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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.

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January 1, 2023: Alexandra Zapruder

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Abraham Zapruder was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant and the owner of Jennifer Juniors, a Dallas company that made inexpensive copies of designer dresses. On November 22nd, 1963, the presidential motorcade would pass in front of his store. He’d thought about taking his home movie camera to work that day to record the event, but in the end he decided not to. His assistant encouraged him to go back and get it, which of course he did.

Alexandra Zapruder never knew her grandfather Abe. He died when she was only ten months old. She writes, “it occurred to me that there was an access route to my grandfather through the Zapruder film and the assassination. I understood, if vaguely, that his experience held clues about Abe Zapruder, clues no one else would notice or look for…”

On November 22, 1963, I was only six years old, but on that day, I added a whole new cluster of phrases to my vocabulary–including the Texas School Book Depository, the grassy knoll, and the Zapruder film. I was excited to read Twenty-Six Seconds–the big, thick book Alexandra Zapruder wrote about her grandfather and his film with the subtitle A Personal History of the Zapruder Film.

As the title and subtitle suggest, the book is both fact-based and family-rich. It includes documentary details and reference notes on the possession and ownership of the film as well as the feelings of the Zapruder family members for Abe and about this film that changed all their lives, including the feelings of the author as she discovers information in connection with the writing of this book–a significant undertaking that required research into the Kennedy assassination as well as the collection and review of family documents.

On that Friday in November of 1963, when Abe got back to work with the camera, to fill up the remaining minutes on side A of the reel (which was full of home movies), he filmed his assistant. He wanted the motorcade to be the first thing on side B. The film was double 8mm color film, which was difficult to process. Later that day, someone had the presence of mind to contact Kodak, who opened a lab just blocks from Love Field at approximately the same time Lyndon Johnson was being sworn in on Air Force One as the thirty-sixth president of the United States.

Twenty-Six Seconds is a fascinating read for those who were alive at the time and for those interested in history. I didn’t know until reading the book that the film showed the president was dead before arrival at Parkland Memorial Hospital (also part of the vocabulary cluster of that day).

Alex started out as a member of the founding staff of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where she became interested in the ways that young people document their lives and how these records can be preserved. So it makes perfect sense that in 2020, in partnership with the Educators Institute for Human Rights, Alex launched a project called Dispatches from Quarantine, which gave teenagers a way to document their experiences during the Covid-19 Pandemic. You can visit an online gallery to see their contributions in prose, poetry, photography, art, and song.

Alex’s first book, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, published in 2002 and winner of the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category, is a collection of diaries written by young people during the Holocaust. After its publication, she wrote and co-produced I’m Still Here, a documentary film for young audiences based on the book, which aired on MTV in May 2005 and was nominated for two Emmy awards. She has also been published in Parade, LitHub, Smithsonian, and The New York Times.

Come back on JANUARY 1st to read how ALEXANDRA ZAPRUDER spends her days.

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

xA

July 1, 2022: Kirie Pedersen

Every day, I marvel that I get to live almost without sounds of civilization here adjoining the Olympic National Park, where I was born and still live on the same property. Instead, I sleep to the sound of waves on the cliff (May through October when I sleep in a tent right on the cliff), and eagles, seals, great blue herons, and myriad other birds in the wildlife sanctuary I left/created around my cabin built mostly of repurposed materials.

For those of you who don’t know her from the delightful comments she leaves after reading essays in this series, meet Kirie Pedersen. She’s published essays, non-fiction, and fiction in more than fifty literary and general interest magazines. More than fifty. I became aware of her writing because she read a story of mine back in 2013, came looking for me, found Catching Days, and left a comment. The excerpt above is from a letter she wrote me in 2019, when we were talking about our days.

I’m obsessed with where Kirie lives and where she writes. In a wonderful 2017 interview over at The Magnolia Review, Kirie describes her writing spot.

I work in a 10×12 foot hut I call Eagle Cottage because bald eagles nest nearby, and they cackle as I write. Eagle Cottage was repurposed from a 1924 schoolhouse that was being demolished… [It] is lined with journals, poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and books on writing craft. Close beside me are jars of colored pencils and fountain pens.

In that interview, you’ll find more lovely details about her process and her materials, and her Artist Chicken!

