Still sickly, but didn’t stop my mother from making photos of us with the self-timer.
Day 112 | Do you know why a raven is like a writing desk?
I’ve been drinking a lot of flavored tea with this cold. This one is raspberry which is spelled with a p. I like the way the tea ink seeps into the sugar like a puddle pushing along the sidewalk.
Day 113 | World Book Night
A giver came to the teen center and now we’re reading Ender’s Game for Book Club. Does anyone out there adore this book?
Day 114 | What is it like to be a woman listening in the dark?
I do a lot of art in art class. This week, I made a pop-up card of lovers dancing in the moonlight.
Day 115 | Wuthering Heights
Reading Anne Carson’s “A Glass Essay.” It’s linked in my Short Fiction 2012 page. Everyone should read it, she’s fabulous. And she’s a classics’ professor – I never even took a classics’ class.
Day 116 | Seriously, Mom?
Weekly cat photo.
Day 117 | Like Mother Like Daughter
My mom is so cute, people. She wanted to take photos because she was wearing a necklace my brother gave her and she wanted to prove on facebook that she’s been wearing it.
Day 112 | Stopping to Smell the Roses
How pretty is my momma? A vibrant, and gorgeous redhead at [age undisclosed].
So, I had a bad night. It may be due to the picture to your left where tissues are crowding my mug of raspberry tea and my Downy napkin poetry. I’ve been sick with a cold for just two short days and yet, I’m a cosmic mess. At least tissues and napkins are pulling double time: snot and words. Hopefully the two are not blurring one another. Due to my lack of composure during creative writing discussions (which was more so the reason for my no good, very bad day) I took a mild trip to the bookstore. By mild I mean I only purchased one book. Quailridge isn’t exactly the place to go when you only want to purchase one book, it’s the place to go when you want to become a serial book killer. It’s an instant mood lifter, it’s like the mood ring of bookstores – you walk in and you’re instantly violet-blue. See the mood ring manual here.
I did the usual: ran my fingertips along the hardcover spines, through F,G,H,I and then poetry, travel, literary journals. I looked through the card section, found quotes for friends in other hemispheres. I cheered myself right up from that crying jag. I joke with my friends that when I’m pregnant my husband will have to run out and get books, not tacos, or pickles. Maybe a book on pickles. Do they have such a thing. Today, I bought a book on birds (typical).
Let me introduce to you, The Conference of the Birds (retold and re-illustrated) by Peter Sis. I have a thing about bird books, or the word bird in titles. I also have two birdish tattoos, and a nickname of “little bird. It’s kind of my thing; birds and books. Any title with “birds” or “birdies” usually lends itself right to the register. This book spoke to me from clear across the room. It was face-up towards me, it’s printed on this unbelievable grid paper, and the whole back sleeve is birds. It didn’t take me long to designate this book, “the one” and marry it right on the spot. In this case, I’m polygamous. This book is amazing.
If you didn’t already know, I’m obsessed with Shaun Tan books. If anyone in Australia wants to send me his new sketch journals, I will not be opposed. I own every single one (The Red Tree is in my nephews room though because I gave it to him for a holiday not even thinking it wasn’t very childish. It’s actually quite depressing). Since my love affair started with Tan in Australia, I have yet to find illustrations, or illustrated books for adults that measure up to Tan. I think in color, and oddness, The Conference of Birds matches. Just check out some of the images that Penguin gave as an excerpt to NPR.
I was delighted to find this book. It only takes one page of something delicious to perk a bookish girl up (boys take note. Maybe read the little diddy “Date a Girl Who Reads” so you can know the truth about love and devotion). Once I did some research, I found that last year Sis was on NPR “All Things Considered” to introduce his dream world of birds to adults, not children. Anywho, that’s not really why I’m writing. I never wrote a blog about how wonderful my Month of Letters was in March and Claire reminded me to blog about it. A month of letters was a really lovely way to get to know bloggers out there and realize how your brain works in the stream-of-concious. I often stream-of-concious for fiction and poetry exercises during my daily writing, but I don’t often enough write about my own life this way. It’s interesting to decide what you’re going to write to a stranger, or how you’re going to present yourself, or if you’re just going to write about the glass in front of you and the orange eye make-up you’re wearing that day. I wrote a lot of letters about coffee and food. I was almost always hungry when I started writing. I filled every first letter with the same note as well:
It's in my notebook called, "Bad Experiments" based on a post-it note I found.
“For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known” (Kate Morton, The Distant Hours).
I think there’s something about the honesty in writing letters that you don’t get through an email. How easy is it to just slide your pinky to the delete key and let everything go blank again, start fresh. With a letter, unless you feel like digging and scraping your pen across a page (who writes in pencil other than Nikki Finney anymore), it’s a lot more work to delete ink than the georgia font on the screen. I like letters because I always feel like myself when I write them. I’m never pretending to be someone else because I know if I do, then it’s all fake. In letters I can scrawl my bad, loopy, half-trying-cursive handwriting, my unknown and aggressive commas. (The page looks like people are on the comma egg hunt). My bad spelling and lack of acceptance of the “i before e” rule. I tend to be the mess that I am when it comes to letters. Usually, the blog world doesn’t see that mess because I try to focus (sometimes it comes out though, like this blog, it can’t be restrained). It wasn’t just me who celebrated the art of hand-writing, but tons of ladies wrote me back. Here is what came of that:
My best friend Sars sent a montage of birds, her wedding, and New Zealand. She’s the one doing 365NZ.
She also sent a cat card.
