WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

August 21, 2009
Washington, DC

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“Typewriter” by aprillynn77 from Flickr

The work of the very best writers is deceptive in that, if the writer does her job well, the reader is aware only of a sense of effortlessness and ease to the text. In truth, every writer struggles with the best way to write, and in most cases revise, the work.  Some writers proceed one sentence at a time and can’t go on until the sentence at hand is absolutely buffed and polished. Other writers prefer to pour as much as possible onto the page at one go, and then go back and start paring and cutting away until the story or poem emerges. From an interview with the NEA, here’s Marilynne Robinson on her approach to writing and revising.

I write when I can.  I write very much when I have the impulse to write. And so I can write five days a week, you know, continuously. And then, if I come to the end and I have to think about things for a while, I don’t write at all for a while. I’m not at all a work ethic sort of writer. Either I have persuaded myself of the illusion or I’m outside of the illusion, and those are my two states, as far as writing is concerned.

I don’t really revise very much.  It seems to me that [if] you have something written the way it ought to be written, then you’ve preserved the integrity of the dream, you know.  That if you make a mistake you’re, in a sense, rupturing this dream. And you cannot go on from a mistake very successfully.  You really have to try to preserve the integrity of the fiction at every point, and that’s what I try to do.

Check out the Housekeeping Reader’s Guide for more on Marilynne Robinson and her Big Read novel.

Posted by Paulette Beete at 11:08 am | Category: Housekeeping
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From the Desk of Paulette

August 21, 2009
Washington, DC

Inspired by veteran Big Read organizer (and Caldwell Public Library Director) Karen Kleppe Lembo’s July 31 article in The Recorder, here’s the library’s Big Read by the numbers . . .

 253: Number of Big Read activities offered by Caldwell Public Library in Caldwell, New Jersey, as part of their Big Read of Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl

$8,000: Amount of Caldwell Public Library’s Big Read grant

18: Number of organizational partners (not including schools, libraries, or museums) for The Big Read

2: Number of sponsors that donated matching grant funds for the library’s program (Rotary Club of the Caldwells and Kiwanis Club of Caldwell/West Essex

>$20,000: Amount of in-kind donations received for the library’s Big Read

1,000: Number of copies of The Shawl in circulation throughout Caldwell during The Big Read

33: Number of official book discussions around The Shawl

400: Number of Big Readers who were able to meet Cynthia Ozick during her visit to Caldwell

16: Number of schools—nursery school through college—that partcipated in Caldwell’s Big Read

1,000: Number of teens that attended teen-friendly panel discussons and participated in a collaborative art exhibit

15,500: # of crayons collected for The Crayon Project at 12 collection bins created by Boy Scout Troop 6. Created by Teh Fair Lawn Jewish Center, the project is a Fair Lawn community rpoject that is collecting one crayon for each child lost during the holocaust. Some of the crayons will be used by local artist Herb Stern to create a permanent memorial to the lsot children, while the rest of the crayons will be donated to underserved schools.

countless: Inspired by Rosa’s shawl, number of squares that have been knit, crocheted, and/or tied by Caldwell crafters to create blankets that are being donated to local domestic violence shelters, halfway homes, and Native American reservations

3: Number of Big Read grants received by Caldwell Public Library to date (You can count on—pun gleefully intended!—Caldwell’s Big Read of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to arrive in early 2010)

Posted by Paulette Beete at 1:50 pm | Category: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Shawl
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WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

August 20, 2009
Washington, DC

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“Washington Square North, nos. 121-125, Manhattan.”
Abbott, Berenice — Photographer. 1935-1938, printed 1935-ca. 1990
from The New York Public Library. Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.
 

Most people have heard about the friendship between Edith Wharton and Henry James. But it turns out that Cynthia Ozick has also spent a great deal of time keeping company with our resident expat bachelor. From an interview with the NEA, here’s Ms. Ozick on “the marvels” of Washington Square.

