A Brilliant Shade of Red

Monday Morning Quote: Jeffery Levine on Craft Annotations

2012-01-30T06:00:00.000-05:00

[T]he idea behind craft annotations is to learn by close examination and informal analysis just what’s going on inside poems written by others. We hold the pen in our hand as we walk and talk our way through a poem, while trying to pay close attention to just one or two elements of the poet’s craft. We ask ourselves, just how does the poet make this or that transcendence happen on the page? The idea is to become a poetry explorer, and as befits and benefits the role of the explorer, to make discoveries that we can then claim for ourselves – both for our own enlightenment (what are some of the ways in which this poet makes that poem effective?) and for our own use: now how can I employ these elements of craft – these tools from the poet’s tool belt – in order to write better poems?
...Let me say that I’ve always found it helpful when annotating a poem to write the thing out, longhand. There’s no better way to get a tactile feel for what’s going on in a poem.

—Jeffrey Levine, Making Better Poems, Part II — with sample annotations

This series of blog posts by the editor-in-chief of Tupelo Press has been incredibly helpful reading for me—especially as I am just starting to write craft annotations myself—and I recommend it to you highly.

Monday Morning Quote: Marvin Bell

2012-01-09T06:00:00.000-05:00

Much of our lives involves the word “no.” In school, we are mostly told, Don’t do this, do that. Don’t do it this way, do it that way. But art is the big yes. In art, you get a chance to make something where there was nothing.

—Marvin Bell, Commencement Address, Whidbey Writers Workshop, Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, MFA Graduation

Independent Booksellers + eBooks = Awesome

2012-01-05T06:00:00.000-05:00

I got a Kindle a little over a year ago, and traded up to an iPad last month. Eight of the books that will be in my top ten for 2011 were read on an ereader. (Confession: I did make a second purchase of one, Leah Hager Cohen's The Grief of Others in hardcover because I loved it and wanted a version signed by the author. I see this kind of thing happening with some regularity in my ereading future).

I love that I can just slip my ereader into my purse instead of lugging one or, on vacation, many books around. I love that I don't have to find more space in my already overcrowded home for the books I cannot seem to stop buying, new year's resolutions about using the library notwithstanding. But I've also felt sad and a little ashamed that I am neglecting my several local independent bookstores.

No more! Last week I read in the Porter Square Books blog that many ereader users can buy some or all of their books from independent booksellers. Here's the full list, organized alphabetically. I haven't tried it out yet but intend to do so with my next purchase and will let you know how it goes!

Happy New Year

2012-01-03T06:00:00.000-05:00

One of the things I love best about milestones like New Years and birthdays is the opportunity to make a fresh start.

This is, of course, completely delusional. You can make a fresh start any time—every Tuesday, if you so desire. Or maybe you can never really make a fresh start, but I'm in a good mood and not going there.

So the blog has gotten a bit of housekeeping this weekend. I've restarted the poetry and non-poetry top 10 lists in the right margin. I've gone through and deleted or posted all the entries in "draft" state that I'm not actually drafting (yes, little post on sloth, I am never getting back to you—ironic, no?). I've back-filled top 10 lists for all the years I've been keeping them, so they are now all in one place (here).

It feels good. This is defininitely the kind of deluded I could get used to.

Happy New Year to all!

Monday Morning Quote: Sharon Olds

2012-01-02T06:00:00.000-05:00

Poems like mine—I don't call them confessional, with that tone of admitting to wrong-doing. My poems have done more accusing than admitting. I call work like mine "apparently personal". Or in my case apparently very personal.

—Sharon Olds, interviewed in The Guardian in 2008

Some of my favorite Sharon Olds poems:
First Thanksgiving
I Go Back to May 1937
The Promise

The Final Top 10 for 2010

2011-12-08T06:00:00.000-05:00

Fire to Fire, by Mark Doty

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender

The Ticking Is the Bomb, by Nick Flynn

The Art of Description by Mark Doty

Name All the Animals, by Alison Smith

A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver

The Wild Iris, by Louise Glück

Native Guard, by Natasha Trethewey

All-American Poem, by Matthew Dickman

Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, by Steve Almond

This has sat in my "drafts" folder for almost a year, waiting for me to come up with something else to say for it, and I'm giving up and moving on to 2011. 2010 was the year I started reading a lot of poetry, and I think for 2011 I will have separate lists for poetry and prose -- see the sidebar.

Monday Morning Quote: Steve Martin on Inspiration

2011-12-05T06:00:00.000-05:00

Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

—Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

I read this book after seeing a video of a conversation between Connie Willis and Neil Gaiman at the 2011 World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, CA (below). At the end of the conversation Ms. Willis, a favorite author of mine, suggested that they each recommend one book for the attendees to read, and this was her choice.

Hazards of Poetry, Automotive Edition

2011-09-16T17:02:00.001-04:00

This morning I was working on revising some poems. Line breaks are my nemesis, and I left one poem in a state that I was less than happy about. As I was driving to work I was thinking about that poem and suddenly had an idea about how to restructure my problem stanza. I'm not sure what I was looking at (OK, I think I may have been looking at the line breaks in my head), but the car ahead of me braked suddenly and I just missed a collision. But(!) I did not forget my new line breaks, and I'm going home now to make the change...

Monday Morning Quote: Kurt Vonnegut and Saul Steinberg on Two Kinds of Artists

2011-09-05T06:00:00.002-04:00

Who was the wisest person I ever met in my life? It was a man, but of course it needn't have been. It was the graphic artist Saul Steinberg, who like everybody else I know, is dead now. I could ask him anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer, gruffly, almost a growl....

I said, "I am a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling like we are in two different businesses. What makes me feel that way?"

Six seconds passed, and then he said "It's very simple. There are two sort of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one response to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself."

I said, "Saul, are you gifted?"

Six seconds passed, and then he growled, "No, but what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations."

—Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country

Monday Morning Quote: Kim Addonizio on Art as a Response to Hopelessness

2011-08-29T06:00:00.001-04:00

Art is a way of dealing with hopelessness, with anger and despair and loss. It is a creative response. While there is a real distinction between art and therapy, the truth is that art is theraputic, It helps you to take something that is within you and make a place for it outside of yourself.

—Kim Addonizio, in Ordinary Genius

Monday Morning Quote: Ellen Hinsey on the Power of Poetry

2011-08-22T06:00:00.003-04:00

Contrary to a generally held view, poetry is a very powerful tool, because poetry is the conscience of a society.... No individual poem can stop a war–that's what diplomacy is supposed to do. But poetry is an independent ambassador for conscience: it answers to no one, its crosses borders without a passport, and it speaks the truth. That's why, despite talk about its marginalization, it is one of the most powerful of the arts.

—Ellen Hinsey, in an interview with Poetry Magazine

I owe this week's quote to Garrison Keillor's wonderful The Writer's Almanac. I find it invariably interesting and inspiring, and I highly recommend that you subscribe to and support it.

Monday Morning Quote: New Poet Laureate Philip Levine on Surprise

2011-08-15T06:00:00.003-04:00

[Y]ou have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, "That is truly what I felt." That is truly what I saw.

—Philip Levine, in an interview with NPR

Monday Morning Quote: Louise Glück on Poetry

2011-07-11T06:00:00.002-04:00

Poetry is autobiography stripped of context and commentary.

—Louise Glück, Proofs and Theories

History of Haiku

2011-06-21T09:13:00.004-04:00

There's an interesting post today on the history of Haiku in boston.com's Braniac blog. Makes me want to try some collaborative poetry...

Massachusetts Poetry Festival

2011-05-10T06:00:00.003-04:00

I'm looking forward to the Massachusetts Poetry Festival this coming weekend in Salem. I went last year and had a great time, and things look even bigger and better this year—lots of great sessions and some wonderful poets speaking and reading, including Mark Doty.

