This morning I spent a sunny hour picking sour cherries on a farm five minutes from my parents’ house. It was a stunning crop, the trees all thick with brilliant fruit, and almost all of it ripe. The clusters of cherries looked like Pop Art: stark, amazing, slightly translucent red. We picked nineteen pounds, and it wasn’t easy to stop — there were so many, and they were beautiful and so easy to pick.

Then we came home and I wrote while my parents pitted them. I think I got the better end of the deal.

I’m working on The White Silk Tent, my revision of my grandmother’s memoir. I’ve been reading biographical theory to try to situate myself and my strategies: what kind of voice did I want to use, what sort of other research did I want to do? I thought for a while, and then I started writing. And I’m still thinking, of course. But for now, my version contains three kinds of text:

• Sections of Louise’s original manuscript, very slightly edited for clarity
• Biographical sections based on her manuscript but substantially rewritten and edited, and recast in the third person
• Interpolations in my voice which allow me to comment on her memoir, to add information she didn’t have, to interpret things, etc.

And then, likely, documentary material — text and photos from the trunk of family memorabilia she left to accompany the manuscript, and maybe things from the HRC, as well.

My goal for the summer is to get three chapters completed and polished, so that I’ll have a sense of the process involved in writing the book and the amount of time I’ll need to complete it. And then I’ll need to get back to working on academic projects and thinking about my dissertation — which may also be related to biography. (I’m reading Paula Backscheider’s Reflections on Biography now with great interest. And on that note: you can find my new Goodreads page here.)

I’m reading Julie Phillips’s biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr. It’s excellent and I’m entranced.

In the beginning I was merely interested, because I found it tough to relax into the biographical form as Phillips practices it. Having spent this semester working on (among other things) Austen’s use of modal verbs, I was struck and a little annoyed by Phillips’s use of “must” and “should have,” her reliance on conditional forms to buttress psychological claims about Sheldon. That choice reminded me, not pleasantly, of the more biographical bits of the Gilbert-and-Gubar style of feminist criticism — another critical mode I view with sympathy and support but can’t help quibbling with, either. Phillips’s “musts” seem, at times, to push too hard to nail down the unknowable:

She also acquired a .38 revolver, which she either bought or was given by Bill at a time when a sensational carjacking and murder had made the New Mexico roads seem unsafe. It was this gun, acquired for self-defense, that Alice claimed Bill had used against her. (She also once suggested that she had used it for a game of Russian roulette.) Nonetheless, she kept it. Later in life, whenever she was depressed enough to think of killing herself, she always pictured doing it with the .38. The gun must have given her a sense of power over death. [James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, 96]

That pithy last sentence! Why? It’s a shove from drama into banality. It flattens an ambivalent and interesting and totemic-seeming fact.

I’m quibbling, as I said — the book is just wonderful, and the psychologizing conditional statements either grow fewer, or integrate more smoothly into Phillips’s thoughtful and careful treatment of Sheldon/Tiptree, or both. (I’ll have to reread it to tell; right now I’m too grabbed by it.) But I wish that, in the early chapters, Phillips had allowed more of Alice’s ambivalence to remain unencapsulated.

More on this later, when I’m done with the book.

ETA: I read the last half of the book in a happy rush yesterday and this morning, and while I stand by my quibbling, I think the whole thing’s delightful. The primary sources make up a great portion of the book’s brilliance — Sheldon/Tiptree wrote wonderful letters — but Phillips does a beautiful job, too.

Some news, as I surface briefly between end-of-semester projects:

I’ll be working at the Harry Ransom Center as a public services intern for the next two years. I’m thrilled about it — everyone I’ve met through the interviewing process has been wonderful and I’m terribly excited about the work I’ll get to do. Expect many more posts gushing about the wonder of its books and manuscripts.

