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Annie Dillard and Joan Didion will be our guides today in English 135. Voice and meaning will be our quest. We'll consider, for a moment, these two sentiments.
Can both be true?
“Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment." — Annie Dillard, “Write Till You Drop”
And from this:
"We are all brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing... Only the young and very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creak near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people's favorite dresses, other people's trout."� Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook"
0 Comments on here you begin (today at Penn, with Dillard and Didion) as of 1/1/1900
Sometimes, as the first day of a new semester begins at Penn, I think of how very close I came to saying no to this opportunity all those years ago.
It would have been one of the greatest mistakes of my life.
And so, again, on this bitter cold day, we begin. We're focused on home this semester. We're reading Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, George Hodgman's Bettyville, and Ta-Nahesi Coates's Between the World and Me, not to mention John Hough on dialogue and countless excerpts (countless as of now, anyway, because I can never tell what's going to inspire me before and during class). We'll be tapping into the new Wexler Studio—recording some of our work. We'll be laying the groundwork for the Beltran evening on March 1—all invited—during which time we'll be visited by my writing friends (and worldly talents) Reiko Rizzuto, A.S. King, and Margo Rabb. We'll hear from former students. We'll write letters to the people in our lives, in Mary-Louise Parker and Ta-Nahesi style.
And today, if all the machines are working, we'll start out with this.
I can't tell you why or how we'll use it.
You'll just have to imagine.
Meanwhile, before any of that, I get to share an hour with Nina and David, who will be writing their theses with me.
How lucky I am.
0 Comments on the new semester begins at Penn with an Adele hello as of 1/19/2016 8:43:00 AM
Last night I was all tangled up with Annie Dillard's Living by Fiction, a book that ponders the makings, magic, and meaning (is there any?) of fiction.
Living by Fiction was published in 1982, while I was still at Penn studying the history of science and too intimidated by capital L literature to take the courses I might have been taking, given the turn my "career" ultimately took.
(Although I have argued, perhaps to appease myself, that my years of studying science and history and biography ultimately helped the novels I'd write. Certainly they shaped my idea of what a novel should or might contain—something larger than plot, something big enough to cradle culture, landscape, and idea, something with a hint of the mesmerized.)
Fiction is about books I have read and also about many books I have not read by authors like Robert Coover, John Hawkes, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jonathan Baumbach, and Flann O'Brien. It weaves in and out of ideas, whisks readers along, challenges at the same time that it befriends. It is short, but the heart and range of it feels unbounded.
I won't pretend to have received all the heft of Dillard's mind in a single reading. I'm planning on a re-read. But I cherish what I've already picked up along the way, a bevy of fragments that have me thinking about how I read and why I write—and, indeed, how and why I write reviews.
Here, for example, the gauntlet is thrown down:
Fiction writers are, I hope to show, thoughtful interpreters of the world. But instead of producing interpretations—instead of doing research or criticism—they doodle on the walls of the cave. They make art objects which must themselves be interpreted. How convolute, how absurd, how endlessly interesting is this complexity! The world is filling up with works of fiction, with these useless, beautiful objects of thought—to what end? What links any work of fiction with anything we want to learn? To the world we see? To our understanding of the world we see? Does fiction illuminate the great world itself, or only the mind of its human creator?
Dillard takes time, in Fiction, to delineate between "fine writing" and "plain prose." These are my favorite pages, the places where I scribbled most energetically in the margins. I have racked up my share of detractors for my interest in complex, unusual language. I have often admired, even envied, the simple and unadorned. I am most assuredly not a fan of the simplistic, which deteriorates all too quickly into dull, trite, overly familiar, crude, or any number of other things. Simplistic doesn't make room for stories, I find. It hammers stories out of imaginistic possibility.
Dillard's own thoughts on all of this had me reading very slow—and wishing I could share the whole with you here. Instead I'll share a few more fragments.
Fine writing, with its elaborated imagery and powerful rhythms, has the beauty of both complexity and grandeur. It also has as its distinction a magnificent power to penetrate. It can penetrate precisely because, and only because, it lays no claim to precision. It is an energy. It sacrifices perfect control to the ambition to mean.... Fine writing is not a mirror, not a window, not a document, not a surgical tool. It is an artifact and an achievement; it is at once an exploratory craft and the planet it attains; it is a testimony to the possibility of the beauty and penetration of written language.
Fine writing lays no claim to precision. It is an energy. Beth Kephart, are you listening?
After teaching us how fine writing sometimes gets done, Dillard moves on to plain prose.
