(I wrote this piece in 1983, for Historic Preservation, and I’ve always felt warmly about it. Recently I was reading Kent Haruf’s glorious novel Benediction, and lo, he mentions a windowhook. So I thought, let’s bring it back. Older readers will know right away what I’m talking about.
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The night before last my wife Jane and I returned from nearly two weeks in Italy, my first visit there (in 70 years), her second. We landed in Boston shortly before 10 PM, having changed planes twice, once in Barcelona, and again at London’s Heathrow. We were pooped of course,
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John
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This morning my glucometer read 102. For those who have never had to worry about blood sugar, this is a “So, what?” fact. But for the last ten years or so I’ve been dealing – and dealing way too cavalierly, I have to confess – with so-called adult-onset diabetes mellitus.
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I’ve been thinking about my father lately. There’s no real reason for it; he died right after the new year in 1998, some 16 years ago. He’s just been popping into my mind. He was a handsome man, who looked something like the golfer Arnold Palmer, always tanned from his outdoor work as a civil engineer building bridges and then a plant engineer at a Maine shipyard.
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Finally I’m posting an essay from my last Bennington class. The assignment was to describe a person, to create a sort of sketch of someone in words. We had spent a couple of classes on modifiers, and I begged the class to use them sparingly, only when necessary. The author here,
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John
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With a certain amount of pride – justifiable, I hope you’ll agree – I announce the invention of a brand new art form: the nifty fifty. This is a piece of prose, not poetry, not a sonnet, not even a limerick. It doesn’t rhyme, although I suppose it could. Its only rule is that,
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For several years, I’ve been teaching a course at Bennington College called “Through Syntax to Style.” It’s (hold on) a grammar course. That’s right. I know: college students? Still, here the point is not to teach old-style grammar with diagramming (everyone asks), for the Bennington students are generally well-prepared syntactically;
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Build worlds, that’s what novelists do, and then they fill them with their people. Sometimes these fictional worlds are separated from ours by the thinness of tissue paper, and by the time lag of a minute. Other times they are moonscapes, unrecognizable to our eyes, set in years long past or years far yet to come.
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Right now it’s mid-March, and I’m in Kissimmee, Florida, sitting in a really nice Starbucks. I’m outside on a roofed terrace, where there are wicker-y couches and tables, with a venti dark roast by my side. It’s five in the afternoon, warmly breezy; most of the rest of the country,
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John
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Carlton Sortwell
Beginning in June of 2012 I began writing a serial novel on this blog. It was called CARLTON SORTWELL and explored among other things Little League baseball. I finished in March of 2013. Like all of my other novels, it has strong ties to Maine,
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