Youthful itinerary follies

Joel's friend Sarah is having problems with her Volvo. She had to go back to Providence (today, by bus) where she is meeting a friend to bring down to some other friends in New York City, while Joel takes the car into a Volvo dealer on Friday morning and gets the electronic throttle reprogrammed or something so she can drive to Atlanta and give the car to her sister at Emory before flying out of Atlanta home to Los Angeles a day before Joel flies out to join her... and I think her family will be back from Hawaii and oh yes two of Joel's friends are flying out later in the week for a L.A. Lakers game against Cleveland who just lost to the Nets. Well, you get the picture....

Much more relaxing was a lovely lunch at Mary and Tony's for me and Mom and Joel, with Ryan and Ann there, their green table cloth and beautiful Christmas dishes and everything Christmas and delicious.

Twas the Day After Christmas...

December 26
Great fun yesterday with Takeshi, Chiaki, Tak's Aunt Yazuko, Joel, Sarah, friend Kasper, and Andy and me! Christmas and Hanukkah! Exhaustion today, and latkes and applesauce for dinner to come. Photo thanks to Takeshi Achiwa:

Christmas Eve

December 24
Christmas Eve Day, and I'm cooking and running around getting ready for Christmas! I wrote this for my Books For Readers friends:

Dear Friends,
Please accept my best wishes for the coming year, and my hopes that you are all enjoying a holiday of family, friends, good food, fires, candles, and whatever is reassuring and hopeful to you in this dark season. My mother and son Joel are here with me and Andy today, and two of Joel’s friends are arriving later (one is his girlfriend!). Tomorrow come three friends from Japan. We will have Christmas with Buddhists, Jews, one serious Christian and a couple of secular humanists, followed by the first night of Hanukkah. This newsletter is all the writing I’ll get to do today, and I don’t expect anyone to read it till after the holidays. When you do get a chance, please get back to me with your suggestions and thoughts.
Meanwhile, Happy, Happy, Holidays!

Books for Readers # 78 Holiday Issue

Newsletter # 78
December 24 , 2005

HOLIDAY ISSUE– FINAL OF 2005

Dear Friends,
Please accept my best wishes for the coming year, and my hopes that you are all enjoying a holiday of family, friends, good food, fires, candles, and whatever is reassuring and hopeful to you in this dark season. My mother and son Joel are here with me and Andy today, and two of Joel’s friends are arriving later (one is his girlfriend!). Tomorrow come three friends from Japan. We will have Christmas with Buddhists, Jews, one serious Christian and a couple of secular humanists, followed by the first night of Hanukkah.
This newsletter is all the writing I’ll get to do today, and I don’t expect anyone to read it till after the holidays. When you do get a chance, please get back to me with your suggestions and thoughts.
Meanwhile, Happy, Happy, Holidays!
-- Meredith Sue Willis

NOTES ON RECENT READING

I read a contemporary book, THE HILLS AT HOME by Nancy Clark. This is an interesting attempt to create a novel of manners, and it has lots of characters and some really amusing scenes , but it is light to the point of floating away–except for its inordinate size. Some commentary called it a satire, but it is gentle satire, which, of course, means satire with no bite. In the end, how do you satirize a society like ours that is at once self-referential and self-parodying? Jon Stewart on THE DAILY SHOW often does it by simply showing clips of real television news that demonstrate official and media stupidity and lying. THE HILLS AT HOME is just making fun of a family. Much of the time Clark seems to be doing what children do when they have small world play: she created this family and now she makes up stories about them. Some of the stories are terrific fun, but some are tedious and self-indulgent. A couple of the characters, the former school teacher family matriarch Aunt Lily and the middle-aged self-deceiving Ginger in particular, were wonderfully quirky, and also viewed affectionately by the author. There’s also some interesting plot material, especially towards the end, bringing in rapacious land developers and the CIA, but over all there were just too many characters and too many pages.

