Having the Having

"I tie knots in the strings of my spirit
to remember."

Jack Gilbert
Refusing Heaven

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Doomed Novels

Having built a career by forging ahead, I now find myself tripping backwards, wading into the waters of novels I never finished, books no publishing house ever wanted to buy. There are stacks of both here; I wonder at my own tenacity. I wonder, too, if it is good to look back—if it's a teachable exercise.

What, for example, do you learn from a novel you wrote and rewrote some 80 times? Five years, 80 drafts, and when I look at it now I see what I could not see then: the novel's failure was inscribed within its very opening lines. The book forecast its own doom. We writers are required, always, to rise above ourselves. For five years (and how is it that I only see this now?) I worked on a novel that wallowed. Here's how it started. Here's what I will hope to never do again.

She was forty-two, and the truth had come to claim her. She was at war within herself and rarely slept.

What the slightest sound could do, to a woman like that. Sound, or the smell inside the spine of a forsaken book, or the way the window held the moon like some gold trigger. An open bottle of vanilla wrecked her. A sprinkling of spices frayed her nerves.

She had tried to write a novel; she had failed. She had taken a comfortable distance from her protagonist’s regret, and the prose had left her cold. It had left her empty, standing on her own made-up terrain, talking to characters who didn’t exist, railing at them, urging their confessions. Who was the old cook in the book she had written? She was herself, disguised and disguised again, way past the mark of any measure. Once someone had asked her what a character was, and how a writer worked to forge one. She had answered, the way she did then, with the posturings of a critic, keeping the article in front of the noun so as to avoid the larger question. Character. It was a big word. It was, or it could be, a condemnation.

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The Florist's Daughter

I've written elsewhere in this blog about the magnificent Patricia Hampl, whose various memoirs have elevated the genre, and whose thinking about memory and imagination is required reading for anyone hoping to pin truth to the page. I've taught her essays and I've learned from them, and last fall I won the review lottery when the Chicago Tribune asked for my opinion on the author's latest, The Florist's Daughter. She's made a difference in my life, this writer—in practice and in theory, from a distance.

Last night, thanks to the generosity of Karl Kirchwey, Libby Mosier, and Bryn Mawr College, I had the privilege of listening to Patricia read in a hall so grand she felt, she said, as if she were on the verge of being knighted. I sat while she fielded questions with humility and grace. And then I joined a really lovely group of people for a round-tabled dinner, in which Patricia proved herself to be that rare breed: as human and dignified and smart in real life as she has always been on the page.

Here's to memory and imagination, then. Here's to ahi tuna and bundt cake and to a writer who reaches past herself in the interest of others—with interest in others, with that sort of wanting-to-know that defines our greatest.

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Curatives

I'm not going to bore you with the facts, but I've been beaten down by panic these past several week—that ridiculous tsunami of adrenaline surges and a badly behaving heart, nights spent praying for an hour of sleep on a downstairs couch. It is what it is. This, too, shall pass, and is a minor inconvenience in the worldly scheme of things.

I speak of it only to celebrate its antidote, which is laughter and the friends who step in to induce it. I speak of it to celebrate, in this one instant of many instances, a particular Jan Suzanne, who walked the city streets with me last evening. Jan Suzanne, glamorous through and through, a little Madison Avenue in my own beloved Philly, more than a little adorable with her queenly absurd absorbing stories, more than willing to take a bolero strut as we turned up Market, nothing but our shadows behind us. Nothing but the night, always young, when she is in it.

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River Talk

I'll be down at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania tomorrow evening, talking about rivers and the way they flow, talking about primary research and the way it builds to narrative. I always feel a deep sense of responsibility, when it comes to giving talks—to the audience, to the material—and often, in the preparatory hours before, I try to strip myself of what I know and yield again to questions and original impulses. What does a river mean? How might a river speak? How might a single organ—a river—embody a city's history? What do you search for, while researching?

It's critical, I think, to approach each talk newly. To reach deep and to keep reaching. To avoid, if you can, being seduced by what you've said before. To keep yourself on the right side of the page.

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Moon Slide and Once

I've been watching the moon slide across my office window this morning—an imperfect, downward-tilted globe. Every time I look up it has escaped to somewhere new, so that just now it passes behind a fringe of trees, limbs incandescent with new buds.

Just now: trapped in the cradle of angled branches.

