August 8, 2008
No difference between stories and real life
“I am a writer and I have been accused of merely writing autobiography in my stories, as if that were somehow easier to do than making everything up. Before I went to meet Lawrence, agitated as I was, it crossed my mind that I would find some way of writing about seeing him after so many years– the things we say to each other, what has become of us– some peripheral telling of lies maybe, or an extension of the fact that will take the encounter from the banal to the cosmic, that will find a universal chord, because that is what good writers do, the ones who know there is no difference among autobiography, biography, fiction or non-fiction, between stories and real life.” –Sharon Butala, “Postmodernism”
July 12, 2008
The house on Jupiter Ave.
The house on Jupiter Ave. had been Wellwood’s, where he’d lived as a boy. Where he’d lived all his life and where he died, in fact, in a terrible plummet from near the top of a gable. Though what he’d been doing on the roof, no one was sure; Wellwood certainly had never climbed a ladder in his life, nor even been inspired to do so.
Afterwards Gardenia had racked her brain trying to figure it out, could she have somehow been responsible? There was no other reason Wellwood might have climbed onto the roof but to satisfy her wishes, for he would have done anything she’d asked him to do– the very point of Wellwood. Could she have mentioned a loose shingle flapping in passing? Or gingerbread trim that needed painting, or the tall tree requiring trimming to stop its limbs slap-slapping the windows at night?
July 6, 2008
Reading stories is bad enough…
“It is extremely interesting,” Anne told Marilla. “Each girl has to read her story out loud and then we have to talk it over. We are going to keep them all sacredly and have them to read to our descendants. We each write under a non-de-plume… All the girls go pretty well. Ruby Gillis is rather sentimental. She puts too much love-making into her stories and you know too much is worse than too little. Jane never puts in any because she says it makes her feel too silly when she has to read it out loud. Jane’s stories are extremely sensible. Then Diana puts too many murders into hers. She says most of the time she doesn’t know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them. I mostly always have to tell them what to write about, but that isn’t hard for I’ve millions of ideas.”
“I think this story-writing business is the foolishest yet,” scoffed Marilla. “You’ll get a pack of nonsense into your heads and waste time that should be put on your lessons. Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.”
“But we’re so careful to put a moral into them all, Marilla,” explained Anne. “I insist upon that. All the good people are rewarded and the bad ones suitably punished. I’m sure that must have a wholesome effect. The moral is the greatest thing. Mr. Allen says so. I read one of my stories to him and Mrs. Allen and they both agreed that the moral was excellent. Only they laughed in the wrong places. I like it better when people cry. Jane and Ruby almost always cry when I come to the pathetic parts. Diana wrote her Aunt Josephine about our club and Aunt Josephine wrote back that we were to send her some of our stories. So we copied out four of our very best and sent them. Miss Josephine Barry wrote back that she had never read anything so amusing in all her life. That kind of puzzled us because the stories were all very pathetic and almost everybody died…” –L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
June 13, 2008
Their own body bags
Nathan Whitlock writes that requiring self-addressed stamped envelopes to accompany literary journal submissions is “kind of like making soldiers go into battle carrying their own body bags”.
May 16, 2008
The girl still can't dance
The girl still can’t dance. When she’s had too much to drink she still flails her arms, knocking drinks out of hands and poking tall people in the eye. Sometimes she abandons fluidity altogether, and jumps up and down on the spot instead— a terrible legacy of Kris Kross and Cypress Hill. When she’s dancing sometimes, people think she’s kidding but she’s not. Celtic is all the rage right now, but when the girl gets her knees up, someone always gets kicked.
May 14, 2008
Born full grown, or make room for a hero
“For a writer those things are what you start with. You wouldn’t have started a story without that awareness– that’s what made you begin. That’s what makes a character, projects a plot. Because you write from the inside. You can’t start with how people look and speak and behave and come to know how they feel. You must know exactly what’s in their hearts and minds before they ever set visible foot on the stage. You must know all, then not tell it all, or not tell too much at once: simply the right thing at the right moment. And the same character would be written completely differently in a novel as opposed to a short story. In a story you don’t go into character in order to develop him. He was born full grown, and he’s present there to perform his part in the story. He’s subservient to his function, and he doesn’t exist outside it. But in a novel, he may. So you may have to allow for his growth and maybe hold him down and not tell everything you know, or else let him have his full sway– make room for a hero, even, in more spacious premises.” —Eudora Welty, The Paris Review Interviews, II
May 6, 2008
Some links
Scroll down for Margaret Drabble’s letter to editor about sorry states of affairs at the British Library. More on Virago Modern Classics– this time from founder Carmen Callil. Listen to an interview with Sharon Butala on Sounds like Canada (from April 29). Writer Rebecca Rosenblum on creation (but not creationism– which is really a strange ism when you think about it). Crooked House passes on some Olivia love, among other children’s lit links.
April 20, 2008
A pleasure
“I think a young poet, or an old poet for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he’s written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading. But if it doesn’t, he shouldn’t be discouraged. I mean, in the seventeenth century every educated man could turn a verse and play the lute. Supposing no one played tennis because they wouldn’t make Wimbledon? First and foremost, writing poems should be a pleasure. So should reading them, by God.” –Philip Larkin, The Paris Reviews Interviews, II
April 11, 2008
A room of one's own
The New House tour continues, and now I take you to my garret. For yes, it is true– I have a garret. Actually the tail end of a very long strange half-gable off our bedroom, through a secret door in the wall. (What quirks have old houses with dubious renovations of yore!)
We use this long strange room as our closet, which contains two dressers, a long rack of hanging clothes, and a whole mess of things like Christmas lights and suitcases, things you’d expect to find in an attic. And in late February when we saw the apartment for ten minutes and decided to make our home here, I didn’t realize how big this room was. Didn’t consider that it could possibly accommodate my desk and a bookshelf, but it does.
My husband was a wee bit disconcerted at the idea of me setting up shop in the back of the closet, but this is not just any closet, and it has a window. And there wouldn’t have been room downstairs for the bookshelves and both our desks (for he requires a desk too, of course, being a brilliant graphic designer). It’s not much to look at, I know, but it’s mine, and really I’m just fond of saying “my garret.” I think I’ve wanted one forever without even knowing it.
(And if anyone’s asking, I’m now reading A Week of This by Nathan Whitlock, and The Myth of the Simple Machines by Laurel Snyder.)
March 16, 2008
What a relief
“Harriet… ran into her room and flung herself on the bed. She lay quietly for a minute, looking reverently at her notebook and then opened it. She had had an unreasonable fear that it would be empty, but there was her handwriting, reassuring if not beautiful. She grabbed up the pen and felt the mercy of her thoughts coming quickly, zooming through her head onto the paper. What a relief, she thought to herself; for a moment I thought I had dried up. She wrote a lot about what she felt, relishing the joy of her fingers gliding across the page, the sheer relief of communication. After a whole she sat back and began to really think hard. Then she wrote again…” –Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy
