Click here for info on Baby Be, my brand-new book for parents and the little kids they’re crazy about. (I loved writing this book.)
Everyone walks around with a stone in their shoe, my friend GE told me a long time ago, and ever since I’ve thought about that saying, and the rueful way he smiled when he said it. It softens me, when I’m out in the world, to look at everyone I meet as the keepers of secret stories I know nothing about.
There’s a treehouse high in an oak tree where I go in my mind, an imaginary place where nothing bad can reach me, a place I’m always safe. Because I carry a stone or few in my shoes too. Don’t you?
A Portable Paradise, by Roger Robinson
And if I speak of Paradise, then I’m speaking of my grandmother who told me to carry it always on my person, concealed, so no one else would know but me. That way they can’t steal it, she’d say. And if life puts you under pressure, trace its ridges in your pocket, smell its piney scent on your handkerchief, turn its anthem under your breath. And if your stresses are sustained and daily, get yourself to an empty room – be it hotel, hostel or hovel – find a lamp and empty your paradise onto a desk: your white sands, green hills and fresh fish. Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.
Click here for more information about British poet Roger Robinson.
Two new online half-day workshops just added to November’s schedule: The Intuitive Leap on November 14 and Poetry, from Flicker to Flame on November 17. For details, please click and scroll down. I’d love to see you in the zoom room!
In second grade one of my classmates died of a common childhood disease that most of us weathered without incident. One day he was at his desk in the row next to the door, and the next he wasn’t. In my mind I see him as he was in his Picture Day photo: dark hair parted on the side, sweater over shirt.
At seven, I thought about him every day. He and my grandfather shared the same old-fashioned first name, and it seemed strange that my grandfather could still be alive when my classmate wasn’t. I still think about that boy. When I became a mother I thought about his mother, and the silence surrounding his empty desk. When I read this poem below, I thought about him again. How we can know only the number of days we’ve already lived, not the number of days remaining.
The Great Plan B, by Justyna Bargielska (translated from the Polish by Maria Jastrzębska)
On my ninth birthday the scoutmaster gave me a card with the number of days I’d already lived. It was an extraordinary number shimmering and dancing, one of those numbers you can’t save in notches on a wolf’s bone or in letters or digits, you can only speak it onto a recordable postcard or carve it in basalt. Do you know what our odds are? Zero. But I’ve learnt to play for time as it’s the body no less which is left on the battlefield.
Two spots still open in our nuts and bolts “how to move from draft to finished book” Plotting for Pantsers workshop on Tuesday, October 3, 6-9:30 pm CT. To register, and to check out our other two remaining November workshops, please click and scroll down. I’d love to see you in the zoom room!
I grew up waaaay out in the country in upstate New York, no town, no streetlights, nada. At night the sky glittered with thousands of stars. The Milky Way. The Big Dipper. Orion. Once in a while the Northern Lights.
If I stared at the sky long enough, stars were suddenly not stars but portals into another world. Pinpricks punched into black paper, that if somehow I could peer into would bring answers to questions I didn’t know how to ask.
Sincerely, the Sky, by David Hernandez
Yes, I see you down there looking up into my vastness.
What are you hoping to find on my vacant face,
there within the margins of telephone wires?
You should know I am only bright blue now because of physics:
molecules break and scatter my light from the sun
more than any other color. You know my variations—
azure at noon, navy by midnight. How often I find you
then on your patio, pajamaed and distressed, head thrown
back so your eyes can pick apart not the darker version of myself
but the carousel of stars. To you I am merely background.
You barely hear my voice. Remember I am most vibrant
when air breaks my light. Do something with your brokenness.
Three spots still open in Plotting for Pantsers, Tuesday, October 3, 6-9:30 pm CT. To register, please click and scroll down. I’d love to see you in the zoom room!
Yesterday I had breakfast with my college Chinese teacher. He and his wife were in town from Vermont and we sat and talked softly about life, about teaching, about all the years between then and now. I told him that when I think of the word “teacher,” it is he who comes to mind. I still remember the first day of Chinese 101, freshperson year in college, a long table with twenty other teenagers. A tall man strode into the room and looked each of us in the eye.
“Nimen hao!” he barked.
In my memory, we all sat straight up, frozen with attention, half terrified, half transfixed. Next day, only eight students returned. I was one of them. Now the memories of tracing characters over and over, the hours and hours spent in the basement of Sunderland Language Lab, earphones clamped on my head, are like a dream. A dream of youth, and time, and a new world opened almost unknowingly because of a man who singlehandedly changed the course of my life with the power of his astonishing teaching.
