In Real Time (7)

work and rest; work as rest

[Image: Joseph Decker, “Green Plums,” c. 1885, courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., collection of Mr. & Mrs. Paul Mellon. Public domain. Decker also painted the cover image ("Ripening Pears”) that Wiseblood used for my story collection Fragile Objects, which, Deo gratias, releases early next week. The pre-order price is still valid till then.

[Plus if you want you can pick up a copy of Painting the Novel, the Wiseblood edition of Henry James’s prefaces with my introduction, for just $10. If you’re able, this kind of support helps me keep on justifying the time I give to this work and lets me begin to try to be even half as generous with my loved ones as they’ve been with me. Still, if you’re not in a position to pick up a new book now, no worries at all. I am simply happy you’re here.]

Heat rolls into harvest rolls into autumn, though the thermometer denies it. This first week of K-12 school has given me the chance to get back into fiction writing, specifically to run around (imaginatively) exploring the glimmers and complexities of my characters’ physical world in a new novel set in a Texas beach town. I couldn’t be more grateful to have the privilege to do this work. It restores me more than any amount of hanging around on sand or in pools (not that a parent shepherding summer-frenzied children exactly ever hangs around; rather you hover, feeling like that on which everything else is pendent: and what a relief to realize that you’re not).

”I read, and I fully believe this, that creative artists of any sort can only renew their energy by using it in creative work, their art; that if they do not, it does not simply go into whatever they use (or do) instead of their proper work, but flickers out altogether; consequently, after some months of complete frustration of their art, they cease to have any energy. This is certainly what happened to me, and I think it is what is happening to you. I hope you now, at last, will be able to get to your own work.”—Caryll Houselander: Her Spiritual Legacy, ed. Maisie Ward (first edition, 1965; now available in a new edition from Cluny Media)