100,000 Views: A Retrospective

I began this blog in October of 2010, at a time when I was beginning to envision myself as a writer. Sure, I had always written—had finished a few novels, even—but this is when I decided to see if I could make a go of it. Get actual people to read my writing, maybe get published. I dug around online for resources. I joined Facebook. I started this blog. And soon, I will have had 100,000 views here, which is certainly not in the range of many viral things you hear about but for me, it feels like a nice milestone.

 

During these 8 ½ years, I’ve written 303 posts. My most prolific year was 2014, during which I posted 51 times, followed closely by 2011 with its 50 entries. In 2016, I only blogged nine times. It’s easy, in retrospect, to recognize the reason for this scarcity: a very tough personal year. 2018 was the same: only 13 posts.

 

I wrote about dance and art, about current things happening in the news and routine, day-to-day events and observations. I worked out conclusions about the writing process, penned memorials for both people I knew and knew of; I wrote about television, movies, songs and poems I liked. I started a series about forgotten novelists with the intention of making it a regular feature, but it petered out after two posts. I began a long-running tradition: Poem for the Weekend, in which I’d share a new poem and info about the author. This feature ran for almost a year beginning in August of 2014, and was reprised briefly in 2017. I wrote about writers and books, of course, sometimes book reviews, sometimes analysis of theory or craft; infrequently, I shared fiction of my own. I wrote about my kids, and published their book reviews of my first novel. I wrote about the writing process, about things that inspired me and about the gifts and pressures of the creative life. And in December of each year, I shared my favorite films and books, until a few years ago when I quit doing the film list. The books are easier to track and so I still do an annual roundup. My most recent post (and only one so far in 2019) talks about my method and inspirations for my new novel, Bellflower.

 

So. At this milestone—100,000 views—I think it would be a good time to look back and remember what I’ve done here, at this outlet, and to maybe set a course forward. I’ve chosen fifteen posts that stood out to me, for a variety of reasons, and I present them to you here. It would seem that these writings of which I’m most proud or which touched something in me fall into five categories: Inspiration, Creativity, Writing Life, Personal, and Memorial.

Inspiration

Vaccination – 5/10/12

A brief contemplation about one of my favorite prose passages of all time.

Focus and Layers – 1/27/15

Notes on a piece of art I saw at MOMA one time, and how it stayed and stayed with me.

 

The Thing about Carson McCullers – 10/26/15

A discussion and appreciation of the mastery of McCullers’s characterizations. She is a huge influence on my work.

 

Creativity

Hotel Thoughts – 7/24/11

A prose poem sort of thing, about feeling isolated and small, and at the same time, connected and complete. Reading this now brings back the exact moment and feeling in stark relief.

Flannery O’Connor on "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" – 1/15/15

My most-read post of all time (3406 reads), this is where I shared my thoughts on O’Connor’s essay collection, a must-read for writers.

Birth of a Story – 11/15/16

A brief post about the genesis of a short story, eventually titled “Driftwood,” which will be published, finally, this April.

In Praise of Stories and the Graying of Genre – 3/21/17

For the past few years, considerations of form and genre have been at the forefront of my creative endeavors, and this post speaks to that.

The Point: A Conversation – 10/27/17

An imagined conversation between “I” and “them,” this post could easily be filed under the Personal category as well. Another entry which brings me back to a specific feeling and time.

Writing Life

Collaboration: A Cautionary Tale – 4/8/11

What happens when you get, perhaps, too much feedback on your writing.

Where Writers Live – 11/2/18

Some thoughts on why a tendency toward melancholy is a gift and a curse for writers.

Personal

My Sister Had a Baby We Didn’t Keep – 1/25/16

I know I said that O’Connor post was the most-read, but this one I also posted on Medium, where it picked up over 11K views. Combined with the views here, it has over 13K to date. It’s the story of the time my sister acted as surrogate for a couple in China.

Things About Grief – 9/7/16

I’ve had many losses in the past few years and unfortunately, learned a lot about grief.

Memorial

Better, Stronger, Faster – 8/29/12

When Neil Armstrong passed away, I wrote about my grandfather, who knew him, and about the Six Million Dollar Man.

My Grandmother’s European Tour – 1/30/18

Going through my grandmother’s belongings, we found some papers pertaining to a trip she took with her nurses’ association. I wrote about it here.

In Remembrance of my Mother – 5/10/18

The post I most wish I hadn’t written, the eulogy for my mother, who passed away last year.

