Miss Jane/Brad Watson: Reflections

I've written about Brad Watson here before.

I've told you the story—of how, through my first editor, W.W. Norton's Alane Mason, I began to hear this writer's name. How my dear friend Alyson Hagy, with whom Watson now teaches at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, has perpetuated the tales about his talent. How I have read his books myself, his essays, his interviews, and been grateful for the care he extends toward literature, the idea he seems to represent (and that he shares with Alyson) that, even today, in a world of quick and trending fiction, real literature rises.

Watson has a new book coming. It's called Miss Jane.

Friends, whomever you are, whatever you love, this one's for you. This one—the story of a young girl born with a genital difference in the early 20th century south—transcends all categories, will touch all hearts, will go down in history as a classic. I see no other way around it.

Inspired by Watson's own great-aunt, Miss Jane is the story of a child limited by her body and uncircumscribed by her heart. She discovers her own difference over time. She discovers it in parallel to discovering the beauty of things on the farm where she lives ("the burst of salty liquid from a plump and ice-cold oyster, the soft skins of wild mushrooms, the quick and violent death of a chicken, the tight and unopened bud of a flower blossom") and in the heart of the older doctor who treats her with kindness, adopts her as a near-daughter, and explains the facts of life—and the facts of her life—as simply as the truth allows. Jane will learn the art of aloneness. The art of forgiveness. The art of self-acceptance. She will have to starve herself in order to mask her terrible incontinence. She will have to say goodbye to a hope she has. She will have to live without physical intimacy, and yet—she will not live without love.

Watson's sentences are simpler here than they have been in his other work. His story streams. He takes the attention away from his own narrative self so as to give everything to Jane. It's the tenderness (without sentimentality) that I most admire here. The wait and the wrestling with the right scenes.

Paragraphs like these:

There were innumerable little faint trails her father said were game trails. Animal trails. Their faint presence like the lingering ghosts of the animals' passing. There was a particular little clearing she believed she had discovered, only her, filled with yellow sunlight on clear days, its long grass harboring primroses and wild sunflowers. A meadow she considered to be her very own, her place. The eyes of all the wild, invisible animals watching her. Time was suspended, or did not exist. She could linger there as long as she liked and when she returned from it no time had passed at all since she had stepped into the clearing and then awakened from it. That's what it was like.

The meadow did not exist if she wasn't in it.

Congratulations to Brad Watson. Congratulations to Alane, who, according to the book's acknowledgments, has waited a long time for this.

It was worth the wait.

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In writing about the young, embrace complexity: what we learn from Per Petterson in Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes

My dear friend Alyson Hagy sends gems through the mail. All kinds of art I would never otherwise see. Stories and poems and images that elevate my trust in this world, our capacity, as humans, to transcend ourselves.

Alyson also knows of my great passion for Per Petterson and not long ago sent me Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes, a story collection Petterson wrote early in his career—and has recently been released by Graywolf.

A young boy named Arvid who lives just outside Oslo stands at the heart of these linked interludes. Petterson rushes and hushes us into his world with language that splits seams. He is too young to understand and filter at first. We watch him want, concede, defy, question, and finally grow from childhood into manhood through an act of singular compassion. Arvid's childhood is a most remarkable transformation built of most ordinary moments. It's an astonishing trick, this tiny book. A master class in writing from a child's perspective, a book for adults, certainly, in the same way that Joyce's Portrait of the Artist is for adults. But it is also a book for anyone working within the middle grade/young adult realm.

This is character development.

This is knowing.

This is art.

This is what the brains of the young are capable of seeing, feeling, thinking, and this is what we must aspire to as writers, no matter what age we think we are writing for. The minds and lives of children and young people are complex. They cannot be realistically distilled into issues. They don't organize neatly around obvious plots. They are the last thing in the world from nuance-free one-liners.

One passage of many. He is speaking of his mother.

She'd looked the way she always had for as far back as he could remember, and she still did right up until the day he happened to see a photograph of her from before he was born, and the difference floored him. He tried to work out what could have happened to her, and then he realised it was time that had happened and it was happening to him too, every second of the day. He held his hands to his face as if to keep his skin in place and for many nights he lay clutching his body, feeling time sweeping through it like little explosions. The palms of his hands were quivering and he tried to resist time and hold it back. But nothing helped, and with every pop he felt himself getting older.

He cried, and said to his mother:

'I don't want to get older. I want to stay like I am now! Six and a half, that's enough, isn't it?' But she smiled sadly and said, to every age its charm. And time withdrew to the large clock on the wall in the living room and went round alone in there, like a tiger in a cage, he thought, just waiting, and Mum became Mum again, almost like before.

It is not, contrary to the opinion of some, easier to write for younger readers. It should not be. Our job, I think, is to keep on seeking ways to embrace and elevate the complexity that makes us true and hurt and human.

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first paragraphs: Haruf, Petterson, Harding, Hagy

In the swell of fever and flu, my mind molten, my thoughts barely latching in, I read (not so random) first paragraphs of favorite books.

These for the melodies that do not interfere with the economy of the stories unveiled. For how, in mere lines, we know who we're in with, the stretch of the world, the mood, the names of the places or the insignificance of names.

Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up. When the sun reached the top of the windmill, for a while he watched what it was doing, that increased reddening of sunrise along the steel blades and the tail vane above the wooden platform. After a time he put out the cigarette and went upstairs and walked past the closed door behind which she lay in bed in the darkened guest room sleeping or not and went down the hall to the glassy room over the kitchen where the two boys were. — Kent Haruf, Plainsong

Early November. It's nine o'clock. The titmice are banging against the window. Sometimes they fly dizzily off after the impact, other times they fall and lie struggling in the new snow until they can take off again. I don't know what they want that I have. I look out the window at the forest. There is a reddish light over the trees by the lake. It is starting to blow. I can see the shape of the wind on the water. — Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died. From the rented hospital bed, placed in the middle of his own living room, he saw insects running in and out of imaginary cracks in the ceiling plaster. The panes in the windows, once snugly pointed and glazed, stood loose in their sashes. The next stiff breeze would topple them all and they would flop onto the heads of his family, who sat on the couch and the love seat and the kitchen chairs his wife had brought in to accommodate everyone. The torrent of panes would drive everyone from the room, his grandchildren in from Kansas and Atlanta and Seattle, his sister in from Florida, and he would be marooned on his bed in a moat of shattered glass. Pollen and sparrows, rain and the intrepid squirrels he had spent half of his life keeping out of the bird feeders would breach the house. — Paul Harding, Tinkers

She was a gift, though he did not think of her that way for a long time. He paid twelve hundred dollars for her, money that came straight from his single account at Cabin Valley Bank. She was halter broke, and trailer broke, and she had been wormed for the spring. Someone had taken a rasp to her feet. She had seen her dam, Sally's Quick Ticket, win more than one prize in cutting horse competitions.... — Alyson Hagy, Boleto

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What if we spent September re-reading our favorite books, like "Housekeeping"?

Readers of this blog (and of Handling the Truth) know how much a certain Alyson Hagy means to me—the quality of her work, her character, her mind. Not long ago she mentioned that she was re-reading Housekeeping, one of my very favorite novels of all time. Oh, I thought. And lifted my copy of the book from its shelf.

The extraordinary thing about re-reading a much-loved novel is realizing how brand new the novel can feel, even the fourth time around. For here I am this morning, turning the early pages of Marilynne Robinson's exquisite story, and thinking: How could I have forgotten this? Or this? And this? Yes, I remember the train and the lake, Sylvie and her flowers, the laundry being hung on the line. But I did not remember how swiftly and gracefully Nelson moves through genealogy and across landscape. There's that impeccable first line, "My name is Ruth." Then an indication of grandmother, sisters-in-law, a daughter, and Edmund Foster—all in seven lines. Then a sudden shift to place and to Edmund Foster's childhood home, described in great detail, "no more a human stronghold than a grave."

All this, and we haven't turned a page.

Why?

It's almost as if the novel has broken into tangents before it has even begun, and this (among so much) is what I didn't think about before (or maybe I forgot thinking about it before so that I read it as brand new)—how Housekeeping declares itself by means of a branching interiority right from the start.

Do I see that now because of something Alyson said in a note to me, or would I have seen it anyway, and is it because of the number of books that I have read between my third read of Housekeeping years ago and now, or because of my age, or because I am looking for something new in the stories I read?

I don't know, but I do wonder this: What if I decided to re-read my favorite two dozen books? What would I learn—about stories and about me?

What if we did?

A project to ponder, as September unfolds.

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All the Light We Cannot See: Anthony Doerr (Reflections)

In Alaska, a new friend asks me what I am reading and I say Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See. I show her the book's first page, and she says, "Read it to me. Out loud." I demur. She insists. I read. In the belly of the boat while the glacial mountains float by. "Leaflets," I say, reading the chapter title. Then:

At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.

The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars.

I hear my own breath catch. I look up into Kristi's face. She isn't sure, quite, about the passage I've read, wants to know why it has enchanted me. I read phrases out loud again, verbs, that word incendiary webbed into the lush lyric of the cartwheels, the flutter. How can you speak about what you love? How can you convey the genius of Anthony Doerr, who has never been more genius than this new novel of his—541 pages long, ten years in the making, and it reads too fast, you could read it in a day, you cannot read it in a day, for there will be nothing like it again or soon. Doerr is like Ondaatje, Doerr is like McCann, Doerr is like McDermott, Doerr is like Hagy, Doerr is a writer, pure.

And this new book—about a blind girl in France and a smart boy in Germany and the war that brings them together but only after terrible journeys and terrible losses and only for a moment—this new book is wrenching and glorious. Wrenching first. Glorious because of its deep and tender soul. Because Doerr embraces life even in the midst of dying. Because Doerr inclines toward science as he writes his art, which is to say that he inclines toward the curious mysteries of our world. Snails. A massive diamond. Electromagnetic waves. The cell that divides and divides again, until it is a human, howling.

I love this book. I believe in it, wholeheartedly. I believe in Doerr. Why do books still wear labels—YA or A, historical or contemporary, literary or not? Banish them. Now. Anyone who loved The Book Thief will be astonished and grateful for this book. Anyone who swoons over an Ondaatje sentence will recognize the power here. Anyone who wishes to return to France or Germany at the time of a devastating war will be returned in a fresh way, an eyes wide-open way.

Anyone who reads will emerge brokenhearted but also grateful that Doerr doesn't just break our hearts. In surprising and redeeming ways, he heals them, too.

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That Florence, Italy, novel: the title, the synopsis

Next spring, Tamra Tuller and Chronicle Books will be releasing a novel set in Florence, Italy, and (to a lesser extent) West Philadelphia. It took me a long time, and many drafts, to get it right, and it is only recently that we have settled on a final title.

I share that here, with an early book description:

Something is just not right with Nadia Cara. She’s become a thief, for one thing. She has secrets she can’t tell. She knows what she thinks, but when she tries to speak, the words seem far away. Now in Florence, Italy, with a Master Chef wanna-be brother, a professor father, and a mother who specializes in at-risk teens, Nadia finds herself trapped by her own obsessions and following the trail of an elusive Italian boy—a flower thief—whom no one else has ever seen.  While her father tries to write the definitive history of the 1966 flood that threatened to destroy Florence, Nadia wonders if she herself will disappear—or if she can be rescued, too.

