Comments on: How We Spend Our Days: Adam Braver

By: so, awp 2012 chicago | catching days

so, awp 2012 chicago | catching days — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:29:00 +0000

[…] is the only time I see some of these people–Adam Braver, for example, whom I met in 2006 at the New York State Summer Writers Workshop. And this […]

By: cynthia

cynthia — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 21:02:06 +0000

In reply to fortunaterebel. Fortunaterebel,thanks for reading and for leaving a comment. I hope you'll be back.

By: fortunaterebel

fortunaterebel — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 06:58:13 +0000

omg i read Adam Braver, i like Mr. Lincoln’s Wars SO MUCH!!!

By: Adam

Adam — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:44:29 +0000

A quick thanks for all the thoughtful comments. It was a pleasure to write the piece, and a pleasure to read the comments. Now back to today’s day.

Best, Adam

By: cynthia

cynthia — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 17:26:53 +0000

In reply to jenniferneri. Thanks for checking back, Jennifer. I don't know what happened with the comments on the first. And as always, thank you for reading.

By: cynthia

cynthia — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 17:17:52 +0000

In reply to David Gillaspie.

David, it’s nice to hear from you. And you’re right. It is definitely encouraging to know, in such a solitary profession, that there are others out there slogging away, day after day, just like we are.

Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment. I hope you’ll be back.

By: cynthia

cynthia — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 17:00:46 +0000

In reply to Walt Pascoe. Walt, what a lovely comment. I know just what you mean about reading something that starts your mind going in a million different directions. When that happens, I must always reread slowly to make sure I don't lose anything. I love the images of the clothes lines. I'm very taken with those--from the old-fashioned multi-layered hexagonal ones to the more straight-lined ones. I have no childhood associations (that I recall) with clothes lines, but I am so taken with them. I've already written one post on the subject, and I have tons of pictures still to wrestle with. Thanks for adding to the conversation!

By: jenniferneri

jenniferneri — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 01:04:25 +0000

I did, Cynthia, but came by today to check. I just wanted to say that I love hearing about a writer’s day and thoughts. Great – thanks to both of you!

By: David Gillaspie

David Gillaspie — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:31:21 +0000

Just a minute, Adam Braver is working my schedule? This is good news. Imagine the ‘pay it forward’ sense of one writer describing another’s day as their own; writers doing the same thing without knowing others on the same track.

If this is the day, Adam’s day, your day, my day, then this is how it’s supposed to work. The encouragment pot is bubbling after reading this post.

Thanks,

David Gillaspie
deegeesbb.wordpress.com

By: Walt Pascoe

Walt Pascoe — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:56:58 +0000

What a wonderful piece. It did something to me as I read it which I love: it sent my mind running all over the place on simultaneous but wildly divergent lines of thought.
Even though I’m not a writer, I found myself going “yes,yes,yes” all the way through Adam’s eloquent description of the balancing act required of anyone in a creative line of work.
And the “Just Show Up” theme, and the need to soldier on even when inspiration is absent, resonates. It seems to pop up in discussions like this often enough that we should probably give it an acronym. J.S.U.
But this line really caught me:
” And today I’m parsing words, part shaman, part mechanic. Trying to fix with precision, yet still foresee the choices that will cause me to cringe two days later. ”
I think Proust spent hundreds of pages saying essentially the same thing!
And this is a deceptively simple statement:
“It’s rarely the story itself that’s interesting, it’s the way you tell it.”
It brings to mind the image of an old fashioned clothesline. The ones w/ pulleys that frequently used to run from back doors, across yards, to the corners of garages. They were ubiquitous in the working class neighborhood where I grew up, and we used to get into all manner of mischief w/them. It’s a mechanism w/ all sorts of variations like cotton line-old and gray and fuzzy, or new and gleaming white w/ the little bumps from the weaving still standing up crisply on the surface. Or plastic line, weirdly unpleasant to the touch, prone to bizarre torqued entanglement, and sometimes w/ a superfluous and vaguely gaudy red line woven through the extruded strands that would unravel at the cut end and prick your skin in unpleasant ways. The pulleys, w/ cross-shaped guards that would contain the line and keep it on track . Some new and galvanized in that flaky silver-gray way, or rusted to various degrees so that new white line would get tattooed w/ rhythmically spaced orangey-brown marks. Or the ghastly old re-painted pulleys, w/ gobs of pathetically ineffectual pigment applied in a fit of hopeful craft-gleam by a parsimonious homeowner, worn away in the grooves of the wheel where all the action was. Oh and then there were the tensioners, whose mechanical variations and mysterious physics could generate pages of rhapsodic description in in a David Foster Wallace novel….So the clothesline. Like the storyline, lots of variations but fundamentally of little interest compared to where the real action starts: with what gets hung on it! I could have a ball going on and on about the airing of ones laundry, and all the strange memories I have of birds starting a nest in a pair of jeans left out overnight…or the partially frozen sheets that needed to be bent in half to be brought inside…and but so the undergarments! The brassieres !… But you probably get the point.

All in all a genuinely stimulating and evocative little bit of writing that left me very curious and interested to read some Adam Braver. As usual my TBR pile gets a little taller every time I stop by here!