Suggested gifts for writers, or those who love good writing

Anyone who really knows me understands that I am not the biggest fan of the Christmas season. I dislike the annual frenzied, consumer-driven ritual it has become, and the constant, media-inflicted we-must-save-the-American-economy guilt.

However, if you love Christmas and/or feel the need to buy gifts, you might as well support good writing, and publications that deserve to continue. [Note: These are not paid promotions...]  Here are a few of the things I am giving to others and to myself:

I Just Lately Started Buying Wings is by Writing Home friend, Kim Dana Kupperman.
    "In this collection of essays, Kupperman looks at major life events—divorce, death, falling in love—with a candor and wisdom that gently places the reader into scenes from her life. We experience her mother's crazed neglect, her father's distance, a new lover's exquisite beauty. ...Kupperman proves that she has found her own wings, and is soaring." [from my Amazon.com review]
     For more on this book, see the NYT book review and NYT Paper Cuts interview with Kim.

A wonderful surprise arrives in my mailbox every three weeks in the form of one story magazine, which provides just what it says—one short story—in a pocketbook-sized issue. While other short story markets continue to dry up, OS keeps plugging away, publishing more than 140 short stories since 2002. I have to admit that it's the size that prompted me to subscribe to it—it's just a little bigger than the early issues of my own (defunct) a very small magazine. But it's the stories that keep me reading and wanting more.

Amazingly, The Sun magazine has been continuously publishing intelligent writing since the mid-1970s and, in recent years, without the support of advertisements. What began for publisher Sy Syfransky as a venture put together in a friend's garage and hawked from his backpack on the streets of Chapel Hill, N.C., is now a respected prize-generating enterprise; stories and essays from The Sun are regularly picked for Pushcart, Best American..., and other publishing awards.
      The long interview, at the front of the magazine, is almost always provocative and interesting; "Readers Write," at the back of the magazine, offers lyrical glimpses into readers' lives; and the fiction and essays in the center of the magazine showcase some of the best writing around. My only criticism of The Sun is that is can veer toward the dark and depressing a little too often. But not to read it is to miss out on things that feel important and necessary.
    The Sun is currently struggling, it seems, to stay afloat, requesting contributions and suggesting that subscribers give friends gift subscriptions. So, if you subscribe to The Sun (as a present to yourself), consider also giving gift subscriptions to people you know who cherish good writing.

What a writer does

During recent bouts of insomnia, I've been reading through Alice Munro's Selected Stories. Unfortunately, the stories don't put me to sleep.

I'm always surprised when I mention Munro to people and they admit that they've never heard of her, despite her repeated publications in the New Yorker and her short story collections. (But I hadn't hear of her myself until John Morris, during a workshop at the Writers Center years ago, told us to read Munro to learn the craft of short story writing.)

Perhaps it was because I was reading at 2 a.m., but the description of what a writer does/is, near the end of the story, "Material," seemed so profound that I sat up in my recliner. In the story, the first-person narrator is looking back on her previous marriage to a writer/professor. He has taken a character they both knew during their marriage and turned her into a short story, an act, the narrator says, where the woman has been:

...lifted out of life and held in light, suspended in the marvelous, clear jelly that Hugo has spent all his life learning how to make. It is an act of magic... of a special, unsparing, unsentimental love. ...(She) is a lucky person... to have this done to her, though she doesn't know what has been done and wouldn't care for it, probably, if she did know. She has passed into Art. It doesn't happen to everybody.

(I would excerpt more from the passage, but I worry about Fair Use/copyright restrictions, and I don't want to give away too much of the story's end).

The wonderful irony of the story is that the narrator has turned the writer/ex-husband into material for her own story, transforming him into art as well.

Munro is a master of succinct, eloquent description, of writing about people you think you already know. "Material" includes an opening passage about writers/professors that, though published in 1973, still seems true today:

Girls, and women too, fall in love with such men; they imagine there is power in them.

(The wives of these men aren't in the audience where the men are reading, they)... are buying groceries or cleaning up messes... They have to remember to get the snow tires on and go to the bank... because their husbands are such brilliant, such talented incapable men, who must be looked after for the sake of the words that will come from them.

How wonderful that Munro, whether she had been one of those women in her first marriage (she divorced the year before this story was published) or had been feeling jealous of male writers—or whatever experience really spurred this story, she was able to convert those feelings into Art.