Drew Myron's Blog, page 13

Cozy Companions: 5 Good Books!

Brrr!

Here’s a mystery: Why does winter come so quick and last so long?

I crave sun and love summer. The best thing about winter — aside from cashmere sweaters and skiing — is the chance to spend hours tucked in a blanket, reading good books. Really, this is my ideal winter weekend.

Just as the weather has turned suddenly cold, my reading tastes have made a turnaround, too. Instead of my usual diet of sad novels, I’ve been tearing through mystery/thrillers. And surprise, it’s been easy, breezy and fun! Sure, I’ve read a few duds, but overall this genre has me completely hooked.

Here are a few of my latest favorites:

Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews
When an assistant steals a famous author’s life, a complicated web unravels. This smart mystery, written by a first-time novelist, will hold special appeal to writers (and voracious readers).

The Mutual Friend by Carter Bays
Sharp, sad, kooky, telling, touching and original — this of-the-moment novel is a masterful mystery of engaging, and surprising, humanity.

The Lies I Tell by Julie Clark
An accomplished con artist reinvents herself with strategic precision. I couldn’t put down this compelling mystery.

The Golden Couple by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen
In this easy-to-read thriller, a ‘perfect’ couple is far from ideal. The authors are former journalists who have co-authored numerous best-selling mystery novels.

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
This is an easy-to-read, not-quite-light but not-too-breezy mystery with great attention to detail and tone. Moriarty, a best-selling author, is an expert at weaving taut, addictive tales.

YOUR TURN: What’s on your good books list? What should I read next? I love your suggestions. Winter is long, keep ‘em coming!

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

Let Yourself Maybe

Start small. Write a line, draw a circle, paint a moment, carve a minute. It doesn’t matter how or when or why. Don’t think or blink. Move the hand, move the mind. Make something.

Why?

Because expression expands head and heart.
Because something is stirring that longs to stretch.
Because your something is different than my something.
Because it feels good.

Start small.

Don’t try for “Art” — find instead the tiny seed of a thing that may (or may not) lead to another thing, better thing, bigger thing. Maybe not. Let yourself maybe.

Set aside self-awareness. Let the hand glide and collide. Let go.

The act is the art.

This week I quickly made these “Hurry Up Horoscopes.”

Because I was exercising the writing muscle.
Because my journal writing was stagnant and stale.
Because I was tired of my own words.

I like these acts that have no point or purpose or intentional ‘art-ness’ — just fun. Remember when making was fun, with no pressure to perform?
Remember when making would take you to places deep and hidden, rich and full, all inside just waiting for your attention?

I want to feel that surprise again, to know the suspension of expectation.

And you — do you open hands & heart and leap across the divide of

here and there / stuck and struck?

What are you making?

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

You can't imagine a stillness that's not

The pine branches, bent sideways by wind, suggest I shut my eyes.

Shut your eyes and you shall see better.

Are you sad? You look so sad, I tell the trees.

We only look sad because you can't imagine a stillness that's not.

 
— from Rough Magic, by Lara Prior-Palmer

  

1.
What did we once say — that silence swallows and grows?

I'm still chasing both. The light, the light, pouring through windows, inching across bare floor, slipping through cracks and under doors. Turning gray to gold.

And then, the hunt for silence in which the light can grow. The plant you gave me one year ago is just now blooming, first flowers from a long suffering.

Don't you, too, hold your breath when the light arrives, fearful sound will shutter the calm, dim the glow? It's why we step outside in exclamation — what a beautiful day, we say, naming what we can't control.

2.
We travel to a big landscape with a dry, austere beauty. The days are pinecone quiet and we listen for birds and search for sheep edged along steep basalt cliffs. The nights are starry and immense. We see so much and nothing at all. Darkness turns everything meaningful and meaningless. 

In a small cabin, we dance to a song we've pressed through time. Of course, I cry — not a sob but a few silent tears. Of course I feel too much, more than the moment, a thousand days collected in this one. Maybe it’s relief, or shadow, or light, or a stillness that is not sad.

3.
The world whispers. We swallow light. Our stillness grows.

 

Surfacing

So much depends upon

morning light,

            its quiet presence

its pressing withdrawal.

So much depends upon

suppose and repose

how we stretch or

                        slow    

the angle of action,

the shine of almost.

