adventures of a midlife writer

A writer's library

2012-02-19T15:24:00.000-05:00

Strunk & White: The Elements of Style, illus. by Maira Kalman

Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
Madison Smartt Bell, Narrative Design
Anne Bernays & Pamela Painter, What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers
Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer
Renni Browne & Dave King, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers
Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction
Julia Cameron, Letters to a Young Artist
Raymond Carver, Fires
John Gardner, The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist
Philip Gerard, Creative Nonfiction
Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones, Wild Mind, and Old Friend from Far Away
Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The New Well-Tempered Sentence
Ariel Gore, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers
Ted Kooser & Steve Cox, Writing Brave and Free
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist
Ron Padgett, ed., Handbook of Poetic Forms
Nancy Peacock, A Broom of One’s Own: Words on Writing, Housecleaning and Life
George Singleton, Pep Talks, Warnings & Screeds
William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl
William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White, The Elements of Style
Abigail Thomas, Thinking about Memoir
Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

Writing advice from Ruth Harrap

2012-02-16T13:58:00.000-05:00

Whenever I start to take myself too seriously, I reread Penelope Lively's “Crumbs of Wisdom.” In the story, Elaine, a writing teacher and "published writer ... whose two novels, long out of print, could occasionally be tracked down in public libraries," is thrilled that she and her students are to be given audience with Ruth Harrap, a once-famous romance novelist. In this scene, Elaine and her students are gathered in Ruth Harrap’s flat.

At this moment there came the unmistakable sound of a lavatory being flushed. Ruth Harrap re-entered the room, adjusting her skirt, and sat down again without a word. The group fidgeted uneasily.

“Have a look round the garden if you like,” said Ruth Harrap.

The group gazed out of the window, beyond which the conifers and a rectangle of lank grass were almost obscured by a curtain of drizzle.

“Well ...,” murmured Elaine. “What we’re all wondering,” she went on brightly, “is ... what advice would you give to the aspiring writer?”

“The who?”

“Aspiring writer. The ... you know ... person who wants to write.”

"You needn’t spell it out,” said Ruth Harrap tartly, displaying her first sign of animation. “I couldn’t hear you, that’s all.” She paused. “Don’t. That’s what I’d say.”

Elaine laughed merrily. “Oh, I do understand. I mean, in my humble way I’ve toiled in the vineyard as well. I know. It’s grueling. Punishing. But the rewards, Miss Harrap! And I don’t of course mean financial rewards. The artistic satisfaction. All that.”

There was a silence. The author stared at Elaine, her face knotted in disapproval. “That may be your experience, for what it’s worth. It’s not mine. I never wrote but for cash. I wanted to be a buyer in a department store. Never got promotion. Ten years in china and gifts, I was, and then all those books, and I don’t know which was worst.” She heaved herself to her feet again. “You’d better have some tea before you go. How many with sugar?”

. . .

Broccoli

2012-02-13T15:19:00.000-05:00

I'm on Falls of the Neuse Road, stuck in traffic behind a wreck, not far from the house where Aunt Helen lived before she left Raleigh to escape the traffic. I don't blame her for leaving. I never blamed her, though I did miss her after she moved away. I remember a night she had me over for supper -- I was new to Raleigh then -- and as an appetizer served raw broccoli florets with a curried mayo dip, thus commencing my long love affair with curry, which I had never before tasted, and which was more exotic and wonderful than I could have imagined.

I'm sure Aunt Helen forgot about the broccoli right away, but I never have.

I'm driving around the wreck now, no one hurt. I'm getting off Falls of the Neuse, heading downtown to the grocery store.

I don't have a grocery list, I just know we need food for supper. I walk in the store and, without stopping to think, make a beeline for the broccoli and pick out a nice head, which tonight I will eat in memory of Aunt Helen, who opened new worlds for me.

