These words, the Fashionable Anne Sexton’s words, gave me permission to share my recent news of joy. I have made my first teeny-tiny baby step into the world of the published. Just three days ago, I screwed my eyes shut and turned my face from the computer screen as I tapped the button that would send off a topic proposal for an article in an anthology. Yesterday, I got word that the topic was accepted (with a note to let the main thing be the main thing). Of course, they could still reject the article itself, but here’s hoping they won’t.
In other news, Sun Belt has finally started back up again and I have the time once again to follow Donald Murray’s brilliant advice:
remember, if you want to write, the rump has to meet the chair on schedule. The rear end is the writing muscle that makes the difference between the writers who want to write and don’t, and those writers who want to write and do.
Murray also writes about the importance of developing a “writer’s attitude,” pointing out that the product produced [is] as much the result of attitude as it [is] of skill. With that in mind, I have taped these words to the top of my computer screen today:
I think the reason I’m important is that I know everything. (Gertrude Stein, the writer, not the cat.)
So far this summer, my reading list includes Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems and Joan Dideon’s The Year of Magical Thinking. I am reading Mrs. Dideon for pleasure but also to study her craft of creative nonfiction.
The piece I’m working on for the anthology will require the kind of working it up that Dideon does for her own writing. If anyone has advice on materials that might be particularly informative about boll weevils, I’m all ears (and eyes).
If you’d like to see what we’re doing in Sun Belt this summer, step over to the blog for a look-see. It’s being maintained by yours truly and one John Guericotti. The book groups have really taken off as well, if you’re an educator and interested in reading some of the discussions that have been taking place there.
Good Lord! You, my fashionable friend, have managed to find, like, the only positive Anne Sexton quote EVER. Though I fear that after she wrote this, she probably took a multicolored rainbow of non-fruit-flavored pills, downed a martini, and smoked an entire pack of Lucky Strikes, whilst ashing into a pair of fashionable yet impractical pumps. I’m actually not sure that she smoked Lucky Strikes, but imagine this to be true, due to the irony. The irony! The irony!
YAY TO THE RETURN OF YER BLOG!
You’re reading The Year of Magical Thinking for “pleasure” !!?
Emma! The quote was found in the last 2 lines of “Welcome Morning”––a fashionable specimen. Indeed, I am back, though I’ll be pressed to find the time to blog until my lit review is finished. I’ll be smoking Lucky Strikes until I the lit review is finished…
Marie! Gauthier! I am a big fan (Though not a stalker. I mean, not really a stalker. As long as you don’t count reading your blog, your comments on various blogs, adding you to my blogroll as stalking. Although if you think stalking is cool, then you can consider me a stalker…). I’m glad you’re here. I am reading The Year of Magical Thinking for pleasure in the sense that I envy/enjoy/am mesmerized by the Fashionable Joan Didion’s writing. Generally, I use the term “pleasure” to refer to things that I get the privilege of choosing to do (vs. those that are assigned/delegated to me to do). Thank you for pointing out the irony (absurdity?) of reading a book about death and grief for fun. I am rationalizing this as “okay” with my knowledge of people (I won’t name names, of course) whose idea of pleasure involves Joan Crawford in the smash hit Straitjacket. Unfortunately, there is no SURPRISE, SHOCK ENDING to be revealed in The Year of Magical Thinking as there is in Straitjacket.
In some respects I am shamefully clueless, but I’m happy to have found you here.
Actually, you’re very brave to read TYoMT — I haven’t been able to bring myself to do so. I read Elizabeth McCracken’s new memoir about a stillbirth, but I knew from the get-go that there would be a hopeful ending, that she gives birth to a healthy child later– she most helpfully tells the reader this upfront. But there’s no such promise in TYoMT, and I don’t think I can bear it.
What is happening to morality these days? I was enjoying your blog, when, completely out of the blue, I cam across the word “rump.” Filthy, filthy, filthy. What if my daughter would have read this?
Repent, sinner.
John
John, I believe it was you who brought auto-erotic asphyxiation into the conversation today.
If auto-erotic asphyxiation is a sin, let he with a free hand cast the first stone.
John
Brilliant!