Sandra Gail Lambert

Tayari Jones on finishing the first draft

I don't often do the touchy feely thing, but the truth is my heart just spread all the way out of my body as I listened to this. 

Any day now, after letting my novel rest for a few weeks, I'm starting the next revision .  Inside my head I've been doing the tough love thing - you must be unrelenting, you must have no mercy with extraneous minor characters, you must cut all that part about the young Seminole girl who charms snakes and wants to know how to sew bathing suits.  There's been more tough than love.

So when Tayari spoke of finding that "other kind of love," I sort of started crying.  And now I think I'm ready to begin this ending of three years of work.   

The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory

Last December I posted about Kenny Fries' memoir Body, Remember.  I've had another of his books at my beside since, but I put it off until now. 

Well.  At least The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory doesn't make me relive childhood loneliness and hospitalizations (except for the sawing off the cast part - I could smell the plaster dust).  No, this one just delves into the feeling I've always had that if things got tough in the world, I'd be an early choice for the ice flow. 

But instead of shutting his eyes to all that and carrying on, Fries looks right into the history, theory, and applications of "survival of the fittest."  He mixes it all up in with his own life, shakes, and pours out words that honor Darwin and himself (and me) and our place in the world.  Read this book. 

 

Ursula K Le Guin: Guesswork & Archaeology & Virgil

This audience was lucky enough to have afternoon tea with Ursula K. LeGuin.  She talks about her novel Lavinia and how, for her, science and historical fictions are metaphors for the here and now.  She emanates beauty. (Not that I'm gaga for her or anything.)

Jami Attenberg and Lauren Groff

Tomorrow, Thursday, at 8pm, Jami Attenberg and Lauren Groff will be speaking at Goerings Bookstore here in Gainesville.  

Jami Attenberg is the author of Kept Man and Instant Love.  Jami has had a website since 1998 and is an advocate of independent and self publishing.  Her novel Instant Love was originally a zine series that she sold mostly through her website/blog. 

Lauren Groff is a Gainesville resident and New York Times bestselling author who is devoted to our local independent bookstores.  Her newest book is Delicate Edible Birds.

These two are bound to offer a evening of good writing, all sorts of options for publication, and encouragement.     

East Hope by Katherine Davis

 

Katherine Davis' new novel East Hope is out.  This is not the one she was in the midst of when we worked together at The Atlantic Center for the Arts, but the one before.  This is a disciplined writer.  And I learned a lot about plot (like that maybe it's important to have one) from her. 

So, Kitty - big congratulations! 

 

Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff's new book of short stories Delicate Edible Birds is having a release party here in Gainesville at Wild Iris Books this coming up Tuesday, January 27th at 6pm.  There are so many reasons why I'll be there.

When her novel Monsters of Templeton (a NYT bestseller) was released last year, I heard her speak at Goerings.  She was genuine and generous, and I enjoyed every minute, especially the part about having rewritten her novel four times and the struggle to let the novel have its sea monster and ghost and Greek chorus of aging joggers no matter what the literary world would think of such things.  It made me feel more regular as a writer. 

Join me, right here at Wild Iris Books, to celebrate with this Pushcart Prize winning author who has been published in Best American Short Stories, the Atlantic Monthly, One Story, and The Chattahoochee Review.  (Yes, you have heard me whine about being rejected from some of these publications.)     

Post Peter Matthiessen

Sometimes - often, actually - I'm amazed that, twenty years ago, I had the good sense to move to Gainesville. 

Last night, I was among a way more than legal capacity crowd at a community center in NE Gainesville. Extra chairs were pulled from everywhere they could find them, people stood two and three deep along the walls, and the more limber sat on the floor at Peter Matthiessen's feet.  There were at least 300 of us.  

Peter Matthiessen introduced one of his main character's descendents who was sitting in the audience and then read the part of Shadow Country set in our county.  He talked about making fiction out of history.  About Cesar Chavez and Leonard Peltier.  I leaned over to my poet friend and whispered, "I'm so happy." 

I was.  It's a thrill to be part of a group celebrating writers and writing and the excitement of reading.  Big cities think that they are the center of the universe, but in Gainesville, Florida we know the truth. 

Peter Matthiessen here in Gainesville

The author Peter Matthiessen is an environmental activist, is the founder of the Paris Review, and has been sued for his writing by both the governor of South Dakota and an FBI agent.  He just won the National Book Award for his novel Shadow Country, a saga about the murder of Edgar J. Watson in the Everglades of 1910.  