Or, as I emailed to my writing group, who know how much I admire his work: "Mark Doty! MARK DOTY!!!!" Can you hear the squeak? My fandom has reached a peak not achieved by anyone since Mike Nesmith of the Monkees (and there, I've managed to make myself look both old and hopelessly dorky in a single sentence). But Doty's Visitation is one of my all-time favorite poems; I regularly make friends and comparative strangers sit and listen as I read it. No matter how many times I do, the last lines still give me (and them!) the same jolt of surprise and pleasure that they delivered the first time. I'm seriously considering a tattoo.

Anywho, the festival is a very well-run event with great poets, excellent workshops, and Mark Doty(!). There's still time to register and get in on the action. I hope I'll see you there!

Paul Lisicky on About-ness

2011-05-09T06:00:00.001-04:00

Sadye Teiser: In workshop, you were talking about the complexity of figuring out what a piece of fiction is "about," what aspects you want to focus on as you tell each story. Could you talk a little bit about this process? Have you ever, in your own writing, figured out what you want your book to focus on while writing and then had to backtrack?

Paul Lisicky: About-ness is such a tricky thing. I don't think we ever want our work to be wholly explainable, or to support a thesis. We want it to be mysterious. We want it to move like music. But we also want it to be bound by meaning. A lot of that meaning is already embedded in our metaphors, whether we know it or not. The trick is to write toward a space that knows more than we do. And that often involves throwing out the original plan.

—Paul Lisicky, author of The Burning House, in an interview with Sadye Teiser for the UNCW Creative Writing Department newsletter, excepted on his blog.

Monday Morning Quote: Ira Glass on Getting Started

2011-05-02T06:00:00.000-04:00

What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

—Ira Glass, host of This American Life

Thanks to Kevin for sending this along. A longer slice of the interview from which it's drawn is here:

Monday Morning Quote: Nicholson Baker on Not Procrastinating

2011-04-18T06:00:00.000-04:00

And never think, Oh, heck, I'll write that whole poem later. Never think, First I'll write this poem about my old orange life jacket, so that I'll be ready to confront the more haunting, daunting reality of this poem here about the treehouse that was rejected by its tree. No. If you do, the bigger theme will rebel and go sour on you. It'll hang there like a forgotten chili pepper on the stem. Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when your crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name, you'll hate yourself.

—Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

Poetry Critique at Our House

2011-04-13T06:00:00.001-04:00

Unlike almost all of my writer friends, I'm married to a non-writer. But Ben is still my first reader. This worked better—or at least was less fraught— when I was writing non-fiction. Reaction to my poetry seems to be limited to a discussion of its level of grimness. A recent example:

Me: What do you think?

Ben: It's pretty grim. You know that, right?

Me: Yes, but can you see why I'm excited about it?

Ben: It's ... evocative.

Me: What does that mean?

Ben: It evokes a degree of horror and dread greater than any of your other poems.

Score!

Monday Morning Quote: Gray Jacobik on Technique

2011-04-11T06:00:00.004-04:00

Principles of technique? My technique consists of writing the best sentences I can write, trying to vary type and length of sentences, adding as much rhyme, consonance, alliteration, and assonance as I can without sounding too obviously poetic. Then I spent a lot of time searching for synonyms that might be more interesting, more precise or more musical than my first word choices. I know that I stop myself a few times and ask whether or not I've got something to say; any central idea. The ideological level of poem making is important to me. I don't care for poems that carry only impressions or sensations and little or not thought. I try to make sure there's at least one line that aims at what I like to think of as the intellectual underpinning of the poem. Lastly, after everything else has settled down, I begin shaping the poem into lines and form, although some lines, as lines, form themselves from the beginning. This is a simplification, of course, since thousands of decisions, some conscious, far many more unconscious, are made while writing a poem; at least that's my sense of things.

—Gray Jacobik, interviewed in Brian Brodeur's excellent blog, How a Poem Happens

Monday Morning Quote: Nicholson Baker on Copying Poems

2011-04-04T06:00:00.000-04:00

One useful tip I can pass on is: Copy poems out. Absolutely top priority. Memorize them if you want to, but the main thing is to copy them out. Get a notebook and a ballpoint pen and copy them out. You will shocked by how much this helps you. You will see immediate results in your very next poem, I promise.

—Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

Monday Morning Quote: George Eliot on Being a Poet

2011-03-28T08:02:00.004-04:00

".... I wonder what your vocation will turn out to be: perhaps you will be a poet?"

"That depends. To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only."

"But you leave out the poems," said Dorothea. "I think they are wanted to complete the poet."

—George Eliot, Middlemarch

I started re-reading Middlemarch with a friend from work, inspired by Rebecca Mead's excellent piece in the New Yorker, and I'm very happy I did. Mead points out Eliot's universal sympathy for her characters, and I find it such pleasant company. It's not that Eliot's characters are universally good; in fact, none of them are. But their flaws are held up to the light with an understanding that does not excuse them, but also does not mistake the part for the whole. There is a glimmer of something to like or pity even in the most crabbed and self-absorbed of her characters, and something fallible in even the best. It feels so different from a lot of contemporary fiction, where we are so often invited to—or incited to—scorn for some characters, and sometimes for all characters. Eliot judges us kindly, as we would wish to be judged.

Monday Morning Quote: Nicholson Baker on Not Saving Up

2011-03-14T06:00:00.000-04:00

Another tip is: If you have something to say, say it. Don't save it up. Don't think to yourself, I'm going to build up to this truth I really want to say. Don't think, In this poem, I'm going to be sneaky and start with this other truth over here, and then I'm going to scamper around a little bit over here, and then play with some purple Sculpey over here in the corner, and finally I'll reach the truth at the very end. No, slam it in immediately. It won't work if you hold it in reserve. Begin by saying what you actually care about saying and the saying of it will guide you to the next line, and the next, and the next. If you need to arrange things differently later, you can do that.

—Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

Although I haven't previously used quotes from fiction, I liked this one very much and you can expect to see other words of wisdom from the narrator of Baker's novel in the coming weeks as I try to revive this blog.

Thanks to Cindy for recommending this novel (New York Times review here), which I am reading slowly but enjoying greatly.

A Conversation Representative of the Level of Fashion Discussion in Our Household

2010-09-14T18:00:00.001-04:00

Ben: What is it with you and all this Eileen Fisher stuff?

Me: She has a system...

Ben: She has a sister?

Me: She has a system—all the tops and jackets and pants and skirts go together.

Ben: Oh, like Garanimals.

Monday Morning Quote: W. H. Auden on His Poetry Apprenticeship

2010-09-13T06:00:00.000-04:00

...[A] would-be poet serves his apprenticeship in a library. This has its advantages. Though the Master is deaf and dumb and gives neither instruction nor criticism, the apprentice can choose any Master he likes, living or dead, the Master is available at any hour of the day or night, lessons are all for free, and his passionate admiration of his Master will ensure that he work hard to please him....

My first Master was Thomas Hardy, and I think I was very lucky in my choice. He was a good poet, perhaps a great one, but not too good. Much as I loved him, even I could see that his diction was often clumsy and forced, and that a lot of his poems were plain bad. This gave me hope where a flawless poet might have made me despair. His world and sensibility were close enough to mine...so that, in imitating him, I was being led towards not away from myself, but they were not so close as to obliterate my identity. If I looked through his spectacles, I was at least conscious of a certain eyestrain.

—W. H. Auden, "Making, Knowing and Judging,"
in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

Monday Morning Quote: Martina Navratilova on What Champions Need

2010-08-30T06:00:00.000-04:00

PARADE: What did you ... have that champions need?

Martina: I think the ability to fail. Not being afraid to put it all on the line and come up short. Most people don't have that.

From A Winning Friendship in PARADE Magazine

Monday Morning Quote: Steve Almond on What Art Does

2010-08-16T06:00:00.000-04:00

As a broad working definition, art awakens feeling.... That is what songs do, even dumb pop songs: they remind us that emotions are not an inconvenient and vaguely embarrassing aspect of the human enterprise but its central purpose.

—Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

A Recent Conversation...

2010-08-12T21:04:00.003-04:00

... while walking Lily Beth in the Middlesex Fells:

Ben: You're pretty.

KT: I'm hungry, I have to pee, and I feel dizzy.

