Category Archives: Quotes

Outward towards the world

First, what a personal essay is not: it’s not journalism. It can be about anything  … but it is not written on assignment. It comes instead from the writer’s own fund of interests and obsessions, questions to be raised or answered, observations, fantasies, regrets, uncertainties, delight. It evolves from a desire to know or to understand, to make connections. It is often triggered by some sort of experience in the world. It will sometimes lead to research, always to reflection. Above all, it is engaged.

And it’s not a confessional piece.  … [A] personal essay needn’t be autobiographical at all except as a kind of autobiography of mind. Memoir is okay, but the expectation is that the memoir is not just a record of dates and events; it’s more like a meditation on a time and place and what their particular conjunction reveals, in retrospect, about the world, human nature, the writer’s own emotional disposition. …  So, the self, but the self isn’t all. … [T]he movement of the essay is not so much inward as outward towards the world. The personal is the conduit to something larger or more foreign.

—Rosalynn Tyo

A few steps to the sand

I like the idea that I can walk out my front door, put one foot in front of the other, and find myself at the beach. The Pacific Ocean meets Ocean Beach roughly five miles from where I’m sitting, and I often switch up my jogging routine to make my way west through Golden Gate Park, past the man-made waterfall, along the buffalo paddock, and out onto the Great Highway. From there you can see and hear the waves, and it is only a few steps to the sand. The quirky sights are rewarding, and they help inspire me to pull on my shoes on days when I might not feel like it.

—Heidi Swanson

Be an Innovator

Starting with the fall 2011 issue, [Shenandoah] will be entirely online. A paid subscription will be a thing of the past. “It is perhaps inevitable when we look at what has happened to other literary journals,” said [editor R.T.] Smith. “Literary magazines per se are going to have to change their way of conceiving themselves and of reaching their audiences. And this is all tied up in the deep inquiry going on in our culture about the future of print. There is time to make that transition and be an innovator.”
…
For the reader, Smith said, an online journal “also leads to more accessibility and an increased audience.” If a reader feels an immediate yen to read a literary magazine like Shenandoah, it’s just a click away.
…
“We will bring all of the very best features of a physical magazine except three-dimensionality,” said Smith. “We believe that we’re going to be gaining in terms of interactivity, accessibility, audio, the kinds of things that have made the whole concept of the Internet interesting to start with.”

—Washington and Lee University

[If Shenandoah is ”an innovator” (!),  what does that make Toasted Cheese? Just asking.]

To covet books as objects

Poetry collections are some of the most beautiful books in my library. They have gorgeous cover designs, seductive embossments, such carefully chosen fonts, wonderfully fibrous paper that sets off the white space,  cut with such crisp edges. A lot of this, I think, is because so many of these books come from independent presses and reflect the care that these presses put into each detail of their books.

…

It’s shallow, I know, to love poetry for its packaging, to covet books as objects, but I can’t help it if I do. It’s only the beginning of the story, of course, but it’s an important part, and it’s fortunate that so many poets and publishers think seem to feel the same.

Honestly, e-books will never hold a candle.

—Kerry Clare

Obstacles to international comprehension

What are the consequences [of globalization] for literature? From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension. …

More importantly the language is kept simple. Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader.

—Tim Parks

Creatures set down here bewildered

Why are we reading, if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness, and press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and which reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. If we are reading for these things, why would anyone read books with advertising slogans and brand names in them? Why would anyone write such books?

—Annie Dillard

Something to Say

There are people in this strange little world of ours who have romantic notions about being a writer, and that, to them, is much more important than actually writing. This is the order in which people like that think. “How do I get a book deal” comes before “How do I become someone who has something to say?” Writing is an act of ego, but your ego should not be the only part of your personality involved.

—Jessa Crispin

Unless it is good in the abstract sense

It is surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or a tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.

—Georgia O’Keeffe
in Georgia O’Keeffe (1976)