Time is on mind. Mainly in the context of the novel I’m writing, but also for various other reasons. I’ve been living in that space between two worlds – the fictional world of my characters, and the real world. It’s a good place to be because I’m always happy when the writing is going well, even if it means fumbling my way through the real world a bit distracted.
In the real world, the start of Daylight Savings Time is a date I look forward to each spring. After the darkness of winter, I’m happy to turn the clocks ahead. I don’t even mind losing that hour of sleep on the night of the time change. It seems a small price to pay for more daylight in the evening. Spring is on the way, and it won’t be long until I can set up shop in my summer office again.
In the fictional world, I’m bouncing around time across decades with my characters in two main story arcs, a “now” arc spanning the last few weeks of October 1989 and a “then” arc set in October 1963. I’m at my writing desk very early, getting in a few hours of work on my novel before going to my job. The morning darkness doesn’t bother me much. I don’t even notice daybreak because I’m lost in the writing. A timer on a lamp is set to shut off the light an hour before I need to leave for work – a reminder to pull myself away from the writing and get ready for the workday ahead.
For most people Daylight Savings Time isn’t such a big deal. Unless you’re a Hoosier, that is. Until 2006, some counties in Indiana switched to Daylight Savings Time while others remained on Standard Time. To further complicate timekeeping there, the state is divided by two time zones. I’m glad I never had to deal with that on a daily basis! It may only be one hour, but it makes a huge difference to me as the earth continues to spin on this trip around the sun.
In the News
I received an e-mail from Chuck Kinder today alerting me to the recent article in Pittsburgh City Paper by Bill O’Driscoll about Kinder: An Anthology of New Fiction. The anthology was put together as a gift to Chuck from his current graduate students as he recovers from serious health issues. Be well, my friend!
I’m going off the grid for the month of December to stretch out the holidays. During that time, I’m looking forward to working my way through my immense TBR (to be read) stack of books – or at least dwindling its height. In This Light will be back in January, ready to start off the New Year refreshed and re-energized. Until then, here are some links to enjoy:
I’ve just finished Franzen’s Freedom and don’t have much to add to what’s already been said about it. It’s an ambitious book but it fell short of the mark, and the awkward device of incorporating an autobiography by one of the main characters didn’t work for me. I liked The Corrections better, and it was due to enjoying that book that I was eager to read Freedom. Maybe I was expecting too much given all the publicity and rave reviews, and I’m certain it would not have received the same coverage had it been written by a female author. Much has been said about gender bias in publishing, including this essay in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette by Tawni O’Dell, who was an Oprah pick for her novel Back Roads. You can also read an interview I did with O’Dell in Word Riot(originally published in 2005 in Paper Street, titled “Tawni O’Dell: The Influence of Landscape and the Journey Home”).
I’m now about midway through Keith Richards’ Life. Sounds of Sticky Fingers and Let It Bleed fill the house to set the mood, triggering my own memories and lots of untapped writing material. If I could relive any decade, it would be the ‘70s. I’ve enjoyed many of the interviews Richards has given recently to promote his book, and was particularly interested in one about how rhythm and sound factored into the edits of the book when Richards had coauthor James Fox read the entire book aloud to him. Richards told the story to Fox, a journalist who gets full credit as coauthor and clearly knew how to prod Richards to capture those tales.
As inspiration in the mornings, I treat myself by listening to podcasts of writer interviews. After my morning writing is finished, I listen to a fifteen minute segment as I wolf down breakfast before rushing off to my day job. Particularly enjoyable is Shelagh Shapiro’s radio show “Write the Book” which airs at WOMM-LP in Burlington, Vermont. I know Shelagh from the MFA program at Vermont College, having met her there when I was a graduate assistant and she was entering the program. Shelagh recently contributed an essay in the series “What It’s Like Living Here” at Doug Glover’s Numero Cinqblog. Doug was one of my workshop teachers at VC, and I enjoyed this interview he did with Shelagh at ‘Write the Book” in July 2010 about his book The Enamoured Knight.
