Reading McKillip

I think that when I grow up, I want to be Patricia Mckillip. Which could be discouraging, because when she was my age she'd had eight books published and won the Newberry. But I don't think that she'd had four kids. I'll take the trade. (And yes, #4 is still in utero, but I swear that he's taking more time and energy than the other three combined right now, just in the amount of extra sleep that been extracted this summer).

In the last month I've read Od Magic and Alphabet of Thorns, (together with a smattering of her short fiction from Harrowing the Dragon). McKillips prose is some of the best out there and the worlds she creates so rich, so layered, that I can actually get lost in them. Putting the book down can be like exiting the theater. "Oh, it's still light out. I had no idea--"

After spending a large chunk of yesterday reading, I could actually feel the need to transition. My head was swirling and it was a good thing, lost in speculation on the nature of magic and the power of words--but I had a first grader getting off the bus in ten minutes, and I needed to be ready to hear about recess and the bus ride, to provide hugs and snacks and start working on dinner. A completely different good thing.

This, I think is what has been one of the hardest things about trying to write over the years. It's not finding the time to write exactly, but I want to be able to submerge myself in the writing and reading--and that requires an emotional and mental energy that is not natural to parenting small children. It's not easily interruptible. I can't lose myself in ten minute allotments between loads of laundry and while keeping one ear open to negotiate squabbles.

I'm reminded of the Olympic biatholon. I'm told that one of the challenges of this sport is that the cross country skiing drives the athlete's heart rate up, while target shooting is most natural while one is calm, with a low heart rate.

I'm not sure that I have any answers. But maybe being able to articulate the problem a little more clearly will be able to clarify things a little. But I think that the start of an answer may be here: this is essentially the same set of concerns that swim around the issues of spirituality and religion and that so plague the church. We have an innate desire for our spirituality to be transcendent, to be able to lose ourselves in worship, to be able to touch the infinite. And yet the reality of Christian discipleship is mostly carried out in the frustratingly mundane. Christ does not pull us out of this world, but rather comes down into it with us--and sets about showing us how to interact with it. Hmm.

Memory and forgetfulness

We are finite and lose even ourselves, sometimes in the end (as with Alzheimer's or Huntington's diseases). But God is infinite and holds each of us perfectly.

Instructions: A poem and children's book, by Neil Gaiman

Jack Prelutsky on Karla Kuskin

I hadn't heard of poet Karla Kuskin before, rather to my shame. Her work looks delightful. Jack Prelutsky presents several of his favorites.

lots of rules of writing

The UK's Guardian asked a slew of authors to each give ten rules of writing. Part one is here. Part two is here.

Featured authors include Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, A.L. Kennedy, Hillary Mantel, Michael Moorcock, Michael Morpugo, Andrew Motion, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Ian Rankin, Will Self, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Colm Toibin, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, and Jeanette Winterson.

Someone else's poem

Author Latayne C. Scott shared an old poem of hers on the group writing blog "Novel Matters" today. I've become friends in the last couple of years with some musicians of the sort that it's a privilige just to listen to the practice. I appreciate this poem.

OPUS ENVY
I watch his fingers
Teasing the piano
As he caresses the ivory teeth
It purrrrrrrs
Harder now – he strikes
A glancing blow off the black fang

An answering roar

ah Rachmaninoff
just because my soul is not in
my fingertips does not
mean I do not have one

Elizabeth Gilbert and the work of the Spirit

the story is . . .

Three year old, drawing on her drawing pad, and Uncle Will

UW: What are you drawing?

3YO: a bridge

UW: don't forget the water

3YO: here it is

UW: where are the fishies in the water?

3YO: they're on land and they all died

UW: oh

3YO: actually, they're looking for their mommies. Their mommies all got eaten. By a shark.

it's all in the narrative . . .

What does God require of us?

well, to walk justly, and love mercy and walk humbly with our God, of course, but sometimes it's nice to have a little more in the way of specifics. :)

The Koala Bear Writer passes on Kathleen Gibson's thoughts on God's requirements and uses of writers. They are:

1. that our words be heard

2. that we become word-wrestlers

3. that we speak and write things we'd often rather not

4. that we do whatever it takes

5. that we be flexible and willing to change

6. that we give feet to our words

7. that we be effective people in our own back yards.

I was particularly struck by the first, second, and fourth of these. I think we are often over-ambitious and prestige hungry about being heard . . . but the error at the opposite end of the spectrum hadn't occurred to me--that it could actually be sin to hide our writing, to keep quiet when God intends us to speak. That wrestling with words means actually pinning concepts down strikes me interestingly too. I know about myself that I do write to pin concepts down, but it's felt like play to me. Or the gravy of life. That God might have intentions for my life and the lives of others through the process of my wrestling . . . hmm. And of course, on the fourth point--doing whatever it takes--the discipline of actually following out and doing the work of living into one's call . . .

