Books, Dreams, Rocks, God as Language

"Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death.... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book."

-- Anthony Doerr

"I will tell you something about stories. They aren't just entertainment. They are all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have stories."

-- Leslie Marmon Silko

"In general, people [are] not road maps. People [are] not hieroglyphs or books. They [are] not stories. A person [is] a collection of accidents. A person [is] an infinite pile of rocks with things growing underneath."

"Everything hurtles toward oblivion, except words, which assemble themselves in time like molecules in space, for God was an act--an act!--of language...."

-- Lorrie Moore

On Lorrie Moore's Birds of America

I give you an oh yes moment, then some hearty laughs from Moore's short story collection (which is marvelous--beautiful and real life prose with lovely doses of subtle / clever / smart humor the likes of which I've never seen before).

"Staring out through the windshield, off into the horizon, Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce--winds, seas--a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world--no flower or stone--as a single hello from a human being."

Did you say OH YES? Makes me think about the food chain, a human eating a fish who ate a smaller fish who ate a fly who ate.... It all gathers and accrues and we become everything and each other. I almost wish I could write an essay for the story class I'm teaching.... tomorrow?! School starts tomorrow???  

And now some Tom Swifties, as she calls them (though the way she uses them in a story makes them even better, even more clever and narratively acute):

I have to go to the hardware store, he said wrenchingly.

This hot dog's awful, he said frankly.

I like a good sled dog, she said huskily.

There's never been an accident, she said recklessly.

You're only average, he said meanly.

Take a bow, he said sternly.

Love, Absence, and the Thin Line of Existence

I've been reading for my new class next month, planning as much as I can, a class on the short story. I've chosen collections published in the last 20 years, some by first timers. Here are quotes from two debut books I've enjoyed immensely this weekend.

From Once the Shore, by Paul Yoon:

"He considered the possibility that there were many kinds of love and as you experienced one, you felt the absence of all the others. He thought of a city perpetually opening onto the sea."

From The Shell Collector, by Anthony Doerr (and a fitting quote for the winter solstice):

Context is a woman who can divine the life experiences of dead creatures (or people) by touching them and going into a trance / vision she can share with others.

"More clearly than ever she could see that there was a fine line between dreams and wakefulness, between living and dying, a line so tenuous it sometimes didn't exist. It was always clearest for her in winter. In winter, in that valley, life and death were not so different. The heart of a hibernating newt was frozen solid but she could warm and wake it in her palm. For the newt there was no line at all, no fence, no River Styx, only an area between living and dying, like a snowfield between two lakes: a place where lake denizens sometimes met each other on their way to the other side, where there was only one state of being, neither living nor dead, where death was only a possibility and visions rose shimmering to the stars like smoke. All that was needed was a hand, the heat of a palm, the touch of fingers."

Tim O'Brien, Vietnam, Truth vs. Fiction

***IF YOU'RE USING THIS PAGE TO FIND LAST-MINUTE QUOTES FOR A COLLEGE ESSAY YOU'RE WRITING, ON A BOOK YOU DIDN'T READ, GO AWAY. GO READ THE BOOK. NOW!!! I PROMISE IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE. REFUNDS AVAILABLE. Stop being lazy!!!!!***

"By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others."

"That's a true story that never happened."

"And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen."

"True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can't believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside. It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe. " [oh my dear writing students, are you listening to this???]

"Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometime remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."

Tim O'Brien, I love you. I've loved you since 1999 when, in my college English capstone course, my favorite professor had us read the only book worth reading that term, In the Lake of the Woods (a novel about murder, politics, policy, lies, truth, fear, Vietnam, loneliness, haunting, terror, love, loss that surely comes as close to making you BE the 60's and 70's as any writing ever has). Later, I read the book which the above quotes are from, The Things They Carried-- the most evocative, well crafted piece of fiction / nonfiction I've maybe ever read (top 10 certainly). What is truth? Can't fiction be a more powerful truth? Does it matter what is true, what isn't? As a writer, the above quotes define how I think, why I write--I'd guess for many writers this is the case, especially the idea of making your stomach believe. Which is why my freshman composition students will always read this book in my class, and why they always respond so positively to it.

O'Brien is here at UNL for two weeks, and the last two nights I've heard a very down to earth writer speak charmingly, candidly, with great humor and timing (a good writer who speaks well to an audience, too? Who is human? VERY rare--paid well or not, even though I'm sure he's being paid quite handsomely.). Tonight he wore jeans, a tie, a suit jacket, and the requisite baseball cap. He writes in his underwear. And he's from Minnesota--what isn't to like? Read him. These books are pieces of writing that can save your life no matter who you are or what you do. A cliche to say, but I deeply believe that this is rare writing, forever writing, writing that can lead us--only in moments of course, which is the grace and burden of life--to where we could, are supposed to be, but may never be. That seems like a terrifying prospect.