This means I won’t be teaching for those two years, at least not as my main source of support. I won’t be teaching this summer, either, despite my plans to. Instead, I’ll be in Oregon for much of the summer, spending time with my parents, who are heading back to Ashland themselves this weekend from the Stanford Medical Center. My dad’s stem cell transplant has been going well, but his cancer is back, too, and we’re all in limbo waiting to see what his new immune system will do, and what can be done oncologically. I’m going home to see them and to work on The White Silk Tent, my next novel project, which my father is eager to see.

But now I’m in the middle of a project on Austen’s modal verbs, and another on Aaron Hill’s King Henry the Fifth, and another on English perceptions of Dutch in the late Restoration. And grading. I’ll be done around May 16.

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the delightful magazine that published my short-short “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster,” was just nominated for a Hugo in the semiprozine category. Congratulations to editors and all-around fabulous people Gavin Grant and Kelly Link!

The boy I dated in college used to say “inspirado” rather than “inspiration” — partly because he liked Tenacious D., and partly, I think, because he just liked words that sounded as if they should be accompanied by a twirl of the old moustache. These are, of course, both valid reasons.

When I think or talk about writing, I generally put little emphasis on inspiration. I don’t mean to devalue it; those moments of sudden new vision are necessary and wondrous. But persistence, skill, and conscious effort are also necessary, and I’m leery of any view of writing that celebrates inspiration rather than hard work. See the New Yorker article on the genesis of “writer’s block,” which I may have linked here before and probably will again; also see Nephele Tempest’s recent post at Romancing the Blog. Both express, rather more eloquently than I am at the moment, the importance of ass-in-chair to the writing process.

I also wonder if writing novels rather than short stories leads one to think differently about inspiration. When I’m working on a long project, inspiration arrives on a smaller scale: I come up with little insights into structure or character rather than silent-upon-a-peak-in-Darien vistas. Short stories, on the other hand, mean a new world every time.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that, last week, I did have the inspiration for a short story — while on the elliptical at the gym, actually, and listening to Shivaree on my slowly-dying old iPod. I’ve been working somewhat steadily on revising my first novel, and making do with the novel-sized bits of revision-inspiration that come. (We won’t get into the vast difference between revision-inspiration and fresh inspiration. Ahem.)

And you know what? After eight months of very little fiction writing, I’d nearly forgotten how much I like inspiration. It’s a nice feeling. It makes me want to twirl my imaginary moustache.

Via boingboing, an odd, beautiful series of photographs of derelict Soviet bus stops.

I’m thinking about stealing this one for the novel I’m revising.

I’ve turned in my grades, which means that my semester is officially complete — a fact that has been celebrated with sushi, as all good things should be. I should be posting here more often over break, especially as I work on revising my first novel. (More about that soon.)

To begin, a recap of the shows I’ve seen this fall, in chronological order:

