Alison McGhee's Blog, page 10

Chicago dwellers! Reading from Firefly Hollow this Monday, October 20.

Dear Chicago readers and friends,

I’ll be reading from my new children’s novel, Firefly Hollow, at the wonderful Anderson’s Bookshop in La Grange, Illinois, this coming Monday, October 20, at 7 pm.

If you’re in the area, please come by. I’d love to see you there.

 

Poem of the Week, by Edgar Allen Poe

I found this note in my poetry hut the other day (the poetry public is more demanding than you’d think), went straight to my computer, dug out my favorite Poe poem, printed it out, and stuck it in the poetry hut with a note that read “For the Poe fan!”

Next day, it was gone.

 

 

A Dream Within a Dream

– Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow:

You are not wrong who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand–

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep–while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

 

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For more about Edgar Allan Poe, click here.

Firefly Hollow reading this Sunday, October 11

Dear Northern Californians, if you’re anywhere in the vicinity of Petaluma this coming Sunday, October 11, please come to the fabulous Copperfield’s Books at 4 pm. I’m giving a reading from Firefly Hollow there and I’d love to meet you!

Poem of the Week, by Gaius Valerius Catullus

Last week in the class I’m teaching we went around the room and each student recited a poem from memory. One man recited the below poem, one I had never heard before, and at first I thought he himself had written it; it was so brief and raw and real. But no, it’s a poem by Catullus, who died in Verona more than two thousand years ago at the age of 30. I drove home thinking about this poem, and then I looked up Catullus and have been reading his work, the little that we have from the one manuscript unearthed long after his death, ever since. The more things change, the more they don’t, even over thousands of years.

Poem 85

– Gaius Valerius Catullus

I hate and I love

Why do I, you ask ?

I don’t know, but it’s happening

and it hurts.

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?

    nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

(In the original Latin)

 

For more information on Catullus, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Javier Etchevarren

I read this poem the other day, my first time reading this poet. The scenes being described were so ordinary but slightly weird, like the image of a mother waiting at school with an apple pie for her grown son. I was zipping right along, happy that the family in the poem had come to this peaceful time in their lives together, the sadnesses and strain behind them, and then I came to the ending. And thought, This is one of those poems that does what poems can do.

Reunion

– Javier Etchevarren, translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval

Mama works less

and hugs me more.

She waits for me

at the school doors

with an apple pie

(no matter that I

am 30 plus years old).

My older brother

has not lost his job.

Luckily,

he has quit smoking

in our bedroom.

My middle brother

has stopped breaking

his back for others

and uncorks an expensive wine.

My father

—who has quit drinking—

returns to the house

and asks forgiveness.

We forgive him.

We smile for the picture

while weeping with joy:

all my family reunited

in this poem.

 

For more information on Javier Etchevarren, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Ernest Hilbert

Once when my son was little I overheard him and some of his friends whispering in the doorway where they had snuck up to watch me type. “Is your mom the fastest typer in the whole world?” one of them said. “Yup,” my son said, “she is.” When it comes to typing all I want is speed, because then my fingers can outrace my thoughts and spin words out without thinking. But when it comes to cooking and quilting and gardening, slowness is what matters, physical labor that absorbs hands and muscles and lets thoughts wander free. (As I wrote that last sentence it just occurred to me that maybe speed and slowness are actually the same thing. Same coin, flip sides.) Poem of the Week, by Ernest Hilbert.

Song

– Ernest Hilbert

A song for those who learn forgotten, slow

skills, crafts submerged long past by massed commerce,

by hard, dark, oily machines, and the din

of duplicates shipped by the millions, stowed

in cavernous depots to be dispersed

to each home, used once, and then binned.

This is for those who weave by hand, who brew

their own suds, and roll their own smokes, hammer

together shelves, print on presses, plant gardens

in vacant lots, raise beams, fire pots, the few

who challenge the swift, transient tenor

of the age, the lonely sincere wardens,

the last, noble pull of old ways restored,

valued and unwanted, admired and ignored.

For more information on Ernest Hilbert, please click here: here.

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Poem of the Week, by Brenda Shaughnessy

The past few weeks I’ve been obsessively reading the Neapolitan novels, by the Italian writer Elana Ferrante. They’re a magnificent trilogy (soon to be a quartet) about a friendship between two girls (who grow into older women by the end of the three novels). Each novel is big and fat and dense and I can’t even explain what, besides the writer’s psychological acuity, makes them so compulsively readable. Finished the second yesterday and immediately walked to Magers & Quinn to buy the third. What do the Ferrante novels have to do with this poem by Brenda Shaughnessy? I can’t explain that either, other than that there’s a stanza in there about mothers and daughters that throws me right into the dark heart of the dark star that makes that kind of love so, so, so whatever it is. Crucial. Essential. Neverending.