Set against the backdrop of a glimmering city, ONE THING STOLEN is an exploration of obsession, art, and a rare neurological disorder. It is a story about the ferocious, gorgeous madness of rivers and birds. It is about surviving in a place that, fifty years ago, was rescued by uncommon heroes known as Mud Angels. It is about art and language, imagining and knowing, and the deep salvation of love written by an author who is herself obsessed with the beguiling and slippery seduction of both wings and words.  

My students Katie Goldrath, Maggie Ercolani, and Stephanie Cara inspired me as I wrote. Emily Sue Rosner and Mario Sulit helped me get the Italian right. Alyson Hagy, Amy Sarig King, and Kelly Simmons kept me going. Patty McCormick and Ruta Sepetys listened. Lori Waselchuk gave me her West Philadelphia. Wendy Robards gave so much of her time and heart during desperate days. And Tamra Tuller stood by.

Always grateful.

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How do we write atmosphere, and give it tension? What I learned from Eva Figes' Light: With Monet at Giverny

I have Ivy Goodman to thank for Eva Figes. Ivy, a writer I first encountered long ago, when asked to write a review of her collected short stories, A Chapter From Her Upbringing, for the Pennsylvania Gazette. Ivy has been an essential part of my writing and reading life ever since—her reach is wide, her mind is gleaming, she whispers the names of important books into my ear, and often sends something unexpected my way.

I am grateful for Ivy.

A few weeks ago a slender novel called Light: With Monet at Giverny made its way to me, a gift from Ivy. Its author is Eva Figes, a writer born in Berlin in 1939. Yesterday, while a single carpenter banged away on kitchen cabinets, I stole upstairs, to my son's room, to read. My son has the largest room in this old house. It feels empty with him gone. I'd never sat there before, and read in his chair, but that was the place to be, for oh, my, what a book this is, and absolute quiet is the sound I needed.

Light recounts a single day in the life of Monet, at his estate in Giverny. In the early morning, he rises to paint. Down the hall, his grieving wife does not sleep, and in the house grandchildren stir, and stepdaughters are about, the help, an anxious cook. We will watch Monet in his pursuit of light, in his return to his house, in his lunch hour, in a walk with a friend, in a stroll through shadows with his saddened wife, but we will also come see, thanks to graceful tricks of authorial omniscience, the thoughts and regrets and dreams of the others who have come to Giverny and live through this day.

Little Lily will wonder "for perhaps the thousandth time why the sunlight should be full of dancing motes, gleaming and moving, when the rest of the air seemed quite so empty." Alice, the wife, will "lose all sense of time, as though she had been in a different place, somewhere that belonged to the night and what was left of her night thoughts, where, habitually now, she spoke to those who had only existed in the dark of her own head for years." Marthe, the spinster aunt (and step-daughter to Monet) wonders "what it would be like to do something, anything, from choice." And Jimmy, Lily's brother, will allow a balloon to escape.

But light—on the river, above the shadows, through the slats of window shutters, on the crisp of rose petals, in the wine—is really the protagonist here, and Figes draws it out so spectacularly that I held my breath as I read. This is atmosphere as suspense. This is weather as plot, and I must quote at length from one of many brilliant passages to show you what I mean:

Five o'clock. The top of the willow tree still shone in the green light. The same light was visible on the slope beyond the house, and on the open fields between the railway track and the river. But the water of the lily pond was sunk in the cool shadow, and only the air above it still gleamed fitfully in the slanting light, soft and tenuous as it came through the trees, playful as mist on the substances of shadow below, which it could not disturb. It was as though a tangible split had occurred between sunlight, shadow and substance, and now earth and water were sinking into themselves, taking leave of the sky. Dragonflies and a swarm of midges could still cross the divide, hovering in the air above the depth of shadow, catching the fitful gleam, but the lilies had begun to close up their colours as the water darkened and the sky withdrew from its surface and stood high above the trees.

I read Light after reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and Melissa Kwasny's Nine Senses. I read it following review work on two other books. Like Kwasny, Figes reaffirmed for me what it is that I am truly looking for on the page, and what I must learn to do to be the writer I hope someday to be.

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The Goldfinch/Donna Tartt: Reflections

As the last few days unfolded—through Christmas gifting and hostessing, through cooking and cleaning, through stripping an old kitchen bare in anticipation of remodeling, through the quiet pile up of real work with ticking deadlines—finishing Donna Tartt's 775-page The Goldfinch became a point of pride. I'd never read Tartt before, as I've written here previously, and I'm naturally inclined toward the kind of compact, complex, emotionally engaging, linguistically inventive novels that writers like Alice McDermott, Michael Ondaatje, Colum McCann, and my friend Alyson Hagy (among many others) write. But I'd bought The Goldfinch and I wanted to read The Goldfinch. I fought to find the time.

The plot can be boiled down to a few sentences: A boy, Theo, loses his mother in a museum explosion and hurries off, in the numb aftermath, with one of the world's most treasured paintings under his arm. A rich Manhattan family will take Theo in. Next a dear antiques refurbisher/dealer (the book's most wonderful character, in my opinion). Next Theo will move with his wayward, gambling father to Las Vegas, fall in with a wild friend and all manner of drugs and disrepair, then return to Manhattan, the implications of that missing painting escalating through it all. Old characters will turn up in new places. Addiction and dealers, sordid transactions and unenviable mistakes will consume much of Theo's time, and much of the tale.

