Hibernation

[caption id="attachment_374" align="aligncenter" width="300"] reorganized shelves[/caption] Two weekends ago, my spouse and I went to a dinner party in Berkeley. When we got there, I realized I hadn’t been out of Davis since the last time we’d been at the same friends’ house for their annual holiday party in mid-December. Two months I’d spent never leaving Davis, California. What was wrong with me? I’ve lived in cities where one might spend months at a stretch without leaving its borders and never run out of interesting things to do. Tokyo. San Francisco. Davis is not one of these places, although for a town of its size, it does surprisingly well. But I wasn’t sampling the delights of my current hometown. I spent nearly every minute of those two months at home. I spent nearly every minute of those two months indoors. This is northern California. The weather’s mild. One doesn’t have to be house-bound through January and February. So what was I doing? ...
pushcart-2011

My Pushcart nominations

pushcart-2011This morning I walked to the mailbox and posted my Pushcart Prize nominations. This is the best thing about being a past Pushcart winner. Well, maybe the second-best thing. The best thing, for me, is appearing right above William Carlos Williams in the index at the back of each Pushcart volume since I made my lucky appearance in the anthology a few years ago. One of these days an Oscar or Samantha Williams is going to come between me and William Carlos, and I'm going to be very sad for a few minutes. But for as long as I or the Pushcart lasts, I get to be a contributing editor. I love everything about this, starting with the amazing fact that I am invited to send in nominations right along with seasoned editors and famous authors. I love reading something wonderful in a lit journal and feeling like I can do something about it, something more than just posting about it on Facebook. I love nominating poems and essays as well as my genre, short stories. And I love having to mail in the list—an old-fashioned letter, addressed to a real person (Bill Henderson, the man who's kept this going for 35 years), folded into a real envelope, and affixed with a real stamp. But I wouldn't be me if I didn't manage to bring some stress to this delightful activity. For most of the year, I read very happily, noting any writing that amazes me on a "Pushcart nominations" list I keep on my desktop. But as the December 15 deadline draws closer, I grow anxious. At least half a dozen journals are piled up on my coffee table unfinished or even unopened. What wonderful pieces are going to lose out on getting nominated because I didn't spend more time reading? Not that I really need more entries on my nominations list: I already have more than the ten I'm allowed. Who will I cut from the list? ...
Hedgebrook, cottage

Anxiety of influence be damned; or, musings from my residency (part 1)

[caption id="attachment_159" align="alignleft" width="300"]Hedgebrook, cottage my reading chair at Hedgebrook[/caption] Three weeks ago I returned from a four-week stay at Hedgebrook, a retreat for women writers on gorgeous Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. This morning I started a blog post to reflect on my experiences there, but it grew so unreadably and Internet-inappropriately long that I've ditched it and opted to share my ideas in smaller installments over the next weeks and months. First up, some thoughts on writers and their relationship to reading. We all know that writing begets writing, and boy, did I ever live that at Hedgebrook. The more I wrote, the more I had to write about, the more I wanted to write, and the more mental energy I had for writing (physical energy was a different matter -- and may be the subject of a future blog post). But I also believe that reading begets writing. ...

Ready or not: residency!

Tomorrow I leave home to attend a writers residency. I'm lucky to have this opportunity -- four weeks in a beautiful place where I'm put up and fed and allowed to work. I'm grateful for the solitude and the time I'll have there as well as for the support of my spouse and kids, who'll be spending the rest of their summer without me. God, am I going to miss them. Today I'm packing. I've probably given more thought to the books I'm taking than to clothes. Here's my portable library for the next five weeks: ...

What’s With All the Fiction Titles That Begin With “What”?

My lovely and gifted friend Cora Stryker recently asked me to read the novel she just completed. It's a compelling post-apocalypse story set in San Francisco, and I hope you all get to read it soon. It's called Raven's Manzanita, which is a hopelessly endangered real-life plant that figures both literally and metaphorically in the novel. A great title, I thought, but then Cora e-mailed to ask me what I thought of a new title she was considering: What The City Was. Please don’t, I wrote back. ...

20 Under 40 Angst

Last week The New Yorker announced its “20 under 40” list of the most promising American fiction writers under the age of 40, and the only people who seem to be happy are the 20 people who made it onto the list and their agents. The unhappiest folks are probably the writers who were short-listed but didn’t make the final cut. And then the writers under 40 who weren’t even considered. And then maybe the writers—Colson Whitehead is most often mentioned in this regard, although to judge from his prolific “tweeting” he’s taking the blow pretty much in stride—who didn’t make the New Yorker’s last list in 1999 but are just over the age cut-off this time. And then there’s the rest of us who weren’t in the running in any way, shape, or form, and still feel a little miserable about the whole thing. ...