Alan Cheuse's Blog, page 5

Good Day to Work

Every day is a good day to work...but even better when, as it is now, the wind is blowing in thirty-forty mile an hour gusts, the sun glows bright but almost without heat--wind-chill at around ten below zero-- and a dusting of ice and snow covers the walks and roads. No walk this morning. Except what my fingers make on the keyboard.
I'll write about Hawaii...

Hit from Behind

Returned from Florida, and went back to work on new novel, when the flu sneaked up behind me and hit me on the head with a blackjack...
Struggled to keep working, but I did keep on, even though some days it felt as though I were writing from underneath my keyboard. Right now, after eleven days, back up to speed, thundering, or is stumbling? toward the completion of a new novel.

Hiatus

A shock to the system, to have spent a week away from work at a novel in progress, in this case, as a visitor at a school in Florida, the weather there lovely but the hours brutal, especially absent the great good time for work, the early block, from sunrise to noon...and on return having to resettle into that pattern again...If I'm traveling I can make up an excuse for not working, with no solitude and desk to set up lap-top on, no hours walled off from all else in the world--except where the world appears on the page you are trying to produce--and then to return home and to the work-desk, and feel untethered, free as anyone might possibly be free, sitting in chair, typing on a keyboard, and flying along like a bird in higher atmospheres...back to work again,
yes!

A New Book

The first finished copies of a new book arrive,in this case, the newest configuration of my 1986 novel then called "The Grandmothers' Club" and now in a new and revised edition "Prayers for the Living"...the first book to be published by the brand new press called Fig Tree Books.
And you hold the book to your face, you
sniff the paper, you touch the book all over, as lovingly as you might handle a new child. Has it happened? Is this real? and you thank the powers of publishing and readers and higher powers, because you remember all the struggle and anguish and worry and seemingly endless hours, days, years that went into the composition of the novel--the novel, which D.H. Lawrence once daringly described as "the one bright book of life"--the choices you made, the choices you chose not to make, and beyond the pages, in the real time of living, all the people and events and troubles and joy that went into the making of it. In life nature does the work of creation. The novelist somehow has to imitate that. What a struggle, yes! But it also can make you feel that it has become one of the few great triumphs in art! A novel, here it is!
One bright book of life!

The Sacrifice

Controversial new novel by Joyce Carol Oates...based in part on the Tawana Brawley case...

http://www.npr.org/2014/12/26/3733038...

work

Waking in the dark, morning ablutions,
exercise, quietly preparing small breakfast and coffee...a twenty-minute walk, and then to the desk...
Every day, the light changing in the changing seasons, everything else pointing toward the work at hand, the work, difficult enough, moving fingers across a keyboard--imagine wielding a chisel and hammer, or turning the wrist with a brush in hand, or--the choreographer-dancer, turning her body to the turns in her mind--not good at anything else, I choose this work at hand.

Edith Pearlman

has just published a wonderful new collection of short stories...

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/22/3786118...

The Jaguar's Children

Crossing the Southern border with The Jaguar's Children by John Vallaint

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/20/3786600...

Alice Turner

One of the best advocates for fiction in the world of magazines, a gone girl now.
Alice Turner...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/nationa...

Robert Stone

Robert Stone died this week, and it's difficult to imagine that anyone who knows his work, let alone who knew Stone himself, will not mourn him, and miss the fiction we might have had if he had been a slightly better caretaker of his talent. RS grew up in a subsistence household, his father out of the picture, and his mother struggling to support herself and her son. He finished a couple of years in a Marist high school before joining the Navy and then went on to educate himself in the literature he loved to read as a child and young man. The ferocity of no-nothing American politics and the disasters of American supported foreign war led to his first two novels. His admiration of Conrad led to a prose style in which deep emotion lurked just beneath the surface. And in the old-fashioned way of twentieth century American male writers from Hemingway to Mailer and James Jones RS turned his experiences at sea and in the war zone into beautifully textured and wonderously evocative fiction in which the individual intersects with the public events of the historical world.
My favorites remain "Dog Soldiers," that early novel about the drug-stained legacy of American intervention in Vietnam, and "Outerbridge Reach", about an attempt by one doubting soul with the determination to sail solo around the world.
As a writer RS stood--stands still--as one of the finest of his generation. As a man, a father and husband, and friend, he elicited admiration, and, often, the worry that comes when you see someone you care about go about the business of habitually dismantling his own best self.
We have lost a fine writer and a dear friend of the world. All we can do now is go back to read, and reread, the things he cared about the most--the novels and stories he hoped might endure beyond himself.