"Emma called, good news"

2012-02-08T13:06:00.001-05:00

Maybe my favorite note from my husband ever . . . so I called Emma back, that's my agent, and the good news is, BYRD will be published by Dzanc Books in spring 2014! Let the celebrating begin, and go on and on and on . . . .

painting by Anna Podris

Blue Nights

2012-01-19T10:24:00.001-05:00

Providence, May 2011

"During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone."

The last book I read in 2011, a Christmas gift from my husband, was Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, a brief, quiet memoir that turned me inside out. Didion's daughter is gone now, and her husband, and her own health is fragile. She lives alone, her home no longer a nest but a closet full of mementoes, reminders of things she does not want to remember.

Reading the book, I thought of all the people I have lost, and how the words we summon to honor a person at death, no matter how honest or eloquent or incisive, no matter how Didionesque, are never adequate, never exactly right. Some things cannot be contained in words. Art, like life, like death, is never perfect. But, as evidenced by Blue Nights, the very act of reaching for words, putting words to paper, may be honor enough.

Inspire.

2011-10-17T11:04:00.000-04:00

"Our job is not to suffer more so that others can suffer less. Our job is to express our divinity to its fullest. The world needs inspiration more than it needs another suffering servant."

-- Neusom Holmes, October 16, 2011

Aunt Helen, who inspired me.

Dispatches from the Millay Colony

2011-09-27T14:17:00.001-04:00

"Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer."
– Louise Glück

Edna's house at Steepletop

Edna St. Vincent Millay, the wildly famous American poet, cultural icon and sexual pioneer, died in 1950 — not from a heart attack as was reported at the time, and maybe not even by accident, though this is never talked about: she pitched backwards down a flight of stairs after first carefully setting her glass of white wine on a ledge.

Edna’s will left her estate, Steepletop, to her older sister, Norma Millay Ellis, who moved into the house and lived there until her own death in 1986. For thirty-six years, Norma treated the house as a museum, carefully preserving all of her sister’s things — every book, paper, picture, article of clothing, even Edna’s toiletries — exactly as Edna had left them. Norma allowed nothing to be disturbed. She became, literally, her sister’s keeper.

"What lips these lips have kissed" --
Edna's bed, shared sometimes with her husband,
sometimes with a lover; her bedjacket and bell.

Edna

In her later years Norma established the nonprofit organization that continues to preserve the house. Norma also established the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Throughout Norma's years at Steepletop, the only part of the estate she claimed for her own was a small outbuilding, to which she added a screened porch.

Norma's cabin

We are told, the artists and writers and composers who come to the colony to work, that Edna was a generous woman. Of that I have no doubt. But it is Norma I want to thank.

Dispatches from the Millay Colony

2011-09-11T16:33:00.001-04:00

"Poems are perfect.

Picketing sometimes is better."

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1927

Dispatches from the Millay Colony

2011-09-06T13:48:00.000-04:00

Would a mountain have meaning, would goldenrod,
if there were no one to write about it?

Dispatches from the Millay Colony

2011-09-03T08:52:00.004-04:00

Edna in Autumn

Those brazen nights before the Fish

rose numbly from the sea,

before the fires of summer died—

remember them to me.

I wanted to believe that love

could ripen without rotting,

and candle-yellow evenings

would not burn down to nothing.

Tonight I sit in supper-robe

before an empty plate;

I’ve eaten but I am not full.

The room is dark. I wait.

photographs: gate, Edna's writing cabin at Steepletop

Why to write, or not

2011-08-28T15:06:00.001-04:00

"If I don't feel that something really needs to be written, I'd rather not write it."

-- Suzanne Vega, Solo

Sentence of the day

2011-08-11T22:18:00.001-04:00

"Slowly, and with a concentration that totally cancelled out my presence, she slit the tape."

-- Julia Glass, I See You Everywhere

Reliquary

2011-07-01T17:08:00.007-04:00

Day Minders for 2009 and 2010 with nothing written in them.

An emery board.

A cuticle pusher.

A small pair of scissors.

A box of Bandaids.

A mirror and comb.

Tweezers.