Which brings me to my recent re-read of Thomas Hardy’s TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES. As I have said repeatedly in this Newsletter, I greatly enjoy a Victorian novel as the days get shorter. TESS is a wonderful, sad, gripping story. I had trouble getting started because I remembered from my first read thirty years ago that it was going to be tragic– Hardy is one of the world’s experts on creating a terrible sense of foreboding. And you can guess right away where it’s going, even if you weren’t an English major in college at a time when TESS was a major stopover on the Great Tradition. But this time, TESS seemed to me less depressing than– just to stick with Hardy– JUDE THE OBSCURE. In the end, Hardy manages both his tragedy and a brief period of happiness for Tess before she is crushed by the hand of Fate and the Law.

TESS is in many ways a novel about belief systems that are too rigid: Tess’s husband thinks he is a liberal thinker, but his philosophy is even more destructive than his father’s strict religious beliefs. Tess too chooses a bad religion – total faith in one individual man. Not that conventional religion would have saved her from the forces of society and the Victorian emphasis on technical purity for women. Hardy’s landscape description is stunning, and the details of farm life beautifully highlighted. Hardy’s laborers, unlike those in books written by Victorians with roots in the upper classes, have rich lives. There are interesting details such as how laborers have one day a year when they switch jobs, whole families on the move, and an almost festive atmosphere as they move from farm to farm. A number of Tess’s working class friends live vagabond lives, and the varieties of working class experience are refreshingly displayed as background. Tess’s tragedy unfolds from her father’s discovery of probable aristocratic roots. It’s a lovely, sad story. Yay, Thomas Hardy!

I also finished THE COLLECTED STORIES OF JEAN STAFFORD, which has some real knock-out wonderful pieces. I finally know why people speak of her as a writer’s writer, incredibly skillful. I liked the stories set in Colorado best– the ones about Manhattan and the northeast are in their own way as grim as Hardy with huge amounts of drinking and depression. But all beautifully written, and the Colorado stories were superb.

READING FOR WRITERS

What do those of you who write read to help you write? Greg Sanders says “It's hard as hell to find the time to sit down, get in that 20 minutes we need to get the thoughts rolling, then actually attempt to write. I've been reading in the interstices--the COLLECTED STORIES OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV (humbling, so very humbling), Stephen Dixon (to inject me with frenetic dialog juice and darkly sardonic whit, and fearlessness), and I've started a collection of Gogol short stories, THE OVERCOAT. Wonderfully weird stuff--and esp. ahead of its time when you consider how long ago he lived (1809-1852).”

SOME ARTICLES ON READING

Don’t miss a piece by Phyllis Moore on how her parents encouraged her to read: http://www.rednecromancer.typepad.com/mouth_of_the_holler/

Also, this newspaper column by Georgia Green Stamper tells about her first visit to a library plus the books that have meant the most to her in her life: http://www.owentonnewsherald.com/20051116/community/georgia.asp

And if you enjoy that essay, take a look at Stamper’s about the day Kennedy died: http://www.owentonnewsherald.com/20051123/community/georgia.asp

SPECIALLY FOR WRITERS:

A book by Adam Sexton called MASTER CLASS IN FICTION
WRITING: LESSONS FROM AUSTEN, HEMINGWAY AND OTHERS has just been published by McGraw-Hill. You can find it at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.

Brighid's Fire Books specializes in First Fiction: http://www.brighidsfirebooks.com/

For writer- run workshops in NYC – see their web page at http://www.newyorkwritersworkshop.com/ or call 212-479-7383.

Ellen Bass gives poetry workshops in all kinds of interesting places. Coming up soon is her February 11-12, 2006 Poetry Workshop at UCSC Extension in Santa Cruz, California. Go to
http://www.ucsc-extension.edu.

Services for self-publishing and other things at Novel 2 Go Publishing: http://www.novel2gopublishing.com/

GOOD NEWS

Ellen Bass reports that her mentor Dorianne Laux has just published her fourth, “amazing”
collection of poetry, Facts About the Moon. Read more at http://www.curledup.com/factsmoo.htm.

