The Silken Tent
My Letter to the World
June 2000

 

June 25, 2000
Monday

Somewhere in my folder of clipped cartoons and images that I used on classroom bulletin boards is a Funky Winkerbean strip which shows a teacher bidding summer farewell to his students. He’s passing out a sheet which he tells them is a list of books they might like for their “reading for pleasure” over the next ten weeks.

“Oh yeah right!” says one girl. “And when I’m finished reading for pleasure, I think I’ll do some algebra equations for pleasure!”

Because I taught literature and writing for so long, it was often hard for me to make distinctions between the reading I did for work and what I did for my own enrichment and entertainment. Of the writers whose work I used in the classroom, I was always trying to keep current with biography and criticism as well as those primary works which were not
the staples of my course syllabus. But I could easily have taught the same thing year after year without reading anything new (lots and lots of my colleagues do!). I enjoyed the reading that I did, and would have done much of it anyway.

In fact, the only professional reading that has diminished significantly since I retired is that concerned with trends and issues in pedagogy, replaced by trying to get and keep current with trends and issues in publishing.

The idea behind “summer reading,” I suppose, is that even those who work at what I always called “real jobs” have a more relaxed attitude during the summer, or at least a block of vacation time for reading material that has nothing to do with business. Fiction often fits this description, and there is not a bookstore or library I’ve ever been to that
does not promote summer reading lists full of contemporary and classic fiction.

Writing fiction is my business now, especially this upcoming month. The application deadline for the 2001 fellowships given by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts is the first of August. This year the genre for creative writers is fiction and literary nonfiction. The application calls for a 20-page writing sample, the only matter that will be used to select recipients of these $10,000 to $20,000 awards.

While literary nonfiction is my strongest suit, fiction is where my ambitions lie, especially regarding this 19th century bereaved mother story which I have been carrying around for more than fifteen years. I have about 3000 words produced already (the 20-page limit dictates about 5000 words).

If I’ve learned anything from the years of teaching writing and attending workshops and conferences, it’s that having an idea and a command of the mechanics of writing is not enough. You have to know the genre you’re working in by studying the structure of novels like the one you’re attempting, by knowing traditional and contemporary theory and fashion in narrative literature and applying those principles to your work. “Give it
good bones,” poet Tess Gallagher told us that autumn we sailed Puget Sound. “Then you can dress it.”

So I’ve committed July to getting the application prepared, and as many months as it takes after that to completing, finally, this project  to create in fiction the experience of a Pennsylvania German farm wife who buries four children in a single month in 1885. Because I need deadlines and assignments and accountability to another person, I’ve begun the process of acquiring a mentor.

And I’m reading. The advice is always to read the kind of work you want to write. I’ve begun with Bobbie Ann Mason’s Feather Crowns.

This is a nice big thick book -- 454 pages in a handsome hardback edition published by HarperCollins in 1993. It covers seventy-three years (1890 to 1963) and tells the story of a Kentucky farm wife who gives birth to quintuplets in February of 1900, an event which combines with apocalyptic fin de siecle fever to create a national sensation. Right up my
alley!

Bobbie Ann Mason had already published In Country, Spence+Lila, and Shiloh and Other Stories before she wrote this. In Country concerns the American homefront during the Vietnam war, and was made into a movie. Last year she brought out a family memoir -- again, among my favorite things to read and write.

I’ve read the stories and In Country and liked them both. When I opened Feather Crowns I was intrigued by the “Acknowledgments,” (a feature of a book I never overlook). “I am grateful to the Pennsylvania State Arts Council for support during the writing of this novel,” it begins.

Evidently, Mason was living in “rural Pennsylvania” when she wrote this book. What better model could I have than something the PCA was enthusiastic enough about to fund. And my book’s about Pennsylvania!

Feather Crowns is about 220,000 words. I’ve read a fourth of it -- the birth of the quints, a section of backstory chronicling the central character’s courtship, marriage and arrivals of her first three children, and the difficult, puzzling pregnancy that produced the miracle/anomaly of five babies at once (achieved, of course, before fertility enhancement was dreamed of).

In a sense, reading a novel for instruction diminishes somewhat the pleasures to be had from just losing oneself in a story. I read about fifty pages at a time (stopping at a chapter break) and then take notes. I’ve set myself ten days to complete this book, thus I have to read about an hour and a half a day. Add another thirty minutes for notes and review, and
there’s two hours.

I try to do at least an hour’s research work a day, two hours on other writing projects (like this journal!), and an hour or so “moodling,” essayist Susan Tiberghien’s word for that process of riding a train of thought in a near trance-like daydream state of mind.

Six hours, and I haven’t made the beds nor fed the family yet!

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