To Certain Students – V. Penelope Pelizzon
On all the days I shut my door to light, all the nights I turned my mind from sleep
while snow fell, filling the space between the trees till dawn ran its iron needle through the east,
in order to read the scribblings of your compeers, illiterate to what Martian sense they made
and mourning my marginalia’s failure to move them, you were what drew me from stupor at the new day’s bell.
You with your pink hair and broken heart. You with your knived smile. You who tried to quit
pre-law for poetry (“my parents will kill me”). You the philosopher king. You who saw Orpheus
alone at the bar and got him to follow you home. You green things, whose songs could move the oldest tree to tears.
Click here for more information on V. Penelope Pelizzon.
Three spots still open in Plotting for Pantsers, Tuesday, October 3, 6-9:30 pm CT. For more details and to register, please click and scroll down. I’d love to see you in the zoom room!
The night we brought him home he sat on my lap, trembling, watching as we played gin rummy and drank Negronis. When I went to the kitchen he slipped a card off the draw pile and covered it with his paw. Then he took a sip of my cocktail. Now he’ s taught himself to speak Human and I’ve taught myself to speak Dog. We communicate via hoots, trills and barks on his side, tone of voice on mine, and without words we know exactly what the other is saying: Come out on the porch and sit with me, he says, and I’m going out for a little bit, but I’ll be back, I say.
Sometimes I put on music, pick him up in my arms and dance him around the living room. He loves it. So do I.
Moon, by Michael Bazzett
The night you climbed in bed and curled up close because your hair’d been shorn and the cool air of the winter house had found bare skin, you fell asleep and grumbled into dreaming like an old farmer after too much wine until scrabbling toenails on the roof lifted your head alertly in the dark. “Raccoon,” I said. Your tail thumped twice under the sheets. If you did not realize you were a dog until that moment, I’m unsurprised. You looked at me then said, “Imagine if I’d lain up there in ambush.” Your glinting humor is so gentle as to disappear at times, like how you fall abashed when singing love songs to the moon.
Maggie Harrison’s War on Wine, in the New York Times Magazine, 9 July 2023. Remember my take on the New Yorker, that each issue is a book in and of itself? Same with the NY Times magazine. I nearly skipped past this article because I hate wine and never drink it (I know, I know. I hate beer too. Sue me). But the mention of Harrison’s take on wine as a “cultural experience” intrigued me, so I read on. Like Harrison, I have synesthesia (words and all sounds appear in my mind with shape and color and texture; it’s a nonstop visual flow), and like her, my synesthesia is directly connected to the process of making art – in her case, wine; in my case, writing. She improvises her wine, based on the feel and memories and experiences she wants it to conjure in the drinker; I write books without knowing the storyline beforehand, only the feeling I hope they conjure in the reader. She doesn’t follow the traditional rules of winemaking, and her extraordinary wines are in a class of their own. I’ll be thinking about this article, and how it applies to the artistic process, for a long time.
Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr. I zipped over to Magers & Quinn the day this book came out and scooped it up. Then I immediately lost it (not difficult, here at the House Made of Books). I may have bought another copy at some point and lost that too. At any rate, I was determined not to read it until I found the copy(s) I’d already bought. Carrot/stick. After I self-hatingly told this to a friend, she slipped another new copy through my mail slot. This long preamble is to show you both how ridiculous I can be and how much I revere Doerr’s writing. For four days I did little else but devour this novel. Is it possible to write a stunning work of fiction about climate devastation, the treachery of corporations, the brutality of humans, and AI that somehow, skipping from ancient Greece to medieval Constantinople to present-day America and on into the future, evokes in the reader the memory of all the libraries of their life, and how stories have been a balm and a call to action all their life, so that by the end of the book you are filled with so much emotion and love that you want to carry this book pressed to your heart forever? No, it is not possible. But Doerr does it. Again.
The Probability of Everything, by Sarah Everett. Throughout much of this novel, I was a little confounded, almost annoyed, along the lines of What am I missing?, because the premise was so strangely unbelievable, as if the characters had blindfolds on and we the readers were supposed to just accept it. I kept turning over possible outcomes in my mind, rejecting each one. But despite straining my credulity from page one, I liked the people in the book, especially the clear love among family members, so I kept going. The ending flipped the script in a way I did not expect, in a way that reflects the times in which we live and the lessons some of us just keep painfully learning, and it went straight to my heart.
