A. > Recent Status Updates

Young Adults(13-18)It's difficult to write fiction for them b/c most of them read from adult shelves. They want to read about complex issues that don't have easy answers.

Adolescents (10-14)Their bodies are telling them they're adults, while the rest of the world is telling them they're still children. As a result, they want to read about characters who confront dramatic situations and prove their adulthood in the process

writing effective nonfiction is at heart a matter of matching readership to topic

10-14 year old don't like to think of themselves as kids any longer. They want to confront adult problems and find solutions...Adolescents crave intense situations. They want to find ways to save the world,and they're willing to learn anything that will help them achieve their quest.

Intermediate readers(8-12) like sifting through the facts and drawing their own conclusions....They especially like yucky topics that make adults cringe

If you give 6 to 9 year olds to many facts leading in diverse directions, you'll overwhelm them.

What makes a poem a poem,...is that it is unparphrasable...I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing

Still life. The deep pun hidden in the term; life with death in it, life after the knowledge of death, is, after all, still life.

Deep paradox; things placed right next to us, in absolute intimacy, yet unknowable. Full of history, but their history is mute; full of association with particular poeple, moments, gestures, emotions, and all...unavailable now..they offer us intimacy and distance at once, allow us to be both here and gone.

Such an accumulation makes one want to be free of possessions, unencumbered; the quick self wishes to flee from the heavy baggage of time, the clanking and clattering weight stacked so precariously, and so difficult to sort out or discard...Each is a kind of trigger point of memory, as if packed within it were the very stuff of time.

As if the world were a corridor through which the body moved.

We're accustomed to not seeing what is so near to us; we do not need to look at things that are at hand, because they are at hand every day. That waht makes home so safe and so appealing, that we do not need to look at it

A still life is more like a poem than a portrait...It is at the eyes of a portrait always, that our seeing stops. But in still life, there is no end to our looking.

Desire brings us back

They refuse perfection, or rather they assert that this is perfection, this state of being consumed, used up, enjoyed, existing in time.

There is a Japanses word for things made more beautiful by use, that bear the evidence of their own making, or the individuating makrs of time's passage:a kind of beauty not immune to time but embedded in it

The first Dutch still lifes are texts of abundance...they are celebrants of prosperity and obervers of the consequences of relative stability...but in only a matter of years, something happens; these paintings of indulgence give way to something more rigorous certainly poetic...their import seems to lie not in plenty but in the poetry of relation...sharpnes and translucency of lemon...light on white damask cloth...

I felt, truly, that there was one Grandmother, whom God had made at the beginning of time, and that it was the strange lot of various old women to become Her: having relinquished all conflicts and expectations, she was forgetful, generous, loving, attentive, devoted solely to food, kindness, and the Word...She did nothing but love us, and dwell in the world of collapse and delight.

I would like to have that scent now,in a bottle; I would like to be able to breathe it at will and return to that lost atmosphere.

It's important to imagine a child at the upper limit of that age range reading your manuscript. Will she be interested? Will he think it's babyish?

Preschool(listeners)- ages 2-5
Beginning(primary graders)- ages 6-9
Intermediate(middle graders)ages-8-12
Adolescent (young teens)- ages 10-14
Young adult(older teens) ages 13-18

In fiction, the age of your main character determines the age of your readership. Children want to read about someone who's their own age or a little older and see what they might become in a few years-

Everything in the field of vision is passing...here intimacy seems to confront its opposite,which is the immensity of time.

the secret subject of these paintings is what they resist. What they deny is also the underlying force...that makes these lemons glow with life.

Portraits often seem pregnant...But no word will ever be spoken here,among the flowers and snails, the solid and dependable apples, this heap of rumpled books, this pewter plate on which a few opened oysters lie, giving up thier silver...painting creates silence...it is the act of painting that makes them perennially poised,an emergent truth about to be articulated,a word waiting to be spoken..will that word be said?

this is the testament of falling in love with light,its endless variation, its subtley and complexity...it is a sort of knowledge that must be wordless, incommunicable,so precisely does it depend upon a long context of looking and practice, and so specific is its aim.

I can't catch the link b/w the still life, lemons, oysters and his granny.

Her name is lona, though I don't know that, and wont for years. Because this is East Tennessee, in the second half of the ninteen fifties, she is called Mamaw, and that's the only name I have ever called her.

To think through things, that's the still life painter's work and the poet's. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a wordly lexicon...a phantom language..why should we have been born knowing how to love the world? We require, again and again, these demonstrations.

We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disapear.