susanstinson

• I can't find my reading and computer glasses. I've lost them before within the past year. I misplace them all the time, but this time I've really searched and retraced my steps, and then doubled back again. I can't find them. I still hope to, somehow, though.


• I thought I'd lost my debit and credit cards earlier this week, then found them in my wallet. After I'd already cancelled them both. I don't have them for my trip.


• I heard today that I need more expensive dental work from a specialist.


• Pain in my joints.


• Aging, loss, money, mind, decay and mortality, in general and in specific.

• A picture that my love took from upstairs of my parents and another dear friend playing 42 dominoes on a small square table with a slick red surface, perfect for shuffling. The garden up there, especially chives and parsley and early swiss chard.


• Having seen an old fashioned, very serious, kindly, ethical clown in white slowly walk a tightrope upside down carrying a lit candlestick in its holder at the Cirque du Soleil in the company of my mother. And watching my father study maps and eighteenth century shoes and marbles and drink his first glass of wine in years in Montreal.


• One friend poured himself into cleaning my living room when it had overwhelmed me. Another friend always listens to my problems, teases me, and does so much to keep my head on my shoulders and pleasure in my life. Together, they brought roses and a strawberry tart to dinner when my parents were here.


• That my book is being honored with other strong work. That I'll be with friends who are travelling to celebrate that with me, bringing me fishnets, theater tickets, their risky, smart, rigorous work, and their radiant selves. And other friends will be there from nearer distances, with their own work being honored, or, many of them, having been honored in the past.


• That there are so many reasons to keep doing new work, so many possibilities, reasons to jump in again.


• That my dear friend Sally -- her own lingered and labored over, much needed and much loved novel not published yet -- who can't come to New York for the award ceremonies, gave me a talisman today for the trip: a ring that a boy gave her when he moved away. She's had it for forty years.

• Sarah Schulman told me that my friend Alison had given my book to her, put it right into her hands when they were both at a writers colony. That is such a concrete, electric kind of gift for me. Sarah, who was sitting behind me, touched my shoulders when I finished reading, told me it was good. This was a small, beautiful thing, and a comfort.



• I think that Mark Wunderlich does amazing stuff in his poetry with assumptions about rural life, human beings' animal natures, passion and power, and he does it with this incredible technical control.



• Colm Toibin, whose most recent book I had been reading with such pleasure on the train, read a scene in which Henry James and a gondolier go out into the water in Venice to try to submerge a dead friend's clothes, a woman, as a kind of burial at sea. The big skirts do not sink easily. One piece, in particular, goes under then rises stubbornly until the gondolier holds it under with his oar. There was so much about grief in this.

Toibin's depiction of James is a nuanced, emotional portrait of an almost unknowable figure — the artist in a life more imagined than lived. Toibin's pacing and prose are exquisite; his novel is a graceful, thoughtful meditation on writing and philosophy, as well as an astute exercise in psychology. Its resonance has continued all year long.