Full archives on access for the rest of the summer.
Take note!
I just finished The Cheater's Guide to Love on my lunch break. I'm not a huge Diaz fan but this story got me inspired for my own writing, how it kept going and taking the reader to new places she/he didn't expect. (At least for me.)
It was repulsive and funny and thought-provoking and somehow touching, too, all at once.
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
Devika's 2014 List (opportunity)
Kim, thank you for getting us back here.
I DID mention sumreading, but only as a fond memory of the past. Just looking back at this year, there have been so many moments where I have looked at my life (look at your life! look at your choices!) and felt definitely out of control of the situations in which I have found myself.
Teaching -- as Camila can attest, I'm sure -- is among some of the hardest, most draining, most rewarding, most under-appreciated endeavors that we can take on as people! Teaching in urban settings is all of these things on steroids. It is, in this country, also a profession that has been culturally devalued to such a degree that the community of educators that I get to work with is a community that inherently struggles to give and receive love, that lacks trust, and, because of various experiences, has grown a quiet sense of despondency about life and about work.
In many ways, this year, I have lost touch with who I am and what it is that I want for myself or to establish a sense of purpose. There are going to be so many opportunities this summer, while here in India (after two years away), to connect once again, more steadily, with that self. I'm so excited to honor my needs and wants and commit myself to following that old Shakespearean adage into the school year: "To thine own self be true."
My summer reading list, with some comments
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
(My roommate in Baltimore, Phoebe, and Nathan, both, have been pushing this book hard. It is an amazing read and I am moving super slowly through it to savor it. Excerpts to follow soon. Definitely see why it's one of the "Great American Novels".)
The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities For Moving From Theory to Practice in Urban Schools, Jeff Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell
(Denis, my TFA mentor coach lifesaver and friend, has helped me push myself to make the most of this first year... and he lives by this book. For more from Andrade-Duncan, check out this ted talk about roses growing from the concrete, and deconstructing schools as seats of oppressive pedagogies, and allowing them to become havens for critical thinking and student empowerment).
The God of Small Things, Arundathi Roy
(Nathan has two books that I've given him for assigned reading. The other is Chimimanda Ngozi Adiche's Americanah. Anyone on this blog who's yet to read BOTH books -- you should read at least one. They are among the most important books of my reading life, if we can call it that. I'm rereading this one, just because.)
Any more would be overwhelming, I think. I'm also doing some intensive LSAT preparation, beginning tomorrow. We can add the Powerscore guides to the LSAT to this list, but I thought that would be rather depressing, so just unofficially, that's on the docket as well.
Kim, I'm so excited for you to be incubating this "idea" for a novel this summer!!! I am of course down to read anything you've written and are ready to share. I'm super excited for you and for this baby of an idea to grow into something great and complicated and powerful! Know that you have all of our support :~)
I hope that you all are doing well in your respective corners of the globe, that the summer months, though they mean something different now than they did before, still offer you lots of quiet moments of reflection, and gentle relaxation.
Vic and Bryan, I know you're both rocking summer internships, and I hope these are fruitful from an intellectual perspective and a personal one. Emily -- are you still a paralegal? Still studying for the LSAT? I hope whatever you're doing that it is bringing you lots of joy. Camila - are you still going to be a little engine that could? Or are you taking your teaching skill(z) elsewhere? Sophie my dear, you're always in my thoughts. I can't wait to see you in New Haven, and I've been carrying a letter that's meant for you, that I didn't know where to send.
Kim my dear, you're the very best (of the... best) for bringing me back here.
Infinite thanks.
Better posts to follow, and that too, about language in the aforementioned books. Language is indeed everything, Kim! It so, so, so, so is.
LOVE YOU ALL.
Devika
"Ms. B"
I DID mention sumreading, but only as a fond memory of the past. Just looking back at this year, there have been so many moments where I have looked at my life (look at your life! look at your choices!) and felt definitely out of control of the situations in which I have found myself.
Teaching -- as Camila can attest, I'm sure -- is among some of the hardest, most draining, most rewarding, most under-appreciated endeavors that we can take on as people! Teaching in urban settings is all of these things on steroids. It is, in this country, also a profession that has been culturally devalued to such a degree that the community of educators that I get to work with is a community that inherently struggles to give and receive love, that lacks trust, and, because of various experiences, has grown a quiet sense of despondency about life and about work.
