Freedom and Melancholy

Eudora, Eudora, Eudora.

She writes the poetry into the narrative without qualifying or explaining it. If you can read "June Recital" without feeling as though a golden thread has been needled through your heart, then gut, and tugged up through the crown of your head and out into the hot, Mississippi night around you there on your couch as you read ...


Other stuff I'm reading besides Golden Apples:

The Optimist's Daughter (again) by Eudora Welty.

Freedom by Jonathon Franzen.

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls.

American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell.

The Screenplay Is Coming! The Screenplay Coming!

This is the third day I have been working on my screenplay, now entitled Water's Edge, formerly The Mother's Wreck. I owe this burst of creativity to the long weekend and Celtx screenwriting software.

I hadn't felt like getting into my old Sophocles software because the print function is down, and I am having a hard time getting a fix on it. I compose both on the software and on printed copies. Without the back and forth I guess I was just shut down. So, Celtx, which is free by the way, got me going again.

The software is aesthetically pleasing and seems to be created for actual visually oriented people, ie, screenwriters. It also has formats for stage plays, radio, advertising, comic books and graphic novels. Wow.

For the most part all I need is a good edit window with smooth transitions from character to scene headers to dialogue and so on. But it has so much more. Character worksheets easily and quickly viewable, general notes on the right, a place to add other media, a print review function for a quick visual of your page, a tab keeping a running account of all your story elements, a list of all your locations in order in constant view.

And that is just the stuff I need. There is this whole other reality called "studios" where you pay five bucks a month for hosting for up to five creators involved in your project. This is the part where folks are taking the work to production, so I haven't even looked that over yet, as I am just a lonely writer getting it down on the page.

I'm thrilled to be back in the story. I plan to write five pages a day until the first draft is complete. Accessing the story again I can see that the whole thing is already outlined, beat out, sequenced, you name it. And it's just up there in my head, not to mention scrawled and posted in paper bits on the two bulletin boards and the dry erase board underneath the blue ticking curtains, ready to flow out. Who knew?

My favorite reality is to get up, write in 30 to 45 minute spurts, take breaks for regular life: laundry, dogs, groceries, making a living. Go outside sit in the deck chair under the umbrella, get thoroughly warmed up and head back into the cool house and start writing again. Heaven.

Mesmerizationalism

I'm super jazzed about my new stack of "mindsatwork" (as one of my favorite bookstore managers puts it) and I just wanna toss the list out to the universe. Yesterday I acquired Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry? by Elizabeth McCracken, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (!!!!!), Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett (again, my loan-out never came home), Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor (cute trade paper to keep company the cloth), Death Comes for the Arch Bishop by Willa Cather (heavy, pretty trade paper), The Painted House by John Grisham (figure if I'm gonna read Grisham I'll start here; trying to branch out), My Father's Tears and Other Stories by John Updike (!!!), Welcome to the Departure Lounge by Meg Federico, The Handyman by Carolyn See and 32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics by Adrian Tomine.

Amy Hempel has me mesmerized. If you're not reading her you're missing mastery. Too, I want to recommend the graphic novel memoir (yes, that's its category) Blankets by Craig Thompson: layered, heartwrenching. Perfect place to start if you're considering dipping into the graphic novel genre, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite forms of art/literature. Please read the Publisher's Weekly review of it; ditto that. It is a masterpiece. Steel yourself and ready some thread to sew back up your broken-open heart.

Short story is kicking right along. I'm doing deep character exploration and experimenting with point-of-view. The legal-pads-full-of-character-stuff thing from Anne Tyler inspired me to try actually filling actual yellow legal pads (I'm usually writing on the compy) with character background and detail. Sheer delight to be alive! The story is beginning to tell itself because of what I'm learning about this guy. And, I love scratchy pencil on yellow paper.

Again, Blankets by Craig Thompson and Amy Hempel stories. You gotta.

What I'm reading and writing, in a walnut shell.

This week I'm reading more Raymond Carver, The Giant's House: A Romance by Elizabeth McCracken, Bird by Bird (again), Best American Short Stories 2008 ed. Salmon Rushdie (just finished "Quality of Life" by Christine Sneed), Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (stalled about a third in) and Livability by John Raymond (a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick). I have too many on my nightstand but glancing over at the spines as I'm turning pages and taking a sip of Santa Cristina is a quiet joy. I'm writing a short story narrated by a man who is, at his mother's request and during the narration, washing black ink and blood out of his younger brother's sheets. Posted this from my cell phone from bed.

Just Add Love

A friend was visiting this past weekend and spent some time perusing my bookshelves and noticing how they look (he's a talented visual artist) and how they were arranged (he's very organized). I gave him the tour: poetry, drama, screenwriting, fiction, non-fiction and the like. He also wanted to know what I was actually reading (he's a good reader) (and he tells entire plots of movies with more feeling than the screenwriter, director and actors combined). (I love that).