— Drew Myron

* with a nod to Williams Carlos Williams
for the borrowed line, “so much depends.”

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

What Does It Take?

PROCESS

Everything is change.
We find our voices in making.
Discovery can feel like a tightrope,
the essence of faith.

— Drew Myron

A room, a pen, a slice of light? Coffee, cocktail, tepid tea? A mood, a mindset, a muse? What does it take to move you to make?

Do you stretch limbs long and lean, or curl in a huddle of hangover and hope? A prayer, a poem, a bit of prose? Potato chips, cigarette, a rush of gumption, a grove of trees? What do you need to hum and thrum, to hive and thrive, to step into and out of your self?

Tell me, what’s your process?

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

Old Tricks

The Art of Dying Well

First you try everything —

memory, gratitude, light.

The trees witness everything

and your braided heart

beats with advice:

let the world

surprise you.

I’m up to my old tricks — collecting words and lines from the nearest thing: cereal box, junk mail, horoscope and bookshelf. This poem is composed of titles from a stack staring at me while I drink my morning coffee.

For writers, readers and word believers, challenge is found at every turn: Write a poem with just six words! Write a letter that includes items from your grocery list! Rearrange these words and make new sense!

Toss me a word, a line, an idea — I’ll make a poem, a ponder, a piece. It’s all taunts and tricks, and these teasers stretch my writing mind and muscle. But mostly they usher me in to possibility.

Poetry is everywhere, says James Tate, it just needs editing.

My book title poem is created from these books: Dear Memory, First You Try Everything, Advice for Future Corpses, The Art of Dying Well, The Trees Witness Everything, A Braided Heart, Gratitude — and a line from horoscope author Holiday Mathis who recently urged Pisces to let the world surprise you.

The element of surprise, combined with attention, stirs the mind and sparks play. Word catching is the start. The rest is add, subtract, hold and release.

Poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,

they are sleeping. They are the shadows

drifting across our ceilings the moment

before we wake up. What we have to do

is live in a way that lets us find them.

— Naomi Shihab Nye, from Valentine for Ernest Mann

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

 

Thankful Thursday: Filled

Please join me for Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for things small and large, from the puny to the profound. Because attention attracts gratitude and gratitude expands joy, let us gather thanksgivings.

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Where I live, the land is now flush with fresh food, an abundance of orchards and vineyards. Every field is thick: blueberries, blackberries, apricots, peaches, apples, pears, grapes.

Further on, the fields turn dry in a sepia patchwork of wheat as solitary tractors crawl across hill and slope. A different kind of plenty. A different sort of beauty.

Closer to home, neighbors share their garden bounty, come to me with arms full of tomatoes, cucumbers, and kindness. I am filled.

On morning walks, the sun burns bright. I pass thickets of bachelor buttons and sunflowers with heavy heads. The wind calms and I move into stillness, break through the racket in my head.

At night when windows are wide open, soft air arrives, wraps me in sleep.

Oh this world, this aching beauty.

SEPTEMBER

This far north, the harvest happens late.

Rooks go clattering over the sycamores

whose shadows yawn after them, down to the river.

Uncut wheat staggers under its own weight.

Summer is leaving too, exchanging its gold

for brass and copper. It is not so strange

to feel nostalgia for the present; already

this September evening is as old

as a photograph of itself. The light, the shadows

on the field, are sepia, as if this were

some other evening in September, some other

harvest that went ungathered years ago.

 

— Dorothy Lawrenson

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

10(ish) Great Books I Read This Summer

Just like writing, my reading pleasure travels through peaks and valleys. This summer I’m on a ride of really good books.

POETRY

The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang

A brilliant collection of short, powerful poems that are both ethereal brushes and in-the-gut punches.

Passage

Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place —
someone’s hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn’t that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?

Also recommend her other new book: Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief

Bough Down by Karen Green

You really can judge a book by its cover. I chose this book for its great design: a vellum wrap cover with interior pages that feature short blocks of poetic prose and ample white space — places to breathe and rest. The evocative 'story' is told in spare but rich language and combined with small images of text-based art, that makes you slow and rush all at once.

Vintage Sadness by Hanif Willis Abdurraqib

Inspired, influenced, and infused with a wide range of contemporary music — from Kanye to Kirk Franklin and lots more — this poetry collection sings!

My fave: And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When the Rapture Comes.

