No Words for It

When I discovered Tom Robbins as a teenager, the passage that I remember just being blown away by was in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues where he talks about the brain overestimating its own importance because it’s the part of the body that goes around estimating relative importance of body parts. I think the word-generating, word-understanding part of my brain has been similarly carried away lately, since I wrote an unprecedented number of words in November and this week finished reading the 750 pages of Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, which is LOVELY and funny (and I love the name Abysmillard! And the comical Binky-isms!). And then I started reading The Maytrees by Annie Dillard which I couldn’t read during NaNoWriMo because I always feel like...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Dec 6, 2007 | 1 comment

The Care and Keeping of a Brain

Ok, even a literary novice like myself realizes that the worst possible ending sentence for a book is “It was all just a dream… or was it?” Which makes me fantasize about a prank appending this sentence to, say, every work in the Penguin Classics series. Watch, I’ll never get a job copyediting now. Still, I’ve realized that one of my on-going themes is distrust of my own brain… It’s been coming up a lot lately in terms of self-doubt, and the odd circuitousness of knowing how your own head works and trying to out-think it, making a habit of filing doubts away right now because they are not useful to the process of making words come out. The funny thing is how doubts don’t like being filed away, and fight back with...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 8, 2007 | 0 comments

Hypographia

So some days writing seems like something I cannot help doing, something as natural as breathing, something I wake up looking forward to doing, the daily opportunity to capture some of the words and thoughts that have been drifting around in my head. And some days it feels like torture. The blog seems like an additional pressure, I don’t want to disappoint anyone, I am sure that anyone reading is going to get sick of it and stop reading entirely, and of course, I have the stats chart conveniently provided by WordPress to back me up (would I be happier with it disabled?). Or I open the computer and read a dozen other blogs and either dismayed at how brilliant the brilliant ones are, or at how the ones that are more like social connection-points for groups...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 29, 2007 | 1 comment

Blockage

At fourteen I thought Douglas Adams’ lesson on flying, to throw yourself at the ground and miss, was about the cleverest thing ever. Now, when I have a day when a grocery list seems like a tremendous creative stretch, I find myself trying to figure out what it is I am so actively not writing about as I jump up to re-fill my coffee cup, wipe the spattered bathroom mirror, start another load of laundry. But that writing should come about by just putting down whatever it is that I am not writing about seems as slick a trick as flying by missing the ground. There’s this feeling of something missing, and I try to imagine what it is I most want to read. Were I to click on a blog of erised, which shows you what you most want to see, what wisdom would be...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 30, 2007 | 0 comments

Not too long or too deep or too edited…

… we’re just keeping up a habit of blogging, if not daily, than more frequently than waiting for the perfect subject to hold forth upon and the time to edit and shape it and get bogged down in perfectionism. I endure the pain of seeing typos, homonyms that slip past the internal spell checker, though I correct them later when I find them. I remind myself that this IS hard, the singing loudly enough to drown out the internal censors, who natter away about how this really is not interesting to ANYONE and whom do I think I am fooling, exactly, that I OUGHT to be embarrassed to be putting this sort of practice writing out there for anyone to read, that everybody will read it, that nobody will read it, that this is but one more step to dying one day alone...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 24, 2007 | 1 comment

Overheard in my morning pages…

I listened yesterday happily to a Fresh Air interview with Natasha Tretheway, Pulitzer-winning poet whose experience was biracial and losing her mother at 18 when her stepfather murdered her, and the questions and answers were both so unflinching, the questions we want to ask but fear are not polite… a good interview. But uncomfortable, in the sort of slamming up against the frailty of our mortal boundaries, that happens with violent death. How thin is the bone protecting our defenseless brains! the integrity of the tubes of blood coursing through our bodies, the tireless pumping of the muscle that is heart: it all seems so improbable and terrifyiing to rely upon. Even the hardened atheist materialists among us breathe faith that all of the...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 19, 2007 | 1 comment