Kathryn Hinds's Blog

This is my first Mother's Day without my mom, and it's been a hard one. Along with the sadness, though, there have been a great many happy memories--and some not entirely happy, but nonetheless comforting. Among these are the memories of Mom taking care of me during all my childhood illnesses and after my surgeries. Here is a scene from my verse novel Arise, Fair Sun that is based largely on my memory of waking up to my mother's care after my second open-heart surgery:
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2...

Yesterday I did something that, for me, is remarkable: I wrote a 1500-word short story. This probably seems like it's not a very big deal; I've written more than fifty books, after all. But my tendency--my proclivity, even--has been to write long. In my YA nonficition, I have always had to cut and cut and cut to fit the required word count. The 16,000-word manuscripts were not such a huge challenge, but getting manuscripts to come in at 10,000-12,000 words--painful! Then there's my novel: 120,000 words. And that's after lots of pruning. So to tell a whole story in only 1500 words--and to write the whole thing in a single day--feels like quite an achievement, especially as I had pretty much convinced myself that I was incapable of writing a short story. But I did it, and I really enjoyed the process, too. Sometimes it's nice to be proved wrong!

And now, I have to reread the thing to see if it's actually any good. :-)

A few nights ago I read Terry Pratchett's delightful homage to Jane Austen in his latest, Snuff. As I've continued with the novel, I've come to a surprising realization: while Pride and Prejudice is still my favorite book, Jane Austen has become my second-favorite author, displaced by Pratchett--who in a great many ways is, after all, Austen's heir. Like Austen, Pratchett is a keen observer of the subtleties of human emotion, motivation, and folly, and is simultaneouly an ironic and incredibly humane writer (much like Thackeray, as well). Both Austen and Pratchett mock human pretension yet have a deep empathy for human frailty. Both celebrate the virtues of intellect and clear-headedness, while also believing in the powers of love, art, and beauty. And, of course, both are deliciously artful in their use of language, and both have the marvelous gift of making us laugh. Pratchett, though--mainly through accidents of history and fate, it must be admitted--is able to paint on a much larger canvas; his work as a result has a kind of Shakespearean scope. And then Pratchett has the twist he gets from working within the fantasy genre, which allows him both to play with the genre conventions and to poke at contemporary society from a bit of a distance. So at first we think we are laughing at Discworld, and by the time we realize we are actually laughing at ourselves, wisdom--the beginning of which is self-knowledge--is already creeping in under cover of mirth.

“IF WE DON’T TURN THE WHEEL, IT WILL NOT TURN”


Our ancestors in their simplicity,
we hear, believed the spent midwinter sun
would die at last and never rise again
without their rites—so every turning of
the seasons had its keeping and its forms,
and failure in them meant the end of all.
“Now we know better”—or do we know less?
In the pattern’s loss, what have we gained?
The days we set aside to mourn the sun
or drive the cattle through the fires or bless
the fields joined our spirits, bodies, minds
to the moving heart of all. We did not turn
the earth upon its axis—what we turned,
and still might turn, was purely our own souls.


(by Kathryn Hinds)

I was thrilled to learn yesterday that a book I copyedited, Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, received the 2011 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. A novel in verse, it truly was one of the most outstanding projects I worked on last year, and every accolade it receives is well deserved. Many congratulations to Ms. Lai--I am so glad that this award will bring many more readers to this beautiful book!

http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2011_y...

My poem "Pomegranate" is in the premier issue of Dead, Mad, or a Poet (http://www.deadmadorpoet.com/issues/). I think this is the first time I've been in the very first issue of a magazine--I love this energy of newness and beginnings!

I love the quotation, "Blessed are those who can laught at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused," and I got to wondering who originally said it. So far as I can discover, nobody knows. But in the course of my search I found several other quotations about laughter (thanks to http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Laughter) that I particularly like:

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
--Edmund Burke in the Preface to Brissot's Address to his Constituents (1794)

"You grow up the first day you have your first good laugh--at yourself."
--Ethel Barrymore, as quoted in 1,600 Quotes & Pieces of Wisdom That Just Might Help You Out When You're Stuck in a Moment (and Can't Get Out of It!) (2003) by Gary P. Guthrie

"Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not."
--Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, Ch. 2 (1986)

"Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand."
--Mark Twain, "The Chronicle of Young Satan" (ca. 1897–1900, unfinished)

"The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion."
--Richard Feynman, in What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988)

"You can't laugh and be afraid at the same time—of anything."
--Stephen Colbert, Parade interview, September 23, 2007

The new issue of Goblin Fruit went live today, and it's got two poems from my sonnet sequence "Eurydice Variations"!
http://www.goblinfruit.net/2011/summer/

I'm so happy to have a poem in the new issue of Canary, one of my favorite online literary journals! You can read it here: http://www.hippocketpress.org/canary/...

The new issue of 14 by 14 has just gone live, and it's got one of my sonnets. :-)

http://www.14by14.com/Sonnets/March20...