Means to Be Lucky, by Annie Kantar. What does it mean to be lucky? What are the means of being lucky? What does it mean to be a woman born and raised in the northern Midwest who transplants herself to the desert and blue skies of Israel? What does it mean to understand two worlds and live in the spaces they both inhabit? What does it mean to be a poet who is fluent in Hebrew, writes in her native English, and translates the work of Hebrew poets into English? What does it mean to be the mother of children whose home is Israel, to feel your own home to be Israel, and yet to sink into the green grass and tall trees of the landscape of your youth and know that your body will always hold this place in its bones? All these questions floated through me as I read Annie Kantar’s lovely, meditative first collection.
Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton. My friend Schumacher and I were discussing recent reads. “Have you read Birnam Wood?” she said, with a certain look I couldn’t quite identify on her face. I hied myself the four blocks to Magers & Quinn and snapped up a copy. Initially I figured I was reading an extremely well-written contemporary novel with a young environmentalist vs. cynical older person book. Which is true-ish, but holy crud. Holy. Crud. Did this book ever keep deepening and spiraling and boring into mystery and horror in a way that feels precisely designed for the melting-planet times in which we live. As I neared the end my heart was pounding and I couldn’t put it down. One of the most sentient and psychologically astute novels I’ve ever read.
The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich. This is a book unlike others by Erdrich, a writer whose novels I’ve loved forever. Set in my neighborhood in Minneapolis during the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, much of what resonated for me in this novel was the pain and familiarity of both events and places. So many of the places, and even the people, in The Sentence, are second-nature to me, including Erdrich’s bookstore Birchbark Books, the walking paths, the lakes, the restaurants, and the fury and pain and power set in motion nationwide by those hideous last nine minutes of Floyd’s life. The ties that bind every one of the disparate people in this book together are books, specific and sought-after and longed for. Beginning with From the time of birth to the time of death, every word you utter is part of one long sentence, a perfect epigraph by Sun Yung Shin, the fierce, beating heart of this novel is the life-giving force of books and the people who sell them.
Ahmed Aziz’s Epic Year, by Nina Hamza. Poor Ahmed, whose father’s serious illness has forced the family to move, for medical care, from Hawaii to Minnesota, where his father grew up but where Ahmed knows no one. The same illness that threatens his father’s life killed Ahmed’s uncle Mohammed, the man he’s been compared to his entire life, both in looks and personality. Ahmed, the only Muslim kid in school and apparently the only brown kid as well, must navigate a sea of new classmates, unfamiliar routines, and winter. Hamza’s sensitivity, keen understanding of otherness, and matter of fact deadpan humor carry us along on Ahmed’s first year in a place different for him in every way, while her deep love of classic childhood books will appeal to every reader out there.
French Exit, by Patrick DeWitt. I wouldn’t have thought that a novel in which you know pretty much from the start that the main character plans to kill herself could be so damn funny, but live and learn. Please meet Frances Price, aging widowed beauty who can’t imagine a life without the money she has entirely squandered. Meet her hapless (but maybe not entirely) son Malcolm, who would be a perfect character on my beloved TV series Arrested Development. Meet Small Frank, the cat in whom Frances and Malcolm believe the soul of Frank Price (Frances’ husband, Malcolm’s father) is now housed. Watch them as they journey from Manhattan opulence to a borrowed apartment in Paris. Even though I knew the ending in the first few chapters of the book, this was a ride I was entirely willing to go on anyway.
Elf Dog & Owl Head, by M.T. Anderson. This slender jewel of a novel by one of my favorite writers was indescribably moving to me. Set in the pandemic, a boy named Clay misses…everything. His older sister DiRossi (I seem to be on an Arrested Development kick with these mini-reviews, because this fictional DiRossi reminded me of Portia Di Rossi’s character on the TV show) and his younger sister Juniper are driving him crazy. The only thing that brings Clay any solace is escaping into the woods, where one day he meets a white dog unlike any other dog he’s ever encountered. From here, the novel turns into M.T. Anderson at his finest: Elphinore the elf-hound leads Clay into worlds parallel to our own but existing in different realms and different times both perilous and filled with wonder. There’s a sense throughout this book that it was written with both joy and longing for a dog whose connection with his human reaches from this world to the next.
Four spots open in Memoir in Moments: Writing Your Life, next Friday, September 8, 1-4:30 CT. To register, please click and scroll down. I’d love to see you in the zoom room.