In many ways, this year, I have lost touch with who I am and what it is that I want for myself or to establish a sense of purpose. There are going to be so many opportunities this summer, while here in India (after two years away), to connect once again, more steadily, with that self. I'm so excited to honor my needs and wants and commit myself to following that old Shakespearean adage into the school year: "To thine own self be true."
My summer reading list, with some comments
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
(My roommate in Baltimore, Phoebe, and Nathan, both, have been pushing this book hard. It is an amazing read and I am moving super slowly through it to savor it. Excerpts to follow soon. Definitely see why it's one of the "Great American Novels".)
The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities For Moving From Theory to Practice in Urban Schools, Jeff Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell
(Denis, my TFA mentor coach lifesaver and friend, has helped me push myself to make the most of this first year... and he lives by this book. For more from Andrade-Duncan, check out this ted talk about roses growing from the concrete, and deconstructing schools as seats of oppressive pedagogies, and allowing them to become havens for critical thinking and student empowerment).
The God of Small Things, Arundathi Roy
(Nathan has two books that I've given him for assigned reading. The other is Chimimanda Ngozi Adiche's Americanah. Anyone on this blog who's yet to read BOTH books -- you should read at least one. They are among the most important books of my reading life, if we can call it that. I'm rereading this one, just because.)
Any more would be overwhelming, I think. I'm also doing some intensive LSAT preparation, beginning tomorrow. We can add the Powerscore guides to the LSAT to this list, but I thought that would be rather depressing, so just unofficially, that's on the docket as well.
Kim, I'm so excited for you to be incubating this "idea" for a novel this summer!!! I am of course down to read anything you've written and are ready to share. I'm super excited for you and for this baby of an idea to grow into something great and complicated and powerful! Know that you have all of our support :~)
I hope that you all are doing well in your respective corners of the globe, that the summer months, though they mean something different now than they did before, still offer you lots of quiet moments of reflection, and gentle relaxation.
Vic and Bryan, I know you're both rocking summer internships, and I hope these are fruitful from an intellectual perspective and a personal one. Emily -- are you still a paralegal? Still studying for the LSAT? I hope whatever you're doing that it is bringing you lots of joy. Camila - are you still going to be a little engine that could? Or are you taking your teaching skill(z) elsewhere? Sophie my dear, you're always in my thoughts. I can't wait to see you in New Haven, and I've been carrying a letter that's meant for you, that I didn't know where to send.
Kim my dear, you're the very best (of the... best) for bringing me back here.
Infinite thanks.
Better posts to follow, and that too, about language in the aforementioned books. Language is indeed everything, Kim! It so, so, so, so is.
LOVE YOU ALL.
Devika
"Ms. B"
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Kim's 2014 List
It's a gloomy day in NYC this morning, June 5, 2014, and for the past few hours I've been sitting at my desk reading over the feedback from my latest story for my Sackett Street workshop (a.k.a. not working). In doing so, I started researching some history on my instructor and her book, and from there wound up in the vast universe of virtual bookstores. (Turns out Amazon and B&N can be just as dangerous to my unstable and overflowing bookshelf as The Strand, though not nearly as exciting to explore.*) In five, maybe ten minutes I had already picked three new books to read, and when thinking of my own "summer reading list," remembered "Sum-Reading"! Also, last weekend Devika came to stay for a day in Rehoboth and reminded me of the blog and how it used to exist. I can't believe none of us posted at all last year! Alas, two years later, I'm bringing "Sum-Reading" back from the dead.
I really miss everyone on this blog, whoever may still be here: Bryan, Devika, Camila, Sophie... Victoria? Emily? This blog hasn't proven to be the best way of keeping in touch in the past, but I just re-read a number of our posts and I felt a visceral connection to all of you, more powerful than a Facebook update or newly posted pictures. Bryan smelling "the faintest hint" of Burberry cologne at a fast food restaurant and being convinced that his mind had willed him to "selectively" smell it because he wanted to be reminded of Thomas... until realizing, actually, someone was wearing it just a few feet away. Emily listening to 93.9 on Sunday mornings, wishing she were born in the 40s so she could have been a teenager at the height of Beatles mania. Devika's notes from India, how Hamid's description of "nostalgia as crack cocaine" in The Reluctant Fundamentalist resonated with her thoughts of family there. All our observations on writers and on what we were reading! (Not to mention my overly-verbose posts... eek.)
