Peg Duthie's Blog, page 67

Eudora Welty to Reynolds Price, August 6, 1955

Don't worry about the "professional" feeling -- you may never have it. I haven't after all these years. That is, if the feeling of something new, fresh, difficult, and strange which comes to you with each story is the mark of the amateur spirit, then I still have the amateur spirit. The excitement comes from what's still to be learned at least as much from what's been struggled with before or partway, for the time being perhaps, mastered.

-- quoted in Eudora Welty: A Biography by Suzanne Marrs (p. 251)

[Side ramble: in this book, and in Two Gardeners: A Friendship in Letters; Katharine S. White and Elizabeth Lawrence (ed. Emily Herring Wilson), there is a lot about women coping with the care of aging parents. I am witnessing friends and clients coping with being those parents or children. I find myself praying about it: be it 1952 or 2012, the solutions are rarely easy and too seldom acceptable to all involved, and sometimes the conversations veer into comfortless territory.

Two more books on my kitchen counter: This is Not the Life I Ordered (found on sale at a Franklin Covey store some years ago) and Crucial Conversations (mentioned by Havi Brooks in a recent post that has already done me some good). I can only handle a few pages a time from either book, but y'know, a little bit at a time can add up to good things.]

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"closets are for hangers, winners use the door"

There be so many roses to see in Nashville right now. I've glimpsed people photographing themselves with the gigantic roses in front of the Frist Center. ( more roses behind the cut )

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words prevailing, words failing

From a New York Times report of protests in Moscow (emphasis mine):

An encampment in a Moscow park ... is modeled on Occupy Wall Street. ... On Thursday, the police detained eight young women in pig costumes. A cow appeared over the weekend, evidently to protest Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization.

Olga Romanova, a longtime opposition activist, said she had given up trying to explain the situation in letters to her husband, who is in prison.

"I started to write, 'There's a wedding taking place here right now, and now a cow has come,' " Ms. Romanova said. "Then I understood that I have to cross it all out because he'll think that I've gone crazy with grief or something is happening with me. How will they explain to Putin? There was a wedding. A cow came. How will they explain that?"

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the birthdays really do get better and better each year

I had modest expectations for my birthday last Wednesday, but it ended up being a terrific day: the White Sox trounced the Indians, Roger Federer squeaked out a win on smurf clay, Barack Obama leapt off the marriage equality tightrope (I was among those who didn't think it would happen until November), the BYM and I dressed up for a late dinner at The Southern (I can't manage steak yet, so I contented myself with gumbo, butternut squash, and bourbon-soaked bread pudding), the sun was shining, and I had time for a walk.

And there were gifts and messages -- I was especially tickled by a friend's note about her son's newly revealed enthusiasm for writing poetry: "I think partly it's because, while most of his classmates think poets are boring dead guys, [he] thinks they're people with interesting houses and big dogs. And CAKE!" Hee!

(I wasn't in the mood to bake or buy a cake for myself, so I improvised a spicy chocolate blancmange instead. In fact, there are a few mouthfuls left in the pot in the fridge -- they ought to go well with this cup of tea I just brewed...)

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redlines and revisions, continued

I'm in the thick of reviewing a client's responses to copyedits, a process that has included some muttering under my breath at Microsoft Word (which I get along with for the most part, but there have been a couple of spots where a random style seems to have suddenly imposed itself -- on random phrases, of course -- and that is Not Okay).

That said, it is so nice being able to deal with all the slicing, deleting, and repositioning by merely tapping and scrolling and clicking (and swearing). Here's another look at Miss Welty at work, as described by Suzanne Marrs:

By the time she was at work on Delta Wedding in 1945, Eudora had become an ardent revisor, using a method she would ever afterward follow--typing a draft chapter, spreading it out on the bed, or on the dining room table downstairs, cutting paragraphs, or even sentences, out of a page and attaching them with straight pins in new locations, before preparing a new typescript and starting the process again.

And here's Eudora writing to Bill Maxwell in 1953, after reading a draft of one of his stories:

I do see from this how elegant rubber cement is. I'm so used to writing with a pincushion that I don't know if I can learn other ways or not, but I did go right down and buy a bottle of Carter's. The smell stimulates the mind and brings up dreams of efficiency. Long ago when my stories were short (I wish they were back) I used to use ordinary paste and put the story together in one long strip, that could be seen as a whole and at a glance -- helpful and realistic. When the stories got too long for the room I took them up on the bed or table & pinned and that's when my worst stories were like patchwork quilts, you could almost read them in any direction. No man would be bemused like that, but Emmy [Maxwell's wife] will understand -- and on the whole I like pins. The Ponder Heart was in straight pins, hat pins, corsage pins, and needles, and when I got through typing it out I had more pins than I started with. (So it's economical.)
What There Is To Say We Have Said (Houghton, 2011)

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"so that she might look over her shoulder"

So far, so good. The Beautiful Young Man occupied himself at the dining room table while I dozed...



