Tuesday Evening Book Report

Poets and Writers Best Books for Writers

My friend Barbara Abercrombie's book is splashed across the pages of Poets and Writers as one of the best writing books.

A few years back I took several of Barbara's classes in the Writer's Program at UCLA Extension. She's a gifted teacher. A writer whisperer. Some of the pages for my book first came out of my pen as I sat in her classroom.

You can find those pages in her book. And in mine. Click on the sidebar link below if you'd like to buy it.

And here's the link for Barbara's book: Kicking in the Wall.

The Grand Canyon of Writing

My writing life has felt like the Grand Canyon lately. Vast and empty. Varied and full. A journey I should have started when I was younger. A friend once told me about his hike down the Grand Canyon. It was a spur of the moment thing with a best buddy just after college--or maybe it was high school. A few cans of beans and some beer. They made it, somehow. I think he told me they almost died, and improbably, it was incredibly funny. 

So here I am. Got the beer and the beans, and I'm old enough to know better, but I still want to plum the depths that writing holds for me. I seldom feel like I have the proper preparation, and I often feel that I just might die trying. Why do I do it, I've asked myself this past month. It's just a giant whole in the ground, this writing thing. Is it too late to go back to school and become, let's say, a paralegal or a dental hygienist?

This past week I took 1379 words of out a short story that I wrote first draft of maybe three years ago. If this story were a hike down the Grand Canyon, it would be like I was stuck at the Phantom Ranch, plundering the canteen day after day with only the vaguest plans of ever hiking back out at again. But hey, it might be finished now--and if only finished meant published, that would be swell. I could say, hey everyone, I hiked the Grand Canyon! Instead, it's like I've bought all the maps and the gear, and in every conversation, I tell people about how I'm going to hike down the Grand Canyon, but I never actually lace up my boots and go. So here I am, now peering into the abyss that is called Sending Work Out. 

And meanwhile as I progress through a weird and difficult week of real life, the words of one of my favorite teachers have come back to me. "Take notes," Barbara Abercrombie says. 

And then there's this from another of my favorite teachers and writers, Abigail Thomas, on the subject of writing memoir.

Writing is the way I ground myself, and it's what keeps me sane. Writing is the way I try to make sense of my life, try to find meaning in accident, reasons why what happens happens—even though I know that why is a distraction, and meaning you have to cobble together yourself. Sometimes just holding a pen in my hand and writing milk butter eggs sugar calms me. Truth is what I'm ultimately after, truth or clarity. I think that's what we're all after, truth, although I'd never have said such a thing when I was young. And I write nonfiction because you can't get away with anything when it's just you and the page. No half-truths, no cosmetics. What would be the point?

Read more: http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/How-to-Write-Your-Memoir-by-Abigail-Thomas/2#ixzz2igGVMrPN

So I'm taking notes on real life while I write fiction. I'm binge watching Breaking Bad, cooking dinner for my mom every night, and afterwards walking off into the quiet suburban dark while I let my mind wander. Mornings, there's yoga and t'ai chi chih, the minute-by-minute life with my mom and everything else. I'm taking notes. Those notes might be a long, long hike toward fiction or memoir, or maybe just calm.

Kicking in the Wall

I have a lot of books about writing. 

Last night at Vroman's books in Pasadena, one of the the most amazing book stores on the planet, I got to read from Kicking in the Wall by Barbara Abercrombie because a few snippets of my writing are in it. Kicking in the Wall and Barbara's previous book A Year of Writing Dangerously are full of writing prompts that will keep you in your chair. She also has a book called "Courage and Craft." Barbara's books, Abigail Thomas's book, "Thinking About Memoir,"and Anne LaMott's Book "Bird by Bird" keep me going.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some writing to do.

Do you have a favorite book about writing? Or about creativity in general?

Books and Brie

Thanks to the presence  of daughter M, I went away for an overnight.

First there was this.

A reading at Flintridge Books by one of my favorite writing teachers.

This book includes snippets of writing by a few of Barbara's students. A half-dozen of us were there last night and we read, too.

Then I spent the night with the man who loves me at his place. 

Dinner was chips and cheese and crackers. After 270-some nights of cooking dinner for my mom with the only respite being three evenings of take-out pizza, and two previous nights away, last night's dinner felt like pure decadence. Cheese. Chips. I think we ate it off of plates, but I'm not sure because there was a lot of wine involved. Maybe we just shoved our heads into the bag and tore at the wedge of brie with our teeth.

I slept with both ears closed, dropping off to the distant yip-yip-yeeeee of coyotes. I sleep well-enough at home with my mom. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm the middle-weight sleeping champion of the world. But there's sleeping and then there's sleeping.

Refreshed, my mom and I tried the various CPAP masks again this afternoon, thinking that we might have better luck if we tried a daytime practice run. 

Nope.

Jack Gilbert: Coming to the End of Triumph

I read my first Jack Gilbert poem in Barbara Abercrombie's UCLA Extension class Writing the Healing Story. It seems overstated, perhaps, to say that now, a decade later,  I can conjure up the classroom, where I was sitting, and many of the faces around the tables that were arranged into a large hollow-centered rectangle. Barbara's writer-whisperer style of teaching often meant that she would use a poem as a prompt, and while this poem by Jack Gilbert did not wrench a premonition from me about the not- so-distant demise of my marriage, time stood still long enough for Gilbert's words to settle into me. Reading it again just after the poet's death on Tuesday, it felt all the more moving as a perfect description of how my marriage didn't end.


Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of triumph.

If you'd like to read more about Jack Gilbert, you can find a piece  here and here. 

The image at the top of the post is a Peter Paul Ruebens painting.

Writer's Residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts/Day 1

My writing life has been in need of some serious repair.
So here I am--just 24 hours since I arrived at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Already I feel the blossoming.

I brought 21 little notebooks with me to the VCCA.

Disorganized paper versions of my disorganized brain. Each one filled with ideas for essays, short stories, stuff for the memoir and stuff for the novel. All completely un-findable when I want to find it.
I'm half-way to fixing that.

Which is not to say that I'm shredding all of it. Much of it I've already used. Some of what's left no longer interests me. Some of it was useful in the short story I started today.

Other things are a revelation. Like this personal note from 2005 or maybe 2006. I found it in one of the little notebooks that I began keeping when my first real writing teacher, Barbara Abercrombie, said that a writer needs to carry a notebook and write things down.

Mr. Ex frequently came home from his office at 9 or 10 p.m. in those days and some nights never even said hellohowwasyourday, and sometimes I worried that he would leave me. I never confessed my fears to anyone.


A year or two later when he did leave me, I told everyone I'd been completely blindsided.
And I had been.
But I also felt insecure enough to wonder what I would do if he left me. Worried enough that I took out my writer's notebook and wrote it down.