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There is a “Dear Teen Me,” meme that I have not done, but if I were to do it now, I might invoke my young self to stop reading Vonnegut, to read maybe one book each by Nabokov, Auster, and Delillo but not read them obsessively, so that my own writing become paralyzed with self-consciousness.

There’s nothing wrong with those writers, but every high-school aged boys with aspirations to write discovers Vonnegut, imagines himself to be the next great wit, and writes Vonnegut-tainted stories for a time, and emerges from the smothering style only when, as an upperclassman, he discovers the likes of Nabokov, Auster, and Delillo. And so, for a time, he begins soon abandoned self-conscious novels, talks about metafiction at parties to anyone who pretend to listen, and wonders if he needs to read more Thomas Mann to have literary street cred. I would like to stop teen me from taking those perilous steps and losing a decade to misdirection.

I would allow the Hawthorn, the Poe, the Steinbeck and Twain but only to have an anchor in Americana. I would discourage an scholarly inclination toward anything — if a story works, it works on instincts, not on explanations. I might even caution him to major in something besides English. Vonnegut was a mechanical engineer, after all, and Nabokov an entomologist. Major in geology or anthropology, I’d tell myself. Something that gets you outside and mucking around in the soil.

Literature built atop a tower of literature is the right road for someone else, but not for you. Your way into a story is the story, not the language. Your strengths are emotional, not cerebral. Find an anchor, a patch of soil to plant yourself, a way to see the world without words.

I would tell my young self to discover Sigurd Olson and Annie Dillard and the poetry of William Stafford and the essays of E.B. White, not because they tell me how to write, but because they tell me how to live.

I would tell myself to go for more walks.

I would tell myself to talk less and listen more.

I would tell myself to learn the names of trees and bugs.

I would tell myself to appreciate silence and the immense value of free time.

But knowing that teen me as I do, I know he wouldn’t listen to any of this.

My  spiritual director called this morning. A lovely man who visits once a month and as I no longer take church services we spend the time talking about books and poetry.   After discussing Japanese poetry, we reached the subject of the Booker and the Nobel prize for literature. For many years I spent the week before the Booker Prize, at a college with others, trying to decide the winner.

As many of you probably read in today's Publisher's Lunch, Vladmir Nabokov's son has decided to publish his last novel--against his instructions to burn it. He claims his papa appeared in a vision and told him to do it.

What struck me is the format of the novel: 50 index cards, currently sitting in a Swiss Bank vault. And they're going to make a novel out of this. You know he wasn't done with this project. Heck, I've got probably a hundred index cards sitting in a drawer for a project. I can't imagine someone claiming it was a finished novel.

Probably a lot of people agree with his son Dmitri's decision. Any chance to read Nabokov's work is a good one, they'd say. Who cares if he liked it or not?

But I think it's unforgivable. Any author who leaves instructions to destroy unfinished work ought to be respected. It's not how they want to be remembered. They know it's not ready. How ridiculous that anybody else thinks they know better than the author.

I've got a couple of manuscripts in the drawer and those babies are staying in there. But I can't quite bring myself to delete them. Maybe part of me thinks I'll revisit them some day. Or maybe I can't kill off something that took so much time and effort.

But if I go first... my husband had better delete them!

Via the Kiki Strike blog, one of the world's smallest cars:

I used to dream about a car like this. I've lived on top of a hill since I was eight years old. For a while one of my friends lived at the very bottom. Every time I trudged back up to my house, I would imagine myself in a little car, made just for me, that would fit on the sidewalk. I could drive it all by myself. Except I wanted it to be red, like this: