9 posts tagged “authors”
Root Cellar by Theodore Roethke
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!--
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.
My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty,
The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers,
Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight,
A few white clouds all rushing eastward,
A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,
And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!
To loosen with all ten fingers held wide and limber
And lift up a patch, dark-green, the kind for lining cemetery baskets,
Thick and cushiony, like an old-fashioned doormat,
The crumbling small hollow sticks on the underside mixed with roots,
And wintergreen berries and leaves still stuck to the top,—
That was moss-gathering.
But something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpets
Of green, or plunged to my elbows in the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes:
And afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,
As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
By pulling off flesh from the living planet;
As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
I really like her illustrations.
another lost book with an awesome story and illustrations that stays with you: Heckedy PEG!
the other night i reminisced with rand about kids books that were kind of a cut above other kids books. ones that weren't just cute but kind of--great art. illustrations and stories that you can never get out of your head. but we couldn't remember the titles. i got panicky tonight because i thought i would never find out what they were, so i looked through the whole house until i found the one we remembered being about this girl who enters the outside world for the first time through a tapestry. we remembered she gets tied down by these vines which grow over her hands and how creepy and magnetic the book was. then we started talking about this other amazing one where this woman weave a tapestry--with her own blood and tears. turns out they are both by the same person--marilee heyer. wow!! what a cool coincidence. the first one is called "the forbidden door" and the second is the weaving of a dream.
Henry got up and recited this first poem in union square at an open mic night.
extremely interesting documentary about phillip pullman. says: stories come from that part of you that is unnaccountably fascinated by dark nights, striking bells, snow swirling in... he didn't make up the daemon until the fifteenth time he rewrote the first chapter, doesn't like the idea of nostalgia for childhood--the story is about leaving childhood behind and becoming wise, the interviewer asks--eve was right to eat the apple, and he says "absolutely. good for her." he says, parallel worlds like lion the witch and the wardrobe, or alice in wonderland is a way to get rid of the parents--so the kids can have adventures in the first place, he loved superman and batman as a kid, learned to write by telling the illiad and odyssey and greek mythology to the 9-14 year olds he was teaching, part four is especially interesting, he says given that he sees the fall as a step up--what is it that the people who condemn the fall are protecting? it talks about how pullman might have been setting out to deliberately supplant Lewis, the bastion of christianity. he talks about how and why he finds the narnia books repulsive--talks about what happens at the ends of the series--wow--which i never knew. susan goes to hell--the others all die in accidents to leave this world as soon as possible...incredible! must watch this.
go here for part one of the three part interview. he wanted to be a painter, and says flewdr flamm is based on him, he hated school and
Good to Know "My current job is teaching graduate students how to write, print type on letterpresses, and create limited-edition books by hand. I work for Columbia College's Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago. I helped to found the Center, and it is the center of my universe nine months of the year. The other three months I try to ignore the phone, and I do my own work." "I make art. Readers can see some of it at Printworks Gallery in Chicago. They have a web site: printworkschicago.com." "Almost all of the places mentioned in my book are real places that you can visit. The Newberry Library is open to people who have research projects that fit the collections of the Newberry. Vintage Vinyl is a real record store in Evanston. The Aragon Ballroom, South Haven, Michigan, Bookman's Alley, The Berghoff -- I heartily recommend them all." "I collect taxidermy, skeletons, books (of course), comics (mostly Raw and post-Rawindependent stuff, no superheroes). I only collect small taxidermy, no bison heads, my place isn't that big. I don't own a TV. I spend a lot of time hanging out with my boyfriend, Christopher Schneberger, and attending Avocet concerts (Avocet is the band Chris plays drums with). We travel a lot; my new book is set in London, so there's lots of research to do. I garden, in a rather haphazard way. I also enjoy finding, buying, and wearing vintage clothes. All in all, it's a pleasant life." I tend to like long books in the summer, when I have all the time in the world to read. Here are some favorites, old and new: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- In the fall of 2003, Audrey Niffenegger took some time to talk with us about her favorite book, authors, and interests. What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer -- and why? What are your ten favorite books, and what makes them special to you? What are some of your favorite films, and what makes them unforgettable to you? I love films that are intense, creepy, beautiful to look at, morally complex. I want a film to be smarter than me, to leave me with mysteries, to haunt my sleep. What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you like to listen to when you're writing? I can only listen to things I've already heard a thousand times while I'm writing. Otherwise I pay attention to the music, and I can't write. If you had a book club, what would it be reading -- and why? What are your favorite kinds of books to give -- and get -- as gifts? I like to receive books from friends who have seen my bookshelves and know that I collect old medical texts and Rosamond Wolfe Purcell books. Books that are bound in interesting ways are always welcome, especially if they are old. I like old books a lot. Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you're writing? What are you working on now? If you could choose one new writer to be "discovered," who would it be -- and why? .
