Inspired By.

I awoke this morning to rolls of thunder and rain whispering on pavement. In the dim morning light I lay quietly and listened, let my eyes droop closed a little longer and wrapped the duvet tighter around myself. There’s just something about the sound of a spring thunderstorm in the early morning that feels so comforting. It makes for a cozier, quieter kind of day, and after an off-beat kind of week, I need that.
As for my weekly must-reads list, my usual wealth of online inspiration has been sparse this week, and maybe that has contributed to its off-beatness. This is not to say that my regular reads haven’t produced good content, but I just haven’t connected with anything. Chalk it up to my own distractions – my own writing, my own struggles, and on a positive note, my distraction from the internet by pages of print.
I started reading Great House nearly a month ago and I’m still working through it. Reading Krauss’ The History of Love was an entirely different experience than this second novel of hers. I started Great House expecting to experience that same love at first sight, but as I never seem to learn, you can’t begin an author’s second novel expecting it to be anything like the first.
No, love at first sight was not the case, even remotely. In fact, I left it untouched for over a week out of sheer frustration. On reflection, this is not a result of Krauss’ writing; her writing is as impeccable as ever. Rather, it was a personality conflict with one of her characters. And actually, I think we can all agree that dislike for a character can be the sign of truly good writing, because it means that the author has made us care about what is happening to the story.
This only really dawned on me when I forced myself to take it up again and reread this passage from the early pages of the book,

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible.

Great House is a collection of loosely connected stories. At this point, I have very little understanding of how they connect with each other, but what I can say is that with each story I find myself more and more aware of those parts of our lives that we live and exist and move around, like furniture, the ones we don’t quite understand but can’t let go of – memories, habits, heritage. Sometimes we notice these things in other people, and we can’t understand why they hold so tightly to them. And when we come to recognize them in ourselves, we have to choose what to do with them.
If you’ve read this book already and totally disagree with me on this analysis, good. I hope I find more to this story than what I understand of it half way through. Your thoughts are welcome here, just no spoilers, please!
So what are you inspired by this week, online, in print, or otherwise? Have a good weekend, friends.

[Photo.]

Why Not Cheese?

I think so often about what life would be like if I had been something else. What if I hadn’t dropped my art major in college to focus on English, and instead dropped English to focus on art?
Sitting on the counter last night and waiting for the water to boil for pasta, I sliced myself a chunk of stinky cheese that my friend and I snagged with a Groupon over the weekend. I am devoted to cheese. It may have to do with the fact that I grew up on a dairy farm. It may be a result of having traveled to other countries in the world that have a healthier relationship to cheese than Americans do. Either way, I am devoted to cheese. I could never be a vegan because of cheese, never mind the fact that I could never be a vegetarian because of bacon.
And this funny thought popped into my head,
Why not cheese?
Why not devote myself to cheese and forget about this whole writing business?
Cheese is simple. Food is simple. Cooking is a simple pleasure that fulfills a basic need. I’m a fairly good cook, so why not just do that? Why not just research and make and sell and eat cheese for the rest of my life?  Add a little bread and wine and fruit and maybe some olives and I’m set.
There is cheese, and then there are words. Words, for all their necessity to life, are complicated. I do not write because I find words easy or because I understand them. And on days like today, I can’t find words to explain why I write at all.
So why writing?
I think about these things when caught in the throws of a particularly difficult piece of writing, or when the question confronts me again, where will you go next? or when I get the same compliment again that I’m a good writer, because just between you and me, that compliment is sometimes more of a blow than a boost to my ego.
And I think about that part in Blue Like Jazz when Miller talks about how people always assume that because writers can articulate thoughts and ideas better than other people, that this somehow means they have the answers to everything. It’s kind of an unfair assumption when you think about it. Writers, for all their words of wisdom, have a pretty good track record for insanity.
I always feel compelled to temper that praise with realism – or is it cynicism? But I don’t have it all figured out, I want to say.
And for this, I contemplate a career in cheese rather than writing. And then I go and write a blog post about it.

book·ish : The Great Minds behind Great American Novels

There are the books themselves, and then there are the minds behind them. Epic writers like John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway seem so much larger than life, this ordinary, often mundane life that you and I live every day. They have captured so much of life in these stories that we conclude that we will never attain that kind of wisdom with our words.,/p>

And then we unearth things like letters they wrote to loved ones or their daily rituals and habits that helped them write those words. Eccentric though they may have been, they were human, and it was their discipline that they helped them pen those great American novels.

I don’t think that everyone can write, or that everyone was born to write. But for those of us that feel it is our purpose and pleasure to wield words, it is a comfort to know that we’re not completely insane. I’m convinced that writing is equal parts eccentricity and discipline; we need enough of both to keep us imaginative and to keep us grounded.

Here are a few bookish links to the great minds behind great American novels, via Brain Pickings.

~

book·ish/ˈbo͝okiSH/Adjective

  1.  (of a person or way of life) Devoted to reading and studying rather than worldly interests.
  2. (of language or writing) Literary in style or allusion.
  3. (of art and all manner of lovely things) devoted to the written word as a form of art and as a way of seeing the world.
  4. (of BethanySuckrow.com) anything of the aforementioned characteristics as they are found on the interwebs and reposted by Bethany, because bookish and writerly things always give reason for amusement.

Inspired By.

Everything has sprung anew. The magnolias and forsythias have bloomed, their branches reaching happily towards sunlight. My heart has warmed with their vibrance, too. I can hardly believe that we sleep with windows open and walk around in shorts and tank tops in March in the Midwest.
Each year I’m always relieved that the miracle of spring has happened again, because I’m always a little afraid it won’t. Sometimes those weeks between late January and early March feel so cold, so dead that I lose faith that the world will thaw and thrive again.
It did. It always does.
A few good reads from around the web this week :
In brief, beautiful bloom. (An old NPR story that still brings tears to my eyes.)

Pedaling the Bicycle.

Sometimes I cry for the clumsiness of it, the awkwardness of not understanding how to move forward. Like everything in life, grief is learning to pedal a bicycle without training wheels. A precarious exercise, a teetering balance that is sometimes exhilarating for a pace, but mostly dangerous and scarring.
I am eight years old again, crying for my pain and pride, bleeding from different parts of me, angry that someone let go of my bike seat before I was ready.