7 quick takes: volume 090724

7 books I'm reading this summer when I'm not blogging

1. The Dresden Files (Jim Butcher): okay, a whole series of books. This summer's fluff. Jim Butcher has a deft hand at weaving a lot of stock Fantasy/Sci-Fi elements with snarky humor and likably flawed under-dog characters. Plop the whole thing in a familiar setting--like an alternate-reality Chicago--and it's easy to see why Butcher's managed to land himself on top of the best seller lists.

2. Watership Down (Richard Adams): Book club book for the summer. A pleasant re-read. I must have been about seven or eight when my dad read this to my brother and me for bed-time reading.

3. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy): The other book club read for the summer. I actually read this when I was fourteen and hated it. Re-reading it at 34 is proving to be a college course's worth of insight into how our life experience informs our reading. I'm not sure if I like it or not this time round. I'm not sure I can even really compare. I feel like I'm reading a completely different book.

4. Story (Robert McKee): A book about writing screenplays that has a lot of material which is directly applicable to novels. My writing classes in college focused on structure at the sentence and paragraph level. They never addressed such things as plot arc and scene selection--those macro-structuring issues with which I've struggled a great deal in my attempts to write. This book is a God-send.

5. Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl (N.D. Wilson): My next book review book for Thomas Nelson. A philosophical, apologetic hymn of awe to a Creator-God who is too great for us to even begin to comprehend. Beautiful.

6. God's Prayer Book (Ben Patterson): A how-to devotional guide for Protestants on the spiritual discipline of praying the book of Psalms. A birthday present from my best friend. A not-so-subtle hint from God.

7. Cicero (Anthony Everitt): A biography of the great Roman orator. An overview of Roman politics that makes our current, corrupt American politics look like a model of integrity.

What are you all reading this summer?

As always, 7 Quick Takes are sponsored by Jen at Conversion Diary

make mine an Irish cream latte with an extra shot of espresso

I admit to being equal parts horrified and delighted at the idea of there being a Starbucks down the Road-Less-Taken . . . and to not being sure that I like what that says about me . . .

Kipling's "Just So Stories"

How marvelous!  The complete Just So Stories, with original illustrations are up in their entirety on-line.

"But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him"

my single biggest weakness as a writer

is focus.  I'm a big picture thinker, and as a writer I'm always instinctively trying to make my camera angle just a little wider, make the view a little more panoramic, to draw a few more connections and cross-connections . . . My first writing teacher in college chewed me out for this, trying to get me to trim the fat and simply strike the passages that were excess baggage.  It was then and is still now a difficult exercise for me.  I have probably as many drafts on my blog as I do actual published posts.  Some of those are certainly pieces that I started and which turned too personal for me to want to publish.  But most of them are things where I started to try to connect two or five or ten disparate ideas, or engaged on a long preamble to where I was trying to go and then ran out of steam or time or interest before I finished.  Maybe in future I should just start posting warning labels:  Attention:  Context and preliminary thoughts may be missing.

Word geek time!

this is just too cool. :) Strange Maps has its latest great contribution up--a piece of concrete poetry that implicitly touches on how our language shapes us and the world around us . . . and opens the fascinating question, does nature reflect our regional accents and dialects?

sketching worlds larger than ourselves

One of the reasons I so appreciate Neil Gaiman as a writer is the depth and breadth of the worlds that he builds. They're bizarre, multi-tentacled things, and there's always the indication of much more beyond the edges of the page. They reflect reality that way--there's more here than any one of us can understand. Too many fantasies fall into the trap of wanting to explain everything. Of wanting their characters and readers to understand how it all fits together. But when an author contracts her story-world into something that I can understand, with nice neat squared off corners and no messy remainders, it rings hollow to me. This "ordinary" world is already boundless. If you're going to add in magic, fantastical creatures, futuristic technology, and the like, why should it shrink? I like that Gaiman's characters neither know it all, or expect to know it all. That we as the readers tend to know rather more than any of the characters, but still get the sense that there is much, much more that we do not know.

Gaiman's newest book is The Graveyard Book. It's an homage of sorts, to the Jungle Book, about a boy whose family is murdered, who is taken in by the ghosts of the local graveyard and raised with a somewhat different understanding of reality than most of us have. It is much less macabre and horrifying than such a descripton makes it sound. Gaiman's dry, observant humor and keen insight of human nature and of children and how they go about life make for a great read or listen. Neil Gaiman is currently touring the U.S., promoting the book, reading a chapter each evening which is being recorded and posted. There are currently four chapters up. You can listen to them here.