Santa Fe College is sponsoring this evening with Peter Matthiessenon Tuesday, Jan 13th from 7-9pm.  It will not be held on campus, but rather at the Thelma Boltin Center just east of downtown. 

Oh yeah.  See you there.

 

 

Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin

Okay. Why is this novel on my "2008 books that have changed my life" list?  First of all, I've sunk happily into LeGuin's novels for almost forty years.  Second, I'm working on a book that tells the stories of women and girl children who, like Lavinia, history would never have remembered.  Third of all, Lavinia is a novel written with such exquisite power that I think about it all the time even these many months after reading it. 

How does she make-up a story and it reads like an ancient myth passed down to you by ancestors and makes you also laugh out loud in parts?  How did she put so much strength into her characters?  How much owl imagery can I have in my novel and not be considered a plagiarizer?  I want to make readers feel the way Ursula K. LeGuin makes me feel - as if I've touched something ancient and deep and tender.  

  

Body, Remember by Kenny Fries

At this end of year time, everyone has their "best books of 2008" list.  I think what I want to do instead is talk about the "read in 2008" books that stirred the emotions underneath my writing.  

First, and in no particular order as they say on "Dancing With the Stars," is the memoir Body, Remember by Kenny Fries.  He writes about growing up disabled with enough effect that it sort of sent me into a week of PTSD. (But in a good way?)  I wrote out this quote from the book and have it posted by my writing bed.

"From the car my parents wave.  As they pull away, I feel as if I am once again their child in the hospital, and even though they left my bedside only moments before, I am already anxiously waiting for the next day when they will return.  And although I am standing with Kevin under the vast expanse of the New Mexico sky, when I can no longer see their car, somewhere I hear the hospital elevator close, the sound that begins to stir the distinct loneliness I still carry with me after all these years." 

I have his latest book, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, at my bedside, but I'm picking my moment to read it.  Just the title makes me remember the shoes that had a bar between them that I had to wear at night, the one style (but I could choose black or brown) of shoe available to fit on my braces, how, once I was financially responsible for my own self, I would get them resoled over and over and over because they cost so much, and how when I started using a wheelchair and could get any shoes I wanted, I vowed to (but never did) become the next Imelda Marcos.   

 

 

Carrie Green - Poet

Remember Carrie Green?  One of the poets in my Kelly Cherry group at the Atlantic Center for the Arts?  She was writing a cycle of poems about Lue Gim Gong? 

Well, she's just had some of the poems published in Gulf Stream.  Yeah, Carrie!

The New York Times and Dykes to Watch Out For

The NYT has a glowing, intelligent review of Alison Bechdel's The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.  Which means, sort of, that they did a glowing, intelligent review of my life. Which means that they said "dyke" in the NYT.  Which means that Alison Bechdel's talent and devotion to her own and our lesbian selves has, among so many other things, opened a bit more space for lesbian writers. 

P.S.  Me, I'm a combination of Mo and Clea who in the past years has relaxed enough to add a good bit of Harriet.  How about you? 

Jane Hilberry - Atlantic Center For the Arts Day 18

 

Jane Hilberry is a poet.  Whew, oh my, you betcha, wowza she's a poet. And she's a fine tarot card reader.  For me, the "significant other" card indicated someone we both were sure was my future agent.  Is it bad that I'm thrilled?

 

I have Jane's collection Body Painting here beside me.  I flip the pages and reread "The Car Salesman," "The Mineral of Skin," "Conception: Dialogues with Several Children and a Cosmologer," and, of course, "Sand."  Sprinkled through the book are her "Crazy Jane" poems.  Here's the last bit of one of them.  

 

Crazy Jane Talks With Bones

 

She thinks her skeleton always wanted

to be like a tree, standing in a grove,

wind washing the bones,

making them sway and dance,

and nothing to support but the veined leaves

which sooner or later loosen their hold

and fly away like messages

to the solid, boneless earth.

Renee Ashley - Atlantic Center for the Arts Day 17

 

 

 

Renée Ashley is a poet, novelist, and she's at ACA writing memoir.  I've read her book The Revisionist's Dream, am half-way through Salt, and have The Various Reasons of Light on the bedside table.  I read myself to sleep with them and wake up with a book beside my pillow and her poems inside my head.  "and, each night, we believe in everything. . ."

Here at ACA, Renée is my next door neighbor.  I hear her coming home from late-night armadillo hunts (she gave up and bought her own), I hear her laughing when she types "elf-inflicted" instead of "self-inflicted" while writing a piece of memoir, and I hear her kind support of all the writers that show up at her door, including me.

This is one of my favorite poems of hers.  It's not just about poetry.