Greg Sanders has a story called "Choco," about a retired circus bear in Moscow, coming out in Pindeldyboz #6 (www.pindeldyboz.com/issue6.htm) plus a story called "Port Authority, Part I," coming out in the next issue of Lit (Winter or Spring '06).

INTERVIEW WITH NANCY CLARK

There’s an interview with Nancy Clark, author of THE HILLS AT HOME at
http://www.absolutewrite.com/novels/nancy_clark.htm

BEAUTIFUL BOOKS– SWAMP PRESS

This company makes books by hand with a letter press– so beautiful they count as art objects. They don’t seem to have an online presence, but you can call them at 413-498-4343 or write Ed Rayher 15 Warwick Avenue, Northfield, MA 01360

DON’T FORGET THESE GREAT WEB SITES

Jane Hicks is at http://cosmicpossum.com/

George Ella Lyon’s new website is just up. It is for everyone, but has special appeal for kids, as she writes many books for children: http://www.georgeellalyon.com/ .

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS BRINGS BACK CLASSICS!

The NYRB Classics series (http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/) reintroduces some of the many remarkable books that have fallen out of print or out of sight in recent years. The series, now entering its fifth year, currently includes more than 100 titles, from Richard Hughes's dazzling tale of childhood, A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA, to Edward Gorey's illustrated selection of ghost stories, THE HAUNTED LOOKING GLASS; from the complete works of J.F. Powers, brilliant comic chronicler of the ways and woes of Midwestern priests, to such blazing singularities of the literary universe as J.R. Ackerley's MY DOG TULIP and Robert Burton's THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. It features an exceptional roster of international authors, too, including Alberto Moravia, Robert Walser, Colette, and Álvaro Mutis.

MORE THOUGHTS ON READING FROM PHYLLIS MOORE AND CAT PLESKA:

From Phyllis Moore: “I once read that sailors in submarines were observed craving cottage cheese. Later, research shows it contains nitrogen, a substance needed in the closed environment they were in. Books are the same, it is my belief readers of all ages find what it is they need to read and should be allowed to read it.”

Cat Pleska adds, “My mother never believed in age appropriate stuff. It was the times, I'm sure. Mothers didn't hang over us so closely. But she was not one to censor in any case. I owe much of my free-thinking to her. Bless her.”

DUSTBOOKS–SINCE 1964!

Still giving information about the small and tiny presses– look for the new editions of the ever-useful Dustbooks publications at http://www.dustbooks.com .

Poem by Halvard Johnson

Here's a poem I like a lot by Halvard Johnson, one of the Hamilton Stone Co-opers:

Old Virginia Trees

Here's one called "Only Our Chagrin Remains"
standing alone in the middle of a cow pasture, forsaken
by its leaves, left starkly branched against a partly clouded sky.
Another called "Liberation of the Mind" hunches
over the road to the highway, dropping its late fruit
on passersby. A nearby copse cries out, "Come!
Join us! We, united, shall prevail!"

Our refusal does not stop there. It is insatiable
and knows no bounds. Our leader, thinking beyond
the limitations of space and time, says, "At the hour
in which I write, new tremors fill the air above the field.
We must be brave enough to face them." His collected works
wave from his branches like tiny hands. His name,
we think, is "Poverty is Not a Crime."

"The hand that writes," he says, "is worth the hand
that ploughs." And we all say, "Amen." Our revolutionary
will is strong in us. We wish the transformation
of the world to be as radical as it can be. On this mental
slope, the mirrors of inconstancy do not disturb us.
What, indeed, could they expect of us? Everything leads us
to our belief that "The Last Days of March" will be our savior.

-- Halvard Johnson

Gingerbread House!

December 18
Another all day Coalition Day yesterday, interviewing for the Executive Director position, the Village Trattoria in Maplewood last night, a lovely solstice event today at Ethical, and Mom went to the Prospect Presbyterian church. Then she and I came home and built a gingerbread house from a Costco kit, and now I'm in desperate need of a nap, but I think I'll walk instead..

