When my dear friend Kat came to visit on the day after my son’s first birthday, she brought with her several books, one of which was Rachel Cusk’s brilliant, startling book A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother
Kat expressed regret that she had not gotten the book to me sooner, but now having read the book, I have to say I think her timing was perfect. I’m not sure my elated, exhausted heart could have stood the revelations this book provided any sooner than now. In short, it is a deeply moving book which may reveal to you the core of your secret heart during that first year of motherhood.
My husband and I don’t typically fight but this year has brought several merciless arguments, many of them ending (or beginning) with my husband saying, “I know how you feel” (and he has every right to believe this as he has been an excellent provider of care for our son and has suffered exhaustion and has experienced the deep love) and with me saying, “No, you don’t.”
I keep trying to explain how I feel to my husband but cannot find the words and it seems I don’t have to now because Rachel Cusk has found them for me. The fear, the loneliness, the exhaustion. The desire to escape, to find the lost self. And above and beyond all, the exquisite, blinding, all-encompassing love for this being who once shared your body and forever more seeks independence, as you seek reconnection.
Simply put, Cusk is fearless in her examination of motherhood.
Here, at the end of the book when Cusk witnesses a new mother with her own mother in a shop, she encapsulates so beautifully, how I feel, or rather, how I have felt:
“She can’t bear something to go unresolved, unfinished, for she fears that nothing will ever be resolved again. She’s trying to keep up, to stay in time, but she’s swimming against a powerful current. I see her steal looks at her mother, brimming with longing and confusion and hurt. After all these years she has discovered her mother’s secret and it is somehow disappointing, a let-down, for she is in those first days of her parturition both mother and child, and the passionate emotion she feels for her vulnerable self finds no reflection in her own mother’s disapproval, her compassionless urge to dispute. Years of human politics have adhered to her mother’s heart: they hang from it like stalectites, like moss. Her own heart is new, raw, frantically pulsing. Will time turn it, too, unfeeling?
The baby cries and cries; and it is all I can do not to lift it from its stroller and hold its small, frightened body close against my chest, hold it and hold it until it stops, so certain am I that it would, that it would know that I knew, and be consoled.”
Cusk is funny, smart. Her views may shock you if you are not used to honesty. At its core, you will probably see what I saw as I read, that this is a woman who deeply loves her children and who understands how we become a mother to the world when we become a mother.
With that, I say thank you very much for writing this book, Rachel Cusk, and thank you very much for giving it to me, Katrina Denza.
Best of the Web 2008 Contents Announced
Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2008 anthology hits stores next Tuesday and can be ordered online, or pre-ordered at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or by your favorite store today! Ryan Call recently reviewed the collection at NewPages.com, ending his review with:
“The book both recognizes a wide range of quality online writing, and gives its readers a comprehensive look at the field from which its contents come – two characteristics of a good anthology. As for the fate of the series, I do not doubt that it will continue to appear each year, given the tremendous success that Dzanc has had since its founding in 2006. Such a development could not have come at a better time for online literary publishing.”
We’re working on others, but there are two readings confirmed, Tuesday, July 15 at Pacific Standard in Brooklyn, and Thursday, July 17 at McNally Robinson in Manhattan.
In order to whet your appetites – here is the listing of contributors and their works – plus the anthology has introductions by both Series Editor, Nathan Leslie, and this year’s Guest Editor, Steve Almond, short interviews with four of the authors, and an appendix with editorial and submission information for over 300 online journals!