 

WITH THE FOREST JUST BEGINNING

 

All poems begin like this: the difficult

half-light, the trees a faint outline in the sand.

 

But somewhere there'll be a white gate, waist-

high and latched, and a first pale bird who'll

 

arrive and make thread-like tracks across the un-

embellished land; no one will know he's come.

 

And the vague sun might glide up from its depth

unnoticed, and the light just might seep

 

over the edge of the quiet, nearly-visible

mountains; a cluster of cedar or willow or pine

 

might be drawn upward before you ─ but slowly,

slowly.  And then, if you're lucky, something small

 

and quick-footed will slip from the low scrub

and scatter the untouched soil.  The bird will become

 

an instant of fierce color deep back on a branch.

And the gate might shift, the latch

 

lift up.  The grasses may quicken around you, and,

as you begin to perceive your place at the edge

 

of the tentative wood, you might pick out the small

yellow eye in the gold field beside you, might catch

 

the white stream's unfaltering voice in the trees, the timber

of that singular forest rising from indistinct ground.

 

P.S.  Oops.  LIne break problem.  The last "three" lines should only be two.  "The timber" should be up there on the line above it. 

 

Doug Van Gundy - Atlantic Center for the Arts Day 16

Doug Van Gundy has gone back to West Virginia.  He had to leave after just two weeks and we miss him.  Doug is a poet and old time music fiddle player and always had us up to something.  During our first week here he gave us an evening of fiddle music, story-telling, and a bit of flat foot dancing.

A Life Above Water is his collection of poetry from Red Hen Press.  He left before I could get his permission to use it on the blog, but this link will take you to a selection.  

Kelly Cherry - Atlantic Center for the Arts Day 15

 

Kelly Cherry writes poetry, memoir, novels, short stories, essays – is there anything else?  And she's our "Master Artist," our group leader, our direct-talking, pinpoint-the-heart-of-our-writing guardian of the meeting room who thrills us when she says "I think you might have something here."

Kitty Davis - Atlantic Center for the Arts Day 14

 

Katherine "Kitty" Davis and I found each other pre-residency through the Internet, so I arrived here already knowing someone, and not just someone, another novelist.  Her novel Capturing Paris is available in stores, another is in her publisher's pipeline, and here, three doors down from me, she's working on a third.  The woman has discipline.  Here's a bit of the work-in-progress.

   

    "Lacey said the scans showed deterioration."

    "Damn the scan.  She's managing fine now." Alex looked down at Margot.  She thought he might reach over and shake her, insisting that she listen to him and believe it was simply a matter of mind or matter.

    "Please, Alex," Margot said.  "I want to believe you.  You know how I love Lacey.  I love both of you.  I don't want any of this to be happening."

    "I know that."

    Margot fought the urge to take him in her arms.  She wanted to tell him that it would be fine, that maybe he was right.  Lacey might not get worse.

    Alex's face grew slack, as if his determination to be positive had been exhausted. 

Carrie Green - ACA Day 13

 

Carrie Green's work is just so interesting.  Her family is from Deland, Florida and in Deland, in the 1800's, Lue Gim Gong, arrived from China, the place where oranges originated, and became the renown horticulturist who developed the eponymous Lue Gim Gong orange.  Carrie is writing a series of poems about his life. 

Here's an excerpt from Cartes de Visite

"... He will send

the finest copy to his mother,

tucked between crisp bills.

In this moment the lenses click

into place, he does not predict

the need to erase

his new sideburns with a nail,

to scratch out all sign

of what she's already lost."  

Jaimie Wilson - Atlantic Center for the Arts - Day 12

 

Jaimie Wilson is another of our poets.  And she lives so close, right in Jacksonville.  She sat with me one night and gave a thoughtful, generous, thorough review of a piece of my writing.  It's exciting when you have the sense that someone understands what you are trying to accomplish.

 

And now an excerpt from Jaimie's poem

 

What Death Leaves

 

"When your mother went,

a series of small strokes,

you were bone-tired of cleaning her.

Worn out from picking her broken sentences up off the kitchen table.

It was at the farm, you remind her.

That was Aunt Margie.

You use to love egg salad,

and I'm your daughter, your daughter.

Like a book on a plane, she took remorse with her,

but she left you a dog-eared copy.

Death is more than worms,"

Jay Orff - ACA Day 11

 

Jay Orff writes short stories, fine short stories, and is here from Minneapolis.  Us three fiction writers have done a bit of collaborative writing during our group time, and Jay has a unique, quick (quicker than mine, for sure) imagination.  His "series" is about gas stations. 

