Get Comfy. Read. Maybe Write.

Last week, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I attended the last lecture of Introduction to Russian Literature: Tolstoy & Dostoevsky.  Like coming to the final chapter of a good novel,  I both want it to end, for freedom of time and resolution in my mind, and I don’t want it to end because that will mean a loss of something that has been a source of pleasure.  The class was a wonderful experience which I think will continue to surface as I read other books.

Picking up a new novel is difficult.  Nothing seems to satisfy.  So, I decide to pick up a book I’ve started many times and give it another try.  A familiar paperback, one that has stared back at me from many different shelves in our various homes, seems a good transition from the Russians. And so Marilynne Robinson’s book, Housekeeping, finds itself in my hands under a hand knit blanket and with a warm cup of hot tea.  The book is a bit strange.  Reading it feels like entering a dreamlike state.  After watching an interview with Robinson taken at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, I understand that this is how she writes. (her whole demeanor reflects a calm, peaceful creativity that will make you want to read a book)

She says in the interview, “When I write fiction I like to be very comfortable, as in prenatal or something!  I like to be in comfortable clothes with no distractions and so on. I like to be in one corner of my house.  When I write nonfiction I sit upright in a chair, and I write on a word processor, or laptop.  And the mood or character of concentration is completely different.  Fiction is much closer to dreaming, a sort of inducing a very strong imagination of something and trying to preserve the integrity-the movement- of it.”



*This interview is Part 3 of a four part interview.  The beginning is about GILEAD, but about 2 minutes in she gets to the writing stuff.  All four parts of the interview are great if you are interested.  But for the sake of space and time, I've only posted the part of the interview that contains the quotes I've included in this post.

I love the way she differentiates writing fiction and writing non-fiction. The act of creating characters seems so elusive, mysterious, and intimidating to me.  Robinson describes the creation of her characters explaining, “Characters tend to be voices.  I have great respect for the complexity of the brain or mind...I’m comfortable assuming I don’t know what is going on in my own mind a great part of the time.  It is kind of like hearing music, I think... I don’t feel as though I create the characters.  I find them.  Something has presented itself to me.  What is it?.”   

“I wrote Housekeeping assuming it would never be published.  I wrote it just to write it,” confesses Marilynne Robinson.  If you have never read this book, consider reading it just to read it.  Don’t get frustrated trying to iron out a plot or a strict narrative as the characters develop.  Rather, let the book quietly move along and you will find yourself immersed in the town of Fingerbone, seeing a lake as a character in the novel, and feeling deeply for the characters’ loss, sorrow, and transience which in a dreamlike, mysterious way reflects our own reality.

If you have read Housekeeping, consider reading another book from an author who studied under Marilynne Robinson.  Tinkers, written by Paul Harding and winner of the 2010 Pulizter Prize, reads in a very similar way.  Both of these books will make you see the blending of your dreams, your memory, and your imagination in a new light.  And who knows?  Maybe you’ll want to write them down.

“For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business?  What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?” ( Housekeeping 92)

“For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires.  To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue so sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it?  And here again is the foreshadowing- the world will be made whole.” (Housekeeping 152)

Also, keep your eyes out for Marilynne Robinson's new book of essays titled When I was  Child I Read Books  coming out in March.