Katie sent me an ugly doll card (totally not knowing I had a keychain). Anna sent me a card on stationary I almost bought two days before I received her card. And Chris drew me a bouquet.
Muzette's Tiger and my favorite drawings by Claire's two children.
Emerson Graduate School - Red Letter from Katie B. that turns into an envelope. All stuck into my 2012 Book.
Whitney is not only a darling human-being with passion, she sent me a magazine creation. It was lovely.
These are assorted letters. One is my to-do list with letter writing on it. One post card of a famous tiger. One fashion card. Two child drawings that are both hilarious, and wonderful. Pink trees in the upper right. Thank you to Claire, Muzette, and Chris(tina) for these.
Two out of Three from Claire. We're going strong.
Thank you to Claire, Jen, Whit, Muzette, Lauren, MyMeanderingMind, Riki, Tracey, Chrissy, Ever, Kate, Katie, Kristine, Cindy, Chris, Sars and Anna. I got more cards than this. Haley sent me this rad owl card that I unfortunately have misplaced. I think my dad moved it from the kitchen counter where I last saw it. It was very hippie Harry Potter, as she is. In fact, I think I just described her in three words. Thank you to everyone who participated with me, or helped me to create a global community of letter writing/penpal-dom. It’s a revolution, get on the bus.
Halfway through Arcadia by Lauren Groff I had this to say:
At the point in the story that I said that – Bit is a teenage boy who teaches me that George Eliot is actually a British WOMAN writer and not a man. This is a fact, I’ve googled it. He’s the too-smart boyfriend. The LSD is the drug of choice, beyond the simple natural high of marijuana, the smell of fields and burnt grass blades in your throat, the pond water aftertaste like algae and a distant gulp of bullfrogs. (This is all in my imagination, of course).
It wasn’t until the end of the book that I really felt the truth of my final description, “an acre of dandelions to breathe flight into.” There’s something so honest, so haunting, so invisible and sacred about this book. I was wholly moved by this novel and I wasn’t expecting it, which made the change in my chest when I finished that last line, wonderful.
Arcadia by Lauren Groff
I found this book so impeccable because it was weaving too many histories together. It’s as if every continent has an Arcadia. In the US, Arcadia is in Downstate, New York. I asked my parents (who are from Buffalo) about it earlier today. Not only is she weaving history, but she has this organic way of making nature and wilderness the heart of the story, rather than the characters. I’m sure I’ve thought about it, but lately, I’ve been thinking more about the way space defines humanity. Since Philadelphia I’ve been thinking about space, setting, and how one person has effect on a setting and that setting has a different effect on every one person.
I’ve found myself growing up in a suburban neighborhood with similar floor plans in every house, children with too-large helmets pushed back on their neck, double swing sets. How my life has been polite and more importantly how I’ve grown up surrounded by the lush of oaks, their veins showing through the leaves like the ones through my wrist. I know the seep of sap down bark, and the smell just before snow when the air is crisp and lonely and gray.
But what if I grew up with Philadelphia surrounded by metal and abandoned row houses, or India surrounded by people who share the smog, or Hawaii where I surfed all day without fear of salt water in my eyes or the jaws of a shark, or anywhere really. What is it to develop in space, certain space. What is it to know trees, or clean air, or white sand. I don’t know. I can physically tell my home has made me safe, made me have control over myself that I wouldn’t otherwise. However, I haven’t grown enough to really see how it’s affected me rationally, or emotionally. I think it’s been easier, but who am I to judge the weight of burden.
Lauren Groff has this delicate way of getting at how nature defines and how we are barefoot and lovely within it. Obviously she had to dive into Bit’s growing up in a hippie commune (Arcadia) and the way it’s affected his future. She weaves him so seamlessly in as a helper and this doesn’t change once he leaves Arcadia as he grows and aches. He’s still compassionate. Arcadia has an effect on everyone within it, Helle is still wild, still unforgotten, still bereft. Hannah is stilled to sorrow over and over, and still in love with Abe. Abe is all man, bearded, forceful. They all stay this way past Arcadia which is an ode to the way our setting, our childhood, our environment stays within us.
This isn’t a foreign concept, I’m sure everyone has seen themselves in the light of their home but it’s just now dawning on me how much of ourselves we fold into the envelope of home, or blame on home, or find in home. Miranda Lambert gets at this in her song The House that Built Me.
“I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me”
How much does our past, our home, those porch steps that my father calked together, crumbling at the sides, half covered in ivy and those night slugs in summer build us?
And then the question is: What do we do with what’s built? Do we leave and collide back with home, with the smell, and the hardwood? Do we stay always, pack photos and shadows in boxes in the garage and keep living? Do we leave and not turn back, never think about how we’re formed? Do we build stronger, sturdier houses, or similar houses, or completely divide ourselves between people of that home and people of this new one, this strange one, this one without the smells of my mother’s hairspray and the burnt food below the stove coils?
I don’t know. I wanted Arcadia to answer these questions, but it didn’t, and that was okay.
Arcadia tells the life of Bit which seems an odd choice for a name, but then he’s this bit of everything, this bit of everyone, and this bit of history, a newborn had in a snowstorm. He’s the purest child of Arcadia filled with everyone’s sorrow, or missteps, or mumbled words. He spends a childhood hovering over his mother while she sleeps. He is the child who doesn’t speak and everyone thinks is “retarded” because he holds the damn of everyone’s sadness and until they are awake and brilliant again, he holds it in, even laughing in silence.
Bit is just a wonderful human being and he’s a great character to spend three-hundred pages with because you want to know him, and he seems to have the recipe for strength.
