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.
