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You know how it goes, right? When you hear that song for the first time, and you tell your kids or your husband to stop talking, or you pull over on the side of the road and close your eyes and let the song fill you up. And you don’t know whether it’s the lyrics, or the voice, or the music itself, but something in that song has wound itself around your heart.

Right now, that song is Sharon Van Etten’s Save Yourself, and it’s absolutely permeating my world these days. Sharon’s got all kinds of heat and attention right now, and she has a new album just out, and I’m slowly falling in love with that one too, but this song, this song is it for me. Her voice and harmonies are hitting me where I live, and the lyrics and the music are equally as gorgeous and haunting.

Has a song done that for you recently? What was it?

Related articles

• Review – Sharon Van Etten: Tramp (thewoundedjukebox.com)
• Sharon Van Etten: Tramp (Review) (popmatters.com)
• Sharon Van Etten’s ‘Tramp’: haunting, hypnotic, brilliant (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Sharon Van Etten Tramp stamps the internet (chromewaves.net)
• The Rough Harmonies of Sharon Van Etten (nytimes.com)

This is the kind of inspiration, however, that I think would be easily adaptable, as writing prompts for poems or any short pieces of writing, especially for people like me who think about their identities or periods in their lives in terms of music.

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Sometimes you read a book because you’ve chosen it specifically, and other times, books land serendipitously into your life. Recently, my mother passed on a book she’d missed in her book club, and I picked up another at The Book Thing of Baltimore when I dropped off the results of my recent book purge. Despite not choosing to read them together, they had a lot in common, and the experience certainly colored my perceptions of each.

Both A Visit from the Goon Squad and A Fortunate Age: A Novel are modern books set primarily in New York City. By modern, I mean not only that they take place in the very recent past, but also that both employ specifically modern techniques, shifting narratives that move from character to character and incorporating themes of modern society into the themes of the novel. If you’ve read much about Goon Squad, for example, you know that there is an entire chapter done in Powerpoint slides, and the characters in Fortunate Age read Gawker.

Despite being in the generation that should be right in tune with the cultural references for these books, I confess up front that as a reader, I don’t usually fall in love with modern novels. I like a little history, a little epic sweep, a little romance and tragedy played out against a greater stage. Therefore, I’m more likely to feel strongly about a contemporary novel like The Invisible Bridge (my review here) or The Paris Wife: A Novel (the latter of which I reviewed here and also recommended to my mother’s book club, so clearly I loved it!). I confess further that I also enjoy real endings to books, with a little more resolution than many modern novels tend to offer.

However, that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate modern novels, and I found much to appreciate and admire in these two. A Fortunate Age does a pitch-perfect job of capturing the post-college wanderings privileged young people go through these days, with major and minor detours of varying strength, and the characters in it ring true. Some of the characters land on their feet, others get lost in the forest, but you end up truly caring about each of them, and their eventual destinies seem authentic and fitting. I especially liked Emily, an aspiring actress with a mentally ill sister, and Dave, a musician who experiences success and ambivalence in equal measures. While A Visit from the Goon Squad does shift like a kaleidoscope and employ some innovative narrative strategies, I never felt like Egan’s maneuvers were gratuitous or distracted from the story she was telling or the characters that were speaking. Each novel did a great job of building a world that felt comprehensive and vivid, realistically flawed and sincere characters, and a pervasive emotional tone.

Related articles

• Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is all about the timing (arts.nationalpost.com)
• ‘A Visit From The Goon Squad’ Book Club Part I: Light And Memory (thinkprogress.org)
• A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (nellafreund.wordpress.com)
• Book Review: A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (swampofboredom.com)

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Like Anjali, I recently passed my 500 post milestone for this blog, which I first posted in on July 12, 2007. That also means that my blog will turn five this summer, the same year that my children and my marriage turn ten.

That first month, I had stopped posting in an old personal blog I maintained primarily to keep in touch with family and friends, back in the old pre-Facebook days and started this shiny new blog, though not yet under my own name. It was my first time using WordPress, and I had decided to make myself a blog/website where I could host the writing clips I was slowly but surely amassing. Like Anjali, I wanted a blog that was much more about myself as a writer than as a mother. I was starting to think more about my voice as a writer and my online presence, and I wanted to start fresh.

Now, looking back, I think this blog made another shift that paralleled my career shifting, as I moved from a writer who taught adjunct classes to a teacher who tries to make time for writing. I still post about wonderful lovely girls, but the focus of my professional and creative life has shifted, and so has my blog.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: maintaining the blogging habit has been one of the best decisions I’ve made in the past five years, as a writer and in terms of personal growth and health.  I simply can’t imagine my life without it.

Thanks so much for coming along on this journey with me; I hope you’ll stick around for the next five years.

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• Happy blogiversary, Poetic Aperture! (poeticaperture.com)

This is a really beautiful project, and I’m thrilled with the results; definitely a great place to publish, or keep checking in on if you are intrigued by ekphrastic art (or really, if you like poetry or visual art at all!).

