My Personal Book Posse

There have been lots of recommended reading lists going around lately. It's summer and people like to read or at least talk about reading. Experience in books is highly personal. Whenever anyone asks for a book recommendation, I always give the titles my friends or teachers wrote. It's too hard to say to someone looking for something to read on the beach or on the plane: Go grab One Hundred Years of Solitude.  It will rock you under the redwoods and the entire world will never be the same again.

Doesn't everyone have a personal book posse? A set of titles that rocked them under the redwoods at exactly the moments in time when they became who they were? These books are your foundation of personhood.  They have your back.  They get you.  Well, here is my personal book posse, in case you were wondering:

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  All of us freshmen at Porter College in UC Santa Cruz in the late eighties read this for our core course.  It peeled off the surface of the world for me.  Then it peeled off my skin and left me to walk around in my bones.  It was painful and glorious and too much.  Just too much.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.  I read this when I was seventeen and it was exactly everything I was feeling at seventeen. I moped around for weeks after reading that novel, because poor Tess.  That Angel Clare was so cold.

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Holden Caulfield shouldn't have been such a revelation to a teenager in the eighties.  But he was.  Sometimes he was the only one who understood.

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx.  This gets a reread at least once a year.  I carry it around with me in my purse half the time.  Quoyle with his chin, Aunt with her strong fingers.  These are good, ferocious people.

Sula by Toni Morrison.  For that scene when Sula cuts off the tip of her own finger to keep that group of boys away. The mushroom cap, the cherry blood. I guess Ms. Morrison and I both speak and write in the English language, but sometimes I doubt it. She's a most powerful magician. The most powerful I've ever read.

The Weetzie Bat Books by Francesca Lia Block. These were published in 1989, but I didn't come across them until I was in my thirties when they promptly made everything possible. I knew all along there were fairies.

White Oleander by Janet Fitch. If you read this, it will be difficult to believe that the characters aren't people you've actually known.  Evocative and alive in some of the same ways Block's writing is.  Those Los Angeles girls are a sensual lot.

Speed of Light by Elizabeth Rosner. I've never looked at a Gingko tree the same way since. It's about some of the ways genocide and torture haunt the human heart, and how love rules anyway. One of the best endings of a book ever.

Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. Victoria will open your eyes to a whole population of young people dumped onto the streets once they age out of the foster system. Beautiful writing.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan. My introduction into zombie literature, and I didn't even know it was about zombies at first.  Apocalyptic horror fiction for young adults. I loved it so much I order 75 copies for the school where I worked at the time. 

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? a short story by Joyce Carol Oates.  Killed me when I was sixteen and made me write my first short story that wasn't about drunk drivers and vampires.

Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories by Raymond Carver. I read this on the dirty carpet on the floor of the studio I lived in with my husband. I was 23 and I had a marriage, a full time career, and a feeling of possibility.  I read these stories and rolled around on the carpet in amazement and then I stopped rolling and looked at the ceiling and thought, I'm going to be a writer.

The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds.  These poems are impossible to take in all at once.  Each one is a devastating, impossibly rich chocolate in a golden box of pain.

What is in your book posse?

The Butterfly Garden

In her excellent writer’s memoir The Getaway Car, Ann Patchett likens a new novel idea to a beautiful butterfly flying overhead.  It is such a perfect thing before a writer grabs it and ruins it by turning it into words and scenes and chapters.  A writer’s idea is at its most divine before she writes a single word. 

For the past two weeks I have resided in a butterfly garden of ideas for my own next novel.  I write down the plot outlines, characterizations and titles in a special notebook I keep just for the purpose.  Every one of these ideas is perfect, sublime. They are not yet squashed within the pages of a draft but rather gently kept between the covers of my idea notebook. They land on my nose and flit their wings. Their wind on my eyelids feels like hope, meaning, truth and possibility.

