Looking Toward San Antonio

A box of books arrived yesterday: Christmas in October. There are two Justina Chen Headleys—Girl Overboard and North of Beautiful (an ARC). There are three Catherine Gilbert Murdocks: Dairy Queen, The Off Season, Princess Ben. There is a note from my friends at HarperCollins: For ALAN, which is shorthand for, Hey, aren't you lucky, this is the work of your co-panelists for the upcoming ALAN conference in San Antonio. (Matt de la Pena will be joining us for this Sports Stories = Life Stories panel as well; I'll be getting his books soon.)

The answer is, Yes, I am so lucky. I rarely travel in my book life—rarely pretend that I do much more than run my business, clean my house, write this blog, chill with friends, text with my boy, stand helpless in the produce aisles attempting to dream up (yet another) dinner, watch Project Runway and DWTS with my happily agreeable husband, dance a sambarumbafoxtrotchachaandsomehorrifyingmixCDofeach, and (on good days) surreptitiously scribble in the dark. The Traveling Writer's Life has eluded me, or perhaps I have eluded it, but this November I am off to San Antonio to sit on a panel with writers with whom I am so genuinely looking forward to thinking out loud, if only for a short while. It's one of those bright collisional possibilities that could shape a point of view or thread a question through, and frankly, I'm in need of a little shattering of self, a little new.

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The Uncommon Reader

Yesterday's guilty pleasure was THE UNCOMMON READER, Alan Bennett's totally fine new novella that wonders what would happen if the queen of England suddenly morphed into an avid reader. Fabulous premise, telling lesson in how ideas can in fact advance plot, how apparent contradictions do indeed broaden understanding, how vocabulary pitched to just the right high can aerate the reading experience (words for the book of words: glabrous, divigation, opsimath). Reading is both passive and a muscle to be developed. Writers are equally brave and mewling. Reading is not for "doers" and yet, reading "tenderises," alters perspective, catalyzes new forms of doing. Bennett has a field day best and worsting the entire lit scene, but cruelty doesn't enter in, only astute observation.

Myopia, self-absorption, grandstanding, melodrama: It can all get the best of us writers. Reader talk, writer talk: Yes, you're right, it grows incestuous, can send my husband (the most happily determined non-reader I know) straight across the room—a cannon shot.

But everytime we write, and everytime we read, and everytime we're out there talking about reading, talking about writing, we are defining what literature is and what it means. We are being given the chance (we are taking the chance) to torque, twist, blue sky it, toward that thing that we want to be part of.

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