Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize
Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize
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Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize
Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize
Support Independent Bookstores
Raffaello Baldini, from Noise, translated by Adria Bernardi...
Victoria Redel interviews Grace Paley, from Your Work Will Correct You...
Louise Mathias, Agapornis Personata (Masked Love Birds)...
Naomi Shihab Nye, from Free Day in Toronto...
There's got to be a place
where all the noises in the world end up,
in the sky, way up, who knows, or down towards the bottom,
but it's got to be far, so far no one can get there,
a basin, or a pond, but immense, a sea,
which from far off you can't see a thing, but getting closer,
if you could,
the first thing you'd hear would be rumbling
like when they were bombing near the coast,
then it shifting down lower, right at the shore,
I'm saying, there's got to be a crashing,
a din, so that in order not to go deaf,
you've got to stick your fingers, tight, into your ears,
but then you get all jittery,
every so often you pull them out, a little, you try, the tiniest bit,
it's all such a hubbub outside that it scares you,
it seems like it could just carry it all away…
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G: So remember I talked about having folders and stuff and my way of going to the folders and finding old paragraphs and beginnings of stories. Anyway, I always think of this book by Juan Miro, which is called, I Woke Up a Gardener . Miro says, “I'm never so happy as when I have many, many canvases, and in the morning, in the beginning, I prune one, I water another, and I go through all of them. I work like a gardener,” he says. And in a way, when I'm finished writing, when I'm done with a piece of work, what I do eventually is just go through these folders and I prune one, I add sentences to another. I could go over a few of these and say these aren't going anywhere. I mean I won't take them out of the folders, there's some reason I wrote them.
V: When you're working on pieces, beyond the folders stage, let's say working on a long story, do you actually work on more than one story at once?
G: Well, in the beginning I might, I might work on a couple things. But then I end up working on one thing.
V: I love this idea of having the folders, hanging on to things that aren't working or seem to be duds. And then later having a chance to revisit them. Because it's a little bit like saying, “at some point I knew I'd need to write these sentences.” You may not even know what the thing was that started you but you pick it up and you hook into it and maybe you're ready for it three years later.
G: Maybe not if it's very short. I mean if I've got three pages of something, I know what started it, started me off. It wouldn't be that mysterious… but I would've gotten stuck, obviously, or there would have been more stuff, more pages, right?
V: Once you've gotten going, Grace, do you write the story straight through to an initial ending and then work on subsequent drafts? I have the feeling you proceed slowly and rework as you're writing your way through.
G: That's what I was doing just now before you arrived. Where is it? Oh, I sat on it!
V: Sitting on your fictions. That's one way of working on the piece!
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It's their use of color that gets me: languid
& brazen, when they should be shy.
Why is the tip of green so desperately shocking?
Filament wings, in all their jaunty
dare…I asked the man what he wanted for the pair.
I want that they continue , he said. & you name
them yin & yang. & this one here, so sherbert
& tender, as if bleached poppies could up & fly.
In their distinctive chatter, odd endearments:
Petal Wing, let me map your town
of downy kisses. Sugar-beak, pack up your weekend
bag of blue joy.
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“Children's literature!” says Jennifer. “I adore children's literature! My daughter's seventeen. I was so sad when William Steig died.”
“But he's not dead!”
“Are you sure?”
“I'm nearly positive! Coincidentally, we were just talking about his book Dr. DeSoto in the cab on the way over here! He's in his 90s, but he's not dead.”
“Oh, I hope you're right! I've been mourning him for three years already!”
The minute my EKG is completed, I hop off the examination table, pull my green shirt over my blue hospital gown, and hoof it out to the waiting room where my friend Ginny, who happens to be director of the renowned Cooperative Children's Book Center in Madison, Wisconsin, is waiting with my fifteen-year-old son. They are eating hot dogs from a streetside vendor and drinking sodas.
“Is William Steig dead?”
“Absolutely not!”
My son leans forward. “I don't think you should laugh so much.”
“He's right,” Ginny whispers. “If you keep acting so happy, they'll keep us here forever.”
“There's somebody back there who ate a rotten fig ,” I say, and we all start laughing. “ Four days ago !”
I should talk. Last night, before the streaking pain shot through my left arm, causing me to sit down on the Bloor Street curb in my good skirt next to a hobo holding out his Blue Jay hat for loonies, I began my own public lecture by mentioning a fig.
“See you guys later! Why don't you go sightseeing or something? For God's sake, this is ruining your whole day!”
But they will not leave me.
We had talked about renting bicycles to ride along the harbor front. We might have poked around for remnants of film director Atom Egoyan's recent “Ararat” movie set or sampled the Bubble Tea (tapioca grains floating in frothy brew, does it sound good to you?) in a café on Bay Street. We had not yet seen Greektown or visited the shoe museum or had a single sighting of Vince Carter, though we were pretty sure we had seen Antonio Davis in front of the Hyatt Hotel.
Coming to the hospital was not our first choice.
Back to the bowels of emergency, I bear good news. “WILLIAM STEIG IS DEFINITELY ALIVE!”
Jennifer, who is moving to Santa Fe in a week to experience a different culture, is thrilled to hear this.
The journalist calls over the striped curtain. “E.B. White was my man !”
We all agree that we can read the books or essays of E.B. White at any time and feel our minds have been distilled . Maybe they should keep his books in here. E.B. White lives forever! I start imagining how William Steig might draw the Emergency Room.
The journalist is dismissed. The beautiful girl is dismissed. The Portuguese man is placed on an I.V. When Jennifer leaves, he calls out to me mournfully, “My blood test is on that computer! I feel horrible! They're waiting for my X-rays to come through on that computer. Do you ever feel like your whole life is on somebody's computer?”
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