Ben: Well, it becomes you.

That's it—our relationship in a nutshell.

Monday Morning Quote: Peter Elbow on Poetry and Rules

2010-08-09T06:00:00.001-04:00

Robert Frost said that writing poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis without a net. And that having to rhyme helped him to think of words and even ideas.... Consider the writing of a poem as the playing of a game, getting the ball through a hoop, a technical problem to be solved. It may seem very unpoetic but it leads to better luck with poems.

What you need for writing poems then is some interesting games to play, that is, some interesting rules you must obey. Allen Tate once described a poet as someone "willing to come under the bondage of limitations—if he can find them."

—Peter Elbow, Writing with Power

Monday Morning Quote: The AKC on Scars

2010-06-14T06:00:00.000-04:00

[S]cars from honorable wounds shall not be considered a fault.

—American Kennel Club Dachshund Breed Standard

I'm familiar with this quote by way of Kevin Kling's wonderful book, The Dog Says How. Highly recommended.

Monday Morning Quote: Stephen Dunn on Composing Poetry

2010-05-24T06:00:00.000-04:00

I like to talk about the composition of poems as involving a series of allegiances that we keep as long as we can, but that we're likely to modify and refine as the poem starts to insist upon itself.

—Stephen Dunn, "The Guardian Angel," in Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Own Poems, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini

Monday Morning Quote: David Huddle on Ambiguity

2010-05-10T06:00:00.000-04:00

After drafting the poem through to its tentative conclusion on the second morning after I'd begun it, I thought about it all day. As I carried out my errands, I conducted a craft discussion with myself about what the poem needed. I was aware that with the word "power" I'd simply named one of the poem's main thematic concerns—a move in composition that I almost always consider a mistake. Naming the theme—which usually occurs in the title or the conclusion of a work—often robs a poem of its natural ambiguity....

—David Huddle, "About my 'Basket': Looking for Closure," in Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Own Poems, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini

Monday Morning Quote: Mark Doty on Metaphor

2010-04-05T06:00:00.000-04:00

Sometimes it seems to me as if metaphor were the advance guard of the mind; something in us reaches out, into the landscape in front of us, looking for the right vessel, the right vehicle, for whatever will serve.

—Mark Doty, Souls on Ice on Poets.org

Monday Morning Quote: Henry James on What's Important

2010-03-29T06:00:00.000-04:00

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

—Henry James

Inspiration Galore!

2010-03-17T06:00:00.000-04:00

Because we here at A Brilliant Shade of Red^1,2 are all about inspiration, we're sharing this link to Poet's & Writer's feature, Writers Recommend, in which the editors ask writers who have been featured in the magazine to share things that have inspired them in their writing. And though I'm a subscriber and have probably received multiple emails about this, I only noticed when it was mentioned in January Gill O'Neil's excellent blog, Poet Mom—a wonderful inspiration in its own right. Dive in and get inspired!

¹That's the editorial we.
²Or possibly the royal we.³
³We're not sure.

Monday Morning Quote: Robert Peake on How to Write Good Poetry Every Day (or at Least Regularly)

2010-03-15T06:00:00.000-04:00

It seems to me that poetry is a lot like photography. The secret to getting good photos, or poems, is to take a lot of shots.

—Robert Peake, How Do You Be a Poet Every Day?, on Read Write Poem

Monday Morning Quote: Stanley Kunitz on Ending a Poem

2010-02-22T06:00:00.000-05:00

End on an image and don't explain it.

—Stanley Kunitz

The Final Top 10 for 2009

2010-02-19T06:00:00.000-05:00

Shakespeare Wrote for Money, by Nick Hornby
Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout
The Tenderness of Wolves, by Stef Penney
The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell
Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland
The Suicide Index, by Joan Wickersham
Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O'Nan
In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lee Gutkind
Abide With Me, by Elizabeth Strout
Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

This was not a great reading year for me—which is not a slam on the fine titles above, but only an observation that I read substantially less this year than in years past. And I'm late posting this wrap up. We'll all survive, I'm sure.

I was saddened that this year's list features the last collection of Believer columns from Nick Hornby, though of course happy to have one last, highly satisfying helping.

This is the second year in a row that the Pulitzer prize-winner has appeared on my list. This one initiated an Elizabeth Strout bender of sorts—though it's always a little disappointing to discover a new author you love and find that he or she has written anything less than 30 books. But Strout's three are all lovely and worth your time.

And though I've written about it here before, I'll say again that Art and Fear is a book I'll be reading again and again. I hope you like it too.

Writing Like a Farmer

2010-02-17T06:00:00.003-05:00

Last Friday I went to see the wonderful Kris Delmhorst and her band at Passim. During the course of the show, she mentioned that she used to be a farmer, and that she still writes songs like a farmer: "You plant a lot of seeds at once, and they all grow up together."

The writer friend with whom I attended the concert asked me afterwards, "Did your heart just sink when she said that?"

And I was as surprised as she when my answer was, "No, actually."

The reason is that I've started writing poetry.¹ One subset of my essay writing has been getting progressively shorter and more lyric, and for a long while this has seemed the natural next step to take. The biggest holdup was finding an introductory class that assumed no previous experience with poetry, but I finally found an eight-week course at an adult education center this winter.

And I'm loving it. In part, it's that poetry seems (to me, at least) so much less all-or-nothing than prose. The stakes on any individual poem are smaller. Don't like how it turned out? Throw it away! I haven't invested weeks or months exclusively in getting it right. Switching between works doesn't require the same level of effort. And revision is so much less painful, for reasons I have yet to understand. I know that all this should also be the case with prose, but that has always been more of a struggle for me.

Best of all, now I write like a farmer. Four weeks into my poetry class I've got four poems that are drafted and are cooling down for revision, two I'm actively working on, and two more in my head trying to build up the critical mass they need to get written.

Maybe it's just the change or a new set of goals rather than poetry per se, but I feel more productive than I have in years.

¹ Because, you know, the number of people who read literary creative nonfiction is way too high.

Monday Morning Quote: Steve Almond on Persistence

2010-02-15T06:00:00.000-05:00

Five different agents declined to represent CandyFreak. The publisher of Metal refused to even read a draft. My point is this: agents and editors sometimes don't know shit. When they reject your work, take it as your mission to prove them wrong.

—Steve Almond, This Won't Take But a Minute, Honey

Outtakes from the Legendary Cow Skulls

2010-02-14T13:58:00.007-05:00

When the Cow Skulls first started meeting, almost six years ago, we were scrupulously faithful to the workshopping guidelines from Grub Street, where we all met. We started every meeting with a prompt and free-write, went around the table in turns offering a balance of positive comments and constructive criticism, didn't allow the author to speak until after everyone else had had a say.

Our meetings these days are much less structured and more collaborative—a kind of group therapy for prose. Ideas about a piece change over the course of the discussion, the author participates throughout, and the final take on an essay or story my be something none of us had thought of when reading it to prepare for the meeting. This improvisational aspect is energizing and valuable; it can, however, make for occasionally hilarious critiques. Notable quotes from a recent Wednesday night:

Cindy (to Julie): "I think this story is too long. Or else it's too short."

Julie (to me): "I love all the words in this essay, I just don't love it."

The best part of all is that these comments were actually both meaningful and quite helpful.

Monday Morning Quote: Ann Patchett on How Fiction Writing Is Like Duck Hunting

2010-02-01T08:04:00.003-05:00

I came to understand that fiction writing is like duck hunting. You go to the right place at the right time with the right dog. You get into the water before dawn, wearing a little protective gear, then you stand behind some reeds and wait for the story to present itself. This is not to say you are passive. You choose the place and the day. You pick the gun and the dog. You have the desire to blow the duck apart for reasons that are entirely your own. But you have to be willing to accept not what you wanted to have happen, but what happens. You have to write the story you find in the circumstances you've created, because more often than not the ducks don't show up. The hunters in the next blind begin to argue, and you realize they're in love. You see a snake swimming in your direction. Your dog begins to shiver and whine, and you start to think about this gun that belonged to your father. By the time you get out of the marsh you will have written a novel so devoid of ducks it will shock you.

