on leaving your writerly self some writerly threads, and on reading RAIN REIGN

I was feeling sad. It doesn't matter why. I wrote part of a story then I didn't have a next, and so I went to take a walk. To think this inchoate tale of mine through. To cast about for a "then...." I wasn't planning to write another word, but I don't believe you can leave a story hanging on the edge of its own cliff. You have to have something to return to—tomorrow, next week, next year. You have to have some dangling threads.

I went to a patch of woods, stood by a creek, took photographs, made notes, gave myself a place to begin again.

Then I came home and chose from this stack of books and read.


Rain Reign by Ann M. Martin is the book I chose. Count me now among the crowd of admirers of this simple-seeming book. It's the story of a girl who loves homonyms (which are in fact called homophones), a girl who loves rules, a girl whose single dad may not be well-equipped to handle her quirks, her needs. Against the odds, this girl's dad does, for her, something that seems right and good—brings home a dog she names Rain. But after a superstorm separates the girl from the dog, she learns loneliness, worry, and how to handle the truth. How to be bigger than one's own needs. How to see the world as others do.

How do we teach our children integrity? We give them books like this one—Rain Reign.

How do we write well, whenever we will write again?

By reading the right books. By burying our sad in another's art.

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what do you want? to write (a shred), to read (up next, on my list)

But what do you want? a friend asked, and I said (hurrying past, on an errand, again), Time.

I'd give you some of mine, if I could, he said.

I believed him. I walked on.

This is a Sunday. I claim it as mine. I spent the morning writing a shred of this strange new inchoate book of mine, the one that will take a very long time; let it take a very long time. I don't want to be in any other imagined space than this one. I don't want to write to be done. I don't want to know, even, if the world will want this book of mine. I just want to write it. Twenty-five thousand words in, and who knows what the hell will happen next. I write to find out. I write to invent the language that this story must be told in.

This afternoon I will choose among the books I have lately gathered unto myself and read. Little Failures. Brown Girl Dreaming. Rain Reign. I'll Give You the Sun, The Dinner. And also, a gift from Daniel Torday's publisher, The Last Flight of Poxl West, which is due out in March and which has been called many great things by many great people.

A writing morning. A reading afternoon. The gift I gave myself for Christmas.

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