Slow and careful writing about love

I finished reading The Handmaid's Tale this month. Margaret Atwood's story about a future America dominated by religion and males, with women subjugated and forced to bear children, does contain love and passion, too.

I was struck by the passage below, so beautiful that I made a note of it in my Kindle copy of the book. The writing shows off how loving Atwood is with words of love. Here, the heroine of the book describes her illicit, secret lover, her respite after she's lost the memory of her husband Luke.

I want to see what can be seen, of him, take him in, memorize him, save him up so I can live on the image, later: the lines of his body, the texture of his flesh, the glisten of sweat on his pelt, his long sardonic unrevealing face. I ought to have done that with Luke, paid more attention, to the details, the moles and scars, the singular creases; I didn’t and he’s fading. Day by day, night by night he recedes, and I become more faithless. For this one I’d wear pink feathers, purple stars, if that were what he wanted; or anything else, even the tail of a rabbit. But he does not require such trimmings. We make love each time as if we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that there will never be any more, for either of us, with anyone, ever. And then when there is, that too is always a surprise, extra, a gift.

Five summers ago I took a Novel seminar at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, where we studied Atonement. Our instructor advised us to deliver the details of a body your character has come to know and love. Atwood gives us this as well as anybody I've read.

Short Roth stories long on quality

I just finished reading a short story from Goodbye, Columbus, the collection that launched Phillip Roth's career 50 years ago this month. The gem included in the Norton North American Literature Anthology was Defender of the Faith, a tight, plainspoken tale about three Jewish Army trainees and the Jewish sergeant who both learns and teaches a lesson about the boundaries of faith.

Roth has plenty of acclaimed long works to his name, having won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. But like so many great novelists, he honed his craft on short stories. About himself writing Goodbye, Columbus, he said in a 30th Anniversary Edition:

With clarity and with crudeness, and a great deal of exuberance, the embryonic writer who was me wrote these stories in his early 20s, while he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, a soldier stationed in New Jersey and Washington, D.C., and a novice English instructor back at Chicago following his Army discharge. Eisenhower, who was president, the embryonic writer despised, though not nearly as much as he was to despise Eisenhower’s Republican successors.

His cultural ambitions were formulated in direct opposition to the triumphant, suffocating American philistinism of that time: he despised Time, Life, Hollywood, television, the best-seller list, advertising copy, McCarthyism, Rotary Clubs, racial prejudice and the American booster mentality. Among the writers he was reading when he wrote these stories in the 1950s — and he was reading all the time, all kinds of books, dozens and dozens of them — were David Riesman, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever, James Baldwin, Randall Jarrell, Sigmund Freud, Paul Goodman, William Styron, C. Wright Mills, Martin Buber, George Orwell, Suzanne Langer, F.R. Leavis, David Daiches, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Ralph Ellison, Erich Fromm, Joseph Conrad, Dylan Thomas, Sean O’Casey, e.e. cummings — who collectively represented a republic of discourse in which he aspired to be naturalized.

Another Workshop Finalist

We received word this week that Gordon Rives Carmichael has landed in the finalist pool in the Writer's League of Texas Manuscript Contest. Gordon's work has come past our manuscript table here for more than a year, with lots of evidence of polishing and extending his skills.

Gordon, we congratulate you. Best of luck in the finals selection; the conference is June 26. Even being nominated, as the Oscar winners say, is an honor.

This sort of milestone can only happen if you get your writing out there, in front of readers. Offer something up soon.

Fast finds for definitions

This morning I stumbled across Memidex, the free online "dictionary, thesaurus and more." If you ever need to know the difference between rhinoviruses and arborviruses, or what contiguous means, or a synonym for incipient, Memidex (memidex.com) finds it fast.

What I liked about this online tool was its relentless linking. The definition for arborvirus is teeming with medical words all linked to other definitions.

The unique features of Memidex include:

• detailed information for each sense
• more cross-references
• convenient hierarchical links
• full listing of inflected forms
• no obscure abbreviated labels
• quick search for exact matches
• complete, easily browsable index
• easy-to-link-to URLs
• clear, simple, uncluttered layout
• frequent, recorded updates
• fast average page access time