I remain off the page—hung up myself in some ambiguous writerly space. Ambivalent? My mind keeps returning to a movie I watched Friday evening—the movie "Once," which must be watched by anyone who cares at all about how stories get made, how love gets answered. It's a simple enough story about an Irish busker, the girl he meets, the time they spend making songs, but really: it goes much deeper than that. John Carney, who wrote and directed the movie, made the whole thing for less than $150,000, made it the way he wanted it made, hiring musicians who he thought might be able to act, as opposed to actors who might be taught to sing. He was guided, he has said, by tone as opposed to plot. He allowed scenes to develop at the distance of a long lens. He cleared a path for the authentic, and it shows, and I'm sitting with that, I'm trying to translate it toward anything I might choose to do—today, tomorrow, sooner or later.

The moon has gone pink on me, the color of the birthing sun.

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Happy Easter

This morning, early, I drove purple irises to my mother's grave, where deer had formed a circle around her resting place. They watched me, didn't mind me, barely moved aside as I approached. I left the flowers to sky and sun, to deer, walked back down the hill, and as I drove off a hawk flew beside me—kept its wings down-to-the-ground low until the road bent and the hawk ascended, and we went our separate ways.

Easter is meant to be all sweet things; Easter is hope. I wish sweetness toward all of you today. I hold to hope.

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Nashville

Nashville, where I have been of late, was all music, as I knew it would be, and all kindness, though I didn't go looking for that. The sort of place where waitresses remember you day to day, and cowboy hatted men stand singing in the streets, and the bars open at 11 AM and invite you in so that you can just sit, if you want to, not thinking about much, not caring about much, just living.

I brought books, but I didn't read them. Paper, but I didn't write. Good not to be a writer for a while. Good to go empty-minded, nothing but a camera bumping up against the chest.

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Another Beginning

Cleaning out my desktop just now, tossing old files, I come across a brief piece I once wrote—my ticket in, as it turned out, to a Jayne Anne Phillips workshop in Prague. The question we applicants had been given to answer was, Why do you write?, and this was 12 years ago, when all I formally knew about writing was what I'd learned during a ten-day workshop conducted the year before by Reginald Gibbons and Rosellen Brown in Spoleto. Everything else was impulse and desire, whatever I could glean from books, whatever I had the patience to learn from the editors of literary magazines, who wrote cryptic rejection notes and sometimes (bliss) said yes instead.

Why do I write? Then as now it was dance and words, it was hollowness and the urge to fill it. I'd forgotten that somehow, until today, when I was emptying parts of my history out:


It has the impact of a first memory, though it isn’t, there were years that came before this, there were seven. I sit with my mother on the living room couch, a gold weave whose chocolate-colored medallions are going darker and darker. My brother is upstairs, my sister’s asleep, my mother says Summer, I repeat it. Sue swims in summer, she says, and dreadfully obedient, I repeat it. Samson is stronger than Sara. I hear her, I answer, I say it. Sugar is sweeter than salt, Cindy is sewing a sweater, Superman sits on the sound, Something special is slipping by Sally. I believe in all this. I say every word. Every word, but minus the S’s.

In school I go through the same exercise with a woman whose face I can’t remember in a room I would be afraid of now, if anyone closed me inside it. A stock room, maybe, a strange cold storage for torn parachutes and punctured dodge balls and the boxes of chalk that won’t write. It seems to me that she is using a machine, this blank woman, that there is metal between her S’s and me. But how could that be? Only the tongue gives up talk, a maneuver of muscle between teeth. Only the tongue, but then also the page, a page where one writes down the S’s.

Maybe this is a good a start as any. Maybe this is why I write but poorly speak. Though I don’t like it. I think it’s too sentimental. I think perhaps it’s not true, perhaps I write because I dance, write because if there is one weak muscle in my mouth there is strength in my legs, my thighs, the space between my hips, my heart in its cage of ribs leaping. There is strength in me and music in my house, turned up so loud that the wood floor sweats and the guitar that no one is playing is shaking and aching in its chest. There is music and I have to dance, I have to dance, I have always had to dance, my body like shattering glass, like a collision in the glare of a song. I write because I dance, because later, when the music is gone, my heart still leaps and my hollows ache and words spelled out in rhythms are the cure. I can close my eyes and be perfectly tame and still feel the fist of the dance in my brain.

