Books for Writers

Before I forget, earlier this month I reviewed Martha Silano’s award-winning new book, This One We Call Ours, for Raven Chronicles. You can read the review here.

 

The holidays are upon us, and if you have a writer-friend, perhaps you’re wondering what book you should buy for them. Along these lines of thought, someone asked me to recommend my top 20 writing books, and I felt flummoxed. Only 20?!

What seemed more doable was to tell you about a few of the books, specifically about writing, that I’ve read this year, the ones that left the deepest footprints, the books I am most likely to reread, or to gift to my close friends.

 

THE WAY OF THE FEARLESS WRITER (St. Martin’s, 2022)

I stumbled across The Way of the Fearless Writer: Mindful Wisdom for a Flourishing Writing Life, by Beth Kempton, maybe in March. I picked it up, to begin with, at my local library. After a couple chapters, I ordered my own copy and returned the library’s (with a hearty recommendation to the volunteer at the desk).

In other words, I knew almost immediately that Fearless Writer was a book I had to mark up.

To write in service of the writing, not the ego, is a radical act. (p. 24)

Kempton is a Japanologist, who has also sojourned to China, and somewhere along the way met herself on the path. She invites us to do the same—not to study Japanese or the Tao Te Ching, but to embrace writing as a way of being. The passage quoted above continues:

What if we gathered up all the energy we usually spend worrying about what other people think and poured it into our writing? What if we really lived our lives, moment to moment, and wrote about that? What if we wrote to release what is burning inside us, allowing that to be enough for now? (pp. 24-25)

Kempton arranges her book around three gates (a symbol that has, for some time, spoken to me). When I reached her chapter on the gate of emptiness, my mind flew open. I was sitting in my writing cabin, my old dog snoring beside the door, but I felt, literally, as though I were poised on a threshold, about to embark on an entirely new way of being with my work. What if we wrote in service of the writing, not the ego?

It matters that I began reading this book around the time I was finishing Red Pine’s translations of Tao Yuanming’s poems, and, before I finished Fearless, I saw the Capitol Hill premier of the documentary film about Bill Porter, AKA Red Pine, Dancing with the Dead. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I urge you to see this film, produced by Ward Serrill, and available now on-line; I have watched it three times.) Taken together these texts—these transcendent works of art—were transforming.

(Follow this link to learn more about Beth Kempton.)

 

OUT OF SILENCE, SOUND. OUT OF NOTHING, SOMETHING (Counterpoint, 2023)

What can I say about this wonderful book of writing advice from Susan Griffin, one of the leading eco-feminist writers of our time? Most of the chapters are quite short. Quoted passages from other writers punctuate the author’s chapters (some of my favorites, Grace Paley, Robert Caro, Le Guin). For instance:

Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want. (Ursula K. Le Guin, qtd. on p. 153)

Out of Silence is full of pithy advice about a writer’s work habits, words, sentences, metaphor, pauses, white space. But it’s never only pithy advice:

Creativity is more like a cat than a dog. You can’t order it to come to you. You just have to make yourself available until all of a sudden you find it leaping into your lap. (p. 55)

This sounds overly folksy, but I assure you I’ve underlined and highlighted passages on almost page. I first read this book last year, and I picked it up again in September when election anxiety was trying to do me in. Griffin is a wise, older guide, taking you by the hand, whispering, See, it doesn’t have to be fancy—it’s better if it’s not fancy!

I’ll leave you with this passage, from a chapter titled “Paragraphs”:

At times writers make [craft] choices logically but more often they come to us after immersing ourselves in the subject matter, after breathing the subject in, walking with it, sleeping on it, letting it fit into our dreams, coaxing it phrase by phrase into language. Sometimes, if we have pondered what approach to take for several hours or days or even weeks, the work starts to speak to us. (p. 106)

Let me emphasize one thread between these books. Kempton is concerned about attention: where our attention lies, how to command it, how to follow its lead. So is Griffin: “you will need to learn to pay attention to your own attention” (p. 7).

(To learn more about Susan Griffin, visit her website.)

 

TRUTH IS THE ARROW, MERCY IS THE BOW (Zando, 2024)

This book, by Steven Almond, was pressed on me by a friend. At first I found it … a little too … something. Casual? Comic? I liked it, well enough, but I let it get pushed aside by other books. Recently I picked it up again, and I’m so glad I did. I have called other writers and read passages aloud to them. (His stories about his children—Josie and the dread Babrika!and about reading children’s books aloud, in particular.)

But there is so much more to this book than Almond’s entertaining and no-bullshit voice (unafraid to write about how to write about sex, unafraid to chronicle his own most humiliating moments as a parent, as a teacher, as a writer). The job of the writer, he tells us, “is to love and mourn” (p. 204). This passage, which is placed at the end of the book, echoes insights threaded throughout, and says it all for me:

We are living in an era of screen addiction and capitalist pornography. As a species, we are squandering the exalted gifts of consciousness, losing our capacity to pay attention, to imagine the suffering of others. You are a part of all of this. It involves you. This is the hard labor we are trying to perform: convincing strangers to translate our specks of ink into stories capable of generating rescue. (p. 230)

What more can I add? “You are all part of this.” Writing is not a retreat or an escape from the world and your responsibility for it. What you write matters. It’s crucial.

(All three books are available at Bookshop.org, your local independent book store, and elsewhere. To learn more about Steve Almond and his books, visit his website.)

WE HAD OUR REASONS, Ricardo Ruiz

Business as usual seems beyond me right now, and I’m daily amazed by the advertisements that make their way into my email-inbox—including from writers merrily chirping about new classes and life changing strategies for writing “your next best-seller!”

