Small world

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

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



"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.”
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Peeve: when a writer, of all people, uses “verbal” to mean “oral.”
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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.
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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

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

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

Byrd, chapter one

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

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.