I should not write. I should dismiss this habit started too many years ago. I don’t have the disposition, I don’t have the vocabulary, I don’t have the patience, one needs so much patience for all these words, one after the other, the only order they’ll flow in, the only sequence they’ll take: I am impatient. I should do manual labor; you don’t need a strong tongue for that. I should be out on a farm in the sunshine, running my body, lengthening the days, losing my mind in the animal instincts.

Why do I write? Why do I do it to myself every day? Why don’t I have conversations instead, just sit and tell the stories that keep twisting, knocking, clanging, bleeding, splitting in my head? I have mastered my S’s. I have learned speech without machines and I should not have to write it down, I should be finished with the page, I should be through.

I'll be returning to this blog on Friday.

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A Step from Death

Reviewing books forces me to try to see a story, a structure, an approach, an attitude from an author's point of view, to decide what is worthy of judgment, to speak authentically of my own necessarily idiosyncratic response. Two weeks ago, I read Larry Woiwode's new memoir on behalf of the Chicago Tribune. Because this book gives writers a lot to think about, and because I hear mostly from writers on this blog, I reproduce my review here.

www.chicagotribune.com/features/booksmags/chi-stepbw15mar15,1,2982770.story
Larry Woiwode's "A Step From Death"

By Beth Kephart
March 15, 2008

A Step From Death
By Larry Woiwode
Counterpoint, 272 pages, $24

Perhaps the hardest books to write are those that hold themselves accountable to no conventional boundaries or forms. Those that permit time to spill across their pages -- backward, forward, a rush of movement, a sudden stilling, returns and retreats. Those in which one thought juts deeply into the core of another, in which elisions are story, in which one is at a loss to define a true end or beginning. Books like these cannot hold their readers, let alone survive themselves, unless they are perfectly calibrated -- orchestrated as if by some higher power, so that all the fragments do at last become a gleaming, self-sustaining whole.

Larry Woiwode's new memoir, "A Step From Death," is a book of interweavings, to use his terminology, a book that rides on the understanding, in Woiwode's words, that:

"All experience is simultaneous, stilled and sealed in itself, and we manage daily by imagining we move from minute to minute, somehow always ahead. Our multiple selves collide at every second of intersection, one or the other vying for supremacy, the scars of the past flooding through the present texture of our personality, and maturity is knowing how to govern the best combination of them."

"A Step From Death" takes as its first impulse a near-fatal accident on Woiwode's farm. It branches toward childhood memories, writerly obsessions, failures, breakthroughs, and as it swims and swirls it addresses Woiwode's only son, Joseph, for whom Woiwode has sought to be a love-deserving father and in whom Woiwode recognizes the weight and opportunity of inheritance and heritage.

But to return to the accident that precipitates this memoir: It involves a machine, a hay baler attached to a tractor. It involves a jacket that Woiwode, knowing better, chooses to work in on that August day. He's off on his own when he becomes caught in a tangle, baling hay in a rocky stretch when one of the rocks appears to get caught in the mechanism.

"I get off and gather [the stones] up, dazed by the hours of noise, and think of how Indians revere rocks as primal material and speak to them, a view that's altered my take on rocks, which to farmers are a nuisance and scourge: Grandfather Rocks. I reach up for the toolbox, feel a tug at my jacket, realize I haven't shut off the [power take-off], and think, My God, this is it, and in a whirl, I'm gone."

Note the back-stepping in that passage -- the sly pause around the idea of Grandfather Rocks just as the author is about to be spun into the teeth of a machine. A less-patient writer would have put the reader right there, in the crescendo of trouble, but Woiwode waits, holds his breath, lunges. Woiwode, as he tells us, prefers language that is "allusive but solid enough to allow comic somersaults within its gravity, while meaning radiates from its premises to wider realms."

Cut, three of his ribs snapped, his jacket wrapped so hard around one arm it's as if the arm has been dressed with a tourniquet, he looks for help and finds none, calls out and can't be heard. If he can't cut himself loose, he'll lose the arm. Cutting himself loose means enduring pain that is already unbearable. Woiwode chooses survival. The next days and weeks are spent in the throes of such excruciating pain that all he can do is try to sleep standing up, or sleep with his head wedged upon his desk.