With Bit is his mother Hannah who comes off in the beginning as a fold of skin and sunlight, but then by the end is this archetypal older woman. Her husband, Bit’s father is Abe who is very much Abraham Lincoln as a hippie in a commune with a work ethic of an ox. Handy, who I haven’t even talked about yet, is the kind of the King of the Commune, almost reaching into cult-king. He spends his days with his wives who are created solely through sex, instead of working like his beehive of hippies that keep up the bakery, the house, the gardens and farms, etc. Then there’s the minors, the friends, and in the last part (of the four) is Grete who is Bit’s daughter. She ages from baby to fourteen in the last half of the book and holds the best of all his worlds. She is obviously, the continuing of Arcadia in a vibrant world of NYC.
It’s interesting to think about this concept (I won’t drown it with analyzation) but what do we carry of home, and what do our children then carry of our home. What do they keepsake? I write a lot of stories about my grandparents (mostly grandmother’s) because I keep those tidbits that my mom shares of Grandma Shealy, or the gentle rocking of Grandma Celestina. I’m not sure why. If you asked me today what I think when I type her name, I’ll say the yellow velvet king chair in the bedroom of my Aunt Nancy, at the top of the stairs under the red light of the room. My Aunt Nancy said in passing, “that chair she always used to sit in” and now I live it in my head. I never even met her.
Just something to think about. I’m full of over-analyzation tonight.
I know now after finishing Arcadia that it’s less about the drugs, the naked gardeners, the expanse of a house that fits two-hundred families, and more about the place.
When you’re young you think, “I want to live in a place that….”
has a moat.
has no reptiles.
owns a chocolate factory.
holds the golden ticket.
is green.
is happy.
has faeries.
inhabits Dr. Suess’ characters.
serves marmalade.
It’s why books like The Secret Garden were written, Alice in Wonderland, any Dr. Suess Book, Where the Sidewalk Ends…We let these homes, these plots, these small spaces of the infinite universe share their stories with us while we build ours on their soil and in my case, Carolina orange mud.
Isn’t it the most correct thing that we’re given a place at birth, one cleaved blank space in the world?
spanking themes in young adult literature: You got my blog? That freaks me out a little, a lot.
farting competitions in bed: haha, welcome to my life.
virginia woolf car: She didn’t drive, she walked into the sea.
metaphors for instructor of yoga: the sun is like a window to heat. my legs are like strong sticks; soft and golden as hay, crossed at the knee like two branches intersecting at a nest. (BAD POETRY).
Earlier this week I had the loveliest chat with new author Kimberly Novosel. I feel like her last name pretty much explains why she’s a novelist since it seems a distant twin to the word itself. She’s the author of upcoming book, Loved and has created a Kickstarter campaign to get the book printed. Normally, I’m a snob about self-publishing and prefer publishing houses and agents, but the theme of her novel, Loved, is dear to my heart. You’ve all heard me rant about self-esteem, usually in the young adult genre, but Novosel has written a novel dedicated to struggling women in their twenties.
We did a quick Q&A from questions I pondered while reading her bio and learning about Loved through the Kickstarter campaign. I feel like everyone at readings always asked, “What inspired you to write?” or “What do you recommend to young writers?” Instead of asking these questions, I asked questions about Novosel’s own upbringing and how it influenced her writing as well as how other authors have influenced her. Read our Q&A below:
How has being a small town girl gone big city shaped your writing? What did the small town give to you as gifts for writing, and what did the city give? And with this what are your favorite writers from both places and landscapes?
Audrey Niffenegger, who wrote The Time Travelers Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, is from South Haven, Michigan and has lived near Chicago most of her life. A small town to a big city, like me. I think in these cases the small town develops a unique kind of imagination, learning to fill the quiet with your own thoughts. Living in a bigger city as an adult helps to surround you with more stimulation, more fodder for stories, new ideas and personalities and backdrops. Nicole Krauss, who wrote The History of Love, was born in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn, where I live now. If you read The History of Love, her deeply rooted knowledge of the city and the people who come to live there is apparent. I think both can develop strengths in a writer in their own way. What matters most is that the best writers write what they know.
What were some of your favorite mystery books as a girl in Pittsburgh and did this shape Loved?
I read a lot of Nancy Drew books and ghost stories, though the names escape me now. I loved that stuff! The little girl who is haunted by the girl who lived in the old house before her. One favorite from those days is Ouida Sebestyen’s The Girl in the Box, about a girl who is kidnapped and held underground in a dirt hole with nothing but a little bit of food, water, and a typewriter. I’ve obviously never been afraid of darker material, even as a pre-teen. I also liked some fantasy stuff like A Wrinkle in Time, The Phantom Tollbooth and The Giver, which I recommend even to adults.
Why did you decide to self-publish Loved rather than shop around for agents and publishing houses?
My goal is just to put the book out there into the hands of readers. I’d love to be published on a large scale, but that wasn’t my immediate goal. First I want to see how it does, what kind of impact it has. Maybe big publishing will happen with this book or maybe the next one, as I continue to grow as a writer.
How did you come to novel writing? Have you tried poetry, short fiction and other genres before ultimately writing Loved?
My earliest memory of writing is changing the words from the willow tree poem in the movie “My Girl”, and then writing new lyrics to Mariah Carey melodies. I was probably ten or twelve. Then I started to write my own poetry. That turned into writing lyrics with musician friends at Belmont University, and then I jumped right into the process of starting this book. I’d love to do short stories eventually, for literary magazines or my own full collection.
How did you come to the title, “Loved?”
