years old, she would say to herself, as she tidied up after supper.  I have a master’s degree.  I taught high school English for thirteen years.  I was a good teacher.  What have I done with my life?  What has become of it?  It’s as if I had a dream of adult life and woke up from it, still here in my parents’ house.”

I knew I had written about other characters expressing this same feeling and I wanted to connect them with Glory. In the search rectangle on the blog, I typed in “life.”

I found two posts: one titled “something more,” in which I wrote about Mrs. Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and Clara in Black & White by Dani Shapiro; the other entitled “more than this,” in which I wrote about Ursula in Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence.

Here’s the weird thing: one was written on December 9th and the other on December 11th, 2008.

The end of the year pulls me toward reflection. But where’s the time?

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winter spring summer fall

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Click here to start the music:

I've been on a musical kick lately...and here on the eve of another change,

I think of Carole King's words, which I first heard in 1970,

and which I think of often, as they reflect the changing and wondrous views outside my window,

for which I'm thankful as I sit inside with the light on.

eucalyptus

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DSC00118I 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 I planted, was below the window.

I sit at my desk and write. Sometimes it’s easy to see change.

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wildlives

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DSC00047In 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 and alive and so delicately parallels the story the character Claire is writing that the reader is unsure whether Claire is writing about what is happening around her or whether Claire’s writing is causing what is happening around her to happen.

“Who knew if diving into the void [writing] shattered the already porous walls between what appears to exist and what does not yet exist?”

Proulx wields repetition like a wand—within sentences, within paragraphs, within the content and the structure of the novel. Take a look at the opening sentences:

“Lila Szach liked uphill paths. In life so many things—and life itself, in fact—go only downhill.”

Wildlives is so beautifully structured that it gave me goose bumps. It begins with a section entitled “Lila,” in which the young Lila is able to imagine herself an old woman. The last section is entitled “Jeremie,” and in it the old Jeremie thinks he sees the figure of a child. In each of these sections, the sun surprises the character so that the world appears to be on fire.

DSC00003In between these sections, the story takes place: Lila is 76 and Jeremie is a boy. Age and youth, the past and the future. And who’s to say it doesn’t all come together at a certain moment in time.

Wildlives was originally written in French and is beautifully translated by David Homel and Fred A. Reed:

“You think you’ll grow old gracefully, so slowly that you’ll hardly notice it; instead, it leaps on you and reduces you to rubble.”

“…but she could not move, weighed down with nostalgia, suddenly stabbed by the brevity of the whole adventure. How cruel it is; we barely have time to master three steps of the immense cosmic choreography before we’re yanked from the ballet.”

“Night had officially ended, but it still hung in the trees.”

Wildlives was a finalist for the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Fiction.

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The library, and step on it

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David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest…

IMG_2089On Humor: This book is often laugh-out-loud funny.

Hal: “I do things like get in a taxi and say, ‘The library, and step on it.’” (12)

Hal: “I’m an O.E.D. man, Doctor.” (29)

The Narrator on Hal: “His way of answering the phone sounded like ‘Mmmyellow.’” (32)

Hal: “We’re all on each other’s food chain. All of us. It’s an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual.” (112)

Hal: “This induced a spell of involuted marijuana-type thinking that led quickly, again, to Hal’s questioning whether or not he was really all that intelligent.” (136)

Hal: “I’m trying to cut down on patronizing places with ”N’ in their name.” (908)

On Humor and Sadness: In the sense of co-existing in a moment, of humor being an attempt to deal with sadness, a layer over the sadness, and finally melting into sadness.

Hal: “…I have administrative bones to pick with God, Boo. I’ll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about. I’m pretty much anti-death. God looks by all accounts to be pro-death. I’m not seeing how we can get together on this issue, he and I, Boo.” (40)

Still writing beautiful sentences: Again, this is what kept my eyes on the page–page after page after page.

Narrator: “the cold-penny tang of the autumn air” (539)

Narrator: “The sun has the attenuated autumn quality of seeming to be behind several panes of glass.” (623)

On Eschaton (the game): Or on reading IJ.

“Its elegant complexity, combined with a dismissive-reenactment frisson and a complete disassociation from the realities of the present, composes most of its puerile appeal. Plus it’s almost addictively compelling…” (322)

On suicide: Yes, it’s all over the place–the fact of it, the attempt to understand it, and the understanding of it.

Geoffrey Day: “As the two vibrations [exhaust fan and violin] combined, it was as if a large dark billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not had the slightest inkling was there.” (649) and “From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not…I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves.” (651)

Kate Gompert: “Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising.” (651)

Describing: I am astonished, over and over again, at DFW’s ability to nail a description.

Marathe: “Also the living room evening resembled an anthill which had been stirred with a stick; it was too full of persons, all of the restless and loud.” (730)

Marathe about someone else: “…she laughed in the manner of an automatic weapon.” (748)

Mario about his mother’s desk: “…what looks like a skyline of file folders and books…” (760)

Hal about Keith Freer: “He was still wearing the weird unitard he slept in, which made him look like someone who tore phone books in half at a sideshow.” (908)

On story-telling: Remember the “use less words” from the previous post? Add these:

Marathe: “‘Because it is necessary that I leave soon, a central point must be soon emerging,’ Marathe worked in as gracefully as possible.”