The prose is, above all, clean. It is sparing in its use of adjectives and adverbs; it avoids relative clauses and fancy punctuation; it forswears exotic lexicons and attention-getting verbs; it eschews splendid metaphors and cultured allusions.... There is nothing relaxed about the pace of this prose; it is as restricted and taut as the pace of lyric poetry. The short sentences of plain prose have a good deal of blank space around them, as lines of lyric poetry do, and even as the abrupt utterances of Beckett characters do. They erupt against a backdrop of silence. These sentences are—in an extreme form of plain writing—objects themselves, objects which invite inspection and which flaunt their simplicity.
Plain prose erupts against a backdrop of silence. Beth Kephart, is that not enticing?
0 Comments on Fine Writing or Plain Prose? Where do you fall within the Annie Dillard spectrum? as of 1/1/1900
I probably should have known better. But so many weeks of mild weather lulled me into complacency. Each weekend I thought, I should empty the rain barrels. But the forecast for the week would be warm and I’d think, eh, I’ll do it next weekend. The last two days we did not get above freezing and Bookman went out this morning to drain the barrels. Too late. Both of them are frozen solid. How could that be? How could 55 gallons of water freeze solid in two days? Well it did. We were hoping for some melt today but the high only made it to 33F/.5C. However, the forecast for the next few days says nights below freezing but days above. So. We opened the hose valves on the barrels for the water to drain should it melt. I hope it melts. Then we can tip the barrels upside down to keep snow out of them and set them up again in spring. Hopefully this one freeze won’t spilt the barrels. Plastic, even when it is thick, is surprisingly fragile when it freezes.
Butterfly weed seeds
During the week I noticed the butterfly weed pods split open. I have one in the front yard and have never seen it do this, probably because by late summer it gets hidden by the taller purple coneflowers. At first I thought it was milkweed and for the life of me could not remember milkweed growing there at all. I was beginning to doubt my memory when I looked up butterfly weed on the internet and discovered, yes, it does have pods that burst open and looks remarkably like milkweed. I also discovered that the plants really like sandy soil which explains why it is doing so well where I planted it in the back garden, the soil in its bed is pretty sandy. This is a happy stroke of luck. I have a chicken garden that is full of sand buried beneath woodchips and leaves. Some of those seeds are going to get scattered along the sandy margins this week. Come spring I just have to remember where they got planted so if they actually sprout, I won’t accidentally pull them up thinking they are a random unwanted weed.
Speaking of the chickens, Bookman and I went out to work on the coop this afternoon. While our bodies were warmly layered, our hands were not. Work gloves are not insulated and one cannot build in mittens. So we got two rafter support beams up before our hands were so numb we could no longer feel them. Barring any surprise “warm” days or December/January thaws, our coop building is done until spring. We didn’t get as much done as I had hoped, but we made pretty good progress considering we have never done anything like this before. If we don’t get the rafters attached before spring, that will be first on the agenda. Then the fun with plywood and foam insulation begins. We bought a jigsaw in preparation for cutting holes in the plywood sheets for windows, doors and vents. Fun times ahead for spring!
Will you be surprised to know I am already thinking about what to plant in the garden next year? That early seed catalog I got? I’ve paged through it all and marked it all up. I’m planning on trying a new to me green bean in the garden, a variety called “masai” that I have heard is tasty and has a very high yield. I also just read a Mother Earth News article about turnips and learned there are small turnips about the size of a golfball that are mostly Japanese varieties that can be eaten fresh, even sliced up like water chestnuts and used in stir fries for a bit of crunch. This has made me far more excited than I should be. After two years of not having much success with parsnips, I have decided to toss those out and plant more turnips which I do have success with. So next year I’ll plant the big late season turnips and the small early season ones too.
And then of course I am planning what to grow on the green roof of the chicken coop. I decided to have a purple/blue and orange color scheme. All the plants have to be drought tolerant and low growing. So far I have decided on blue fescue grass, pussytoes, pasque flower and catmint (not a cat-attracting variety!). Next autumn I will plant spring blooming bulbs of Siberian squill, grape hyacinth, and orange species tulips. The roof is 10 feet/3 m long and about 2.5 feet/.8 m from peak to edge. I am planting both sides of it so have lots of area to play with and all winter to imagine and plan. If you could see me as I type this, I have the biggest, dopiest grin on my face.
I am still reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I am reading it little bits at a time and I hope, as the gardening posts become few and far between for a while, you won’t mind me updating you on my progress through this beautiful book and the occasional quote. This one is from the chapter called “Seeing:”
It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret to seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
Isn’t that a beautiful image?