Coming up with a title was one of the most stressful parts of writing this book. There was one title in the beginning, and as a different theme began to emerge I came to a second title and stuck with that one a good while. In the end I felt there was a better fit, and in the absence of coming up with the perfect clever title, I landed on Loved. I just kept coming back to that word. It just felt right to me, summing up the theme and evoking the right emotion, so I had to go with succinct over poetic.
What is your favorite quote from Loved and from literature?
From literature…oh how to choose! I love so much of the mother’s dialog in White Oleander. She’s such a fascinating character to me. She has this one rant in which she says, “If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.” She’s practically evil but sometimes what she says rings true. Fascinating! I don’t know the exact quote for this, but in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller, a young Pippa follows a man she’s attracted to down the street and into a café. In such a short time, she imagines their future together, and when he leaves with out speaking to her, she’s heartbroken. That is amazing writing.
This is one of my favorite quotes from Loved:
“The thing about secrets is that they can hurt you more than the person you’re keeping them from. It’s like eating the last piece of caramel candy, a delicacy for you alone to experience. You hold it on your tongue, savoring the layers of salty sweetness. It makes you so happy while it rots your teeth.”
If you could tell women struggling with self-esteem or self-discovery, what would you say? With this can you give book recommendations for girls or women dealing with these struggles.
Forget what’s normal or what’s expected of you and decide for yourself. Are you talking to yourself respectfully? Are you listening to yourself and what it is that you need? For example, I need more alone time than most people do, and when I thought that was weird or that I was acting out of fear and not health by isolating myself, it actually caused me to be unhealthy. Now I know it’s ok for me to take that time that I need, and it makes me better around people when I am social. Write your own rules.
I suggest coming of age stories or stories of survival rather than the typical self-help books. Study others’ stories of growing and overcoming and you’ll start to recognize your own. Alice Sebold’s Lucky, Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise, Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle, (all adult) Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep (adult or young adult).
It’s week 16 and I’m going to do more than just show my week in photos (we all know it’s about my cat anyway).
My best friend is this amazing photographer who has spent her life in the eye of wanderlust. Right now this means she’s all “mermaid hair, hippie feet.” She just opened an etsy account where you can purchase prints, cards, and postcards based on her Project 365. Keep in mind that her Project 365 is glaciers, mountains, sheep, and seas, definitely not cats. She even had a newborn pig at one point. Her Project 365 can be found here & the etsy shop can be found here. If you’re too lazy to go to these sites here are some of my favorite photos from the last few weeks.
This next one is by far my favorite ever:
If you’re interested in ordering prints, she has a ton of photos on her website and you’re allowed to order any print you want in a postcard, 8×10 or normal folded card. They’re beautiful, even if I’m bias.
Onto my week in photos:
Day 105: Welcome Back to North Carolina
I was walking into TJ Maxx minding my own and killed nature parked right down the row from me.
Day 106: Writing Life
My boss needed a pick-me-up. He went next door to Southern Hospitality @ NOFO and got us glass bottles of soda pop. I felt so 50′s with my pen, stapler and black cheery fuzz.
Day 107: Baby Birds Flew the Coop
Those baby birds with glossed goose flesh over their eyeballs two weeks ago have now grown up and moved out.
Day 108: Caribou Inspiration Board
I go to Caribou to share opinions on the chalk board because I’m a narcissist.
Day 109: Frustration via Tail
My monster only likes a certain amount of petting. You can tell by the frustrated tail how much is too much.
Day 110: Silks & Inches
You think you’ve placed them gently on the sidewalk just out the back door, and then surprise! they’re on your finger.
Day 111: Happy Birthday Daddy!
My brother likes to buy my father odd plants for holidays. A few years ago it was a “Satan” plant and this year it’s a muppet.
Lunar Chronicles 0.5 - Illustration by Goni Montes
Who knew? Who knew I would be this deliciously into cyborgs and hover crafts? The girl doesn’t even have a glass slipper, but instead a robotic foot, six years too small and yet, she’s just as Cinderella as the next gal waving from the Disney Castle. I was literally number 179 on the request list for this book at the library. Cinder is the story of Cinderella, in the future, when girls can have grease stained foreheads and lay under the hot bed of a truck mixing wires and nug luts in their tool boxes (that’s right, I know what a lug nut is).
It makes me laugh whenever a girlfriend brags about her boyfriend, or husband, being able to change her tie, or her oil. How the grease stains on the boy’s hands stay all day and don’t wash off even after scrubbing with that expensive brand name soap that smells like Cucumber Melon. How manly those grease stains seem to be. How to spot a husband: look for the dirt under his fingernails, the dregs in his palm’s love line.
Flower Power
Anyway this isn’t about husband hunting, it’s about machinery, and women of power. I loved this book as a young adult selection for many reasons. The first is that it can be read and enjoyed by both young adult males and young adult females. You’d think a refigured fairytale would turn boys off. On the contrary, the machinary takes on the element of another character in this book. It’s just as important as the over all story telling as the characters are. While the adventure, technology, and machinery is there for the typical boy this also gives teenage girls the ability to fantasize. Today we clap-on girls who get stuck on the side of a highway and can change their own tire without having to flag down a conspicuous male or call their daddy, and Cinder is a mechanic. She makes it acceptable for girls to lie under a truck on one of those sliding boards and pluck at the wires, configure the engine, change the oil.
Disney should take a lesson. Not all girls have to get crowns, and floating dresses. Not all girls have to get glass slippers in the end to make it worth it, or live happily ever after. Some girls are perfectly happy being at the top of fantasy leagues, having happy ever after be a coffee and a good book, or the 53rd Superbowl Game between the Patriots and the Panthers rather than a man and a soft bed.