Hot Metal Bridge, the literary magazine published online at the University of Pittsburgh, issued the podcast “A Dialogue with Paris Review Editor Lorin Stein” last month. The introduction is by Chuck Kinder, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette book review editor Bob Hoover asks some questions at the end of Stein’s talk. Stein was the editor for Kinder’s novel Honeymooners: ACautionary Talewhen it was originally published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Honeymooners was re-issued last fall by Carnegie Mellon University Press as part of their 2009 Classic Contemporary Series. The CMU Press edition includes “The Lost Chapters” and “The Lost Love Letters” which were cut from the original mammoth manuscript (along with the hundreds of other pages Kinder jokes about in the Hot Metal Bridge podcast mentioned above) and a new introduction by Jay McInerney. You can read more about Chuck Kinder and Diane Cecily’s long friendship with Raymond Carver here. I thoroughly enjoyed rereading this new edition of Honeymooner after catching Chuck’s reading last fall at The New Yinzer Reading Series, which was one of the best readings I’ve heard him give. I’d forgotten how wonderful and funny this book is, and I loved seeing those lost letters and chapters.
The new issue of Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine is due out in December and includes my short-short fiction piece, “Red-winged Blackbirds at 7:35.”
[Note: During the summer months posting will be far less frequent, most likely one post per month, so that I can focus on another writing project. Weekly posts will resume in September, after Labor Day.]
Marker at Kayford Mountain Cemetery (Copyright 2008 by Dory Adams)
I was taught to remember the dead and grew up watching my elders place wreaths and flowers on family graves for Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Christmas. However, the most important day for tending to family graves was Decoration Day, which was what we called Memorial Day when I was a young girl. In much of Appalachia, Decoration Day was a remembrance of ancestors, not just about honoring those who had died while serving in the military. Flags decorated the graves of fallen soldiers, and flowers decorated the graves of family members.
There is some concern that the meaning of Memorial Day has been lost since the traditional observance date of May 30th was moved to the last Monday of May in 1971. When the National Holiday Act created a three-day weekend, the focus of Memorial Day gradually shifted to weekend getaways and family cookouts – a summer kickoff of sorts.
For me, Memorial Day has always been about all those things – cemeteries, fallen soldiers, the beginning of summer, kin and cookouts. Only the language has changed: Decoration Day, The 30th of May, Memorial Day. My maternal family is from the small towns nestled in the hills of Huntingdon County in Pennsylvania, and my great-grandparents, grandparents, and assorted aunts and uncles are buried in the mountain cemeteries there. On Memorial Day, in the town of Three Springs where my grandfather lived, people would gather flowers from their gardens and meet at the town green to form a procession where they carried the flowers to the cemetery. It wasn’t exactly a parade as there was no band, but there may have been a drummer on occasion to provide a cadence. Grandpap always cut rosebuds from the bush in his front yard on the morning of May 30th for me to carry and place on the graves of Grandma and Sarah Alice, their youngest daughter who’d died at birth. He carried flowers for the graves of his parents and for his brother Alfred who’d been killed in World War II. Following a small service in the cemetery, a trumpeter would play Taps, and then we’d walk across the cemetery to place our flowers at the gravesites.
Later that day, everyone seemed to gather at my grandfather’s house. Carloads of out-of-town relatives would arrive. There would be a backyard cookout and the house would fill up with aunts and uncles and cousins. When every lawn chair, porch swing, and porch banister was taken, blankets would be spread on the ground so people could sit on the lawn without getting grass stain on their clothes. People came and went all day long, and if you paid attention to the grownups talking you were bound to pick up a family story or two. My great-aunts loved to tell stories of their brother’s (my grandpap) mischief as a boy, so I know all about whose pigtails he scorched with a match, and how he caught a fish with his bare hands when jumping into the creek in his Sunday suit on the way home from church, and how he rode his new sled down the stairs at the farm on Christmas morning. The stories of Uncle Alfred were told in a different tone of voice, more hushed and with sadness filling up the silent gaps.
Reading Lee Maynard’s The Pale Light of Sunset got me thinking about mountain cemeteries again. Although I’m not from West Virginia, the kinship I feel with West Virginia writers began when I first read Chuck Kinder’s work, and has continued as I’ve read the work of other West Virginia writers. In the opening chapter of The Pale Light of Sunset, Lee Maynard wrote of being born in his grandmother’s parlor, and of learning fifty years later of the birth of a stillborn aunt, his mother’s twin, who’d also been born in that same parlor. Maynard writes: “There was no money for tiny burials. In the stillness and quiet of a black summer night, with waves of heat pouring down the valley and out across the rivers in the distance, with the heavy scent of honeysuckle hanging in the night air, the tiny body was named, wrapped in my grandmother’s prized quilt, and buried in a hand-dug grave beneath the tall grass just beyond the vegetable garden. Beneath the tall grass where I played.” Many years later after living most of his life in the southwest, he returns to where the house once stood in the West Virginia mountains, but the house and everything that he knew there was gone. He writes: “I lie down in the grass and stare upward into a pale steel sky. And I realize that, had I, too, been stillborn, I would lie here, too, forever, next to an aunt whose name I never knew. Under the grass.”
I remember slowly closing the book and putting it down after reading that opening chapter, too moved by and connected to those words to read any further just then. I thought of my mother telling me about a baby buried under a rosebush on my great-grandparents’ farm. She wasn’t sure whose baby it was as it had happened long ago; no doubt in a similar situation to what Lee Maynard writes of when there was no money for tiny burials. I suppose the rosebush was planted later to mark the spot, but Mom always phrased it as “the baby buried under the rosebush at the farm.” Everyone was born at home back then, including her. It was a grim irony that the first of her family to be born in a hospital would be her baby sister, strangled by the umbilical cord which had become wrapped around her neck in the birth process. It was to her grave that I carried those rosebuds on Memorial Day.
Red poppies are supposed to be the flower of remembrance for war dead, but roses have become a flower of remembrance for me, starting with those deep pink roses from my grandfather’s yard. It may even go back to that rosebush on my great-grandfather’s farm. In my own garden there are white roses planted in memory of a dear friend who died far too young of cancer. In fact, when we moved to the house where we now live, that rosebush came with us, transplanted from the yard at the old house. Just last week, my husband set a new stake into the ground to help support the branches which are heavy with white buds and blossoms. There are also poppies in my garden, but they are orange poppies and not the “In Flanders Field” red poppies meant for soldiers, planted because I remember them growing in Grandma’s garden when I was barely three years old and the orange blossoms seemed almost as tall as me.
In Chuck Kinder’s first novel, Snakehunter, one of the characters, an aunt, is determined to make sure all the family graves have tombstones marking them. After forty years of putting headstones on family graves, she manages to get the final stone set on her brother’s grave in a West Virginia hillside cemetery on Decoration Day 1950. The day is spent getting the new granite marker up the hill on a washed-out and deeply rutted dirt road to the family gravesite, and then pulling weeds and tending to the other family graves there. I think of this story every time I visit a mountainside graveyard, and of two West Virginia cemeteries in particular, the Hatfield Cemetery and the Kayford Cemetery.
In the Hatfield cemetery in Logan County, West Virginia, the graves go all the way up the steep hillside to the woods, and some of the older graves at the top are actually in the woods now. At the center of the cemetery is the Hatfield family plot where a marble statue of the patriarch, Devil Anse, dominates. In contrast to this formal plot are the more humble graves further up the hillside, some with handmade wooden markers, others marked by rocks with hand-chiseled names and dates. We tend to think of a marked grave as a permanent memorial, but it’s impossible to stand in such a hillside cemetery and not notice how the wilderness reclaims those graves if left untended.
