Winding Down, Winding Up
My summer is quickly dwindling, but I’m feeling pretty content with the summer of ’08 and so am feeling fine about watching it go. We took a short trip to the beach, and I remembered how much I like to read short stories on vacation. They’re easy to dip in and out of, and you can still get a deep reading experience in a short time frame. My girls and I stopped at a favorite bookstore on our way out of town and I bought The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley, part of my ongoing project to read all of her published work. I hadn’t read any of her short fiction before, and I found it true to her style and satisfying for that reason. The title novella is truly a quiet heartbreaker, about the way a marriage can roil and quake under a placid surface.
I also bought and read an older edition of Best New American Voices, a series I always enjoy. I managed to read the majority of both, not on the sand, but a fair portion of it on a balcony with a lovely bay view. I know people often complain about “workshoppy” tones in the fiction produced in the great university writing programs today, but Sue Miller takes this complaint head-on in her intro to this volume and dismisses it, and I completely agree with her. Each of these stories had a fresh voice that I enjoyed reading. I also read Amanda Eyre Ward’s How To Be Lost, which I enjoyed, but found a bit predictable at times.
This weekend I also went to my poetry workshop, the second one I’ve taken at the BMA and with Christine Stewart. This time, we have the whole museum at our fingertips, but have to choose one piece we will write about for our final poems, the poems the museum will be looking at for inclusion in their new audio tour. I was really struck by the sculpture I chose as my final piece (which is not pictured in that link, but should give you an idea) and have already made great headway on the poem I’ve written about it. I find that for me as a poet, sometimes when I am really gathering steam on one poem, that will spill over, and I find myself revising poems I’ve been stuck on or haven’t looked at in a long while. That has been another great gift of these workshops for me, and I have also found that looking to visual art for inspiration is a very useful method of recharging my creativity.
This poem was new for me in that I had never written about a sculpture before. My next assignment for the workshop– to use a portrait for inspiration, which will be another first for me. I’m not often drawn to portraits, and also in this week, we’ve been asked to think about engaging with the artist as we imagine them, not just the artwork itself. Should be an interesting challenge.
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