Burgess, Beatrix, and Our Favorite Bear
One thing I didn’t expect to be doing in my forties was re-reading all the books of early childhood. I was a mom of only one for nearly eleven years and thought surely I wouldn’t revisit Thornton Burgess, Beatrix Potter, and Winnie-the-Pooh until I was a grandmother. But then I had three more babies.
I started reading Thornton Burgess out loud to my oldest and two of my niblings when there was a family crisis and I absorbed a niece and a nephew into my household for two months while my second child was two months old. Thornton Burgess always brings calm to an afternoon when you need it. He’s gentle, like Mr. Rogers, and tells you all about the animals the way Bob Ross tells you all about painting. During this season of chaos, we read The Big Book of Burgess, the pale green front board and back board matched my bedroom walls and put us all in a soothing nap-like mood. We usually read over elevenses or afternoon tea, the sunlight from my east facing living room windows often cascading over my shoulders while the baby kicked in the bouncer and the older kids settled in to watch the oak tree’s leaves dance across the area rug and faux hardwood flooring. What I learned then while the fifth graders sat restfully (the only time of day they were restful) and listened, is that I would never stop reading Burgess ever again. Never. Now, we always have a Burgess book going. I read bits of the Adventures of… series to my toddler, Lightfoot the Deer and Bowser the Hound when I had a teenager, a preschooler, and a toddler, and even now with a highschooler, preschooler, toddler, and newborn, we are reading Blacky the Crow. Burgess writes delightful little chapter books every age can enjoy, but…
Beatrix Potter’s work are picture books. I definitely didn’t expect to be reading The Tales of Peter Rabbit nearly every day for another decade. Even more, I didn’t expect to not get tired of them. Jeremy Fisher doesn’t stop being exciting, if anything I think he’s more exciting now that I have a little boy obsessed with fishing. Two Bad Mice is especially amusing with two precocious little human partners in crime scurrying about my home.
Last, I’ll never forget the first time I picked up the Winnie-the-Pooh collection to read to my second born. He was pudgy and snuggly and the lamplight was low and my voice fell into the patterns that my oldest calls my Winnie-the-Pooh voice and I thought, “Oh I get to do this again. How lovely.” The book smells like vanilla and baby powder, the spine reassuring in my palm. Winnie-the-Pooh of the Hundred Acre Wood, floating up to steal honey like a rain cloud really never gets old. It might be my favorite bedtime book.
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Hard Roads to Cultural Literacy
In May of 2019, I read a book called Hard Road West: History and Geology Along the Gold Rush Trail by Keith Heyer Meldahl. I remember it being riveting. When I logged it on Goodreads all I wrote was, “Excellent and fascinating.” I was dating my now husband at the time and I remember sharing with him sections I thought he would enjoy, as we both like geology and one of our dates was to the HMNS gemstone exhibit. At one point I laughed out loud at something clever Meldahl wrote (I don’t recall what it was) and my husband commented that it is a rare geology book that causes one to laugh in pleasure.
Naturally, I thought this would make excellent assigned reading for my homeschooled highschooler. But one chapter into it she was struggling. It wasn’t the reading level, she has a collegiate reading level and has had one for a few years now. I was certain it couldn’t be the science as she had been perusing geology books since childhood and had done a whole geology curriculum with a friend as part of their own little science club they created. Nerds. I went over the science with her and she kept reading. It became less of a struggle, but she is not laughing out loud with pleasure from her geology book.
Then I started reading Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch and things became clearer. In Cultural Literacy Hirsch talks about a study done on the results of seven year olds who took a reading assessment test. In the test the children were asked to read a story about a spider. The children who had more prior knowledge about spiders scored higher on the reading comprehension questions about the story (which did not require special knowledge about spiders) than those who did not know much about spiders.
I shared this with my oldest daughter, as we often study together while the younger kids are playing. We discussed it and determined that it makes sense to not get hung up on something being mentioned in passing because you already know a lot on a topic and can picture it in your mind with little effort, but to struggle to retain what something is about if it mentions a lot of things you’re trying to picture because you’re not as familiar with them. Perhaps it is easier to envision Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web if as a child you also have watched a real spider build its web, perhaps it is easier to remember the story if you’ve seen or read about how baby spiders hatch. Or, if you’ve had Charlotte’s Web read to you as a child, maybe a technical book on pig husbandry would be easier to retain as an adult. Hirsch includes an example of college students reading a paragraph about Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee and struggling because they had no prior knowledge of who they were and how they related to the Civil War (shocking because these were college students out of Virginia).