Kirie has lived a fascinating life. Earlier this year, I read a piece by her, entitled “Finding Pulali,” which was published in Sunspot Literary Journal. This piece is about where and how she grew up. Before I read it, I didn’t know what Pulali was.

Pulali Point sits pretty much in the middle of the Olympic Peninsula and is itself a small peninsula jutting into Dabob Bay, Hood Canal, and Jackson Cove. The geological formation itself dates from the Eocene Era and is about forty million years old.

I could spend this entire introduction talking about this one piece that is alive with form. Here’s the beginning.

For a graduate workshop, I entitled this “Essay in Twelve Genres.” Feedback: The word genre is phony, unnecessary, and insufficiently ironic, a pretension by someone fancying herself intellectual. I was, they suggested, using genre to seal myself up and be safe.
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I too was concerned by the word, but it is the idea that disturbs me. When I try to write about Pulali, I grope for a form that captures my birthplace, my home. I attempt essay, dream, play, story. Word made manifest. Word made flesh.

Kirie had a hard time when each of her parents died in a two-year period while she was living across the country, far away from this world, on the opposite coast in Manhattan. In “In a Dark Time,” she wrote about the despair and depression she suffered and how she brought herself back from it. This essay was snapped up by The Magnolia Review, prompting the interview mentioned above. “In a Dark Time” received the Ink Award, for being the piece that unified the entire issue. It also received a Pushcart nomination. The excerpt below shows the mind/body connection in a number of ways.

My previous despair returned full-force, and perhaps due to the depleted immune response grief can cause, a tooth abscessed, and I developed debilitating back pain. I’d tried my list of non-drug cures that final year of my mother’s life, but my practice was desultory. Now, flattened by physical and emotional pain, I became determined to survive.

If you’re looking for a peak into Kirie’s fiction, check out “Liberating Life,” a flash piece from Glossalalia, with an ending that just keeps echoing out… Here’s an excerpt from the middle.

In Buddhism, Paul said, there was a ceremony called Liberating Life. The monks gathered animals scheduled for slaughter, and they freed them. When the Mormons purchased a live turkey for Thanksgiving, the turkey wandered around the yard. Melissa asked Paul if they could purchase the turkey and talk the Mormons into buying one already killed.
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The Mormons agreed, and the turkey moved to the Buddhist side of the fence.

This essay, “Getting a Life–Coming of Age with Killers,” which was published in Under the Sun and which received a Notable Mention in The Best American Essays 2018, is a personal look at growing up in the same place in which Ted Bundy was murdering women. It’s also a solid piece of journalism about what was actually happening, as well as the realities of the death penalty. Here’s the first sentence, which starts with the personal.

“Ted got Brenda,” my sister said.

And here’s one more excerpt from the beginning so you can get a sense of how the journalistic voice mixes with the personal.

In my early twenties, every three or four weeks a peer in her late teens or early twenties disappeared. Brenda, a year behind me at Mt. Ranier High School, was number six. The women vanished from streets I’d walked that same day, from beaches where my friends and I sat to tan, from beds just blocks from my own, and from the campuses of the universities my sisters, friends, and I attended.

Kirie’s essay “Saving Paradise,” published in the beautiful Still Point Artists Quarterly in 2017, will be of special interest to those who love places that are disappearing.

The last thing on earth I wanted was to walk to the front of that room, but if I didn’t say something, I would forever lose my chance. “I propose preservation of Meadowdale as a wilderness,” I murmured into the microphone, voice thin and shaking. “A walking-only park where children can learn about the environment.”

Kirie earned an M.A. in fiction writing from Western Washington University, where Annie Dillard (!) was her thesis chair. Kirie also loves the writing of Ellen Gilchrist, another favorite of mine. She’s taught writing for gifted and talented inner-city students, elders, and others. Washington State commissioned and published her Writing Handbook for Teachers and Tutors (published in Spanish and English) and Teaching Creative Writing Using Native American Songs and Myths. Please check out her website–I love how she introduces each new publication with a few words about the piece and about the journal where it’s published. P.S. Click on the little white lines in the upper right to subscribe to her publication updates!

Come back on JULY 1st to read how KIRIE PEDERSEN spends her days.