Single Digits

December 14
We've got single digit temperatures this week! My mother visiting, Joel not coming till next week, Andy working till all hours. Last night Adrienne Bolden and I spoke to a mixed group at Wincester Gardens, mixed of League of Women Voters (it was their yearly party) and Wincester Gardens residents. Except for major problems with their PA system ("Speak UP!!!") it went very very well. I so enjoy these public outreaches. Give me an audience and I'll be high as a kite. Adrienne said her cold felt better after speaking!

snow..

Snow is down, a good six or eight inches of it--and as I write, Mom is en avion coming from Phoenix to here. Supposed to arrive just before 5:00 P.M, and Andy wants to come along to pick her up. I've got dinner under control, a Sherry Weinberger pot roast sliced and ready to heat; potatoes to heat; bread in the bread maker, an apple and cabbage cole slaw, and a fruicake for dessert. I wish the Coalition were so well under control...

Lucille in California

December 6
My mom in California with brother-in-law Goro, viewing the elephant seals! She's coming to New Jersey on Friday.

First Serious Snow

December 4
The first serious snow of the season! Just a couple of inches, but enough to have to shovel (Andy got out his new Big Blower). There will be more tomorrow night, they're saying, my last class at NYU. Also the day the Provost says he's going to lower the boom on the graduate students who are striking to have their union recognized. Bad days for workers uniting, I'd say.
Boe did a nice Colloquy on Acceptance today at Ethical. Buddhist quotations about how we will do harm, so the objective is to do as little as possible. Also a fable about a woman who goes to a fortune teller and is told that she will have ups and downs for six months, and beyond that, the fortune teller says, she can make out nothing. The woman is terribly anxious for the full six months, and then, at the end of the six months, the fortune teller dies. This isn't quite as good as Appointment in Samarra, but it's good.

December 2

As usual, brother-in-law David "Joho" Weinberger's blog is hilarious. See his insightful comments on Helsinki.

Loving Couples

November 29
Reading Ted Hughes' The Birthday Poems -- wonderful stuff, his incredible belief in language that is at once admirable and enviable and also old like polished oak panels on walls: the muscularity of the poems. People write that sometimes about poets, usually guy poets. When my revision work is going best, it feels that way, like a strong forearm, flexed, taut, impulses moving up and down its length. Very apparent in these poems, which don’t have a lot of his mystical Jungian hoo-hah. I just read the Diane Middlebrook book about him and Sylvia Plath, Her Husband.
I’ve been intrigued occupied by couples lately: Hughes and Plath, then Carter and Cash thanks to the movie and the internet. I found an image of John Carter Cash, the late baby of Johnny and June, who is in his mid thirties now, and his parents both gone. Even if Andy and I live into our eighties, we’ll be gone when Joel is our age, so I hope he does get himself attached to some big family, his own or another.

Thanksgiving is over...

November 27
End of the long week-end which included going in to NYC Wednesday night to have dinner with Ken and Linda and see their hotel room which was really a one bedroom apartment, then early the next a.m. off to Ellen's for Thanksgiving-- after Andy dealing with a broken lock on the door, scrambling around to find keys to the old lock in the door handle that we never use. Then Weinbergers and Cavanaghs and Joel and Sarah and a couple of Ellen's friends for dinner, followed by Jurassic Park and the traditional walk and shopping at the outlets at seven a.m. the next morning like real Americans. Sarah and Joel drove down together in her car behind and then ahead of us, then hanging out with Joel and Sarah when they weren't hanging out with Joel's other friends.

Friday Morning

November 18

Eleven a.m., and I feel ready for a nap– we had the the Fund-raiser breakfast this morning, and I felt good about my little speech, I don't know why, but this was one of the ones where at a certain moment you feel the people out there, that a line of energy has opened up between you and them
I've been especially happy to have Andy home--I think it's because this was the first time he's been gone since my dad died, and I had that sense of the missing person in your life, and in this case it was Andy only missing for five days. Daddy, of course, I haven't lived with in forty years. He's in most ways as present in my imaginative life as ever– but of course for my mother, whose life for five years was totally centered around the man in the chair and his physical needs– well, it’s a great rent in the fabric for her, as well as the loss of the love of her life and companion since girlhood.
I’m re-reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles and can hardly stand it. It’s a wonderful book, but you feel doom foreshadowed from the first page. By golly Thomas Hardy had a grim view of this vale of tears.

