Two Umbrellas

Monday Word Count

Tue, 01 May 2012 12:57:00 -0700

Last week’s total: 8121

This week’s count: 798

Total: 8919

I am ignoring that it’s Tuesday and not Monday and that it’s been a month and not a week since I last posted this paltry number.

I’m chugging along on something I’m not enjoying working on. Do I abandon it? Can I?

The Point by Charles D'Ambrosio

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 21:29:31 -0700

Charles D’Ambrosio is one of my favorite short story writers but there are two things I didn’t know about him. One, that The Point is his first story collection. And, two, that he’s from Seattle. Usually this is tangential information - secondary to the reading experience. But I couldn’t get past it. *

For some reason but I find it very easy to spot a ‘debut’ collection of short stories. Maybe it’s the editor in me or maybe the writer in me but there’s something in the writing that hasn’t quite found it’s way. Often there are young male narrators, 13-15 years old that have a similar vocabulary and perspective as, say, someone who is at the Iowa’s Writers Workshop. I know it seems picky but it happened enough that I began waiting for it in each story. And yet. And yet, there is everything else in the writing that is right.

This is something I struggle with: I read something. It is ordinary. Simple. Real. I I know these are big fat words that can often be quite hollow. I don’t know how to describe what makes it so good. How do I describe something that I love?** D’Ambrosio captures this reality. Carver does too. It’s not showy. The writing is right there for the reader to empathize. Maybe that’s it - it’s just empathetic to the ordinary, so much so it’s a celebration of it.

I started reading this book knowing I was going to love it. The surprise came when I realized the stories were set in and around Seattle. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Seattle. I’ve been here about two and a half years and I’m still not quite sure how I feel about it. But to read about it makes me feel differently. Granted, these stories were written before what I’ll call ‘modern’ Seattle - pre-Microsoft and Amazon hugeness when Boeing was Seattle. All three are huge businesses but Boeing means manufacturing. Microsoft and Amazon (and now just about about any other software company that’s here) means hi-tech, higher educated, people from just about everywhere in the world. Manufacturing and fishing means people from Seattle born and raised here, working and living here. (I have only met a handful of people that are actually from Seattle.) My point is that The Point was written during and about a time before the Seattle that I know it. There were places and references that I know and understood, which always brings a visceral connection to a book***; but, it was a glimpse into a Seattle that doesn’t quite exist anymore - a bit of its history, something I am becoming more interested in understanding. I’m not sure I’m ready to say that I like it here. I am willing to give it a chance.

*This is one of the reasons I keep a blog and gave up on my poor attempts at reviewing. I’m terrible at looking at works completely objectively. (Well, I was probably pretty good at it once or twice in grad school.) It is so personal for me. I like it better that way. Then, selfishly, the experience is all about me.

**My inability to describe what makes the voice real is probably what is preventing me from becoming a better writer. Sometimes you just don’t have it. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to prevent me from doing it.

***The greatest example of this, for me, is Rabbit, Run by John Updike. That was just a surreal read for me being from Reading, PA.

Monday Word Count

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:25:38 -0700

Last week’s total: 7095

This week’s count: 1026

Total: 8121

I am trying not to imagine what the word count would be if I wrote every day.

Monday Word Count

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:30:14 -0700

Last week’s total: 6178

This week’s count: 917

Total: 7095

I am starting to wonder why I make these posts at all. They are becoming embarrassing. Apparently, I can only write about 1000 words a week, which usually means I am writing once a week. That’s better than the last few years but not really worth noting. Except, I will admit, it does keep me motivated to do something since my project isn’t really motivating me.

I should probably start a new project.

"She rose to her feet, gripping my pant leg, my shirt, my sleeve, then my neck. We started walking..."

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:24:20 -0700

“She rose to her feet, gripping my pant leg, my shirt, my sleeve, then my neck. We started walking again. The sand was deep and loose, and with every step we sank down through the soft layers until a solid purchase was gained in the hard-packed sand below, and we could push off in baby steps. The night was sharp and alive with shadows - everything, even the tiny tufted weeds that sprouted through the sand, had a shadow - and this deepened the world, made it seem thicker, with layers, and more layers, and then a darkness into which I couldn’t see.”

- “The Point” by Charles D’Ambrosio.

For the love of the paragraph.

Monday Word Count

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 08:00:06 -0700

Last week’s total: 5221

This week’s count: 957

Total: 6178

I took a week off. But I had a houseguest. I am happy that I broke 6000 words. For some reason that seems like so much more than 5000. I don’t have a word count goal. It isn’t really about how many words I write although keeping a weekly count makes it seem that way. I just need to see progress.

