I’ve been working for almost 50 years now including an eight-year stint when I worked every day from dawn to dusk on a two-acre home farm in the high mountain desert of Arizona to grow enough food to feed our household and write about how I managed to do it. And write a few poems about the desert and the importance of taking care of the land when I had a little time. Apricot trees, aloe plants, tomatillos, salmon-colored calendula flowers with their peppery petals, everything thrived in the hard-fought-for bounty as I spent days crawling up and down the hills in the wadis installing sprinklers to save water and trying to outwit one wily desert creature after another. My partner, a woman ten years older than me, told me one day she was acting about actually loving me and left me high and dry without any warning. “I am an actress, you know,” she said with a flourish of a kind after she gave me the news about her intention to leave me. She had studied acting in New York but it made no difference to me. I lost it all.
The younger of the two men said, “you don’t look like an artist.”
For the next few weeks this comment rattled around in my head. What did an artist look like? What did I look like? The more I thought about it, the more I came to understand how I had always avoided identifying as an artist by hiding behind the figure of the architect, a complicated two-sided image I had constructed from experience and fiction — from professors and friends and characters in novels and films. I did not want to be an architect, but I felt comfortable in the archetype. It was an image that had currency in the art world at the time when I entered it, and I had used that to my advantage.
Elizabeth Strout’s batting average now qualifies as dazzling — with reason. Each new title seems only to refine and distill the Pulitzer winner’s already gorgeous skills. You know you’re in expert hands when a novel’s first lines chop a clean stroke straight to its own heart: “Grief is such a — oh, it is such a solitary thing; this is the terror of it, I think.”
Pouring over the family scrapbook brings back fond memories for most of us, and the scrapbooking hobby continues to be popular. In the clever “These Toxic Things,” Rachel Howzell Hall explores how future generations may prefer their memories to be preserved digitally.
In The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams (Gail Hudson is an additional author), discuss the park as an example of how our injured Earth can be restored and healed. At one point the park was "a monstrous five-hundred-acre scar where almost nothing grew" because a cement company created a quarry that ravaged the land. The company's CEO decided to repair the damage and slowly, year by year, with horticultural tending and introduction of wild animals, the area was transformed.
I start with this story in honor of Goodall's forceful argument that hope for our ailing planet is galvanized through storytelling: It's crucial, she says, that people — especially young people — know how positive action can still turn around the frightening trajectories of climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and the ongoing global pandemic. "It's mostly because people are so overwhelmed by the magnitude of our folly that they feel helpless," Goodall states. They need to hear stories of "the people who succeed because they won't give up."
“Do not dictate to your author; try to become him,” Virginia Woolf admonishes in her 1926 essay “How Should One Read a Book?” While Woolf’s use of the male pronoun would likely rankle progressive readers today, her sentiment — that we should strive, when reading, to adopt the author’s perspective on the world — is perhaps even more provocative to prevailing literary sensibilities. In a 2019 essay for The New York Times, Brian Morton finds himself differing with a young reader who can’t bear another page of Edith Wharton due to her manifest antisemitism. Thinking along similar lines as Woolf, Morton sees readers of old books as “journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around,” whereas others might imagine writers of the past, with their outdated views, invading ours.
When University of Oxford professor and literary critic Merve Emre began work on a new, annotated edition of Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, she decided to retype the entire text herself, which she describes in the introduction as a “monkish” practice. For Emre, following Woolf’s advice doesn’t mean inhibiting her critical faculties, and indeed, we find her vigorously wrestling with the author’s entrenched racism whenever it rears its head in the novel. But part of what Emre achieves in this scholarly yet accessible work is to reanimate for us the world in which the novel was written.