Today while I worked at the bookstore, the biggest snowstorm of the year hit Minnesota. It whitewashed the air, flocked the trees, drifted thickly over the ground, and obscured my view of…the Snyder’s drugstore across the street.
I love the weather; love its colors and textures, the sounds it makes, and how it changes the landscape. I love its force and changeability, and every time it does something awe-inspiring while I live in the city, I mourn our efforts to triumph over it. We see it coming, refuse to stay home in deference to it, and then clean up (or at least spoil) its effects within days if not hours. And in the city, the machinery of our lives — cars, buildings, billboards, stoplights, all of it — clutter the backdrop to the weather, uglifying and dulling our impression of it. A blizzard-struck street is by definition less vast and magnificent than a field or forest in the same conditions.
In the city, I have to grasp at my connection to the weather, consciously remind myself that what I’m looking at is breathtaking — or should be. And in the city, every time the weather stages a performance, I regret that I’m not watching from a better seat.
In my last post, I mentioned that I’d been nurturing some ideas that would motivate me to write here on a regular basis. Today I’d like to unveil one of those ideas, but because it doesn’t do anyone any good if I write things no one wants to read, I want this to be more of a test screening than a ribbon cutting. My idea is this: a 50-word review of each book I read, as I finish it. The longer I’m out of school, the easier it is to consume and discard books without giving them much thought. I like the idea of forcing myself to think about what I’m reading again, and the challenge of paring those thoughts down to 50 words (exactly?) appeals to me. On the other hand, I’m allergic to instituting gimmicks for the sake of gimmicks, and I want to know if this piques your interest or makes you cringe. My first review is below for your consideration. Please comment, and be honest.
50: Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins
This love story - set against the buildup to the atomic age, intertwined with the themes of Moby-Dick, and made epic by the ordinariness of its lovers – is one of the best novels I’ve read: at once humble and celestial, heartbreaking and joyous, literary and compulsively readable. I felt every character.
So. I’ve moved. There are several reasons behind my decision to do so, foremost among them being that Jonathan suggested it and then offered to do all the heavy lifting. I simply don’t have the skills to make a web page look like this, so if you think it’s pretty, direct your compliments to him.
Jonathan’s offer was well-timed, though, because lately I’ve been thinking about doing something different with my blog. If you try to keep up with my writing, you’ve probably noticed that that’s become a much easier task over the past several months. There was a time when I wrote multiple blog posts a week, but that dwindled to once a week on average, and now…. Well, by now some of you probably wonder every time I write a post if it’s the last thing you’ll ever hear from me. The fact is, my underlying reasons for keeping a blog have shifted, but until now, I hadn’t changed my use of the space accordingly. What started as a way to strengthen my connection to a real-life community has evolved into the only connection, in some cases, that my friends and family have to my life. Moreover, my blog puts a face to the professional writing I do online. For both of these purposes, my old blog was not working. It wasn’t a professional-quality website, and a half-hearted post every two and a half weeks can’t give my distant friends and family much of a sense of what I’m experiencing.
That’s why, with this new blog, I will write more often. Promise. I have some partially-formed ideas that I think will lend an overall structure to my writing, motivate me to write more, and — I’m hoping — help me overcome this debilitating lack of inspiration I’ve been wrestling with. I can’t physically move out of the city now, so I’m going to try to move out of it in my head. More on that later.
For now, thanks for following me here. I’ll try to make it worth the effort.