More grad student strike

November 15
My NYU class met at midtown in a lovely conference room at one of the students' offices--and it had windows! This was in support of the Graduate Student Strike. There was a good article in the Village Voice today--I really don't get why NYU is being to hard-nosed about this, and it makes me suspect they'd like to get rid of our union too, the adjuncts. Which has made me feel so safe.

Fall colors

It’s a return to the colors, not as brilliant as some years but bright oranges and yellows, the leave falling fast now. We still haven’t had a true hard frost, but I’m down to my last three tomatoes (ripening in the house), and I’ve had to cover the greens and lettuce not against frost, which they can take a little of or they wouldn’t be out all winter, but because Somebeast chomped the radicchios. Is this another deer? A cat wanting a tonic for a bad stomach?

Books for Readers Newsletter # 76

Newsletter # 76
November 5 , 2005

After missing October entirely, I finally sat down to put together this newsletter– only to have my hard drive die. I spent hours a day for almost a week on the phone with #$&*!* Dell computers, waiting for a human being while loud advertisements were broadcast from my speaker phone. Then, once #$&*!* Dell finally agreed that my contract did indeed include repairs, I had to wait to hear from the technician who would be coming to install a new hard drive. Now that I have a hard drive again, I’ve been installing software, copying files, making sure of what I still have and what I lost.

I am now wildly dependent now on the computer– and increasingly on the Internet as well. I’ll be writing a note, or actually working on fiction, and I’ll need to know something— usually a fact, a birth date or death (is Mary Lee Settle in the same age cohort as Mary McCarthy? McCarthy is five or six years older). I just flip over to the ever-available Internet. It’s a kind of super-sizing of my memory if not my whole brain. And it’s right here on my desk in chunky beige plastic. Some other time, I’ll write about the serious negatives of the computer (the option of obsessive ego surfing, shopping when you could be creating– addictions are only a mouse click away).

Another reason for the slowness of this newsletter is that I’ve been focusing my reading on a couple of books by Mary Lee Settle, who died a month and a half ago. She was born in 1918 in West Virginia, although she lived all over the world and died in Charlottesville, Virginia. She wrote the Beulah Quintet, a series of five historical novels covering the history of West Virginia, and the National Book Award winning Blood Tie. I’m reading her two earliest books, written when she was making the switch from being a playwright and actress (she is said to have done a screen test for the part of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind), plus The Clam Shell, a later novel that explored the events of her eighteenth year. She was in my parents’ generation, when the drive to leave home regions was probably even stronger in America than it was for people of my generation. The present young people of Appalachia are not, I don’t believe, so convinced that you have to go to Paris or New York to have adventures or make art.

Even before Settle died, I was reading books by some of the old grand old dames of the twentieth century, especially those who came to adulthood before the Second World War: stories by Jean Stafford, who is a marvel, and the redoubtable Mary McCarthy, whose cool judgmental mind is as refreshing as iced spring water. I re-read THE GROUP, which I liked much better this time around. I also read HOW I GREW, a memoir written when she was in her sixties, that covers some of the same period as THE GROUP, and is full of opinions and a breezy tone that makes it feel more like journalism that a memoir. But the most interesting surprise was CANNIBALS AND MISSIONARIES, a novel that centers on an act of terrorism in the style of twenty years ago– that is back when people were taken hostage and threatened with death rather than simply blown up.

The novel’s characters include several art collectors and politicians, and is full of discussions of art as consumer product as well as terrorism as art for art’s sake– very interesting indeed. The title of the book, by the way, comes from a mental game in which you have to figure how some cannibals and missionaries can get ferried back and forth across a river with no one getting eaten. I think the game I knew was about foxes and ducks.