Eight years ago, on a whim, I sat down at my dining table and hand-wrote myself a letter. Dear Alison, it began, here are some things you did in 2015. Each entry, such as loved your children and wrote and rewrote that book and stayed in good shape despite plantar fasciitis, holds within it an arc of emotion and effort and accomplishment. I read it again just now. Everything I tried to do that year came rushing back over me, along with a sense of being just one of a long line of humans who are all just trying.
Which brings me to this beautiful farewell poem by Tony Hoagland, especially the ending lines, which I had to read twice to understand were not an admonition but a gentle acknowledgment to himself that he had been a good man who should have been kinder to himself.
Distant Regard, by Tony Hoagland
If I knew I would be dead by this time next year I believe I would spend the months from now till then writing thank-you notes to strangers and acquaintances, telling them, “You really were a great travel agent,” or “I never got the taste of your kisses out of my mouth.” or “Watching you walk across the room was part of my destination.” It would be the equivalent, I think, of leaving a chocolate wrapped in shiny foil on the pillow of a guest in a hotel– “Hotel of earth, where we resided for some years together,” I start to say, before I realize it is a terrible cliche, and stop, and then go on, forgiving myself in a mere split second because now that I’m dying, I just go forward like water, flowing around obstacles and second thoughts, not getting snagged, just continuing with my long list of thank-yous, which seems to naturally expand to include sunlight and wind, and the aspen trees which gleam and shimmer in the yard as if grateful for being soaked last night by the irrigation system invented by an individual to whom I am quietly grateful. Outside it is autumn, the philosophical season, when cold air sharpens the intellect; the hills are red and copper in their shaggy majesty. The clouds blow overhead like governments and years. It took me a long time to understand the phrase “distant regard,” but I am grateful for it now, and I am grateful for my heart, that turned out to be good, after all; and grateful for my mind, to which, in retrospect, I can see I have never been sufficiently kind.
I’d love to see you in one or both of next week’s afternoon workshops, The Intuitive Leap or Memoir in Moments. Click here and scroll for all the details.
Photo by Stephen Kiernan
That woman sitting on the bar stool with a martini and a magazine, or alone on her couch spinning imaginary people into books, or flying solo around the world: she is me. But won’t you be lonely? is a question I’ve heard a lot in my life, and I don’t know how to answer it, because isn’t everyone, somewhere inside themselves, lonely?
It’s rare to be deeply understood. Rare to meet a kindred spirit who understands when you need to jump in your car and drive alone for thousands of miles, or go to a movie alone, or hike alone. Falling in love doesn’t change this conundrum. It took me a long time to understand that my heart’s silent, fierce response to a disappointed partner —What you want from me I cannot give you–did not mean I was at fault. Thirty years ago I might not have understood this beautiful poem below, but I do now.
Pathways, by Rainer Maria Rilke
Understand, I’ll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.
I’ll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows, with only this one dream:
I’d love to see you in our Freedom of Form workshop next Thursday, August 24. Four hours, $100 or pay as you’re able. Click and scroll for all the details.
I volunteer as a trained crisis counselor via text. Everyone who reaches out to us is in pain, much of it hard to witness. The other day I talked with a teen who’s being bullied in a particularly vicious way. In our time together I shared resources and we brainstormed ways they could find relief and build connections. The teen’s quiet, hurting resolve went straight to my heart. Over and over I told them how courageous and self-aware they were.
What I wanted to do was hold that child close and reassure them they are perfect exactly as they are. In the days following our conversation I keep sending invisible messages to them through the invisible air, tiny lamps to light their way, hoping they can somehow feel the love beaming toward them.
Urgent Message to a Friend in Pain, by Joseph Fasano
I have to tell you a little thing about living (I know, I know, but hear me) a little thing I’ve carried in the dark: Remember when you saw the stars of childhood, when you knelt alone and thought that they were there for you, lamps that something held to prove your beauty? They are they are they are they are they are.
Our summer and fall four-hour workshops are coming right up. I’d love to see you in one! Click here and scroll down for all the details.
Last week my daughter and I were naming dreams that won’t happen because of time, because of choices, because we can only live one life at a time. Like my dream of living in Vermont, I said, and my other dream of living on an island off the coast of Maine, and my other other dream of being a forest ranger in the Adirondacks.
Sometimes other selves rattle around inside me, wanting out, wanting to live those other lives. But decades and decades into this one life, here I am, still trying to write something beautiful, still trying to learn how to live with all my imperfections.
Alison McGhee 