Pen to Paper: Writers and Cats

I recently had the pleasure of speaking to Greg Bryant’s creative writing class at Highland Community College. I don’t recall why, but I mentioned that writers and cats seem to be a common pairing.

Monica Wood, in her The Pocket Muse: Ideas & Inspirations for Writing, has this list of writers who loved cats: T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Christina Rossetti, John Keats, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Christopher Smart, Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, Doris Lessing, Rita Mae Brown, Carolyn Chute, and Nuala O’Faolain.

Then she asks: “Isn’t it time you got a cat?”

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Fiction: Blades Sharpened Wile You Wate

LaVon limped and trudged from his little house to his workshop after lunch. He hadn’t eaten much; it was too hot to care about food. He had made himself drink one glass of water, but even that had been an effort.

“Don’t rightly know why I’m botherin’,” he told himself as he wiped his brow. “Ain’t no one ’round here been needin’ any blades sharpened in a month of Sundays.” He grunted softly. “Folks ’cross the tracks have their own sharpenin’ man.”

But a man went to work; LaVon had been going to one kind of work or another since he was eight years old, and that had been more than six decades ago. Now his work, when he got any, was running a foot-powered grindstone to sharpen dull blades. He couldn’t lift and tote and bend like he had done in his younger days, and this was what was left to him to keep body and soul together.

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Pen to Paper: Shiki

Finally, in our brief look at the great haiku masters of Japan, we come to Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Shiki gave us haiku as we know it today. He was the one who counseled writing from life, just as we see it. He did not disdain imaginary images for haiku, but he told us to prefer what was real because it made for better haiku.

Other pearls of Shiki’s advice, from Henderson:

Be natural.

Write to please yourself. If your writings do not please yourself, how can you expect them to please anybody else?

Remember perspective. Large things are large, but small things are also large if seen close up.

Know all kinds of haiku, but have your own style.

In his short life, Shiki revitalized the very art of haiku, which had fallen into disrepute after Issa’s death. He gave haiku its name (formerly hokku), its modern values, founded a school of haiku and published a haiku magazine. His last years were spent in bed, in tremendous pain from tuberculosis which spread from his lungs into his spine. He continued to write to the very end.

tell them
I was a persimmon eater
who liked haiku

Fiction: Given the Circumstances

Seth led the horse into the barn and let it drink from the trough before pitching some hay under its nose. He gave it a quick rubdown, more a lick and a promise than proper care of a tired animal, but the human was also a tired animal. Plowing twenty acres of someone else’s hard land twelve miles distant in heat and humidity he had never even had nightmares about – but would from now on – was more than a middle-aged man could stand for too long. Seth had stood it for longer than that because it had to be done.

He walked toward his house. He didn’t smell supper being made, but it was too hot to eat, anyway, and he was too tired to care; he just wanted to lie down. But he forgot his exhaustion as soon as he walked through the back door into the kitchen. He stood perfectly still for a moment and took in the situation.

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Quotable 17

Sometimes students seem shy about writing about people who do the wrong thing — we’re all taught to do the right thing and focus on the right thing. But all of literature is about people who do the wrong thing, despite themselves. What would the story be if they did the right thing? No story at all. Fiction wants to look at all the things that go wrong.
– Chang-rae Lee