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

xA

May 1, 2022: Heath Hardage Lee

Vietnam was the war of my childhood. We watched it on the CBS Evening News. I wore MIA and POW bracelets. In sixth grade, I read a POW autobiography. But I never heard anything about the League of Wives, a group of women whose military husbands were prisoners during the war.

Huge thanks to fellow Davidson College graduate Heath Hardage Lee for telling this story. Her narrative nonfiction book, The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took On the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home, is now out in paperback, and Reese Witherspoon and her production company Hello Sunshine, in partnership with Sony 3000, have optioned the book for a feature film with Heath as executive producer and historical consultant!

During the course of the book, we meet many amazing women. Sybil Stockdale, the founder of the League of Wives, was born in 1924, an era when women had few rights. And, she was a Navy wife, schooled to stay home and stay quiet. Before her husband was shot down in the fall of 1965, she had “found her role as a mother and wife fulfilling.” Jane Denton was not only born in the twenties but also southern. When her husband was shot down in 1965, she was thirty-nine and the mother of seven. She “was determined to follow the U.S. government rules to the letter…terrified of deviating from protocol in any way.” These women, and Louise and Phyllis and Andrea and Helene and Kathleen and more, were led to believe they might endanger the lives of their husbands by speaking out.

To make matters worse, most of the wives needed their missing and imprisoned husbands’ signatures to cash the paychecks the military was writing. And because it was the early sixties, “[m]any could not buy or register a car, create and manage a mortgage, refinance, rent an apartment, or buy a house.” Not only were the women filled with worry for their husbands, but they had major practical problems at home. Sybil urged “the Navy to make the wives a priority, not an afterthought.”

These women played nice until they couldn’t stand it any longer. Then they flew to Washington, over and over again. They organized (with wine!) and, with the military’s help, wrote coded letters to their husbands. The end result was better treatment for the men while they were in prisons in Vietnam and better treatment for the women while they managed houses and children at home.

It’s a fascinating story. The details will amaze you–many of these women kept diaries. And Heath’s writing style is a pleasure to read.

What would later be called “mansplaining” was almost always how men in power communicated with women. It would not even have been remarked upon or noticed.

The truth was, when confronted with the Vietnam POW/MIA scenario and the women the men had left behind, neither Whiz Kids nor Wise Men knew what the hell to do.

This next excerpt begins with President Nixon’s words during a press conference.

“I have the very great honor to present in this room today five of the most courageous women I have had the privilege to meet in my life.” Sybil stood next to him, nodding in approval, dressed again in her favorite bright-pink wool suit. There was no doubt in her mind that she had gotten her money’s worth out of that outfit.

I had no idea that the POW/MIA bracelet fund drive was started in 1969 by two college students, who sold more than five million bracelets and raised tens of thousands of dollars for POW/MIA awareness-building programs. While you wait for the movie, read the book!

In addition to being a historian, Heath is a biographer and a curator. Her first book, Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause, was published in 2014. In 2017, Heath was the Robert J. Dole Curatorial Fellow, and her exhibition entitled The League of Wives: Vietnam POW MIA Advocates & Allies about Vietnam POW MIA wives traveled to museum venues all over the United States. She is currently at work on a biography of Pat Nixon that is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in 2024.

Come back on MAY 1st to read how HEATH HARDAGE LEE spends her days.

If you prefer to follow the posts by RSS feed, just click on the RSS button in the footer of any page. A bunch of gobbledygook will appear. Disregard that, and copy the url that appears at top of the page: https://cynthianewberrymartin.com/feed/. Then paste that url into your reader.

If you don’t have an RSS reader, I can recommend Bloglovin as easy to use. There are also apps like Feedly and Inoreader.

And if you use Chrome, they have a cool feed reader that will appear as a tiny orange icon in the top right corner of your screen. It’s awesome. I just tried it out and may actually move the sites I follow from Bloglovin’ to the Chrome reader. Here are the simple steps to set this up.

1. Go to the Chrome “store” and download the free chrome reader. The orange RSS icon will magically appear in the top right corner of your screen.
2. When the create-an-account page appears, you can skip that by going to the bottom of the page and clicking the box to continue without an account, which is what I did.
3. A welcome-to-feeder page will appear. Just click the purple button to proceed to the next step.
4. A notification page will appear. I declined notifications because I can just check the icon when I want to. It’s now part of my nav bar. But if you want email notifications, that’s an option.
5. A feeder-extension option will appear. I ignored and clicked next.
6. The pick-a-theme option is next, and I surprised myself by choosing orange! I’m usually all black and white.
7. And I was DONE!

