Memoirous

My friend Tammy Perlmutter has a poem in this anthology. Tammy is a persistent blogger and founder of The Mudroom , a blogging alliance. From her blog: In 2009 Zadie Smith wrote a piece called “The Rise of the Essay.”  She writes about the problems of even the highest-regarded classical literary fiction and the arguments that “all plots are ‘conventional’ and all characters sentimental and bourgeois, and all settings bad theatrical backdrops, wooden and painted.”  Instead of mourning the demise of the perfect novel, she poses an important question: “Will the ‘lyrical essay,’ be the answer to the novel’s problems? Is the very idea of plot, character and setting in the novel to be abandoned, no longer fit for our new purposes, and all ground ceded to the coolly superior, aphoristic essay?”   Virginia Woolf herself wrote an essay on essays called “The Modern Essay”  in which she wrote. “There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay....

According to Martin Amis, "fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life." Without story my own life narrative would be rather bleak. I need fiction, stories, lies even to move forward. When I come across fiction so powerful it blows me away I’ll want to get on Facebook or run up to the rooftops and scream: READ THIS BOOK! I’m also lucky in that I have a good friend who reads and absorbs fiction like it ain’t no fiction, just like me. We are able to talk book. A language of intuition, that automatically assumes that most pain can be assuaged or distracted by an enthralling fable. I think this is how mankind has been able to continue in the face of wooly mammoths, armies of invaders, revolution, stock market crashes, hurricanes, job loss—all the marquee stuff that stops us cold. We can pick up the flag and go on if only we can carry a really good story around inside of us. Tammy read Girl Child by Tupelo Hassman and had a literal literary reac...

My workmate just got an invitation to join her daughter in the future. We had a nice laugh. It was set up like a Google invite or one of those things you get through e-mail. The date was something like 2016. On one hand it showed that the child has computer chops (just like her mama) and knows her way around a program, and is likely going to grow up to be a hacker. The really good hackers always get recruited to work for the government. On the other hand in the present sense it was cute. Knowing the sender of such e-mail, she is precocious: Something’s always goin’ on. She goes through phases, but her main obsession is biology—specifically bugs and bones. These things hold whole worlds. They tell stories. Yet the invitation held a whisp of melancholy. In 2016 she will be just turning teen—will she want Mom to join her in the future? Will that future occupy a space of stress, eyerolls, and monosyllabic replies (usually followed by more eyerolls)? Will she trade her ...

Here is a timely word (see my last post) from my office mate Tammy Perlmutter with her poem introducing  this Advent season--and HOPE "A Hope That Doesn't Disappoint" By Tammy Perlmutter