Biking
Biking on the trainer is going great. Zwift added a bunch of workouts a couple weeks ago and I thought I would give one of them a try. I chose an intervals workout that was 60 minutes long. The workout Zwift gives me is based on my FTP (functional threshold power). I expected it would be hard, but holy Lance Armstrong Batman! After the first two intervals I was sucking wind so bad I could not get my watts up to where they were supposed to be. The screen kept flashing “More Power” in big read letters. I yelled at my legs like Captain Kirk to Scottie, “Give me more power!” And my legs yelled back, “I’m givin’ ye all she’s got Cap’n!” And then the five minute interval would be over and “Fail!” would flash up on the screen in big red letters. To my credit I didn’t give up. I failed interval after interval right up to the end. I am apparently not the only one who is having problems because this week a new workout was added: 6-week ftp for beginners. Ha! As the name implies, it is a six-week workout training to improve ftp. I have decided to embark on that in January.
At the moment my riding plan is to add 5 miles/8 km to my Saturday ride each week through the end of the year. Have I mentioned this yet? Sorry if I am repeating myself. Anyway, by doing that I will be putting in a 100 mile/161 km ride on January 3rd. Yesterday I did 70 miles/112.7 km. I’ve done that far on Astrid outdoors but that included rest stops. Yesterday my only rest was a quick bathroom break. My legs were tired but my rear end was a bit sore. A hot shower never felt so good. Everything is feeling just fine today, but then I haven’t gotten on the trainer yet. That will be the real test.
That I think all of this is a whole lot of fun is utterly amazing to me. If this time last year you would have told me about this I would have called you crazy. Now it seems I am the crazy one.
It was a cool, rainy week and we even had snow mixed in with the rain one day. And sleet. We had sleet too. But in spite of the snow and sleet, temperatures remain above freezing. There are still trees with leaves. This week temperatures are going to hover around 60F/15C with a few days forecast to be warmer. It’s really crazy how mild it has been. In the just over twenty years I have lived in the Twin Cities, I don’t recall it ever being this warm at this time of the year even when there was an el niño.
With this long mild autumn, the sorrel has regrown and is looking even nicer than it did in the spring. Bookman has plans to make some pesto to enjoy with dinner one night this week. The chard is still going too. And that’s really it, nothing else in the garden any longer except the turnips which will also be made into dinner sometime during the week. If I had known it was going to be so mild this late I would have planted some late season peas and radishes. Too late now. I will have to work on my psychic abilities for next year though so I don’t miss another wonderful opportunity.
Bookman had the entire week off from work and had planned on working on the chicken coop. That did not happen because of the rain. Today, however, was quite comfortable so we spent several hours outside working on it.
Making progress!
We gave up trying to prime all the boards before building with them because it kept raining or was going to rain and they never had time enough for the paint to dry. It isn’t a big deal really, the wood is all treated. The primer is so we can paint the coop later and is easier to get on when you just have a flat board to paint and no corners and angles. But if we continued painting we were never going to be able to start building and building was more important. So.
We got all the upright supports done, the top cross supports for the walls and roof, and the supports for the coop floor. Next step is to figure out how to frame the roof. It’s coming along and we are having fun making it and feeling rather proud of ourselves especially since we have never done anything like this before. Now that we are really making progress, it is beginning to feel like we really are going to have chickens.
Eventually the weather will get too cold for us to work outside and then we will have to start thinking about where the chickens will live indoors. We will be getting them in March as chicks just a few days old and they will have to live in the house under a heat lamp for a while and even when they don’t need the lamp anymore they will still need to live indoors until they get all their feathers and it is warm enough for them to safely move outside, probably around the end of May. So they need a place to live that is big enough and safe from the sure to be curious Waldo and Dickens. We have a few months to get that worked out.
Since there isn’t much to do in the garden any longer, I have picked Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek back up. I wanted to share a thought that caught my attention:
beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do it try to be there.
Biking
Biking until I’m nothing but bones
I am very much enjoying riding Astrid indoors hooked up to the smart trainer. This week for Halloween, the folks at Zwift had a little fun and and turned all the avatars into skeletons. We all had little scarves on our heads that matched the color and pattern of our jerseys when we had flesh on our bones. They also added jack-o-lanterns on the roadside throughout the course. It was pretty fun. I wonder if we might all get Santa hats for Christmas? Or maybe our bikes will turn into reindeer?
Anyway, they recently added structured workouts as a beta feature. The one workout everyone is trying is the FTP, functional threshold power. It’s a “test” to find out how much power per weight you can maintain for twenty minutes of going all out. They structure it so you get ten minutes of warmup at a cadence of 90 rpm and then you do about twenty minutes of riding at various watts (power is measured in watts), and then you do twenty minutes all out with nice messages telling things like, you are halfway there if you aren’t struggling you should try to go up ten watts. At first I thought, no way but I’ll try. And I did it and it was hard but not as hard as I thought it would be.