—Ann Patchett, What now?

Monday Morning Quote: Stephanie Elizondo Griest on Miracles

2010-01-04T06:00:00.000-05:00

I used to think authors could make their books best-sellers through willpower alone. But we can't. What we need is a miracle.

And that's fantastic. Because miracles happen. Like my Princeton fellowship. That one application, assembled the night before the deadline, bought a whole year of time to think and create. If I've learned anything in this business, it's that the more you fling yourself out there and chase those dreams and miracles, the higher your likelihood of catching one. [Lesson No. 7: Miracles happen, especially if you pursue them.]

—Stephanie Elizondo Griest, "Confessions of an Author Nomad" in Poets & Writers

The monday morning quote returns after a brief hiatus for a family emergency and I'm going to start the new year with a quote I find to be both inspiring and true--and with a plug for Poets & Writers.

In the first serious writing class I took, in the fall of 2001, our wonderful instructor Jane Brox spent a few minutes of our final class giving us some parting advice on becoming a writer, and one of her recommendations was Poets & Writers. I've had a subscription ever since, and I look forward every other month to an issue packed with interviews, advice, and deadlines. This week's quote comes from the section called "The Practical Writer," available in the print edition only, where I always seem to find something something useful and inspiring. I bet you will too.

Monday Morning Quote: Samuel Beckett on Persistence

2009-11-30T06:00:00.001-05:00

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

—Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

Thanks to Legendary Cow Skull Cindy for the suggestion!

Monday Morning Quote: Robin Abrahams on a Career in the Arts

2009-11-23T06:00:00.003-05:00

I think there are only two kinds of people who make those "If you could be happy doing anything besides acting, do it!" or "People become writers because they have no choice but to write!" One kind are the people in the field who want to feel special, called in some way, or at least not to feel so bad that they are 30 years old and don’t have health insurance. There isn't any shame in being 30 years old with no health insurance—but there’s no great romance or meaning to it, either. Really, you could have taken the real estate class and become a leasing agent. You chose not to, which is fine, but it really is a choice. The muse invites you to dance, she doesn’t mug you in an alley.

—Robin Abrahams, What We Want to Be on her blog, Miss Conduct's Mind Over Manners

Robin Abrahams (Miss Conduct) is my favorite advice columnist. She manages to be both sensible and very funny on every topic, both manners-related or, in this case, not. Check out her blog and her new book.

Monday Morning Quote: William Stafford on What Makes a Successful Poem

2009-11-16T06:00:00.000-05:00

[R]eaders do not like to extend credit to poets: a poem must have early rewards. It must be eventful in language; there must be early and frequent verbal events. Content, or topic, is not nearly enough, of course. A poem is an experience in the reading or hearing; the eventfulness of a poem comes in the experience of the reader. And in those events for the reader there must be coherence; one experience must relate to and enhance the next, and so on. Readers should not be loaded with more information and guidance than a lively mind needs—puzzlement can be accepted, but insulting clarity is fatal to a poem.

—William Stafford, You Must Revise Your Life

Monday Morning Quote: Annie Dillard, via Alexander Chee, on Persistence

2009-11-09T06:00:00.002-05:00

Talent isn’t enough, she had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It’s not rocket science, it’s habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me, she said, and they’re dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between myself and them is that I’m writing.

—Alexander Chee, "Annie Dillard and the Writing Life", in Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, edited by Elizabeth Benedict

On the basis of this quote alone, I will be attending the event for this title presented by the Harvard Bookstore, Grub Street, and The Cambridge Center for Adult Education on Friday, November 13th, at 6:00PM at the Brattle Theater. Five bucks gets you in to hear Elizabeth Benedict and contributors Chris Castellani, Margot Livesey, Jay Cantor, Julia Glass, and Jim Shepard talk about mentorship and influence. Check it out!

Special thanks to Kevin for suggesting this quote.

Hooked on Form

2009-11-04T19:08:00.001-05:00

I've noticed lately that a lot of my writing is falling into forms with relatively fixed structures: a how-to, a braided essay ("Faith and Reason"), two micro-essays, a collage ("Pictures of You"), a list ("Catch and Release"), and a chronology ("A Brief History of My Hair and What Was Said About It," just accepted for publication in Sycamore Review).

I tend to decide on the structure of a piece early. When I don't, or when I've got a structure that I haven't yet recognized, I struggle a lot more with both content and organization. Settling on a form, whenever I manage to do it, gives me a road map for completing the piece.

A well-defined structure dictates a lot of choices for the writer—particularly choices about what must be left out. If a paragraph or section or detail doesn't fit in the structure—it disrupts the timeline of a chronology, it can't gracefully be expressed in as an instruction, it's too long-winded for the target word-count—then it must go. No stays of execution on compassionate grounds. Throw in additional restrictions, like second- or third-person narration or limiting the piece to the present tense, and if the essay doesn't exactly write itself, nevertheless the way forward is both clear and narrow.

Formal constraints make explicit the kinds of choices writers make all the time. For newer writers especially this helps us understand what those choices are, gives us an understanding of the effects they produce, and gets us in the habit of making them consciously. I think that in order to grow as a writer I will have to venture beyond my road maps, but for now I'm satisfied that experimenting with form is a valuable learning experience and my time as a structure junkie will not be wasted.

Monday Morning Quote: David Bayles and Ted Orland on Perfection

2009-11-02T06:00:00.007-05:00

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those of the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an "A," forty pounds a "B," and so on. Those being graded on "quality," however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an "A." Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

—David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

I cannot say enough good things about this book. I've read it twice and now and have recommended it to every writer I know plus a couple of software engineers. I expect that I will read it regularly, as a kind of refresher course, in the future. If you want to practice any kind of craft and find that you are the biggest obstacle to your own work, this is the book for you.

I particularly love this passage. Perfectionism is my nemesis—I'm so afraid of failing, as if writing something badly would cost me anything more than the time spent. I need frequent reminders that the only way to get better at writing it to write, that even failing is a step forward.

Monday Morning Quote: A. Alvarez on Doneness

2009-10-26T06:00:00.001-04:00

As someone who writes prose for a living and poems when I get lucky, I assure you that the two activities are curiously different. No matter how many times you rewrite prose or how easily it seems to read when you are done with it, prose is never quite finished. There is always a word ill-chosen or out of place, a repetition you missed, an adjective that could be cut, a comma that should have been a semicolon—something to set your teeth on edge when you reread it later in cold print. Poems don't work like that. They are as intricate as the giant locks on a bank vault: each one of the dozens of tumblers has to click into place before the door will swing open. A poem, I mean, isn't finished until every word is precisely weighted and precisely placed, and if the poet is serious, he knows, to his sorrow, when he has it wrong and it won't let him rest. Once he's got it right, however, he knows with equal certainty that there is nothing more to be done; he has produced something that, for the time being, is as near perfect as he can make it. And that is a satisfaction worth sweating for.

—A. Alvarez, The Writer's Voice

Monday Morning Quote: William Stafford on What a Writer Is

2009-10-19T06:00:00.001-04:00

In an effort to post more regularly, read more widely on craft, and inspire myself to make every week a good writing week, I'm instituting a new feature: the Monday morning quote. Each week on Monday I'll post a quote about writing—or reading, or art more generally—in this space. Sometimes I'll have something to say about it; sometimes I'll let it stand by itself. Suggestions and contributions welcome!

Here's this week's quote:

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

—William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl

I love the way this gets at the indirect nature of the process and the very dotted line between the original intent and the finished product. It reminds me, too, how much the pleasure of writing is the surprise of seeing what comes out on the page.

I owe my introduction to William Stafford to Ellen Steinbaum's blog, Reading and Writing and the Occasional Recipe, which I recommend to you and which includes a lovely post that is particularly relevant in this, my contest-mad year: Confessions of a Poetry Contest Judge.

Rejection

2009-10-18T15:15:00.001-04:00

I wrote a snarky little satire of a rejection letter as a bookend to my posting on acceptance, but I've decided I'm not yet ready to murder my fledgling writing career.