I love books that make these things okay, makes girls guts speak. As in, sometimes we all get stuck into the crowd, afraid to be unique, afraid to like sports, or wake up and go to school with last nights mascara under our eyes, or no mascara because we’re naked badasses. We’ll it is okay, we can be badass, naked, never own nail polish, or “healthy glow” blush.
Cinder by Marissa Meyer (unrelated to Stephanie)
I think all this is honky dory for young adult book clubs. The only problem I had with this as a young adult read was that it was entirely predictable, and there were too many foreshadows to not grasp what was coming. This may come as a rant to you, but I hate predictable or easy young adult fiction. Young adults are apt, insightful, and they’re all miniature spies. If I can tell from page twenty what the plot twist is, every teen in the teen center can tell on page twenty what the plot twist is. I hate when authors think that young adults are less savvy than their adult counterparts or that they won’t figure it out. Just because you’ll be published under the “young adult” umbrella doesn’t mean that your book shouldn’t have the equivalent intelligent level of an “adult” read.
You find this with teachers sometimes, that their expectations are lower than what young adults can actually produce and due to that students are less likely to offer their high quality imaginations or insights. We need to enter the world where we realize what young adults are capable of, and that our expectations for them as readers have turned into sick love triangles, and make-out sessions. Young adults don’t need that in a book (as you’ll find with Cinder which is impeccable without one awkward tongue make-out scene). What they need is books that light up the world around them.
While I am disappointed by the Hunger Games love triangle because it’s so predictable, it did tell young adults about politics, about American freedom, or their own countries power, their own governments power. I was lucky enough to be born in America, but just this morning on BBC News Hour I heard that Pussy Riot (a band) was arrested and has been in jail for six weeks because they wrote a song to Mary asking to take Putin away. They sang it in a famous religious space, yes, but in the US you could write a song about nearly anything and be safe in your home that very night.
In Hunger Games, teens are brought into a world where no one is safe, no life is one of freedom whether you’re in a rich district or a poor district. It serves the same purpose as Animal Farm, showing young adults the world of politics, and current events.
Honky Dory isn’t the word I want to use for young adult fiction, I want to use words we use to describe adult fiction: gripping, captivating, enlightening, riveting, intelligent, emotional, “it changed my life.” All of these words should be the same words we use for all sorts of fiction, every genre. We don’t want to raise girls who only go from Sweet Valley High to the pink chick-lit section of a bookstore. Nothing against chick-lit, I love the stuff when I’m sitting in a beach chair and letting the wind whiff my hair. However, girls need to experience more than romance and dating as young adults and adults. Boys need to experience more than war novels, adventure novels, and mystery novels. It would do them some good to read Virginia Woolf, and Jane Austen. It would do girls some good to read Cormac McCarthy, and Mark Twain.
We need to raise a new generation that crosses stigmas, boundaries, and barriers. We can only do this by promoting books that do this. Bertolt Brecht says, “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” Literature has a duty to not only match the minds of young adults, but go beyond their high school lives, their lockers. It’s duty is to take them to a new culture, experience, a new government, less freedom, less electricity, more life outside of the confines of their own existence.
Sherman Alexie said it best, “The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don’t know.” Regardless if you’re a kid from a broken home, if you lived under a Seattle railway system because your mother was hooked on crank, if you were brought up with your car insurance paid and your college money in a savings. Whether you have white picket fences, or chain linked fences, literature should shape your view of the world as something greater than these things. It should empower you, change you, expand you as a human being.
Cinder does this in ways, and fails in others. By fail, I mean fail my high expectations of what SOLID young adult books should do. It’s a sweet read. Read it if you need a break from the literary, or the mystery. Read it if you need to go back to sixteen and breathe in the heat of hair straighteners, or the smell of soggy cafeteria hotdogs. Let your young adults read it because it has less love story, and gives power to the unique. Don’t expect it to tell you about the world, just expect it to be. Read Sonya Hartnett, Markus Zusak, and Sherman Alexie to chisel your world.
TODAY ONLY ON AMAZON the author of TOUCHBACK (now a major motion picture) is having a FREE DAY for the book he wrote based on the movie.BUY IT HERE.If anyone is interested. Let me know that you’re reading this book and after I finish it I will email everyone questions about if they liked it, what they liked, what they didn’t like and we can have everyone’s answers up on my blog along with my review so people get more than one opinion and we see how diverse we are as bloggers and readers.
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Snow White and Sherlock, Thanks http://curiousatekka.wordpress.com for sharing. These images were created by Colombian advertising agency, Lowe/SSP3.
bookish wedding ideas: How cute are you? Get on pinterest, ideas will abound.
is it rude for females to talk about bowel movements: No. We’ve entered the age when women leave their house, untie the apron strings and discuss poop at the dining room table. Even your use of “bowel movements” is polite so I assume you’ll need a manual. I’ll have to do a blog of recommendations for manner manuals.
does the book heat have literary merit: I wonder if you’re searching for a book titled heat, or whether or not the temperature of the book is hot, literally or metaphorically. I can tell you that metaphorically Nora Roberts and Erica Jong write “steamy” books. However, the heat of a book when you hold it depends on how it makes you feel inside that soft spot above your ribs.
at the age of six, cassie announced that the idea that a man lived in the sky: I wonder if my mother googled this, or someone is growing up to be a writer. It’s these search terms that I love.
ted hughes bra poems: Everyone comes to my blog in search of Ted Hughes. This is a SYLVIA PLATH sided blog.
