New Books of Note

Murray Edwards, an editing client of mine through my business theWORDwright (http://www.thewordwright.net/), has recently published a new collection of short stories. Looking for Lucy Gilligan is a wonderfully quirky collection that is often laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes irreverent, and still manages to prove frequently touching. Don't be fooled by Edwards' dry humor, for he proves a sensitive writer, one who paints portraits of complex, concrete characters unafraid of showing the world themselves as they really are. It is a rewarding first collection. The book offers a wonderful individualized vision of contemporary Texas. Visit the website for the book at http://www.lucygilligan.com/.

Another recent book of interest that is receiving very good reviews is the true story of a Nazi concentration camp survivor. I am biased on this one, I must admit, for the author is an old college friend--Von Petersen--and I had the pleasure of reading the book while it was still in manuscript. Carl's Story: The Persistence of Hope is a moving true account of one man's unlikely survival of the Nazi horror and of the time he endured at three of the infamous Nazi camps. The book is extremely compelling and an edge-of-the-seat adventure ride of narrow escapes, happen-chance salvation, and enduring hope. It is an important book about commonplace heroism and stoicism. The author and its subject were recently interviewed on NPR, and the book has been well-received by notable authors who have written on the Holocaust. It is available at http://amazon.com/.

Revision Revisited

The word "confluence" appears all over this page I know, but it is something real, something organic, a thing I have come to believe in and and an expression I have come to use where others might use karma or sycronicity or even community. It has particular meaning for me in regards to writing and is on my mind nearly always when I am in the deep trenches of revision. Particularly when one is revising a novel, perhaps the strongest force directing revision is finding the points of confluence, finding, if you will, where the threads interect like the fibers from which the woven garment is constructed. Where does an image need to reoccur? Where does a signifier associated with a character help prepare for her future self or indicate his lingering presence? Where does one chapter echo another? More imortantly still, when one trusts the organic nature of the creative process, how can one learn to listen to the text by paying attention to where currents naturally intersect?

In his wonderful novel The Goat Bridge T.M. McNally writes: "Study the common things of this world long enough and things reveal increasingly what they have in common: namely, the language by which we describe them. This search for detecting forms of order and arrangement, always, is the work of all artists, regardless of form." Such is the work of book-length revision, detecting order, studying arrangement via shared language. Do so long enough, carefully enough and you create work that achieves intrinsic unity. Then maybe, if you have done your job well, the book helps you see how such unity is reflected in the world around you too, for it is the world that gave you the book from within the confuence of the imaginative and the real.

Rain

How appropriate that I've been writing about water all morning, for it has been raining all day. I hear it drumming over my head and rushing from the eaves. Cold mountain rain in April. Still, it melts the snow, and I've begun to see hints and glimmers of green.

Endless Revision

For years as a teacher I preached that so much of writing was really rewriting, that revision literally often meant re-seeing a text. How true that remains. Water Cycle is a book that has taken years and years to write, in large part because I had to learn how to write a book, and in large part because I chose a project (perhaps purposefully, perhaps to impose self-punishment) that is intricate, complicated, layered. I've spent the last three or four days not just revisiting a text that most would feel is complete, but working on one more short chapter that might help relieve an itch that has always existed, a need to have one of the dead characters in the book have a chance at touching the reader from beyond the grave. It is a revision that is a response both to a need I have always felt but never been able to articulate and a reaction to my interpretation of what several agents have been quietly indicating. Mostly this latest revision comes with a thank you to a quality reader who (my youngest daughter) who not only proved a close, and capable reader, but one willing to take me seriously when I asked her questions. 18 and about to leave for college, the quality of her reading reminds me again of why we must never dismiss the young just because they are young, and why we can always sustain hope for our future. Sometime a reader can offer you just the right prompt to make you ask questions of yourself and then return to instincts on how you respond to those questions. Ultimately good revision can be as fulfilling as the initial creative act, for you begin to see the deeper textures, the veins and sinew running within a text that fuel it and hold it together. In the end the focus remains on finding the way to tell all the story as it wishes and needs to be told. It's just that sometime it takes years to listen to the story.

Transcendence

Transcendence
Originally uploaded by wordwright

This is one of my favorite shots taken in the fall of 2007 from under the arch in front of the Chapel of Tranquility in Grand Teton National Park. Some days the mountains really are that crisp. I liked the framing of the bell chain and the top of the archway, as well as the way it crops the top of the chapel and links it to the Grand. When I luck into pictures like this on crisp fall days when the sky is so clear, I sometimes can't believe how beautiful this world is and how lucky I am to live in such unspoiled country.