One of McCarthy’s great strengths is that she is so interested in details of the physical world as well as details of argument and social behavior that her books don’t feel dated. Even a book like this with what on the surface appears to be a kind of passé terrorism is so full of interesting detail about the nineteen eighties that it seems fresh. One of the difficulties for most people of writing about your own time is that we have so many assumptions– that we will always and forever know who Paris Hilton was, for example. McCarthy, by contrast, looks so closely at everything that if she uses slang or refers to a figure in pop culture, it is always with close analysis and critique.

CANNIBALS, like most of her work is very cool. She seems to prefer her most annoyingly superficial characters to the ones who have depth– not that she doesn’t know they are annoying, but they seem to amuse her most, and thus she keeps them alive when others die. The violence, which you know has to happen, is presented almost off-handedly, which gives it a kind of bracing realism. McCarthy, also has rather more affection for the rich as a class than I do, but the book is engagingly intelligent– and inexpensively available in the online used book stores.

-- Meredith Sue Willis

BOOKS TO CONSIDER AS GIFTS

I’m still working on a list of books to give as gifts. Around the middle of November, I’m going to e-mail and post a special page recommending these books, and I would greatly appreciate your suggestions. Two requests: (1) The book should be from a small publisher or long out-of-print so that people probably won’t see it advertised elsewhere, and (2) try to write a brief line about who you think would really enjoy the book. See Issue 75, plus some samples here:

SHANNAGANEY BLUE, a novella by West Virginian native June Langford Berkley, gets Phyllis Moore’s vote as one of the best publications by a small press. First published in 1983 in The Akros Review, Spring, 1983, Number 7, the intriguing volume is now in its fifth printing. Never advertised, it has a loyal readership and has been used in classrooms. Shannaganey's protagnoist Kate calls to mind another much loved fictional character, Scout in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Each child tells a story as only a child can, a story set firmly in a place they know and love. Kate and Scout are the real deals, each speaks with an authentic, sometimes amusing, voice. Each tells the truth as they see it. Moore says, “I've read SHANNAGANEY's 47 tightly crafted pages many times. In case of a house fire, it's one of the books I'd rescue.”
To order SHANNAGANEY BLUE readers may contact the author. Berkely.jberkley@columbus.rr.com . The cost is $5.00 and postage is included

Here’s one I think I’ll get for my mother, who is 86 and likes to be inspired and comforted: EVERYDAY BLESSINGS: A Year of Inspiration, Comfort and Gratitude Compiled by June Corner (Source books, Inc., $11.99, ISBN 1-4022-0606-2) Available now at bookstores nationwide. For more information, visit www.junecotner.com.

In the same vein, Barbara Crooker has a 2006 Everyday Blessings calendar, a 365-day, page-a-day boxed calendar, is now in bookstores.Click here: Everyday Blessings

That’s the idea. You can always, of course, recommend best sellers and classics as well, but for this special page I’m looking for books that people might miss otherwise.

RECENTLY PUBLISHED

South Orange resident James VanOosting has just published his tenth book (See HarperCollins’ page on him at http://www.harpercollins.com/global_scripts/product_catalog/author_xml.asp?authorid=12835 ). Actually, he has two new books out– one is a novel called WALKING MARY that is the object of a censorship campaign by a librarian in South Carolina! He also has a book of reflections on ways to think about words, from writing and book making, to reading and sharing what we have read, called AND THE FLESH BECAME WORD: REFLECTIONS THEOLOGICAL AND AESTHETIC.

Kenneth J. Harvey’s new novel is out: THE TOWN THAT FORGOT HOW TO BREATHE, which concerns what happens when the art of storytelling begins to die out in a small, coastal community. His work has been highly praised and well reviewed, and J.M. Coetzee gave this book one of his rare blurbs: "An eerie and gripping story, the work of an extravagantly haunted imagination."