The whole time I was writing this post, this was playing in my brain.

~

To paint a thing had always been a way for me to love it.

If you’re looking for a good book–a sure thing, a book you can sink down into and a world you can get lost in–you’re in luck. Robin Black’s debut novel, Life Drawing, was published on Tuesday. The story of a marriage between a painter and a writer, it’s written with lots of interiority, and most importantly, lots of honesty. The characters are as flawed as we all are, and there are no easy answers anywhere.

The opening paragraph paints a picture that sticks with the reader not only the length of the book, but even now, months after I finished it.

In the days leading up to my husband Owen’s death, he visited Alison’s house every afternoon. I would watch him trudge over the small, snowy hill between our two properties, half the time away from me, half the time toward me. And I would wonder what he thought about as he went. Wonder too if Alison watched him from a window of her own, and whether the expression she saw on his face as he approached was very different from the one I saw as he came home.

The narrator, Augusta (Gus) Edelman, is a painter, and periodically she tells the story as if she were looking at a picture.

This is me, just before my first glimpse of Alison…

And later,

This is Owen, on the day we moved in…

Genius structure for a novel written in the point of view of a painter and here’s a genius use of an adverb:

We shared our bed, uneventfully.

While renovating a bathroom, Gus discovers old WWI newspapers, which spark a desire to paint these lost boys, and this project is as captivating as the relationship between Gus and Owen, with the dead boys moving through the rooms as though they had all the time in the world, an eerie echo of Owen’s movements, and for that matter, all our movements.

There are rich descriptions of table settings…

On Thursday morning, I decided to set the table in white, almost entirely white. White lace over white linen. White napkins. White china—or as close as I could find among our strange collection. White candles set into old silver candlesticks. I wanted a canvas for the meal. I wanted to experience the table filling with food as I experienced a painting coming together. The only exception I made was for a handful of leaves, still moist, orange, red, that I cut into thin strips and scattered, confetti across the whiteness, ribbons of autumn itself.

There is the world of marriage…

“And so it begins,” Owen said at dusk, as together we crossed the hill between our homes. And so it began.

There are often two conversations going on in a marriage. The one that you’re having and the one you’re not. Sometimes you don’t even know when that second, silent one has begun.

Meanwhile, we lay side by side each night like figures on paired sarcophagi, and instead of stopping for a caress or a kiss when our paths crossed in the kitchen, or on the stairs, we muttered things like excuse me, and sorry about that.

Often in novels about a marriage, there’s nothing driving the novel forward. Not so here, where, with the retrospective point of view, we know from the first paragraph that Owen dies. In addition, the writing itself pushes the reader from page to page.

“Yet I didn’t hate Nora that night.”

I may have to read Life Drawing again, right now, right this minute.

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month, a guest writer shares how he or she spends the day.

March 1, 2014: Robert Boswell

One of the things I love about Robert Boswell’s new novel Tumbledown, a big, thick book of four hundred forty-eight pages, is how structure echoes content. There is no white space between the narratives of the different point of view characters. For example, the therapist James Candler’s story glides seamlessly into that of Elizabeth Ray, a former patient. This lack of white space threw me until I realized what the book was about. There is no difference between us. It’s not therapists over here and patients over there. We are all in this together. Genius, really.

People encounter life in vastly dissimilar ways. Some insist their days are orderly and unchanging, vessels on a slow-moving assembly belt, each identically filled by invisible hands. For others, the days are relentlessly complicated and unpredictable, as different, one from the other, as patients waiting to see a therapist. But for everyone there comes a day when the filling no longer fits the vessel, when the therapist finds himself pouring out his heart to the patient, when air is indistinguishable from water and out is the rough equivalent of in… Such days are worthy of our attention.

Pam Houston described the book this way: “it’s like a net, a net that catches all of us.”

Tumbledown‘s dedication may be my favorite ever.

This book is dedicated to all the clients who survived my tenure as a counselor and to the one who didn’t.

As you can tell from the first quote, this novel has a strong narrator. It also has tender characters who create lots of story. It’s funny and honest.  And I have to admit, I fell in love with its sentences. Obviously, some of the quotes below place in more than one category.

