Cheryl Snell's Blog, page 42
February 18, 2011
Variations on a Theme with Harmonica
Writers are often asked where their ideas come from. A more telling question might be what form those ideas -- poems, novels, stories short and long -- shape themselves into. Cheryl Snell's Variations on a Theme with Harmonica is a deftly crafted chapbook that draws on the nature of improvisation.Experimental in form, it sheds light on the shape-shifting nature of fictional characters.
---Deborah Batterman
February 16, 2011
In a world of blinking beeping distractions...
How and why do writers write, despite everything? Especially when you consider that a writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people, as Thomas Mann observed.
Alice Walker kept a sign over her office desk which would cause much fall-out later. It was to remind her about obstacles other writers had faced, and stared down: Woolf had madness, Eliot was ostracized, Austen had no privacy, the Brontes died young and dependent, Hurston had poor health. Walker had her daughter,"who is more delightful and less distracting than any of the calamities above."
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads, said William Styron.
Colette told us to Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Writing is a struggle against silence. ~Carlos Fuentes
Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death - fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant; ~ Edna Ferber.
Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence. ~Fay Weldon.
This one, about process, resonates with me--
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.~ E.L. Doctorow
Alice Walker kept a sign over her office desk which would cause much fall-out later. It was to remind her about obstacles other writers had faced, and stared down: Woolf had madness, Eliot was ostracized, Austen had no privacy, the Brontes died young and dependent, Hurston had poor health. Walker had her daughter,"who is more delightful and less distracting than any of the calamities above."
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads, said William Styron.
Colette told us to Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Writing is a struggle against silence. ~Carlos Fuentes
Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death - fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant; ~ Edna Ferber.
Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence. ~Fay Weldon.
This one, about process, resonates with me--
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.~ E.L. Doctorow
February 15, 2011
Variations on a Theme with Harmonica
Writers are often asked where their ideas come from. A more telling question might be what form those ideas -- poems, novels, stories short and long -- shape themselves into. Cheryl Snell's Variations on a Theme with Harmonica is a deftly crafted chapbook that draws on the nature of improvisation.
---Deborah Batterman
February 13, 2011
One Stop Poetry
Sean McCormick provided that picture for today's One Stop Poetry Picture Challenge. This is what the image made me think of:
The childhood house,
torn down to a sprawl of stones,
has a doorframe
that contracts with cold.
Bitter enough to shrink
the room where the birthday boy
is blowing on trickster candles,
where striped wax melts
through singed fingers,
still he blows.
What ripples from that—
walls within walls
far from the only window still open,
ghosted curtains billowing into the light
alive with silver
from so many extinguished stars.
February 12, 2011
February 11, 2011
February 10, 2011
February 9, 2011
The Fusion Series
My sister Janet's latest drawings fusing abstract and figurative elements, and accompanied by Tom Waits. Oh, why not?