I was reminded about a public schooled girl I was working with who had failed her reading portion on her standardized tests. Her phonics were impeccable, but where she struggled was comprehension. When I worked with her, almost every time she struggled to read something it was because she had never heard the word. She didn’t have the vocabulary to support her phonics skills. I advised the family to listen to audiobooks, read stories together at night, talk to each other more, look words up in the dictionary. Children learn the meanings of words by hearing them, then when they see them on paper for the first time while sounding it out… they have a picture in their mind of what that word means, feels like, or how it can be used in different sentences. Kids should always have access to stories above their reading level, so that they can learn grammar structures and vocabulary words organically. Hirsch drives home the idea that you can know how to read and still be illiterate if you don’t know anything about what you’re reading.
I told my daughter how this was interesting to me because my husband had said he thought she didn’t know enough geology to read Hard Road West smoothly, even though I thought it was a very approachable book and that she had a strong foundation in geology. She and I laughed over the time a volunteer at the museum asked her what a specific rock smelled like and the big reveal fell flat when she answered, “Sulfur.” Poor guy deflated and said, “Yes, it’s Sulfur. You must be homeschooled.” Apparently the public school kids her age on field trips liked to shout “Farts!” She was about seven at the time and it is one of her favorite museum memories. (I’m not going to lie, even if I knew it was sulfur at seven, I’d probably have shouted “Farts!” too, but I went to public school.)
“So, why, if you’ve read all the same geology books we read as children, is this geology book difficult? Because I genuinely don’t think it would have been difficult for me at fifteen.” That is when she confessed that the geology books we owned and had spent hours reading… she hadn’t actually been reading them: “I was looking at the pretty rocks. I could tell you the page numbers where all my favorite rocks are, all the prettiest ones, I didn’t read all the stuff…” We genuinely laughed together, two wildly different personalities approaching children’s geology books in wildly different ways. As Charlotte Mason said, “Children are born persons.” But for every moment, like this geology one where she struggles because maybe she didn’t pay as much attention to what was put before her in the past, she has so many where she shines. She catches every Shakespeare reference. Every time. (Hirsch writes a bit about how Shakespeare allusions used to be quite common in all kinds of writing, including business memos, but as of the publication of his book in 1987, that was no longer the case.)
Hirsch’s argument for cultural literacy was never meant to be for homeschool parents to refine the presentation of their educational feasts, his goal is educational reform in the public sector. There is extensive discussion in his book about the struggle to properly regulate education in that if you mandate that schools teach at least two Shakespeare plays there will always be arguments about which two should be selected and that no two districts will choose the same two, therefore knowing who Shakespeare is might be universal, but catching Shakespeare references will vary. (I vote for all the Shakespeare. Every play! All the sonnets!) But I did feel like Hirsch’s essay very much affirmed the education I am providing. Maybe my oldest gets a little bogged down in this particular geology book, but to be fair, it could easily be assigned in a college course, most high school students wouldn’t be reading it between their Homer and Geometry lessons. The paragraph that boggled the minds of the Virginian community college students in the 1980s didn’t phase her, and for that I have hope.
Additional affirmation came when I realized I had owned other books by Hirsch in the past. He’s the one that wrote the series Everything Your ___Grader Needs to Know. My first two years of formal homeschooling (first and second grade), I had read those books out loud the last month of the traditional school year to see if we were covering everything. What I learned was reading those books out loud was a waste of time because a classical Charlotte Mason education is thorough and she not only knew what she needed, but she knew richer versions than the sad paragraphs presented. That was the final nail in the coffin on us ever relying on textbooks. Cultural literacy can be gained from textbooks, but it’s boring and far less effective. The better road to true literacy, in my opinion, is living books. I donated Hirsch’s other books, but I’m keeping Cultural Literacy.
One whole day after finishing Cultural Literacy, I went to our local library to donate a bag of books I was purging from my collection. There on the shelf next to the library bookstore register was E. D. Hirsch’s Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, a compilation of all the things the average American graduate should know, for $2. Of course I bought it.
“Also unrealistic is the pragmatist emphasis on individuality, at least as the idea has been institutionalized. The best teaching does accommodate itself to individual differences in temperament, but a child’s temperament does not come freighted with content. To learn a culture is natural to human beings. Children can express individuality only in relation to the traditions of their society, which they have to learn. The greatest human individuality is developed in response to a tradition, not in response to disorderly uncertain, and fragmented education. Americans in their teens and twenties who were brought up under individualistic theories are not less conventional than their predecessors, only less literate, less able to express their individuality.” – E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy, pg. 126.