The old cemetery atop Kayford Mountain is now practically surrounded by a mountain top removal mine site there. The dirt road up to the cemetery is deeply rutted, which make it impassable to all but four-wheel drive vehicles. As we walked the rest of the way up after driving as far as we could, I wondered How do they ever get funeral processions and caskets up here for burials? While most of the graves there are very old, there are also a few recent graves with new granite markers. It’s an odd juxtaposition of the cemetery and the mine site, the land defying human attempts to claim it along the washed out dirt road, yet destroyed beyond belief by humans and mining corporations blasting away just beyond the graveyard.
Kayford Mountain Cemetery, copyright 2008 by Dory Adams
The cemetery where my grandparents are buried is in a more pastoral setting, at the edge of town and surrounded by a gated stone wall separating it from the adjacent hill farms, the coal long ago mined from the region before the era of extreme strip mining. My mother and a cousin make sure there are flowers on the family graves for the holiday observances, particularly Memorial Day. It gives me a sense of peace knowing my ancestors are at rest in their mountain cemetery while I remember the dead my own way, planting flowers of remembrance in my own garden here in the city.
Photo Credits:
Top and bottom photographs: Kayford Mountain Cemetery, copyright 2008 by Dory Adams
Middle photographs: Hatfield Cemetery, copyright 2006 by Kevin Scanlon, all rights reserved, used by permission
Other News:
June 1st marks the first anniversary of In This Light.
During the summer months, posting will be far less frequent (most likely one post per month) so that I can focus on another writing project. Weekly posts will resume in September, after Labor Day.
Lee Maynard’s latest book is his best yet. Described as “autobiographical fiction” by West Virginia University Press, it is a road trip that is part interior journey and part physical exploration of the landscape – West Virginia’s hills and hollers, the Sea of Cortez, the desert of New Mexico, and the arctic tundra. Opening with Maynard’s birth in 1936 in the parlor of his grandmother’s home, very short chapters polished like gems cover most of his lifetime between 1941 and 2005.
I immediately connected with the childhood chapters, feeling a kinship in the way that I do with so many Appalachian writers – and those from West Virginia in particular. The best writers have a way of making us think about our own lives through their stories, and the early chapters of The Pale Light of Sunset had me thinking about my own growing up on Jacks Mountain in central Pennsylvania. Maynard’s chapters are short in length, but long on thought – for both the writer and the reader.
Fellow West Virginia writers give The Pale Light of Sunset high praise. Ann Pancake describes the chapters “Arrow in the Light” and “A Death in the Mountains” as “miniature masterpieces” that “chilled my skin in awe.” Richard Currey describes the stories as “infused with a wanderer’s soul” and calls the book a “narrative of the mind and spirit for our own time.” Meredith Sue Willis describes the book as a “fictional memoir – a kind of heightened and imagined life” and says “Lee Maynard writes better than anyone else I know about how a boy is infused with the rules of American manhood.”
I had the good luck of hearing Lee Maynard read in 2003 at the Quiet Storm in Pittsburgh, as he and friend Chuck Kinder set out on their “Outlaw Writers Tour” along with the alt-country band The Deliberate Strangers. Both had new books out: Maynard’s Screaming with the Cannibals and Kinder’s The Last Mountain Dancer.
Maynard had already achieved notoriety with his first book, Crum, which was pretty much banned in his home state of West Virginia. In fact, Tamarack slapped “Adult Content” stickers on two of my favorite books which I bought there after finding them shelved low and in a very dark corner: Chuck Kinder’s Mountain Dancer and Keith Maillard’s Gloria. When I met Keith Maillard a few years back and asked him to sign that copy, he was startled by the neon green adult content sticker slapped on the cover, and gasped “What’s this?” I explained about where I’d bought it and told him not to worry because he was in very good company on that bottom corner bookshelf. When I asked Chuck if he was offended by Tamarack’s actions, he said he’d be offended if they hadn’t put a sticker on his book.
