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.