After the twenty minutes is over there is ten minutes of cool down riding. Then you get your FTP. I was hoping for 160 but got 157. It will serve as a baseline for training. I will check back with the FTP workout in three months and see if I have improved at all. It’s my understanding that FTP works better than maximum heart rate for training purposes. I will have to do some research to figure out how to use that number and improve it.
I did read a really good book published by Bicycling magazine called The Bicycling Big Book of Cycling for Women. It has all kinds of general stuff about cycling like the different types of riding and the kinds of bikes and lots of good stuff specific to women like core/strength training exercises, nutrition, and how our hormones affect performance because they do and it isn’t our imagination. Very informative I thought. It’s a good book for novice to intermediate level cyclists, is written by a woman, and is encouraging and motivating as well as fun.
You know you have fallen in love with a sport when you read books about it. I’m pretty sure I’m a goner.
Author Annie Dillard has inked a deal with HarperCollins.
Entertainment Weekly reports that the Ecco imprint will publish an new essay collection curated by the Pulitzer Prize winner. Some of the pieces featured in The Abundance include “Total Eclipse,” “Expedition to the Pole,” and “This is the Life.”
Novelist Geoff Dyer will contribute the foreword. According to Dillard’s website, the book will be released either later this year or in 2016. (Photo Credit: Phyllis Rose)
We'll meet at Penn today—me and my new flock of young memoirists. I've chosen, among many other things, to share the first page or two of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. What do these sentences tell us about the memoir form, I'll ask? What do they free us, as writers, to do?
It's a question I might as well ask you:
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I'd half-awaken. He'd stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his back, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses.
1 Comments on Spring Semester English 135.302 Begins, with words from Annie Dillard, last added: 1/15/2013
Last Saturday I bought the novel ‘Canada’ by Richard Ford. I’d seen the book around, read a couple of reviews, happened to be going to Canada myself in the autumn – a country I’d never visited and knew nothing about – and thought I’d give it a go.
There’s something, isn’t there, about discovering a new author, especially one for the ‘Favourites’ list. People talk about remembering where they were when Kennedy died, or men landed on the moon or the first airplane ploughed into the twin towers. But it’s the first time I realized a particular book or author was wonderful that I remember.
Like A. A. Milne, at the age of nine, and Alan Garner’s ‘Weirdstone’ scaring me senseless. Then Tolkien, read beneath the bedcovers at night, and Emily Bronte [who I’d have given anything to be, in order to have written ‘Wuthering Heights’].
Then, later, there was Graham Greene, whose writing seemed so effortless, followed by Ella Maillart, crossing China with Peter Fleming, brother [of sorts] of James Bond. Then, in no particular order, Annie Dillard, Flannery O’Connor, Ray Carver, Marilyn Robinson, Richard McFarlane, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and on and on until only last month I read my first short story by the American writer, Linda McCulloch Moore, and got so excited because it was good.
Electric. That’s what these moments of discovery are.And it’s not only [in fact rarely] the sorts of books and authors making media waves that have this effect on me. It’s the ones I stumble across all by myself, blundering from book to book in pursuit of something precious and mysterious, which is impossible to explain.
Having said all that, it’s not authors I want to write about this month.It’s not even Richard Ford or his novel ‘Canada’. It’s Canada itself.
The country, I mean.
6 Comments on CANADA MINUS FIFTY-FOUR DAYS: Pauline Fisk on Canada [the country] and ‘Canada’ [the book], last added: 7/22/2012
Well I envy you if you can go to Nova Scotia! If it were me, I think I'd approach Canada via the historical angle. The Viking site at L'Anse aux Meadows, and the history of the Native Americans, and the French arrivals and then the Scottish - and the various alliances and battles.
I agree it's a huge country, and difficult to make sense of from a distance - but I'd love to go to Quebec and Montreal... I've been to Toronto several times as my sister used to live there. There's a lovely board walk along the shore, and it feels different from an American city - the French influence is quite obvious, and of course all the signs are dual language, and all the distances are in kilometres...
So I hope you have fun! I'll look forward to your blog! :)
As a Torontonian now living in Germany, I found this a fascinating post.