A lipstick, coral, ordered from Bloomingdale’s.

A tissue blotter with a coral imprint: her thin, creased lips.

A pouch of coupons, all of which expired before her estate could be inventoried.

A wallet with three twenties, a ten, two quarters, two dimes, a nickel and five pennies, because it’s important to keep cash on hand, which is what the Clerk of Court’s form calls it: “cash on hand.” $70.80.

An unfilled prescription.

Five pens and a pencil.

Pictures of children: great-nieces and great-nephews who, even if they knew her, won't remember her.

Keys to a climate-controlled storage unit full of framed prints, record albums, songbooks, and boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of unused stamps the Post Office won’t buy back.

Credit cards from the department stores where she liked to go shoe-shopping on her way home from the beauty parlor. Every week, even after the cancer, after her fall, when she was on oxygen and had little stamina, she managed to get her hair done. When she went out, she stayed out as long as possible, shopping until she was exhausted, leaving the caregiver to deal with her invalid partner. Now her closet is full of shoes, many never unboxed. They could be sent to tornado victims if the Red Cross took shoes but they don’t, it’s money only.

Hand lotion.

Hand sanitizer.

A safety pin.

My Eudora Welty year

2011-05-08T14:59:00.001-04:00

Lately I've taken time away from my writing practice to care for elderly family members who live out of town. Most days I'm hovered over by the characters in my interrupted novel. They're like guardian angels, making me feel at home no matter where I am. Sometimes they nag me for not paying enough attention to them. I say to them, well, Eudora Welty spent fifteen years taking care of her parents, and the characters in her stories didn't suffer one iota. They smile, all angelic and amused, and say, ah but sweetheart, you're no Eudora Welty.

Small world

2011-02-22T19:55:00.029-05:00

Joni Mitchell on Emily Carr: "I love her . . . . It so helps to find a writer whose style I love and maybe it's because she's a painter . . . . I've read a lot of great writers and I go 'Oh, this is a great writer,' but I don't love it. I can't explain it, it's just the way Emily Carr creates a sentence . . . like a songwriter's sentence. She's extremely gifted at condensing a lot into a very small space. She visually saturates her sentences in a way that's beyond compare to me." (Quoted in Michelle Mercer's Will You Take Me As I Am.)

I fell in love with Emily Carr's art during a trip to British Columbia years ago, and only recently discovered her writing. The Book of Small, first published in 1942, is her memoir of early childhood, a portrait of the artist as a minutely observant young girl in frontier Victoria. Joni Mitchell is right about these sentences: they're saturated with sensory detail. Rich, fresh, startling.

From "Sunday": "Dr. Reid [the Presbyterian minister] had very shiny eyes and very red lips. He wore a black gown with two little white tabs like the tail of a bird sticking out from under his beard. He carried a roll in his hand like Moses, and on it were all the things that he was going to say to us."

From "The Cow Yard": "But it was in the Cow Yard that you felt most strongly the warm life-giving existence of the great red-and-white loose-knit Cow."

From "Mrs. Crane," about a neighbor who cared for Small (Carr's name for herself) and her sisters when their mother was ill: "Mary Crane and our Alice were shy little girls. They sat on the sofa with their dolls in their laps. Their eyes stared like the dolls' eyes. Mrs. Crane would not allow dolls to be dressed or undressed in the drawing-room; she said it was not nice."

From "The Bishop and the Canary": "Small had earned the canary and loved him. How she did love him! When they had told her, 'You may take your pick,' and she leaned over the cage and saw the four fluffy yellow balls, too young to have even sung their first song, her breath and her heart acted so queerly that it seemed as if she must strangle. She chose the one with the topknot. He was the first live creature she had ever owned. 'Mine! I shall be his God,' she whispered."

The book flies by and is over before you know it. Like childhood.

Why I'm glad I went to AWP

2011-02-14T16:59:00.013-05:00

What Would Judy Blume Do?

The Amtrak conductor who wished everyone a "Happy Groundhog's Day."

Woodley Park, one of my favorite DC neighborhoods.

VCCA's opening-night party at Open City. A sweet welcome.

Free stuff at the bookfair. My treasure: a “What Would Judy Blume Do?” pencil from Nieto Press.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s keynote address, in which she read a short memoir of her writing life, a piece as graceful and moving as any of her stories. I sat on the front row, mesmerized.

Junot Diaz (“Great art is made in the elsewheres.”)

Holding in my hot little hands the new Painted Bride Quarterly with my story inside. Meeting the lovely & spirited editor, Kathy Volk Miller.

Discovering new presses. Discovering old presses that are new to me.

The Gang of Four: previously unacquainted women writers from North Carolina. We commandeered the dance floor at the Marriott Friday night and didn't leave until the DJ fell asleep.

Panels, panels, panels: The Intimate Detail (Alice McDermott, Mary Kay Zuravleff, Carole Burns), Raymond Carver in the Workshops (Carol Sklenicka, Brett Lott, Douglas Unger, C.J. Hribal), Putting the Story in History (Ron Hansen, Philip Gerard, Debra Brenegan), Short Story to Novel (Alan Heathcock, Heidi Durrow, Eugenia Kim, Marie Mockett, Alexi Zentner, and Tea Obreht), and The Craft of Historical Fiction (Robin Oliveira, John Pipkin, Kelly O’Connor McNees, Anna Keesey). And these were just the ones I loved.

Old friends.

New friends.

Pets & peeves

2011-02-08T16:27:00.008-05:00

"Insomnia in a small town," Duncan, BC, 2007 © Len Langevin

Pet: the word “clean” to mean “empty.” Last night our train made an unscheduled stop in Weldon, North Carolina, so the crew could manually set a switch. It had been raining, and the town was darkly shiny, pink-amber from sodium vapor lights. A woman sitting behind me showed her daughter. “Look it,” she said. “The streets is so clean. They’s nobody out, not a single body out there.”
---
Peeve: when a writer, of all people, uses “verbal” to mean “oral.”
---
Peeve: stories about children who disappear never to be found again and the narrator knows what happened to them but withholds the information in order to build suspense. This is what Raymond Carver called a cheap trick.
---
Peeve: stories about children who disappear never to be found again and not even the writer knows what happened to them.

Why I'm going to AWP

2011-01-31T12:44:00.004-05:00

An editor talked me into it. She said, "The first question to ask yourself isn't, can I survive on 4 hours' sleep, can I afford this, what about my real job, etc. It’s, do I like cocktails?"

I have my warm coat, my comfortable shoes, and a new journal. I have business cards and a pocket full of hard candy. I'm a midlife writer ready for adventure.

AWP Conference schedule

Happy without cause

2011-01-27T16:55:00.001-05:00

What you can't tell is, there's glitter in her lipstick.

Byrd, chapter one

2011-01-22T14:23:00.010-05:00

Dear Byrd,

This is how I told your father.

We climbed up on his roof — he lived at the beach; we could see the ocean, wrinkles of light in the distance. I was wearing a billowy cotton skirt. I wanted to look soft, unthreatening, unselfconsciously pretty. I wanted your father to love me. My legs were pale, not used to sun in February. I had painted my toenails lavender. I wanted him to be a little sorry he hadn't loved me all along.

He had a mustache and his hair was cut in what we called a mullet — short in front, long in back. He was tanned and lean. Long arms, long flat fingers. He was glad to see me, he said.  He didn’t ask why I’d come back so soon.

The roof of his apartment was flat, asphalt. All grit and sparkle.

He unfolded an orange blanket from his sofabed and we laid out our picnic, a lavish spread: smoothies, crinkle-cut fries from his favorite stand on the beach, canned peaches from his kitchen, and barbecue I’d brought from home, packed on dry ice in a travel cooler. So much food.  I had to make myself eat. I chewed slowly, counting to thirty with each bite, the way they say you’re supposed to.