[T]here’s not surprise in this novel, and that’s one of the surprises in this novel, that there’s no surprise.  That [Morris Townsend] comes on to begin with as somebody who has his eye on a dull but very rich girl, and it ends that way.  And nothing has changed in between the beginning and the end of the book, except the transformation of Catherine who, to begin with, has been transformed from dullness into a sense of her own worth, her own actual beauty, herself, really, as a work of art. . . . And later, she becomes transformed from a humble, obedient girl, into a hard, sarcastic, unkind simulacru and echo of her father.

So, although nothing changes, everything has changed, because if Catherine is the focal point of the novel, and the change takes place in her, then this novel, which is seemingly about no change, is about enormous change, but in one person only.  And that is one of the marvels of [Washington Square]. 

There [is also] the dialogue, which you can reread and reread and study and study, and see that every sentence in a passage is crucial to the next sentence.  Each sentence creates the succeeding sentence, and it’s always with extreme wit, extreme insight, and moving the story another notch forward. 

Posted by Paulette Beete at 4:12 pm | Category: Washington Square
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WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON

August 18, 2009
Washington, DC

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Nebraska prairie by jasminedelilah from Flickr

Given his tenure as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2004-2006,  it’s fair to surmise that Ted Kooser knows a thing or two about inspiration. In Kooser’s case, much of that inspiration comes from Nebraska where he’s lived for more than 40 years. Here are some thoughts from the poet on Willa Cather, who also took great inspiration from the Cornhusker State. (Check out the audio guide  to hear more from Ted Kooser on Willa Cather and My Antonia.)

Well, [Willa Cather] really wanted to be a kind of Henry James, in a way. She went east , turning her back on [Nebraska]and got there and wrote some things and was fairly successful in that more elite place and way of writing and so on. Then the prairie books come along and, she has discovered this source of material from her experience. I think it was Flannery O’Connor who said once that you’ve had enough experience by the time you’re eight years old to write for the rest of your life, you know? So that, in a way, is what’s happening here. [Cather's] going back and looking at all that experience she had as a girl, and it’s become valuable to her in a way. It must have made her quite exotic among those people, you know, who were in Manhattan and so on.

Posted by Paulette Beete at 10:52 am | Category: My Antonia
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From The Big Read mailbox

August 17, 2009
Washington, DC

 

 

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Photo by Oskay from Flickr

A couple of weeks ago, I posed this question to folks around the office: What would you carry as you headed—literally or metaphorically—into battle? Here’s a response sent into the blog by Susan Gregory of Pioneer Library System in Norman, Oklahoma. (A Repeat Reader, Pioneer Library will host a Big Read of The Maltese Falcon next March.)

A 1928 Book of Common Prayer that my dad gave me when I was eight; a large hunting knife (in case the prayers are taking too long); Mace (does it work on snakes?); photos of my son and my brother’s family; pens and notebooks; a mirror, to signal for help and to check for jaundice; Immodium A-D; Tootsie Rolls; toothbrush; St. Francis medal that my son brought me from Assisi; did I mention Immodium A-D?

Posted by Paulette Beete at 12:04 pm | Category: The Things They Carried
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WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

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Photo by Alan Zale courtesty of  Caldwell Public Library’s (New Jersey) Big Read of The Shawl

For the month of July, I set myself the challenge of writing a poem a day. While I didn’t manage to write each and every day, I did manage to at least start quite a few poems. There’s the old saying that writing is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. But there were a couple of times during my writing vigil when my pen seemed to be functioning on 100 percent inspiration, a feeling Cynthia Ozick describes rather fluently in this excerpt from an NEA interview in which she talks about beginning The Shawl.

We read now and again that a person sits down to write and there’s a sense that some mystical hand is guiding you and you’re not writing out of youself. I think reasonably, if you’re a rational person, you can’t accept that. But I did have the sense—I did this one time in my life—that I was extraordinarly fluent, and I’m never fluent. I wrote those five pages as if I heard a voice.