It is hard to get one's head around "Canada" even for a Canadian. I think that's why most seem to identify strongly with the region they come from. The fact that most Canadians are relatively new to that land also affects the essence of what it means to be Canadian: it's a slightly amorphous thing, not like what it means to be British or German or just about anything else. And it's forever changing in the cities as the ethnic mix is in constant flux - making for a fascinating, dynamic identity, but a not-quite graspable one in its constant shape-shifting nature.
Don't be put off by those pictures of the Toronto skyline - one hardly ever sees the city like that, and then only from the islands - the city itself is made up of numerous neighbourhoods - each with its own very distinct character: Chinatown, Little Italy, Greektown where the signs are in English and the languages of the inhabitants and the food is incredible; The Annex with its Victorian Mansions and funky mix of university students and professors, artists and writers; Queen St. West with loads of art galleries and interesting pubs and restaurants...
British Columbia is gorgeous! The culture of the First Nations People is very strong there which I found fascinating and wish I could have spent more time there.
I'm with Katherine - envious if you get out East! I never made it to the East coast, but it's also supposed to be stunning with a fascinating regional culture and history.
I hadn't meant to go on like this - sorry! I do hope you have a good trip - full of adventure and discoveries. I look forward to reading more on your blog!
Thank you, Katherine and Lynn. You've both given me things to think about. Canadian history is something I know little about. I must remedy that. And as most of my time will be spent in the east, your bits about fascinating regional culture and history, not to say anything of stunning landscape, are most encouraging.
I'm sure there will be a blog. I can't bear the idea of travelling without writing it all down. I'll probably do the same as with my Belize travels and have a Canada blog button on my website, so do look out for it. I'm not going until September but as and when I find things that are interesting, I'll probably throw them all in.
A post like this makes one want to start packing. So happy to hear you are off on another travel adventure. I'll look foward to your blog.
I wasn't in Canada long but one of my most magical memories is of swimming in a lake in the summer with all the mountains around. That, and all the warnings about bears the Canadians enjoy giving you. You'll have great time.
One thing I found odd was the pattern of place names. Here the language patterns of the names often indicate the local history - Viking names in the north etc. However, in Canada you see UK place names scattered almost randomly across the map - though presumably where settlers settled. Takes some getting used to.
Penny - lake swimming sounds good to me. Just back from Pembrokeshire [see this coming Saturday's Authors Electric] where swimming definitely wasn't the order of the day - though it has been every other year, and I'm definitely missing it.
Lynn - thanks for your comments on the essence of being Canadian. It's just this sort of thing I want to hear. From now onwards, and throughout the trip, I'll be trying to get a better understanding of what 'being Canadian' is all about.
When I first moved to Shropshire, I arrived without roots. I was born in London and grew up there, but I never felt as if I belonged. Maybe my mother's alienation rubbed off on me - a Guernsey girl fleeing Hitler's army during the Second World War, she never felt at home in London, or indeed anywhere else. But thirty-five years after my arrival here, I now feel like a proud Salopian. It's living and breathing a place over time, I guess, that makes it yours - if you want it to of course And, as you're experiencing as a Torontonian in Germany, once you've got that it remains with you wherever you go.
I'm a Canadian living in the UK. I love both countries, both are beautiful and dear to me in different ways. Those vast roads you talk about, they are long, and journeying through the praries on the trans-canada highway is dangerous. It will feel like driving through a day and half of the same flat open space, it is hard not to fall asleep. Also, it is difficult even when you are a local resident to know when and where the next petrol (gas) station is. The signs in rural Canada are non existent. If they were ever put up in the first place, a snow plow probably knocked them down. That said, have an amazing time. The country is beautiful, the bears are not nearly so mean, the people will welcome you with open arms, and there is lots to do. Do please visit BC. Everyone goes to Toronto, but don't by pass Vancouver, or better still go to Victoria! (Perhaps my west coast roots are showing.) I've lived in five different provinces, and each have something worth seeing. I am sure you will be happy to be home, as I am, when I return to the UK. There is so much unsung about the wonderfulness that is living here! Canadians love breakfast, it's a thing, so make sure to hit an IHOP, or TimHorton's while you are out there. There is many quick, but tasty breakfasts that I do miss. I could ramble all day, but if you want any local info, just email me. Places like Cultus lake, Whistler, or Harrison rarely get a mention in travel books, but are well wroth the journey.
“Every book has an intrinsic impossibility.” ~ Annie Dillard.
I don’t mean to ruin your day. Quite the opposite.
As a reader, I’m drawn to the impossible dilemma. As a writer, I’m pumped by the prospect of accomplishing the impossible. In her little book, “The Writing Life”, Ms. Dillard suggests that every novelist asks two questions: Can it be done? and Can I do it?
The appropriate answer is ‘no’.
