by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 14, 2008 | continuous life |
Tim O’Brien, in The Things They Carried: “It’s now 1990. I’m forty-three years old, which would’ve seemed impossible to a fourth grader, and yet when I look at photographs of myself as I was in 1956, I realize that in the important ways...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 12, 2008 | stories |
My favorite journal is One Story. That’s what it is. One story. At a time. Brilliant. Every three weeks, one story arrives in my mailbox. I always keep a story in my purse. Or my pocket. I’m never without something to read. One Story is the...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 10, 2008 | reviews |
On my list of top ten all-time favorite books is a book I read in 2000, The Half-Life of Happiness by John Casey. It’s a novel about a marriage and a family, but I haven’t read it since then and can no longer remember any specifics. My yellow highlights,...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 8, 2008 | reviews, shapes, truth |
Rachel Cusk’s fourth book is a memoir, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. My favorite line, because of the unwritten premise, comes in the Introduction, where she writes, “…so it would be a contradiction to write a book about motherhood...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 7, 2008 | life, time |
On NPR, on September 20th, I heard David Sedaris say that he was no different than anyone else except that he kept a notebook in his pocket. He noticed and he recorded. In the May 8, 2006 issue of the New Yorker, he wrote: “For the past ten years or so, I’ve...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 4, 2008 | life |
Life is weather. Life is meals. Lunches on a blue checked cloth on which salt has spilled. The smell of tobacco. Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives. James Salter, in one of my all-time favorite books, Light Years. I met James Salter in Portland in July of 2004,...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 2, 2008 | my writing |
marry tale #1: the doors between Once upon a time there was a man and a woman, who decided to become the husband and the wife. They wanted to be sensible. They wanted to continue to respect each other. Each wanted to preserve his and her privacy. They weren’t...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Sep 30, 2008 | shapes |
The Oxford American Dictionary defines this beautiful sounding word as like prose; lacking poetic beauty. unromantic; dull; comonplace. The top three definitions of prose are the ordinary form of the written or spoken language a passage of prose a tedious speech or...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Sep 28, 2008 | details, journeys, reviews |
The Country Life, published in 1997, is Rachel Cusk’s third novel. She is spacing them out like children–one every two years. As opposed to The Temporary, the writing is solid throughout, continuously propelling the reader forward. The first sentence...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Sep 27, 2008 | continuous life |
I used to copy down favorite passages in a notebook. A small five by seven three-ring binder. I could move the pages around, organize them. I haven’t written in it in a while. I’m not sure why. Maybe too busy writing myself. Anyway, I was looking...
