Making a Literary Life Friday: Pushing Forward

Maybe it is the change in seasons. We seem to be thinking about our work, our lives, and connections between the two as we launch into editing, revising, changing, promoting. A deep breath, and let's push forward!

Amy
Tuesday night at Grub Street South at Buttonwood Books was a rush! Catherine Goldhammer, author of "Still Life with Chickens," was our guest host and she spoke to how poetry should inform our writing. Lynne & I were tickled to learn she reads our blog; I hope she was equally pleased that we love her memoir.

I've been chosen for jury duty this week, so my literary life has been interrupted somewhat. Instead of being antsy at my inability to work on my own writing, I've taken along Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" to keep me company during the judicial lulls. I told Lynne when I was just a few pages into it, that I couldn't understand why this book was so adored. A few pages after that, I stepped onto that road alongside the Man and the Boy, and I've fallen into lockstep with them. Definitely one of my Top Five favorites of all time.

Thanks for awarding us with the Thinking Blogger Award, Melissa Marsh! I love your blog as well, but since I can't vote for you, I'm going to go with Patry Francis's blog, Simply Wait. I always leave there in a thoughtful stupor.

Lisa
Spring! To sit outside, to feel the warm breeze through one's hair, to put one's broken foot up on a bench and hear that satisfying "clunk" of one's cast. Ahhh! It's arrived. Besides soaking in the lovely sunshine this week, I have also been enjoying a wonderful e-mail conversation with one of my agent's other clients. He is encouraging and inspiring and, well, a regular person too! I am looking forward to meeting him at Grub Street's Muse & the Marketplace. And thanks to one of my favorite authors, Christopher Castellani, for the out of the box suggestion he gave me today that I ask writers to sign my cast at the Muse next weekend...hmmm. Sounds like an ice breaker to me!
My nominee for thinking blogger--Therese Fowler.

Hannah
Amy's post this week prompted me to pick up Carolyn Heilbrun's Writing A Woman's Life. "We women have lived too much with closure... "if I marry him, if I get this work accepted..." -- there always seems to loom the possibility of something being over, settled, sweeping clear the way for contentment. This is the delusion of a passive life. When the hope for closure is abandoned, when there is an end to fantasy, adventure for women will begin." Here's to Grace Paley and all the other writers who keep at it, showing us the way!
My nominee--Debutante Ball.

Lynne
This week I met my publicist at Penguin, first via email, later in a phone meeting. I am planning a trip to NYC to meet her in person. I traveled to NH and then to OK, and instead of being overwhelmed by the long drive and plane rides, I listened to a book CD and read a beautiful book. I adore Look at me, by Jennifer Egan and love The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. Both are must reads.

Ditto the thanks to Melissa Marsh for nominating us for The Thinking Bloggers Award. It's an honor to be in such fine company. I nominate Tess Gerritsen's blog and our Writers' Group collectively nominates another four person blog--Jungle Red Writers. Jan Brogan, Hallie Ephron, Rosemary Harris, and Hank Phillipi Ryan--have a smashing blog about mystery writing.

To those we tagged with the Thinking Bloggers Award...

1. Patry Francis
2. Tess Gerritsen
3. Jungle Red Writers
4. Debutante Ball
5. Therese Fowler
   

If you feel so inclined, please do the following:

• If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think.
• Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.
• Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote.