In the Jan/Feb issue of Poets & Writers, Joshua Bodwell wrote:

I won’t get to all the books I want to read in my lifetime.

[C]onfronting the fact that there is a limit to the number of them we will read feels a bit like realizing there’s a finite amount of oxygen in the room.

At the beginning of the year, Bodwell made a list of the best books he’d read in 2011–Bodwell’s Baker’s Dozen 2011. Apparently some writers (Richard Ford, Dave Eggers) don’t like to make lists, but Bodwell discovered that the act of making a list helped him to reflect on his reading life in different ways.

Simon Van Booy, the author of Everything Beautiful Began After, wrote:

If I didn’t read, I wouldn’t be able to write a word. Reading is the food that fuels my writing.

Here, at the beginning of summer, is a good time to consider reading lists. Do you make them? Do you have one for the summer? I love lists. I wish I had a list of every book I’d ever read. I wonder how many I could remember…. How would you describe your reading life?

I returned to my stack and chose a book I had borrowed from a friend an embarrassingly long time ago–The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk.

I read the first paragraph and thought, now you’re talking.

What is art? Thomas Bradshaw asks himself this question frequently. He does not yet know the answer. He used to believe art was a kind of pretending, but he doesn’t think that any more. He uses the word authenticity to describe what he thinks now. Some things are artificial and some are authentic. It is easy to tell when something is artificial. The other is harder.

I settled back and relaxed into the book. I knew right from the start that I would stay with this one. The first year of this blog, I read all of Rachel Cusk’s books in order–well, I read the most recent one first. Loved it. Then started from the beginning, rereading the most recent one when I got to it.

But it wasn’t just because I had enjoyed books by this author before that I felt safe. In fact, when, about six weeks ago, I was also deciding what book to read, I was choosing between two books, each one by a favorite author. The first one I chose, I only made it about 3 pages. Is it me? I wondered. So I turned to the other one–Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder. From the first sentence, I was a goner.

The news of Anders Eckman’s death came by way of Aerogram, a piece of bright blue airmail paper that served as both the stationery and, when folded over and sealed along the edges, the envelope.

Two very different openings. One begins with a huge question but in the next sentence dives inside the head of the character. Close in. And the other begins with a matter-of-fact sentence, focusing on a concrete object rather than an esoteric question. It’s difficult to put my finger on just what does the trick in each case.

Any ideas?

Fourteen writers respond in a collection of nine interlocking essays, meditations, and lists, all framed by excerpts from an interview with Michael Martone, and all aimed at pulling the curtain back, just a little, on that most important character we craft: The writer.

Claire Guyton, the creative brain behind this piece and its collage format, has this to say about the piece:

Michael demystifies the writing life and empowers his students because he talks about writing-related subjects that so many other writers and teachers seem to believe are beside the point.

And:

All writers make choices every day about what kind of writer we want to be. Many of the decisions we make are subconscious—why did I choose to take my author photo in my back yard? On the other hand, much of what we do is intentional.

Michael inspired Hunger Mountain to ask other writers about:

• The Author Photo
• Publishing: Do It Yourself ?
• Other than books, what do you read?
• Other than books, what do you write?
• What kind of author are YOU crafting?

Read How to Be a Writer…

June 1, 2012: Sybil Baker

I met Sybil at AWP this year at the Vermont College of Fine Arts party. I had read bits and pieces of Talismans, her linked collection, and loved it, but was prevented from finishing by MFA demands. Check out Jodi Paloni’s review in Contrary, which is where I first heard of Sybil. I look forward to getting back to Talismans this month, and to reading Sybil’s second novel, Into This World, which comes out this month from Engine Books.

Come back on June 1st to read how Sybil Baker spends her days.

*The next writer in the series is announced on the 8th of each month so you can read ahead!