Speaking of, I’m seeing little of it. I’ve hit a rut and realized I am writing around my writing.

On rejection

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 21:17:37 -0700

I was cleaning out some old files. Of course I have old files. But what was in those old files and why I have them are probably not for this blog, or at least, not now. I went through the old files to get rid of them. My plan was to go through them and make sure I didn’t throw away my social security card or passport or anything else detailing my existence and then throw everything else away. For what was it but old paper?

At one point I started keeping my short stories in manila folders. Each folder had draft upon draft upon draft upon draft. Some had different fonts. (I went through phases.) Some were handwritten (always on graph paper). Some were fortunate enough to have notes from classes that I took. Most just had my notes and ramblings. But there was one file: Writing. In it I found notes I kept when I worked at Borders.* Some of those notes became stories. Most of them didn’t. I couldn’t read through them all. My kids were playing in the room and something felt too private.

Among those notes was a little red piece of paper. It was one of the best little red pieces of paper I’ve ever received. It was a rejection note from the Mid-American Review. I don’t remember the date. It wasn’t important. But it was signed. Oh, that signature! You read it, Mr. Editor. You maybe liked it a little bit. And, and, you suggested I try submitting again. Who me? Really? You mean I can come back and try again?

How amazing that a rejection can be so empowering, so motivating, so uplifting, almost as good as getting published (okay, not really, but I can pretend since I’ve never gotten published anywhere but my graduate school literary journal and, no offense,*** I didn’t think that counted for much.)

So, then, why didn’t I ever submit again. What happened? Years later I am still trying to figure that out, why I lost sight of my goal of being a writer. Was it ever really a goal? Were all of those other rejections, mostly form letters (Dear Author, No.), too heavy for me to keep trying? Maybe other parts of my life got in the way: work, kids, marriage, hobbies. Not really. That would be making excuses. And so I am making excuses.

And here’s the real one: I got rejected enough times to realize that I wasn’t going to make a living as a writer. I’ve also realized that making a living as a writer is not mutually exclusive. I can be a writer and not make a living of it. I love to write. I will always love to write. I am writing now, goddammit, isn’t that enough? For me? For now? Yes.

*I worked full time at Borders in center city Philadelphia while I was going to graduate school. I worked in the day and went to school at night. The mornings weren’t busy. I spent a lot of time writing notes on receipt and scrap paper**. I was trying to be a writer, right? Oh, did my heart ache when I found those notes. I am no longer that person. I am still trying to be a writer but I am not that person. Who am I fooling?

**I was also fortunate enough to be assigned to the fiction section. I spent a lot of time writing lists of books to read while I was straightening the books. (What was that called again, facing? face-out? there were lots of ‘terms’ I’ve chosen to forget.) My little badge was filled with pieces of paper and a pen at all times. I discovered a lot of books in that little corner of the store. I still haven’t read a lot of them. Who am I fooling?

***To myself, really, because I eventually became an editor at said literary journal.

Stoner by John Williams

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:03:36 -0800

I fell in love with Stoner a little bit while reading - not the character, really, but just the idea of the book: a book about a man, a somewhat weak one at that, and his life as a literature professor. While it’s not exactly sexy material, despite the appearance of a sex scene (yes, literaries do have sex) - unless you’re into the life of a literature professor (ahem) - it got my heart racing.

Reading Stoner was a week (or two) of intimacy and movement, writing that was able to slow down and see and feel. Yes, all writing should do that and most do. And then there are those that do it better:

Once, late, after his evening class, he returned to his office and sat at his desk, trying to read. It was winter, and a snow had fallen during the day, so that the out-of-doors was covered with a white softness. The office was overheated; he opened a window beside the desk so that the cool air might come into the close room. He breathed deeply, and let his eyes wander over the white floor of the campus. On an impulse he switched out of the light on his desk and sat in the hot darkness of his office; the cold air filled his lungs, and he leaned toward the open window. he heard the silence of the winter night, and it seemed to him that he somehow felt the sounds that were absorbed by the delicate and intricately cellular being of the snow. Nothing moved upon the whiteness; it was a dead scene, which seemed to pull at him, to suck at his consciousness just as it pulled the sound from the air and buried it within a cold white softness. He felt himself pulled outward toward the whiteness, which spread as far as he could see, and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed, of the claire and cloudless sky without height or depth. For an instant he felt himself go out of the body that sat motionless before the window; and as he felt himself slip away, everything - the flat whiteness, the trees, the tall columns, the night, the far stars - seemed incredibly tiny and far away, as if they were dwindling to a nothingness. Then, behind him, a radiator clanked. He moved, and the scene became itself. With a curiously reluctant relief he again snapped on his desk lamp. He gathered a book and a few papers, went out of the office, walked through the darkened corridors, and let himself out of the wide double doors at the back of Jesse Hall. We walked slowly home, aware of each footstep crunching with muffled loudness in the dry snow.