Here are the first lines of Ramon's Gasoline Station.

 

     "It was a really busy morning.  Someone was coming in to get gas like every ten minutes and then I saw the sign and realized it was because I forgot to change the gas prices and for most of the morning we were selling gas at about the same price as everyone else.  By noon I figured it out and bumped up the numbers 34 cents and bing bang bongo I had some free time.  But by then the whole vibe, the feeling, the idea to reorganize the office was gone, you know?"

Llewellyn McKernan - ACA Day 10

 

 

 

For the next few days, the blog will introduce you to our group – the six of us that Kelly Cherry picked to work with for these three weeks. 

 

First up is our West Virginian, Llewellyn McKernan, who is one of our three poets.  Kelly had said she was especially interested in "work that lends itself to development as sequence or cycle."  Llewellyn has been bringing us her pencil poems – The Last Pencil, Pencil in the All-Nite Diner, and Old Pencil so far.  These pencils have a range of voices, and they make me want to rededicate myself to them.  I mean, I'm a writer, and the last time I used a pencil it was in a sushi bar. (How about it? What do you use a pencil for, if you do?) 

 

Today Llewellyn brought in a poem from a new book about her childhood that she's bringing together.  Here are the opening lines of In the Garden.

 

"I'm holding someone's hand,

my mother's

I guess.  I am small.  Giant branches climb over

my head, spill their rich Guernsey-white flowers onto

the path,

where we walk slowly."

 

P.S.  Sorry about the small print.  I was trying to keep the line breaks intact.  I failed with one line.  "my head, spill their rich Guernsey-white flowers onto" should be all on one line. 

Poets and Baby Giggling - ACA Day 9

 

Clea Roberts came to ACA from the Yukon - from Canada's "up there" to the "down there" of Florida.  She brought her baby and her mother-in-law with her, and let me tell you, baby giggling is a fine thing to be around.

 

Clea gets lonely for poets in her town of 25,000, so she founded the Whitehorse Poetry Festival.  It takes place every two years in June - next chance 2009.

  

One evening I arrived back at my room to find that Clea had returned a map to me.  Around it, she'd wrapped one of her poems.  Now, I'd never told her I was writing a novel about a river, and yet the poem was addressed to and from one of her, very different from my, rivers. 

Here's an excerpt:

 

Breakup

 

1. (In which a woman addresses the river)

 

I was a half-believer

in the myth of water.

 

All winter I heard the river ice

whimper and stretch in its bed.

 

I could speculate on breakup,

and the first boat to water

but not the weight of the ice

as it flips and squawks,

or how the water

wears it like a skin, reptilian

or how the sound of it

is like a large crowd

whispering and breaking dishes

as it goes.

 

Clea Roberts

The Book on a Wall - ACA Day 5

Leslie Sussan is writing a memoir.  It's layered and haunting and all the threads of it gave her that trapped in a sticky spider's web feeling of confusion.  So, she went visual and spent the first days here at ACA taping all 164 pages of the manuscript up on a wall of the painting studio.  Isn't it beautiful? 

 

 

Fourteen Days Until The Atlantic Center for the Arts

Fifty thousand half-way decent words - that is what I want done on this novel by the time I arrive at the residency with Kelly Cherry.  Most likely, I'm going to make it.  I mean I have the words right now, but the last 4,000 are only half half-way decent.  There's a week to change this, a week to pack, and then it's on to three weeks of away-from-my-life writing.  All the time, I yearn. 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

One of my favorite novelists just received a MacArthur "genius" grant.  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, and I'm hoping she'll use the grant money in a way that means I'll have a new novel of hers propped open on a pillow soon.  (Of course, she should also get a fabulous facial, travel, have fun giving away largess, do some house repairs, and buy a new wheelchair with even more power - oops, that's my list for an unexpected $500,000.)

Chimamanda writes a really fine novel.  Read them both. 

Cynthia Barnett and Florida's Vanishing Water

Flamingo Campground, the Everglades, over a decade ago - I was perched beside the wooden benches overlooking the Florida Bay and waiting for the evening naturalist program to begin.  A tall ranger strode up through the crowd, tapped the microphone, and said his talk was going to be on Florida's water.  The first slide was a map of mish mashed lines, and I thought "this is going to be boring."  But I already had a nice layer of mosquito repellent applied, so I stayed.  Well.  Even his government-issued, try-not-to-piss-off-too-many-people version was like an espionage novel.  It had intrigue at the highest political levels, evil corporations, unrelenting natural forces, violence , and all sorts of Byzantine machinations.  

