From: What My Mother Doesn't Know

Mom's The Word

My mother has never talked to me
about birth control or safe sex or about
whether I should wait till I'm married.

But whenever I'm getting ready
to go out with Dylan,
she hovers in the hall

and keeps wringing her hands,
like she's scared that
I'm going to get pregnant or something.

And if I ever did,
which of course I won't,
it would serve her right....

Sonya Sones

"Be Nobody's Darling"

Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.
Watch the people succumb
To madness
With ample cheer;
Let them look askance at you
And you askance reply.

Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool)
or line the crowded
river beds
with other impetuous
Fools.

Make a merry gathering
O the bank
Where thousands perished
For brave hurt words
They said.

Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Qualified to live
Among your dead.

Alice Walker

Making a Fist

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching the palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

Naomi Shihab Nye

From: "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

image by Gordon Parks

"My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

Langston Hughes

From: "Her Majesty Loses Her Touch"

"Back in the days
when I was called Queen of Cherries
I used to write.
Not like this.
I'd lie in bed at night
composing bawdy lyrics,
a regal drifter through my private orchard
of no regrets.
Cherries simply rained
down on my head."

from A Working Girl Can't Win
by Deborah Garrison

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."

Dr. Seuss

This is one of my all-time favorite quotes! It's magnetted to my fridge. What's your favorite Dr. Seuss line or book?

A Rare Saturday Post

I loved the Daily Literary Quote so much, I had to immediately Web-nap it:

"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

Mary Oliver

Enjoy your weekends, bloggees!

Me loves this.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, --
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson

From: "What Do Women Want?"

"I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath..."

You can hear Kim Addonizio read this poem aloud by visiting the Academy of American Poets Web site.

Loves her. Don't want to infringe on copyright though, so go read the whole thing. Read more from her book Tell Me at her author's Web site.

From: "Passer Mortuus Est"

"Death devours all lovely things...

After all my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished;
Need we say it was not love,
Just because it perished?"

from "Passer Mortuus Est"
Edna St. Vincent Millay

From: "A Mood"

"A blight, a gloom, I know not what, has crept upon my gladness--
Some vague, remote ancestral touch of sorrow, or of madness..."

T.B. Aldrich

"Time to murder and create"

The voice in my head chides me regularly:

• Why did you trust her? You should’ve known better.
• Hey dummy, why don't you keep that thought to yourself.
• Is this a game of how many was-es and thats you can fit on a page?

The voice is smart, snarky, and quick. When it goes off on me, which is often, I get a taste of all the hurt I’ve laid on others over the years in the name of being funny. I can be a real bitch, but I’m working on it.

In my lifelong quest for inner peace, I’ve been reading a lot of hippie new-age stuff--I read everything--and this one hippie in particular recommends talking to your anger, finding out why it’s so, well, angry.

My anger rolls her eyes when I approach. She taps her foot impatiently and asks, “What now?”

But I walk right up to her and ask, "Whats your damage, Heather?"

The rest is personal, so I won’t go into it. I mean, it’s embarrassing, and even though my anger is kind of a bitch, I don’t want to sell her out. I’m trying to teach her about trusting people and being nicer, especially to me—so I lead by example.

Here she comes again, yapping about my low nano word count.

“There will be time, there will be time…” I tell her, and get this—she smiles. She remembers college when we used to skip class to sit around our dorm smoking cigarettes and reading poetry out loud with passionate inflection. She remembers writing 600 poems in the style of "Prufrock" because we couldn’t get that haunting voice out of our head--and how all that useless, horrible writing made us the wordsmith we are today.

These days, me and my anger are tight, yo. Still, she leaned in close this morning and said, “Staring into the distance is cool, but it’s November 17, and I really want to know what you-know-who is going to do about you-know-what. If you don’t start writing that scene, we’ll never know.”

And my anger is totally right, although I’m glad she’s found a nicer way to express herself.

Describe your inner voice. Give it an adjective, and tell me about it in the comments. If it’s a negative adjective, have a conversation with your inner voice. The world has enough mean people. Be nice to yourself.

From: A Certain Slant of Light

"I thought if I could read you what I wrote, you could give me some advice."

He was struck silent, rarely having heard these words from a student's lips. "Of course." He motioned me to sit in the front row. "Is it a poem?" he asked.

"No," I said, letting my bag clunk onto the floor beside the chair as I sat. I cherished his attention so much, but now it was difficult to bear. I kept my gaze on the paper in my hands. "Not exactly."

"A short story?"

"Well, it's short."

Be bold, I told myself. "A Letter from a Muse to Her Poet," I read. He leaned back in his chair. "Dear sir, I was called away and couldn't bring you, but now I feel haunted." He was staring at me, which made my cheeks prickle. "I know that sometimes you felt I was a part of you and that losing me would leave a hole in your heart, but that's not true." I looked up now, knowing the rest by heart. "I liked to pretend I was the core of your talent, but it wasn't me. Everything you do, the ideas you weave, the lines you write, the words you choose, it was always only you." He was still as a statue. "Please forgive me," I said. "I'm sorry that I didn't say goodbye."