The Daily Beast talks Shine by Lauren Myracle. I own this book and have been meaning to read it forever, but it just sits in the basket. I do so love reading banned books though, you can feel the angst of the extremist nation rising from the pages.
Swoon. Sigh. Let me dust my cheek with my handkerchief and lean my palm against my chin. My elbow against this balcony. My eyes against the green stems of the Gardens of Kyoto. If you can picture this, my bottom lip is out, plush, my hair huffed up with each breath. This story was a doozy, it makes me want to be a romantic in a dainty cloth dress. The Gardens of Kyoto spans years of wars, men going insane, or sad. It spans gardens, Philadelphia, dark slave rooms filled with walls of scratched numbers, mansions, and sisters. How can you span sisters without spanning generations, without explaining they’re like their mother or their father. You read Gardens of Kyoto and you see sisters, their span of lives, their similarities and differences. I love the confusion of sisters, the “why does she do it this way when it’s so clear our duty is this.”
This is a sad book. Nobody is happy in the end, well Daphne, but Daphne is such a flower name that you can’t make her outcomes ugly. (NOBODY WON THE PULITZER IN FICTION).
The Pulitzer
*EXCUSE ME WHILE I RANT AND THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE DISAGREE WITH MY OPINION: The reason no one won the Pulitzer this year, in my humble blogging opinion, is that the art of fiction in America needs to do better. We are in an age where people are selling e-books and e-stories for pennies and people are self-publishing due to various reasons (some that they can’t find a publisher who will take their story). Let’s not forget Harry Potter was discarded by numerous publisher’s before a humble small publishing house finally accepted it for publication. We need to remember it isn’t always in the name. All of the people up for Pulitzer’s this year had made a name in contemporary fiction. Does a name mean that the book you published, the trees you killed for that paper, were worth it? We just need to ask ourselves this before we publish our books. If I’m going to buy a hardcover, I expect that the book is as good as its binding.
I’m not saying any of the books up for this years Pulitzer Prize were bad (I haven’t read them), I’m just saying that maybe it’s a sign for American fiction. We need to stay true to our spirit. Just because a book is outlandish, does not mean it’s wonderful. Just because your last name is Wallace, does not mean everything you write will turn to gold. I do love some Denis Johnson though, he gets me every time. I will read this new novella even though it was not awarded.
I hope the publishing world starts looking for writers in the humblest of places. We all have a story, but we don’t all want to write it down. Do you trust publishing houses to tell you what’s wonderful in fiction? Or do you ever wonder if something great is out there that you’ll never read because it’s been turned down too many times, and the writer is now stuffing it into a drawer, folding a twine string around the parchment, or leaving it to collect dust, for their children to find after their death. I wonder…I often wonder.
Thank you, Pulitzer committee for making us scared again. What is writing if not fear? Fear that we won’t have time to tell our stories. Fear that these characters will die and disappear. Fear that the people won’t love you, that the words won’t be beautifully strung together like a back home Christmas wreath on your dying mother’s door. Fear is what writing is. Be memorable.
*END RANT.
Gardens of Kyoto is a lovely book if you don’t mind being unhappy for a few days. The words are beautiful, Kate Walbert has a way of saying something with a choir of bodies that makes you want to scream, bury your face in a pillow and shove the book into the sleeve of the pillow case to dream about later. I’m especially bias about this book because I have this sick fantasy about being a girl someone writes letters home too. I think I was meant to be born in the thirty’s, when my father was born. I was meant to feel a sliver of the depression and then send someone off into the clutches of battlefields, dead trees, winter.
Maybe that’s why I especially love books written from the narration of war widows, or war girlfriends, girls who’ve been pinned and are always waiting. I have this ideal of running down the dust road to the mail box, missing the pot holes slick with mud from yesterday’s rain. And while Ellen doesn’t ever get to do this, she does have men who belong to her, but belong more to the war. Men who gave her a small piece of themselves, but took the rest to be closed and trampled.
I think that’s the thing I loved most of the book, the small pieces of human. Every character gave Ellen a small bit of themselves. Her child, who she writes too, gave her the smell of fresh skin, of babies, a murmur. Her cousin Randall, gave her a goodbye – his hands pressed to the round parts of her face. Her mother gave her nothing but quiet, to mourn. Sterling gave her a view of history. Everyone gave her something of themselves, something of history. Isn’t that the way though, we will never truly know someone because we won’t know their thoughts.
Southern Belle
In my head, I talk in a southern accent. I have to be careful it doesn’t come out in my real life but I like to decorate the words, round them, drawl out my conversations with myself. It’s strange the way we have these small secrets with ourselves. It must be the reason our imagination is at its best in the night, just before sleep, when we are the most ourself – the most alone with these bodies.
Clearly, mine is a body lying in the sweat of the South. And yours…
To get the full effect of this blog you have to listen to some Sleepy John Estes -”The Girl I Love has Long Curly Hair.” Once you have that in the background, commence reading. I heard this song last night on the way home from Philly, driving the back roads of Henderson on US 1.
For the past week, I lived and worked on Kensington Avenue in Philadelphia. I can’t put into words (which is unusual for me) how much this experience helped me grow as a person. It made me realize how much more simply I could live and how simply others are forced to live by factors that are sometimes beyond their control. At night, the L sweeped by on its metal tracks, never grinding, but swiftly moving through the night carrying passengers to and from the Frankford neighborhood. I’m sure some of the guests of the Inn would have been happy just to have the change to take a ride through the sky metal. I wasn’t in the neighborhood where Ben Franklin wore his coat jacket tails and carried quills in his pockets, but a neighborhood filled with abandoned row houses and amazing people.