But back to Lee Maynard’s new book. The foreword “I’m still here, Lowenstein, you son of a bitch” intrigued me and by the end of the first chapter “The Parlor” which was barely three pages long, he’d totally hooked me. At times I wanted to savor a particular chapter by putting the book aside and losing myself in thoughts about it, but the momentum of the story propelled me to the next chapter and I could not put the book down for long. I connected most with the early childhood chapters and the later chapters. The rowdy and bawdy young manhood years were interesting and surreal with film noir shadings, and they worked well to make the later chapters all the more poignant. By the end – all the rivers crossed, all the running away from and toward something, all the small details as simple and significant as a treasured button – all those short chapters covering a lifetime of decades add up to one hell of a story. One of my favorite chapters, “1948: My Mother’s Coat” is about grasping the sense of loss. After running away for the day, Maynard returns home in the evening to find his mother gone: “I charge through the small rooms, breathing the scent of her, knowing that she has been here, waiting for me. There is no fire in the stove and the house is chilled. She is gone. Without her, the house has no meaning.” Another favorite chapter late in the book, “2003: Where I’m From,” is about the images that come to mind as the essence of the West Virginia landscape.
On the page following the dedication, there is a wonderful quote by Lee’s good friend Chuck Kinder: “All Stories are true, if they are well written. The question is what they are telling the truth about.” The stories in The Pale Light of Sunset are truths that I will carry with me for a very long time.
Additional Links:
You can see and hear Lee Maynard talk about The Pale Light of Sunset in this WVU Press podcast.
October 21st will mark the 40th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s death. He’s one of those writers of an era, whose work stays with me over the decades. I’ve revisited his books many times since first reading On the Road in 1977. Jack Kerouac died on October 21, 1969 at the age of 47, and in May of 1983 I went to Lowell, Massachusetts to find his grave.
I’d traveled by train from Chicago to Boston to visit friends. Amtrak was having some sort of special fare. I don’t remember the details of the deal except that it allowed me to make several stopovers along the route so that I could also visit friends in Buffalo for a few days. It was a good enough bargain that I was able to afford a sleeper car roomette, a welcome luxury since most of the trip between Chicago and Buffalo was at night.
Cozy in my roomette, I watched out the window until dusk turned to darkness, amazed at how different the towns looked from my vantage point aboard the train – inside the lowered crossing gates with bells clanging and lights flashing where the tracks crossed streets and roadways. I had a new paperback with me, Joan Didion’sThe White Album, and after it got too dark to enjoy the scenery I lost myself in those pages – reading about the power of water in her essays “Holy Water” and “At the Dam” while my train rolled along dark rails at the southern edge of Lake Erie. The tracks ran closer to the lake at industrial areas, where mills still operated at nearly full blast, although the Manufacturing Belt was already corroding into what would become the Rust Belt. Despite my cozy nest in the roomette, I don’t think I slept much that night. I was homesick for California, and reading Didion’s essays for the first time. She had me hooked from the very first sentence of the first essay: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” She was writing about the end of an era, the end of the 1960s. It was the beginning of the 1980s then, and I was somehow saying goodbye to the 1970s on this journey as I headed further east, saying goodbye to California even though I’d left it behind the year before with the move to Chicago.
In Boston, I visited longtime friends Sherry and Jeff, who’d also lived in California for a few years after we’d all graduated from art school in Pittsburgh half a decade earlier. I’d been having a difficult time adjusting to the flatness of the Illinois landscape and needed a change of scenery. Needed to travel for a while. Needed hills and mountains. Needed to be near water that moved with oceanic tides. Chicago and Lake Michigan made me feel oddly claustrophobic, and I needed to escape the prairie land of the far southern suburbs where we lived.
