Ethan Frome

I am currently taking a novel writing course at Emerson College. We will read several short novels to examine the author's craft as we go along crafting our own first novels. We just read Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. A terrible story, worth reading.

Below I collected some colorful phrases,
vocabulary and even a few good lines:

careless powerful look

degenerate
having declined (as in nature, character, structure, or function) from an ancestral or former state / having sunk to a condition below that which is normal to a type; especially : having sunk to a lower and usually corrupt and vicious state

rich Irish

exanimate
lacking animation : SPIRITLESS / being or appearing lifeless

declivity
downward inclination / a descending slope

fatuity
something foolish or stupid : STUPIDITY, FOOLISHNESS / archaic : IMBECILITY, DEMENTIA

rill
noun : a very small brook
verb: to flow like a rill

a growl of rapture

white and scintillating fields
scintillate: to emit sparks / to emit quick flashes as if throwing off sparks , sparkle
scintillating: brilliantly lively, stimulating, witty

"His dread was so strong that, man-like, he sought to postpone certainty." (Chapter 3)

"Ethan was suffocated with the sense of well-being." (Chapter 4)

aver
to verify or prove to be true in pleading a cause; to allege or assert in pleading /
to declare positively

ebullition
a sudden violent outburst or display / the act, process, or state of boiling or bubbling up

adjure
to urge or advise earnestly

Trip to the Boston Public Library

I will return the following Young Adult books:

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

and

the perks of being a wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Both books are extremely popular for high school students. I can see why. Both worth a read, especially if you want to hear voices from that netherworld of adolescence.

The library has the following books on hold for me:

Consider the lobster, and other essays by David Foster Wallace

and

From beginning to end: the rituals of our lives by Robert Fulghum.

I intend to read only selected portions of the above books.

I just finished reading Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (for my novel writing class)

and

I am currently reading for book club (even though they already discussed this one!) The Writing on the Wall: a novel by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.

and

I am working my way through The Kenyon Review and Special Handling, a book of poetry by Mark Pawlak.

What's on your shelf?????

Michiana Chronicles: Vagina Monologues

April Lidinsky, one of the five local writers who write
"Michiana Chronicles" for the local (South Bend, Indiana)
NPR station, broadcast this yesterday.

http://www.mchron.net/ee/radio/the_plays_the_thing/

Friday, January 27, 2006

The Play's the Thing

Ok, folks – time for a literature quiz that should take you back
to, oh, maybe your Sophomore language arts class.  So: Who said the
following line:  “The play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the
conscience of the king.” Anyone?  Ah ... I see lots of hands.
And yes, “Hamlet” is correct.  But with that line, Shakespeare
illuminates something larger than Hamlet’s desire for revenge.
That line reminds us that the best theater catches everyone’s
conscience, and makes all of us shift a bit in our seats. 
Art is political– it’s about power.

A friend once gave me a t-shirt, decorated with Andy Warhol
images and the jaunty motto, “Art can’t hurt you.” I wore it a few
times, feeling pretty bohemian-hip, until a colleague said, “You know,
that t-shirt is totally wrong! It can too hurt.” And ... he was
right.  To say art can’t hurt us is to say it doesn’t have any teeth, any
power– that art doesn’t matter. A quick reflection on the long
history of censorship reminds us that art has always been under suspicion
for blasphemy or sedition.  Art makes arguments we don’t always want
to hear.

But unlike editorials or ranting TV commentators, art rarely
presents one single perspective, which might be its greatest virtue.
Perhaps you, like me, have stood in front of a painting, or in a theater
lobby at intermission, muttering darkly, “Huh ... I don’t get
it.”  Art, at its best, reminds us that we should never assume we
“get” anything at first glance. Even those pastel-pretty landscape
paintings by Claude Monet say to us, “You think you know what a
pile of hay looks like?  Think again.  Look at a haystack in this
light. And now late in the day.  And again in a storm.
And again in wintertime.” First impressions are always partial, imperfect.

Art usefully undermines our assumption that we know it all; it keeps
us from thinking simply, and from simply taking sides.

