Rules

Such a strange day here. It is snowing. My friends are abuzz with the news of BH's passing.

Here are a bunch of famous writer's rules for writing fiction. What are yours?

And here's part two (including Joyce Carol Oates)

Moving books

This NYT piece has me second-guessing moving every book I own into my new efficiency. I'm still comforted by their presence even though many of them have been in boxes for over a year and a half. Sometimes I'm jealous of a house with spare bookshelves; other times I'm skeptical or depressed.

What books will you never get rid of? And what should leave your collection, or what did you most recently part with and why? The only reason I keep that heavy burgundy literary criticism book from Debra's class is for the Nietzsche essay, which I could easily photocopy. There are books I'm sure I'll never read, or that I have tried reading more than once and that collect dust on makeshift bookmarks browning and crumpled out their tops. I'll make a list as I start to pack. Anyone want a copy of Month-by-Month Gardening in Texas? Better Living Through Ventriloquism? Of Wolves and Men?

writing groups

hey! have any of you participated in face-to-face writing groups, workshops, etc. since we graduated? i'm hoping to find some people locally to take on julia cameron's the artist's way, a 12-week program with daily commitments. has anyone tried this? or, what methods have worked to trick yourself back into a habit that used to come so easily? what's worked, not worked for you? i'm totally serious.

More babies!

Beards and Laura got their referral yesterday (after 18+ months)!! I don't even think he reads this blog anymore, but I want to give them a hearty and long overdue congrats. The '07 family grows...

Southwestern Studies I, August 2004-December 2004

I must lighten my load of notebooks I tote around every time I move, so I'm doing the painful and picking through B.A., M.A., M.F.A. to see which ones can go in the recycle bin. It's that nagging in my brain that keeps this from being an easy process, "but what if, at some point in the future, I need to know the nuances of difference between stem succulents and leaf succulents, drought deciduous species and indicator species."

Anyway, I feel some tribute must be paid. Here's a list of my favorite gems from my notes for Southwestern Studies I in 2004, a class I only managed to stay awake through because you, Jack, and you, Amelia, helped me through it:

"Cuaranchuia- cannibals. The Europeans are the ones who ate each other. The civilized taught the uncivilized cannablialism."

"berdache- man taking on dress, role, status of the opposite sex. Anthropologists interested in this ongoing tradition, primitive people engaged in long history of homosexulaity. Cyclone Covey translation= bad!"

"deserts have sparse vegetation."

"D.H. says for next week's reading, 'don't bother with the footnotes, just the text.'"

"Conquistadors: 1) wore sombreros 2) were magic 3) liked coffee in the mornings"

"Cancer is unnatural.
The unnatural infringes on birds.
A man made lake.
First atomic test-New Mexico."

"American cowboy-one of the most iconic America figures."

"Change-Hall, Montejano
Imagine that you are __________."

"Geronimo was an Apache. Apaches either killed or corraled."

So what does everyone else do with all of their old paper? I'm interested. Are you keeping all the notebooks, keeping a select few; are you the type who can dump them all wholesale into the bin?

McArthur Genuis Grants

for Heather McHugh, Edwidge Danicat, and Deborah Eisenberg!

Take Me To Your Reader(s)

I'm prepping (get a load of that!) for a unit/week on voice, and I've been reading Janet Burroway's chapter from Imaginative Writing, which is pretty good, but now I have this question jumping around my brainy brain. Everything I've ever read about voice talks about where we're writing from, or from where the narrator/speaker is telling, how important it is to capture the idiosyncrasies of diction and syntax, pitch, tone, mood, etc. What I'm wondering is if any of you give, or have given, that same amount of thought to whom your narrator is telling the story? And, if so, did/does it help?

I've read of authors having ideal readers they're always writing to, and I'm interested in that, I suppose, if you have one and what her name is and what she looks like and when she gets mad at you or whatever. But I wonder if we sometimes fall into this ill-defined idea of the perfect reader who sits around reading literary fiction all day and loves to be entertained by writers with degrees. For me, it used to be y'all and our teachers I'd write to specifically, but, unfortunately, that's not always the case anymore. So I'm more curious to know if, other than epistolary stories or the semi-gimmicky 2nd-person turns to "the physical reader as the new, implicated character in the story," you can think of any stories (or have written any) with a clearly defined or implied audience. I'm wondering if this lesson we teach our comp students, about writing to a specific audience for a specific purpose (ie: you write an email this way to your parents, this way to your friends), might not benefit us as creative writers? Any experience, thoughts, suggestions? Does this make any sense?