by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Feb 28, 2010 | continuous life, Dani Shapiro, life |
Devotion, the new memoir by Dani Shapiro, is divided into 102 sections. Number 54 is one of my favorites. In it, Dani writes about two subjects that have intrigued me for some time. The first one not surprisingly has to do with memory. She writes: “Why do we...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Jul 21, 2009 | catching moments, continuous life, poetry |
One of my all-time-favorite poems is “The Continuous Life” by Mark Strand from his book of poems, The Continuous Life. Here’s the beginning: What of the neighborhood homes awash In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes, Watching the...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Feb 14, 2009 | continuous life |
I am fascinated, and continue to find other writers who are fascinated, with the Russian doll aspect of life. With trying to get our minds around the fact that we are the same person who climbed out of a crib in the dark, who sat on one side of a see-saw at Spring...
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 | 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 | 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...
