On Writing - Michelle Richmond

Joshilyn Jackson, in the carpool lane

Roxanne Ravenel over at All Things Girl conducted a wonderful two-part interview with Joshilyn Jackson, whose new novel, Backseat Saints, will surely satisfy her fans and earn her many new ones. Joshilyn talks about her love-hate relationship with the South (“I am truly happy nowhere else, and yet I am angry with it, so I don’t imagine I am finished writing about it”), what she reads, and why she thinks writing groups are a good idea, among other things.

My favorite bit of the interview involves Joshilyn’s writing process (or lack thereof). This pretty much sums my process up, too, sans ballet (my boy is more into ninjas).

Oh Lord, I wish I had a process. It would be so much more efficient. I write on three different computers and mail the updated files to my g-mail account to download the latest every time I switch. I write at home in bed on my ancient craptoposaurus, at home in my office on my desktop, and I drag my little netbook everywhere to write in coffee shops and carpool lines and while waiting on a folding chair for my youngest to finish her ballet lesson. I do not have set working hours, either. I write in seizures, disappearing to borrowed vacation homes, off season, to draft twenty thousand words in four days, and then I don’t open a single file again for two weeks, then I’ll be up at three am for nine days in a row, revising. It’s a ridiculous, stupid way to work, and I cannot recommend it. It’s also the only way that works for me.

Jose Saramago quits blogging

The AFP reports that Nobel prize-winning author Jose Saramago, known for his haunting novel Blindness, will say goodbye to the blog that he began writing last September. Why? He needs to finish his novel. Saramago was 85 when he started the blog with a love letter to Lisbon. In his last blog entry, Saramago writes:

“It has always been convenient that goodbyes be brief…Goodbye therefore. Until another day? I sincerely don’t think so. I have started another book and want to dedicate all my time to it,” he wrote in his final blog entry.

Good advice for all of us. Now, if only I could get this blog monkey off my back.

Readings for Writers

The Kenyon Review has just published a new anthology of work culled from the magazine over the past seventy years. Editor David Lynn writes:

Readings for Writers is a very different creature from your usual anthology…A different principle of selection comes into play: choosing stories, poems, and essays from across the decades to provoke lively responses from writers today, to inspire and challenge…the selections here are intended to inspire active response—pen to paper, fingers to keyboard.”

All in all, it looks like a terrific volume for teachers of writing, not to mention anyone who is engaged in the practice of writing short stories, essays, and poems. Contributions are arranged chronologically, beginning with Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, and Dylan Thomas–all published in the magazine’s first year, 1939–and ending with Cara Blue Adams, whose essay appeared in 2009. Along the way areworks by the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Sylvia Plath, Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Naipul, Don DeLillo, Robert Haas, Annie Dillard, Billy Collins, Virgil Suarez, Czeslaw Milosz, Pablo Neruda, W.S. Merwin, and many others–82 selections in all.

I was browsing the contents page when, quite by surprise, I came upon “A Life in Pods,” an essay of mine which appeared in the magazine in 2008. I’m thrilled to be included in such amazing company, and can’t wait to get my copy and dig in.

You can order the issue here.

Two From the World of Ink

I met Georges and Anne Borchardt at Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2003. The couple co-founded their literary agency in 1967, and are known for introducing American audiences to the work of Roland Barthes, Samuel Beckett, Pierre Bourdieu, Marguerite Duras, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Eugene Ionesco, Jacques Lacan, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Elie Wiesel.

When we met, I’d just had my first novel published with San Francisco independent MacAdam/Cage (sans agent) and was looking for representation. Jill McCorkle, a faculty member at the conference, read a chapter of the novel I was working on and set up a meeting. Many of the other fellows were going spelunking, but I skipped the cave trip and met the Borchardts on the little patio behind the apartment where they were staying. We talked for a while–about books, writing, my background and interests, my novel-in-progress. I immediately felt a connection with them. I liked their calmness, their magnetic presence. One had the feeling of being in the company of extraordinarily sharp and sensitive literary minds …