An Animating Strangeness
I can’t resist impossibilities in fiction. Of course, a story’s fabulism is no guarantee I’m going to love that story in the end—but if a first line promises me a new world, I’m going to keep reading.
Author: Clare Beams
The Current
Lately I’ve been thinking more than usual, like a lot of us, I suspect, about the two stages I occupy at the same time, in each moment and with every decision: the personal and the political. My own small domestic stage has stretched.
Constructing Selves: Character in Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s “Accomplice”
I’ve written before about the magic I find, as a writer and reader, in the world of the school as a setting for fiction. Like most of my predilections when it comes to literature, gravitating toward this world isn’t really a conscious choice.
The Effects of Children
My second daughter is due on December 11th. A couple of months back, I wrote about how all-consuming I was already finding this period of waiting; now, of course, I’m swollen to bursting with it.
Launching
Today, my first book launches. It’s kind of a wonderful word, launch: such propulsive force in its sound. Such muscular, fearless leaping. To mark the occasion, I thought I’d take a look at launchings of various kinds in literature. Not gradual beginnings, not slow evolutions into different forms, but sudden catapults into the new.
A Held Breath: Alice Munro’s “Tricks” and Waiting in Literature
I am in the midst of an anticipating season. My first book comes out in a month; my second baby will be born in a little over two. I’m finding that in terms of productivity right now I’m pretty useless.
On Music and Story
I had a professor in college who maintained that writers write about artists in other disciplines—painters, musicians, sculptors, etc.—when they want to write about writers without actually writing about writers. There’s probably something to this.
Bodily Shifts
I’m currently about five months pregnant with our second child, and I’m finding this state no less strange the second time around. It’s plenty of other things too—miraculous, exciting, fascinating, wonderful—and I’m very grateful for it; but in describing the actual daily, bodily experience, that’s the word that first comes to mind for me, strange.