Jeannine Atkins's Blog, page 43

Borrowed Names Interview with Bethany Hegedus

Now and then I give talks to aspiring writers and other people. One leaves lecture platforms as we mostly leave classrooms, our books, or just about anything --say, parenting -- wondering what the heck, if anything, got through. I was lucky enough to have one listener approach me years later and tell me that my words had mattered to her. Bethany Hegedus and I are now friends and colleagues, and it was a thrill to read her first novel, Between Us Baxters, which is about friendships in a small...

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

Before, during, and for some time after I wrote the picture book, Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon (FSG, 1999), I read as much about the fossil-hunter as I could find. Since she grew up in the first decade of the 1800s, one of many children in a poor family on the coast of England, she never learned to read or write very well, and most of what we know about her is hearsay passed down from scientists who bought the fossils she collected. Many of her finds are now displayed in the British Museum ...

Ways to Listen to the World

The journals I keep these days aren't records of my life, but I sometimes jot down notes of sights or incidents that touch me for reasons I can't always know. Sometimes we're lucky enough to have someone tell a short story, perhaps just a sentence, that goes right to our heart, but often it's what's overheard, an attention to accidents, that give me what I need for a book. When my husband and I visited our daughter in L.A. this summer, we did some touristy things, some hanging out, and I wrot...

The Journal Keeper: A Memoir by Phyllis Theroux

I recently wrote about keeping a journal as some kind of dust bin, but that's not the sort Phyllis Theroux keeps. This book is edited from six years of journals, but even so, her method is to convey finished thoughts and telling anecdotes, and here we do feel as we have the best of the best. Her writing has ranged from essays, often on motherhood, to various sorts of fiction, and here her topic is often writing: how to stay inspired, how to make a living, how to keep going when making a livin...

Back Home

We've taken family vacations in Maine, near where my husband and I got married, since soon after our daughter was born. That's a lot of memories, and they include my friend Pat, a teacher with summers off, who loved the ocean, though her having lupus meant we tended to hit the beach more toward evening and under wide-brimmed hats. My brother-in-law Don loved visiting his beloved niece, frolicking in waves, eating ice cream, and playing Scrabble after supper. One summer when Emily was little, ...

Balancing the "Huh?" and "Oh!" of Poetry

As my poetry manuscript gets shorter and slimmer, that strange goal, I'm not only careful that I don't go overboard and end up where I began --with a blank page -- but I weigh words. And punctuations. As I trim, I watch to make sure that not too much meaning disappears, but leave just enough to hint or provoke. I'm trying to be as careful as a jeweler chipping a precious stone, knowing the right angle can let in more light, but a wrong stroke will just make it a smaller rock. Or dust. My aim...

National Dog Day! and Maine!

I love dogs and I love Jama http://jamarattigan.livejournal.com/461197.html. You can click on the link to celebrate both and see a picture of me with big Parker and lap-sized Louis. I'm the only one looking at the camera, but there are shots of children's book writers with more aim-to-please dogs. In Parker's defense, when my husband, with camera, called Parker to look, he obediently came when called. We don't have a command for smile at the camera.

Have a great day! It poured in southern Main...

A Thousand Bad Drawings

Our friend Dan recently told about an art student who brought him four unfinished drawings. Okay, not bad, he said, "but why didn't you finish them? You need to make a thousand bad drawings before you get a good one. So finish these and get back to work on all the next."

She insisted on a critique of the unfinished work, so he delivered, and she defended.

Which doesn't help either. Agree or disagree, but use either to finish the work.

Bad art comes before the good isn't just a rule for the begin...

What Does Discipline Look Like?

I once read about how John Cheever, who wrote brilliant stories blending realism and a bit of the fantastic, while writing in New York City in the fifties put on a white shirt and well-pressed jacket before heading to work at his typewriter. He didn't commute to an office, but he wanted to look the part.

Now here I am on coastal Maine with a gorgeous view, wearing t-shirt, shorts, shabby sun hat, bare feet, and a grocery list in my pocket. Sometimes I watch a chipmunk scurry with a mouth fill...

Friday Five in Maine

1. Two blue herons.

2. Five deer.

3. Three sailboats

4. About twenty-three Canada geese on the salt marsh.

5. Many many rocks and one that looks like a cuneiform tablet, speaking to me from about five thousand years ago.



Have a great weekend! My daughter arrives tomorrow –yay! -- and things may get livelier. But we're enjoying pure bliss and peace for now. And, yes, for the record, I'm writing.