Book Recommendation: A Visit from the Goon Squad

I'd have to label Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad not just as one of the best books of 2010, but as one of the best books of the decade.  Strikingly original, smart, penetrating in its insights on both individual nature and collective American consciousness, the book is as rewarding to read as it is fun.  A reader's book for sure, this is a must read for writers.  What Egan does with structure alone--taking the notion of suddenly popular "linked stories" to a place perhaps only ventured into with as much authority by Tim O'Brien and Elizabeth Strout--the book could be required reading for writers wanting to examine a book's architecture.  It's made a couple of dozen "best of 2010" lists already and it certainly tops mine.  Navigate towards this Washington Post review for not just more praise but an excellent summary and analysis:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/15/AR2010061504751.html

After Setting Record, UConn Women Keep It In Perspective : The Two-Way : NPR

As the father of three daughters, all three of whom have competed in athletics in college and all of whom have "kept it in perspective," getting it done in the classroom first and participating in sports second, all of whom have always exhibited class and humility, my own perspective on the UConn Women's record is a bit jaded. It is a view in total agreement with this commentary: After Setting Record, UConn Women Keep It In Perspective : The Two-Way : NPR. How refreshing it is to see a group of athletes show the class they have to celebrate their success without tarnishing the successful history of others. Some lament UConn's total domination of women's basketball in the way we so enjoy hating those who are so wildly successful. I say give the women, their coaching staff, and the program the credit it deserves; you have to build programs like these and you have to do so with a relentless pursuit of excellence. We should show them something akin to the class with which they have reached this milestone and congratulate their success. Then we should move along, people; it's just basketball. The real repercussions of such achievement reside in the things we can learn from it: hard work, camaraderie, goal-setting, high expectation of the self, surrounding oneself with others who demand excellence...

Query Mistakes

Here is a link to an excellent article by JH Tohline compiled from interviews with agents about the most common mistakes they see from first time writers in query letters:  http://www.jmtohline.com/2010/12/biggest-mistakes-writers-make-when.html

Hurray for Small Presses!

The 2010 National Book Award for fiction goes to Jaimy Gordon for Lord of Misrule and published by McPherson and Company, a small New York press that typically plans print runs of 2,000 copies for literary titles (they bumped this one up to 8,000 for the first run when the nomination for Lord of Misrule was announced just before the first run, knees shaking, no doubt, with worries of unsold returns.)

On the bestseller list...the first volume (and a doorstop at that) of Mark Twain's autobiography, published by the University of California Press.  It has now sold something over a quarter of a million copies after a planned initial print run of 7,500.

Another NBA finalist this year was I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita, published by Coffee House Press.

Just a few recent examples of wonderful success stories from small publishers.  Good for the editors at these and other fine small presses.

Dare to be smart and buy books that fuel the imagination and challenge the mind.  Don't let sales volume and marketing budgets determine what should be read.  One way to see a more eclectic vision and read a greater breadth of work is to support small presses with your purchasing power.

Book Recommendation: The New Valley

Remember the name Josh Weil.  When he produces a book to follow up his debut collection of three novellas The New Valley (2009), buy it.  Once in a while a new writer comes along who reminds you why you love books, why  books allow you to see people in ways you'd forgotten you could, books even that teach you to question yourself and your preconceptions.  In this beautifully, honestly written novella collection, Weil continuously shows us characters we tend to, at first glance, think that we should dismiss, and in some instances, characters we dearly want to hate.  And then he does the remarkable--he redeems them, or rather, he presents them in the fullness of their humanity and allows us to redeem ourselves.  You'll never see the hill country between the Virginias in quite the same way after reading this book.  He writes himself into situations that seem like they might well prove impossible for a veteran author and then every time he gets it just right.

2010 National Book Awards, The National Book Foundation

2010 National Book Awards, The National Book Foundation

Pearls Before Breakfast - washingtonpost.com

This story is several years old now, from 2007. but it is not only tremendously well written, it forces us to ask critical questions about art and the role of art in our lives, our ability to recognize beauty, our tendency to believe there is value in the shear industry of our busy lives, and our current hierarchy of values. Focused on the world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell, the Washington Post put on a fascinating experiment with music in a public space. This is well worth reading: Pearls Before Breakfast - washingtonpost.com

Book Recommendation: The Lady Matador's Hotel

Christina Garcia's new novel The Lady Matador's Hotel is wonderfully original, employing a cast of six radically different characters whose live cross through their stays at an affluent hotel in an unnamed central American capital.  The novel's structure is complex and original.  The atmosphere of a place in perpetual turmoil is spot-on in its portrayal.  And the narrative, like the character depiction, is energized by occupying some space between realism and Magical realism--an altogether fitting style for the setting, the character's backgrounds, and the events.  You can read reviews and learn more about Garcia through her website. 

Women's Basketball - Blogs - Denver Pioneers Official Athletics Site

"Abbey's Angles" a daughter's view of Wyoming, etc. Women's Basketball - Blogs - Denver Pioneers Official Athletics Site

Looking Back At The Great 'Life' Photographers : The Picture Show : NPR

Looking Back At The Great 'Life' Photographers : The Picture Show : NPR

Standing on the Lake Bottom

(This essay appears today at http://www.earthstorys.org/ as well.)
Depending on the time of year, the amount of snowfall, and the thirst of people and potatoes downstream along the Snake River, I live anywhere from a third of a mile to a little over a mile of the Palisades Reservoir. I run with the dog for miles along its edge with frequency, particularly in late spring when snow keeps me out of the mountains and early fall when hunters push me back to the flatland. This late in October I can drive for miles across the lake bottom, bumping along on a ever-narrowing strip of old asphalt pock-marked with gaps where the lake gradually erodes the pavement during the few months each year the abandoned highway is underwater. Sometimes the dog and I explore the lake bottom and the high-tide line. This day I stand on the low foundation remains of a farmhouse, the neat grid of cement blocks the only legacy of someone’s home before the dam was completed a dozen miles away in 1957. Silt anchors the blocks in the ground and covers more than half their small elevation.



The lake has receded for the winter, drained to fatten Idaho potatoes to McDonald’s uniformity, or to be fair, to the uniformity demanded not just by McDonalds but by Burger King, In and Out Burger, Carl’s Junior, Ore-Ida, and a few dozen other purveyors of the American obsession with the French Fry. A bit of the water goes to Idaho cities of course, which largely means Kentucky bluegrass imported to Idaho, and some of it feeds sugar beets and alfalfa and wheat, but mostly it goes to potatoes, for Idaho is practically a case study in industrialized monoculture, which means it hosts many “managers” with expertise in irrigation storage and chemical soil enhancement. The reservoir is 34% full the Bureau of Reclamation tells me in its daily statistics, nearly two thirds of its million and a half acre feet of storage removed. The summer boaters are gone too. No anglers here in a land that is often cracked like an aging palm.


