Thoughts On Grace Paley
This week in my independent study we started Paley’s Collected Stories, and alongside my reactions I wanted to post the cover of the edition I am using, which though it doesn’t seem to me that I bought it so many years ago is already browning inwards from the corners.
Why scan a book cover when you can Google it, right? My laziness yielded a Google bonus: a copy with a Philip Roth endorsement that my copy lacks (did the publishers add it in a later edition, or decide it was better to do without it?). “Splendidly comic and unladylike,” Philip says. Which would never have occurred to me! In fact with most people I would wonder why anyone after 1903 or so would use “unladylike” as praise or at all, but this is Philip Roth so we know what he’s referring to.
But: let’s get crafty, shall we?
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Grammar Missteps Into Poetry
It’s 1:30 AM and I am grading papers—writing is glamorous! Then along comes this:
I was invited back in the future.
I want to write an entire piece composed of sentences like that.
Looking up Broadway toward the old post office in what’s now City Hall Park. There’s something about seeing recognizable locations so completely different.. something very chilly, and I don’t mean the weather. Then as now everyone is wearing black.
“Some AccuWeather.com meteorologists have even been referring to the storm as a ‘snowicane’ rather than a blizzard,” reports AccuWeather.com, “in order to express the fierce extent of the snow and wind expected from the storm.”
Because ‘blizzard’ clearly can’t convey the extent of snow and wind that confronts us.
‘Blizzard’ is such an awesome word—the punch of the ‘b,’ the white-out fuzz of the double ‘z’… Blizzards were the best parts of the Little House series, when they got to play word games by the potbellied stove and had to go between buildings by rope. Also: starvation! Blizzards will kick your a**! We have Blizzard of 1888 to thank for buried utility cables in New York City:
English teachers of America, where did we go wrong? How can anyone pass up an opportunity to say ‘blizzard’? Say it today!
(AccuWeather quote via)
What’s better than lists of “if you want to write” tips? Well, this from Laura Ellen Scott:
3. If your plot is too exciting or moving too fast, enhance realism by making your characters stop for a meal at an ethnic restaurant. Describe each course and allow your characters to re-cap the plot so far.
5. Do not write a single word unless you know how your story will end. You are the dungeon master.
7. Trust your workshop peers. They aren’t in competition with you or anything, nor are they attempting to hijack your story to make it their own. Use all of their advice. Also, keep work-shopping a recalcitrant story for years.
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Downfall: WSJ Edition
…Or, Hitler finds out that The Wall Street Journal misses why his meme is funny…
I love the Downfall meme (as does the director of Downfall). I’ve been surprised by how much I like it. Describe it literally—Hitler rants anachronistically about some contemporary, usually minor, pop-cultural event—and doesn’t it sound, at best, quease-inducingly disrespectful?
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NPR Three Minute Fiction, Round Three
I’m not usually keen on writing from prompts, but this one I like. The deadline is midnight Sunday Feb 28 (submit stories here). Three minutes=600 words or less—slightly shorter than Amy Hempel’s “Beach Town.” The contest judge is Alan Cheuse (who’s quoted on the dust jacket of Hempel’s Collected Stories as saying that her story “San Francisco” is “arguably the finest short story composed by any living writer”). Here’s the prompt:
Who’s in?
