On Writing - Michelle Richmond

In Praise of Grace Paley

The iconic short story writer and essayist Grace Paley died yesterday at her home in Vermont. I have long been an admirer of her work, and have been such a disciple that my students over the years have probably become bored with the refrain, “If you want to learn how to write dialogue, read Grace Paley!”

I first read Paley in 1993, while living alone in a miserable little duplex in Knoxville, TN. I’d just accepted a job as a copywriter at an ad agency. I remember being snowed in during my first scheduled week of work, reading Paley on a set of Salvation Army sofa cushions I’d arranged on the floor as a bed. The crazy neighbors were screaming at each other, the snow was coming down, and I was bundled up in scarf, hat, and layers of sweats because I couldn’t afford to run the steam heat. That’s where I met Paley, in Little Disturbances of Man. I was mesmerized. Reading Paley was what taught me to write short stories. More on Paley in coming days…

On the Difficulty of Editing Well

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
Blaise Pascal

A Toy and an Amusement

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.
~Winston Churchill

Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje

I’ve just finished reading the ARC of Michael Ondaatje’s extraordinary new novel Divisadero, which will be published in May. The book begins with a harrowing familial violence on a farm in Petaluma and ends in another country at another time. San Francisco residents will recognize the title, which is the street where the novel’s overriding consciousness, Anna, lives as an adult. I say “overriding consciousness” because, while Anna narrates some portions of the novel, there are also large swaths of omniscience, as well as points at which the omniscient narrator collides, unexpectedly, with Anna’s voice.

Years after the violence that shatters her family, Anna moves to France to temporarily inhabit the home of Lucien Seguro, a famous French poet. After a detailed and arresting account of the lives of Anna, her sister Claire, their father, and a cardsharp named Coop who was raised alongside the two girls, the novel’s focus shifts to Lucien: his upbringing in the French countryside, his affection for a neighbor woman, Marie-Neige, and her husband Roman, his childhood. Slowly and brilliantly, these stories intersect, held together by a man named Rafael, who becomes Anna’s lover in France.

This is a story about orphans, and about events that drastically alter the landscape of family. It is a patient, gentle book. Ondaatje writes truthfully and unflinchingly about desire. One of the most memorable aspects of the novel is his portrayal of parent-child relationships, particularly between mothers and sons. …