In my college classrooms, sometimes students feel sopassionately
about ideas they want to pick a fight with everyone who disagrees
with them.  Not so fast, I urge them – if you tell people
they’re full of hooey, you’ll only get an “Am not!” for every one of
your “Are too!”s.  So how do you invite someone to try on a new
perspective?  Well, reach back to your childhood, and remember
how those interactions with friends went.  Something like: “Ok, now
you play like you’re a such-and-so, and then I’ll play like I’m a
something-or-other, and then let’s play like ...” and on and on.
Remember?  Yeah – the play’s the thing.  Trying on new roles is
a skill that weakens, sadly, with our harrowing passage to
adulthood.

But art reminds us to play with ideas. To empathize with
perspectives that stretch us, however uncomfortably.

And that is why I teach plays like Eve Ensler’s The Vagina
Monologues, and why college students everywhere have found power
in producing the play themselves, despite the controversy that
often surrounds it.  The Vagina Monologues is a response – a creative
response – to a terrible truth about power, and that is that
women worldwide suffer – and resist – the mental and physical effects
of sexism in ways that are both readily apparent and everywhere
ignored.

But instead of dashing off a rant in the face of gruesome
statistics, Ensler wrote a play, with a multitude of perspectives
for us to try on.  Now I’m not comfortable, myself, with every
voice in that piece.  But when I watch students practicing for
the production, I see the power of art at work as they inhabit
these different roles, empathizing with an amazing range of
human experience.  I test myself by the students’ brave example:
How could I become a person who wouldn’t leave a battering husband?
How might I live a life in which fear or belief led me to
inflict violence on others?  What would it be like not to
feel vulnerable in my own body?  And I wonder,
why are these questions threatening to ask right now?

I think of a playwright controversial and censored in his own
time, Molière, and the pleasure I get every year when I attend the
exuberant undergraduate performance at Notre Dame, all in
French, and this year coming in February, just like some productions
of The Vagina Monologues.  While full of humor, Molière’s political
satires still leave tooth marks, thanks to talented student performers
who inhabit his hypocritical, unjust, and foolishly lovable
characters so fully they feel familiar to us, despite the period costumes.

The cliché says that, “Life is not a dress rehearsal.” But how
much better off we’d be if we acted as if it were. Art strengthens
our atrophied empathy muscles.  It says, play like you’re born into
a Bangkok slum and sold into sexual slavery.  Play like you’re a
president.  Play like you’re a person who lets someone tape a
bomb to your chest, and really feel the power of your belief, the
strange weight of metal and wires, the pull of the duct tape on your
skin.

What is your life like?  And what powers of imagination might
revise your story?

The play is the thing.  And the conscience that needs catching
is always our own.

Lecture: James McBride

Last night L. and I went to see James McBride lecture and play a little jazz at Northeastern University. I taught McBride’s memoir, The Color of Water, to my sophomore class last year. It is an amazing story that tells of his heritage: his mother was a Polish Jew and his father was African American. It is a book that I highly recommend.

Last night McBride took the stage and began to speak. His manner was so relaxed and witty and fun. He spoke about his childhood and young adulthood. He was careful to tailor his remarks for the college students in the crowd, many of whom were writers and musicians themselves. He spoke at length about his experience writing his memoir and how its success has impacted his life.

He is a gifted speaker. I can easily say that it was one of the best lectures I have attended by an author. I just wish my students, and other students could hear him speak.

A few interesting things I learned: He did write the chapters in his mother’s voice first and only when an editor suggested that he tell his own story did the memoir as it stands take shape. Also, his mother and her long lost sister did reunite after the book was published, although it was not the Hallmark moment you might see in a made for TV special.

McBride spoke passionately about being politically aware and active. He supported liberal arts education and independent book stores. He played a little jazz.

Afterwards, we walked a bit on Northeastern’s campus for the first time. I saw my first rat scurry across an open sidewalk. The cafeteria must have been near. Ugh. We grow rats with tails in Indiana.