Barbara Crooker’s poem "Elegy for New Orleans" is up at
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/Secure/Content/cb.asp?cbid=4766, and information about her new book RADIANCE is available at http://www.word-press.com/ or through
http://www.barbaracrooker.com

NONFICTION ON IRAQ AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Here are some books on Iraq recommended in an “Essay”column at the end of the 10-30-05 NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW by Robert F. Worth. He especially likes Wilfred Thesiger: ARABIAN SANDS (1959) and (better) Thesiger’s book THE MARSH ARABS, plus OUT OF THE ASHES by the Cockburns and books by Hiro, Kelly, and Atkinson. The best general books on the Middle East and Iraq, says Worth, are Bernard Lewis: THE MIDDLE EAST and THE CRISIS OF ISLAM and David Fromkin’s PEACE TO END ALL PEACE. The latter gives the background on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and British efforts to govern Iraq in the early 20th century. Worth also recommends Makiya on Baathism and Saddam Hussein and Ajami on the Iran-Iraq war, a book called DREAM PALACE OF THE ARABS, as well as Yitzhak Nakash on Shi’ism.

DUSTBOOKS–SINCE 1964!

Still giving information about the small and tiny presses– look for the new editions of the ever-useful Dustbooks publications at http://www.dustbooks.com .

ARTICLE BY BELINDA ANDERSON ON PHYLLIS MOORE AND THE WV LITERARY MAP!

See Belinda Anderson’s article on West Virginia’s own Literary Map at http://www.wvculture.org/arts/artworks/artworksfall05.pdf

SUBMIT

I found two little online magazines that actually welcome long fiction: THE KING’S ENGLISH at http://www.thekingsenglish.org and the OREGON LITERARY REVIEW at http://www.oregonliteraryreview.org.

NIMROD INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL has themes for its spring and fall 2006 issues– “The Healing Arts” and “Doings the Hundreds at Fifty.” Send work to NIMROD, The University of Tulsa, 600 S. College Ave., Tulsa, OK 74104. Please send email submissions only if you are a writer living overseas. If you have any questions, please write to us at nimrod@utulsa.edu .

MORE FOR WRITERS: DO YOU NEED NAMES?

These websites will give you ideas (Suggestions thanks to SOCIETY OF CHILDREN’S BOOK WRITERS AND ILLUSTRATORS NEWSLETTER):
20,000 names at http://20000-names.com/
Random name generator at : http://www.kleimo.com/random/name

My NYU class plus strike

November 8
I’m feeling extremely affectionate towards my Beginning Your Novel class this fall. Great group, full of talk, and even the people are not the big talkers feel present and accounted for. I was heartened last night by their willingness, indeed eagerness, not to cross the picket lines if the NYU graduate students strike tomorrow. This was especially funny because we were reading from a novel in which a grocery store-owning family has trouble with the grocery workers union! Anyhow, they all agreed they’d like to meet off campus if there’s a strike, and two people volunteered offices. I look forward to the class– comfort with liveliness, familiarity of situation including my own confidence in my ability to teach this class, and, always, the fun of talking about writing plus Life.

November 5

November 5, 2005
This would have been my father's 88th birthday. The photo is from the early 1970's, when he was principal of Victory High School in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

Up Close and Personal with the Computer

I’m getting very close to having things fixed up with the computer: as my husband says, I’m having a few days “up close and personal” with my computer. I would like to be writing but find it hard not to be obsessed with getting my website whipped back into shape, and now I’m fooling with the Big Dreamweaver, #8, which I’ve got on a 30 day free trial, and while I’m not doing anywhere near what it’s capable of , it has some solid improvements: you can have the “properties” screen and the code available while you’re looking at the “design.” I’m not convinced that all my work with the web is truly useful– and yet, aside from being a certain kind of fun, I keep thinking there is something important about it, to be able to publish this way.
I really enjoyed Writers’ group last night. My friends there are wonderful writers and people. Carole Rosenthal read a very interesting beginning to her memoir, really lovely. Rebecca read some new fiction, don’t know if it’s old or new, but definitely strong, and if it’s new, that’s great news. Also of course in the group are Edith Konecky and Vera Williams along with Joan and Suzanne. And they liked my bar mitzvah boy story.