B. Morrison's Blog, page 38

The Ha-Ha, by Dave King

I’d never heard of ha-has being installed here in the U.S. I’ve seen them in England, most dating from the Victorian era: walls set into a slope, separating high ground from low, like a river lock. The purpose is to keep the cows or sheep where they belong without disturbing the view. When you look out from the house, all you see lovely green lawns stretching into the distance, under the same principle of having the servants face the wall and pretend to be invisible when the lords and ladies...

Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng

Elena Richardson is living the perfect life in her perfect suburb of Shaker Heights. Although Elena is proud of the suburb’s idealistic beginnings, she’s thankful for its current rule-bound incarnation which fits her own obsessively programmed approach to life.

Well, it would be perfect if it weren’t for her rebellious daughter Izzy. Luckily Elena doesn’t know what her other two children are getting up to. What she does know is that her problems really began when artist and single-mother Mia...

Home, Edited by Sharon Sloan Fiffer and Steve Fiffer

A friend gave me this enjoyable collection of essays, subtitled American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own. Each author takes a room as a starting point for remembering: the porch, the hallway, the dining room, the closet, and so on.

This structure is similar to a writing exercise I use in my memoir classes. I invite the participants to think about a room in their house, perhaps the living room or their bedroom. Then I ask them to stand in the center and mentally do a 360° turn around it,...

[Asian Figures], by W.S. Merwin

Some of the earliest writing in English that we have are Anglo-Saxon proverbs. These pithy statements are a good way to pass on wisdom because they are easy to remember.

Merwin, a prolific and popular poet, a former poet laureate, chose to translate these proverbs from various Asian cultures. He side-steps the thorny question of whether they are poetry, and instead concentrates instead on what they share.

There are qualities that they obviously have in common: an urge to finality of utteran...

Timeout: 1968

I’ve been thinking a lot about 1968. For one thing, I’m on the campus where I landed that year. Remembering what it felt like: all our dreams, all our resolves. Life was different back then. Rules on top of rules: no going barefoot, 10:15 curfews, sororities and fraternities, in loco parentis.

All that was a long time ago. Hard to believe I could be such a long way from 18.

There were drugs then, sure. My kids, when we had the drug talk said, “Your generation was so naïve about drugs.” and...

Light, by Eva Figes

Like Waking, this second novel is slim and beautifully written. In it, we follow Claude Monet and members of his household through a single day, moving seamlessly from one to another. Each has their own concerns, their own fears and griefs.

There’s his wife Alice, haunted by the death a year ago of her daughter Suzanne. Suzanne’s two young children live there as well, cared for by their aunt Marthe. The children are accorded equal space and value in this account with the adults. There are se...

Life Work, by Donald Hall

This slim book is part memoir, part meditation on the role of work in our lives from Donald Hall, who died this week. He and his wife Jane Kenyon moved from Michigan to his grandparents’ farm in 1975, giving up stable teaching jobs for the uncertain income of freelance writers.

Like Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging” where he describes his father digging in the garden outside the window where Heaney sits writing, Hall compares his beloved work laboring with words to the more physical work of his...

Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee

Lee’s second novel is a multi-generational saga of a Korean family, beginning in the early 20th century in a tiny village in Yeong-do and stretching through Tokyo and Yokohama to the present, following one family through this tumultuous time in Korean history.

It starts with the arranged marriage of Hoonie, a good-hearted man who is disfigured by a cleft palate and club foot, to a much younger Yangjin and the birth of their daughter Sunja. While selling her mother’s kimchi at the market, the...

Punishment, by Nancy Miller Gomez

Gomez’s book, part of the Rattle Chapbook Series, grew out of her experiences teaching poetry in Salina Valley State Prison. These are strong poems, often with a twist at the end that pierces your preconceptions.

I was blown away by the title poem, which describes an incident she must have heard about. She enters into it, using strong verbs to detail the happenings and poignant images to rend the heart.

Some poems seem based on observation, such as “Growing Apples” where inmates are excited...

Collected Poems, by Jane Kenyon

In any communication there is a sender, a transference medium, and a recipient. When you whisper a secret to a friend, you are the speaker; the medium is the vibration in the air; and your friend is the recipient. For writers, our medium is our written work and our readers the recipients.

Each of these three components affects the content and quality of the communication. In the various discussion groups and critique sessions in which I’ve participated, I’ve been continually impressed by th...