May 21, 2007
Bang
I really should have known. The Girls came recommended by Patricia Storms, Richard and Judy, and everybody else in the whole wide world. If, like me, however, you were put off by all the hype, and by the prospect of a story about craniopagus twins, you really have been cheating yourself. Lori Lansens’ The Girls casts a perfect spell, expresses every lovely notion I’ve ever had about the world, and says so much about perspective, writing, and love. (Those of us who love Kate Atkinson will definitely find something to love here.)
I was under that perfect spell from the very start, probably due to Lansens’ dramatic beginning. A lot gets said about great opening lines, but what about great opening scenes? It’s actually the second chapter of The Girls: “A tornado touched down in Baldoon County on the day Ruby and I were born”. And Lansens’ describes the tornado with such energy, intricacy, and action, I could almost feel the wind. I was hooked from then on. It was the best story opening I’ve read since Arthur Seaton fell down a flight of stairs in the pub and puked all over a woman in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Since the moment of Ruby Lennox’s conception in Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Sometimes it pays to start with a bang.
Bookwise, what’s ahead? Cease to Blush and then The Children of Men (upon the recommendation of my husband!).
May 15, 2007
Wooden leg first
I think it’s quite cool that my rereading of A Good Man is Hard to Find coincided with Flannery O’Connor in the news, as a new letters archive is opened. Maud Newton provides excellent coverage, as well as links to previous O’Connor posts she has written. I especially like her “But it is a wooden leg first”.
“If you want to say that the wooden leg is a symbol, you can say that. But it is a wooden leg first, and as a wooden leg it is absolutely necessary to the story. It has its place on the literal level of the story, but it operates in depth as well as on the surface. It increases the story in every direction, and this is esentially the way a story escapes being short”.
May 14, 2007
Glorious youth circa late 1990s
Fun was had! Mucho family, and lobsterfest with my favourite cousins. Saturday my dad took us shopping for baseball gloves (we love catch) and now we’re all kitted up for the big leagues. Last night we hit downtown Peterborough with Mike my best friend 6 and hilarity reigned. I drank too much beer and a tall tri-coloured drink, behaved like an adolescent and was ill the next morning. Recovering just in time to have my Muv and Farve take us out for brunch in celebration of my finishing school, and we sat with a view of the lake and the food was delish. We had such a good time with my parents all weekend, but then it made Stuart miss his. Thankfully we’ll be seeing them three weeks from tonight.
My mom is moving, and so I had to do something about the last few boxes of my stuff in her house. One looked vaguely interesting, so I brought it home. Sorting through tonight, and I find the most extraordinary things: the “novel” I wrote when I was eleven, which was really long and all about dragons and princesses and the kind of story I never had any interest in, but precocious children in other books always wrote about things like that, so I thought it was the way. Story books I made throughout elementary school (I had an early gift for the rhyming couplet, but not so much for staying inside the lines). Essays from grade nine English (“teenagers today are too worldy for religion” said I). Terrible articles I used to write for the “teen” page in our local paper (“violence is something that affects people in many places”). I was pleased (and surprised) to find out that my grade thirteen and first year uni English papers were not as terrible as I had feared, and that I did not entirely make my TA’s want to kill themselves. Oh the list goes on, pages and pages and treasure. But the best is an entire journal of Bad Teenage Poetry, written between 1995-1998. Back when nobody understood me, I was jealous of my best friends, and thought that poetry had to be obligatorily weird (“I found the meaning of life/ in my glass of orange juice”). Oh, but the angst I knew.
Your knife has dug deeper/ into me than any other/ I feel the metal slice/ cut me and I bleed/ You use your knife for a purpose/ but you didn’t succeed/ I am not destroyed.
And can you believe that that actually is edited, as the original was so awful that any poetic sensibility I have come to possess wouldn’t allow me to transcribe it as is? Oh what fun. And all of this has underlined why I have zero interest in Facebook.
April 27, 2007
Never never never salt
Up here at the cottage there is no line between inside and out; the domestic is only barely tamed. We will wake up with windows dripping on the inside, and grit underfoot. Newspapers are kindling. Bat’s wings flap in the rafters while we sleep out under the stars. The old board games have missing pieces, mismatched dice, and mice have ravaged the Monopoly money, leaving their droppings behind. And the screen door is ripped, which is how the flies get in, but if the hole was patched, the bugs would only find another way.
Nothing much else happens. Which is the very point of being here, fortunately and unfortunately. I picture cottage days constructed of blocks, only the same shapes, patterns and colours. Once or twice we’ll go into town for a diversion, but diversions get in the way of hours spent hot and sunburnt, prune-skinned and water-logged. Evenings are warmed round the fire always, with marshmallows burning on the pointy ends of sticks, and warbly old songs everybody else knows the wrong words to.
