Posts Tagged ‘writing’
gearing up
AWP is only five days away, and I’ve been thinking of little else. It’s not just the writing conference that’s on my mind, of course. I’ve been thinking about getting on a plane alone, without anyone I need to hold or rock or calm. I’ve been thinking about sleeping through the night and having three…
Read Morestill reading
I haven’t posted about what I’m reading in a while and this is probably because I’m all over the place, reading three books at once. I prefer to read one book at a time, submerging myself completely in one voice, one plot, etc. But this kind of reading doesn’t fit into my life right now.…
Read Morea little like golf
My grandpa, Spencer, will be 100 years old on January 19th, and we’re having a big party for him on Saturday. 100 years old! It’s difficult to imagine the changes he’s witnessed in his lifetime. He has lived to see 19 different presidents in office (including Obama, for whom he voted). Grandpa was born in…
Read Morefirst paragraphs
A number of times a day I have a thought followed by, oh, this will make a good blog post. I walk through the day writing paragraphs in my head. Some of these paragraphs are very good. Some are not. Regardless, by the time I get the kids to bed (especially when D is gone,…
Read Moreforgetting and remembering
I keep having dreams in which I lose things or have them stolen: credit cards, my purse, a huge backpack from a train platform. In each dream, the same thing happens as soon as I realize the loss: my stomach sinks in that oh-no-I-can’t-believe-it kind of way. This is always followed by shame. How could…
Read Morehow far is the ocean from here
I’m here at the coffee shop near my house, the one where I wrote the majority of Ready for Air, and it’s exactly where I need to be. The sun is streaming in the windows and I’m all by myself (with the exception of the other customers, of course, but I don’t have to carry…
Read Morede-funking
I’ve been in such a funk this summer, which is unlike me because I love summer. I love the green and the heat (within reason) and the long days. But the days have been so very long with the two girls, and I’m always scrambling to squeeze in one more thing. I have been taking…
Read Moreon narrative urgency and single parenting
I’ve been thinking a lot about narrative urgency the last couple of weeks because I recently went to see Charles Baxter talk about and read from his new novel, The Soul Thief. (I dragged both Stella and Zoe out in the cold so I could get my literary fix.) He used the term narrative urgency,…
Read Morereading again
D will be home tonight. He’s been gone for ten days with his new job. I doubt the timing, with Zoe just four weeks old when he left, could have been any worse, but there was nothing we could do about it, so he went. Stella missed him a ton. Yesterday morning, she was watching…
Read Morea kinder, gentler version
Zoe is 4 weeks old today, which seems impossible. How have four weeks already passed? How have four weeks of me doing nothing but nursing and bouncing a baby just disappeared? These are hard times for me. I started to feel more like myself at the end of last week—the scary hormone visions (more on…
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