What those “managers” mostly offer me this day is a place for contemplation from a small rectangular pad of cement that probably served as the front stoop of a farmhouse. From there I contemplate the surrounding mountains that are my daily companions and try to imagine the valley as it might have once been. Now miles of that valley succumb to a mostly flat expanse of spongy soil tinted faint green by the limited hardy plants and grasses that can sprout during the brief time between burial under summer water and winter snow. In the days of the farmhouse I assume I would be looking at a waist-deep expanse of hay meadows turning autumn gold and awaiting the reaper’s scythe. I have followed the irrigations ditches that once curved along the valley floor, have seen the labor evident in rock piles from cleared fields. I wonder if any neighbor’s rooflines would have been visible. I imagine the work: the labor of digging irrigation ditches and tending animals and harvesting enough hay to get them through brutal winters, the effort of hauling enough wood from the surrounding mountains to heat this tiny home through six months of bitter cold when the snow would pile four feet deep against the now missing walls


And what was here before these foundation stones where laid in their neat, small grid? Probably sage flats, and in October that would have meant the presence of bison to be joined in November or December by elk. Would there have been cottonwoods and willows along the river? How many pools and unexpected falls would the river have offered, how many braided channels and choked-off islands?


I stand on these thin strips marking the outline of a once-house and I wonder. There are a few cliffs that protrude from the mountainsides above me, though such palisades are not the dominant topography of these timbered mountains. What fences, what barriers then did the managers choose from when naming their new lake? There is not a fence in sight. Only the occasional roofline dots the last fall color in the surrounding mountains. No army settled here. No, the only true barrier seems the lake itself, slowly silting the past.

Death in Western Forests

This is a post "recycled" from an article I wrote last month for Earthstorys (http://www.earthstorys.org/):

I dreamed of flames last night, a forest erupting around me: fogbanks of smoke, a landscape of living flame, come-hither gestures of fiery fingers followed by encircling snares of engulfing orange demons. I awoke trying to run among persistent runnels of fire, smoke filming my eyes and clotting my throat. The root of the dream is no mystery, for the day before we had travelled deep within the smoke of a smoldering forest—the Bull fire in the Gros Ventre Range—a scene made surreal by the dampening effect of an elongated rainstorm, a storm that would prove to save thousands of forest acres no doubt. With the fire suddenly manageable again—for it had grown quite unmanageable, adding more than 1,000 acres every twenty-four hours—the Forest Service hopes to direct the burning back to the mosaic pattern that might be the best hope for preserving the forest’s long term health and its best defense against a burgeoning invasion: the western pine bark beetle.




It is a forest in need of health, a forest, like most in the region and soon throughout the west, sickly with the ravages of the pine bark beetle. Rocky Mountain forests are dying. It is a crisis so severe that it is difficult to describe to those who don’t live in the west or are not frequently visitors over time. Entire landscapes are changing and death is everywhere apparent—mountainsides where brown has replaced green as the dominant color, stands of pine where the death rate can reach greater than 80%. Colorado may have seen the worst ravages thus far, and aerial photographs there reveal National Forests inundated. The standing dead that remains creates a tender-box of fuel in regions that have already suffered year upon year of drought and decades of fire suppression that has created a lethal understory and where often there are twice as many trees as scientists view as healthy.



The current and future devastation is far more than aesthetically unpleasant or visually shocking. Like all radical changes in an ecosystem, this dominant presence by a single species will have caustic effects on most others, and in this case that will ripple all the way up the food chain. For example, the double blow of pine beetle infestations at high altitudes when coupled with the deadly presence of white pine blister rust threatens overwhelming loss of white pines, which means the loss of white pine nuts, a critical staple in grizzly bear diets. Similarly, sudden blow-downs of standing dead wood are not only lethal to the living things in immediate proximity—be they animal or vegetable—the soil disruption will create new erosion hazards, impacting streams, rivers, and their inhabitants alike.



Western forests are in critical condition and there is no clear cure. There are few sure means to kill the beetles. The most effective means is fire, though even then the timing matters, for it needs to occur while the next generation of beetles remains in larval form. One can cut and burn diseased trees at this stage or cut and bury them in an attempt to save those nearby, though this is entirely unrealistic when considering the millions upon millions of acres already in one stage or another of infestation. The traditional environmental control—freezing—where there are -30° temperatures sustained for at least five days, rarely have occurred in recent years. Thus every year the beetles advance further north, though the pundits who deny the existence of global warming refuse a relational view.



If viewed in ecological time, the forests will recover, even if they will be dramatically different forests from the ones we have been familiar with previously. Those who are informed understand the multiple fingers of the human hand that has accelerated conditions where such devastating insects now thrive, including decades upon decades of “management” practices that suppressed fires and encouraged logging techniques detrimental to natural reproductive patterns. Eventually succession will be revealed and western forests will feature more deciduous species and fewer coniferous ones. In my little neck of the woods, this will mean more aspen and more Rocky Mountain maple. Human settlements in wooded western regions probably will fare worse than the forests we have built within, and it is certain our strategies for recovery will prove impoverished by comparison. Coupled with our inability to have the patience for natural transformation, this may well spell intellectual disaster in our relationship with the forest equal to the consequences of catastrophic fires. Indeed the forests will eventually recover, if in ways that we are not accustomed to seeing. The greater question may be whether we will prove capable of learning to change as well, and most particularly change the patterns that aided in the development of the crisis in the first place.



Each morning this week I have awoken to the aroma of smoke, for the Bull fire is but one (and among the smallest) of fires burning in the greater area in a fire season that has proven relatively mild and winds carry far. I suspect we in the west should prepare for a future where the smell of smoke will be the least of our worries and but one lethal element encroaching on our dreams.

Employee of the Month

Employee of the Month
Originally uploaded by theWORDwright

Gee, thanks a lot for the honor.

New Project ~ bioStories

I have launched a new writing project, a website devoted to honoring the lives of ordinary people called bioStories.  Visit the site at http://www.biostories.com/.  I am actively looking for contributors as well as trying to build a readership base.  For a clearer sense of the project's intent, I am posting the following from the "About" page.

bioStories offers word portraits of the people surrounding us in our daily lives, of the strangers we pass on the street unnoticed and those intimate to us who have been most influential and most familiar but who remain strangers to others. We feature daily posts from a diverse variety of writers and select some of the portraits they offer as featured essays. We particularly look for work that offers slices of a life that help the reader imagine the whole of that life, work that demonstrates that ordinary people's experiences often contain extraordinary moments, visionary ideas, inspirational acts, and examples of success and failure that prove instructive. In short, we believe every life displays moments of grace. bioStories wishes to share pieces of these lives and celebrate them.


View the pieces of the lives presented here as portraits, sketches, tributes, memories, remembrances...pieces of lives that enrich our experience for having shared them. We ask writers to, as Toni Morrison has said, "Imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar." Share a life. Introduce us to someone we don't yet know.

October

October 1st and we've just seen the hottest week of the year in Western Wyoming.  The world seems topsy turvy--snow in late August and now highs in the 80s.  It was still a pleasant temperature somewhere in the mid 40s for this morning's run, a soothing, mind-cleansing sort of  5 or 6 mile run in easy, flat terrain.  October, and I avoid the woods as hunting season is in full swing, so it was the lake bottom today, for the lake has gone away, swelling potatoes now that will soon swell MacDonald's french fries that will then swell American bellies and arteries.  I ran at random across the lake bed veering into what must have once been an irrigation canal in hay meadows before the construction of a dam and the stopping of the Snake River.  Barely identifiable, silted over, I suppose, in places there are hummocks of piled rock on each side slowly giving way to grasslands.  How much work that?  Decades of a rancher clearing rocks.  The ditch bottom is relatively smooth, easy running in most places, the grass laid over by the presence of the lake part of the year, a faint game trail giving over to sand for much of its length.  The lake gives way to grassland, the grassland was once hayfield, the hayfield once meadow and likely tree-lines along the river course.  Flat.  I can see 15 miles north until the river bends, 20 miles or more south.  Rising east and west are the Snake River Range and the Caribous, sporting patches of aspen orange and yellow and highlights of red from the last of the Rocky Mountain Maples now losing their leaves.  Absolute silence.  The only sound that of my feet on the earth and the "jick, jick, jick" of the dog's collar.  Rejuvinating.  Room to think and clear my mind.