In our interview, Niffenegger shared some fun facts about herself:
In the summer of 2004, we asked authors featured in Meet the Writers to give us a list of their all-time favorite summer reads, and tell us what makes them just right for the season. Here's what Audrey Niffenegger had to say:Interview
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. I first read this book when I was nine. I identified with Harriet so completely that I went out and got myself a spy notebook and wrote in it all the time. My teachers made my mom take it away from me. I think I loved Harriet the Spybecause I was a loner, because I read all the time and no one I knew did that, because I wanted to feel powerful, and writing can do that for you. I loved Harriet because she spoke her mind, because she lived in a big city and traveled around by herself without fear, because she knew what was what. The Long Secret, Fitzhugh's sequel to Harriet the Spy,is also a wonderful and very odd book.
In no particular order:
Punk and indie rock, and classical music. I listen to the Gang of Four, Golden Palominos, Elvis Costello, the Beatles, the Poster Children, Built to Spill, Crooked Fingers, Duvall, the Sex Pistols, Joni Mitchell, Bach, Chopin, the Kronos Quartet, early classical music, Lene Lovich, New Order, Andrew Bird, Dianogagh, the Pixies, the Breeders, Kate Bush, and Björk.
I'd like to have a Complete Works Book Club. We would read the Complete Works of Wilkie Collins, Chris Ware, Edward Gorey, Josephine Tey, Dan Claus, Julie Doucet, E. B. White. No rhyme or reason, but always everything they wrote.
Art books always please my friends -- they're all artists. I like to give Pat the Bunny as a baby shower gift. And I give cookbooks to my mom.
No special rituals. I'm so busy that I'm like a starving person: I sit down and I write. I have no schedule, either, I just write whenever I can squeeze it in. I have a photograph of my great-aunt Dulcie on my worktable. It was taken around 1900. She's a young woman, and she looks very benevolent. I only met her once. She was old, and she was driving a tractor.
A new novel, Her Fearful Symmetry. It's set in London, near Highgate Cemetery. I'm trying to include all the clichés of 19th-century English writing: mirror-image twins, mistaken identity, mysterious death, obsessive-compulsive disorder. And I want all these things in there, and I want to make them new, and interesting, and contemporary. That's the idea, anyway.
Josie Kearns, a poet who lives near Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her most recent collection, New Numbers, is wonderful. She invented numbers and wrote poems about the emotional and physical properties each one possesses. The poems are surprising, thoughtful, sometimes downright spooky
mom:
AS: Now, the books are a great deal of fun to read, and children have a great deal of fun to read. Are they as much fun to create, or is it a lot of hard work?
JM: No. No. Sometimes — it’s a law of nature — actually, it’s a law of art, I think — sometimes when I’m working on a book — and I think this is true of a lot of people, because I have a number of friends who are illustrators and authors — if you think the book is going very, very well, and you’re creating a masterpiece, nine times out of ten it will be just the opposite. The books that I’ve done that look — I hope look like they’re fun to do, are the ones that made me throw up ten times a day. I mean, the Miss Nelson books: I really thought I was going to die doing those books. Very, very hard stuff. Because humor, which I do — comedy — is very tricky. You can’t show how hard you work. You can’t call attention to yourself. You can’t show the wheels turning. It’s got to be like a balloon that floats up into the air. You don’t make the reader, the viewer aware of anything but the story.