...and Abby (as usual) made sure nobody would leave the room without her noticing:



There are three new pieces up at unFold: "Lickety-split," "The Season So Long," and "Tacky."

The bibliography is sort of updated (still some gaps).

My book (and also 140 and Counting ) has been added to Operation eBook Drop (i.e., it is being made available free of charge to deployed soldiers).

Here's a bit from the Eudora Welty biography I've been reading, by Suzanne Marrs:

In her upstairs bedroom at the Pinehurst Street house, when she had no eight-to-five job, she established a pattern that would typify her writing career, devoting most mornings and early afternoons to composing, taking time off for reading and gardening, perhaps, but often not changing from her nightgown until she had reached a stopping point in a story. She had positioned her typing table so that she did not directly face the windows overlooking the large front yard, but so that she might look over her shoulder when she needed a glimpse of the outside world.

(I'll likely continue quoting from this and What There Is To Say... over the next couple of weeks. The books have been good company the past few days.)

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"I think my heart is a magnet too."

[Subject line from Sandra Simonds's Red Wand, which a friend introduced me to yesterday.]

How is it May already? And yet, of course it is May already. Yesterday was apparently clear-the-decks day for a number of literary editors -- by midnight, I'd been notified that three pieces will appear in unFold's Garden Show and received rejections from three markets. (I also hit "send" on a submission a few hours before the reading window closed, go me!)

My book is still on Amazon UK's Top 100 list for Asian American poetry, and it's received a number of thoughtful (and, thankfully, positive!) reviews from readers I haven't (yet) met. In reverse order of appearance:

Christine Klocek-Lim
David Allan Barker
Renee Emerson
Heather Kamins
Kristine Ong Muslim

My own purchases included:

* Kristine Ong Muslim, We Bury the Landscape
* John Brehm, Help is on the Way (I'm almost done with this one; it's largely set in NYC and Japan; its major themes include the messiness of life as a aging, non-superstar poet, and the untimely death of his nephew in spite of Brehm's donation of part of his liver...)
* Lisa Dordal, Commemoration (pre-order)
* Dick Barnes, A Word Like Fire

As part of the big, beautiful and bountiful Couplets tour, I was involved with (or featured in) the following:

April 30: videos of me reading some poems at the Nashville Public Library
April 20: ysabetwordsmith on Revision in Science Fiction Poetry (hosted at this here blog)
April 16: first and final draft of "Proportions," at Heather Kamins's blog
April 13: haiga: a powder brush, at Joanne Merriam's blog
April 10: poems by Christina Nguyen (guest post at this here blog)
April 4: Couplets Blog Tour: Carol Berg Hosts Peg Duthie (at Ophelia Unraveling)
April 1: Kristine Ong Muslim on Arlene Ang's "Living Without Water" (guest post at this here blog)

Also:
7x20 tweeted a piece on April 6
Rose Lemberg mentions that The Moment of Change has already received a very positive review. (The anthology will be released later this month.)

And now I'm going to head offline for the rest of the week. Wishing you all sustenance and sweetness (if desired, in the measures you desire):



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an etheree and a pendant

poetree Challenge #7: Pick a thing or two that sums up how you're doing today, this week, in general, and write about it in etheree format (see the link for details on the form).

Pain
simmers
underneath
the must-be-dones
but I've finally
learned something about space --
about true mathematics
and necessary selfishness.
The pain will be answered soon enough;
I've done enough today to go to bed.



Earlier this month, I received a pendant as my reward for the start of a poem, prompt and prize both created by stillnotbored . (click on the images to enlarge)





(Coincidentally, Flickr decided to greet me in Mandarin this time. The pendant features the Yangtze River.)

This month's contest (open to anyone except her partner and previous winners, natch) is here.

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a moment to see the roses (and honeysuckle, and lilacs, and...)

Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them.
- G. K. Chesterton

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Naomi Shihab Nye in Geneen Roth

Kindness

I think kass introduced me to this poem? Anyway, last night I started reading Geneen Roth's Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations about Food and Money. It opens with Roth and other friends finding out that they've been swindled out of their savings by Madoff.

After hanging up the phone, I still couldn't move. I felt as if a bomb had crashed through my chest and left me in pieces, but my body was still intact. A hummingbird whizzed by. Then I thought of a poem that I'd once read by Naomi Shihab Nye called "Kindness." I couldn't recall any of the lines, but I remembered the word sorrow, and I remembered something about losing what you saved and that kindness was prominent, was, in this poem, the outcome of devastation.

Kindness.

I said the word to the stove, the walls, the refrigerator. The sound it made, the feeling of it in my mouth, made me want to cry.

Suddenly, I didn't want to do anything but read that poem.

... The doorbell rang. Kim.

She was standing there, in black velvet shirt and jeans, looking dazed and grief-stricken. The first thing she said was, "I need to find that 'Kindness' poem. Do you have it?"

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