A child I didn’t have has been with me throughout my adult life. He has grown up without me in a shadow world that exists within this world: invisible but close by. In dreams he stands in the doorway of a room I’m writing in, his feet on the doorsill, never stepping into the room itself. He’s tall now, and lean, and always smiling. The fact that he never existed makes him no less real to me. Every one of Ross Gay’s poems goes straight to my heart, but none quite like this. 
names and roles taken directly from a seriously cheesy VHS TV series called Ewoks (which I probably found for a quarter at a garage sale). What I remember most is my daughter’s bright eyes as she tromped around the house after her older brother, who was always kind to her.
We used to call them the funnies, and I have a memory of sitting on my dad’s big lap while he folded the newspaper in half, then quarters, so he could read them to me. This would have been on a Sunday, because I remember the strips as being full-color. I still read the daily comics, even though most of them are terrible – tired, unfunny, boring, and retreading the same exact ground for decades on end. Once in a while a strip comes along that’s electrifyingly good –Calvin & Hobbes, Boondocks, Cul de Sac–but they don’t last long, usually because their creators have the courage to cancel them when they’ve run out of steam. So I read out of habit, with no expectation of transcendence. But every once in a while one of them pierces my heart, like today’s Pearls Before Swine, by Stephan Pastis.
My friends, I’m offering a bunch of brand-new one- to three-day creative writing workshops in 2018. Topics include The Freedom of Form, Playing with Tense and Point of View, Writing through Pivotal Moments, and –for the first time ever– Creative Writing Boot Camp! Dates, descriptions and details can be found below. I’d love to see you in one of these workshops.
Books of the Month, February 2018
Looking for a good book? Here are my favorites from the past month.
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, by Lesley Nneka Arimah. Holy crud, but this woman can write! I don’t often read short story collections, mostly because a short story sucks me in so completely and then poof, it’s over, and I have to gather up emotional energy to read the next one. But these stories flow one into another in an almost novelistic way, even though each features different characters. Set in Nigeria, the U.S. and elsewhere, this book is about the ties –of family, of love, of misery, of geography– that bind us. Astonishingly good.
True Crime Addict, by James Renner. This book, by a citizen detective who set out to solve a cold case about the disappearance of a young woman in the New Hampshire woods, is fascinating. Not only because of all the hidden stories he uncovers, but also because it’s a glimpse into the origins of fixation, and how closely attuned they are to our long ago personal histories.
Rainlight, by Alison McGhee (yeah, me). Why did I re-read a novel that I myself wrote a long time ago? Because I am a fool who can’t remember all the details, ages, and dates of my own characters’ lives, and yet I continue to write novel after novel in which they appear and reappear. It’s horrible to re-read my own work –I usually try to avoid it at all costs–because I just want to keep revising it. That said, this novel (my first) surprised me. It was really pretty damn good. Super cheap too, as an e-book anyway.
The Bright Hour, by Nina Riggs. This is one of the most beautiful books I’ve read. Nina Riggs was a poet, something abundantly clear in every passage of this lambent, funny, heartbreaking and profoundly tender memoir. I loved this book and will not forget it. 
❤
Wonder, by RJ Palacio. I’m late to the party here with Wonder, but what a kind, observant, and loving book it is. Told in different voices, most of them middle-schoolers, this novel charts a year in the life of Auggie, a kid with chromosomal differences that have given him an extremely unusual face. Palacio has her ear to the pulse of life in middle school, all the ins and outs and warring factions of a time I for one would rather not remember, and she brings all of it –the good, the bad, the ugly– to memorable life.
Alison McGhee 