Instead, I'm going to talk about how much I actually like my pile of rejection letters. When I used to send out my work in batches of one or two, the wait for a response seemed interminable and the rejections were bitterly disappointing. Now I send out so many that it is, as my fellow Cow Skull Julie once said, kind of an empty day when there are no SASEs in the mailbox.

For someone like me, who is good at starting essays but not so awesome at finishing them, it's positive reinforcement to look at my pile of rejections (an inch thick now!) and realize that I've actually completed essays that I don't despair of entirely and that I'm doing the work of sending them out and getting them in front of editors. When I look at those letters these days, I see that I am keeping myself in the game.

Go me!

Lily Beth, Queen of the Mulch Pile

2009-10-07T19:40:00.003-04:00

Thanks to Ed for the picture!

Acceptance

2009-08-24T07:30:00.001-04:00

In her book Bird by Bird Anne Lamott writes about discussing publication with students in her writing classes:

...I try to make sure they understand that writing, and even getting good at it, and having books and stories and articles published, will not open the doors that most of them hope for. It will not make them well. It will not give them the feeling that the world has finally validated their parking tickets, that they have in fact finally arrived.

All this is true. By the time each of my essays was published I was several months or even years removed from the day-to-day of wrestling with its structure and diction and imagery. The journals arrived and I felt happy to see them but a little distant. It's like running into old work friends from a particularly all-consuming job long after we've all moved on to other companies: the fondness remains, but the intensity has drained away. I find this leaves me with a much clearer view of my essays' sins and virtues, but no desire to revisit them. Actually, I feel positively grateful not to have to work on them anymore.

Acceptance, however, is another matter entirely. The thrill of a total stranger—someone not related to me by blood or marriage or friendship or the fact that she is in my writing group and has read fifteen drafts of an essay and wants nothing so much as to never to see it again—saying she likes my writing enough to publish it does not pall. I've gotten form letter acceptances and I've received personal emails that refer to my "fine work" or say they are "charmed" by a humorous essay. And every time, while I don't think the world has validated my parking ticket, I do feel like I got a gold star pasted on my forehead for the afternoon. It's not a durable or lasting thrill, and it doesn't help at all with the next day's work. But as an occasional shot of encouragement in what is a sometimes a lonely activity, it's more than enough.

Games Dogs Play

2009-08-22T14:17:00.005-04:00

One of the most fun things about having dogs is that they love to play.

Even on their own, dogs play inventive games. Ed, who provides Lily Beth's doggie day-stay, told us about a game the dogs had made up on their own one day this spring. All the dogs would dig a big pit in Ed's yard, and then one dog would get in it. The other dogs would jump over the pit and as they did the dog inside would jump out and try to bite them. They played this over and over. Ed says the game is called "Dog in the Hole."

But dogs like to play with people, too, and the process of figuring out what the game is—something fun for both players—is a collaborative one. Our dog tries one action, sees how we respond, and then reinforces that response positively or negatively by continuing to play or walking away. We do the same, and together we shape each other's behavior into patterns that come to have recognizable rules and variations. The play is fun, but I think the cross-species communication that goes on in developing and elaborating the game is the best part of all.

Ben and Lily Beth have come up with something we call "The Game," which is a combination of fetch and keep-away. When Ben gets home from work, LB greets him at the door with one of her stuffed toys in her mouth. They go out to the front yard and Lily Beth gives Ben the toy, he throws it for her, and then he chases her around the yard to try to get it back. Sometimes Ben gets tired of it first, sometimes LB does, but it's become one of those routines that demarcate the transition between work and home, and I think they both look forward to it.

I have finally figured out how to use the video setting on our digital camera. The intent of the video below was to capture this routine for posterity, but, alas, we're having a heat wave and neither Ben nor LB was at the top of their Game.

My Kind of Writers!

2009-08-12T18:20:00.008-04:00

As I mentioned, there are some really terrific writers in my workshop, and it's a great group of people. My one worry was that my fellow writers would be Deeply Serious and my desire to eat food that is bad for me and find the Fresh Produce store would reveal me to be the self-absorbed philistine and glutton that I am.

"No, no," my fellow writers said. "That's the other writing workshops."

Many of them are already familiar from previous visits with the town where our workshop is held. Thanks to them I now know where to get:

excellent fried seafood and fabulous onion rings
foot-long hotdogs
the best gelato in town
heavenly made-to-order pasta dishes
a nice salad when one really needs vegetables.

I've also stocked up on pastel oxford shirts and insanely comfortably cotton pants.

Best of all, though, I've made some new writer friends.

The Nunnery

2009-08-11T16:57:00.003-04:00

I'm staying at an inn just a block away from the center that offers my workshop. My room is known as "The Nunnery," and perhaps you can see why:

Most of the room (which is perhaps 6' x 12') is actually in the photo, and you can sort of see the dormer that angles over the bed. But it's cozy and comfortable, the owners are delightful, and if I have to go out into the hall to get to my bathroom, it's a small price to pay for a not-crazy-expensive room in a seaside town in August. The Nunnery got its name from a previous inhabitant and workshop attendee, a former nun, who noted that it was about the same size as her room at the convent.

I'm doing too much writing in my little room, which is making it harder and harder to sleep there. I guess that's why the writing lab at the workshop is open 24 hours a day.

Life at Writing Camp

2009-08-10T17:02:00.009-04:00

So, the writing workshop is awesome, and actually a lot more like camp than I expected—a pretty satisfying mix of structured activities and free time.

There's coffee and fruit and pastries at 8:30 and then I'm in class from 9:00 AM to noon each day.

"What?" asked Ben, when he heard I only had three hours of class a day. "I thought it would be like boot camp: 'Drop and give me a metaphor, maggots.' 'I want a literary allusion and I want it now!' 'You call that irony?'"

"Three hours a day is a lot," I said.

"I sort of imagined a Rocky-like montage," he said. "You know, pictures of you all sharpening your pencils, then a shot of you all writing in your little notebooks. Except the music is a customized version of Survivor's 'Eye of the Tiger,' like that Starbuck's commercial."

It's not quite like that, but it's still pretty intense. I have the afternoon to write and prepare for the next day's class, and then there are readings and artist talks every evening. My instructor is great, and my classmates are interesting people and really good writers. I'm determined to make the most of my time here.

The only bad news—and it's really only bad news for the Cow Skulls—is that I haven't managed to find a new topic, so be prepared for more of the same. Sooner or later I will write my way out.

Off to "Camp"

2009-08-09T16:39:00.005-04:00

I've arrived for my orientation session at the writing workshop I'm attending this week. Since I signed up in March I've been referring to it as "Writing Camp" in an unsuccessful attempt to feel less intimidated.

As I stood by the car getting ready to leave this afternoon—worrying about my clothes (trying too hard? not trying hard enough?) and worrying a lot more about the fact that I haven't written a word in the last two weeks—I said goodbye to Ben.

"I'm nervous," I said.

"What are you nervous about? It'll be fun."

"What if nobody likes me?"

"Then you'll have something to write about!"

Workshopping Comments from McSweeney's

2009-07-01T10:15:00.003-04:00

On today's New Pages blog there's a link to this on the McSweeney's web site: Comments written by actual students extracted from workshopped manuscripts at a major university".

My favorite:

"It's your story, your voice, your choices, and I don't want to question
them, but why these words?"

Change Is Good (But Hard to Come By in Italy)

2009-06-21T17:07:00.001-04:00

We're recently back from a trip to Italy, and one of the things that has not changed since our last visit is the Italian shopkeeper's unwillingness to part with his or her euro coins. There is no apparent shortage of these coins, only a deep and nationwide reluctance to give them out.

When we made small purchases, even if we paid for them with a 5€, the smallest denomination of paper note, shopkeepers would frown at the proffered bill as if it were mildly insulting. Did we did not have anything smaller, they demanded.

Ben, infinitely nicer than I, always fished in his pockets to find a 1€ or 2€ coin, as I stood beside him hissing, "Don't! We need those."