Fish and chips and vinegar, never never never salt
March 29, 2007
It's so easy to be charming
“I felt like a writer for the first time when I was twenty-nine years old and writing a series of poems. I was very strict with myself for some reason, and each time I finished a poem, I put the question to myself: is this what I really mean? It’s so easy to be charming. It’s a lot harder to say what you really mean.” – Carol Shields, “An Epistolary Interview” with Joan Thomas.
March 28, 2007
You write because
Lately on all sides I’ve been hearing variations on an old adage; this article quotes Robertson Davies: “There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.” And in other articles, in conversations, books etc. lately, I’ve encountered this same pressing melodrama, and it troubles me. I understand F. Scott Fitzgerald’s take on it, to some extent. He said, “You don’t write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.” Point taken. But my first reaction to Davies’s assertion is a crisis of confidence. Because if I never wrote anything again, I don’t know that I would go mad or die. The world is far too rich for such an ultimatum. I know that a hole would grow up in my days, and that my fingers would itch for release by pen or keyboard. I know that ideas would continue to appear in my mind, and they’d wait there patiently for cultivation, until they’d wilt and die. If I never wrote again, I would miss it as I would miss never reading again, or never kissing again. But to go out and out mad, or die? I don’t think so. And so I wonder, does this mean that I am therefore not allowed to write at all?
Lately I’ve sat down to write for six or seven hours every day, and I’ve done it because I love it. In my life so far, I’ve found no better way to spend my days. I know I will have to rejoin the real world soon, which makes me appreciate the last two years all the more. It has been a pleasure to devote my days to reading, learning, and writing. Writing makes me thoroughly happy, and if I never have such freedom again, at least I had it once. And I think that’s enough really. No Robertson Davies lightning bolt has ever shot down from the sky and compelled me to deliver my manifesto, but world all around me inspires me to write all the time.
Everywhere I go is whispering with stories, and I write them down because to do so fills me with joy.
March 20, 2007
Reality is Ralph
From Lisey’s Story by Stephen King:
~He didn’t even plan his books, as complex as some of them were. Plotting them, he said, would take out all the fun. He claimed that for him, writing a book was like finding a brilliantly coloured string in the grass and following it to see where it might lead. Sometimes the string broke and left you with nothing. But sometimes– if you were lucky, if you were brave, if you perservered– it brought you to a treasure. And the treasure was never the money you got for the book; the treasure was the book.~
March 15, 2007
Uneasy
I am somewhat uneasy based on the fact that the story I’ve been working on for a year now must be put away for a week or two. Until I get some feedback on the whole thing, which might just lead me toward defenestration. And I just don’t know what to do with myself. Luckily I’m reading Lullabies for Little Criminals and it’s gripping and surprising.
I am also uneasy by the fact that it looked like spring, it wasn’t, I didn’t wear gloves, and now my hands won’t move properly.
March 15, 2007
Quite
I tend to overuse the word “quite”, which is probably apparent from this blog, but I’m not going to check to be sure because then I’ll just be embarrassed. And so I’ve just gone through my entire story and removed most instances of the dreaded Q word. It really is the most ineffectual word one can use. In its ability to either intensify or lighten meaning, it comes to mean nothing. It’s not so bad in speech I think, when tone can guide it, but in writing it just obscures the point. Or in my writing, at least.
Not so related, but thinking about this has made me remember the way students use to use “maybe” when we taught English conversation in Japan. “Maybe” preceded anything someone didn’t feel quite (! but I won’t backspace) comfortable saying.
“Why don’t you love your boyfriend Yumiko?”
“May-be [drawn out long] he is not so handsome.”
or
“Are you okay today Tadayuki?”
“Hmmmm. May-be, I am sleepy.”
And most effectively:
“Gosh, it feels cold in here today.”
“May-be there is hole in back of your trousers.”
Other words I overuse: suppose, perhaps, so, bit, sure, fast, etc I am sure.
March 14, 2007
Anywhere
In lieu of news about us going without jackets these days, check out a good old fashioned spring post over at Calhounsville. And I have been gobbling books like mad: just finished The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, which was like one big looong story out of her prize-winning collection. This is not a bad thing; it’s just not the most typically-structured novel (ie my thesis advisor would probably hate it). Does that woman wrench hearts though? Also, I’m realizing that final changes to my story are just about done, which is very odd. I’m sending it out to my helpful copy-editors this weekend. And now I’m about to fall into the tub with Ami McKay (haha- she has a cool website though).