1. Final Fantasy at the Parish: by far the best show of the fall (though T. might argue for Asobi Seksu or Man Man), and probably one of the most technically impressive performances I’ve seen. I wrote about it briefly here, and I’m not sure what else to add, except maybe little glittery hearts around Owen Pallett’s name. I loved this show.
2. Sufjan Stevens at the Paramount. This was just — not affecting, I guess. Beautiful, though the visual elements of the show were silly at times, but not beautiful in any way that surpassed the experience of listening to his most recent album. Not dynamic. I felt somewhat the same way about Sigur Rós, which we saw in a similar venue last year, though their music suited the opera-hall style space better.
3. Man Man at Emo’s. This was an anniversary present for T., who’s wanted to see them again since we saw them open for Okkervil River last fall. They were, uh, still mustachioed and crazy? Just as crazy as their music video, in fact, except with fewer images borrowed from Married to the Sea. I liked their show a lot when we saw them first, but found them less charming as a repeat concert experience, and I don’t think Emo’s was as good a venue for them as the Stubb’s indoor stage was. They had more room to play and less matter to fill it up.
4. Beirut/Voxtrot at Emo’s. We didn’t catch all of Voxtrot; it was late, and I was tired. Plus, Voxtrot was not so great. I was there for Beirut, who were marvelous and energetic.
5. Asoki Seksu/Mates of State at Emo’s. This concert was outdoors and FREEZING. Asobi Seksu sounded lovely, and were very — professional? I’m not sure if that’s quite the right word, but their lead singer had a delightfully no-nonsense air and a wonderful stylized voice. Mates of State were somewhat dull, or maybe that was just their song structures. Repetition annoys me, and I really don’t go for the verse/chorus/verse/chorus mode, especially when the rest of the song’s not complex. The onstage flirting between wife and husband was sweet, though I kept thinking of Oscar Wilde’s line about airing one’s clean laundry in public. They had a cute bit about encores, though, which seemed somewhat ironic after…
6. Joanna Newsom at the Parish, just this Wednesday. Disappointing — I’d been really excited about this, because I adore Ys and much of The Milk-Eyed Mender. But the opening act (Smog) was dreadful, the show wasn’t terribly well-run, and Joanna herself wasn’t so professional. She’d already done an earlier show, and began our show by begging that she not be videotaped because she was losing her voice and she was going to be “bad.” She kept repeating this throughout the show, excusing herself for skipping songs or singing roughly (to her own ears, I guess), and then left without an encore. Aside from some hoarseness on the first two songs and a few moments in which she didn’t reach for the high notes, I wouldn’t have been able to tell, and her anxiety just made it seem as if she wanted to be elsewhere. Not the most pleasant kind of stage banter. As with Sufjan Stevens, I didn’t feel that being present for the show added much to the music as recorded.

I find this approximately tri-weekly schedule of concerts both fun and odd, considering that I went to about six shows during my entire college career. Austin has me trained.

My short-short entitled “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster” — a riff on Sei Shonagon’s style — was just published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 19, the tenth anniversary issue of Small Beer’s beautiful zine. I’m listed in the poetry section of the masthead, which startled me, then made me laugh at myself for being startled. The piece is a prose poem, it’s true, but somehow I’d never thought of it as anything but a short piece of fiction. I spent most of my adolescence writing poetry — and now I think of myself only as a fiction writer. Brains are odd!

The contributor’s copies are in the mail, so I’ll report on the contents of the issue in more detail when they arrive, but it looks lovely and I’m proud to be in such company.

The order page for the issue is here.

Last Monday night, Kelly Link gave a wonderful reading at the Joynes Reading Room at UT. It was followed by one of the most interesting Q&As I’ve ever attended, pleasant chatting over food (provided by the Joynes Reading Room, hurrah), and then an even more delightful dinner at El Chile. Kelly read a story called “The Wrong Grave,” which will be published next year. I think it set the tone for the evening — when we weren’t talking about publishing, at dinner, we mostly told creepy stories (of ghosts and of brains, which can be just as scary). It was, in fact, a lovely night.

Tomorrow morning I present a paper on Charlotte Charke in my bibliography class, and then it’s grading, more paper-writing, and more grading until mid-December. I promise to post at least once more before Christmas.

WFC is happening in Austin this weekend! I’ll be there on Friday and Saturday. I have no idea what to expect, as this is my first con, but I’m looking forward to it (and to meeting lots of people I’ve only corresponded with before!). If you’re coming to town for WFC and haven’t yet checked out the unofficial guide to Austin that M. Thomas and I put together, do!

If you’re hanging around Austin after the con, or if you’re local, please also come to Kelly Link’s reading at the Joynes Reading Room (on the UT campus) on Monday, November 6, at 7:30 pm. Kelly will be reading from recent work and answering questions about writing and publishing — and I personally guarantee that it will be a fabulous event.

One thing to note: The Joynes Reading Room is located in room 007 of the Carothers building on the UT Campus, which is essentially in the basement of the building. Visitors must enter through the east (courtyard) entrance.

Hope to see some of you there!