Writers Recommend

“Here’s what I believe: The perfect writing you might do lies already waiting for you like a sculpture inside. Your job is to subtract: Subtract the ego, the chorus of censors and self-numbing devices, the greater question of the indulgence of art or any distraction that fuzzes intention. Your flavor is your subjectivity, your take on the mysterious world we live in, and if you contribute it without overlay, you perform a service to others who seek an articulated world. Be someone upon whom nothing is lost indeed. If you have a certain threshold of calling and skill—a love of literature and its redemptive powers, a fluency with words—the subtractive sculpture you create offers refuge for others. One trick I like to use to get to the sculpture by the back door is to use aleatory cues when I’m writing, letting chance work as a Rohrshach: a café waiter’s delighted gesture, a random line of poetry, a photography book opened on a bent page. In this way, chance becomes destiny becomes your intention, honed to do its part in some bigger tarantella, the mystery of chance as you are there, winded or not, offering it up to your readers.”
—Edie Meidav, author of Lola, California (forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 2011)

“A friend sent me a link to this video of several poets reciting their work at the White House. I’d been meaning to look for it myself, and watch it, but I haven’t yet. I haven’t had a chance. It’s a long story why, but basically it seems like whenever I get a link to some video from a friend, my headphones are downstairs, and my child has just gone to sleep. His room, you see, is right at the top of the stairs, and the floorboards squeak in ways that my wife and I still can’t always predict or anticipate, even after three years of trying. But anyway, in the still photo for this video, in that picture one sees before one clicks “play,” the president is standing at a lectern about to speak. In the background, off to the side a bit, a band of daylight peeks through the drapes. It’s a brilliant stripe, all blues and greens and bright whites. In fact, when I started to look, I noticed two more bands of daylight, much thinner than the first, more like threads, really, a mere pixel’s width perhaps. Someone must not have drawn the curtains all the way. And someone else didn’t notice. Many someones, no doubt. What can I say, except that I like those bands of daylight? The oversight, the tiny imperfection, they seem to me immediately and achingly human.”
—Paul Maliszewski, author of Prayer and Parable (Fence Books, 2011)

“I see a pigeon dying on my porch the day before Christmas, deer up to their ears in snow, my father in his last bed, heart and lungs and liver failing: I am learning how to love; I cannot save them. In the park, a woman drags a drunken man into the grass, kisses her fingers and oh-so-tenderly touches his face before she leaves him. A coyote howls across the arroyo, and in delight, I answer. One-legged Clarence Purdy runs down a ditch to pull a 216-pound stranger out the window of his rolled truck as the battery sparks and gas trickles, drags the stunned man up the bank seconds before flames burst behind them. I don’t know how. I can’t explain it. The photograph of Clarence Purdy fills the front page of the paper, left pant leg split to the knee to expose his prosthesis. Seventy-three years old, this savior. All these images come from my ‘Book of Wonders,’ notebooks I’ve been keeping for more than twenty years. Your book of miracle and mystery can contain anything! Be free! Be joyful! Let your own delight, your awe and sorrow, your love of life, your searing perceptions and silent astonishment guide you.”
—Melanie Rae Thon, author of In This Light (Graywolf Press, 2011)

“Travel. Of any kind. Whether to a country you'd have a hard time finding on a map, or to the bead shop in your neighborhood you've never set foot in. Get out of your head—your head is good at convincing you that what is bouncing around inside is incredibly important. Usually it's not. Travel to remind yourself that there are six billion people on the planet and most of them live lives you could not recognize, and the minutia and nuance of your own small concerns would be unrecognizable to them. Stand in an airport—outside of time, bound to no place—and let the crush of people, the flow of times and destinations on the board, carry you out of yourself. Remember how big the world is, and how full of trouble.”
—Andrew Foster Altschul, author of Deus Ex Machina (Counterpoint, 2011)