U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey - Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

Interesting results from a Pew Study...U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey - Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. I'm just sayin'... 'cause there are those days where it feels like there's a lot of finger pointing by some crooked fingers...

I'll leave the conclusions to you.

"Speak" Latest Victim of Attempted Book Banning

A reminder: September 26th – October 1st is National Banned Books Week. If you live in a school district where those with closed minds are attempting (or have succeeded) to ban books, please take the time to write your newspaper editor or your school board members or your school administrators and speak up against such ignorance and injustice. The latest victim of attempted book banning is Laurie Hals Anderson’s Young Adult novel Speak. She offers details of the idiot behind the attempt to ban the book at her blog, along with links to write on the book’s behalf in Missouri where it is under attack.



I spent twenty years of my life teaching writing and literature at the university level. I can't tell you the number of students I encountered in my career who talked about having read Speak as teenagers and having it become the book that motivated them to want to write. Moreover, many students spoke passionately about how Speak touched their lives and encouraged them to share their voice, to speak out against injustice, and in one case, gave a student who had suffered a similar fate the courage to face her past and speak out against violence.


I have read only a handful of YA books. I read Speak because of these students I mention. I found it eloquent, smart, and respectful of its subject, its characters, and its readers. I remember reading the book in one sitting and feeling I had known some of the people who populate its pages. As the father of three daughters, it is one of the books that I suggested each of them read when they reached their own teenage years.


It is exactly the sort of book that should make all of us speak loudly against ignorance and simple-mindedness, two qualities shared by those who suggest we ban books. To ban books is to ban ideas. It is an affront to freedom and we should speak out against those who try and disperse injustice.

Fall Sky

Fall Sky
Originally uploaded by theWORDwright

Aspens against that impossibly blue September sky. We are in full fall in Wyoming.

“Upwards Condescension,” Ravenous Paranoia, and Why I Despise the Tea Party

I have a coworker who generally keeps to herself and does her job well and without much complaint, a person who is typically pleasant and polite if too quick to doubt herself and her abilities and a bit fast in harboring jealously that other coworkers might be receiving preferential treatment. She is frequently a person who seems full of self-doubt and an unfocused, likely unvoiced, longing for a life she hasn’t quite found. She is rather shy and self-effacing in a classically Midwestern sort of way, keeping largely to herself. She is blond-haired and blue-eyed and all-American in appearance, though the darkness at her roots defies the blond dye and the contacts exaggerate the natural color of her eyes. She spends an undue amount of time dismissing herself and her abilities, a trait that I, in the quiet of my own head, label “preemptive error insurance.” And thus, when she does share opinions, they sometimes come as something of a surprise and are direct and simply rendered and clearly very personally held views guided often by emotion. The surprise is exaggerated once you start to recognize that her means of attempting to voice dissatisfaction or affect office politics tend toward the Machiavellian. She would hate me for using that word “Machiavellian.” Indeed there is a touch of paranoia glimpsed in her nature at moments, and she would find my use of the word pretentious, possibly suspicious, and she would hold her lack of familiarity with the word against me. She has commented to me on several occasions when she dislikes people we both know because they act “superior” or “show off that they are smarter than me.” Sadly, particularly if the person in question is formally educated, she genuinely seems to believe she is inferior. She has a particular dislike for professors (and having been one in a former life, I admit inclination to trust her instincts in this regard) and seems critical of all in the teaching profession.



What takes me by greatest surprise then is the realization that her reaction to people and ideas she dislikes is to be condescending. Given her tendencies towards self-effacement and lack of self-confidence, such condescension feels backwards, like a mirror shone back on those to whom she ascribes feelings of superiority. Sharing this observation with my wife, she coined a term: “upwards condescension.” Today, when in a meeting I reminded our staff to promote an upcoming event sponsored by one of our patrons for a talk to be provided by a Rwandan journalist, I received a teenager-like eye roll from my coworker. She has spoken before about how much she dislikes the patron sponsoring the event, dismissing him as “weird.” When I suggested, my dander up at the eye roll, that our rural town, capable too often of holding parochial views on the larger world (an idea suggested in no such language as this), would benefit from such a unique guest speaker, I was met with another eye roll. When she spoke, she said, “Oh, yeah, I saw the sign. She’s going to talk about teenage pregnancy or something.” I merely replied that the poster was specific, that the journalist would be talking much more broadly about the state of Rwanda today. I added that the journalist’s series of articles about single Rwandan mothers had been the prompt for a lecture she had been requested to provide in New York. How I longed to take the clarification further, to explain that the fates of these mothers was further complicated by the extreme poverty of the country, that they were frequently raising their children in the squalor of a post-war world and from within a nightmarish psychology of post traumatic stress disorder, that these were women who might have to wait three or four hours after walking miles to get a day’s supply of water in a place where some men will trade sexual favors as a promise to supply water, that most of the women had likely witnessed the murders of their families, and that many of the children in question and now of age to risk pregnancy themselves had been conceived during acts of rape, rape used both as an externalized threat of more deadly violence and as a means of ensuring the end of an ethnic bloodline. To my regret and shame, I said nothing. Indeed it took me a good long bit of contemplation to realize the amount of recent history that would need conveyed or to process completely the subtext of what had been said and left unsaid in our brief, workplace exchange during a meeting where we had also discussed “the illegality of photocopying money, passports, and driver’s licenses at actual size.”


I had long thought my coworker was simply dismissive of people she found intimidating out of defensiveness. Today I began to recognize that there was something more complicated and entrenched than defensiveness at play, something beyond dismissal out of ignorance or self-doubt. In fact, observing her past reactions to others who displayed excitement at learning of the larger world or exploring new ideas, I came to realize that there was an active, if unconscious, desire to defend such ignorance and to sustain the myopic comfort of a xenophobic mindset. (Would she read this sentence, I have little doubt she would seal her vision of me by the very presence of words unfamiliar to her.)


It came by almost immediate extension to me then that what I had observed in my coworker paralleled nearly exactly what has made me come to despise the current “Tea Party” movement. I do not use the word “despise” lightly, nor do I fail to admit that my direct interaction with its participants (who do not seem to value interacting but rather proselytizing) is minimal and likely not comprehensive of the breadth of its adherents, nor do I fail recognition that using so strong a word risks placing me into a position that replicates the condemnation I accuse them of harboring. Yet that is one of the symptoms of extremism, it tends to generate hatred and fear. And in truth, I do fear the rise of Tea Party candidates into positions of power having too often witnessed the results of extremism and having too long watched the world suffer at the hands of American governmental policy and corporate action from positions of false superior belief and self righteousness. The observations allowed via the rhetoric of the movement in its public face, certainly as exemplified by its most visual and vocal icons, most notably Sarah Palin, appear to display a movement that defends ignorance and isolationism and fears smart people. It appears to prefer “homespun” talk to the need in a frighteningly complex world for nuance and precision. At the very least, it asks the most intelligent among its ranks not to display that intelligence at the fear of appearing an “insider.” It feeds unfocused worry, fear and uncertainty to a public that feels the world is increasingly unpredictable and unfriendly. It is a movement that closes doors and builds bomb shelters, a movement that waves patriotic flags and then defiles the constitution by denying equal rights for anyone who holds beliefs in opposition to theirs. It is a movement that shouts “no” to everything and refuses to discuss specificity of solution for anything.