The Jewish day goes from sundown to sundown, and since I’m writing about the day before Pesach, I will begin with the evening before. After we have supper together—I cook and Ira does the dishes—I put on the water to boil a dozen eggs. Tomorrow I will use them in a dish. But since I have to get everything cooked and packed up to go to the friends’ house where the Seder will take place, I need to do some chores tonight.

From the big freezer, I take out a whole chicken and a four and a half pound brisket. I drop the chicken on my foot (it is very slippery) and curse loudly and hop around. When the pain subsides, I put both the brisket and the chicken in the laundry room to thaw. I put a bag of dried apricots into kosher wine to soak.

It being Thursday night, I watch Big Bang Theory and then plunge the eggs into cold water so I can peel them. After peeling, I stick them in a stainless steel bowl in the refrigerator and resume reading American English. I read a lot of poetry, some fiction, and a fair amount of nonfiction. The novel I finished last night was The Tiger’s Wife, set in the fragmented former Yugoslavia, in Serbia, after the war. The poetry I am currently reading is Ruth Daigon’s Between One Future and the Next. The novel I will read next is Stone Arabia; I’ll start that tonight if I finish American English.

At ten all six cats are staring at me. I go downstairs, unload the dishwasher, and prepare to feed six cats from one jar of baby food. The largest amounts go to Malkah, who is seventeen, an orange tabby I tamed from a feral rescue, and Sugar Ray, a sweet laid back Burmese who thinks he is married to me. They have to get their hyperthyroid medicine mixed into the baby food. I never had cats get hyperthyroidism before; now two have it. I want to know why but my vet says no one knows. Puck the Abyssinian, Mingus, Sugar Ray’s cousin and best friend, Efi, a somewhat daft Siamese, also a rescue, and Xena, who is ten months old and by far the largest cat—they all get a little bit of baby food. We got Xena from the MSPCA in September when she fit into my cupped hands. She is sweet-tempered, gets along with everybody but has an ambition—to be the biggest domestic cat ever seen.

I go to bed, read something dull for a while—catalogs or a cookbook—and sleep. In the morning, Ira makes two huge mugs of coffee. While the water is getting to the boil for French press, he feeds a moil of semi-starving cats. We have coffee in bed while we plan our day. Then he goes to his office. I write some last-minute fixes I thought of for the novel tentatively called End Game, which should go off to my agent this coming week.

At noon we gather in the kitchen. I made charoset—in my case, a blend of almonds, apples, figs, dates, and kosher wine. Charoset is one of the ritual items at the Seder. Then I start chopping for gedempte flaisch mit abricotten, made of brisket, carrots, parsnips, onions, and the apricots I soaked plus any liquid left over. I add ginger, ground coriander, ground cardamom, salt, some more kosher wine, and beef broth. The meat is browned, then the veggies. Then everything else is added and the heavy Le Creuset pot goes into the oven at 300 degrees. It will bake for four and a half hours. My grandmother Hannah served this every Pesach.

Then I go back to my computer to fiddle with the supposedly finished novel for an hour. I play with whatever cats want to play. I roast one of the peeled eggs over a flame on the gas stove until it is blackened on all sides, for the Seder plate. I wash the parsley, the snippet that goes on the plate—the bunch that will be passed around and dipped in salt water. Ira starts his famous matzo ball soup. Some people’s matzo balls, you could bowl with. His are light as dandelion fluff.

I look for the lamb shank in the refrigerator freezer, freaking out when I can’t find it. Ira finds it. Then I look for the horseradish, which I do find, and then the three blood oranges. One will go in the center of the Seder plate—all will be eaten by the participants, section by section. I am putting items for the Seder plate not on the plate itself, which we brought down from a high shelf and washed, but rather in little plastic sandwich bags. The cats are sniffing the redolent air by now. I feed them cat food. Tough shit, kids. No begging tonight.

We no longer hold the Seder in our house, as our dining room is too small. I have been conducting a Seder and working on my Haggadah (the script for the Seder) for over thirty years. By now some of the participants are grandparents and we are into the third generation. These years the Seder is held at the home of the fire chief of Wellfleet and his wife, a financial consultant. They can put four tables together so that everybody fits.

