Hand sewn

I've been doing a lot of stitching by hand, and my wrist is sore. So, today is for writing here instead, forcing myself to give my arm a break.

School is starting soon (any day now!), and I'm still relishing in the work-mode I got into while here this summer:

http://www.millaycolony.org/

I started a new project, and wrote lots on a project that was already underway. Lucky times.

More to come soon, as teaching gets underway, but I'm also REALLY looking forward to this show, which Danielle Krcmar, Babson's Artist-in-Residence, and I co-curated. Most of the quilters are part of my book, which is coming out oh so soon...And I'm looking forward to seeing them, and their quilts, in person!

Sept. 18-Nov. 1, with an opening and artists' talk on Sept. 18 at 5pm in Hollister Hall foyer at Babson College.

Home / Toni Morrison

I've just finished Toni Morrison's Home, and still love her writing. I read The Bluest Eye when I was a freshman in college, and the story has stayed with me forever since; I think I'm going to teach it next  year in one of my classes.

I've read reviews saying that Home sustains themes that have run through all of Morrison's writing, but this story, while it crosses space and time as do her other books (flashing back and forth with haunted characters), it feels more linear -- maybe because it's sparer than her other books. (Cohen goes on to say that this is a novella in length.)

From the NY Times review, by Leah Hager Cohen:

"The first four words of Toni Morrison’s new book greet — or assail — us before the story even begins. They’re from the epigraph, which quotes a song cycle written by the author some 20 years ago and therefore, it seems safe to say, not originally intended for this book, but an indication, perhaps, of how long its themes have been haunting her. And “haunting” is a fitting word for the lyric itself, in which a speaker professes to lack both recognition of and accountability for the strange, shadowy, dissembling domicile in which he finds himself. The atmosphere of alienation makes the song’s final line even more uncanny: “Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/books/review/home-a-novel-by-toni-morrison.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


Cohen writes later in the review that some of the character's revelations in Home are too obvious. I don't read those moments as obvious but, instead, declarative.  Not everything in Frank's foggy world can remain so.

I hope to hear her read or talk one day...

Reading & Walking

Now that spring is here, Piper and I are at the beach at least one or two afternoons a week, savoring our walking days before dogs are banned and the sunbathers are afoot.

The days are beautiful.

More good news: my students are incredible this semester, and are currently making their final chapbook and compiling their portfolios. We took a group photo for the chapbook this afternoon; I'll have to ask them if I can post it here. It's been so much fun to talk fiction with them all semester, and to hear what they think about the stories they've read and workshopped, as well as (in the process) everything from bengal tigers to tutoring middle school students. They're a brilliant bunch, heading for good things.

Reading gems!:
Barrie Jean Borich's Body Geographic. Palimpsests of body and land, inscribing and mapping a life.

This is one of the maps from the book, copied from Barrie Jean Borich's website: 


http://barriejeanborich.com/audio-video/

A friend recommended Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and I am engrossed. It's my before-bed and when-I-wake-up reading. I'm astounded by the research that went into its writing, and the replication of conversations with Lacks' family, and the layers of information about cell research, race and science, and treatment of cancer over time. So many missteps and injustices, and so much has changed (seemingly) in our knowledge of disease and patient rights.

(I also love that Skloot says, in this video, that she first learned of Henrietta Lacks when she was just sixteen, and how that story stuck with her into adulthood. I need to show my students this clip.)

And what's life without a novel (or three) and some poetry?

Currently devouring Laird Hunt's Kind One, Valerie Vogrin's Shebang, and recently finished Amity Gaige's incredible Schroder (how did she make a liar so sympathetic? this is what I need to learn), and John Yau's poetry (cheering for his art-and-language play).

Full of calamari from the farmer's market, now, it's time to read in bed.

Well, every few months, I return to this blog, though I vow that it's going to happen more often from here on out.

We've been snowed in for days now, and I've been quilting and writing up a storm (ha.). A friend is helping me to take some images so that I can finally post more quilts -- oh la la! -- so the next time I'm here, I'll do that. For now, here is the campus in the snow, with a dog in the foreground:

 

Alternating between delighting in the snow, making things, and feeling some cabin-fever, I've also been reading a lot. I finished The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey, which was an appropriate read. I was grateful that I wasn't living in snowbound Alaska pre-internet-and-telephone. Now that's some cabin fever. But the landscape sounds so beautiful, I'd love to visit someday. This was a first novel, which makes me happy. A great start out of the gate -- lyrical language, a little magic.  Cozy winter snowy read.