It is wrong to attribute all I fear in the Tea Party to my coworker. Indeed she is outwardly apolitical. Rather, identifying what can prove so unnerving in her personality provides me a window to a mindset much larger than hers. Her desire to abdicate a responsibility to the world beyond her front door and fearful of those who strive to be informed and engaged in that broader world helps me find an ability to articulate why I believe that we must, regardless of political leaning or party affiliation, stand opposed to those seeking power who cannot distinguish common sense from simple-mindedness.

Toni Morrison on Writers

"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familarize the strange and mystify the familiar is the test of their power."      --Toni Morrison

Barry Lopez on Reverence

"I'm not writing about nature. I'm writing about humanity. And if I have a subject, it is justice. And the rediscovery of the manifold way in which our lives can be shaped by the recovery of a sense of reverence for life."      --Barry Lopez, in an interview with Bill Moyers

Book Recommendation: The Lotus Eaters

Looking for new voices?  I highly recommend the debut novel by Tatjana Soli The Lotus Eaters.  The novel follows Helen Adams, one of the few female photojournalists covering the Vietnam War.  The novel paints vivid and haunting images of Vietnam and of the war and Soli proves an outstanding researcher.  The characters succinctly drawn, and while the love stories that fuel Helen’s larger love affair with the country and with covering the story are often rushed and a bit overly romanticized, the novel offers a compelling vision of the past and a protagonist who feels real and complex.  This book is a strong debut from a novelist who will be worth watching.

Read a Bad Book

If I start a writing day by first reading something, I tend to read work that I respect, work that inspires me, that reminds me why writing matters and of the role books can have in our lives. I still subscribe to such a theory and advocate its application. However, after a conversation with my oldest daughter about an ethnography she was assigned early on in a graduate course, I am reminded that there is merit and instruction in doing the opposite—read a BAD book.


Why waste your time, you are inclined to say. Well, one could offer the argument that I recall no lesser writer than William Stafford once made, that reading a bad book can bolster your confidence to write a good one. There is something more, I think. It is something that requires you to read differently, for if you are reading a bad book as part of your writing development, then you must identify, specifically, what makes it so bad. Here you can’t just dismiss opinion or consider your reaction a matter of taste, you really have to identify how and why the book fails in its writing. (Remember, there are books written badly on important and compelling subjects and those who wish earnestly to have value, as well as those that simply offer bad “B” movie treatments of tired, weak-limbed, I’m-not-pretending-not-to-waste-your-time wood pulp destroyers.) You must get analytical and study a bad book with the same intensity the smart writer studies a good book. Once identified, the hard part is not repeating the same errors.


Try this useful exercise the next time you are frustrated, but don’t give it too much time because not only are there droves of good books you need to read, you’ve can’t afford another excuse to delay returning to your own work (remembering that it might just take a great deal of bad writing to ever get to the good stuff).

Learning from Gardens

"We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of time.  How much is enough?"
                                                                             --Wendell Berry

Time

Writers have few real needs.  It can be a simple, fulfilling life.  The commodity I need most is time.  Time to write.  Time to think.  Time to love.  Time to live.

I have learned to edit in short bursts and breaks.  Certainly research can be done in lots of settings and in bits and pieces.  But to truly create text, to find stories and hear characters, I need the luxury of uncommitted hours, a long enough stretch of time to find my way.  We all have busy, crazy lives.  To write is, for me, to run against the grain, to slow down and think with depth, to look into the dark corners.  There is no greater gift than that of time if one tries to lead this writing life.

Learning to Let Go

The house is quiet. The daughters have all left, returning to their respective schools and the lives they are creating for themselves. These departures remain one of the hardest parts of parenting—the constant letting go. The departure of children is a melancholy thing, for the ache of missing those one loves so greatly is real, but it is pain tempered by the pride one has in the people these young women have become and the shared excitement for futures that are vibrant and full.


At the best moments the brightness of their potential becomes nearly infectious and I believe in the possibilities of my future too, one made more conceivable by their presence within it, even if an altered participation, one featuring adults come into their own. There is joy in watching their lives unfold, despite the knowledge that they will face heartache and indecision in moments along the way to rewarding lives. You can’t protect children forever, although every parent wishes to try, no more than you can protect oneself from the empty space when they are not in one’s immediate presence. The distances are a bit greater, the quiet more disconcerting, but adventure awaits—for them and for their parents as we step uncertainly onto that path that grants entrance into the unknown future.

When the *%^&(* Flows Without End

So what does you do when you can’t string three words together without it sounding like the equivalent of fried shit on a crisp Ritz cracker? The cracker isn’t enough to pull this off. A full sentence simply scares the hell out of you. You’ve written pages and pages of excrement.


Welcome to my present writing life.

Well, if you really can differentiate the excrement from the cream, you are off to a good start. Sometimes a smallish fire is worthwhile. There might be catharsis in the burning of manuscript pages. (I picture Toby from “The West Wing” now, burning speech drafts in his office and suddenly wish I smoked cigars—reason enough to keep an old Zippo around.) Don’t burn just anything. You might need some of the shit. But still, knowing when you suck can help. If you can separate the pages that need burning from the others, you’re already off to a good start.


Not great advice? Step two: remember that crazy, lovely, lonely, brainy Georgian who made art out of simpletons, yes, good old Flannery O’, and you will be reminded that you’ve got to stay in the chair. Sit down. Face the page. Maybe, okay, quite likely, write some more shit. But you’ve got to do it. Face the blank page. Stare into the empty air. Pick up the pen. The only real way through is to produce work.


In the meanwhile, change form if it helps. Write in a different style. Use a different technology. Write in the journal rather than on the stack of manuscript pages. Post to the blog. Sometimes you can trick yourself into quality by changing the venue or fooling yourself into lowering your standards (because really you are aiming to raise your standards—you just need a springboard into text).


Be productive in other ways. If you are being judgmental about the text you are failing to produce, maybe all that negativity is actually perfect for going backwards and facing the story that you said was done but that you know in fact really isn’t done because it has that one fatally flawed scene, or is it that whole damn chapter of the novel that you know you’ve let slide on every revision, every reading, acting as if the good teeth around the festering, infected, pus-filled decaying one won’t really bother you (or kill you for that matter if you wait long enough). Maybe it’s time to tackle what you’ve been putting off. Hate your work at present? Then go hate the work that can really cause good work harm.


Finally, basics like reading. You’re producing shit. Read more. Read the good books, the hard books you keep putting off. Learn from them. Study them. There are days where it is important you read more than you write, if for no other reason than to prepare for the days when you will write more than you read.


Think I’m full of it? Probably. But what have we got to lose?

