Plums: Not just for William Carlos Williams

Hey Friends!

Ahhh I can’t believe it’s August already—it’s in the high 90s all this week in MS, yet my kids go went back to school on Thursday, Aug. 3. That’s not a typo. August 3! MS is trying an experiment that nudges the calendar closer to year-round—the same number of classroom days but a shorter summer and more breaks during the school year, in an attempt for forestall retention loss. It sounded like a fine idea when it was proposed, but now that I’ve had school open houses in JULY, I’m just not so sure.

Anyway, to focus on a nicer part of August’s arrival—plums! They are at our farmer’s market just today, and are coming soon to a farmer’s market neat you. I love to mark summer by making different fruit pies, and now in August I like to make “Late Summer Plum Cake.” In fact, I’ve spoken of the seductive power of this cake—it’s great for making friends! —in a piece in The Washington Post I published a few years back about how isolation during Covid affected my mother’s Alzheimer’s. Usually as soon as people try this cake they ask me for the recipe. Here it is. You’re welcome. Let me know if you try it!

I Ate 8 Lobsters in 10 Days

A great part of summer was swapping 97 degree MS days for sunny and 76 in Maine! I got to do wonderful watery things on boats! There were already three lobsters in my belly (and corresponding shot glasses of butter) when this photo was taken.

I was there to teach in Rockland for Maine Media, a fifty-year-old outfit that specializes in “visual story telling”—filmmaking and digital photography, etc.—that has expanded to literary storytelling. I taught a 5 day class on short-form memoir (micro-memoir, hermit crab essays, zuihitsu, etc.) , and the 8 students in my class were such a joy. Here they are: aren’t they cute?

I stayed in nearby Camden. The arts community there was so robust—so many artists and painters and photographers and galleries. I love when art layers on art, as in the Farnsworth Museum when scenes of Rockport were painted both by Edward Hopper in 1926 and Andrew Wyeth in 1954. Here is Hopper’s harbor:

and here is Wyeth’s (with my image on the glass, sorry):

I love the way the two scenes, precisely because they capture the same view, underscore the artists’ differences, how Hopper’s interest in the slightly chaotic geometric shapes of the harbor take precedent, while Wyeth makes the harbor’s buildings harmonious with the landscape, due to his coloration and his inclusion of the grass.

I also love it when writers handle the same subject—my favorite local example is that here at the Univ. of MS we have a “Champion Tree”—a catalpa that is over 400 years old, and it has been written about so beautifully by two of my poetry colleagues, Ann Fisher-Wirth and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Here is a photo I snapped of someone taking a photo of the catalpa in bloom during grad weekend:

Also I just googled this tree so I could give you an accurate age for it and I saw it has a google review. You will be glad to know it received 5 stars.

How Do You Translate Joy?

Because I love languages and travel, I’m fascinated with the art of translation. I’m not a translator myself—I’ve learned several languages halfway, but none well enough to presume I could translate. But I take joy in seeing the foreign editions of my husbands’s work appear—because he’s a novelist, there are many more opportunities for him to be translated than a lowly poet/memoirist like myself. And he’s had some pretty stunning translations, but I confess this new Czech translation has personal meaning for me. In 1993, the year I graduated college, I lived on the Czech/Polish border, in a coal mining village, teaching English. It was a strange time to be there—communism has just fallen and while Prague was beginning to blossom, the place where I lived was very depressed and polluted. But I learned a lot about myself that year, and learned to speak that very difficult language pretty well. How amazing, 30 years later, to see a Czech translation of Tommy’s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter:

The 22 year old woman I was then would never have been able to believe all that would come to pass in these 30 years. The fact that she feels like a different person is only exacerbated by the fact that when I page through this translation, I can’t read it at all, though by the end of my year there I could read anything, have full conversations in Czech. Where do those parts of our brains go when we can no longer access them? Now all I can do is page through the translation and marvel.

Mississippi Book Festival: So Amazing

I’m excited for the MS Book Fest, the greatest day for literature imaginable, though it’s August in Jackson, mostly outside; the Exec Director Ellen Rodgers Daniels claims it's "hotter than hell's front porch."  But somehow the day is worth it.  We are about the celebrate (next year) our 10^th year, and this is an event that MS has done correctly from the start.  I'm so proud to be on the board.  Richard Ford, Ann Patchett, James McBride, Richard Russo, and a bunch of other amazing authors coming!  A lot of my author friends from all over say MBF is their fav book fest across the country.  It really shows our state in our best light.  This year I’m moderating a panel on “Marriage and Memoir.” It features two of my old favorites—Harrison Scott Key, who my students know I adore and have taught many times. My review of his new book is here. Also, the hysterical and warm and awesome Helen Ellis, who was on a virtual panel I moderated during Covid. Here is just one Helen Ellis sentence from Meet Me in the Coral Lounge. Instead of writing, “I was surprised,” she writes: “I gasped the kind of gasp that leaves your face looking like a cornhole board.” See? You love her too. And then the poet Maggie Smith (whose poetry I’ve adored for years)—here we are with current MS poet laureate Katie Pierce when I brought them both to campus years ago:

Maggie’s new memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, is heartbreakingly good. Finally the writers who is new to me, whom I’m so excited to get to know: Hannah Pittard. There are so many great panels—all FREE—Check out the schedule and meet us in Jackson!

Eat My Book

If you ever visit Oxford, and you should, you’ll want to eat breakfast at Big, Bad Breakfast, our town’s literary diner. And when you go there, you’ll want to order:

That’s right, the menu item named after one of my books of poetry. To read my take on the unusual honor of having a dish named after my book, check this out.

Writing Advice from Someone Smarter Than Me

We’ve been talking a little bit about Mary Karr in this newsletter, so I thought I’d share something I love from her book, The Art of Memoir. Karr writes about voice, “A voice has to sound like the person wielding it—the super-most interesting version of that person ever—and grow from her core self.” I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that. Sometimes when a voice in a beginning student’s memoir sound false, it’s because they’re trying on a persona. Whereas really I think we want to drill down into the “me.” We need to be the Me-est me possible, to lean into our unique perspective, phrasing, and way of perceiving the past. Three paragraphs later, Karr writes: “However you charm people in the world, you should do on the page. . . .Charm is from the Latin carmen: to sing. By “charm,” I mean sing well enough to hold the reader in thrall. Whatever people like about you will manifest itself on the page.”

BYE and let’s chat again soon

And will that, my friends, I will leave you to do your own singing, even if it’s in the shower. Thanks for reading! Leave me a comment if there’s something you liked or want to know! I don’t have any zoom classes coming up—I’ll let you know when I do here, and on my website, which lists my readings coming up in Knoxville, Portland Maine, and Atlanta!