When I think about Stoner, I think of Katherine Driscoll:

“Then I’ll say it,” Katherine said. “We will have had this week.”

Monday Word Count

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 14:30:55 -0800

Last week’s total: 4569

This week’s count: 652

Total: 5221

I know some people write 652 words in an hour. It takes me a week just to find that extra time. Once I find that time it takes energy, energy I often don’t have. I am working on something that is the hardest thing I’ve ever written. I forgot how physical writing can be.

Big Books I Haven't Read

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 21:07:09 -0800

Lists are fun to make even when they are list of your inadequacies. Here’s a few that I haven’t read yet:

In Search of Lost Time
Gravity’s Rainbow
Underworld
Don Quixote
Of Human Bondage
A Dance to the Music of Time
Oh so much of William T. Vollmann
War and Peace

I’m sure I’m missing some that I should read at some point in my life. I tried reading the Bible when I was in grade school and never went back to it (and probably never will). I can say that I have read Ulysses and Infinite Jest and Anna Karenina so I do have a few under my belt. Although I’m sure I’ll have to reread both Ulysses and Infinite Jest again. Do I avoid big books? Can I not make a commitment?

I think I don’t read big books because I don’t think I could ever write a big book. I have spent a lot of time reading in order to study writing but, oh, how that limits me! I like to write short stories but they can be so short sometimes. I’m not saying I’ve written my immediate TBR list, especially since I’ve got Charles D’Ambrosio on deck, but it’s time to reconnect with literature for pleasure instead of study. I will probably learn so much more.

Monday Word Count

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 08:02:06 -0800

Last week’s total: 4200

This week’s count: 369

Total: 4569

Sometimes there will just be these weeks. But I keep writing. I have to.

Monday Word Count

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 11:24:08 -0800

Last week’s total: 2692

This week’s count: 1508

Total: 4200

Not too bad considering I finished some quilting deadlines. Now, let’s just hope it doesn’t take me three weeks to finish reading Stoner. Although I’ve hit a wall with it - Edith is making me tense.

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:00:33 -0800

Her name was Rita Achenbach. She was short and feisty with tussled brown hair. She walked and talked fast - in a hurry, very busy, and always purposeful. She was tough but emotional and always cried when we talked about the Vietnam War. She smoked - Marlboros I presumed. I saw her husband a few times. He drove an old Ford Bronco, wore white t-shirts and a cowboy hat and mustache without irony in a mid-1990s, Pennsylvania suburb. They looked like they were a couple that had always been together.

Mrs. Achenbach was my high school English teacher. I went to a small Catholic high school and I had Mrs. Achenbach for 10th and 12th grade honors English. I wanted to become a teacher because of her. I did become a teacher because of her. She told me not to do it. Years later I still wonder if I should have taken her warning personally. (I didn’t and still don’t even though she was right.)

She went to college in the South - the University of Alabama, if I remember correctly - and we read a lot of books from the South. She introduced me to Carson McCullers (Ballad of the Sad Cafe) and, most importantly, William Faulkner. In 10th grade it was As I Lay Dying, in 12th, A Light in August. And I knew where my heart was. It was in her class, in her books, struggling to show that I got it or at least that I felt it. Reading The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter was like being transported back all those years, sitting in an old wooden desk, with a plaid skirt hanging just to the knee, thinking and writing about the symbolism of the South.

What can I say? I’ve never been to the South. A weekend trip to Knoxville, TN doesn’t quite count as having the Southern experience. And yet. Each time I read Southern literary classics it is so familiar - almost like coming home. I am comfortable among those characters, lost in a continually changing and confusing identity and trying to find a way out of internal and external turmoil. The lost is my home.

I should have loved The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. It is a beautiful book. I found it hard to put down. And, when I did, I found it hard to pick back up. Reading it felt like I hit my saturation point. It felt a little too textbook. I recently discovered it was her first novel and for some reason I feel like that explains a lot. I get it. I wish I would have read it in high school or college. And if I were still teaching high school (and had a choice), I would assign it.