I live in suburbia full-time. I’ve grown up here with the white picket fences running down the main neighborhood row, the cave of trees overhead that are perfectly pruned and paid through home owner’s fees. No one has ever said to me, don’t go out at night – in fact I run at night when I get off work sometimes and no one stops me. People are walking their dogs, talking on their cell phones, enjoying the Southern breeze. Neighbors sit in their driveway’s and have beers, men get up at the whip of dawn and mow their lawns.
In Kensington, women were reminding me not to go anywhere by myself and gaffed when I went off exploring with my camera. I took photos of the barbed wire fences, circled in knives hung atop school yard enclosures, trash collected on stoops and I watched a prostitute get picked up by a man with a ring on his wedding finger. She smiled and a gold tooth flared in the sun, it was always sunny in Philadelphia (like the show). When you drive in from Frankford Avenue, these are the first images you see:
The L
The L
The sky through the windows, anywhere but up.
This is a metaphor for life in Kensington. When you close off the sky to a city of people, you get people who have no where up to look. Where can hope ride if you can’t look up and see stars, see sky, imagine a presence or another world out there. Hope has to hide in the pockets of abandoned factories, prayers, row houses, streets filled with poverty and people without coats. I think the L is a physical symbol of crushing people down to the street; stay grounded, stay poor. It was the first thing I saw when I entered Frankford. At first I thought, “how awesome” and I snapped a million photographs while the streets became more and more unfamiliar. And by the end of the week, I saw The L as this silent predator that you don’t even hear moving in the night. It’s almost stirred quiet while it rides empty in the dark hours. It reminds you that there’s no way out.
You force yourself to find hope in the wrinkles at the corners of smiles and below the plump of cheeks. You see a guest with a large coat and you know that they’ll be warm through the night wherever they go. You watch them eat hard bread because they still have teeth. These are the things you find to hope at. Hope, a verb.
People in Kensington hang hope on the wall.
Street Mural at St. Francis Inn
Backyard Fence Decoration
And give the birds feed.
There are pockets of hope in the streets as well. They are beautiful in their ugliness, in their reminders. I didn’t realize Philly was a pretty religious city until I was immersed into the murals of Bible Verses and reminders of John 3:16. I was living my faith throughout the week by attending Mass everyday, prayer service every evening, and spending my days sorting bagels, cleaning dirty plates, cooking ham and deer stew, or peeling carrots. I was living hope and faith through works and not through my own selfish desires (which is how it normally goes). I often find myself praying when I think there is no hope, when I’m teared up in bed and I need someone to answer to what is happening in my life. I hardly say thank you, but am always saying, “I need you…I need you to fix this.” I lose sight of hope because there’s so much of it in my life. I hope my dad walks me down the isle, I hope my nephew grows up healthy, I hope I get into graduate school. My hope has options, my hope has fall back plans. What do you do when your hope is life-sustaining, when you need that hope to live?
St. Francis Inn Mural
School Yard Mural
Station of Green. Yes, that is a tub with Jesus.
Wall Quote
And yet, I’ve never seen a city come together in the face of tragedy the way I did this past week. The night before I arrived in Philadelphia, a local abandoned factory was set aflame by unknown causes. It was the staying place of a few homeless who were guests of the food shelter, and the fire took the lives of two firemen. A volunteer I worked with called it “White Lightening” because she suspected the owner set the building on fire to earn the insurance money (this is heresy). Apparently this happens all the time. In a frenzy, the volunteers left the food shelter and rushed to the Nun’s house down the street. They lost bits and pieces of Clare House where the Nuns were to move in two weeks from today.
On Thursday night, coming home from dinner I was able to see the City’s response to these deaths and to the fire. In an act of remembrance, hundreds of motorcyclists gathered to celebrate the life of the passed fire fighters. There was a police led parade through Kensington Avenue just under The L.
Fire Fighter Remembrance
Even through all of this, and because of it, I was taken with Philly. I was in this love-hate relationship with the street trash, the people who remembered my name after one day, but had no kitchen to cook in, used public bathrooms for their own privacy. I love Philadelphia (Kensington Ave) because it lives everyday like the light coming out of the darkness. And the St. Francis Inn is one of the bright spots of the narrow streets. Feeding between 200 and 500 people a day, the Inn serves restaurant style to the homeless, or down-trodden in Philadelphia. The guests are more than memorable.
Carlos who taught me how to pet a street cat. Chocolate Moose who’s wife wore rolled-up sleeves in forty degree weather and told me jokes about “egg bombs” creating a mess in their kitchen. Rambo who told me I “shock him” and who protects the neighborhood from crime while wearing tights like a superhero, the old man with blue eyes who had the kindest smile, the lumberjack who said I had “pretty eyes,” Dreads who’s life went haywire from meeting a bad woman and who calls me “Baby PhD.” He also told me men were merciful and women were severe and backed it up with examples. All of them were unique, all of them had something to share.
Thank you, for letting me be completely sarcastic with you and for laughing at my corny jokes, and for being bright when there’s nothing in your world to be bright about, but the meals that you eat inside the walls of an Inn. I now know that hope is a gaunt figure, lonely, cracked like the sidewalk with a few clover sprouts poking through. Hope smells like ham on your fingers and is in the slow peel of a carrot or a potato. Hope is in setting tables and perfectly folding napkins. Hope is in dish washing, which I used to loath, but I see the romance in it.