Story

All the girl needed was a new life. Wasn’t that what everyone needed? 

In those days, the morning had several stages and each stage could hold a dozen surprises and the distance between waking and sleeping was too great to be measured by anything so flimsy as hours. 

…to wonder about the alternate paths, the echo trajectories, the shadow lives that trail after all of us at every turn, and lend to the single life we lead the definition that gives it meaning. 

Honesty

“I heard it on the movie,” Karly said, “and rewinded the DVD nineteen times to get it on paper.”

Sentence

He was a moderate fatso and had too much action in his face, like a reasonably cool piano piece played way too quickly.

He would fill his glass from the pitcher, that bubbling, sweating pitcher with an indefinable smell, which, years later, Jimmy—by then James—would identify as tonic, a pitcher of gin and tonic, and the adult James could be carried back by that slight smell to his youth, the rambling house in the high Sonora, and the expansive sense of possibility, as wide as the desert sky. 

Description

Their damp pants left ovals on the plank floor, like mouths, like the wet places lips were always making, like the coloring on a topo map that indicated forests or high elevation or great swamps.

Character

He remembers the story that Karly told him about Mr. James Candler racing his car and wrecking, or maybe it was another car that wrecked. Karly is not great at telling and his receiving is mediocre at best, and it only matters that Mr. James Candler was racing—Mick takes his foot off the accelerator—and how everybody it seems, has to live in this tumbledown world, not just him. He isn’t alone, and following that thought comes another, sweeping in to join it. He understands that it is his former life that never existed, that is unreal, deluded, that is only a child’s imagining. Believing in those days of seamless reality is the real madness. There is no going back, if he’s lucky, there’s slowing down.

Robert Boswell had a life before Tumbledown–six novels, two collections, a craft book, and a book of nonfiction—and I wanted to specifically mention his novel, Mystery Ride, which was published in 1992, which doesn’t seem all that long ago until I think about what I was doing then. The title of this novel took its name from the lyrics to “Walk Like a Man” by Bruce Springsteen:

Would they ever look so happy again
The handsome groom and his bride
As they stepped into that long black limousine
For their mystery ride.

When I pulled this book off the shelf to write this essay, I found myself reading it all over again. I’ll just give you one paragraph. Notice all that it doesn’t tell us, and in so doing, all that it does:

As he turned from the phone, a specific, familiar pain began in his chest, just above his heart, a sharp ache, as if a ragged chunk of glass had lodged in an important artery. Whether this signaled fear or grief or loneliness, he didn’t know. He knew only that this was his pain—it came to let him know his body was smarter than he was, his body had a better understanding of his life, a longer memory. It came either as warning or as retribution, as a moment of sorrow or a reminder of guilt. He could never know as well as his body.

That quote is a perfect lead into Robert Boswell’s wonderful craft book, The Half-Known World, which I also recommend. All readers (not just writers) will enjoy it, I think, for its discussions of stories and books we’ve all read or want to read. I’ll leave you with two short excerpts. The first is a piece of advice for writers that we don’t often hear, but that the more you think about it, the more right it seems.

Write the character so that his actions and dialogue suggest that the reader can only ever half-know him.

The second excerpt is on the subject of details. I read it as a nod to the half-known world of the subconscious and a vote for leaving all those seemingly random details in the first draft and only getting rid of what doesn’t turn out to be important in revision.

I believe details originally offered to create a sense of place or to convince one of a story’s authenticity may accrue power over the course of a narrative and return late in a story in a new, more important role.

Come back on MARCH 1st to read how ROBERT BOSWELL spends his days.

The story is so good. I mean, I would get in the middle of a scene and not have any idea what was going to happen next–and then you would describe a bottle of olive oil so specifically that I felt like I could go to the grocery store and pull it off the shelf–but what I wanted was to get back to the husband and wife.

I’m not sure why it takes me so long to figure these things out. Details are good, right? Be specific. How many times have I heard this?

Well, here’s the thing. Details are good. They go toward bringing things to life. They go toward creating our characters–what Angelina might notice, Lucy might not. They go toward creating a world the reader can see and believe in.

But. They can also annoy the reader and pull her right out of a scene. They can bog a scene down.