Sherry and Jeff wanted to show me as much of New England as we could squeeze into a weekend drive, and we managed to see parts of New Hampshire and Maine. I saw the Atlantic Ocean for the first time on that trip. It’s ironic that I would see the Pacific Ocean first, after having grown up living much closer to the Atlantic. Looking at maps during our drive back to Boston, I spotted Lowell and requested that we go there to see the town where Jack Kerouac had grown up as a boy. It was where he was buried, and I wanted to try to find his grave.
Lowell looked exactly as I’d expected it to look, with brick mills along the Merrimac River. Despite there being many cemeteries in Lowell, Jeff instinctively turned the car into the correct one. We found a caretaker who asked, “Who yer lookin’ fer?” When I said Kerouac’s name, he went inside his gardener’s shed and brought out a mimeographed sheet of paper with directions to Kerouac’s tombstone. It pleased me that enough fans came seeking his gravesite that they’d printed directions.
There may be a different marker there now, but the small flat stone in the photograph above marked his grave then. We stayed only a few minutes. I no doubt would’ve lingered longer had I been alone. But, it was getting late in the day and we still had to drive back to Boston. It was just one stop on our journey, a side trip really, before getting back on the road again.
Leaving Boston by train, I thought about Kerouac. I’d read most of Kerouac’s work while living in California. One of my favorite pieces was “The Railroad Earth” in Lonesome Traveler, about working as a brakeman for the Southern Pacific Railroad while he lived in San Francisco. In the essay, Kerouac reminisces about Lowell while he’s working in the rail yards and riding the trains between San Francisco and San Jose. There’s something about traveling that makes us think about other places we’ve been and about the people we were with there. I was missing my husband whose job had kept him in Chicago while I was on this trip. In New York City I would change trains and then travel west to Pittsburgh for another stopover before returning to Chicago – toward what was our home for a brief while.
When I was younger I mostly measured time by weeks and months; only long chunks of time such as school grades and birthdays were measured in years. Now, I measure time in decades. I was barely out of my first decade when Kerouac died. As we quickly approach the end of our first decade in the 21st century, I’m already in my fifth decade, having surpassed the length of Kerouac’s short life. Rest in peace, Ti Jean. Your words live on as I continue speeding through my own lifetime.
News and Updates:
• Photojournalist Clyde Hare died last week. Hare came to Pittsburgh to work with Roy Stryker on the Pittsburgh Photographic Library Project and then made Pittsburgh his home for the next fifty years. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette news obituary includes several of his images of Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Hare’s photographs are included in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art and at George Eastman House, among others.
• Carnegie Mellon University Press has announced the release of a new edition of Chuck Kinder’sThe Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale as part of their Classic Contemporaries list. The new edition includes additional chapters and lost love letters which were not included in the original edition, as well as an introduction by Jay McInerney. Even though I have a signed first edition on my bookshelves, you can bet I’ll be buying and reading the new edition as soon as I can get my hands on it.
in my mind like holy places. . .” (from “Where Water Comes Together With Other Water”
by Raymond Carver)
I visited Raymond Carver’s grave in 2005. Hard to believe that four years have passed since I sat on the bench beside his granite marker, high on a hill in Port Angeles, Washington above the Strait of San Juan de Fuco which connects the Pacific Ocean with Puget Sound.
That particular trip west had been for a family event, the wedding of a beloved nephew who has settled down in Tacoma. Following the wedding festivities, my husband and I spent a week vacationing. We explored Seattle, ferried across Puget Sound from port to port, toured Olympia National Park, fell in love with the town of Edmonds and wished we could live there for a while, and made a pilgrimage to Port Angeles simply because I wanted to pay my respects to Ray Carver, whose writing about blue collar life and his own struggle to be a writer so inspired me.
I discovered Carver’s work while taking writing classes at the University of Pittsburgh. In an introduction to fiction course we’d read Carver’s “Cathedral.” I soon bought all of Carver’s books, read and reread his stories, and loved his later work the best: “A Small, Good Thing” and “Boxes” and, of course, “Cathedral” are among my favorites. I read his poetry and found it to be beautiful and accessible. Poetry can be very intimidating on the page, but Ray’s pulled me into the language and the imagery, in the way that the poetry of Jane Kenyon, Maggie Anderson, and Irene McKinney also pulls me in – with directness and immediacy.