Last night, I chose one.  I’ve bent its wings already, forcing it into a plot outline of 22 chapters.  Now that I begin to write, the characters won’t flesh out exactly as I’ve imagined them.  They will grow their own vocal chords and saying what they want to say.  They’ll head this way on the highway instead of that.  The meaning that I’ve imagined for their lives will shift and mean something slightly or wholly different.

We are on our adventure together now, this idea and me. We exit the garden and enter into real life which requires cause and effect, show not tell and a narrative arc.  I’ve chosen this particular idea for its relevance and strength.  I’ve chosen this idea because it matters to me the most, because I looked into my teenaged daughter’s face over dinner two nights ago and it came to me like that.

And so we begin. 

Writer and artist friends, what is your process?  How do you decide which idea to turn into form? 

Blue Morpho. Photo by unknown photographer, posted on www.mini-life.com.

 

The Boys From Rugby

Ten minutes ago I returned home from this year's Squaw Valley Community of Writers poetry reading benefit featuring Bob Hass, Evie Shockley, Brenda Hillman, Forest Gander and Sharon Olds.  So poetry tonight, and that's how it is.

The Boys From Rugby

The boys from rugby pass

cleats clacking on the wet concrete

and in the puddles their otherworld brothers march under identical leaden skies

These subalterns with mud on their shins

These wild and tired boys

These other mothers’ sons

Who will be home in time for dinner

Smile on each other then

These northern lads from northern lands

The west has already been won.

So I stand by

And I stand by.

Other sons pass through unwon lands on the other side of the gate

Once I stood

For those boys wild and broken

Those otherworld brothers

My morning boys with their endless needing

On the run from R.I.P.s sneaky as rogue waves

Forgotten sons of loveless mothers with hearts like graves.

I do not stand by them now.

My arms are empty and hang by my sides.

The boys from rugby pass and smile

In friendly greetings, too fleet for Death

Too loved for need yet

Needlessly I stand. And I stand.

Summer

The focal point of the day is swimming. We live within walking distance of a community pool.  This walk is just a little bit too far for comfort on a hot day but we take it anyway knowing the water will feel all the better for it. It always does.

Hardly anybody uses community pools in our community anymore so we have the whole thing nearly to ourselves. We play mermaids.

The we is my nine-year-old daughter and me.  I call her Witch Baby but her real name is Margaret. She reminds me of Hester's Pearl, hence the name.  Plus she has powers. I'm only bothering to tell you this because I have the time. I'm not in a hurry right now.

We have been using the hour before pool time for household tasks that never get done during the school year.  Yesterday we reorganized a giant closet of chaos and turned it into a usable space. Today we touched up the ceiling where I smudged it with the wall paint two years ago.  These were impossible, insurmountable tasks. Together did them in less than 45 minutes. 

This morning she drew pictures in the garden while I wrote out a new book idea longhand. Tomorrow is for scrubbing the windowsills and then movies. Sunday we're thinking church. Then maybe baking something. Monday the pool. Maybe a roller blade trip. Library. Reading time. We're on chapter two of The Hobbit, shared reading at bedtime. Which is whenever we're tired.

Tonight I'm going to hear Sharon Olds and Robert Hass read their poetry at a benefit for Squaw Valley Community of Writers. My older daughter is coming with me. She is tired from working but has kindly agreed to be my date for the evening. 

This is the first summer in a long time that I haven't worked.  I'm off school, in between novels. I feel untethered to the earth without work. I cling to the household tasks, the pool, the poetry like an astronaut to a lifeline, bouncing from satellite to satellite searching for gravity. I protect my children's downtime so that they never turn to a job or employer for evidence of their personhood. They make their own gravity.

Tomorrow morning I'll go for a long walk and think of things. I won't look at the time. I'll think of what to write next, of the kind of woman I want to be, of what sorts of hummingbirds are knocking around my backyard, of nothing. Maybe I'll float away for a while. Maybe I will come back to earth.

Weekday mornings are so unbelievably hectic.