Bookshelf

The following is an evolving scroll of books, essays, interviews, and blogs
organized according to whim, time, and memory.

Interviews

Lisa Robertson talking about reading, thinking, and feminism in this CWILA interview with Brecken Hancock. “Thinking is a form of acting, an acting within the space of language.”

Ali Smith's 2014 interview on Writers & Company with Eleanor Wachtel talking about time and art.

Aislinn Hunter's interview with Laurie Brown on about her book Certainties. It's also about grief and art and why writers need to write.

“Instead of Sobbing I Write Sentences,” Leslie Jamison’s interview with Charles D’Ambrosio. As Jamison says, “For D’Ambrosio, complexity is not just an intellectual or aesthetic boon, a way to be “smart.” It is an ethical necessity.”

Books

Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay, for his introduction, for the many brilliant essays within it, and especially for Junichiro Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows” and Natalia Ginzburg’s “He and I.”

Pathologies by Susan Olding. The tag line on this book is “a life in essays,” and indeed it is, beautifully rendered pieces of life. Read Susan’s piece in Maisonneuve: “In Anna Karenina Furs.”

Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s Threading Light: Meditations on Love and Loss. Consider this: “Language is a hinge that connects us with the flesh of our experience; it is also residue, the ash of memory and imagination.”

Consider too, Lorri’s stark and moving piece, “Thresholds” in How Not to Expect What You’re Expecting, a collection of essays about the things that can and do wrong in pregnancy and childrearing. Also memorable and striking in that collection, Fiona Tinwei Lam’s haunting “Invisible Mending,” Lisa Martin-DeMoor’s “A Container of Light” and Cathy Stonehouse’s “Dead Baby, Imperfect Baby: A Meditation With Dolls.”

Quotes

I am so excited about discovering Abigail Thomas. Her writing is crisp and startling, some of the chapters in her memoir are just a few lines long -- the space around the words feels just right, not contrived, but open and startling. She's a painter, as well as a writer. She writes about scraping the paint away and discovering the real painting as she thinks she's discarding it. I wonder if she does this with words as well.

From What's Coming Next and How to Like It:

One lunch hour we were too depressed to sit down. We wandered over to the Tisch Children’s Zoo where we came upon three little pigs eating shit. We patted them, smelled our hands afterward, and moved on to goats. Chuck noted that goats were particularly dumb, but delicious roasted. I told the goat never mind and it started eating my skirt through the fence. It was a pretty day.
On the way back to work I bought a paper snake on a stick for a dollar, and Chuck grabbed it away, and practised the wrist action, getting the snake to strike in the air all the way back to work, cheering us up.

From Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille (famed for being choreographer of Oklahoma, though apparently not proud of that particular dance sequence). Here, her friend Martha Graham admonishes her. This quote from Dani Shapiro’s excellent book Still Writing:

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not hear it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even need to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keep us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

Divine dissatisfaction! Blessed unrest. Thank you, Martha Graham.

Blogs

From Dani Shapiro's website, from her blog about how she feels after finishing a book: On the Space In Between. "Making art is not an act of catharsis. If anything, it embeds our narrative ever more deeply within us by freezing it in time. It transforms us -- yes -- but as anyone who has ever really gone there will tell you – transformation is painful and oh, it is ongoing."

Gardener, writer, and teacher Christin Geall’s blog, “Cultivated,” is a visual feast. If you love flowers and subtlety and good writing, visit. You’ll be enchanted.

Julija Sukys teaches creative nonfiction in the Department of English at the University of Missouri. Her blog, called Writing. Life. Reflections on Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, (Auto)Biography, Life-Writing, and the Essay is rich with intelligent interviews and thoughtful writing.

Lisa Martin-DeMoor’s “Writer-in-Residence.” Although she’s taking a hiatus from this for a time, there’s much here that’s worth reading and musing over. Read and enjoy and hope she’ll come back with more soon.

Mandy Len’s “The Love Story Project.” Mandy says things like “the happiness apex” and “lingering mirto headache.” Just two, among many, reasons to read her thoughts.

Essays

Scott Russell Sanders: “The Singular First Person.” Read it to find out why writing essays is like being a dog snuffling through the woods.

Cynthia Ozick’s “SHE: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body.” I love this essay for many reasons, among them the idea that in writing an essay (writing anything), we are responsible for creating a “cosmogony.” We are writing a world.

From Brick, Milosz and His Fans by Molly Wesling. Here is one of my favourite kinds of essays, complex and whimsical.

Here from the Longreads Best of 2014, “The Empathy Exams” by Leslie Jamison, a piece I will read again and study and wonder over.

Then there’s “Ghosts of the Tsunami” by Richard Lloyd Parry: ”‘When people see ghosts, they are telling a story, a story which has been broken off. They dream of ghosts, because then the story carries on, or comes to a conclusion. And if that brings them comfort, that’s a good thing . . . There were thousands of deaths, each of them different,’ Ayane said. ‘Most of them have never been told. My father’s name was Tsutomu Suto. By writing about him, I share his death with others. Perhaps I save him in some way, and perhaps I save myself.’”