While wonderfully written and beautifully sad (I’m not sure I can add too many more adverbs to describe an American classic without sounding too much like a high schooler myself), I feel there are reasons it is a classic besides how well it is written and it’s compelling characters - both Mick Kelley and Biff Brannon almost brought me to tears. Is it a criticism if the book is too good? I felt I knew the book before I finished reading it - as if I was back in Mrs. Achenbach’s class discussing Southern Gothic literature and religion (in Catholic school all literature goes back to religion - can anyone name the Jesus symbol?*).

*Funny, how we were never assigned the Bible - as literature, of course.

Monday Word Count

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:37:08 -0800

Last week’s count: 2008

This week’s count: 684

Total: 2692

In defense of my numbers, I am working with a few quilting deadlines…Oh, the excuses never end!

"In the University library he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, inhaling the..."

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:02:44 -0800

“In the University library he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, inhaling the musty odor of leather, cloth, and drying page as if it were an exotic incense. Sometimes he would pause, remove a volume from the shelves, and hold it for a moment in his large hands, which tingled at the still unfamiliar feel of spine and board and unresisting page. Then he would leaf through the book, reading a paragraph here and there, his stiff fingers careful as they turned the pages, as if in their clumsiness they might tear and destroy what they took such pains to uncover.”

- from Stoner by John Williams

A confession

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:46:07 -0800

I often think about my reaction to my writing after becoming a mother. This is how it felt. Thankfully, it no longer feels this way:

But now no music was in her mind. That was a funny thing. It was like she was shut out from the inside room. Sometimes a quick little tune would come and go - but she never went into the inside room with music like she used to do. It was like she was too tense. Or maybe because it was like the store took all her energy and time. Woolworth’s wasn’t the same as school. When she used to come home from school she felt good and was ready to start working on the music. But now she was always tired. At home she just ate supper and slept and then ate breakfast and went off to the store again. A song she had started in her private notebook two months before was still not finished. And she wanted to stay in the inside room but she didn’t know how. It was like the inside room was locked somewhere away from her. A very hard thing to understand.

-Carson McCullers, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

I understand. Time to finish those stories.

Monday Word Count

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:02:05 -0800

This week’s count: 530

Total: 2008

I’m not quite sure the point of this exercise other than to make myself feel badly for not writing more. I’m hoping public shaming* will force me to make more time to write.**

*As if anyone reads this.

**Yes, I’m going to put the blame not on me but the rest of my life. I don’t want to feel too badly about it.

Monday Word Count

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:18:00 -0800

To keep myself in check, I’m going to start documenting my weekly word count:

1474

(Not bad considering last year’s total was close to zero. And, yes, I know it’s Tuesday.)

Weekday reads

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:14:00 -0800

I’ve hit a bit of a wall with The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter and am in need of a good distraction. I’ve got a few tabs open in my browser just waiting to be read*:

A long article from The Atlantic on Joan Didion. It’s by Caitlin Flanagan. Could be interesting or enraging. I’ll try not to be too biased.
Guernica considers how book design will affect the future of the printed book.
I’ll admit I don’t quite get Gertrude Stein. I’m hoping Lynne Tillman will help.
Oh, and this, because I’m having a hard time not being angry at smart women pretending not to be or assuming the rest of us aren’t. I’m looking forward to this review.

*Sure, I could use Instapaper but I rarely go back and read things. It has become my reading purgatory.

Why I keep books

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:41:00 -0800

Recently, I saw that Granta had published a story by Jon McGregor. I instantly clicked on it because I loved both So Many Ways To Begin and If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. I liked his books so much that I read them just about back to back, something I rarely do - there’s just too many new books to discover.* As I clicked over to Granta I realized that the story is a reworking of a story originally published in 2002. I also noticed the cover of that particular issue looked familiar. So I went over to my bookshelf and sure enough there it was. What a find! A long time ago I used to ‘collect’ Granta magazines, particularly if there were pieces by Milan Kundera. Not sure why I collected them (or why I looked for Milan Kundera above anyone else) other than they are always beautiful and have great writing. I subscribe now and then, when I feel like spending the money; but, mostly, if I’m at a used bookstore or book sale I find one or two and pick them up.

This particular issue is a treasure trove with writings from:

Milan Kundera
Rachel Cusk
Edmund White
Arthur Miller
Jon McGregor
Gary Shteyngart

I can not wait to go back and reread some of these pieces. Just when I think about getting rid of more of my books I realize why I keep them in the first place.** I am always discovering and rediscovering.

*A sentiment I no longer believe. I am now more concerned with reading whatever I feel is the right thing to read right now. If I want to read two books by Jon McGregor, one right after the other, then that is what I shall do.

**I understand that this could easily open a discussion on the physical book versus its electronic version. I have not formed a concrete position on this issue other than that it should always, always be about the writing.