Again, in honor of EWN’s short story month: 43 Fictions, by Steve Katz. Published by Sun & Moon Press, 1992. I picked this up at Green Apple a couple of years ago. This snappy compilation contains very short stories from several of Katz’s previous published collections. A sampling from the story “Parcel of Wrists:”
In this morning’s mail I received a parcel postmarked from Irondale, Tennessee. It was wrapped in heavy, glazed brown paper, like butcher paper. The box was of even dimensions, two feet high, two feet deep, three feet long, and it was packed from top to bottom with human wrists.
I love Steve Katz, and I think probably not enough folks read him. My husband Kevin took a writing class from Katz about 20 years ago in Boulder, Colorado, and to this day Kevin still has the reader Katz compiled–says it’s the best reader of any class he ever took, and it introduced him to several writers he’d never heard of.
And here’s Susan Ito on the writer’s notebook:
It is very left brain-right brainy. The notebook is the intuitive side, the curious and playful side, that asks all the questions, and plays around and tries things out. The narrative, the typed sentences, is the side that tries to produce what the notebook is asking for.
When I got serious with my current novel-in-progress, I started using these spiral notebooks by Chronicle Books, $9.95 at Green Apple or The Gables on Geary. Nice thick covers make for a firm surface; smooth, thick pages; good spiraling so that both sides of the page can be used; subtle, pretty cover patterns; just the right thickness to make me feel that I can eventually actually fill one up and move on to the next. I’m on my third at the moment. My first two notebooks for this novel were retro school composition books from the five-and-dime in Laurel Village–one has a horse on the cover, the other has a puppy. What’s your idea of notebook nirvana?
What authors were discovered in that reader???
I like the Chronicle Books notebooks a lot. My choice for my Morning Pages (or, as I like to call them, the Moanin’ Pages): moleskine cahiers, ruled, large, good for carrying in the purse. My only complaint is that sometimes the cahiers have inconsistent paper and will “feather” certain inks. For my book, I have used Kokuyo notebooks in various colors, but mostly pink (due to love of notebooks with colorful paper since childhood). I also love Clairefontaine notebooks, but prefer the small sizes and the steno pad. I like the violet ruled lines and the smooth paper, but the larger Clairefontaine notebooks tend to fall apart right on the shelves of the store. So it goes. As a Luddite who writes by hand much of the time, I like a good notebook.