The Weeding, the Weeding
Sep. 11th, 2022 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitSee, the reason I have to actually try to read the books before adding them to the donate pile is that, particularly among the accidentally acquired books, I absolutely cannot tell whether they'll be worth my time or not without doing so. This is somewhat less true for fiction, or at least I have fewer compunctions about being like "I don't actually want to read this" about fiction, but nonfiction? This is the second book I've started recently thinking "I'll get a chapter or two in, become aware that it's really bad, and it'll go into the donate pile without much further effort" that has ended in "Okay actually this book is awesome and I'm going to keep it forever."
(This does sometimes go the other way; I thought Interviews with Southern Writers would be interesting and instead was so terribly boring that I did in fact only get a couple of chapters in before getting rid of it.)
This reaction is why I insist on reading them a bit first and also why my weeding project is going so slowly. But I own some magnificent gems. I still haven't read much in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry because it seems like it's going to be a quite challenging book and I want to devote my full attention to it-- it's about the process of taking the clarity you achieve in meditation back into the rest of your life, since most people can't go live in ascetic meditation forever, with a lot of interviews with people very devoted to their practices who had to find a balance. (I know that description kind of makes it sound like Eat Pray Love's marketing copy, but this book is an actual serious examination of the idea of balance.)
And now it's The Writer on Her Work: Contemporary Women Writers Reflect on their Art and Situation. It was published in 1980. The cover looks like it was published in 1980. None of these people are contemporary anymore and the only ones I've heard of are Joan Didion and Alice Walker. But the book seems to have tapped into a time-transcendant constant, because the essays themselves reflect on so many of the things I fear about my writing. In particular, there's a set of excerpts from the diaries of Michele Murray as she goes from being young and very hopeful about her career to trying to write around her children (and the expectations of a wife at the time) to trying very hard to get a book out before her death from cancer in 1974 that strike very close to my heart, given the family history that gives me high odds of dying young and the things that have prevented me from having much of a writing career so far.
I mean, yes, eight stories published in various places-- and it will be nine, there's another with a contract signed that will be out in 2024; it's called "A Bier of Bloody Roses" and I cannot wait for you all to see it--plus a podcast is more than a lot of people, even a lot of writers, get. (And if Nick Mamatas is to be believed, more than a number of Clarion graduates, even.) Certainly more than I imagined when I started out. But I want to do more than that. I want to be more than that.
And I appreciate knowing that there was another writer out there who spent a lot of time thinking and diarizing about these same things.
(This does sometimes go the other way; I thought Interviews with Southern Writers would be interesting and instead was so terribly boring that I did in fact only get a couple of chapters in before getting rid of it.)
This reaction is why I insist on reading them a bit first and also why my weeding project is going so slowly. But I own some magnificent gems. I still haven't read much in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry because it seems like it's going to be a quite challenging book and I want to devote my full attention to it-- it's about the process of taking the clarity you achieve in meditation back into the rest of your life, since most people can't go live in ascetic meditation forever, with a lot of interviews with people very devoted to their practices who had to find a balance. (I know that description kind of makes it sound like Eat Pray Love's marketing copy, but this book is an actual serious examination of the idea of balance.)
And now it's The Writer on Her Work: Contemporary Women Writers Reflect on their Art and Situation. It was published in 1980. The cover looks like it was published in 1980. None of these people are contemporary anymore and the only ones I've heard of are Joan Didion and Alice Walker. But the book seems to have tapped into a time-transcendant constant, because the essays themselves reflect on so many of the things I fear about my writing. In particular, there's a set of excerpts from the diaries of Michele Murray as she goes from being young and very hopeful about her career to trying to write around her children (and the expectations of a wife at the time) to trying very hard to get a book out before her death from cancer in 1974 that strike very close to my heart, given the family history that gives me high odds of dying young and the things that have prevented me from having much of a writing career so far.
I mean, yes, eight stories published in various places-- and it will be nine, there's another with a contract signed that will be out in 2024; it's called "A Bier of Bloody Roses" and I cannot wait for you all to see it--plus a podcast is more than a lot of people, even a lot of writers, get. (And if Nick Mamatas is to be believed, more than a number of Clarion graduates, even.) Certainly more than I imagined when I started out. But I want to do more than that. I want to be more than that.
And I appreciate knowing that there was another writer out there who spent a lot of time thinking and diarizing about these same things.