And we did need them. In Italy coins are necessary to pay for almost all parking, for public transportation, for tipping chambermaids and concierges, and, most importantly, for restaurant tips. While American waiters will usually give you your change in denominations that facilitate tipping, in Italy it wasn't at all unusual for change from our meals to consist of a single large bill, leaving us with the option of tipping ridiculously or not at all.

And so getting—and keeping—coins became my obsession. When I paid for coffee or museum entrances or bottles of water, I always pulled out the bill in advance so I wouldn't have to open my purse and reveal my mesh change pocket full of precious euros. When shopkeepers asked me if I had something smaller, I lied outright.

"I'm sorry," I'd say with a shrug, "the ATM only gave us these." I tried to look regretful, as if I had hoped that the ATM would, like a slot machine, cough up a shower of coins but instead, to my great disappointment, only gave me these lousy tens and twenties.

Our tour guide at the Borghese Villa, where we were supposed to bring exact change for our entrance fee so she could pay for us en masse, speculated that this parsimony dated from shortages in the days of the lira. There's an interesting article here on Italians' difficulty in switching to the euro in 2002 and some of the reasons for and fallout from that switch.

Whatever the reasons, by the the second week of our trip I was confiscating the change from all transactions. We used a lot of it for tips and parking on our last few days, but I nonetheless returned home with a small mountain of gold and silver. Our bank won't exchange it into dollars, but that's OK: I'm ready for our next trip.

Me at the Trevi Fountain, assuring myself of a return visit to Rome.

Writing Nightmare

2009-02-16T12:30:00.005-05:00

"Thanks for walking the dog this morning," I said to Ben when I finally got up at 10:30. "I slept really well, except for a nightmare I had at the very end."

"What did you dream?"

"I don't remember, just that it was about writing."

"What's a writing nightmare?" he asked, then gasped melodramatically. "'That essay is coming from inside the house!'"

Craft Books

2009-02-15T19:40:00.010-05:00

Not knitting, not macramé, and no glue guns involved. I'm on a mission to find great books about the craft of writing.

As previously noted, I am a sucker for just about any writing advice book. And I've read a lot of them—books about how to get your butt in the chair, books about how to keep it there, books of writing exercises, and books about how to trick yourself into writing without realizing it.

But now I want specifics. I'm taking a class right now and I learn more about craft. Last week I got some feedback on a work in progress that said I was splitting the tone and content in a way that worked well for the piece. And I thought, "Oh, riiiight . . . tone!" Not that I don't know what tone is, but I am not thinking about it explicitly when writing or revising. And I should be.

So I want to get more conversant with my craft. I believe this will make me a better writer and better able to manipulate the elements of my essays to do what I want them to do. And I think it will make me a better to the Legendary Cow Skulls.

Part of this is explained by my crabbed little engineer's soul, which believes that there's a mechanical explanation for absolutely everything—that it;s possible to say something like, "If you do X, it will have Y effect on your prose and on your reader." And while I know that overstates what's realistically possible, if you believe that writing can be taught (and I do) then it has at least some basis in truth.

There are not a ton of books about the craft of creative nonfiction, or at least I haven't found them. My favorite so far is Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola. Also, on my instructor's recommendation, I've picked up The Portable MFA, by The New York Writers Workshop.

John Webster, You Are No William Shakespeare

2009-02-14T17:02:00.003-05:00

Last month I went to see the Actors' Shakespeare Project's The Duchess of Malfi. This was the company's first production of a play by someone other than Shakespeare—in this case John Webster—and I was looking forward to seeing it. And I loved everything except . . . the play. The performances were outstanding, the production gorgeous and highly stylized, the staging innovative (a long narrow corridor with the audience on either side) and psychologically appropriate to this claustrophobic revenge tragedy. Absolutely everything was up to the ASP's usual high standards of excellence, but I found myself counting up the bodies in the last act to figure out how many more people still had to die before we could go home.

I had never read any of Shakespeare's contemporaries in college and always assumed that part of the reason that Shakespeare was produced today and most of them are not (outside of academia) is that we have made such a cultural fetish out of Shakespeare. But The Duchess of Malfi is reputed to be one of the masterpieces of early seventeenth century English theater, so I'm revising my opinion and now think it's because Shakespeare is just better.

Compare these famous lines from from King Lear:

As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,
They kill us for their sport.

with the expression of a similar sentiment from the final act of The Duchess of Malfi:

We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and bandied
Which way please them.

These words are uttered by the only remotely complex character in the play as he is dying, and I'm sorry to say I had to resist the urge to laugh.

I went with my friend Kevin who, I think, liked the play better than I did but acknowledged that he devoted some mental energy to trying to imagine how seventeenth-century English audiences would have reacted to the play (his conclusion: the depraved and outrageous doings of those crazy Italians always made for a good night of theater). I say that if you have to attempt time travel to enjoy a play then it may not have aged all that well.

I'm clearly in the minority on this. The reviews of the play were uniformly positive—and I am glad because I love the Actors' Shakespeare Project (I'm a subscriber) and want them to do well. But I will not be running out to buy The Works of John Webster any time soon.

Another Legenday Cow Skull in the News

2009-01-28T16:11:00.004-05:00

Three cheers for Carol, whose Suburban Study blog has just been picked up by Boston.com! It's also available on the Wicked Local^TM Medfield site.

Congratulations, Carol!

Cow Skulls Rule!

Giving Up On a Book

2009-01-18T13:08:00.005-05:00

A few weeks ago I mentioned to Kevin that I was having a hard time getting through the novel I was reading, and he asked why I didn't just put it down. He mentioned a former professor of his, who said that if you didn't get anything .

Now, not reading books you don't want to read is one of the two great pleasures of the post-English-major reading life. (The other is reading whatever the hell you want again, the way you did when you were a kid). But I feel bad when I do it. Part of this is my penchant since childhood for anthropomorphizing inanimate objects—yes, I'm worried that the book will feel bad—and part of it is feeling bad for the author.

And this mixture of obligation, compassion, and hope gets me through a lot. I will put up with sentimental chick lit; with memoirs whose narrators seem to lack the basic self-awareness needed to write a memoir; with books that attempt big things and fall a little short of the mark.

There are books I've seen all the way through to the end and been very glad I did, and others (which shall remain nameless) where I closed the book and thought, "Well, there's another several hours I won't be getting back."

When, if ever, do you give up on a book?

Doggie Adorableness

2009-01-12T12:37:00.002-05:00

Lily Beth in the snow:

Thanks to Ed for the video!

Stamps

2009-01-07T08:01:00.004-05:00

One of the dorky little pleasures of my production-line submissions schedule (25-30 copies of a different essay every two months) and the time-scale for responses from a lot of literary magazines (geologic) is the selection of stamps for my self-addressed stamped envelopes¹. Initially, I just tried to have a different stamp for each essay so that when the rejections came back I could tell what was being rejected before opening the envelope.

Lately, though, I've been trying to tie stamp selection to the theme of the essay. For "Faith and Reason," my essay on adopting from China, I found a lunar new year stamp:
For an essay on breast cancer, an obvious choice:

This month I'm sending out a piece on my conflicted feelings about suburban yard maintenance (I swear it's more interesting than it sounds), and so I was absurdly pleased Saturday morning at the post office to find this:
I said it was dorky...

¹ When I referred to these as SASEs (pronounced say'-zees) in my writing group, everyone, without exception, looked at me as if I had three heads. Am I the only one who pronounces it this way? I'm trying to figure out where I heard it, and my best guess is the PBS TV show ZOOM. Sing it with me, you children of the seventies: "ZOOM! Z double-O M. Box 3-5-0. Boston Mass. 0-2-1-3-4. Send it to ZOOM!"