I start on the salad. The gedempteh flaisch is Ashkenazi cooking, Eastern European. The charoset I make is Misraki from the cooking of Jews from the Middle East. The egg course I am about to make is Sephardic, the Jews who lived in Spain and Portugal for fifteen hundred years before being forcibly expelled, converted or burned at the stake. This mixture is intentional. I cut up the hard cooked eggs. Then cucumbers. Then fennel bulbs. I mix them all and dress the salad with virgin olive oil, lemon juice, and a little salt.

I count out the right number of Haggadahs. Back in early March I went over last year’s and cut passages, added stuff about the Republican war on women and more about contemporary slavery and hunger, put in a new poem in an appropriate place. My Haggadah is about two-thirds poetry. I sent out music for the songs several weeks ago. We start loading the truck. Some years we have to bring extra chairs; some years, not.

The sun is setting. Since the Jewish calendar is lunar, at some point we will go outside to watch the moon rise. At our house it rose majestically over the marsh. At the fire chief’s, it rises over Dunkin Donuts, but it is still a big beautiful full moon. Everyone has gathered together. There are always some new people among the old friends, and there are introductions. We pass out my Haggadahs with beautiful covers I have cobbled from many sources. The wine and grape juice are on the table. The sun is setting and we begin by lighting the Pesach candles and saying the first blessing. The special evening has begun. This is my favorite holiday.

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?

• The best books I’ve read in the last year are A Song of Ice and Fire, four volumes by George R.R. Martin. I started the first book when HBO had Game of Thrones on, and got hooked. Martin creates an entire world but unlike most fantasy worlds, it is not good versus evil but stories about power struggles and the struggle to survive among compelling characters who are a mix of good and evil. There’s much more sex than in most fantasy worlds and it feels real.

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

• The best advice for anybody who wants to write is to read, not books about writing but books in the genre they are interested in. You don’t learn to be a surgeon by reading The Way of the Surgeon.  You don’t reinvent the wheel. Don’t directly imitate but learn what has been done and what is being done in your genre.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I always have a cat sitting on my lap or next to the computer while I am writing. Sometimes they get on the printer and I have to push them off. Writing in a lonely activity and they keep me company.

.

Some–but not all–of the books by Marge Piercy:

Recently, though, to keep up with everything, I’ve given my evenings over to emails and editing, with a slim 15 or 30 minutes before I conk out for reading. And my weekends over to writing.

Note to self-this has got to stop.

I wanted to write because I loved to read. The books I want to read are piling up at a stressful rate. I’m not happy with this state of affairs, now readily apparent by the lone books filling the months of March and February on my reading list.

It makes me sad that I must remind myself to find time to read.

How is your reading life? When do you read?

I didn’t know whether to sit at the table for Literary Fiction (what I hoped I was learning how to write) or at the table for Women’s Fiction (what was that exactly?).

People often ask me what kind of books I write. And, darn it, why is that such a difficult question? Sometimes they give me multiple choices, again like the table placards. A) Mysteries, B) Love Stories, C) Sci-Fi?

Literary Fiction, by the way, is never an option. The people who ask me want to know, and understandably so, about content. What are your novels about? Another hard question. “I write about relationships,” I say. “Oh, love stories,” they say. And I say, “Sometimes. And sometimes not.”

In the April 1st NYT Sunday Book Review, in an essay entitled  ”The Second Shelf” Meg Wolitzer answers this question regarding her own books:

“You know, contemporary, I guess,” I said. “Sometimes they’re about marriage. Families. Sex. Desire. Parents and children.”

In her essay, Meg discusses the big issue of “women’s fiction”:

When I refer to so-called women’s fiction, I’m not applying the term the way it’s sometimes used: to describe a certain type of fast-reading novel, which sets its sights almost exclusively on women readers and might well find a big, ready-made audience. I’m referring to literature that happens to be written by women.