I found my way into an intermediate fiction workshop at Pitt which was taught by Chuck Kinder, a friend and contemporary of Ray, Toby Wolff, Richard Ford, and others of that group of writers. There’s a Zen saying that goes something like this: when the student is ready, the teacher will be presented. Now, Chuck is probably the most un-Zenlike person you’d ever meet, and I’m sure if he were ever accused of such, he’d immediately make up some hilariously self-deprecating title for himself as a hillbilly Zen Master. But the truth is that Chuck was the right teacher at the right time for me. I felt a kinship to this native West Virginian who allowed a middle-aged fledgling writer into a very full class and made her feel she had stories worth telling. It was clear while sitting in his class how much he admires and respects Carver’s writing, and that he misses his old pal. Chuck has since become the Director of the Writing Program at Pitt, and still teaches students who are lucky enough to get into one of his workshops. He also closes the gap in the standard six degrees of separation between me and Carver.
I spent an afternoon writing at Ray’s grave back in August of 2005. Kevin and I found the cemetery, and I then sent him off to photograph for a few hours while I wrote. At graveside, there was a small black box by the leg of the bench, and when I opened it I found a journal where visitors had left messages. When I turned to the first blank page, I saw that the last entry had been made the previous afternoon by Ray’s widow, poet Tess Gallagher.
(click images to enlarge)
I was still writing in my notebook when Kevin returned. It had been peaceful there in the cemetery – a quiet place to think and write, the silence broken only by the music of wind chimes on the gravestone. We took some photographs of the granite marker, which is engraved with two of Carver’s poems. Then we went into downtown Port Angeles, which happened to be hosting the annual meeting of the Northwest tribes that week. We watched some traditional tribal dances, admired the hand-carved red cedar ocean canoes on the beach, and watched the current flowing in the Strait under the changing evening light.
When I earned my MFA from Vermont College, Kevin surprised me with the gift of a signed first edition of Carver’s Where I’m Calling From. After the graduation ceremony, a small group of friends stopped by for drinks to celebrate our newly earned diplomas. We passed around the book, and I insisted everyone to take a turn lightly place their writing hand on top of Ray’s signature for good luck.
“. . . There’ll be a place on board for everyone’s stories.
My own, but also the ones belonging to my friends. Short stories and the ones that go on and on. The true and the made-up. The ones already finished, and the ones still being written. . .” (from “My Boat” by Raymond Carver)
Last week on August 20th, the Library of America released Raymond Carver: Collected Stories in hardcover, 960 pages of stories and selected essays. I’ve noticed that the pages in my paperback copies from my student days are beginning to yellow; what better excuse to treat myself to a new edition?
Photo credits: Both photographs of Raymond Carver’s grave are copyright 2005 by Kevin Scanlon, used by permission.
"Arrange what pieces come your way." ~ Virginia Woolf
About This Blog:
In This Light is a blog about the influence of images on writers and writing. Think of it as a place where imagery joins narrative, to see how things look through the light of words.
I live and write in Pittsburgh, PA and have a diverse background with degrees in photography and psychology, as well as an MFA in writing from Vermont College. I prefer to think of this as the winding path toward writing -- a journey where interests in image and human behavior converged as story.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Connotation Press, Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine, The Santa Fe Literary Review, The Avery Anthology, Hamilton Stone Review, Blue Earth Review, Hobart, Slipstream, Forge, Word Riot, The Oklahoma Review, Common Ground Magazine, Shalla Magazine, and Paper Street. My story "Tests and Measurements" which appeared in Workers Write! Tales from the Clinic was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2009.
“1 Hour Cleaning” copyright by Dory Adams
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