The Final Top 10 For 2008

2009-01-04T14:55:00.000-05:00

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz
Home, by Marilynne Robinson
The Courage Muscle, by Monique Doyle Spencer
The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
The Death of Vishnu, by Manil Suri
I See You Everywhere, by Julia Glass
Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar
Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Age of Shiva, by Manil Suri
The Time of Our Singing, by Richard Powers

2008 was a year of old friends. Novels from Ursula Le Guin, Marilynne Robinson, and Julia Glass (whose reading at Porter Square Books I attended) are as close as you can get to a lock on the top ten for me. I had also previously read Joan Didion and was familiar with Monique Doyle Spencer through her very funny essays in the Boston Globe.

2008 was also a year of friends-of-friends: two of the books on the list were recommendations from other readers that I would have never picked up on my own. Memoirs of Hadrian was recommended by Michelle on a round-the-table-what-are-you-reading discussion on the first night of a class. It fit in very well with my current fascination with all-things-Roman in anticipation of a Rome vacation this year. (And, though it's not a book, if you, too, are fascinated by all-things-Roman, let me recommend Garret Fagan's History of Ancient Rome course from The Teaching Company—Ben and I both loved it). And, thanks to a recommendation from Don, I finally finished a Richard Powers book, after starting at least three of them previously. Powers is one of those massively brainy authors whose work I always feel I should love but which instead tends to leave me feeling battered by the author's big brain. The Time of Our Singing was different.

Finally, 2008 was a year of a of new friends. I bought The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao after seeing Junot Díaz's interview with Stephen Colbert, in which he came across as modest and smart and geeky and completely adorable. It's not the sort of book I'm usually inclined to read, but it blew me away and, although my list is unordered, I will confess here that it was my favorite book of the year. Read it. I found Manil Suri, math professor and novelist(!), through the serendipity of the "New Fiction" shelf at my local library. The first two books of his projected trilogy are on this list, and I suspect the third one would be as well if it were published. Maybe next year.

Resolution

2009-01-01T15:56:00.000-05:00

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent.

—Calvin Coolidge

The topic of persistence came up a lot in 2008. The quote above is one of Ben's favorites, and the year started with me promising to get it printed and framed for him. I'm going to get around to that any day now, pal; I promise.

This spring, I read Michelle's posting on Ron Carlson Writes a Story, which cited as his best advice: "All the valuable writing I've done in the last ten years has been done in the first twenty minutes after the first time I've wanted to leave the room."

This fall, I subscribed to the Southeast Review Writing Regimen. One of the benefits was having access to podcasts of author readings at Florida State University, and I was particularly struck by one statement made by Ann Patchett in her post-reading Q&A. "My great genius as a writer," she said, "is the ability to stay in my chair."

The universe has spoken: this is the year I make a non-vague writing resolution (since "Write more" hasn't really worked out in the past). So here it is in a nutshell: two pages a day, six magazine submissions this year.

I decided on two pages because it seemed small enough to be doable. Even on a comparatively lousy day, I should be able to slog though 500 first-draft words. Six submissions is the basic schedule of the submissions service I use and this will keep me from having to pay them to do nothing for me for two months.

My boss has told me about the key questions he was taught to ask about every consulting project: Where are we going? How will we know when we get there? Measurement, that's how. So unless you are reading an RSS feed you will notice a new box to the right, labeled "2009." I'm going to track how many pages I write, how many submissions I make to literary magazines, how many contests I enter, and how many acceptances and publications I have. While the latter two are pretty much out of my control, the first three should give me a good idea of how I'm doing vis-à-vis my goals. At the end of the year, pages written should be at least 500 (two pages a day x five days a week x 50 weeks—yes, I'm taking off for vacation) and submissions should be at least 150 (six essays, one every two months, x 25 magazines each submissions batch). I don't have a specific contest entry goal, but let's say ten. That would still be an improvement over last year's four, and it's always good to have one easily makeable goal.

Napoleon Hill, one of the first self-help authors, is famously quoted as saying: "A goal is a dream with a deadline." Here's to working to make some of my writing dreams come true.

Happy New Year!

A Great Day for the Legendary Cow Skulls1

2008-12-31T12:32:00.007-05:00

The January/February issue of The Rambler arrived yesterday:

The Rambler published my first essay. This issue is notable because it includes essays from not one, but two of my writing group colleagues: "An Accounting," by Julie, and "Flight," by Cindy². Having read both these pieces in draft, I'm absolutely thrilled to see them in print. The Rambler has done its usual excellent job of selecting artwork to accompany each piece. Pick up a copy and see for yourself.

Congratulations, Cindy and Julie!

¹ Who are the Legendary Cow Skulls and how did they get that way? The Legendary Cow Skulls are my writing group: Julie, Cindy, Kevin, and Carol. Most of us met six years ago in a Grub Street memoir class taught by Michelle, which course is a story in itself. We have a name because I insisted we have a name³—everyone had book ideas they were working on⁴ and when you publish your book you have to thank your writing group and it's better, and funnier, if it has a good name. The "cow skulls" part comes from the exterior frieze on the Somerville Public Library. The "legendary" part comes from Michelle. Someday we will all have matching T-shirts that look like this:

² Why, yes, we do rock...

³ I'm the bossy one.

⁴ Everyone except me—I'm the sole sprinter in a group full of writing marathoners.

Tattered Cover

2008-12-28T20:23:00.005-05:00

Any visit to my parents in the Denver area must always include at least one trip to the Tattered Cover Book Store. I got some book money as a Christmas gift from the dog and the cat (don't ask), so it was our first stop on the 26th.

The Tattered Cover is one of the legendary indie bookstores. Founded in 1971, it has three locations in the Denver area. The 16th Street location, where we went, covers three enormous floors and includes a space for author events, a cafe, and a magazine section that boasts the largest collection of literary magazines I have seen anywhere, ever. There's no discernable organizational principle to the layout, and all the signs are hand-written in faded ink. I always have to ask in order to find anything I'm looking for, but that's actually one of the great pleasures of this place: the staff are knowledgeable and enthusiastic and will not only tell me where a book is located but will take me over to the relevant section and find it for me. There are semi-ratty chairs and tables all over the store, dogs are more than welcome, and the whole place is like a big, shabby, disorganized Church of Reading. I love it.

Above all, however, I love the Tattered Cover for its commitment to freedom of expression. In 2000 the store resisted, on First Amendment grounds, a search warrant for a customer's purchase records. The customer was suspected of illegally making methamphetamine and the police were trying to connect him with books they found on manufacturing the drug. The case went all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court and was ultimately decided in the bookstore's favor. At the customer's request, the store later revealed that the book in question was a volume on Japanese calligraphy.

That's right: your phone company will sell you out in a heartbeat, but your local independent bookseller will go to the state Supreme Court to protect your privacy. More reason to love them, were any needed.

So we went on Friday, with me hemming and hawing the entire way about how I already had a lot of books I needed to read and had gotten several more that I was dying to read from various relatives for Christmas, and, really, I couldn't actually think of anything I wanted to read that I didn't already have. I would probably go in and then leave empty-handed.

I picked up: Last Night at the Lobster because I read an interview with Stewart O'Nan and it sounded interesting; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle because I missed when it came out in paperback this spring; The Wordy Shipmates because I adore Sarah Vowell and will buy anything she writes; Old Friend from Far Away because I am constitutionally incapable of resisting how-to books on memoir; and Unstuck ($4.98 in the bargain bin) because, okay, the truth is that I am constitutionally incapable of resisting any writing advice book.

I also got his beautiful blank notebook:

I'm not ordinarily a fan of fancy-shmancy blank notebooks—my college-rule cardboard-covered notebooks exert much less pressure to write Deathless Prose. But this looked so good it was practically edible, and we're coming up on the new year and fresh beginnings, so I decided to try something new. About which, more later.

My "On My Bookshelf" list has gone from worrisome to completely-out-of-control, but hopefully I've also improved my bookstore-related karma enough to end the year in the black.

Snowy Weekend Dog- and Cat-blogging

2008-12-22T07:54:00.010-05:00

Some days it's not clear why we call it a "dog bed"...

... then we remember.

At least one of us loves the snow—the one who doesn't have opposable thumbs and is therefore exempt from shoveling.