This is what NPR had to say about it (a good review):


http://www.npr.org/2012/12/26/167557065/revisiting-a-sad-yet-hopeful-winters-tale-in-the-snow-child



I'm also now reading The Chronology of Water, and have recently finished Autobiography of a Face. That last one knocked me out, the story was so powerful (why hadn't I read it sooner??). AND, Dawn Raffel came to visit this week, so we read and discussed her work in a class I'm taking. I love, love, The Secret Life of Objects and her gorgeous story collection, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe.





http://www.thefastertimes.com/writersonwriting/2012/06/06/nothing-in-my-interior-life-is-linear-dawn-raffel/

That's an interesting interview, above.

Now I must move on to her novel and first collection. It was fantastic to have her here at URI, talking about how her work moves and becomes.

Teaching Storytelling

I've been so lucky to teach a lit class this semester, the Short Story. I decided to focus on storytelling in not only short stories but also visual art and film. We've been looking at work by Kara Walker,

Ann Hamilton, Carrie Mae Weems, and using the online collaborative space www.hitrecord.org for students to contribute their writing or art work. We'll sometimes do a fiction exercise in class as a warm-up or response, and students have posted stories to their blogs. I'm always stunned at the work students can create in class in just 10 minutes or so, and I hooooope that at least a few of them keep writing these sorts of pieces now and then, or springboard off of what they've started in class.

My favorite unit this semester was our "Roaring 20's" time, in which we looked at the work of Dali, Picasso, and Matisse, watched Josephine Baker dance, listened to Cole Porter's music,

read Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and both Fitzgeralds. And then -- grand finale! -- we watched "Midnight in Paris." Some students had already seen it and were happy to find that they "got all the jokes" this time around. I loved seeing Stein and Hemingway and Picasso et al. brought to life, and I hope the students had some fun with it, too.

Now, we're onto contemporary short story collections and have had the joy of reading Jody Lisberger's stories, Remember Love, and then visiting with her in class. Then, David McGlynn's stories, The End of the Straight and Narrow, and he Skyped in with us. The technology wasn't perfect -- but it was a lot of fun to have him in class from Wisconsin.

Next up -- Tiphanie Yanique's How to Escape from a Leper Colony, one of my favorite collections. Hoorah!

Two Kinds of Decay

Last night, I started reading Sarah Manguso's Two Kinds of Decay, and I couldn't put it down. I finished it at about 1am and am still thinking about the story this afternoon. I love her poet's-language and the way that she pushes through the story -- diagnosis, treatments (many painful treatments), leaving and re-entering and leaving school again to live with her parents -- without falling into the pitfalls of dwelling too much on emotion. She's also funny at times:

"My blood plasma had filled with poison made by my immune system. My immune system was trying to destroy my nervous system. It was a misperception that caused me a lot of trouble" (14).

Understated and direct. Woven in shorts that focus on the trajectory of her life with the disease, sometimes interspersed with memories of the past, after the second half of the story -- this is a brilliant arrangement of parts.

And this line is just, so, perfect, in response to a doctor who took pity on her and told her that she'd "already endured something much worse than most people have to endure in an entire regular-length life":

"The doctor was older than my parents, and he must have had plenty of younger patients, but he didn't understand yet that suffering, however much and whatever type, shrinks or swells to fit the size and shape of a life" (83-84).

I love this book. 

I've abandoned this place for almost a year now, and have decided it's time to have another crack at blogging. Having finished up the first year of the PhD program here in RI, turned in the book copy, and let go of other commitments -- oh, fall is stretching out ahead with freedom all over it! No classes! Just READING! Sure, there's a test at the end of all that reading (errr, two tests), but that's just fine. I also get to teach LIT -- glorious LIT! -- and am excited about my plan for the semester -- a lot of art, film, and short stories by writers who are going to be visiting my classes -- oh, la la, good times abound. My sister Becky http://iusemarkers.com/ deserves lots of credit for her film and art suggestions for me this semester. She's a talented artist and illustrator, and always points me towards artists I love.

This summer was full of travels and the chance to quilt, quilt, and quilt some more. Finishing Mike and Ellen's quilt after two years of sewing was pretty exciting.

I may prefer the back to the front, because of the quilting and the loud-orange-splash on one side. But the front is all shot cottons, and so soft. I hope they like it -- and use it, use it, use it -- take it on picnics, eat breakfast in bed under it, etc..

I'm now finishing up an all-by-hand quilt, which will be shipped off to its home soon. It's so nice to have my hands on fabric again, playing with color.

One of my many goals for fall is one short assignment (for myself) a week, inspired again by Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, which has fed me for...oh, decades...on and off.

"'E.L. Doctorow once said that writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard."

I like it.