Download the book (and playlist) for FREE.

FICTION

I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck

This is a love story that is tragic, ordinary, and extraordinary — all at the same time. Beautifully told in elegant stops and starts that mimic memory and grief.

Afterlife by Julia Alvarez

A slim, quiet novel with deep reverberations. The story reveals one life jolt after another and asks: What do we owe those in crisis? And how do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves?

NON-FICTION

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke

“Only a few friends realized at the time how much physical suffering I was undergoing. We are bad at recognizing the suffering of others unless we are given clear-cut clues and evidence. And so invisible illnesses often go unacknowledged.”

Brilliant, insightful, scholarly and thorough. Blending the personal and universal, this books provides a sweeping examination of chronic illness —from mysterious symptoms to failed diagnoses, elusive treatments, and the devastating toll disease can take. With clarity, compassion and painstaking research, the author calls for a seismic shift in our approach to disease — and I am cheering her on!

The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life by Katy Butler

A no-nonsense guide for living, aging, and dying with meaning and joy. Katy Butler offers clear advice with warmth and wisdom, with an emphasis on a life of quality-over-quantity. Also recommend her earlier book: Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death.

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom

Amy Bloom writes with humanity and humor.While heartbreaking, this story of an end-of-life decision is told with such wit and candor that it left me in triumphant tears.

These Precious Days: Essays by Ann Patchett

A surprising and moving meditation on family, friendship, reading and writing.

“The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past.”

SOME THOUGHTS
There are things you don’t notice until you share your reading choices:

• I’m reading a lot of books about illness and death. (Don’t worry, I’m fine).

• I’m reading a lot of books about marriage. (Don’t worry, I’m happily hitched).

• I’m reading books with tree titles that have little to do with trees:
The Trees Witness Everything and Bough Down

• I’m not trying to read anything. That is, my book choices are random and mostly spontaneous. I keep a running list of books I want to read but an interesting cover or great title can change my course, as does the proliferation of Little Free Libraries.

• Reading is my mental health medicine of choice. What’s yours?

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

Writing, Not Writing

Are you doing the work of being a writer?

1.
I let the question simmer, an hour, a day, a week, more. In my head I explain, defend, whine and walk away. Your question is innocent. You know what's important to me and you're offering a gentle encouragement. Not what are you writing, or why aren't you writing but the kindness of a gentle lob that asks:

Is your heart beating, your hand moving?
Do you still move in the world touching everything you want to feel?

2.
I've been numbed into an old exhaustion of caring and not caring. Everything matters so nothing matters. The world is weighty and my words are not able to sustain these winds.

 3.
"I remember nodding as if I was fine. I was fine. I had language. And it would be the one thing that would keep returning, like light," writes Victoria Chang in Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. “Language felt like wanting to drown but being able to experience drowning by standing on a pier."

4.
Years ago, a poet-friend stopped writing, for an entire year, by choice. You can read about her experience here. “This decision came as a relief,” she said. “Immediately a kind of cocoon began to form around my deepest self.”

At the time of her announcement, I was energized with my own world of writing, reading, teaching, and couldn't imagine why anyone would push words away. I’d lived through writing blocks and serious slumps but to willingly cease seemed so forced and unnecessary.

Time, however, may have softened my view.  

5.
Swimming, I hear my own ragged breath as a sort of secret language. My arms slice through silence and I kick to shore. It's never easy, the strokes, the breathing. I have to think. But all these years, the still water holds me. Is writing the same — instinct and breath?

6.
Find the light, you say.
But the day is dimming and how can I hold what I cannot see?

7.
Don't try so hard.
Give yourself a break.
(but stop whining)

8.
This is your fallow season, you say. Write anyway.

Nearly every day of his life poet William Stafford rose early and wrote a poem.

“It is like fishing,” he explained. “If I am to keep writing, I cannot bother to insist on high standards . . . I am following a process that leads so wildly and originally into new territory that no judgment can at the moment be made about values, significance, and so on . . . I am headlong to discover.”

9.
Today in the forest, tree roots provide a path.

Thick, tangled, ancient, a staircase and walk, a cragged way forward.

Is paying attention a poem, or just a good first step?

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

Sob Stories

Sometimes when the world is heavy and your heart is worn, you need a good, wrenching, cleansing, body-shaking cry.

ca·thar·tic

/kəˈTHärdik/

adjective — providing psychological relief through the open expression of strong emotions; causing catharsis, as in: “crying is a cathartic release.”