One More Year of Reading
It has been a year since I last wrote a blog post. The choir girl in me starts humming “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes” as soon as I think the words “a year.”
I don’t measure my years in daylights or sunsets or cups of coffee, although I observe, draw, and inhale many of them. This last year was measured in inches grown by my thirteen-year-old, new words spoken by my two-year-old, and the birth of a new baby… and, as always, a lot of books.
After my last post, I re-read the Hunger Games series. I still like it. I hated the prequel fourth book. Naturally, after spending a lot of time discussing totalitarian governments with my middle schooler, I read Larry Correia’s In Defense of the Second Amendment. Everyone should give that one a go. Correia is great.
I read a lot of crap while I was pregnant, at least in the barfing phase. I started purging my shelves of things that I had accumulated for free or cheap over the years but never read. If you haven’t been in the mood to read it in a decade, four moves, and as many 1,000 volume plus purges… you probably don’t want to read the book. I’ve been reading a lot of those books, and giving them away. I’ve donated about a box of books per month this last year, and I plan to keep going. We have exactly the number of bookshelves we will ever have in this house and they are beyond full. Now I curate. I replace the chaff with the gold. I have a lot of “gold” already, I have already decided I do not have the time, patience, or meanness left to write all the bad reviews I have floating in my head. This is not the season of cotton candy fiction, and it shows in my star ratings. This is a season of meat, the books I never want to let go. Still, I’m alternating between reading things I might want to let go with things I know I never will, and organizing my overcrowded shelves of chaos as I do.
In July, two months before I had my third baby, I discovered The Literary Life Podcast. I also discovered that the majority of the books they cover I had either already read before or already owned. I started listening to the podcast voraciously. Around the third trimester of all my pregnancies, my mind begins to “itch,” I start studying anything and everything. My mind can’t be still. I have to learn when there is a baby on the way. The truth is, I’m perpetually desperate for a book club or to go back to school and earn a few useless degrees, and the Lit Life group is the next best thing.
I loved Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. It was not one of the Lord Peter Wimsey’s that I had read before the podcast, so that was a real treat. I started re-reading all my G. K. Chesterton titles because they talk about him quite a bit. I was teaching Saint Francis of Assisi, so I read Chesterton’s biography. Surprised by Oxford by Weber came up, so I had to read that one as well. I still haven’t seen the movie, but I would like to. I moved all my Inklings-related titles to my bedroom, so they’d be closer to me when I was nursing. I’ve now listened to over a hundred podcast episodes.
The baby came nearly a month before she was due. She’s perfect. She’s an infant wrapped in a blanket of E. M. Forster stories, C. S. Lewis essays, and Shakespeare plays. My oldest helps set the tone of our homeschool as we study together, and the two-year-old interrupts to have us read to him as well. We are a house of books, and it is my dream come true. I’ve been reading something by Madeleine L’Engle at all times and decided to do it until I’ve read all her work.
I bought Cindy Rollins’s Morning Time book, and have implemented a more consistent and orderly way of doing ours. Her thoughtful reminders and lists have been a blessing. That led to us also using her Hallelujah book for advent. It’s truly lovely and I have enjoyed incorporating fine arts into our worship this way, as I always thought they should go hand in hand.
I will try to write more than once a year. As it is, this post is hardly about anything at all, other than I noticed it was February 15th and that I hadn’t written one since last February 15th. I will try to write something thoughtful about the books I have read another day, but I will admit it isn’t my priority these days. I keep this blog because I have always kept it, but my children are in my care for only so long and I am a homeschool mom. We have reading to do. When I remember, I will share it with you.
My Continuing Adventures with PKD
Solar Lottery.
It wasn’t my favorite, but I suppose they can’t all be. It was PKD’s first published novel, and it feels like it. Not because it isn’t good, but because it’s so very typical genre. There was a lack of bravery in it. It’s plot pointed. It’s correct.
I fell in love with PKD’s writing because it wasn’t confined to a formula, because he didn’t seem to care whether or not the plot points occurred when they were supposed to. It is why Clans of the Alphane Moon is my favorite of his work so far.
The same week I read Solar Lottery, I also got a DVD I requested from the library:
The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick.
It was an interlibrary loan from a college – what I call my “super fancy request” because it has a $3 a day late fee.
It looks like something they’d show in a high school class. I say high school because I always thought showing videos in college courses was a lazy prof’s way out. (You should require students to watch something, then discuss in class.) Also, because by the time I got to college cheesy 90’s videos were being replaced by updated videos.
