Books I'm reading (by Sarah M)

 I chose two books to read during this course. One was given to me by a fellow teacher called I Rode a Horse of Milk White Jade by Diane L. Wilson and the other is a book I read while camping a few years ago: The Abundance by Annie Dillard.  

I planned to read them slowly, but blew through the YA novel about horses, Mongolia, young heroes, and listening to the world with our hearts in a morning and part of an afternoon. It was one of those books that just grabbed me for its magic and beauty. 

There's an essay in the Dillard book called "A Writer in the World" and I thought I'd share a few lines with you. I hope you like them.  

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. "The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity." Anne Truitt, the sculptor, said this. "Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life. . . . Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still." 

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality? 

Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Will Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.