At the level of “story”, it’s the hero who confronts the impossible. The powers of antagonism compel us if they appear insurmountable. Writers generally understand this. But Dillard is more concerned with a worse impossibility facing the writer.
“…it is insoluble,” says Dillard, “it is why no one can ever write this book.”
Ernest Hemingway acknowledged that “writing well is impossibly difficult.” His advice for the would-be writer was to “go out and hang himself”. Then…
“…he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.”
Launching a tale is rarely the writer’s problem. But soon the plot sags for want of a protagonist with momentum—to say nothing of her reaching a meaningful conclusion. The writer swears that the original idea literally oozed meaning.
So, what went wrong?
In her beloved little book, Dillard suggests that the writer typically discovers the “structural defect” and then “wishes he had never noticed”.
“He finds ways to minimize the difficulty; he strengthens other virtues; he cantilevers the whole narrative out into thin air, and it holds. And if it can be done, he can do it, and only he.”
Dillard loves the notion of the writer doggedly intuiting his way toward
There's a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud, and flower. Trees seem to do their feats so effortlessly. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes; it splits, sucks, and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out ever more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air. (p. 114)
Along with intricacy, there is another aspect of the creation that has impressed me in the course of my wanderings...Look, in short, at practically anything--the coot's foot, the mantis's face, a banana, the human ear--and see that not only did the creator create everything, but that he is apt to create anything. He'll stop at nothing. (p.138)
What I aim to do is not so much learn the names of the shreds of creation that flouish in this valley, but to keep myself open to their meanings, which is to try to impress myself at all times with the fullest possible force of their very reality. I want to have things as multiply and intricately as possible and visible in my mind. Then I might be able to sit on the hill by the burnt books where the starlings fly over, and see not only the starlings, the grass field, the quarried rock, the viney woods, Hollis Pond, and the mountains beyond, but also, and simultaneously, feathers' barbs, springtails in the soil, crystal in rock, chloroplasts streaming, rotifers pulsing, and the shape of the air in the pines. And, if I try to keep my eye on quantum physics, if I try to keep up with astronomy and cosmology, and really believe it all, I might ultimately be able to make out the landscape of the universe. Why not? (p.141)
Yes, I'm playing a little fast and loose with the idea of poetry here, but I've been listening to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek on my commute to and from school for the past few
5 Comments on Poetry Friday: Annie Dillard, last added: 5/29/2011
Oh, yes. These words are definitely poetry. Definitely. Congratulations on completing another year. Relax and enjoy the summer. Stop by my blog and read the end of school poem I posted. It's a lovely image of the process of starting over again and again and again.
Hi, Mary Lee. I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in college and it has always stuck with me. What beautiful language. I can see the snake-face in that butterfly wing. Amazing!
Laura (AA), I first read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in college, too. I've reread it several times since, but it's a new experience to LISTEN to it. The text is so dense sometimes that I'm GLAD I've read it...which brings me back to the idea that it's really an extended prose poem, and it NEEDS to be read and reread to be fully/mostly understood!
In class today we'll be reviewing the possibilities inherent in the first-person literary profile. How, for example, does James Baldwin both summon his father and reveal his own soul in "Notes of a Native Son"? He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness was now mine.
How much knowing lies behind Frederick Busch's words, about Terrence des Pres: He had found what most writers searched for, consciously or otherwise, all their working lives: the subject that was metaphor for the interior strife that drove them to be writers.
And what is Annie Dillard up to with "The Stunt Pilot"? How is that she reveals herself, even when her seeming purpose is to help us see this plane and its magic-making driver? The black plane dropped spinning, and flattened out spinning the other way; it began to carve the air into forms that built wildly and musically on each other and never ended. Reluctantly, I started paying attention. Rahm drew high above the world an inexhaustibly glorious line; it piled over our heads in loops and arabesques. It was like a Saul Steinberg fantasy; the plane was the pen. Like Steinberg's contracting and billowing pen line, the line Rahm spun moved to form new, punning shapes from the edges of the old. Like a Klee line, it smattered the sky with landscapes and systems.
We'll talk about all this and more, then get back to the business of critiquing student memoirs.
0 Comments on What makes for a memorable literary profile? as of 1/1/1900
“Do you think writers have to feel what they want the reader to feel when they’re writing?” I asked my friend Alex Chee in email this weekend, after reading a new story of his that powerfully evokes the kind of moony, depressive, sickeningly self-reflective state I’ve been in. “Because the end of this novel is completely kicking my ass. I hate what I’m learning about myself as I write it, but the dissociated part of me is fascinated that I’m learning so much about myself by writing something that is not literally about me at all.”
