Draft No. 4

Noted: Pico Iyer on voice

April 19, 2013 | 4 Comments

The paradox of persona—which you is speaking—devils nonfictionists. Especially memoirists and essayists, but apparently fiction writers, too, more than I’d supposed. From Pico Iyer’s superb April 11 “Voices Inside Their Head” column in The New York Times: At its core, writing is about cutting beneath every social expectation to get to the voice you have when no one is listening. It’s about finding something true, the voice that lies beneath all words. But the paradox of writing is that everyone at …

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Meet a character in my memoir

April 15, 2013 | 20 Comments

To the memory of Freckles, sheep super mother, and my teacher. In my decade as a grass farmer, as a shepherd, my lambs came in the middle of April. They dropped heavy and wet and wriggling onto the pasture. The spring grass was shiny and emerald green, as billowy as a blanket across the ground, and for a time made southern Ohio look like Ireland. Every morning, such sweet newborn lambs they were, coming into my arms dazed and ethereal. …

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Lee Martin: artists must risk failure

April 10, 2013 | 16 Comments

Celebrated novelist & memoirist discusses how he became an artist. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few. . . . This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner. Be very very careful about this point.— Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind I’m trying to learn from Lee Martin whenever and however I can, as a writer and teacher. I haven’t yet made it to his celebrated fiction—one of …

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Spiritual affinities: Tolle, Rilke, Woolf

April 5, 2013 | 5 Comments

Spiritual Affinities. I’m pleased to have a guest post today at Daisy Hickman’s Sunny Room Studio on the spiritual insights and strength I’ve drawn from a number of thinkers, especially Eckhart Tolle, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Virginia Woolf. They’ve given me “fragments to shore against my ruins,” as T.S. Eliot put it in his poem “The Waste Land.”

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Review: ‘The Days are Gods’

April 3, 2013 | 12 Comments

No one expects the days to be gods—Ralph Waldo Emerson The Days are Gods by Liz Stephens. Nebraska, 203 pp. Last week I got four memoirs in the mail and picked up the most celebrated. Bounced right off it. Next, I tried The Days are Gods by Liz Stephens and got hooked. That happened despite what seemed thin material: L.A.-Hollywood gal with roots in middle America sees middle age approaching, moves with her mate, an ex-actor-turned-welder, to rural Utah for …

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Reading Rilke again at Eastertide

March 29, 2013 | 8 Comments

Spirituality, authenticity & Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. — Letters to a Young Poet As a broody kid, growing up in a Florida beach town and grieving my family’s exodus from our farm in Georgia, I found a library book by a guy about his hobby farm. I loved it, probably sensing …

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Lore of a gravedigger’s daughter

March 24, 2013 | 15 Comments

It takes a village to raise a child, and my village was the graveyard.—from Rachael Hanel’s memoir We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter by Rachael Hanel. University of Minnesota Press, 177 pp. Rachael Hanel grew up in a sleepy Minnesota town where old people “have more faith that cars will stop for them than they have in Jesus Christ.” But where her gravedigger father could joke, with a darker edge than any …

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