The thing with feathers

     I've been hesitant to write this post, maybe because it is a little too personally revealing. I'm not sure.
     First, I said I would expound on the discovery I made while listening to Dana Jennings talk last week. Not a big discovery, but something that surprised me quite a bit. Didn't see it coming at all.
     Pretty much since I decided to get serious as a writer, I've been told that I have to declare a genre. Mostly by graduate schools, but one gets the question all of the time, even from other writers. Last week at Writer's Night Out, I was asked to write my genre on my name tag, and I couldn't do it. I put a big fat question mark there instead. This has been a problem for me for years now. I write across all of the genres, and I have no desire to change that. I really want to learn to be a better poet and fiction writer, not just one or the other. I've wrestled with this conondrum to a degree that would probably seem silly to most people.
     But it was while listening to Dana talk about his work (he also does several kinds of writing) and how one finds their voice, that I realized that most of the writing that I do, what I seem to be a bit better at, is actually non-fiction. Don't know why it took me so long to figure that out. The vast majority of writing projects I have been drawn too, including blogging, are non-fiction or creative non-fiction, often with a historical angle of some kind. So, I'm thinking that is where my authentic voice must be. But I still want to become a good writer in general. I can not imagine ever abandoning poetry.
       Yesterday, I had the good fortune of seeing a chataqua performance of Emily Dickinson at my local library. It was captivating. And I kept having strange feelings of affinity with Emily that had never occured to me before. Like Emily, I have been feeling more and more the need to withdraw and hunker down at home, where I can focus on my work to the greatest degree posssible. In examing her life and my own. I wonder ~ is this an ascent into a serious literary life, or a descent into middle age madness? Though she shunned personal interaction she wrote several letters a day to many different correspondents, and I chuckled at the correlation of that with my own FaceBook habit. The following is a list of quotes from Emily about her life, that reflect my very own feeings about mine, more than a century later.

~ This is freedom.
~ The perfected life.
~ How do people live without their thoughts?
~ Words are my dearest companion.
~  Home is my definition of God.
~ Publication is the auction of the mind of man.
~ We stagger under the wieght of grief.
~  ...  then the letting go.

 is the thing with feathers---

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—



And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—

And sore must be the storm—

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm—



I've heard it in the chillest land—

And on the strangest Sea—

Yet, never, in Extremity,

It asked a crumb—of Me.

Pausing to Write

     I went to hear Dana Jennings talk about his life story yesterday, and learned something about myself. I'll post more about my ah-hah tomorrow. This one is all about him. He was visiting our mutual alma mater, UNH, as The 2010 Don Murray visiting journalist.
     I was not familiar with him, but my friend and partner in The Prickly Pear Poetry Project, was a follower of his NYT Wellness Blog, and as I'm taking a graduate course called Narrating Illness, I wanted to attend.
     Dana's story is a fascinating one which is good since at 52 he is about to release his second memoir. He grew up in Kingston, New Hampshire, not far from where I live now. Like me, he was the first person in his family tree to go to college. Eventually he left our little apple state for the Big Apple, and became a writer and editor at The New York Times, while writing several books.
      Somewhere around his fiftieth birthday he was diagnosed with stage 3 prostate cancer, and he began blogging about it for The Times. The blog was, and still is, quite popular, and his latest book deal sprang from it. It has also earned him several awards.
      I liked what he had to say about blogging; that the craftmanship required of good journalism still applies, and that it is a valid contribution to the current canon. He feels unsure and skeptical about the future of newspapers, but more optimistic about the future of books. As with his battle with cancer, he knows relentless odds can be beat.
    I especially want to share the following post fom his blog, which he read to us during his lecture. I was so impressed, not about his cancer battle though I respect that immensely, but because he seems to have written what I feel, and for any writer to nail that, least of all a guy, is amazing. That is good writing. I would say Dana is no longer a man paused, he seems to be going strong, like a literary Lance Armstrong.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/my-brief-life-as-a-woman/?scp=1&sq=my%20brief%20life%20as%20a%20woman&st=cse
     Here he is giving an introduction to his next book, due out soon, about his dog and his recovery. Bloggers will be interested to know that this book deal came about due to his blog, when not one, but several publishers, responded to his post about his aging dog. He has already released one memoir that I am very intersted in reading that covers his youth here in New Hampshire, and seems to also be about country music, and what the two have in common. I am intrigued.