It's a story Tartt takes her time telling—sometimes with the slow ease of old-fashioned nineteenth century novels, sometimes with the hurry of a caper film, always with great attention to every detail. Tartt knows antiques and paintings, drugs and obliteration, snaggletoothed, double-dealing friends who have just enough "good" in them to redeem their presence in Theo's life, and in the reader's. She can write brilliantly and she is, above all else, patient, never hurrying (to say the least) to complete a scene or to get to the next bout of stolen-painting-induced action.

She writes, with expert atmospherics, like this:

Through the dusty windows I saw Straffordshire dogs and majolica cats, dusty crystal, tarnished silver, antique chairs and settees upholstered in sallow old brocade, an elaborate falence birdcage, miniature marble obelisks atop a marble-topped pedestal table and a pair of alabaster cockatoos. It was just the kind of shop my mother would have liked—packed tightly, a bit dilapidated, with stacks of old books on the floor.

As the novel progressed, I felt, at times, more keenly aware of Tartt's strategies (as a sentence maker, as a storyteller) than I perhaps wanted to feel. I also felt wearied away by the deep seediness of the majority of the characters, save for Hobie and Pippa, the antiques dealer and his young charge, and Theo's absent mother. Theo can barely rescue himself from the tortured person that he is, from all the bad that he reeks and reaps. There are, in all these many pages, few instances of light. At times all the rot began to weigh me down, no matter how immaculately Tartt evoked it:

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil.

Still, Tartt rises, symphonically, at the end. Asks the big moral questions about how much control any of us really have about who we are, what we want, how we see the world, how we navigate through it. Indeed, I found the final pages of the book—after the caper elements of the plot had long been put to rest—to be the most thrilling in the book, the mark of all that greatness for which Tartt is justifiably famous.

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On Reading What a Friend Discovers Before You: The Nine Senses/Melissa Kwasny

I am a woman blessed with friends more intelligent, more searching, more knowing. Friends who will say—read this. Friends who will place the book in my hands.

A few days ago Melissa Kwasny's The Nine Senses (Milkweed Editions) arrived with a note from my friend Alyson Hagy. This book, I already knew from the year's correspondence, had left its mark on Alyson. I was eager to read for myself.

And so yesterday and today I read these ingenious, unmediated prose poems. Each line like something almost already gone from here, or gone ahead, and the connections between the lines both sturdy and strange, and the whole unaccountably greater than parts I do not profess to fully understand. Kwasny's thoughts are broken apart and fastened together. Her world is built of flowers, wings, rivers, love, illness, dreams reengineered. Of age reengineered. Love is human. Love is not human. Someone is getting lost. Organs are. Everything is disappearing.

Here: A few lines from "Orient" —

Sometimes it is a matter of one small thing, a gift to send away with a friend. Or to take the morning slow, making calls the way the birds do, to know the others are all safe, in their places. September's sister-quiet, when there is no complaint and you don't speak ill of anyone. Pressed between the days, which are close as reeds. You are used to being in control of your life. You have been lucky is another way of putting this. You try to imagine what it is to think without language. You look at your mother, staggering with her deep heart, or those women who are nine-tenths the needs of others, and you wonder if language has shrunken you. To a body with a foreign language of its own.

Reading a book like The Nine Senses forces a reader like me to slow things down. To watch very carefully, decode. It encourages a writer like me to work with language in a new way. To be unafraid of the strange juxtaposition. To be less inclined to explain.

I know that it is easier to read easy books. I know that it is easier to write them.

I guess I'll always be interested in those on the edge. Those who do it differently—not to show that they can, but because they must.

I am thinking of Alyson Hagy today. And I am forever grateful for her friendship.

(As for the photo: My husband, taking pictures of me yesterday, handed me the book. Let it distract you, he said, for I was grimacing. It distracted me.)

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Women in Bed/Jessica Keener: Reflections

Jessica Keener and I became friends slowly, through social media, though both of us are, in fact, very much real-people people. Look you in the eyes people. Grab a cup of tea and talk people. Walk up Newbury Street in the freezing wind speaking of flowers in the summer people.

Which is what we got to be when I went to Boston for a few days recently.

Last May, while traveling by train to Washington, DC, to surprise my niece on her thirteenth birthday, I read and loved Jessica Keener's much-heralded debut novel, Night Swim. In Boston, Jessica gave me an inscribed copy of her new and gorgeously produced collection of nine short stories, Women in Bed (The Story Plant). Once again I was reading Jessica while traveling—this time through the raucous Tuesday skies from Boston to Philadelphia.

Today, Thanksgiving, I woke to finish these shimmering and unexpected stories. These originals. Like Alyson Hagy, Jessica Francis Kane, Alice Elliott Dark, Susan Straight, Robin Black, Alice Munro, among others, Jessica Keener is an exquisite writer of the shorter tale. She has mastered that nearly impossible trick of condensing entire lives into compelling and telling brevities. Of finding just the right image. Of stealing just the right snatches of dialogue from what, in a novel, would run as full-fledged-and-then-he-coughed digressions or scenes.

We don't need anything more than what Jessica gives us here. We are convinced, persuaded, brokenhearted by these women who don't have what they want, or don't know what they can have, or can't find the proper language of desire. They run, they walk, they sit, they wait, they steer a boat out onto a chlorine-colored sea, and always, always, they return in their thoughts or in their lives to a lying-in place, to sheets and pillows.

Consistently the language is thrilling. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes not.