Dear readers: I appreciate all of your comments and feedback over these years. I was hoping to come to some conclusions through this process of looking back, and I think I have. In the next couple of years, I have plans to finish two novels, and I think what I miss doing most at this blog is writing about books. Other writer’s books, and the ways they inspire, disappoint and confound me. So look for more book reviews here, maybe. I’d also like to expand the types of things I’m reading. I’d like to get back to reading more biography and history, maybe even an occasional memoir, YA or spiritual book. Lastly, I’d like to read thematically—several books on a topic or theme. And I think I already have an idea for a summer reading project along those lines, so watch for that as well.

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The Ordering of Place

I was reading a memoir recently, and the author talked about sitting down to draw a detailed map of a home where she felt safe and happy when she was a child—her grandparents’, I think—and I took a breath because I have done the exact thing; once, I pulled myself from bed to draw a recollection of my grandmother’s house, blueprint-style, with what I imagined was true-to-proportion squares and rectangles for each bedroom, the hallway, and the kitchen where it was always cool, clean, and bright. My grandma had a house that would be considered cramped by today’s standards—three small bedrooms, a living room, a dining area within the kitchen. No family room, no loft, no “bonus room.” And yet in it, she raised three children with my grandpa, and continued to live there after he died in his early sixties. I was eight years old when he passed and do remember my grandpa a bit, but I still think of the house as hers. To this day, I can visualize her well-organized closets and cupboards and what was kept in each one. I remember the sheen on her dining room table, the pattern in the dark green carpeting.

I wonder if everyone thinks about special places this way, or if it’s those of us drawn to some sort of creativity. Among writers, there’s lots of talk about place and how it figures into the stories we spin. But when we say “place,” surely there’s much more involved than the placement of linens, the size of a bathroom, the view from a quiet bedroom to the empty clothesline outside. It’s not where the rooms are, of course, but how we felt in them.

Perhaps this compulsion to document the layout of my grandmother’s home is a way to begin to give order to memory. This ordering must come first, because while it’s very well and good to talk about how wonderful it was at Grandma’s, someone has to make sense of it—the whys, the hows, the everlasting ripples of memory, what it meant to be warm and safe and happy within those walls. This sometimes unwelcome task falls to the creative types, I suppose, just as certain tasks fall to grandmothers, and grandfathers, and children whose only job it is to absorb, and live, and love.

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Readings: Shirley Jackson on Memory, Fans and Garlic

Earlier this month, Random House released a collection of previously unpublished work by Shirley Jackson. It's called Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings and I eagerly anticipate the arrival of my copy any day now. Also this month, The New Yorker ran a three-part series, to whet your appetite for these new pieces by Jackson, and it's one of the best things I read this month. How could I not be affected, when she talks about her home life with four adolescents?

"My situation is peculiarly poignant. Not, perhaps, as sad as that of an orphan child condemned to sweep chimneys, but sadder than almost anything else. I am a writer who, due to a series of innocent and ignorant faults of judgment, finds herself with a family of four children and a husband, an eighteen-room house and no help, and two Great Danes and four cats, and—if he has survived this long—a hamster. There may also be a goldfish somewhere. Anyway, what this means is that I have at most a few hours a day to spend at the typewriter, and about sixteen—assuming that I indulge myself with a few hours of sleep—to spend wondering what to have for dinner tonight that we didn’t have last night, and letting the dogs in and letting the dogs out, and trying to get the living room looking decent without actually cleaning it..."

 And--

"Actually, if you’re a writer, the only good thing about adolescent children is that they’re so easily offended. You can drive one of them out of the room with any kind of simple word or phrase—such as “Why don’t you pick up your room?”—and get a little peace to write in. They go storming upstairs and don’t come down again until dinner, which usually gives me plenty of time in which to write a short story."

 

These excerpts are packed with practical writing advice too. The first relays the convoluted process we writers sometimes have; the third deals with symbol in fiction and speaks absolute truths about the short story form. Here are a few quotes:

 

"A writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing..."

 

"Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer’s only unrelenting, genuine enemy."

 

"Here is one of the greatest pitfalls for beginning or inexperienced writers: Their stories are, far too often, just simply not very interesting."

 

 "It seems to me that in our present great drive—fiction-wise—toward the spare, clean, direct kind of story, we are somehow leaving behind the most useful tools of the writer, the small devices that separate fiction from reporting, the work of the imagination from the everyday account."

 

So get a cup of something hot and clear some time for these three wonderful pieces:

 

Memory and Delusion

On Fans and Fan Mail

Garlic in Fiction

 

 

 

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