Elizabeth Crane – Promise – failbetter
David Willems – A Girl Made of Glass – Hotel St. George Press
Melanie Carter – Fish Catcher – storySouth
George Saunders – Some Brief and Frightening Tips from George Saunders – Konundrum Engine Literary Review
Richard Jespers – Basketball is Not a Drug – Blackbird
Tess Taylor – Route 1 North, Woolich, Maine – Memorious
Ron Tanner – My Small Murders – Wheelhouse Magazine
Christopher Rizzo – Zone – H_NGM_N
Amy Minton – Overhanded – Hobart
J.W. Young – Pageant Queen – Apple Valley Review
Juan Jose Millas – Translated by Peter Robertson – To See Them Again – Mad Hatter’s Review
Anne Dyer Stuart – [envy is a nude door] – 2River Review
Jacques Rancourt – Fireflies – Rumble
Kris Broughton – The Black Fokls’ Guide to Survival – Eclectica Magazine
Stevie Davis – Corner Knows the Dust – Failbetter
Amy L. Sargent – Shotgun – Wheelhouse Magazine
Justin Taylor – The Jealousy of Angels – Del Sol Review
Carmen Gimenez Smith – So You Know Who We Are – diode
Seth Harwood – Tattooed People – Storyglossia
Arlene Ang – Ceremonial Spoon – Caffeine Destiny
Paul Yoon – Postcards from My Brother – Memorious
Abby Frucht – Blue Shirt – Brevity
Kim Whitehead – The Split – Terrain
Christina Kallery – Swan Falls in Love with Swan-Shaped Boat – Failbetter
Michael Bahler – The Stiff Jew – Swink
Jared Carter – Prophet Township – Valparaiso Poetry Review
Sarah Sweeney – Tell Me if You’re Lying – fringe
Cara Hoffman – Waking – Our Stories
Zachary Amendt – Casa de Serenidad – Underground Voices
David Bottoms – Thirst and the Writer’s Sense of Consequence – Kennesaw Review
Claudia Zuluaga – Okeechobee – Narrative Magazine
Maurice Manning – The Doctrine of an Axe – Cortland Review
Jenny Pritchett – Bugaboo – Fiction Attic
Thomas King – Household Poisons – Contrary
Nancy Cherry – Yearly Trek to Bear Valley – Green Hills Literary Lantern
LaTanya McQueen – The Women of My Father – BluePrintReview
Garth Risk Hallberg – The One That Got Away: Why James Wood is Wrong About Underworld (and Why Anyone Should Care) – The Quarterly Conversation
Edward Byrne – Island Fever – Apple Valley Review
Robin Behn – Childbirth in Alabama – Brevity
Edward Hirsch – The Minimalist Museum – Per Contra
Sandra Huber – Eels – Danforth Review
Anna Kushner – Olor a Cuba – ep:phany
Andrew Sorge – Bruxism – Menda City Review
Andrea Cohen – Still Life with Childhood – Memorious
Elaine Chiew – Huckleberry Thumb – Juked
Bill Mohr – Headway – Pemmican
Valerie Loveland – Anatomy Test, Eleventh Grade – wicked alice
Okey Ndibe – My Biafran Eyes – Guernica
Benjamin Buchholz – The Cabalfish – Storyglossia
Stefani Nellen – The Attraction of Asphalt – SmokeLong Quarterly
Bruce Fisher – Flat at Dawn and at Twilight – The King’s English
Leigh Anne Crouch – I am not a man; I am dynamite – Blackbird
Charlie Geoghegean-Clements – Woodbury Notes – Furnace Review
Frannie Lindsay – Walking an Old Woman Into the Sea – Valparaiso Poetry Review
R.T. Smith – What I Omitted from the Office Personnel Services Report – Per Contra
Myfanwy Collins – The Daughters – Monkeybicycle
Michael Wood – with introduction by Jonthan Ames – The Mystery of Henry’s Bicycle – Konundrum Engine Literary Review
My darling son, my heart, was born. This morning I am up with the birds and reliving every moment of it: The fear, the expectation, the excitement.
The joy that eclipses all other joy.
That moment when he is held up before you and he opens his mouth to say, “It is me. I am here. Pay attention.”
And forever more, he is where your attention goes.
The weather forecast says today is the pick of the week and today we will go to the ocean, the three of us. We will go to the ocean and we will eat cake and we will remember each day that led us to this glorious day when the birds’ first song was a birthday song.
Pia Z. Ehrhardt is one of my favorite writers and human beings and her excellent story “Closer, Still” is serialized on fivechapters.com this week. Here’s part I. Read it!
I’ve been under the weather and so I apologize for being a fews days late in saying Happy Birthday to one of my favorite ezines–SmokeLong Quarterly.
I am extremely grateful to the editors of SmokeLong for being so supportive of my writing over the years. In particular, I am grateful to Dave Clapper, whose devotion to SmokeLong and flash fiction inspires.
