He charms all.  He pauses in the driveway and animals materialize, kneel at his feet.   He is handsome and good.

(That's Old Nemo, sunning himself center.  He is weak, senile, and loving - and undergoing an epic shed.)

My inspiration for book tour outfits.  Now don't you want to come and hear/see me read?!

I'm going to be honest with you:  I'm scared.  Next week Birds of a Lesser Paradise will be out in the world, a fledgling.   

There's nothing like a first book to make you feel vulnerable, insecure.  I Google reviews, feel a stab in my heart when someone tosses out a bit of criticism on Goodreads.   I feel as though I am annoying friends and family with my promotional announcements, my pleas for folks to attend my readings.  I picture the sound of my voice bouncing around in an empty bookstore.  

But this is silly stuff.  And among the small bouts of narcissism and worry comes a beautiful reminder that reviews and readings will never make my heart swell the way it did when I held my niece for the first time a few days ago.  
         
It's not that I'm not emotionally-invested in my book - I am.  And I will still worry, and I will still feel the pangs of insecurity as people talk about the book (or don't talk about it at all).  But I love when perspective comes rushing at me this way, that little bitch-slap of reason, clarity coming to me in the form of a cooing, snoring six-pound infant in a plush onesie.  The big things - not so big in their weight, but their weight in your heart.

xo
MMB

15 days until my first book launches, until the dream comes true.  

Here, Bebe Z demonstrates the art of launching successfully.  

xo
MMB

I live in a world where Miss Mary Mack and Sven Birkerts collide (not a staged picture - just my kitchen table yesterday).  

I wish you the kind of weekend where you wear your bib backwards and eat/read a copy of Leonard Michael's Sylvia.  (Seriously, though, if you haven't read that book, you should.  For starters, try Wyatt Mason's Harper's piece, The Irresponsibility of Feelings, on Reading Leonard Michaels.)

xo
MMB

This weekend we loaded up the girls and went south to the Dogtor's homeland, a place where his mother's roots run deep.  Since her death we have worked to keep a connection to the place and people.  One of those people is Mom Mom, the Dogtor's 93-year-old grandmother.  A nurse who was shot by friendly fire in Burma and full of carefully-worded witticisms (Do the evening's delights bear the light of morning's reflection?), she makes me feel boring.   And quite happy.   Mom Mom looked at me during dinner and asked - with a gleam in her eye - why don't you try for six more kids?

As you can see, Bebe Z thought it was an excellent idea to pull up on the dear nonagenarian's legs.  

Our two-year-old had lots of (sometimes uncomfortable, high volume, and overly honest) questions for Mom Mom's peers, like:  What's that lady riding in?  Is she asleep?

One of the best parts of the weekend was the box of old books procured from the attic of Mom Mom's homestead.  Most of them were from the 1800s.  I marveled at the fonts, but most of all the inscriptions and sepia-toned, inked names of my husband's relatives.  My favorite is a french version of the New Testament once owned by "Anna Valentine."  (And yes, I'm calling dibs on that pen name.  So when you see poisonous tirades on housing developments or Monsanto, written by sweet little Anna Valentine, be suspicious.)

I like the thought of passing down my heavily annotated books to my girls, and their children, and so on.  Any favorite old books you have on hand?

 

I'm grateful to have some new followers on the blog.  I thought I would share an essay I wrote a year ago that gives some background into life events that shaped my collection of stories.   The farmhouse I speak of in the essay, my husband's childhood home and the house we live in now, is pictured above (a different winter, when we actually had snow.)

An excerpt of the essay is below, as well as a link to the entire piece, which was published on the Ploughshares blog.   Enjoy.

An Excerpt from My Essay "Learning the Taste of Stone":

Donald Hall is a thing of beauty. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing him speak–seeing him speak–twice at Bennington. The second was in June 2009–six weeks after my first child was born, a week after attending my beloved mother-in-law, Anna’s, memorial service, and days after leaving my family in North Carolina to settle in Vermont with my husband in the house where he grew up. 
   
Donald Hall was wearing a rumpled tie-dyed t-shirt and trousers. His hair was long and his beard curled over, and at times into, his mouth, giving him the otherworldly look of Confederate veterans I’d seen in vintage photographs, or an elderly Walt Whitman. His lips made oblong shapes when he spoke about prosody. His voice moved between a whisper, a growl, and a specter-like song, pausing at invisible line breaks. His casual posture gave you the feeling he was in the mood to be recklessly, charmingly honest about meter, Robert Frost, and baseball.
  
You want to know what really turns me on? Hall said. Assonance. Assonance turns me on.
   
It was the first time I’d laughed in weeks, in a time when I’d forgotten I was capable of laughing. I was still fat and achy, a post-partum mess of grief and haywire hormones. I was attending my graduate residency at Bennington College, but painfully aware of the grieving family, unpacked boxes and colicky infant that waited for me back home, a few miles down the road.Read the entire essay at Ploughshares.