I Have a Time Machine, by Brenda Shaughnessy

But unfortunately it can only travel into the future

at a rate of one second per second,which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant

committees and even to me.

But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next

moment and to the next.

Thing is, I can’t turn it off. I keep zipping ahead—

well, not zipping—And if I try

to get out of this time machine, open the latch,

I’ll fall into space, unconscious,

then desiccated! And I’m pretty sure I’m afraid of that.

So I stay inside.

There’s a window, though. It shows the past.

It’s like a television or fish tank

but it’s never live, it’s always over.

The fish swim in backward circles.

Sometimes it’s like a rearview mirror, another chance

to see what I’m leaving behind,

and sometimes like blackout, all that time

wasted sleeping.

Myself age eight, whole head burnt with embarrassment

at having lost a library book.

Myself lurking in a candled corner expecting

to be found charming.

Me holding a rose though I want to put it down

so I can smoke.

Me exploding at my mother who explodes at me

because the explosion

of some dark star all the way back struck hard

at mother’s mother’s mother.

I turn away from the window, anticipating a blow.

I thought I’d find myself

an old woman by now, traveling so light in time.

But I haven’t gotten far at all.

Strange not to be able to pick up the pace as I’d like;

the past is so horribly fast.

—

​For more information about Brenda Shaughnessy, please click here.




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The Conjuring of “Firefly Hollow”

My new novel for children, Firefly Hollow, with its enchanting illustrations by Christopher Denise, has been in the world for one week as of today. Except not really, seeing as it took a good six years to conjure itself.  (This book is evidence that someone born fast, impatient and jumpy can, over many years, learn the art of patience. Lord love a duck, this thing took its own sweet time.)

The final version was written with a little wooden cricket, a poem (Spring and Fall, to a Young Child), and the film adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are” propped next to me on the table. Since I long ago trained myself out of both superstition and muse-invoking rituals, you know it had to be a tough slog.

For the inside scoop on the process, please click here.

I will be touring around this fall, giving readings and doing signings, and I would truly love to meet any of you who can make any of the dates. Here they are so far, and I’ll update as necessary.

Sunday, August 30: The Toadstool Bookstore in Peterborough, NH, signing copies, 10 am-noon

Sat, October 3 – Northshire Bookstore, Manchester, VT, reading and signing, 4:00 PM

Sun, October 4 – Flying Pig Bookstore, Shelburne, VT, time TBA

Mon, October 5 – Flying Pig school events in Shelburne, VT

Sunday, October 11: Copperfield’s Books, Petaluma, CA, reading and signing, 2 PM

Monday, October 12: Books Inc., San Francisco, school events

Tuesday, October 13: Book Passage, San Francisco, reading, 10 AM, and school event, 12:30 pm

Monday, October 19: Anderson’s Bookstore, Chicago, reading and signing, 7:00 PM

Tuesday, October 20: The Bookstall, Chicago, school events, morning and afternoon

Friday, October 23: Whale of a Tale, Los Angeles, school events, morning and afternoon

Saturday, October 24: Southern California Independent Booksellers Association conference, North Hollywood, 6 pm appearance

Sunday, November 1: Westport Public Library, Westport, CT, I’m giving a talk, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer,” to kick off National Novel Writing Month, 2-3 pm

Poem of the Week, by Denise Levertov

At a dinner party the other night some friends asked why my mother, born and raised in Manhattan, had lived her entire adult life in the rural foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. I told them she had always wanted to live in the country, that she had spent childhood summers at a camp where her mother had a job. Like my mother, I’m both country and city, but when things get too worrisome I recite poems like this one to myself. Which might mean that at some level, country wins out.

A Reward

–  Denise Levertov

Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled

to leave the house and search for what

might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,

I stood by the shore waiting.

I had walked in the silent woods:

the trees withdrew into their secrets.

Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk

over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.

Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies

afloat on their element as I was not

on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.

But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again

to linger, to look North before nightfall-the expanse

of calm, of calming water, last wafts

of rose in the few high clouds.

And was rewarded:

the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying

widewinged toward me, settled

just offshore on his post,

took up his vigil.

If you ask

why this cleared a fog from my spirit,

I have no answer.

​

For more information on Denise Levertov, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Andrew Marvell

This past week, while working on a new novel, the line “Had we but world enough and time” kept appearing in my head, like subtitles across the bottom of a movie in another language. Because I wasn’t 1) an English major and b) am a dunce (take your choice; #1 is true but #2 is probably more true), I had to look up the line. Then I sat here reading and re-reading the beautiful poem from which it comes. Familiar lines like “But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,” are now weaving themselves throughout the new novel. Thank you, Mr. lived-and-died-so-long-ago Marvell.

To His Coy Mistress

– Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side

Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires and more slow;

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found;

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long-preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust;

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour

Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

For more information on Andrew Marvell, please click here.

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