A year ago, Pam Houston, reading a few of the pages from the novel I’m working on now, reminded me: details need to do double duty. They need to do more than just be details. Why do we care that the bartender is wiping off the counter and putting out a candle? Now I know the answer and I’ve adjusted the language.

And good for Benjamin Percy, in this month’s The Writer’s Chronicle, taking the time to go beyond the pat be more specific:

Over and over again in workshop, [students] have heard their instructor say, “Be specific.” They listen, but they go too far and end up choking the reader with details. So there should be an asterisk next to the command “Be specific.” Be specific when something is interesting. [emphasis mine]

When something is interesting, you look at it longer. You prolong and amplify. These set pieces are the most interesting moments and so they demand a slowness, an elongation. Stretch out the physical beats.

Or as Mary Gordon told me back in 2005: saturate these moments.

In other words, go light on the olive oil.

Did you see the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times on Sunday?

For a long, long time, I’ve wanted to read all of Shakespeare’s plays–all 38.

In June I was re-reading one of my favorite books, The Writing Life, by Ellen Gilchrist. And in it, there’s a chapter about “The Shakespeare Group.” Ellen writes:

We were sitting on the swings on a screened-in porch and I said, “I wish we could go to Stratford in England and see some of Shakespeare’s plays.” I had seen plays there the year before and been dazzled by them although I only half understood what I was seeing. I had studied Shakespeare at Vanderbilt and seen the movies made from the plays. WHAT I HAD NOT DONE WAS READ THEM OUT LOUD, WHICH IS THE ONLY WAY TO KNOW WHAT THEY ARE.

“We could get the plays and read them,” Patti said. “We could read them right here in Fayetteville.”

“We could read King Lear!” I shouted. “Of course we could.”

“Let’s do it,” Margaret said. “Let’s do it tonight.”

So, in Ellen Gilchrist fashion, they did. And they continued to do so for at least 16 years. Later in the book, she recommends reading the plays in order. Which I thought, sure, of course, why not. But what order Shakespeare wrote them in is not exactly something that is agreed upon. After spending a couple of hours on the internet, I decided whatever order Harold Bloom thought Shakespeare wrote them in was good enough for me.

Then I thought, a deadline. One a week! Or all 38 in a year! Then I thought, why kill yourself?

So I’m reading them. In order. Kind of constantly. Hoping to read two a month. I started July 1, 2013.

I will add a tab at the top of the blog with a list and some easy-to-find details in case anyone wants to join me. I’ve also added a tiny counter to the right sidebar.

Here’s my plan …

1. read the play
2. listen to the play (I read first if I can but if I happen to be driving a long distance, I listen first)
3. watch a movie if it exists and is not terrible
4. see a play if I can

… and here are my tools:

1. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom
2. The Riverside Shakespeare, plus for traveling
3. the FOLGER Shakespeare Library Editions of the individual plays, with text on the right and notes on the left
4. The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare audio recordings (a wonderful gift request)

What do you notice when you’re out walking?

Here’s the beginning of my essay:

In “Letter from the Pulitzer Fiction Jury: What Really Happened This Year” (The New Yorker online, July 9, 2012), Michael Cunningham, one of the three Pulitzer fiction jurors for 2012, wrote the following about sentences:

– I was the language crank, the one who swooned over sentences. I could forgive much in a book if it was written with force and beauty, if its story was told in a voice unlike anything I’d heard before, if the writer was finding new and mesmerizing ways to employ the same words that have been available to all American writers for hundreds of years. I tended to balk if a book contained some good lines but also some indifferent ones. I insisted that every line should be a good one. I was—and am—a bit fanatical on the subject.

True to his word, during the jury process, Cunningham argued successfully to eliminate a contender because, “although there were plenty of good lines, there were simply too many slack, utilitarian ones.”

Since July I’ve been thinking about Cunningham’s insistence that every sentence should be a good one. I would periodically look for his letter online, and, having forgotten I’d already printed it, print it again. When I was going through a pile of articles in my office recently, I found I had three copies. Then, Pam Houston, when reading my novel-in-progress, marked a sentence with this word: boring. When I took a closer look, she was right. The sentence was boring. And utilitarian. Only there to move the reader from point A to point B.

To read more of Not Every Sentence Can Be Great But Every Sentence Must Be Good…