susanstinson

I liked this account of a literary novelist's take on economic hard times, including a rush of hope at the AWP by my friend Sarah Van Arsdale.

PS Did you see this, desayunoencama? She mentions your press with excitement.

It was still hot when I went back to New York last week. ( Read more... )

I went to a beautiful reading in New York this weekend. It was my dear friend, Sarah Van Arsdale, reading from her second novel Blue, which was just released by the University of Tennessee Press, where it won the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel.

I was in the Valley Lesbian Writers Group with Sarah for a whole bunch of years in the late eighties and early nineties, and it's so great to see her getting compared to Faulkner (!) and to witness her persistent love of language getting her back into print, surrounded by people who love and/or admire her and her work, happy in her happiness.

The book itself I could fall in love with simply for all of the music in the ways she describes the sounds of cars passing, so that the sounds of their tires on the road come shushing past, and the traffic sounds like water in a river. I think that, too -- that the sound of traffic is like great waves of modern life and motion, people going places in rhythmic, incessant spurts and ebbs, washing past people walking or sitting or sleeping like a river rolling on. Blue uses suspense and mystery very effectively, but its strongest pull on me was as a meditation on the repetitive qualities of grief and loss, how much these human experiences overlap and are the same from one person to another, as if we were all dangling our feet into the same slow river, and how dizzy we get with memory, or with lack of memory, of all that we've suffered, all that we've loved. And, still, there are the specifics of each person's story: a cleft lip, a culture, one particular Halloween. People don't become one another, even if we have common experiences, and are inextricably joined. In Blue, which uses repetition in a beautiful way that is both revelatory and disorienting, the novel begins one woman witnessing another being dumped from a moving car. Both are without coherent memories of who they are, and where they're from.

I also got to talk with my friend Alison about her memoir, about moving to Brooklyn. I'm getting less and less intimidated by the city, for all that I still have trouble getting through the subway turnstyles without wasting a fare or two, more and more present when I'm there with the hardworking, ordinary affections that do the heavy-lifting in my life. I stayed with the wonderful beccawrites who told me stories of her trip to the civil rights museum in Memphis and gave me such a sweet, ringing, "Happy Birthday" as the first thing I heard the next day.

It was a good trip. And turning 43 left me drenched with the kindness of the people I love. Lucky.