The Morning Reading: "The Land and Words of Mary Oliver, the Bard of Provincetown "

In today's Sunday New York Times, on the Travel section, Mary Duenwald visits Provincetown using Mary Oliver's poetry as a guidebook.

excerpt:

To follow in Ms. Oliver’s footsteps is not to power walk, but to stroll and stop often to take in sights and sounds and feelings. As she told an interviewer 15 years ago: “When things are going well, you know, the walk does not get rapid or get anywhere: I finally just stop, and write. That’s a successful walk!”

Once, she added, she found herself in the woods with no pen and so later went around and hid pencils in some of the trees.

In her back pocket, Ms. Oliver carries a 3-by-5-inch hand-sewn notebook for recording impressions and phrases that often end up in poems, she explained in 1991. In that same essay, she also revealed a few of the entries, including these:

“The cry of the killdeer/like a tiny sickle.”

“little myrtle warblers/kissing the air”

“When will you have a little pity for/every soft thing/that walks through the world,/yourself included?”

To read the rest, click here.

Poetry for the 4th of July: Sharon Olds

Topography

After we flew across the country we
got into bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

— Sharon Olds

The Morning Reading: Robert Hass

Surprise! Surprise! Poet Robert Hass profiled in The Wall Street Journal.

excerpt:

To Mr. Hass, who's married to the poet and antiwar activist Brenda Hillman, terms like "collateral damage" and "soft targets" are not merely euphemisms but sacrilege. In another poem, written after visiting the demilitarized zone that separates South and North Korea, he writes: "The human imagination does not do well with large numbers. / More than two and a half million people died during the Korean / War. It seems it ought to have taken more time to wreck so many / bodies."

Raised in a Catholic household, Mr. Hass attended parochial school not far from here in the Marin County suburb of San Rafael and had, like his friend Milosz, a "relentlessly moral upbringing." His first book, "Field Guide," earned him the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1973. In it, he writes lovingly of the lush California coast, but he also questions the relevance of romantic or elevated poetry in a violent age. Responding to Baudelaire he writes, "Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds. / He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite, / over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century / while Marx in the library gloom / studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit / and that gentle man Bakunin . . . applies his numb hands / to the making of bombs."

To read the rest, click here.

Submit: Electric Literature

via Practicing Writing:

"Electric Literature’s mission is to spark a revival of the short story by pairing captivating narratives from America's best contemporary writers with innovative new forms of distribution."

Pays: $1,000 for each of the five stories published every other month. (via Duotrope.com)

From their website:

Founded by writers uncharacteristically optimistic about literary publishing, Electric Literature has come together with Michael Cunningham and Jim Shepard to usher literary fiction into the digital age. The result: Electric Literature No. 1, a publication you can read as an e-book on your Kindle, pop open on your iPhone on the way to work, or simply slip into your back pocket as a paperback. Streamlined for all mediums, its flexibility stems from its simplicity: just five great stories that grab you.

The current issue features contributions by T. Cooper, Michael Cunningham, Lydia Millet, Jim Shepard and Diana Wagman.

For more information, click here.

Contest: Real Simple wants essays

via Creative Writing Contests:

I’m writing today to announce Real Simple’s second annual Life Lessons Essay Contest and to ask that you publicize this opportunity widely within your community. The Life Lessons column, which reaches more than two million readers monthly, has featured noted authors such as Mary Gordon, Jane Smiley, Ann Patchett, and many others. We invite all non-fiction writers to submit their work for consideration and potential publication in Real Simple, in the company of these distinguished authors.

The topic of this year’s essay is: When did you first realize that you had become a grown-up? Whether the experience was difficult, funny, easy, or bittersweet, share your lesson and you could win.

The winning essay is scheduled to appear in the April 2010 issue of Real Simple magazine. The winner will also receive a $3,000 cash prize; roundtrip tickets for two to New York City, hotel accommodations for two nights, and tickets to a Broadway play; and lunch with Real Simple editors.

To enter, please send a typed, double-spaced submission of no more than 1,500 words, preferably as a Microsoft Word attachment, to lifelessons@realsimple.com. The contest is open to legal residents of the U.S. who are 19 or older at the time of entry. It began at 12:01AM this past May 1 and runs through 11:50PM on September 7, 2009. For complete contest rules, please visit realsimple.com/lifelessonscontest.

Tonight: Rachel Kushner in Laguna

Excerpt from the NY Times review:

In the early 1950s, a doll called Scribbles shook up the toy industry. Her face had no features of its own but could be sketched on with a special marker, washed clean and drawn on again. Creepy as this may sound, she's a handy metaphor for creating a self in an uncertain environment like the one in Rachel Kushner's multi-layered and absorbing first novel, "Telex From Cuba." Here a little American girl plays with her Scribbles the way Madame Defarge knits, while the international drifters around her settle in to bury pasts that include murder, adultery and neurotic meltdown.

Meanwhile, Cuba itself is being remade; President Prio is replaced by the Americans' favorite, Batista, and the Castro brothers gather revolutionaries in the hills of Oriente Province.

For the last half-century, Cuba has been America's cultural Other, a nearby example of what capitalists dread most (Communism! revolution! beards!). But before that, it was America's outpost. Most of Kushner's story takes place in the sweltering canebrakes and comfortable homes of the expatriates who run the United Fruit Company and prosperous nickel mines of Oriente Province. A large cast of latter-day colonials employ Cubans in their homes and import Jamaican workers for the hardest jobs; they dab on expensive Jean Patou Colony perfume, mix as little as possible with the natives - including Batista, who's a mulatto - and pride themselves on treating hirelings better than they think they have to.

Rachel Kushner will read and discuss her novel,Telex from Cuba, a National Book Award finalist, tonight at 6 PM at Laguna Beach Books.

The Morning Reading: Interview with Ron Carlson

Via Tayari Jones' blog, this interview with Ron Carlson about his new novel, The Signal.

excerpts:

NW: I once heard you mention how you can sometimes coax students into writing a better story by taking the story that they start with—which is often about some kind of drunken road trip, if I remember correctly—and have them add another layer of time to it, so that the voice is that of a changed, somewhat older person looking back on these events. It seems like The Signal works in somewhat of the same way—it’s a story about a camping trip, but everything is overlain with the tension and the past between Vonnie and Mack.

RC: In all fiction—and it’s not spoken of in these terms—but there are always two stories. The stories both have to function. The immediate story that’s right in our face needs to capture us. And then coming along under the boat like some ominous force there should be the other story that’s about some feature of the characters’ hearts. Many times that has to do with the past.

...


NW: I wrote in my review that it seemed like it would take somebody else 400 pages to write this 200 page book. Did all your work with short stories help you to condense?

RC: Thank you. I am a writer who wants his writing to have density. You don’t need a four-pound book. I want the story to have real voltage. A little writing can carry lots of volts. That’s the way I’m working now. It’s the way I worked on short stories, and I’m sure it helped me. In a story you have to get a whole world up, deal with it, and then done.

To read the rest, click here - and then scroll around. It's worth it.