The Most Obnoxious Squeak

According to yesterday’s The Globe and Mail, Charles Lamb had this to say about Percy Bysshe Shelley: “His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with.” Harsh, right?

More scathing still, here’s James Dickey on Robert Frost: “If it were thought that anything I wrote were influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes. … a more sententious holding-forth old bore, who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word, I never saw.” (The gibes get even more bilious from there. Check out the article here to see what Faulkner had to say about Twain, and which barbs Woolf had for Maugham.) (more…)

Published in:  on February 3, 2010 at 12:39 am Comments (3)

Jennifer Bartlett’s guest blog at Delirious Hem

I’d like to take a moment to direct you to a blog I’m happy I ran across this week: Delirious Hem. I found this January 16 guest post by Jennifer Bartlett insightful and refreshing. (more…)

Published in:  on January 22, 2010 at 5:14 pm Comments Off

On One of My Compulsions: Grammar

I’ve been teaching English language, literature, and writing to ESL (English as a Second Language) students for about four years now. As much as I do love seeing my students grow and learn, having the freedom to take a chunk of time off this past fall (in order to work seriously on my writing projects) has been fantastic. But last week marked my return to the classroom after that much-needed hiatus, and I do have to say that it’s good to be back with my students.

One of the fun things about teaching learners of English is the fact that I get to spend a great deal of time talking about grammar. Okay, that’s not everyone’s idea of a good time, but I find the structure and usage of the English language quite fascinating. Growing up, I was never taught the rules of the English language until I was in middle school, and even then I promptly forgot the parts of the sentence I was made to diagram. I relied, as most Americans do, on what my ear suggested. Absorbed grammar one takes on from reading and listening is fine for many of us, so long as we’ve been exposed to correct patterns of usage. (more…)

Published in:  on January 21, 2010 at 6:32 am Comments (1)

So, what do I do now that I’ve finished the book?

Now I really finish it. Jacob Wrestling is back on my desk with a handful of revision notes and instructions to extend the novel’s length by a hefty percentage. After I had a nightmare in which I was told to expunge one of my main characters, the idea of writing more rather than hacking out sounded pretty great. Once the reality of the revision process set in, I followed the below program in preparing myself for the road ahead: (more…)

Published in:  on January 11, 2010 at 10:57 pm Comments (2)

You can do it. We will not help you.

For a while, I’ve been saying that there’s no such thing as writer’s block. And I still believe it; getting one’s rear end connected with a desk chair and then causing one’s hand to make marks on paper is pretty much the cure for that sense of ennui. But I’ve recently come to feel that there’s something else at work in the universe, and that some alignment of stars that conspires to make writing–even when we want nothing more than to get the work done–impossible.

This last weekend, I’d blocked out Sunday as a full day to work on a nonfiction piece I’ve been marinating. My husband would be snowboarding all day, God love ‘im, so I’d have the house to myself, and could work all day while wearing my pajamas and listening to the cat snore. Saturday night, as I was falling asleep, hoping to feel refreshed for my written session, my upstairs neighbor (we will henceforth refer to him as Godzilla) started his nightly floor-pounding session. Godzilla seems to have some compulsion to find large sticks, pipes or cudgels, and then pounds, rolls or otherwise clouts them about the floor all day, every day. Now that this practice is creeping into the night, we’re getting rather frustrated. We’ve been upstairs six times in the last two weeks to talk to Godzilla about his hobby, but he maintains that we are imagining things and that we must be hearing his two-pound chihuahua walking across the floor (right.). This Saturday night was no ordinary floor-pounding session, though. Apparently, it was time to par-tay, and the clobber-fest went on into the small hours of the morning. (more…)

Published in:  on January 6, 2010 at 9:11 pm Comments (5)

Shameless Promotion

It’s time to shamelessly promote a journal I like and respect a great deal (and not simply because they’re publishing my work in Issue 13). Copper Nickel consistently prints fresh voices alongside mainstays of the American literary scene, engages the community with outreach programs, and supports its writers. If you’re thinking of subscribing to a few literary magazines this year (and, frankly, it wouldn’t be a bad New Year’s resolution to do so), Copper Nickel should be high on your list.