Barnes & Noble: “Piazzas of American Culture” - Deal Journal - WSJ

More evidence that the book world is changing, and changing rapidly. Here's a Wall Street Journal blog post regarding this week's news that Barnes & Noble is likely looking to sell themselves in an attempt to save themselves. Think the Kindle hasn't already garnered most of the market share in ebooks? Think ebooks are little more than a passing fad? Thing again. Barnes & Noble: “Piazzas of American Culture” - Deal Journal - WSJ

Librarian Nancy Pearl Picks 'Under The Radar' Reads

Among the most trusted reading sources is Nancy Pearl, author of the Book Lust series and simply a reader of impeccable taste. From NPR, follow her summer reading advice: Librarian Nancy Pearl Picks 'Under The Radar' Reads

Book Lovers, Carbon Footprints, and Moral Dilemmas

Among editors, agents, writers, and others associated in one form or another with the publishing industry, you can’t have a conversation or open a industry journal or blog post without encountering the varying debates on what e-books will do (are doing) to transform the medium of how reading materials are presented to the consumer. Every sort of argument is posted, from the economic impacts, the contractual language of book deals, the future for publishing houses, the role of gatekeepers, to the very structures and contents of books themselves. Forgetting aesthetics, personal preferences, individual fondness (the heft of a good book, the pace of turning real pages, the portability, the possession of a library built over years and years of reading…), e-book technology is here, it is growing exponentially, and it is quickly gaining real aficionados among serious readers and techies alike. For the first time in its history Amazon reported that last month the sales of e-book titles surpassed sales of physical books. According to Eco-Libris, e-reader sales saw a 176.8% increase in 2009. The world moves on. E-books will continue to become a growing presence in the publishing marketplace and likely will one day dominate book sales.


One question often lost in the debates among industry insiders is whether this explosion of e-books is good for the environment. The more studies one reads, the more unclear the answer often is, due in large part to most all of the voices weighing in on such debates having vested interests one way or another on the answer. (In the spirit of disclosure, I must reveal my own interests here, for as a writer, the price-per-item of initial e-book titles vs. physical books will almost certainly reduce my future earnings significantly should e-books outpace physical books.) While likely imperfect, a study put out by the Cleantech Group would seem to indicate that e-books can have substantial positive environmental impact. Their study finds that the carbon footprint of an e-reader (factoring in manufacture, energy use, delivery to consumer, raw materials, etc.) is equivalent to that of 22.5 physical books (which do not use vast quantities of paper but have extremely high transportation costs). There is a good deal of statistical data to weigh through in the full report and a good deal of base point assumptions about the reading habits of those who own e-readers, etc. but their initial findings seem to be generally corroborated elsewhere. Whatever may happen in the commercial market, and we probably would be guilty of mimicking ostriches if we don’t see the inevitability of this growth, e-books hold tremendous economic and environmental savings in large niche markets such as college textbooks (removing the paper waste associated with multiple editions with minimal changes) and medical texts, among others.



What we can know is that the traditional publishing industry hasn’t exactly been environmentally conscious, and only in recent years have major publishing houses made much of any push to increase their use of recycled paper. Even among those publishers who have made such commitments, we’re still talking about 25 – 30% recycled paper usage at best. Estimates vary, but even towards the conservative side, the book publishing industry alone is responsible for the harvest of 30 million trees annually (and this grows explosively once the newspaper and magazine publishers are added).


More hard evidence is needed, for the manufacturers of e-readers aren’t exactly forthcoming on all the component materials that go into the construction of their devices and the environmental impact of those materials. Debates continue; a good beginning place for further investigation is present at Eco-Libris (an organization with its own vested interests we must note) that offers links to a number of related articles about environmental sustainability and carbon footprints in traditional and in electronic publishing. As an aside, I will point out that Eco-Libris may be an organization lovers of physical books want to support, for their mission is to provide readers with easy means to plant trees to offset the physical books they own.


Like most issues, this one gets really complicated, and almost no scenarios for the future seem to bode well for local, independent booksellers or community libraries, to say nothing of emphasizing the quality of book content or the development of a serious literature. At the very least, it is my hope that consumers will become educated such that one of the leading questions they ask as they contemplate the purchase of a product or their participation in an industry is focused on the environmental impact of that decision. If the demographics among frequent book purchasers hold up and we are looking at consumers who tend to be highly educated, frequently urban, and typically upwardly mobile, the trickle-down effect of becoming environmentally educated consumers becomes even more critical. In a consumer culture, like it or not, where we spend our dollars matters a great deal. Our culture needs books. We need good books. And we need intelligent, curious readers. The medium by which we get those good books may mean a great deal to our collective future as well.

(This post also appears on last Wednesday's blog over at Earthstorys.org.)

Seeing Vs. Thinking Part 2

I don’t wish to be misunderstood and have it believed that I don’t believe thinking is important. Quite the opposite. Indeed, part of the potency of writing is that writing offers organized thinking. The finished writing product is carefully constructed, ordered. It is architecture with engineering. What I do wish to distinguish is where and when that kind of formalized thought process occurs. As the cliché suggests, most of writing is re-writing. Revision takes a great deal of concentrated thought. Much of the work of revision is identifying relationships, ordering ideas, pursuing patterns, developing a cohesive, forward-moving, engineered text, only one where the reader can’t quite see all the elements of structural support. But you must provide the ideas legs and means of expression. You must have text first, and I am firmly convinced that over thinking a text before you have the raw materials will keep you from ever producing much of anything. It doesn’t necessarily take much to start or to move deeper within a text, not much more than the ability to see an image or a scene, although this does mean releasing control to the text rather than to the logical mind. That comes later and is equally vital.


We need writers who are clear thinkers. We need writers with ideas, not fluff. For me, the roots of texts exist in such vaguely formed and murky ideas that I must start with images or a character’s or narrator’s voice or a circumstance. It is THROUGH the writing that the ideas begin to clarify and take shape.

Word Temple

This reminder from the press stamp of Copper Canyon Press:  the Chinese symbol for poetry, when broken into its parts, are word and temple.

Seeing Text Vs. Thinking Text

I find that among the greatest writing dangers for me is to outthink a work in progress. When I catch myself trying to answer questions about a character, about that character’s motivations or thought processes, I get in trouble. Instead I must see. I must see an image, however incomplete, or a scene, or a character in action, or I must hear characters speaking. I only need shadows to write. Once I can see shadowy silhouettes, I can proceed, find the full scene, convey the moment or frozen image for which I have vision, and then, typically, doing so will allow me to see what I must see next or to power through a whole scene or even a chapter without too much thought. It is the translation of seeing through the vessel of the pen that matters, for the pen delivers the language on to the page. Once written, there remains a lot of work to be done, a great deal of development and revision and finessing, but as I then look back to move forward, I realize the logical questions now have answers. I don’t have to ask so many questions now for the people have stepped nearer to becoming whole and can supply the answers. For me, this is one of the great ironies about writing, for I am convinced that writing is about real clarity of thought and I pride myself on producing texts that develop ideas, but the only way forward into those ideas for me is not thinking too much. It is a matter of trust: trust in the self, trust in the medium, trust in the characters, and trust in the nature of the human story.

On Trying to Write

Today I have arrived at the study seeking morning sunshine, warmth on my skin, natural air, space and time to allow the expansion of stories and ideas that clutter the page and clutter the mind. So I step out onto the little deck that opens from the study. There is birdsong and slanted light accenting the intricate fibers of spider webs. The mosquitoes are put to bed. The day will be warm but the night still lingers in the air.

