Posts Tagged ‘Housekeeping’

WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

October 29, 2009
Washington, DC

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Stack of books, Seattle, Washington by Wonderlane (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/ / CC BY 2.0)

In a world saturated with self-help books, I still swear by the words of courage, inspiration, and even caution that I’ve found in works of fiction. Here are a few of my favorite words to live by from the pages of  The Big Read.

“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” — Willa Cather, from My Antonia

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” — Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”— Harper Lee, from To Kill a Mockingbird

“Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime,/ And departing, leave behind us/ Footprints on the sands of time . . . “— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“What a curiosity it was to hold a pen . . . An immersion into the living language: all at once this cleanliness, this capacity, this power to make a history, to tell, to explain. To retrieve, to reprieve!”— Cynthia Ozick, from The Shawl

“Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them.”— Marilynne Robinson, from Housekeeping

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”— Thornton Wilder, from The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“From today on, I’ll be whatever I choose to be at the moment . . . “— Rosario Castellanos, from “Cooking Lesson”

Visit The Big Read website to hear more from the authors in The Big Read library.

 

 

 

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WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Monday, August 24th, 2009

August 24, 2009
Washington, DC

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“Typewriter” by aprillynn77 from Flickr

The work of the very best writers is deceptive in that, if the writer does her job well, the reader is aware only of a sense of effortlessness and ease to the text. In truth, every writer struggles with the best way to write, and in most cases revise, the work.  Some writers proceed one sentence at a time and can’t go on until the sentence at hand is absolutely buffed and polished. Other writers prefer to pour as much as possible onto the page at one go, and then go back and start paring and cutting away until the story or poem emerges. From an interview with the NEA, here’s Marilynne Robinson on her approach to writing and revising.

I write when I can.  I write very much when I have the impulse to write. And so I can write five days a week, you know, continuously. And then, if I come to the end and I have to think about things for a while, I don’t write at all for a while. I’m not at all a work ethic sort of writer. Either I have persuaded myself of the illusion or I’m outside of the illusion, and those are my two states, as far as writing is concerned.

I don’t really revise very much.  It seems to me that [if] you have something written the way it ought to be written, then you’ve preserved the integrity of the dream, you know.  That if you make a mistake you’re, in a sense, rupturing this dream. And you cannot go on from a mistake very successfully.  You really have to try to preserve the integrity of the fiction at every point, and that’s what I try to do.

Check out the Housekeeping Reader’s Guide for more on Marilynne Robinson and her Big Read novel.

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WHAT PAGE ARE YOU ON?

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

July 22, 2009
Washington, DC

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Marilynne Robinson was the guest of honor at Marshall Public Library's Big Read of Housekeeping, her first published novel.

 Today I’m diving into The Big Read audio archive (again) to bring you author Bret Lott on Marilynne Robinson.  (Lott, whose novel Jewel was an Oprah Book Club pick, currently serves on the NEA’s National Council on the Arts.)

“I’ve probably read [Housekeeping] seven or eight times.  I use it for my classes. All my undergrads will read it [and] my graduate students will read it because it does precisely what I think a great book should do and that is to combine language and story.  Too often, language can eclipse story and story can eclipse language but this one has both in equal measure.

When I wrote my first novel, there were many things in Housekeeping that informed it. My first novel takes place in western Massachusetts and there’s a lake that plays prominently in it. . . . [I]t’s one of these old 1930s-era reservoirs that were built by flooding towns in the floors of the valleys. There’s this real haunting sense, not even a sense, it’s just pervasive everywhere, the haunting. In fact, the lake is a character in the book, [representing] what’s beneath the surface. When I finally got to this part of the novel, I realized that . . . Housekeeping was why I was so enchanted with this idea of these villages at the bottom of the Quabbin Reservoir in western Massachusetts.“

Check out The Big Read Reader’s Guide to learn more about Marilynne Robinson and Housekeeping.

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