In chapter 2, (around the 11-13 minute mark), Gaiman neatly reminds us of how much of what we take as fact, we in fact take on faith. (Bod is the boy, Scarlet his new friend)

Bod would introduce Scarlet to some of his other friends. That she
could not seem them did not seem to matter. She had already been told
firmly by her parents that Bod was imaginary, and that there was nothing at
all wrong with that. . . . So it came as no surprise to her that Bod also
had imaginary friends. He would pass on their comments to her.
"Bartleby says that 'Thou dost have a face like unto a squished plum.' . . .
Scarlet was happy. She was a bright, lonely child, whose mother worked for
a distant university teaching people she never met face to face, grading English
papers sent to her over the computer, sending messages of advice or
encouragement back. Her father taught particle physics. But there
were, Scarlet told Bod, too many people who wanted to teach particle physics,
and not enough people who wanted to learn it. So Scarlet's family had to
keep moving to different university towns, and in each town her father would
hope for a permanent teaching position, which never came.
"What's particle physics?" asked Bod.
Scarlet shrugged. "Well," she said, "there's atoms, which is
things that is too small to see. That's what we're all made of. And
there's things that's smaller than atoms, and that's particle physics."
Bod nodded and decided that Scarlet's father was probably interested
in imaginary things.

Sub-creation, responsibility and big noses

One of the on-going discussions in our marriage is our role as sub-creators in the image of God. This discussion actually started quite a while before we were married, in a college seminar that discussed, among many other works of fanatasy, Tolkien's Tree and Leaf, which is a fascinating essay on the nature of story and fairy, coupled with an the illustrative short Leaf by Niggle. I firmly believe that we bear responsibility for and to our creations--to make them the best that they can be . . . that we are to be good gods to the little worlds and character-people that we dream up . . . I also believe that it is possible for our works to transcend us. That the true God will redeem and fulfill all of our little attempts beyond what we could dream of--that anything that is good and true and right and lovely will, in some sense, be carried over into the new heavens and new earth . . . I half expect to meet Reepicheep there. And that even as creators, if we behave irresponsibly that we can forfeit rights over our own creations . . .

Anyway, given the--animated--discussion on the subject that Rob and I were having last night, for this comic to come up via a mis-click in my morning comic crawl seemed apropos. The highly entertaining and theologically dubious Berkely Breathed has also played with this material recently. I think . . . that many of our actions are far more perilous and real than we dare hope or fear . . .

10 Things that make me happy

Tag! I'm it.

Rules . . . the usual. You know. Follow 'em . . . post 'em . . . tag more people . . . nah. If you haven't seen these on Rob's blog already you can go look at them there.

1. Coffee: Well, what did you expect to be first on my list? This includes it in all forms. Fresh-brewed. Lattes. As a mixed drink. Ice cream. But not left-over-and-oxidized-from-yesterday-and -then-reheated. That's not happiness. That's just desperation.

2. The music turned up really loud on a sunny morning.
3. A good morning with my kids.
4. A couple of hours to write
5. Worshipping together with people who are right there with me
6. My husband. I'd elaborate, but none of you really want to read my getting sappy.
7. Rereading a great book
8. Arches National Park
9. Coyote and road runner
10. Poking a stick in the campfire.

11. Rome
12. comics
13. chocolate
14. prayer
15. cats!

For your reading pleasure

I recommend Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union. It's always a delight to find a previously unread author with a back catalog to devour. The last time I was this taken with a read was when I read Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. Chabon is a master of prose. Never mind the fact that the book's written in present tense. Quite beside the fact that you'll stop noticing that you're reading present tense after about the first chapter, it serves a purpose. (The POV character is severed from his past and is pointedly neglecting his future--to tell this story nearly requires that it be always living only in the immediate moment). The plot is beautiful, the characters vivid, and this Sitka-that-never-was is alive in a way that makes me wish that the U.S. had given part of Alaska to the Jews in 1940 after all . . .

What I did not expect to find in so secular an author and his vulgarity riddled book was an extended meditation on the nature of faith and the desire for home. And not just an earthly home, but a spiritual one . . . and how much of that can we have here on earth anyway? And what does our salvation look like? And how much of our own salvation can we create for ourselves? What is this thing we call faith really made up of?

Deep thoughts with Bucky Katt

Bucky would have fit in just fine in my expository writing classes in college. We had a two week project in one of them during which we were each given a plant and had to daily chronicle our thoughts and feelings on the thing as it died. I really hated that weed by the end of that particular assignment.

The last couple of weeks I have felt too glutted with thoughts and feelings to be able to write about it. I've been reading some incredible thoughts and journeys in the blogosphere the last couple of weeks, and the conversations have been galloping along ahead of me while I'm still wrestling with entry one. The nature of the church. Coffee. Denominationalism. Individuality. Our feminimity and masculinity. Grief. Maps. Characters and writing. More coffee. Sometimes a little reminder not to take our own writing and ideas too seriously is a good thing. And the gentle assurance that God holds us in the palm of his hand and that all of those ideas, words, creative impulses, etc. are one of the ways that we reflect the image of Creator God, and that even in those times when we escape ourselves, we do not escape him.