Kate to Marathe: “Is the madly-in-love part coming up?” (779)

IMG_2254I’m realizing as of the end of the 700′s that more and more lines I would like to include might be spoilers so I have left them out.

On living in the moment: A recurrent theme.

Gately: “An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat…Living in the Present between pulses…living completely In The Moment.” (860)

On addiction: Everywhere to every possible thing, and I include “to this book.”

Gately: “Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight.” (859)

Gately: “…everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you somehow believed.” (861)

Gately: “the psychic emergency-brake was off…” (906)

Gately: “…he found himself starting to cry like a babe. It came out of emotional nowheres…” (916)

OMG, I’m at the end again…

[4th in a series of 5 posts on finishing IJ]

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a kind of fugue

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Polly Thayer's portrait of May Sarton owned by the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University

“There is nothing to be done but go ahead with life moment by moment and hour by hour–put out birdseed, tidy the rooms, try to create order and peace around me even if I cannot achieve it inside me.” May Sarton.

As the last days of summer float by, I’m thinking about reclaiming control of my days. I want to read more and write more, lose fewer hours to Twitter and Facebook, the internet in general.

Social networking does have a place. It helps me stay current with the latest articles on writing and books. It helps me feel connected to the writing community. And it’s a way to let others know what I’m doing. As Lori A. May pointed out in a recent post I discovered on Twitter, “For a writer, it’s not only about writing.”

“I am in a limbo that needs to be patterned from within….this problem of ordering a day that has no pattern imposed on it from without.” Again May Sarton.

Last week a friend and I were brainstorming about how to order our days. First we made a list of deadlines and everything we wanted and needed to do. Then we made daily, less-than-daily-and-more-than-weekly, and weekly lists. Finally we talked about what shape we wanted the mornings, afternoons, and evenings to take.

“That was what I was after–a daily rhythm, a kind of fugue of poetry, gardening, sleeping and waking in the house.” Yes, May Sarton.

Lori May eschews the word schedule as antithetical to writing. She refers, instead, to a plan of attack. I like that. I also like fugue for its sense of interweaving of parts, for its writerly rhythm. So yes, I am working on a plan of attack, in order to create my daily rhythm–a kind of fugue of reading, writing, blogging, connecting, and living.

Eleanor Marie Sarton was born in Belgium in 1912. All of her quotes in this post can be found in  Journal of a Solitude, published in 1973.

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stop time

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Frank Conroy was the director of the Iowa Writers Workshop for 18 years. He was also a writer himself, the author of 5 books, including the “classic memoir” Stop-Time. He died of colon cancer in 2005 at the age of 69.

“My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I begin to believe that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes existence.”

Conroy was interested in time and memory. The title of his book on Nantucket, a place both he and I love, is Time & Tide. img_19701He begins this book with a preface, which recounts his earliest memory.

Stop-Time begins at the opposite end of the spectrum, with a brilliant one-page prologue from the point of view of the older speed-crazed Conroy, who would do “anything at all to keep up the speed, to maintain the speed and streak through the dark world.” We don’t see this older narrator except for a couple of other times in the memoir. Yet we keep him in the back of our mind as we move through his memories of his childhood.

Conroy’s writing is exact. Note these three examples from the memoir:

“My mother would make a quick meal out of cans.”

“Half to himself, his voice fading as we went around opposite sides of the car, he said…”

“My mother laughed nervously, not because she thought it was funny, but because her relationship with Donald forced her to laugh.”

Jayne Anne Phillips said, “He believed that the work leads the writer, and not the other way around. He used to say that in his own writing he’d read and re-read what he’d written the day before until he knew what to do next.”

Frank Conroy could also write beautiful sentences:

“A bewildering array of emotions exploded simultaneously–confusion, embarrassment, a kind of childish love, apprehensiveness, but behind it all, as steady as the solid bar of sunlight across the polished table, triumph. The moment was at hand.”

Fitzgerald finale, part 2

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img_1910The Russian Doll Aspect of Life:

I am the same person who liked to play with Troll Dolls in third grade, tried out for cheer leading in ninth, worked as a waitress in college, lived in France, and practiced law. All of these “me’s” are difficult for the “me now’ to believe–some more so than others.

“Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”

Catching Days:

Life is hard to get hold of. We have to break it down to make it manageable. We have to try to catch moments. Yet, there is the big picture. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

“Dick tried to dissect it into pieces small enough to store away–realizing that the totality of a life my be different in quality from its segments.”

Time:

Sometimes it seems as if the clock is not moving at all, and other times, how can it be Monday again already. Is it a function of what we are doing or what we are looking forward to? I’m a person who always needs to see the days on a calendar, who is always printing out different calendars–one week, two weeks, a month, six weeks–trying to keep track of life. What does it say about a character, his or her view of time?

“He stayed in the big room a long time listening to the buzz of the electric clock, listening to time.”img_19001

“For him time stood still and then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-wind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday…”

“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”