Here in order of appearance are the books I am supposedly reading with little twitter-like reviews:

A Moveable Feast by Hemingway: surprisingly, not grabbing me. Essays on the writing life usually glue themselves to my eyeballs even if I'm just walking along minding my own business, but I like his short stories better. However, a novel, The Sun Also Rises, is my all-time favorite Hemingway. I don't like bull-fighting or tales of twenty-four hours a day drinking and debauchery or a female character that you just know is really a guy, but hey, the writing is beautiful and it seared my soul, so there you go.

The Hounds of Winter by James Magnuson. Good story, well-told (high praise). The two others of his I have read strike me the same way, Windfall and Ghost Dancing. In addition to the writing being as clear and plain and luminous as that of Anne Tyler or Hemingway himself, I loved Windfall for the protagonist who thinks in terms of how little money he has and exactly to the dollar where it all goes. Ya know, real life. Not since eleventh grade when I discovered Henry Thoreau listing stuff and how much it costs--the beans being worth more because they heated him up twice, once when he planted them and again when he ate them--have I run across a character so broke and frugal and pristine as the guy in Windfall. Plus, Windfall takes place on UT campus (where I studied under "The Ten Year Plan") and Parlin Hall (English Department!) (such a sneaky suspenseful building). And South Congress, Sixth Street, West Lake Hills and Burnet Road Self Storage for goodness' sake, which is right down the street from my house. A novel about a broke English teacher/literature-loving fool finding tons of money. From this blog to God's ears.

The Book of Secrets: Keys to Love and Meditation by Osho (Bagwan Shree Rajneesh for all you old hippies) explains Tantra. 112 meditations to cover the needs of all humanity past, present and future. Pick one; try for three days; if you don't dig it, dump it. I like the one where you let your joy take over when you see an old friend for the first time in a while. My kind of meditation. Oh, and he says if you are in love you don't need any other meditation. Or if you are big into prayer, nuff said. If you're scientific, there are meditations for you folks, too. If you're the love-at-first-sight type, you can basically do the scientific ones and just add a feeling of love. Whatever works. Plus, Osho is hilarious, and laughing is good meditation. The section on sexual meditations is the only thing Westerners seem to remember about Tantra. The upshot is you can make anything a meditation, including sex, if you get in the right frame of no-mind. Other groovy methods: showering, eating, staring into space. That last one is one of my faves.

A couple of little shorties:

Words in Air: the Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Two friends. Two great poets' letters. Luscious.

Consumer Reports Buying Guide 2009. See comments about frugality above.

These are only a few of the books I am supposedly reading. I'll regale you later.

Books Are For Writing...In?

Got my dander up reading an interview with Elizabeth McCracken in Novel Voices.

She blithely describes how her many early years as a librarian taught her not a reverence for books, but a disregard for their physical state. She admits reading in the tub and getting lipstick on covers. What gets me pissed, though, is her casual comment that she never (HORRORS!) writes in books. “....there’s nothing worse than somebody who writes in books....,” she bleats.

My face got hot. I held my breath.

I hate you, Elizabeth McCracken. You’re probably a no-good writer anyway. So what, you read in the tub? Who doesn’t? I do, too, lady. So, what’s so bad about writers-in-books anyway, LADY? Tub water, pencil. What’s the DIFF?

Ann Patchett and ElCrack are buds--first readers for each other, even--I thinks to myself. I like Ann Patchett just fine. (I’d never call her lady.) So, I thinks to myself, I thinks, let’s just go grab some ElCrack and check her out.

I have read Elizabeth McCracken before. Lots, actually. I remember this as I grudgingly begin, then give over to, the first few paragraphs of The Giant’s House: A Romance. And, yeah, it’s great and she’s a pretty great writer who thinks there’s nothing worse in the world than a person like me.

I draw round brackets around a sentence of hers I particularly love on page six and jot in the margin in scratchy, pale, tiny, delicious, number three lead, “Hair on arms standing up; swallowing hard.”

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

Of course I am reading Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler...again! I read it about twice a year along with my other favorite of hers, A Patchwork Planet. Maybe once a year each for Back When We Were Grownups and Morgan's Passing.

Every time I read Dinner...I truly believe I will be able to watch Tyler crafting it; I will look behind the curtain and see how she does it. About two paragraphs in I fall into the story and that is all she wrote (or all she noticed how she wrote) until the end of the book.

The good news is that some day I may accidentally write a novel using some of her methods as they are now part of my DNA.

The things I know:

Multiple characters tell the story.

Each chapter is from the point of view of one of four main characters, Pearl and her three children, Cody, Ezra and Jenny.

Each chapter travels from present to recent past to deep past and back to present seamlessly.

The story is fueled entirely by character. The lesson here is to make reams of lists of character traits for each: character's thoughts, their memories, their failures, their needs and desires, their gestures, their friends.

The center around which the whole thing spins is each character's response to food and nourishment, one of the most basic things about any human being and therefore an effective way to reveal character at its deepest point. So, think basic human need for depth.

I think I read somewhere Anne Tyler saying she writes many legal pads worth of character traits and may rely on only the thinnest of plots.

If you have read the book, you will understand when I say this: it really is A Taste of Honey.