This is my second, and final, excerpt from my memoir’s Epilogue. At this point, after the death of our farm helper, Sam, we’ve sold the sheep flock we tended for a decade. My mother has just died. We’re getting ready to list our farm for sale. We’ve been attending a country church for almost a year, and after thirteen years in Appalachian Ohio we feel at last at home as we prepare to leave. February 15, 2009. “Have you heard …
Below is part of the new Epilogue of the memoir I’m writing. The book is about my and my family’s experiences living in Appalachian Ohio for thirteen years, years in which our children grew up, my wife, Kathy, rose through the ranks of a university, and I worked in book publishing, taught, and ran our sheep farm. Now we’re on the cusp of leaving, a bittersweet time. My mother is ill. We’ve become empty-nesters. I’ve delivered a eulogy, in a …
I knew Dave Owen in another life—my Hoosier period—and since then he’s become an admired landscape painter in southern Indiana. In his thoughtful new blog post “With the Artist Added,” at David Owen Art Notes, Dave reflects on the nature of art and artists as he prepares for a show. I was struck by how much his insights apply to writers and writing.
In the first place, he isn’t wild about the three pieces he’s taking to the competition, including the landscape reproduced above. And yet: “. . . I have realized that my paintings become neither better nor worse when a judge gives them a thumbs down or a thumbs up. They have a life of their own and are whatever they are.”
To me, “In Schooner Valley” is lovely. But I can’t see what Dave sees—and certainly not what he’d hoped to see emerge from his brushstrokes. I too have finished pieces that I feel don’t quite work. Or at least fell short of what I’d imagined. Even successful and published stories, essays, and poems are handmade things and are lumpy or lopsided in spots. And what a mess we had to make to get halfway close to our intentions. Have you ever seen an artist’s studio, a potter’s bench, or a writer’s hard drive?
After fearsome effort, the creator sees flaws. “A poem is never finished, only abandoned,” said Paul Valery. I believe it. Artists labor until they’re frustrated with what they have made—the work’s no longer an ego extension, far from it—and their feelings can’t be hurt by a judge or an editor. They did the best they could, got what help they could, and at some point they moved on. Not because they gave up too easily, but because whatever that object still needs is beyond their powers.
Darin Strauss’s sad and somber gift to others from his suffering: stunning in its artistry, honesty. Half a Life: A Memoir by Darin Strauss. Random House, 187 pp. Everybody wants life to speak to them with special kindness.—Darin Strauss I was surprised—but pleased—when Darin Strauss’s memoir Half A Life recently won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle award for autobiography. I hadn’t heard much buzz about the book. The judges called it a “brave and heartbreaking account,” placing it ahead of finalists that …
Archibald MacLeish on the fine line between poetry and journalism. “What is uttered from the heart alone, will win the hearts of others to your own.” —Goethe “I was signed up in the Writer’s Workshop at Iowa, so I was a poet and they didn’t let you cross over. If you said you were a poet, then you had to write in those funny lines. You couldn’t switch. But when I started writing nonfiction, memoir, and the kind of prose …
Archibald MacLeish’s great essay on literature vs. transcription. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.—John Updike As with David Shields, when Archibald MacLeish talks about “poetry” he means poetry in the larger sense of writing that is literary art vs. writing considered a mere transcription of events. Good journalism was never that, but exemplary works of reportage have always tended to get lumped by the literati—perhaps more so in MacLeish’s day—with garden-variety news …
How Archibald MacLeish courted Bob Dylan for a musical. Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) won three Pulitzer prizes, two for poetry and one for his play about Job, J.B, which also won a Tony Award. His collected poems won the National Book Award. Like some other famous writers of his generation, MacLeish served as an ambulance driver in World War I but also as an artillery officer. After the war he moved to Paris and knew many artists, including Gertrude Stein, John …