Index of African Writers and Writing

An  Index of sources about African Writers and Writing:

African American Writers--Cornell Library

NATURAL HABITAT, by Michelle Reale

Natural Habitats, a collection of a dozen stories by Michelle Reale, has just been published by Burning River Press. Here is a link to an interview with the author:

Interview with Reale

FULL MOON AT NOONTIDE, by Ann Putnam

In the last post, I mentioned a fine new novel I'd read, and now I'd like to mention one of the best memoirs I've read in a long time, Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter's Last Goodbye, by Ann Putnam. It's the story of identical twins, Ann's father and his brother; of their journey through life; and of their journey toward death. They almost simultaneously in the same hospital, with Ann caring for them both (the uncle was a bachelor). While Ann was finishing the book, her husband died of cancer. There's enough tragedy in the circumstances for three books, but the memoir is full of hard-earned joy, hope, and humor that lift Ann's experiences and the reader's response to them out of despair and into understanding.

The book is published by Southern Methodist University Press. Superbly written; a great read.

Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter's Last Goodbye (MEDICAL HUMANITIES SERIES)

SNAKETOWN, by Kathleen Wakefield

I just finished reading SNAKETOWN (2010) by Kathleen Wakefield, and it’s one of the best contemporary American novels I’ve read in a long time. As fresh as its language and structure is, the book has qualities of medieval literature inasmuch as it confronts questions of evil, character, fate, and redemption unabashedly.

Set in a Southwestern mining town, the novel re-imagines the region with language and images that are at once lyrical and primal, mythic and immediate. The mountains, the mine, the valley, the town, and the key family never become fantastical, but they take on an aura that’s just surreal enough to lift the regional to the universal, as happens in the work of Morrison, Marquez, and Faulkner. Indeed, the hard-scrabble, insulated Sibel family sometimes seems distantly related to Faulkner’s Snopes clan but is more wretched. The novel opens with a note of doom and builds toward a dark symphony.

SNAKETOWN is an ambitious but unpretentious meditation on evil—how it arises, is cultivated, and overwhelms. Wakefield renders the tale in brief, carefully sculpted chapters. The character Orin Sibel, among others, is unforgettable.

SNAKETOWN won the Ruthanne Wiley Memorial Novella Contest and is published in paperback by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Wakefield is a lyricist as well as a fiction writer, working in television and film with Vangelis, Michel Colombier, and other composers.

Snaketown

Highly Qualified

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Highly Qualified


The lambs are qualified to be young.
We believe we're qualified to choose them
as symbols, food, and future wool.
God is not at the top of the great chain
of being, command, or corporate
personhood. God is, to say the lamby least,
beyond all that. The pasture belongs to us,
in our view. Our view carries a lot of weight
around here. A continent of clouds

advances over mountains toward our
real estate. The storm is not personal or
apocalyptic, but it does not necessarily
agree with us, and it is highly qualified.

Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Bill Murray Ruins a Dickinson Poem

Lord knows why someone asked Bill Murray to read an Emily Dickinson poem--"I dwell in possibility"--to workers building a Poet's House in Manhattan.  Occasionally his diffident, smart-ass persona lands like a cow-pie on a girder, and this was one of those times:

Murray "Reading" Dickinson

A lot of dynamics here: male Hollywood celebrity in front of male workers; actor not knowing what Dickinson's poetry is; bad idea to have him read; etc.; he thinks he's beneath the task.

So his decision was to read it like a 5th grader who's never seen poetry before, pushing a half-rhyme to be a full-rhyme as if he just discovered Dickinson uses half-rhymes.

Why?

And why not select a poem by Langston Hughes, Jim Daniels, or Philip Levine (among many others) that would have riveted, so to speak, the workers?

What I'm Reading

In case anyone asks, I'm reading lots of students' essays and short stories right now.  The end of the semester, and all that.

However, I'm also reading The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which I had not read before: shame on me.  I guess one good thing about waiting is that this relatively new translation is supposed to be miles better than earlier ones.  Another book I'm reading is The Vikings, by Robert Ferguson, which relies in part on recent archaeological discoveries--as late as 2001.

The Vikings: A History, by Robert Ferguson

The Idiot, , translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky (Vintage)

Sam Waterston Reads Poetry

Sad news today: NBC is canceling the long-running and, for some of us, highly addictive Law and Order.  The tightly controlled form of the show, accompanied by those "beats," reminded of a sonnet, transposed to the one-hour [@40 minutes] TV-drama genre.  Great work, Dick Wolf.  (With a tip of the cap to the late Raymond Burr, I must mention that Perry Mason had a similar crime-first, trial-second form.)

