Reading through Months
When March began, I lined up books, novels mostly, which centered on women. I was going to read them in honor of Women's History Month. I was going to be one of the presenters at a college event focusing of women characters in literature. It so happened that someone had given me a copy of a novel entitled A Short History of Women, and I had just received a review copy of The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. Things were falling into place as finding characters was looking easy and interesting.
There were three of us at the event, each talking about their favorite female characters, and reading from their own work. For some reason I showed up without any of my works, but I brought Paradise by Toni Morrison, Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera, and Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. I was going to talk about how these books had influenced my own writing, then I would discuss some features relating to their main characters. This part worked well, worked so well that I ran out of time before the need to read from my own writng arose. It seems I have grown more hesitant to read from my own works. I am growing a bit more private (if that can be considered growth), looking at my work from the inside. Something in the air says, "Take this stuff seriously," and those who know me well may be tempted to say, "But you have always been very serious."
That day I talked about the dangerous women in Paradise, talked about how the men of Ruby considered them dangerous, then I connected that to dangerous women in Morrison's other books. And 'dangerous' is not a label the reader gives them; it is how the other characters tend to see them, and once you see this strait in one character, you can easily see it in all the others. I talked about the women in Paradise, and how that book alone had inspired me (years back) to take a college class called Toni Morrison. I have been fascinated with the Morrison corpus until and since then.
To conclude my March reading obligation, I am almost done with a rereading of Song of Solomon. I may have noticed this before, but there is something I have loved about this book this time: it is the way Morrison named her characters, which adds to the sad humor in this novel. That name Macon Dead ("Ain't but three Deads alive"). Then names like First Corinthians, Hagar, Milkman, Guitar, Pilate, Railway Tommy resonated with new meaning. I now believe that one of the best ways to learn writing is to read everything by an author like Morrison, reading as a writer.
I also talked about Nervous Conditions. I started with an apology, like I always do. Because to this day I don't know why I never read Nervous Conditions in Zimbabwe. I knew about it, everyone in my circle of writers talked about Tsitsi Dangarembga. I even browsed the book in Book Center (Harare), where you could actually browse books longer than you could in Kingstones, but I never got to read it. I have blamed my literature syllabi, asking questions like, why were there Bones, House of Hunger, Waiting for the Rain, Things Fall Apart, and not Nervous Conditions? I have blamed it on the teachers who did not include the book on syllabus. However, I have realized too that that was only an excuse for not having read a book so important. Then when I read it finally, it was a time I needed a book that took me back home, took me to an important time in Zimbabwean history. I read it when I missed home, and it came to me like a gift. Not only did it remind me of home, it seemed to make fun of me by presenting a protagonist who bore my last name, so I often joke and say things like this is a story about my family, the Sigauke family,but I wouldn't want to be part of that family. I read the book when I needed to read something like it.
The audience at the event was fascinated by the premise of Nervous Conditions and that rousing first sentence: "I was not sorry when my brother died."
When it comes to reading that matters, you have to rely on your honest taste for what is good; you start moving away from school literature syllabi, redifining your pool of favorite writers. Well, in some cases you will be lucky that some writers you read for a literature course have become your favorites, as I have done with William Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison,Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and a few others. But as I was discovering James Joyce, I was staying ignorant of the existence of Frank O'Connor, as I learned about Joseph Conrad, I was missing out on Graham Greene, and learning Maxim Gorky, Nicholai Gogol, and Vladimir Nabokov somehow did not give me access to Anton Checkov. But when you read as a writer and not as a student, you begin to discover the true nature of reading, and you get closer to understanding what writing is all about. And the rest: you just have to figure it all out.
I talked about The Stone Virgins. About how it demands rereading, about how Vera was one of the most enchanting authors, one whose works shows how far we can stretch language. I said many things about this book, and it is on this book that many questions at the end of the session, when were broken down into smaller Q&A groups, were centered.
But for me, that event was not the highlight of the month in as far as reading went. A great part of my reading in March occurred in a class I was teaching at UC Davis Extension," Reading Contemporary Fiction as a Writer". The participants were motivated, and they challenged themselves to fit as much reading in the eight weeks (we started in February) as possible, including taking most of my book recommendation very seriously. We read three books, Interpreter of Maladies (by Jhumpa Lahiri), Giliad, by Marylin Robinson, and Best American Short Stories (2007), edited by Stephen King. We liked these writers so much that we started to look for the other works they have written. I now have Lahiri and Robinson's complete sets, and the reading fun is about to begin (again).
