This summer I have a few projects. Besides preparing to teach a new class (writing 2, with the theme of the psychodynamics of slavery), I am trying to clean up my house, and possibly also will be looking for a place to move into so I can start over trying to live decently. Every day I choose one little task or maybe two and leave it at that. That way I do not feel the sense of panic in my stomach that the thought of having to clear out the mess brings me. I fool myself into calmly taking on a tiny part of the mess.
I am also reading short stories. For some reason, I have not ever done that. In fact, I have sort of avoided them, with a couple of exceptions--Kafka and Borges. I didn't even read Nabokov's short stories, although I have read everything else he has written. It is sitting there still on my shelf. So no wonder I have trouble knowing how to teach people to write them and to write them myself. I am even thinking that I may take on a few stories in Russian. I have books on my shelf I have not touched since my years of language study in grad school and summer institutes. I know that Tolstoi's and Dostoevski's Russian are lucid and wonderful, though of course I have to struggle to read them, and will have to struggle even more because it's been years since I've practiced and studied the language.
And of course I am teaching the workshop and writing the exercises along with the students. It is a very stimulating and freeing experience. I have read two of the stories students in the class have sent me. One is very good. This person has real ability. It should be interesting working with her.
6 comments:
Be sure to include Joyce's Dubliners.
Of course. I've already read a Carver collection and am starting on Chekhov.
Grace Paley. Amy Bloom. John Cheever.
I knew Grace Paley from Provincetown, where I had her over one day for tea. She was quite a character. I have read some of her stuff, not all, and admire it very much.
I've got a Cheever story I'm going to assign to the students.
Flannery O'Conner
I've read quite a bit of Flannery O'Connor. I guess I have read lots of short stories, but I don't love most of them the way I do some novels. There are none I just treasure except, as I said, Kafka and Borges. Flannery O'Conner is someone I come back to, though I haven't read everything she's written, by any means.
Post a Comment