Sam Waterston, who acted on the show for a long time, reads poetry on the CD accompanying John Lithgow's anthology, Poets' Corner.

The Poets' Corner (An Unabridged Production)[6-CD Set]; The One-and-Only Poetry Book for the Whole Family

New Law Keeps Texas Profs Under Surveillance

From another blog to which I contribute:

Texas Profs


Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter

Red Scare!: Right-Wing Hysteria Fifties Fanaticism and Their Legacy in Texas, by Don E. Carleton

Larkin on May

I was poking around for a poem by Philip Larkin about spring, and I found this one a site called sundeepdougal:

The Trees


by Philip Larkin


The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.


Is it that they are born again
And we grow old ? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.


Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Copyright Estate of Philip Larkin

Wow, much to like in this poem, including the terrific fourth line, "Their green is a kind of grief," and the image, "the unresting castles thresh/In fullgrown thickness . . ."

Philip Larkin: Collected Poems

Poet Publishes Novel

Hey, I published a novel. It's called Honoring Juanita, and it's a contemporary novel set in the High Sierra, where I grew up, so to that extent I wrote about what I ostensibly know.  It does have an historical subplot based on the notorious lynching of a woman named Juanita during the Gold Rush.

Anyway, here's a link, but not a sales-pitch, mind you (you have more important things to spend $ on), although if you were to mention the book to your local librarian, I wouldn't mount a huge protest:

Honoring Juanita

The brief official  recap of the novel is . . ."The global scramble for energy has made a river in California's High Sierra ripe for damming. Mary Bluestone, woodcarver and longtime resident of a remote mountain town, impulsively puts herself between the river and the dam, becoming a protester in spite of herself. Mary's husband, the county sheriff, must arrest her. A flood of unintended consequences ensues as the 21st century invades a pristine canyon. Meanwhile, Mary Bluestone is haunted by the legend of Juanita, a woman lynched during the Gold Rush Era. Honoring Juanita is a tale of entangled histories and divided loyalties, of greed, power, memory, and love."

This is the second novel I've published and, if memory serves, the 6th I've written.

With all genres, writers learn to write in them by writing in them, but I think with poetry, short fiction, and occasional essays (or creative nonfiction), I think it's easier to find ways to learn things efficiently, through reading about the genre, taking classes, etc.  Of course, one may read a lot of novels, and one should do so, but for me, at least, it's harder to extract the structure and method of a novel from a novel than to extract same from a poem.

Probably this means what I already know: I'm a poet first, an essayist second, a short-fiction writer third, and a novelist  fourth. Writing novels doesn't come easily to me.  All the more reason why I've had fun making lots of mistakes writing them. I now know many things NOT to do when writing a novel.

I teach both the writing of (short) fiction and of poetry, and occasionally I'll run into a student is is more or less a "pure" poet, and she or he and I usually end up commiserating about just how many words it takes to finish a story, let alone a novel.  And with novels, you have to manage people, move them around, remember their birthdays, know something about their extended families.  I tell you, it's exhausting work! But pure novelists like Tolstoy, Dickens, Faulkner, and Morrison didn't/don't feel that way, I suspect.

Three of my favorite poets--Randall Jarrell, Karl Shapiro, and Richard Hugo--published exactly one novel each.  I think I know why.  It's because they were, well, you know, poets. Read Faulkner's or Hemingway's poetry, and you'll see how this genre-preference thing works in the other direction.

The biggest thrill out of publishing this novel was that I got to dedicate it to my two brothers, Ike and Sven.

Anne Spencer, Poet and Gardener

Here's a link to a terrific recent article on Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, who was born in New Jersey but spent most of her life in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she tended a garden, which is the focus of the article.

Half My World, the Garden of Anne Spencer, a History and Guide

Garden-Gadget Additions

I'm a happy gardener today because I got a rain-barrel installed and two compost-barrels delivered.

The rain-barrel has an automatic overflow, a faucet at the bottom, and a screen up top.  The compost barrels are great because you just bury the bottom of them in dirt and worms come in; also, they have lids with screw-down seals, so there's no trouble with raccoons, possums, or rodents.

So now I can water the garden using the rain-barrel--after it rains.  Today, of course, it is sunny.

Dan Borba, the fellow I got the materials from, has been in the harvesting-of-rain business since 1999 (in Tacoma).  Here's a link:

harvesting rain