But that was March. April will bring a different focus. I will continue to read ficton, of course, and other things, but I will focus on poetry, becasue April is poetry history month. I have started well already since I am on Spring Break. I have read (and am to review) Intwasa Poetry by amaBooks (Zimbabwe). Great talent in there. I know nearly all the poets, which may make the reviewing business tricky, but their pieces have a fresh perspective on Zimbabwe. I am also reading Joshua McKinney's The Novice Mourner. Josh, a local (Sacramento) guy, teaches at Sacramento State University. I could have taken his poetry workshops at the end of the 90s, but I had already comfortably settled into fiction, only to go back to poetry shortly after, and now I think I am striking the genre balance I should have always kept. But if you can, read Joshua McKinney. There is a certain clear quality in his words, a clarity that goes beyond clarity, something seductive because you can easily feel good about the way the poem reads and almost miss the gravity of the message. This is poetry that teaches you how to do poetry.
Oh, I have scheduled two appearances for my own poetry. Next week, April 7, I am reading at Majestic Lounge, from 7 pm to 9 pm. Then later in the month, April 30 I think, I will appear at a hotel. There will be a band playing. I think I will go first, then the band performs, or that they will perform first, then I read. Either way, I am the featured poet.
The Sacramento Poetry Center Writing Conference occurs during the weekend of April 16. That's a big deal, featuring great classes and talent. Although it is mostly a poetry conference, there are classes on fiction writing. And all of them are free. The conference starts on Friday and ends on Saturday evening.
On April 24, I will facilitate fiction workshops during the CRC/Hart Annual Writing Conference. My workshop is entitled "The Making of a Story". I look forward to this one, an opportunity for writers to create stories and discuss them with other participants. In such classes, I often get a chance to talk about some of the cool writing strategies writers like Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, Chinua Achebe, and others have shared. We get to read a few writing samples (the shor kinds, often not longer than a paragraph or a sentence), which show us the function of voice in writing. This is the only fiction-related gig I have planned for April. The rest will be realted to poetry. And of course, there are things I am working on too, fiction kinds of things, but I have learned that when works are in progress, refer to them vaguely.
There were three of us at the event, each talking about their favorite female characters, and reading from their own work. For some reason I showed up without any of my works, but I brought Paradise by Toni Morrison, Stone Virgins by Yvonne Vera, and Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. I was going to talk about how these books had influenced my own writing, then I would discuss some features relating to their main characters. This part worked well, worked so well that I ran out of time before the need to read from my own writng arose. It seems I have grown more hesitant to read from my own works. I am growing a bit more private (if that can be considered growth), looking at my work from the inside. Something in the air says, "Take this stuff seriously," and those who know me well may be tempted to say, "But you have always been very serious."
That day I talked about the dangerous women in Paradise, talked about how the men of Ruby considered them dangerous, then I connected that to dangerous women in Morrison's other books. And 'dangerous' is not a label the reader gives them; it is how the other characters tend to see them, and once you see this strait in one character, you can easily see it in all the others. I talked about the women in Paradise, and how that book alone had inspired me (years back) to take a college class called Toni Morrison. I have been fascinated with the Morrison corpus until and since then.
To conclude my March reading obligation, I am almost done with a rereading of Song of Solomon. I may have noticed this before, but there is something I have loved about this book this time: it is the way Morrison named her characters, which adds to the sad humor in this novel. That name Macon Dead ("Ain't but three Deads alive"). Then names like First Corinthians, Hagar, Milkman, Guitar, Pilate, Railway Tommy resonated with new meaning. I now believe that one of the best ways to learn writing is to read everything by an author like Morrison, reading as a writer.