I hope we can find a way to contribute here and reconnect this summer. I'm busier than I ever was in the past (as we all are) which may make it difficult to read and post often, but even if we all have one or two notes during the summer, that would be enough. A passage even that struck you. One of my old creative writing professors used to start class off with each of us bringing in a line, a paragraph, a song lyric, that intrigued us from the past week. I would love to see what you guys come up with.
I also, after my Sackett workshop last night (pic below from my instructor Dina's rooftop, a lovely place to workshop stories, until it gets dark, haha), finally, for the first time ever, feel like I might have a novel of my own brewing. An idea worth committing to and getting started on. So maybe I'll post some notes or excerpts on that here... would be amazing to get your guys' feedback, careful readers and writers that you are!
As always, this list may expand or contract as time passes. But I'm looking forward to delving in, and to seeing what you decide to delve into too.
This week's inspiration comes from a Susan McCabe essay I read on Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art." The villanelle, as McCabe describes, is a form, "tellingly imitative of the obsessional behavior of mourners with their need for repetition and ritual as resistance to 'moving on' and their inevitable search for substitutions." The quote that follows somehow manages to encapsulate both a new way to look at one of my favorite poems, as well as a new way to think about what the practice of writing, and of reading, mean to me:
That's why I read, at least, and probably why I write. Language is everything, and it seems I'm only recently beginning to appreciate something Devika has known forever. ;-)
Hope you're all in for an amazing summer!
Love,
Kim
*Given Amazon's recent behavior towards Hachette, I'm boycotting them and have decided to order today's new books from B&N. Which, did you guys know they offer same-day delivery for free in Manhattan? Win.
I really miss everyone on this blog, whoever may still be here: Bryan, Devika, Camila, Sophie... Victoria? Emily? This blog hasn't proven to be the best way of keeping in touch in the past, but I just re-read a number of our posts and I felt a visceral connection to all of you, more powerful than a Facebook update or newly posted pictures. Bryan smelling "the faintest hint" of Burberry cologne at a fast food restaurant and being convinced that his mind had willed him to "selectively" smell it because he wanted to be reminded of Thomas... until realizing, actually, someone was wearing it just a few feet away. Emily listening to 93.9 on Sunday mornings, wishing she were born in the 40s so she could have been a teenager at the height of Beatles mania. Devika's notes from India, how Hamid's description of "nostalgia as crack cocaine" in The Reluctant Fundamentalist resonated with her thoughts of family there. All our observations on writers and on what we were reading! (Not to mention my overly-verbose posts... eek.)
I hope we can find a way to contribute here and reconnect this summer. I'm busier than I ever was in the past (as we all are) which may make it difficult to read and post often, but even if we all have one or two notes during the summer, that would be enough. A passage even that struck you. One of my old creative writing professors used to start class off with each of us bringing in a line, a paragraph, a song lyric, that intrigued us from the past week. I would love to see what you guys come up with.
I also, after my Sackett workshop last night (pic below from my instructor Dina's rooftop, a lovely place to workshop stories, until it gets dark, haha), finally, for the first time ever, feel like I might have a novel of my own brewing. An idea worth committing to and getting started on. So maybe I'll post some notes or excerpts on that here... would be amazing to get your guys' feedback, careful readers and writers that you are!
Without further ado, my list:
1) Half a Life, Darin Strauss (I'm about halfway through this already)
2) Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose
3) A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, Dina Nayeri
4) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
5) The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
6) No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
7) In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
As always, this list may expand or contract as time passes. But I'm looking forward to delving in, and to seeing what you decide to delve into too.
This week's inspiration comes from a Susan McCabe essay I read on Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art." The villanelle, as McCabe describes, is a form, "tellingly imitative of the obsessional behavior of mourners with their need for repetition and ritual as resistance to 'moving on' and their inevitable search for substitutions." The quote that follows somehow manages to encapsulate both a new way to look at one of my favorite poems, as well as a new way to think about what the practice of writing, and of reading, mean to me:
"We are ultimately left not with control, but with the unresolved tension between mastery and a world that refuses to be mastered; we are left with language."
That's why I read, at least, and probably why I write. Language is everything, and it seems I'm only recently beginning to appreciate something Devika has known forever. ;-)
Hope you're all in for an amazing summer!
Love,
Kim
*Given Amazon's recent behavior towards Hachette, I'm boycotting them and have decided to order today's new books from B&N. Which, did you guys know they offer same-day delivery for free in Manhattan? Win.
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