Of course it would be absurd to divide book stores into women’s fiction and men’s fiction. Hopefully that’s not answering anyone’s question. And certainly in 2012, we’re not going to say “relationships” or “marriage” are topics only women are interested in, or that “the wilderness” or “sports” are only men’s topics. My husband reads almost everything I read. And I would read more of what he reads if I had more time to read.

Meg concludes her essay with these sentences:

And will “Women’s Fiction” become such an absurd category it’s phased out entirely? Maybe, in a more just world.

I vote we stop using the term “women’s fiction” now, in an attempt to create a more just world.

Cross-posted at the Contrary Blog

May 1, 2012: Marge Piercy

I’ve been reading books by Marge Piercy for over twenty years. The first one I read was Summer People, published in 1989:

One of the reasons she liked sleeping alone was to avoid having to talk to anybody before she set down or played those lines, chords, rhythms, those shapes of sound that moved in her. Music was fragile when it started to coalesce. Silence was the ground.

Then Gone To Soldiers and The Longings of Women, which I re-bought because I gave my hardback to someone who could not part with it. Seventeen novels so far, her first one published in 1969.

And eighteen volumes of poetry, her first one published in 1968. From Mars and Her Children:

When I was poor and shopped Salvation Army
stores for clothes and housewares, I used
to think I could hear the clothes whispering
in piles the dreams of women who discarded them,
this is the dress in which he did not love me,
this is the coat that never kept me warm
from the wind of need and anxiety’s icy tweak.

from “Cast skins”

And

How can we belong to ourselves, when home
is something to pry yourself out of
like a pickup stuck on a sand road;
when what holds you has to be sacrificed
as a fox will gnaw off a foot to be free.

Growing up, what you love most can trap you.

from “Up and out”

And

Easy to forget the shock
of the miracle and turn love
into a background hum, air
conditioning, the hiss on a record,
when it is the electricity
that powers us.

from “Domestic danger”

In addition to novels and poetry, Marge Piercy has written a book of essays, a play, a memoir, and a book on writing.

Come back on May 1st to read how Marge Piercy spends her days.

*The next writer in the series is announced on the 8th of each month so you can read ahead!

Yangon and the day starts the night before. We’re at the airport waiting to meet Owen, his first time back to Burma since taking off his monk’s robes. He looks so different when we see him—t-shirt, jeans, sneakers, watch, and hair—everything except his smile seems to have changed. It’s been a season of wild changes in Burma, as if some spell is slowly lifting from the country, and we catch up with Owen over dinner at a nearby restaurant, make plans to find each other in Mandalay later, and let him get to family and friends waiting for him.

This is my eighth visit to Burma in the last twelve years, my wife and I living in Mandalay last summer with our three young children. I’m traveling ahead of the rainy season this winter with a buddy of mine, the two of us heading first to Mandalay and then the elephant camps and villages north of Monywa and Shwebo.

Our plane leaves at seven the next morning, and we’re heading to the British Club for Yangon’s monthly gathering of expats. We’re lucky to have a chance to connect with the city’s diplomats and teachers and business owners over that medicinal tang of gin and tonics, night cool and comfortable, all the talk about the elections and changes building in Burma. There’s a charge to the air, an energy and excitement, everyone excited and hopeful, last call sneaking up to us surprisingly fast, city streets quiet and dark as we ride back to the hotel, our wake-up call in less than two hours, which is why the day starts the night before, that raw, out-of-sync feeling as we stand on the tarmac and climb the stairs to the plane.

I wish I could describe the scene at the airport in Mandalay. Aung San Suu Kyi’s charter arrives just behind us, and hundreds of people press toward the gates, bright red flags and banners of National League for Democracy everywhere, everyone cheering and smiling and crying, everyone chanting, “Mae Suu! Jemma Bazé! Mae Suu! Jemma Bazé!” In the lobby, at the edge of the crowd, I ask an older man to translate what they’re saying. “It means,” he tells me and smiles, “Mother Suu, long life and good health!” There are tears in the man’s eyes, and tears are suddenly blurring mine as well, the emotion of the scene not easy to understand, my chin going all quicksand on me, none of us knowing whether to cry or laugh or shout as Aung San Suu Kyi approaches and passes within a few feet of us.