So I hope you will join me in wishing SmokeLong a happy fifth birthday. Also, please be sure to dig into the special double issue.
I will be reading at the Book B Que hosted by Quick Fiction and NOÖ Journal on June 23 at Brookline Booksmith. Reading begins at 7PM.
A writer’s take on the new New Orleans in the LA Times blog Jacket Copy is an enlightening interview with Pia Z. Ehrhardt. Read it.
Got an email about this new ezine:
Freight Stories seeks to publish a range of fiction. As our first issue shows, we’re comfortable with the very short story — not uncommon for an online journal, as you well know — and with longer works (such as Debra Spark’s novella), and everything in between.
Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh
This is the story of Fee–how his life ended up the way it did, on a beach, deciding to live instead of die.
It is also “a fox story. Of how a fox can be a boy. And so it is also the story of a fire.” The significance of the fox comes from Fee’s heritage–the myths of the shape-shifting fox demon and how that demon returns and speaks through those possessed. Most importantly, it is about how the fox demon turns back into a human being, back into a man.
The significance of fire is that it is how things die; they are set alight and then they extinguish, keeping their secrets:
“Burning hides what burns there. Somewhere deep in him was a memory of light that pierced him from end to end like a spit.”
Mostly, it is a tragic love story. Unrequited love. Burning love. The horrible love of a man for young boys. The wondrous love of a boy for another boy. The unbearable love of a teenager for his teacher. The never-ending love of a boy for his lost sisters.
There is also a love so desperate that it sends its owner underground, beneath the earth into tunnels he builds so that he might hide from the love and bury himself alive: entomb himself within it for to do so would mean his beloved was trapped in that moment with him.
This is a rich, many-layered novel, filled with mythical allusions and using language that is always gorgeous. You will marvel at the beauty of these sentences even when what the author is describing is something you do not want to see.
Read it.
The excellent folks at wigleaf have announced their top 50 online stories. Nice foreword and introduction from the series and selecting editors.
The Kenyon Review announced KROnline described by David Lynn as:
“a lively and innovative bridge between the world of the very best print literature and the emerging potential of the electronic universe.”
A new issue of Narrative Magazine is live. Go on and read it.
Last, but definitely not least, check out this Quick Fiction Interview with Kim Chinquee
Great interview with Charles Baxter in the latest issue of The Missouri Review in which he discusses his new novel (The Soul Thief) and writing and the writing life.
I loved, especially, what he had to say about writing novels vs writing stories–what you learn (or don’t learn) from each:
The novel is a very forgiving form. I spent years of my life writing bad novels that were never published because I didn’t realize the mistakes I was making. I only figured out how to do it by writing short stories.
When asked what those mistakes were, Baxter replied:
I thought it was enough to write great sentences and that I didn’t have to know how people actually behaved. I had these implausible characters. It was kind of a hallucinatory, bogus world. I was trying to impress people. I was thinking too much about the audience. I was gripped by a form of literary bad faith.
The entire interview is filled with such gems. Read it.
Jack Gorse/Ronan the protagonist of Pamela Erens’s smashing debut novel, The Understory
“I imagine that I am a conjoined creature; two souls wrapped into one, and after a while this thought lulls me to sleep.”
Basically, he is unwittingly his own twin—and so gives himself two names. Everything is connected in Jack’s world and there are no randomness of events something he’s believed since childhood:
“Every plant—everything, I was suddenly sure—was related, everything was part of some larger group, some bigger whole.”
In keeping with the twin-ness of things, the thread of connection, the book is told in interweaving chapters of past and present as we follow Jack through his troubles of the not so distant past (the events leading up to his eviction), his troubles of the present (he is in hiding in a Buddhist monastery in Vermont and they are wary of him), and his overarching troubles (the outcome of his involvement with Patrick).
Despite his odd (and sometimes scary) behavior, Jack will win you over. You will wish him well. You will want him not to fail. And in the end, when you know his dark secrets and what horrible things he has done, you will hope that he will have a brighter tomorrow.
In short: a masterful, graceful book that will often leave you breathless. Read it.
myfanwy collins 