susanstinson

There are some great readings at UMass this week at the Juniper Writing Institute.

Tonight, I'm going to see Mark Doty and Grace Paley, two writers whose work I love and whose very different presences as readers knock me out. My friend Chaia Heller, who has asked me to do fat liberation workshops as paid gigs way more than anyone else has over the years -- she asked me to do my first one, as a matter of fact and the most recent one, too -- once invited me to give a reading with Grace Paley at the Institute for Social Ecology, and it was utterly delicious, even if Grace did get mildly annoyed at the way I raved about her work before I started reading. I couldn't help it, though. I read her early short story collections when I was haunting the University of Colorado library in the early eighties, partly because I didn't get along with my dorm roommates and needed somewhere to be, and partly because I was looking for models of fiction writers and poets who were women, and those stories were funny, ardent, heartbreaking and political in ways that left me practically bruised with the desire to be able to write like that.

Mark Doty is a poet whose new books I always order as soon as they're published. He once gave a keynote at the OutWrite conference that left me crying in my seat with his evocation of the reasons to write and the things that poetry (counter to what WH Auden wrote) actually can do. I've just started his latest book, Dog Years, a memoir about his dogs Beau and Arden.

In response to a comment from a stranger, about facing the prospective death of his aging dog, he writes:

Just now death remains an interruption, leaves me furious, sorrowing, refusing to yield. Too easy an acceptance seems, frankly, sentimental, an erasure of the particular irreplaceable stuff of individuality with a vague, generalized truth. That's how sentimentality works, replacing particularity with a warm fog of acceptable feeling, the difficult exact stuff of individual character with the vagueness of convention. Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss or the fierce individuality of passion with the dulling, "universal" certainty of platitude.

I'm also particularly excited about Paul Lisicky's reading coming up on Tuesday, when Thomas Sayers Ellis will read as well. Paul is a novelist and memoir writer --I especially loved his memoir, Famous Builder, very much.