A Certain Slant of Light
Laura Whitcomb

P.S., A friend of mine is reading a certain vampire book and of course she loves it, but her main qualm is an interesting one. She gets perturbed when the vampire speaks with incorrect grammar. The other characters' bad grammar doesn't bother her, but as she put it "THAT IS NOT HOW HE SPEAKS! HE WOULD NEVER SAY THAT!"

Secret: long ago, when I only dreamed of being a writer, I convinced myself I did not need to pay attention to all that grammar stuff because "my peeps talked real." I was really limiting myself, I later realized, by not even learning the tools required to write intelligent characters.

Why am I telling you this? Because bibliophiles and grammarphiles will love A Certain Slant of Light because the main characters speak so well. It's their very nature. Plus, OMG, IT'S SO GOOD!

From: "The Black Art"

"A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl."

Man, I love me some Anne Sexton.

From: Tricks

They Call Vegas

Sin City, like calling it what it is
somehow legitimizes the name.
Las Vegas is Sin City. Whole lot

of sinning going on, from fancy
high-rise casino rooms to sleazy
well-off-the-strip motel dives.

People come here specifically
to sin. But I wonder whether
it's really true that "what happens

in Vegas stays in Vegas."
People stain themselves here.
I bet, no matter how hard they

scrub themselves after sinning,
when they go home, a certain
amount of stain remains visible.

Then, I guess, it's up to the spouse
or significant other to recognize
the meaning of that dark splotch

ghosting beneath the bleach.
Most of 'em probably don't want
to look. Don't want to know.

Ellen Hopkins

This Conventional World of Unhip Undergraduates*

I've read books about writing for as long as I can remember. The act of writing fascinates me. A lot of people, however, consider books about writing useless schlock.

Have you read the Alexander Chee article about learning to write with Annie Dillard?

It's beautifully written and boasts all sorts of valuable thoughts on ego and writing. One of the most memorable lines came not from Dillard or Chee, but from Chee's father:

"Whatever it is you want to do, find the person who does it best, and then see if they will teach you."

In the old days, they called this an apprenticeship. I'm a writing apprentice, willing to unquestioningly wax on and wax off for the right person. That's what I'm doing when I read Speak for the 50th time, when I read On Writing and Stein on Writing and A. Victoria Mixon, Editor, the blog that recently mentioned that Donald Maass's book The Career Novelist is available for free download. (go 'nap it!)

As far as I know, Laurie Halse Anderson (aka, the person who does it best) isn't accepting any mentees, but if her book-eating daughter tweets that she LOVES a certain writing essay, I'm going to read it with an open notebook and poised pen. Does that make me a neophyte? Do I care? In the new age of life coaches, blogs, and tweets, I'm still an old-school apprentice learning my craft.

*I searched high and low on the Interwebs to find a poem I love called "I the Graduate" by Ted Joans because I think it complements this post. It's not widely booknapped, so it's probably not well-known. That's a shame, 'cause it rules. Read the whole thing on the ultimate booknapping site. Here's a taste:

I graduated
From my mom's womb
From childhood and family
From neighbors
From villages/towns/and cities
From religions/creeds/nationalities
And stagnant allegiances
And fad conformity
I graduated
From it all

Do you read writers writing about writing? Why or why not? If you do, how 'bout some recommendations?

Apropos

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
at the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

James Wright

Poetry Isn't Dead, or Quiet

Despite what the Debbie Downers would have you believe, people still write kick-ass poetry.

Want proof?

You can listen to Kim Addonizio read one of her best poems, "You Were," at poems out loud, which features poets reading poetry and other poem-related frackery.

"You're Already a Voice Inside My Head"

I preach a lot about reading contemporary books, but the truth of the matter is that I’m steeped in the classics.

In life and in literature, I respect my elders.

I read young adult books now, but when I was a young adult, I was a literary snob. I also, and this goes for now and then, have always read any sort of writing advice I could find, but especially heeded that of Writers with a capital W.

One of my favorite pieces of writing advice comes from Writer Mark Twain:

“Use the right word, not its second cousin.”

This statement is hanging right above my desk. My office has zero pictures on the walls, but plenty of black text printed on white paper pinned around my desk. That way, I don’t spend too much time staring at distractions. All of my distractions lead me back to writing.

JA Konrath publishes a writing blog where he recently advised, “Do not start a story with telling,” and I cursed, because I have very recently done that. I started a story with this sentence: “She felt terrible.”--the exact sentence Konrath uses as an example of what not to do. When revising that story, I questioned the sentence, questioned others about whether my questioning was justified, and then left it. Oh inner voice, why do you mock me so?

Wait a minute. I’m having an epiphany here. Who is that inner voice and where does she get her information?

My inner voice is really a collection of people, only some of whom are Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Annie Dillard, Frank Soos, Derick Burleson, Ray Bradbury, Garrison Keilor, Henry David Thoreau, and Barbara Kingsolver. They blend together in a literary conversation in my head, continuing to teach me long after I’ve completed their classes and read their books.

So, let me ask you: whose voices are filling your head and guiding your writing? Do you block out the writers of the past? Nothing wrong with that approach. Bob Dylan said “your old road is rapidly aging” in one of the best songs ever written. That’s the thing. Sometimes my voices disagree and I have to make the call.

Do you have a quote you write by? A lesson from an old or new Writer?

Something to Ponder

"Instant karma's going to get you."

-John Lennon