There was a warm breeze blowing. It ruffled my skirt.

Your father offered to spike my smoothie.

No, I said, and covered my cup with my hand.

I wish I could tell you we were young, inexperienced, not yet grownups or ready to be.  That's the story you're expecting, isn't it? In fact we were thirty-two. We’d grown up together. Everything about that afternoon — our picnic, the roof, the sun, the salty air, your father's pilled orange blanket, him sitting beside me close and warm — had been coming all my life.

After we’d eaten, when I couldn’t put it off any longer, I told him my news, the news I had carried across the country to deliver in person. I’d thought if I could see him when I told him, I would know what to do.

I was delicate, telling him. Artful, as I’d practiced. So artful he didn’t understand at first what I was saying. He blinked like the sun was hurting his eyes. The big white California sun, dazzling, warm even in February, constant, as if it knew already, and forgave, as I never will, everything that had happened between us, everything that was about to happen.

painting: Anna Podris

Arthur Rimbaud

2011-01-15T18:51:00.003-05:00

He did not change my life the way he changed Patti Smith's or Bob Dylan's, though after reading A Season in Hell and Illuminations I was inspired to write some prose poems. I was getting into a rhythm, writing prose poems like I'd invented the form myself, when I came across an interview with a journal editor who said she'd been getting so many prose poems she'd decided to quit publishing them altogether.

Birthday books!

2010-08-07T19:03:00.004-04:00

The Book of Small / Emily Carr
Memory Wall / Anthony Doerr
The Thieves of Manhattan / Adam Langer

Bear

2010-07-11T12:02:00.012-04:00

He has been awake all night, ever since the bear took the lid off the can of bird seed, peeked in, shrugged, then stood down and stared at him through the porch door. (He thinks bear; he doesn’t know the word raccoon.) The curious black eyes fascinated him, the mask, the delicate fingers and toes, the way the bear stood on his hind legs, the striped tail big as his own. He whimpered through the screen door. The bear didn’t answer but went lumping up the hill, into the night. He tried to follow, ran from window to window, whimpering.

Now the sun is up and so are the people, wanting to play with him, but he’s sleepy and frustrated and hot. It’s summer; his fur is thick. The man brushes him. He does not want to be brushed. He does not want to be thick and orange. He wants to be gray like the bear, with small round ears. He wants delicate fingers and toes, not big tufted feet. He wants to be wild, to disappear into the night. He wants a mask. The man keeps stroking him with the stupid plastic brush.

He hisses.

Picture window

2010-06-24T16:19:00.017-04:00

(Another new song, a blues in A minor.
One of these days I'll add audio.)

girl at her picture window
watching the clouds blow by
the sun and the stars, the boys in the cars
the road and the prairie sky

the prairie’s a place for leaving
here’s how you say goodbye
pack up your hopes and tune your guitar and kiss your mother
pick up your feet and fly

to the city, the blazing nights
the crowds, the crazy colored lights
that’s where she’s gonna go

girl wants a man to hold her
she won’t let him hold her long
she’s got a suitcase full of dreams and desperation
come morning she’ll be gone

somewhere a lover is lonesome
somewhere a baby cries
somewhere she’s singing her blue blue love songs
her sorrowful lullabies

in the city, her famous nights
the crowds, her name up in lights
she did what she had to do

girl in a dark motel room
radio turned down low
one of these nights she’ll be famously forgotten
someone you used to know

girl at a picture window
call her the prairie queen
no matter how sweetly she promises to love you
love isn’t everything
love isn’t everything
love isn't everything

photo: Max Church

Mockingbird

2010-06-12T20:04:00.009-04:00

here here
Peter Peter
free free
per-fect
whit whit whit
dooey ooey
never never chick chick
wheat wheat wheat wheat
somewhere, somewhere
four more now horrit horrit
hunt hunt hunt hunt LuCILLE, LuCILLE
wee wee tiny baby
okay
cigarette, cigarette?