He replied:
I think we do. In true first person, definitely. God knows it was why writing Edinburgh was hell. When someone asked me if I wanted to work on a screenplay for it I thought ‘Not for anything in the world.’ But also, for writers, there’s a book that makes you as you make it. And in the writing of it, you learn to master both yourself and the book in a way you never have to again.
What comes to mind is advice Annie Dillard gave us, to think of yourself as going down in an old-fashioned diving bell [see above], a thread of air connecting you back to yourself. And when you must, to return to the surface. To treat an engagement with that work like deep sea diving. She meant for essays, memoir, but I found it applies to first person autobiographical fiction, too.
I knew what I was doing at Paw-Paw: I was beginning the lifelong task of tuning my own gauges. I was there to brace myself for leaving. I was having my childhood. But I was haunting it, as well, practically reading it, and preventing it. How much noticing could I permit myself without driving myself round the bend? Too much noticing and I was too self-conscious to live; I trapped and paralyzed myself, and dragged my friends down with me, so we couldn’t meet each other’s eyes, my own loud awareness damning us both. Too little noticing, though—I would risk much to avoid this—and I would miss the whole show. I would wake on my deathbed and say, What was that?
—Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
4 Comments on Annie Dillard on noticing, last added: 5/23/2010
I just picked this book up on Tuesday. (I was at a conference at a local church, and they had a table in a hallway of used books for sale, on the honor system.)
Ah, I love Annie Dillard. Read what she has to say about writing http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/28/specials/dillard-drop.html?_r=4&oref=slogin&oref=login
The best on writing ever. Especially this sentence “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”
I’ve been caught up in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics this week. Last night, one of the featured stories was Shaun White, the amazing half-pipe snowboarder. What stands out to me is his joie de vivre, his joy in his sport and in his life. That outrageous long, red hair, his infectious smile, the casual plaid of the US snowboarding team — Wow!
And then, he dropped into the half-pipe for his first run. Snowboarders must do one pass without any tricks, just a plain jump to show they are in control. White’s plain jump was this slow, tremendous leap toward the starry night, then he hung there weightless for a moment before dropping back into the half-pipe for the tricks his fans were looking for. But it’s that plain jump that held me: the sheer height of it, the reach beyond the grasp of the other boarders.
Then, when he’d already won the Gold Medal on the basis of his first run, he had a chance for a second run, a sort of victory lap. His coach told him to do whatever tricks he wanted. He joked, “Maybe just a run straight down the middle.”
No. White did the run he had planned, including his special “Sean Snake” or “Big Mac” or “the double MacTwist 1260″ or the “Tomahawk” (as White dubbed it, after a steak he’d eaten in Vancouver): it’s an impossibly difficult trick, in which the boarder flies over the half-pipe and flips head over heels twice, while packing 3 spins sideways into that jump. Wow. On a give-away, a victory lap, he gave it his all. And bested his own score by two points.
Elmore Leonard on One Million Words
It reminds me of my friend, BB. He’s been writing about four or five years now and just sent me a couple new chapters for review this week and I was blown away. BB is an Elmore Leonard fan (to the utmost!) and BB tells me that Leonard said you must write a million words before you find out what you want to write and how you want to write it.
Well, this time BB’s writing was confident, strong – like Sean White was last night. BB is finally saying what he wants to say and saying it how he wants to say it. Wow!
Hold Nothing Back
It reminds me of Annie Dillard’s essay, “The Stunt Pilot,” in her book, The Writing Life. She begins her book of journal entries about writing like this:
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood-carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you found the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or at this time next year.
Yesterday the brave souls of English 145 at Penn lobbed Natalia Ginzburg, Paul West, and Annie Dillard around the room—declaiming, declaring, rebutting, suggesting, insisting on asynchronous points of view.
West, via his essay "Remembrance of Things Proust," emerged variously as brilliant, smug, teacherly, full of his own conceits, and ultimately vulnerable. Ginzburg, with her classic "My Craft," riled the suspicious among us with her declaration that, "When we are happy our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy, memory acts with greater force." In "To Fashion a Text," Dillard won the hard-to-win with her words, "What impels the writer is a deep love for and respect for language, for literary forms, for books. It's a privilege to muck about in sentences all morning. It's a challenge to bring off a powerful effect, or to tell the truth about something. You don't do it from willpower; you do it from an abiding passion for the field... Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong."
