Why to write, or not

"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

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

 -- Julia Glass, I See You Everywhere

Reliquary

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

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

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.