Look at this paragraph, from "Boarders":

In the shadows of the backyard, pine trees lacing the property appeared more distant than they actually were. The lawn, stiffened with frost, bent like thin, wire mesh under her feet. She headed for the small swing set and began to swing under a big, leafless oak. She knew it was cold but felt nothing.

Now look at this, from "Woman With Birds in her Chest":

In April she struggled in her sleep. Her dreams became shadows of fingers, and the night, a troubling piece of lint in her throat. Beside her Miles slept with his arm heavy on her thigh. She wanted to wake him. Something wrong? Everything okay? he would have asked. But she didn't.

She didn't know. She didn't know.

Lawn like wire mesh. Night like a troubling piece of lint. These are two stellar images among countless stellar images written not to declare a brilliance but to elucidate a moment, a woman, a mood.

I have learned from Jessica Keener, reading this collection. And I think that you will, too.

A sweet Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

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The Orchardist/Amanda Coplin: a work of utter genius

I had thought, a week ago, that I would dedicate this post to both novels read during (and just after) my trip to Italy, but in my heart there is room for just this one.  Amanda Coplin's first novel, The Orchardist, deserves every line of praise you likely have already have read, and I turn, decidedly, from the voices of any who might complain.  This is a book of compassionate genius.  Period.

The Orchardist is late 19th-century, northwest.  There is land.  There is a lonesome man, Talmadge.  There are two girls, sisters, both of them abused and pregnant and lost.  There is an herbalist.  There are apples and apricots and lettuce, horses, horse traders, pickers, craters.  There are babies, and just one survives. 

From these raw elements Coplin produces a portrait of an era complete, shattered, shattering.  She dedicates the soul of this book to biblical themes—prodigal children, irremediable sins, revenge and its hollow aftertaste, a father's inequality, unconditional but unspoken love.  She writes like very few write, like my friend Alyson Hagy writes—so elegiacally sure, so unafraid, so careful to meet the darkness and to know the darkness and to deliver, nonetheless, blinding light. No one will ever convince me that Talmadge didn't live, or that the baby Angelene isn't living, still, or that somewhere in the northwest, a grove of gnarled trees isn't recalling two ruined sisters. 

I have had so much work to do since my return from Italy but I refused to do it until I finished reading The Orchardist.  I am in awe of it.  I am grateful for it.  I believe that this first-time novelist has written a book that any long-time novelist would say, secretly or out loud, That was the one.

A passage:

There was a certain uncanniness Angelene felt opening her closet in the morning, her oatmeal-colored dress hanging in the space on its hanger, her workboots leaning against each other on the porch.  (You turned them over and shook them, knocked them on the post, for mice.)  The narrow bed with its purple, red, and green quilt, the bedside table with its jar of rocks, piled books.  The porcelain basin near the window where she washed her face, the pitcher with the brown rose painted on it, the large crack like a vein in the bottom of the basin.  The apricot orchard, the buzzing bees like a haze in spring.  The barn–the smell of hay and manure, grease, old leather. The sun streaming through the slats.  The mule's nose in her palm.

All of these things she kept inside herself, constantly rearranged them, to create her happiness.  Being alone, she was able to see each thing more clearly.  Although there was fear in solitude, somehow this only made things sharper.

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Bruce Springsteen, Glory Days Symposium, and Thanks

Could there be anything more thrilling (for a reader-rocker) than reading the beautifully researched, impeccably written David Remnick profile of Bruce Springsteen in the July 30 issue of The New Yorker?  The story is called "We Are Alive," and most everyone read it before I did, because my issue didn't arrive until late yesterday afternoon.  I'd read pieces online.  I'd read the raves.  But yesterday, after a very long day of corporate work and minor agitations, I found a breeze and read the profile through.  I didn't have to fall in love again with Bruce Springsteen; I've been in love since I was a kid.  But I loved, loved, loved every word of this story.  I would like to frame it.

(For those who haven't seen my Devon Horse Show photos and video of Jessica Springsteen, who is as sensational in her way as Bruce is, I share them here.)

Perhaps my favorite part of Remnick's article was discovering the way that Springsteen reads, how he thinks about books.  You don't get to be sixty-two and still magnetic, necessary, pulsingly, yes, alive if you don't know something, and if you don't commit yourself to endless learning.  Reading is one of the many ways Springsteen stays so connected to us, and so relevant.  From The New Yorker:

Lately, he has been consumed with Russian fiction.  "It's compensatory—what you missed the first time around," he said.  "I'm sixty-some, and I think, There are a lot of these Russian guys!  What's all the fuss about?  So I was just curious.  That was an incredible book: 'The Brothers Karamazov.' Then I read 'The Gambler.'  The social play in the first half was less interesting to me, but the second half, about obsession, was fun.  That could speak to me. I was a big John Cheever fan, and so when I got into Chekhov I could see where Cheever was coming from.  And I was a big Philip Roth fan, so I got into Saul Bellow, 'Augie March.' These are all new connections for me.  It'd be like finding out now that the Stones covered Chuck Berry."

Next week, I'll begin to write my paper for Glory Days: The Bruce Springsteen Symposium, which is being held in mid-September at Monmouth University, and where I'll be joining April Lindner, Ann Michael, Jane Satterfield, and Ned Balbo on a panel called "Sitting Round Here Trying to Write This Book: Bruce Springsteen and Literary Inspiration." I don't know if I've ever been so intimidated, or (at the same time) excited.  I don't know what I have in me, if I can write smart and well enough.