Posted by Paulette Beete at 11:40 am | Category: The Shawl, Uncategorized
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WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

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“La Bodeguita Ernest Hemingway” by ahisgett from Flick’r

A recurring theme on the blog is hearing from The Big Read authors about other writers and artists who have influenced their work. From an interview with the NEA, here’s Tobias Wolff  (author of Old School) on some of the writers whom he admires—and has cast as characters in his novels—and the tension between the public and private selves of these authors.

[T]he greatest pleasure in writing [Old School] was to try to bring [Robert] Frost and Ayn Rand and even [Ernest] Hemingway to life in this novel. I was very much affected by all these writers when I was young, and they were truly, all of them, legendary in different ways. And, for that reason, I felt justified in creating them as characters because all of them, quite consciously, made of themselves public characters that were a little different from their private selves. They did this no doubt for protection. You craft a kind of public persona and you can kind of hide behind that and add a bit of privacy behind it. But also that was the way they wanted to be seen for good or ill. In Hemingway’s case as we all know, that public persona kind of got the better of him and wrestled him to the ground. Because his early work is very tender and not at all concerned with trumpeting the virtues of stoicism and masculine strength and warrior values, all that kind of thing. But as that kind of bristling masculinity of his that was so much a part of his public persona leaked into his work, it damaged it, no question about it.

Posted by Paulette Beete at 10:27 am | Category: Old School
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The Things We’d Carry, Part 4

August 7, 2009
Washington, DC

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A look at what’s in my bag today.

Here’s the final installment in our series of responses to the prompt: “Marching into battle—literally or metaphorically—what things might you carry? It’s your choice to tell or not to tell why you select what you do.”

I’ll lead off today’s answers . . .

From Paulette Beete:

I’d carry my Bible, as many ruled Moleskine notebooks and blue ink pens as I could, a photograph of my sister and me taken in my grandfather’s shop in Trinidad when we were about two and five respectively, poems by Mary Oliver and Yusef Komunyakaa, postcards of New York and Chicago, and an 80s mixed tape that my friend Michelle gave me when I graduated from high school

From David Kipen:

Marching into battle, I’d carry a copy of The Things They Carried. Somebody must’ve suggested that already, right? Then I’d bring copies for my whole platoon, and start a  Big Read right there in the foxhole.

What would you carry? Let me know at bigreadblog@arts.gov, and it might make it onto the blog.

Want to read more in the series?

The Things We’d Carry, Part 1

The Things We’d Carry, Part 2

The Things We’d Carry, Part 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by Paulette Beete at 9:42 am | Category: The Things They Carried, Uncategorized
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From the Desk of Paulette

August 5, 2009
Washington, DC

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  A display from San Antonio Public Library’s Big Read of Fahrenheit 451.

Not surprisingly, I’m not the only writer that has a huge crush on Ray Bradbury. The admirably prolific Alice Hoffman recently spoke on NPR’s All Things Considered about the significant impact Bradbury has had on her writing life.

Here’s just a snippet:

I have always believed that the books of youth stay with us in a unique way. The fairy tales, nursery rhymes and novels we read when we’re young become part of our DNA. Perhaps that is why I was led back to Fahrenheit 451 after 9/11. It was a brilliant remedy for restoring my faith.

Read and/or listen to Hoffman’s paean to Fahrenheit 451 and Bradbury in its entirety on NPR’s Web site.

Posted by Paulette Beete at 2:41 pm | Category: Fahrenheit 451
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Get Caught Reading!

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Photo courtesy of Wallowa Public Library (Oregon)

So remember way back when I shared my summer reading list? Well, I’ll be far far away from my computer for the next few days trying to finally get a start on it. It’s a good thing too since summer seems to be hellbent on coming to an end sooner rather than later.

See you in August!

Posted by Paulette Beete at 2:38 pm | Category: General, Uncategorized
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