The Lady, as she’s called here, seems carried in this river of people, radiant and frail and jostled as she drifts past, the woman so serene and smiling at the center of the storm of bodies and voices, everyone trying to reach to her, trying to hand flowers and gifts to her, trying to somehow call or touch or just see this living embodiment of hope of theirs. It’s impossible to overstate what Aung San Suu Kyi has come to mean to the people of Burma—the woman a vessel into which an entire country’s pent-up hope and promise has been poured—her presence in the crowd almost otherworldly, her connection with people spooky, her hands taking flowers, her head bowing to monks, her pale green dress gracious, magnolia flowers vivid and beautiful in her hair.

Outside, overcast and hot, her motorcade crawls through the crowds that line the long road to Mandalay. For the first time in twenty-two years, she and her party, the National League for Democracy, are campaigning ahead of the new by-elections to be held on the first of April, and the air is choked with dust and diesel and the braying of car and motorbike horns, people waving flags and banners, even soldiers looking on with what seem like eager faces. Even an outsider cannot help but feel swept along in the energy and hope of this—crowds lining the roadways all the way to the city—and it’s deep into the afternoon before we arrive at our hotel, feverish with hunger and exhaustion.

As chance would have it, later we find another friend catching up on letters in the hotel’s courtyard. He’s a former British Consul to Burma and has lived in-country for more than twenty-five years. We can’t help but gush about the scene—Aung San Suu Kyi at the airport—and he smiles and explains how the Lady doesn’t much care for him. He once had dinner with her, he says, and she leaned over to him and called him a conspirator. Well, he tells me, he did work with the government, helping to improve its education policy. And now, he adds, with the elections maybe she’s a conspirator finally as well.

I’m writing this on a riverboat heading south from Mandalay. A few days have passed since we found Aung San Suu Kyi. We’ve been to the elephant camps, been to the monastery, and been witness to the love and hope that the Lady brings to life.

*More on Burma and Aung San Suu Kyi in my essay, “Captives of the Junta,” in The American Scholar.

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?

• Most of my reading for the last few years—let alone the last few months—has revolved around research for my new novel and nonfiction book, both of which are set in Burma, but I am currently reviewing Ron Rash’s intriguing and enigmatic new novel, The Cove, for The Boston Globe. I recently listened to—and loved—Keith Richards’ autobiography Life. I have Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad, and Pulphead, by John Jeremiah Sullivan, going on my nightstand as I type this.

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

• Almost twenty years ago, the writer and editor William Maxwell sent some advice that keeps coming back to me: “Try to listen to your feelings as you would to the sound in a seashell and then put them down on paper.” That seems the kind of perfect, direct, and reasonable counsel that an aspiring writer (such as myself) might ignore for a good decade. And one ignores it for good reason—it’s difficult, almost impossible work—but I’ve come to feel one’s real job as a writer is to find and say what you feel about the world and put it down on paper.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• Is it strange that I don’t believe any of my writing or reading habits are particularly noteworthy or strange? Alas, sometimes the fact that anyone writes or reads at all often seems to qualify as strange enough in this world.

.

By William Lychack:

Margaret Atwood

On moving in and out of the present action:

Frowning, she tears out three tokens and hands them to me.

[13 paragraphs of backstory and interior monologue]

I take the tokens from Rita’s outstretched hand. (10-11)

On truth (and the end of the story):

When I get out of here, if I’m ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, at yet another remove. It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which [sic] can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many. (134)

On seeing the big picture:

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bed sheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be. (143)

On associative writing:

With that man [the man you loved] you wanted it to work, to work out. Working out was also something you did to keep your body in shape, for the man. If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. (226-227)