Archive for June, 2012

The Silent Voice

June 30, 2012 | 19 Comments

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice                      by Terry Tempest Williams                                                                                       New York: Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 208 pp. Guest Review by Lanie Tankard …

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About writers’ conferences

June 24, 2012 | 18 Comments

When I was farming, at first it surprised me how much farmers love conferences—just like everybody else. Isolated most of the time, farmers liked to get together, have a learning vacation, stay in a motel with a pool for the kids. I already knew they’d adopted the digital world, its message boards and email lists. Just like writers, whose own conferences bear a striking similarity—though lacking booths devoted to kelp meal and artificial insemination. The mother of all writing conferences, …

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We like the Oxford comma II

June 22, 2012 | 3 Comments

Thanks to Leslie Miller, friend and fellow blogger, who corrected some wit’s work and sent it to me. Quick as you please. She moved the series into proper order, per the drawing, and capitalized proper nouns. Hope the (surely visual) artist who did this doesn’t get mad. But then, s/he probably stole the idea from a book, maybe from Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Here’s one I use in class to try to show the importance of commas, which most undergraduates …

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Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Why Be Happy?’

June 19, 2012 | 10 Comments

There are people who could never commit murder. I am not one of those people. —Jeanette Winterson Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson Grove Press, 230 pp.  Novelist Jeanette Winterson’s searing memoir about life with her depressive mother in working-class England breaks the rules that American memoirists live by. By the rules I mean our emphasis on scene. I won’t bash scene—it’s vital for really conveying one’s experience—and usually scene is deepened and balanced with …

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Ray Bradbury on Shakespeare

June 10, 2012 | 14 Comments

How long he stood he did not know, but there was a foolish and yet delicious sense of knowing himself as an animal come from the forest, drawn by the fire. He was a thing of brush and liquid eye, of fur and muzzle and hoof, he was a thing of horn and blood that would smell like autumn if you bled it out on the ground. He stood a long long time, listening to the warm crackle of the …

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