Harvard Square Holiday Fair

2008-12-14T19:49:00.006-05:00

This Saturday, at the suggestion of Ed, who takes care of Lily Beth, I went to the Harvard Square Holiday Fair in the basement of the Unitarian Church on the corner of Church Street and Mass. Ave., right in Harvard Square.

Though this annual fair has been around for a while, this was my first visit. It's small enough so you can see it all in less than an hour, and it's full of interesting craftspeople from New England and New York, all of whom were unfailingly nice and more than happy to talk about their work. I saw adorable handmade baby clothes, gorgeous ceramics, cool lighting made from recycled cans, and tons of jewelry. I bought some wonderful scented soaps and bath salts—including one called "Sore Muscles" in honor of my new workout regimen and one called "Amber Love" because it contains frankincense and when I asked what that smelled like the woman who made it replied "It smells like the Catholic Church."

I also bought this choker from Ed's wife, Jen, whose Parrish Relics is exhibiting there:

I think I was 16 the last time time I wore a choker, but this tickled me and, besides, recent hair issues have me experimenting with all aspects of my appearance these days.

I came home and showed Ben and he smirked.

"You're not really very wicked," he said.

"I know," I replied. "It's ironic. That's why it's funny!"

Still looking for something one-of-a-kind, local, and handmade for someone on your holiday gift list? The fair's last days are Thursday through Tuesday, December 18th through the 23rd. Stop by the Parrish Relics booth and tell Jen that Lily Beth sent you.

"Catch and Release" Published in The Fourth River

2008-11-30T13:04:00.005-05:00

My essay, "Catch and Release," was just published in Issue 5 of The Fourth River. The issue's TOC isn't up on the magazine's web site yet (I'll update the link when it is), but my author copies arrived on Saturday. This was my first acceptance and it's a piece I finished up about four years ago, so it's a thrill to see it in print—and a relief to see that the footnotes aren't all in italics the way they were in the page proofs.

Poetry Slam

2008-11-17T18:17:00.001-05:00

I've started writing poetry. Don't ask.

I showed one of my first efforts to Ben, who sees everything before my writing group.

"It's good," he said.

"Really? It's, like, my first poem. Good? Really?"

"Yeah, it's good."

I basked in his praise for a few hours before I thought to ask a follow-up question.

"What, exactly, was good about it?"

"Your poem? I understood it."

"You understood it."

"Yeah, you know, some poems you can't understand. I was able to read yours."

"So your standard for 'good' in poetry is (a) written in the English language and (b) intelligible?"

"It makes me sound like a philistine when you put it that way."

I stopped basking and got back to work.

New Design

2008-11-11T18:29:00.005-05:00

I spent today switching blog templates. I liked the old one, but this one lets me get a lot more in the way of lists and other stuff into the sidebar in a space-efficient manner, so I'm going with it. I'll probably continue to tweak it for a while longer—comments and suggestions welcome!

The photo in the header is actually of the tree behind our house. I took pictures with our digital camera, imported them into iPhoto, cropped one to fit the new design, punched up the color a smidgen (OK, three smidgens), and voilà! I do love my Mac.

In Which I Realize What a Bad Person I Am for Patronizing a Chain Bookseller

2008-10-13T11:29:00.004-04:00

"Hi," I said, walking up to the employee at the desk on the second floor in the literary nonfiction section of the big chain bookstore out by the mall. "Do you have the new Best American Essays?"

"Is that, like ... a book?"

Yes, my good man, it is exactly like a book. In fact, it is a book! Even though it is National Sarcasm Awareness Month (and thanks to the fabulous Miss Conduct for the notice!), I keep this observation to myself. I really want that ... book thingy.

"Yes, it's a series that's published annually. I think this year it will be Best American Essays 2008."

He types it in on the computer, with Ben and me looking over his shoulder.

"Yep, it's in stock," he says. "It's downstairs by the main information desk."

I sigh audibly for his benefit (I am a jerk) and head down the escalator. How can you not have at least a copy or two of Best American Essays in your essay section? I realize I am about to support, though my patronage, both this bizarre shelving scheme and the hiring of employees who have to think about whether something called Best American Essays is a book. I feel even worse because I heard this volume was available though the email newsletter of an independent bookstore that I love, but that is also a good 40 minutes from my house. I am a jerk, and lazy, and a bad, unreflective consumer.

Two take-aways:

Best American Essays 2008 (yes, I did buy it) totally rocks, about which more soon.
Find and patronize your local independent bookstore. Do it even when it's inconvenient and more expensive. The aggravation (and guilt) you save may be your own.

The Final Top 10 For 2007

2008-02-23T17:14:00.001-05:00

Safekeeping, by Abigail Thomas
A Three Dog Life, by Abigail Thomas
Here If You Need Me, by Kate Braestrup
Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola
Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, by Nick Hornby
The Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby
"Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?", by Beverly Daniel Tatum
The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Stones of Florence, by Mary McCarthy
(Not that You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions, by Steve Almond

2007 was, as is often the case for me, a year of author jags: Abigail Thomas and Nick Hornby both had multiple books in the top ten. There's a fuller discussion of Thomas's work here, but let me take a moment to sing the praises of Nick Hornby. Both titles on my list are collections of his book reviews for The Believer. I would love Hornby forever on the basis of his appreciation of Marilynn Robinson alone, but in addition to that he is everything one could want in a reviewer: opinionated, funny, forthright about his prejudices, willing to be pleased, and, above all, firmly on the reader's side. He talks about books the way your best-read friends do—as if he has discovered something he knows you'll love and can't wait to tell you about it.

Excellent Technical Blog Post on Writing

2008-02-21T12:02:00.002-05:00

I subscribe to a lot of technical blogs for work. This post was on one of them, Signal vs. Noise, today: [On writing] John Gruber, Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky, and Judge Judy. Well worth reading.

Style and Substance

2007-07-20T18:05:00.001-04:00

Whenever I go to the library, I browse the "New Nonfiction" section. Lately I have been reading extensively in memoir and creative nonfiction. But unlike fiction, where a browse through the stacks results in all kinds of happy connections -- authors I've never heard of, books I'd never otherwise find -- nonfiction is more "destination" reading. I go, locate a specific book by its call number, pull it from the shelf, and leave. Occasionally I'll find an interesting book nearby, but this is generally more the case with, say, books on travel in Italy than with memoir, where the adjacent books have no more in common than the alphabetization of the subject's last name. The "New Nonfiction" section opens up again the possibility for literary serendipity, albeit on a smaller and time-delimited scale, since I'll find only books published in the last few months.

An so on a recent troll through my library's single case of new nonfiction Abigail Thomas's brilliant memoir, A Three Dog Life, caught my eye. I confess that I picked it up because there was a dog on the cover. I read a few pages and that was enough to propel me at a run to the checkout desk. I got the book home, devoured it in a day, and immediately requested her previous book, Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life, via interlibrary loan. I have since bought copies of both books for myself. Both are in my current Top 10 for 2007, and I guarantee that they will still be there at the end of the year.

Thomas is the rare writer with a style that is vividly distinctive and yet somehow does not call attention to itself. The chapters are short -- often a couple of pages or less -- and the prose is generally spare, almost telegraphic in places. While you cannot read her books without noticing her style, there is nothing flashy or affected about it; it is entirely in service to the work.

"Don't spell everything out," the instructor of my first memoir class told us. "Let the reader do some of the heavy lifting." Thomas's writing is the first where I can see how that collaboration actually works. I think of her technique as "bell ringing." Thomas touches on a topic or emotion that resonates in the reader's mind and then moves on. Later, she circles back and touches on the same topic again, but with a slightly different emphasis or point of view, like a bell rung at a pitch that harmonizes with the first occurrence. The result is something greater than what is on the page: a work of art that is not so much the book itself as the multi-layered effects it creates in the reader. And as a reader, it is exhilarating to feel oneself an active partner in this act of creation with the author.

Thomas's web site contains a wonderful section called Getting Started that gives me inspiration and new ideas every time I visit. Today it's this: "Sometimes it’s what you’re not saying that gives a piece its shape."