Thomas Frank and Kansas

What’s the Matter with Kansas?
How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank

I first heard about this book from Garrison Keillor. Keillor was in my home town, Hutchinson, Kansas for a live taping of his radio show The Prairie Home Companion. He worked the title into his opening monologue and got a good laugh. I had to ask my sister about the punch line. I haven't lived in Kansas since I was in high school and had missed the stir the book must have caused there when it was published in 2004.

Then a few weeks ago I was browsing at the Harvard Book Store and couldn’t resist adding the title to my small collection of purchases. If this book was about Kansas, then this native Sunflower State girl should see what Frank had to say.

Frank details Kansas political history and how it began as radical—fighting slavery and the evil of drink—but has turned reactionary. Kansans today look at American culture piped in by satellite and react with disgust. The country’s soul is perverted and those damn East Coasters/Hollywood types are trying to cram their perversions down their honestly parched throats.

Kansas’s have a history of fighting to protect their way of life on the prairie. The battles they choose today are still the stuff of moral righteousness: abortion, evolution, feminism as a curse on the family, etc. What they have lost (or perhaps never fully had?) is a concern with the economic forces that drive the cultural issues for which they wage life-or-death battles.

At times Frank’s narrative lost me, I have to admit. I couldn’t tell if he assumed his reader would be more of a political insider or if his logic went a bit askew here and there.

At any rate, I can say that his characterization of Kansas culture hit home with me. As a fairly self-reflective person, I have often tried to put together my own personal narrative. I often use the forces of family and faith as literary devices. Frank’s book, however, made me realize that I am a product of Kansas culture as well.

Even though I was the typical teenager wrapped up in my teenage issues, I was busy soaking up the special angst of Kansas as well. I was sixteen during the “Summer of Mercy” when abortion protesters descended on Wichita for a summer of civil protest and arrests. As I read Frank’s account of that summer, memories began to take form in a haze.

It’s no wonder that the “Summer of Mercy” is a blur. That was the same summer that I stepped out of Kansas and into the heart of Moscow, Sochi and St. Petersburg. With little trouble I can still roll the bubbles of caviar across my tongue and feel the slick butter slathered on the slightly sour bread of my host family’s breakfast table. Yet somehow the details of that summer of protest in Wichita and the role I played in it are suppressed. I know that I was pro-life. It was the moral high road. And in those days, it was only road worth traveling.

Even my trip to Russia on People to People was sanctified as by its diplomatic nature. I didn’t sit in my father’s bedroom and plead for him to send me “on this once-in-a-lifetime” trip because I planned to pleasure in exotic foods, foreign tongues and the liberty of being a Kansas girl of sixteen half-way around the world from her plains. I wasn’t doing it for my own pleasure. No, I was going as the Kansas Student Ambassador for the United States. I would be a peace-maker by virtue of my American youthful presence on Russia’s soil. I was trying to be a citizen, a very grown up thing to do, I thought.

I have no idea how deeply my father pondered my request. Did he worry about the cost? It was a significant sum. Did he worry about my safety? Would he miss me? In our household of six kids and a rotating cast of dogs, I never gave the latter a moment’s consideration. I don’t remember how much I bothered him about it. But I do know that I set my heart on it. I decided that it was possible for me to go. And that made it almost imperative in my mind. I still have that streak in me. If a thing can be done, and it is a worthy cause, then it should be done. I do remember using the “once-in-a-lifetime” logic. He gave his permission.

Suddenly I was part of something much bigger than the irregular rectangle of Kansas State. Students from across the country converged on Washington, DC, where we gathered at George Washington University before we flew out to Moscow. The few days we spent in DC were a whirlwind of new faces and accents. I was one of the youngest students in the program and I was thankful to have this excuse. The others were urbane and well-traveled for the most part. They had never been to Kansas. My sixteen years and Kansas roots, not to mention my perfect hair and blue eyes added up to a kind of self-assured glow. I was a Kansas girl, going places.

