You know how it is when you steal that time to read the book you desperately want to read? I have been stealing that time.
Among the many wonderful people I met at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference (a conference I attended so that I could spend more time with the great Jayne Anne Phillips)—Brooks Hansen, Anne Lamott, Jane Satterfield, Leslie Pietrzyk, Jay Kirk, Olena Kalytiak Davis, my first editor, Alane Salierno Mason (W.W. Norton), my second editor in chief, Janet Silver, Grace Paley, even—there was a young scholarship winner named Susan Tekulve, who hailed from the south and told intriguing tales. Through the years Susan and I remained in touch as she published short stories and built a reputation as a fine teacher at Converse College in Spartanburg, SC. She traveled to and taught in Italy. She spent time among the Appalachian hills, where my great grandfather had left a mark. She brokered fascinating details. She was always humble and she, like me, loved chocolate, cats, and gardens.
Not long ago, Susan won the South Carolina First Novel Prize for
In the Garden of Stone, which will be released in a beautifully designed package by Hub City Press in late April.
Kirkus gave it a huge star.
Library Journal named it as a Spring Break. None other than Robert Olmstead, Thomas E. Kennedy, and Josephine Humphreys have sung its praises, and I asked for an early copy.
This is the book I've been desperate to read, and my joy for Susan, my enthusiasm, my deep respect, I'll use the word "awe"�it overflows. I'm 100 pages in and now must leave it for a spell to do some corporate work. I'll write a full response in a few days. But for now let me say that this generational book about the south and southern Italy (yes, they combine to perfection here) is so brilliantly built and quietly affecting that I could choose any single paragraph and it would impress you.
Here's just one. It's 1924, the first evening of a southern honeymoon.
Around the mountain pool, the butterflies flattened themselves against long, polished stones, drinking the water held in their dimpled surfaces. Emma took off her shoes and walked across the slippery rocks. Water sprayed her face and arms as she dodged the drinking butterflies and stood at the pool's edge, watching the giant trout swim around the pool. Dark blue and mottled, they skulled just below the surface, gulping up butterflies and water, their stomachs filling like empty buckets. She saw now why her husband had released them. She, too, was satisfied just to know that they were there.
Sleep did not befriend me last night (come on, I thought, what did I do to
you?), but I made good use of time of the dark and restless time. First, I prepared a series of reading/writing exercises for my visit to Villa Maria Academy today in honor of World Read Aloud Day. We'll read Helme Heine's magical THE MARVELOUS JOURNEY THROUGH THE NIGHT as adults, for example, and then define our idea of paradise. We'll dwell with the simple words of William Carlos Williams. We'll write from different points of view and ask ourselves what makes for a first-chapter cliffhanger.
It will be fun, I think. I'm just hoping that I can locate my speaking voice between now and 9:15 AM.
When I was all finished that, I decided to download one of the Kindle Singles I had read about yesterday in Dwight Garner's
New York Times story. My choice, but of course, was Ann Patchett's
Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life, though in about five minutes I'll also be downloading Jane Hirshfield's
Heart of Haiku.
In any case, there I was, four A.M., as wide-eyed as my puffy eyes would allow, reading Patchett's primer on writing. My verdict: Spend the $2.99. Please. It's memoir, it's advice, it's fantastic stuff on Grace Paley and Elizabeth McCracken. Patchett is realistic. She's not ashamed of the facts. Writing is hard work, she reminds us. And it doesn't get done until you show up to do it.
A sliver:
If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish but because there is something that you alone can say. Write the story, learn from it, pull away, write another story. Think of a sink pipe filled with sticky sentiment: The only way to get clean water is to force a small ocean through the tap. Most of us are full up with bad stories, boring stories, self-indulgent stories, searing works of unendurable melodrama. We must get all of them out of our system in order to find the good stories that may or may not exist in the fresh water underneath.
Boy, I needed that.
And on another, final note: That is not my dining-room table (though it is a restaurant where I tend to take my clients). But if I
did own that table and if I
did have that much light, I'd work right there, writing the bad stories down so that I could finally (it's taking long enough) get to the good ones (they must be somewhere).
[Paley] insists that life continues beyond the confining plots of tragedy or comedy; she hates plot, "because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real, or invented, deserves the open destiny of life."
A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter, pg 462,
Leave it to Paley to so brilliantly express this particular propulsion that in so many ways defines my own approach to my work: Everyone deserves the open destiny of a life.
Congratulations to Susan! I loved the imagery in this excerpt, especially the gulping trout buckets. It was a nice change to imagine butterflies and flowing water during a snowy week.
What a lovely passage.