An accident, but not the first in Woiwode's life, and not the worst, for the worst, we learn, as Woiwode addresses his son, lies in the past, when Joseph -- or critical parts of him -- were nearly lost, first in a horse accident and later to another farm machine. As the only boy of four children, Joseph is held particularly dear. He has been a companion, a work help, a steady guide; he has been there -- a son worthy of an extraordinary father, a son who listens. "A Step From Death" is addressed to this son's open ear.

Regrets, wants, self-disgust, confessions -- all of that is here, in the mad, bold waters of this book. The literati, however, will no doubt dwell on the passages that recount Woiwode's days as an impassioned reader engorged on a new book each day, as a New Yorker short-story writer working with the legendary William Maxwell, as a writer churning the same one manuscript over and over for a decade (jeopardizing his marriage, temporarily straining his sanity), as an author haunting the halls of his publishing house for the whiff of the tortured book's first review (grand reviews, by the way, great praise for this "Beyond the Bedroom Wall"). This material is powerful, muscular, raw, even thrilling. It is a handbook to the writing life like none other I have read.

But of course "A Step From Death" is meant to be so much more than that: a coming to terms, a reconciliation with self, a bid to understand fathers and fatherhood. It tumbles and stonewalls and enthralls and wounds, roping readers through the thick braid of its sentences, its unapologetic instructions on how to read the book. One senses no precocity here, no purposeful manipulations. One senses, instead, a struggle to find the best way to say the hardest things, to put a life into context.

I read with deep admiration, then -- not always certain I'd grasped every embedded connection, not entirely clear on the workings of those farm machines, but deeply grateful to spend time inside the mind and life of a man who has fought so hard to live an authentic life and to write authentically. I predict a groundswell of affection for "A Step From Death," and I think Woiwode has earned it.

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Beth Kephart's ninth book, "House of Dance," is due out in May.

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

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Hearkening Back to Spring

Whenever I went to the garden I was leaving work behind. Words and books, the writing life, the expectations others had of me. I was forsaking deadlines and logic, a liberation I had not realized, until that spring, that I was seeking. I was giving up on the notion that words alone can solve riddles. You can write yourself into your life, or you can write yourself directly out of it; I had been losing track of me. I had found myself measuring myself by my words, found myself too awfully focused on the need to get things right.

But you are never perfectly right when it comes to words. You are only yourself, and when you are alone as much as I had been alone with the work, yourself becomes too tight and stingy. You try to put too fine a point on things; you lose your talent for idle thought or lazy dreaming. You start doing battle with yourself over finally meaningless things when you could and actually should be out helping your neighbor rake her leaves. You obsess (but of course you obsess) until the joy is gone from that thing you’d loved, until your fury overwhelms your passion, until you no longer know how to sit with your back against a tree and write poetry that no one will ever see. I had become a writer because I’d loved the sound, the kiss of words. But now language seemed vacuous and puny.

What I had loved had become what I felt compelled to do; it was time to walk out my own front door. “Keenly observed,” Gretel Ehrlich has written, “the world is transformed.” I went to the garden to see more truly. I went for transformation’s sake, and to win back my talent for plain living.

Ghosts in the Garden: Reflections on Endings, Beginnings, and the Unearthing of Self (Beth Kephart, New World Library, 2005)

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Positive Thinking

Yesterday, dancing, two weeks before a show, Jean the fantastically talented (and more than a little famous) dance instructor, says to me, "I have had my revelation for the week."

"Which is what?" I ask.

"Anything is possible," he says.

"Is that a fact?"

"Yes. It's all about positive thinking."

And of course I laugh. Because he is asking me to do the impossible, because there isn't enough time to learn, because I'm too old for this. But then I say, "Okay. Fine." And strut out onto the floor and stand up straighter and settle my hips deeper and listen, really listen, for the beat. Pretend there is an audience. Pretend I have this right to dance on a stage, with a champion dancer.

And something happens. Not perfection. Not glory. But something that sets me, for those few moments, free—of self-consciousness and regret, of timidity and reserve, of a long, long life of near invisibility.

I can hide behind the words, with writing. There is nowhere to hide on a dance floor. There is nothing to do, but to believe.

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Bodies of Water

I had a client meeting in the city, cause to board a train, an excuse to stop the madness and huddle with a book.

I chose THREE VIEWS OF CRYSTAL WATER, by Katherine Govier (author of the previously mentioned CREATION). I sunk straight in. I had that physical response I often get to books that are immaculately conceived and written. The slight shiver before the stillness sets in. The dulled hammering of the heart. The slow uncranking of the muscles about the jaw.

