a private river

The best memoirs—like This Boy’s Life, or Crazy Brave [by Joy Harjo], for instance—bring you through a private river of storytelling that joins a major ocean of human struggle and joy. Lidia Yuknavitch. From The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Scarboro and Lidia Yuknavitch by Roxane Gay. 

Photo: Untitled, Dayton, Ohio 2013 by Joey Bolender via oldtimefriend

adobe books

All the books are now 60% off, but Andrew McKinley, among the kindest and most generous bookstore owners on earth, will still try and make you pay even less. Peter Orner on Adobe Books in The Rumpus 

Photo: Adobe Books by Chris Cobb

we have a house in our two imaginations

How like an island we are in love encouraging
moss & like an island we are barely moving Just
to exist takes much concentration & like an island
in love we have a house in our two imaginations &
they intersect It strengthens the house & our feelings
Unlike an island we wake up An island never sleeps
That is its duty & ours to remain in love barely moving
We do not want to disturb the house Do not want it
to fall into the ocean that is always so nearby It surrounds
us & is moving Like an island the ocean does not see us
or care why though we persist in loving it at one rate
or another & are waking close together in the dark

from How Like an Island by Heather Christie via the Rumpus 

Photo: Margaret Kilgallen on view at SFMOMA

even the doubt

When I teach, I tell my students:

Write. Trust your own voice, your own instincts. Learn your own process. Write. Learn what works for you and trust in that. Writing is a discipline. No doubt. It takes persistence, hard work, and drive. It is about working and reworking a passage, a page, or the arc of a story until it breathes. There is a learned ruthlessness that writing demands, when you can go back through a manuscript and pare out what you love—strip even those lines you most long to keep—it gives what remains a kind of luminous intensity. And there is also that other ineffable, but deeply essential aspect of the process: what is mystical, Muse-given—the obsession, the inspiration, even the doubt—all of which to my mind are only different turns of the same coin. from Life in Fiction by Dawn Tripp in the Rumpus

  Photo: Samuel Barnes' Bruno Munari mask making workshop 

via an ambitious project collapsing

with my daylight mind

I write for the same reason I read: to free fall into a story and live in that world for a while. My novels begin in tiny glimmers—of character, story, scene. When those pieces surface in me, I feel them, not with my mind, but in the body. They have a feverish intensity—a dreamlike immediacy—they feel alive. And when a story comes to me that way, I begin to write into it longhand to see how it evolves. I toss that old rule Write what you know, and I write into what moves me, what I am impelled by. I’ll fill a notebook, sometimes two, and if that burn persists, if those bits of story are still zipping around like liquid silver in my veins or falling through me while I am out for a run with the dog, or washing the dishes, or down on the beach with my kids; if they continue to snap me awake at 3 a.m., if the story has that kind of life, even if I can’t see—with my daylight mind—how it will all come together or where it will go, if I continue to feel it that way, in the body, I know it’s a piece I am meant to write. from Life in Fiction by Dawn Tripp in the Rumpus

Photo: Samuel Barnes' Bruno Munari mask making workshop 

via an ambitious project collapsing

it's complicated, of course

I've been thinking about writing, how we create from life. It's complicated, of course. Stephen Elliott in today's Daily Rumpus.

Painting: Narangkar Glover, Shangri-La Girls School: A Thousand Stairs, 2010

whatever the scenario

I'm bringing it up because I want to talk about rejection. I'm not saying Happy Baby is a great book, but it tries to be. If you want to create something great you have to be willing to make something that people dislike, that's the only way to find an audience who is in love with you. If someone loves it then someone else will want to tear it down because it puts certain conventions on display and there it is, what we think we know, sitting uncomfortably on a pedestal, as if under a searchlight, scratching at her neck. Stephen Elliott in The Daily Rumpus, January 8, 2012

Painting: Fathom No. 1, 2010, by Olive Jeffers

competitive swinging

Paolo Salvagione's "Competitive Swinging" via The Rumpus

get in the water

Sometimes I just stop people on the street to tell them about Wendy MacNaughton's work.

it's not the person,

it's the player.

Amazing new work, "The Market Street Chess Players in their own Words," by Wendy MacNaughton at the Rumpus.

an ambitious project collapsing

"The point isn't A. or the Stone Temple Pilots, or Michael Miller. The point is to write you have to feel. You can't fake it. You can't pretend to love someone the day after they die and write a memoir about it." Stephen Elliott in the Daily Rumpus (do you get the Daily Rumpus?)

James R. Murphy's La Guardia students with their string figures via An Ambitious Project Collapsing. More here.

it's not something to hold

"I was thinking about Justin Taylor and a short online conversation we had around this article, the final point being ambition. I was thinking about rock climbing and bouldering problems, the differences in how the routes are rated. You climb with your feet so you don't tire out, but at some point you have to make a move, find the hold, press your hand on the top of a rock that doesn't even make sense, be willing to fall. They say writing's not a competition, and it isn't, but it also is. If we're being honest we should admit certain things. Even a great book might not find its audience, which strikes me as less of a tragedy than spending years writing something that's only very good. There are other factors. It's best just to believe in the meritocracy. It's still most of it. Get your foot up on the wall, stretch toward an innocuous bump. It's not something to hold, but you can lean against it. Work yourself straight until your body is finally angled into the face and you can rest for a moment. I don't know if it's a good thing, but it matters." Stephen Elliott in the Daily Rumpus

but the real life

But the real life of a writer resides in showing up at the keyboard every day, with the necessary patience and mercy, and making the best decisions you can on behalf of your people. It’s a slow process. It often feels hopeless, more like an affliction than an art form. Steve Almond from The New Yorker's One over 40 in The Rumpus

Photo via per temeritas

so soundly slaps

...there’s no accounting for lust, my friend, and nothing that so soundly slaps together the nasty with the desirable. Amy Letter, Poem I Love in The Rumpus

Untitled by Vivian Maier

poets who write prose

I've been reading Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn and this remembrance of John Updike by Lucy Corin on The Rumpus, which pointed me to this For This I Believe by John Updike. Oh, and this is wonderful: "I made tea," by Joe Davis (via this is sippey.typepad.com).