I was so caught up in the excitement of sleeping in a college dorm and joining forces with my fellow ambassadors that I barely had time to think of my family already so far away even though I had yet to leave the country. I did manage to call them just once before leaving for the three-week trip. In my exhilaration I had exhausted myself before we even arrived to Dulles airport. It is no wonder then that I somehow I got my hand pinched in the luggage conveyer belt as I tried to retrieve my things from the security screening. It must have smarted, and my pride must have been wounded too. Here I was about to embark on a world journey and I carelessly pinch my fingers. Suddenly I was lonely and I gave in to my tiredness. I cried as I dialed home. I cried as I left a garbled message about my hand getting pinched and goodbye and it really hurts. I did not call my parents again while I was abroad.

At the time, I didn’t find it strange that I never called. My friends took advantage of weekly or even more frequent opportunities to phone. I always refrained out of a kind of self-discipline. It was expensive to call. I would not indulge myself in such an extravagance. My parents had sacrificed to send me and I didn’t want to cost them any more than necessary. My parents never told me not to call. I am sure they assumed that I would. In my way I was trying to be grown up do the right thing by saving on the expensive call. I was trying to be frugal with their money. Now I see that my failure to call was really the product of a teen’s callous self-absorption. I only thought of their financial, not their emotional needs. Oddly, it made me feel “grown up” to restrain myself from calling.

The buildup and the experience of spending three weeks in Russia at the age of sixteen go a long way to explain why my memories of the “Summer of Mercy” in Kansas are vague. I do know this: I spent at least several hours on a busy thoroughfare near Dr. George Tiller’s clinic. I held a sign in my hand that was pro-life. I wanted the drivers to honk to show solidarity. I believed that it was honorable to stand up for the unborn. I do remember that I was scared. Their had been violence and protests all over Wichita that summer as legions of pro-lifers flocked there to rally for the cause. Dr. Tiller’s clinic was the center of the fray. He performed late-term abortions and thus earned a special place of hate in the pro-lifer’s quest to end abortion.

I was young. I had seen the world. I was eager to be grown up. Abortion was a grown up issue. The Pope condemned abortion; so did I. It was grown up to accept the teachings of the church. It was puerile and pathetic to rebel against the wisdom of the Holy Father. I did ask questions about abortion: but not the kind that ever considered a non-canonical viewpoint. I wanted to know more about what the church taught, not why they taught it or why other people (who were those people?) had different ideas. It wasn’t about ideas anyway. It was about babies being killed. I thought that I was being grown up by taking the moral high road. I thought that I was joining a noble fight, a fight that made my own life more worthwhile and more sophisticated. It gave me character. Instead of being a kid, I was a teen with a cause. Some kids drank beer and had sex to rebel against their parents; I never drank or had sex to rebel against a world that used such distractions to get young people like me to waste our lives.

I was a Kansas girl with blue eyes back from a trip around the world and ready to take on the world here in Kansas. I had been places and now I would step up into the world of adult issues with a voice that could clearly articulate: I am Pro-Life, and then punctuate that credo with a deftly executed toss of long honey blonde hair.

My memories of that summer are a tangle of Russian folk dancers, dark tea and fresh raspberries in the mountains of Georgia, all night gab, basketball games with kids from Spain (who drank red wine afterward!) and coming home to a Kansas on fire with a moral crusade.

Frank comments that his experience growing up in Kansas roughly the same time as me (though in the “big city” part of Kansas). “What mattered most were the ideals; everyday reality was too degraded to count” (145). I know that my ideals as a sixteen-year-old coursed through my veins. They still do. And I think this held true and holds true for many Kansans today. Yet the primary way Kansans know the world is through entertainment—movies and sitcoms. I have known the world on my intimate terms. For me, everyday reality has not been degraded. It is the stuff of life—in Kansas, on the shores of the Black Sea, in my steaming cup of tea on my desk—that can filter the bitterness that results from too much cable television and rap music. I can have my ideals and live with a world that doesn’t always conform to my standards, as long as that world is a democracy. And as long as people and not ideals remain at the center of the democracy.