But this morning I take my energy, my inspiration, from the friends and good souls who have written over the past few days to tell me about their experience with Small Damages.  We writers write a long time, and sometimes our work resonates, and when it does, we are so grateful.  When others reach out to us, we don't know what to say.  We hope that thank you is enough.  And so, this morning, thank you, Jennifer Brown.  Thank you, Alyson Hagy and Robb Forman Dew.  Thank you, Tamara Smith.  Thank you, Elizabeth Ator and Katherine Wilson.  Thank you, Jessica Ferro.  Thank you, Hilary Hanes.  And thank you, Miss Rosella Eleanor LaFevre, who interviewed me a few years ago about Dangerous Neighbors, and who has stayed in touch ever since.  I don't even know how to say thank you for her blog magazine thoughts on Small Damages today.  I can only suggest that if you read it through, you'll know something important about her heart.

To being inspired.  To writing forward.  To keeping on with keeping on, with the hope of better work.  Always.

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a sort of unbelievable Small Damages review

I try to keep my head down, to keep working or reading, or thinking or being—and not to dwell over responses to a book that cannot now be changed in any fashion (unless I go all trickworthy during the paperback process, and I would never do that).  And sometimes people like a book and sometimes people don't, and you just have to go with the flow.  You have to keep flowing.

This morning, however, my friend Alyson Hagy wrote me an email that I will always treasure.  She shares my love of place, of depth, of landscape, of birds, and when she talks I listen, I learn.  And this afternoon, I stopped again—was stopped—by Meghan Miller of Forever Young Adult (she calls herself an erstwhile librarian; I can't believe there's anything erstwhile about her).  She has put together a review of Small Damages reviews here; she's even cast my movie; she's brought me Emma Stone; she's set the table.  I cannot let this pass.  I cannot let it go.  I don't want to be tedious or all about me, but:

This is remarkable. I have to thank her.

The review, titled "I've Waited Years For A Book Like This" can be found in its entirety here.

Some of the (many) words that made me smile here.  Note to Meghan:  Kenzie will be your BFF anytime.

Kenzie is marvelous. She's magnificent. She has both an artist's perception of the world and a teenager's self-absorbed blindness; Kenzie's not mean or selfish, but it takes time for her to see past her own (admittedly huge) concerns and sympathize with others. But she's funny and kind, and she really does care, and I'd love to carefully wrap my arm around her and help her heal, because I think she's definite BFF material.

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three things loved, three things hated: Kate Northrop's haunted poetry

Out in Wyoming, where Alyson Hagy lives and teaches and writes, there are many very real, very committed artists.  One is named Kate Northrop, a poet with whom I have enjoyed a correspondence. 

Her poems have been called "haunted."  They have been likened to "the penumbra in painting, where light and shade blend." They have been described as "inclusive and generous, yet the tension, the thrill, never slackens."  Kate herself has been hailed as a poet with a "remarkable ability to combine erudition and empathy."  Last year she sent me an early copy of what would become the Persea publication Clean.  I read it in a sustained state of awe.

Today, thinking of Kate, I returned to Clean—the manuscript she'd sent—and found this page, these words.  I'm teaching this week at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  I'm taking Kate's words with me.

The first day they had to name
Three things they loved, three
They hated

Loved:  pulling moss from the seams
Between bricks; a stone
Cracked open; Jello, when you touch it

With a spoon, how it resists

Hated: a too-visible part
On the girl in front of you, scalp;
The skin formed on house paint;

Feet; white condiments

(Miracle whip, tartar sauce, mayonnaise)

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celebrating Alyson Hagy, a writer we can all root for

For the past many weeks, Alyson Hagy has been touring the country with her fine third novel Boleto, a book that has been celebrated in media ranging from The New Yorker and the Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune and Star Tribune.  Ron Hogan, writing for USA Character Approved, concluded his thoughts about the book with the words, "If there's a better novel published this year, it's going to have to be pretty spectacular." And of course I've been singing about Boleto ever since I sat down at Christmas to read the ARC. 

This weekend, Boleto is the lead novel reviewed in The New York Times Sunday Book Review—an achievement for Alyson that makes me, her friend, incredibly proud.  Bruce Machart was given the responsibility.  He writes, among other things, "Hagy often dazzles with her descriptions of the Wyoming landscape and wildlife. Whether it’s the corral of the Testerman ranch, the rugged passes of the Black Bell Ranch or the depressed outskirts of Anaheim, the settings glimmer with well-chosen metaphors."  He also uses the words entertaining and entrancing to describe her opening pages.

Yes, in fact, that's true.  I've known Alyson for a long time now.  I've read nearly every published word she's written, and I continue to be mystified by her continuing, and continually strengthening, powers.  I'm mystified, too, by the way she finds time to report back about her life amidst her travels, teaching, adventures, her raising of a remarkable, words-bound son.  Alyson has friends all across this country.  She somehow makes time for us all.  And never once—in all that she has achieved, in all that she can do—does she so much as lean toward attitude.  Never once does she fail to ask, "And how are you?"  She's just doing her thing, living her life, finding her stories, and thank goodness the world has noticed, because heaven knows, Alyson Hagy does not trumpet herself, does not ask for that kind of attention.

Alyson Hagy is that quality of person—and writer—we can all root for.

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when good things happen to good people: congratulations to Alyson Hagy, Lilian Nattel, Alex Kotlowitz, Laura Geringer, Buzz Bissinger

This morning I take a moment to honor my friends whose work is gaining the attention it most assuredly deserves.

Alex Kotlowitz, a supremely talented writer and journalist who recently transitioned into film, won a Spirit Award for his documentary, "The Interrupters," made with Steve James for Kartemquin Films.  It's an extraordinary recognition, and I'm so happy for him.