The therapeutics of a book upon a lap.

Why don't more people know about THREE VIEWS? Why isn't Govier a household name? How much talent bucks out there, in the world beyond, just waiting for more of us to notice?

On the train two days ago, I got to notice. Today I implore you to notice, too.

A fraction, then, from Govier:

"Bodies of water, we call them. Fresh, salt, dead, alive, still, fast-moving, tidal, land-locked. I know little about those other bodies which span the world, but I can tell you that the sea I plumb is a trickster. Lashing at the black lava rocks, tasting of the myterious living things, shot with sunbeams or sunk in massive gloom, it is bitter to the nostrils and stinging to the lips. I've seen rock cliffs under water that trail air bubbles out of some crevice as if they were breathing."

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Spin

Here's the truth: The best news comes when you aren't looking for it, not even imagining it, not pretending not to want it.

And it comes on days when you're feeling sort of drowning-in-the-work-stuff blue.

Via email.

Thanks to Emilie of HarperTeen for your note today that UNDERCOVER has been named to the 2008 New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age list. Just to think that someone in that gorgeous institution was sitting somewhere (perhaps beneath the spangled sky?) with the book in his or her lap—well, that's enough for me. Really. Today, especially, it's huge.

Miss Melissa Walker: You are one generous soul. Get well soon.

Finally, Judy, beautiful Judy, of the dress photographed here. Thanks for the photo session.

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The Writing Career

I spent part of yesterday at a local high school on behalf of an immaculately well-planned Career Week program: What do you do? How do you do it? Why do you do it? How did you come to do it? Is it worth it? These were the questions we careerists were to address.

Easy enough? Depends, I discovered, on how you approach the topic, and me being me, I likely thought too much about it. Had too many thoughts to cram into not even an hour, too many exhortions: Listen well to the world beyond yourself. Read widely and variously. Find your voice. Do not compromise. Never lock yourself into the end of your story until you actually reach the end of your story, for if you give yourself nothing to discover throughout the writing process, there will be no adventure for you, the writer, and, usually, a little less gleam for your reader.

I said, Story is choreography.

I said, Be satisfied before you publish, for once you publish a story (or a life) is fixed.

I said, By analyzing the work of others you'll find the tools with which to assess your own.

I said, Even after all these years, I equate writing with privilege.

But I don't know, really, if I said enough, if I left a mark, if I rode my horse in, then rode away, leaving nothing in the air but dust.

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Dance Soul

If you sit in the path of a breeze on an unselfconscious day, you will be danced for. Some leaf will pinch itself off a tree and, not wishing to reach the ground, will flick and glide. Or a monarch butterfly will nicker in. Or a spider will step high. Or a single spot of bravura dew will not take the straightest path down the brawny stalk in the garden. The leaf, the monarch, the spider, the dew all lie in sympathy with dance. They are, like dancers, seeking more, hell bent on the bold, wrenched toward beauty.

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Feathered Up

This morning I remembered the bird who nested in the rafters outside my office door last spring, constructing her home with the husks of ornamental grass, the shreddings of twigs, a line or two from a newspaper page. The bird and I never bothered to trouble the other, and soon she did not even mind my coming and going, so that I could open the door, look up, call out, and she'd stay just where she was, minding her eggs.

Once the chicks were born, she yielded to instinct—feeding, protecting, giving lessons in flight or, at least, some sort of birdly encouragement. And then one day I opened the door and a chick looked up from its perch upon my welcome mat, curious and unafraid. It posed for portraits, greeted my father. By afternoon it was gone. I never saw it again, or if I did, it had long since changed its coat of feathers.

I lived this past week inside the shell of an intense and finally empowering novel revision. I slept for the first time last night. This morning I wake to dim light, a soggy garden, an understanding that the novel is not mine anymore; it has somehow completed itself. We make and shape our books and then, of necessity, we set them apart. They will fly or not without us in the end. We feather them up and watch the skies.

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Nothing But Ghosts

You can’t be as alive as Mom was, and then be dead. You can’t be singing so that your voice fills every room in a hand-me-down house, and then not be heard at all. The math doesn’t work; I try it upside down and backwards. I went kind of crazy with the wrongness of it for awhile, and then Dad and I talked and he said he knew no cure, the only thing he knew was the power of staying busy. I took on more school projects. I joined more clubs. I stopped hanging out so much with my two best friends, Jessica and Ellen, because I didn’t feel like explaining, I didn’t want to answer their questions or feel their pity. I got a job at wacko Miss Martine’s estate the day we finished finals.