New song

2010-05-08T11:27:00.027-04:00

Michael Timmins on Townes Van Zandt: “What he taught me was that no matter how lyrical or poetic a song is, it should always be grounded in a place or an event.”

– A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt, Robert Earl Hardy

This April I was working in an arts colony in the mountains of Virginia. Everything was fresh and green, coming back to life; all you had to do was set foot outside and you felt full of possibility. One morning I woke up thinking about the spring my father died, nineteen years ago, and how my mother wasn't much older then than I am now. I tried to imagine how she might feel on a day like this.

Tender Green

in the hills it’s early spring
morning opens tender green
bluest sky, wish you could see it

with my hands I count the days
old men bring me tired bouquets
small talk, comfort when I need it

young and reckless for too long
we thought love would make us strong
why’d you leave me here alone
I still love you anyhow

you were the sleekest boy I’d seen
I said you were my own James Dean
and I the country girl who’d hold you

your dark car blazing in the sun
I saw the man you might become
a gentle man, I wish I’d told you

all the nights and all the days
all the miles that rolled away
all the things I did not say
I would say them to you now

robins sing, the mountains rise
I think of you and close my eyes
where did they go, our by-and-bys
I would cry if I knew how

headlong days and wasted nights
we lost our chance to make things right
I'm tired of being broken

all the hills are tender green
can you hear the robins sing
sad and bright the morning opens

John Steinbeck, world's greatest breakfast writer

2010-03-30T19:51:00.011-04:00

"He shoveled the bacon out on a plate and broke the eggs and they jumped and fluttered their edges to brown lace and made clucking sounds."

"The hot cakes rose like little hassocks, and small volcanoes formed and erupted on them until they were ready to be turned."

-- East of Eden

Twin towers, Chatham County

2010-02-18T19:12:00.005-05:00

James Salter opening sentences

2010-01-18T08:36:00.028-05:00

"Barcelona at dawn."

"This happened near Carbondale to a woman named Jane."

"It's hard now to think of all the places and nights, Nicola's like a railway car, deep and gleaming, the crowd at the Un, Deux, Trois, Billy's."

"Mrs. Pence and her white shoes were gone."

"At ten-thirty then, she arrived."

"All afternoon the cars, many with out-of-state plates, were coming along the road."

"It was late August."

"Mrs. Chandler stood alone near the window in a tailored suit, almost in front of the neon sign that said in small, red letters PRIME MEATS."

"There is a kind of minor writer who is found in a room of the library signing his novel."

"In the garden, standing alone, he found the young woman who was a friend of the writer William Hedges, then unknown but even Kafka had lived in obscurity, she said, and so moreover had Mendel, perhaps she meant Mendeleev."

"Billy was under the house."

Old

2009-12-04T20:01:00.015-05:00

We’d been exploring one of my favorite parts of North Carolina, the Pamlico coast: Washington, Bath (the state's oldest town, with its oldest church), and, up the Pungo River, Belhaven, where we ate flounder for lunch and toured the museum. Now we were heading home, with me driving, Anthony riding up front, Kelly and Mike in back. At first we were all talking. Gradually, as lunch settled, Anthony and Mike fell asleep and the car went quiet. That was okay. It was a nice drive, a golden day, sun stretching out long across the cotton fields. I've always loved late November. I've always loved this landscape. Miles and miles of nothing.

When I checked the rearview, Kelly was wide awake, fidgeting like she does when she's just figured something out. "This is what old people do," she said. "They all get in the car and go riding around in the country and don’t talk."

Even an animal couldn't save it.