Published in:  on January 4, 2010 at 11:34 pm Leave a Comment

What a difference a decade makes

I’ll begin this little foray into the past decade (don’t worry–I don’t plan to cover the whole thing) with a disclaimer: I rarely like or take any interest in year-end retrospectives. But, on the occasion of this decade’s end, I’m indulging.

Ten years ago, I was a high school senior, still living at home, and in a fairly strange situation. In November of 1999, my parents sold their home and moved our family–including two toddlers–into my grandparents’ isolated home in mountains above the Central California city where we’d lived for years.

The reasons for the move were due in part to a desire on my parents’ part to move from the poorly-built (and, we would later learn, toxic) house in which we’d been living, but the overriding factor was a deep conviction on their part that the “Y2K Bug” was going to wreak havoc on all systems logistical, financial and municipal. There was talk of sewers backing up into streets, of food stores being depleted, of potable water and electricity being a thing of the past. In a preparedness-exercise on the scale of a Red Cross effort, my parents amassed a vast store of hard red winter wheat in 10-gallon buckets, and squirreled the containers away beneath my grandparents’ home (the plan was to, in some way that remains incomprehensible to me, till the California hardpan for subsistence). Canned meats (protein treats to sprinkle in among the all-wheat diet) and vegetables took up the remaining space under the house. There was much gun-cleaning between my grandfather and my dad, though it was unclear to me at the time whether the arms were meant to stave off the bands of roving outlaws Cormac McCarthy would later describe in The Road, or for the shooting and subsequent eating of the opossum that roamed the property looking like a half-peeled potato. (more…)

Published in:  on December 30, 2009 at 9:36 pm Comments (4)

The Reading List

Now that Jacob Wrestling is out of my hands for a while, I’ve had a good bit of time to replenish my brain with writing by other people. When I feel my creative energy flagging, reading other writers working at the top of their respective games never fails to get me excited and ready to get back to my own work. And since I had a good bit of time on my hands in this week before I go back to teaching, I decided to squeeze in as many new books as possible. Here’s what I read over this past week: (more…)

Published in:  on December 27, 2009 at 10:41 pm Comments (2)

What I Learned from Writing a Book in Four Months

Yesterday, I “finished” Jacob Wrestling, (the quotes are my nod to the fact that I’m sure more revisions are looming, much as I don’t want to think of them right now) and after reading through my book, my proposal, and my cover letter about 30 times each, I hit the “send” button on the email that will whisk it off to an agent’s inbox, where things are–mercifully–out of my hands for the moment.

I’m tired–emotionally, physically, mentally, artistically…you name the adverb. And while I’d really like to retreat into a headspace that allows me to be a bit of a slacker/zombie for a while (I sat slack-jawed in front of a soap opera yesterday afternoon. I’m not even sure which one it was. It may have been in Spanish–I don’t remember–but it was remarkably relaxing) I realize I should take a moment to reflect on this entire experience, since I’ll probably end up working on  another book soon enough. So, here’s what I’ve learned thus far: (more…)

Published in:  on December 18, 2009 at 9:18 pm Comments (3)

You don’t do it alone.

Coming to the end of writing Jacob Wrestling while at the same time having a number of other things to take care of (closing reading periods at two magazines, living at 22 degrees Fahrenheit while I fight with my electrician about fixing my heaters, being locked out of the car, having my laptop die, and getting ready for the busy holidays) my nerves are a little frazzled. But even though I’m feeling stressed, I’m feeling very taken-care-of in terms of my writing–I think I’ve determined the answer to The Question (the one authors are always asked at readings: “how do you become a writer?”) After the requisite condition that the aspiring writer read as much as possible, I think the next step is to find and maintain supportive relationships. (more…)

Published in:  on December 11, 2009 at 8:40 pm Leave a Comment