Quotes
(page numbers from paperback edition)

“The [conservative] movement’s basic premise is that culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern—that Values Matter Most, as a one backlash title has it.” (6)

“What divides Americans is authenticity, not something hard and ugly like economics.” (27)

Kansas is: “where Dorothy wants to return. It’s where Superman grows up.” (29)

“Kansas may be the land of averageness, but is a freaky, militant, outraged averageness.” (34)

“The people who were once radical are now reactionary.” (76)

“All claims on the right, in other words, advance from victimhood.” (119)

“Indignation is the great aesthetic principle of the backlash culture; voicing the fury of the imposed-upon is to the backlash what the guitar solo is to have metal. Indignation is the privileged emotion, the magic moment that brings a consciousness of rightness and a determination to persist.” (122)

“Conservatives are only able to ignore economics the way they do because they live in a civilization whose highest cultural expressions—movies, advertisements, and sitcoms—have for decades insisted on downplaying the world of work.” (129)

On growing up in Kansas in the 80s and 90s: “What mattered most were the ideals; everyday reality was too degraded to count.”(145)

“Ignoring one’s own economic self-interest may seem like a suicidal move to you and me, but viewed a different way it is an act of self-denial; a sacrifice for a holier cause.”(168)

Colorful Vocabulary

deracinate (uproot)

patois (provincial speech, local dialect)

puissance (strength, power)

bonhomie (good-natured friendliness)

mulct (v. to defraud of money; swindle)

sedulous (accomplished with great perseverance; diligent)

calumniate (to utter maliciously false statements, charges)

quislings (traitor—Vidkun Quisling died 1945, Norwegian who collaborated with Nazis)

adulate (flatter excessively)

proles (proletarian)

breast-beating underdoggery

filigree

mansard (a type of roof: http://www.m-w.com/mw/art/roof.htm)

doppelgängers (double, alter ego)

anomie (personal unrest, alienation comes from lack of purpose or ideals)

depredation (plunder, ravage)

Picasso Poem

The second poetry exercise given to me as part of my course at Grub Street asked students to go forth and gather favorite first lines of poetry. I found this a worthwhile venture. I sat with books of poetry that I hadn't perused in years. I paged through entire anthologies that usually gather dust because I am daunted by their sheer size. Once I knew that I was to mine only first lines, I had the energy to dig in. Of course I found myself reading much more than the first lines and losing myself in the pages. I gathered many first lines (and perhaps I will enter them in this blog at a later date). The task was to use these first lines as a jumping off place for a new poem. Thus far I have written two very different poems. I'll include one here. First, here is the poem I ransacked:

Musée des Beaux Arts W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong, 

The Old Masters; how well, they understood 

Its human position: how it takes place 

While someone else is eating or opening a window 

or just walking dully along; 

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting 

For the miraculous birth, there always must be 

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 

On a pond at the edge of the wood: 

They never forgot 

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course 

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot 

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse 

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may 

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen 

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

And here is my new poem:



Musée National Picasso Paris Janet Kelley

About strangeness, he was never wrong, 

Picasso: how well he took human skin and bones 

apart. The joints, the hidden fluids and mucous 

grease between living bone, these became, for him, 

a palette. Each small hard mystery within the body, 

the human form, was splotched across his wooden arc of oils. 

He must have planned his compositions in the shower, 

on the way to the café, after fucking, after wishing to 

fuck her instead or him. His bristles scraped the canvas 

hard as glaciers in slow retreat.  Crevasses fractured, graphite boulders 

left stranded on plains. This must have made him laugh. 

It made us – two college girls – earnest. She tried to wander and 

get lost there, in the wake of his fervor. I gave up. His art 

abused me, made me feel small. So much brazen wanting humidified the 

air with his heavy longing, caused constriction in my chest and condensation 

between my thighs. I had gotten lost in the Renaissance, happily. To love Picasso, 

openly, seemed a kind of cuckoldry on my part. 

We dared not laugh, or try to appear witty about cubism. 

Instead we lined up for the toilette. When the women’s stayed occupied, 

we brazenly entered the men’s room, taking turns to guard the door.

Acrostic Poems

I was late to my first poetry class last night. I popped up out of the metro and went in the exact opposite direction. After asking at least eight people, I got turned around. Just a few minutes late and one student arrived after me. Not the end of the world.

