What Are You Reading?
I asked Shumate in the interview what he was reading because as a writer I know the importance of reading to any creative endeavor. As I’m working on the piece I’m writing– a mixed genre piece– I have been doing a lot more reading these days. Reading not related to my studies (necessarily). So…what am I reading?
Alice Walker– Living by the Word and We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For- which was given to me as a Christmas gift by my ex-lover. I’m reading it now because Alice Walker is what you should read when you’re feeling jaded by life.
The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction– another gift from another ex-lover.
Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott.
And The Four Spirits by my teacher, Sena Jeter Naslund (my copy is signed by Sena).
A funny story about Sena: On the last night of class, she invited us to dinner at her house for a reading of a piece we wrote. She greeted me at the door with a glass of champagne. “Come in,” she said, beaming with that warmth and hospitality that’s unique to Southerners, “I’m so glad you’re here.” She told us the story of her house: It was built by the first poet laureate of Kentucky. When he fell on hard times, he moved into an apartment across the street from the house he built on St. James Court, so that he could look out every day and see the place that had been his home. Sena, herself one of Kentucky’s poet laureates, said to us, “I hope when I’m living in that apartment, y’all will come and visit me.”
Me, at Sena’s house (with Sena’s daughter, Flora):
And I’m being a good boy and studying my French.
Since I am doing so much reading, quite by accident, about the civil rights movement (both Walker and Sena), I think I may re-read Walker’s short story collection, The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart. And, perhaps, Vonnegut’s Man Without a Country. Though my deepest hope is to read Love in the Time of Cholera.
And what, dear readers, are you reading?
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