What We are Reading: a Survival Guide for Writers

I am working on a non-fiction proposal (something that is, perhaps ironically, a bit more involved than a marriage proposal). What is the first thing I do when I want to write a book? I begin to devour other books. There’s an amazing organization in our town that will funnel them to me, a kind of harm-reduction model for obsessive readers called the Library. I am usually maxed out at 30 books, and I rotate them. This is not to mention the books I seem to have borrowed from my friend Dorothy, who is as generous as a library. And then I read them, often in the wee hours of the morning before anyone else is awake, because I am short of sleep, it’s true, but I need reading even more than I need sleep, and perhaps for some of the same reasons: to rejuvenate, to dream, to process my life experience into something associative, poetic, rhythmic, imagistic, narrative, sustaining . . .

I have ingested upon some amazing books in the past week or so, including An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken, The Guardians: an Elegy for a Friend by Sarah Manguso, The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit. The first two are about seriously heavy topics, and yet I often felt ecstatic reading them, so carried away was I by the transparent beauty of the prose and the intelligence of the writers–none of this heavy-handed or in any way purple. I’m in the middle of the Solnit. It’s all about storytelling. This morning I thought (to you, really, in my head), Storytelling is our birthright, and we all of us have a great hunger for stories–we require them–so there need be no fear about a plethora of stories and a shortage of need.

This afternoon, Angie and I figured out what we will teach in the winter. I am so excited about it and will be filling in more next week. But for now I just want to say, I believe in you and the stories you have to tell. I am a reader with a library card (and a bookstore budget, too, because we have to support the arts we want to practice) and a heady desire for more . . .

Here’s a quote from Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby, for a dose of inspiration. In exchange, if you are up for it, I’d love to hear about a book you are reading or read recently or maybe not recently that you loved, that inspired you, that helped you remember why you want to write . . .

“What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.” Rebecca Solnit