Surrounded by cool, green views and birdsong. So tranquil that it took this city girl a little while to get used to the calm factor, but I finally gave in to the quiet immersion of reading and writing and restructuring. Slowly, surely, the novel is coming together, apart, and together again.
Midwestern Writing
In response to Casey Pycior's book review and writing discussions blog, "The Story is the Cure," I wrote a little something about writing that is deemed "midwestern." Never having considered this, though I've lived in "the midwest" for over twenty years (eighteen in Ohio and two in Iowa), I thought it was time. If I consider myself a southern writer, having been raised in the Gulf Coast region, then what comprises a midwestern writer?
Here's what I told Casey:
To me, midwestern writing is broad and expansive. It offers a view without boundaries, train rides that go on and on, cornfields and flights of geese that extend beyond the horizon. Midwestern writing is Willa Cather and Louise Erdrich, Sherwood Anderson and Mark Twain, Jane Smiley, Jonathan Franzen, Marilynne Robinson, and Lee Martin. Midwestern writing doesn't seek out shade and something cool to drink the way southern writing does; it roams and meanders without the need to rush headlong down subway stairs, the way east coast stories do; it doesn’t have to be coastal and effervescent in the manner of the west coast. It is sure-footed and sure-minded and keeps the company of truth and prairie grass and Norwegian farmers.
I might say that My Ántonia, or Winesberg, Ohio, or A Thousand Acres, or even The Corrections wins the “most midwestern” writing prize. That’s a tough one. I might throw the favorites into the air and watch as Gilead and The Bright Forever land among the corn tassels. It’s too difficult, though, and I despise decisions. So instead, I gather them, happy for the armload of novels and story collections – a few slim, most weighted and thick with pages, all of them Midwestern – amazed that summer is wide open and as welcoming as these books.
If you'd like to respond yourself, with the plus of possibly winning Lee Martin's upcoming novel, Break the Skin, here's the link:
http://thestoryisthecure.blogspot.com/2011/06/book-giveaway-lee-martins-new-novel.html
Discards
post-Katrina painting by Tuni Bose, from a photograph by Mary Bradley Virre
Old sweaters, sneakers, beach towels and blankets,
college texts, ill intentions, forgotten dreams,
odd bits of poetry we once thought pretty but really were pretty bad,
passages torn out of notebooks that were meant to define
and ended up
misrepresentative and misanthropic, even maudlin.
Better to pass them on, throw them out, no reason to rinse or even refurbish them.
Just put them in the big, heaping dustbin,
or straight into that corner of the basement,
into the boxes with the rest of the discards.
Only the weather can remind of things we meant to save.
In Memory of Wayne Brown
"On the water some nights you can feel the earth breathing, the black mountains and the black-gleaming sea together: one world, and old, in the slow-encompassing darkness. Quietude is easy, and vacancy. To speak at all on such a night is to stir the air."
- Wayne Brown - from Landscape with Heron
Thunderstruck
Thunder crowds my head. Some are struck by the bright stare of lightning, but I am simply thunderstruck. By stolen thunder, sun and thunder, thunderous prose, thunder thighs, thunder road, imaginary bolts of thunder, thunderclaps, and the screen door that slams when kids hear the first crack.
I grew up in the 1960’s in the Gulf South where thunder was a big part of life. Lightning, too. Thunder stayed with me, though—a lifelong reverberation.
Back in childhood, thunderstorms wrapped around me, the air like a fine cotton blouse, brushing up, arriving each afternoon for the usual visit. Breezes came through our dusty screened windows and filled the rooms with dampness. Loose envelopes might flutter down from my grandmother’s writing desk and the house become dim. I remember the approaching darkness and the wind, at first subtle, turning over leaves and then recklessly tearing them. The orange and grapefruit trees littered the driveway with twigs, dark green foliage, and odd-sized citrus. And then in the distance, the first rumble. I always loved that first echo, far off, promising to come nearer.
Now I live in the Ohio River Valley where thunderstorms are less frequent. There is a room in this house that is windowed on three sides and surrounded by trees. Not the citrus trees of my youth, but great oaks, white pines, and a tulip tree, which in spring hosts cedar waxwings and in summer ill-kempt raccoons. The view from this room is green and lush for about half of the year, and this is the time when I wait for thunder.
The recent weeks have been rainless. Clear, cerulean September skies and a late August that felt like early autumn. The days became warmer and the sweeping blue veiled itself in white, at first thin, barely there, and gradually spun with silken clouds.
But this morning there is no colored cast to the sky at all. Instead, there’s a damp gray blanket hanging overhead and the world smells like rain. Pure, cool, impending rain. And it’s quiet. Almost too quiet. I look out at the yellowing leaves of the tulip tree and wish for thunder.