As I watch the video, I keep thinking how much I’d rather be reading the content in a book than be viewing a documentary. I suffer from a plight the majority of my contemporaries will never understand… watching things on a screen is far more tedious to me than reading them.
Also, as I’m watching, Solar Lottery slips away from my mind as my most recent PKD experience (of slight disappointment) and all the reasons I adore PKD flood back.
There’s a cheesy cartoon of PKD moving his mouth to Phil’s actual audio responses, recorded when he was still living. This would be cool if I didn’t feel like I was watching Southpark. It’s hard to focus on the documentary without closing my eyes because a headache is starting to form behind my eyes, another reason why I don’t watch a lot of tv but can read for days straight.
I’m glad I’m listening, though. There are so many things about him that fascinate me. The break in to his safe, for instance. People relate this tale in direct correlation to his drug use and having an unhealthy level of skepticism for the world around him… then the police thought he orchestrated the explosion himself… to which his supposedly drug addled mind thinks, “Maybe I did…? What would my motivation have been?”
They attribute all of this to a novelist’s mind on drugs.
How is this not just a normal human response to an accusation? I have these spin off thoughts nearly every moment of every day. I’ve written entire novels in my head based on an accusation. My first published novella was born slightly out of a similar strain of thought.
I may not be drug addled. I may not be as prolific or clever. But I do think, had I ever met PKD in person, we may have been friends, at least I think I would have liked him a lot.
Circle of Quiet, Trails of Solace
Title:A Circle of Quiet
Author: Madeleine L’Engle
Publisher: Harper Collins
Genre: Memoir/ Spirituality
Length: 229 pages
A Circle of Quiet is powerful. So powerful it inspired me to write nearly 10,000 useable words, to writers you may note the awe I have when I say useable.
Some were used for the sequel to my novella, a novel that is supposed to come out in the fall of this year – fingers crossed. But most of the words were for a new book, stories about my trails in the woods that are itching to be told but I’ve not known how to tell them because it’s all still happening, my trails are still real.
What is most impressive to me about A Circle of Quiet is not how many beautifully quotable quotes there are, but how completely relevant L’Engle’s story is to me. So relevant, I didn’t noticed until 3/4 of the way through the book that it was published in 1972 and the things she writes about occurred in the early seventies if not the late sixties.
I was baffled to discover this. A Wrinkle in Time and the rest of her children’s books are as fresh to me as the Harry Potter series. I read them as I child without the impression that they were old. In my mind, L’Engle has been an author of the 80’s who would be around as long as C.S. Lewis once the years had passed. I did not realize that the books were much older than that and that the years had already passed. A Wrinkle in Time was first published in 1962.
How is this possible that every moment, every ache, every joy (aside from winning the Newberry of course, as I’ve won nothing) is one I feel in every fiber of my being as a thirty year old in 2014? When she was born in 1918. What struck me most is that A Circle of Quiet is timeless.
Madeleine L’Engle is timeless.
This is a must read for any mother, any writer or creative, any soul searching for God, any person trying to balance their introversion with their extroversion, and ultimately any person.
She published these from her journals, which she admits were written for publication, but still I am honored to have been allowed a peek into the window of her thoughts.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism sort of fascinates me. Mostly because I am a reader, I think. And as a reader I absorb.
I absorb thoughts, ideas, fairy tales, story lines, dialogue… and sometimes when I’m writing I find that I can’t remember if what I’m writing came from a dream I had, a book I read, or a an actual idea that I am actually formulating as my ink pours from my pen.
I am re-reading The Mortal Instruments series, and with a re-read comes more review reading, more research, because I no longer fear a spoiler. So long after the scandal, I discovered this morning that Cassandra Clare was accused of plagiarism on a fan fiction site for a Harry Potter spin-off series about Draco. Not only accused, but her account was cancelled because of it.
I’m not defending plagiarism, it’s not ok. The idea that someone would purposely just copy someone else’s work turns my stomach.
But what if it is purely accidental?
What if you have internalized a work so completely in your youth that as an adult an idea, dialogue, plot points, come to you so wholly formed and you recall that it was inspired by something, but not necessarily who or where the inspiration came from?
I can see that happening to me. I read so much as a child and I cannot remember it all, but I do have to say that I don’t think a single idea I’ve ever had could actually be attributed to myself. They aren’t my ideas. They are the ideas of those who came before me. They are the ideas that came from authors I loved, and characters who became my friends.