Alyson Hagy, one of my dearest friends and one of the great Renaissance ladies of our times (not just a writer and a teacher, but a university leader and an athlete), received a starred review from Publishers Weekly for her most-magnificent Boleto, which will appear in stores in May.  It's the first of many accolades for Alyson, who was cited by PW as "fast becoming a recognizable author of the American West."  I have no words.  Her time has come.

Lilian Nattel, meanwhile, is enjoying a rush of deeply deserved attention for her groundbreaking novel, Web of Angels, a book I recently reviewed here.  She's on the radio, she's in the papers, and her book is selling.  After many years of work on this book, she emerges with a winner.

Laura Geringer, who first invited me to write for teens however many years ago, will, like the rest of us, be watching the Oscars this evening.  But Laura will have a very special connection, for an animated short in which she played a key role, "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore," is up for one of those shiny figurines.  It's a short dedicated to a great man in books, Bill Morris—a man Jennifer Brown, featured last week in Publishing Perspectives, refers to as her unforgettable mentor.  Many bibliophiles are cheering this short on. 

Lots of people, finally, are talking about Buzz Bissinger's remarkable memoir, Father's Day, also due out in May.  Buzz broke my heart with this book, as I wrote here.  He's about to break the hearts of many.  If things go as planned, Buzz will be joining my classroom this Tuesday, talking about how this book got made.  We will be lucky to have him.

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Reading Boleto for Christmas

This afternoon, once the final big meal is cooked for our small but happy family of three, this will be me on the couch, the sun floating in, Alyson Hagy's Boleto on my quilted lap.  I started reading this gorgeous novel the day it arrived.  Irrefutable deadlines and pressures took the pleasure from me.  But just this morning—one boy upstairs still asleep (we passed in the night at 4 AM; he was just finishing a scene he had been writing and I was getting up to finish a client project), one outside in his workshop, making art—I began to read again. 

I have not yet been able to put words to just how much I love this book of Alyson's.  I cannot describe her talent, the deep and never show-boating knowing that fills her every page.  I cannot say what an honor it is to have an early copy of this novel in my home, or how lucky I am to have Alyson as an ever-enduring friend.  But I began to tell you something of Boleto here, when I quoted from the very first page, and in a moment I will quote to you from a page deeper in.

Somewhere in Wyoming, Alyson's preparing a dinner for six.  She's been out snowshoe-ing this morning with her son.  She's been looking for, in her email words, "deer trails, moose tracks, pine cones recently flaked by squirrels, chickadees, ravens." 

But before all that, she wrote this:

... He could always recall the peculiar stink of his mother's lilac blossoms when they thawed out in the spring.  He could practically write lyrics to the music the field mice made in his bedroom walls, or the midnight bawling of cows and calves.  These were the truths that were fixed inside him.  They hung like well-used tools on a workshop wall.  People were not fixed.  People slipped away like weather over a horizon.  You could love a person all you wanted, all that you were capable of, but a person would not settle once you left them behind.

If there is justice in this literary world, Alyson Hagy will become a household name in the year about to dawn.

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I breathed; I read the opening of Boleto

It's all moving at lightning speed around here, and frankly, I'm not keeping up.  "Breathe," a friend said the other day, and so, over the course of a train ride to Philadelphia yesterday morning, I neglected all other pressing responsibilities and did.  I breathed.  Which is to say, I read the first pages of my friend Alyson Hagy's new novel, Boleto, which had arrived by way of uncorrected proofs from Graywolf Saturday morning. 

I have known Alyson for a long time.  I have read every book she has written.  I have read some of her stories twice.  I have treasured every email, learned what she has generously taught me, savored the quality of her—no fair-weather friend, this Alyson Hagy.  She is always there, she is never self-important, she takes time even though I am not entirely sure how she finds a speck of time, for she is as deeply involved in the life of the creative writing department of University of Wyoming (Laramie) as she is in the university's sports program.  She snow shoes and plays championship tennis on the side.  She celebrates students, other writers, townsfolk, horsefolk.  She also writes books.

Oh, good Lord, does she write books.

My entire mood changed as I read the opening pages of Boleto.  My heart beat slowed.  For once again Alyson is doing something new with language, she is pulling me in, she is calming me with the tremendous grace of her talent.  I recalled the tone of Kent Haruf's Plainsong as I read, one of my all-time most favorite books.  I thought of how Alyson never stays in one place, is never happy with a single note, is perpetually tempted by language.

Here, for the time being, are the opening sentences of Boleto.  You are going to hear so much more about this book.  And not just from me, I swear.

She was a gift, though he did not think of her that way for a long time.  He paid twelve hundred dollars for her, money that came straight from his single account at Cabin Valley Bank.  She was halter broke, and trailer broke, and she had been wormed for the spring....  He knew twelve hundred dollars was a bargain for a strong-legged filly with papers.  He knew that even before he saw her.

Yes, reading Alyson Hagy is breathing.

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Teaching (and knowing) the best of the best

This coming Wednesday, I'll be at Rutgers-Camden for a reading, a talk about new trends in young adult literature...and a workshop.  As I considered just what I wanted to convey during that workshop hour—something about precision and continuity, something about the speed of one sentence as flared against the long, quelling quietude of another—I began to think about the novelists and short story writers I am infinitely lucky to know.

(And I rush to say that I know so many talented people—humorists, memoirists, bloggers, poets.  It is my hope, with this blog, to give voice to them all, one way or the other, in time.)

Today I share some of the lines I'll be discussing at Rutgers-Camden.  We'll be talking about what makes these passages work, what we can learn from them.  As I type them in, I catch my breath.  These, my friends, are writers. 