The class is offered by Grub Street, a non-university conglomeration of writers teaching writing. The class is called 10 Poems in 10 Weeks. The instructor, Morgan Frank, will dole out a writing exercise each week as our homework. Our class time will primarily be spent work-shopping each students' work. This is considered a mid-level course and all the students have had experience writing, most have been in a variety of creative writing workshops. It looks like a good group. I need to write. Especially these days.

This morning I forced myself out of the house. I knew the empty house and my inbox would defeat me entirely. I knew that I needed to be squarely at the mercy of a patient waiter and a gallon of caffeine. It was just one of those days.

I plunked down, ordered my double-shot cappuccino and then followed that with a fresh carrot-apple-beet cocktail. A liquid breakfast, quite tasty. My lower GI was primed, for sure. The instructor started us off with an assignment to write an acrostic—you know the form, you’ve seen them since you were in the third grade. Here is the definition:

ACROSTIC: A poem in which the first or last letters of each line vertically form a word, phrase, or sentence. Apart from puzzles in newspapers and magazines, the most common modern versions involve the first letters of each line forming a single word when read downwards. An acrostic that involves the sequential letters of the alphabet is said to be an abecedarius or an abcedarian poem.

While this kind of assignment might make the highbrow guffaw, Me? doing a third-grade piddling of a doggerel? I think it was a great choice on the part of Ms. Frank. This form is playful. And it is good to get warmed up with play. Too many words get in the way of visceral poetry. Play first, furrow your brow later.

The assignment: choose a six-letter word and write an acrostic poem.

Here are the six-letter words I first brainstormed:

afghan
virgin
climax
famine
toilet
varsity
gran’ma
Grade 9


See me play! I chose the more "playful" titles. These are unedited! Just me having fun.

Grade 9
Get on the bus, don’t look back
Rivulets of dread pool beneath his freshly shaven lip
Asinine, waste of time teacher be
Damned. Stop. Looking.
Even that prick has more friends. My life is over—
9th Grade— it’s only Grade 9.

***

Grade 9
Going to Snow Ball, he sidles up to
Rachel, bumps her tray and lights up an
asinine, faintly sour, grin.
Darn, she almost says too loudly.
Evan asked me, like, just yesterday.

O No problem, shit, well, then, later.
Into the crowd he swaggers.
No, she fierce whispers to Tiffany,
Evan didn’t ask me—he is so gay, but that guy, come on!

***

Grade 9
Go stand in the hall, if you must pass gas.
Read, please.
Assignments be damned! Let’s play!
Dismal and endearing
Energy black hole.

***

Grade 9
Get it on, yeah, my friend,
Romeo, down with his girl, Juliet—those Montagues
and Capulets. Damn. Even my buds—

Matt, Ryan, D-man, Tyrone, Rat, Spence, that loyal Heather chick and yeah my wet dream Mrs. Sweater Just a Bit Too Tight, Mrs English Teacher. Yeah.

***

Toilet
Tea tinkles and wafts delicate jasmine and castor
oil slicks and sluices, a satisfying shit.
If only poets could defecate
letters—expel vowels and similes from the lyrical bowel, the poet’s
entrails composted, sprouting rebel pumpkin vines,
then a flush could punctuate the flesh.

***

Toilet
Tata takes us to India, Bangalore
on a trip to see the other side of the world.
It assails us--putrid air, defiant silks
Please, Not spicy at all no. Please, May I help you? Miss?
Even a half-moon of mango we doubt.
Then, squat on a hole to piss 'n shit, I see suddenly the beauty of it.

***

Climax
Cooh ew catch cuddle, can’t quite—
lick, yes,
m m m m m m m m m
and then

X o x o x o x o x o x o x o x o o o

***

Climax
Chester lost his mother and
loved no one. He
met Lucy
and found where
X marks his heart.

***

Henry
Hop, kick, jut, speak volumes
Eavesdrop too, Henry dear.
noodle arms, seafish eyes
reverses our clocks, Oh
Henry. Henry, oh!

Things I Plan to Read. . .