I seek quiet and find it, seek words and stumble. The quiet helps me find footing. Scrambling to locate toeholds, I jump from a muddled manuscript in progress to a muddled journal. I switch pens. I stare at the horizon. I watch birds in flight. It is easier to turn to the volume of Ted Kooser I have carried through the French doors, easier to venture into his Iowa farmyards than to locate the elusive figures emerging from the shadows of my pen. Easier as well than face the inevitable shadows of memory or the silhouettes that extend into those unknown places of a thousand tomorrows or the equally unknown of the book unwritten. The faces in Kooser are familiar but not mine. The birds we share, or at least many of them. His words are lovelier, his images more honed, but it is language I need. Language and memory and metaphor and idea, and mixing with the sunlight he helps ease me into this dark world of my own making, this density of inky pages and monochrome figures needing to become flesh.

Guest Blogging at Earthstorys

Okay, so it's been forever since I've posted on my own blog, so who am I to be trusted?  Despite my absence here for June, I'm now guest blogging every Wednesday at Earthstorys.  Please visit the site, not because I'm blogging there, but because it is an excellent hub for sustainability culture, one loaded with information and insight, containing a daily blog, feature ideas, news articles, an almanac--all things Earth.  Learn more about farm cooperatives, solar technologies, updates on the Gulf crisis and much more.

Wisdom from Maya Angelou

These are some simple but wise words appropriate to anyone but especially for writers and other artists:

"You can only become truly accomplished at something you love.  Don't make money your goal.  Instead pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can't take their eyes off of you."
                                                                                   --Maya Angelou

If It Would Have Been a Snake...

When we are deep in the bowels of working on a writing project, does the world really offer up magic to us with astonishing frequency or are we just paying attention?  For instance, this week I stumbled upon a William Stafford poem "Ask Me" that includes in four lines the distilled essence of a central theme I've taken 500 pages and 10 years to get right in a novel.  Would I have understood those lines without the years and pages?  Would I have seen them at all?

I'm honestly not sure.  The world does seem full with magic at times.  I do know I must be awake to see it.

Endless Editing

How is it possible that you can work through your manuscript dozens of times spread over years and still realize how much it benefits from editing.  I'm prone to verbosity, so eliminating wordiness probably shouldn't come as a surprise.  And, as an editor recently reminded me (something I told myself and my students for years), there are times you need to trust your reader to get what you are spending too much time detailing.  Then there are the filler words, like a freshman stumbling through the first speech.  Still I thought I'd caught it all.  I haven't.  You can't come close to the aggressiveness of editing the manuscript needs until you let go.  Give it to a near stranger who has nothing at stake.  She may not see the editing needs, but your psychology can change for having given it to her.  I did.  Again.  The book will be better for it, and that's what counts.

Accepting Critiquing from Querytracker.com

This is a really good post on accepting critiques from Querytracker.com:

Often, we try to sweep unpleasant feelings under the carpet to avoid dealing with them. But experiencing them can help us deal with and get past them. So go ahead and admit to yourself -- and your crit buddies, if you need to -- that sometimes it's hard to take even constructive criticism. I bet they'll tell you they feel the same way!



Now that we've established the problem, let's look at how to deal with it.

1. Realize that a critique of your work is not a critique of you.


Like I said above, it can be hard not to take crits personally. But nobody -- and that includes people like, oh, Stephen King -- started out as a brilliant writer. Yes, some folks (like King) have a definite head start when it comes to raw talent, but everyone needs some work to get it right.

For example, King was determined to get published from the time he was a teen. He began sending short stories out and, like the rest of us, started racking up rejections. He put a nail in the wall, and each time he got one, he stuck it on the nail. Pretty soon the nail fell off the wall and he had to put up a big fat spike instead. But when he got feedback from an editor or a mentor, he didn't feel sorry for himself or swear to give up writing -- he buckled down and figured out how to be a better writer based on that feedback.


And we all know how that turned out.

So separate critique of your work from a critique of you.

2. Even if you can't help but take critiques personally, realize that the criticism (and the bad feelings that can accompany it) won't kill you.

People who choose to pursue clinical or counseling psychology need to be aware of their own biases and the messages they're sending others verbally and nonverbally. But when you start grad school, you're rarely as self-aware as you need to be. So guess what happens when you get there? That's right -- they start pointing out every little mannerism, bias, and trait. Worse, they videotape you so they can point to the behavior and say "That is a problem." If you can't see it, they play it over and over -- often in front of a crowd -- to force you to acknowledge the problem.


It's enough to make anyone want to crawl into a corner and curl into a fetal ball. But you know what? Even in such a situation, you start to realize that you can survive it. Eventually, you realize that the fear of taking in constructive criticism is often worse than actually facing it head-on and dealing with it. Sure, you might have some mannerisms or vocal tics that need work, but that doesn't mean you're a failure as a person.


The same thing is true with writing. You may have a lot of trouble not feeling bad when someone doesn't like your character or the twists your plot took. You may want to throw everything out the window when someone believes you need a major change to make the story work. But that doesn't mean there's something wrong with you as a person. It just means that your vision isn't coming through as clearly as you'd hoped.

Still, sometimes we need to feel the sad and frustrated feelings before we can look at things more clearly. So if you need to, go ahead and feel sorry for yourself for a day or two, but then it's important to pack up your pity party and get down to business.


Criticism can be tough to take, but you CAN take it. And the more practice you have at taking it gracefully, the better you will get at it. Promise!


3. Rather than getting overtly defensive, ask questions and find ways to improve clarity.

Now that you know that it's okay to experience the bad feelings -- they won't kill you -- you can have them and then move on. One of the best ways to move on is to look at places your crit buddies see problems and find out more so you can make good changes. Try asking questions like:


What made this [plot point, character motivation, etc.] confusing? What would help me make it clearer?

Is this a problem you're seeing consistently through the story/novel? What skills do I need to hone to correct that problem? Can you recommend any resources that might help me/have helped you?

Could you suggest ways I might fix this problem? Examples might help me see possibilities.

Remember, the goal in soliciting crits is to make your story better -- so follow up on anything that's unclear!

4. Keep your eye on the goal.


Remember, growth and change are usually difficult. But if they get you closer to a treasured goal, it's all worth it!

So...what have I missed? How do YOU deal with constructive criticism?

Listening to Your Draft Readers

When you use readers for your work (and you really must), don't forget to listen.  Sounds obvious, huh?  But you'd be surprised.  Listen to them.  Listen to what they are really saying.  They are being heartfelt  (Or are you really so far gone you don't chose readers you know you need to listen to?)  Think about what they say and then think some more.

I'm not saying you have to agree with them.  You don't.  Perhaps much of the time you shouldn't.  But you have to consider the work they've put in at your request, think about the greater objectivity they can bring to a text, ponder the points of your work that provide them struggle.

Once you've listened to them, once you've contemplated their reactions, then really listen to yourself.  Not your dreaming of being done with this damn thing self, not your dreaming about publication self, listen to the part of you that has been whispering in your ear since the beginning.  About that nagging part of our character you never actually portrayed.  About that little logistical problem you keep avoiding.  About that really difficult chapter you have never written because you're not sure how.  You've been unsure before and you have found a way.  Part of why you gave your readers the text is so that you can finally face the revisions you've known are necessary for so long now.  Listening to them will help you listen to your honest self.

