This was ultimately my failure: my inability to work up a passion for the location of balls. Well, honey, he's not right in the head,' Dad said, flipping his cigarette into the front yard. I glared at him. Well, how about this: he once got locked in a basement by evil Petey Scroggs in the middle of January and survived on snow and little frozen mice.
When I'm cold at night he sleeps right on my face. Of that whole litter of kittens he came out of he's the only one left. One of his brothers didn't even have a butthole. PeeDink is a survivor. See all Haven Kimmel's quotes ». Topics Mentioning This Author. Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. A Girl Named Zippy 3. Premium online access is only available to PW subscribers. If you have an active subscription and need to set up or change your password, please click here.
New to PW? To set up immediate access, click here. If working at an office location and you are not "logged in", simply close and relaunch your preferred browser. For off-site access, click here. Thank you for visiting Publishers Weekly.
There are 3 possible reasons you were unable to login and get access our premium online pages. You may cancel at any time with no questions asked. You are a subscriber but you have not yet set up your account for premium online access. Contact customer service see details below to add your preferred email address and password to your account. You forgot your password and you need to retrieve it.
Everything in my book is revelatory of my acorn. If I may say such a thing. You describe the career aspirations of your friends--Rose the artist and Maggie the "Solid Gold" disc jockey--and your own fluctuations between the Mafia and co-owning a farm with your best friend Julie. At what point did you realize you wanted to write? Oh, I never wanted to be a writer.
My only real dream was to be a rodeo star. Wait, that's not true. There was a time I thought I'd make a good prison guard, and my sister agreed with me.
I remember that the first time I heard the phrase "legislate morality" I thought that was probably for me, and so I announced to the world at large that I was going to be a Supreme Court justice. I had some ideas about what was moral, and they didn't seem to be in keeping with the rest of the world.
Finding a way to inflict my values on the innocent greatly appealed to me. However, I was never able to fulfill any of my career goals because I am essentially free of talent.
I started writing at age nine--automatically and without intention--like a savant; much the same way, I imagine, Rain Man couldn't help himself from counting jelly beans and match sticks. When I say I started "writing," what I mean is that I copied Ray Bradbury's stories out of Twice onto my own paper and then showed them to my mom, declaring them my own. It is, perhaps, rare for a person to be both a savant and a plagiarist, I don't know.
My mom was very supportive some might even say enabling of those efforts, and of other examples of my creativity, such as the way I liked to recite whole episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies , lying, each time, about the ending.
Sometimes the Hillbillies all died in a plane crash, sometimes they were mauled by rabid possums. That sort of thing. The turning point for me, the place I parted from Mr. Bradbury, was the moment I looked at a story of his--let's say it contained a little girl doing little girl things--and as I was copying it I decided that the story could greatly benefit from an explosion out of the girl's nose.
Perhaps it was a special gift of hers. I'd veer away from the plot I was copying in order to accommodate the nose eruptions, and soon I wouldn't be looking at Twice at all. Eventually I stopped copying and just began inventing and then things really got ugly. One of my favorite sections in the book described your agitation over the power of poetry, particularly the famous repeating line of Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," which everyone has wrestled with at some point.
Did you ever reconcile with poetry? Or even perhaps become inspired by it? Who are some of your literary inspirations?
I would say, with only a slight measure of hysteria and hyperbole, that by the time I was twenty-one I had given my life over to Poetry. This prose thing I'm doing is really an act of infidelity and I'm terrified Poetry will find out.
I wrote poems exclusively and with great seriousness for at least fifteen years, but as with all those other vocations, I wasn't good enough. The level of my talent was egregiously distant from my aspirations. Elizabeth Bishop once said to Robert Lowell, "When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.
Did you draw upon your wealth of childhood experiences? How did this book get its start? I didn't write much about my childhood when I was in college because I was a poet and too cool for that. The first essay I attempted to write was about Edythe Koontz, the old woman who lived across the street from my house and who hated me for inexplicable reasons.
I started the essay in the autumn, twelve or thirteen years ago, and did it secretly. I didn't even really let myself catch on that I was doing work that wasn't poetry. Something about that particular season caused me to remember Edythe, and I found that there was something about her I very much wanted to say.
She had recently died and had left no family, so I began by writing down everything I knew about her. What I discovered was that what remained the most vivid about Edythe for me were the things my parents repeated to me, the details about her behavior and personal habits that my mother and father had sorted out from the infinite details that make up a real life.
I had heard my mom say countless times in conversations with people not from Mooreland, "Edythe walked to the post office every morning at seven, where she would salute the flag while whistling 'The Star-Spangled Banner.
Added to the other things my parents had recorded--the way Edythe bathed only twice or so a year; the way she played hymns on her discordant piano late in the night; her bathtub full of old newspapers--the little picture of Edythe whistling at the flag became more resonant. I began the essay and it went disastrously wrong; there was, in fact, nothing right about it, it stunk to high heaven, and I put it aside.
Over the next few years I worked on the essay sporadically. Sometimes at night I told stories about Mooreland into a small tape recorder, just so I wouldn't forget them. As I was telling them I tried to remember the facets my parents considered the most cogent, and built from there.
Years after first writing about Edythe, I took a writing class while in seminary at the Earlham School of Religion. The professor, Tom Mullen, made as the course requirement that we all begin a book-length project.
I began the manuscript for what I would later call Qualities of Light and which is now titled A Girl Named Zippy in that course, completing about fifty pages. When I left seminary and moved to North Carolina I put it aside for three years, during which time I became pregnant, had my son, Obadiah, and spent a year exclusively with him.
After his first birthday, when it became clear that mothering would not, strictly speaking, be enough of an occupation for me, I started writing in the evenings, after Obadiah went to bed. I decided to look over those essays I had written for Tom at Earlham. None of them made it into the finished book because they were lousy , but some events were recycled.
Jane Austen famously said that "3 or 4 Families in a Country village is the very thing to work on.
0コメント