Tonight Florida's Eden hosted an event to "Celebrate our Springs, Floridan Aquifer, and the Water Which Defines Us."  They brought together forty artists, a jazz band, good food, and Cynthia Barnett, the author of Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern US.  I've only just started on it (sinkholes!) and, like that long-ago ranger lecture, it is the opposite of boring.

P.S.  Also, there was a painting of the view looking up from under the spring water to the sky that is exactly a scene I was trying to write earlier today.  Is it plagiarism if I take that image and put it in my character's eyes? 

Del Martin has died.

Co-founder of The Daughters of Bilitis, The Ladder, and the Alice B. Tolklas Democratic Club, instrumental in the fight to get homosexuality delisted as a psychiatric illness, the mother of a daughter, part of the first out lesbian couple to join NOW, author of Lesbian/Woman, Lesbian Love and Liberation, and Battered Wives, and finally, two months ago, wife to her love of fifty-five years - Del Martin was eighty-seven years old when she died this Wednesday.  

Pat Spears

Every night at the Below Sea Level Conference we had readings.  There was this moment on the second night when Pat Spears got up to read.  Mouths dropped.  No one coughed or shifted in their seat or ruffled any papers.  When she ended, when her character had shot the horse, there was a long sigh.  Maybe it was just from me, but I don't think so.

 

Pat is sixth generation Floridian, and her writing has our sand and pine sap all over it.  Usually you would have to wait until her book is published to know what I'm talking about, but Pat has just put up a website.  Click on over so you can say that you were reading her when.   

The Lesbian Novel

Here's a link to "From the Ban to the Booker," a BBC radio broadcast of Val McDermid's exploration of the development of the lesbian novel.  This is the second part of a series, but I can't find a workable link to the first part.  Anyway, listen to Ali Smith, Jeannette Winterson, Sarah Waters, and other lesbians talk about their own writing and earlier works by authors such as Valerie Taylor, Patricia Highsmith (writing as Clare Morgan), Maureen Duffy, and Ann Bannon.  This episode takes us from pulp, through the explosion of lesbian feminist presses in the 80's, and to the present day.  My only additions would be Ann Allen Shockley, Paula Gunn Allen, and Jewelle Gomez just to drop a little color into the list. 

Now, things are different in Great Britain than in the U.S.  There, the novel by a lesbian with lesbian characters is considered mainstream, not genre.  For an exploration of why this might be true, see Nicola Griffith's blog.  

Besides the content, my favorite part was to hear Val McDermid's voice speak to me.  She sounds just like I always imagine whenever I gaze at her picture.  Sigh. 

Kelly Cherry

"What does the act of writing signify?  That you, the writer, have an inner life, that you are more than what you appear to be, regardless of what that may be, that you possess spirit, imagination, thought, that the world of the immaterial is housed in you.  And that you believe others - others who might, in an ideal world, be readers - possess these attributes as well.  The act of writing is an act of faith." Kelly Cherry, Writing the World.

And this is the writer that I get to spend time with at ACA in October. 

Kay Ryan - Poet Laureate of the United States

And check out this interview in the New York Times.  An out lesbian as Poet Laureate of the United States - life is good.  So is the poetry.  My favorite is her "chickens flying" poem.   

Mary Anna Evans - Findings

It was another Sunday author event at Goerings, one of Gainesville's independent bookstores, and I was there listening to Mary Anna Evans. 

Mary Anna Evans writes, mostly, Florida-placed mysteries, her heroine is an archaeologist so there's always a deep history component to the plot, and she never shies away from the modern tensions between the races, the sexes, and government agencies.  This is my sort of read. And she talked about how to do research, but not clobber your readers with it. ("Make every scene do more than one thing.") And she talked about her beginnings as a writer.  I was so happy every second I was there. 

We should thank, all the time, over and over, our local, independent bookstores for existing.  As an ex-bookstore woman, I know the best way to do this is to spend money in them. Yes, I bought two magazines and Mary Anna Evan's new book, Findings, while I was there.        

Harriet McBryde Johnson has died

Oh, this just hurts. 

We never met.  I did write her a fan letter once.  I'd just read To Late to Die Young, her book of essays about disability.  I closed the book and felt part of a community of writers, like we had a style.  She never left the body out of the discussion.  She had that particular crip humor that combines earthy self-deprecation with verbally nailing assholes to the wall with their own bad logic.  Death wasn't so scary, and she was relentless about living well, about all of our rights to live well.

Her essay Unspeakable Conversations, is important.  In 2003, when it was published in the New York Times, I made everyone in my life read it.  She says the things I always want to, but without the impotant sputtering. Read it here.