What is the opposite of memory? What is the inverse of an echo?
Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House.
D. A. Hosek
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Beautiful Sentences: Karen Joy Fowler
Just imagine writing one of your books with two thousand dead bodies to explain. And every single one of them left someone behind, begging their gods to undo it.
Karen Joy Fowler, “Private Grave 9.”
Beautiful Sentences: Jamie Quatro
Augustine’s God-shaped hole. But some people, she says, realize the emptiness itself is God.
Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon.
Beautiful Sentences: Laura Kolbe
They were small people, with lawny eyebrows and demure hands.
Laura Kolbe, “Crimes of Paris.”
Writerly resolutions, January status
A note on how my writerly resolutions for 2019 are going. On the novel front, I’m not doing so great. Only 1,664 words net gained on the novel. I should be doing over 4,000 words per month to meet my goal (well now, it’s more like 4,400).
Short stories are both a bit ahead of the game and behind it courtesy of the long story which has been blocking my writing process like a colonic obstruction. That said, I’ve finished a revision of the long story to a somewhat shorter version (9,000-some-odd words instead of 10,000-some-odd-words) and now am working on the longer version in which I’m letting the narrative’s tendency towards digression flow free. Then I have to somehow decide which version I’ll try to foist upon the world (I’m leaning towards trying to publish the longer version first and if that fails to gain any traction to return to the shorter version). Meanwhile I have two stories which I’d been working on last year finished and revised enough to workshop with my writing group so with any luck I’ll be ahead of the game by this time next month.
Beautiful Sentences: Annie Dillard
Now feelings lasted so long they left stains.
Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.
“Kiddush”: The Story Behind the Story
“Kiddush” is the opening 
chapter of my novel in progress, We, the Rescued. The novel, in an Oulipo-esque fashion, takes its structure from the Passover Haggadah and in a sort of an ontogeny-recapitulates-philogeny fashion, the chapter takes its structure from the first prayer of the Passover Seder, the Kiddush, or blessing over wine. I took the nesting structure one step further in some of the earliest drafts of the story and recapitulated the creation story of Genesis 1 in the opening section of the story (I’ve taken the excised bit and have been shopping that around as a bit of flash with no success as of this writing). This is the only chapter of the planned novel that interacts directly with the text of the Haggadah, using the words of the Kiddush to give form and in many cases to allow the text to make ironic commentary on the prayer.
The structure of the story with the primary narrative in present tense and shifts into past tense for flashbacks is inspired by reading Mario Vargas Llosa’s La Fiesta del Chivo, which does similar things with time. I found the way that it caused the past and present to be intermingled to be a great inspiration towards what I could do with the form.
I’ve received early feedback on this story from writer friends including Jonathan Eig, Katherine Sanger, Justin Sikes, Steve Nelson and Maria Feldman.
Beautiful Sentences: Taylor Koekkoek
The way she looked was something I felt in my guts.
Taylor Koekkoek, “The Wedding Party.”
Beautiful Sentences: Annie Dillard
After all, I was the intelligentsia around these parts, single handedly. The intelligentsium.
Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.
Beautiful Sentences: J. Courtney Sullivan
They were surprised that the nuns did not proselytize or try to get them to see the light. They just listened. Some only came once or twice. But the ones who returned again and again began to realize on their own that the conversations were about God, even if He was never mentioned. God through the lens of their own lives.
J. Courtney Sullivan, Saints for All Occasions.