I distinctly remember writing a story once, I was maybe seventeen at the time, and I was so in love with it. I thought, man, I’m good – this story is fantastic. I re-read it, I worked on it avidly. Then I realized, about a month later, that it wasn’t mine. I was re-writing The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. Perhaps slightly in my own words, but the essence of it was entirely hers and I was forced to throw it away.
It was the first time I became doubtful that I would ever publish anything. Until then, I had been completely convinced that no matter what happened in my life, I would at least become an author in some capacity. It was in my veins since the first time I picked up a book and could decode the letters that made words and sentences. I had been writing stories and ‘books’ since I could manage to scrawl out a readable letter with my number two pencil. But right then, as a teenager, I realized my biggest fear – that perhaps I didn’t have any words of my own. Perhaps they all came from elsewhere.
That is when I realized what the biggest challenge would be for me to become an author – writing something original. How do you sort through all that you’ve read, all that you love, and find something that doesn’t already belong to someone in some way?
Because of this, my novella doesn’t have much in the way of plot points. The characters came to me, yes. I can write their essence, yes. But ultimately, I am terrified of plot points. I feel like they’ve all been written before. But people, people are always capable of being their own. Characters are easier to write than plots, because I’m surrounded by characters – they live in my head. Plots, on the other hand, only live in books that have already been written. Real life doesn’t seem to consist of plots so I can’t rely on life to deliver inspiration that hasn’t already been had by someone.
Logical fallacies, of course. But that’s how I feel.
And I can’t help but wonder if Cassandra Clare felt the same way from time to time.
Freelance Writing
I wish this blog was a post about me receiving one of those… see Daphne, above, a royal portable from 1930. Green, no less.
It’s not.
But it is pretty exciting.
I’m pursuing supplementing my income with freelance writing jobs. So far, I have been hired on by Money-Fax.com and I’m enjoying it quite a bit. Money-Fax has me writing about Kid & Family Budgeting, which is pretty perfect because I’m a homeschool mom chronically on an author budget. (That’s code for mommy who lives off nothing.)
Here are links to my published articles, so far:
The Economics of Cloth Diapers
How to Entertain Your Child for Free This Summer
How Much Does it Really Cost to Homeschool
The more traffic my articles get, the more people will want to have me write them – naturally. So, please, if you have someone in your life any of these articles would interest, share them.
There are more to come. Keep checking Money-Fax.com for budget friendly pets and ways to celebrate Easter. Browse through their site for other helpful articles as well. They are an education service geared toward helping the public learn to improve the state of their finances.
Bones of My Bones
Below is a very small piece out of a decently long series that is not yet published, but still lurking about on my computer. The story is from ages ago, an angsty sci-fi piece I started writing when I was 14. Things change and flesh themselves out when they see the light of day – or the eyes of others. So periodically I like to post excerpts of things still in progress.
If you like this and you haven’t yet purchased my book, The Bookshop Hotel, please do. Again – This is not from that book, but it is a sample of my writing.
She often wondered what her bones would look like after death. Bones tell tales. Bones are the memory book of all our scars, all our aches and pains, all our wounds. An autopsy would show her broken ribs, her smashed fingers, conditioned arms and legs… but would it also show the bruising on the inside? All the times her heart nearly burst and beat her sternum in anger and sadness from the inside?
They say that if old lovers can be friends they either were never in love or they still are. She wondered if that could be true, and if it was true then which was the case now? What would be worse? Thinking none of it was real before, or thinking there was still something there that neither one could acknowledge? Worse yet: if old feelings could bubble to the surface at any moment and disrupt the fabric of her current reality.
Then again, what defines lover? The problem with the world is that they apply emotional concepts to physical acts. By doing so, does that make the emotions with non-physical acts irrelevant? You can love someone and be loved by someone, you can be in love with someone, and never cross the line into the realm of ‘lovers.’ Lover implies physical contact, lover implies intercourse, lover implies bones of my bones and flesh of my flesh sort of contact.
It either takes serious emotional bonding or a vivid imagination to feel like you’re one flesh with someone you’ve never touched. To feel their absence like a stab in the gut. To feel their loss like a loss of your own limb. What if she just had the most vivid of imaginations? What if none of it had ever been real?
After death, would they see that too? Would her delusions be written on her bones? In her muscle mass… in her muscle memory. The heart having expanded too much, too quickly. Would they see that?