We took a break. We caught our breath. We leaned in toward the end of the day. We sat for a moment with Larry Woiwode, his words: "All experience is simultaneous, stilled and sealed in itself, and we manage daily by imagining we move from minute to minute, somehow always ahead. Our multiple selves collide at every second of intersection, one or the other vying for supremacy, the scars of the past flooding through the present texture of our personality, and maturity is knowing how to govern the best combination of them."
Finally we agreed to read Ondaatje's Running in the Family, perhaps my favorite memoir of all time. It's not just story. It's not just language. It's the making of memoir, revealed.
I miss being in school. English classes most of all. Its amazing to hear other peoples thoughts on a passage you've just read - everyone sees something different with a few unifying truths.
I could be in an English class all day. I miss the analysis, discussion and debate about great literature. This was a very interesting post, Beth. Larry Woiwode's words give us much to think about it. That's what life should be about: stimulating conversation spurring more thought and maybe some creativity.
Your favorite or not, I don't think I'll be reading the Ondaatje memoir. I hated The English Patient, and I'm not sure I'd tackle him again, even in nonfiction.
Enjoy Running in the Family with your class! Just finished up our discussion last week. A few students were baffled by the lushness of the prose. But many were won over by the sheer magic of his storytelling.
Your total commitment to the current draft of your novel is in direct conflict with the need to maintain an attitude of revision
Teaching Freshmen to Have an Attitude of Revision
When I taught Freshman Composition at a local college, I started on the first day by pairing students up with a partner and asking them to tell a story, a personal narrative. The story had to be something in which they were actively doing something, and it took place over only a 30-minute time period. And, since it was college, I forbade several topics: no boyfriend/girlfriend stories; no stories of senior trips where you attended the “Party of the Century”; and no car wrecks. I gave them one-and-a-half minutes each to tell their story.
Easy. They loved getting to chat with a fellow classmate, especially since as freshmen on the campus they still felt like strangers. They expected me to then ask them to write their story.
But even before a word is committed to the page, I wanted my students to consider revision. I asked them to tell the story again, a different way. Start at a different place, end at a different place, start at a different time, include details you forgot the first time, omit details that didn’t really matter, slow down and really remember what you did step-by-step, etc. This time, each story had to fill two minutes.
Were the stories better? Yes.
At the risk of my students thinking I was totally crazy, they had to tell their own story a third time, expanding even more to fill a full three minutes.
Then, they got to write their own story. Even at the early stage of prewriting – rehearsing a story orally to write later – writers need to remember that nothing is set in stone yet. Everything is open for change, until you are much farther along in the writing process.
A Novelist’s Attitude of Revision
Crude StoryCrafting. The first draft of a story is you mostly decide/find out one thing: what is the story I want to tell? Later drafts may or may not refine the story, but they will certainly address this concern: what is the best way to tell this story? For me, even as I write a draft, I’m always asking if this is the best way, the most dramatic way, the most emotionally involving way to tell my story. I realize that first drafts help me nail down characters, plots, settings and more. The next drafts may need drastic changes to some element here or there, but I hope the overall story shape emerges in the first draft.
Logical, Logistical Details. Second drafts need to fill in holes in the story. The narrative and emotional arcs need to build, events need to challenge the main character, characters need to reveal their inner lives. But you can’t leave major logical problems: readers must never be given any reason to doubt your storytelling. Logistically, you must make sure the transitions are appropriate and move the story smoothly from one scene to the next.
Focus on Storytelling Skills. For the later drafts, the storytelling skills come to the forefront, as you polish the language, pacing, and voice. This is one of the most fun stages of drafts, because I love to play with the language, trying out different words, different combinations of sounds, varying sentence length. It’s here that I like to challenge myself to use a really long sentence, maybe 200 words. And to use sentence fragments correctly and effectively. Fun!
A Novelist’s Passionate Commitment to the Current Draft
Commit to the Current Draft. So, while I write that first draft, I’m aware of what’s coming. But I also have to make an emotional commitment to this draft. Otherwise, my characters aren’t convincing, I won’t take the time to fully explore a setting because, “It might get cut in the next draft.” If I make the mistake of thinking this is a Kleenex Draft, then I’ll have to do many more drafts later.
Give. In her book, The Writing Life, Annie Dillard has said, “Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.”
Commit to the draft you are currently writing, but realize that this draft is the beginning of an exciting process. It should actually give you some relief: you don’t have to be perfect on this first draft. Just passionate.
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“…he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.”
, by Annie Dillard.
It reminds me of Annie Dillard’s essay, “The Stunt Pilot,” in her book, 
How many memoirs do you have them read?
Issues that come to mind when I think about writing memoir: Fear. Honesty. Permission. Where to begin. Self-examination. Interpretation.