April 22, 2019 at 7:18 am (Books, Places, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: environment, interviews, memoir, natural history, nonfiction, reading lists, science writing
Lately my feeling is that I need time to just be here before I can decide whether to stay or not. My guess is that I will tap into so much gratitude for my life alongside this marsh that I may just become an old lady who drowns right here.
— Laura Sewell, resident of Small Point, Maine
March 10, 2019 at 8:15 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs, Recommended, Sundays, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: advice, English writers, memoir, reading lists
— The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography, p. 36
February 5, 2019 at 8:56 pm (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Family, Filipino Writers, Memoirs, Publishers, Relatives, short story collections, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Asian American Writers, grief, illness, Mayor of the Roses, medicine, memoir, memories, Miami University Press, short story, teaching, writing process
For the workshop this weekend, re-reading some old stories to show different ways of writing memoir. In particular, thinking of a story called Lenox Hill, December 1991, which Jessica Hagedorn included in the anthology Charlie Chan is Dead.
When Jessica contacted self to solicit a piece, self had nothing, nothing, nothing.
Her sister had died just the month before. She did keep a diary, though.
The diary became the story. The first story in what later become a cycle of grief stories: Mayor of the Roses (Miami University Press)
For a while, a course called Ethics in Medicine, taught at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, included the story in their syllabus.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
December 1, 2018 at 9:39 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: interviews, London, memoir, reading lists, Russia, Saturday, World War II
Ditched Mirror, Shoulder, Signal last night. Ugh. In the end, it was impossible for self to read about the driving lessons with a married instructor that the narrator tries to imbue with romantic significance.
Self is doing much better with the stoicism of Svetlana Alexievich’s women soldiers.
Alexievich: A Human Being Is Greater Than War:
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
June 30, 2018 at 3:15 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Lists, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Traveling)
Tags: book lists, historical fiction, John Steinbeck, memoir, nonfiction, novel, Philip Pullman, reading lists, summer, Tim O'Brien, translation, travel books
Self has been reading blazing fast, ever since she began Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, vol. 1 of The Book of Dust, in late March. The last week of March, and through April and May, she was on such a tear. After La Belle Sauvage, she read all of His Dark Materials, then moved on to childhood classics like Treasure Island and Lord of the Flies, Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, Tove Jansson’s exquisite The Summer Book, two first novels (As Lie Is to Grin by Simeon Marsalis and Mikhail and Margarita by Julie Lekstrom Himes, both excellent), and two books by Tim O’Brien (In the Lake of the Woods gutted her. In fact, she can’t stop thinking about it)
Since beginning Travels with Charley, however, she’s been moving at a glacial pace. It took her forever just to get through the Jay Parini introduction, and she’s just on p. 17.
She almost put the book aside last night, because it suddenly struck her that the kind of problems a man might encounter while traveling alone through America are very different from the kind of problems self experiences when she travels alone — self has traveled through not just America, but through Asia and Europe — and she is usually alone. It gets harder with every passing year. Security seems more suspicious (so many stamps on her passport!), people are less kind (or maybe self has just become more paranoid), and she’s definitely become more impatient. For one thing, she hates delays of any sort, and she hates flying because it’s so dehumanizing.
On p. 17, Steinbeck shares one of his underlying reasons for undertaking this trip, and she understands:
Travel is one way to resist the gravitational pull of age. It’s like being young again because everything is new, and you can still be surprised, on a daily basis.
(Note: Self was taken aback that Steinbeck viewed himself as a kind of Ernest Hemingway manly man. She’s always thought of him as ‘gentle.’ He might even be insulted by that description.)
Onward!
Self can’t believe summer is officially here. Time moves so fast. Soon, she’ll have a harvest of figs and plums from her backyard:
Stay tuned.
June 27, 2018 at 7:37 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Explorers, Lists, Memoirs, Publishers, Women Writers)
Tags: experimental, history, interviews, memoir, natural history, novel, reading lists, science writing
April 25, 2018 at 11:06 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Filipino Writers, Links, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, short story collections, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Asian American Writers, book lists, Carlos Bulosan, Luisa Igloria, Mayor of the Roses, memoir, Mendocino, nonfiction, novel, poetry, review
Luisa Igloria, Poet
Since self is currently Writer-in-Residence at the Mendocino Art Center, this week she’s been writing up a storm (also sending out her work) and adding to her reading list with regular drop-ins to one of the best bookstores in the world: Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino. Yelp gives them five stars!
She also asked two fabulous writers if they could share their list of Recommended Books with her, and she was so happy when they agreed. (Even if your local indie doesn’t carry the titles, they can always order them. In most cases, they’ll take an average of three or four days to get to the bookstore)
First up, Luisa Igloria
Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. Her latest works include the collection The Buddha Wonders If She Is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018), the chapbooks Haori (Tea & Tattered Pages Press, 2017), Check & Balance (Moria Press/Locofo Chaps, 2017), and Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015). Her collection Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser was selected by Mark Doty for the 2014 May Swenson Prize and published by Utah State University Press. Her other collections are: Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press). She teaches on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015. Her website is www.luisaigloria.com
Luisa’s Poetry Recommendations:
Luisa’s Fiction Recommendations:
Luisa’s Nonfiction/Hybrid Recommendations:
Self doesn’t know about you, but she’s itchy to get at more than a few of these books!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
April 14, 2018 at 3:49 pm (Books, Links, Lists, Memoirs, Recommended, The Guardian, Women Writers)
Tags: advice, biographies, book lists, diary, England, English writers, environment, history, memoir, memories, nonfiction, Obama, Saturday, Stanford, The Guardian, Vietnam, war literature, World War I
There is very little overlap been self’s reading list and the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time by The Guardian.
Below, books on The Guardian’s list that self has read:
2. The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
5. Dreams From My Father, by Barack Obama
9. Dispatches, by Michael Herr
15. The Double Helix, by James D. Watson
20. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
23. The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and EB White
33. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child-care, by Dr. Benjamin Spock
42. Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain (for a course on the Literature of World War I, taught by Prof. Albert Guerard at Stanford)
44. Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves (for a course on the Literature of World War I, taught by Prof. Albert Guerard at Stanford)
65. Roget’s Thesaurus
83. A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon
92. The Diary of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys, via Claire Tomalin’s excellent biography of Pepys’ life
February 20, 2018 at 5:28 am (Books, Recommended)
Tags: memoir, Mondays, reading lists
p. 177: “. . . whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, ‘The feeling that our choices don’t matter.’ “
February 6, 2018 at 5:54 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs)
Tags: essay, inspiration, literature of medicine, medicine, memoir, Mondays, New York Review of Books, review, sayings, wisdom
You will notice, dear blog reader, that all the magazines self has been quoting this week are three years old. That is because 2015 is the last year she had much leisure time. She thinks it’s a very good sign that she saved all these past issues of New York Review of Books. Like she knew, she’d be getting back to them one day. Even if that day was three years later.
Moving on.
Oliver Sacks is no longer with us. Nevertheless, his ouevre remains. Jerome Groopman, in his review of Oliver Sacks’s memoir On the Move: A Life, quotes Sacks’s description of himself:
of “vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.” A talented student drew a contrast with Ivan Ilyich, who was passionless and shaped his behavior to strictly conform to others’ expectations. Tolstoy judged Ilyich’s life as “most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
Which is why self is sharing this photo (taken at the San Carlos Auto Pride carwash):
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
 | anthropologist on SIGNS: Cee’s Fun Foto… |
 | Cee Neuner on SIGNS: Cee’s Fun Foto… |
| anthropologist on The Admiral’s Dream |
 | litadoolan on The Admiral’s Dream |
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