— from Whistling in the Dark: A Doubters Dictionary by Frederick Buechner

When it’s time for catharsis, I pull out the proper tools: movies, television, and books.

My top movie for a good cleansing cry is always Magnolia. It’s a potent mix of stellar acting, interlacing storylines, and the alchemy of the Aimee Mann soundtrack (particularly the repeated song Save Me, with the lines: “If you could save me / From the ranks of the freaks / Who suspect they could never love anyone.”

My latest favorite television binge is Six Feet Under. This odd drama series had a devoted following when it debuted 20 years ago and frequently stirs my out-of-nowhere tears.

My favorite tear-inducing novels come unexpectedly. I don’t go looking for catharsis. It just happens, which makes it all the more powerful and cleansing. Years ago, back when I attended church and had more faith in institutions, I had a similar feeling: a sudden rise of emotion that swells in the chest, gathers in the throat, spills over and leaves to leave me both foolish and released. Tears are such a bubbling mystery.

But sometimes you need help finding those feels-good-to-feel-sad kind of books. Please, let me be your guide:

The Good Women of Safe Harbour
by Bobbi French

A life-affirming novel about a woman facing death and mending a friendship.

“Fight. Such a flat, ugly word. Why was everyone forever harping about fighting? I’d taken to reading the obituaries lately, paying close attention to the ones that read ‘lost her courageous battle with cancer’ or some such nonsense. It seemed to me the mortality had somehow been made over as a character defect.”

This beautiful and sometimes funny book is my favorite novel of 2022.

One Heart
by Jane McCafferty

A quiet character study of the simple and conflicting bonds of sisterhood. This is a novel of both despair and hope.

A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara

A staggering, brutal, poignant novel about a man physically and emotionally broken. (Caution: As with most things, readers are deeply divided on the brilliance — or not — of this book).

“Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice.”

The Magical Language of Others
by E.J. Koh

A powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter, that is written with a level of poetic detachment that provides space to hold the pain.

“Neither happiness nor sadness are ever done with us. They are always passing by.”

The Great Believers
by Rebecca Makkai

A sweeping story that weaves numerous storylines, from AIDS to art to friendships lost and found. Written with beautiful economy and precision.

“But when someone’s gone and you’re the primary keeper of his memory—letting go would be a kind of murder, wouldn’t it? I had so much love for him, even if it was a complicated love, and where is all that love supposed to go?”

Crossing to Safety
by Wallace Stegner

A quiet novel of deep compassion and insight into the bonds of friendship and marriage.

“Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth...”

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Your Turn: What’s your vice for a good cathartic cry?

You Reading This

Dear S —

This letter has sat in my head, in my heart, for too long.

I think of you often and jot silent notes that I never seem to send.

So this is to say: I’m thinking of you. You hold a place in my heart where time sits still and daily life matters little. I’ve missed that sense of suspension, where worries are placed gently away.

These last few years have been difficult in such varied and complicated ways. The stress and strain of the pandemic, compounded with racial injustice, economic turmoil, international upheaval . . . and that’s not even our personal challenges of sickness and aging, sadness and defeat. More than ever we see the dominoes of our lives tip, collide, fall away.

How do we keep on? How do you?

I’d like to say poetry has helped me float but in this last year my well has gone dry. I’m now facing the fact that poetry is in my past, a person I use to be.

Maybe it is love that gets us through these difficult days. It’s hardly an original thought — but there’s a reason cliches are called just that: there’s truth in the refrain.

Maybe it is the small gratitudes that sustain. This morning the sun bursts through a month of damp days and I am suddenly restored. Hope springs in small ways and I am larger for it. As the sun moves across the room I’m warmed by the memory of a Stafford line — how sunlight creeps along a shining floor.

I am warmed by the memory of you and I drinking coffee and tea in that cozy coffeeshop, playing Bananagrams while the rain and wind thrashed our small town and we, safe inside, laughed and sighed. How simple time seems as it ticks along, how complex the memory of days past.

I am not waiting for time to show some better thoughts. I am here, now, in my head, my heart, and on this page, thankful for you and our friendship.

With love,

Drew

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

 

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

 

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life  —

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

— William Stafford