Copyright A.K. Klemm
Little Tiny Novels
Title: The Newton Letter
Author: John Banville
Publisher: David R. Godine
Genre: Fiction
Length: 81 pages
After publishing my novella (roughly 130 pages long), my editor and I decided to make the sequel to my novella much longer. The publisher wants a full length novel, but in our attempt for length we started to believe that length would equate higher quality.
Reading through drafts we found that for the sake of propelling the story and actually achieving the higher quality work we were looking for, large chunks of filler might have to be scrapped. So I set out to read some great short work, to make myself feel better about not being Kate Morton. And though I am no where near ever going to have the talent of John Banville, Panlo De Santis, John Steinbeck, or William Kennedy, there’s something to be said about reading these and knowing that a finished product is all about quality over quantity.
“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” – Stephen King, “The Horror Writer Market and the Ten Bears,” November 1973 WD
John Banville makes me crazy jealous. I want his brain in my brain ever so briefly… just long enough to write something amazing. Because everything he touches is amazing. Even just an 80 page bit of story written before I was born reads like his full length prize winners.
The lesson in this for me (because almost every book I read teaches me something) is that while doing these edits for the second edition of my novella, I also need to edit in some breaks between paragraphs. Visually there are some things that don’t flow. I can thank my first edition readers for pointing this out. Even if I pout a little bit, I am so grateful for all the criticism on my first work. I’m pouting that I wasn’t more diligent about catching these things before you read it, not that you caught these things. Anything any reader of mine tells me is something I truly do ponder in great detail.
“The worst advice? ‘Don’t listen to the critics.’ I think that you really ought to listen to the critics, because sometimes they’re telling you something is broken that you can fix.” – Stephen King
I want even my first work to be better. I want my second work to be even better than the first. Whether I achieve the length of a traditional novel or not, I hope the second book achieves the complete story arch of a traditional novel. Hopefully, one day, when I’m old and gray, I can write something I’m happy with. It won’t be John Banville, because I’m not him, but in the meantime I can adore him a lot and work a lot harder.
Aspects of a Novelist
Title: Aspects of the Novel
Author: E.M. Forster
Genre: Literary Criticism
Length: 176 pages
I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a very small child. So small that I don’t recall the first revelation or declaration. I simply always knew it was something I wanted to do one day. I also have always enjoyed books. I remember loving to read before I was even any good at it. I remember devouring books before my peers had even mastered their letters. This is not because I was smarter than them, not by a long shot. This is just how much passion I had for the idea of language and the written word.
Naturally, I also love books about writers writing… like Stephen King’s On Writing and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden Letters. I even like authors who get bossy about it like Umberto Eco and E.M. Forster. They deserve to be bossy, as they are brilliant.
I fell in love with E.M. Forster in high school when my favorite English teacher of all time told me to get a copy of Howards End. I remember devouring it almost over night and spending nearly a half hour after school discussing it with him. I remember being utterly blown away by Howards End for reasons I cannot even vaguely recall now, but things amaze you at sixteen for no particular reason at all, it is a habit I have tried to keep as I age too.
My debut as a novelist comes out this week – a novella, actually – called The Bookshop Hotel. I’m about halfway through writing the sequel, a book that will be a full length novel twice as long as the novella, and I’m already paranoid about potential reviews hailing my inferiority as a writer. So, I’m consulting one of my heroes for advice, writerly wisdom from the talented author of Howards End.
As I read Forster’s famous lectures, it is becoming clear to me that I will never be E.M. Forster, John Steinbeck, or even an Audrey Niffenegger! I will never be a best-selling New York Times sensation. I’m ok with that, it was never my intention to be infamous. I have other aspirations.
What I would like to do, though, is to tell a few good stories, make some income for my family, and have the satisfaction of stumbling across my books on shelves in unexpected places. That will be enough for me.
In the mean time, I’ll work as though my goal is to be the next Stephen King (on the prolific level anyway), because even though I am not the most talented, I don’t ever want to be accused of being half-assed. I’d rather be untalented than lazy.
So here I am on a Sunday night perusing Aspects of the Novel, munching on every tidbit, taking notes, wondering if Forster himself would have anything positive to say about my stories because the vital elements to a novel he points out are vital indeed and I’m unsure as to whether my characters can live up to that vitality.
“Forster’s casual and wittily acute guidance… transmutes the dull stuff of He-said and She-said into characters, stories, and intimations of truth,” Jacques Barzun is quoted. Let’s hope he’s right.
Whether it transforms me into something wonderful or not, the book is amazing. Every student of literature, lover of books, or budding author should give this one a go. Then again, I am partial, remember, I fell in love with Forster ages ago.
Anakalian Whims 