Arab and Jew: wounded spirits in a promised land by David K. Shipler

The perks of being a wallflower by Stephen Chobsky

Speak by Laurie Anderson

The writing on the wall: a novely by Lynne Schwartz

Independent People: an epic by Halldor Laxness

What's the Matter with Kansas? : How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank

and. . .Preparing Your Catholic Wedding: Practical Considerations by Overbeck and Marcozzi

Writing Down the Bones

I started to hear the title probably about the same time I started to teach high school a few years ago. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. A quick reference or a cherished passage popped up now and then in conversations. I might have even scribbled the title on a napkin or a ripped sheet of notebook paper. This past fall, I happened to see it on the book shelf at the Trident book store. There it was. Slim and inviting. Then a few weeks ago I saw it recommended again by a valued colleague. I had to pick up something else anyway and it fit so nicely in my open palm. So now I have my own paperback copy.

I needed this book.

Natalie Goldberg’s collection of essays presents a coherent vision for why writers write. Her philosophy is that writing is a kind of practice like yoga, even music--an idea she seems to have gleaned from her Buddhist practice. Indeed, the novel could have been called Zen and the Art of Writing.

Goldberg’s novel fell into my hands just as I was in a glump (what I call the gloomy slump when I can’t get my butt in the chair and make the damn keyboard sing). I need a path. I need a community of writers. The Fall semester had ended and I was waiting, waiting for my next round of classes to get me back in line. Goldberg reset my gears. Tuned me up. Got me hot to write. If you write or don’t write because you think you can’t. . . check out this little book for a patient guide into the practice of writing.

Memorable Passages

“It is easy to lose sight of the fact that writers do not write to impart knowledge to others; rather, they write to inform themselves.” (Foreword, xii)

“It is not an excuse to not write and sit on the couch eating bonbons.” (15)

“Don’t worry if what you know you can’t prove or haven’t studied. . . . Own anything you want in your writing and then let it go.” (29)

“Writing practice softens the heart and mind, helps to keep us flexible so that rigid distinctions between apples and milk, tigers and celery, disappear.” (35)

“In writing with detail, you are turning to face the world. It is a deeply political act, because you are not just staying in the heat of your own emotions. You are offering up some good solid bread for the hungry.” (47)

“I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work.” (48)

“But we should always concentrate, not by blocking out the world; but by allowing it all to exist. This is a tricky balance.” (73)

“It’s much better to be a tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find one peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.” (80)

“Writing is the act of discovery. You want to discover your relationship with a topic, not the dictionary definition.” (97)

“Have a tenderness and determination toward your writing, a sense of humor and a deep patience that you are doing the right thing.” (109)

“You can’t go deep into your writing and then step out of it, clamp down, go home, “be nice,” and not speak the truth. If you give yourself over to honesty in your [writing] practice, it will permeate your life.” (134)

“And the truth is that the truth can never ultimately hurt.” (160)

“Anything we fully do is an alone journey. . . . you can’t expect anyone to match the intensity of your emotions.” (Epilogue, 169)

Gregory Maguire: Wicked

The lovely Ms. L.-H chose the phenomenally successful Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (published 1995) as her inaugural book club selection. I finished it yesterday while I was on the bus, oddly. It is quite unsatisfying to finish a novel while lurching along breathing in the odors of strangers. But I digress.

Ms. L.-H is the group’s newbie and chose one of her dearest favorites to share with us. In our Book Club the custom is that one member hosts at her home and whips up a scrumptious meal to get our literary cogs turning, while another member leads the discussion about the book of her choice. If you host, you don't have to fuss with prepping a discussion (actually we rarely need any grease for our booky-talk hinges). Everyone gets to proffer their book selections; and we take turns preparing our homes and dinner tables. The sharing of books and our culinary talents (or experiments, in my case) works for our group.

I should clarify, for the record, that I am actually not attending Book Club this year. You see, Book Club is in South Bend, Indiana. I am in Boston, Massachusetts. While I would love to find a grant that supports my desire to travel for Book Club, it hasn’t happened. Apparently, Oprah just hasn’t read my letter stipulating my wildest dream and why she should make it come true. I understand; Oprah is quite busy. All those needy kids in Africa—I bet she reads their precious little letters first. Alas. Did I just digress, again?