He was heading to the bathroom to brush his teeth.  His starched shirt made crisp noises as he walked.  He wore brown-and-blue suspenders and he'd tucked his tie in his shirt to save it from his three-minute egg.  I said nothing, just smiled and lifted one eyebrow.  And he looked at me oddly, the way he did more and more in those days, as if I'd spoken too quickly, overlapping my words and rendering them foreign.  He said he had to go to work, and I dropped his fingers, and he went in and brushed his teeth.  The sound of the bristles against his gums, doing their ugly work, was like an assault, as if he was scrubbing me away.  — Kelly Simmons, The Bird House

Death, which used to seem so remote, now feels to Clara as though it is everywhere, like the universally disliked relative who arrives early to every gathering and shows no discernible sign of ever going home.  She can sense it turning against her own work, lurking in the notion of permanence surrounding portraiture, skulking around the very idea of catching a person at one moment and documenting them, just then.  This is what death does, she thinks, stony-faced, staring right into her own eyes.  Catches us all.  Stops time. — Robin Black, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This

Evelyn eyed Sarah's lunatic ensemble: hair blasted from its elastic band, bath-splashed T-shirt, teeth spackled with pulp from oranges she'd sucked hungrily at lunch because she didn't have the patience to peel.  "I'd go nuts if I didn't work," she said.  "I mean, what do those women do all day?"  Elizabeth Mosier, The Playgroup

Even now, in middle age, she preserved the vital though self-deceptive hope that anything might change and nothing need be done meanwhile. She still had a kind of vision, she still could see, and she still was moved by perceptions as poignant as consciousness. But nothing came of it; nothing was expressed. She had fallen to a place where people worked at tolerable but not thrilling work, a lifetime of work whose chief reward and motivation was (never quite enough) money. If she died tomorrow, she would leave behind no aborted masterpiece. — Ivy Goodman, A Chapter from Her Upbringing

When the cinema went dark, the audience stirred to life.  People leaned toward the shapes in the seats next to them.  "What happened?" they asked.  "Did you see?" — Jessica Francis Kane, The Report

Tapping a cigarette on the dashboard, Eric lights it and sucks, the smoke hits the back of his throat like a branding iron.  He holds his breath, then blows the smoke in a disappearing draft.  He wants to pop his chin, blow a smoke ring, but he's never learned how.  He isn't sure, either, if it's cool.  — Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Why She Left Us

I judge their hands.  I say to myself, yes, that guy fights fires in the mountains.  Or no, that guy's not a roofer, no matter what he claims.  Armand has spadelike hands, troweling hands, and they convince me he speaks a certain kind of truth.  He woos me with the fused joint of his ring finger, the corrugated grasp of his palms.  —Alyson Hagy, Ghosts of Wyoming

In all the years they've been together, he's never hurt her, never raised a hand or even his voice, but he's smashed five sets of dishes, broken several glasses and a figurine he had bought her as a joke, a Scottish terrier with a tiny gold chain. — Caroline Leavitt, Pictures of You

For a single moment she accepted the situation and had the kind of prosaic thought that gains weight in the timing of its application—that her time had come, as it had come to many before her and would to many again.  Then she felt a split second of peace, during which she continued to make sense of what was happening in the odd, lofty way that came upon her every once in a while and made her wonder about herself. She thought with an amused clarity that her ingrained sense of her own insignificance was finally coming in handy, enabling her to accept being blown where the wind took her, like a piece of dandelion fluff. — Alice Elliott Dark, "Home"

She would waken and find herself trussed and pinned to the earth with violin strings, like Gulliver in Lilliput. — Karen Rile, "No Ear for Languages"

Before dawn, when the souls of the dead hovered in the greying sky, the women gathered in the synagogue courtyard.  Lilian Nattel, The River Midnight

This final excerpt is from Kathryn Davis's miraculous The Thin Place.  She is not a friend, but we're going to be talking a little about magic realism in the class (thanks to one of the submitted workshop pieces), and so she is necessary:

There were three girlfriends and they were walking down a trail that led to a lake.  One small and plump, one pretty and medium-sized, one not so pretty and tall.  This was in the early years of the twenty-first century, the unspeakable having happened so many times everyone was still in shock, still reeling from what they'd seen, what they'd done or failed to do.  The dead souls no longer wore gowns.  They'd gotten loose, broadcasting their immense soundless chord through the precincts of the living.  — Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place

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Alyson Hagy Wins High Plains Best Fiction Award

Just a few weeks ago I was writing here about my friend Alyson Hagy, and her win of The Devil's Kitchen Award.  Today I write to say that this extraordinarily talented writer and honest, good, and soulful friend just won Best Fiction prize at the High Plains Book Awards, an event held at Parmly Billings Library this past Saturday.  The book is Ghosts of Wyoming (Graywolf Press), a collection of short stories that deserves every last bit of praise it gets. 

But so does Alyson, as a person, deserve that praise.  She sends the most gorgeous and considered emails from her post in Laramie, Wyoming (where she helps run one of the greatest creative writing programs anywhere)—talks about books she's liked or tussled with, her early morning spottings of birds, the six inches of October snow.  She'll tell me she's headed out of town for a little tennis, and only later and by accident will I discover that she's playing tournament tennis, and winning to boot.  She'll say, ahead of a trip to what she calls a book festival, "I love the folks at Billings who work so darn hard on behalf of the arts," without mentioning that her own book is up for a Billings award.

This is not false modesty at work.  It's Alyson Hagy—whose quality of mind and richness of perspective have kept me necessary company through the years.

And so, dear Alyson, this tribute is again for you.  Not just for what you've won.  But for who you are.

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