Fiction

Jon shouldn't have fallen in love with Edie. But he did, hence the story. I had to read it over a couple times because time is elapsed and Joyce is much older by the end. How Christie was so aloof about her own work and did not even have the faintest recollection of her violin teacher. In that way, she is like a piece of fiction herself. How she fabricated her identity not only as a writer but also as her own character.

You couldn't even be sure that she had recognized the title of her on story. You would think she had nothing to do with it. As if it was just something she wriggled out of and left on the grass.

Alice Munro, "Fiction"

Mr. Darcy Words

In my growing list of vocabulary:
606. chivalrous
806. dapper
819. debonaire
832. decorum

Council of Dads

I believe my daughters will have plenty of resources in their lives. They’ll have loving families. They’ll have welcoming homes. They’ll have each other. But they may not have me. They may not have their dad.

Will you help be their dad? 

--Bruce Feiler, Council of Dads

I came across this excerpt quite fortuitously. I was reading an article about the modern trend of married couples sleeping in separate beds by Bruce Feiler on the New York Times. At the end, it said that Feiler was diagnosed with cancer in 2008 and asked six important men to be surrogate dads to his daughters, would I want to read an excerpt from his book? Of course--hence this lovely letter to his six friends. 

After nine months since his diagnosis, Feiler has been cancer-free, wrote the above New York Times article just a couple days ago, and is an affectionate dad to his two daughters. 

On Writers

"A writer is on whom nothing is wasted." --Henry James


"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." --Mark Twain


"The job of the writer is not to be immersed in experience but to contemplate it." --Flannery O'Connor

Coming back from forgetfulness. 


I had the best week of my summer July 12 to 16 at Ragdale. For the second time, I had these amazing writers sitting next to and in front of me writing and reading their works. I quoted some of their works for they were all so good I wished to steal them. The kind of phrases you think, I wish I could write like that. 


"I move through life, frame by frame." --Nina
"time thaws" --Kamal
"You cannot simply take down the picture." --Nicole
"dangling from the strings of your heart" --Molly