2009-11-12T15:28:00.007-05:00

This week I tried to read a novel that’s coming up for discussion at the library, a bestseller. I don't often read bestsellers, but I like discussing books at the library, and this one had an unusual premise involving an animal, and I like animals. I couldn’t get to page fifty. The sentences were soggy, and every chapter ended with something or someone "glowing palely in the growing dark," "silhouetted by the falling dusk," etc. There was a time when I would have finished the book anyway, if only to complain during the library discussion, but that was last year.

photo: Anthony Ulinski

Blue parrot, or the perils of nonfiction

2009-11-03T09:41:00.025-05:00

Lately I've been writing personal essays, a new form for me, and twice last week I let worries over the feelings of others creep into my editing decisions. It's hard enough to edit when your motives are purely literary. In an odd sort of punctuation to these episodes, I happened on an essay by David Sedaris, "Repeat After Me," in which he repeats a story his sister has told him in confidence. The particulars of the story aren't important; the point is that Sedaris is telling it. The essay is about betrayal, and the guilt that often goes along with writing personal stories. In the last scene, Sedaris imagines himself in his sister’s kitchen, chanting while his sister's parrot listens, teaching the parrot to say, "Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me."

blue parrot photo: JT Reby / jtdc.files.wordpress.com.

Stories!

2009-10-31T15:14:00.014-04:00

Two of my favorite books this year are story collections. Going Away Shoes is Jill McCorkle's heart-rendingest, funniest, most satisfying work yet. If you've ever taken care of an aging parent, been divorced, remarried, tried to blend families, if you've ever been at the mercy of a plumber on Christmas Eve or dated an imaginary boyfriend, and even if you haven't, these stories are for you.

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing is the first book by Lydia Peelle, one of the "Five Under 35" writers honored this year by the National Book Foundation. Set in the hill country of Tennessee, these stories are bleakly beautiful and haunting as high lonesome music. I loved them AND the red boots Lydia wore to her reading in Raleigh.

A few of my favorite books

2009-10-27T13:41:00.009-04:00

Any Small Thing Can Save You / Christina Adam
A Box of Matches / Nicholson Baker
In Cold Blood / Truman Capote
Where I'm Calling From / Raymond Carver
Death Comes for the Archbishop / Willa Cather
The House on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros
The End of the Story / Lydia Davis
Slouching Towards Bethlehem / Joan Didion
The Book of Daniel / E.L. Doctorow
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon / Mark Doty
The Woman Who Walked into Doors / Roddy Doyle
The Brothers K / David James Duncan
Light in August / William Faulkner
I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere / Anna Gavalda
In the Land of Dreamy Dreams / Ellen Gilchrist
Catch-22 / Joseph Heller
Tumble Home / Amy Hempel
The Secret of Cartwheels / Patricia Henley
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest / Ken Kesey
Interpreter of Maladies / Jhumpa Lahiri
Unaccustomed Earth / Jhumpa Lahiri
The Diviners / Margaret Laurence
To Kill a Mockingbird / Harper Lee
The Five Thousand and One Nights / Penelope Lively
Seeing Eye / Michael Martone
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? / Lorrie Moore
Beloved / Toni Morrison
The Moons of Jupiter / Alice Munro
Dusk / James Salter
The Loom / R.A. Sasaki
Burning Patience / Antonio Skarmeta
The Grapes of Wrath / John Steinbeck
View with a Grain of Sand / Wislawa Szymborska
Slaughterhouse-Five / Kurt Vonnegut
Collected Stories / Eudora Welty
Mrs. Dalloway / Virginia Woolf

In memory of my father

2009-10-19T18:31:00.005-04:00

Today would have been my father's 77th birthday. Here he is in Germany in 1956, the year I was born: Max M. Church, 24-year-old U.S. Army cryptographer. From him I inherited a wide forehead, blue eyes, and a tendency toward fiction.

Please, not the blog.

2009-10-17T16:45:00.002-04:00

I love words. I love to hear them spoken, read aloud, sung, whispered. I love to hear them being tapped out on computer keys, or typewriters, when there used to be typewriters. I love pens and pencils on paper, and erasers. I love the hushed, holy sound of a book being opened, a page being turned. I love words that sound like what they mean. A word I do not love is "blog," which sounds like a sickness -- lethargy, stuffy nose, churning stomach. "Oh, no, she's got the blog."