October 11, 2007
Descant Blog
And in exciting news, I’m thrilled to announce my new incarnation as a Descant Blogger. My first posting goes up this weekend, I believe. I’ll be writing about the remarkable intersections between reading and every day life, and I hope that you will join me in that conversation.
October 4, 2007
More from Kate Grenville
“In the years after Lilian’s Story was published, our children Tom and Alice were born, and I added another mantra: Don’t wait for time to write. I learned to work in whatever slivers of time the day might give me– one of my favourite scenes in Joan Makes History was written in the car waiting to pick up Tom from a birthday party, on the only paper I could find, the inside of a Panadol packet. I had slivers of time, so I wrote in slivers of words: a page here, a paragraph there. Eventually the slivers would add up to something.” –Kate Grenville, from Search for the Secret River
September 27, 2007
Particularly telling
From The Guardian Review of When To Walk: “It’s a sign of how good a writer she is that you even forgive Ramble’s perusal of boxes of memorabilia – usually the sign of a book that deserves to be forgotten beneath the bed.”
Exactly.
September 22, 2007
I have to hope
~Before I could say anything, she declared, ‘Personally, I have an ignorance towards books. Don’t ask me nothing about books. I only read magazines.’
‘I write for magazines,’ I said at once. ‘That’s my job.’
‘Kidding me,’ said Mrs. Shaw. ‘What ones?’
I hoped I wouldn’t lose cachet by showing her. I have an unfiled heap of them on one of the counters right there in the kitchen, where they sit like beached jetsam above a swill of more mobile rubbish.
…[I]t pleases me to know that, technically speaking, ‘jetsam’ is the matter you throw out of a ship when you’re afraid it’s going to sink, whereas, if the ship sinks anyway and is destroyed by the tides, ‘flotsam’ is the debris of the smashed vessel itself.
I have to hope my work is jetsam.~
Rebecca Gowers, When to Walk
September 12, 2007
I made a pie instead
The Poet’s Occasional Alternative — by Grace Paley
I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft a poem would have had some
distance to go days and weeks and
much crumpled paper
the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor
everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it many friends
will say why in the world did you
make only one
this does not happen with poems
because of unreportable
sadness I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership I do not
want to wait a week a year a
generation for the right
consumer to come along
from Begin Again Collected Poems, 2000
September 11, 2007
Blowing off dust
Today was exciting for a number of reasons: that I woke up and sat down to spend the morning working on my manuscript, which has been living under my bed since April. Had to blow off a layer of dust, but it was easy to get started, and strange to be affected by words I’d written so long ago they’ve ceased to belong to me. My goal is to finish this final revision by the end of this year, and then what’s next would, quite naturally, come with the future. Further exciting, was lunch with my old dear friend Erin Sanko who I’ve not seen in at least five years. Nice to have it feel like no time had passed, and her boyfriend is lovely. (I was also happy to hear that she had so much enjoyed Half of a Yellow Sun). I spent the afternoon shopping, for skirts, shoes, and turtleneck sweaters. Also for a new backpack, and any number of things to replace hideousness. And then I had my first visit to Ben McNally Books, which was a marvelous experience, and I had the good fortune of picking up a copy of Jonathan Garfinkel’s new book Ambivalence. It’s a beautiful book, and I am very happy for him. I also look quite forward to reading it.
August 28, 2007
A Word from Rosie Little
“I could get all writerly about it, and call it an ‘aqualine nose’, but to do so would be to confine its owner for all time to the pages of fiction, for how could I ever expect you to believe that he truly existed were I to plonk such a literary phenomenon squarely in the middle of his face? An actual nose– a nose of flesh and bone and cartilege– might in be be aqualine in profile, but it is a strange fact of life that it is almost never so described unless the describer has a pen in her hand or a keyboard beneath her fingertips”– Danielle Wood, Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls
August 19, 2007
In another space
“We were brought up to believe that stories have meanings and that meanings have stories and that journeys have ends. We were brought up to believe that there would be an ending, that there would be completion. For each and every life, for each and every organism. But we now know that that’s not true. It was true, once, but it’s true no longer. We have passed the point in time and in history where that truth applies. The universe has shed the teleological fallacy. So now we have to work out what can take place. We have to tell and shape our stories in another space, in another concept of space.” –from Margaret Drabble’s The Sea Lady
August 9, 2007
The non-presence of friends
“I have been careful to give Alicia a few friends. It’s curious how friends get left out of novels, but I can see how it happens. Blame it on Hemingway, blame it on Conrad, blame even Edith Wharton, but the modernist tradition has set the individual, the conflicted self, up against the world. Parents (loving or negligent) are admitted to fiction, and siblings (weak, envious or self-destructive) have a role. But the non-presence of friends is almost a convention– there seems no room for friends in a narrative already cluttered with event and the tortuous vibrations of the inner person. Nevertheless, I like to sketch in a few friends in the hope they will provide a release from a profound novelistic isolation that might otherwise ring hollow and smell suspicious.” –Carol Shields, Unless
August 2, 2007
Boys are ordinary
Happy she is tonight, what with golden tomatoes ripe in the garden, and a short story forthcoming in The New Quarterly. Up to her elbows, also, in To the Lighthouse, and with a date scheduled with Rebecca Rosenblum. The whole third person thing because she’s somewhat delirious with glee, and because sometimes the universe sets up so well.