From NOTHING BUT GHOSTS, a work in progress

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Illuminated

Eventually, the light goes on. Last night it happened for me at four in the morning, as I lay on the downstairs couch listening to rain, watching the room flash bright with every lightning strike. I was (as I've been saying) trying to find my way back into a novel I had written, trying to run a new ribbon of color through the fabric I had woven. I trained my mind on details, not plot. Motifs, not action. I lay awake but not moving all night long, until a single image—a yellow flag iris—floated forward and remained.

Perhaps the hardest part of writing is the not-writing, the thinking through. Silence eludes us, solutions do, and all we can do is wait. Faith is required. And weather.

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Love and Consequences

So what do we make of the news today regarding one Margaret Seltzer, aka Margaret Jones, who penned Love and Consequences, the true story of the author's gang-riddled youth. Widely praised, the author allowed herself to be photographed for the New York Times, to be trotted out as a literary star, to be interviewed about her troubled youth, only to be outted, a few days later, by a sister who revealed that the entire life story was a fabrication—a tale told by a privileged woman who had not lived even a semblance of the life she put on the page.

Audacity? Naivety? Never heard of Nasdij or James Frey, never paid attention to the psychic fall-out experienced by authors whose farces unravel over time? Thought she could get away with it? Didn't mind taking the risk? Really did believe, as she is quoted in today's New York Times as saying, that the book represented her "opportunity to put a voice to people who people don't listen to"?

Reading the early reviews last week, I thought to myself: Well, oh dear. Here comes another. Wondered how long it would take for the author to be in some way found out. Some stories simply don't ring true, no matter how well they've been crafted, and while I'd have certainly never guessed at the depth of this deception, I do wonder why more questions were not asked before the author was sent out to dazzle the world with her distortions.

Memoir writing is a tricky business. My story isn't your story, even if you grew up in my house, even if you are my son, even if you chose to marry me, even if you raised me. Still, there are facts, hard, abrasive truths, documents, photographs from which one cannot escape. Memoir riddles readers with interpretations, true. But memoir is not borrowing another's story as one's own. It is not abusing the personal "I" for the sake of an imagined global good.

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Balancing Act

The day seems perilously balanced upon itself—the sky drenched with the color of rain, the earth dry. I have been reading and reviewing extraordinary books these past few days, dwelling on the decisions other authors make about form, language, indirection, instruction. I've been meeting client deadlines and folding the laundry, dressing the turkey and peeling the carrots, and all the while I've been thinking about NOTHING BUT GHOSTS, wondering how to re-enter a book I had imagined was finished.

I've been thinking about how you keep a book whole, even as you pry it apart. How you maintain its organic urgency, even as you address a broken link in plot. I've been recreating the mood that generated the story in the first place, retracing a particular terrain. I've been afraid to start again. I've backed away. I've circled.

The writing life.

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What is it for?

And so we turn (when we're stuck; when we're not certain of why we push so hard against a discipline, a form; when we need a shakedowntalkingto, a goading forward) to those so much wiser than ourselves, and read familiar passages newly.

Today I leafed through the essential Pinsky book and came upon these words:

"I presume that the technology of poetry, using the human body as its medium, evolved for specific uses: to hold things in memory, both within and beyond the individual life span; to achieve intensity and sensuous appeal; to express feelings and ideas rapidly and memorably. To share those feelings and ideas with companions, and also with the dead and with those to come after us."

Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry

Poetry, then, like a tree holding its own inside the wind.

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Spinning

This morning, I (caught inside a decision I didn't imagine myself having to make about a book I thought I'd finished writing) study these words from Larry Woiwode's new memoir, A STEP FROM DEATH:

"So I learned you had to trust in the organic nature and structure of the story or novel, as all good editors do, or you shear away its potential to be original."

And this:

"There is a barbarity in the compression a word can assume, holding a soul of multiple meanings, as with a person, in its inner space. The meanings meld into the meanings of the surrounding words, suggesting meanings I didn't mean to suggest, and a typeset page stares back with such clarity, once a book is out, I recoil at passages as I would a toad."

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