Earthshine

Earthshine Define Earthshine at Dictionary.com: "–noun Astronomy .
the faint illumination of the part of the moon not illuminated by sunlight, as during a crescent phase, caused by the reflection of light from the earth"

Don't you love it when simple language is so evocative and lyrical while remaining spot-on specific in meaning. Okay, I'm a total geek, but it is a simple, beautiful word.

The Bookshelf

I have way too many books.  Shelves and shelves of them and still I use the library every week.  But I have one bookshelf, the one closest to my writing desk, that gets preferential treatment.  Only the books that I love best--a very select few--are housed there.  These are the books I come back to again and again.  Dog-eared, their covers often worn soft from use, they are books I turn to not only out of love but for study.  Some I read parts of virtually every week.  They are joined by the books I need for research at that particular moment, but that purpose is different from the use I make of these--which is something more like carrying photos of the ones you love.  A few titles change from time to time.  More will be added.  But there are a few that will always have a place on that shelf.  Among them:

• The Collected Poems of Rilke
• The Times Are Never So Bad by Andre Dubus
• The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
• Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
• Joe by Larry Brown
• Fay by Larry Brown
• Olive Kittridge by Elizabeth Stout
• The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
• American Primitive by Mary Oliver
• The Paradise of Bombs by Scott Russell Sanders

Those are some of mine.  What's on your shelf?

A Sort of Bio

As you've gathered by now, I write. I write every day. That's the thing, writers write--a complete cliché and the stuff of truth…
…some of that writing has been rewarded and you can find my work regularly in literary magazines, more of it is before agents, stating its case for representation. (For a traditional credits list and information on my books, skip to the bottom of the page—this post, like everything else I do, probably appears backwards. To read my stance on the value of writing, read on.)
I write literary fiction. I'm serious about craft and I have a love affair with language—so much so I have to watch becoming indulgent. I differentiate between the architecture of story from the engineering of plot. Now I recognize this all makes me sound pompous and pretentious. Perhaps I am. However, I think it is vitally important that all artists know who they are and stay true to themselves.

Writing is a way of seeing, a way of being, and it is typically the only way I can consistently make sense of the world and articulate my eccentric and often chaotic mind. I enter my writing knowing that it asks work of its readers—not hard labor, but mindfulness. Writing worth reading is a sacred exchange. It is not television. It is not candy. I like candy, but I want to eat it, not read it and certainly not write it. I believe that fiction is a means towards truth. When I speak about truth I mean, in part, that I wish to know human character, to understand people as they are and as they wish to be seen. The human mind is fragile and potent; it is beautiful and it is capable of doing unspeakable things. To say that I value character-driven fiction over plot is an understatement. A reflective life is more than a string of events, no matter how dramatic those events. There is meaning in living a life fully awake.

Such ridiculously bold statements are some of the essentials about me as a writer. I may well prove myself wrong over time. I'm willing to take that risk, for I want to lead an examined life and for me that means producing writing that tries to examine lives—mine, those in the culture around me, and those who preceded me.

As for the more pedestrian elements about, I offer the following synopsis:

I am a husband and a parent of three grown daughters. Those roles are more important than writing or anything else. I spent twenty years teaching writing at the college level, work that I valued for the contact with students and with their writing. At some point every day for those twenty years I was humbled by something powerful a student wrote, said, or realized. I continue to feel privileged to spend so much of my adult life working within the vibrancy of the unique setting of a university. Beyond teaching, that setting allowed me contact with genuine intellectualism and the perks of coordinating a writing program and a writing conference. I now live and write in one of the most beautiful and largely unspoiled American wildernesses at the edge of greater Yellowstone ecosystem just south of Jackson, WY.

I write primarily fiction, dabble regularly in essays, and occasionally produce really bad poetry. My work has appeared in the following publications, among others, and I am deeply indebted to the editors of such literary magazines, editors who typically toil in obscurity and without pay: Arlington Literary Journal, The Bloomsbury Review, Dogwood, The Externalist, Fugue, Matter, Porcupine Literary Arts, Talking River Review, Tar River Review, Weber: the Contemporary West, Zone 3. I publish under the pseudonym Mark Hummel. I have completed three novels, each radically different from the next. A synopsis for each is available under their corresponding titles in the menu bar.

On Publishing (or Not-Publishing)

“…I would advise you not to waste time feeling ashamed for being an unpublished writer. Each time you sit alone and give your most honest and complete effort, you’ve earned the title of writer, particularly on those days when you struggle the hardest, when you spend all afternoon and evening refining an idea or the precise phrasing of a few descriptions, when you’re pushing yourself beyond your own abilities. These hard-fought and seemingly inconsequential victories accumulate over time and make all the difference.”

                                                                                             --John Dalton

Needing Inspiration

I’ve been struggling these past few days with writing, both in the story I am working on now and in editing old work (badly needed edits, I am realizing). These are times with the isolation of a writing life begins to close in, when the darkness seems near at hand. So you have choices: give up, give in, or get back to work. I try and get back to work. In such times I often turn to the writers who mean the most to me, the ones who make me push myself to be better. I re-read their texts, study them, allow myself to feel inspired by them anew. For me, one mainstay is always Andre Dubus (right). Not only did the tough old bastard write like an angel, he wrote even when the world often ignored him. And he wrote what he wanted to write, stories that moved him, characters who wouldn’t let him go. He concentrated on getting people right, even if it meant facing hard truths about himself and about humanity. One would be hard pressed to find stories more powerful than “A Father’s Story” or novellas that said more than most writers’ novels. Reading him can be like reading a voice that has existed inside my head for years. Dubus suffered hardship—physically (after an accident suffered while coming to another's aid), personally, financially—yet he never backed away from writing fiction that matters. His work sets a kind of standard for me. Some days I think if I could just write one story or one chapter that could come close to measuring up to the quality and precision of his work, it would be a successful writing life. So I read him and I learn. Again. And then I set back to work.

Make Sure Your Train Stops for You

"Time goes faster the more hollow it is.  Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don't stop at your station."
                                                                               --Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Basketball Addicted

When you are a college basketball fan, you've got to love the first weekend of April.  There have been so many buzzer beaters and improbable success stories this tournament, which are exactly the sorts of things I love about college basketball.

It's so good to see Duke back in the NCAA finals (Don't hate them because they're successful).  Class program.  Class coach.  Wonderful players.  I would never have thought they'd make it this far this year (much to the chastisement of my daughter, who looks like a genius now that she picked them to win it all), but you take their top three and let them have a stellar night at the same time and they're nearly unstoppable.

It's equally good to see a team like Butler in the finals.  Team ball.  Defense oriented.  It's been a long time since we saw those characteristics take a team to the top.

As a twenty year college faculty member and as a father of three college daughters, I'll reveal my true geekdom when I say that it is so much easier to root for these two programs when both post a 90% graduation success rate for their players (Butler at 90%, Duke at 92%).  Indeed, the NCAA should bar teams from the tournament that can't even match their institution's overall student success rates.

As a basketball purist, I'm also loving this finals match-up because it features two teams that understand the nature of team and that actually play defense on every possession.
Can't wait for the Monday match-up.  An always present powerhouse that exudes class against an upstart mid-major (and what, is their coach like 12?)--loving it.

