B. Morrison's Blog, page 17

Author Tours

When I went to Toronto many years ago to visit my son who had moved there, he took me on a tour of the city to show me the places in Michael Ondaatje’s masterful novel In the Skin of a Lion. I had loved the novel, along with the other Can Lit books my son had recommended (Timothy Findley, Alistair MacLeod, Jane Urquhart, David Adams Richards, Margaret Laurence, etc.) at that time not available in the U.S. Somehow, seeing the actual places mentioned in Ondaatje’s book made it come alive for me ...

The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich

When Tookie is sent to federal prison for moving a dead body—it was to help a friend and Tookie didn’t know what else she was moving—a teacher sends her a dictionary. The study of words saves her sanity. Sentence, for example, is not just an independent thought or expression. It is not just a mathematical equation or logical statement. It is both a judgment and a punishment. She says that “the most important skill I’d gained in prison was how to read with murderous attention.”

When she is unexp...

Year of the Monkey, by Patti Smith

Part memoir and part meditation, part travelogue and part dream journal: this book takes us into Smith’s world during the unsettling year 2016. Smith’s wanderings during that Chinese zodiac year certainly embody a monkey’s traits of cleverness, curiosity, and mischievousness.

The year starts for Smith with a series of concerts at San Francisco’s Fillmore Theatre, followed by a surreal visit to Santa Cruz. From there she takes off on solitary wanderings to places like New York, Arizona, Kentuc...

“The Practice,” by Barbara O’Neal

This blog of mine grew out of a reading journal I had been keeping at the recommendation of the marvelous writer and teacher Jewell Parker Rhodes in her craft book Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors. Its lessons on writing craft are honed by exercises and illustrated by story examples and analyses, making it a treasure for all authors.

In the reading journal I jotted down three things that I, as a writer, learned from reading each book. I found the exercise so useful that ...

Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

I read this first novel by the author of the Gilead series a long time ago. Or rather, I sank into it, stunned by its richness. Sisters Ruth and Lucille are being brought up by their grandmother on the outskirts of Fingerbone, a small town uncomfortably situated on a lake somewhere in the northwest part of the U.S. “It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below.”

Whether it is flooding the town or receding into its s...

A Fortnight in September, by R. C. Sherriff

Touted as an escape from the pandemic, this 1931 novel follows a lower-middle-class London family as they go on their annual vacation to the seaside holiday spot Bognor Regis.

Mr. Stevens carefully updates his Marching Orders, the list of what each person needs to do to prepare for the trip, not out of an autocratic need to control but from a genuine desire to have things go well for everyone. Mrs. Stevens hides her terror of the sea because her family always has such a good time. Dick at 17 a...

Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey

Trethewey is one of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed.

With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood, the move to Atlanta, and the terrible path to her mother’s murder when Trethewey was only 19. The girl’s response was to bury all memory of the years in Atlanta, the good and the bad. The woman’s self-appointed task i...

The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters

After the carnage of the Great War, many women in England found themselves condemned to spinsterhood. That’s not why in 1922 Frances Wray remains unmarried and living with her mother in South London, where their lives are circumscribed by the endless domestic chores, church on Sundays, and occasional visits with a few friends.

Frances does the domestic work, her mother being elderly and still grieving for the loss of her sons in the war. They once had a servant, but after the death of Frances’...

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce

I enjoyed Miss Benson’s Beetle so much that I went back to look at this, Joyce’s first novel. The recently retired Harold has too much time on his hands. His wife Maureen keeps their home in a small village in southern England immaculate, seemingly angry at Harold though it is not clear why. For Harold “Days went by and nothing changed; only his waist thickened, and he lost more hair.”

Then a letter arrives, addressed to him in a shaky scrawl. It is from a former colleague Queenie Hennessy. The...

What Comes Next and How to Like It? by Abigail Thomas

There are many ways to write a memoir. You can make it a mostly chronological narrative of a particular time in your life—a small, self-contained period—as I did in my memoir Innocent. Still working chronolgoically, you can hopscotch through the years following a particular object or relationship, as J. R. Moehringer did in The Tender Bar. You can concentrate on a particular incident and explore how it ripples through the rest of your life, as Marguerite Duras did in The Lover.

You can abandon...