I also talked about Nervous Conditions. I started with an apology, like I always do. Because to this day I don't know why I never read Nervous Conditions in Zimbabwe. I knew about it, everyone in my circle of writers talked about Tsitsi Dangarembga. I even browsed the book in Book Center (Harare), where you could actually browse books longer than you could in Kingstones, but I never got to read it. I have blamed my literature syllabi, asking questions like, why were there Bones, House of Hunger, Waiting for the Rain, Things Fall Apart, and not Nervous Conditions? I have blamed it on the teachers who did not include the book on syllabus. However, I have realized too that that was only an excuse for not having read a book so important. Then when I read it finally, it was a time I needed a book that took me back home, took me to an important time in Zimbabwean history. I read it when I missed home, and it came to me like a gift. Not only did it remind me of home, it seemed to make fun of me by presenting a protagonist who bore my last name, so I often joke and say things like this is a story about my family, the Sigauke family,but I wouldn't want to be part of that family. I read the book when I needed to read something like it.
The audience at the event was fascinated by the premise of Nervous Conditions and that rousing first sentence: "I was not sorry when my brother died."
When it comes to reading that matters, you have to rely on your honest taste for what is good; you start moving away from school literature syllabi, redifining your pool of favorite writers. Well, in some cases you will be lucky that some writers you read for a literature course have become your favorites, as I have done with William Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison,Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and a few others. But as I was discovering James Joyce, I was staying ignorant of the existence of Frank O'Connor, as I learned about Joseph Conrad, I was missing out on Graham Greene, and learning Maxim Gorky, Nicholai Gogol, and Vladimir Nabokov somehow did not give me access to Anton Checkov. But when you read as a writer and not as a student, you begin to discover the true nature of reading, and you get closer to understanding what writing is all about. And the rest: you just have to figure it all out.
I talked about The Stone Virgins. About how it demands rereading, about how Vera was one of the most enchanting authors, one whose works shows how far we can stretch language. I said many things about this book, and it is on this book that many questions at the end of the session, when were broken down into smaller Q&A groups, were centered.
But for me, that event was not the highlight of the month in as far as reading went. A great part of my reading in March occurred in a class I was teaching at UC Davis Extension," Reading Contemporary Fiction as a Writer". The participants were motivated, and they challenged themselves to fit as much reading in the eight weeks (we started in February) as possible, including taking most of my book recommendation very seriously. We read three books, Interpreter of Maladies (by Jhumpa Lahiri), Giliad, by Marylin Robinson, and Best American Short Stories (2007), edited by Stephen King. We liked these writers so much that we started to look for the other works they have written. I now have Lahiri and Robinson's complete sets, and the reading fun is about to begin (again).
But that was March. April will bring a different focus. I will continue to read ficton, of course, and other things, but I will focus on poetry, becasue April is poetry history month. I have started well already since I am on Spring Break. I have read (and am to review) Intwasa Poetry by amaBooks (Zimbabwe). Great talent in there. I know nearly all the poets, which may make the reviewing business tricky, but their pieces have a fresh perspective on Zimbabwe. I am also reading Joshua McKinney's The Novice Mourner. Josh, a local (Sacramento) guy, teaches at Sacramento State University. I could have taken his poetry workshops at the end of the 90s, but I had already comfortably settled into fiction, only to go back to poetry shortly after, and now I think I am striking the genre balance I should have always kept. But if you can, read Joshua McKinney. There is a certain clear quality in his words, a clarity that goes beyond clarity, something seductive because you can easily feel good about the way the poem reads and almost miss the gravity of the message. This is poetry that teaches you how to do poetry.
Oh, I have scheduled two appearances for my own poetry. Next week, April 7, I am reading at Majestic Lounge, from 7 pm to 9 pm. Then later in the month, April 30 I think, I will appear at a hotel. There will be a band playing. I think I will go first, then the band performs, or that they will perform first, then I read. Either way, I am the featured poet.
The Sacramento Poetry Center Writing Conference occurs during the weekend of April 16. That's a big deal, featuring great classes and talent. Although it is mostly a poetry conference, there are classes on fiction writing. And all of them are free. The conference starts on Friday and ends on Saturday evening.
On April 24, I will facilitate fiction workshops during the CRC/Hart Annual Writing Conference. My workshop is entitled "The Making of a Story". I look forward to this one, an opportunity for writers to create stories and discuss them with other participants. In such classes, I often get a chance to talk about some of the cool writing strategies writers like Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, Chinua Achebe, and others have shared. We get to read a few writing samples (the shor kinds, often not longer than a paragraph or a sentence), which show us the function of voice in writing. This is the only fiction-related gig I have planned for April. The rest will be realted to poetry. And of course, there are things I am working on too, fiction kinds of things, but I have learned that when works are in progress, refer to them vaguely.
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