But here’s me. Dropping some of my 2024 goals, downsizing from the usual blog reviews, but still reading poetry and still wanting to share amazing poets with you, particularly the ones who are sustaining me just now.

We Had Our Reasons, a Washington State Book Award winner from 2022, is one of the books I keep picking up.

This community effort was created by poet and translator Ricardo Ruiz. On the cover, we find not only Ruiz’s name, but also: “and other hard-working Mexicans from Eastern Washington.” It was published by Pulley Press, an imprint of Clyde Hill Publishing (Seattle, WA).

Each poem appears in the language of the writer (or collaborator), and in English translation. Thus, “Un saco de dormir y un semi,” by Centavo and Ricardo, on one page, and on the facing page:

A Sleeping Bag and a Semi

I came from Mexicali across the border.
There was work for me in Arizona.
I crawled into the gray sleeping bag,
hearing the zipper, feeling the tape
tighten around my legs and body.
I became a gray balloon floating into
the storage compartment
where the trucker kept the chains.
My mind, clouded by the smoke.
I meet the sky again
in Nogales.
I was born in California,
so I could have walked but I didn’t know.
I was bound up in not knowing.

—Centavo and Ricardo

The voices of the poems vary. Many are young, sounding a bit like any suburban kid dealing with divorcing parents, Game Boys, attempts to buy beer. Some, like Centavo, work alongside their parents in the fields. Many of the voices sound to me older, worn out with work and trying to keep families together. Ruiz’s own poems often address his service in the U. S. Military. The profiles of the collaborators are in prose, in the back of the book. We Had Our Reasons has a cumulative power that moved and educated me.

These are the people who will be threatened with deportation in the coming years.

After Ten Years They Came Back Again

My Social Security is good.
When I was detained
on the bus outside of Indio,
we filled out the paperwork.
So, I have been legal to work.

The call came in
while I was at lunch.
Don’t clock in.
Head straight to HR.

The officer told me
I had two choices
– walk out with them
– or be taken out in handcuffs

The shame shot into me
that I was wrong
as ICE paraded me out of my workplace.
I’d worked there seven years.

They took me to my house.
Let me change out of my scrubs
and we waited for my mom.

—Patty and Ricardo

You can learn more about the book at https://www.poetruiz.com/reasons.

To learn more about justice for migrant farm workers, visit this site: https://www.wslc.org/immigrant-toolkit/.

Victoria Doerper, WHAT IF WE ALL BLOOMED?

WHAT IF WE ALL BLOOMED? POEMS OF NATURE, LOVE, AND AGING, Victoria Doerper. Penchant Press International, Bellingham, WA, 2019, 94 pages, paper, $15.95.

What If We All Bloomed? is a perfect title for this book of meditative poems. Here’s a poet who can celebrate marriage in one poem, and claim kinship with frogs in the next. Another riffs off Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” beginning, “Praise God for damaged things.” Yes, life is messy, Doerper proclaims here, then offers praise “For mismatched mates and misdirected mail, / For bulbs of scarlet tulips, rising in a golden bloom, / For spackled spark of beauty in tender broken things…” It made me want to grab my pen and write my own poem for what’s broken.

Last week I began reading Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart, but stopped when I came to this line at the end of the Introduction, a quote from her teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

“Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.”

Doerper’s poems encouraged me to return to Chodron, to muster at least some willingness to sit with all that is swirling inside me, to consider bringing it back with me “to the path” (Chodron, xiii).

Meanwhile, reading poems (and walking) are keeping me alive.

Hedgerows

I’m convinced that heaven
Lurks in old hedgerows,
Not like a predator, but
More like a mystery
Laced through thickets
Tangled with song.
In those byzantine temples
Of leafy, shaggy, profligate
Bud, flower, and berried
Commonplace delight,
Visited by visions of roses
Wafting the incense of attar
Into the sacred air,
Where angels shelter
The hungry, the trod-upon,
The sky-travelers seeking rest,
No questions asked,
No proof of worthiness,
No papers required
For an offer of ground
In an unsullied place
Filled with the potent
Possibility of grace.

—Victoria Doerper

That “possibility of grace” is, I think, what Chodron is talking about, too.

What If We All Bloomed? is dedicated to John Doerper, the poet’s husband, who also did the lovely drawings illustrating the cover and throughout the book.

The website for Penchant International didn’t work, but I found Doerper’s book for sale at Sidekick Press, and it is also available at Village Books ($1 shipping). Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times is widely available.

Thanks to Suzy Hazelwood at Pexels

Karen Rigby’s FABULOSA

“Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being. Each time we enter its word-woven and musical invocation, we give ourselves over to a different mode of knowing: to poetry’s knowing, and to the increase of existence it brings, unlike any other.”  — Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

I decided this morning to count my blog-reviews for 2024. Thirty-three thus far (fewer than I thought!). As this is week 41 of the year — or is it 42? — I’m 9 reviews behind. This is doable. For today, here’s a link to my most recent review at Escape Into Life (EIL). I have an additional review there that never got linked to the blog:  At the Edge of a Thousand Yearsby Matt Hohner.

Some poets and some books stand out for me, but all of them have had their effect — to borrow from Jane Hirshfield again, each has had a part in mapping the terrain of my year of reading poetry.

So, with about 10 weeks left to the year, expect to see a flurry of reviews, or — barring actual reviews — shout-outs for poetry books. Maybe those read in August?? See, doable.

Click on the link below to see my review of Karen Rigby’s Fabulosa. And thank you for reading poetry!