Does she read a cookbook
the way I read poetry?
Category: Arts & Letters
This should be a word
Outdoorable.
It might even have commercial opportunities.
How would you apply it?
Can it really be a whole year since the book appeared?
Have to admit it’s been an exciting, though not exactly lucrative, past 12 months since Quaking Dover appeared in print. The 255-page volume is quite different from my earlier publications. It’s history, rather than a novel or poetry, and its tone and outlook pushed my journalism training in new ways. I’ve even come to see this as my major creative nonfiction opus.
Reader reaction has been enthusiastic, and the book’s perspective has challenged the conventional take on New England history and its impact on the rest of America.
Friends Journal magazine called it an “eminently well-argued and documented account,“ while others declared it “a rich feast of a book” or said “It’s like you’re speaking right to me! It’s not like a history at all!” or simply “enjoyed your conversational writing style.”
Unlike my novels, its publication led to a festive book-release party in the Dover Quaker meetinghouse, followed by other events – some of them with unique PowerPoint visuals – in Dover, New Hampshire; Haverhill and Cape Cod, Massachusetts; and Eastport and Pembroke, Maine. Ten in all, and all well received. Didn’t get to do that with the novels. I’ve even had strangers stop me in the street to tell me how much they like my reading. And creating the presentations and accompanying illustrations has been fun in a whole new way for me.
One thing that’s impressed me is the way this has connected with people. It’s about places they live in or have visited, about families and communities they know, about values they share. It’s more concrete than fiction but no less personal.
Overall, it’s sold close to the U.S. average of 200 copies a year. Considering that the book is, at its core, the story of a small congregation in a small city in a small state, I’ll take that as a good start.
Time in the creation of poetry and much else
Robert Bly once said that to write a line of poetry requires two hours. Not so much for the actual writing. Not even for the inspiration. Though certainly for the revision. As well as compression and redistillation. And more revision.
His estimate, to me, seems quite optimistic.
I’m thinking it can be applied to many more examples of where human creative action is involved, too.
Go ahead, name one where you wish you had more time for the project.
As I wrote to somebody, somewhere
“Gimmicks” is, of course, a loaded word, pejorative, “cheap tricks,” say in contrast to “devices” or structural support or a Greek chorus or some such. In Vonnegut’s day, his repeated quips made him hip, sassy, cool, droll, fun to read, on the same shelf as supercharged Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson. They were never dull, archly serious, overtly pedantic. Oh, maybe strike the last item, in retrospect. But somehow we always wanted another hit. I don’t mean that in the best-seller sense. No, that would be a sell-out. (Maybe that’s the crux of the issue you’re raising.)
As much as I loved Vonnegut’s work, especially Rosewater, I’m surprised how little I remember all these years later, apart from the asterisk, just don’t ask me which novel that punctuated.
By the way, I am taken with the ideal of a short novel, though obtaining that can be elusive.
One facet to consider is the way Vonnegut spoke from the Midwest, a region largely ignored or overlooked in American literature, in contrast to New York City mostly Manhattan but rarely Queens or the Bronx. That in itself was a major accomplishment, even if it was from his firehouse on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. So it goes.
Well, his father did run a hardware store and had to sell, uh, useful gimmicks. Drain stoppers, screws, nuts, hammers. (Bang, bang, expletive.)
It is amazing how much “bad writing” fills “great literature,” or even the New York Times Magazine, as one of my ambitious writing teachers led us to see. (He, too, had his own addiction to cool as in gimmicks.)
One question you stir up is how much a piece works for the time when it’s published and how much will still work (function) in later eras? And why?
What did your daughter think of the book, anyway?
When it comes to photos for blogging
Have you ever thought about the best shape for a photo in blogging?
So much depends on the device your reader is using. A large PC screen offers many alternatives a cell phone or tablet doesn’t. My own frame of reference is a laptop.
My earlier posts often mixed the sizes of pictures in a post, for variety the way a newspaper photo essay would. But cell phones require a strong image rather than detail.
In general, then, I’ve been settling on full width but shallow – not that the visual content always cooperates.
Alas, those shots do lose some power in fitting into the blog’s formula width, unlike the full screen I use in selecting and editing.
In a grouping, I’ve been keeping them full-width rather than mixing and matching sizes. When our reader scans down, this functions somewhat like a moving camera roll shot. It’s not the way you’d “read” a photo on paper or in an art gallery, admittedly, but it’s an option the technology leads to.
But I’ve also been shooting a lot of square shots, which not too long ago was considered verboten by many observers.
And then, sometimes a deep vertical shot is dramatic, revealing itself portion by portion instead of fully at once.
What’s working best for you?
Regarding flaws in my published work
Many of the typos are a consequence of deep revisions.
Blame revision, too, for the times when subject/verb or the time tenses don’t match, especially when a novel shifted direction after an earlier draft.
The fact remains that for a writer, the work is rarely if ever actually finished.
It’s like an itch, actually.
Two blemishes I see too often in self-published fiction
The author misuses “that” for “who.”
Or uses single quotation marks randomly where a double is required.
It really smacks of amateurish, a warning of some less than savvy writing ahead. Still, there’s a chance the content will outweigh faulty prose – no guarantees, though.
When a painter writes poetry, too
I love the idea of artists who are inspired by other artistic fields. Too often, alas, they’re stuck in their own genre.
The term for what I’m discussing here is cross-disciplinary.
For example, I’m primarily a writer, lately of fiction as well as a poet, but I’m moved most intensely by classical music and then opera, jazz, folk, film, theater, and yes, painting and related visual fields. And I consider myself essentially a visual person?
Maybe you get the idea.
So a few months ago, I got news that a friend now living in California had a new book, Roots, Stones, & Baggage, and I assumed it was a catalog for his most recent gallery presentation. He is, after all, a marvelous painter, still active in his 90s.
What arrived in the mail was mostly his selected poems, revealing a whole other side of himself. They’re good, by they way. He respects craft. And there is a sampling of his paintings over the years, too.
I remember his reply during a Q&A at his gallery show opening at the Ogunquit Art Museum in Maine when he said he understood Blake’s poetry, something that left many dumbfounded. Think of understanding as gut-level rather than legalistic, OK?
The new booklet’s worth getting even for the wonderful introduction by his son, the celebrated novelist Jonathan Letham.
And the poet slash painter in question is Richard Brown Letham, still going strong.
Attention, please!
Are you a fellow blogger? Or did something else grab your notice here?
Let me confess that in playing creating titles for posts at the Red Barn, I’ve undergone a shift from the strict rules of writing newspaper headlines back when I was a professional journalist. For the record, I wrote hundreds of thousands of those, even while fixing the texts that followed or placing stories on the many pages I designed, all under a ticking clock and backlog.
One of the things I’ve discovered in blogging is that the title can stand on its own without having to quote from the text that follows. Instead, it can be a tease or even the first sentence of what then follows rather than a summary.
For another, it can be as long as I want. Not just up to ten counts or so of lettering on each of three lines, for example, which might turn out to be three to five words. Haiku looks easy in comparison. In blogging, the title might even be longer than the text that follows. Could you even summarize your post in a handful of words and still seduce readers? That was the newspaper challenge.
What we’re doing here seems all rather liberating or even lazy.
Not that it’s any less difficult.
Now, what grabs you next?
Jnana's Red Barn 