Speaking of class and disciplined programs that play defense, understand team, and hold a hand in creating successful individuals, how about the UConn women (again, hating programs because they are successful is human nature but just isn't fair)?  One name:  Maya Moore, 3 time All American, pure shooter, 3.9 GPA, Rhoades Scholarship candidate.  We need role models like her.

New Sustainability Journal

Eathstorys is an exciting new on-line venture, part journal, part community and focused entirely on sustainability.  Edited by my old friend Wilmer Frey, Earthstorys, which went live on April 1, promises to be an wise, varied clearinghouse for a modern sustainabilty movement, one that balances intellectual depth with honest practical applications.  Visit and bookmark the site; it has offerings that will leave you wanting to return.

Remember This

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on--have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear--what remains?  Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons--the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night. We will begin from these convictions.
                                                                                    --Walt Whiman

Backcountry Editorial

Does This Need a Title?
Originally uploaded by wordwright

Really, do I need to say anything?

Words on the Nature of Books

'"This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary.  Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul.  the soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.  Every time a book changes hands,every time somene runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and stregthens."'
                                 --from The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Goat

Goat
Originally uploaded by wordwright

We look for spring in unusual ways in snow country. Seeing mountain goats usually means that south-facing slopes are melting and revealing new feeding opportunities. There is a group of regular visitors right near the mouth of the Snake River canyon this time of year.

Some Life Advice

"All my life I concentrated on moving forward."  --the great Willie Mays

Boycott Amazon

Okay.  I've been an Amazon customer before like most of you.  There are times the used book prices just look TOO good and the purchase is just a little too effortless.  But really, why should an ebook cost less than a real book?  (Don't bother me with the paper argument and the labor argument and all the rest; I get it.)  The thing is that the book didn't cost the writer any less blood to produce.  It didn't save the agent any time.  It didn't remove the role of the editor both in selecting it or in making it better.  Doesn't Amazon already get these services essentially for free?

Amazon has aleady largely run most of the best independent booksellers out of business.  Now they want to dictate to publishers what they must charge to place their books on the precious Kindle.  I'm sure some of you love your Kindles and certainly there must be a place for digital books in the marketplace, but hasn't Amazon become just a little too identical to Walmart?  Yes, even those who have a bit more money like to save money, but haven't we learned the lesson of what is incurred when we always try and reduce commodities to the lowest common denominator?  Mediocrity.  (Doubt the role of mediocrity? Turn on the TV for a moment to any reality series or any network show; sample most of what lingers on the bestseller lists, try cutting a steak with some Soviet era East Bloc untensils...) If ever there was a demographic that can afford to pay real market value for a commodity, surely it is Kindle owners.  The day Amazon wants to get the classics into every school kid's hands for, say $1.99, or if they decide to distruibute free, current textbooks to every high school science class, then maybe I'll cut them a break.  Until then, if they continue to insist on telling publishers what they will publish and what they will charge, I say boycott.  I'm not a Luddite, but books still read like books and there remain quality, sophisticated writers producing work if you are willing to look hard enough to find it (which, by the way, is a tougher search if limited to titles currently available on the Kindle).  The digital age can be transformative, but let's make sure it is change for the better rather than change for the mediocre.

A World Far From Familiar

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Daniyal Mueenudin
W.W. Norton and Company (2009), 247 pp.


Daniyal Mueenudin’s debut title suggests a book that will force readers to step far outside their lives and enter unfamiliar worlds. Indeed perhaps the greatest reward in reading In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is gaining entrance to the largely unfamiliar, nearly dysfunctional world of contemporary Pakistan, a culture so stratified and so deadened to its own corruption that its inner-workings may well fascinate many American readers. Mueenudin, a Pakistani-born, American-educated newcomer on the literary scene, has garnered wide critical praise and a National Book Award nomination for this group of eight linked stories. The book is beautifully written and culturally enlightening, though the stories themselves may often prove to keep American readers too distant from its characters and events and sometimes struggles to bring closure to the individual stories. The characters are well crafted and identifiable, though the patterns of their lives may seem largely alien. The vision granted of the vivid and unflinching portraits of Pakistani culture—from its wealthiest landowners to their lowliest servants—can, for readers interested in places and people beyond their own immediate frame of reference, make up for the lack of closure and the grand scale of the collection.


The stories are all linked in one fashion or another to one of its principle characters, wealthy landowner K.K. Harouni. Whether exploring Harouni himself as his once vast landholdings are slowly sold off to low bidders in the effort to maintain his luxurious lifestyle or centering on the tales of his servants and managers, the linked stories eventually allow readers to recognize that everyone within Pakistan may share similar linkages. These stories are connected by association to Harouni and, more importantly, by themes that focus on bartering and greed and manipulation, by the sexual politics of advancement for women and the power hunger exhibited by those who can touch the fringes of wealth. It is not a collection of stories that assembles to form an alternative sort of novel, rather the stories offer the reader, as the title suggests, glimpses into rooms they have never inhabited. The Pakistan that Mueenudin introduces us to is one where corruption and near chaos exist at every social level, where middle managers skim profits from their employers, women attempt to sleep their way off village streets and into the manor house, where the educated and the powerful are often bored and harm themselves and others by their attempts to resolve boredom, and the peasants often mimic the wealthy they serve. While the stories sometimes fail to complete a storytelling arc that is comforting to American readers, the characters and their sometimes desperate measure to better their living conditions prove fascinating and likely universal. For literary readers who recognize the role essential elements of Pakistani culture will play in the West’s inevitable future interdependency within Pakistani politics, the book can prove particularly fulfilling.

Mueenudin sees his own culture with astonishing clarity (the author has returned to Pakistan after earning degrees from Dartmouth and Yale to run a family farm). Importantly, he refuses to be overtly charitable nor chastising with any of his characters. Nearly all seem deeply flawed individuals, characters whose very flaws may arise either from the expected “back-scratching” reality of their deeply stratified culture or by elemental human envy and desire for advancement. The tale Mueenudin tells is larger than any of these individual characters, larger than Harouni, larger perhaps even than Pakistan. While some Western readers may feel kept at arm’s length from the events that unfold, they will find themselves thinking about the world Mueenudin portrays long after they close the final story.

Language and Structure

Consider this rich quotation from T.M.McNally's The Goat Bridge (a greatly under-read book, a powerful novel that conveys the complexities of the Baltic wars with grace and intelligence):

"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.

"Art joins,war, like pornography, seperates."

New Year's Words

"He who spends time regretting the past loses the present and risks the future."
                                                         --Francisco de Quevedo

Winter Visitors

One of the benefits of living in the rural West, we had three elk wandering around on the back deck last night eating the last holdovers out of the apple tree.  I suspect some would find them a nuisance or worry about the damage they might do to landscaping, but I can't help but feel blessed by their presence.  After all, we live in their winter feeding grounds, not the other way around.  It was a biting cold night, somewhere in the 12 below range, a clear night with good moonlight--all in all a perfect night to be indoors and admiring some impressive ungulates just a few feet away, even if it was two in the morning.  The irony is that we usually don't get such visitors at all, probably because we've had two winters of record snowpack that's made moving in the valley as difficult for them as in the surrounding mountains and thus it is easier to mosy down the road to the refuge where the state of Wyoming benevolently feeds them fresh hay.  It's good to see them here in their traditional winter range and a comfort to be reminded of some of the "others" we share this landscape with.