Writing practice, the act of practicing writing much like one practices an instrument, is a concept I embraced after enrolling in an online six-week intensive with Natalie Goldberg in the height of pandemic shutdown. "Put into words what you most need to say," she suggests.
As an integral part of this practice, she encourages reading the work of others. "I tell students to read deeply ... Reading is important because when you read, you enter the mind of an author, and so you get to study a practiced mind. How do writers create structure in a book? How do they turn phrases and present facts?"
Finally I have permission to read as part of my work! I've just finished 'Demon Copperhead," the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by one of my favorite writers, Barbara Kingsolver. Dense, difficult and funny all at the same time, it's told in first person, a tale narrated by a young man looking back at his harrowing childhood in the 1990s. "I understood that his voice would be that narrative engine that would get people into this difficult story, and it will get them through to the other side. It needed to be first person, just to give readers that assurance that he's gonna make it because he's telling you this story." Kingsolver wrote in an interview about her book.
The writer weaves the story with a diverse cast of characters - many named and patterned after those in Dickens' David Copperfield, the novel that inspired Kingsolver to re-imagine this tale in our times.
Orphan Tommy Waddles is introduced early in the story and appears and reappears through the 550 pages, finding his place in a newspaper office. And though I was holding my new purple Kindle propped up in bed, there I was back in the Enterprise office. "He was proud of this one, showing me around: machines, computers, the office with a stale ashtray smell that could knock a man flat."
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| at work in 1978 'composing' room at The Potter Enterprise |
"The pegboard on the wall, the giant mess of border tape rolls and X-acto knives.... Clip-art books that were like giant coloring books on different subjects. .... picked over and cut to shreds."
"Tommy showed me how to feed print columns through the hot wax rollers and help him stick them on the pages. It was all done on a big slanted table with light inside. They had blue pencil marks showing where to line things up. The whole place smelled like hot wax.
"Little cut ends of waxy paper ended up all over everywhere, sticking to your shoes or the backs of your hands, like a baby eating Cheerios."
1 comment:
I love the way she just keeps going with it, getting way over the top, until you are even able to buy the cheerios image. And the smell that could knock a man flat. Maybe mine will paste here - Bill Fish was Uncle Bill's father. He had been introduced to printing presses around the turn of the century and never let go of them. As proprietor of the Potter Enterprise he situated his desk between the office and the shop so the smell of printer’s ink would mix with the smoke from his cigarettes. Brown lozenges were burned into the old man’s oak desk all along its edges because he was prone to get distracted and forget his Pall Mall.
I might have preferred the more rarefied air of the arts but really I grew up around an odor of nicotine and printer’s ink that could knock you over. And I, like Bill Fish, would end up not letting go of that which multiplied my production.
I can’t say that Grandaddy and I ever talked much about newspapering or media, though it turned out I picked up some tricks from him anyway. By the time I knew him he was an old man, and his ways seemed quaint and of a different world than the modern one I moved in. Of course now it’s my turn to be old, and watch historic and human time line up in far different ways than they did when I was a kid, my grandchildrens' attention wandering off as I try to tell them my stories.
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