I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with … Continue reading
During the past year, whenever I would say to Cal that I had no idea what to write about, he would always say, “You can write about how wonderful I am.” Which of course isn’t a true thing about me. … Continue reading
It was February of 1965. I was seven. My parents and I, and two of my sisters, had just piled into the station wagon that was parked in front of the church in Russellville, Kentucky, after my grandfather’s funeral. I was … Continue reading
I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with … Continue reading
I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with … Continue reading
I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with … Continue reading
In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard wrote, I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we … Continue reading
In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard wrote, I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we … Continue reading
Still Writing is Dani Shapiro‘s most recent book, a book she described at AWP as a “love letter to her tribe,” a book I might have bought just for its cover, a book that’s part inspiration, part memoir, part meditation, part craft. … Continue reading
In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard wrote, I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we … Continue reading
Those of you who know me in real life know I have issues with aging—as in I couldn’t possibly be this old; this is my mother’s age. Resisting the truth is not making me any more comfortable in my crinkling … Continue reading
In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard wrote, I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we … Continue reading
Some of my favorite writers will be teaching workshops this coming October at Tomales Bay–Pam Houston, Ron Carlson, Antonya Nelson, Cheryl Strayed, Fenton Johnson, and Carl Phillips. Writing By Writers is hosting six workshops October 16-20, 2013 at the Marconi … Continue reading
In Paul Auster’s latest, Winter Journal, written in the second person, he lists his 21 permanent addresses–or, acknowledging the inadequacy of the adjective, his stopping places. Enclosures, habitations, the small rooms and large rooms that have sheltered your body from the … Continue reading
The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch. Wow. Some book. One reviewer admits to considering throwing it across the room.
It’s a memoir, and the writing is uneven. But that fits the life it mirrors. Like the story out of which it grew, it’s
About fathers and swimming and fucking and dead babies and drowning. Written entirely in random fragments–how I understood my entire life. In the language–image and fragments and non-linear lyric passages–that seemed most precise.
A striking chapter tells the story of a hot pink Schwinn bike “with a banana seat and streamers coming out of the handlebars.” Her father brought it home to cheer her up after her sister left. She was ten and thought “it was perhaps the most beautiful thing I had ever seen…”
But she didn’t know how to ride a bike.
So when I came outside to touch the hot pink ride, beautiful as she was, all I felt was terror.
Besides being a hell of a story, this is a living, breathing object lesson. How a beautiful pink bike can also be an object of terror. How in a fictional world a bicycle could be beautiful to one character and terrifying to another.
She writes: “In water, like in books–you can leave your life.”
About the breakup of her second marriage:
I would have done anything for him. A love unto death. And…
Goddamn it.
I’m already lying. I’m making it all sound literary.
It was messier than that. A lot.
At the end of the book is an interview. Yuknavitch writes:
I do know that when I’m inside writing I don’t want to be anywhere else. It’s like being inside a song or a painting.
Cross-posted at the Contrary Blog
Julian Barnes wrote Nothing To Be Frightened Of, a memoir about death, “in order to make the fear familiar.” I’m not sure he succeeds, but he does write with a compelling “matter-of-factness” about the subject:
I suspect that if I get any sort of decent dying time…
Because of the How We Spend Our Days series, I wanted to share this story that he recounts. A biographer friend of Barnes’ wanted to write about his life. The biographer’s husband joked that it would be a short book because all of JB’s days were the same:
Got up. Wrote book. Went out, bought bottle of wine. Came home, cooked dinner. Drank wine.
A one-year subscription to Quick Fiction is $13.50.
with new pages!
#2: What’s happening?
#3: What’s in a cover?
A one-year subscription to Conjunctions is $18.00.
I’ve subscribed to One Story since 2004. Plus, I try to subscribe to 3-4 other literary journals. And I mix it up from year to year.
If we don’t subscribe to the journals where we want to see our writing, who will?
For lunch today or tomorrow, make a pb&j and spend your $ on a subscription to the journal of your choice.
“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.
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 the year. So I reached for May Sarton‘s Journal of a Solitude, written from September to September–1970 to 1971, I think. And guess what? As far as December, there’s an entry for the 2nd and then nothing until January.
It’s like falling into a black hole. In December, most of all, it’s a struggle to claw through the must-do’s, the should-do’s, and the do-nows to find something real. In December, it definitely takes both hands to catch a day. So I’m going to aim for a minute here and there. Maybe an hour. I’m not going to give in. I’m going to take a deep breath. Read a few words. Write a sentence.
In her January 2nd entry, May Sarton writes,
“I
can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become even for those, like me, without children. Everyone must feel revolt as I do about the middle of December when I am buried under the necessity of finding presents, the immense effort of wrapping and sending, and the never-ended guilt about unsent cards…”
In an attempt at a real thought for today, I leave you with this. In her last entry in the book, she suggests that writing is a “messenger of growth,” that from where we are, “we write toward what we will become…”
[Something about my desk this morning felt familiar, hence this re-post from December 19, 2008.]