Carlos introduced me to Nubs, the street cat without a tail who everyone calls Marisa or Stumpy. We became friends rather quickly after that.
His brothers and sisters weren’t really fans of my human smell.
Paisley, who only ever let me as close as ten inches.
Jazzy Hazzard ate my tuna, but never let me near.
At this point, my mind still won’t let me fathom homelessness. How do you live never knowing where your next meal is coming from. I don’t know what it is to own one skirt that I wear everyday, or have my child wear the same pants for a week only to find ten cents and a laundromat that will let me wash just one pair of black cargos, too small. How does your hair feel when it’s only been washed once this week. How do you ask someone else for diapers for your child. How to, how to, how to. Where is the manual.
In Philly, one street separates poor and poorer. I was walking down Jasper and then turned onto Cumberland, passing Kensington High School and heading towards Genericville (where Applebee’s and CVS hold still). Genericville is goodville, and the journey-through slowly rises to the occasion.
It goes from this:
Backyard Fence and Wires
and this,
Row Houses, Cumberland
Inn Yard
to here…
House Capsule
Green Pocket
Knobby Tree
It’s just strange to me how close we are to nothing and we still feel that we have everything.
I wish, for this, that I had words to move a whole country to social justice. To make people see that their whole world needs help, not just third world countries. There is education to be had in your own backyard, difference to make in your own city, mouths to feed at your own table.
I’ve always thought that literature reached passed these boundaries between people. We’ve all read Catcher in the Rye and heard Holden Caulfield’s homeless shenanigans. Flannery O’Connor has given us a window into the poverty of the South. Salvage the Bones tells us of happiness in the eye of tension and uncontrolled circumstances. The literature has forced into us places that are uncomfortable, trash-ridden, unavoidable and yet, here in America we rush to the suburbs. We place our feet up on our white picket fences and breathe a sigh of relief that we’re out of our suit coats and into our Saturday pajama pants. And I’m to blame as much as anyone because I forget to live like I know there are people who have less, but are not less.
This is for all of you who say, “if they would only get jobs, then they could feed their family,” or “Even if you work at McDonald’s, you at least have a job.” We’ll news flash, McDonald’s doesn’t give average workers a living wage, and most times people who work at minimum wage jobs work two jobs just to survive in their small crack of a home on the “bad side” of town. We forget that these people may work harder than us, may have hands dry and cracked, may make their children write extra book reports to make sure they go onto college and push past the stereotypes of poverty. It isn’t THAT easy to just “pick yourself up by your boot straps,” put on a tie and get a job. The wife of “Chocolate Moose” (a guest at the Inn) owns two t-shirts, sleeves cut at the shoulder bones, a pair of gym shorts and a flower print skirt. She has tennis shoes, speaks with an accent. If she walked into your business tomorrow would you offer her a job?
I want to talk about it. I want authors to write about it. I want people who have “beach reads” to experience poverty while sand is between their toes. I just want people to think about it. We live in a world where my family owns three cupboards of towels for showering and I have twenty-some pairs of jeans in sizes I don’t even fit into anymore, but people are out there with a t-shirt, missing sleeves. Our class system, it’s broken.
Here’s to hoping:
“I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.”
— Neil Gaiman
I have some fun things to share for April 10th. First, go without shoes tomorrow for TOMS’ One Day Without Shoes. They can say it better than me so check it out to the right. The other thing is the Goodread’s Book Blogger Award. I really wasn’t going to enter myself in this because I do not have the luck of my Irish ancestors, but I would love to go to the book convention and take my mother on a trip to NY. If you like this blog, please just take the time to vote for me. I will go as low as putting cherries on top to earn your vote.
And now for the usual:
Favorite Tweets
Favorite Search Terms
The big sleep bookstore: sounds like a store in Sleepy Hollow. Maybe I should hibernate there in the winter instead of wearing scarves, turning red, and shivering.
“blog” tights: I need these. I commenced in googling until I found any reference to blogging on a pair of tights. I’m pretty positive that they don’t quite exist yet – blogging tights, or blogging leggings, in case you’re wondering. What we need are “blogging is sexy” tees. Yum.
poems about liking a boy: Aren’t you cute. Look up Romeo and Juliet, buy a dagger.
why is carolyn forche a good poet: WHOAREYOU. And you can’t capitalize a name (even in a google search). You’re hearby kicked off this blogging island. Banned. Banished. Exiled. Removed by deadly force.
wwjd bracelet font: One thing you don’t know about me… since I was fourteen I’ve worn a WWJD bracelet on my left wrist. When one breaks, I immediately run out to the Family Christian Store and get a new one. I used to have a rainbow one – it was my gay pride Jesus bracelet, now I just have black. I like the person who googled this, they get me.
Tweet Seats. I want to see this at a poetry reading. It would go something like, “she just said breast, this is getting sexual.”
I always knew Jodi Picoult was pure evil (and I want to hear no argumentative comments about this either). Assisted suicide and now no self-publishing? Okay, maybe I’m with her on the no self-publishing thing.
Instagram is worth more than NY Times. If I wasn’t so obsessed with it than I would definitely be belligerent right now with the state of reading in our country. Then again, I’m always belligerent about the state of reading.
I can’t resist this (did Bill recite this to Monica)? Okay, now that I got that out of the way, because I adore Bill Clinton as a President, here is his favorite poem (recited on youtube). If you are a staunch, angry republican, just hearing him will make you flustered so don’t bother.
Book for a Book, Free Shipping World Wide, All $ Goes to Literacy Orgs.
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” —Franz Kafka
