Another Year
Another Year Of writing. Of shoveling snow. Planting a garden. Inch by inch. One word after another. I’m like those old ladies I used to make fun of. Who keep trying to be relevant. Who think they still have something to say. I’ve been reading literary criticism of Ernest Hemingway—literary and criticism, the author spends the first 30 pages not necessarily defending Hemingway but acknowledging the criticism of the man, the Hemingway myth. Today’s culture wraps the persona into the writing—the two cannot be separated—making it difficult to really examine the literature. Hemingway embraced flash and hybrid before they became a thing. He was king of the declarative sentence. Especially if it focused on an aside. His sparse, naturalistic dialogue was famous for talking around the subject. He approached writing as if it were a job. He called it his “work.” Once he got his work done, he’d drink or box or loaf, go to horse races. As he got older, the process got harder and ha...