by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Dec 9, 2008 | continuous life, Dani Shapiro |
My favorite passage in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: “Do you remember the lake? she said, in an abrupt voice, under pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Dec 6, 2008 | my writing, stories |
My story, “Into the Woods,” appears in Storyglossia’s Issue 32, December 2008. Here’s how it starts: Georgia was putting Tyler’s baseball schedule into her computer when she heard the racing of a car’s engine, followed by the squeal of tires...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Dec 3, 2008 | first novels, reviews |
How do you tell a story? First sentence: “The man arrived after morning prayers.” The first paragraph goes on to paint the scene of that morning. “The man waited, and the boys watched…” The second paragraph drops back to explain: ...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Dec 1, 2008 | poetry |
Sunny and cold. The long, December shadows of bare trees run far away from the woods. So begins Ted Kooser’s short poem, “December 1.” In the fall of 1998, as he was recovering from cancer, Ted Kooser, still six years away from being the thirteenth...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 28, 2008 | Pam Houston, reviews |
I just finished Toni Morrison’s new novel, A Mercy. Which was amazing. Yet I now regret that, while I was reading it, I spent so much time trying to figure out the story. I believe that if I had just let myself succumb to the effect of the words, the story...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 27, 2008 | poetry |
Jane Hirshfield writes: Having eaten the pears. Having eaten the black figs, the white figs. Eaten the apples. Table be strewn. Table be strewn with stems, table with peelings of grapefruit and pleasure. Table be strewn with pleasure, what was here to be done...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 26, 2008 | life, shapes |
In Remembering the Bone House, Nancy Mairs writes, “Here I develop that ability to concatenate events which characterizes human consciousness and makes ‘daily life’ possible.” I had to look it up. To concatenate is to link together, as in a...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 24, 2008 | memoir, memory, reviews |
Remembering the Bone House is one of my all-time favorite books. Nancy Mairs wrote this memoir in 1989. It was out of print for a while, but then Beacon Press did a new printing in 1995, for which the author wrote a new preface. In it, she called...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 21, 2008 | craft of writing, memory, reviews, truth |
The Gathering, by Irish writer Anne Enright, won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. I read it in April. In this novel, the narrator describes her family of origin in terms of the labels we acquire, as families and as individuals in a family. “The Hegartys didn’t...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 19, 2008 | journeys, reviews, shapes |
If I weren’t reading all of Rachel Cusk’s books to look at how her writing develops over time, I would not have finished her sixth book, In the Fold, published in 2005. As one reviewer wrote, “too little happened to too many people.” Or...