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Sonnet XVII (100 Love Sonnets, 1960)

Pablo Neruda

I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

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Exciting news! Next spring, I’ll be teaching a new senior elective at my school, called “20th Century Latin American Literature.” Here’s the description I wrote when proposing it:

Torrid sonnets of love, magically realistic epics, post-modern murder mysteries: all of these and more comprise what we call Latin American literature. As the world becomes increasingly globalized, great literature is an ever more powerful key to understanding both that which seems foreign, like the mountaintops of Chile or drug cartels of Colombia, as well as that which remains universal, like the importance of love and family or the human quest for independence. In 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru (The War of the End of the World, Conversation in the Cathedral) became the sixth Latin American author to become a Nobel Laureate in Literature, joining an illustrious list that also includes Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Works from these authors, as well as writers like Octavio Paz of Mexico (The Death of Artemio Cruz) and Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina (Labyrinths, The Book of Sand), would form the majority of our reading list, and students would produce both formal critical essays and more personal, creative or poetic pieces in response to these readings. Previous studies in Spanish helpful, but not at all required.

How cool does that sound? This is a course I’ve been wanting to teach for a few years, partly because I think it fills a real gap in our offering of electives, and partly because it’s an area of literature I have wanted to study deeper myself. I’ve read the majority of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s work, for example, and I’m thrilled to get to teach One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.) for the first time. I’ve also long been a fan of Neruda, but the rest of the authors on my proposed list will be new for me, and I’m looking forward to diving in. Right now I’m reading The Feast of the Goat: A Novel to see if I would want to teach it, and I think I’ll try Ficciones (English Translation) next, as I’ve been really intrigued by the descriptions of the works within.  In conjunction with developing this course, I have plans to refresh my knowledge of Spanish, which I haven’t studied formally since high school. My dream would be to have enough fluency by next spring to read some of the literature in the original, and I’m hoping to increase our conversations in Spanish here at home.  I’m also very lucky to have a theater-teaching colleague who’s going to hook me up with some contemporary plays by Latin American female authors, since my proposed list is light on women.

It’s been years since I’ve gotten to do this, design a course around books I’m choosing entirely because I really like them, and getting be more adventurous with assignments than I am with my freshmen.  This is also what it means to me to be a lifelong learner: continually pushing myself, exploring new fields, adding new skills, traversing new landscapes, and maybe even getting to bring my students along for the ride.

Related articles

• Shakira’s Love for Gabriel García Márquez (manonmona.wordpress.com)
• World literature tour: Chile (guardian.co.uk)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (dayistartedreading.wordpress.com)
• The Value of Literature (Third and Last Part). (examiner.com)

• prioritize regular writing time
• join and regularly participate in and attend a poetry critique group
• complete the Poem-A-Day challenge in April, like I have before
• workshop/revise two poems I’ve been working on for several years
• polish/revise a few creative nonfiction pieces I’ve been working on, and send them out
• develop some target poetry markets and shower them with submissions
• use Poets & Writersclassifieds and website resources to help me find information on literary journals and calls for submissions
• use the P&W prompts for inspiration and practical exercises

If you notice, there’s a pattern here having to do with submissions, my most-dreaded portion of the writing life. Trying to do the whole tackling-it-head-on thing.

Just as with my other resolutions, I’ll be posting when I have success in meeting these goals too.

Related articles

• Jumpstarting My Writing (jackieregales.com)

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As important as writing is to me, and as central as it is to my identity and conception of myself, when something has to drop from my daily juggling act, too often, it’s writing. So for 2012, I’m determined to jumpstart my trajectory as a writer and poet. This is a broader goal, not a concrete one, which means I need to think creatively about how to accomplish it and what that might look like, and what the steps toward success might be.

Thanks to my poet friend Christine Stewart, I’ve got some specific ways to get started on reinvigorating my writing routines. As always, Chris has a pile of fun, creative and reflective ways to start thinking about this, so I’m feeling inspired to get started. Right now, I’m thinking my theme will be “commitment,” in line with my determination to shuffle writing higher on my priority list as often as I can.

Another interesting exercise I’m planning to try is inspired by this post of Penelope Trunk’s on things she wishes she had written, and what that told her not only about her dreams for her writing career, but about the accompanying emotions each evoked in her. As provocative and disturbing as Trunk can often be, I also find her writing to frequently be insightful and inspiring, and this entry was a great example. I often think I’d like to have written some of the many amazing Dear Sugar columns, for example (the one on your invisible inner terrible someone blows me away every time I read it), but I don’t aspire to being an advice columnist, per se, so what is it exactly about Sugar’s writing that I’d like to emulate? I think it’s not only her eloquence, but her candor and compassion, so how can I incorporate those threads into my work?

Finally, I sat down and drafted a list of specific writing goals for the year, which I’ll share in an upcoming post.  In the past, I made lists of broader goals, but I didn’t find those to be motivating as I would like, so I’m working on a specific list, as those seem to be more effective for me.

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