Yes, Ms. L-H, it is true that I had to deal with a bit of personal reluctance before I dove into Wicked. I am a Kansas girl, born and bred on the tales of the plucky young Dorothy. Yes, I owned a Cairn Terrier—the exact same breed as darling Toto. My Toto was named: Haley’s Comet (check your astrology charts and you can do a complicated story problem to figure out my age when I welcomed little Haley into our Kansas acreage.) Little Haley went the way of the car accident and we buried her on a gentle hill near the road. But you didn’t log in to read dead-dog stories.

My point is this: I grew up with the Munchkins and the Wicked Witch of the West. I am sure many readers are drawn to the tale precisely because of their great familiarity with and love for the characters and its fantasy. I was hesitant, however, to jump into a long novel about a story that I already “knew” and LOVED.

But I love Ms. L-H too. It was a terrible triangle: me, the Wicked Witch of my childhood and my passionate devotion to Book Club. I gave in. And. . .I am glad that I did. I am glad to have been goaded into reading a fantasy.

I have to say, honestly, that I did really get into the Wicked Witch. I think Maguire did a convincing job creating a fully realized character for her. She was the star of my reading. The discussion of EVIL, on the other hand, just got annoying. Don’t get me wrong, I love EVIL (really, I studied it in college. no really.), but here I felt it was a bit forced.

I wanted adventure, intrigue. I wanted to feel delight. I wanted to empathize with the witch. I didn’t want to think about the nature of evil or her “baptism” at the end. She died. End of story. She was not baptized. I know, I know that I should/could think more deeply about the ideas in the novel. But I don’t want to. I want to read this one for pleasure. Don’t make me think. I love Maguire when he lets me gallop along in his fantasy land. I love him not so much when he tries to get too deep.

Recommendation: Yes, read it. It is a perfect bedside/planeride read. Here are some of the little jewels you will delight in down the yellow brick road. . .

Memorable Lines
(page numbers taken from paperback edition)

"He meant this, and for such intensity she had fallen in love with him; but she hated him for it too, of course." (9)

"She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though she what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet." (65)

"The broad, offensive panoply of life and Life, seamlessly intertwined." (75)

"Walk softly but marry a big prick." (161)

"I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral," said the Wizard. "In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early sign of apoplexy. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the most, it is hypocritical." (175)

"When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis," she said, "those who are the most themselves are the victims." (238)

"Poets are just as responsible for empire building as any other professional hacks." (320)

"Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven, so you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it." (377)

Intriguing words

gawp (67; 167)
Function: intransitive verb
Etymology: English dialect gawp to yawn, gape, from obsolete galp, from Middle English

etiolate (108) A perfect way to describe a blanched green witch!
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): -lat·ed; -lat·ing
Etymology: French étioler
1 : to bleach and alter the natural development of (a green plant) by excluding sunlight
2 a : to make pale b : to deprive of natural vigor : make feeble

voluble as in volubly weeping (142)
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle French or Latin; Middle French, from Latin volubilis, from volvere to roll; akin to Old English wealwian to roll, Greek eilyein to roll, wrap
1 : easily rolling or turning : ROTATING
2 : characterized by ready or rapid speech : GLIB, FLUENT
synonym see TALKATIVE

glower used as glowery (161) to describe the weather
Function: noun
: a sullen brooding look of annoyance or anger

splenetic (171)
Function: adjective
Etymology: Late Latin spleneticus, from Latin splen spleen
1 archaic : given to melancholy
2 : marked by bad temper, malevolence, or spite

sententious (175)
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, full of meaning, from Latin sententiosus, from sententia sentence, maxim
1 a : given to or abounding in aphoristic expression b : given to or abounding in excessive moralizing
2 : terse, aphoristic, or moralistic in expression : PITHY,

camels in glittering caparisons (236)
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle French caparaçon, from Old Spanish caparazón
1 a : an ornamental covering for a horse b : decorative trappings and harness
2 : rich clothing : ADORNMENT

parlous (361)
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, alteration of perilous
1 obsolete : dangerously shrewd or cunning
2 : full of danger or risk : HAZARDOUS