eat · the · meatball

Great cause, great series, and you get to be part of Team Dragon. 

the_slow_train 

Mr. Lightman read excerpts from his current WIP and also Einstein's Dreams.   Ms. Le Guin read a poem, and excerpts from Lavinia.
The readings were terrific and in the Q&A afterwards, both authors were funny and articulate.

• "First to create difference -- to establish strangeness -- then to let the fiery arc of human emotion leap and close the gap: this acrobatics of the imagination fascinates and satisfies me as almost no other."   Ursula K. Le Guin
• "It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope."  Ursula K. Le Guin
• "Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case."  Alan LIghtman, Einstein's Dream
  

oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as
     god's own ribs
 

corydon & alexis, redux
by D. A. Powell

And speaking of cruelty and favorite things I've run across recently...in case you missed it, check out

tinaconnolly

My story "Dizzy Bridge" has found a home.
Not only is it my first prose pro sale, but also, lucky lucky girl that I am, I will get to attend the WotF this August, and meet many wonderful writers, established and upcoming, plus attend the writing workshop. 
I'm thrilled. 
And daunted.
And thrilled.
And daunted.
(And if this keeps up, I'll end up like Faye Dunaway in Chinatown.)

Heartfelt thanks to those of you who gave me such excellent insights and feedback on Dizzy. 
And for those of you I'll meet in August, I look forward to it!

And my thanks to all of you who have offered me such kind congratulations already!  Much appreciated!

Yep, out and about. 
In St. Louis for a production of Miracle Worker, playing Helen Keller's mother, Kate Adams Keller.
Profoundly inspiring story and it's been fascinating to reacquaint myself with the historical facts of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan's life. Absolutely extraordinary individuals. 

To date, what's most caught my imagination is how deeply intimate her relationship to language was.  
Of course, more radically than for most, language was her entry to the world. 

For all you writers out there, two quotes from Helen Keller's first book (she wrote four!), The Story of My Life.  Fascinating read, by the way.
Here, Helen's trying to explain how an early unintentional plagiarism came about,("The Frost King" incident.)  She was only 11 at the time (!), but horrified when she found out.  Unintentional plagiarism aside...
I think what she says here speaks beautifully to the glorious problem of writing:

Oh and holler if you want to meet me in St. Louis. ;) 

Toasted ravioli anyone?

How can you tell him?  On every urgent page, in every book born of human need, however flaccid, puerile, slight, or wrong, there is at least one sentence, one where the author is bigger than the writer, one that sheds the weight of its dead fixations and throws off the lead of its prose, one sentence that remembers the prisoner in his cell, locked away nowhere, victim of the world’s shared failure, begging for something to read.”

Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark

from Josh Marshall's TPM:
Lotta Fun

When you see this, post in your own journal with your favorite quote from The Princess Bride. Preferably not "As you wish" or the Inigo Montoya speech.

***
INIGO
You seem a decent fellow ... I hate to kill you.

THE MAN IN BLACK
You seem a decent fellow ... I hate to die.

Bigfoot: I Not Dead

Check it out, if you want:  Minerva:  daily upsweep

One of my favorite moments included the Q&A afterwards. 
The emcee asked Mr. Crowley something along the lines of, what's the difference between writing historical fiction and writing fantastic fiction?
His answer (forgive the paraphrase, his real answer was cogent & charming & clear): 
The challenge is to have historical fiction convey a sense of the fantastic, and for fantastic fiction to convey a sense of history.

From Elizabeth Bowen's essay  "Notes on Writing a Novel" at Narrative Magazine.  

My favorite:  "...it must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie."

"Plot.—Essential. The Pre-Essential. Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to. It is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives. The novelist is confronted, at a moment (or at what appears to be the moment: actually its extension may be indefinite) by the impossibility of saying what is to be said in any other way.

He is forced towards his plot. By what? By the ‘what is to be said.’ What is ‘what is to be said’? A mass of subjective matter that has accumulated—impressions received, feelings about experience, distorted results of ordinary observation, and something else—x. This matter is extra matter. It is superfluous to the non-writing life of the writer. It is luggage left in the hall between two journeys, as opposed to the perpetual furniture of rooms. It is destined to be elsewhere. It cannot move till its destination is known. Plot is the knowing of destination.

Plot is diction. Action of language, language of action.

Plot is story. It is also ‘a story’ in the nursery sense = lie. The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie."

Go Ms. Bowen. 

Read the whole essay here: https://narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2006/notes-writing-novel

Your loveliest of sway-backs;
of mine I was once ashamed,
and my uni-brow and crooked teeth,
and red hair my mother never let me wash
all winter,
afraid I'd catch a draft.
She wouldn't let me bathe, either,
which made gym class a horror.
I thought I had it bad
until I met that handsome Scottish man
whose parents tried to make him spontaneously combust
by feeding him haggis laced with gunpowder
and making him sleep in the stove.
Instead of an ear, he had a shiny, snail-shaped ridge.
I guess we all have our tragic flaw.
Mine is like that of the naked man
who holds up a sign that says "I'm naked"
and runs screaming through the park.
My handlers say I'm difficult,
but don't you believe it.
My soul still radiates a luminous intensity
despite this stupid university job.

from The Virgin Formica, just published by Hanging Loose Press.
(via Academy of American Poets, poem-a-day-in-April-program)

Publication Date

One of the few pleasures of writing
is the thought of one's book in the hands of a kindhearted
intelligent person somewhere. I can't remember what the others
        are right now.
I just noticed that it is my own private


National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever). The forecast calls
for a cold night in Boston all morning


and all afternoon. They say
tomorrow will be just like today,
only different. I'm in the cemetery now
at the edge of town, how did I get here?


A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying
I am Federico García Lorca
risen from the dead—
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.

--Franz Wright