by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 25, 2008 | Pam Houston, stories, truth |
Pam Houston is one of my all-time favorite writers. She is a master at getting it out of her head and onto the page. Take for example this bit of dialogue from her novel, Sight Hound: “You know,” she said, “I’m not going to be one of those...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 23, 2008 | memory, shapes, truth |
Charles Frazier’s second book,Thirteen Moons, is narrated by Will Cooper, who has a friend named Bear, a Cherokee Indian chief. “I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. ...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 22, 2008 | my writing |
marry tale #2: the kitten Once upon a time there was a man and a woman, who decided to become the husband and the wife. They were very new at being the husband and the wife and had no skills at it. And so they had a problem. They weren’t quite sure how to handle...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 20, 2008 | novels, reviews, stories |
In a 1921 New York Times article entitled, “What is a Novel, Anyhow?”, Henry Kitchell Webster, writes “A novel is defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary as a fictitious prose narrative of sufficient length to fill one or more volumes. Well, do you...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 18, 2008 | catching moments, details |
The Oxford American Dictionary defines collaboration as “working jointly, especially in a literary or artistic production.” It defines commitment as “the process or an instance of committing oneself.” And committing as “pledging or...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Oct 16, 2008 | memoir |
In his memoir, Dog Years, the poet Mark Doty writes, “only part of our reality is representable in words. I feel immersed in things I can’t name most of the time.” Still, he is a poet and a writer. He spends his life fighting against the...
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...
